Textual Practice Vol 7 No 2

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TEXTUAL PRACTICE Editor Terence Hawkes, University of Wales College of CardiffPostal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. U.S. associate editor Jean E. Howard Columbia UniversityPostal address: Department of English and Comparative Literature, 602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York N.Y. 10027, USA Reviews editor Fred Botting University of Wales College of CardiffPostal address. Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XB. Editorial board Gillian Beer Girton College, CambridgeTerry Eagleton University of OxfordJohn Frow Queensland University, AustraliaLinda Hutcheon Toronto University, CanadaAnia Loomba Stanford University, USAMalcolm Bowie All Souls’ College, Oxford Editorial Assistant Louise Tucker

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University of Wales, College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Christopher Norris at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. Advertisements. Enquiries to David Polley, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £55.00; UK personal: £28.00; Rest of World full: £$8.00; Rest of World personal: £30.00; USA full: $90.00; USA personal: $58.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP10 5BE. ISSN 0950-236X © Routledge 1993

ISBN 0-203-98924-4 Master e-book ISBN

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 SUMMER 1993

Contents

Articles ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘rapport’ in Toni Morrison’s Sula BARBARA JOHNSON

1

An introduction to Bataille: the impossible as (a practice of) writing JOHN LECHTE

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Literature as heterological practice: Georges Bataille, writing and inner experience FRED BOTTING AND SCOTT WILSON

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Translation as cultural politics: regimes of domestication in English LAWRENCE VENUTI

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Imagist travels in modernist space ANDREW THACKER

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Interviewed by David Seed CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE

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Maidens and monsters in modern popular culture: The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast HARRIETT HAWKINS

75

Reviews Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács KOENRAAD GELDOF

83

Suzette A.Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, Patrick McGee, Paperspace, R.B.Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature ROSEMARIE A.BATTAGLIA

99

Benjamin Bennett, Hugo von Hofmannsthal DAVID DARBY

107

Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism, Jon Stratton, Writing Sites, Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory STEVEN CONNOR

112

Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories RUTH BARCAN

121

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J.Hillis Miller, Tropes, Parables, Performatives and Victorian Subjects STEVEN J.SKELLEY

127

Barry Jordan, Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain JACQUELINE A.HURTLEY

133

Morag Schiach, Discourses on Popular Culture, Tony Bennett (ed.), Popular Fiction, John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture and Reading the Popular GARY DAY

138

Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell (eds), Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH

143

Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film REYNOLD HUMPHRIES

145

Martin Orkin, Drama and the South African State MYRTLE HOOPER

150

Jean E.Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced, Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing, Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America: America’s Shakespeare DUNCAN SALKELD

154

Penelope Murray (ed.), Genius TIA DENORA

158

James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (eds), Modernity and Mass Culture NOEL KING

161

Carl R.Hausman, Metaphor and Art CLIVE CAZEAUX

166

‘Aesthetic’ and ‘rapport’ in Toni Morrison’s Sula BARBARA JOHNSON

(The Routledge Lecture, delivered on 9 May, 1992 at the University of Wales College of Cardiff) Toni Morrison’s novels have often been read as presenting something beloved, lost, and familiar to an African-American reader. Renita Weems, for instance, writes: Toni Morrison is one of the few authors I enjoy rereading. Having lived in the North for the last six years (against my better senses), when I read Morrison’s novels I am reminded of home: the South. Although her first three books take place in the Midwest and the fourth primarily in the Caribbean— places I have never seen—there is something still very familiar, very nostalgic about the people I meet on her pages. There is something about their meddling communities which reminds me of the men and women I so desperately miss back home.1 Houston Baker, in an essay entitled, ‘When Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith’, describes an equally strong sense of recognition when he writes about Sula: Morrison ‘remembers’ and enables us to know our PLACE and to be cool about our hair. For, in truth, it has often seemed in black male writings of a putatively asexual Western technological world as our proper PLACE, that the dominant expressive impulse has been more toward an escape from ‘bad hair’ than from ‘bad air’. Morrison’s linguistic cosmetology allows this very basic ‘badness’ to be refigured as village value, as a mirroring language—a springy ‘lying’ down if you will—in which we can find ourselves, and where especially black men may yet make a jubilant response, saying, ‘We are that!’2 Baker’s essay is in part a response to a groundbreaking essay by Barbara Smith in which she writes of Sula:

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Despite the apparent heterosexuality of the female characters, I discovered in re-reading Sula that it works as a lesbian novel not only because of the passionate friendship between Sula and Nel but because of Morrison’s consistently critical stance toward the heterosexual institutions of male-female relationships, marriage, and the family.3 How does Sula—a novel that holds up a mirror to black men, displaced Southerners, and black lesbians— manage to produce so strong a mechanism for recognition? How does Morrison manage to hold out so strong a promise of ‘home’? One way, I would submit, is by presenting home as always already lost. The novel begins: ‘In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, where was once a neighborhood.’4 Morrison’s novel conveys so strong a sense of what she calls ‘rootedness’ precisely by writing under the sign of uprootedness. Yet it is not simply that there was once a there there and now it is gone, but that there is from the beginning something profoundly uncanny about ‘that place’. Home is familiar precisely to the extent that, as Renita Weems puts it, it is somehow a place one has never been. By telling the story of a lost neighborhood called the Bottom which is situated at the top of the hills, Morrison establishes home as that which is always already its own other. This, of course, is the discovery Freud made when, in his essay on ‘The uncanny’, he investigated the German word for ‘homey’. Freud exclaims over the fact that the German word for ‘homey’ extends itself to turn into its opposite—that the meaning of ‘heimlich’ moves with a kind of inevitability from cozy, comfortable, and familiar to hidden, secret, and strange, so that one meaning of ‘heimlich’ is identical to its opposite, ‘unheimlich’. What Toni Morrison demonstrates in Sula, I think, is that that is exactly what home is. Morrison’s perceptions about human intimacy, ambivalence, and desire intersect often with psychoanalytic paradigms and figures, but at the same time she dramatizes political and social forces that provide a larger context for what Freud generally analyses in individuals as purely intra-psychic. In this essay, I will look at some of the intersections between Sula and Freud’s essay on ‘The uncanny’, but first, let me offer a quick sketch of the novel. Sula is divided into two parts separated by a ten-year interval, and into chapters entitled by dates: 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1927//1937, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1965. It is preceded by a prologue from the point of view of the present. The first part of the novel describes the girlhood of two friends, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, up to the point at which Nel marries Jude Greene and Sula leaves town. When Sula returns ten years later, she is seen as evil incarnate by the townspeople because of her perceived disrespect for conventional constraints. They use her transgressiveness to define their own morality. Sula sleeps with Nel’s husband, Jude, creating a rift between the two friends and provoking an unarticulated howl of grief which hovers within Nel until the very end of the novel when, after Sula’s death, Nel realizes that all that time she had been mourning the loss of Sula, not Jude. Now for a catalogue of figures Freud associates with the uncanny: Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist,… feet which dance by themselves… —all these have something peculi arly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove able to move of themselves in addition. As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its association with the castration complex. To many people, the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness—the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.5

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In Sula, the echoes of this list are really quite uncanny. Sula’s house is presided over by a one-legged grandmother, Eva, who has perhaps cut off her own leg to get the insurance money she needs to support her children, and yet who, later fearing that her grown son (who has returned from the war a drug addict) wants to crawl back into her womb, sets fire to him and kills him. Sula herself defies the teasing of a group of Irish boys by cutting off the tip of her own finger. Toni Morrison both displaces and deconstructs Freud’s notion of the castration complex. On the one hand, the loss of bodily intactness is integral to survival, at least in the case of Eva. And the novel itself is written under the sign of ‘something newly missing’: the body of a little boy named Chicken Little whom Sula and Nel have inadvertently drowned in the river. On the other hand, castration is recognized as a mechanism of social control. Sula ironically inverts familiar power relations when she answers Jude’s lament that a black man has a hard row to hoe in this world by saying: I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I mean, everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their own. The only thing they want to do is cut off a nigger’s privates. And if that ain’t love and respect I don’t know what is. And white women? They chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you under every bed. I knew a white woman wouldn’t leave the house after 6 o’clock for fear one of you would snatch her. Now ain’t that love? They think rape soon’s they see you, and if they don’t get the rape they looking for, they scream it anyway just so the search won’t be in vain. Colored women worry themselves into bad health just trying to hang onto your cuffs. Even little children—white and black, boys and girls— spend all their childhood eating their hearts out ’cause they think you don’t love them. And if that ain’t enough, you love yourselves. Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can’t stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world. (pp. 103–4) It could be said that what Morrison is doing is taking the Freudian concepts of envy, the penis, and castration, and recontextualizing them in the framework of American racial and sexual arrangements. It becomes impossible to speak about such terms in the abstract, universal sense in which Freud uses them once one realizes that the historical experience of some people is to be subjected to the literalization and institutionalization of the fantasies of others. Lynching dramatizes an unconscious phantasy of white men, but an historical and political reality for black men. Penis envy seems not to be confined to women at all, but to be a motive force in the repression of some men by other men. And one of the most revolutionary things Morrison does in Sula is to deconstruct the phallus as law, patriarchy, and cultural ground, while appreciating the penis for the trivial but exciting pleasures and fantasies it can provide for the female characters in the novel. Morrison reverses the Lacanian elevation of the phallus into the signifier of signifiers by restoring the penis to its status as an organ. Home, then, in Sula, is where the phallus isn’t. This may be one of the reasons for the pervasive uncanniness of the novel. But the uncanny image that sets the tone for the text as a whole involves not Sula but a young black soldier named Shadrack whose experience of the battlefield in 1917 is described as follows: Shellfire was all around him, and though he knew that this was something called it, he could not muster up the proper feeling—the feeling that would accommodate it. He expected to be terrified or exhilarated—to feel something very strong. In fact, he felt only the bite of a nail in his boot…. He ran, bayonet fixed, deep in the great sweep of men flying across the field. Wincing at the pain in his foot,

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he turned his head a little to the right and saw the face of the soldier near him fly off. Before he could register shock, the rest of the soldier’s head disappeared under the inverted soup bowl of his helmet. But stubbornly, taking no direction from the brain, the body of the headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether the drip and slide of brain tissue down its back. (pp. 7–8) Severed heads, feet that run by themselves, this would seem a perfect image of Freud’s uncanny. But I think Morrison deepens the meaning of those images by describing a psychic discontinuity that precedes the severing of the head. Shadrack already experiences a lack of fit between his feelings and it, a dissociation of expectations, an affective split. The dissociation of affect and event is one of Morrison’s most striking literary techniques in this novel, both in her narrative voice (in which things like infanticide are not exclaimed over) and in the emotional lives of her characters. The most important example of affective discontinuity is Nel’s reaction to the discovery of Jude, her husband, naked on the floor with Sula, her best friend. She tries to howl in pain but cannot do so until seventy pages later when she realizes that she mourns the loss of Sula rather than Jude. A good deal of the novel takes place in the space between the moment when the howl is called for and the moment when it occurs. Similarly, the scene of the death of Chicken Little is broken up into delayed effects throughout the novel. While the chapter headings promise chronological linearity, the text demonstrates that lived time is anything but continuous, that things don’t happen when they happen, that neither intentionality nor reaction can naturalize trauma into consecutive narrative. Shadrack, described by the wonderful oxymoron of ‘permanently astonished’, institutes the fort-da game of National Suicide Day upon his return from the war as a way of ritually trying to get a jump on unpreparedness, but he can only repeat the lack of fit between affect and event. For me, the most intriguing figuration of the dissociation between affect and event in Sula occurs at the moment when Nel discovers Sula and Jude naked on the floor together. While the novel as a whole is narrated in the third person, this particular passage shifts into the first person to coincide with Nel’s point of view. The passage runs as follows: When I opened the door they didn’t even look for a minute and I thought the reason they are not looking up is because they are not doing that. So it’s all right. I am just standing there…. And I did not know how to move my feet or fix my eyes or what. I just stood there seeing it and smiling, because maybe there was some explanation, something important that I did not know about that would have made it all right. I waited for Sula to look up at me any minute and say one of those lovely college words like aesthetic or rapport, which I never understood but which I loved because they sounded so comfortable and firm. (p. 105) Aesthetic and rapport? At a time like this, when Nel is seeing her best friend naked with her husband, why in the world is this the thought she turns to for an image of reassurance? The desire for an explanation, for some domain of sense that escapes her, is certainly understandable, but why does Toni Morrison pick these two words? The very arbitrariness of these two floating signifiers tempts me to see them as keys to the preoccupations of the novel as a whole. The words ‘aesthetic’ and ‘rapport’ are referred to as ‘college words’—they thus come out of a scene included in the novel as other, not represented, not ‘home’. (Of course, they are also from the ‘other scene’ of the novel’s author and of many of its readers.) The fact that Sula has been away to college while Nel has

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not does not, however, play much of a role in their friendship as it is re-established—at least not on the surface. Sula and Nel discuss college really only once, when Nel is trying to get Sula to talk about how she spent the ten years away from the Bottom: ‘Tell me about it. The big city.’ ‘Big is all it is. A big Medallion.’ ‘No. I mean the life. The nightclubs, and parties…’ ‘I was in college, Nellie. No nightclubs on campus.’ ‘Campus? That what they call it? Well. You wasn’t in no college for—what—ten years now? And you didn’t write to nobody.’ (p. 99) Nel’s desire for Sula’s story remains unsatisfied. We never observe a conversation between Sula and Nel that remotely resembles one in which the words ‘aesthetic’ or ‘rapport’ would have occurred. What we learn Nel learns in this conversation is that college is a place of foreign-sounding words. But so, for Nel, was her voyage to her roots: her grandmother’s parting ‘voir’ and her mother’s admonition that she and her daughter did not speak Creole. The words ‘aesthetic’ and ‘rapport’, in addition to coming from what could be called ‘another scene’— both college and foreign—also both contain silent letters, signalling their status as writing, that is, as themselves silent letters. Silent because not oral—and in writing, the sign of the oral has conventionally been the missing letter rather that the silent letter, although the missing letter is marked by a diacritical mark like an apostrophe which is all the more obviously a sign of writing in its completely unphonetic dimension. And both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘rapport’, somewhat like the word ‘unheimlich’, span a wide stretch of meaning. ‘Aesthetic’ moves from the domain of sense experience to the domain of artistic forms, while ‘rapport’ names connection and trust but at the same time, archaically, mesmerism—a much more uncanny form of trust. I think that in many ways the novel is precisely about the relations between aesthetic and rapport. If aesthetics is taken as the domain of the contemplation of forms, implying detachment and distance, and rapport is taken as the dynamics of connectedness, the two words name an opposition, or at least a set of issues, that are central in Sula. In one of the novel’s primal scenes, Nel and Sula are described playing with Chicken Little, whom Sula is swinging around in circles until he slips from her grasp, flies into the river, and drowns. At the end of the novel, Eva, Sula’s grandmother, accuses Nel of having thrown the little boy into the water. Nel protests that it was Sula, but Eva responds, ‘You. Sula. What’s the difference? You was there. You watched, didn’t you? Me, I never would’ve watched’ (p. 168). Nel mulls this over in her head: ‘What did old Eva mean by you watched. How could she help seeing it? She was right there. But Eva didn’t say see, she said watched’ (p. 170). Indeed, Nel has to acknowledge the unavowable memory of joy, of pleasure, that accompanied for her the spectacle of the boy slipping out of Sula’s grasp. ‘It was there anyway, as it had always been, the old feeling and the old question. The good feeling she had had when Chicken’s hands slipped.’ Watching becomes even more of an issue when Hannah, Sula’s mother, burns to death. Hannah’s mother, Eva, leaps to try to save her. Thinking about this afterward, Eva muses: She remembered something else, too, and try as she might to deny it, she knew that as she lay on the ground trying to drag herself through the sweet peas and clover to get to Hannah, she had seen Sula standing on the back porch just looking. When Eva, who was never one to hide the faults of her

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children, mentioned what she thought she’d seen to a few friends, they said it was natural. Sula was probably struck dumb, as anybody would be who saw her own mamma burn up. Eva said yes, but inside she disagreed and remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed but because she was interested. (p. 78) What Eva is accusing both Nel and Sula of here is a privileging of aesthetics over rapport. Contemplating with detachment, with no move to intervene, they watch. ‘Interest’ is the name of a lack of involvement. Curiously, Kant defines the domain of the aesthetic as the domain of disinterestedness. What is the difference between interest and disinterest? Interest and disinterestedness are like heimlich and unheimlich —almost impossible to tell apart. Interestingly (uncannily?), it is precisely under the category of the aesthetic that Freud inserts his analysis of the uncanny. The first sentence of his essay begins, ‘It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics…’ (p. 219). It is as though what turns the home unheimlich cannot be fully understood without a passage through the aesthetic. The question of aesthetics versus rapport is raised, in fact, by Toni Morrison’s novel as a whole as well. The novel presents us with a series of horrible images, painful truths, excruciating losses. Do we just sit back and watch? What is the nature of our pleasure in contemplating trauma? What would be a response that would embody rapport rather than aesthetics? Is this what Toni Morrison is challenging us to consider? Or is she merely trying to make us less innocent in our contemplation, our analysis, our ‘interest’? It seems to me that the challenge Toni Morrison presents to the relations between aesthetics and politics lies precisely in the uncomfortable ways in which she makes it clear that the domain of the aesthetic is both profoundly political and impossible to make politically correct. By choosing to aestheticize a father’s rape of his daughter in The Bluest Eye, a mother’s murder of her grown son and a daughter watching her mother burn to death in Sula, and the scars on a slave woman’s back in Beloved, Morrison makes the aesthetic inextricable from trauma, taboo, and violation. It is no accident that the plantation from which the infanticidal slave woman has escaped in Beloved is called ‘Sweet Home’. Sethe, the former slave, muses again and again about her memory of Sweet Home as aesthetically beautiful, and about that fact as a deep violation. On the one hand, the realm of forms—like National Suicide Day—is seen as a first line of defence against the abyss. Sula is said to be dangerous precisely because she is an artist without an art form. On the other hand, Morrison runs—indeed courts—the risk of transforming horror into pleasure, violence into beauty, mourning into nostalgia. In Sula she represents—in all its moral ambiguity—the problematic fascination of such transformations. Thus she shows that it is not a matter of choosing between politics and aesthetics but of recognizing the profoundly political nature of the inescapability of the aesthetic within personal, political, and historical life. Harvard University NOTES 1 Renita Weems, ‘“Artists without art form”: A look at one black woman’s world of unrevered black women,’ in Barbara Smith (ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), p. 95. 2 Houston A.Baker, Jr, ‘When Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith: The writing of place in Toni Morrison’s Sula’, in Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker (eds), The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989), pp. 109–10.

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3 Barbara Smith, ‘Toward a black feminist criticism’, in Gloria T.Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith (eds), All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982), p. 165. 4 Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: New American Library, 1973), p. 3. Further references to this text will be included parenthetically. 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Standard Edition, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 244.

An introduction to Bataille: the impossible as (a practice of) writing JOHN LECHTE

Anguish in me contests the possible. To an obscure desire it opposes an impossible obscurity. Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche To say that George Bataille is an unusual, exceptional or even rare writer and thinker is to prejudge the case. For the risk is that we impose an already elaborated framework of normality onto the individual and his œuvre without first having been unsettled, repelled, delighted or transformed by the profound experience that reading Bataille entails. To read Bataille is to be confronted by an excess, by an experience of limits, by an experience of difference, by a horror that seems to derive as much from an interior experience which has no object, as from the text deemed to be exterior to the reading self. Does Bataille evoke things in us that we should prefer to deny, to keep under wraps, to repress? Or is it that Bataille is ‘outside’—so profoundly outside, and foreign and apparently beyond objectification—that a threatened self must work to domesticate him, render him acceptable, comprehensible, and worthy of being spoken/ written about? I must say that although every introduction qua instrument of illumination has to follow the course of ‘domestication’, I write about, or on, Bataille with anguish and uncertainty.1 For me, reading Bataille involves reading myself in more than one way. It is to confront a self that I do not always want to see; it is ultimately my self as dead that is at issue. What other meaning can horror—and the pleasure that is often the path to it—have? Take, for example, Bataille’s Story of the Eye. At last, [Simone] squeezed [the throat of the priest] so resolutely that an even more violent thrill shot through her victim, and she felt the come shooting inside her cunt. Now she let go, collapsing backwards in a tempest of joy.2 Later, Simone will ask for the priest’s eye to be cut out so that she can fondle it and insert it into her vagina. Here then, is extreme pleasure mixed with extreme horror. Maximum pleasure arrives (for both Simone and the victim) at the very point of (the priest’s) death, and the reader is confronted by a tension that derives from the contradiction of the forces of attraction and repulsion. This tension is the source of the situation’s impact. It is this sort of effect which makes Bataille a uniquely compelling writer.

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Bataille himself speaks about the ‘practice of joy before death’ as a kind of governing principle of human experience. ‘“Joy before death”’, he says, ‘belongs only to the person for whom there is no beyond; it is the only intellectually honest route in the search for ecstasy’.3 ‘Joy before death’ would be the only true affirmation of life, an affirmation that renews a ‘kind of tragic jubilation’ that has no time for ‘servile morality’.4 I am attracted by this notion of intellectual honesty—and repelled by it. I am repelled, first, because of the painful consequences that it must entail; and, second, by the fear that I cannot achieve it. Intellectual honesty thus goes hand in hand with anguish. It would be wrong to think that what I am talking about concerns some highly moral stance that I cannot live up to. Probably, it is just the opposite. I need to dirty my hands a bit, indulge in pleasure, confront evil—not for the good of my soul, not because I have always suppressed lascivious desires which, now, I feel must have an outlet, but simply because I am caught up in the intoxication of a drive to be honest, whatever the price. For me, this is the most important point made by Bataille. What is at stake is partly caught in the idea that Bataille’s writing is a ‘cry of horror’ (as our author says in referring to his first literary effort, W.C.). A cry of horror—not of his debauchery, Bataille says in explanation, but of his ‘philosopher’s head’.5 Rather than writing about death or intellectual honesty, Bataille, more often than not, simply puts himself —or the ‘self’—in the position of death, as the following lines from the poem, Le Tombeau, show: I am the dead one/the blind one/the shadow without air/like the rivers in the sea/in me sound and light/ endlessly lose themselves.6 The title of the poem is significant enough, while the lines refer to death and dissolution. Or again, compare these lines: The night is my nudity/the stars are my teeth/I throw myself into the house of the dead/dressed in a white sun.7 And further: Death inhabits my heart/like a small widow/she sobs that she is a coward/I am afraid I could vomit8. Death is immanent in pleasure, and pleasure is often encountered, as in eroticism, in the ‘innocence’ of the world: When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.9 The face (symbol, in the West, of identity) would thus evoke sexual pleasure, without this pleasure—unlike desire—being spoken. Or, it could rather be a question of a spoken, and horrific, desire: ‘I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.’10 With an introduction to Bataille, then, the task is to remain in a position of transcendence (the position of theory, of interpretation, of objectification, etc.) in relation to the immanence of practice in writing. In other words, one has to try to accomplish what Bataille’s œuvre most puts into question: distinguish the enunciation from the ‘place’ of the enunciation. This point may be reiterated by invoking a number of familiar oppositions that are either explicitly or implicitly challenged by the Bataillean text.

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Bataille’s writing challenges the distinction between poetry (practice) and theory—poetry being understood in its strongest sense as a practice of affectivity; similarly, Bataille’s writing challenges the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, between transcendence and immanence, purity and obscenity, knowledge and blindness, life and death. Bataille challenges the separation of each side of these oppositions. He does not attempt to deny, or to resolve them in a new unity, in a new synthesis. Bataille is not Hegel. Blindness is not, therefore, another form of illumination; science is not another fiction; life is not death. A bull in a china shop might be inside the shop, but that does not make it a part of the shop. Bataille, then, is even anti-Hegelian in this sense. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS Similarly, the difference between the horror in Bataille’s autobiography and the horror in his fiction is never absolute. In fact, as horror’s source is most often an aspect of what is familiar (particularly the family), putting the horror of the familiar into fiction is a way of rendering it more benign. And this, because—if we accept Julia Kristeva’s interpretation—horror is equivalent to a fundamental ambiguity between ‘inside’ (the familiar) and ‘outside’ (the Other).11 Writing—particularly as fiction—would thus be a way of making firm the boundary between inside and outside. Consequently, there is more than mere anecdotal interest attaching to Bataille’s autobiography. The author himself insists on the ‘literal exactness’ of his experiences: I gave the author of W.C. the pseudonym of Troppmann. I masturbated naked, at night, by my mother’s corpse. (A few people, reading Coincidences, wondered whether it did not have the fictional character of the tale itself. But, like this Preface [to Story of the Eye], Coincidences has a literal exactness: many people in the village of R. could confirm the material; moreover, some of my friends did read W.C.)12 On two occasions, Bataille wrote autobiographical fragments: once in ‘Coincidences’ at the end of Story of the Eye, later to become, with changes, ‘Réminiscences’ in the afterword to the new version of Histoire de l’œil,13 and once in about 1958.14 The latter remained unpublished at the time of its author’s death, but in all probability was destined for publi cation. Despite what I have said above regarding the importance of the connection between autobiography and fiction in Bataille’s writing, the fact that horror is the determining element does not mean that it is a question of assuming that, here, fiction (its narrative content) is explicable in terms of certain autobiographical ‘facts’. And we would do well to remember that fictionalizing is always part of autobiography if only because its presentation is tied to the narrative form, whereas life’s contact with horror is antithetical to narrative. We should remember this in the case of Bataille’s autobiographical fragments in particular. For it is more than likely that we are dealing with just the kind of autobiography that Bataille needed for his fiction. It remains significant, however, that these are the elements Bataille chose to include in his autobiographical sketches. As such, they constitute what Starobinski—referring to the same point with regard to Rousseau’s Confessions—calls ‘authentic speech’.15 Authentic speech is not significant because it is true (or false), but because it was/is indeed uttered. The following, then, is based on what Bataille says about himself. He was born into a peasant family in Billom in France in 1897. His forebears came from Ariège and Cantal. Bataille’s father had gone blind before the birth of his son, and became paralysed in 1900 when Georges was not yet 3 years old—both conditions being the result of syphilis. Initially, the child adored its father.

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As a consequence of the syphilis, Bataille senior was forced to urinate under a blanket into a container while seated in his chair. The memory of the blank whites of the father’s eyes, open wide while urinating, remained with him, Bataille says, well into adulthood. ‘It is the image of these white eyes’, writes the son, ‘that I linked to the whites of eggs.’ Thus ‘eye’ or ‘egg’—frequently evoked in Story of the Eye’—came to be associated, in Bataillean fiction, with urination. This is an example of transposition, one of the most important features of this fiction. With puberty, Bataille’s affection for his father changed to ‘unconscious aversion’. At this stage of his illness, Bataille senior smelt terribly and was in such extreme pain that he often cried out. Rather than placate his father, the son opposed him on every point—even to the extent of leaving school in 1913 and becoming converted to catholicism (the father was a non-believer). Another memory: Bataille and his mother were woken one night (in 1913) by the father talking loudly to himself in his bedroom—a sign, as it turned out, of his having become insane. In light of this, young Georges was sent urgently to fetch the doctor. While the doctor was talking to Madame Bataille in a neighbouring bedroom, the father cried out ‘in a stentorian voice’: ‘Doctor, let me know when you’re done fucking my wife.’16 The new version of the text not translated into English adds—very significantly in terms of my later discussion—‘Il riait’: ‘He was laughing.’17 With the cry, laughter is evoked at every turn in Bataille’s text. At a stroke, this single utterance overturned the effects of a narrow upbringing and engendered the search for its equivalents in any situation. As though the shattering of every calm and proper conduct, brought to a climax by the cry and by laughter, might now become the focus of a lifetime investigation. Story of the Eye would thus be an equivalent of that utterance. Not long afterwards, Bataille’s mother also went insane so that the son was forced to keep her under constant surveillance, at the same time as he lived in fear of what she might do to him in her delirium. Things eventually reached such a pitch that Georges struck his mother. Then followed the mother’s attempted suicide by hanging, along with her frequent disappearances, and the son’s desperate efforts to find her again. After explaining the fate of his first obscene novel, W.C., in the 1943 Preface to Story of the Eye in his short novel Le Petit, Bataille relates another incident concerning his father. On 6 November 1915, Bataille senior died in a bombed-out town, abandoned by his wife and son during the German advance of August 1914. They could have returned to the town after the Germans had moved through: ‘my mother unable to bear the thought of it went mad’. The mother recovered, but refused to allow her son to visit his father. However, Bataille writes, ‘when we learned he was dying, my mother agreed to go with me. He died a few days before our arrival, asking for his children: we found a sealed coffin in the bedroom.’18 In the same piece, Bataille also notes an occasion in which he was almost overwhelmed by a sense of horror, which, while seemingly leading to the abyss, suddenly becomes a source of strength in avoiding the descent. The incident occurred after the collapse of Bataille senior while Georges was on his way to the post office to send a telegram for his mother: ‘I remember being stuck with horrible pride en route. Misery overwhelmed me, internal irony replied: “So much horror makes you predestined”.’19 In effect, horror makes him predestined to struggle to render it symbolically and thereby make it part of the world outside the subject. Having been raised outside religion, Bataille was converted to Catholicism in August 1914, and he even considered becoming a priest or a monk. He ‘stopped believing in anything’ in 1920: My piety was merely an attempt at evasion: I wanted to escape my destiny at any price. I was abandoning my father. Today, I know I am ‘blind’, immeasurable, I am ‘abandoned’ on the globe like my father at N. No one on earth or in heaven cared about my father’s dying terror. Still, I believe he faced up to it, as always. What a ‘horrible pride’, at moments, in Father’s blind smile!20

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In the Preface to the second edition of L’Impossible, Bataille will write: I even believe that in a sense my stories clearly reach the impossible. In truth, these evocations bear a painful heaviness. This heaviness is bound perhaps to the fact that horror has sometimes been a real presence in my life. It is also possible that, even though reached in fiction, horror alone allowed me still to escape the feeling of the void of the lie.21 To face horror, to look it in the face and thus avoid the lie, is to render it in language or in some symbolic form; it is to utter it, and therefore communicate it, even if this be only to oneself. Horror, then, can ‘expand symbolic and imaginary capacities’, to use Julia Kristeva’s phrase. By his own account, Bataille was a bad student at the Reims lycée; and so between January and October 1913 he refused to continue his studies. He chose, subsequently, to become a pensioner at Epernay college. In 1918, he entered the prestigious Ecole des Chartres from where he graduated in second place. After graduation, Bataille was named a member of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Hispaniques in Madrid. Fascinated by bull-fighting, he witnessed the death of the popular matador, Manuel Granero. Granero died as the result of being gored through the eye. Later, the author of Story of the Eye discovers that skinned bulls’ testicles are white like eyeballs, and not red, as he had at first assumed (cf. the episodes in the novel which link testicles, eyes, and urine). The process of transposition in fiction becomes inseparable from a very real horror. The bull’s testicles thus recall Bataille’s urinating father. Nietzsche, whom Bataille first read in 1923, was a decisive intellectual influence. Indeed, Bataille’s insistence on the notion of ‘joy before death’ as being life affirming recalls Nietzsche. Most importantly, Nietzsche is a philosopher who is inexorably a writer. First, because he does not exclude ‘life’ (autobiography) from his philosophical writings, and second, because in refusing, unconditionally, to lend his voice to any cause, Nietzsche condemns himself to solitude. Nietzsche’s philosophy is a cry in the wildnerness—in the desert. And the cry, as we have already noted, is the basis of all literary-poetic writing for Bataille. During the mid-1920s, Bataille became associated with Michel Leiris and the surrealist movement led by André Breton. He also wrote his first book, W.C.—which was read by Leiris—but then burned it because, as he explained, it was a piece of writing ‘violently opposed to all dignity’. Bataille’s links with surrealism were always tenuous, not only because of his profound disagreement with what he perceived to be the movement’s ‘Icarian’ stance on art and society (it soared above the ‘filth’ of the ‘low’ elements of life), but also because he found Breton arrogant and overbearing. A subsequent polemic saw Breton labelling the author of W.C. as a psychological ‘case’ in the Second Surrealist Manifesto. Apparently, Breton exploited his knowledge of Bataille’s first effort at writing fiction—a fiction done less from a desire to write than as a way of coping with certain obsessions. The plausibility for Breton’s thesis in the Manifesto seemed to come from the fact that Bataille had undergone psychoanalysis with Dr Adrien Borel, probably in 1925, and possibly in 1927.22 In 1922, after becoming a good student and being trained as a medievalist librarian, Bataille obtained a position as librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, a position he held until 1942 when he was forced to leave due to tuberculosis. He died in 1962. Academically, Bataille’s first publications (1926–8) were in the field of numismatics and were written while he was working at the cabinet des médailles at the Bibliothèque Nationale. According to Hollier, a number of factors connect numismatics with Bataille’s later concerns. Indeed, medal, coin, sun, etc.23 will become important in the contrast between the equilibrium of metaphor and the excess of the general economy. The latter is the limit of exchange: the point at which the system of equivalence collapses. In

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language, metaphor would be the system of equivalence par excellence. The sun is equivalent to illumination when it becomes a metaphor for life. When looked at directly, and thus experienced as a pure object, the sun causes blindness and possibly death. Medals, gold, coins, become the basis of exchange in the monetary system, as metaphor is the basis of exchange in the linguistic system. At least this is so to the extent that money (as coins, etc.) is not viewed as a ‘document’, as a pure object no longer in circulation, in which case its exchange value becomes problematic. In other words, each can be a common measure: the sun, the common measure of life; metaphor, the common measure of language, and money, the common measure in the (restricted) economy. The limits of the common measure are revealed by sacrifice and sovereignty which defy any system of equivalence, being as they are radically heterogeneous. Thus, as Hollier has noted, Bataille’s numismatic researches may not have been as far removed from his later theory of the general economy as might have been expected. ASPECTS OF BATAILLE’S INTELLECTUAL TRAJECTORY Hegel Like many of the intellectuals of the day, Bataille attended Alexandre Kojève’s idiosyncratic lectures on Hegel at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, between 1933 and 1939. Although it should be remembered that Nietzsche is much more of a positive reference for Bataille (he began learning German in the early twenties in order to read Nietzsche), the presence of Hegel in Bataille’s writing is significant. It was in these lectures on Hegel that the Russian announced to a hushed lecture theatre, in impeccable French (‘made original and fascinating’, according to Raymond Aron, by his Slavic accent), that, for Hegel, history ended with Napoleon, and that he agreed with him. For Kojève’s Hegel, real history is active and bloody, and not, as it had become, contemplative and intellectual. In recognizing the world historical importance of Napoleon as historical actor, Hegel brought philosophy (the theoretical idea) and history (the practical idea) together— presumably in Absolute Knowledge. Such would be indeed a sign of reason’s delirium, the point where it would tip over into madness. As Bataille wrote in 1930, in an article called the ‘Rotten sun’: All this leads one to say that the summit of elevation is in practice confused with a sudden fall of unheard-of violence. The myth of Icarus is particularly expressive from this point of view: it clearly splits the sun in two—the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus’s elevation, and the one that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got too close.24 Understanding philosophy in terms of the Icarian myth is quite fundamental to Bataille’s thought and writing, and I shall return to this. From 1931 to 1934, Bataille was involved with an anti-Stalinist Marxist review, La Critique sociale, where his seminal article on the notion of dépense (expenditure)—a notion influenced by Mauss’s theory of exchange—was published in 1933. From 1937 to 1939, Bataille and a number of colleagues set up the College of Sociology. Its aim was to study forms of the sacred in everyday life in light of the so-called capitalist disenchantment of the world. At least this is how Michel Leiris saw things. Bataille had a different view. For him, the sacred opened up directly onto horror. Like Goethe, Bataille could agree that the sacred is what unites souls, but the basis of this unity was what repelled them. As Hollier puts it, for the heterologist, what unites people is what repels them. ‘Society stands on things it cannot stand.’25 The heterologist investigates and explores the nature and sources of the heterogeneous elements of social life: difference and otherness as embodied in waste and rejected elements of all kinds; elements which repel

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—abject, dark elements which humans would prefer to expel from their range of experience for ever. On the other hand, the descent from high-flying transcendentalism and the encounter with the potentially radical immanence of the heterogeneous can lead to violence, the collapse of the symbolic, and to mystical encounters of various kinds. In a word, the collapse of the social is foreshadowed. Thus, Bataille’s work can be seen, from one angle at least, as a demonstration that contradiction is an inescapable fact of human experience, and that it can be confronted as a productive tension, or as the melancholic sign of human imperfection. The vertical and the horizontal Because his fiction is never simply the objectification of an inner state, but is rather the embodiment of a practice, there is a great deal of Bataille in his writing. At the beginning of the Preface to his major study of Nietzsche, Sur Nietzscbe, written during the Second World War in the form of a journal, Bataille famously explains that what drives him to write ‘is the fear of becoming mad’. And he goes on to say that he is subjected to an ‘ardent, and painful longing’, which ‘remains in him like an insatiable desire’.26 The tension he experiences (a crucial aspect of Bataille’s writing as we have seen) is, ‘in a sense like a mad urge to laugh, it differs little from the burning passions of Sade’s heroes, and yet, it is close to that of martyrs and saints’.27 Tension—anguish (angoisse)—means that Bataille’s writing cannot be explained, or interpreted, from the position of the reader who comes to occupy the place of the writer. For the writer is in the text (like Joyce, as I have argued elsewhere),28 and not exterior to it; in other words, Bataille’s writing is an obstacle to the reader’s objectification of him. In ‘being’ this obstacle, Bataille comes to challenge interpretation at its very roots. The reader, for this reason—and not by way of identification—is led to try his or her hand as a writer. Anguish, eroticism-obscenity (within which horror is always to be found), and madness (whether actual or potential) constitute the field of Bataille’s writing, a field that corresponds to the horizontal—as opposed to the vertical—axis of the text. Bataille explicitly refers to these two axes in his essay, ‘The pineal eye’,29 where vegetation occupies a position more or less exclusively on the vertical axis, while animal life tends to be situated along the horizontal axis, although animals do strive to raise themselves up and so assume a certain literal verticality. The two axes can be understood in Bataille’s work in a number of different but related ways. For instance, verticality can be taken to refer to the axis of transcendence where this refers to objectification, conceptualization, representation, homogeneity, knowledge, and, more generally, to the domain of theory (especially in the sense of theoria—to see, to observe).30 Horizontality, on the other hand, refers to immanence and to ritual, difference, horror, silence, heterogeneity, abjection (in Kristeva’s sense), or, more generally, to the domain of the non-discursive: to practice. It is where history has universal significance, but at the level of blindness or fate: the Moira.31 Societies organized through a state apparatus (Western democracies) provide instances of social life dominated by transcendence, while non-state societies (cf. Australian Aboriginal society) are organized through ritual practices and kinship alliances of so-called tradition. Needless to say, there are immanent features in societies with a state (especially at the more private level of kinship alliances and affections), just as there are transcendent features in non-state societies—if only because of language. The point is that although transcendence and immanence can be considered to be two modes of integration, they are not at all compatible with one another. Immanence is a threat to transcendence, and transcendence tends to eliminate immanence. In her essay on abjection Kristeva has shown how—with reference to India—horror (of the mother’s body) constitutes a crucial element in social cohesion. And in her earlier work, Kristeva shows how the thetic phase (the positing of subject and object) privileged by phenomenology, begins at the transcendental

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level where the subject is always already given in language. Lacan, for his part, does not radically change this situation when he makes the mirror stage the starting-point for psychoanalysis. Bataille, by contrast, speaks about the ‘interior experience’ as being ‘objectless’ and a break with all objectification. The interior experience as ecstasy, Bataille says, means that the subject is a ‘non-knowledge’ (non-savoir) and thereby sovereign. Thus does the interior experience come to ‘embody’ the horizontal axis in its capacity to shake (cf. ‘solicitation’, and ‘moirer’)32 the transcendent thetic. Seen in this way, the horizontal axis is a threat to the vertical. But it can also prove to be a source of rejuvenation for a flagging transcendence—as, for example, when different cultural practices pose a clear challenge to the existing mode of representation and the symbolic order that produces it. For Bataille, writing constitutes a challenge to existing modes of integration since it places the unified, speaking subject under pressure. Although we need to proceed with caution in any categorization, it seems clear that the horizontal ceaselessly challenges the vertical—even to the extent that the writer of exhaustion will come to reinterpret transcendent features of the vertical axis in terms of the horizontal, as in Bataille’s writing about class.33 This reinterpretation transforms class relations, which depend on a hierarchical scale of ‘high’ and ‘low’, into the absolutely high and the absolutely low, for which there can be no scale. The hierarchical scale is subverted by an unassimilable, qualitative leap into indifference and heterogeneity. Or, to use Hollier’s terms: because, for Bataille, hierarchy and architecture are inextricably linked, Bataille’s gesture is profoundly anti-architectural. It shakes all edifying edifices.34 Metaphor and metonymy Another version of the clash between the two axes distinguishes Bataille from the surrealists, and particularly from Breton. This version concerns the difference between metaphor (which, as is known, was the privileged trope for surrealism) and metonymy, which comes closest to a general figure that allows us an insight into Bataille’s writing. Since metaphor evokes the vertical, paradigmatic axis, and metonymy the horizontal, syntagmatic axis, we find that a basis emerges for interpreting the relationship between Bataille and surrealism. Although I cannot go into detail here about Bataille’s relation to surrealism, I can, as a way of introducing a further commentary on Bataille’s writing, indicate that surrealism privileged metaphor because it saw metaphor was a way out of the banality of conventional realism in art. Metaphor was a way of liberating the imagination and of giving the works it produced the strangeness of dream. Poetry in particular, and for Breton especially, would be the liberation of the imagination through the creation of original images that come to have the value of a new way of seeing. The aim becomes, Breton writes, to compose a poem ‘in which visual elements take their place between the words without ever duplicating them’.35 In an approach which is the opposite of Bataille’s, surrealism understands the image within the framework of metaphor and attributes to the image a new way of seeing that transcends the banality of so-called commonplace realism. This is truly a vision of the image which is way above the clouds! Bataille’s stroke, by stark contrast, is to show that the image, far from being located in metaphor, leads into horror, ecstasy, obscenity, and death. The image, in short, is the way to a certain blindness (non-savoir). Within the meaning structure of the West, as Derrida has indicated, metaphor has always been linked with sight, seeing and light. Epistemologically, knowledge, too, is linked to seeing and the eye in the Western tradition. Sight, sun, and metaphor all join to form the basis of the vertical axis. Metaphor is an instance of transcendence. The sun can only enter language through metaphor. As a real object, it remains heterogeneous to language and the symbolic. The separation between the real sun and language is the latter’s very precondition. Bataille knew this better than anyone. And this is why he opposed the surrealist

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attempt to give metaphor complete ascendancy over difference and heterogeneity, an ascendancy brought about by the (Hegelian) uniting of contraries. La Rochefoucault, quoted by Bataille in My Mother, says: ‘Neither the sun nor death can be stared at.’36 The sun thus comes to occupy the place of the real object, the place of death. Again, in Le Tombeau, we read: ‘le soleil n’est que la mort’.37 The tale of Icarus’s fall makes a similar point. Too much sun (too much illumination as in Hegel) leads to blindness and death. Perhaps, Bataille speculates, we could come to terms with blindness and death instead of constantly denying them. The surrealist move would constitute a denial of death, blindness and horror (a denial of the excremental, rejected, and heterogeneous elements)—a denial that Bataille’s fiction refuses. Bataille refuses to repress, refuses to sublimate the horror. Bataille writes, in short, in order to put out the light of the sun. Death, as a result, is also the death of metaphor; with its power to fascinate, the image evokes death in as far as it becomes the death of metaphor, a death premissed on the emergence of obscenity and horror. How precisely does this occur in Bataille’s writing? Discontinuity The answer is, in large measure, through discontinuity brought about especially by laughter (rire), by the cry (cri), and by silence—by equivalences to the father’s stentorian (crying) and laughing utterance. Most importantly, sacrifice makes a radical break with the existing—necessarily continuous and homogeneous— state of affairs exemplified in the calculable economy of the exchange of equivalences. Sacrifice involves discontinuity and transgression—an alteration, mutilation, and liberation of heterogeneous elements. Bataille writes, for example, that: [I]f I laugh (ris) on meeting a friend, it…is because a tension close to anguish (angoisse) is lifted…38 Clearly, what elicits laughter (rire) is not anguish but anguish in some necessary form: it is when anguish is lifted that laughter begins.39 And anguish evokes sacrifice: Anguish is maintained at various levels of tolerance: sacrifice being the communication of anguish (as laughter is the communication of its lifting), the amount of anguish communicated approximates in principle the amount of communicable anguish.40 Even though the kind of violent sacrifice Bataille refers to is, historically, now rare, anguish and laughter still evoke it. Laughter, as we have seen, is the lifting of the anguish evoked by sacrifice as violence and death. Laughter thus evokes the violent excess of the general economy. ‘In human consciousness eroticism is that within man which calls being into question.’41 We can interpret ‘being’ here as an imaginary equilibrium and continuity, the basis of (symbolic) homogeneity (of individual identities), presence, and society. Eroticism is also linked to sovereignty because the latter in Bataille does not involve the sovereignty which classical political theory sees as unity; it is rather the heterogeneous, sacred instant beyond knowledge. Eroticism thus introduces a discontinuity and disequilibrium into consciousness. This fundamental disequilibrium promoted by both eroticism and sacrifice as aspects of interior life, separates the human from the animal world. The loss of the object in eroticism results in the loss of the subject: ‘In eroticism: I am losing myself.’42 In sacrifice, too, loss (whether or not of self) is fundamental. Sacrifice and loss, then, are part of what Bataille calls the ‘general

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economy’—unproductive expenditure without reserve—which contrasts with the necessary acquisition that must compensate for expenditure in the particular economy of ‘balanced accounts’ and production. Let us note here that it was Bataille’s notion of the ‘general economy’ based on excess that caught the attention of philosophers such as Derrida, although the latter sought, in 1967, to distance himself from the notion’s perceived Hegelian residue.43 Although Derrida could claim that the sovereignty of the general economy remains at least partially caught within a classical philosophy of the subject, and that the other term important for the general economy, transgression, conserves what it exceeds, and is thereby indebted to Hegel’s (untranslatable) Aufhebung, and so is possibly still within the restricted economy, what really influenced a generation of French intellectuals after the Second World War was more than Bataille’s philosophical insights. Indeed, despite Michel Foucault’s laudatory article on Bataillean transgression, which is seen as replacing the notion of contradiction, the author of the Order of Things moves closer to the source of Bataille’s importance when, as is now well known, he writes in the ‘Presentation’ to the first volume of Bataille’s collected works that: ‘Today we know it: Bataille is one of the most important writers of his century. The Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda have broken the thread of narratives in order to recount what has never been recounted.’44 Foucault’s unequivocal remarks allude to the délire45 of sovereignty in Bataille’s writing, which would shake—in 1960s France—the stultifying emphasis on systematic and sane thought, whether this be of Marxist, phenomenological, or liberal/economic rationalist persuasion. Even if his more philosophical analyses and statements (e.g. on Hegel) in the end connect Bataille to the restricted economy, as Derrida proposes, his fictional and poetic writing (not interpreted by Derrida) comes to disrupt the tranquillity of conformist equilibrium and—as Barthes, Foucault, Sollers, Kristeva and others realized—raises again the unanswerable question about where to draw the border between madness and sanity. Or, to use a more Freudian terminology, Bataille’s writing embraces repression just enough to be disruptive of identity without being totally destructive. And this is what gave it that revolutionary tinge so necessary and fascinating in the halycon days of the sixties in France.46 Let us now look at Bataillean délire in more detail. TRANSPOSITION Anguish (angoisse) evoked in sacrifice, Bataille shows, confronts the self (moi). Even more, anguish is constitutive of the subject as a loss of self, as non-knowledge (non-savoir), being both an intimation of death, and a means of separation from it. Anguish is also a desire to communicate, a desire equivalent again to a loss of self: ‘Anguish supposes a desire to communicate, that is to say, to lose myself.’ Anguish, however, is a non-discursive element borne along by discursivity. To write anguish and loss, is to be beyond the discursive form of communication within discursivity. Again, to write anguish is to open up the possibility of overcoming it, non-discursively, in ecstasy, in eroticism, through the cry and through laughter. Non-discursively means: homophonically and anagrammatically. As a result, ‘angoisse’ (‘anguish’) and ‘moi’ (‘self’) not only exist in a discursive and logical relation to each other; they are also related by the same phoneme (in French): ‘/oi/’. In the fictional texts, /oi/ can be made to stand for a whole series of terms that inevitably evoke angoisse (anguish). Hence the frequency of: voir (to see), voix (voice), devoir (to have to), pouvoir (to be able to), joie (joy), étoile (star), vouloir (to wish/ want to), fois (once), noir (black), croire (to believe), etc. Another series, which can be designated as the series which evokes laughter (rire), can be made from the phoneme /i/, giving the series formed by the repetition of: rire (to laugh), cri (cry), déchirer (to tear up), écrire (to write), dire (to say), délire (delirium), plaisir (pleasure), lit

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(bed), lire (to read), vivre (to live), vide (empty, void), ivre (drunk), pipi (slang for urine), finir (to finish), etc. Another series comes from /ou/: fou (mad), souillet (to sully), jouir (to enjoy), rougir (to blush), etc. A fourth series of repeated terms derives from œil (as is shown in full in Story of the Eye), the phoneme/ œ/: œil, œuf, yeux, seuil, jeu, horreur, Dieu, cœur, meurtre, etc. And still a fifth from mort and corps with the phoneme /or/, hence the frequency of: mort (death), corps (body), sort(ir) (to go out), fort (strong), etc. Finally, a sixth series evoking the night (nuit) can be discerned, based on the phoneme /u/, so that the following are often encountered in Bataille’s writing: nudité (nudity), (je) suis, ((I) am), lumière (light), nuit (night), etc. As Lucette Finas has shown in her study of the anagrammaticality of Bataille’s Madame Edwarda,47 there is an almost infinite play of transpositions—both anagrammatical and homophonic—in Bataille’s writing, transpositions that seem to recall and repeat the key notions of his philosophy. These notions tend to centre around the terms which form the focal points of the series set out above: anguish, laughter and cry, joy and impurity, eye and egg, horror and death, body, nudity and night. These words do not of course exhaust the list; nor are they the only ones to evoke Bataille’s ideas. For example, from the series œil, we would have to acknowledge the evocation of ‘testicle’, and soleil (sun). Rigour demands that this homophony and anagrammaticality be shown to be more than a chance phenomenon of the French language itself. Certainly, homophony, etc. would seem to be more than a chance phenomenon in Bataille’s poetry, where the /i/ as in ‘cri’, for example, can be observed repeated throughout key poems.48 With regard to the rest of Bataille’s writing, particularly his prose, the issue of chance effects versus intention in language is very revealing. For might it not be that Bataille’s writing has connected with something that is intrinsic to language—as the ‘house of Being’ (Heidegger)—as (part of) existence as such? Put another way: the fundamental link between self (moi) and anguish (angoisse) made visible by Bataille, could be intrinsic to language. The issue is similar to the one faced by Saussure in his study of anagrams in Saturnalian poetry. Saussure’s worry about the rigour of his researches arose from the fact that he could not be sure that his discovery of the names of heroes did not arise by chance. As a result, he did not publish the results of his work. In his well-known study of Saussure’s anagrams, Starobinski comments: ‘Was Saussure mistaken? Did he let himself become frustrated by a mirage? Are anagrams like those faces that one reads in ink blots?’49 In response, Starobinski argues that it might not be an ‘either/or’ issue— either chance or conscious procedure—but a symptom of the linguistic process as such—a process ‘neither purely fortuitous nor fully conscious’. And he concludes: Ferdinand de Saussure’s error (if error there is) would also be an exemplary lesson. It would teach us how difficult it is for the critic to avoid taking his own finding for the rule followed by the poet. Believing he, or she, has made a discovery, the critic cannot easily accept that the poet has not consciously or unconsciously wanted what the analysis can only suppose. He cannot easily resign himself to remain alone with his discovery. He wants to share it with the poet.50 With Bataille’s writing, a similar situation seems to pertain. Is it Bataille the poet who produces the language effects we have talked about, or are these effects simply chance features of the French language— features which the critic chooses to highlight? No doubt, as Starobinski has argued in the case of Saussure’s research, it is neither entirely the language nor entirely Bataille the writer/poet, nor the critic’s drive to find an underlying coherence which explains the phenomena in question. My view is that whether or not Bataille intended that it be so, the phonic aspect of his writing confirms that he wished to engage in writing as an interior experience: that is, as an ecstatic state, as a dramatization of existence. ‘To write’, says Bataille in Guilty, ‘is never more than a game played with an ungraspable

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reality.’51 To write, in other words, is to come into contact with the horizontal axis of immanence and the drives rather than with the vertical axis of transcendence and the symbolic order. The cry (cri), laughter (rire), and silence—these, in particular, are immanent in Bataille’s text: this is to say that they are only obscurely present in language, present at the semiotic (material) level of language,52 the level of the signifying process. Such is the case, for example, in the following passage from L’Impossible: A ce moment, la douceur de la nudité (la naissance des jambes ou des seins) touchait l’infini. A ce moment, le désir (l’angoisse que double l’amitié) fut si merveilleusement comblé que je déséspérai. Ce moment immense—comme un fou-rire, infiniment heureux, démasquant ce qui dure après lui (en révélant l’inévitable déclin)—substituait l’alcool à l’eau, une absence de mort, un vide sans fin à la proximité apparente du ciel.53 (At this moment, the sweetness of nudity (the baring of legs or of breasts) touched the infinite. At this moment, desire (the anguish that heightens friendship) was so marvellously satisfied that I despaired. This immense moment—like an infinitely happy giggle unmasking what remains after it (in revealing the inevitable decline)—substituted alcohol for water, an absence of death, an endless void for the apparent proximity of the sky.) Moments of drunkenness (ivresse), and of consummation, moments which last a certain time even though they do not result from a desire to exist, these are moments on the edge of oblivion, on the edge of the abyss; they are an extreme pleasure that opens the way to death. Such moments are, in fact, a singular moment that glorifies the moment as the end of time. The latter recalls the non-knowledge of the interior experience, but it is called the moment of insane meaning (sens insensé) as well as the moment of nonmeaning (non-sens). The moment is thus a writing of limits. And it is revelatory of the cry (cri) and of laughter (rire) which mark these limits. To be noted in the two pages from L’Impossible which includes the above quotation is, first of all, the frequency of the phoneme /i/ in words such as ivresse, etc. This sound pattern, carried along by the themes of Bataille’s fiction, while often being tangential to them, is equivalent to laughter as an irrepressible insistence of the horizontal axis, the axis which opens out onto writing as practice. Now the significance of the word écrire (to write) for Bataille would be contained in its anagrammatical cri, and rire. Writing as practice (that is, literature) opens out onto anagrammaticality as the incipient dissolution of meaning that begins the movement towards horror and death. It is a movement of transposition such as is found in Story of the Eye, where milk becomes the whites of eyes, eyes become eggs, the latter become testicles, etc. Bataille’s writing is a writing of limits (it moves to the edge of the abyss and confronts death) which threatens metaphor as the way to light and life, although it also makes limited use of metaphor. It is a writing which makes metonymy its instrument for exploring horizontality. Metonymy, which deals in contiguity, is spatial: the link between elements tends to be the result of proximity rather than of similarity or of equivalence. Lacan said that desire is a metonymy because the object of desire is always lost. Desire, constituted by the ‘original’ metaphor of separation, takes a horizontal trajectory and only comes to an end when the drive energy necessary to sustain it comes to an end. Bataille’s writing, qua writing, is the outcome of the tension between the metonymy of desire which produces writing, and the themes of this writing which, in effect, repeat the dream of bringing writing to an end in a maelstrom of horror, jouissance and death. This is not simply writing in which the object is lost; it is a writing without an object, one of laughter and tears. The subject experiences loss and comes face to face with the horror of the void.

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Bataille’s unadorned style (which Marguerite Duras once described, with respect to The Blue of Noon, as an absence of style)54 approaches horror and becomes a symptom of its effects. For horror and abjection would drain desire of the drive energy needed to sustain it. In this way, writing approaches the point of exhaustion and loss. Death, then, haunts Bataille’s work, both as a theme of his fiction and as a reality embodied in a (writing) practice. This is what the surrealists could not fathom, so concerned were they with the themes of Bataille’s fiction, in contrast to the practice of his writing. From a thematic perspective, then, death in Bataille’s universe figures as the synthesis of joy (ecstasy) and horror. Or rather, just as the sun provides illumination but is also blinding if looked at directly at noon, so joy, when pushed to the limit, topples over into horror—like the priest’s orgasm at the point of death in Story of the Eye. There, the narrator is paralysed before the reality of the synthesis of orgasm—provoked by Simone—and death, a synthesis that is also not one, but rather a totally explosive combination: ‘all I could do was squeeze her in my arms and kiss her mouth, because of a strange inward paralysis ultimately caused by my love for the girl and the death of the unspeakable creature.’55 Exhaustion, anguish, loss are not just emblematic. They are the reality of a meeting of opposites in what would be the realization of contradiction if death did not intervene. The first ‘sign’ (mark) of death is the exhaustion of the writing practice itself. By implication, Bataille is thus locked into the logic of dépense (unproductive expenditure) rather than into the logic of the restricted economy. Angoisse is the mark of the tension that both generates, and at the same time threatens, the text. Light, knowledge, self, the gaze, pleasure, joy never exist without evoking anguish, horror and loss (cf. the series based on the sound /oi/). Unlike the Hegelian turn of surreal-ism as Breton outlines it, contraries never merge into one another, but remain in a relationship of extreme tension. Bataille’s writing embodies this tension. Even to see, to know, to understand, opens up a field in which blindness, non-knowledge (non-savoir), and incomprehension are immediately on the horizon. Thus, when, in The Blue of NOON, the narrator and Dorothea finally come together, without anguish, and walk together in the mountains near the Moselle river, they look into each other’s eyes, with fear, and without hope;56 and then, as they are walking down into the valley in the darkness, at a turn in the path, a void opens up before them. ‘Curiously, this empty space, at our feet, was no less infinite than a starry sky over our heads.’57 In this scene, the stars of the vertical axis reflect the void of the horizontal. The stars, in fact, look like candles on coffins and, as such, become a reminder of the death inscribed in the void. Fascinated by the void, the novel’s protagonists become sexually excited and copulate in the cold, slippery mud. So slippery is the mud on the mountain, that at the height of passion, the lovers begin to slide towards the void: ‘If I hadn’t stopped this slide with my foot, we would have fallen into the night, and I might have wondered with amazement if we weren’t falling in the void of the sky’.58 The slide renews the anguish, the tension, deriving from the very reality of the abyss. The abyss is the joy before death; it is not at all the joy of death. In a discarded passage from Le Coupable, Bataille relates how, when visiting the grave of his former lover, Laure (Colette Peignot) he remembered having walked with Laure up to the crater of Mount Etna when, suddenly, she was seized by a violent anguish before the void of the crater.59 This experience of anguish (psychoanalytically linked to an experience of castration), an experience repeated throughout Bataille’s fiction, becomes an intimation of the impossible as the experience of one’s own death. The impossible is a loss of self and the lack of an object. It is the impossibility of persevering in desire, in eroticism. Again, in L’Impossible, Bataille sees the ‘impossible as a void’,60 a void into which erotic energy goes for no return, and which leads to depression, disgust, the suffering of unsatisfied desire and the impossibility of persevering.61 Anguish, however, is inseparable from the cry (cf. the series based on the sound /i/) of anguish, a cry that often tips over into laughter (rire) at horror. Then, laughter—especially the laughter of women—becomes a cutting, lacerating laughter (cf. déchirer: to tear up, to rent) that often provokes a cry.

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To write (écrire), therefore, is, as Taylor62 has pointed out, to evoke laughter and the cry (cf. écrirer: to exclaim, to cry out) which in turn opens out onto anguish, the void and death. In one sense, then, to write at all is to maintain desire thereby invoking the anguish of the cry—and the laughter—before death. Again, nudity and death are linked because to see nudity is to see erotically, to experience loss—even though seeing might dissimulate this effect through the clinical gaze. The clinical gaze tends towards excessive circumspection; with a sanitized vocabulary incorporating a wealth of euphemisms, this excess may appear at any moment as a fear of madness that puts the clinical gaze on the trail of the fear and horror that it tries to repress so totally. ‘Not that horror is ever to be confounded with attraction’, we read in the Preface to Madame Edwarda, ‘but if it cannot inhibit it, destroy it, horror reinforces attraction!’63 The eagle, like Icarus, flies high. It can see over a vast area. However, if it flies too high, it risks being blinded, as Icarus was when the sun melted his wax. The sun, as we know, is an ambivalent object; it can give rise to both life and death. The Hegelian urge of the modern era can lead reason and knowledge—exorbitantly situated in the vertical axis—towards the fall brought about by the reassertion of the horizontal axis. The Hegelian dream of a fundamental reconciliation between practical and theoretical knowledge in the Absolute Idea (and I am not the first to say it) is, for Bataille, destined to turn, without knowing it (because fate is always obscure), into the excesses of reason the modern world has witnessed only too often. Need it be spelled out that the Hegelian system also constitutes such a delirium of metaphoricity and verticality that there is no outside to the system? For Bataille, by contrast, the void, the erotic, excrement, and all kinds of horror raise the spectre of unassimilable difference and put the subject in question to the point of death—to the point where the symbolic order itself is at the point of collapse. While Breton claims that to write is to poeticize through image and metaphor, Bataille counters by showing that any writing that is worthy of the name—that is, any writing that expands symbolic capacities—is one that takes place in the wake of the very impossibility of writing. For Breton, writing is always possible; metaphor is always possible—that was the point about automatic writing. For Bataille, writing is possible, but only as impossible—only as dogged by its blindness: it is the cry and laughter, desire and horror, the erotic and anguish, day and night. In short, writing is the excrement that cannot ‘be’. For many people, the raison d’être of psychoanalysis is to illuminate by way of its interpretations. Certainly, in some of its versions, it has acquired a sensitivity to the dynamics of intersubjectivity that is unheard of in other discourses. The question none the less remains as to the nature of its objectifying urge. To objectify is to invoke the light of the sun in order to see into even the darkest of recesses. Let us recall here Freud’s statement that woman is a dark continent. Being a power to illuminate, psychoanalysis thus has to bring woman into the light. Woman must be objectified. The question is: can psychoanalysis celebrate its capacity to see without denying the inevitable blindness implicit in this very proclamation? For those with perfect sight, writing as impossible is this blindness. It is Breton’s blindness with regard to Bataille when he sees him as a ‘case’.64 The thesis gradually emerging is that Bataille’s writing is a blindness that, paradoxically, would ‘illuminate’ the blindness of every exclusively objectifying discourse—not simply in the manner referred to by Shoshana Felman when she notes that psychoanalysis has taken some of its terminology and its concepts from literature, nor perhaps simply in the manner of Denis Hollier when he points out that theory (seeing) cannot grasp its other,65 but rather in the sense that the obstacle of the impossible reveals seeing as nothing but a will to see. In effect, seeing is not a simple reflection of the world in the eye. Rather, seeing entails a repressed component which links it to drive energy and renders it unstable. In this sense, psychoanalysis and seeing take on the characteristics of Lévi-Strauss’s version of myth. For the structural anthropologist, myths survive for as long as there is intellectual energy available to sustain them. No doubt, in Bataille’s case, the

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notion of will translates into that of an expenditure without return. This awareness enables the recognition that, at one level at least, Bataille’s own writing is an expenditure without return; its ‘meaning’ is in good measure contained in its being performed: to write becomes a will to write, a will to a loss of meaning, as well as to meaning itself. Ironically, like Nietzsche, from whom the notion of will has of course been taken, the act of writing by no means goes without saying. The exhaustion and fatigue to which Bataille’s texts constantly refer, is also evident in the relatively fragmentary nature of the œuvre, in the bursts of poetry, and in the loss incurred in producing a sustained text.66 This loss is of course death, the expenditure without return. Macquarie University, Sydney NOTES 1 For an illuminating discussion of this point from a slightly different angle, see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 23–6. 2 Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, by Lord Auch, trans. Joachim Neugroschal (Harmondsworth: Penguin, reprinted 1986), p. 65. This translation follows the original 1928 edition of Histoire de l’œil published in 134 copies in Paris in 1928 under the pseudonym of Lord Auch. Subsequently, a new version was published in three editions: 1940, 1941 and 1967. Only the last, posthumous edition was published under Bataille’s own name. I shall have occasion to refer to this edition later in the paper in connection with exhaustion and loss. 3 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd printing 1986), p. 236. 4 ibid., p. 237. 5 George Bataille, ‘W.C. (Preface to Story of the Eye from Le Petit: 1943)’, in Story of the Eye, p. 75. 6 Georges Bataille, Le Tombeau, in Œuvres Complètes (hereafter O.C.), vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 77. This and all subsequent translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 7 Bataille, L’Impossible, O.C., vol. III, p. 211. 8 ibid. 9 Bataille, ‘The solar anus’, Visions of Excess, p. 8. 10 ibid., p. 9. 11 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S.Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 7. 12 Bataille, Story of the Eye, p. 76. 13 See Georges Bataille, ‘Coincidences’, Story of the Eye, pp. 69–74, and ‘Réminiscences’, Histoire de l’œil (Paris: Société Nouvelle des Editions Pauvert, reprint of 1967 edn, 1979), pp. 101–10. The latter version is much reduced, both in terms of the incidences recounted (for example the death of Manuel Granero, the bull-fighter, is not included), and in terms of the number of words used. Both versions will be called upon in what follows. 14 See Georges Bataille, O.C., vol. VII (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 614, n. 12. What I am here calling autobiography is a text conventionally producing a ‘story of a life’. It should not be forgotten of course that many of Bataille’s writings now found in O.C. contain facts about his life. One such text is ‘Le surréalisme au jour le jour’, in O.C., vol. VIII, pp. 167–84. In it Bataille describes his encounters with surrealists such as Breton, Aragon and Leiris. 15 Jean Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 198–200. 16 Bataille, Story of the Eye, p. 73. 17 See Bataille, Histoire de l’œil (1979 edn) p. 108. 18 Bataille, Story of the Eye, p. 77. 19 ibid. 20 ibid., p. 78. 21 Bataille, L’Impossible, O.C., vol. III, p. 101. Bataille’s emphasis.

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22 See Denis Hollier. 23 An exemplary article here, is Bataille’s ‘Les monnaies des Grands Mogols au Cabinet des Médailles’ in Aréthuse, 4 (October 1926), pp. 133–42, reproduced in O.C., vol. I, pp. 108–19. Bataille refers there to ‘gobelet’ medals which have the impression of the emperor on one side, and a lion and the sun, or the sun alone, on the reverse side (see p. 114). 24 Bataille, Visions of Excess, p. 58 (The last part of Bataille’s novel, The Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du ciel, trans. Harry Mathews, London and New York: Marion Boyars, reprinted 1991) demystifies political engagement in roughly these terms: idealism—perhaps represented by Xénie—comes crashing down to earth. As if to reinforce this point, the two key protagonists in the story—the narrator and his girlfriend ‘Dirty’—end up screwing in the mud. See my later commentary. 25 Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology: 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xix. 26 Bataille, O.C., vol. VI, p. 11. 27 ibid. 28 John Lechte, ‘The co(s)mic voice of Finnegans Wake’, in Pavel Petr et al., Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire and Parody (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1985), pp. 29–42, p. 31. 29 Bataille, Visions of Excess, pp. 82–3. 30 On this point see the following: Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 32–6; Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 202–5; Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 52–3. 31 For a fascinating discussion of this term, see Ulmer, Applied Grammatology, pp. 36–40 and pp. 44–8. 32 ‘Structure then can be methodically threatened in order to be compre hended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability. This operation is called (from the Latin) soliciting. In other words, shaking in a way related to the whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin “the whole” and from citare, “to put in motion”).’ (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 6, cited by Ulmer in Applied Grammatology, p. 38). 33 See, for example, Bataille, ‘The notion of expenditure’, in Visions of Excess, pp. 116–29. 34 Cf. Hollier, Against Architecture, p. 23. 35 ‘Surrealist situation of the object’, in André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R.Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 263. 36 Bataille, My Mother, in Georges Bataille, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1989), p. 50. Translation modified. 37 ‘The sun is only death’. Bataille, O.C., vol. III, p. 81. 38 Bataille, O.C., vol. VII, p. 275. 39 ibid. Bataille’s emphasis. 40 ibid., pp. 279–80. Bataille’s emphasis. 41 Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London and New York: Marion Boyars, paperback edn, 1987), p. 29. Bataille’s emphasis. Translation modified. 42 ibid. p. 31. Bataille’s emphasis. 43 Although it is possible that Bataille, along with Husserl, Heidegger and Freud, constitutes a seminal thinker for Derrida and his notion of différance (as suggested by Michèle Richman in her Reading Georges Bataille (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), ch. 6), it seems to me equally true that Freudian repression (leading, it should be noted, to the instability of the symbolic) has been at least as influential in Derrida’s œuvre as has been the Bataillean ‘general economy’. 44 Michel Foucault, ‘Presentation’ in Georges Bataille, O.C., vol. I, Premiers écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 5. 45 For a discussion of the notion of délire in French philosophy and literature, see Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy Through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (Le Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985). Of

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47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

64 65 66

Bataille and délire, Lecercle says: ‘What the cultural event marked was the discovery of a frontier between philosophy and literature, and its exploration. Bataille, whose work is both philosophy and literature is a case in point. Délire is the name for this frontier, the point where two theoretical interests meet: literature-language/ délire-philosophy.’ (p. 44.) As Michèle Richman explains, there emerged in France intellectuals who saw that ‘the revolutionary potential of literature was suffocating in its limits. This position summarizes the issues attacked by Bataille’s peers who attained maturity between the world wars, aspired to redefine revolution while confronting the historical reality of Fascism, and recognised that the term literature no longer conjured an identifiable object.’ (Michèle H.Richman, Reading Georges Bataille, p. 5.) Here, it should be added that while the serious reading of Bataille in the 1960s—largely though the initiative of Tel Quel—certainly opened up new literary, philosophical and political possibilities, my judgement is that key aspects of Bataillean experience such as anguish, loss (includes obscurity and insignificance), and chance have never really been embraced by the French intellectual establishment. The reasons for this would require a separate paper. For the moment I shall simply say that a truly Bataillean experience is hardly the basis for building an intellectual reputation or for wielding academic power. See Lucette Finas, La Crue. Une lecture de Bataille: Madame Edwarda (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Cf. poems making up the collection entitled L’Archangélique in O.C., vol. III, pp. 71–96. Translation modified. Jean Starobinski, Les Mots sous les mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 153. ibid., p. 154. Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (Venice, Calif.: Lapis Press, 1988), p. 47. For an explanation of ‘semiotic’ as used here, see Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), Pt I and especially pp. 40–1; and John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990), ch. 5. Bataille, O.C., vol. III, p. 110. Marguerite Duras, La Ciguë (‘Hommage à Georges Bataille’), 1 (January 1958), cited in Francis Marmande, Georges Bataille Politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985), p. 173. Bataille, Story of the Eye, p. 65. Bataille, The Blue of Noon, p. 143. ibid. ibid., p. 145. Bataille, O.C., vol. V, p. 500. The ‘final’ version, translated in Guilty, refers to the narrator’s fear, horror and exhaustion as a fierce wind takes hold of him while he looks into Mt Etna’s crater: ‘I was offered the chilling sight of the crater two hundred meters above. The night didn’t prevent me from taking in the extent of the horror. I stepped back, frightened, protecting myself, then—gathering my courage—stepped forward again’ (p. 119). Bataille, O.C., vol. III, p. 108. For a discussion of the impossible as loss in Bataille, see Marie-Christine Lala, ‘The conversions of writing in Georges Bataille’s L’Impossible’, Yale French Studies, 78 (1990), pp. 237–45. Cf. Bataille, O.C., vol. V. p. 247. Mark C.Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 148, n. 33. Bataille, ‘Preface to Madame Edwarda’, in O.C., vol III, p. 11. Bataille’s emphasis. For some reason the point hardly comes through in Austryn Wainhouse’s translation. But see My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, p. 140. See Hollier, Against Architecture, pp. 106–12 for further discussion of this issue. ibid., pp. 87–8. Cf. Bataille’s Eroticism, where the attempted full-length book gives way to a series of occasional essays that make nearly half the text.

Literature as heterological practice: Georges Bataille, writing and inner experience FRED BOTTING AND SCOTT WILSON

I’m writing… Sharp serenity, the sky before me black, star-filled, the hill black and so too the trees: I’ve found out why my heart’s a banked fire, though inside still alive. There’s a feeling of presence in me irreducible to any kind of notion—the thunderbolt that ecstasy causes. I become a towering flight from myself as if my life flowed in slow rivers through the inky sky. I’ve stopped being ME. But whatever issues from me reaches and encloses boundless presence, itself similar to the loss of myself, which is no longer either myself or someone else. And a deep kiss between us, in which the distinction of our lips is lost, is linked to that ecstasy and is dark, familiar to the universe as the earth wheeling through heaven’s loss.1 Writing, for Georges Bataille, doubles as experience. No longer, or not merely, the representation of ‘some occasion’, some ecstatic embrace in the woods, writing itself performs the experience of loss, performs ecstasy. In this account, inky blackness literally surrounds the writing subject; and inside, at the point of the interior inaccessible to thought, presence is consumed by fire. Writing drains, ‘in slow rivers through the inky sky’, the life of the subject to the point of death: to the point where ‘I’ve stopped being ME.’ Through an intense identification with the Other, the subject’s interiority is projected out into an exteriority of pure affect. In an ecstatic tension, immanence bleeds away into external objects that similarly lose themselves as both subject and object, self and other, dissolve in a ‘deep kiss’, rolled round in earth’s nocturnal course, ‘wheeling through heaven’s loss’. Heaven’s loss is the space of the modern sacred, rent open by the terror summoned by the death of God. The space of literature. Or is it? Can Bataille’s accounts of mystical or inner experience, accounts in which the writing itself enacts experience, be called literature? And who am I, the critic, to say? Given the incommensurability of criticism with what Bataille speaks of as literature or, more or less properly, as poetry, what use is criticism? What job can it do? Superfluous in relation to the superfluity that defines literature, criticism can either attempt to assimilate literature, to return it to orders of rationality, restricted economy and empirical reality, or else merely gaze in silent wonder at this sacred form beyond its utility and understanding.

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LITERATURE AS THE MODERN SACRED Poetry alone, which denies and destroys the limitations of things, can return us to this absence of limitations—in short, the world is given to us when the image which we have within us is sacred, because all that is sacred is poetic and all that is poetic is sacred.2 As the Enlightenment slowly began to eclipse the light of God, or rather stripped Him of His demoniacal, terrifying features, He lost the ambivalence crucial to the properly sacred and became merely ‘the simple (paternal) sign of universal homogeneity’: rationality’s metaphysical guarantee.3 By 1792 the old God was dead; rationality reigned. In the space vacated by God, and as a method of ‘mental projection’, poetry could potentially permit one to reach beyond the limitations defined by rationality and accede ‘to an entirely heterogeneous world’.4 In Poetry The isolated being loses himself in something other than himself. What the ‘other thing’ represents is of no importance. It is still a reality that transcends the common limitations. So unlimited that it is not even a thing: it is nothing.5 This mental projection, then, involves a sort of hyper-identification with ‘something other’ that is essentially, or ultimately, ‘nothing’. Such identification, beyond yet intrinsic to the relations of identity in everyday language, actuates an experience of loss, of non-being. As the impossible expression of such an experience, literature exceeds the determination of any system of utility: it overwhelms orders of rationality and sense. Overflowing restricted economies based on use and exchange value, literature opens on to an indefinable arena where expenditure becomes loss without profit or return, where negativity dissolves identity and reason without the assurance of a dialectic that promises to give them back. In the essay ‘The notion of expenditure’ published in 1933, Bataille wrote: The term poetry, applied to the least degraded and least intellectualized forms of expression of a state of loss, can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore close to that of sacrifice. It is true that the word ‘poetry’ can only be appropriately applied to an extremely rare residue of what it commonly signifies and that, without a preliminary reduction, the worst confusions could result; it is however, impossible in a first, rapid exposition to speak of the infinitely variable limits separating subsidiary formations from the residual element of poetry.6 Poetry is sacred not only because between language, the subject and the world of being, ‘an extremely rare residue’ of attenuated emotion, analogous to that found in religious mysticism, uncovers a truth exterior to, or in excess of, the world of perceived objects and coherent discussion, but also because the scene of poetry’s production is abject. In order to ‘be’ sacred, the poet is required to sacrifice him- or herself and take on a heterogeneous existence. The poet becomes a sort of Christ figure whose work is revered not least because of the suffering from which it has issued. But this is, perhaps, all the same, the familiar work of literary criticism. It is criticism which appropriates poetry as exchange value by excreting the Poet as sacred, suffering Author, rendering both author and work useless. In ‘The use value of D.A.F.de Sade’, Bataille castigated some of his ‘current comrades’ in the Surrealist movement for homogenizing and reducing Sade’s works to the orders of aesthetic, literary and

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philosophical value. Bataille, who in this essay does not talk about Sade, advocates a different ‘use value’ of his work and attempts to reactivate the initial, disturbing force of its irruption and its revolutionary effects. In the essay, Bataille proposes a set of principles for a Practical Heterology, which, as a paradoxical ‘science of the sacred’ (the sacred being precisely everything that eludes science), sets itself to inquire into the uses and subversive effects of the category of the heterogeneous. Heterogeneity signifies all the elements that cannot be contained within the restricted boundaries of homogeneous social, rational, economic and political order: undesirables, bodies, the unconscious, base matter, extravagant and excremental waste, and associated excitations, energies and disturbances all combine and decompose in states of exile, repression or exclusion. As the science of the heterogeneous, heterology counters conventional scientific knowledge’s complicity with and productions of homogeneous representations of the world since those representations project the deprivation of our universe’s source of excitation and the development of a servile human species, fit only for the fabrication, rational consumption and conservation of products.7 Heterology, however, occupies the uncertain space within rationality where heterogeneity declares its necessity… the intellectual process automatically limits itself by producing of its own accord its own waste products, thus liberating in a disordered way the heterogeneous excremental element.8 Heterology leads to the complete reversal of the philosophical process, which ceases to be the instrument of appropriation, and now serves excretion; it introduces the demand for the violent gratification implied by social life.9 As such, heterology is utterly antithetical to criticism and critique. Criticism lies not on the side of action but of inertia; concerned with capture rather than loss, return rather than expenditure, criticism orders heterogeneous elements according to homogeneous systems of representation: identity, homology and similitude, rendering them stale and static. The project of criticism is always to return texts to an order already imagined for them, consuming and appropriating what it can use and fit into its scheme, while effacing or repressing anything which it cannot. In the late 1930s Bataille complemented his attack on philosophy, science and criticism with an attack on criticism’s object: literature. Bataille and the other main members of the College of Sociology denounced literature, which was seen as the product of an homogenizing aesthetic framework. Roger Caillois, in ‘An intellectual indictment of art’, concluded that ‘the crisis of literature is entering the critical stage. [We] hope that this crisis is terminal’;10 Michel Leiris announced that his forthcoming autobiographical ‘performance’, Manhood, was to be ‘the negation of the novel’;11 and Bataille, in his College manifesto The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, denounced artistic activity along with science and politics as a product of the dissociation of l’homme intégral, the complete man.12 In the wake of the Enlightenment, Romanticism replaced mystical experience—possession by an exterior, unknowable and terrifying God—and substituted the miserable fate of the poet, who quickly turned this misery into ‘a new sort of career’.13 For Bataille, in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, art is virtually

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indistinguishable from the criticism for which it is pleased to create. So forget poetry, forget literature, forget your miserable career. And yet Bataille still produced literature. The Blue of Noon was written in 1934, but he neglected to publish it—he didn’t even try. Perhaps he felt guilty about it. LITERATURE AS LA COUPABLE In 1957, late in his career, Bataille wrote: Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us… Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication. Literature is not innocent. It is guilty and should admit so.14 Just as death is the condition of life, evil, according to Bataille, which is cognate with death, is both the basis for existence and its representations found in literature. Literature is a mode of communication which demands loyalty, but a rigorous loyalty that must be based on constant betrayal. As a couple, the writer and the reader, or the work and the critic, are engaged in a fraught, though potentially perfect relationship defined by absence and constituted in writing. The reader, or even the critic, must remain true to the text with the anguished knowledge that the fidelity demanded by truth is impossible. The project to which truth requires the critic to subject the text must, of necessity, betray the text’s sovereignty, which, indifferent to the critic, remains endlessly promiscuous, dispensing its favours to other readers, other critics. The text is bound to do this, to maintain the inaccessibility of its truth and sustain the relationship, eternally. Because desire lies at the heart of communication. For both the writer and the reader, desire is the source of the work and of the project for meaning, yet it also destroys this project, deferring meaning continually and un-working the work: precluding its end, killing completion. Bataille frequently defined communication in terms of the amorous relationship. In the space of communication between lover and beloved, no ‘message’ is sent (the amorous message being blank), but rather there occurs a disjunction in the structure of the message and in the syntax that situates and holds the lovers apart. Communication, which for Bataille must be intense or it is nothing, implies the loss of the signified self and the displacement of the orders of signification that constitute it. In Wuthering Heights, love, for Cathy and Heathcliff, begins on the wild moors in childhood outside the adult, homogeneous world of responsibility, work and normality. In the novel, this childhood love persists through adulthood, in spite of its impossibility, to destroy the possibility of any other successful project, any marriage. According to Bataille, Heathcliff and ultimately Cathy (‘I am Heathcliff’) ‘demoniacally’ commit themselves to this absent, exterior love remorselessly to the death. Yet it is in this destructive betrayal of life and presence, in this desire for the ‘impossible’, that lies the locus of loyalty. That literature is guilty and inextricably linked to evil is, as Bataille claims, undeniable. Indeed, the connection is probably as old as Western literature likes to think itself. In the West, literature locates its origin on the plains of Argos, in Homeric narrative and Sophoclean tragedy. But while epic history narrates the progress of humanity and its uneasy relation with the gods, tragedy stages their catastrophic separation. Greek tragedy enacts a terrifying betrayal: a double turning away in which humanity turns its face from the gods and the gods turn from humanity, tearing open the cathartic space of the sacred, an abyssal rift in history from which the future derives its origin.

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In the Christian universe everything that has being is good—evil is only the negation of being, non-being itself, or rather, nothing. Thomas Aquinas sums up the conventional Christian conception of evil, in the Summa Theologica, like this: Malum est non ens (Evil is not essence). If literature is not the essential, then it is nothing, or rather the representation of nothing: evil, the ‘shade of death’.15 And this is where popular literature, at least, locates its space of emergence: in the place of evil allotted for it by the Church. Rather like the leering gargoyles that pock the façade of a great cathedral and function as (the comic) part of the sacred (in its repulsive aspect), so, on festival days, saints’ days and holidays, profane representation took to the streets and performed the comic panoply of evil: as personifications of Sin, Vice, devils, firecracking demons. The great so-called ‘characters’ of English literature can be traced there. When Richard III snickers in solitude before the auditorium, he is not representing some real historical character, he is a Vice; when Macbeth frets and struts his hour on the stage, he signifies, as he says, precisely nothing: evil. These ‘characters’ are seductive masks veiling a void that leads straight down the mouth of Hell, yet a mask so seductive and a void so powerful that it threatens to suck in enough desire and tumult to shatter the frail moral parameters of the play. To an extent, all literature has this problem, the problem, incidentally, of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: in order to instruct for the good it must represent or perform evil—and evil can get out of hand. Milton, for example, was said by Blake to be of the Devil’s party without knowing it. For English Romantics like Blake the ‘use value’ of Milton’s rebellious, revolutionary Satan superseded his author’s ‘exchange value’ as the devout father of parliamentarians. Like Milton’s Satan, there is an irreducible part of literature that will not serve: First of all, it is impossible to define just what propels the phenomenon of literature which cannot be made to serve a master. NON SERVIAM is said to be the devil’s motto. If this is so, then literature is diabolical.16 Literature will not serve the demands of the critic, will not serve the demands of its author, will not serve the demands of representing reality or mediating expression; instead it proliferates in its own sovereign space, demonically betraying its function, becoming its own likeness, devoid of origin and reference, a veil to nothingness, a shade of death, joyfully dispersing meaning and identity among a multiplicity of differences and significances. In Bataille’s book La Coupable (‘Guilty’ or ‘The Guilty One’), written during his wanderings in the Second World War, literature returns in aphorism as heterological practice. The negativity and evil of literature turns on itself as it eroticizes its own production, as it betrays itself, laughs at itself and loses itself in a swoon of ecstasy. The negativity of Bataille’s writing announces a ‘double movement’. No longer merely the reflection of thought, writing becomes, simultaneously, both an ‘action’ and a ‘questioning’.17 ‘Poetry’ as ‘sacrifice’, ‘laughter’ or ‘ecstasy’ announces itself as a mode of radical negativity that will ‘break closed systems’ as it takes possession.18 It is a writing that describes itself even as it acts: If poetry isn’t committed to the experience of going beyond poetry (being distinct from it), it’s not movement—it’s a residue left over from excitement.19 Such questioning, such a commitment to ‘going beyond’ links poetry to eroticism:

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The two movements in eroticism. One’s in harmony with nature; the other questions it. We can’t do away with either. Horror and attraction intermingle. Innocence and the explosion both serve play…. Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I’m leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We’re brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a ‘questioning’ of everything possible.20 Restless and unsure, this radical, active yet destructive questioning opens language, thought and subjectivity to the demands of an Other beyond the reach of knowledge. The double movement that links poetry, ecstasy and eroticism draws them all along a dangerous trajectory towards the impossible, towards silence, the abyss, death. Bataille, in La Coupable, pushes literature towards an ‘inner experience’ that puts its own life at stake, that loses itself, denies itself and takes itself away from itself towards a literature without literature. LITERATURE WITHOUT LITERATURE/INNER EXPERIENCE [What one doesn’t grasp]: that, literature being nothing if it isn’t poetry, poetry being the opposite of its name, literary language—expression of hidden desires, of obscure life—is the perversion of language even a bit more than eroticism is the perversion of sexual function. Hence the ‘terror’ which holds sway in the end ‘in letters’, as does the search for vice, for new stimulation at the end of a debauchee’s life.21 The movement away—by language, from language—takes language to what one doesn’t grasp, to what one cannot grasp in language. Literature reduces itself, thins itself out to the shimmery residue of a ‘poetry’ that denies itself and betrays its own name. It is apparently a question of perversion, the search of a jaded palette for new stimulation, a perverse doubling and redoubling of negativity that takes one away from oneself and cuts oneself off from being. The obscure life of hidden desires perverts the copula, the verb ‘to be’, as beingin-language, just as eroticism perverts the reproductive meaning of copulation. But this ‘perversion’ takes place in language anyway. Indifferent to obscure life, or secret desire, language hollows out the copula of being by reducing it to the level of function, making it the most mundane servant of every syntactic unit, the empty means of relating words together, producing meaning through the inter play of attribution. The copula is only an anonymous functionary in the bordello of words, a cog in a relentless, autonomous, copulative machine. Poetry, like purity, is lost, not found, in words. Bataille, unsatisfied and debauched with words, sought a rare, interior silence complicit, in its solitude, with the violent energy outside the limits of being defined by language: The world of words is laughable. Threats, violence, and the blandishments of power are part of silence. Deep complicity can’t be expressed in words.22 Silence and communication occupy a realm distinct from the restricted field of language. In Inner Experience, the inadequacy of words produces ‘treachery’ and deception, a quicks and that drains the energies of life and contestation.23 Words are also here linked to work: they are ants ordering and consuming the world and the lives that they reconstruct and thus cause to disappear. Beyond the trickery and deceptions of language, and in the face of its restricted economy of appropriation and consumption, Bataille aims to recover the heterogeneous motions of inner experience, proclaiming the value of silence and mystical communication. Words become strictly distinguished from experience.

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Silence, communication, experience remain outside, elusive and ungraspable, except at moments of contestation and play. But, like poetry’s position in relation to literature, individual words and sentences can slip over the silent and ungraspable world of ‘experience’: I will give only one example of a ‘slipping’ word. I say word: it could just as well be the sentence into which one inserts the word, but I limit myself to the word silence. It is already, as I have said, the abolition of the sound which the word is; among all words it is the most perverse, or the most poetic: it is the token of its own death.24 In the slipping, impossible dimension of language, words hollow out for themselves a space of paradox that engenders both the necessity to speak and repeat the power of death: the possibilities and impossibility of silence itself. As the relationships between literature, language, silence and poetry slip and slide in Bataille’s writings, heterogeneous spaces emerge within discourse itself, as the domain for poetic and literary exchange. Acknowledging the labyrinthine quicks and of words that he does not want to enter since its multiple paths direct energy away from life, silence, experience and communication, Bataille’s writing is drawn nevertheless into the labyrinth—indeed, it constitutes its own labyrinth within the labyrinth stretching across modernity’s void. As these labyrinths merge together, separate and cross each other’s paths, words begin to exert their heterogeneous force and blur the distinction between isolated, discontinuous individuals and the complex and indefinable totality of others and the Other: In men, all existence is tied in particular to language, whose terms determine its modes of appearance within each person. Each person can only represent his total existence, if only in his own eyes, through the medium of words. Words spring forth in his head, laden with a host of human or superhuman lives in relation to which he privately exists. Being depends on the mediation of words, which cannot merely present it arbitrarily as ‘autonomous being’, but which must present it profoundly as ‘being in relation’. One need only follow, for a short time, the traces of the repeated circuits of words to discover, in a disconcerting vision, the labyrinthine structure of the human being.25 Entering the labyrinth of the human being through the labyrinth of language, Bataille’s writing this time performs more than it admits. The analogical labyrinths that both equate and distinguish words and beings can be seen as an effect of words’ power to construct being in its imaginary totality and displace it in the repetitious and circuitous labyrinthine structure of language—a structure that, indeed, explodes structure. Language, then, in the relations with others that it establishes and severs, becomes more than the field in which being makes its appearance, more than the instrument which mediates being: it is the locus in which subjectivity experiences, as an effect of signification, both the fullness and the loss of being, precisely the scene of writing which presents being and places it under erasure. THE DEATH OF LITERATURE The labyrinth of language expands until its obscure horizons mark out the conditions of (im)possibility for being and subjectivity. For Foucault, the mise en abyme of language dispossesses philosophy of its subject, multiplying it into infinity in the space of its dispersal and disappearance:

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And it is at the centre of the subject’s disappearance that philosophical language proceeds as if through a labyrinth, not to recapture him, but to test (and through language itself) the extremity of its loss. That is, it proceeds to the limit and to this opening where its being surges forth, but where it is already completely lost, completely overflowing itself, emptied of itself to the point where it becomes an absolute void—an opening which is communication.26 The subject disappears not as ‘the result of an external accident or imaginary exercise’ outside language,27 but at its very heart, at the centre where the labyrinth suddenly again offers the same and being meets its mirror image, discovers itself as a mirror, and disappears down the never-ending series of displacements deflected in the virtual space of the glass. Like the labyrinth, language offers up an impoverished, but marvellously proliferating experience of limitation that transgresses the sovereignty of the one who speaks, the subject becoming erased by the recurring tide of a sea of impossibility whose endless horizon dims the violent brilliance of philosophy’s sun. No longer bound to the service of a subject, all language thus harbours movements of heterogeneity. Indeed, Derrida’s expanded notion of writing depends upon the enigmatic and heterogeneous principle of différance: Here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscurity, on the very enigma of différance, on precisely that which divides its very concept by means of a strange cleavage. How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by calculation, and, on the other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, the death instinct, and the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy?…. I am speaking of a relationship between a différance that can make a profit on its investment and a différance that misses its profit, the investiture of a presence that is pure and without loss being here confused with absolute loss, with death.28 Writing, linked by Derrida in this essay and elsewhere, to sovereignty and general economy, sacrifices meaning and the nominal systems that are supposed to guarantee it, and discloses the absolute negativity that inhabits all language. The mystery and fatal power of words that Bataille linked to literature becomes the paradoxical property of all writing—even the most laboured or labouring—in its general, Derridean sense of the iterable and uncertain condition at the irrecuperable core of language. As writing expands its heterological horizon, to fold back on the death, the abyss at its heart, literature, it seems, is rendered more than redundant. Always bound up with death, literature itself dies. Jacques Ehrmann, in ‘The death of literature’, not only celebrates this demise, but analyses its effects and implications. By profaning the mystique and value that confers haloes of authority, originality and immortality upon it, the death of literature enables all texts to manifest their ‘literariness’. ‘Poetic’ language is not another language, it is the same language. Or, more precisely, it is language itself whose capacity (and function) to change and expand is suddenly exposed.29 Poetry is no more or less than the play of movement in language in relation to chance and indeterminacy. Literature is no more or less than a manner of reading within a wider current in which all language is open to new modes of reading and writing.

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The new strategies of reading and writing available in language are outlined by Ehrmann in a distinctly Bataillean manner. Meaning becomes language’s excess. It cuts and explodes, delicately or violently rending signifying practices in an overflow of signs: Since it cuts, disposes, executes, meaning is accessible only in the form of violence, scandal, tyranny. Let that tyranny be a terror, that violence a subversion!30 Since its only viable status is as subversion, its function can only be a terrorizing one: it consists of setting fire to the powder, of activating the flames—of burning, consuming meaning. By this act, the reading-writing process makes manifest the impossibility of meaning. But let us not go so far as to believe, by trusting to the preceding incendiary metaphors, that our hidden or avowed concern is for purification. On an altogether different level, changing the act but nonetheless allowing it to keep the same role, I could just have well have said that the reading-writing process consists of stirring up shit. It all comes back to the same thing: fire and shit.31 Putting the shit back into the sacred, the play of meaning and non-meaning, of self-subversion, opens up the heterological effects of literature to all modes of signification. Literature as a heterological practice comes to signify language’s own ‘inner experience’, as it contests all limitations. As a mode of reading and writing, heterological practice explodes Meaning and multiplies meanings, producing an excess of signifying and semantic expenditure which cannot be recovered by rational or useful economies of sense and nonsense. As literature dies, criticism, of necessity, shrinks to nothing in/at its wake. Writing expands into a double process of writing-as-reading and reading-as-writing, and the literary and critical functions of writing meet and clash in the same space—or in a series of different spaces, different writings, different modes, different projects. As heterological practice, writing cannot reduce the Other to an object of knowledge, since the ‘objects’ of heterological practice constantly overflow their definition. As Denis Hollier suggests, heterology is not a ‘theory’ in the sense that theory always attempts to define and assimilate its ‘other’. Yet, heterology does not exclude theory, but rather exists within it, at its limits and below its threshold of assimilation. The ‘objects’ produced by heterological practice are only defined by a certain virulence making them constantly overflow their definition. This virulence is one of refusal: they do not allow themselves to be subjected to concepts. Much the opposite, they reverse the action and, far from bending to lexical injunctions, they act back on the human mind, disturbing it with their stimulation.32 At the moment when theory loses itself in its encounter with the unknown, when the ‘edge’ of theory loses its distinction from the other, and virulent refusals flash between them shattering theory’s critical foundations, then these refusals become linked to the ‘inner experience’ of language and the dark night familiar to the enucleated ‘I’ of the subject wheeling through criticism’s loss—an expenditure that bursts open the space of heterology cleared by the death of literature. From literature’s dead remains and criticism’s non-productive dépense, then, heterology rises to activate the silent recalcitrance of heterogeneity, forcing it to pose questions. University of Wales College of Cardiff Lancaster University

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NOTES This essay is a version of the paper ‘Literature as heterological practice’ given at ‘Georges Bataille: An International Conference,’ Birkbeck College, University of London, 13–17 May 1991. 1 Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone, with an Introduction by Denis Hollier (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1988), p. 18. 2 Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), pp. 83–4. 3 Georges Bataille, ‘The use value of D.A.F.de Sade’, in Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 96. 4 ibid., p. 97. 5 Bataille, Literature and Evil, p. 26. 6 Georges Bataille, ‘The notion of expenditure’, in Visions of Excess, p. 120. 7 Bataille, ‘The use value of D.A.F.de Sade’, p. 97. 8 ibid. 9 ibid. 10 Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xxv. 11 Hollier, The College of Sociology, p. xxv. 12 Georges Bataille, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, in Hollier, The College of Sociology, p. 14. See also Visions of Excess, pp. 223–34. 13 Bataille, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, p. 15. 14 Bataille, Literature and Evil, Preface. 15 Bataille, Literature and Evil, p. 49. 16 Georges Bataille, ‘Letter to René Char on the incompatibilities of the writer’, in Allan Stoekl (ed.), On Bataille, Yale French Studies, 78 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 31–43, p. 34. 17 Bataille, Guilty, p. 136. 18 ibid., p. 137. 19 ibid., p. 105. 20 ibid., p. 108. 21 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. with an Introduction by Leslie Anne Boldt (New York: SUNY Press, 1988), p. 150. 22 Bataille, Guilty, p. 40. 23 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 14. 24 ibid., p. 16. 25 Georges Bataille, ‘The labyrinth’ in Visions of Excess, pp. 173–4. 26 Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to transgression’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited with an Introduction by Donald F.Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 43. 27 ibid., p. 42. 28 Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 19. 29 Jacques Ehrmann, ‘The death of literature’, New Literary History, 3 (1971), p. 38. 30 ibid., p. 44. 31 ibid., pp. 45–6. 32 Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989), p. 88.

Translation as cultural politics regimes of domestication in English LAWRENCE VENUTI

A metalanguage is always terrorist. Roland Barthes (trans. Richard Howard) All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype. Barbara Kruger I propose these two epigraphs as an extravagant but pointed metaphor for translation. The statement from Roland Barthes concludes his incisive 1961 review of Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie.1 For Barthes, Foucault’s history shows that madness is the discourse of reason about unreason, and this discourse, apart from the physical exclusions of exile, imprisonment, and hospitalization which it makes possible, also excludes the discourse of unreason about unreason, hence reducing the object of which it professes knowledge. In Barthes’s conclusion, a metalanguage, a second-order discourse that takes a prior signifying system as its object, is found to be reductive and exclusionary and thus likened to terrorism, violent action that is both intense and damaging, that intimidates and coerces, usually in the service of social interests and political agendas, often under the aegis of reason or truth. The epigram from the artist Barbara Kruger was part of a 1991 installation, in which the accusatory aphoristic statements that distinguish her photomontages were painted across the walls and floors of the Mary Boone Gallery in New York.2 Here violence is likened to a metalanguage: it is action with the function of representation, a second-order discourse illustrating a prior stereotype, which can be seen as pathetic in its destructiveness, its reductive and exclusionary relation to a person or social group. Violence is the enactment of a cultural discourse that already constitutes a conceptual or representational violence. Reflection on translation in the context of Barthes’s and Kruger’s statements undoubtedly cheapens violent action, trivializing its serious physical and psychological costs, its brutal materiality. But such reflection will also illuminate the discursive conditions of violence by attending to the material effects of another metalanguage, the power of translation to (re)constitute and cheapen foreign texts, to trivialize and exclude foreign cultures, and thus potentially to figure in racial discrimination and ethnic violence, international political confrontations, terrorism, war. The violence of translation resides in its very purpose and activity: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that pre-exist it in the target language, always

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configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts. Translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target-language reader. This difference can never be entirely removed, of course, but it necessarily suffers a reduction and exclusion of possibilities—and an exorbitant gain of other possibilities specific to the translating language. Whatever difference the translation conveys is now imprinted by the target-language culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation serves an imperialist appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political. Thus, the violent effects of translation are felt at home as well as abroad. On the one hand, translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures and hence can play a role in racial and ethnic conflicts and geopolitical confrontations. On the other hand, translation enlists the foreign text in the maintenance or revision of literary canons in the target-language culture, inscribing poetry and fiction, for example, with the various poetic and narrative discourses that compete for cultural dominance in the target language. Translation also enlists the foreign text in the maintenance or revision of dominant conceptual paradigms, research methodologies, and clinical practices in target-language disciplines and professions, whether physics or architecture, philosophy or psychiatry, sociology or law. It is these social affiliations and effects—written into the materiality of the translated text, into its discursive strategy and its range of allusiveness for the target-language reader, but also into the very choice to translate it and the ways it is published, reviewed, and taught—all these conditions permit translation to be called a cultural political practice, constructing or critiquing ideology-stamped identities for foreign cultures, affirming or transgressing discursive values and institutional limits in the target-language culture. The violence wreaked by translation is partly inevitable, inherent in the translation process, partly potential, emerging at any point in the production and reception of the translated text, varying with specific cultural and social formations at different historical moments. The most urgent question facing the translator who possesses this knowledge is: What to do? Why and how do I translate? Although I have construed translation as the site of multiple determinations and effects— linguistic, cultural, ideological, political—I also want to indicate that the translator always exercises a choice concerning the degree and direction of the violence at work in his practice. This choice was given its most decisive formulation at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In an 1813 lecture on the different methods of translation, Schleiermacher argued that ‘there are only two. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.’3 Admitting (with qualifications like ‘as much as possible’) that translation can never be completely adequate to the foreign text, Schleiermacher allowed the translator to choose between a domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back home, and a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad. Schleiermacher made clear that his choice was foreignizing translation, and this has led the French translator and translation theorist Antoine Berman to treat Schleiermacher’s argument as an ethics of translation, concerned with making the translated text a place where a cultural other is manifested— although, of course, an otherness that can never be manifested in its own terms, only in those of the target langauge, and hence always already encoded.4 The ‘foreign’ in foreignizing translation is not a transparent representation of an essence that resides in the foreign text and is valuable in itself, but a strategic

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construction whose value is contingent on the current target-language situation. Foreignizing translation signifies the difference of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language. In its efforts to do right abroad, this translation method must do wrong at home, deviating from native norms to stage an alien reading experience. I want to suggest that in so far as foreignizing translation seeks to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation, it is highly desirable today, a strategic intervention in the current state of world affairs, pitched against the hegemonic English-language nations and the unequal cultural exchanges in which they engage their global others. For the fact is that only 2–3 per cent of the books published in the US and UK each year are translations, whereas foreign titles, many from English, count for as much as 25 per cent (or more) of the books published annually in other countries.5 And yet foreignizing translation has always been marginalized in Anglo-American culture. This method is specific to certain European countries at particular historical moments: formulated first in German culture during the classical and romantic periods, it has recently been revived in a French cultural scene characterized by postmodern developments in philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and social theory that have come to be known as ‘poststructuralism’.6 English-language translation, in contrast, has been dominated by domesticating theories and practices at least since the seventeenth century. In 1656, Sir John Denham prefaced The Destruction of Troy, his version of the second book of the Aeneid, with the remark that ‘if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this age.’7 Denham saw himself as presenting a naturalized English Virgil. He felt that poetic discourse in particular called for domesticating translation because ‘Poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum’ (p. 65). The ‘new spirit’ Denham ‘added’ to Virgil belonged to Denham (‘my Art’, ‘my self’), and he was acutely aware that it was specifically English, so that domestication was a translation method laden with nationalism, even if expressed with courtly self-effacement: if this disguise I have put upon him (I wish I could give it a better name) fit not naturally and easily on so grave a person, yet it may become him better than that Fools-Coat wherein the French and Italian have of late presented him. (p. 65) Domestication became the preferred method for English-language poetry translation by the end of the seventeenth century, when it received its authoritative formulation in John Dryden’s Dedication of the Aeneis (1697). ‘I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English,’ wrote Dryden, ‘as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.’8 In Dryden’s wake, from Alexander Pope’s multi-volumed Homer (1715–26) to Alexander Tytler’s systematic Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), domestication dominated the theory and practice of English-language translation in every genre, prose as well as poetry. William Guthrie, for example, in the preface to his version of The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero (1741), argued that ‘it is living Manners alone that can communicate the Spirit of an Original’ and so urged the translator to make ‘it his Business to be as conversant as he cou’d in that Study and Manner which comes the nearest to what we may suppose his Author, were he now to live, wou’d pursue, and in which he wou’d shine.’9 Hence, Guthrie cast his Cicero as a member of Parliament, ‘where,’ he says, ‘by a constant Attendance, in which I was indulg’d for several Years, I endeavour’d to possess myself of the Language most proper for this translation.’

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It is important not to view such instances of domestication as simply inaccurate translations. Canons of accuracy and fidelity are always locally defined, specific to different cultural formations at different historical moments. Both Denham and Dryden recognized that a ratio of loss and gain inevitably occurs in the translation process and situates the translation in an equivocal relationship to the foreign text, never quite faithful, always somewhat free, never establishing an identity, always a lack and a supplement. Yet they also viewed their domesticating method as the most effective way to control this equivocal relationship and produce versions adequate to the Latin text. As a result, they castigated methods that either rigorously adhered to source-language textual features or played fast and loose with them, that either did not sufficiently domesticate the foreign text or did so by omitting parts of it. Following Horace’s dictum in Ars Poetica, Denham ‘conceive[d] it a vulgar error in translating Poets, to affect being Fides Interpres’, because poetic discourse required more latitude to capture its ‘spirit’ in the target language than a close adherence to each foreign word would allow. But he also professed to ‘having made it my principal care to follow [Virgil]’, noting that ‘neither have I any where offered such violence to his sense, as to make it seem mine, and not his’. Dryden similarly ‘thought it fit to steer betwixt the two extremes of paraphrase and literal translation’, i.e. between the aim of reproducing primarily the meanings of the Latin text, usually at the cost of its phonological and syntactical features, and the aim of rendering it word for word, respecting syntax and line break. And he distinguished his method from Abraham Cowley’s ‘imitations’ of Pindar, partial translations that revised and, in effect, abandoned the foreign text. The ethnocentric violence performed by domesticating translation rested on a double fidelity, to the source-language text as well as to the targetlanguage culture, but this was clearly impossible and knowingly duplicitous, accompanied by the rationale that a gain in domestic intelligibility and cultural force outweighed the loss suffered by the foreign text and culture. By the turn of the nineteenth century, a translation method of eliding the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text was firmly entrenched as a canon in English-language translation, usually linked to a valorization of transparent discourse. In 1820, a translator of Aristophanes, John Hookham Frere, unfavourably reviewed Thomas Mitchell’s versions of The Acharnians and The Knights, their principal ‘defect’ being ‘the adoption of a particular style; the style of our ancient comedy in the beginning of the 16th century’.10 Frere faulted Mitchell’s use of an archaic literary and dramatic discourse, English Renaissance comedy, because the language of translation ought, we think, as far as possible, to be a pure, impalpable and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more; it ought never to attract attention to itself; hence all phrases that are remarkable in themselves, either as old or new; all importations from foreign languages and quotations, are as far as possible to be avoided…such phrases as [Mitchell] has sometimes admitted, ‘solus cum solo’, for instance, ‘petits pates’, &c. have the immediate effect of reminding the reader, that he is reading a translation, and…the illusion of originality, which the spirited or natural turn of a sentence immediately preceding might have excited, is instantly dissipated by it. (p. 481) Frere advocated a fluent strategy, in which the language of the translation is made to read with a ‘spirited or natural turn’, so that the absence of any syntactical or lexical peculiarities produces the illusionistic effect of transparency, the appearance that the translation reflects the foreign writer’s intention (‘It is the office, we presume, of the Translator to represent the forms of language according to the intention with which they are employed’) (p. 482) and therefore the appearance that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the

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original, still within the foreign writer’s control, not worked over by the translator. Fluency produces an individualistic illusion, in which the text is assumed to originate fundamentally with the author, to be authorial self-expression, free of cultural and social determinations. Since fluency is here a translation strategy, it can be considered a discursive sleight of hand by which the translator domesticates the foreign text, causing its difference to vanish by making it intelligible in an English-language culture that values easy readability, transparent discourse, and the illusion of authorial presence. And, once again, the domestication enacted by a fluent strategy does not necessarily result in an inaccurate translation. In 1823, the anonymous reviewer of William Stewart Rose’s Orlando Furioso recommended this strategy in the pronouncement that the two characteristics of a good translation are, that it should be faithful, and that it should be unconstrained. Faithful, as well in rendering correctly the meaning of the original, as in exhibiting the general spirit which pervades it: unconstrained, so as not to betray by its phraseology, by the collocation of its words, or construction of its sentences that it is only a copy.11 Fluency can be associated with fidelity because it means foregrounding the conceptual signified in the translation, checking the drift of language away from communication, minimizing any play of the signifier which calls attention to its materiality, to words as words, their opacity, their resistance to immediate intelligibility, empathic response, interpretive mastery. What the fluent strategy conceals with the effect of transparency, what it makes seem faithful, is in fact the translator’s interpretation of the foreign text, the signified he has demarcated in the translation in accordance with target-language cultural values. The fluent translation is seen as ‘rendering correctly the meaning of the original’ because it constitutes an interpretation that conforms or can be easily assimilated to those values, not only the valorization of ‘unconstrained’ language, but also the understanding of the foreign text or literature that concurrently prevails in the target culture. In Frere’s case fluency entailed a linguistic homogenization that avoided ‘associations exclusively belonging to modern manners’ as well as archaism, that removed as many of the historically specific markers of the foreign text as possible by generalizing or simply omitting them. The translator will, if he is capable of executing his task upon a philosophic principle, endeavour to resolve the personal and local allusions into the genera, of which the local or personal variety employed by the original author, is merely the accidental type; and to reproduce them in one of those permanent forms which are connected with the universal and immutable habits of mankind. (p. 482) Frere rationalized these admitted ‘liberties’ by appealing to a ‘philosophic principle’: The proper domain of the Translator is, we conceive, to be found in that vast mass of feeling, passion, interest, action and habit which is common to mankind in all countries and in all ages; and which, in all languages, is invested with its appropriate forms of expression, capable of representing it in all its infinite varieties, in all the permanent distinctions of age, profession and temperament. (p. 481) In Frere’s view, a fluent strategy enables the translation to be a transparent representation of the eternal human verities expressed by the foreign author.

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The principle on which Frere’s translation theory rests is liberal humanism, in which subjectivity is seen as at once self-determining and determined by human nature, individualistic yet generic, transcending cultural difference, social conflict, and historical change to represent ‘every shade of the human character’. Frere’s theory may appear to be democratic in its appeal to what is ‘common to mankind’, to a timeless and universal human essence, but it actually involved an insidious domestication that allowed him to imprint the foreign text with his conservative sexual morality and cultural elitism. He made plain his squeamishness about the physical coarseness of Aristophanic humour, its grotesque realism, and felt the need to explain it away as inconsistent with the author’s intention: the ‘lines of extreme grossness’ were ‘forced compromises’, ‘which have evidently been inserted, for the purpose of pacifying the vulgar part of the audience, during passages in which their anger, or impatience, or disappointment, was likely to break out’ (p. 491). Hence, ‘in discarding such passages,’ Frere asserted, ‘the translator is merely doing that for his author, which he would willingly have done for himself’—were he not ‘often under the necessity of addressing himself exclusively to the lower class’ (p. 491). Frere’s advocacy of a fluent strategy was premissed on a bourgeois snobbery, in which the moral and political conservatism emerging in early nineteenth-century English culture resulted in a call for a bowdlerized Aristophanes that represented the ‘permanent’ class divisions of humanity, what Frere described as ‘that true comic humour which he was directing to the more refined and intelligent part of his audience’ (p. 491).12 For Frere, ‘the persons of taste and judgment to whom the author occasionally appeals, form, in modern times, the tribunal to which his translator must address himself’ (p. 491). Fluency is thus a discursive strategy ideally suited to domesticating translation, capable not only of executing the ethnocentric violence of domestication, but also of concealing this violence by producing the illusionistic effect of transparency. And it is this strategy that, with very few exceptions (the Victorian archaism of Francis Newman and William Morris, for example, or the modernist experiments of Ezra Pound and Louis and Celia Zukofsky), has continued to dominate the theory and practice of English-language translation to this day. Perhaps the clearest indication of this dominance is Eugene Nida’s influential concept of ‘dynamic’ or ‘functional equivalence’ in translation, formulated first in 1964, but restated and developed in numerous books and articles over the past twenty-five years. ‘A translation of dynamic equivalence aims at complete naturalness of expression,’ states Nida, ‘and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture.’13 The phrase ‘naturalness of expression’ signals the importance of a fluent strategy to this theory of translation, and in Nida’s work it is evident that fluency involves domestication. As he has recently put it, ‘the translator must be a person who can draw aside the curtains of linguistic and cultural differences so that people may see clearly the relevance of the original message.’14 This is of course a relevance to the target-language culture, something with which foreign writers are usually not concerned when they write their texts, so that relevance can be established in the translation process only by replacing source-language features that are not recognizable with targetlanguage ones that are. Thus, when Nida asserts that ‘an easy and natural style in translating, despite the extreme difficulty of producing it…is nevertheless essential to producing in the ultimate receptors a response similar to that of the original receptors’ (Science, p. 163), he is in fact imposing the Englishlanguage valorization of transparent discourse on every foreign culture, masking a basic disjunction between the source- and target-language texts which puts into question the possibility of eliciting a ‘similar’ response. Like earlier theorists in the Anglo-American tradition, however, Nida has argued that dynamic equivalence is consistent with a notion of accuracy. The dynamically equivalent translation does not indiscriminately use ‘anything which might have special impact and appeal for receptors’; it rather ‘means thoroughly understanding not only the meaning of the source text but also the manner in which the intended

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receptors of a text are likely to understand it in the receptor language’ (One Language, pp. vii-viii, 9). For Nida, accuracy in translation depends on generating an equivalent effect in the target-language culture: ‘the receptors of a translation should comprehend the translated text to such an extent that they can understand how the original receptors must have understood the original text’ (ibid., p. 36). The dynamically equivalent translation is ‘interlingual communication’ which overcomes the linguistic and cultural differences that impede it (ibid., p. 11). Yet the understanding of the foreign text and culture which this kind of translation makes possible answers fundamentally to target-language cultural values while veiling this domestication in the transparency evoked by a fluent strategy. Communication here is initiated and controlled by the targetlanguage culture, and therefore it seems less an exchange of information than an imperialist appropriation of a foreign text. Nida’s theory of translation as communication does not adequately take into account the ethnocentric violence that is inherent in every translation process—but especially in one governed by dynamic equivalence. As with John Hookham Frere, Nida’s advocacy of domesticating translation is explicitly grounded on a transcendental concept of humanity as an essence that remains unchanged over time and space. ‘As linguists and anthropologists have discovered,’ Nida states, ‘that which unites mankind is much greater than that which divides, and hence there is, even in cases of very disparate languages and cultures, a basis for communication’ (Science, p. 2). Yet the democratic potential of Nida’s humanism, as with Frere’s, is contradicted by the more exclusionary values that inform his theory of translation, specifically Christian evangelism and cultural elitism. From the very beginning of his career, Nida’s work has been motivated by the exigencies of Bible translation: not only have problems in the history of the Bible translation served as examples for his theoretical statements, but he has written studies in anthropology and linguistics designed primarily for Bible translators and missionaries. Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence in fact links the translator to the missionary. When, in Customs and Cultures: Anthropology for Christian Missions (1954), Nida asserted that a close examination of successful missionary work inevitably reveals the correspondingly effective manner in which the missionaries were able to identify themselves with the people—‘to be all things to all men’—and to communicate their message in terms which have meaning for the lives of the people, he was echoing what he had earlier asserted of the Bible translator in God’s Word in Man’s Language (1952): ‘The task of the true translator is one of identification. As a Christian servant he must identify with Christ; as a translator he must identify himself with the Word; as a missionary he must identify himself with the people.’15 Both the missionary and the translator must find the dynamic equivalent in the target language in order to establish the relevance of the Bible in the target culture. But Nida permits only a particular kind of relevance to be established. While he disapproves of ‘the tendency to promote by means of Bible translating the cause of a particular theological viewpoint, whether deistic, rationalistic, immersionistic, millenarian, or charismatic’ (One Language, p. 33), it is obvious that he himself has promoted a reception of the text centred in Christian dogma. And although he offers a nuanced account of how ‘diversities in the backgrounds of receptors’ can shape any Bible translation, he insists that ‘translations prepared primarily for minority groups must generally involve highly restrictive forms of language, but they must not involve substandard grammar or vulgar wording’ (ibid., p. 14). Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence in Bible translation goes hand in hand with an evangelical zeal that seeks to impose on English-language readers a specific dialect of English as well as a distinctly Christian understanding of the text.

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To advocate foreignizing translation in opposition to the Anglo-American tradition of domestication is not to do away with cultural political agendas. Clearly, such an advocacy is itself an agenda. The point is rather to develop a theory and practice of translation that resists dominant target-language cultural values so as to signify the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text. Philip Lewis’s concept of abusive fidelity can be taken as a first step in such a theorization: it acknowledges the equivocal relationship between the foreign text and the translation and eschews a fluent strategy in order to reproduce in the translation whatever features of the foreign text abuse or resist dominant cultural values in the source language.16 Abusive fidelity directs the translator’s attention away from the conceptual signified to the play of signifiers on which it depends, to phonological, syntactical, and discursive structures, resulting in a ‘translation that values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies or plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing its own’ (p. 41). Such a translation strategy can best be called resistancy, not merely because it avoids fluency, but because it challenges the targetlanguage culture even as it enacts its own ethnocentric violence on the foreign text. The notion of foreignization can alter the ways translations are read as well as produced because it assumes a concept of human subjectivity that is very different from the humanist assumptions underlying domestication. Neither the foreign author nor the translator is conceived as the transcendental origin of the text, freely expressing an idea about human nature or communicating it in transparent language to a reader from a different culture. Rather, subjectivity is constituted by cultural and social determinations that are diverse and even conflicting, that mediate any language use, and that vary with every cultural formation and every historical moment. Human action is intentional, but determinate, self-reflexively measured against social rules and resources, the heterogeneity of which allows for the possibility of change with every selfreflexive action.17 Textual production may be initiated and guided by the producer, but it puts to work various linguistic and cultural materials which make the text discontinuous, despite its appearance of unity, and which result in meanings and effects that may exceed the producer’s intention, creating an unconscious that is at once personal and social, psychological and ideological. Thus, the translator consults many different target-language cultural materials, ranging from dictionaries and grammars to texts, discursive strategies, and translations to values, paradigms, and ideologies, both canonical and marginal. Although intended to reproduce the source-language text, the translator’s consultation of these materials inevitably reduces and supplements it, even when source-language cultural materials are also consulted, and their sheer heterogeneity leads to discontinuities in the translation that are symptomatic of its ethnocentric violence. Discontinuities at the level of syntax, diction, or discourse allow the translation to be read as a translation, revealing the strategy at work in it, foreignizing a domesticating translation by showing where it departs from target-language cultural values, domesticating a foreignizing translation by showing where it depends on them. This method of symptomatic reading can be illustrated with the trans lations of Freud’s texts for the Standard Edition, although the translations have acquired such unimpeachable authority that we needed Bruno Bettelheim’s critique to become aware of the discontinuities.18 Bettelheim’s point is that the translations make Freud’s texts ‘appear to readers of English as abstract, depersonalized, highly theoretical, erudite, and mechanized—in short “scientific”—statements about the strange and very complex workings of our mind’ (p. 5). Bettelheim seems to assume that a close examination of Freud’s German is necessary to detect the translators’ scientistic strategy, but the fact is that his point can be demonstrated with no more than a careful reading of the English text. Bettelheim argues, for example, that in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1960), the term ‘parapraxis’ reveals the scientism of the translation because it is used to render a rather simple German word, Fehlleistungen, which Bettelheim himself prefers to translate as ‘faulty achievement’

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(p. 87). Yet the translator’s strategy may also be glimpsed through certain peculiarities in the diction of the translated text: I now return to the forgetting of names. So far we have not exhaustively considered either the casematerial or the motives behind it. As this is exactly the kind of parapraxis that I can from time to time observe abundantly in myself, I am at no loss for examples. The mild attacks of migraine from which I still suffer usually announce themselves hours in advance by my forgetting names, and at the height of these attacks, during which I am not forced to abandon my work, it frequently happens that all proper names go out of my head.19 The diction of much of this passage is so simple and common (‘forgetting’), even colloquial (‘go out of my head’), that ‘parapraxis’ represents a conspicuous difference, an inconsistency in word choice which exposes the translation process. The inconsistency is underscored not only by Freud’s heavy reliance on anecdotal, ‘everyday’ examples, some—as above—taken from his own experience, but also by a footnote added to a later edition of the German text and included in the English translation: This book is of an entirely popular character; it merely aims, by an accumulation of examples, at paving the way for the necessary assumption of unconscious yet operative mental processes, and it avoids all theoretical considerations on the nature of the unconscious. (p. 272n) James Strachey himself unwittingly called attention to the inconsistent diction in his preface to Alan Tyson’s translation, where he felt it necessary to provide a rationale for the use of ‘parapraxis’: ‘In German “Fehlleistung”, “faulty function”. It is a curious fact that before Freud wrote this book the general concept seems not to have existed in psychology, and in English a new word had to be invented to cover it’ (p. viii n). It can of course be objected (against Bettelheim) that the mixture of specialized scientific terms and commonly used diction is characteristic of Freud’s German, and therefore (against me) that the English translation in itself cannot be the basis for an account of the translators’ strategy. Yet although I am very much in agreement with the first point, the second weakens when we realize that even a comparison between the English versions of key Freudian terms easily demonstrates the inconsistency in kinds of diction I have located in the translated passage: ‘id’ vs. ‘unconscious’; ‘cathexis’ vs. ‘charge’, or ‘energy’; ‘libidinal’ vs. ‘sexual’. Bettelheim helpfully suggests some of the determinations that shaped the scientistic translation strategy of the Standard Edition. One important consideration is the intellectual current that had dominated AngloAmerican psychology and philosophy since the eighteenth century: ‘In theory, many topics with which Freud dealt permit both a hermeneutic-spiritual and a positivistic-pragmatic approach. When this is so, the English translators nearly always opt for the latter, positivism being the most important English philosophical tradition’ (p. 44). But there are also the social institutions in which this tradition was entrenched and against which psychoanalysis had to struggle in order to gain acceptance after the Second World War. As Bettelheim concisely puts it, ‘psychological research and teaching in American universities are either behaviorally, cognitively, or physiologically oriented and concentrate almost exclusively on what can be measured or observed from the outside’ (p. 19). For psychoanalysis this meant that its assimilation in Anglo-American culture entailed a redefinition, in which it ‘was perceived in the United States as a practice that ought to be the sole prerogative of physicians’ (p. 33), ‘a medical specialty’ (p. 35), and this redefinition was carried out in a variety of social practices, including not only legislation by state

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assemblies and certification by the psychoanalytic profession, but the scientistic translation of the Standard Edition: When Freud appears to be either more abstruse or more dogmatic in English translation than in the original German, to speak about abstract concepts rather than about the reader himself, and about man’s mind rather than about his soul, the probable explanation isn’t mischievousness or carelessness on the translators’ part but a deliberate wish to perceive Freud strictly within the framework of medicine. (p. 32) The domesticating method at work in the translations of the Standard Edition sought to assimilate Freud’s texts to the dominance of positivism in Anglo-American culture so as to facilitate the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the medical profession and in academic psychology. Bettelheim’s book is of course couched in the most judgemental of terms, and it is his negative judgement that must be avoided (or perhaps rethought) if we want to understand the manifold significance of the Standard Edition as a translation. Bettelheim views the work of Strachey and his collaborators as a distortion and a betrayal of Freud’s ‘essential humanism’, a view that points to a valorization of the concept of the transcendental subject in both Bettelheim and Freud. Bettelheim’s assessment of the psychoanalytic project is stated in his own humanistic ver sions for the Standard Edition’s ‘ego’, ‘id’, and ‘superego’: ‘A reasonable dominance of our I over our id and above-I—this was Freud’s goal for all of us’ (p. 110). This notion of ego dominance thinks of the subject as the potentially self-consistent source of its knowledge and actions, not perpetually split by psychological (‘id’) and social (‘superego’) determinations over which it has no or limited control. The same assumption can often be seen in Freud’s German text: not only in his emphasis on social adjustment, for instance, as with the concept of the ‘reality principle’, but also in his repeated use of his own experience for analysis; both represent the subject as healing the determinate split in its own consciousness. Yet in so far as Freud’s various psychic models theorized the ever-present, contradictory determinations of consciousness, the effect of his work was to decentre the subject, to remove it from the transcendental realm of freedom and unity and conceive it as the determinate product of psychic and familial forces beyond its conscious control. These conflicting concepts of the subject underlie different aspects of Freud’s project: the transcendental subject, on the one hand, leads to a definition of psychoanalysis as primarily therapeutic, what Bettelheim calls a ‘demanding and potentially dangerous voyage of self-discovery…so that we may no longer be enslaved without knowing it to the dark forces that reside in us’ (p. 4); the determinate subject, on the other hand, leads to a definition of psychoanalysis as primarily hermeneutic, a theoretical apparatus with sufficient scientific rigour to analyse the shifting but always active forces that constitute and divide human subjectivity. Freud’s texts are thus marked by a fundamental discontinuity, one which is ‘resolved’ in Bettelheim’s humanistic representation of psychoanalysis as compassionate therapy, but which is exacerbated by the scientistic strategy of the English translations and their representation of Freud as the coolly analysing physician.20 The inconsistent diction in the Standard Edition, by reflecting the positivistic redefinition of psychoanalysis in Anglo-American institutions, signifies another, alternative reading of Freud that heightens the contradictions of his project. It can be argued, therefore, that the inconsistent diction in the English translations does not really deserve to be judged erroneous; on the contrary, it discloses interpretive choices determined by a wide range of social institutions and cultural movements, some (like the specific institutionalization of psychoanalysis) calculated by the translators, others (like the dominance of positivism and the discontinuities in Freud’s texts) remaining dimly perceived or entirely unconscious during the translation process. The fact that the inconsistencies have gone unnoticed for so long is perhaps largely the result of two mutually determining

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factors: the privileged status accorded the Standard Edition among English-language readers and the entrenchment of a positivistic reading of Freud in the Anglo-American psychoanalytic establishment. Hence, a different critical approach with a different set of assumptions becomes necessary to perceive the inconsistent diction of the translations: Bettelheim’s particular humanism, or my own attempt to ground a reading of translated texts on a foreignizing method of translation that assumes a concept of determinate subjectivity. In many translations, however, the discontinuities are readily apparent, unintentionally disturbing the fluency of the language or deliberately establishing the linguistic heterogeneity that distinguishes a resistant strategy. Literary translations, in particular, often bear prefaces which announce the translator’s strategy and alert the reader to the presence of noticeable stylistic peculiarities. But perhaps translations in other disciplines should also contain prefaces that not merely describe the problems posed by the foreign text and the translator’s solutions, but rationalize the global strategy developed and implemented by the translator, including the specific kind of discourse chosen for the translation and the specific interpretations assigned to key concepts. Such prefaces will ultimately force translators and their readers to reflect on the ethnocentric violence of translation and possibly to write and read translated texts in ways that seek to recognize the linguistic and cultural difference of foreign texts. What I am advocating is not an indiscriminate valorization of every foreign culture or a metaphysical concept of foreignness as an essential value; indeed, the foreign text is privileged in a foreignizing translation only in so far as it enables a disruption of target-language cultural values, so that its value is always strategic, depending on the cultural formation into which it is translated. My goal is not an essentializing of the foreign, but resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations. Hence, my project is the elaboration of the theoretical, critical, and textual means by which translation can be studied and practised as a focus of difference, instead of the homogeneity that widely characterizes it today. Once the violence of translation is recognized, the choices facing the writers and readers of translated texts become clear—however difficult they are to make. Temple University, Philadelphia NOTES 1 Roland Barthes, ‘Taking sides’, in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972) pp. 163–70. 2 Barbara Kruger, Mary Boone Gallery, 5–26 January 1991. 3 Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the different methods of translating’, in Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosensweig, ed. and trans. André Lefevere (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977), pp. 67–89. 4 Antoine Berman, L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). See also Berman’s ‘La traduction et la lettre, ou l’auberge du lointain’, in Les Tours de Babel: Essais sur la traduction (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1985), pp. 31–150, especially pp. 87–91. Schleiermacher’s theory, despite its stress on foreignizing translation, is complicated by the nationalist cul tural programme he wants German translation to serve: see my article ‘Genealogies of translation theory: Schleiermacher’, in TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction: Etudes sur le texte et ses transformations, vol. 4, no. 2 (1991), pp. 125–50. 5 See the annual statistics for the American publishing industry presented by Chandler B.Grannis in Publishers Weekly, 19 September 1989, pp. 24–5, 9 March 1990, pp. 32–5, and 8 March 1991, pp. 36–9. For the British statistics, see Whittaker’s Almanack for the years 1986 to 1991. The volume of translations published annually in a European country like Italy can be gauged from Herbert R.Lottman, ‘Milan: A world of change’, Publishers Weekly, 21 June 1991, pp. s5–s11.

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6 I discuss the impact of French poststructuralism on translation theory and practice in the introduction of my anthology, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) pp. 1–17. The present article develops theoretical issues set forth in that introduction. Although I am theorizing translation from within Anglo-American culture, the foreign theoretical discourses I put to work considerably complicate my ‘home’ position, creating possibilities for cultural critique and resistance. In a previous article —‘The translator’s invisibility’, Criticism, 28, (1986), pp. 179–212—I offer an assessment of current Englishlanguage translation that is indebted as much to Althusserian Marxism as to poststructuralism. 7 Sir John Denham, ‘Preface’ to The Destruction of Troy, in English Translation Theory, 1650–1800, ed. T.R.Steiner (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975), pp. 64–5. 8 John Dryden, ‘Dedication of the Aeneis,’ in English Translation Theory, pp. 72–4. 9 William Guthrie, ‘Preface’ to The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, in English Translation Theory, pp. 96–9. 10 John Hookman Frere, Review of Thomas Mitchell’s translation of The Comedies of Aristophanes, Quarterly Review, 23 (July 1820), pp. 474–505. 11 Review of William Stewart Rose’s translation of Orlando Furioso, Quarterly Review, 30 (October 1823), pp. 40– 61. 12 For the emergence of moral and political conservatism in early nineteenth-century England, see Maurice J.Quinlan, Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners, 1780–1830 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941) and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 13 Eugene A.Nida, Toward a Science of Translating, with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating (Leiden: Brill, 1964), p. 159. Further references to this work will be indicated by Science. 14 Jan de Waard and Eugene A.Nida, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1986), p. 14. Further references to this work will be indicated by One Language. 15 Eugene A.Nida, Customs and Cultures: Anthropology for Christian Missions (1954; reprinted South Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1975), p. 250; God’s World in Man’s Language (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), p. 117. 16 Philip E.Lewis, ‘The measure of translation effects’, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 31–62. 17 These remarks assume Anthony Giddens’ concept of agency in Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), especially ch. 2. 18 Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Knopf, 1983). 19 Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. Alan Tyson, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), p. 21. 20 The same contradiction appears in Freud’s own reflections on the therapeutic/hermeneutic dilemma of psychoanalysis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 12: Twenty-five years of intense work have had as their result that the immediate aims of psychoanalytic technique are other today than they were at the outset. At first the analyzing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst’s construction from his own memory. In that endeavor the chief emphasis lay upon the patient’s resistances: the art considered now in uncovering these as quickly as possible, in pointing them out to the patient and in inducing him by human influence—this was where suggestion operating as ‘transference’ played its part—to abandon his resistances.

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It will be noted that although Freud intends to draw a sharp distinction in the development of psychoanalysis between an early, hermeneutic phase and a later, therapeutic phase, his exposition really blurs the distinction: both phases require a primary emphasis on interpretation, whether of ‘unconscious material’ or of ‘the patient’s resistances’, which in so far as they require ‘uncovering’ are likewise ‘unconscious’; in both ‘the analyst’s construction’ can be said to be ‘first and foremost’. What has changed is not so much ‘the immediate aims of psychoanalytic technique’ as its theoretical apparatus: the intervening years witnessed the development of a new interpretive concept—the ‘transference’. It is also worth pointing out that this characterization of psychoanalysis as primarily therapeutic occurs in a late text that is one of Freud’s most theoretical and speculative. Bettelheim’s characterization of psychoanalysis, the basis for his rejection of the Standard Edition, smooths out the discontinuities in Freud’s texts and project by resorting to a schema of development (like Freud himself): ‘The English translations cleave to an early stage of Freud’s thought, in which he inclined toward science and medicine, and disregard the more mature Freud, whose orientation was humanistic, and who was concerned mostly with broadly conceived cultural and human problems and with matters of the soul’ (p. 32).

Imagist travels in modernist space ANDREW THACKER

I Travellers on the London Underground in the past few years have so enjoyed one facet of the experience that they have made a best-seller of a volume of poetry. The success of 100 Poems on the Underground— reprinted three times in its first year—testifies to a remarkable desire for poetry by the London public, granted the parlous state of contemporary poetry publishing. The popularity of poems on the tube, placed in the narrow rectangular spaces normally occupied by advertisements, is enhanced by the prevailing conditions of their consumption. The contemporary urban experience of the Underground, as any user will say, is often a frustrating one. Aside from multifarious cancellations, signal failures, delays and emergencies, the feeling of being crushed into a small confined space with large numbers of unknown people produces a very strange, not to say strained, set of social relations. The tube is a visual trap; the opportunity to read something other than adverts, another person’s Evening Standard or a stranger’s face, is obviously a welcome one. Visual relations predominate and the invention of the Walkman only emphasizes this, allowing the eye to roam while appearing to concentrate on listening. The enthusiasm for poems on the Underground, therefore, points to the stress placed upon visual experience across the spaces of present-day urban life. I want to consider a number of poems that are not in the 100 Poems on the Underground anthology, but are focused upon the tube and other modes of urban transport. These are a cluster of poems by the Imagists, the influential group of early modernist poets who produced five anthologies between 1914 and 1930. The Imagists wrote a number of poems illustrating early twentieth-century visual relations as experienced on transport, texts characterized by their interrogation of what I want to call modernist space. Imagism helps us specify the spaces of modernism, showing that the postmodern world where we consume poems as posters on the Underground is not that different from the modernist’s experience of tube travel in the first two decades of the century. By examining the aesthetic practices of one key formation within early AngloAmerican modernism we can determine if modernist space is still, in a sense, our own space. One important experience of space—for the Imagists and for ourselves, is the kind of intersubjective visual relations that

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dominate city life. In considering space we must also consider theories of the gaze, and of the gendered nature of the spatial relations of looking. One of the poems to appear in the underground anthology is T.E. Hulme’s ‘The Embankment (The fantasia of a fallen gentlemen on a cold, bitter night)’: Once, in a finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy, In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement. Now see I That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy. Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.1 This early Imagist poem, first published in 1909, concerns an experience of urban ‘ecstasy’ prompted by the visual ‘flash’ of a pair of ‘gold heels’. Reading this poem as a traveller on the tube recreates the moment, intense but provocative, informing the subject-matter of the original poem. The final image, comparing the starry sky to an old blanket, develops from the insight that ‘warmth’s the very stuff of poesy’. But this point, and the image of warmth embodied in wrapping the sky around one, are prompted only by the initial visual experience of the discovery of ‘ecstasy’. From the poem’s subtitle we can deduce the ‘gold heels’ refer to a woman perceived while walking along the Embankment in London. Relations of a sexualized nature are suggested, maybe not consummated since this is a ‘fantasia’, but certainly crystallized around the ‘flash’ of a gentleman’s gaze. ‘Fallen’ carries the hint of sexual sinning, perhaps indicating that the woman is a prostitute; the fall also matches the downward movement of the man’s gaze onto the fetishized female heels.2 The poem, then, offers an interesting illumination of the urban experience as represented in the modernist period: the spatial relations of looking are interwoven with sexual and gender relations. Transcending the urban context is achieved by a moment of sexualized visual pleasure, transformed into a literary text. Finding Hulme’s poem on the Underground in the 1990s prompts us to consider the textuality of space, how modernism depicted the new urban environment of advanced transport systems. Before examining how space was negotiated in the poems of Imagism, it is useful to consider how the city and its spaces has reemerged in contemporary discussion of the nature of postmodernity. In his influential article, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, Fredric Jameson outlines the need for a new ‘cognitive mapping’ of postmodernist urban space. Jameson argues we are ‘in the presence of something like a mutation in built space’ which we are unable to comprehend completely. This is because ‘we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace’. Our sensual under standing of the built environment of the postmodern city is still lodged in the world of modernism: ‘our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism’. Production of a ‘cognitive map’ able to guide and help comprehend this new ‘hyperspace’ requires the growth of our perceptual capabilities through an expansion of ‘our sensorium and our body’.3 Equipped with refined bodily organs we can then attempt to develop our self-consciousness as postmodern subjects in this new spatial environment. Jameson’s argument here can be condensed into the idea that at present there exists a gap between the social relations of postmodernity and the spatial relations of our senses. Our perceptual sense of space is a modernist one, our social situation is a postmodernist one. In order to comprehend the social level we require a reorientation at the level of our understanding of space.

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A close reading of Imagist poems about transport suggest a rather different picture from that offered by Jameson. Reading Imagism through postmodernist eyes draws attention to how far we rely upon similar sorts of spatial/social relations to those represented in modernism. Issues of gender and visual space raised by the Hulme poem indicate that Jameson’s understanding of our ‘perceptual habits’ is inadequate as it stands. The social spaces of the city—whether today or in modernism—are sites of struggle over gender and sexuality. II Space has come to the forefront of recent critical debates in two ways. First we see the growing influence for cultural and aesthetic theorists of considerations of geography. The work of Stephen Kern, Tony Pinkney, Kristin Ross, Edward Said, Raymond Williams and Jameson himself all bear witness to a geographical turn in certain cultural critics.4 David Harvey’s work on modernity, postmodernity and the urbanization of consciousness is a major influence upon these writers. In his The Condition of Postmodernity Harvey offers a compelling account of the similarities and differences between modernity and postmodernity, told in terms of their mode of spatio-temporal relations under capitalism. Harvey argues that capitalism produces historical periods of ‘time-space compression’, where phenomena such as the time taken to travel across space or the way we represent such experiences by maps, demonstrate basic rearrangements in our purchase upon the world.5 Distinctions between modernism and postmodernism, for Harvey, are based upon differing reactions to specific bursts of time-space compression. In what is itself a brilliantly compressed account, Harvey interprets the rise of European cultural modernism in the mid-nineteenth century as ‘a crisis of representation’ deriving from ‘a radical readjustment in the sense of time and space in economic, political, and cultural life’.6 Postmodernism, then, is a different set of responses to this ‘history of successive waves of time-space compression generated out of the pressures of capital accumulation’.7 One of Harvey’s key arguments is that space, as well as time, has always to be connected to social and power relations. Harvey suggests there is no politics of social relations without a politics of space: ‘any struggle to reconstitute power relations is a struggle to reorganize their spatial bases’.8 Practices of space, the production of various types of space by planning, building, gentrification, or slum-clearance, can only be defined by reference to social relations. This point is echoed in Edward W.Soja’s Postmodern Geographies. Previous attempts by radical urban geographers ‘to connect spatial form with social process’ have generally revolved around understanding space as determined by the social processes of the means of production.9 This results, argues Soja, in an ‘overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and social theory’ which ‘actively submerges and peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination’.10 A postmodern geography must think in terms of a ‘socio-spatial dialectic’, whereby ‘the organisation of space [is] not only a social product but simultaneously rebound[s] back to shape social relations’.11 If twentieth-century geography, and other disciplines within the social sciences, refused to recognize space as an important shaping force in society, it is interesting to note that Soja believes cultural modernism, between 1880 and 1920, paid more scrupulous attention to the socio-spatial dialectic. For Soja, ‘at every scale of life…the spatial organisation of society was being restructured to meet the urgent demands of capitalism in crisis’ and it was the artistic avant-garde movements of the fin de siècle that ‘perceptively sensed the instrumentality of space and the disciplining effects of the changing geography of capitalism’.12 English literary modernism in this period clearly registers the effects of this ‘spatial fix’ upon the social fabric. Depictions of the urban experience predominate in the writings of the period, from the city poems of 1890s symbolists such as Ernest Dowson, John Davidson and Arthur Symons to the cityscape backdrop of Eliot’s early verse, Vorticism’s praise for the machinery of docks and ports, and to the re-created Dublin of

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Ulysses or the London of Mrs Dalloway. Critics have often commented upon how negotiation of the city is a key theme in modernist writing.13 The ‘spatial form’ of much modernist writing has also, at least since Joseph Frank’s celebrated article in 1945, been a topic of discussion.14 But little work has been done connecting the external social space of the city with the internal spatial form of the text.15 Many modernist works not only depict societies in which space is being ferociously reconstituted, they also register in their own textual spaces the effects of urban modernization. Feminist cultural theory is the second area in which space, especially urban space, has become an important issue. Discussion has focused upon the gendering of ‘intimate space’, or rather the nature of the intimacies proffered by city spaces.16 In what might be called the great flâneur debate, critics such as Susan Buck-Morss, Griselda Pollock, Elizabeth Wilson and Janet Wolff have considered the availability or unavailability of city space for women from the nineteenth century onwards.17 Griselda Pollock, for example, links the ‘intimate space’ of looking between men and women with the social spaces of the city in which such gazes occur, and attempts to illustrate how the formal experiments of modernist art are informed by these spatial relations. For this argument she draws upon two sources: psychoanalytic models of the ‘male gaze’, where women are fixed in ocular images as part of a masculine defence against castrationanxiety; and the idea of the male flâneur, that city-dweller first noted by Baudelaire and subsequently described by Walter Benjamin as the archetype of modernity. The flâneur, writes Pollock, ‘embodies the gaze of modernity which is both covetous and erotic’.18 He is free to roam public city space with a ‘detached observing gaze, whose possession and power is never questioned as its basis in the hierarchy of the sexes is never acknowledged’.19 Quoting Janet Wolff to support her, Pollock argues that there can be no female flâneuse, for women ‘were never positioned as the normal occupants of the public realm. They did not have the right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch’.20 Women’s spaces were predominantly those of private domestic interiors, while unaccompanied women in public places were taken to be prostitutes. It was these women, working the spaces of the modern city, that were figured as the objects gazed at by the flâneur during his metropolitan excursions.21 T.E.Hulme’s ecstatic glance at a woman’s ‘gold heels’ is a good example of the habits of the flâneur. Recently this analysis by Pollock and Wolff has received a trenchant critique by Elizabeth Wilson.22 Rather than repeat Wilson’s arguments I want to extend the debate from the flâneur to the voyageur, as a way of specifying historically the socio-spatial relations obtaining in metropolitan London. If transport is, as E.M.Forster noted, a ‘forcing-house for the idea of sex’, then it is important to discuss the ways in which this experience of space differs from that of the ambulant flâneur.23 Transport is also an integral part of the ‘time-space compression’ of capitalist modernization discussed by Soja and Harvey. It seems important to see what links, if any, can be made between these two schools of interpretation of space, one Marxist in inflection, the other feminist.24 Before discussing the modernist spaces of transport, one point in Wilson’s brilliant account of the flâneur bears emphasis because it suggests a convergence between these two interpretations of space. Wilson argues the flâneur is actually a fiction, being nothing ‘but an embodiment of the special blend of excitement, tedium and horror aroused by many in the new metropolis, and the disintegrative effect of this on the masculine identity…. He is a…shifting projection of angst rather than a solid embodiment of male bourgeois power.’ The ‘male gaze’ of the flâneur is an anxious response to the presence, rather than the absence, of women in the modern city, ultimately representing ‘masculinity as unstable, caught up in the violent dislocations that characterized urbanization’.25 It is the sexual and social forces of urban spatial relations that produce the nature of masculine looking in modernism, not simply psychic structures of dominance. The ‘giddy space’ of the city, argues Wilson, is ‘too open’ to be subject to any simple masculine manipulation; unbridled urban sensations cause the symptomatic modern sense of

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disorientation, Jameson’s lack of a ‘cognitive map’. The only defence against this destabilization—the modernity where ‘all that is solid melts into air’ as a consequence of time-space compression—is to try to solidify and fix either oneself or other subjects. ‘One such attempt’, suggests Wilson, ‘may be the representation of women in art as petrified, fixed sexual objects.’26 It is, then, no surprise to find, as in Forster’s ‘forcing-house’, that the ‘giddy space’ of urban transport staged in Imagist poetry replays this sexual and textual dialectic of fixity and dissolution. Male Imagism is marked by attempts to root one’s self in the modernist maelstrom, often by fixing others in the spaces of one’s poems. One site of these struggles is that of the Underground. The tube condenses the two forms of space discussed so far: the spaces of newly modernized urban landscapes and the narrower spaces of the intimate relations between people when travelling. To these can be added a third conception of space: the representational spaces of texts in which the forces of these other spaces are registered. III ‘Transportation’, Ezra Pound quoted from Kipling in 1917, ‘is civilization.’ Furthermore, he added, ‘A tunnel is worth more than a dynasty.’27 Imagism welcomed transport as a modern sensation par excellence. Taking your pet turtle for a walk in the city, as the flâneur did in 1840s Paris to show distaste for the increased pace of life, was an option no longer available in a city like London in 1914, the year of the first Imagist anthology. As Susan Buck-Morss states: ‘For the flâneur, it was traffic that did him in.’28 But, for the Imagist, urban traffic offered many new perceptual possibilities. Imagism sought to represent in textual space the new urban spaces of capitalist modernization.29 One of the key examples of modernization in Edwardian London was the recently completed network of underground railways. These were praised by the Futurist poet Marinetti in 1912 for providing ‘a totally new idea of motion, of speed’.30 This interest in the technical modernization of the railways may have influenced the Imagists, but the latter group never quite eulogized machinery in the manner of the Italian coterie. For Imagism transport represented a modern world redolent with anxieties as well as mechanical pleasures. The world’s first underground was the London Metropolitan Railway in 1863, running just below ground level from Paddington to Farringdon Street, and following the lines of existing streets.31 The first proper ‘tube’ railway opened in 1870, and the first electric tube appeared in 1890 with the opening of the City and South London Railway (now part of the Northern Line). From this date onwards a network of tubes grew beneath London, extending to a system 40 miles long by 1914.32 Suburbanization was aided by the tube and other new transport systems such as the electric tram, moving the working class from inner-city slums to new suburbs like Islington and Clapham. These demographic changes often produced social conflict over the occupation of urban space. The exten sion of a tramcar line to Hampstead in 1882, for example, was opposed by residents on the grounds that it would lower the middle-class tone of the neighbourhood. Modernized transport prompted a profound restructuring of urban living space. The building of ‘garden suburbs’ and ‘Metro-Land’ housing estates constructed in Buckingham, Middlesex and Hertfordshire in cooperation with the Metropolitan Railways, produced the characteristic drift of the affluent classes to leafy environs outside their place of work. Golders Green, for example, was rural until 1907, when the tube opened there and urbanized the area, doubling the population by 1923.33 One commentator in 1910 noted that ‘in this strenuous age business men find it necessary to spend much time in the Metropolis, and yet yearn for the charm, healthfulness and repose of a country residence.’34 Although most of the early tubes were designed for such commuters, the Central London Railway (1900) provided a popular and cheap service from west London for theatre-goers and shoppers in Oxford Street.

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This transport revolution in London was perhaps the key experience of modernity and modernization for the vast majority of people. Other technical innovations followed the tube: the first escalators began at Earl’s Court in 1911 and electric lifts were common by 1907.35 Early Underground posters stressed the modernity of the service, employing the slogan ‘Light, Power and Speed’.36 The first maps and standardized design of station signs appeared between 1906 and 1908, the distinctive Underground typeface in 1916.37 The visual experience of space and time in the city was profoundly altered by encountering such phenomena. The proximity of certain places in the city is often distorted by the time taken to traverse them. One’s sense of the actual distance between, say, Waterloo and the Embankment, is governed by the time it takes to travel under the river by tube. The represented distance on the tube map thus replaces the actual distance between places, altering one’s sense of space and time in the city. Phenomena such as these emphasized one of the experiences common to all rail travel: the shrinking of space and of the time taken to cover it. One earlier commentator on conventional railways commented, ‘Distance is abolished, scratch that out of the catalogue of human evils.’38 In 1841 Heinrich Heine claimed that with rail transport, ‘Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone.’39 As Schivelbusch notes, such extreme reactions are the effect of a profound disorientation in our ‘perceptive powers’, producing a feeling that space and time are being destroyed. In effect, the growth of railway transport heightened the desire for a new ‘cognitive map’ of modernity. One contributor to a medical congress of 1866 complained of the change in habits brought by travel: ‘Conversation no longer takes place except among people who know each other, at least not beyond the exchange of mere generalities; any attempt to go beyond these often lapses due to the indifference of some travellers.’ Loss of human conversation means that ‘reading becomes a necessity’.40 Looking thus usurps talking or listening. This point, central to the experience of urban modernity, was stated succinctly by the sociologist Georg Simmel in 1903: Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing…. Interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.41 Psychic unease at being situated in the ‘giddy space’ of the metropolis is intensified on tube journeys. On conventional trains—and upon the few overground parts of the tube—the stimulus to look can be alleviated by snapshots of the landscape through which one hurtles. But even this ‘synthetic philosophy of the glance’,42 is denied to the underground passenger. Objects for the gaze are drastically curtailed on the tube. The anxiety of the experience of urban modernity is increased: stimulated by the social processes of transport to gaze, one is prevented by the organization of space within the train from viewing anything but other people. Early tube-trains on the City and South London line were nicknamed ‘padded-cells’ because they lacked windows, and low levels of lighting prevented reading. Lacking route diagrams, guards informed travellers of the stations, increasing one’s spatial disorientation.43 These early trains lacked advertisements, although this was soon to change, with adverts being placed over window spaces and then, with regulation, into the areas between and above windows.44 Advertising worked in the tube because of the arrangement of visual space: at least now one could gaze at images without incurring the potential social embarrassment of exchanged glances with other passengers.

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The tube is the most urban of transport systems; it requires us to relearn our perceptual relationship to the environment. By the end of the century conventional overground rail transport was accepted, and journeys through countryside became, as they sometimes still are today, experiences of leisured visual consumption. However, in the early years of this century the tube required a new cognitive guide to parallel the geographic map of the underground. Negotiation of city space via the tube is an ambivalent phenomenon, especially for the Imagist poet determined to capture the essence of modern life. As Elizabeth Wilson comments, searching for meaning in the city takes various forms, ‘not the least important of which is to create new forms of beauty’. However, such beauty ‘will never be without a kind of unease’.45 One must cope with the anxieties of the new spaces, and their specific visual regimes, but also celebrate the fresh experiences and pleasures offered. Initial reactions to spatial change often consist of mourning the loss of established sureties. But these changes also represent the myriad possibilities of modern metropolitan life, to be transformed and recorded as instances of aesthetic beauty. IV Locked inside small tubular carriages, your gaze could only fix on two sorts of images: adverts or people. Imagist poems of tube travel show how urban angst was negotiated via visual images which then became aesthetic artefacts. It is hardly surprising that the first fully modernist group of English poets should call themselves Imagists: the appellation merely drew upon the ‘cult of images’ pressing all around one in the spaces of modernization.46 By considering a number of poems by the male members of the Imagist movement—Richard Aldington, F.S.Flint, John Gould Fletcher and Ezra Pound—we can understand how the experience of ‘time-space compression’ is connected to the social and sexual relations of looking in modernist space.47 The manner in which urban anxiety metamorphoses into the basis of a new aesthetic is evident in Richard Aldington’s poem ‘In the Tube’: The electric car jerks; I stumble on the slates of the floor, Fall into a leather seat And look up. A row of advertisements, A row of windows, Set in brown woodwork pitted with brass nails, A row of hard faces, Immobile, In the swaying train, Rush across the flickering background of fluted dingy tunnel; A row of eyes, Eyes of greed, of pitiful blankness, of plethoric complacency, Immobile, Gaze, stare at one point, At my eyes. Antagonism, Disgust,

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Immediate antipathy, Cut my brain, as a sharp reed Cuts a finger. I surprise the same thought In the brasslike eyes: ‘What right have you to live?’48 Aldington here casually displays what he called the Imagist method of having ‘an eye for the common people, even if it be only to pity or to hate them’.49 Both emotions are clearly evident. The final question can be read either as the protagonist’s opinion of the ‘row of eyes’ of the fellow travellers, or as the antagonism of the ‘eyes’ to the poet. The image of the reed cutting the finger indicates the violence of perception between artist and people: this is a gaze of mutual antipathy. The poet, however, has the upper hand since he can try to represent and control the gaze confronting him. The Imagist drive to a concise language enacts a synecdoche of ‘eyes’ of ‘pitiful blankness’ to replace the other passengers. People are fragmented into component parts; these parts are then viciously solidified. Faces are ‘hard’ and eyes, using a term displaced from the ‘brass nails’ embedded in the train, become ‘brasslike’. This reifying gaze signals not only contempt towards the non-artist, but also the defensive strategy of an aesthetic group threatened by the ‘blankness’ of these eyes. Concentration upon the fearful gaze of the public, however, springs initially from the visual space inside the tube. Aldington’s fixing of human subjects originates in the ‘row of advertisements’ upon which his first gaze falls. The ordered structure of this ‘row’ gets displaced onto other signifiers: the row of advertisements becomes a row of windows, which becomes a row of faces, only to conclude as a row of eyes. The travellers in the poem are not only punitively anatomized by the poet’s gaze, but are also rendered static and ‘immobile’. The whole text vacillates between movement and stasis, mirroring the spatial/ temporal experience of travel. The language of the poem itself jumps from condensed single word lines (‘Antagonism/Disgust’) to longer, jerkily moving lines such as ‘Eyes of greed, of pitiful blankness, of plethoric complacency’. Faces are ‘immobile’ but are situated within the ‘swaying train’, travelling at speed through the ‘dingy tunnel’. Aldington’s gaze seeks to arrest antithetical faces, preventing them realizing their violent dislike of him. Ferocious gazing at antagonistic eyes will, the poet hopes, contain their threat, transforming their active staring into the fixity of the brass nails embedded in the woodwork of the train. Eyes that were ‘pitiful’ would thus become ‘pitted’ like nails, their pointed ends safely hidden from view. The eyes and their attendant bodies became images safely affixed to the train. Pumped around at velocity within the metropolis, people become like adverts, images proclaiming their availability for visual consumption. F.S.Flint’s poem ‘Tube’ presents a similar experience of travelling. Here the travelling public is ‘stolid’, and sit ‘lulled/By the roar of the train in the tube/Content with the electric light/Assured, comfortable, warm.’50 Once more the focus is upon the eyes of other travellers: ‘You look in vain for a sign,/For a light in their eyes. No!’ In contrast to Aldington’s text, where active public eyes must be restricted, Flint’s poem represents a desire to energize the public: ‘And we, the spirit that moves,/ We leaven the mass,/And it changes’. The public must be propelled into motion out of their inertia, infused, as poets are, with ‘the spirit that moves’. In Flint’s text this artistic ‘spirit’ derives from the current powering the tube and its ‘electric light’, and is commandeered by the poet to disturb the ‘mass, inert,/Unalarmed, undisturbed’. Technological modernization, altering the experience of space and time, here informs the very textuality of writing.51 Only poets can ‘sweeten’ and ‘leaven’, engineering a modernizing rejuvenation of the public, for otherwise the

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‘world/Would sink in the ether’. Flint is anxious to distinguish the modernist poet from the anonymous ‘mass’ of the other travellers, to carve out a social distance from them that is not evident in the space of the tube train. Urban travel produces the perilous necessity to try to individualize one’s identity and thus distance oneself from the lumpen mass. Traffic in urban environments forces a mingling of social, sexual and class relations. The desire to ‘leaven’ the mass was thus prompted by the poet’s encounter with large numbers of people while travelling. T.E.Hulme had remarked that ‘The beauty of London [is] only seen in detached and careful moments’ such as when the artist is ‘in some manner detached’ travelling ‘on top of [a] bus’.52 Representations of meetings while travelling provided new everyday material for modernist verse. But such liaisons also allowed the writer to remain aloof from the ‘mass’ by means of the safe detachment of the gaze. This distance helped uphold the poet’s superior status in a world where the economic market was ruthlessly equalizing old social hierarchies.53 The poems by Aldington and Flint demonstrate how they valued the social distance and reserve that the spaces of transport offered. In 1902 Simmel argued that the individual’s sense of reserve in crowded cities was ‘because the bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental distance only the more visible’.54 The experience of the ‘narrowness’ of the London Underground transforms, in Aldington’s case, ‘reserve’ into ‘antagonism’. One of the most sustained Imagist texts about urban transport, John Gould Fletcher’s ‘London Excursion’, published in Some Imagist Poets (1915), finds the poet forced into intimate spatial relations with the commuting masses from the new suburbs ringing the city.55 Fletcher’s poem recounts travel, initially by bus, across the capital from morning till early evening. His journey summons the familiar feeling of alienation in the city. Though the passengers ‘shrink’ together for comfort the poet seeks to isolate himself from real connection with them: ‘Yet I revolt: I bend, I twist myself,/I crawl into a million convolutions.’ In a section entitled ‘’Bus-Top’ the poet looks down and sees ‘Monotonous domes of bowlerhats/Vibrate in the heat.’ The uniformity of the urban commercial worker recalls the ‘rows’ in Aldington’s poem. This fact is noted from a position which marks the poet’s spatial distance above the object of his gaze: his visual skills separate him from ‘monotony’. Amid this detached vision the poet has a ‘Sudden desire for something changeless’, for something ‘Unmelted by hissing wheels’. This is a desire for some firm grasp upon solid objects among the ‘melting’ modernizing city. But the poet is unable to locate himself in the city: ‘I can no longer find a place for myself:/I go.’ Forced back into the position of a meaningless urban atom, the poet has no choice but to join the ‘Straggling shapes’ of commuters about to depart for home: ‘A clock with quivering hands/Leaps to the trajectory-angle of our departure.’ The revolt against urban life fails and the poet finds himself controlled by that powerful symbol of modernist time, the station clock. No ‘essence’ of urban life has been discovered and the poet travels home to the ‘green’ suburbs with the wearers of the bowler-hats he had earlier perused with contempt. The poem marks a failure, the inability of the Imagist poet to maintain a necessary ‘distance’ from the people despised, or to fix his own identity in the swirling spaces of the city. F.S.Flint’s ‘Accident’ shows gender and not class as the locus of the personal relations imposed on urban space, and shows fixity to be directed at another passenger: Dear one! you sit there in the corner of the carriage; and you do not know me; and your eyes forbid.56

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In the 1930 Imagist anthology, Richard Aldington wrote that ‘what enters by the eyes is desire’ and when desire ‘speeds through the eyes/For a moment there is strange tumult/In the whole nature of man or woman,/ And in a flash all life is changed.’57 In Flint’s poem the moment of transformative desire is prompted by the chance visual encounter with a stranger whose ‘eyes forbid’ further intimacies. The woman can ‘see beyond’ and understand that the other passengers are ‘nothing’. This visionary gift propels the woman to transcend the ‘dead faces’ and ‘wear of human bodies’. The poet desires this ability in order to project himself out of the ‘dirt’ and ‘squalor’ of the urban context, symbolized by the faces of these neighbours. Watching the woman turns swiftly from ‘love’ to ‘desire’, but this gaze is curtailed by the train arriving at the protagonist’s destination: ‘This is my station…’ The poem shows perceptual desire, ‘tense and tender’, thwarted by the necessity of leaving the train. The ‘accident’ of the encounter with the ‘dear one’ is constrained by the systematic nature of the travelling: one has to leave at one’s destination and make do with creating a poem from this experience of desire within intimate space. Women in the ‘closing years of the nineteenth century’, comments Wilson, ‘were emerging more and more into the public spaces of the city’.58 But their presences on public transport were often organized so as to minimize the sort of accidental meeting with the other sex portrayed in Flint’s poem. Following American practice, ‘Ladies Only’ carriages appeared on British railways, along with separate waiting-rooms for the sexes on stations.59 In nineteenth-century Paris women were forbidden to travel on top of buses, preventing the visual pleasures advocated by Hulme and Fletcher.60 Smoking carriages were assumed to be for men only. The early ‘padded cell’ tubes contained one car for smokers from which women were banned.61 In 1910 The Railway and Travel Monthly discussed the growth of women smoking, quoting the advice of Punch: ‘Here’s the place where men may smoke;/Not designed for women-folk./ If they come in solid packs,/Take and put them on the racks;/Should they faint or weep or shout;/Ope the door and drop them out!’62 If there is evidence that the volume of women travelling increased by the end of the nineteenth century, their visibility was still subject, not only to the ‘male gaze’, but also spatial and social organization. It was only with the 1914 war that women began working in any numbers upon the railways.63 Women were first recruited onto the tubes in March 1915, and in that June Maida Vale station boasted an all-female staff. As Sandra M.Gilbert has argued, these uniformed women challenged the male modernist occupancy of the metropolis.64 Women also contested city space in the marches and spectacular demonstrations mounted by the suffragettes in London between 1906 and 1913. City crowds became perceived as essentially ‘feminine’.65 Wyndham Lewis, for example, viewing the pre-war London crowds in July 1914, pondered, ‘Are the Crowds then female?’, referring to them as a ‘feminine entity’ of ‘meaningless numbers’.66 Such public displays of femininity in the city compromised the detached male pleasure in looking desired by Imagism. Ezra Pound’s famous definition of the ‘Image’ was that it presented ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’; its effect was ‘that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits…which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art’.67 Perhaps it is not too fanciful to view this desire for aesthetic transcendence as conditioned by the crises in perception wrought by the ‘time-space compression’ of modernity: central to these is a sense of the failure of the aloof male gaze. Elizabeth Wilson argues that the flâneur ‘embodies the Oedipal under threat. The male gaze has failed to annihilate the castrate, woman. On the contrary anonymity annihilates him.’68 This scenario is exacerbated when the stroller becomes the traveller. In Flint’s ‘Tube’ we see the poet desire to distinguish himself from the anonymity of the ‘mass’, an experience shared by the protagonist of Fletcher’s urban excursion; Aldington’s journey shows his gaze countered by that of other travellers. The most famous of Imagist poems, Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, shows the poet striving to manufacture beauty

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from the mundane surroundings of the Paris Metro. The poem also registers the desire to escape the suffocations of the crowd by producing a distance sufficient to view with detachment the faces of other passengers. I want to look at this poem in some detail, to demonstrate the importance of a spatialized reading of Imagism. By examining Pound’s account of the poem in his essay on ‘Vorticism’ we can see how the text displays clearly the beauty and unease of modern city spaces for the masculine traveller. V Pound’s account of the composition of ‘In a Station of the Metro’ in his ‘Vorticism’ essay attaches special emphasis to his vision of anonymous faces: ‘Three years ago in Paris I got out of a “metro” train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman.’69 The stress on the suddenness of the incident accords with the ‘sudden liberation’ of the Imagist complex. This sense of the instant is matched by the separated set of faces Pound describes; these are particular faces that Pound seems unwilling to combine, the cumulative syntax of ‘and then’ and ‘another’ stressing their discreteness. The continuation of Pound’s narrative shows that his initial difficulty in finding words to capture his experience (‘I could not find words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion’) eased when he turned to a visual discourse. Walking home that evening a form of expression for the emotion came to him, not actual words but ‘an equation…in little splotches of colour’. It was, notes Pound, the start of ‘a language of colour’ (‘Vorticism’, p. 87). It is strange, then, that very little colour appears in the finished text. Instead the image is drained of colourful intensity, surrendering to the bleak environment of the Metro platform. As quoted in the ‘Vorticism’ essay, the poem appears as follows: In A Station Of The Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough. (‘Vorticism’, p. 89)70 Finding beauty in the urban crowd is a difficult experience for Pound, as for the other Imagists. Beauty in the Metro lies not in the crowd, not in a person in the crowd, but only in their faces. However this beauty is only evident at a perceptual distance and is devoid of Pound’s initial ‘language of colour’. In his other account of the composition of the poem, Pound refers to being jostled by the departing passengers.71 Touch is thus replaced in the poem by the detachment of the gaze. For it is not the faces-in-themselves that are beautiful, but their ‘apparition’ as ‘petals’ which is pleasing to the poet. As Maud Ellmann notes, ‘the text records the “apparition” rather than the faces per se’.72 Pound’s claim that the poem is of ‘a thing outward and objective’ is vanquished by the subjectivism of the perceiving consciousness of the apparition. The poet does not just record objective ‘arrangements in colour’ (‘Vorticism’, p. 87), but displays his emotions before the objects. It is a feeling which, as in Aldington, an-atomizes human beings into mere ‘faces’. Pound’s ‘faces in the crowd’ are merely fixed images to be consumed, ‘petals’ to be plucked by the gazing poet as objects of beauty. The poem matches the negative emotions of other Imagist texts before crowds, but in a more aestheticized and disguised manner. Crowds blur the particularity of individuals, producing facial ‘splotches’. The problem with these ‘splotches’ is that they threaten the spatial clarity of the textual Image, spilling image into surrounding image.

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Pound’s solution to this visual dilemma is found in the typography of the poem. It marks a small, but radical, break in the formal treatment of poetic language, an innovation that was to be developed in Pound’s later writings. When originally published in Poetry in April 1913 this is the way the text appeared: In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough. The poem’s visual form is designed to resist sequence and time in favour of spatial arrangement. The poem not only fragments people into faces, it also atomizes its own language. The collectivism of the crowd is analysed into a series of linguistic monads. Language is literally chopped into separated components, each unit of discourse striving to render only one thing—the faces, the crowd, the petals, the bough. The words ‘these’ and ‘the’ indicate a definiteness of linguistic reference: it is not a crowd but this crowd, this word referring to this thing. Any sense of movement—as in the transport process of the Metro itself—is resisted by the spatial form of the words. The text decomposes not so much into two complex images—faces and the petals—which are then compared, but rather divides into six discrete images, six linguistic units parcelled off from one another by blank spaces. These six pictures now resemble nothing more than the rows of advertisements found in the Underground or Metro station or within the train, and noted in Aldington’s poem. The way adverts for different commodities are juxtaposed without any sense of their logical, narrative or economic connection is just how Pound’s six linguistic things appear. Syntactical links are forced asunder by the Mallarmean blanks between the words, just as in Pound’s prose account the faces were split by phrases such as ‘and then’ and ‘another’. Now textual space parallels other spaces—that between the Metro stations, spaces between poet and passengers, and the gaps between each of the ‘faces’. The ‘apparition’ is not of Pound entering any relationship with these subjects. Instead he see ‘faces’, as restricted in their movements as the fixed ‘petals’ on the ‘bough’. Subsequent printings of the poem erased the spaces between the linguistic units. One explanation for this is Pound’s advocacy of Vorticism as a ‘dynamic’ art. A poem syntactically falling apart from within is a poor example of the vortex, ‘from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’ (‘Vorticism’, p. 92). Pound’s original poem had, almost too clearly, grasped the uneasy nature of the modern experience of space: atomistic, reified, and where the only obtainable sensual satisfaction was that of a naked staring at ‘beautiful faces’. And we are not even compensated by the promised myriad of pleasurable colours. In ‘The Condolence’ Pound wrote, ‘Our maleness lifts us out of the ruck.’73 The ruck, that is, of the crowd that smothers particularity and the detached male voyeur. Trying to be hoisted above the social space of the city crowd here involves the male gaze desiring desperately to create beauty from the everyday. VI Visual transcendence, the creation of the Imagist ‘image’, is an aestheticized attempt to escape the social and sexual constrictions of urban time and space. But, as Pound’s poem shows, the experience of urban space is too strong to be simply jettisoned. Social space forces itself in the ‘Metro’ poem into the very crevices of the text. Urban transport creates conditions which privilege the visual sense. But the worrisome space of this experience, where sight is isolated from other sensual human relations, entails either a desire to transcend the situation—as in Flint’s ‘Accident’ or Pound’s ‘Metro’—or an antagonism towards those one’s gaze falls upon. Often transcendence merges into a violent visual gaze, as in Aldington’s ‘In the Tube’.

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Both are responses to the socio-spatial relations of the city. By fixing others in an aesthetic image urban anomie can be confronted. This strategy influences Imagist texts that are not specifically about the urban. Richard Aldington, discussing how to write an Imagist poem describing a beautiful woman, notes that instead of utilizing wasteful adjectives, ‘we present that woman, we make an “image” of her’. Such an Imagist poem would possess ‘hardness, as of cut stone. No slop, no sentimentality’, and might be ‘nicely-carved marble’.74 This desire for concretized concision, manifesting itself in the characteristic shortness of the Imagist poem, is stylistic advice drawn from the urban environment, where brief glances are the norm. Instilling such snapshots with intense significance and making them solid, like marble, grants a permanence denied to the glimpse of a stranger’s face on the tube. Drawing on Bergson, T.E.Hulme theorized poetry as a ‘visual concrete’ language, a ‘compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing.’ Hulme then provides an example of how this visual reification operates: ‘If you are walking behind a woman in the street, you notice the curious way in which the skirt rebounds from her heels.’ If, notes Hulme, this ‘motion’ interests you, then you will search for the ‘exact epithet’ to convey this ‘aesthetic emotion’. Hulme concludes: ‘it is the zest with which you look at the thing which decides you to make the effort.’75 Aesthetically arresting, the ‘motion’ of the woman produces a visual concrete image. If poetry is a compromise for another discourse, one which enacts bodily sensations, then we see here the sexualized nature of Hulme’s theory. The transcendent ‘zest’ of the gaze prompts the poem, the bodily desire which must be diverted into visual pleasures that produce the correct aesthetic. Hulme’s scopophilic example also intrigues because the voyeur is behind the woman in the street, spatially safe from being gazed at in return. The same structure occurs in Hulme’s ‘The Embankment’, anthologized in 100 Poems on the Underground. One of Hulme’s poetic ‘Images’ also illustrates this idea: ‘Her skirt lifted as a dark mist/From the columns of amethyst.’76 The textual space of the ‘zestful’ image is, then, informed by the response of the male poet to the urban experience. The metaphor of solidity for the woman’s body (‘columns of amethyst’) halts her movement, and thus eases the poem out of the limits of time and space: it is a case of all that is moving is fixed into stone. The aesthetic success of the poem, the production of a concrete and striking image, relies upon reifying the subject of the poet’s glance. We have seen how the transcendent ‘image’, rooted in a version of the male gaze, is a gendered response to the spatial and social conditions of the modernist city. Discerning the politics of the gaze, as represented in a cluster of Imagist poems, relies upon untangling the psychic and social relations between looking and the politics of space. In these poems textual space is infused by the social spaces of modernism. But it is important to understand how social space is also simultaneously psychic space and sexual space. Urban social space produces conditions necessary, but not sufficient, for the mastering ‘zest’ of the gaze. Certain forms of transport in urban cities are one important example. This is not to suggest forms of travel inherently enforce male visual power. For the male Imagist gaze has only a tenuous grip upon these spaces: fixing others in images, or rooting oneself apart from others, is the course the Imagists took to subdue the terrors of urban disorientation. It seems appropriate, as in many tube journeys, to end where we started, with a contemporary version of the textual space of the city. By this means we can evaluate the distance we have come from Imagist poems about the Underground, to a contemporary world where we have 100 Poems on the Underground. Jonathan Raban’s Soft City (1974), used by David Harvey as a symptomatic account of postmodernist city life, contains descriptions of traffic which have their ancestors in the Imagist poems I have been considering: ‘Back among strangers—the essential condition of metropolitan life—straphanging in a rush hour tube, everyone avoids each other’s eyes.’ For Raban ‘city-life’ consists of ‘belonging’ mixed with anonymity,

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‘when one is stripped of credentials and credibility, when one sees oneself as just another moon-face in the crowd’.77 Urban alienation—and the preponderance of the visual—mark the experience of this space as essentially unchanged since modernism. The desire to ‘belong’ is ruthlessly denied by the speed at which one travels, preventing one becoming rooted in any one space. Absorption into the ‘faces’ of the crowd is still a threat, as it was for Pound, Flint and Fletcher. Raban continues by indicating the sexualization of looking in such situations: ‘In the crowd, I catch the eyes of girls—that rapid, casual, essentially urban interrogation: a glance held between a man and a woman fixes each for an instant; another belonging, of a kind.’ The lesson of such encounters is that a ‘big city is an encyclopaedia of sexual possibility, and the eye language of the crowd asserts this possibility without the risk of real encounters.’78 These possibilities, notes Raban, possibility, and the eye language of the crowd asserts this possibility are ‘best at a distance— when you are on an up-escalator while the girl is travelling down; through carriage windows; across streets thick with traffic.’ They are not ‘invitations to an assignation’ but merely ‘the small reassuring services which men and women can render for each other’ when ‘sucked in and reduced by the crowd’. The momentary glance of Imagism appears once more, this time viewed both as detached sexual possibility and as ‘reassuring services’ for those riddled with urban angst. People are brought together in the spaces of transport, but intimacy is replaced by the less risky action of gazing ‘at a distance’. For Raban the sexual gaze is a way of overcoming the anxiety of being ‘reduced’ by the city to just another featureless face. If one cannot ‘belong’ to this urban place, then one can at least transcend it via an imagined sexual encounter. Gazing is a reciprocal relation, an Hegelian move of mutual recognition, in which both sexes attempt to understand and ‘belong’. Are Raban’s ‘reassuring services’ another reformulation of the male gaze, assuaging a troubled masculinity by the ‘interrogation’ of women representing ‘sexual possibility’? Or is this episode mournfully heroic, what Elizabeth Wilson describes as the attempt of both sexes to survive in the ‘disorientating space…of the metropolis’ by finding meaning, beauty and individual identity wherever possible.79 Whichever interpretation we choose it is clear that the spaces and images of modernism are still ours to contest and revise. This discussion of Imagism has tried to specify some of these modernist spaces: the social spaces of technical modernization shown in tube transport and the psychic spaces of looking and relationships in city experiences. These two forms of space cannot, in practice, be separated and are central to the textual space of Imagism. Imagism shows the necessity of linking the concerns of cultural geography—Harvey et al.— with the feminist work on gendered visual relations in the city. To Soja’s ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ must be added the dialectic of gender relations. Implicitly I have suggested that Jameson’s account of postmodern ‘hyperspace’ as a decisive break with modernist space needs to be treated cautiously. Jameson’s call for a new ‘sensorium’ adequate to the spaces of postmodernism contains dangers of its own. Might not his plea for new perceptual organs be prompted by the sort of male anxiety over turbulent urban space which we have found in the texts of Imagism? Overcoming urban disorientation by equipping oneself with new eyes is not in itself sufficient: attention must be paid to how, and in what spatial and sexual contexts, one looks with these eyes. We need much fuller investigation of the uneasy beauty of modernist space, starting with movements such as Imagism, which clearly condense social, psychic and textual space, before, I would suggest, we are free to travel to some other set of spaces. University of Wolverhampton NOTES I wish to thank the following for making many helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this article: David Peters Corbett, Mair Evans, and Dick Leith.

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1 T.E.Hulme, ‘The Embankment (The Fantasia of a Fallen Gentleman on a Cold, Bitter Night)’, in 100 Poems on the Underground, ed. Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik, Cicely Herbert (London: Cassell, 1991). The manuscript version of the poem appears in A.R.Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme (London: Gollancz, 1960), p. 159. 2 Freud’s technical definition of fetishism fits Hulme’s image well. See Freud, ‘Fetishism’ (1927) and ‘Splitting of the Ego in the defensive process’ (1938), in Collected Papers, vol. 5, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959). For an application of the concept to the visual arts see Laura Mulvey, ‘Fears, fantasies and the male unconscious’, in her Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989). 3 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (July/August 1984), p. 80. 4 See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Tony Pinkney, ‘Space: The final frontier’, in News from Nowhere, 8 (Autumn 1990), pp. 10–28, and Raymond Williams (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1991); Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (London: Macmillan, 1988); Edward Said, ‘Narrative, geography and interpretation’, New Left Review, 180 (March/April 1990); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); and Fredric Jameson, ‘Rimbaud and the spatial text’, in Rewriting Literary History, ed. Tak-Wai Wong and M.A.Abbas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1984) and ‘Postmodernism and Utopia: Interview with Fredric Jameson’, News from Nowhere, 9 (Autumn 1991), pp. 6–17. 5 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 340. For the concept of the ‘urbanization of consciousness’ see Harvey, The Urban Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), ch. 8. 6 Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 260–1. 7 ibid., p. 306. 8 ibid., p. 238. 9 Edward W.Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 52; 54. For another example of the new cultural geography see Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 10 Soja, p. 15. 11 ibid., p. 57. 12 ibid., p. 34. 13 See, inter alia, Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The cities of modernism’, in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976); Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989); and Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, ed. E.Timms and D.Kelley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 14 Frank argues that ‘Aesthetic form in modern poetry…is based on a space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in the reader’s attitude toward language.’ Frank, however, does not connect this feature in any way to the social spaces of the modernist metropolis. See Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial form in modern literature’ (1945), reprinted in his The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 13. 15 Kristin Ross’s account of Rimbaud in terms of a ‘synchronic history’ is one exception. For Ross, ‘social space’ is a ‘way of mediating between the discursive and the event’. The Emergence of Social Space, p. 8. 16 The concept of ‘intimate space’ derives from Bachelard and refers to the nooks and corners of the built environment within which we discover ‘the topography of our intimate being’. This is a phenomenological space, comprising relations with other people and objects. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. xxxii. 17 See Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The flâneur, the sandwichman and the whore: The politics of loitering’, New German Critique, 39 (1986), pp. 99–140; Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the spaces of femininity’, in her Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The invisible flâneur’, New Left Review, 191 (Jan./Feb. 1992), pp. 90–110; and Janet Wolff, ‘The

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invisible flâneuse: Women and the literature of modernity’, in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989). Pollock, ‘Modernity and the spaces of femininity’, p. 67. The origin of the psychoanalytic theory of ‘the gaze’ is Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, reprinted in her Visual and Other Pleasures. Mary Ann Doane argues that space is a key component of ‘the gaze’. For Doane the structure of the gaze is not so much Mulvey’s one of active:male/ passive: female, as a model of proximity/distance in relation to the image. The (male) voyeur must maintain a distance between himself and the female image; this space is the lack which fuels desire. ‘Spatial proximity’ is seen as a ‘female’ attribute, to be resisted if the detached male gaze is to operate. See Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the masquerade: Theorizing the female spectator’, Screen, vol. 23, nos. 3–4 (September/October 1982), pp. 77–80. Pollock, p. 71. ibid. See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 149; 151. Wilson, ‘The invisible flâneur’. E.M.Forster, diary entry, 21 October 1909, cited in Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 351. Forster’s novel contains many descriptions of how the new transport systems altered human and spatial relationships. For a reading of Forster from this perspective see Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and imperialism’, Field Day Pamphlet, no. 14 (Derry: Field Day Theatre Co., 1988). Doreen Massey offers a critique of Soja and Harvey from a feminist viewpoint in ‘Flexible sexism’, Society and Space, vol. 9 (1991), pp. 31–57. Wilson, ‘The invisible flâneur’, p. 109. ibid., p. 110. Ezra Pound, ‘Provincialism the enemy’, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), p. 169. Buck-Morss, ‘The flâneur, the sandwichman and the whore’, p. 102. My use of the terms modernism, modernity and modernization derives from Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 15–16. For a critique of Berman see Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and revolution’, New Left Review, 144 (March/April 1984), pp. 96–113. For an overview of this debate see Peter Osborne, ‘Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category’, New Left Review, 192 (March/April 1992), pp. 65–84. Interview with Marinetti, cited in Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age Vol. 1 (London and Bedford: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1975), p. 28. Peter Nicholls argues that Futurism’s uncritical praise for technical modernization distinguished them from the Imagists. Imagism and Vorticism, he suggests, subordinated ‘the technological to the aesthetic’ so as to uphold art against commerce. Both Futurism and Imagism were interested in space, but for Imagism ‘space was redefined as distance, as a praxis of visual perception which allowed detachment and contemplation rather than immersion in the flows of capital.’ Peter Nicholls, ‘Futurism, gender, and theories of postmodernity’, Textual Practice, vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 210–11. John R.Day, The Story of London’s Underground (London: London Transport, 1963), p. 4. Unattributed information concerning the tube comes from the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden, London. Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 24. J.P.Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic (London: London’s Underground, 1928), p. 216. G.A.Selcon, ‘Pullman cars on the Metropolitan Railway’, The Railway and Travel Monthly, vol. 1, no. 3 (July 1910), p. 228. Thomas, London’s Underground Traffic, p. 188. Oliver Green, Underground Art: London Transport Posters 1908 to the Present (London: Studio Vista, 1990), p. 25. Oliver Green, The London Underground: An Illustrated History (London: Ian Allen, 1987), p. 31.

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38 Simmons, Victorian Railway, p. 213; 310. 39 Cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Leamington Spa and New York: Berg, 1986), p. 37. 40 Cited in Schivelbusch, p. 68. For an account of the rise of railway reading that indicates the importance of women as consumers of the new fiction, see Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 86–9. 41 Georg Simmel, ‘Soziologie des Raumes’, cited in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, pp. 37–8. 42 This phrase was used by Benjamin Gastineau to describe the visual experience of the chemin de fer in 1861; cited in Schivelbusch, p. 60. 43 Day, London’s Underground, p. 45. 44 For details of the growth of advertising on the tube see Thomas, London’s Underground Traffic, p. 135; J.Graeme Bruce, Tube Trains Under London: An Illustrated History (London: London Transport, 1968), p. 10; and T.R.Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London: Heinemann, 1982), pp. 57–111. 45 Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago, 1991), p. 24. 46 For Christine Buci-Glucksmann a ‘cult of images’ is characteristic of modernity. See her ‘Catastrophic Utopia: The feminine as allegory of the modern’, Representations, 14 (Spring 1986), p. 221. 47 I have focused upon the male Imagists because I believe that the two female Imagists—H.D. and Amy Lowell— represent rather different tendencies within the group, especially in response to the urban experience. On H.D.’s relation to Imagist theory see Cyrena N.Pondrom, ‘H. D. and the origins of Imagism’, in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). On Lowell and Imagism see Gillia Hanscombe and Virginia L.Smyers, Writing for their Lives: The Modernist Women 1910–1940 (London: Women’s Press, 1987). 48 Richard Aldington, The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington (London: Allen Wingate, 1948), p. 49. First published in 1915 in The Egoist. 49 Aldington, ‘The poetry of F.S.Flint’, The Egoist (1 May 1915), pp. 80–1. 50 F.S.Flint, ‘Tube’, Otherworld Cadences (London: Poetry Bookshop, 1920), p. 36. 51 Behind Flint’s trope is Pound’s early Imagist theory, which viewed the ‘spirit’ animating both poet and language as akin to electricity: ‘words are like great hollow cones of steel…charged with a force like electricity’ (‘I gather the limbs of Osiris’, Selected Prose, p. 34). Pound articulates a sort of macho-modernist aesthetic wherein the barometer of the good writer is the person who can arduously endure the most force: ‘The best artist is the man whose machinery can stand the highest voltage.’ (‘As for Imagism’, Selected Prose, p. 346). 52 T.E.Hulme, Further Speculations, ed. S.Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 99. Finding the material for Imagist ‘moments’ upon transport was first suggested by Ford who argued that a renaissance in poetry would only emerge ‘When some young poets get it into their heads to come out of their book-closet and take…a ride on the top of a bus from Shepherd’s Bush to Poplar.’ See Ford Madox Ford, ‘Modern poetry’, The Thrush, vol. 1, no. 1 (1 December 1909), pp. 52–3. 53 One response was Pound’s notion of the ‘aristocracy’ of the artist. Pound, ‘The new sculpture’, The Egoist (February 1914), p. 68. For a discussion of the political affiliations of modernist ‘classicism’ see Alan Robinson, Poetry, Painting and Ideas 1885–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1985), ch. 4. 54 Georg Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life,’ in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H.Wolff (Illinois: The Free Press, 1950), p. 418. 55 John Gould Fletcher, ‘London Excursion’, in Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology (London: Constable, 1915), pp. 39–49. Richards and MacKenzie note that ‘The inhabitants of the new suburbs were in the main middle class… white-collar workers…called into existence by Britain’s commercial and financial pre-eminence…these men… travelled into London each day by train from Clapham, Wimbledon, Richmond, Putney, and Barnes.’ Jeffrey Richards and John M.MacKenzie, The Railway Station A Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 166. For the working classes, the cost of regular tube-travel was prohibitive and railway

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companies, eager to keep their suburban customers happy in splendid isolation, resisted attempts to encourage workers to use trains (ibid., p. 167). F.S.Flint, ‘Accident’, in Some Imagist Poets, pp. 58–9. Richard Aldington, ‘The Eaten Heart’, Imagist Anthology 1930, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), p. 3; 5. Wilson, ‘The invisible flâneur’, p. 100. Simmons, Victorian Railway, p. 334. Buck-Morss, ‘The flâneur, the sandwichman and the whore’, p. 102. Day, London’s Underground, p. 45. ‘Don’ts for holiday travellers’, The Railway and Travel Monthly, vol. 1, no. 5 (September 1910), p. 395. Simmons, Victorian Railway, pp. 334–5. Sandra M.Gilbert, ‘Soldier’s heart: literary men, literary women, and the Great War’, in Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Lisa Tickner discusses the visual impact of the suffragette crowds in her The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987). Wilson notes that the modern urban crowd ‘was increasingly invested with female characteristics…as hysterical, or, in images of feminine instability and sexuality, as a flood or swamp’, Sphinx in the City, p. 7. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937: reprinted London: Calder & Boyars, 1967), pp. 78–9. E.Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ (1913); reprinted in Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 130. Wilson, ‘invisible flâneur’, p. 109. E.Pound, ‘Vorticism’ (1914); reprinted in E.Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; New York: New Directions, 1970), pp. 86–7. Further references will be given in the text. The most thorough discussion of Pound’s attention to typography and punctuation in the poem is by Randolph Chilton and Carol Gibertson, ‘Pound’s “‘Metro’ Hokku”: The evolution of an image’, Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 36, no. 2 (1990), pp. 225–36. See Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 170. Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 146. E.Pound, Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 82. Richard Aldington, ‘Modern poetry and the Imagists’, The Egoist (1 June 1914), p. 202. T.E.Hulme, Speculations; Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (1924; London: Routledge, 1987), p. 134; 136. Hulme, ‘Images’, in Jones, Life and Opinions of T.E.Hulme, p. 181. Jonathan Raban, Soft City, (London: Collins Harvill, 1988), p. 248. ibid., pp. 248–9. Wilson, ‘invisible flâneur’, p. 110.

Christine Brooke-Rose interviewed by David Seed CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE

Christine Brooke-Rose was born in 1923 in Geneva and attended Belgian and English schools. During the Second World War she served in the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force both in Liverpool and at the Bletchley Park intelligence centre. She received her BA in English at Oxford in 1949 and subsequently pursued research on medieval poetry at University College London. Between 1956 and 1968 she worked as a reviewer and journalist in London. In this period she produced her first novels (The Languages of Love, 1957, The Sycamore Tree, 1958, etc.) which Brooke-Rose has described as ‘light satires on society’, all within the realist mode. From 1968 to 1988 she taught at the University of Paris VIII, rising to full professor, and now lives in Provence. Her doctoral research led partly to her first published work of criticism, A Grammar of Metaphor (1958), and Brooke-Rose has also pursued an interest in the poetry of Ezra Pound, resulting in A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) and A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura Canto (1976) which investigates among other things the nature of negatives in that work. Two books of criticism bear eloquent testimony to Christine Brooke-Rose’s interest in the genre of Science Fiction, free indirect discourse and a host of related topics all centring on narrative: A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) and, more recently, Stories, Theories and Things (1991). Christine Brooke-Rose’s non-realistic fiction began with the publication of Out in 1964 and her first sequence of four continued with Such (1966), Between (1968), which virtually excludes the verb to be, and Thru (1975), the last being her most inventive in typography. These novels never repeat themselves but try out certain specific possibilities of expression. Thus, as Brooke-Rose herself has said of Amalgamemnon (1984), ‘it is written in the future and conditional tenses, the subjunctive or imperative moods.’ Although allusions to and elements of Science Fiction occur in her earlier works, it was Xorandor (1986) which made the most sustained application of Science Fiction elements in a dialogue-narrative about a silicon-based form of life told by two intellectually precocious children. This was followed by Verbivore (1990) and Textermination (1991), a comic fantasia on the role of the reader in constituting character. The following interview with David Seed was conducted by post over a period of weeks following Christine Brooke-Rose’s visit to Liverpool University in January 1992 to give a reading from her works. Q: Could we start with your work at Bletchley Park during the War? Did that develop an awareness of codes that fed into any of your later novels?

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A: A lot of other awareness rather than an awareness of codes specifically, even less of codes in the later semiotic sense. I was not on the cryptographic side as code-breaker, but on the intelligence side, that is, dealing with the result of the decoding. But Bletchley Park was in a way my first university. I was 16 when the war broke out and 18 when I joined up and was sent there because I knew some German. My only education was School Certificate (now called GCSE) and two years as an accountant’s clerk certainly didn’t increase that. There I was surrounded with top mathematicians and top German scholars, and I felt my ignorance, especially cultural, in private conversation. But there I also learnt that a piece of text can be analysed and interpreted in the light of other information, its every item indexed to build up a huge background of knowledge and further clues that helped us make sense of messages. It aroused in me, with perhaps greater intensity than I might have felt if I had gone straight into higher education, an almost mystical attitude to knowledge, tied up with absolute secrecy and perhaps guilt (was this ‘fair play’?) and glee, rapidly transformed into an awareness of the power of knowledge (this one partly won the war). I also learnt, from this inner knowledge, not to believe a word the papers said, or the ‘wireless’, and even less the newsreels, which were absurdly cheerful and wholly irrelevant to what was actually happening. And knowledge has been a constant theme, in one way and another, throughout my work. Bletchley also had the first-ever computer (‘Colossus’), for running through trial positions, and although I didn’t understand it in those days its mysteries must have influenced my later fascination with computer themes. But perhaps the most profound experience, at that early age, was psychological: reading the whole war, every day, from the other viewpoint (we were the enemy), which may well have formed me both as a novelist, who learns to imagine the other, and as a human being, who should do so but doesn’t always. However, your question does touch on one eerie though continuous awareness, that of all this information coming over the air, being intercepted and decoded, sometimes at once and sometimes not, and, as the war went on, becoming more and more voluminous and more and more (for some keys) speedily decoded, so that we were sending orders from, say, Kesselring or Rommel to our commanders in the field within an hour of emission. This notion of words being captured and worked on in this way gave me a very strongly poetic feeling, which I later recognized in Yeats’s phrase ‘I made it out of a mouthful of air’, quoted by Pound with great emotion in Guide to Kulchur and The Cantos. Similarly I have always had the feeling, while writing, that I am ‘intercepting’ or listening to silent words which I have to drag down into my pen and onto my paper and somehow to decode. In a more outward sense, Verbivore (1990) is the novel in which, so many years later, some of this feeling about radio-waves (on which I was then an expert, knowing every frequency in the Luftwaffe) returns to be used thematically, but I suppose that it is already there in Xorandor, with Xorandor and his fellow creatures listening in to mankind for aeons, and then (in Verbivore) not coping with the sheer volubility that mankind has developed in the twentieth century. Q: Language always seems to occupy the foreground of your writings. Was this helped at all by your studies in Philology at Oxford or your research on medieval poetry? A: Language has always been my primary interest, presumably because I was brought up bilingually in French and English, which makes a child very clearly aware of contrastive structures, arbitrariness, word-play and so on. My family were mostly trilingual and loved translating idioms literally (e.g. ‘there is no what’ for il n’y a pas de quoi or ‘quelle est la matière?’ for what’s the matter). This awareness and these jokes continued with German at

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Bletchley. I specialized at once in Philology at Oxford chiefly because in my ignorance I thought that this meant Linguistics, so when I discovered that it was merely about sound-changes in ninthcentury Northumbrian I rather suffered. It did, however, deepen my feeling for language and put it on a sound basis. And it prepared me for my later interest in Linguistics. And my long immersion in medieval poetry also aroused an excited sense of change in grammatical and syntactic forms, of language as a body alive. But I think I had always had this interest. My very first novel was called The Languages of Love (a skit about philologists) and if anything Oxford blocked me with scandalously careless teaching, at least for one coming straight from the Services with mere O-levels. I have found it hard to forgive them, for it was my big chance—I would never have been able to go to University if there hadn’t been the ex-Service grants. London, to which I went afterwards for my doctorate, was much better, but even there I got very little concrete help and worked very much on my own. This working unhelped has remained part of my life. Q: You have said that Pound influenced your work. Could you elaborate on that a little? A: Not so much in content, and politically not at all, but in tone and technique: two main features I think, the juxtaposition of disparate ideas to clash in a metaphoric equivalence, and the repetition of a same phrase, with or without a slight alteration, in a later context that gives it a different meaning. I developed the latter mainly in Between, and again in Thru. Q: Your early novels have been compared with Evelyn Waugh’s and Iris Murdoch’s. Do you find any validity in the comparison? A: Not much. Evelyn Waugh perhaps, I’ve said myself that they’re ‘sub-Waugh’, but they’re very different as well, certainly in topic and type of society described (I did not move in upper-class circles), so it’s hard to tell, and probably not for me to say. I did admire him. But I also admired Langland! Admiration doesn’t always mean ‘influence’. On the other hand, I never particularly admired Iris Murdoch, even at the time, so any influence must be fortuitous—indeed I don’t remember ever being compared to her.1 Q: To take an example from these early works, the nature of reality is discussed in The Sycamore Tree. Would you say you were looking for a reader who was alert to such speculations, a reader who was prepared to do some work in understanding texts? A: I doubt it. I never thought in such terms then, nor have I ever tried to be hermetic (except once, much later, in Thru, where I was privately resolving some narratological problems and writing for a few narratologists). But it’s only later that I could be assumed to be looking for a ‘prepared reader’, as I call him in Thru, and only after observing to my surprise that not even critics were following what I was doing. Of course, I wasn’t at any time writing for the women’s magazine public either. The irony is that with The Sycamore Tree I intended it as a parody of women’s magazines, but at the ‘glossies’ level. As it was taken straight (i.e. when noticed at all, criticized as Womens’ Magazinish), I must have failed, precisely because the ‘nature of reality’ was a common topic, a cliché, the basic theme of any novelist, and if anything I dealt with it too directly (characters discussing it, for instance). But I did assume it was familiar. This tendency of intended parody to fall back into its model probably generated my much later discussion of that problem, with reference to some American ‘postmodern’ novels, in A Rhetoric of the Unreal and in Stories, Theories and Things. Q: What was it that made you turn away from realism in the 1960s? A: Naïve dissatisfaction with the conventions. I am assuming that by ‘realism’ you do mean the fatigued conventions of the realist novel as practised mid-century, and not nineteenth-century

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realism or for that matter any other (there are so many realisms, all the way back to Plato, and in any case, as I say in Stories, Theories and Things, even in fantasy we’re imprisoned by realisms since language is representative, and it’s only a question of degree of naïveté about its representative powers). My next novel, The Dear Deceit (1959), was written backwards, so I was already beginning to ‘experiment’ with the reader’s expectations (e.g. when the character vows or intends something the reader already knows it went wrong). But this is straightforward and still within realist representation. The Middlemen (1961) was more adventurous, a fantasy dressed up in all the realist conventions, so that I was criticized for not observing them, e.g. (on TV, by an adman-novelist) for not knowing anything about advertising. The general perception, you see, was still through realist conventions. Few reviewers were interested in SF for instance, and even fewer were aware of what was going on in France, and some who were fought it. Meanwhile, however, I was aware. I was the first English critic to write about Beckett’s Watt, published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1958. It changed my life, as Pinter said it changed his, though in different ways. I read Sarraute’s The Age of Suspicion and Robbe-Grillet’s Towards a New Novel on, precisely, realist narrative conventions, and of course their novels. Then I fell very ill, on New Year’s Eve, 1961 and all through 1962, eventually losing a kidney. This gave me time to meditate and, very slowly, one sentence or paragraph a day at first then falling back on the pillow, I wrote Out. It’s a very ‘sick’ book, the Whites in the grip of a radiation disease and the Blacks (or any colour) having the power and the privileges. From then on I never looked back. Q: I was struck by the amount of observation of phenomena in Out. Was such observation and measurement a conscious preoccupation, perhaps deriving from Robbe-Grillet? A: There’s no ‘perhaps’ about it, as I just said. I consciously used his technique of objectification (protagonist undescribed, not ‘dramatized’ through an ‘I’ observer, everything he sees merely registered as he sees it, which paradoxically produces a peculiar intensity so that his novels of the time give two different readings, subjective/objective). I did so in order to convey the obsession with detail developed by sick people and the pervasive atmosphere of sickness generally in that imagined society. Robbe-Grillet’s characters in his early novels are also in some way sick. In that sense Out is still within the ideology of realist representation. The movement was after all called nouveau réalisme. But by writing I also imbibed his other, anti-realist devices (unmarked time-shifts and displacements, self-erasures, aporias, etc.). This is the only novel of mine directly influenced by Robbe-Grillet, but for an SF device (the colour-bar reversed), nor would he approve, I think, of such a visibly social theme. But that’s the way ‘influence’ works among writers, in little bits and pieces from others plus your own. And it enabled me to take off and explore quite different areas of life and consciousness, rather differently. Q: Was the idea of a return after death attractive in Such, as a sequel to the emphasis on the body and illness in Out? A: That’s not what it felt like. The opening sentence about stairs creaking (as they did in a hotel in Portugal, with a notice saying Silence) led to a coffin lid creaking open and each sentence led to the next. Out isn’t only body, there is a real spiritual agony in this old white man, once educated and privileged, now powerless. Nor is Such only about a return after death (it’s quite ambiguous whether there is a return) but about maturing psychically and readapting to a trivial and immoral world. I don’t myself believe in a return after death, that was only a device for the rest. But any reading is possible.

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Q: Was one sign of your move away from realism your choice of titles? The first four are noun phrases whereas from Out onwards you go for terms suggesting connections, and in your latest four novels the titles conflate different words. A: Yes, I think that’s clear. Only Henry Green had used one-word parts of speech as titles before, and his were present participles like Loving. In A Grammar of Metaphor I had examined the extraordinary dynamism of prepositions in English (the same is true of other Germanic languages) compared to French, and I decided to explore this—though out of the four, Such is not a preposition but a demonstrative. In the next decade, and independently of me, Ron Sukenick noticed the same thing, and even wrote a novel called Out. Q: Turning to Between, I’d like to pick up some of the implications of the title. You say that prepositions are dynamic, but I wonder if ‘between’ is rather a special case in suggesting both mobility and immobility, or both space and time simultaneously in a phrase like ‘between Rome and Khartoum’? A: That’s an excellent insight, though I can’t say now whether I was aware of it at the time. I think I must have been. My simultaneous interpreter is always on the move between conferences, and she exercises between languages, but she’s also in a constant suspension between states as well as States, and I play a lot with the impression of immobility one has in a plane. I’ve said elsewhere that I wrote the whole novel without the verb ‘to be’ which meant giving up both its senses (stasis and existence), this in order to get the feeling of constant movement, but also a permanent loss of identity. The title may well also reflect this. Nevertheless, the preposition ‘between’ is a good deal more dynamic than, say, French entre, perhaps because ‘twain’ is still concretely felt. The same would apply to German zwischen. Q: I was struck by the recurring sentence ‘between the enormous wings the body floats’, partly for its suggestion of stasis despite the many evocations of moving from place to place but also because ‘body’ could be read as either metaphor or metonym. Is the reader being invited to move between different levels of meaning in such phrases? A: Yes. Sorry, I partly forestalled you in my previous answer. The body of the plane is constantly treated very physically, even as a penis full of chromosomes, or ‘with the distant brain way up’. I think the reader can’t help moving from one level to another, the metaphors/metonyms are not at all obscure. Q: I’d like to ask about language again in relation to Between. Obvi ously the novel explores relations between languages and sign-systems and I particularly enjoy those passages where we get a Portuguese or a Turkish colouring of English. Were you making use of the Saussurian notion of meaning emerging from difference, for instance when male and female passengers sit on opposite sides of the plane? A: Certainly. One conference speaker even quotes Saussure on the ‘unmarked’ masculine term (in French grand, for instance), as opposed to the ‘marked’ grande (which incidentally goes against Freud’s notion of female lack of what the male has). Of course these notions have now become over-familiar, especially since Derrida’s différence/différance. At the time the fact that language is built of difference was less obvious, but that is what I was exploring, and more especially in the juxtaposition of different types of discourses (but then I have been doing that, in different ways, in all my novels). The passengers on the plane are not literally sitting on opposite sides, this happens in the protagonist’s mind at a moment when the plane is likened to a church, with the curtain between the second and first class, or sometimes (in earlier planes) between the passengers and the crew (the distant brain way up), compared to that of a tabernacle.

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Q: Thru makes a startling use of typography, which I believe delayed publication of the novel a little. Sometimes structural designs emerge. Or were you also using typography to fragment the text? A: Both. But the designs oppose the fragmentation, in the sense that they often introduce such elements of mimeticism that remain, in other words they are not just ornamental but imitate what is said (the rectangles of a timetable like the room you enter to teach, for instance, or arclamps not quite meeting, or the ‘dance of the twenty-seven veils’, and many others. Q: Thru starts with a mirror and contains quite a lot of glasses, reflections and so on. Sometimes these made me think of the Alice books, sometimes of ways of engaging with reality. Would you say the mirrors help to set up different dimensions in the text, more, for instance, than just mimesis? A: If you like, though mirrors and reflections are pretty old in literature, especially writing as mirror of life. Note that the main mirror is a driving-mirror, which thus connotes looking forward to look back, and that it is faulty and plays tricks. I doubt whether ‘engaging with reality’ is the most important element. The text is also constantly mirroring itself, and of course that’s what language is forever doing. Q: One of the fictions which recurs in Thru is of a class in a university. Did your experiences of teaching in Paris play a part here in suggesting the debates about theory which come up again and again? A: Absolutely. The experience was at first devastating, then stimulating. Some critics have said it takes place in a ‘radical American University’, but in fact I don’t locate it anywhere. And a little later or even now it could be anywhere, but at the time of writing nothing like that was yet happening in America. The experience is, I hope, transmuted into poetry and humour, I never use experience direct. Q: The use of the future tense in Amalgamemnon sets up quite strong expectations in the reader. Was it an irony that one of the narrator’s guises is as Cassandra, the prophet no one believed? A: Her only guise I think. I suppose so, in an obvious way, but that wasn’t the essential point, I mean, I wasn’t trying to set her up as a prophet unrecognized. The idea was to avoid all constative sentences, of which it can be said that they are true or false. The only exceptions occur in dialogue (since people can’t talk wholly in the future, the conditional or the imperative), when I allow constative sentences in the interrogative or the negative. So nothing can ever be said to be ‘really’ happening, or to be ‘true’. It’s in fact a thorough exploration of the performative, excluding the constative. Non-assertive sentences have always posed ridiculous problems in the logic of propositions, which has tended therefore to exclude all fictional sentences. Nor do the modal logics since developed to account for fiction apply here, since the future and conditional tenses etc. are not modalities but modals, that is, elements of natural language, always virtually ambiguous. One French critic who has dealt with this very well points out that my use of the future is not in the least teleological—otherwise it would be unbearably prophetic, oracular, portentous (and indeed this was a problem for me during the first versions).2 On a more realistic level I was also trying to explore the pseudo-future we all have to live in today, what will probably be discussed at this or that summit and other such speculations, indeed half the news seems to be given in the future tense. Q: Is one significance of the title Amalgamemnon a merging together? I was thinking of the fluidity of ‘characters’ if it’s still possible to use the term in such a shifting text.

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A: Well, on one level that’s so, the characters are chiefly formed in the narrator’s mind, and so fluid by nature, often out of students’ names, or constellations or both (Andromeda out of a student Anne de Rommède for instance, but the narrator is called Mira Enketei, her surname meaning ‘inside the whale’, and Mira being—as she states—a not very interesting star in the Whale constellation). On another, political level the title means almost the opposite; the tendency towards the ‘amalgam’ made by, say, both political parties or religions in general), so that anything said is at once labelled ‘reactionary’ (or whatever). Andromeda is criticized for this by Orion. So the meaning is critical on one level, poetic on another, or, if you like, destructive versus poetic amalgamation. Hence it is itself amalgamated with a destructive but ‘poetic’ character of classical tragedy. Q: A last point on that novel. The notion of redundancy is quickly related in your text to the predictability of messages and perhaps, by implication, to the novel itself. To what extent do the narrator’s predictions refer to the future of the novel genre? A: To no extent consciously. The novel does not play with self-reference. I was exploring an aspect of language, as well as an important aspect of public and private life today. We live in a pseudo-future which at the same time holds few surprises for us (hence our complete unpreparedness when there really are surprises, like the sudden collapse of Communism). On a private level we have also become too knowing, every reaction is ‘psychologically’ expected, yet this blocks rather than releases communication. I don’t think I was thinking of the future of the novel, at least, if any reading is possible even though unintended, this one doesn’t add much to the novel itself. I rarely think of ‘the future of the novel’ when I write, I just explore specific problems of language, politics, communication. Q: In A Rhetoric of the Unreal you point out how conservative Science Fiction narrative techniques have been. Was your decision to narrate Xorandor mainly through dialogue made to avoid the need for expo-sition? A: Yes. But it’s not dialogue as such that was meant to achieve this, it’s the fact that the dialogue is between two computer whizz-kids dictating their story into a computer and quarrelling about how to tell it, and they also grow up a bit during the story. They also use tapes of grownup scientists (their father and ‘Biggles’, but chiefly in a state of unknowing). This enabled me to avoid the usual SF flaw (when it really is ‘S’) of passing necessary scientific information to the reader through ‘illegitimate’ means (from the ‘realist’ viewpoint adopted by classical SF), for instance dialogue between scientists explaining elementary things to each other or ‘thinking’ them in free indirect discourse, etc., about which I have written in A Rhetoric of the Unreal. The narrators are whizz-kids but don’t understand everything, and later find themselves out of their own story. So even in a straight SF I like to play with narrative conventions. Q: The dialogues in Xorandor are so varied in tone and point of view that the reader’s scepticism or doubts are anticipated and woven into the narrative. In fact the emphasis on voice and language learning nicely avoids the visual cliché of aliens from outer space and minimizes the jerk which occurs in many Science Fiction novels when we move from the familiar to the strange. A: I’m glad you think so. Basically there are two types of SF. The first wholly elsewhere, say in another galaxy, which gives complete freedom but sometimes strains the plausible (or merely transplants familiar social problems in an ultra-realistic style, as in Delaney’s Dhalgren for instance); the second here on earth, even in a small village, with only one parameter changed. I prefer the latter, but it’s more difficult to do than it appears. Xorandor is deeply concerned with two fundamental problems: nuclear waste and nuclear warheads, and my task was to contrast

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three areas of dialogue: the kids, the grown-ups (scientific, political, personal) and Xorandor himself, but all echoed through the narrative dialogue of the kids—hence the device among others of using the small Xor’s as ‘reporters’, and other such. Q: You say in Stories, Theories and Things that you planned Verbivore as a sequel which plays with the techniques of sequels. That’s an interesting idea. Could you elaborate on it a little? A: Not really, because I can’t remember saying that, but if I did, then presumably it had been my intention, and I know I was once interested in those techniques. I wish I had done it. If I tried, I’m pretty sure I didn’t succeed. I think I got involved with the story of Xorandor in a ‘realistic’ way, imagining the twins grown up and so on, but although the novel is, like all my novels, playful, I don’t think the play concerns ‘the techniques of sequels’, or perhaps I lost the notion on the way. I do play with narrative levels though, characters invented by a character (e.g. in the radio play) becoming involved at the main narrative level. Q: Textermination comically dramatizes the dependence of a text on a reader. He is addressed as God by the fictional characters, who pray to him for existence. Do you believe in the allimportance or even omnipotence of the reader for the writer? A: Yes and no. I don’t write with any reader in mind, but obviously no text begins to exist without him or her, and that’s the basic conceit. The original idea came from my criticism (in Stories, Theories and Things) of some American ‘postmodern’ writers who, in an age of reader-oriented criticism, continue to apostrophize the reader in an insulting/but basically old-fashioned way which really expresses ‘look at me’, i.e. still in the author-orientated dispensation—which is fine, but unoriginal. Not all, Sorrentino plays nicely, if overemphatically, with the reader’s ‘gaps’. So I determined to write a novel where the reader was the real hero. Or the Reader (Implied, Ideal, etc., a theoretical construct). For I also play with theory here, and with the whole notion of canon. If a character can’t exist unless read, he or she depends wholly on what is read or no longer read, or read only as part of a university syllabus, or only within this or that culture. I had great fun with that. Q: One subject which we haven’t discussed at all so far is humour in your works. To be specific, I was wondering whether some of the comedy in your latest novel grew out of incongruity, taking a character out of his/ her familiar context, or juxtaposing the classical with the contemporary. A: Well, all humour arises from incongruity, and one of the ways of creating incongruity is juxtaposition of things that don’t belong together. Pound taught me a lot here. But I think one either has it or not, just as one either has the capacity to create metaphors out of disparate things, or not. Some writers have one without the other. I hope I have both. Hemingway said a wholly serious writer is always a bloody owl. I think the most efficient way to be deeply serious is to be humorous, but it’s often difficult to keep the delicate balance. What seems funny or serious to me may not be so to others. University of Liverpool PUBLICATIONS BY CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE Gold (Aldington, Kent: Hand & Flower, 1955). The Languages of Love (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957). The Sycamore Tree (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958; New York: Norton, 1959). A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958). The Dear Deceit (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960; Garden City: Doubleday, 1961).

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The Middlemen: A Satire (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961). Out (London: Michael Joseph, 1964). Such (London: Michael Joseph, 1966). Between (London: Michael Joseph, 1968). Go When You See the Green Man Walking (London: Michael Joseph, 1970); A ZBC of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Thru (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975). A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura Canto (The Hague: Mouton, 1976). A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Amalgamemnon (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984; Normal, Ill: Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming). Xorandor (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986). The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus: Four Novels: Out, Such, Between, Thru (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986). Such, Between, Thru (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986). Verbivore (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990). Textermination (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991). Stories, Theories and Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

NOTES 1 A comparison drawn by Morton P.Levitt in his article on Christine Brooke-Rose in British Novelists since 1960. Part I: A–G Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 14, ed. Jay L.Helis (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), p. 125. 2 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘Une lecture d’Amalgamemnon de Christine Brooke-Rose’, in Tropismes 5, L’errance (Paris: Centre de Recherches Anglo-Américaines, Université de Paris X, 1991), pp. 263–90.

Maidens and monsters in modern popular culture: The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast HARRIETT HAWKINS

Jonetta Johnson of WPIK was on coast-to-coast with the revelation that Starling had found the remains in the garage through an ‘eerie bonding with a man authorities have branded…a monster!’ Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs The monster and the maiden. La Belle et La Bête. The star-maker Svengali and his Trilby. The Phantom of the Opera and Christine Daaé. And now FBI trainee Clarice Starling and Dr Hannibal Lecter. Throughout his original novel, Thomas Harris evokes memories of social and professional bondings between a beautiful ingénue and a sinister monster/mentor who inhabits a subterranean domain. 72-point tabloid headlines underscore the novel’s mythic associations: ‘“BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN!!” screamed the National Tattler from its supermarket racks’ (p. 62).1 And comparably haunting references likewise pervade Jonathan Demme’s phenomenally successful film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs wherein Anthony Hopkins’s burning eyes, spectral pallor and imperious demeanour are eerily reminiscent of Lon Chaney’s make-up and mannerisms, as well as the bloated, blood-red lips and the white mask worn by Michael Crawford as the Phantom of the Opera. As the film’s brilliant designer, Kristi Zea, intended, the demon Lecter’s face and dungeon seem primal nightmare images, like a painting by Francis Bacon. Red Dragon, Harris’s previous best-seller (Bodley Head, 1982) that introduced the fiendish psychiatrist, Hannibal (‘The Cannibal’) Lecter as a monstrous modern version of Professor Moriarty, was very intelligently filmed by Michael Mann. Like The Silence of the Lambs the earlier thriller is concerned with metamorphosis and myth, visually encapsulated in William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun from which the book takes its title. But Manhunter (as Mann’s film was prosaically titled) was not a mega-hit of comparable force, arguably because it lacks the single most distinctive component of The Silence of the Lambs. And that is the female agent without which Jonathan Demme’s film would be engrossing entertainment, but not an unfor gettable thriller. Simply substitute a male detective in the place of Clarice Starling and the impact is gone. It is the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling that, simultaneously, takes us into the twilight zone lying somewhere between symbolism

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and realism and, in its radical departure from the familiar Svengali/Trilby paradigm, dramatically breaks new ground. In marked contrast to his mythic precursors, the monster-genius Lecter (spectre? ‘reader’—lecteur—of the psyche?) does not hold the pretty ingénue, Clarice Starling, in hypnotic or sexual thrall to his powers. Quite the contrary. He liberates her from her own class-resentments and past anxieties even as he enables her to save the life of Catherine Baker Martin through the application of her own arduously acquired professional skills and her own deductive, as well as uniquely feminine, insights. In the only physical contact between them that occurs in the novel, Dr Lecter passes Starling the file containing the information with which she solves the crime. He held the file ‘through the bars, his forefinger along the spine’. ‘She reached across the barrier and took it. For an instant the tip of her forefinger touched Dr Lecter’s. The touch crackled in his eyes. “Thank you, Clarice,” “Thank you, Dr Lecter.”’ And ‘that is how he remained in her mind’—and likewise remains etched in the mind of the reader—‘Caught in the instant when he did not mock’ (p. 222). From their first encounter to the last, their relationship is reciprocal: quid pro quo. In their parting scene, he thanks her before she thanks him. In his last communication to his protégée (by letter in the novel and by telephone in the film) he tells her that he has no plans to come after her (‘the world being more interesting with you in it’), and respectfully requests her to extend ‘the same courtesy’ to him. ‘Some of our stars are the same’, he concludes. Offering psychological growth as well as professional advancement, her searing sessions with Lecter enable the upwardly-mobile young Starling (starlet? commonplace bird in flight to stardom?) to take pride and courage and strength from once painful memories of her working-class parents, and, simultaneously, to surmount her class-based but justifiable resentment of the privileged Senator Ruth Martin who initially suspects her of being a thief. Looked at historically, this positive, enabling and ultimately liberating relationship between Clarice Starling and her internal, as well as externalized, daemons of ambition could represent an important crossing of the bridge between pre-feminist and post-feminist portrayals of ambitious women in popular art. In The Silence of the Lambs the ambition of the heroine is equated with growth: with the cumulative acquisition of skills and strength, with virtue. By contrast, up to the day before yesterday it was taboo to portray an overtly ambitious woman either positively or sympathetically in a popular Hollywood movie. The title of the mid-century film classic, All About Eve, just about said it all. If a showgirl like the ‘graduate of the Copacabana school of the theatre’ (portrayed by the gorgeous young Marilyn Monroe) got a part in a Broadway play, she was patronized for having won it for her performance on the casting couch. At the same time, if an undeniably talented young actress (like ambitious Eve Harrington) or an older, established star (like Margo Channing) deservedly achieved triumphant success, she had to be shown to achieve it at the cost of true happiness and fulfilment ‘as a woman’: any ‘real’ woman would give up stardom for a man. This ubiquitous cultural propaganda against feminine ambition generally, and blonde ambition in particular, made it impossible for the era’s ultimate megastar, Marilyn Monroe, to reconcile a ‘sympathetic’ sexual persona (emblematic of vulnerable, submissive femininity and childlike ingenuousness) with the driving ambition and artistic aspirations of a (pre-Madonna) prima donna. Ever since Eve, self-driving, self-directed ambition in a woman has been, and to countless people still is, identified with monstrous, unwomanly insubordination, if not with essentially evil, satanic presumption. And so, in order to maintain audience approval for a fictional heroine who achieved supreme success, she had to be portrayed as an artless innocent, driven (if not hypnotized into stardom) by a tyrannical genius who dramatically personified her ‘demonic’ ambition. Obvious examples of comparably alien, abnormal, freakish, monster/mentors include Trilby O’Farrell’s dread, powerful demon, the sinister Jewish megalomaniac, Svengali; the hideous Phantom of the Opera; and the egotistical impresario lethally opposed

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to the ballerina heroine’s marriage in The Red Shoes.2 The artists who created and portrayed the figures were imaginatively if not morally on the side of their svengalis, but society generally cheered when the maiden was rescued from the monster by a virile young suitor with whom she would find true womanly happiness as a contented wife and mother, free from the demon of ambition. More recent cries of outrage, directed against the overtly ambitious personas of a Madonna or a Susan Street,3 demonstrate that a woman unapologetically determined to make it to the top in any field is still bound to be feared and reviled as a freak as fearsome as the Phantom of the Opera if not a man-eater as monstrous as Hannibal Lecter himself. By contrast, in both the novel and the screenplay of The Silence of the Lambs the professional ambition of the heroine is unselfconsciously portrayed with unqualified approval, admiration and sympathy. This is why Jodie Foster so eagerly sought to establish Agent Starling as the cinema’s first explicitly ‘postfeminist’ film heroine. As described by Foster (The Sunday Times magazine, 12 May 1991, pp. 6–9), Starling is one of the most true and progressive portrayals of a female hero ever…I feel proud that we didn’t say, ‘Here’s a hero because we pumped her full of steroids so she would look like a guy’ or ‘Here’s a hero because she is really sweet and nice and that’s why we like her.’ ‘The truth is’ that Starling is a hero because she has flaws, ‘because she faces things about herself that are ugly, and while facing them she solves the crime’. This, Foster concluded, ‘is hero mythology’. Before she can fulfil her own ambition and save the life of Catherine Baker Martin, Starling must, in the mythology of the novel (as visually realized in the descending-down-into-the-psychic-dungeon progression of the film), pass through gates that clash shut and bolt behind her, and summon the will to proceed on down to the isolation ward ‘where there can be no windows’ and ‘no mixing’ with any other visitors or inmates, then go down the dim corridor alone to reach the last cell (pp. 11–12). The first thing she notices about Dr Lecter is not his death-like pallor, or the maroon eyes that reflect light in points of red, but that his arms and hands show a ‘wiry strength like her own’ (pp. 14–15). The erudite Thomas Harris constantly stresses dark mirror-relationships. ‘One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.’ These lines from Alphonse Bertillon that serve as an epigraph to Red Dragon are markedly comparable to the lines from John Donne that Harris uses as an epigraph to The Silence of the Lambs: ‘Need I look upon a death’s head in a ring, that have one in my face?’ Does Lecter’s name suggest the most famous line from Baudelaire’s Fleurs de Mal, ‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère’? Revoltingly horrible though he may be to everyone else, Lecter fraternally helps Clarice. Indeed in an interview on the South Bank Show (broadcast on the eve of the American Academy Awards), Anthony Hopkins said he used Lecter’s supportive pledge to Starling, ‘I’ll help you catch him, Clarry’, as the spine-line of his Oscar-winning performance. In turn, Clarice admits that every harsh thing Lecter says about her is true: ‘He sees very clearly—he damn sure sees through me’ (p. 281). She unstintingly acknowledges the painful fears and buried resentments he calls to her conscious attention, and learns how to live with them, to find courage from them (p. 312), to outgrow them. The first thing he calls attention to is her combination of ambition and class-based insecurity. ‘Your handbag is lovely’, he tells her. This was true. It was the best item she owned. ‘It’s much better than your shoes,’ he adds. ‘Maybe they’ll catch up’, she replies. ‘I have no doubt of it,’ he says encouragingly (p. 17). Likewise, after mercilessly calling attention to her points of shame: her ‘rube’ origins, her fear of being thought common and tacky (an all-too-ordinary starling), he acclaims her intelligence and ambition: ‘You’re far from common, Officer Starling. All you have is fear of it’ (p. 22). And he then promises to give her what she ‘loves the most’. ‘What’s that Dr Lecter?’ ‘Advancement, of course’ (p. 24). And the

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advancement here is not just professional or social, it is psychic, in the way the caterpillar enters the chrysalis as a pupa and then ‘comes out of its secret changing room’ as a beautiful, winged, liberated imago (p. 157). Hers is the real, vital, metamorphosis in a parable about a serial killer attempting a horrific, artificial, impossible metamorphosis. The portrayal of Starling’s ambition in The Silence of the Lambs seems remarkably positive in a postfeminist, even post-sexist way. But the co-equal, co-starring relationship between Starling and Lecter/Foster and Hopkins is also reminiscent of the old Hollywood that, at its best, was populated by equally matched pairs of male and female characters (lovers, sleuths, partners in crime) and performers (singers, dancers) alike. Think of Scarlett and Rhett, Charlie and Rosie (in The African Queen), Nick and Nora Charles (popular cosleuths in The Thin Man series as portrayed by Loy and Powell) and all those film noir partners in crime (Stanwyck and MacMurray in Double Indemnity, Turner and Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice) and so on (the list is legion): Garbo and Gilbert, Garland and Rooney, Tracy and Hepburn, Astaire and Rogers, Eddy and MacDonald, Bogart and Bacall. By contrast, in recent years up to The Silence of the Lambs and Disney’s sparkling new Beauty and the Beast, characters and performers named, portrayed and billed as equals from Butch and the Kid, to Starsky and Hutch, to Willie and Phil, to Melvin and Howard and from Cagney and Lacey to Thelma and Louise—have all been same-sex (mostly male) buddies, with members of the opposite sex relegated to supporting roles or portrayed as members of an enemy tribe.4 There is obviously some metaphorical truth to these sexually-based marginalizations and hostilities. But past and present theories of gender-determination to the contrary notwithstanding, The Silence of the Lambs is refreshingly lifelike in so far as the best professionals of both sexes and all ages often do support and encourage each other independently of gender. Lecter’s arch-enemy, FBI Section Chief Jack Crawford, is also supportive of Clarice: ‘I level with you’, he tells her. ‘You’ll do the same when you have a command.’ He wants her to do well: ‘For Starling, that beat courtesy any time’ (p. 31). And when she asks him, on the basis of her unique qualifications, for the free rein she needs to solve the case, he gives it to her. ‘I’m as good as anybody you’ve got at the cop stuff, better at some things,’ she insists. ‘The victims are all women and there aren’t any women working this. I can walk in a woman’s room and know three times as much about her as a man would know, and you know that’s a fact. Send me.’ ‘Go, Starling,’ he agrees (pp. 286– 7). What has been noted by many British film critics is that, in contrast to Jack Crawford as portrayed by Scott Glenn (and indeed to everyone else in the film) the fiendish Hannibal Lecter, who is likewise an American in the book, is portrayed by the Welsh actor, Anthony Hopkins, just as the Scot Brian Cox played the part in Manhunter. This follows the rigid Hollywood convention whereby a cultivated, sophisticated, intellectual male villain of the type so often played by James Mason is traditionally un-American as well as traditionally wicked. Stereotypically (unhistorically) cultivated Nazis played by German refugees like suave Conrad Veidt, or by British actors like Cedric Hardwicke, abounded in Second World War films. Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone spoke with upper-class British accents when they played the odious Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisborne, as opposed to Errol Flynn and his merry men, who spoke with American accents in The Adventures of Robin Hood, even as the British Alan Rickman, as the Sheriff of Nottingham, was recently bested by all-American Kevin Costner as The Prince of Thieves. Even America’s most famous archaeologist, Indiana Jones, is not likely to quote from Marcus Aurelius or John Donne (as Dr Lecter does): he is an action man at heart. If cultural sophistication, book-learning and intellectuality are traditionally deemed by Hollywood to be fundamentally foreign, they are also deemed unmanly and sissified, in so far as virility and sex-appeal are equated in American literature and films with frontier virtues as opposed to the effete urbanity of the city slicker. If it has hitherto been a cultural taboo to show a resolutely ambitious woman as a heroine, then to show a suave, brilliant,

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cultivated, intellectual American man—as opposed to a boyish hunk—as a hero who saves the day and wins the girl, would be to violate what is the most powerful of all Hollywood taboos. It is therefore salutary to have Anthony Hopkins’s compelling portrayal of Hannibal Lecter to cite as conclusive evidence that intelligence, cultivation, sophistication may be very sexy. Although only their fingertips touch, the scenes between Starling and Lecter crackle with intellectually charged emotional and sexual energy. There is no reason to continue to associate this form of intellectual sex appeal with evil, and a Hollywood film that separates them will truly break new ground. ‘People will say we’re in love,’ Lecter slyly suggests to Clarice in a wonderfully incongruous quotation from the musical Oklahoma (p. 216). They won’t, but they might like to, because it would be so good to have a popular film portray love between equally strong, equally intelligent, equally matched male and female characters. There is certainly no valid ideological—or commercial—reason why they should not make them that way any more. Indeed the recent success of The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast suggests that there is every reason why they should. For however much Demme’s dark nightmare and Disney’s bright dream-come-true may otherwise differ, their markedly comparable portrayals of equally strong male and female characters, and their comparably dramatic departures from the formula whereby the maiden is rescued from the monster by a hunky hero, may, likewise, help to account for their box-office triumphs. If Jodie Foster could describe Clarice as a postfeminist heroine, the same can be said of Disney’s Belle, who is comparably independent, adventureseeking, unconventional, province-hating, and hunk-despising. And also a bookworm. Indeed, instead of offering her candy and flowers, the Beast woos her by showing her his magnificent library. Moreover, Disney’s film likewise challenges popular myths about macho virility in which a softening by beauty (the ‘feminine’ principle) is emasculating, if not lethal: King Kong, for instance, ends with the line, ‘it was beauty killed the beast’ and begins with the ‘Old Arabian Proverb’: ‘And the beast looked upon the face of the beauty/And it stayed his hand from killing/And from that day, it was as one dead.’ In Disney’s film, the reverse is true. The Beast literally and metaphorically saves Belle’s life in rescuing her from a life of ordinary ‘feminine’ conformity. In a rescue comparable to saving her from the wolf-pack, the Beast’s love rescues her from the macho Gaston. And—quid pro quo—her love rescues the Beast from his own arrogant and heartless earlier self and in doing so saves his life. From the beginning of Disney’s film (contrast the earlier Cocteau version), Belle is utterly repelled by the smirky, male-supremacist Gaston who is determined to marry her. Indeed, Beauty and the Beast is the first blockbuster film in modern memory in which the villain is a conventionally handsome, macho jock of the Schwarzenegger/Bruce Willis type who is likewise adored by a trio of bimbos as well as a cohort of admiring male buddies—in short, Gaston personifies the type Hollywood most commonly extols to modern audiences as the masculine ideal. By contrast, at the end of the Disney film, far from cheering the rescue of the maiden from the monster by a hunky hero, audiences cheer the rescue of the beautiful maiden from a tyrannically, conventionally malesupremacist suitor (and the conformist forces that he represents) whose goal is to ‘put a lid on her’, to force her, as his ‘little wife’, into subordination. They likewise cheer Belle’s reciprocal liberation of the Beast from the curse previously (and rightly) imposed on his conceited (Gaston-like) earlier self by an old hag who offered the young prince a rose if he would allow her to stay for the night in his castle. When he spurned her offer, she magically turned into the beautiful, all-powerful sorceress who turned him into a beast who could only be redeemed by learning to love and be loved by a woman who would not judge him by appearances. In giving ‘The Force’ (of salvation and destruction) to its female characters (the Old Hag and Belle), Beauty and the Beast is reminiscent of Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ as well as the classic

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Hollywood fantasies, The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio and Snow White wherein the real power is wielded by the Wicked Witch of the West, Glinda the Good (the male Wizard turns out to be a humbug with no magical power at all), the Blue Fairy, the Wicked Queen and the lovable virgins Dorothy and Snow White, and not primarily by men as in today’s fantasies such as the Star Wars trilogy. But the transforming forces in Beauty and the Beast as in The Silence of the Lambs operate internally as well as externally. In their final combat, having defeated the arrogant Gaston-force (within as without) the redeemed Beast first simply banishes him, orders him to go away. And that would seem one way to end the conflict. But it doesn’t. It is as if the force Gaston represents has to be both externally and internally—and irrevocably—destroyed. If not, Gaston might rise again (within and without) to sneak up and stab the reformed Beast in the back, just as he does before he finally plunges to his death, in exactly the same way the Wicked Queen falls off the precipice in Snow White, to the literal as well as the metaphorical relief and satisfaction of the audience. The film thus suggests that the Gaston-persona must finally be killed off and so exorcised for ever, in order to assure that Belle and the Beast can live happily ever after as equals. Which is a wonderfully satisfying reversal of the ending of Fatal Attraction (as released in mainstream cinemas) where it was as if the single career woman had to be killed off (‘Kill the Bitch!) to ensure that the hero and his cereal-box wife and children could live happily ever after in domestic conformity. If characters in Beauty and the Beast and The Silence of the Lambs, as in all violent fictions from fairy tales to horror movies, do but poison in jest, murder in metaphor (no offence in the world), and their sources are likewise extant in classic and popular texts, there’s no reason we need be unduly upset by Hannibal Lecter’s grim jest at the end of Jonathan Demme’s film. The line ‘I’m having an old friend for dinner’ does not appear in the novel but most effectively expresses Hannibal the Cannibal’s laudable desire to devour Thomas Harris’s equivalent to Gaston, the pompous, knowing, patronizing male supremacist, Dr Chilton. If Hopkins’ Lecter metaphorically gobbles up Chilton, then good for him—the cinema could do with far fewer Bruce Willis/Jack Nicholson-type sexists. Surely post-pubescent male cinemagoers must by now be just as bored with smirky macho film stars as women are. Indeed, Clarice and Belle, in giving the brush-off to Chilton and Gaston, stand for untold millions of women turned off, not on, by Hollywood’s hunks. By the same metaphorical token, one can only applaud Starling’s/Jodie Foster’s determination to gun down the serial killer who preys on women. Too many serial film-makers nowadays are out to strip and flay them. Rumour has it that Dr Lecter himself may be threatened in a sequel dealing with a serial killer who preys on other serial killers. And one wonders if Clarice Starling will come to his aid even as Disney’s Beauty saved the life of her Beast. The ultimate quid pro quo? If so, more power to her: ‘Go, Starling.’ Linacre College, Oxford NOTES 1 Quotations are from Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (London: Mandarin Books, 1989). 2 I have discussed the ‘Svengali’ paradigm with reference to various other works in Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in ‘High’ Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). 3 In Ambition (London: Corgi Books, 1989), Julie Burchill boldly defied two major cultural taboos by portraying Susan Street, who is not only without any sexual inhibitions or sexual guilt, but is also unapologetically ambitious, as an entirely laudable heroine. As was observed in the Literary Review (quoted on the first page inside), ‘Civilization will not lightly forgive her.’ 4 The tradition of portraying male and female characters as equal in passion, heroism, virtue and vice—so far as I can track it back—historically entered the popular dramatic (and literary) tradition with Shakespeare. Before

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Shakespeare created Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, Othello and Desdemona, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Kate and Petruchio and Beatrice and Benedick, Western European drama tended to focus, primarily, on either a male or a female protagonist: Medea, Antigone, Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus. After Shakespeare, you get a host of matched pairs. For instance: a direct line of sparring lovers who move from conflict to kisses runs from Beatrice and Benedick to Mirabell and Millamant to Elizabeth and Darcy to Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn and Bogart and Bacall (who met with a veritable love song of wisecracks in To Have and Have Not). Heirs apparent of the Macbeths are those film noir partners in crime who jointly kill an older man to collect his insurance in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. As made-for-eachother body- and soul-mates (‘she was his kind of woman and he was her kind of man’), Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra are succeeded by equally passionate lovers from Cathy and Heathcliff to Scarlett and Rhett. The Shakespearean tradition of co-starring male and female roles subsequently (in his day female parts were played by male actors) called for co-starring male and female performers ranging from Garbo and Gilbert to the matched pairs and singing, dancing, mixed-doubles cited above—until it was replaced by today’s same-sex ‘buddy’ formula. Which is one reason why female film stars today have so few opportunities to twinkle except in the occasional female buddy movie such as Thelma and Louise. Even if there were equal numbers of male and female buddy movies, could this gender-based segregation of co-starring roles in the cinema possibly be rationalized as progress?

Reviews

• Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and Politics (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), xv +538 pp., £25.00 (hardback) KOENRAAD GELDOF

Once upon a time, when preconceived and unreflected politico-ideological schemes enabled a facile recuperation of Lukács for a leftist discourse on culture or politics, or an equally facile dismissal of his thought on the basis of a diametrically opposed set of axiological axioms, and when a reading of Lukács could without qualms focus exclusively on his aesthetic and literary studies, or, on the contrary, single out only the political texts, it was after all not so difficult a task to read Lukács. In a certain sense, it was even exceptionally easy since, strictly speaking, very few people actually did read Lukács. What was produced instead largely amounts to a proliferation of crypto-hagiographical defences and correlative antithetical (d) evaluations of Lukács’s work, in which his various texts suffered the fate typical of all classics: they were reduced to a set of endlessly repeated sacred quotations, totally torn out of their complex textual, intertextual and historical context. It would appear that today things have become a bit more difficult. The debate inaugurated at the end of the sixties by various poststructuralist theoreticians has had the positive effect of finally putting into question the way in which critics usually have dealt and, in some academic quarters, still deal with texts: the erstwhile categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’ ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’, ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’, ‘textual’ and ‘extratextual’ as well as most other normative binarisms seem to have definitively lost their enchanting but fallacious self-evidence. This evolution, which demands that readers become more sensitive not only to the textuality of the discourses they are dealing with, but also, and perhaps most importantly, to their own way of reading, offers new possibilities for the Lukácsforschung, which has been seriously debilitated by the complete absence of reflexivity on the side of many commentators. This implies, among other things, that we can really start reading Lukács but also that we can no longer take as read the claims and interpretations made by a large number of metatexts on Lukács. To put it differently, the effort to produce another and more subtle reading of Lukács requires a permanent interrogation of the existing literature on the ‘topic’, not in order to supplement it with this or that factual or interpretive detail, but to scrutinize the very strategies which have presented us with a far too unproblematic picture of Lukács. Although a lot has been done and said in the dozens and dozens of articles and monographs on Lukács1, one cannot help feeling that, on various levels and from various perspectives, even more still remains to be done, if not done over. This process of reading and re-reading previous readings has most certainly nothing to do whatsoever with some kind of mysteriously inexhaustible depth of the Lukácsian texture. What is at stake

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here is the more fundamental issue of the destabilization of the categories that once structured, in various fields of inquiry, the act of reading to the very point of vainly effacing its performative character. Once upon a time, in the West as in the East, reading Lukács did not raise serious questions because neither did reading in general. Given the innumerable hasty and unfair judgements on Lukács’s work, one may say that in a sense Lukács deserves better readers. This is perhaps what Terry Eagleton has in mind when he affirms on the back cover of Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and Politics: ‘Kadarkay’s magisterial study, surpassing any in the field, will surely restore its recently somewhat unfashionable subject to his true political status.’ But the question remains whether Kadarkay has actually succeeded in bringing into practice the type of subtle and sensitive reading I mentioned above. To be sure, this biography of Lukács is an impressive and interesting piece of scholarship. In twenty chronologically-ordered and well-documented chapters, the author draws a lively picture of the turbulent and many-faceted life and thought of Georg Lukács, who, to this day, remains one of the most unknown classics of twentieth-century intellectual history and whose name seemed to be without history, the signifier ‘Lukács’ having been flattened to a mere sign of ritual reference (pro or con). Though much of the material used was already available in other sources, it is Kadarkay’s undisputed merit to have brought it all together and to have added on some specific points of further and useful information. The author is certainly justified in writing that ‘[t]here is no other full-scale biography of Lukács in English covering all aspects of his life’ (p. xi), and this biography will without any doubt be of great value to those who want to know more about Lukács. Even for those who are already well acquainted with the writings on and of the Hungarian philosopher and theoretician of art, Kadarkay’s book is a welcome and challenging synthesis of what was either not yet available in any language or only accessible in fragments distributed over a disablingly large number of English, Italian, French or German sources. It is impossible even to try summarizing this detailed portrait of Lukács and of the political and cultural background of his intellectual development. I thus warmly recommend to the reader this exciting trip through Europe in the course of which one (re-)discovers the fin-de-siècle Budapest of the turn of the century, as well as Berlin, Florence, Heidelberg, Vienna, Moscow, Paris and the sometimes crude and harsh reality of Cold-War Europe. During this geographical journey, the stages of which constitute neat emblems of different moments in Lukács’s long and proteiform intellectual evolution, the reader encounters representatives of a wide range of artistic, theoretical and philosophical traditions, including Ibsen, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Hegel, Kant, Mann, Marx, Lenin and Stalin, who have all, in one way or another, contributed positively or negatively to the formation of this remarkable and highly talented man. Rather than to rehearse a feeble synopsis of this travelogue, however, I would like to summarize my journey through Kadarkay’s book and to concentrate on some of its problems, since irrespective of its being a remarkable achievement, this biography raises several serious questions. In what follows I first submit a series of rather isolated remarks which will indicate that on various levels Kadarkay’s analysis is not always equally convincing. Subsequently I will pass to a more highly convected set of questions concerning the psychologism, structuring the interpretive strategy of the book, the way in which Kadarkay is actually using his information, and finally the translation strategy adopted by the author. By way of conclusion I will then address the question whether Kadarkay has really succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls so obviously present in much of the already existing corpus of metatexts on Lukács. I have already noted that this biography sheds a refreshing and sometimes illuminating light on different events in Lukács’s rich life. Such is the case, for instance, when Kadarkay points to the questionable role of Lukács’s friend Bela Balázs in the tragic suicide of Irma Seidler (Lukács’s partner in a complicated and philosophically overdetermined love-affair) and to the change in the relationship between the friends during the immediate aftermath of the young painter’s death. On other occasions, however, Kadarkay’s interpretation is surprisingly unconvincing, as in his comments on Lukács’s attitude to religious matters. In

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1907 Lukács abandoned his Jewish faith, which had never been of any substantial meaning to him, and adopted the Protestant religion. Kadarkay notes that ‘[f]or motives that appear rather prudential, Lukács converted to the Evangelical faith in 1907. No one knows for sure why he converted so late—when he was turning twenty-two—or just how seriously he took his baptism.’ (p. 7). While there is considerable uncertainty regarding this dimension of Lukács’s life, one thing seems to me beyond any doubt, namely that the motives for the conversion to Protestantism cannot possibly be qualified as ‘prudential’. Protestantism was not a very adequate solution to the widespread anti-semitic discrimination in Hungary at that time. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the hegemony of Catholicism in the Austrian-Hungarian Dual Monarchy was still intact, the 1867 Secession having had no impact whatsoever on the leading role of the Catholic Church.2 In such a context, where Catholicism remained a very powerful instance on many levels of social life, opting for the Protestant faith can hardly be called ‘prudential’. Another more plausible explanation for this episode is that, in converting to Protestantism, the young Lukács, following in this the example of Otto Weininger,3 performed just another act of nonconformity with the world he was living in. In this perspective, his Protestantism only emphasized his voluntary marginality in a society where his intellectualism and his being a Jew already had the effect of turning him into an outsider. Kadarkay’s matter-of-fact assertion that it is difficult to seize the real importance of this event is accurate, but he might have acknowledged Lukács’s marked interest in the systematic conduct of life he associated with Protestantism (echoing Max Weber) as it transpires in the essay on Theodor Storm in Soul and Forms.4 Kadarkay’s failure to indicate this meaningful and to a certain extent elucidating link is all the more surprising since, further on in the book, he does recognize the affinity between Soul and Forms and Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Kadarkay, among other things, establishes a highly problematical and superficial parallelism between Weber and Lukács, who are said to ‘share an intellectual perspective that was antithetical to materalism’ (p. 100). Weber himself has denied that the analytical perspective of the book on Protestantism is the opposite of materialism5 and the question remains open whether Kadarkay’s remark has any relevance at all with respect to Lukács’s essays. But the reference to Weber’s and Lukács’s interest in asceticism and Protestantism remains too general: Kadarkay does not mention here the essay on Theodor Storm but instead extends the parallelism over the whole of Soul and Forms, a generalization that is far from self-evident, if, at least, one takes into account the irreducible heterogeneity of the polyperspectivism underlying Lukács’s essays. When Kadarkay finally does bring together the Storm essay and Weber’s Protestant Ethic, he affirms: ‘Some of Lukács’s early essays, notably the essay on Storm, are haunted by the fear of “mechanized petrification” and worldly asceticism that also pervades the last part of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (p. 188). This is a far too univocal and negative presentation of Lukács’s essay because Kadarkay fails to register the author’s ambivalence toward the systematic conduct of life. Having turned himself toward Protestantism, Lukács indeed described the austere universe of Storm with some kind of nostalgia: in the well-ordered life of the Protestant Storm, art could not become problematic but was instead integrated into life itself. Storm’s world represented thus a form of life Lukács was precisely longing for but could not realize, because it has irredeemably vanished. Other interpretations fail to convince because they are mere assertions without substantial argumentation. When dealing with The Theory of the Novel and the Notes on Dostoevsky, for instance, the biographer affirms that the link between those two texts is far more loose than many commentators have pretended (p. 154). Since the issue is an important one and since there are indeed some problems with the way in which many critics have correlated those two texts, one is interested to know what Kadarkay makes of it, but in vain: a detailed textual analysis which could substantiate this claim remains in abeyance. Another instance of this apodictic strategy occurs when Kadarkay stresses the profound impact of Irma Seidler’s suicide on Lukács:

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Irma’s death [in 1911] played an important role in Lukács’s decision to join the Communist Party in 1918. Edith [Hajós] once wrote to Lukács [in 1910]: ‘Yesterday, I met Ernö Seidler in a dairy-shop. This was God’s will.’ The bolshevik-trained Ernö Seidler was Irma’s brother and played a decisive role in converting Lukács. (p. 123) It is difficult to accept this quasi post hoc ergo propter hoc argument as an ‘explanation’ of what happened to Lukács in 1918. Kadarkay’s further remarks on Ernö Seidler (pp. 202–3) do not alter this. With respect to the complexity of the development of Lukács’s thought during the years 1910–18, the implied teleology in Kadarkay’s assertion is moreover misleading and simplifying. The same phenomenon of unwarranted assertions returns frequently when it comes to establish the intertextual frame of reference to Lukács’s works. The ‘Nietzschean moment’ (pp. 56ff) which Kadarkay (in this opposed to the majority of the readings of Lukács I am familiar with) tends to overstate, is only described in very general terms and the sparse textual evidence we are given is too unspecific to carry the point. The same can be said of the alleged intertextual affinities between History and Class Consciousness and other texts (pp. 268ff). Here we are told that Lukács’s masterpiece shows traces of Dostoevsky, Hegel and St Augustine but again the reader will wait in vain for some form of corroboration of this claim, which could save it from what it now is: a reduction of intertextuality to highly suggestive but equally unconvincing namedropping. Throughout the book, Kadarkay operates with a problematical concept of ‘history of ideas’ and never really moves beyond polite nods of recognition to the many authors and traditions that ‘influenced’ Lukács. Since any serious textual analysis is lacking, Kadarkay is constantly in danger of seeing intertextual similarities and continuities everywhere, whereas in reality the Lukácsian discourse entertains a much more reflexive and subverting relation towards its intertextual environment. The lack of subtlety in the exploration of the intertextual frame of reference becomes obvious when, for instance, Kadarkay points to the elective affinities between the young Lukács and the author of Degeneration and The Conventional Lies of Our Civilisation, Max Nordau. That such an affinity exists is undeniable: Lukács himself has stressed the point6 as have others (mainly E.Keller).7 But one has to be cautious because, if Lukács, like so many others at that time, felt attracted by Nordau’s raving criticism, he also fundamentally differed even if only in the sense that most of the authors and artistic traditions condemned by Nordau played a positive and formative role in his thought. Yet Kadarkay fails to register any substantial divergence between Lukács and Nordau: Nordau’s visionary power to devalue modern culture, his sweeping diagnosis of degeneration and indiscriminate application of the idea of degeneration to art and literature, and his messianic damnation of the social cosmos—all this continued to haunt and preoccupy Lukács in his long quest to save humanity. (p. 41) Kadarkay’s line of argument further fails to convince because, when speaking of the link between Nordau and Lukács (pp. 39–41), he does not at any moment refer to any of Lukács’s early texts, with the exception of an implicit reference to The Theory of the Novel (p. 40) and one quotation from Modern Drama (p. 40), which has only indirect relevance for the issue. All this may further seriously diminish the degree to which Kadarkay may be said to understand the historical individuality of the subject he is speaking of. Another difficulty concerns the use of quotation marks and the precision with which the sources mentioned in the biography are identified. Here the reader faces two problems that are so overwhelmingly

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present in the book that they simply become irritating. On the one hand, Kadarkay very frequently uses quotation marks without however indicating his source, which makes it impossible to verify or identify the passage cited. On the other hand, the author often makes interesting claims which clearly betray the possession of first-hand information, but again there is a complete lack of precise bibliographical reference. This can only make the critical reader suspicious and casts doubt on the validity of Kadarkay’s analysis. Two examples. Kadarkay suggests that Lukács actually did submit the first two chapters of his Modern Drama to Georg Simmel for his habilitation at the University of Berlin (pp. 110–11). Since I did not know of any attempt by Lukács to obtain his habilitation in Berlin, I was curious where Kadarkay got his information, especially as the story is both interesting and surprising. If Lukács wanted to secure his chances of an academic career through Simmel, this was a bad choice, as from a purely institutional point of view, Simmel was a completely marginal figure with no power whatsoever. He was not only just a Privatdozent (which he remained until his appointment as Ordinarius in 1914 at the peripheral University of Strasbourg), he was also a Jew, thus belonging to a totally impotent minority in an generally anti-semitic academic environment.8 Moreover, if Lukács submitted those translated chapters for his habilitation, one is led to expect that this procedure should have left, in one way or another, some official trace in the archives of the University. Unfortunately, Kadarkay only asserts this event without indicating precise dates, without referring to or quoting from any substantial documentation and without any further analysis. The only directly relevant evidence cited comes from Lukács’s still untranslated diary (p. 110: ‘I was impatient with Simmel and things came to an end. Very likely this destroyed the whole relationship’) but it does not give the reader any precise, factual information about the event. A similar case occurs in Kadarkay’s discussion of Lukács’s unsuccessful request to be appointed at the University of Budapest (1911). Kadarkay correctly underlines the negative impact of Lukács’s friendship with Bela Balázs, which seems to have seriously jeopardized the very prospect of an academic future for Lukács: Undeniably, however, the kinship and bond between Lukács and Balázs struck many people as strange and incomprehensible. And very few people took seriously Lukács’s extraordinary claim that Balázs commanded the tragic sense of Dostoevsky and Sophocles. When the academic senate of the University of Budapest voted on Lukács’s application for a docentship, Gedeon Petz, a German philologist, opposed Lukács, saying that he was capable of comparing a contemporary Hungarian playwright to Shakespeare. The barb was sharp, stuck home, and provoked laughter. (p. 125) Kadarkay’s story is interesting and adds a new dimension to what we already knew about the topic, through, for instance, a letter from Bernhard Alexander to Lukács, which communicates the negative outcome of the vote in the University’s senate.9 Curiously, however, and contrary to what Kadarkay is suggesting, Alexander seems to minimize Petz’s resistance to the person of Lukács and he does not mention at all the ‘deadly’ remark. Petz (who was in fact only one among several professors who opposed, for various reasons, an eventual appointment of Lukács) essentially resented the style of thinking and writing of Lukács the essayist, which he thought incompatible with the required standards of scientific rigueur. (A few years later, Lukács’s application in Heidelberg will be rejected for similar reasons.)10 Kadarkay makes no mention of Alexander’s revealing letter, nor does he identify his source. This is hard to understand since the episode is an important one and contributed to making 1911 a crucial year in Lukács’s development: the death of Irma Seidler and Leo Popper and the veto of the University of Budapest confirmed Lukács’s decision to leave Hungary and to settle in Heidelberg, where he hoped to be able to obtain a position as lecturer. In omitting the wider institutional context of the affair, Kadarkay, in my opinion, also focuses too

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exclusively on the role of Balázs. This somehow excessive emphasis on Balázs is probably due to the overall presentation of the poet, who is portrayed as a decadent and mediocre Don Juan as long as Kadarkay is dealing with the young Lukács. From the moment, however, that Lukács has converted to Marxism and fully endorses Leninism and later Stalinism, Kadarkay inverses the roles: Lukács is the Stalinist baddy, while Balázs appears as a tragic poet, who died in complete isolation, abandoned and artistically ignored by his former friend (pp. 369–70). Apart from this, Kadarkay’s biography also contains several deplorable inaccuracies. On page 69, for instance, he quotes approvingly Allan Bloom’s assertion that, ‘[a]s a young man’, Lukács ‘frequented the circle of Stefan George as well as that of Max Weber and was aware of the power of things being discussed there about history and culture’.11 The same claim that Lukács was a member of the George Circle has been made by G.Lichtheim,12 but the question is whether Lukács actually ever met George. As far as I know, he did not. The only thing one can be sure of on the basis of the Briefwechsel is that Lukács indeed tried to get into contact with the visionary poet through Simmel and Gundolf, but that he never managed to meet him nor to participate in the George Circle. The fact that Lukács was for a while very close to Simmel, an intimate friend of George, and that he and Gundolf, a notorious member of the George Circle, were both participating in the Sunday Circle at Weber’s house in Heidelberg, may have led some critics to conclude that Lukács must also have been a member of the George Circle. Further, Lukács’s membership is very unplausible if one takes into consideration the intellectual distance that very soon separated Lukács from George13 after an initial, though already ambivalent, sympathy.14 A second inaccuracy occurs in Kadarkay’s comment on Lukács’s Heidelberg project for a philosophical aesthetics: between 1912 and 1914, with several interruptions, he labored on in the most austere regions of art, mostly at Heidelberg, and completed what is known as The Heidelberg Aesthetics, which deals with the philosophy of art, the first part of the projected work…. The one demonstrable result of all his labors was the posthumously published Heidelberg Aesthetics. The work on his book on Dostoevsky (1914–16) thus stands between his work on the philosophy of art (1912–14) and the fragmentary remainder of the work on a systematic aesthetics (1916–18). (pp. 153–4) To begin with, Lukács was indeed writing a treatise on aesthetics between 1912 and 1914 but, contrary to what Kadarkay suggests, he did not complete it. Moreover, the text was published posthumously not as The Heidelberg Aesthetics but as the Heidelberger Philosophie der Kunst (1912–1914),15 while the Heidelberger Ästhetik16 contains the fragments of Lukács’s attempt to pursue, between 1916 and 1918, his theoretical research started in 1912. The difference in the titles is important, since from one text to the other there are very significant shifts of emphasis which, however, I cannot deal with here. In Kadarkay’s rather unclear presentation, this difference simply disappears: he only refers to one title, while inverting the chronology of the two fragmentary works. Another example of Kadarkay’s rather careless handling of his material concerns a quotation attributed to Ernst Bloch: ‘Bloch, complimenting Lukács on his Theory of the Novel, said, “How lovely that from the sterile wartime you managed to pluck such a fruit!”’ (p. 156). The reference for the quotation runs as follows: ‘Ernst Bloch to Lukács, 1 November 1916, LAK [Lukács Archive, KG]’ (p. 486, note 51). When I checked this letter in the German edition of Lukács’s Briefwechsel, I could not, to my surprise, find a single trace of the compliment Kadarkay quotes. The point is not that the biographer has referred to another letter from Bloch but that the sentence is simply not Bloch’s. I have found it instead in a letter (November 1916) from

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Emil von Gebsattel to Lukács, in which it is added, between brackets, as a kind of postscript.17 If there is a mistake in the German edition, Kadarkay should have signalled it to his readers; if, on the contrary, the German edition is correct, then Kadarkay should perhaps correct this error in the next edition of his book. Besides this series of rather punctual remarks, to which I could add some errors in the spelling of proper names in the bibliography (Avron instead of Arvon, p. 519; Kutzenbach instead of Kutzbach, p. 487),18 there is also a set of more fundamental problems which, in one way or another, concern the perspective through which Kadarkay approaches his subject matter. In his preface, the author states: I have tried to convey something of the course and quality of his life. As such [the book] is a portrait, not a theory, of Lukács, who lived in an age of collapsing empires and rising revolutions…. There is a vast amount of information and commentary on Lukács, and the very process of selection suggests a certain standpoint. However, I have written this book neither to excuse him nor to revile him, but to explain and to understand, to show what he was. In the text itself, I do not explicitly argue with anyone or take stand on contentious issues with others. (p. xi) The way in which Kadarkay formulates his point of view betrays the intention of somehow attaining direct representation of Lukács’s life and thought. This norm of immediacy, of presentness, which structures this reading of Lukács, can clearly be observed in the explicit, but none the less illusory, refusal to adopt some ‘theoretical’ perspective and in the use of visual terms (‘portrait’, ‘show’). What Kadarkay seems to say to his readers is: ‘I will show you Lukács as he really was, the man, the soul, behind the texts, and therefore I will not obscure the picture by constantly engaging in theoretical debates.’ Of course, this strategy is far less innocent than it looks. First of all and certainly in the case of Lukács, who might better be studied in a bibliography than in a biography, the very project of writing a portrait on such premisses is constantly and inevitably doomed to degenerate into a psychologistic biographism pure and simple, which treats texts as documents, as symptoms, as the mere passive medium of expression, communicating an underlying state of mind. Kadarkay has not managed to avoid this pitfall. His reading of the texts of the young Lukács, for instance, is systematically pervaded by a relentless psychologism, which hypostatizes one dimension as the decisive one and thus seriously reduces the centrifugal effect of the essayist’s irony, typical of all of the early writings, the complexity of the respective texts and the theoretical and philosophical relevance of the issues they raise. In speaking of Soul and Forms, for instance, Kadarkay rather boldly affirms: ‘those essays constitute his unwitting intellectual autobiography’ (p. 91). It is further said that the essays ‘contain [Lukács’s] essence in the pre-1918 period’ (p. 91). Here we have an omniscient narrator, who, as Sartre once said of Mauriac, behaves as if he were God, and whose panoptic glance is able to reveal to us, post factum, the secret hidden in the essays of Soul and Forms, a secret called Lukács. Such a psychologistic bias, such a ventriloquist gesture may perhaps suffice to tell us the true story of the odyssey of Lukács’s most inner life; it most certainly does not when it comes to reading and understanding what Lukács himself tried to tell us. It also tends heavily to underestimate the bewildering complexity with which the early writings relate to one another. Making Soul and Forms the very essence of Lukács’s pre-1918 years is an enormously simplifying manoeuvre: between the publication of Soul and Forms (1910/11) and Lukács’s conversion to communism at the end of 1918, I count no less than two diverging and unfinished probes of an Aesthetics, ‘On poverty of spirit’, the Notes on Dostoevsky, The Theory of the Novel, and various articles dealing with Paul Ernst, Solovieff, Masaryk, communism as a moral problem, and so on. Seen from this angle, Kadarkay’s assertion is simply misleading. By turning Lukács’s psyche into the centre of a biographical narrative, which, by the way, is structured according to the conventions of the traditional novel,

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Kadarkay endows his portrait of Lukács with a somewhat static character, which eventually has the effect of deproblematizing the tricky question of the periodization of his writings. This becomes obvious, for instance, in a typical passage on page 150, where Kadarkay apparently sees no problem at all in quoting from three different sources (‘On poverty of spirit’, ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’ and The Theory of the Novel), ranging from 1911 to 1915, without the slightest shift in the argumentation. In the case of the young Lukács, such a ‘continuity’ cannot but be highly problematical. The static character of the analysis also surfaces when Kadarkay deals with Lukács’s Marxist period. Having made the protagonist’s psyche the real protagonist of his story, the biographer can easily make of this psyche the ahistorical and non-textual prime mover of the intellectual development of his hero. Thus Marxism can be presented as merely conjunctural and only one of the many manifestations of Lukács’s chameleon-like and yet frozen psychè, whose innermost essence after all has always already been ‘discontent’: ‘Born with an existential discontent, [Lukács] hardly needed Marx’s evidence in order to feel the need to “change” the world…reading Marx offers little insight into Lukács’ (p. 340). One is tempted to add that Kadarkay seems to have thought the same thing about Lukács: reading Lukács offers little insight into Lukács. The self-declared intention of delivering us a true portrait of Lukács, and the concomitant refusal to engage with ‘theory’, is not only problematical because of the psychologism: it tries to tear the reader’s attention away from the very act of reading performed by Kadarkay himself. In reality, he does not present us with a portrait of Lukács but rather re presents the life and thought of a man by way of textual mediation. Without thematizing this fundamental fact and problem, Kadarkay uses his documents in order to produce an image of Lukács, and the way in which he uses them shows how his reading of Lukács and of so many authors is structured by a teleology which is however far from self-evident. The already noted psychologism seems to have its negative side-effect in that Kadarkay, at times, rather drastically manipulates the texts he is reading. Let’s take the example of the ‘Nietzschean moment’ in the writings of the young Lukács. On this point, Kadarkay notes: Lukács’s ‘orgiastic triumphal dance of the soul’, which served as a derogation of bourgeois life, is unmistakably Nietzschean. Both his essay on Sterne and ‘The Metaphysics of Tragedy’, the latter originally published in the journal A Szellem (March 1911), which Lukács co-founded with Lajos Fülep, are heavily indebted to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Popper stated unequivocally that these essays do not contain Lukács’s own ideas. (pp. 56–7) The letter from Popper that Kadarkay refers to is thus said to confirm the Nietzscheanism of the essays in question. Even without having read Popper’s letter, the critical reader suspects some problem in Kadarkay’s use of it. Indeed, Leo Popper’s letter is dated 25 October 1909, while one of the essays in question, ‘The Metaphysics of Tragedy’, was written afterwards, probably during the first half of 1910.19 So Popper cannot possibly have written that those two essays are not really Lukács’s. But let’s have a look at the letter itself. ‘My son,’ Popper says, ‘this essay [“Reichtum, Chaos und Form: Ein Zwiegespräch über Lawrence Sterne”, 1909, KG] is not quite yours.’20 Can this be read as: ‘This essay is not quite yours because it is (too) Nietzschean’, as Kadarkay would have it? Not quite. In the letter, there is not the slightest hint of Nietzsche explicitly nor implicitly. What Popper is actually telling Lukács is that the essay is not of the same quality as the other ones, a claim Popper tries to corroborate by pointing to the various ‘weaknesses’ of the text, both formally and theoretically. What bothers Popper most is that in the essay on Sterne Lukács uses, without mentioning it, a scheme of thought which is in fact Popper’s. If this essay is not Lukács’s, it is not because it is Nietzschean but simply because it is in a certain sense Popper’s:

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My dear son, I do not only have the right but it is also my duty, to say this to you. I have the right, because the ideas [in your essay] are mine, and it is my duty, because I do not any longer think they are any good.21 And there is more. Apparently, Popper, after having written his severe letter must have felt somehow guilty. In a remark on Lukács’s answer to Popper’s letter, the editors of the Briefwechsel write: Popper implored Lukács by telegram not to read his letter of 25 October and to return it unopened; having received Popper’s message, Lukács sent him a telegram, saying that he had received Popper’s letter before the latter’s telegram.22 In his next letter to Lukács, Popper apologized for his sharp criticism of the Sterne essay: Don’t panic because of the telegram. My last letter contained some stupidities, and I did not want them to cause you any trouble, knowing that anyway you have a lot to do and that you are also in a nervous temper…. Please, forget about everything.23 As far as I can see, all this is not exactly what Kadarkay is making of this story. Another example of a problematical use of sources is Kadarkay’s account of Lukács’s obsessive preoccupation with the theme of ‘goodness’, a theme which emerged fully in the essay ‘On poverty of spirit’ (1911). Goodness, for the young Lukács, has to do with an unconstrained form of life centred around an immediately experienced intersubjectivity, Dostoevsky being its emblem. In this context, Kadarkay notes: With so obsessive and so vital a moral purpose, Lukács had no alternative but to live with Ljena [Grabenko, Lukács’s first wife, to whom he dedicated The Theory of the Novel], even though she proved unfit for wedded life. Max Weber warned him early of the dangers involved in living his ‘essence’ through others. And Weber minced no words about Lukács’s ‘sudden turn toward Dostoevsky’. He wrote to him, ‘I hated and still hate this work of yours.’ (p. 171) However, Weber’s letter has nothing to do with the ‘dangers involved in living [one’s] “essence” through others’. If Weber hated Lukács’s turn toward Dostoevsky, it was mainly because the work on The Theory of the Novel undermined the possibilities of an academic career at Heidelberg, Weber being afraid that the essay would only confirm, in the eyes of Lask and Windelband, Lukács’s reputed inability to write a systematic treatise. Weber’s letter thus deals with institutional matters and Kadarkay’s use of it here is improper. Curiously enough, he quotes from the same letter some twenty pages further on (p. 190), but this time to demonstrate more correctly the institutional problems involved with Lukács’s project on Dostoevsky: ‘Based on what you read to us from your splendid history of aesthetics,’ Weber wrote to Lukács, ‘I have misgivings. Your sudden turn toward Dostoevsky appears to verify Lask’s view. I hated and I still hate this work of yours. Fundamentally, I too share his view’ (p. 190). But here too there is a problem with Kadarkay’s presentation of Weber’s opinion. When comparing Kadarkay’s translation to the German edition of the letter, and since he refers to the German autograph in the Lukács Archive I presume Kadarkay is translating, one observes a remarkable shift, in that the ambivalence of Weber’s opinion totally disappears. My translation of the letter runs as follows: ‘Based on what you read to us from your splendid aesthetics, I

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sharply opposed [Lask’s] view. I hated and I still hate this work of yours.’24 What Weber deplores in this letter is that Lukács has abandoned the Aesthetics, which proved beyond any doubt his ability as a systematic philosopher, in favour of the Dostoevsky project, a reorientation that would only confirm Lask’s and Windelband’s suspicion that Lukács was not capable of systematic reflexion as academically required. My third example concerns a quotation attributed to József Révai. In an effort to stress the radicalism of the intellectuals participating in the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, Kadarkay states: ‘The neophyte József Révai, having joined the party, wrote “Death to my mother, death to my father, death to my teacher”’ (p. 204). It was not possible for me to verify Kadarkay’s source because he quotes from a Hungarian book. Yet there are reasons to question his use of this little sentence, put in the mouth of the communist Révai. According to P.Por, Révai was a member of an avant-gardist circle before he turned to communism and joined the already decaying circle around Lukács: ‘[Révai] had certainly left behind his avant-gardist beginnings: “death to my father/death to my mother/ death to my first teacher”’25. In my opinion, Kadarkay should have been more explicit and clear about this because it makes a significant difference whether Révai’s phrase was pronounced by a dadaist-like avant-gardist or by a radical Bolshevik. A second set of problems which are symptomatic of Kadarkay’s strategy of reading have to do with the actual interpretation he offers of the texts he uses. Those interpretations frequently betray a rather careless reading, which may be provoked by the already signalled psychologistic tendency to reduce texts to the mere expressive medium of a certain state of mind. Let’s take the example of Kadarkay’s presentation of ‘On poverty of spirit’,26 an essay which was written in the immediate aftermath of Irma Seidler’s suicide and which first appeared in 1911 in Hungarian (A Szellem) and was then translated into German and published in 1912 in the Neue Blätter. Resuming the significance of the essay, Kadarkay notes: The importance of this confessional essay is threefold. First, ‘On Poverty of Spirit’ closed his essayistic period and Lukács’s ‘bad conscience’ over Irma’s death sought the world ‘beyond tragedy’. Secondly, it cleared the way to the Dostoevsky phase of his development (1912–18). And thirdly, in it he disavowed Kant’s categorical imperative as no more than the moral code of the ‘living dead’. (p. 146) And two pages further it is said that, ‘[i]n “On Poverty of Spirit”, the hero of bad conscience, who represents Lukács himself, substitutes the [Dostoevskyan] ethics of “goodness” for the Kantian ethics of duty’ (p. 148). This interpretation of the essay as the place of a transition from Kant to Dostoevsky tends, in my opinion, to reduce the ambivalent complexity of the text. One may even wonder if the ‘hero’ of ‘On poverty of spirit’ really substitutes one type of ethics for the other, if he really transcends the Kantian categorical imperative of duty. To be sure, the alternative is posed, but it seems that the protagonist of the essay himself is only speaking of a possibility which is not open to him. This becomes very clear when he analyses the cause of the death of the woman he once tried to love: the hero feels guilty because he has attempted to bring together two realms of reality which cannot be fused. He wanted to mix the purity of thought, that is the realm of the Work, with life, but life does not tolerate such a purity; he wanted to be good but goodness belongs to another sphere, it is not pure. This is why the tragic hero of the essay can say: I wanted to lead a pure life, in which everything was handled with only cautious and frightfully cleankept hands! This way of living is, however, the application to life of a false category. The Work which is separated from life must be pure. Life, however, can neither become nor be pure; in the realm of the ‘everyday’, purity is no more than an impotent negation: hardly a way out of confusion, it rather

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increases confusion. And the grand life—the life of Goodness—no longer needs such a purity; it has another purity—a higher one.27 In this context, the death of the woman acquires the value of a judgement, of a moment of revelation about the protagonist’s real destiny: But now clarity has come over me: the senseless and absurd, untragic-catastrophic ending is, for me, a divine judgment. I am withdrawing from life. Because just as it is only the genius, who may play a role in the philosophy of art, so it is only the man graced with Goodness, who may play a role in life…. I have confused the forms and gotten them all tangled up among one another: my ‘life-forms’ are not forms of life—that has only now become clear to me. For that reason, her death is, for me, a divine judgment. She had to die, so that my work could be completed—so that nothing remains in the world for me except my work.28 If the protagonist clearly points to the possibility of an ethics of Goodness, he does not opt for it: the duty of the work, and of nothing but the work—that is the philosophy of art—is all that remains. This is the avowal of an austere and almost masochistic will to renounce the world in favour of the realm of forms, not so much because forms would be superior to life but rather the other way round because forms are fundamentally inadequate for life, where only the Dostoevskyan Goodness can bring salvation. In a certain sense, the protagonist of the essays, and contrary to what Kadarkay is suggesting, assumes the life of the ‘living dead’. This reading is also confirmed on a purely biographical level. ‘On poverty of spirit’ is indeed not followed by the Dostoevsky project, as Kadarkay would have it, but by the first draft of the aesthetics, namely the Heidelberger Philosophie der Kunst 1912–1914, Lukács’s first attempt to solve the riddle of the mysterious and defying perfection of the work of art. Another significant detail is that one of the titles Lukács considered for this aesthetics was The Road toward the Work.29 That the protagonist of ‘On poverty of spirit’ finally commits suicide himself and that the aesthetics was not completed in 1914 nor in 1918 sheds a light on the complex and tense coexistence of conflicting motives in Lukács’s early writings. Thus one cannot simply say that Kant is superseded by Dostoevsky and that ‘On poverty of spirit’ functions as the place of this transition: the essay brings together in a irreducibly paradoxical form two possibilities of conducting one’s life, the one in the realm of forms, the other, more complete but out of reach for the protagonist, beyond it. A second example of Kadarkay’s rather peculiar way of reading Lukács concerns the latter’s answer to a questionnaire written by Felix Bertaux and Jean-Richard Bloch, the editors of the French review L’effort libre. The title of that questionnaire was: ‘What does Young Germany think of?’30 Though Bertaux’s and Bloch’s project did not come to an end and Lukács’s answer was thus never actually published, the text is an important document, though perhaps not for the reason invoked in the biography. Kadarkay writes: The dialectical tension that informs Lukács’s analysis of German culture is the unbearable loneliness of the self, on the one hand, and the disorientation of values, on the other. According to Lukács, this tension could only resolve itself through religious or collective values. And here lies the strongest reason for our feeling that Lukács, on the eve of the Great War, already prefigures the revolutionary future. It was in response to this questionnaire that Lukács made his first reference to ‘socialism’ as a cultural movement. (p. 159)

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This is a daring claim with respect to Lukács’s letter to Félix Berteaux, which moreover betrays the heavily teleological bias of Kadarkay’s interpretation. However, is it also a plausible claim? I don’t think so because Kadarkay’s ‘analysis’ suffers from some serious problems. First of all, at the time of the response, socialism was not, in the eyes of Lukács, a valuable alternative for the cultural crisis he was speaking of: The last culturally effective force in Germany, the naturalistic-materialistic socialism, based its effectiveness on its hidden religious and Weltanschauung-like elements, a Weltanschauung which could become a metasubjective as well as a highly personal experience. This force, however, did not suffice, and today we have entered a period of abandonment and of a seeking for community.31 Lukács clearly rejects socialism as a possible solution to the problem he has raised. Does he see another solution? Strictly speaking no, because the only thing he can talk of is one symptom of a cultural renewal in Germany, a symptom the outcome of which is still unpredictable. Con trary to what Kadarkay suggests, Lukács does not point to socialism as the agent of a cultural renaissance, but mainly to neo-Kantian philosophy. I quote Lukács in extenso: After German philosophy has been for such a long time a scholarly enterprise, which, notwithstanding its impressive scientific merits, could not become a leading cultural power, after its cultural philosophical branch (e.g. Dilthey) showed a distinguished essayistic sensibility, today its will to system, as a symbol of culture and a collector for culture, has woken again. If this philosophical renaissance, which is today no more than a hope, really flourishes, when the system that should be born here, will be more than a simply scholarly and methodological accumulation of epistemological possibilities, when it will be instead the increasingly loud voice of the unspoken religiosity of our time, the real answer to the latter’s questions, then we can hope again for the coming of a German culture, in which literature will be more than a catalogue of applauded poetic personalities, who, in reality, are strongly isolated from each other and from the public.32 All this is, I think, not quite what Kadarkay is making of Lukács’s response, and it is rather far removed from the alleged ‘prefiguration of the revolutionary future’. Moreover, it is incorrect to state that, in Lukács’s response, we find the first mention of socialism as cultural movement. Some years before the letter to Berteaux, more precisely in his Modern Drama, Lukács had already characterized socialism as the last large cultural movement since medieval Catholicism, and already at that moment socialism was seen as something of the past and as a problematical basis for modern cultural creation.33 Finally, there are places in Kadarkay’s book where the problematic character of the adopted reading strategy is accompanied and aggravated by the dubious translation of certain sources. A symptomatic example of such a questionable translation can be found in the chapter on Lukács’s Moscow period. Before analysing the example, I would like to stress that much of what Kadarkay is writing on Lukács’s theory which realism is disappointing. His treatment of the topic has not at all convinced me, because it mainly and uncritically rehearses the all too familiar inquisitorial stigmatizations of Lukács’s literary theory which one can find, for instance, in an exemplary form in Demetz and Kolakowski (style: ‘reason in the service of dogma’). What is basically lacking in Kadarkay’s account, which at times curiously degenerates into an anachronistic Cold War anti-marxist rhetoric, is a careful and cautious contextualization of the discussions on art and politics in the thirties and, above all, the very attempt to link what Lukács has said on realism with his other historical and philosophical studies of those years. One certainly does not need to be a fanatic supporter of Lukács’s doctrine on art and literature to be able to stress the point that, if one pretends to offer

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a detailed and fair picture of this complex man and of his writings, one should be at the same time extremely reluctant to condemn an œuvre hastily without having analysed it carefully in its variant textual, intertextual and contextual articulations. From this point of view, Kadarkay’s pages on the Marxist Lukács do not, strictly speaking, add anything substantial to what a certain dogmatically and apodictically antimarxist criticism has already said on the matter. This is regrettable and I think that Kadarkay has missed the opportunity, not to defend Lukács against his detractors, but to show that the latter’s view on art and literature is perhaps far more subtle and far-reaching than many critics have thought. To this end Kadarkay could have relied on more recent scholarly work, but, unfortunately—and the remark also applies to other aspects of the biography—a close look at the bibliography shows that the author has not sufficiently consulted many valuable and insightful studies on Lukács, in French and German, that have appeared during the eighties. This being said, let’s return to the question of translation. In the context of the Brecht—Lukács debate, Kadarkay, wanting to stress the gap between the modernism of the former and the alleged classicism of the latter, comes to talk about the plan of Brecht, Benjamin, Lukács and some other Marxist intellectuals to start a new journal: In the early thirties, while Lukács was in Berlin, Benjamin, Brecht and Lukács discussed plans to launch Krisis und Kritik, which was to be a journal devoted to both bourgeois and Marxist views. But soon Brecht had serious misgivings, and wrote to Lukács: ‘I regret that work on the journal has stopped. It is true that Benjamin and I…from the beginning have been sceptical about your attempt to judge intellectuals politically. A journal such as you propose would not be effective and, in some circumstances, we think it would be wrong. The purely educational attitude, of flaunting our superiority, is hardly practical even if we knew that the intellectuals, their economic position shaken, would be interested in engaging in some debate. Dear Lukács, you made very clear your superiority over me and Benjamin. Benjamin’s passionate outburst when he insisted that you listen to his arguments demonstrated how far one can get by an authoritarian attitude…. It is a mistake to believe that the intellectuals, scared by crisis, will fall, like a ripe pear, into the lap of communism!’ (pp. 334–5) The letter Kadarkay quotes from is referred to as ‘Bertolt Brecht, Briefe 1913–1956 (1983), vol. 1, pp. 145– 6.’ (p. 504, note 38). I must admit that I had some difficulty in retracing this edition of the Brecht Correspondence, since the standard edition on this matter, used in the majority of recent Brecht studies, is the one published by Suhrkamp in 1981 in two volumes and edited by Günther Glaeser.34 After a brief search, I discovered that Kadarkay’s reference is to the East German version (Lizenzausgabe) of the first edition and, according to the bibliographical details of this edition, it seems to be identical to the Suhrkamp edition.35 Thus one can reasonably infer from this that the 1983 DDR edition probably does not modify the text of the 1981 West German edition. If this were the case, then Kadarkay should certainly have mentioned it, because his version of Brecht’s letter raises serious questions. What is exactly the problem? First of all, if one would like to be correct, one cannot say without any further qualification, as Kadarkay does, that ‘Brecht wrote to Lukács’, because this fragment is only the unfinished draft of a letter that Brecht never actually sent to Lukács.36 Secondly, and this is more serious, Brecht’s letter, and contrary to Kadarkay’s translation of it, does not refer to Benjamin but instead names Bernard von Brentano, another friend of Brecht who was also involved, and earlier than Benjamin was,37 in the Krisis und Kritik project. Has the East German edition been changed on this point? It could be the case, but this would be a little bit surprising since the 1981 version of the Correspondence indicates nowhere that the name ‘Brentano’ was a conjecture of the editor. Anyhow, if a modification has occurred with respect to the 1981 edition, Kadarkay should have

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signalled it. If, on the contrary, the 1983 edition clearly speaks of Brentano instead of Benjamin, then Kadarkay’s scholarly reliability is at stake, because in that case he would have manipulated the original text in such a way that Lukács appears once more as the vilain Stalinist who is finally responsible for the failure of Brecht’s and Benjamin’s project. Thirdly, and independently of the Benjamin/Brentano question, the translation of the biographer tends to exacerbate incorrectly the divergence between Brecht and Lukács to the point of making the Brecht letter a little bit too manichean. In order to allow the reader to read critically Kadarkay’s translation of the letter, I here offer another and more accurate translation, indicating in italics the differences from the biographer’s version: I regret very much that the work on the journal apparently does not progress. It is absolutely true that Brentano and I, in the (few) talks we had with you on our repeated request, have been sceptical from the beginning about the methods of propaganda you proposed and also about a too conceptual definition of ‘intellectuals’, a definition which did not seem to us practical enough (from a political point of view and with respect to the actual canvassing of intellectuals!). We do not think that a journal as you propose would be effective enough and within certain circumstances it would even be a failure. A purely professorial [dozierende] attitude, which exhibits too much our superiority, is even then unpractical, when we know that intellectuals, their economic position shaken, would be interested in engaging in discussions of a certain level. It is without any doubt a mistake to believe that the intellectuals, shaken by the crisis, will fall, like a ripe pear, into the lap of communism…. Dear Lukács, you have very plainly made us feel, Brentano and me too, your superiority, and Brentano’s outburst when he insisted that you listen to his arguments, demonstrated how far one can get with dictating. This scene (which by the way, is completely devoid of any importance) would certainly have been avoided, if we [the text stops here.]38 In my translation, Lukács is not as opposed to Brecht and Brentano/ Benjamin as Kadarkay suggests. All three of them are equally concerned by the political question of how effectively to use means of propaganda to win the intellectuals for their cause. Whereas Kadarkay’s translation seems to frame Lukács as the one who went too far in ‘judging intellectuals politically’, I think that Brecht’s letter amounts to the opposite: Lukács behaves too much like a professor towards the intellectuals, while Brecht, by implication, clearly wants to find a much more active, less contemplative political strategy: concepts and analysis alone will not suffice to make intellectuals pass to communism. This is a letter, from communist to communist, which deals with questions of tactics and which does not primarily intend to communicate ‘misgivings’ about Lukács’s allegedly too political attitude. Once upon a time, I wrote at the beginning of this review, in the West as in the East, reading Lukács did not raise serious problems, because neither did reading in general. In a certain sense and although it has just appeared, Kadarkay’s biography of Lukács already belongs to that past. He has written an informative book on his subject matter but, considering the vast amount of already available studies, I believe that Kadarkay has failed to seize the opportunity to present a more balanced and fair analysis of the life and thought of Georg Lukács. The fundamental weakness of the book is at the same time its strength: Kadarkay has managed to draw a vivid picture of Lukács but he could only do so at the price of the absence of a thoroughly close analysis of the latter’s writings. After having read this biography once, I had a vague feeling of uneasiness and dissatisfaction. After having read it a second time and even more attentively, I must emphatically disagree with Kolakowski’s blurb, which praises Kadarkay’s book as ‘by far the best, the most comprehensive and the most convincing portrait of Lukács ever written’. I have tried to articulate some elements of my dissatisfaction with Kadarkay’s work, a dissatisfaction which, as far as I can see, in no

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way derives from some Marxist sympathy with Lukács but which is essentially provoked by Kadarkay’s complete lack of a reflexive reading strategy. I fear—and hope—that the editor’s promotional slogan that this book ‘will unquestionably be recognized as the definitive biography of one of the most central figures of twentieth-century thought and politics’ will prove to be even more sadly hyperbolic and daring than it already is. Catholic University of Leuven NOTES I would like to thank my colleague, Ortwin de Graef, for his meticulous correction of the style and language of this article. 1 Lapointe’s critical bibliography of the dissertations, articles and books on Lukács lists some 2,000 items, and since 1982 a lot of new titles should be added to this already impressive catalogue. F.H.Lapointe, Georg Lukács and his Critics: An International Bibliography with Annotations (1910–1982) (Westpoint, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1983). 2 See W.M.Johnston, L’esprit viennois. Une histoire intellectuelle et sociale 1848–1938 (Paris: P.U.F., 1985 (1972)), p. 396. 3 See J.Le Rider, Der Fall Otto Weininger. Wurzeln des Antifeminismus und Antisemitismus. Mit der Erstveröffentlichung der ‘Rede auf Otto Weininger’ von Heimito von Doderer (Vienna and Munich: Löcker Verlag, 1985), pp. 33–4. 4 See G.von Lukács, ‘Bürgerlichkeit und l’art pour l’art’, in Die Seele und die Formen, Essays (Berlin: Egon Fleischer, 1911), pp. 121–69. 5 M.Weber, L’éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Plon, 1964), pp. 226–7. 6 G.Lukács, Pensée vécue. Mémoires parlées (Paris: L’Arche, 1986), p. 37. 7 E.Keller, Der junge Lukács. Antibürger und wesentliches Leben. Literatur- und Kulturkritik 1902–1915 (Frankfurt am Main: Sendler Verlag, 1984), pp. 29ff. 8 On this point, see F.Ringer, Die Gelehrten. Der Niedergang der deutschen Mandarine 1890–1933 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983 (1969)). 9 G.Lukács, Briefwechsel 1902–1917. Herausgegeben von Eva Karádi und Eva Fekete (Stuttgart: J.B.Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1982), pp. 222–4. 10 See the epistolary exchange between Weber and Lukács in the Briefwechsel and G.Sauder, ‘Von Formalitäten zur Politik: Georg Lukács’ Heidelberger Habilitationsversuch’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 53/54 (1984), pp. 79–107. 11 A.Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 222. 12 G.Lichtheim, Georg Lukács (New York: Viking Press, 1970), pp. 6–7. 13 See G.Lukács, Briefwechsel, pp. 314ff; L.A.Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1989), p. 216. 14 See G.von Lukács, ‘Die neue Einsamkeit und ihre Lyrik. Stefan George’ (1908), in Die Seele und die Formen, pp. 173–94. 15 G.Lukács, Frühe Schriften zur Ästhetik I. Heidelberger Philosophie der Kunst (1912–1914) (Neuwied-Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Georg Lukács Werke, Bd. 16, 1974). 16 G.Lukács, Frühe Schriften zur Ästhetik II. Heidelberger Ästhetik (1916–1918) (Neuwied-Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Georg Lukács Werke, Bd. 17, 1974). 17 G.Lukács, Briefwechsel, p. 383. 18 The notes also contain some inaccuracies. On page 477, note 29, for instance, Kadarkay refers to the following article: Mátyás Sárközi, ‘The influence of George Lukács on the young Karl Mannheim in the light of the newly

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

discovered diary’, Slavonic and East European Review, 7 (July 1986), p. 436. However, I have not found Sárközi’s article in number or volume 7 but in volume 64, number 3 of the review. In Die Seele und die Formen, the essay is said to be written in 1910: see G.von Lukács, Die Seele, p. 373. G.Lukács, Briefwechsel, p. 83; translation mine. ibid., p. 83; translation mine. ibid., p. 87, note 1; translation mine. ibid., p. 87; translation mine. ibid., p. 372; translation and emphasis mine. P.Por, ‘Lukács und sein Sonntagskreis: ein unbekanntes Kapitel aus der Geschichte des europäischen Denkens’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 53/54 (1984), p. 126; translation and emphasis mine. G.Von Lukács, ‘On poverty of spirit: A conversation and a letter (1912)’, Philosophical Forum, vol. 3, nos. 3/4 (1972), pp. 371–85. ibid., p. 378. ibid., pp. 378–9; emphasis mine. G.Lukács, Briefwechsel, p. 366. The reader will find a German translation of the questionnaire in the Briefwechsel, pp. 310–11. ibid., p. 318; translation and emphasis mine. ibid., p. 319; translation and emphasis mine. See G. (von) Lukács, Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Dramas (Neuwied-Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Georg Lukács Werke, Bd. 15, 1981), pp. 358ff. B.Brecht, Briefe. Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Günther Glaeser, vol. I, Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981); vol. II, Anmerkungen, 1981, pp. 795–1175. B.Brecht, Briefe: 1913–1956. Hrsg. u. kommentiert v. Günther Glaeser (Berlin-Weimar: Aufbau Verlag (Lizenzausgabe der Suhrkampverlag, Frankfurt am Main—Ausgabe für d. DDR u.d. anderen sozialistischen Staaten), 1983), vol. 1, Texte, vol. 2, Anmerkungen. (Source: Bibliography of Germany, 1983). B.Brecht, Briefe (1981), p. 928 (note 1 added to letter 156). ibid, p. 153. ibid., pp. 153–4; emphasis mine. The word underlined is stressed by Brecht.

• Suzette A.Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 288 pp., $45.00 (hardback), $15.95 (paperback) • Patrick McGee, Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce’s Ulysses (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 243 pp., $25.00 • R.B.Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 338 pp., $34.95 ROSEMARIE A.BATTAGLIA I have selected Suzette A.Henke’s, Patrick McGee’s, and R.B.Kershner’s books for this review article because poststructuralist, postmodernist critiques of Joyce’s texts appropriately place them in the rapidly growing body of modernist works being studied in light of the perspectives and insights gained by such investigations. Although Joyce’s works are of the high modernist period, they become central in postmodernist critique because of Joyce’s deconstructive tendencies in writing. All three authors are concerned with the language of Joyce, a field ripe for such inquiries, as well as the issue of the subject, and studies of desire are undertaken by Henke and McGee. Kershner’s endeavour is to appropriate Bakhtinian readings of Joyce’s texts, a most relevant effort because of the current abundant attention given to Bakhtin and the recuperation of his concepts and theories in postmodernist criticism. Although Henke’s attention to the play of desire in Joyce’s texts and McGee’s analysis of Joyce’s style through Lacanian theories of language are clearly evident as postmodernist critical readings, the rediscovery of Bakhtin in a later context and the use of his theories by Kershner with respect to Joyce’s texts and their relation to popular literature provide us with not only a compendium or source-book of the popular texts resonating in Joyce’s works but also an occasion for understanding Joyce’s major works in the context of the plurality of voices playing against the concepts, in Stephen Dedalus’s words in Portrait, of consonantia and integritas, or the totalized harmony of the literary text. Kershner’s effort fits in well with the strategies of postmodernist criticism because he indicates through the play of dialogism and heteroglossia Joyce’s undermining of closure and wholeness and his intentions in working against logocentric assurances in the literary text, in contrast to the claims of traditional criticism, which tried to coerce readings of Joyce’s texts as integrated and holistic. Henke’s theoretical design, which she designates as feminist/psychoana lytic, in her well written and highly insightful study of Joyce’s work, draws upon the formulations of Lacan and Kristeva and refers to Freud, Irigaray, Gallop, Chodorow, Deleuze and Guattari for a criticism of Dubliners, Portrait, Exiles, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. ‘Politics’ in the title, Henke explains, means ‘sexual politics’. Hers is a seminal work, leading to further consideration of the issue and vicissitudes of desire as it informs Joyce’s works. She suggests that Joyce has been read incorrectly as anti-feminist and corrects such readings by showing that Joyce wrote with an ‘anti-patriarchal bias’ which challenges phallocentric authority and logocentric discourse. Joyce is shown as subverting the law and name of the Father in carnivalesque voices, delighting in semiotexte and aesthetic jouissance, ‘defusing the patriarchal can(n)on’ (p. 11). It is apropos to

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mention here that Henke’s description of Joyce’s subversion of patriarchal, logocentric culture through heteroglossia or plurality of voices in the text is the main thesis of Kershner’s book, in which Joyce is shown to have contested logocentrism through the play of the heteroglossia of literary resonances from high and popular culture and the working of those voices at times as unconscious, disruptive presences in his texts. Henke mentions Hélène Cixous’s belief that non-phallogocentric ‘feminine’ writing challenges the political dominance of the law and word of the Father, and Henke assumes that a male author can successfully adopt and speak from a feminine subject position. Joyce’s remarkable rendering of the language of Molly Bloom and Anna Livia, and in a lesser way, of the language of Gertie MacDowell, testifies to that ability. It is Henke’s contention that Joyce shows human civilization in a dialectic between Logos and Eros, male and female positions, between symbolic discourse and semiotic process, which is defined by Kristeva as partaking of the pulsions and desires of the female body. With respect to language, Kershner sees Joyce’s texts as a play of the Bakhtinian theories of language, including dialogism (polyphony and heteroglossia), speech genre, and carnivalization as well as the intertextuality evident through the voices of high and popular culture pervading Joyce’s texts. The play of linguistic influences undermines the concept of the stability of an autotelic, self-referential, seamless text and the concomitant autonomous identity, persona, self, or characterization of Stephen Dedalus. Stephen’s ‘self’ is not clearly defined by Joyce and is seen by Kershner as comprised of many voices, inner as well as outer or cultural. The consciousness of Stephen, as well as of anyone, is comprised of the languages of the outer environment, which translate into linguistic influences and their effects, which Stephen describes as the ‘nets’ of nationality, language, and religion from which he must escape. I mention Stephen Dedalus and his need to escape here because the question of a stable ‘self’ or identity, of great urgency in current psychoanalytic theory, is particularly appropriate to consider in light of the characterization of a ‘self’ in fiction, particularly when the character represents a younger fictionalized ‘self’ in relation to an author writing at a later age, as Stephen is to Joyce, and who is tied to the issue of language. How language affects the formation of Stephen’s identity is described by Kershner; Stephen’s ‘self’ is comprised of inner and outer voices, is, in effect, linguistically formed. Lacan describes the unconscious as structured like a language and places the origin of the formation of the self at the mirrorstage and at the entrance into the order of the Symbolic, which is the entry into language. Henke also describes Stephen’s entry into language or the order of the Symbolic at the opening of Portrait. In this respect, Kershner’s intention is to show how popular literature helps comprise the fiction’s unconscious design and how, as language embodied in literature, it creates at both conscious and unconscious levels the identities of the characters in Joyce’s texts who act out the motifs of the fictions they read in the creation and re-creation of fictional selves. Stephen absorbs the outer languages of his world, including those of popular literature, and this osmosis results in the formation of his own identity at both conscious and unconscious levels. Kershner’s thesis in this respect is Lacanian, and Henke’s designation of Joyce’s deconstructive efforts in language in semiotexte and in his celebration of jouissance derives also from Lacan. Although Kershner’s work helps disrupt logocentric notions of Joyce’s texts as holistic and integrated in his portrayal of the linguistic play of voices from high and low culture, it is in Henke’s and McGee’s books that Joyce’s deconstructive efforts are most clearly indicated by their specification of desire as constitutive of Joyce’s intentions and style. In describing Dubliners, both Henke and Kershner speak of the failure of desire and the mediation of sexuality by power that inform the text. Henke sees the stories in this collection as the playing out of the ‘hemiplegia of the will’ that Joyce said characterized his countrymen. This hemiplegia or paralysis is shown as a metaphorical hysterical displacement of repressed desire. The repression does not give room to erotic fulfilment, and Henke describes the stories as the site of the enactment of Eros ‘on a stage of overt danger and covert pleasure, so that the model for heterosexual coupling becomes one of antagonism and conquest—

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a battle for power’ (p. 12). I would like to mention that the story ‘The Dead’ provides both Henke and Kershner with an example at the end of the collection of the fusion of the themes earlier present—sexuality, power, and death. In this respect, I should also like to mention that Gabriel Conroy’s failure to overcome the pathological cultural codes Kershner mentions and his motion toward passivity and death reveal his latent death-wish as a substratum of the earlier parts of the story. Kershner’s description of Gabriel’s wish to become a woman I see as the emptiness resulting from the over-inflated ego which has been deflated by Gretta’s admission of her former love for the now dead Michael Furey. The inflated consciousness of Gabriel, derived from pathological codes which are deconstructed by the three women in the story who transgress stereotypical expectations, is constructed over emptiness, the emptiness of death, which Gabriel openly acknowledges at the end. Gabriel’s ego and self-assertiveness are a defence against the swooning, powerless, feminine self Kershner describes and which Irish culture must repress at great cost. ‘The Dead’ is obviously a story of a power struggle within Gabriel’s consciousness, a struggle for power which covers over inner vulnerability and weakness, associated with the female by Kershner, and which escapes at the end in a vision of death. His masculine ego and sense of privileged control of Gretta have been destroyed and leave him with an emptiness evoking the sense of death at the end in a totalizing vision of snow all over Ireland, ‘upon all the living and the dead’. For this reason, I stated that Gabriel’s death-wish is implicitly and unconsciously present in the earlier part of the story, covered over by his need for self-assertion and egocentric control. Henke, in chapter 2, ‘Stephen Dedalus and Women’, states that Stephen’s perceptions of women dominate their characterization as ‘powerful emblems of the flesh—frightening reminders of sexual temptation’ and presents psychoanalytic theory describing Stephen’s development from the pre-Oedipal stage to the time of separation when leaving for Clongowes, where he will be initiated into the world of male camaraderie, where, according to his father, he should never ‘peach on a fellow’. Clearly shown here are Joyce’s own psychoanalytic tendencies in writing; Henke indicates that Joyce did read psychoanalytic books, citing Richard Ellmann’s mention of them in The Consciousness of Joyce as present in Joyce’s 1920 library. I should add that Joyce seems to be adumbrating a theory of psychological development that is similar to Freud’s by creating a character, Stephen, who embodies all the developmental stages elucidated by psychoanalytic theory. It is important to see the entrance of Stephen into the Symbolic order with the acquisition of language and a name and the separation from the ‘nice mother’, and Henke does justice here to the unconscious designs of the text. It bears mention here that Stephen, when leaving for Clongowes, is also at the stage of the passing of the Oedipal complex as described by Freud, so his separation is not only from the pre-Oedipal mother of an earlier stage but also from the Oedipal mother as object of sexual desire. He turns to identification with the father, enters the world of men at Clongowes, and relinquishes the object of his earlier desire. As Freud would describe, he enters the latency period of psychosexual development, after the passing of the Oedipal complex. Later at Clongowes, he regresses to memories of his mother at home when the miseries of the brutish world of schoolboys he has entered force him into reverie. But, as Henke points out later, Stephen never completely masters his original Oedipal feelings, transforming his desire for the ‘nice mother’ of his early years into fantasies of jewel-eyed harlots and enacting that transformed desire in visits to prostitutes, typifying Freud’s ‘Madonna-Whore’ syndrome. Stephen is unable in Portrait or in Ulysses to achieve a stable, gratifying relationship with an appropriate woman, such as Emma in Portrait. His desire in both novels moves from Mother to Whore to Catholic Virgin to Ghoul, ultimately ending when the apparition of his dead mother as ghoul taunts him with guilt in the Circe episode of Ulysses. At the end of Portrait, Stephen’s desire is transformed into an aesthetic longing in the scene on the beach when he gazes at the wading girl, for whom he feels no sexual desire but who awakens his artistic vocation. Stephen’s fantasies about women serve as a replacement for his frustrated ability to achieve a

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stable relationship with one woman; this inability seems to indicate his incomplete resolution of the Oedipal complex and his retention of traces of it, evident, as Henke points out, in his child-like need for the maternalized figure of the prostitute and his turn to the Catholic Madonna after his riotous orgies of sensuality. Henke concludes that Stephen is an adolescent, narcissistic misogynist. I conclude that it is in keeping with Stephen’s unresolved attachment to the mother that the transformations of his desire occur; the mother, who reserves her body for the father, refusing the son’s incestuous desire, becomes degraded as the figure of the Whore, whom Stephen can approach in lieu of an appropriate love object such as Emma and who completes the other half of the Madonna-Whore syndrome that inhabits him; the mother appears as the horrific ghoul from whom Stephen must flee in Circe. Stephen’s misogynism is then ultimately derived from his original Oedipal bond, transforming the ‘nice mother’ from his early years into a ghoul, showing the association of the desire for the mother with death, as Freud described; and his entrance into the Symbolic and patriarchal order, a world inhabited by men, introduces him to stages of development in which he can ‘forget’ the mother, identify with the father and become a man, only to be entrapped by the vestigial remains of his early attachment to her in his relations with women. In the Monte Cristo-Mercedes fantasy in Portrait, Stephen appropriates in imagination the figure of Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo, from that novel by Dumas père, as an enactment of the Count’s disdain for women (‘Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes,’ says Stephen-Dantes, in a gesture of refusal when offered them by Mercedes). Kershner specifies the intertextuality of The Count of Monte Cristo and Portrait as well as of other popular literature of Joyce’s time, such as Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, Eric, or Little by Little: A Tale of Roslyn School by Frederick Farrar, The Harrovians by Arnold Lunn, Jack Harkaway’s Journal for Boys, and Vice Versa by F.Anstey, the dramatic version of which is the play in which Joyce performed at Belvedere. Incidentally, Kershner’s book is rich, as I mentioned earlier, in many popular intertextual sources, some of which appear as obvious, for example The Count of Monte Cristo and Shelley’s fragment, and works which appear only as tangentially influential, such as the presence of the Byronic hero in the figure of Dantes and the romantic narrative present in Joyce’s style. Exiles, written by Joyce after Portrait and before Ulysses, is his only non-intertextual work, and Kershner explains this fact as caused by the genre of drama, a monologic form which, according to Bakhtin, cannot integrate a multiplicity of levels. However, Kershner describes several works whose influence can be felt in the play, such as Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, Filson Young’s The Sands of Pleasure, and Karen Michaelis’s The Dangerous Age: Letters and Fragments from a Woman’s Diary, as well as the major theoretical work on the marriage question in Joyce’s library, Charles Albert’s L’amour libre. We are all aware of Joyce’s debt to Ibsen, and there were in his library large collections of Shaw, Wilde, George Moore, as well as Madame Bovary and Balzac’s A Woman of Thirty. Henke, like Kershner, mentions Joyce’s statement that Exiles is ‘a rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher-Masoch’. The pawning of Bertha to Robert by Richard Rowan, Joyce’s ‘semiautobiographical’ writer-character, suggests not only Joyce’s ‘marriage game’ with Nora and Roberto Prezioso, the editor of Piccolo della Sera, who took an amorous interest in Nora, but also the Cosgrave affair. In her biography of Nora Joyce, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, Brenda Maddox suggests that there are vestiges of Vincent Cosgrave in Robert Hand. Like Henke, Maddox also states that there are parallels between Robert Hand and Roberto Prezioso, and that Joyce luxuriated in the suspicion of Nora’s infidelity. Maddox mentions that Joyce was not ignorant of troilism, in which a homosexual desire for someone is expressed in sharing or dreaming of sharing a partner, strong hints of which can be found in Exiles. Henke’s note that Joyce was plagued by doubt about his paternity of Giorgio and his questioning Nora about it provides an autobiographical scenario that may well apply to the tissue of ambiguities that Joyce weaves in Exiles about Bertha’s fidelity to Richard. It is difficult not to conjecture in this respect that

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Richard’s wound of doubt, the ‘restless living wounding doubt’ by means of which he wants to desire Bertha, ‘not in the darkness of belief’, reflects Joyce’s own feelings about Nora’s supposed infidelity. Rowan’s wound of doubt is a spur to his artistic creativity, much as Joyce artistically agonized in a labyrinth of ambiguity and doubt over Nora through the staging of the marriage game with Prezioso, over the possibility of the Cosgrave affair, and over his paternity of Giorgio, all of which motifs appear in the play and which may have spurred Joyce to write Ulysses. Maddox states that the Joyces had forgone sexual intercourse during the writing of Ulysses, and sexual abstinence as well as Joyce’s agonies over Nora’s fidelity and sexuality may have also provided an incentive to creativity. At any rate, the play of ambiguity over Bertha’s fidelity or infidelity, the pawning of her by Richard onto Robert and the guesswork regarding Robert’s and Bertha’s night of love, as well as the staging by Bloom of Molly’s adultery with Boylan and the jealousy evoked in Gabriel Conroy by Gretta’s memory of Michael Furey in ‘The Dead’—all seem to resonate with Joyce’s tormented feelings about Nora’s conjectured infidelity and the issue of her sexuality in real life. Joyce, an artist like Richard, must have needed his mind penetrated by jealousy, Henke richly implies when she writes, ‘The writer’s mind recoils from emotional pain and continually rehearses the traumatic event until trauma has been mastered in the realm of fabulation’ (p. 104). To move to Ulysses, it is McGee’s contention that Leopold Bloom is not the unitary centre of the novel, that he is dispersed in the text through language, symbols, letters, and thoughts. Such dispersal shows Joyce’s deliberate rupture with traditional characterizations, admitting the unconscious into the text. McGee conducts a dialogue with Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, and Marxism in taking us through the novel. It is in chapter 2 of his book that McGee’s thoughts coalesce with Henke’s, in that Stephen, created by Joyce as a desiring subject, is seen as writing against the law of the Father in a discourse which McGee describes as arising from lack in his construction of the Hamlet-Shakespeare theory in the Scylla and Charybdis episode. Here Stephen is described as acting through speech, through telling a story and constructing a theory; in McGee’s words, ‘He transforms the discourse of history (i.e. the textual trace of what we call the ‘real’ Shakespeare) into the performative utterance that stands out as the “actuality of the possible” in Stephen as subject’ (p. 61). Stephen becomes disseminated in his discourse, becomes a ‘subject in process’ in that he restructures the narrative about Shakespeare that constitutes his subjectivity. Stephen’s dialogue, unlike Hamlet’s (which represents dejection), results in abjection, ‘his being-thrownaway-from-and-outside-of-the-self into the symbolic’ (p. 61). The Scylla and Charybdis episode is seen in traditional Joycean criticism as the opposition of Plato to Aristotle. By McGee, the episode is seen as the opposition between subject and object, the Scylla and Charybdis of Western discourse with a writing ‘whose law and authority remain unnameable’ (p. 68). I would add that that law and authority remain unnameable because they subvert the law and name of the Father present in patriarchal discursive structures and are hence impermissible. Stephen’s writing strikes, in effect, against the Logos. The duality between subject and object, the Cartesian conundrum or Gordian knot which lacanisme and postmodernism try to untie, can be seen in Stephen’s efforts to restore the unconscious as a motivation in discourse, for example in the Shakespeare discussion, which dissolves the Cartesian separation between consciousness and being and the problematics of subject versus object. Stephen’s desire, as seen by McGee in Scylla and Charybdis, is to reconstitute himself as subject writing against the law of the Father, and the vicissitudes and transformations of Bloom’s desires form the thematic centre of the Circe episode of Ulysses, in which, as Henke writes, sex roles are tested on the stage of language. She writes, ‘Phallocentric authority passes from male to female in a transvestite drama that parodies the psychosexual scripts that dominate 1904 Dublin’ (p. 110). Like McGee who describes Bloom’s dispersal in signs through the text of the novel, Henke suggests that Circe offers a plurality of signs confirming Bloom’s psychological androgyny. Bloom is described as projecting his psychic need for

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punishment onto a powerful imago of a manly woman, Bella/ Bello, and his impotence as well as his loss of father and son are defined in terms of phallic lack. Bakhtin’s carnival comes into play in Joyce’s dialogic imagination, and various characters appear in transvestite and transsexual roles. As Henke describes the artist’s attempt at control in Exiles, Bloom, who, incidentally, is described in Ulysses as having a ‘bit of the artist’ about him, gains artistic control over emotional traumas (the sexual encounter of Molly and Boylan) by re-creating the dread event in exaggerated detail through perverse fantasy. Accordingly, Henke notes that in the Fort/Da episode in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud writes that there is an effort at mastery on the child’s part, becoming active rather than passive in the mother’s absence, mastering the trauma of separation by re-enactment with the spool and string. Freud adds that adult artistic play and artistic imitation do not spare audiences any painful experience yet are felt as enjoyable. (In this respect, I would mention that Joyce in an effort at mastery may have also re-enacted the traumas inflicted on him, among others his separation from Nora, the aforementioned jealousy over her supposed infidelity, and the eroticization of his writing in Ulysses, to replace the forgone sexual intercourse with his wife. Artistic transformations in the case of Joyce become an intriguing puzzle which further effort can decipher.) The Circean Walpurgisnacht enables Bloom to emerge as ‘more integrated and authoritative’, as Henke concludes, becoming his old self as caretaker after the psychological transformation resembling less a Freudian psychoanalysis than a Deleuzian schizoanalysis. The third main character in Ulysses, Molly Bloom, is described by Henke as the Lacanian ‘woman creature’ of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Her soliloquy is characterized as flowing from a streamof-consciousness that draws freely on those pre-verbal, pre-discursive dimensions of language described by Julia Kristeva as semiotic, a threatening and subversive discourse associated with pre-Oedipal attachment to the body, voice, and pulsions of an imaginary maternal figure. Henke writes that her monologue ‘offers a linguisitic paradigm of écriture feminine as jouissance is deferred by the free play of a woman character’s imagination over the elusive terrain of sexual difference’ (p. 127). Molly’s narcissistic tendencies derive from the trauma of maternal abjection; she was deserted at an early age by her mother, Lunita Laredo, and is described by Henke as exhibiting many of the debilitating consequences of long-term mother-absence. ‘Cut off from the attachment to her “moon mother” Lunita, Molly constructs a myth of origins that imagines the plenitude of feminine nurture as an always-already absent object of desire’ (p. 129). Molly seeks the veiled phallus of the father as a replacement for the loss of satisfaction in fantasy of an all-powerful phallic mother: as Luce Irigaray explains, she experiences an exmatriation from her economy of desire; and like Persephone crying for her lost mother, Demeter, transfers her desire to the father/lover who prohibits the expression of it; in short, she wants to assimilate the phallic presence as a substitute for the breast. Her narcissistic pose of vanity and insouciance covers over her wounded loss of the inconstant phallic mother, whom she internalizes and for whom she plays the role of ‘genital proxy’. Henke cites Irigaray, who writes in Speculum of the Other Woman, ‘The girl’s only way to redeem her personal value, and value in general, would be to seduce the father, and persuade him to express, if not admit, some interest in her.’ For satisfaction of the needs of her own being, Molly must then seduce a chain of father surrogates, and not only Major Brian Cooper Tweedy. Molly finds in Bloom the ‘new womanly man’ who can compensate for her earlier desertion by the mother. As Leopold plays the role of nurturant mother, Boylan plays the role of authoritative father. Molly thus is inscribed by Joyce into an Oedipal triad, and Molly vainly seeks in Boylan a father-substitute. After the sexual encounter with Boylan, Molly is disappointed because it was sexuality without tenderness or sentiment. Molly with Boylan repeats the earlier drama of maternal desertion and Henke contends that she thus sees herself as specular object rather than as an experiencing subject.

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McGee mentions that Joyce described the Penelope episode as the clou of the novel. The English translation of the French word clou is ‘nail’, ‘spike’, or ‘stud’, but it also carries the signification of the point of greatest interest, the chief attraction, or the central idea. Like Henke, McGee characterizes Molly’s language as semiotic, following Kristeva, or the language of jouissance, of the body, instincts, pleasure, and of the unconscious. When McGee states that Molly’s language is ‘non-representational’, does he mean that it is the language of the unconscious, deconstructing logocentric representation? An interesting section is McGee’s description of Joyce’s dream of Molly as ‘La Duse’, the famous operatic star. In the dream, Molly throws the figure of a coffin twice, once in the form of a child’s coffin at the figure of Bloom, and once as a snuffbox in the form of a coffin at Joyce. The snuffbox, as Joyce explains, was like the one Joyce kept at Clongowes Wood College, given to him by his godfather, Philip McCann. In throwing the coffin in the dream, Molly says that she is ‘done with’ both Bloom and Joyce. In the dream, Molly is given the dignity of La Duse, which she does not have in Ulysses; she wears black, associated with mourning. It appears to me that in the dream Molly is throwing away, leaving behind, the burden of death. Is she throwing away the burden of the death of Rudy? In her monologue she says she no longer wishes to think of that event, so such an interpretation could be likely. Like Henke, McGee describes Joyce as writing from the feminine subject position in Penelope: ‘The only desire speaking in “Penelope” is Joyce’s masquerading as female. This does not mean that Joyce’s desire is essentially male but that sexuality is essentially a masquerade’ (p. 175). McGee concludes that Joyce performs a deconstruction of style in conjunction with the dismantling of the autonomous subject in his writing, which reveals the ‘truth’ of style as ideology, as a symptom or imaginary resolution of over-determined historical contradictions. He describes Ulysses as giving form to the abject horror of history’s nightmare: it illustrates Adorno’s assertion in his Aesthetic Theory that ‘The unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form.’ He states that Ulysses has a ‘political unconscious’, that it responds to the failure of Joyce’s father, the early death of his mother, and the general breakdown of the Irish family, to his ambivalent passion for the language and literature of his conqueror and his hatred of English imperialism in general, to his equally ambivalent refusal of the Catholic Church, the Irish patriarchy, and the Irish nationalist movement, to an antagonism toward Western capitalism. Joyce’s personal nightmare is described as circumscribed by a larger, collective nightmare, the symbolic nightmare of historical beings whose overt intentions can never fully account for what they have done or said. McGee further situates Ulysses in relation to Fredric Jameson’s three semantic horizons of the process of interpretation: the political, the social, and the historical. In the political horizon, the book is a resolution to Joyce’s family romance. The social horizon extends to the relation of the text to the broader historical dialogue between antagonistic classes. In the historical horizon, the remarkable complexity of form of Ulysses emits an equally complicated ideological message. The mythical structures and Homeric narrative provide a background in which hegemonic patriarchal law can be traced to the present. McGee claims that Joyce’s writing could not refuse politics, despite the fact that he disclaimed an interest in politics. His writing, according to McGee, teaches us that no style is innocent; every style occupies political space and contains political content; the politics Joyce disowns comes to signify through repression. Henke is the only writer in this group who discusses Finnegans Wake in the context of postmodernist critique. A postmodernist criticism of the Wake I believe would require a book-length study of its own. Henke sets against HCE’s impotent, phallocentric rigidity the periodic rhythms of a capacious unconscious and the flow of female libidinal desire captured by Anna Livia, and Joyce is described as setting up a repressive Oedipal triangle in order to mock, destroy, and obliterate it in the Wake as he did in Ulysses. In her final chapter, ‘Ricorso’, Henke describes Joyce’s écriture feminine in the Wake as an attempt to write

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the body and incorporate into discourse those subversive, semiotic rhythms Kristeva has allied with the body, voice, and pulsions of pre-Oedipal contact between infant and mother. This writing subverts the law of the Father by subverting the phallocentric discourse of the master narrative. Henke writes that Anna adopts a ‘femiline’ river-speech that writes itself against the stony language of male symbolic discourse. Like écriture féminine, Joyce’s writing annuls classical notions of identity and origin, of metaphysical authority and textual closure. Molly’s and Anna’s language is seen by Henke as arising from the linguistic unconscious of the text itself, and the female story that emerges from Joyce’s master narrative gradually deconstructs the linguistic codes essential for the logocentric and phallocentric discourse not only of ‘dear dirty Dublin’ but of Western patriarchal culture. Henke’s delightful conclusion describes the final word of the Wake, ‘the’, as reaching out, futilely, for a compatible term to introduce. She writes, ‘The Logos, sought, eludes the desiring speaker eager to sustain the salutary metaphysical presence of verbal affirmation’ (p. 212), and thus the text refuses closure as linguistic longing remains unsatisfied. Joyce’s texts lend themselves well to postmodernist critique such as that given by the three books reviewed in this article because Joyce’s deconstructive energies in writing show the symbiosis between high modernism and postmodern tendencies in the practice of literature, and postmodernism’s critical effort is not only to interrogate former conceptual assumptions about literature but to create the context of a discourse in which further probing of the theoretical grounds of all discourses, literary and other, can be carried out. Morehead State University

• Benjamin Bennett, Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Theaters of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 391 pp., £40.00 DAVID DARBY

The preface to Bennett’s monograph Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Theaters of Consciousness1 points ahead to the most critical challenge facing both the author and reader of this text. Bennett describes his argument as ‘proceeding from the interpretation of a relatively small number of texts’ (p. xi) to the proposal of ‘as complete and balanced a picture of Hofmannsthal’s career as the limits of my [i.e. Bennett’s] interest and competence permit’ (p. xiii). One is immediately invited to ask questions about the degree to which the selectiveness of Bennett’s activity as an interpretative critic is compatible with the—albeit qualified— comprehensiveness of his project as a scholar of Hofmannsthal’s entire writing career. It appears, however, that the tension between the book’s identity as a thematically unified collection of studies of specific texts and its claims of totality, once raised in the preface, is subsequently assumed by the author to be a fairly unproblematic aspect of his stated methodology. A reader’s alertness is prompted also by the acknowledgement in the front-matter that fully ten of the book’s eighteen chapters contain revised versions of previously published articles. The almost exact correspondence of the titles of these chapters to those of the listed articles suggests not only a laudable scholarly honesty on Bennett’s part (scarcely ubiquitous in the world of academic publishing) but also the ability of these parts of the book to stand independently of its whole as essays on single texts or on small groups of texts. Perhaps the most curious aspect of this matter is that all of these articles appeared between 1975 and 1977, leaving a substantial interval before the appearance of this book. What is striking in this context is that the previously published chapters are exclusively concerned with highly detailed textual exegesis (bearing witness to an exemplary critical dexterity), while the new chapters are predominantly occupied with theoretical concerns, bridgings and summations of Bennett’s overall thesis. This difference in focus explains why, of the ten chapters containing previously published material, only one has found a place in the final third of Bennett’s book, and that one chapter reads as something of a formal and stylistic anomaly at so late a stage in the book where Bennett, having traced his line through most of Hofmannsthal’s career, devotes his efforts largely to the retrospective interconnection of the parts of his ambitious project. My point here is not primarily to question the process or chronology of the composition of Bennett’s book, but rather to ask whether the book is in effect a convincingly unified text or simply an impressive collection of interrelated analytical-critical studies of individual writings by Hofmannsthal. Even if one soon realizes that this book has much of interest to say about a far greater number of Hofmannsthal’s writings

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than the preface might lead the reader to expect, the question is not easily settled. The tension still remains between, on the one hand, the intensely intricate analysis to which Bennett subjects those texts on which he concentrates and, on the other, the broad sweep of the overall project of this book. Both aspects invite a linear reading: the former on account of the potential autonomy of many chapters, the latter on account of chronologically organized argument. Bennett’s analysis of lyric texts, witnessed in the earliest chapters of the book’s Part I (‘Principles of lyric and drama’), is so effective that the broadening of perspective as the book proceeds might be perceived as a dilution of the method. The inclusion of the microscopic readings of the poems at the beginning of the book is however by no means inappropriately out of scale with Bennett’s larger project. For one thing, the sheer logistics of writing about the substantially longer texts with which Bennett subsequently concerns himself render such comprehensiveness of interpretative detail untenable. Beyond that, these studies serve two purposes extremely well which could not be so well served in sections dealing with more extended texts. Firstly, Bennett provides a precise demonstration of some pivotal interpretative categories—of the social and the poetic, of consciousness and self-consciousness, and of intellectual detachment and its transcendence —which will be essential to his later focus and which could not have been so neatly and clearly introduced in more general terms. Secondly, by presenting these interdependent categories as central themes—albeit in more or less embryonic form—of some of Hofmannsthal’s relatively early writings, Bennett succeeds in establishing the credibility of his central thesis that the progress of his subject’s whole writing career, while marked by frequent developmental crises, is characterized by ‘an extraordinary, if deeply problematic cohesion’ (p. xi). Thus this extremely close reading—focusing on what Bennett sees as Hofmannsthal’s essentially dramatic idea of the mimetic communicability of experience—of the ‘Terzinen I-IV’, ‘Ein Traum von großer Magie’, ‘Die Beiden’ and ‘Reiselied’ becomes an intrinsic and necessary part of Bennett’s much broader project. Following the chapters concentrating on these poems, Bennett moves analeptically to a reading of Der Tor und der Tod. This uncharacteristic deviation from the chronological method has in itself significance for Bennett’s thesis. He exploits it to demonstrate the non-existence of a turning-point in Hofmannsthal’s development from the lyric to the dramatic, from the metaphysical to the mimetic. This is convincingly achieved by his emphasizing the logical and thematic links between this earliest of Hofmannsthal’s major works and what is usually perceived as a pivotal crisis in the author’s career, the Chandos letter. As a consequence, Bennett’s book begins here to reveal itself, in its constitution, to be more than just the sum of its often brilliantly persuasive parts. In its analysis of Der Tor und der Tod, Bennett’s study moves logically to the fruitful confusion of the poetic and the dramatic by arguing for the analogy between, on the one hand, Claudio’s situation and hallucination, and on the other, the situation and theatrical hallucination of the audience. What commences as a fascinating reading of the play evolves, as Bennett draws together these two ontologically distinct zones, into an equally fascinating reckoning with central problems of Hofmannsthal’s poetics, presenting the staging of the play as an enactment of both metaphysical and social (i.e. theatrical) ‘self-consciousness as a problem’ (p. 71). This first major section of Bennett’s study concludes by pointing ahead to Hofmannsthal’s perceived developmental crisis of 1897 and to the movement in the direction of the mimetic as seen in the more plotheavy pieces of the collection Theater in Versen. Bennett is here at pains to emphasize that this change in direction does not represent a repudiation of earlier work but rather a ‘natural outgrowth’ (p. 91). Nevertheless, one notices a further unevenness in the degree of detail with which Bennett is prepared to approach the Theater in Versen compared to that applied to Der Tor und der Tod and especially some of the lyric pieces. Such unevenness is clearly necessary in a project like Bennett’s, though it is perhaps uncomfortable here that what Bennett acknowledges to be a developmental crisis should be discussed in

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relatively cursory terms in a bridging chapter at the end of a major section. The potentially problematic crisis is appropriated into Bennett’s thesis at best adequately, but it is clearly of less interest to him than other parts of Hofmannsthal’s career. It is of no surprise to note that this is one of the two chapters in Part I of Bennett’s study which had not appeared previously in article form. Part II (‘Language and society’) concentrates on the creative crisis represented by the Chandos letter and on Hofmannsthal’s play Der Schwierige. As Bennett returns to the intricate interpretative analysis of these texts, one observes that this section of the book consists, with just one exception (chapter 12, the last in Part II), of chapters corresponding to Bennett’s previously published articles. That this is the strongest and most clearly unified section of the book is due not simply to the fact that the central focus is limited to a very small number of very important texts about which Bennett has much of great interest and importance to say. It is here that he most harmoniously and productively combines close reading with a diachronic examination of an especially crucial phase of Hofmannsthal’s writing career. This is therefore the centre of Bennett’s work in more ways than one, and he is clearly at his most confident, convincing and effective in these chapters. It is hardly irrelevant that Bennett is dealing with the formulation, which he argues Hofmannsthal undertakes deliberately as a therapeutic strategy, of a pivotal creative crisis and with a work which he discusses as Hofmannsthal’s resolution of that crisis. The subject itself—Hofmannsthal’s intellectual development toward specifically dramatic writing, aiming at a new relationship between collective and individual consciousness—is in this middle phase, as perceived in Bennett’s scheme of things, at its most dynamic. Bennett clearly rises to the occasion here, as he comes to grips with the essential paradoxes of two of Hofmannsthal’s most challenging texts. He first outlines the philosophical problem contained in the Chandos letter: that the ultimate inward order of being can be known by anyone, but is not expressible or usable, that there is no medium of communication between those who know the truth and those who need to know it, that ‘truth and justice are realizable, but lead nowhere when realized, for the intellect collapses under their weight’ (p. 114). This then serves as an interpretative centre from which connections are made both back to earlier sections on the lyric and forward to those dealing with the tragedies: Elektra, Das gerettete Venedig, Ödipus und die Sphinx and the 1925 version of Der Turm. The strength of the chapters outlining Bennett’s treatment of the Chandos letter (and of Hofmannsthal’s antithetical response provided in ‘Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten’) lies to a great extent in the productive union, achieved nowhere else in the progression of our author’s argument with the same degree of success, of the book’s two main projects: on the one hand, detailed interpretative criticism; on the other, the overarching demonstration of the complex and self-problematizing unity of Hofmannsthal’s poetic-intellectual development. Equally effective in Part II are Bennett’s chapters treating what is perhaps Hofmannsthal’s most subtle and intriguing play, Der Schwierige. Concentrating attention on a few specific scenes, their discussion of this ‘comedy at the brink of the abyss’ (pp. 167 and 168) concentrates on the presence in this conversational drama of Viennese society of a tragic situation precisely analogous to that outlined in the Chandos letter. Where this phase of Bennett’s argument succeeds especially well is in the incorporation of the point of view that this play does not represent a fully satisfactory resolution of Chandos’s impasse. Rather, he argues, it serves further to develop in terms of a recognizable milieu the fundamental problem of the impossibility of bridging the chasm between the social and the intellectual. Consciously echoing his earlier commentary on ‘Die Beiden’, Bennett sees in the crucial scene of Hans Karl’s return (Der Schwierige, III, 3) Hans Karl’s and Helene’s putting together ‘out of sheer language, in defiance of “reality”, a pair of masks or philosophically symbolic rôles that are more genuine than the selves they had been before, if not as “real”’ (p. 183). While communication is achieved by the failure to communicate, ‘indeed by [the lovers’] demolishing the whole structure of presupposition, the whole idea of language as reference to a preexisting reality’ (p. 183), Bennett emphasizes that its achievement is always fragile. He continues: ‘Constantly

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present behind the forms of this conversation, and so unmasking them as mere forms, is the specter of reality or fact as a danger…. [O]nly the suppression of this reality enables the chaos of chance to be transmuted into a higher necessity’ (p. 183). Bennett’s minutely concentrated treatment of Der Schwierige represents, as I have already suggested, perhaps the outstanding interpretative achievement of The Theaters of Consciousness. These chapters, however, also represent the flawlessly integrated centre in the depiction of the unified development of Hofmannsthal as formulated in Bennett’s preface. It is here, in this pivotal, analytical study of a drama which is seen to be ‘at once wholly lyrical and wholly mimetic in mode’ (p. 189), that Bennett’s mutually exclusive categories of the social and the poetic are demonstrated to have achieved a dynamic, paradoxical and by no means indefinitely tenable synthesis. The final chapter of Part II—chapter 12, to which I made allusion earlier as the only chapter not obviously based on a previously published article—attempts in large part to summarize the interpretations of the Chandos letter and of Der Schwierige and to place them even more firmly within Bennett’s overall scheme. In doing so it tends both to emphasize points that have already been made quite effectively in the context of Bennett’s preceding discussion of these texts and to fall into a kind of self-made trap. It takes as its subject the paradoxes and dialectically productive oppositions which cluster at the core of Bennett’s highly persuasive reading of the subtleties of Hofmannsthal’s writings. Among these, the tension between individual, poetic discourse and social, transactable language is close to central. But what Bennett attempts to do is to explicate (however subtly) and to draw logical conclusions from—in effect, to socialize—the set of paradoxes which can perhaps only be articulated in essentially poetic terms. The danger he encounters is exactly that which one faces when trying to paraphrase poetry: that one denies exactly that which identifies a text as poetic. That this danger is present within any interpretative project is obvious, as is the fact that it is especially acute in an extended study of an author such as Hofmannsthal whose writings are so extraordinarily and subtly complex. It is, nevertheless, to the considerable credit of this book that this danger is contained so well in the first five chapters of its most challenging section, in which Bennett’s elegant reading elucidates the texts and stimulates the reader without compromising the essentially poetic nature of its subject. It is no coincidence that the point at which the indistinct line between sympathetic reading and schematic formulation is crossed is also that at which Bennett’s book departs from previously published material. If Part II of this book is constituted predominantly of such previously published material, the reverse is true of Part III (‘Culture and collapse’) in which five of the six chapters are new. This last third of Bennett’s book claims immediately to be occupied with ‘loose ends’ (p. 233), and covers a vast amount of ground with an attitude quite different from that which characterizes the carefully argued readings offered in most of Part II. It speeds the reader through Andreas, Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Frau ohne Schatten, makes a brief return to Der Schwierige, and completes the tour with retrospective reference to Der Tor und der Tod, before hastening on with comparative breathlessness toward Das Salzburger Große Welttheater and Der Turm. The enterprise here, in contrast to Part II, is primarily schematic: the contextualization of a group of works within the bounds of Bennett’s overriding thesis under Hofmannsthal’s rubric of the ‘allomatic’. (Bennett offers a careful assessment of Hofmannsthal’s adoption and usage of the term (pp. 253–5).) Of course, this in itself does not necessarily imply a criticism; what is disturbing, though, is the unevenness which manifests itself in the radical and not always convincingly effected transitions between the essential projects and rhythms of the various phases of Bennett’s work. Like Parts I and II, this last major section of Bennett’s book is not exempt from such conspicuous imbalances. Chapter 15, concentrating on the figure of Vorwitz in Großes Welttheater, and reprinted from an essay first published in 1975, stands out for its reversion to detailed textual analysis. Here, while not neglecting to describe the pertinent aspects of the relationship of this text to those discussed earlier, in

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particular to Die Frau ohne Schatten and Der Tor und der Tod, Bennett’s formidable skills as a textual scholar are displayed both more effectively and more satisfyingly—with respect to the intricacy, subtlety and perpetual self-questioning of Hofmannsthal’s thought—than in any of the other chapters of Part III. To illustrate the contrast it is necessary to look only as far as the following chapter, also concerned with the Großes Welttheater but now explicitly from the point of view of its place in Hofmannsthal’s poetic and intellectual development. There Bennett is able to state surprisingly unproblematically (albeit quoted here out of context) that Jedermann, Ariadne auf Naxos, and the Großes Welttheater are ‘more or less rewritings of Der Tor und der Tod’ (p. 292). The development of Hofmannsthal’s theatre of consciousness reaches its completion, according to Bennett’s thesis, in the 1925 version of Der Turm, where a synthesis of the poetic and the social is finally achieved, where ‘[i]ntellect is commitment, and the imagined obligation of the intellectual either to sacrifice his speculation or to detach himself from society vanishes’ (p. 325). If Bennett’s stated aim in Part III is the tying up of loose ends, his certainty of the success of his own synthetic, schematic project is indicated in his assessment of this version of Der Turm as ‘not only a closing of the circle, but a retracing of the circle, a transfiguration of Hofmannsthal’s development’ (p. 318). The somewhat cursory repudiation of the 1927 version of Der Turm, which Bennett denigrates as ‘a piece of conservative intellectual propaganda’ (p. 338) rewritten largely under the sinister misguidance of Max Reinhardt, may not in itself significantly threaten the book’s overarching thesis. Nevertheless, Bennett’s closing of Part III of his book—so concerned as it is with the incorporation of the products of Hofmannsthal’s entire writing career—with his first dismissal of an unassimilable text, strikes an unexpectedly discordant note. (Der Unbestechliche too is passed over hastily as ‘thoroughly confused’ (p. 348)) Despite his obvious dislike for the later version of Der Turm, Bennett makes some attempt in his conclusion to connect it logically to the earlier version, and so implicitly to define it as a part—however misguided and regrettable in his own view—of the whole. But this inclusion is uncertain: the previously concentric whole has now suddenly split into two distinct parts, one produced by ‘one Hofmannsthal’, one produced by ‘the other’ (p. 348). While it would perhaps be unfair to exaggerate the importance of this problem in relation to Bennett’s project as a whole, it is symptomatic of a conflict in the text which remains finally unresolved. If Bennett gives priority to his schematic enterprise, he can only do so at the expense of the integrity of his close textual analysis; on the other hand, if justice is to be done to the interpretation of every single text touched, the proposed comprehensiveness of the larger project is sooner or later compromised. The unevenness which characterizes the structure of this book results directly from this unresolved conflict, as does the impasse encountered in the discussion of Der Turm. Thus, even though Bennett’s book is worthy of qualified endorsement on account both of its remarkable interpretative insight and of its bold approach to a formidably complex body of writing, it ultimately fails to meet the challenge indicated in its own preface: a challenge which reveals itself to be considerably more problematic than Bennett, as his argument proceeds, appears willing to admit. Laurentian University NOTE 1 The hard cover carries the subtitle ‘The Theatres of Consciousness’; however, the title-page and the body of the text follow American orthographical conventions.

• Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodern British and American Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), vi+216 pp., £9.95 (paperback) • Jon Stratton, Writing Sites: A Genealogy of the Postmodern World (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), viii+339 pp., £42.50 (hardback) • Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), xii+256 pp., £10.95 (paperback) STEVEN CONNOR One might hazard the proposition that there are currently and habitually two modes of postmodern theory. The first takes the postmodern as a condition, a set of symptoms, a field of objects. It determines aetiology, proposes diagnosis and, sometimes, offers treatment and cure for the condition. Such criticism maintains a cool but concerned bedside manner, never allowing its sympathy for the patient to interfere with its understanding of the ailment. Of course, there are distinct modes of diagnosis and treatment—those opponents of postmodernism, for example, who would wish to excoriate the disease, as opposed to the mild apologists of postmodernism who see therapeutic value in allowing the condition to run its course. Because it speaks of the postmodern condition from outside rather than from within it, maintaining a professional composure in the face of its fitful fevering, this mode of theory could be called ‘theory-of-the-postmodern’. Included in this expanding category would therefore be polemics against postmodernism such as Christopher Norris’s What’s Wrong with Postmodernism or Uncritical Theory, handy bluffers’ guides to postmodernism, such as Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture or Margaret Rose’s The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial, epidemiological critiques such as David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, and more or less sympathetic taxonomies and surveys of postmodern effects in a number of different particular cultural areas.1 Marguerite Alexander’s investigation of what the subtitle of her Flights From Realism calls ‘themes and strategies in postmodernist British and American fiction’ belongs clearly to this category. But there is another mode of postmodern theory. This mode of writing has a commitment to an agenda rather than merely an interest in a condition. Such writing aims to give voice to rather than merely to speak of the postmodern, to evidence it rather than gathering evidence of it. Levelling Habermas’s ‘genre distinction’ between theory and fiction, this kind of postmodern theory deliberately courts contamination by what it treats, seeming to say to the critic of the first kind, ‘Physician, infect thyself’. Postmodern theory of this kind is not theory of the postmodern, but theory as the postmodern. Early examples that one might point to of this kind of theory would include Jean-François Lyotard’s Economie libidinale, Derrida’s Glas and much of Barthes’s later writing.2 More recent examples, that hover between distance and disease, would include Tom Docherty’s After Theory3 and the two other books here under review, Greg Ulmer’s Teletheory and Jon Stratton’s Writing Sites. Marguerite Alexander’s Flights From Realism aims to be what it exactly and unexcessively is—a clear and helpful exploration of a number of recent novels in the light of some theories of the postmodern. No

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new theory of postmodernism is offered here, nor is there any sense of pressure to organize and legislate the field of postmodern theory. Alexander is content to graze among the critical options which a decade or so of speculation and criticism have made available (and you would think from this book that everything in the field was sweet consensus and polite reciprocity) and then to run these options past an interesting, if fairly predictable group of novels. One of the problems with the book is finding anything to disagree with, so modest and reasonable is its manner of proceeding, so exactly coextensive its reach and its grasp. The argument, if anything so pushy could be imputed to it, would be that postmodernism in fiction has got something or other to do with ‘anti-realism’, or at least the dissatisfaction with what Alexander calls ‘naïve realism’. But the book does not seem inclined to elaborate this link between anti-realism and postmodernism into anything stronger than a sort of hunch or background assumption. Were it anything stronger, it might be more embarrassed by the discovery in its opening chapter that most of modernism is also anti-realist. But as it is, despite the concerns seemingly signalled in its title, (‘The word and the world’), the opening chapter keeps a discreet distance from all the theoretical agonizing about language, writing and representation of recent decades and instead strolls gently around the postmodern garden, stringing together a posy of idées reçues. Among them are the following: the relations between author and reader in postmodernist fiction are treacherous and unreliable; the rejection of ‘naïve realism’ is associated with an increased sensitivity to language; postmodernist fiction tends to be self-referential; alienation, personal despair and disintegration are recurring themes in postmodernist writing; the close relation of form and content forces the reader to experience in postmodernist fiction what s/he is merely told about at one remove in realist fiction; postmodernist fiction is fascinated by the idea of apocalypse; postmodernist fiction is interested in various forms of the fantastic; postmodernist fiction offers metafictional explorations of its own condition and possibilities; some postmodernist fiction draws on the conscious subversiveness of poststructuralist theory. Now, none of these are ideas that one would want to say are impossible of exemplification, and accordingly Alexander is able, in a steady, unexceptionable way, to exemplify them in the readings that follow. But there equally seems to be no particularly pressing reason for isolating or associating these alleged themes and strategies of postmodernist fiction, rather than others. As a survey, the book lacks comprehensiveness and ambition; as an analysis of particular texts, it lacks the bite of specificity. The first three chapters are centred on a number of mostly ‘late modernist’ novels—though, characteristically, no definition is offered of what late modernism might be in literature, nor is there any attempt to relate the term to its usage in other areas such as architectural theory. These texts are grouped together according to their interest in language and language games (Joyce’s Portrait, Beckett’s Murphy, O’Brien’s At Swim-TwoBirds), in death and the extremities of consciousness (Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Golding’s Pincher Martin, Beckett’s trilogy) and in sexual desire (Nabokov’s Lolita, Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet). The discussions of the texts are lucid and rational, if never exactly electrifying, and, here again, what the book contracts to do, it does with a relaxed assurance and facility. But no attempt is made to show chronological or stylistic development through these texts, nor is Alexander very concerned to generate ideas out of the abrasion of one text upon another. The second part of the book offers five more groups of novels, organized according to the following topics: Breakdown, Society, History, War and The Games People Play. Of these, I think that the most coherent is the chapter on history and the postmodernist novel, which has some very intelligent commentary on Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman, Doctorow’s Ragtime and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Alexander here offers some pointed and precise discussion of the ways in which the general awareness of the unreliability of all narratives affects the work of writers concerned to explore the connections between myth, nation and personal identity. The concluding chapter on the various forms of self-conscious and metafictional games played in Fowles’s Magus, Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, Spark’s Not to Disturb,

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Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Auster’s New York Trilogy is also clear and interesting—if at times also numbed by statements of the self-announcing: ‘The New York Trilogy’, we are told, ‘shares with Pale Fire a foregrounding of the text, and its power to create its own reality, which in turn confuses the reader’s certainty about everyday reality’ (p. 190). In the other chapters the reasons for grouping the novels together seem more arbitrary. It is only in a very spongy sort of way, for example, that Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Lodge’s Small World can be said to share a concern with the question of ‘society’, or even, as Alexander claims, to ‘have in common with the Dickensian model for “realizing” society, the tracing of unexpected connections’ (p. 107). You can tell that, in the end, the easy reasonableness of Alexander’s book began to grate on me. She is firmly on the side of what she regards as the typical reader, who is, she is sure, still mostly concerned with what novels are ‘about’, mostly bent on the extraction of pleasure (the assumption being that we already know perfectly well what pleasure consists in and what its objects are) and, though willing to allow for the adolescent excesses of postmodernist experimentation, is apt to grow impatient when asked to read too much rambling, self-regarding metafiction without proper characters or stories. Alexander acknowledges the horror, alienation and fragmentation of a certain kind of apocalyptic postmodernism, but cannot conceal her vexation with a novel such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, at whose vision of fragmented society she testily clicks her tongue: ‘there are real dangers in trading in despair, paranoia and conspiracy, however brilliant the literary product’ (p. 166). Here, as sometimes elsewhere in Flights From Realism, one hears the brisk clack of sensible shoes, and the swish of the curtains letting in the daylight of cheerful common sense; it’s time the patient pulled themselves together and starting being a bit more, well, positive. Writing Sites has much more emphatic designs on its reader. As its unapologetic subtitle indicates, the aim is to provide a genealogy, or narrative, of the historical emergence of the condition of postmodernity. To do this it conjoins the intellectual history of Foucault, or at least the Foucault of The Order of Things, with Derrida’s critique of logocentrism as it is found principally in Of Grammatology. The book displays in equal measure the huge intellectual revenue and the inevitable difficulties to be drawn from such a conjuncture. Stratton takes from Foucault the characterization of the classical and modern epistemes of thought and representation and adds to it a third, which he calls the postmodern episteme. In the classical episteme, Stratton reminds us, the world is conceived as both abundant and complete: the wealth of the natural world, the relations between God and man, between man and nature, and between signs and their referents, are all given and limited, if not always immediately visible. The economic form characteristic of this period is said to be mercantile trade, consisting in the distribution and redistribution of a finite quantity of goods. In the modern episteme, a fracture takes place between man and nature and between signs and their referents. Characteristic of this era is an economic reconstruction around industrial production; where, for the classical episteme, wealth is given in the pre-established relations between man and nature, for the modern episteme wealth is actively produced out of their disjuncture, even their antagonism. Where the classical episteme is characterized by given and invariable relations of resemblance between signs and their objects, the sundering of signifier and signified in the modern episteme produces the more complex and indeterminate relations of representation. The third, postmodern episteme privileges consumption over production, and is organized around the ownership and control of information rather than the ownership and control of the means of production. In this epoch, relations of representation give way to processes of simulation, seduction and spectacle. So far so good. Things only really start fizzing when Stratton stirs into this model Derrida’s quasihistorical account of the splitting of speech and writing accompanied and consolidated by the systematic relegation of the latter. This is a political history, or has the powerful potential to be so, says Stratton, because it is an allegory of the expulsion of every kind of marginality or otherness from presence, which

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enables us to grasp, for instance, the ways in which, through both the classical and modern epistemes, ‘the articulation of Europe as the privileged and valorised site of presence was made possible by that which Europe Othered’ (p. 44). The point of the analyses which follow, analyses of examples of travel writing from different centuries from the early modern period onwards, the ideologies of literary criticism, nineteenth-century representations of colonized peoples and of the working class, texts by Kafka, Flaubert and Freud, and the discourses of tourism in the contemporary world, is to investigate the close and constitutive relations between writing and travel. According to the startling and brilliantly substantiated perspective opened up through this book, the phrase ‘travel writing’ should mean much more than writing about travel, for it also names the reciprocal relations between a travel that is a form of writing and a writing that is a form of travel, both being founded upon and enacted through spacing, difference and the fractured relations of Self and Other. If Foucault provides the transformative syntax of this relationship, allowing Stratton to distinguish between different historical articulations of the relations between Self and Other, Derrida provides as it were its invariant deep structure. In fact, I would say that, rather than effecting a merger between genealogy and deconstruction, or providing a genealogy inflected by deconstruction, Stratton is really vehiculating the former in the service of the latter, using history to lengthen and solidify the profile of an essentially rhetorical analysis. His problem lies in accommodating the conventional and progressive temporality of Foucault’s account—at least that account contained in The Order of Things—to the paradoxical temporality of Derrida’s analysis, in which the founding antecedence of voice as presence is seen as the incessantly reproduced after-effect of a split between voice and writing which must always already have occurred. It is the difficulty of integrating a model in which forms of signification change in time with a model in which time is itself a function of signification. The texts which Stratton employs to demonstrate the relations between travel and writing and the forms of travel constituted by writing itself suffer from the strain of having to testify to these different and competing kinds of proposition. Stratton is meticulous to a fault in assigning his chosen texts to their various moments or epistemes. Thus we are offered the travel accounts of Eden, Hakluyt, Purchas, Marco Polo and Columbus as exemplifications of the classical episteme of resemblance, in which, we remember (and, if we don’t, are remorselessly reminded) the Other is perceived as a variant form of the Same, and is thus included in advance within the always already ‘known world’. Stratton often has some very striking things to say about the analogy amounting to identity between trade and travel writing in this respect, for example when he suggests that ‘Writing does for time what ships do for space, and does it in the same way. Difference is presupposed. What is written, the representation, becomes a product to be conveyed to the site of presence. Writing traces the spacing of representation’ (p. 65). But he is too scrupulous for the good of the genealogical side of his argument in showing that the apparent plenitude of resemblance always reveals itself under analysis to be the effacement of a lack, or a surplus (they come to the same thing), in the irreducible Otherness of the Other which Europe projects for its own assimilatory comfort. Stratton cites, for example, the journal of a friar, Ramon Pane, whom Columbus took with him on his second voyage across the Atlantic to write an account of the inhabitants. Pane is troubled by the fact that the native peoples he encounters have neither alphabet nor writing, since this makes it impossible to know whether he has transcribed their myths correctly. Here then, in what Stratton confirms is ‘the beginning of the articulation of the Classical episteme’, we find the restricted economy of resemblance rent by the excessiveness of the Other. Travel writing is already clearly defined as constituted in the fracture articulated by phonetic alphabet writing. Pane’s inability to fix the Indians, preserve their myths in a perfect representation, signals the articulation of the Other

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as excessive. It is this excess which, definitionally, cannot be encompassed by a representation which, in both Classical and modern epistemes, is limited, lacking in relation to presence. (p. 46) Time and again, we find that what start out as examples of the classical episteme of resemblance twist in this way into moments of transition between the classical and the modern, between resemblance and representation, every example of apparent presence and plenitude demanding to be read as the aching space of a fracture. So that, if the classical is always ahead of itself in Stratton’s account, it is also true that, in another sense, it is always belated, always attempting to recover or resume a lost plenitude. And if the classical episteme is characterized by the anachronistic modes in which it attempts to produce or restore its ‘own’ plenitude, then the classical episteme can never exemplify itself, but only the modes of its selfimpersonation. There are, in short, no ‘classical’ examples of the classical episteme to be procured. A similar difficulty is apparent when it comes to providing evidence of the fracture of resemblance and the distancing of signifier and signified in the modern episteme. Here, Stratton is drawn to those forms of cultural thought which fantasize a healing of dissociation in dreams of organic community or the perfect adequacy of word and thing, for example in the literary criticism of Arnold and Leavis. Once again, the epoch must be defined in terms of identity that is analeptic, other to itself. All this leaves Stratton at something of a loss when it comes to charac terizing and exemplifying the postmodern episteme. After some sensible and effective synthesis of some of the principal arguments about the move towards an economy based on consumption rather than production, he attempts to provide an account of the accompanying economies of postmodern signification. The postmodern, he ventures, is characterized by the following: the institution of the principle of insatiable jouissance in place of a theory of attainable happiness through the satisfaction of needs; the ‘revenge of the Other…[in] the problematisation of realism from the edge of civilisation’ (pp. 322–3); the derivation of identity from difference rather than vice versa; and, in more general terms, the recoil of difference into différance, which is to say, the collapse of regular and arrested relations of spacing and distance into a paradoxical ‘fracturing from within’ (p. 291), in which fracture no longer marks the space between Self and Other but rather the very intimacy of the Self’s contamination by the Other. Much of this is very familiar, and the detailing of the theory and the deployment of examples in these last chapters dealing with the postmodern episteme are more predictable than in the earlier chapters. The really interesting problem is that Stratton has already discharged much of his best ammunition, in showing so convincingly the postmodern inhabitation of the Self by the Other, and the constitution of identity on lack and excess, even in earlier periods. Thus construed, the difference between the classical, the modern and the postmodern epistemes is itself churned into a kind of différance, in which each period is defined by the ways in which it anticipates or resumes the others, resembling itself, so to speak by the manner of its differing from itself. This is the kind of book, in other words, that ends up demonstrating that all the apparent precedents for postmodernism are in fact ways of covering over or coping with a primordial condition of postmodern reflexivity, since once identity has come to be founded upon lack and otherness, it is hard to understand how it could ever not have been. The postmodern episteme must therefore be seen, neither as an orderly unfolding nor as a sensational emergence from its own genealogy, but as a kind of anamnesis or repetitious coming to light of a permanent, if permanently dissimulated trauma. Another, less benign way of putting this might be to say that, as the postmodern hypothesis reaches out to encompass everything that seems to differ from it in space and time, its claims grow more irresistible and more self-validating. Adapting Foucault’s criticism of Marx, Stratton in fact criticizes Derrida for being so thoroughly and autistically ‘in the true’,

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when he includes him among those ‘theorists of the postmodern episteme [who] (re)produce the reformulation of the structure of presence and representation which articulates consumption capitalism…we need also to understand that Derrida’s critique is itself couched in the formulations of the postmodern episteme’ (p. 322). But I think that Stratton himself has scarcely solved the problem of how to ensure that the postmodern hypothesis does not itself come to function as a new episteme of resemblance, in which differences are derived from and returned to a theory for which everything has always already happened. The danger is strong in such a book as this, in which the condition of postmodernity is not merely the destination of travelling theory but also its vehicle, and the very curve of its itinerary. Stratton urges us to distinguish ‘the cutting edge, the fracture, of a postmodern, deconstructionist radical politics’ (p. 320), from the more politically conciliatory and conservative kind of critique which does not attend to the historical limits of the text. But it is hard to see what it is, other than spontaneous goodwill, that guarantees the adversary exorbitance of the radical postmodern politics intimated by Writing Sites—and, of course, partly attributed to itself—or ensures its deliverance from the asphyxiating clasp of the always-already adequacy-to-itself of postmodern theory. If Stratton’s work lies half-way between the kinds of work I began by characterizing as theory of the postmodern and theory as the postmodern, then Gregory Ulmer’s Teletheory is unabashedly of the second kind. Unlike the two other books reviewed here, the purpose of Ulmer’s enquiry is not to describe and theorize the forms of postmodern culture but more brashly to exemplify and promote them. Theory here functions not as a means of understanding, but as a model of ways of writing. The shape of the book bears this out, in its move from general theoretical justification in the first section, through the analysis of particular examples in the second, to the climax of the book in the third section, which is Ulmer’s own exercise in practical teletheory. Like Stratton, Ulmer has a partiality for epochal analysis. His argument depends upon the claim that we are currently undergoing a cultural shift analogous in its importance to the earlier shift from oral culture to print or alphabetic culture. The latter, Ulmer claims, is now yielding place to televisual culture, literacy mutating into what he cutely calls ‘videocy’. The first section of his book is devoted to explicating and recommending the consequences of this epochal shift. Ulmer joins with a number of recent genealogists of Western thinking, and especially Timothy Reiss,4 in seeing the principal characteristic of alphabetic culture in the West as the capacity it confers to analyse, order and reliably represent a world that is thereby separated from its knower. With alphabetic culture, thinking becomes predominantly hermeneutic, which is to say governed by the desire to discover and extract truth from its object. Against this, Ulmer urges the advantages of what, reanimating a term from Renaissance rhetoric, he calls the ‘euretic’, which is to say the activities of invention and imaginative inauguration. A euretic turn in theory would entrain the acknowledgement of what had previously been systematically repressed in itself, namely the constitutive part played by discourse and its material occasions (and especially that of the body) in creating the objects and conditions into which theory enquires with such seeming neutrality. The notion of euresis, or theory-asinvention, seems to extend what in his earlier Applied Grammatology5 Ulmer describes as the shift from ‘allegoresis’ to ‘allegory’ in critical writing, by which he means a shift from a desire to interpret the text, to give voice to the truth that its phenomenality mutes, to the desire to dramatize the text, recombining and improvising upon its elements. Such allegorical ‘post-criticism’, he argued in an essay first printed in Hal Foster’s influential Postmodern Culture, is well evidenced in a text like Derrida’s Spurs, which rather than seeking to interpret Nietzsche’s jotting ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’, unrolls from it a whole series of actual and virtual contexts for understanding.6 One might suggest that the theory-as-invention hypothesis proposes a wholly new hygiene of truth. Instead of working to sanitize truth against the morbidity of error,

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postmodern theory engages in a kind of viral mimicry of the processes of replication which are at work indifferently in healthy and diseased organisms. The conjectural mode of knowing promoted by euresis or allegory thus compels what Ulmer calls a ‘conduction’, or cross-infection between polarities which the deductive processes of hermeneutic reasoning quarantine from each other, knower and object, signifier and signified, method and intuition. The most important of these conductions is that between the abstract and public truthfulness of science and research and the private and particular conditions of their undertaking. Ulmer whistles up another neologism here, calling the kind of writing he has in mind ‘mystory’, in order to condense the ideas of mystery, or ‘the manipulation of enigma and delay’ (p. 86), and ‘my story’, or the unblushing incorporation of the personal into critical writing, as well as to travesty the ideal of ‘mastery’ and to allude to the feminist mutation of ‘history’ into ‘herstory’. In fact, mystory comes to stand through Teletheory for something more than the inmixing of the personal and the impersonal, and becomes a more general guarantee or promise of ‘the intertranslatability between the expert discourses and the discourses of everyday life both public and private’ (p. 137). The second section of the book, entitled ‘Models and relays’, discusses in detail a number of examples of critical ‘mystory’, including Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Derrida’s Glas, Ponge’s The Making of the Pré and Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, all of which seem to effect this kind of integration of the personal and the theoretical, the inventive and the investigative. But, throughout the book, it is psychoanalysis that functions as the principal example of mystory, in its derivation of an entire discipline from a personal story (Freud’s own, says Ulmer), and its mingling of theory and life-story in practice (this, a pretty counterfactual view of psychoanalysis, is it not). Ulmer wants to persuade us that the conditions and technologies of visual culture are uniquely fitted to foster the kind of theory he elaborates so energetically: ‘Video’, he roundly affirms, ‘is the prosthesis of inventive or euretic thinking, just as literacy is the prosthesis of hermeneutics’ (p. 42). It is not quite plain to me how this is so. Ulmer quotes with excited approval Eisenstein’s remarks about the way in which the techniques of avant-garde cinema match what he calls ‘the forms of sensual, pre-logical thinking’, and he looks to the cinema for a model of a new theoretical kind of dreamwork, made up not of analysis, explication and the linear sequence of truth’s retrieval, but of combination, condensation and evocative play. Here, as in the passages where he affirms the association between video-viewing and the allegedly ‘creative’, ‘experimental’, ‘emotive’ activities of the right hemisphere of the brain, or the relation between the collapse of inner and outer worlds to be found in the viewer of TV and the experience of the schizophrenic alike, there seems to me to be a great deal of wishful thinking, along with some of the sentimental primitivism that is characteristic of a certain strain of recent postmodernist theory. Although he resists the claim that he is seeking merely to replace analytic thinking with non-analytic thinking, Ulmer’s wild surmise that ‘video…is becoming the conductor of primal thinking’ (p. 70) suggests an uncritical attachment to an oversimplified and ultimately ethnocentric notion of the prelapsarian opulence of archaic or primitive mental life. This is a pity because there is otherwise so much that is richly suggestive in this athletically wide-ranging book. If its obsessive neologism and profligacy of analogy can be rather fatiguing, there is no doubt that Teletheory is one of the most significant and brilliantly accomplished of recent attempts to turn back on to theory its own contemporary thematics of incompetence—the unreliability of language, unavailability of truth, dissemination of authorial mastery, and so on. The attempt ‘to think of ignorance as a passion, rather than as a void or mere lack of information’ (p. 124), or, a little less extravagantly perhaps, ‘to approach knowledge from the side of not knowing what it is, from the side of the one who is learning’ (p. 106) has implications, not just for the writing of theory, but, crucially, for the teaching of it. Ulmer is uncomfortably aware of the grotesque mismatch between the institutional prestige and authority of what is called ‘theory’

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and the pedagogic forms by which it is transmitted, and his book aims to make up for the general failure to transform pedagogic practice in the light of the challenges of theory. In this Ulmer’s work both anticipates and in some ways presses beyond the theories of postmodern education that are currently being elaborated by such as Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux in the face of the backlash against theory in American universities.7 Much of Teletheory is taken up with the question of what kind of writing or research is appropriate to the age of video and information technology, and the book is impressively driven by the need to extend and democratize these technologies. Unfortunately, this is about as far as the affirmation or analysis of the value of teletheory or the necessity for its dissemination goes. One can see why this should be so, in a book whose whole argument centres so emphatically on the preferability of ostensive or performative modes of reasoning over abstract or analytic modes, and indeed most of the arguing in the book is done through the very impetus of its examples. However, this does leave it rather naked of explanatory justification when the examples seem unattractive or controversial, as they can do. What about these for example: the comparison of Barthes’s ideal of the erotics of reading to the ‘everyday life reading, of the kind practiced by Mark Chapman, for example, who explained his murder of John Lennon by reference to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye’ (p. 122); or the instancing of the ‘bliss-sense’ of the logic of the joke (which, Ulmer reminds us, ‘is the source of interruptions and short-circuits destabilizing every level of culture’) in the ‘massive, grotesque joke’ practised at Auschwitz, whereby the gas chambers were disguised as delousing rooms; the joke, as Ulmer observes, poker-faced, being that ‘the Jews were associated with the plague, with (rhizomatic) rats and with the lice they carried…. As far as the Nazis were concerned, the holocaust constituted a figurative and literal “delousing” of Europe’ (p. 193). Joke? Well, ho ho ho. If the logic of the joke is to be enlisted on the side of a radical and emancipatory pedagogy, then I think the latter example calls for a little more in the way of justification than the remark that we ‘may have been wrong about the totalitarian lack of a sense of humor’ (ibid.). However, for the most part, Ulmer’s discussions of his models are hugely suggestive and perceptive: particularly so, I think, are the accounts offered of the art of the encrypted signature in Derrida, Ponge and Cage, or the topographic thinking evidenced in the earthwork of Robert Smithson. As in his earlier Applied Grammatology, what we are offered here is in part a superb documentation of the close relations between artistic and theoretical research in our time. But there is a more general problem with the use of examples, of which the book is conscious but with which it appears to be able to do little in reparation. The problem is that the authoritative bringing forward of examples puts theory at the legislative end of a process of description, analysis and justification, whereas Ulmer wants to recommend a pedagogic and philosophical practice which is much more proleptic and anterior, working without rules, on the lines, perhaps, of the avant-garde art conjured by Jean-François Lyotard, ‘in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done’.8 But, in a reversal of the tortoise and the hare parable, this theory in the future tense seems here always to have outstripped itself, seems always to have arrived at the evaluative or significative terminus of the work which is offered or alleged as pure perte or permanent non-arrival. The issue of exemplification is raised particularly by the last item in the book, which bravely stands as an example of mystory, or embodied teletheory. Entitled ‘Derrida at the Little Big Horn’, it is a grafting together of autobiography, oral history, speculation, analysis and ‘puncepts’, which concerns, among other things, Ulmer’s upbringing and professional career, the history of Custer’s Last Stand, the letter ‘H’, and Derrida’s collaboration with the architect Peter Eisenman. I’m sorry to say that I found it whimsical, self-indulgent and, ironically, since it seems meant to stand as an example of the deliberated remission of rational knowledge, thoroughly, archly knowing. In this, perhaps, it is representative of the duality of the book as a whole and perhaps of a duality intrinsic to the mongrel thing I have been calling theory as the postmodern. For the strength of this book, the precision, the passion and the authority of its arguments for new forms of thinking and theoretical

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invention, along with the widening of those forms into collective participation, is directly related to its weakness, namely its trust that the values to which it cleaves are demonstrable or spontaneously inventable without detour into that kind of analytic and referential rationality which Teletheory at once evidences, richly augments and gratuitously discredits. Birkbeck College, London NOTES 1 See Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong With Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991), Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992); Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Margaret Rose, The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Social Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 2 Jean-François Lyotard, Economie libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974); Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974). 3 Thomas Docherty, After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 4 Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982). 5 Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Joseph Beuys to Jacques Derrida (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 6 ‘The object of post-criticism’, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985), pp. 83–110. Ulmer’s notion of allegory is partly anticipated in an article by Craig Owens, ‘The allegorical impulse: Toward a theory of postmodernism’, published in two parts in October, 12 (1980), pp. 67–86 and October, 13 (1980), pp. 58–80. 7 See Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 8 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 81.

• Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, translated by Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 234 pp., £29. 95 (hardback), £11.95 (paperback) RUTH BARCAN

Cool Memories, a recent work by Jean Baudrillard, is a literary postscript—a diary written after the end of everything. It opens with Baudrillard’s announcement that he is now playing in extra time. Having seen the most beautiful place he will ever see, having met the most beautiful woman he will ever meet, he is resolved to dwindle, peak and pine: It is [also] probable that I have written the one—or two—best books I shall ever write. They are done with. And it is most unlikely that a second burst of inspiration will alter this irreversible fact. This is where the rest of life begins. (p. 3) The result of this irreversible fact is Cool Memories, a melancholy, autumnal work that uses a kind of diary form as an excuse to couch personal observations as universal truths. The bravado and the virtuosic linguistic displays of Baudrillard’s earlier works have given way to a series of aphorisms and observations that, falling short of being evocative and provocative, remain at best distasteful. Melancholy is, of course, tremendously attractive—but it ought to remain a solitary vice. Baudrillard, locked up with his drooping spirit, performs linguistic sleights-of-hand that are, finally, just indulgent. For Baudrillard, ‘the ultimate achievement is to live beyond the end, by any means whatsoever’ (p. 34). Many will regret that he has chosen these means. There is frequently a kind of Keatsian beauty to Baudrillard’s autumnal prose: Bright, icy sunshine like moonlight on snow or the tragic cry of seagulls over the green sea of a February twilight. (p. 43) Taken in small doses, it is not unaffecting. His customary epigrams are still capable of rousing both a wry laugh and some serious reflection: Powdered water: just add water to get water.

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(p. 69) Snow is no longer a gift from on high. It falls precisely at those places designated as winter resorts. (p. 144) Unfortunately, these considerations are outweighed by their deeply disquieting framework. Cool Memories is troubling; it evoked an automatic and angry response in this (female) reader. Baudrillard’s characteristic motif of seduction is here revealed in all its misogynistic literality. No metaphor, no aesthetic theory can serve as justification for observations that are not only phallocentric but occasionally violent. And if they are ‘beautifully’ expressed, then that is all the more reprehensible (not out of any notion that the beautiful ought to express the good, but simply because ‘poetry’ too can be a strategy). I here leave Baudrillard to speak for himself. To select and cite is to decontextualize and dismember, but Baudrillard himself consigns his ‘notes’ to ‘the happy chance of being caught with their defences down, without the defence literature provides’ (p. 70). In Italy, the men are affectionate, but the women never are. You feel they have a harsh revenge to wreak, their sensuality is full of bitterness and they are only happy in their lives when surrounded by broken men, swapping them as they swap their hysterical jealousies. (p. 76) Dream femininity: it lives only in the heads and desires of men. Women can get together in their millions, but they will never produce that image which can only come from elsewhere. If women don’t accept being dreamt of any more, including in the phantasm of violence, then they will lose even their sexual pleasure and their rights…. Man must continue to decide what is the ideal woman. (p. 68; my emphasis) When a woman turns off all signals of pleasure in your arms and leaves you with no other solution but a disenchanted rape, no phantasy is any use. But the same applies when her sexual demand is so great as to leave no room even for the illusion of rape. (p. 93) Better than those women who climax are those who give the impression of climaxing, but maintain a sort of distance and virginity beneath the pretence of pleasure, for they provide us with the illusion of rape. (p. 6) The moving moment is the one when a woman takes off her shoes and suddenly becomes smaller before your eyes. She becomes marvellously tiny, and, at the same time, her face changes. She creates intimacy in its most seductive form. (p. 16) If you don’t have to be missed by someone, it is no use slipping away If you do not have to love her, it is no use being missed by her If you do not have to destroy her, it is no use loving her (p. 44)

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I call that woman a slut who is capable of shying away from you out of sheer perversity, without any amorous necessity, out of the pure temptation to slip through your fingers. (p. 29) Every woman is unique, fragile, ineluctable, immoral, radiant, insatiable. But whether pretty or ugly, she is never any of these things entirely directly. (p. 24) etc., etc. No worst, there is none. Baudrillard’s literary defences may be down, but his rhetorical ones are not, since the act of admitting to leaving oneself defenceless is itself a defence. In fact, the most worrying thing about the misogyny in Cool Memories is its knowingness. Defence is built into the very structures of Baudrillard’s attack. His strategy of including or pre-empting criticisms positions him as omniscient speaker, capable of foreshadowing (and therefore disarming) responses to his statements. One way to deflect criticism is to criticize philosophy’s ‘affectation of profundity’ (p. 92) while simultaneously writing ‘profoundly’. And indeed, faced with the brilliance and the undoubted complexities of Baudrillard’s prose, I hesitate to criticize—evidence no doubt of the effectiveness of this tactical use of rhetoric. Nonetheless, at times a line from Russell’s Educating Rita springs to mind: ‘You’ll find there’s less to me than meets the eye.’1 It’s the kind of phrase Baudrillard would like. Another, more subtle, way of disarming criticism in advance is to turn accounts of the loss of determinate meaning to his own use: Only one way of looking at things produces a supreme sense of understanding and that is a completely controlled form of delirium or simulation. (p. 23) Thus the people who are most likely to be offended by Baudrillard’s work (those with ‘only one way of looking at things’) are condemned to silence—or rather delirium. A similar strategy is to hide in the mirage of the loss of referentiality. If language refers only to language, the potential social implications of one’s words get lost in the play of signifiers. Thus: When things reach that apogee where they clarify and resolve themselves, they then with equal suddenness become unintelligible and ungraspable. (p. 6) The prophet of loss, he has become a simulacrum of himself, producing aphorisms à la Baudrillard, while his prose wheels vertiginously into meaninglessness. He frequently shelters in the protection of paradoxes: Reversibility, like that of day and night, of all the concepts at the equatorial heart of the system: this paradoxical, derisory, indefensible and therefore impregnable position is the bitter privilege of phantom rhetorics. (p. 102; my emphasis) This paradoxical equation of indefensibility with impregnability is central to the book. In a similar way, Baudrillard pleads for the sanctity and non-referentiality of the theoretical domain:

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Theory must not only be cut off from its reference, but also from any commentary: it’s not normal to carry out an autopsy on a newborn child. (p. 102) This particular refuge slips seamlessly into a tactical use of naïveté: They say that stupidity is a crime, but it seems to me that explanation is the real crime…. With those who understand, I make a contract of intelligence, but with the others, at the very same instant, I secretly make a pact of stupidity. The intellectual or the person who claims that title (there are no others) is the one who has broken that pact of stupidity, and feels released from it. In so doing, he plumbs the very depths of stupidity. (p. 201) But this reasoning is as old as Socrates. Naïveté is a game for the knowing, as William Routt points out: ‘The predatory gaze of sophistication is the condition of existence for naïveté.’2 Many of Baudrillard’s observations seem to serve as images of his own project, such as his image of the Rubik cube (p. 23) and his statement that the real art of gymnastics lies in landing gracefully after the ecstasy of flight. Again and again, we find an implicit self-reflexivity and knowing naïveté designed to disarm criticism: A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal. (p. 110) Copying out these notes is indelicate in every respect, and I fear only bad will come of it. (p. 70) The book’s final disclaimer, hidden on a back page by itself (‘This journal is a subtle matrix of idleness’, p. 234) is a nice try at gainsaying what precedes. The ultimate sanctuary, however, is simply for the author to die—or rather to fade away, since ‘Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear’ (p. 24). Which Baudrillard obligingly does: ‘No one exists—me included’ (p. 60). What is most disturbing, then, in Baudrillard’s misogyny is its knowingness. His most knowing strategy for debilitating criticism is to criticize himself. At the end of the first section, Baudrillard describes Woman’s allotted role as that of a ‘sacred prostitution’ (p. 36). Then ensues a section of ‘delirious selfcriticism’ (p. 38)—an extended mea culpa written in the form of two prayers in which he accuses himself, among other things, of ‘having dreamt of a different world which—whether women or concepts3—would have been that of a sacred form of prostitution’ (p. 38). Thus Baudrillard grants himself the right of accusation and the rite of absolution. The je m’accuse melts into air as the high priest of seduction literally indulges himself. At question is not ‘just’ an eloquent and seething misogyny, but issues of speaking positions and readership. Feminist work on the positioning of the subject in narrative (Kristeva, Mulvey, de Lauretis, Silverman…) seems almost impotent in its subtlety when confronted by a text such as this. To and for whom does Baudrillard think he is speaking? If this is not the voice of an unknowing phallocentrism, is it that of a consciously defiant masculinity, or simply of one who does not want his glorious solipsism interrupted by distinctions? The voice is at once intimate and totalizing, its unashamed and universalizing maleness (‘We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman’) (p. 24) sliding unproblematically one sentence later into an omnipresent ‘we’:4

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We are becoming like cats…enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the ‘social’…our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures. (p. 44) Women he either reviles, reveres or ignores. Ironically in the name of ‘a stupid, ancestral belief in the real’ (p. 27), he reduces women to metaphor. But it is not only females who would want to refuse his categorizations. As the self-appointed spokesman of a monolithic, undifferentiated, male postmodernity, he takes none of his audience seriously. ‘That’s not my reality’, an inner voice insistently retaliates as he proudly displays his cherished wounds and prized scars. Given the auratic quality of Baudrillard’s name within the academy and the fervour with which his theories are cited and ‘applied,’ the potential influence of this particular collection of thoughts is all the more disturbing. The parallel publisher, translator and format of America (widely used within the academy) and Cool Memories constructs an implied intellectual continuum of worrying potential.5 How does a work like this affect Baudrillard’s position within the rapidly setting canon of cultural studies? Once again (and ironically), Baudrillard himself seems to have already considered and resigned himself to such issues: One may justify the existence of men in power in many different ways. Yet power remains a pernicious thing for what justifies it is inexpiable. (p. 122) So how does Baudrillard justify committing his cool memories to print? ‘The diagnosis is simple: there is strictly no reason to hide a mirror in your drawer’ (p. 70). But there is. For despite the death of Meaning, meanings are still produced and still have consequences in a world that doggedly insists on existing. The flaws in Baudrillard’s glass have real implications, and such implications must not be allowed to be hidden behind the glitter of the text. If one publishes one’s reflections, one must be prepared for others to glare through the glass, darkly. Indifference of the sky to the earth: it will not rain Indifference of the soul to things: it will not mingle with them Indifference of lips to words: they maintain their silence Indifference of dreams to reality: they will not absolve it (p. 37) Indifference of the female image to the philosopher: it will not absolve him. University of Melbourne NOTES 1 Willy Russell, Educating Rita, ed. Richard Adams (Harlow, Essex: Long-man, 1985), Act One, Scene Two, p. 22. 2 Cited in Meaghan Morris, ‘Tooth and Claw’, in The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 263. Morris links the pretension of naïveté with a nostalgic longing for innocence and the invention of origins, a position that Baudrillard openly adopts. 3 Itself a telling coupling. 4 Complicated by the effect of the French authorial ‘nous’.

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5 I am grateful to Leigh Dale for discussions on this topic.

• J.Hillis Miller, Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), xii+266 pp., £40.00 (hardback) • J.Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), xii+330 pp., £35.00 (hardback) STEVEN J.SKELLEY

In his article on J.Hillis Miller for The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (1983), Donald Pease begins his critique by citing the ‘several abrupt turns [that] mark [Miller’s] critical career’, specifically ‘the New Critical dissertation at Harvard’ in the early 1950s, then ‘the years of phenomenological criticism at Johns Hopkins from 1953 to 1972, and more recently the move to deconstruction at Yale’.1 Pease goes on to suggest that, ‘[a]s if to effect a literal correlation between topoi and figures of thought,… Miller has signified his changes of mind with changes of academic affiliation.’ Since 1986, Miller has moved on from Yale to the University of California at Irvine, my own alma mater. If Pease’s suggestion carries predictive weight, then we should expect that a new Hillis Miller has been emerging in California. Could The Ethics of Reading, which he published in 1987, be the sign of this new post-deconstructive Miller?2 Three books published in 1990, including the two that are the subject of this review, provide a perspective on Miller’s prolific career by collecting various essays and articles previously published.3 Whether or not these books allow us to see the emergence of another new Miller, they certainly afford rich examples of the work of a critical intellect that has been subtle and lively in its pursuits, and engagingly antithetical in its trajectory. When we read J.Hillis Miller, we read the work of a man in love with literature and sharing his passion4—an attribution that marks him off from so many younger critics, belated colleagues who, by their writings, seem less interested in literature than in ‘the politics of interpretation’. Victorian Subjects focuses on Dickens (six chapters), Trollope (four chapters), George Eliot and Hopkins (two chapters each), along with commentary on Twain, Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and others— twenty chapters of writings from 1961 to 1989; Tropes, Parables, Performatives focuses on Hardy (five chapters), Wallace Stevens (four chapters) and William Carlos Williams (two chapters), along with D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, Woolf, and Conrad—fifteen chapters of work running from 1952 to 1989. The preface of each work attempts, somewhat defensively, to articulate a rationale for gathering together such disparate essays, written for highly varied ends over a long period of time. Anticipating the very objections that younger critics like Pease might raise, Miller writes: the reader would be in error if he were to expect to find some teleological unity in these essays, for example a movement from a phenomenological ‘criticism of consciousness’ to a deconstructive

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‘rhetorical criticism’, and, beyond that, to the premonitory signs of a criticism focusing on a performative, positional ethics of writing and reading. (VS, p. vii)5 Despite such evasiveness, there can be little doubt that the overall trajectory of each book mirrors the very ‘movement’ of Miller’s career that he here seeks to deny. In fact, it is one of the sublimities of being students and readers of Miller that we follow the winding path of his visions and self-revisions—from his early emphasis on ‘organic unity’ (VS, p. 14) and ‘recurring motifs’ (TPP, p. 230); through his later emphasis on the subjectivity of the author or poet, ‘the priority of consciousness over its objects’ (VS, p. 79); to his even later vision of literature as always already caught in ‘the linguistic moment’ (VS, p. 211) with its endless oscillation of undecidable meaning;6 and now to his most recent speculations concerning ‘the ethics of reading’ and ‘the power of the words of the text over the mind and words of the reader’ (VS, p. 255). Among his contemporaries, only Harold Bloom can be credited with having endowed us with work of such revisionary breadth and depth. Nevertheless, there is justice in Miller’s evasive denial of a ‘teleological unity’ to be found in each book. The earliest essays show signs of the deconstructive work and ‘positional ethics’ to come later, while the latest essays often betray elements of the earlier ‘consciousness criticism’ and even of the much earlier New Critical work. Of Hopkins’ poetic career Miller writes: But at the center of the project of individuation by means of ‘poeting’ there lies a double flaw, a flaw which leads to the faltering and ultimate total collapse of the project. In this collapse, Hopkins is left bare again, ‘no one, nowhere’, enclosed within the unpierced walls of his own impotent taste of self. (VS, p. 15) Of Wallace Stevens’ poetic career Miller writes: Stevens’ pervasive use of the figure, or concept, or literal objective fact (it is all three) of the trajectory of the sun, its rising, its majestic march across the sky, its setting, is one more example of the heliotropic unity of the occidental repertoire of tropes. (TPP, p. 230) The first citation, from a text published in 1963, gestures presciently towards the split self of Miller’s later deconstructive pieces, while the second citation, from a text published in 1986, gestures memorably back to pre-deconstructive tropes of unified consciousness. During the regime of New Criticism in the United States, it appeared as if tropes such as ‘organic unity’ and ‘autonomous form’ were indomitably in control of critical discourse about individual literary works. Northrop Frye’s foray into his own form of structuralism, his archetype criticism, overturned New Critical dogma concerning discrete texts and replaced it with the grander trope of synchronic formalism. During the same period, Hillis Miller’s use of European phenomenology to interpret poems and novels broke radically from the pseudo-objectivism of both Frye and the New Critics; this move enforced the pre-eminence of the trope of ‘consciousness’ in literary criticism. With hindsight, however, it was only a prelude to the utter usurpation of criticism by the deconstructive trope of differential linguistics. For a decade or more critics were mesmerized by the trope called ‘language’, the one trope supposed to contain and undo all other tropes. But even the trope of ‘language’ has now, it seems, been undone. Versions of ‘history’, ‘ideology’, and ‘politics’ have usurped even ‘language’, and now operate as master-tropes in contemporary critical

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discourse. When, in the early 1980s, Edward Said and Frank Lentricchia criticized deconstruction by complaining of ‘the prisonhouse of language’ and ‘wall to wall discourse’, they sought to replace the trope of ‘language’ with the trope of ‘actuality’.7 The New Historicism that currently dominates critical discourse is in fact a new mimeticism that protests against the anti-mimeticism of deconstructive discourse. Miller’s concern for ‘the ethics of reading’ in his recent writings shows that he is not untouched by this new mimeticism, that he is in search of a vision that will situate history and power within textuality. Miller’s most memorable work, however, is surely his comprehensive assault on mimetic criticism, his deconstructive criticism. The two books under review contain several remarkable contributions to the highly evasive freedom in deconstruction. Indeed, the unintended irony found in Said, Lentricchia, and other champions of the politics of interpretation is that, while protesting against deconstruction’s prison-house of language, they would chain language to a mimesis of worldly forces. In contrast, Miller’s anti-mimetic impulse admirably seeks a freedom that transcends the boundaries of mimetic thought and expression. Critique of mimesis is at times the explicit theme of Miller’s essays in these books, for example in his 1986 piece called ‘When is a primitive like an orb?’ (TPP, pp. 227–44) on a poem by Stevens. Here Miller attacks the possibility of ‘extralinguistic reference’ (p. 239). He lists the three forms of mimesis—‘some scene or object in the external world that the poem imitates or represents,…some psychic state, for example the mind of the poet, which…the poem expresses or copies,…[or] some transcendent or spiritual center…to which the poem refers’ (p. 239). Miller’s claim is that the Stevens poem ‘systematically baffles all three possible explanations’. First, there is ‘no coherent scene or single definable object’ that the poem represents. Instead, ‘[a]ll the terms in the poem are names for that invisible and unnamable primitive’ (p. 240). The second form of imitation—which looks suspiciously like the consciousness criticism that Miller used to practice—is likewise dismissed, for ‘there is no self in the poem, no personal psyche expressing itself to which the words in the poem can easily be referred.’ The third form which is Platonic mimesis is also denied, despite his reference to the ‘invisible and unnamable primitive’ in his rejection of the first form of mimesis. ‘Even this third possibility’, says Miller, ‘is put into question by the poem’s linguistic strategy’ (p. 241). Here Miller repeats and reaffirms the by now ‘classic’ Nietzschean deconstruction of Platonism. The poem’s inscriptions or embodiments are both pale imitations of the central poem, its division, fragmentation, and dispersal, and at the same time they are what constitutes it, in both senses of the word. Taken all together they are the central poem, and at the same time they generate it as the vanishing point they all indicate in the failure of each to be more than part of that whole, a synecdoche of it. (p. 241) Miller’s point is that, though granting that the poem does imitate something pre-existent to itself, this Platonic view is less than an adequate or comprehensive view, neither the first nor the last word in the matter. For the poem also turns this perspective inside out, so to speak. The ‘invisible and unnamable primitive’ in fact requires the tropes of the poem in order to be somehow seen and named: ‘The image must partake of the nature of that of which it is an image…. The light of this central primitive is not a light apart’ (p. 242). Throughout much of both books—certainly beginning at least with a major essay of 1971 called ‘The fiction of realism’ (VS, pp. 119–77) concerning three novels by Dickens—Miller performs deconstructions that subvert the possibility that literature imitates anything extralinguistic. The grand trope called ‘language’ reigns supreme, and any other realms that may be deemed to exist can only be known or dealt with through the mediation of language; nevertheless, language always maintains its distance, its

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discontinuity from those realms that it may gesture toward, but never actually coincide with, in its ultimate preoccupation with its own self-referential forms. The very prison-house of language that Said and Lentricchia complain of becomes for Miller an ethos of evasive tropological freedom. This ethos may be an aporia, a figuration of undecidability or bewilderment, but it is the place, the linguistic moment, wherein Miller can rally his own creativity to rival that of the literary works he interprets or ‘reads’, without serving the interests of any extra-literary force or influence. In another piece on Stevens, the 1985 essay, ‘Impossible metaphor’, Miller builds his discussion around the opposition between ‘interpretation’ and ‘reading’: Far from inviting a shift from sight as seeing, that is, an interpretation of the poem according to its referential logic, to sight as insight, some presumed mastery of the language of the poem gained through a shift to reading, the act of reading leads to a double experience of that blinding by the text which Paul de Man calls unreadability. (TPP, p. 225; Miller’s emphasis) By reading literary works always in light of de Manian ‘unreadability’, Miller enforces a Nietzschean perspectivization of these works which liberates critic and poem or novel from ‘referential logic’, but only at the cost of a free fall into the ironies of linguistic undecidability. The high price of such a liberation is implicit in a recent essay on a poem by George Crabbe, ‘The ethics of reading: Vast gaps and parting hours’ (VS, 237–56). Here in 1981 Miller’s anxiety about the pressures of a resurgent mimeticism upon his anti-mimetic discourse is almost palpable. ‘The concrete situation of teachers of the humanities’ (p. 239), the possibility of the existence of a canon of literature and its relation to a curriculum, the ‘ethical complexity of a given curriculum’ (p. 238) and related issues, all influence Miller’s discussion; but his crucial targets—the tropes he feels most obsessively compelled to defend against—are ‘the forms of Marxist literary criticism which are beginning to be institutionalized in America and to exert force, particularly over younger teachers’ (p. 239). Miller clearly feels that the danger here is that these ‘more sophisticated’ Marxisms (i.e. ‘“adulterated” as well as “wiser”’) are influenced by discourses which would otherwise be, like deconstruction, anti-mimetic. As he puts it, this new Marxism, which is influenced by semiotics, structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and so on, tends strangely enough, to join forces with [a] conservative reaction [in the universities] to affirm more or less traditional notions of history, of selfhood, of the moral function of literature, and, most of all, of its mimetic or referential status. (pp. 239–40) In a word, deconstruction is under siege, not just by established old guard figures such as W.H.Abrams (with whom Miller had an ongoing public debate about deconstruction in the 1970s and early 80s),8 but also, and more importantly, by younger critics now gaining power in universities. Unfortunately, Miller’s response to this challenge, his reading of a poem by Crabbe, shows why the deconstructors are in such disarray over the challenge by the new mimeticists. Suppose there should fall into my hands ‘The Parting Hour’, a poem by George Crabbe (1754–1832) published in Tales (1812). Should I teach it or write about it? What will happen when I do so?…

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Crabbe’s poem is a good example of the way an apparently peripheral and unproblematic example in literary studies, taken more or less at random, always turns out to raise again all the most difficult questions about literature and about literary criticism. (pp. 241–2) Miller’s typically masterful reading of this poem that ‘is a marginal part of the canon of English literature’ (p. 241) demonstrates only that a brilliant critic can read a relatively weak poem into the discursive dialectics of deconstruction: Crabbe’s ‘The Parting Hour’, in its attempt to fulfill its promise of being able to show how a life hangs together, reveals the impossibility of fulfilling this promise. Any attempt to do so is a coverup, a varnishing over. This infallibly betrays the hiatuses it tries to obscure. (p. 250) To show how yet another poem ‘infallibly betrays’ its own internal discontinuity, even a poem whose relation to the canon is ambiguous and peripheral, does nothing to answer questions such as the following: is there a canon at all, and if there is, what is its relation to the curriculum? Why read or teach Milton or Wordsworth as opposed to Crabbe? Why read or teach Maya Angelou as opposed to Milton or Wordsworth? If Crabbe ‘infallibly betrays’ logocentrism and its deconstruction as much as Milton and Wordsworth do, then surely Maya Angelou does this just as well. Hillis Miller’s deconstruction of Crabbe is unable to suggest that reading or teaching Crabbe would be of any more or any less literary or critical value than reading or teaching Milton, Wordsworth, or Angelou. Implicitly there is a great levelling of values here, an infinite exchange or displacement of one item, author, or poem, for another, without remainder, without affect on the whole of the tradition of English literature. And yet, as the list of authors and poets dealt with by Miller in these two books shows, his criticism—except for the example of Crabbe—invariably concerns canonical figures, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Woolf, Stevens, and so on. The question that therefore persists is: Why and how does Miller choose to deal with canonical figures if, according to his own theory, the canon is a mystification to be replaced by a level democracy among texts? The answer as I conceive it is not a retreat into mimeticism, and yet the answer shows the limits of deconstructive anti-mimeticism. It lies in what Harold Bloom has called ‘supermimesis’9—a relation among literary works that seizes upon their anti-mimetic status and refuses the delusion of a great democracy among them by reading the anxiety of style that these works betray or reveal about their relation to great works of the past. Though his own theory is blind to any hierarchy among works, his own practice never fails to enlighten his readers that Miller himself is engaged with certain works of literature because he finds their greatness within himself, yet he must not merely repeat or reproduce their greatness if he too is to achieve a voice, the lie of voice. We read Miller today and will always read him not because he is a ‘text’ among other texts, but because he has struggled with and against the great voices of the past and has won some measure of individuation, which for a writer is an intimation of immortality. University of Nottingham NOTES 1 Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, Wallace Martin (eds), The Yale Critics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 66.

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2 The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 3 The third book, Theory Now and Then, also published in New York and London by Harvester Wheatsheaf in 1990, ‘collects [Miller’s] more overtly theoretical essays published between 1966 and 1989’ (p. vii). His Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1991) has also been published, independently of the Harvester Wheatsheaf essay collections. 4 I do not believe for one moment, of course, that this love is anything but ambivalent. 5 Quotations will be noted by the initials of the title, followed by the page number. 6 The Linguistic Moment (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985) may be Miller’s best book, especially for those readers interested in lyric poetry. 7 In The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), Said protests against deconstruction on the grounds that it puts forward a textuality ‘with no ground in actuality’ (p. 183). Similarly, in After the New Criticism (London: Althone Press, 1980), Lentricchia would have us turn away from the prisonhouse of language and towards ‘actual historical formations’ (p. 310). 8 Miller’s contributions to this debate are published among the essays collected in Theory Now and Then. 9 This term is used from time to time by Bloom, for example in Agon (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 70 and 177.

• Barry Jordan, Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 213 pp., £30.00 JACQUELINE A.HURTLEY

In another text, also published in 1990: British Hispanism and the Challenge of Literary Theory,1 Jordan appears to be attempting within the British Spanish/Hispanic2 field of study the deconstructive blow dealt at the academic discipline of English by Peter Widdowson et al. in the 1980s.3 It is surprising, therefore, to find him adopting a conventional methodology in his analysis of the ‘novela social’, announced on the dustcover blurb of Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain as ‘a major reassessment of an important literary movement’. Indeed, in spite of a sprinkling of Barthes, Said and Ingarden, essentially of little consequence within the whole, the reader is left with a sense of minor reshuffle, i.e. the reproduction of the critics’ views plus a contribution or so of Jordan’s own, the most memorable being the comments on women in Aldecoa’s El fulgor y la sangre (pp. 144–5) and Fernández Santos’s Los bravos (pp. 155–6), together with those on Lucio’s ‘urination’ in Sánchez Ferlosio’s El Jarama—but is almost a page (pp. 169–70) on pee warranted? Jordan himself goes on to label it a trivial event. I take the initial, laboured point concerning process as opposed to progress but overall one is largely left reflecting: ‘Plus ça change, plus ça c’est la même chose.’ The very title chosen by Jordan contains an established construct with regard to Spain and General Franco’s role within it from 1939 and into the 1960s when Martin Santos’s Tiempo de Silencio was published, the novel which hailed a new direction for Spanish narrative, as Jordan points out, as did G.G.Brown twenty years ago in A Literary History of Spain. The Twentieth Century. Even if we accept that Spain was the ‘patria’ which ‘el Generalísimo’ saw himself as saviour of, then if it ever was his (Franco’s), it was so in the 1940s rather than the 1950s. Following the Hispano-American military pacts of 1953 (mentioned by Jordan), Spain became increasingly less Franco’s and more American, as well as more English with the rise and expansion of the tourist trade, as well as more the Opus Dei’s with the lodging of its technocrats in high places. Hence, the reader may well go into the text, having only read the title, expecting a work of criticism concerned with the 1940s, and if not exclusively, then at least as well. In Jordan’s study, the 1940s only acquire relevance as a result of the publication of Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature (1948), the influence of which Jordan dwells on at some length, since he argues that Sartre’s work (filtered through J.M.Castellet, the Barcelona critic and publisher, repeatedly labelled as ‘guru’ (?) of the ‘novela social’ by Jordan), together with Italian neo-realism in the cinema and the ‘North’ [sic] American inter-war writing of Faulkner and Hemingway, amongst others, were the basic ingredients which would produce the ‘novela social’ in Spain.

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I understand from Jordan’s introduction that he is concerned to achieve ‘a non-reductive view of a literary-historical process’ (p. xiii) but he strikes me as falling short of his aim on a number of counts. The most important of these relates to the production of books in the decade following the Civil War, which involves the role of censorship, translation, publishers and literary prizes. I suspect that it is Jordan’s neglect of the 1940s which leads him to claim in one of his passing comments on the period: ‘for a whole decade, the 1940s, and despite a few isolated exceptions, literature and the novel [sic] in Spain had been the exclusive product of the winning side’ (p. 32). From his following sentence, the reader understands that Jordan is referring to literature as written but, as he himself observes elsewhere, the production of literature also depends on phenomena beyond the writer him/herself. Jordan does not elaborate further on the ‘few isolated exceptions’ so we are left wondering who/ what he might have in mind. Be that as it may, it is important to recognize that just as the Spanish state was never wholly Franco’s, so ‘literature and the novel’ never belonged exclusively to the winning side. Here Jordan overlooks the role of inner exile.4 Throughout the 1940s, and beyond, there were figures involved in the production of literature who were contributing to the development of a pattern of production embarked upon before the Civil War began. The most obvious example of this is the publisher Janés (not publishers, as listed in the index of Jordan’s volume), who had already published foreign literature in Catalan translation from 1934 to 1938. His enterprise would pick up in 1940, perforce in Castilian, and would come to be supported by translators whom he had already employed in the 1930s: Simó Santainés for instance, or by those who had been creative writers themselves in Catalan and now translated as a means of survival, thus Agustí Esclasans, Marià Manent and Carles Riba. The main current of literature in the state was infiltrated, then, by a subversive current or currents (what of the Madrid-based La Nave’s publication of texts by Republican sympathizer Kate O’Brien over the 1940s, some of whose writing was banned in Ireland and who was denied entry into Spain until 1957?).5 Interestingly, Janés would subsequently be responsible for the launching of at least two of the ‘social novelists’ considered by Jordan: Juan Goytisolo, awarded the ‘Premio a la Joven Literatura’ founded by Janés in 1952 (according to information supplied by J.M.Martínez Cachero in a text cited by Jordan) and Francisco Candel, two of whose works were published by Janés just before the latter’s death in a car crash in 1959. To challenge Jordan again, then: ‘the students of the late 40s and early 50s’ were not ‘the first protagonists of intellectual and cultural dissent under Franco’ (p. 53). Intellectual and cultural dissent was never absent and was represented by those protean figures who adapted ‘processes’, to follow Jordan’s rationale, being developed in Republican Spain. Jordan’s disregard for the 1940s will also lead him to conclude that ‘travelling abroad would also be important in providing opportunities for exposure to deviant ideologies, through foreign books and personal contacts, for people hitherto limited to the highly restricted cultural panorama of the dictatorship’ (p. 51). It should be noted too, though, that wider horizons were available in the 1940s through translation, and the terrain reveals some surprises: witness Radclyffe Hall, James Hanley and Rosamond Lehmann. Jordan does highlight the Barcelona journal Laye’s ‘European and non-Castillian [sic] cultural perspective’ (p. 58), naming Joyce in this connection. This may have been the case but it is distorting to ignore the existence of a European and non-Castilian cultural perspective in Spain before the publication of Laye. Apart from Janés’s efforts within the publishing field, which included some Catalan works in the later 1940s: new editions of Sebastià Juan Arbó’s Camins de nit and Miquel Llor’s Laura a la Ciutat dels Sants, there was the clandestine publication in Catalan, Ariel, which brought out critical work on Lawrence by the then Director of the British Institute in Barcelona, Derek Traversi, as well as the translation of some Ezra Pound by Arthur Terry and news of contemporary writing in England, all in the 1940s. As regards Joyce in particular, Janés had already published a translation of The Dead (Los muertos) in his ‘Grano de Arena’ series in 1941, and his fellow traveller in the Editorial Emporion, Felix

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Ros, published Dubliners (Gente de Dublin) in 1942, once he had set up his own, short-lived publishing house, Tartessos. Traversi’s contribution to Ariel brings me to another area of omission in Jordan’s study, i.e. the role of foreign cultural embassies in promoting their own cultural products. Jordan does mention the ‘Instituto Italiano de Cultura’ in Madrid, in connection with the showing of Italian neo- realist cinema, but fails to show how what he records as an ‘appetite for things foreign and dissatisfaction with the backwardness and conservatism of official cultural forms’ (p. 84) was taken advantage of, by, for instance, the British book trade under the auspices of the British Council, orchestrated in Madrid by Walter Starkie. In his memoirs, El apasionante mundo del libro, José Ruiz-Castillo Basala recalls the reception given to Spanish publishers in search of English works to produce in translation. Furthermore, Jordan speaks of ‘a surge in the translation market’ (p. 116) in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, but articles published in a variety of contemporary journals and newspapers, from Bibliografía Hispánica in 1942 to ABC in 1943 and El Español in 1944, reveal that translation rose much earlier as a force to be reckoned with. By 1948, one commentator saw the Spanish novel sinking in a sea of translations.6 Jordan points to the Barcelona publisher Luis Caralt ‘[dominating] the translation market’ (p. 116) at the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s ‘closely followed by Janés’ (p. 116). It should be made clear that Janés followed no other publisher in post-war Spain: he had published a first translation of Hemingway, Torrents of Spring, in Catalan (Torrents de primavera) in 1937, and had been a pioneer in publishing translated literature following the Civil War, as Valeriano Bozal’s article, cited by Jordan in a note to his chapter 4 (p. 193), points out. Janés did not wait for the Americans to forge deals with General Franco’s government in the 1950s but took advantage of the facilities offered by the British Council in the early years of the Second World War. It is true to say that as a consequence of his publishing zeal, and given his failure to sustain a steady grip on the economics of the matter, Janés did fall behind others in the 1950s, becoming a notable publisher of re-impressions. In connection with the American inter-war literature published by Caralt (described as ‘very much a man of the regime’ (p. 116) in contrast to ‘strictly commercial publishers such as Planeta and Plaza’ (p. 116)—it may be worth pointing out here that the entrepreneur behind Planeta, José Manuel Lara, is reputed to have entered Barcelona with General Franco’s troops in 1939), Jordan tentatively concludes ‘that the Americans were not immediately conceived as suspect, subversive or conveying a politically radical message’ (p. 116). This takes us into another area which required more attention than is devoted to it in Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain: censorship. Jordan alludes to censorship on a number of occasions but never comes to analyse the impact of such restraint in any depth. He never considers that the translations of ‘the Americans’ may be purged pieces: Hemingway was certainly subject to modification, as D.E.Laprade has illustrated in La censura de Hemingway en España, as were several works of English literature from G.K.Chesterton to Winifred Holtby. On the other hand, the suspect, subversive and politically radical might become less so depending on the fortunes of Spain’s foreign policy. Winston Churchill, no less, was rejected as an ‘aventurero’ and ‘enemigo de España’ by a censor in September 1943,7 but following the success of the allied war effort, essays, speeches, his biography of Marlborough and memoirs of the Second World War were all published in translation. Jordan’s making short shrift of the question of censorship will also lead him to produce remarks on Goytisolo’s novels Juegos de manos and Duelo en el paraíso which may be considered wide of the mark or confused. When assessing Juegos, Jordan produces a list of accusations: the novel lacks any discernible political frame of reference; group members never discuss politics or engage in political theorising; their political utterances are of the crudest and most elementary kind;

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the few references that are made to politics in the novel are not to revolutionary political theory by Marx or Lenin… (p. 131) And later he is critical of the fact that the act of assassination in the same novel is ‘removed from any recognizable historical or political context’ (p. 132). Having argued along these lines for two long paragraphs, Jordan then goes on to undermine his own criticism by claiming: In fairness to Goytisolo, and in the context of the early 1950s in Spain, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to novelize or publish an account of political commitment based on the relations between the real student opposition and the forces of the political opposition. (pp. 132–3) Indeed. Wasn’t this the place to begin? However, in his final paragraph on Juegos, Jordan places the onus back on the writer when he records as ‘significant…the author’s inability, at this stage in his writing career, to envisage and create credible, would-be revolutionary adolescents facing the difficulties of political commitment’ (p. 135). But is it Goytisolo’s lack of skill or the restrictions of censorship—be it ‘autocensura’ or state imposed? This must be at least considered and the latter might be verified by consulting documents at the Archivo General de la Administración at Alcalá de Henares near Madrid. Jordan further criticizes Goytisolo on the grounds of poor character portrayal since his characters are ‘already formed and show little inner evolution’ (p. 135). Notwithstanding, such characters are typical of didactic literature and it seems to me that Jordan ignores the relevance of didacticism both here in particular (see, furthermore, his sentence on the ‘golpe’ (p. 34, lines 15–18)) and within the wider context of the ‘novela social’. With regard to Goytisolo’s Duelo, the absence of a specific anchoring in time and space is criticized: ‘the main novelistic action is played out in a temporal and spatial vacuum where time seems to stand still and which, in a sense, directly negates the realm of the historical, war-time backcloth’ (p. 137). Again, this may have been a censorship requirement. Yet Jordan notes previously that the context of this second novel by Goytisolo is ‘an identifiable historical framework, that of the civil war’ (p. 136). Hardly a vacuum, then, and it should be remembered that it was not unheard of for ‘delicate’ dates to be removed. (W.Holtby’s South Riding is a case in point. The novel ends with the ‘Epilogue at a Silver Jubilee’, i.e. that of King George V in 1935. In the Spanish version (Distrito del Sur), the day as supplied in the original, 6 May, is respected but the year is omitted, thus keeping the monarchical historical memory at bay.) The question of didacticism must also be relevant to Duelo, where a character called Abel is sacrificed, but this is never touched upon. Finally, on the subject of sexuality in the novel, Jordan suggests: ‘Goytisolo seems to approve of [the character] Enrique’s infidelity to his wife as a challenge to bourgeois decency’ (p. 140) but he is unable to recognize a similar vigour in the son Romano’s ‘strange [sic] relationship with the mysterious, androgynous Claude’ (p. 140). A last word on some ideological and theoretical points of confusion in Jordan’s work. Line 1 of Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain records the defeat of fascism in post-war Europe (p. vii). However, in chapter 2, we read: ‘Let us recall that in the 1940s, falangists were fascists’ (p. 34)—a further debatable point, incidentally—and in chapter 4, when speaking of the penetration of Italian neo-realism in the 1950s, Jordan declares: ‘In Spain…a junior partner of the fascisms of the 1930s was still in power’ (p. 103). Thus, while Jordan initially writes of the fall of fascism in post-war Europe, he then goes on to claim for its survival in Spain. The point may be that Jordan is not including Spain in Europe but this is not made clear. On the other hand, one might surmise that he confidently makes the assertion in line 1 of the text because the

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Spanish regime was a ‘para-fascist’8 power, but this possible interpretation is denied given what is quoted above. At the level of narrative technique, Jordan appears shaky on author and narrator distinctions with such usage as ‘the omniscient author [sic] of nineteenth-century realism’ (p. 95) and ‘authorial narrator [sic]’ (p. 135). He also attributes Filomena’s distress on hearing of Abel’s death in Duelo, conveyed by means of free discourse: ‘Imposible de [sic] comprender. Todo era absürdo [sic]’ (p. 139),9 to the narrator. It might be added here that a concept on which one would have expected to find further elaboration is that of ‘tremendismo’, especially as a section is devoted to it in the opening chapter. Jordan repeatedly quotes from J.L.Marfany’s work on the Spanish post-war novel but never picks up his dispute regarding ‘un terme poc afortunat’ (a rather unfortunate term), as Marfany qualifies it in the first of the three articles cited by Jordan in his bibliography. The reader is struck in the culminating chapter on ‘The writers and their works’ that Goytisolo should be given the last word on his novel Juegos (p. 136). The gesture seems to award the author a final authority over the text which post-Barthian Jordan might well be expected to contest. In a sense, he falls into the same trap at the end of Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain when he quotes the Barcelona critic, publisher and writer Carlos Barral’s diagnosis of the ‘novela social’ in 1968 without further ado (p. 181). The reader is disconcerted to find Barral ceded the final assessment, not because the critic’s opinion may not be worth recall ing but because he writes the movement off as an emergency measure and mere fashion. If Jordan agrees, then one wonders why he bothered devoting a book to it. Almost twenty-five years on, some new thinking is called for as well as a wider range of reference than is provided by Jordan. The ‘model of dispersion’ (p. xiii) needed to scatter itself further. All told, British Hispanism and the Challenge of Literary Theory constitutes a better buy. For £22 less, an errata sheet is also included and this is needed for the errors (finme (p. 40) for fin me; pubelo (p. 159) for pueblo; Goytisola (p. 210) for Goytisolo, amongst others) and omissions (such as: of (p. 145, line 3); exemplfies (p. 154, line 6) for exemplifies in the black hardback. University of Barcelona NOTES 1 B.Jordan, British Hispanism and the Challenge of Literary Theory (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990), 108 pages. £7.95. 2 In the text quoted in note 1, B.Jordan is identified as Lecturer in Spanish at Birmingham University. In the text under review, he is referred to as Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. 3 P.Widdowson (ed.), Re-reading English (London: Methuen, 1982). 4 See P.Ilie, Literature and Inner Exile: Authoritarian Spain 1939–1975 (Baltimore, 1980). 5 See J.M.Areilza, ‘Mary Lavelle’, El País (13 August 1985). 6 The metaphor is used in comments introduced on the cover of Bibliografía Hispánica, May 1948, regarding the publication of M.Pombo’s Hospital general. 7 See the dossier on W.Churchill, Mi juventud at the Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, in the documents of the Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular, expediente 5983 (1943). 8 See R.Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991). 9 The original text reads: ‘Imposible comprender. Todo era absurdo.’ See: J.Goytisolo, Duelo en le paraúso (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, S.A., 1987, p. 81.

• Morag Schiach, Discourse on Popular Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 238 pp., £29.50 • Tony Bennett (ed.), Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 486 pp., £10.99 • John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 206 pp., £8.95 • John Fiske, Reading the Popular (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 228 pp., £8.95 GARY DAY The study of popular culture continues to grow apace. In the early 1960s it barely had a foothold in the curriculum of English Departments but now it is respectably installed in most tertiary institutions. This situation has arisen mainly due to the constant questioning by cultural theorists of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. One of the most celebrated forms of this distinction was expressed by Leavis when he opposed literature to mass culture. The former was an embodiment of a unique sensibility, a work of imagination reproducing the texture of real life. The latter, by contrast, was formulaic and sensational. Few would now accept Leavis’s rigid division, not just because it offends the democratic sensibility but because it is theoretically untenable. Leavis saw literature as an incarnation of permanent truths about human nature but critical theory has undermined his position by showing how the same text is read in different ways in different periods. Once literature was relativized in these and other ways its position vis-à-vis ‘low’ culture could no longer be maintained. Moreover, if literature was not what it had formerly been claimed to be, then neither, perhaps, was its other, and so it became necessary and even desirable to study what is now known as popular culture, a term which avoids the negative evaluation implicit in ‘low’ culture and the sense of imposition suggested by mass culture, while itself connotating notions of choice and democracy. The collapse of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is not without its problems. Both are now seen as examples of a signifying practice and discussed in terms such as institution, ideology and gender. But this common language does not mean that the two are of equivalent worth. The strength of this language is that it contextualizes both, but its weakness is that it fails to discriminate between them. In particular, it shirks the issue of value, replacing it with the altogether more limited one of pleasure. Nevertheless the ghost of value haunts discussions of popular culture and this is because, although the terms of the hierarchy ‘high’ and ‘low’ have been redefined, the hierarchy itself remains in place. When literature is exposed as elitist and duplicitous it is inevitable that its other comes to assume the characteristics formerly ascribed to its opposite. This perception is strengthened when it is noted, as Morag Schiach expresses it, that literary criticism continues to have an ‘important role…in the development of categories and methodologies with which we analyse…popular culture’ (p. 15). We can see this in the very language used to describe popular culture whose products are ‘texts’ and ‘fictions’. Interpretation too plays a key role in understanding these texts and the careful probing which reveals contrary but balanced meanings (see, for example, Laura Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ in Bennett, pp. 139–51) is

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reminiscent of nothing so much as New Criticism; we are returned to an almost transcendental view of the text, as if poststructuralism had never happened. These persistent if unconscious literary practices mean that the study of popular culture is not, as fondly imagined, a sign of solidarity with the working class but, on the contrary, a wholesale appropriation of its culture. That this is not more widely recognized only highlights the astonishing naïvety of those who are supposedly au fait with the operations of discourses and institutions. Until cultural critics confront these problems, especially the entangled relations of pleasure and value, they are never going to develop a rhetoric that will build bridges between themselves and those they claim to represent. Political practice, however modest, is underpinned by a sense of right and wrong but these terms, along with the notion of worth, have no place in the new which has appropriated their old context, literature, for its own ends. They need to be restored and re-thought if the idea of qualitative social change is to have any meaning. Pleasure, though a necessary concept, simply cannot carry that kind of burden. Morag Schiach shows how, along with literature, assumptions regarding class, gender history, cultural authenticity and decline continue to structure discussions of popular culture. As such, critics are in danger of ‘reproducing one of a very limited number of explanations or descriptions of popular culture while straining after specificity and novelty’ (p. 200). She investigates the origins of the word ‘popular’, showing that it is not simply a cultural or aesthetic term but that it has its roots in a range of political and legal discourses. The history of the term, however, is one of the gradual severing of the relations between social power, political democracy and cultural production, with the result that ‘popular’ has now come to be synonymous with individual choice or taste. Schiach’s book is a welcome reminder that the phrase popular culture is not as straightforward as its use often implies. She is also illuminating on the complex transactions between the popular and the dominant culture, nowhere more so than in the chapter ‘Peasant poets’. She argues for the rehabilitation of women in the history of popular culture and urges that we should all be more conscious of our presuppositions and of the links between social power and cultural production. Her book is limited to the extent that she does not establish these links and she is also silent on the question of how popular culture was or is experienced. Popular Fiction is a collection of extracts and essays that have been published elsewhere. It is a comprehensive survey of the field and serves to fill the gaps in Schiach’s argument. The title is a little unfortunate in that the word ‘fiction’ suggests a reality from which it is differentiated, but this is to quibble. The collection is divided into four parts. The contributors in the first section are at pains to show that cultural forms are not simply determined by a set of relations which they then reflect; rather they are inextricably bound up with the technological, economic and ideological, working with them to regulate social relations and specific forms of subjectivity. While this is a salutary, if by now axiomatic correction of crude Marxism, the impression of a multiple simultaneity of determinations is somewhat depressing since it seems to close down any possibility of resistance. However, the impression fades when it is remembered that this situation is not necessarily experienced as it is described. Furthermore, despite the desire to conceptualize the totality of relations, the arguments are always directed towards specific ones, thus making them more manageable as well as suggesting that there is no final synthesis in which we are finally trapped. The second section addresses the problem that, due to Marxism ignoring nationalism, the idea of the nation has been monopolized and developed by the Tories. The extracts in this section show some of the different ways in which the national consciousness is produced and reproduced. Although there is an emphasis on the fact that the struggle for the idea of a nation is conducted on pre-given grounds, there is a sense in which the dominant representations can be subverted, a point well illustrated by Graeme Turner’s ‘Representing the nation’ (pp. 117–27).

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Indeed this piece points up one of the main trends in theories of popular culture, namely that the artefact (text, commodity etc.) can be read in opposition to the system whose meanings it carries. This is regarded as a way of intervening in the operations of popular culture, of neutralizing its effects and appropriating it for socialist ends. This is a laudable sentiment, but what exactly does it mean? An intellectual reading of Terminator 2 may appease the political conscience and give the perpetrator street cred in the academic community but it does not really address the problem of how that reading could achieve wider circulation, nor how it would be received, nor how it would differ from—or even why it should be preferable to—other readings or, for that matter, consumptions, nor how it would contribute, if at all, to change. Until cultural theorists have tackled these and related issues they cannot honestly claim that the study of popular culture is a force in the hoped-for transformation of society. In the third section, the idea of reading in opposition is linked to pleasure. The focus is on the relations between pleasure and patriarchal ideology, specifically how the former is possible and how it can be used to delay, disrupt and interrogate the text’s closure. Mulvey argues that pleasure is consequent on films reactivating ‘masculine’ fantasies of action which have to be repressed in the interests of correct femininity. This argument relies rather too heavily on Freud and is suspiciously masochistic in that the pleasure derived from the reactivation is ultimately inseparable from its repression. In this context pleasure, far from being subversive of the dominant order, is the experience of its re-imposition. This is just one example of the problematic nature of pleasure in the analysis of popular culture. More grievously it is simply too subjectspecific to use either as the basis of an argument or a rallying cry. Although this section reveals a subtle sense of the mechanisms of gender construction there is, finally, too much emphasis on sexuality. As such, the contributors can be seen to reproduce patriarchal anxieties about femininity. Also, the sense that it somehow escapes patriarchal definitions is too readily assimilable to notions of excess which themselves border on biological rather than social definitions of femininity. The overall impression is that no one’s escaped from the prison because they’ve been too busy redesigning it. The contributors in the fourth section draw on Foucault’s notion of truth as a function of discourse to place the detective story within nineteenth-century ideologies of individualism and science, further locating the genre within the development of the city, the police force and related forms of surveillance. The consensus among the contributors is that the detective story functions to suppress individualism. If this is the case, which is doubtful, it is hard to reconcile with one of the major claims of the collection, that popular culture exists to construct individuality. Such contradictions make the collection prey to the sort of deconstructionist turn which Catherine Belsey performs so exquisitely on the Sherlock Holmes stories (‘Deconstructing the text: Sherlock Holmes’, pp. 277–85) in which she shows how a hidden sexuality contradicts the project of scientific explicitness. Her analysis encourages the belief that no matter how finely interlocked discourses may be, there is always a chance to escape the definitions they collectively try to impose. The section on production makes the familiar point that economic effects are always mediated and never direct. This idea does not, however, emerge very strongly in any of the contributions here. They read as straightforward histories though with a density of fact that is likely to appeal only to the specialist. Given the link between revelation and action which is tacitly urged throughout this collection, the reader feels slightly uncomfortable when confronted with such a mass of information. It is difficult to know what to do with it for, sadly, the theoretical framework which is evident elsewhere is here overwhelmed by a vengeful flood of empirical data. The final section picks up the pace again and examines what has to be one of the major problems in the study of popular culture, namely the difference between what Bourdieu calls high and popular taste. The former is based on distance, detachment and a preference for form, and the latter on involvement,

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identification and a preference for the concrete. This suggests that popular culture is experienced by subjectivities which are already in place whereas the claim of this collection is that popular culture exists to construct them. For Bourdieu, subjectivity is prior to popular culture; for Bennett et al. it is the other way round. The contributors in this section do not so much deal with this division as exemplify it, producing interpretations which are so masterly, so controlled and so sure of themselves that it is a source of wonder how popular culture could ever be regarded as a determining force. All in all, Bennett’s collection is a sound one. He’s been successful in representing the different approaches to popular culture and he’s to be commended for moving away from simple evaluation in order to try to place it within the technological, economic and ideological relations of production and the institutional contexts which determine its deployment and reception. Unfortunately the text sometimes collapses under the weight of its own ambition. What is needed is some comment that would link the different sections together which, as they stand, remain stubbornly unintegrated. This generates the kind of contradictions already noted, though it’s uncertain whether this is a bad thing, for there’s a fundamental ambiguity surrounding the notion of contradiction; it’s either seen as a fault in an argument and therefore a reason for dismissing it, or else it’s the site for the production of new meanings. The real drawback of this collection, however, is that it doesn’t acknowledge its own class-based approach to the subject and, as such, offers itself as being somehow representative, the norm. It also attempts to dissipate the inevitable questions of worth and value by cultivating an air of objectivity which gives no sense of the seductive glamour of popular culture, and, to that extent, it fails to address what is perhaps its most important aspect. This is not a charge that one could make against John Fiske. He revels in the bold attractions of popular culture. ‘I enjoy watching television, I love the sensational tabloid press, I read trashy popular novels and enjoy popular block buster movies’ (Understanding Popular Culture, p. 258). Fiske’s confession is typical of his lively, engaging style which makes a refreshing change from the ponderousness of some cultural critics. Fiske’s position is that popular culture is always in opposition to the dominant culture. This opposition is expressed in two ways, evasion and resistance, and both are a form of pleasure. Evasion centres on the body which in such experiences as ‘the intense concentration of video games’ or subjection ‘to the terrifying physical forces of the white knuckle rides’ is momentarily released ‘from its social definition and control… it is a moment of carnivalesque freedom closely related to Barthes’s jouissance’ (ibid., p. 83). Resistance is making meanings opposite to those of the dominant culture; thus tearing jeans is a way of redefining them in a manner that suits the consumer rather than the producer. In essence, such actions give people a measure of control over their identities and social relations which the forces of domination systematically deny them. At first glance Fiske’s arguments are appealing, not least because they flatter readers into thinking that they are constantly making guerrilla raids on the system which oppresses them. However, if they are doing this without realizing it, as Fiske implies, then what value is their opposition? His desire to see everything as an act of opposition, such as consuming the images in a mall instead of its commodities (Reading the Popular, p. 17) threatens to rob the term of all meaning. Similarly Fiske is a little too confident about divining people’s intentions—are surfers and sunbathers really riding out to do battle with society when they pursue their pleasures? It’s odd that someone who is trying to resist the system uses its key terms with approval. Take his use of choice, that thoroughly bourgeois concept and prop of consumerism. For Fiske it is, as he demonstrates in his discussion of shopping, an ‘empowered moment’ (ibid., p. 28) since the act of buying one thing involves the rejection of others. This is the kind of thinking found in a Tory election manifesto. In the same discussion Fiske also involves himself in some spectacular contradictions. The best concerns his claim that the way commodities are consumed subverts the social order yet, in the next breath, he states that they

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enable women ‘to relate to the social order’ and participate in the ideology of progress (ibid., p. 41). Similarly, it is hard to see how popular culture is opposed to ideology when, in talking about video games, Fiske notes that they ‘defuse the contradictions between subordination and masculinity’ (ibid., p. 85), for isn’t this the ideological function par excellence? And what about the description of popular culture as having to work against differences ‘to find a commonality between divergent social groups’? (ibid., p. 6). You couldn’t have a better description of ideology. These lapses are compounded by smaller but equally damaging ones. Fiske’s notion of relevance, which he sees as central to popular culture, can only work to reinforce the dominant order. Then there is his muddled view of society. On the one hand it is a simple opposition between the forces of domination and those of subordination, on the other it is a complex structure the relation between whose parts is diffused and deferred and not one of cause and effect. However, while Fiske refuses a simplistic correspondence between the structural levels of the economic, the social and the cultural, he positively embraces it at the level of representation, as when he writes that the wrestler is ‘a metaphor for the body of the people, the subordinated body, the labouring body’ (Understanding Popular Culture, p. 102). Despite these imbroglios, Fiske is required reading. He is accessible and challenging. He may make too much of the notion of pleasure which is control and loss of control, resistance and acquiesence, nor does it take him very far in analysing the complex relations between the macro and the micro levels of society, but he at least tries to give a popular account of it. He also shows that opposition is indeed possible even if here, also, he presses his case too hard. Throughout both books Fiske attempts to develop a rhetoric that will connect left-wing theory and politics ‘with the everyday lives of the people who stand to gain the most by them’ (ibid., p. 163). That he sometimes stumbles along the way is no reason to discount him. University of Wales College of Cardiff

• Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell (eds), Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 256 pp., £35.00 JOSEPHINE McDONAGH

The critical terrain revisited in Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day is that domiciled by the ‘Unreliable Narrator’. This stalwart of practical criticism is uncovered with disconcerting enthusiasm in a selection of texts, from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette to the works of Orwell and Fowles. But perhaps the most unreliable narrative voice to make an appearance is that of the editors, Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell, whose introduction outlines a collection of essays poised on the cutting edge of theoretical enquiry. They describe a volume that interrogates the questions of subjectivity generated by Kant and renegotiated by Derrida, Deleuze and the later Foucault. This may have been the collection they would like to have assembled but sadly it is not the one that unfolds. A curious abyss opens between the introduction and the essays that follow—not only in terms of the purported common critical interest, which recedes out of view between essays, but also, in some cases, between a theoretical sophistication claimed for the essays and the methodology and critical agenda that are in fact invoked. At its weakest points the collection investigates subjectivity as though it were a facet of character development, and identifies postmodernism as a straightforward disjunction between belief and action, apparently forgetting the critical presupposition announced in the introduction and its implications: that the various fictions of subjectivity in all their complex inflections, which emerge alongside the political, economic and social shifts of 1789, are historically specific and have no absolute status. This is not to say that the volume, which began life as the proceedings of a conference, lacks stimulating and sophisticated work. Among the most engaging pieces for example is Sian Macfie’s essay on vampires. This demonstrates the way in which vampire fiction of the 1890s draws on material from contemporary sexologists, criminologists and spiritualists. The material is fascinating, but the essay is too short to explore its implications fully. Emma Francis’s essay, ‘Is Emily Brontë a woman?’, stands out as the most challenging in the volume. This negotiates Bataille’s reading of Brontë as a transgressive writer, in which transgression is achieved through the loss of sexual identity, alongside Francis’s own larger project, to find a poetics that is specific and common to Victorian women poets. Through some subtle readings of Brontë’s poems she develops a theory of reading as paranoia which is enacted in the poems as they represent a desire for loss of identity simultaneous with a despair at this loss. The essay suggests that a historicized recuperation of Bataille’s work might be enabling for the feminist critic. Also of note are Carolyn Masel’s elegant essay on Wallace Stevens, a scrupulous close reading of some poems to show that Stevens’

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espoused impersonality works by principles of dialogism; and Jamie Brassett’s ‘The spaced-out subject: Bachelard and Perec’, which provides a suggestive reading of Perec’s work through Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. On the whole, however, the volume lacks the firm and sensitive editorial control that conference proceedings in particular require. Too many papers are included, some are too slight to warrant publication and those that contain interesting material are not allowed sufficient space. The publication is an ambitious project since the editors and virtually all the contributors were, at the time of writing, graduate students. As a consequence of this a sense of youthful enthusiasm, a difference from the tired academic mainstream, becomes something of a hallmark of the collection. In some cases this is effective, but when an excuse for longwinded self-examination, or wild and unsubstantiated generalizations, or indeed the massive array of typographical errors, it becomes perplexing, if not tedious. This is to be regretted, for enmeshed within the book is some serious and innovative work. University of Exeter

• Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film. Memory & History (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 278 pp., £35.00 (hardback) REYNOLD HUMPHRIES

Flashbacks in Film is an ambitious work, from the point of view of both approach and material: silent American and Japanese cinema; Hollywood sound films turning on the two World Wars; film noir of the forties; and modernist cinema, European and Japanese. For reasons of space and competence, I shall concentrate on the Hollywood sound period, as it is here that Turim is particularly interesting, while at the same time revealing certain weaknesses in her approach. Turim calls the flashback ‘a privileged moment in unfolding that juxtaposes different moments of temporal reference. A juncture is wrought between present and past and two concepts are implied in this juncture: memory and history’ (p. 1). She then introduces the concept of memory as something that ‘strengthens or protects’ (which she analyses in the pages devoted to films representing the American war effort) or that ‘repeats and haunts’ (the film noir of the forties). This in turn leads her to stress the ways in which, through flashbacks, ‘the personal archives of the past’ and ‘the shared and recorded past’ can converge and be played off against one another (p. 2). Thus, within the space of two pages, she has raised the questions of the psychic dimension of memory and its representation in images; the interaction of the distant or immediate past and ideology; the constitution of the spectator as a ‘Subject in history’. Throughout her book Turim is anxious to avoid treating Hollywood as a monolithic and homogenizing machine, devoted to an imaginary transparency. Now this tendency to pass the image off as an unmediated reality is a determining factor without which Hollywood would never have existed, and she is particularly good at pin-pointing the conflicts and contradictions that structure so many films and which she works on patiently in order to displace the accent from the manifest content to the latent meaning: film noir is a veritable gold-mine here. Thus we can say that the flashback is used to explain an enigma in such a way as to remove doubt and hesitancy both within the text and, crucially, within the spectator by a retroactive reorganization of temporality that ends up by suturing the very gaps opened by the text’s admission that the cinema is a discourse and that ‘life’ is not a chronological and continuous series of images whose transformation into a narrative goes without saying. At the same time, however, flashbacks in films that tend, as so often in Hollywood cinema, to ‘evade direct references to history’, can become ‘the primary sites for fixing referential meaning’ (p. 12). In such cases, ‘fixing meaning’ would not be a case of providing the spectator with an imaginary site from which to constitute him/herself as a self-centred ego, but a means of reintroducing the Symbolic in the form of a discours that questions the bland histoire of the present.

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As Turim’s analyses of individual films show, however, this possibility tends to be stopped short by a text’s move towards an imaginary solution of real contradictions, with the result that, ‘made aware of the past, the spectator is freed to forget it once again’ (p. 12). The results, nevertheless, can be interesting inasmuch as they provide the critic with a lever to prise open the text and deconstruct its ideological and representational contradictions. Much of Turim’s argument turns on the representation of Woman and I propose to start there. In her discussion of Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy, 1940) Turim points out how the needs of propaganda, overdetermined by the dictates of the codes of melodrama, marginalize the story’s theme ‘of the difficulties for women waiting and working on the home front’ (p. 124). Here, as in other instances, what Turim calls ‘personal traumas of loss and recovery’ (p. 125) are wont to take precedence over the representation of social concerns that are objectively present, but which are subjectivized the better to dehistoricize the problem, to reduce it to the individual lest it become the object of a genuine debate. Thus the need to present History as a series of inter-individual conflicts guided and resolved by a male discourse ultimately wins the day even in a film such as The Great Man’s Lady (William Wellman, 1942), which ‘suggests that there is a male form of history and biography that needs to suppress a female version that must be kept secret’ (p. 117). At the end of the film, the heroine destroys all evidence pointing to her role in history, thus ‘insuring perpetuation of the myth surrounding the “Great Man”’. This not only maintains Woman in a role determined by and dependent on men; it also naturalizes both discourse and representation, snatches them from the tensions and contradictions of History and leaves the spectator to bathe in the blissful light of a belief that the knowledge provided by the text has been systematically questioned. Although she does not stress the fact, Turim provides a striking example of how such contradictions can transcend texts and take root in society itself. Comparing two films—Joe Smith, American (Richard Thorpe, 1942) and Tender Comrade (Edward Dmytryk, 1943)—Turim points out how, in the former, ‘a sexual division of labour’ is seen as ‘a source of male pride and gratitude’ (p. 127), whereas the latter explores ‘the possibility of wage-earning women cooperating in an experimental form of socialism’ (p. 129), adding significantly that the film’s ending ‘bears within it another promise for the future than the present of war seems to allow’ (p. 130). This suggests that socialism is seen as a viable alternative to the established order. The fact that the author of the film’s script, Dalton Trumbo, was to become a victim of the Hollywood witch-hunts of 1947—orchestrated by the Republicans (including young lawyer Richard Nixon) in order to smear the Democrats of the ‘New Deal’— and that the very title of the film is positive about socialism, is perhaps not entirely coincidental. More common a reaction than this, however, is one structured by the way an entire society conceives the place accorded each individual: a non-problematic self who, in the last instance, is the source of his/her feelings and judgements. Any questioning of this will at once trigger off unpleasure: the flashback structure tends to override this split constituting the impression of reality with a second level rearticulating a similar conflict of beliefs. On this level, the spectator is again presented with a duality, and this time the balance often tilts towards a knowledge of structure, an awareness of the process of telling stories about the past. This may be a reason flashback structures are negatively received as too artificial and as slowing down the action. (p. 17)

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This is nicely put, especially as Turim goes on to underline the ‘logic of inevitability’ contained within flashbacks containing ‘psychoanalytic fatalism’. She rightly sees this problematic within the context of ‘figures of repetition and fate’ (p. 13), which brings us back to the representation of Woman in film noir. Thus a major and much-neglected film on which Turim is particularly good, John Brahm’s The Locket (1946), gets dismissed as incomprehensible because it has flashbacks within flashbacks, although its narrative is perfectly clear in the best traditions of the genre. If The Lady from Shanghai, however, is objectively complicated, it is due less to the story than to the foregrounding of the codes of representation: the shift from énoncé to énonciation produces negative effects. Critical and spectatorial unpleasure is a form of defence mechanism, the effect of another and far more dangerous threat to the serene, stable ego than a supposedly incompetent use of flashbacks: Woman. I do not believe I am exaggerating when I claim that Woman as threat is the central theme of film noir and determines the genre (from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1952). Be she the object of fascination or a calculating murderess, the female character is there to compromise, ensnare or destroy the hapless male. This fear of women is, of course, presented as justified by the behaviour of the female characters, which, just as obviously, is a question of representation where an overwhelming atmosphere of the Uncanny for both male character and spectator is projected onto the individual woman, who thus becomes a threat. Inasmuch as the female body is the source of male castration anxiety, this psychic projection, overdetermined as it is by Hollywood’s ideological need to see everything in individual terms, enables the filmic text to displace the accent and make of a given female the physical source of the poor male’s woes. White male Angst, dutifully overdetermined by ideological discourses of a precise social nature, now finds its full misogynistic and paranoid flowering in such films as Edgar G.Ulmer’s Detour (1945), John Stahl’s significantly titled Leave Her to Heaven (1945), The Locket, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Angel Face. It is most instructive to see the role of disavowal functioning so well, notably in the way certain films allow themselves to foreground the neurotic nature of the repetition compulsion structuring every aspect of the behaviour of the hero, while at the same time blaming his demise on the woman. The characters played by Robert Mitchum in The Locket, Out of the Past and Angel Face return obsessively to their past to repeat it, but so strong is the sway of belief over knowledge that their death-wish—openly acknowledged in the films of Tourneur and Preminger—can be blamed on the heroine. It is always a question of external fate and, in Hollywood terms, this can only be individual, not historical. In the films of Lang, Preminger, Tourneur and Welles, however, the self-conscious aspects of the mise en scène tend to foreground the devices leading the spectator to identify with the male character in such a way as to make the spectator part of the text’s enunciative strategies, of a structure where representation becomes an activity to the point where the woman-as-object-of-representation/desire can no longer be seen as an unproblematic given. Thus the viewing subject, too, finds its look being questioned: what it sees is suddenly conditioned by how it sees, and the split between subject of the énonciation and subject of the énoncé becomes the locus of a desire the filmic text is meant simultaneously to mask and to assuage. It would be rash and erroneous to draw the conclusion that the foregrounding of the énonciation is, in itself, sufficient to subvert the imaginary plenitude desired by and offered the spectator by the Hollywood machine. Let me give a counter-example: Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1947), a film which, like many others, straddles the interrelated genres of film noir and psychological melodrama. Little of the film is in flashback, but the opening exploits it in a very particular way. A feminine voice-off talks of dreams and danger, then dismisses such talk in favour of the narration of the characters’ wedding, which leads into a lengthy flashback representing the events leading up to Celia meeting Mark in Mexico, then marrying him.

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The énoncé of Secret Beyond the Door is simple and striking for a Hollywood film: a woman faced with the neuroses of her husband takes things in hand, fights to help him and finally overcomes his problems, thus saving the marriage. Giving the male a passive feminine role and the female an active masculine one is not exactly everyday fare, and it is precisely the entire panoply of enunciative strategies that is put to work to rectify matters. Thus, gradually, the ideology of the voice-off as garantor of Truth is pressed into service to reveal that the heroine is as neurotic as the hero, that her desire to know and to attain the Absolute is part and parcel of that death-wish we have seen functioning in the Robert Mitchum characters evoked above. If the ending is a happy ending in so far as the couple are reunited, the fact that they are back in Mexico suggests they can continue where things left off, as if nothing had happened. This enunciative device is now overdetermined by the script where Celia insists that they both ‘have a long way to go’, thus relinquishing her status as all-knowing female doctor to the male soul. If the énonciation subverts the énoncé in a way that brings comfort to a conservative ideology that naturalizes the woman’s ‘entrapment as the object of the desire of the Other’ (p. 156), the complexity of the interaction of the specific cinematic codes nevertheless prevents the spectator from being able to adopt, at any given moment, a clear position from which to judge ‘objectively’ the events.1 An interesting comparison can be made with the cinema’s most celebrated example of the voice-off: Preminger’s Laura (1944). Turim rightly insists on its ambiguity (p. 186), but fails to see why. If Waldo Lydecker is given a privileged position before being revealed as the murderer, this must also be seen in the context of the film’s insistence on details—Lydecker, significantly, claims to pay no attention to them— which connote him as a homosexual. Thus the constant questioning of his status implied by the narrative— he is presented negatively within the flashbacks he narrates himself—ends up by assimilating him to a ‘typical’ female character. Turim, I should add, makes similar observations about the Susan Alexander character in Citizen Kane (p. 114). When all is said and done, there is not meant to be any doubt about the maleness of narrative. It is on the status of the spectator-as-subject that Turim’s analyses come unstuck. Despite her interest in films that refuse the spectator that desired plenitude, she does not seem to be able systematically to draw the necessary conclusions from certain Hollywood movies that exploit it. She is clearly intrigued by the use of flashback in Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) which begins with a ‘corpse’ relating how he came to be one. We see the body of a young man floating in a swimming-pool, accompanied by a voice-off claiming to be the corpse, ‘a voice-over from beyond death’ as Turim puts it (p. 136). By referring to ‘this “impossible” narration’ Turim is surely hedging her bets. It is impossible only if one assumes a complete identity between corpse and narrator, between subject of the énoncé and subject of the énonciation, an imaginary position inasmuch as the speaking subject assumes sole responsibility for what it says. What we are dealing with here is rather a narrative instance, which not only foregrounds the enunciative strategy whereby the elements of the text are put in place, but also the position imposed upon the spectators as effects of that strategy which, in turn, determines their way of seeing/interpreting/ identifying with the subjects of the énoncé. Either Turim cannot push the logic of decentring to its conclusion, or else she is shying away from the implications as far as critics are concerned: they are, after all, first and foremost, spectators themselves.2 If death is central to Sunset Boulevard, then it is so in a very special sense in Ulmer’s Detour. The film opens with the hero, in a state of complete physical and psychological collapse, in a café. It ends with his emerging from the café, only to be picked up by the police and driven off, clearly to be tried and executed for murder. Only he and the spectators know that the two deaths were accidental. The rest of the film is in flashback. It shows the hero deciding to join his fiancée in Los Angeles, but allowing himself to be side-tracked by another woman to the point where he even refuses to phone his fiancée when he has the

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chance. Consciously, his desire is to be with his fiancée. Unconsciously, he throws in his lot with a woman whose simple look—and the meaning of her look is anything but simple—is enough to turn him into a helpless slave of her desire. Significantly, it is with the cord of the telephone that he accidentally strangles her. The film becomes a sort of illustration of the Pleasure Principle, with the various detours showing that the human subject does not go to its death by just any route.3 The fact that the end of the film coincides with the end of the hero can be seen, in turn, as illustrating the spectator’s desire to find, through a fiction, that plenitude which, in life, can be attained only at death. The flashback in Detour is a mise en abyme of memory as phantasy, as desire, with the woman’s castrating glare as the signifier of the lack that sets desire in motion and that finds its imaginary solution with the man’s impending execution, ‘imaginary’ in so far as it displaces the meaning of the viewing subject’s own desire onto a seemingly unproblematic character. The far-reaching—and hardly reassuring—implications for the status of the subject implicit in films like Sunset Boulevard and Detour may explain why Turim joins in the chorus of undeserved adulation that has greeted over the years Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). It is insufficient to claim that, in a film where each character gives a different version of a death and the events leading up to it, ‘all that appears constant is the samurai’s death’ (p. 197). The narrator with whose anguish the film opens and who goes off nobly with the baby at the end is just another variant of the voice of common sense and honesty, the latter being the film’s Ultimate Signified towards which everything moves. Kurosawa is not interested in questioning the inherently problematic status of the image as something that produces meaning for a spectator. If the image ‘lies’, it is because of humanity’s basic vices, dishonesty and self-interest, as banal and reactionary a ‘message’ as one can get. Any interest the film shows in the énonciation is there to hammer the point home. It is also a pity that Turim should have chosen to discuss so many films and directors in her chapter on the modern cinema, where a more selective approach and more detailed analyses would have been more productive. Indeed, the book as a whole suffers from a lack of close textual analyses in favour of an insistence on overall narrative structures. Instead of giving example after example, she might have chosen to give more space to the one modern director who has used flashback in a way that affords us radically new insights into politics and history, the family and the representation of women, the image and the unconscious of the text as determining the spectator’s reception of it: Nagisa Oshima’.4 That she does not do so stems perhaps from her refusal to tackle the question of the subject. After making allowances for this, however, it must be admitted that Flashbacks in Film is a mostly rigorous and valuable attempt to come to terms with complex matters. Paris NOTES 1 For a detailed analysis of these codes, see the chapter on the film in my Fritz Lang. Genre and Representation in his American Films (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 136–52. 2 As I pointed out in my review of his book on Conrad, it is this same reticence that prevents Jeremy Hawthorn from tackling coherently the problematics of the narration in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. 3 See Jacques Lacan: ‘Le Circuit’. Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse. Le Séminaire, livre II (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 103. 4 The fact that so redoubtable a theorist as Stephen Heath has written so brilliantly on Oshima is hardly a reason for making no reference to Death by Hanging. Quite the contrary. See Heath: ‘Anata mo’, Screen, vol. 17, no. 4, (Winter 1976–7), pp. 49–66.

• Martin Orkin, Drama and the South African State (Manchester and Johannesburg: Manchester University Press and Wits University Press, 1991), 263 pp., £9.95 MYRTLE HOOPER

It is perhaps inevitable that any book written about South Africa before 1990 should begin with a declaration of credentials such as we find in the Introduction to Martin Orkin’s Drama and the South African State. It is perhaps less inevitable, however, that such a declaration should take the particular form of games-playing that Orkin’s does. Of course there is no reason why stupid Afrikaner Nationalist politicians should not be fair game for critical attack; but Orkin’s game is not entirely fair. In the first place, his vituperation smacks of a rhetorical manoeuvre frequently enacted by South African English-speakers assured of certain political certainties: one which might be labelled ‘Get the Nationalist’. In the second, if it is not a requirement of Orkin’s argument that the identity of the Minister in question be disclosed, there is nevertheless a concomitant difficulty in gauging the validity of the implied generalization. ‘All Nationalists Are One of a Kind’ thus elides seamlessly into ‘The Conspiracy of Oppression’ manifest in ‘the steady determination on the part of ruling classes and groups to obfuscate and marginalise awareness’ (p. 2). Although Orkin works hard at keeping ‘the ruling classes’ in the plural (including within this category Afrikaners, British, non-British Europeans, North Americans and East Europeans), the ‘subordinate classes’ are less fortunate as regards specification. We are left, in the end, with a fundamentally dualist conception of oppression which opposes rulers and subordinates with enviable simplicity. Into this particular pitched battle, and on the side of the oppressed classes, strides ‘Literature Heroic’: Drama practitioners have often to struggle against and to contest, not only the communications media, but those discourses which, privileged by the apartheid state and the ruling classes, flow powerfully through cultural, educational and social institutions. (p. 2) The heroism of literature, in Orkin’s scheme of things, resides precisely in its propensity for ‘Resistance!’ to ‘hardship and oppression’ (as is evident in the title given his first book, Shakespeare Against Apartheid). The heavyweights which ‘collude in processes of suppression’ encompass, after all, not only the ‘discourses…privileged by the apartheid state’, but also ‘British cultural influence’, its economic base, ‘British capital’, and ‘the powerful influence of the emergent North American metropolis’ (p. 2). Thus

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Orkin’s oppositional discourse is transferred into the domain of the postcolonial, implicating and indicting the superpowers along with the apartheid state. This Introduction begins an admirable and groundbreaking if somewhat headlong history of alternative theatre in South Africa. The mandate Orkin has given himself is to examine how, over the past five decades or so, at the significant moments of South African dramatic activity, the subject, the land, the body and culture, amongst other concepts, have been imagined or presented on stage and in playtext. (pp. 17–18) His initiative is an important one, given the condition of the academic study of drama in this country. There is considerable justice in Orkin’s indictment of the South African academy of letters: The ‘political turn’ which this practice of criticism by the South African English literary establishment in the schools and universities has entailed at least up to the time [1970] that these comments [of Philip Segal’s] were made (and in some Departments of English until the present day still entails) the almost complete suppression of any study of South African drama as literary object worth either their own or their students’ concern. These attitudes complemented nicely the government banning of numbers of plays over the decades. (p. 15) Whatever reasons might exist to explain ‘the suppression of South African drama as literary object worth… concern’ besides the crude implication of collusion between academy and government, it seems certain that the publication of Orkin’s book will make it more difficult for such suppression to continue. His study is erudite and detailed; and at times offers perspectives and insights which reading in this field for several years has not brought me. And if Orkin is at his best on the white dramatist Fugard, this is perhaps not to be held against him. One of the greater significances of the text is, in my view, the postcolonial imperative which activates it. Orkin’s earlier study, Shakespeare Against Apartheid, was published locally. The joint publication of Drama and the South African State by Wits University Press and Manchester University Press is surely a reflection both of the recognition Orkin has achieved internationally and of the topicality of his subject. The theoretical orientation of the book is towards an application of metropolitan theory within the Southern African context, and, necessarily, a testing of such theory by this context. Orkin’s attempt to write South African drama back to the centre is thus an important critical manoeuvre. Yet as a representation of Southern African letters by an insider for outsiders, Orkin’s study has a responsibility to be accurate and to be objective. It is not always so. If, for example, Orkin chooses to speak for and on behalf of the ‘oppressed classes’, the declaration of credentials that introduces his study is neither direct nor complete. It is the same biographical gap which undermines the force of his argument when, for example, he attacks for literary support of the establishment a man whose long-standing opposition to apartheid is well known within South African academic circles—and this on the basis of a single article written in 1958. Clearly the coincidence of political activism and literary conservatism—and it does exist—deserves more attention and better explanations than Orkin’s jargon-ridden neo-Marxism can summon for the occasion. For a fellow South African academic the study makes uneasy reading, because there is no knowing whose clay feet are next in line for personal exposure. Indeed even Orkin’s careful use of ‘sic’ to distance himself from the masculinism apparent in Volosinov (p. 4), in Bakhtin (p. 59) and in the

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Freedom Charter’s ‘brotherhood’ (p. 19) slips at points. Yet the problems of his obfuscatory jargon are more serious and more immediate. One is that such jargon undermines the usefulness of the text for students in the very disciplines in which it ought to have its greatest impact—Drama and English Literature. Another is the blinkered refuge his jargon allows him. The unselfconsciousness with which Fairclough is cited is particularly paradoxical: [often] subjects are typically unaware of the ideological dimensions of the subject positions they occupy…it is quite possible for a social subject to occupy institutional subject positions which are ideologically incompatible, or to occupy a subject position incompatible with his or her overt political or social beliefs and affiliations, without being aware of any contradiction. (p. 18) As a professor at a still predominantly white university Orkin can scarce escape the classification he elsewhere ascribes to one H.W.D.Manson: that of ‘an academic attached to the middle classes’ (p. 115). If South African society consists, as Orkin frequently asserts it does, of the two opposed categories ‘ruling classes’ and ‘oppressed classes’, then his own ‘subject position’ is clearly important—or his division is specious. It is a matter of contention which Orkin never directly confronts. Of course in this he is not alone. Similar and equally unenviable contortions have been enacted by members of a South African radical left forced by conditions of academic boycott both to condemn the repressive censorship of the apartheid state and to seek an ANC ticket of approval to achieve or maintain contacts abroad. One of the more pernicious impacts of apartheid has been to blunt people’s awareness of their own postures. If Orkin has picked up bad habits which eighteen months after February 1990 seem somewhat out of place, his book nevertheless remains an index of the ways in which apartheid will continue to loom large, not only in the political but also in the cultural and specifically literary sphere, for many years to come. In this regard, the journalist and cultural observer Gus Silber offers an irresistible and apposite (if lowkey) corrective. In a book entitled It Takes Two to Toyi-Toyi—a Survival Guide to the New South Africa, he attaches to his Blanket Apology Application Form the following credo: Although I have never personally believed in Apartheid, and have not to my knowledge ever voted for a political organisation that may once have inadvertently created the impression that it believed in Apartheid, I nevertheless wish to place on record my willingness to be absolved of any crimes or offences I may have committed in the name of Apartheid many, many, many years ago.1 Such a sense—of humour and of place—is sorely absent from Orkin’s analysis of ‘the South African State’. Again, in a collection of essays on South African literary culture published contemporaneously with Orkin’s book, the critics Kelwyn Sole and Eddie Koch sound the following cautionary note: A great deal of previous literary analysis which deals with the country’s literature sees it only in terms of racial determinants or, in more radical cases, with reference to a vaguely defined oppositional populism of the ‘oppressed’—and this serves, in effect, to obfuscate class differences in black cultural and social life.2 Indeed Orkin’s attempt to maintain, even to exaggerate political dichotomies within the sphere of literature comes as something of an anomaly at a time when Gordimer, Oliphant, Ndebele, Serote, amongst

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others, are talking rapprochement. Perhaps the final word can be given to Albie Sachs, head of the ANC’s cultural desk, and as such a different kind of spokesman for the struggle: We need to accept broad parameters rather than narrow ones: the criterion being pro- or anti-apartheid. In my opinion we should be big enough to encompass the view that the anti-apartheid forces and individuals come in every shape and size, especially if they belong to the artistic community.3 It is a view that Orkin could afford to remember. University of Zululand NOTES 1 L.Shaw, Review of It Takes Two to Toyi-Toyi—a Survival Guide to the New South Africa, Sunday Times, 29 September 1991. 2 K.Sole and E.Koch, ‘The Marabi Dance: A working class novel?’, in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990), p. 219. 3 A.Sachs, ‘Preparing ourselves for freedom’, in Spring is Rebellious, ed. I. de Kok and K.Press (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990), p. 28.

• Jean E.Howard and Marion F.O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), 292 pp., £45.00 (hardback), £10.99 (paperback) • Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakespeare’s Texts (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 2nd edn, 1989), 317 pp., £10.95 (paperback) • Michael D.Bristol, Shakespeare’s America: America’s Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) 237 pp., £36.00 (hardback), £9.99 (paperback) DUNCAN SALKELD Shakespeare Reproduced comprises papers given at the International Shakespeare Congress held in Berlin, 1986. The momentous events of November 1989 could not then be foreseen, of course, and in their preface the editors, Jean E.Howard and Marion F.O’Connor, refer to the Berlin Wall as a signifier which marked the city as ‘the site of political contest and ideological division’. The object of their reference is to point out a structural similarity between lived social reality, Shakespeare’s texts and the proceedings of the Conference itself. Now the Wall has gone, it would appear that the division to which they refer has since become less a matter of polarization and position, and more a question of political process. The relevance of their analogy remains since what these essays have in common with other recent publications on Shakespeare is their participation in a discursive process, an exploration and critique of reading practices in light of current discourses about literature, criticism, gender and modernity. The scope of Howard and O’Connor’s volume is wide-ranging. It incorporates essays on the state of play in Shakespeare criticism up to 1987 (Walter Cohen, Don E.Wayne), imperialist iconography in the ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1912 (Marion F. O’Connor), African readings of The Tempest (Thomas Cartelli), the interrelation between ritual, femininity and power in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Peter Erickson), the representation of racism and misogyny in Othello (Karen Newman), the politics of theatrical fictions in Much Ado About Nothing (Jean E.Howard), the incommensurability of economic and religious interests in The Merchant of Venice (Thomas Moisan), political crisis and failure in Coriolanus (Michael D.Bristol, Thomas Sorge), heterogeneity and excess in Macbeth (Jonathan Goldberg), the political effects of theatrical representations (Robert Weimann). These contributions reflect a range of textual and political viewpoints: Marxist, feminist, new historicist, deconstructionist and postmodernist. Each essay shares a general concern among these writers to make readings of historical texts speak to the present situation, pointing up the ideological assumptions and interests which inform Renaissance and contemporary critical discourse. The theoretical frame for this effort is provided largely by Louis Althusser whose account of ideology, in summary form, begins and ends the book. But the concern of the editors is not just theoretical. As the preface makes clear, once new or alternative meanings of Shakespeare have been produced, and ‘Shakespeare’ reproduced, the question is how to ‘reconstitute the Shakespeare classroom’. That task is all the more likely to succeed when powerful essays of the kind here included are made widely accessible. The best in the collection are written by the editors themselves. Marion F.O’Connor reads

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unusual and interesting source material (photographs, programmes, architectural drawings, and letters) to discuss the semiotics of a major pre-First World War Shakespeare exhibition, which in all its grandeur seemed to assert (adapting a line from Arnold) that in nothing was England so glorious as in Shakespeare and the aristocracy. O’Connor argues that the exhibition represented one version of English history, ‘a version that so emphasized one class as to exclude most of the nation and so emphasized continuity as to occlude change’. Apparently, some of the buildings used in the exhibition ended up in 1914 as quarters for a special yuppie battalion. The historical detail gathered in O’Connor’s essay is fresh and entertaining, and her argument is more appealing for its lack of theoretical justification. Jean E.Howard’s reading of Much Ado shows how comic conventions serve ideological functions in Shakespeare. Focusing particularly on the disguises, shows, masques and pretences of the play, Howard discusses the ways in which Much Ado can be interpreted as written against itself. She sees a similarity between the function of Renaissance anti-theatrical tracts which proposed a conservative social order, and the extent to which role-playing and deception (theatricality) are contained and ultimately appropriated by a genial but no less oppressive patrician ideology. Howard’s argument that the play ‘differs from itself in ways that allow other readings—readings which reveal the constitutive, as opposed to the reflective, power of discursive practices, including theatrical practices, and of the role of authority, not nature, in securing the precedence of one truth over other possible truths’ is substantiated by a sophisticated, rigorous and convincing reading of the play. Many of the essays in the volume include comprehensive bibliographies, not least those by Cohen and Wayne which offer two very useful surveys of work in Britain and the United States, and give thoughtful delineations of the differences between various Marxist, cultural materialist, new historicist and deconstructive positions currently in circulation. In the second edition of Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakespeare’s Texts (first edition, 1986), Malcolm Evans takes the opportunity for reflecting on the prospects for Shakespeare criticism after the Thatcherite eighties. Evans has appended a rather sobering ‘Post Card’ from British Honduras (the colonial outpost in which the already mythical Edward Harrison allegedly taught Shakespeare to native students) as a corrective to the ‘sanguine espousal of contemporary critical theory’ with which the first edition began. Evans invites us to see beyond the euphoria of theorizing Shakespeare and ‘recognize a process of continuing change’ by facing up to the reality of conflicting critical interests. Evans’s mood is more dispassionate now. But if there are retrospective signs that Evans might have written his book differently (how else?), his text is nonetheless impressive. The title is as slippery as the text, promising the true contents of Shakespeare’s texts; snatching it back by suggesting that the entire book might just as well signify nothing; yet offering all in so far as Shakespeare’s ‘nothing’ turns out to mean everything. The text begins by counterposing the haphazard notes of a journal that either doesn’t exist or isn’t ‘authentic’ against the orthodoxy of idealist Shakespeare interpretation. The point of this uncertainty is to trouble from the start settled notions of authorship, text and meaning. For Evans, much of what has passed for truth in previous (bourgeois) Shakespeare criticism is allied to specific power and class interests. From the Caribbean, Edward Harrison reads the myths of European colonialism in The Tempest and observes sympathetically of his pupils, ‘More than Shakespeare they need ammu nition’. Shakespeare, as Evans goes on to show, constituted the paper bullets of colonialist culture. Building a case against an entrenched idealist notion of ‘literature’ and its most potent symbol, ‘Shakespeare’, Evans takes on a number of the orthodoxy’s representatives: Frank Kermode, Matthew Arnold, the Newbolt Report, Dover Wilson, and bourgeoiscommon-sense-liberal-humanist critics like A.D.Nuthall and Marilyn French. Modern critical theory is deployed where appropriate to point up the ideological effects of these critical forms which declare themselves ‘disinterested’, ‘straightforward’ or ‘objective’. Kermode, as editor of the Arden edition of The Tempest, is attacked for complicity in the colonialist sanctions of the play with a severity that falls not far

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from libel. Arnold and the Newbolt Report are rather easier ideological targets and there is simply no contest when Evans lines up a heavyweight like Althusser against them. One of the book’s principal concerns is to open up Shakespeare’s texts to the plurality of meaning. Evans achieves this by emphasizing the ‘division’ and ‘doubleness’ of Shakespeare’s rhetoric. Looking for heterogeneity becomes the source of a great deal of fun for Evans where textual play makes serious interpretative and ideological points. The instability of language in Macbeth—the accumulation of its narratives and the ambiguities of its ‘imperfect speakers’—makes any univocal reading of the play, which might see itself as elicited ‘naturally’ from the text by a unified subject, impossible. Evans extends this discussion of the ‘doubleness’ of Elizabethan rhetoric through a reading of Hamlet as an opaque locus of multiple representations to an analysis of As You Like It which offers us the choice of 168 interpretations of Hymen’s single line ‘If truth holds true contents’. The point of multiplying the hermeneutic permutations is, of course, to ask (in a footnote), ‘Where and by what authority do you draw the line beyond which the interpretation of these words itself ceases to hold true contents? Edward Harrison says “As You Like It—Take It or Leave It”’. The jokes are a welcome aspect of Evans’ book and the notes really do match Derrida’s notion of ‘that dangerous supplement’. They contain important disclaimers, cryptic remarks, theoretical musings, quotations from Derek and Clive, or don’t exist at all (p. 187, n. 14). The thrust of the argument is to enlarge the focus of critical attention to ‘Shakespeare’ by taking in the wider concerns of language, discourse, culture and ideology. The purpose is to relativize notions of aesthetic value (vested with a singular power in ‘Shakespeare’) and show how literary assumptions are stratified by different theoretical and political interests so that we end up not with a canon, an English Literature, but a range of specific ‘literatures’ identified by feminist, marxist, or extra-cultural commitments. In his ‘Post Card’ he hints at a fault of the book which was the occasional, irritating use of theoretical jargon as a metalanguage for textual criticism: Critical theory, when I embarked on Signifying Nothing, looked like an effective implement for derailing ‘Shakespeare’. Now Shakespeare, a useful empirical testing-ground by virtue of its functioning across a broad cultural and institutional spectrum, suggests alternative directions for theory: back into the spiralling dynamic of the literary academy or out into the language of an educated populace whose commonsense accommodates a grounding in a wide range of discursive, institutional and technical strategies. Evans hopes the latter and looks forward to a time when the interdisciplinary concerns of ‘Discourse, Communication or Cultural Studies’ will be pursued in preference to standard ‘literature’. The implications of critical theory, Evans states, extend beyond the restrictions of literary theory and need to be followed up in the broader areas of information and communication technology. In the meantime, Evans assures us that auditions for the film version of his book are well in hand with the part of Derrida played by Sacha Distel, Foucault by Telly Savalas, and Kristeva by Meryl Streep and/or Dustin Hoffman. In his second book, after Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England, Michael D.Bristol offers a full-scale critique of the American Shakespeare institution (comprising of libraries, collections, institutes, editors, scholars and critics). Notwithstanding its clumsy title, Shakespeare’s America: America’s Shakespeare deserves to be widely read, and someone ought to follow it up with a similar single-volume analysis of the Shakespeare establishment in Britain. Some of that work has been done by Derek Longhurst, Terence Hawkes and, perhaps, Gary Taylor. But none of these critics has taken on, as Bristol has, the sociological, ideological and conservative functions of archives, libraries, standard editions, annotated editions, editorial philosophies and critical assumptions associated with Shakespeare, with a working theory of tradition as a social agency. Bristol enters the hallowed ground

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of ‘serious’ Shakespeare scholarship with an equally serious critique of its various axioms and practices. He covers a vast area of inquiry: the organization, goals and values of scholarship itself; normative and counternormative aspects of cultural tradition; the social/ideological function and formation of libraries, particularly the Furness, Folger, and Huntington institutions; the idealist assumptions underlying early editions of Shakespeare, especially those of Furness and Bowers, and recent ‘revisionist’ developments in the work of Michael Warren, Stephen Urkowitz and Stephen Orgel; the influence of Emerson and Kittredge on twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism; and, finally, the critical approaches of A.O.Lovejoy, Hardin Craig, Theodore Spencer, Northrop Frye, Maynard Mack, C.L.Barber, Stanely Cavell and Stephen Greenblatt. As a summation of the development of post-war American Shakespeare criticism, the later chapters of Bristol’s book provide an invaluable resource for students. Bristol’s accounts of the positions of American critics is itself critical and, on the whole, fair. Deconstructive ‘free play’ is dismissed as irrelevant to issues of textual scholarship: ‘if everyone can “do his own text” so to speak, then what are the reasons for excluding a conflated text that claims to represent a “lost original”?’ Stephen Green-blatt is criticized for his ideological pessimism: In Greenblatt’s account of subversion and containment, the more ‘subversive’ a writer like Shakespeare is in unmasking the fraud and coercive force that sustains power, the more such a writer invites ‘celebration of that power’. This conclusion expresses a political hopelessness that stems from seeing an urgent need for rational political and social change without seeing any credible agency for achieving that purpose. But Greenblatt is also described as ‘an extremely sensitive reader whose scholarship very acutely registers certain very deep rifts and contradictions in our cultural dispensation’. Some discussion of Greenblatt’s recent reflections on Montaigne, colonialism and his own problematic position with regard to American political discourse would, one feels, have given Bristol’s conclusion a sharper focus. As it is, the book ends in a Foucauldian manner reflecting on the end of the integrated, self-expressive (autopoetic) reading-subject formulated powerfully by Emerson. The historical moment of the idealized, centred consciousness is over: ‘A cultural/intellectual dispensation oriented to the conservation of that experience of private autopoesis cannot envision any future for itself.’ I don’t argue with this. But what surprises is that Bristol’s mood is much the same as Greenblatt’s. The new historicism has radically undermined earlier critical admiration for the Elizabethan World Order, and questioned the power which that ideal exerted in Renaissance society. The White House is currently speaking of a New World Order, an all-American status quo, and it is what part ‘Shakespeare’ will play in that which constitutes the future. West Sussex Institute of Higher Education

• Penelope Murray (ed.), Genius: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), vii+ 235 pp., £25.00 (hardback) TIA DENORA

I took this book along with me as bed-time reading to one of the major ‘Mozart Bicentennial’ conferences held early last year. My assumption was that reports of current research on Mozart and a book devoted to exploring the history of the idea of genius would provide interesting contexts for each other. They did, though not in the ways I’d expected. The conference papers focused almost without exception on Mozart-as-musical-genius. For example, in one report devoted to the otherwise interesting issue of how Mozart made use of conventional musical resources and models, the speaker then went on to describe how Mozart was able to exceed his contemporaries: in attempting to account for Mozart’s ‘superior handling of period structure’, that speaker suggested, we are forced to ‘step into the mysterious territory of genius’. Of course, one tends to expect this sort of thing from Mozart scholars and it was precisely here that I had hoped Murray’s collection would have something to say. While I came away from the book feeling I’d learned a good deal about the history of aesthetic philosophy, as a scholar interested in the sociology of artistic reputation and in the social recognition of genius I felt somewhat disappointed for reasons that I detail below. The twelve essays in this collection examine topics ranging chronologically from Murray’s own consideration of the classical origins of the idea of poetic genius to Christopher Norris’s discussion of genius as an ideology and its deconstruction in the work of Paul de Man. One of the virtues of this book taken as a whole is that the various essays attend carefully to the linguistic contexts in which discussions about extraordinary creative talent are situated. Because of this, the volume makes a contribution, larger than the sum of its parts, to our understanding of how and when the modern notion of genius first emerged. For example, Martin Kemp’s piece on the role of the ‘Super-artist’ in the sixteenth century observes some of the ways that artists such as Dürer and Michelangelo have been interpreted in romantic terms not wholly appropriate to the imageries and vocabularies of creativity of that time. Essays such as Glenn Most’s on the Homeric Renaissance in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Bate’s on Shakespeare and the notion of original genius, and Michael Beddow’s on the conception of genius in Goethe’s writings, help to illuminate some of the ways in which the modern idea of genius as connoting autonomous extraordinary powers of creativity was articulated during the eighteenth century. Additionally, there is an essay on genius in mathematics by Clive

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Kilmister, and one on music by the well-known scholar Wilfrid Mellers. The collection finishes with two pieces on genius as seen through the psychological and psychoanalytic perspective. What then is missing? From my own more sociological perspective, the book elides crucial aspects of the phenomenon of genius. In part, this may be due to the framework offered in Murray’s introduction. There, Murray seems to delineate the history of genius as an idea (an important historical project) while simultaneously maintaining the mystery of genius as a category of being. One of the more enigmatic features of this framework is how Murray can maintain that ‘genius is, indeed, problematic… perforce elitist, not only in that it privileges certain individuals, but also because it elevates certain kinds of activity above others: genius forces us to make value judgments’ (p. 6) and reconcile that statement with the following (p. 1): In calling [Albert Einstein] a genius we acknowledge his extraordinary creative powers, powers which distinguish him from men and women of talent and which are certainly beyond the reach of ordinary mortals like the rest of us. Scientists and mathematicians can explain what it is about Einstein’s work which compels us to speak of him as a genius, and psychoanalysts may seek the sources of such creativity in the personality and upbringing of Einstein the man, but there remains something fundamentally inexplicable about the nature of such prodigious powers. We attribute the extraordinary quality of, for example, Shakespeare’s poetry, Mozart’s music and Leonardo’s paintings to the genius of their creators because we recognize that such works are not simply the product of learning, technique, or sheer hard work…no amount of analysis has yet been able to explain the capacities of those rare and gifted individuals who can produce creative work of lasting quality and value. If we ask how Mozart was able to compose music of such purity and perfection (significantly Einstein himself is said to have remarked that Mozart’s music was so pure that ‘it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master’) we can only answer, ‘because he was a genius’, which is tantamount to saying that we do not know. For in each age and in each art, genius is that which defies analysis. Perhaps if Murray had turned either to the by now well-established subfield of reception theory or to some of the more recent work in the interdisciplinary field of science studies currently gaining momentum both in the UK and abroad, she would have found models capable of explaining the phenomenon of genius (as opposed to the phenomenon of talent which she conceives of as more securely grounded in rules of practice) by relating it to studies of rhetoric, prospective and retrospective practices of accounting for scientific and artistic value, public relations, controversies, power, the ability to mobilize significant ‘others’ to testify to (and thereby magnify) the worth of a discovery or creative work, and finally, the sometimes mundane and practical activities that evidencing ‘genius’ often entails. To take just one example from this final category: in the essay, ‘What is musical genius?’ Wilfrid Mellers points to the ways in which the familiar story of the child Mozart writing out a note-perfect score of the Allegri Miserere after one hearing [the story, as Mozart’s father Leopold told it, was that the Miserere was ‘so jealously guarded, that members of the chapel are forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to take their parts out of the chapel, or to copy or allow it to be copied’] may be not more than a, to us miraculous, feat of aural memory…. Must it not have been also an experience as sensuously instantaneous as the blaze of a single note on a trumpet (at which the child Mozart fainted), the fragrance of a rose, or the silky caress of the paw of a cat?

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(p. 169) There are, however, alternative explanations that can be offered, and these rest on the fact that access to the manuscript was, in reality, far less restricted. First, as Friedrich Riedel’s study has documented, the Miserere had been performed several times in the Hofkapelle in Vienna. Second, it had actually been published by Bremner in London in 1771, with a preface by Charles Burney, who had received a copy from the Papal Kapellmeister, Santarelli, the year before. Thus, there may well have been, as the music scholar and psychologist Maynard Solomon recently suggested, some ‘trickster’ aspects to Mozart’s seemingly superhuman gifts. Indeed, Otto Jahn reports that Mozart heard the piece twice, once on a Wednesday and then again on Friday in Holy Week, when ‘Wolfgang took his manuscript with him into the chapel, and holding it in his hat, corrected some passages where his memory had not been quite true’ (vol. I, p. 120). Whatever the case (and it remains speculative), it seems fair to suggest that if we are to understand the phenomenon of genius more completely, we cannot accept rhetorical accounts of genius as in themselves unproblematic. Obviously, my dissatisfaction with this book’s framework comes from my position within a different scholarly paradigm. In this case, however, I think ‘external’ critique and dialogue are warranted, both because Murray’s collection is explicitly oriented to exploring the idea of genius from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (p. 7), and, more importantly, because of the social issues that competing conceptualizations of genius and the history of genius as an idea place at stake. Sociological perspectives on genius need to be acknowledged because, as other recent scholarship has documented (for one example see Battersby, 1989), historically, the category of ‘recognized geniuses’ of Western culture has been socially skewed. University of Wales College of Cardiff REFERENCES Battersby, Christine (1989) Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: The Women’s Press). Jahn, Otto, (1891) The Life of Mozart, 3 vols, trans. Pauline D.Townsend. (London: Novello, Ewer & Co.). Riedel, F. (1977) Kirchenmusik am Hofe Karls VI (1711–1740) (Munich: Emil Katzbichler). Solomon, Maynard (1991) ‘The myth of the Eternal Child’, Paper read at the Royal Musical Association Mozart Bicentenary Conference, London.

• James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (eds), Modernity and Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), $14.95 (paperback) NOEL KING

Most of the essays in this collection derive from a series of lectures on ‘The Theory and Interpretation of Mass Culture’ given at Indiana University in 1988/9 and with its combination of ‘British’ and American contributors the collection is further evidence of the extent to which a revamped version of ‘cultural studies’ has taken off in the United States. An earlier indication of this shift was the ‘Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture’ conference held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983.1 Later signs were the regular importing of (mainly male) ‘British’ personnel (Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, Peter Wollen, Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath, Dick Hebdige) and the transformation of ‘communication studies’ journals such as Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry along more broadly cultural-studies lines. A commodity was invented called ‘British cultural studies’ (which, in America, stands for the work of the 1970s and 1980s of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Screen and Screen Education and, say, the three issues of Formations). A short-hand way of characterising this transformation of paradigms and institutions would be to say that North American communication/cultural studies discovered Stuart Hall. Perhaps this is what Leslie Fiedler had in mind years ago when he spoke of the need for ‘crossing the border, closing the gap’ in discussions of high/low culture. In their introduction Naremore and Brantlinger say that the collection, taken together, ‘represents a variety of concerns in the growing academic movement known as “cultural studies”’ (p. 1) by which they mean that recent renovation of communication and cultural studies. At the outset they are quick to disown one notion of mass culture when they say: ‘Far from congealing into a mass, Western Society in the early decades of the twentieth century seems to have split into an unsettled mixture of at least six artistic cultures, each producing different kinds of images, stories, music…“intellectual objects”’ (p. 8). They further claim that: We now live in a world of global electronic communication, where texts are constantly metamorphosed and recycled. In such an environment, Walter Benjamin seems our only contemporary, if only because he points to the way words, images or simulacra can move easily across reading formations and historical conjunctures. (p. 15)

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It’s a situation in which ‘cultural meaning is always, already unstable’, with struggles over meaning and various processes of ‘appropriation and resistance’ all occurring in a cultural context in which the omnipresence of television has ‘made the old cultural debates, as well as the arguments about camp and canonicity, seem problematic’ (p. 19). As is the case with most anthologies, across the different critical emphases of the various articles, contradictions appear that no introductory chapter could hope to pre-empt or cohere. After all, it’s an anthology which contains articles on Anne Rice’s Vampire trilogy, an episode of Moonlighting, Kire Te Kanawa and Meet Me in St Louis, Baudrillard, Andy Hardy movies and experimental pedagogy, nineteenthcentury popular American magazines, the 1950s move into television by the Hollywood studios, contemporary American fiction (Max Apple, Jay Cantor) while also containing lengthy allusions to everything from The Bandwagon to Madonna. But despite this diversity of object and methodology, two themes recur. First, the historical traditions of academic discussions of mass/popular culture (e.g. the Frankfurt School and its legacy, Barthes, Williams, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Althusser, Gramsci, Dwight McDonald, Susan Sontag) and second, the question of how best to constitute the popular culture text as an object of analysis in a situation where ‘depth-readings’ are eschewed and where a rampant self-reflexivity and intertextuality seem to be the order of the day. It’s not surprising, then, to find many of the articles using some notion of ‘intertextuality’. Peter Wollen, for instance, refers to an age of ‘electronic intertextuality’ where a ‘data base of stored images in the electronic memory…opens up the possibility of recycling the contents of a vast image bank, an archive from which images can be taken and recontextualised at will’ (p. 63). Wollen foresees ‘films in which Charlie Chaplin meets Marilyn Monroe’ and elsewhere he has described this as a kind of electronic, computerised version of Malraux’s Imaginary Museum.2 One of the memories this sparks for me is that of the famous AliMarciano ‘computer fight’ of the late 1960s and no doubt that media event is now being (or already has been) analysed in great detail. In an article filled with suggestive remarks, Jim Collins describes the speeded-up retro tendencies of late twentieth-century culture as producing a popular culture that is intensely self-reflexive: ‘How do we account for texts that are so hyperconscious about their own history and their own discursive frameworks that the very basis of their textuality appears grounded not in representation but in the appropriation of antecedent representation?’ (pp. 203–4). He points to such retro gestures as the Patsy Cline/k.d. lang couplet and describes a double-direction valorization whereby the contemporary text is congratulated on being the inheritor of a tradition which thereby comes to enjoy the status of the distinguished progenitor. Other allusions to practices of self-reflexivity and intertextuality occur in Lynne Joyrich’s article on the ‘Womb with a view’ episode of Moonlighting and in Barbara Klinger’s description of the phenomenon of ‘in theatre commentary’ in film viewing. For Joyrich, ‘television’ is a self-enclosed, perpetually selfreferring system in which there is a complete collapse of any distinction between the world on TV and the world of TV, with Moonlighting used as an example of a TV programme pitched at a highly mediaconscious audience, one acutely aware of the way the programme plays with the boundaries of the real and the fictional, commenting as it does on American popular culture, televisual conventions, production constraints, etc. And in what is becoming a familiar move, ‘television’ is figured as ‘feminine’. ‘Television’s look is a domestic and distracted one…multiple and fragmented’ as opposed to the allegedly masterful, masculine spectatorial position activated in relation to cinema. Perhaps when the editors referred to Walter Benjamin as ‘our only contemporary’ they also had in mind the way his notion of ‘distracted reception’ would be mobilized in recent accounts (usually phenomenological) of film viewing, TV watching and popular culture consuming. Klinger’s article contains a version of Benjamin’s notion, albeit mapped onto a number of other concerns, from the film audience/ spectator distinction through to various

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ethnographic descriptions of reception contexts (as against formal textual analyses). Her essay targets ‘a particular region of intertextuality and type of digression associated with a film’s circulation through culture as a commodity’ (p. 131) and her description of the phenomenon of ‘in-theatre commentary’ sees it as a ‘digressive dynamic in [film] reception’. For Klinger, a ‘wild’ form of ‘digression or oppositional reading’ occurs when a man sings along loudly with Sweet Dreams and when a teenager quotes lines from The Terminator during a screening of The Golden Child. Wonderful as these anecdotes are I’m not sure they warrant a populist academic essay celebrating the activities of people who refuse to behave in public. Another response to ‘in-theatre commentary’ would be to call the cinema management and have the babblers escorted from the cinema. At various points in most of these essays, the status of the popular culture text as opposed to the high culture text is debated, sometimes in terms that recall the argument of Iain Chambers’s Popular Culture book. Chambers had opposed the ‘official culture’ of museums, galleries and universities to ‘popular culture’, had opposed a culture which demanded ‘cultivated tastes and formally imparted knowledges’, moments of ‘attention’ and ‘contemplation’, to a popular culture that mobilized ‘the tactile, the incidental, the visceral’, one that invoked ‘mobile orders of sense, taste and desire’ and whose comprehension required ‘an informal knowledge of the everyday, based on the sensory, the immediate, the pleasurable, the concrete’ rather than ‘the authority of the academic mind’ seeking to explain an experience that is ‘rarely personal’ and that is ‘separated from the run of daily life’. Instead of a contemplative academic gaze, popular culture requires Benjamin’s ‘distracted reception’ in order to be apprehended properly.3 Similarly in Modernism and Mass Culture, Jim Collins argues that popular texts, by ‘operating outside the confines of the academy and/or museum are deprived of the very institutional frameworks that secure canons and maintain traditions’ (p. 204). But this depends on how strictly you understand ‘institution’. The ‘institution’ of the juke box in a pub or club performs some of the archival, memorializing functions of the museum (and only those functions if someone like me is playing it) and if you think of arts pages in newspapers, theatre programme booklets, TV arts and rock programmes, popular magazines, etc. as so many institutional spaces in which taste is displayed, confirmed and formed, then the clichéd opposition of the cold academy to the pulsating street, the aloof egg-head to the hot child in the city, starts to lose some of its romantic allure. Eventually Collins comes to define popular culture as ‘an endlessly configurable assemblage of representations, the function, audience and value of which are subject to constant re-articulation’ (p. 222), while John Fiske’s chapter on ‘Popular discrimination’ concludes that ‘popular taste’ favours ‘polysemic texts that are open to a variety of readings’ (p. 106). Fiske’s article is best seen as another in his series of polemical sidings with ‘the people’ over ‘bourgeois aestheticism’. The one aim of the article is to privilege ‘popular discrimination’ over ‘bourgeois aesthetic distance’ and throughout its argument it raises for itself the question of the reading of popular culture, a question which surfaces in a number of other contributions. For if popular culture is everywhere being found to be highly self-reflexive, so too are its critical commentators, many of whom interrogate themselves about their social function as popular culture critics and who agonize about the precise nature of the meaning they are discovering in the texts they discuss. Richard Ohmann, in discussing a story from an 1895 popular American magazine, makes the interesting claim that his reading ‘does not look behind or through the text to “background” conditions but reconstructs meanings that were “there” in the text for properly schooled contemporaries’ (p. 38). This is a claim which places Ohmann, perhaps unexpectedly given a book of this kind, within a critical tradition running from philology to the still fashionable ‘new historicism’. For this particular critical practice the obscured or hidden dimension of the text, far from being a perpetual, symptomatic psycho-textual problem, is a practical and contingent matter. Old texts whose initial uses are now foreign to us (and this could mean ‘silent

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cinema’ as readily as it could a medieval poem) require what might be called interpretative reconstruction, a more or less definitive clarification of the conditions under which the text came to be read in the first place. Of course in the wake of deconstruction this might seem like a delusory positivist utopia but it serves to remind us of the crucial question: when, and under what (localized) circumstances do we say that texts ‘require interpretation’? Ohmann’s perspective might be seen to connect with such methodologies as, say, Stephen Orgel’s description of the court masque in The Illusion Of Power.4 Orgel’s critical project is to explain a particular ritual that no longer is part of social life but which once was implicated directly in the production of dramatic works. He discusses texts whose initial uses are now foreign to us, texts which have become historically, socially, opaque. This is not unlike the situation described by Ian Hacking in Representing and Intervening when he refers to ‘forgotten styles of reasoning’.5 Hacking quotes some remarkable statements from Paracelsus, a Renaissance ‘doctor’ who practised medicine, physiology, alchemy, astrology and divination as a single art. Hacking then observes: ‘The historian can find in Paracelsus anticipations of later chemistry and medicine. The herbalist can retrieve some forgotten lore from his remarks, but if you try to read him you will find someone utterly different from us’ (p. 70). Hacking says that this difference derives from an incommensurability of discourses. As he characterizes the situation: ‘It is not that we cannot understand his words one by one’ but rather that Paracelsus’s ordering of thought ‘is based on a whole system of categories that is hardly intelligible to us’. Paracelsus’s ‘style of reasoning is alien’ (p. 71) and Hacking uses the word ‘dissociation’ (ibid.) to describe this historical incommensurability of discourses. Orgel, Hacking and Ohmann in their different ways discuss the way a text can become mysterious across historically varying regimes of representation. In such cases textual mystery can be clarified by a work of interpretative historical reconstruction and is not to be thought of as a necessarily perpetual property of the text. Robert Ray’s chapter, ‘Andy Hardy finds the avant-garde’, pursues questions of reading and pedagogy in quite unusual ways. In his Stanley-Fish-style description of what he’s been doing to his students at the University of Florida, Ray announces that he had become tired of the predictability of an academic film criticism that had come to resemble ‘a machine running on automatic pilot’ (p. 232) and where ‘we know in advance where such analyses will lead’ (ibid.). In its stead Ray practises a mixture of (what seems to me) ‘automatic writing’, ‘wild analysis’ and neo-rhetorical inventions reconceived via surrealist manifestos. He wants his students to produce critical writing of a kind which could acknowledge the ‘formal experimentation of contemporary theory’ (p. 236) and which could help regain its social function of asking ‘improper questions’. Ray believes the work of people like Barthes and Derrida to be formally very strange and wants his students to ‘imitate the forms’ (ibid.) rather than reproducing a situation in which ‘for the most part academics have merely cited [this] work [as if it appeared in conventional formats] and gone on writing straightforward essays’ (ibid.). Although this isn’t true of the writing found in Sub-Stance, enclitic and Diacritics, you can see his point. He wants his students to recognize the bizarreness of books which activate ‘surrealist techniques of collage, fragments, typographical play, puns, neologisms’ and which work by ‘motif’ more than ‘logic’. To some extent, in all this, Ray is following comments made by Rosalind Krauss back in 1981 when she remarked that Barthes and Derrida were ‘the writers, not the critics, that students now read’, and when she suggested that much of Barthes’s writing ‘simply cannot be called criticism but it cannot, for that matter, be called not-criticism either’. Krauss described this criticism as finding itself ‘caught in a dramatic web of many voices, citations, asides, divagations. And what is created, as is the case of much of Derrida, is a kind of paraliterature’, a paraliterary space which is ‘the space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation: but it is not the space of unity, coherence or resolution that we think of as constituting the

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work of literature’. Krauss then went on to caution that it was ‘as impossible to reconcile this project with a formalism as to revive within it the heartbeat of humanism’6 and this caveat should be kept in mind when reading Ray’s chapter. Although I’m sure many of Ray’s students had a lot of fun doing his course (and the examples of their work which he quotes are very impressive) I’m not convinced that correcting the academic refusal to recognize the weirdness of Barthes and Derrida rests in adopting a mimetic, performative relation to the dazzling formal inventiveness of their various paraliterary writings. For in their stunning one-offness they, in some sense, can’t be emulated or repeated, only quoted, much as I propose now to end this review by quoting a wonderful story from John Cage’s Silence, a story quoted in Robert Ray’s chapter. You might be forgiven for thinking it was a sketch from At Last the 1948 Show or That was the Week That Was and, who knows, maybe it does have some sort of intertextual relation to those ancient television texts: A crowded bus on the point of leaving Manchester for Stockport was found by its conductress to have one too many standees. She therefore asked, ‘Who was the last person to get on the bus?’ No one said a word. Declaring that the bus would not leave until the extra passenger was put off, she went and fetched the driver, who also asked, ‘All right, who was the last person to get on the bus?’ Again there was a public silence. So the two went to find an inspector. He asked, ‘Who was the last person to get on the bus?’ No one spoke. He then announced that he would fetch a policeman. While the conductress, driver, and inspector were away looking for a policeman, a little man came up to the bus stop and asked, ‘Is this the bus to Stockport?’ Hearing that it was, he got on. A few minutes later the three returned accompanied by a policeman. He asked, ‘What seems to be the trouble? Who was the last person to get on the bus?’ The little man said, ‘I was.’ The policeman said, ‘All right, get off.’ All the people on the bus burst into laughter. The conductress, thinking they were laughing at her, burst into tears and said she refused to make the trip to Stockport. The inspector then arranged for another conductress to take over. She, seeing the little man standing at the bus stop, said, ‘What are you doing there?’ He said, ‘I’m waiting to go to Stockport.’ She said, ‘Well, this is the bus to Stockport. Are you getting on or not?’ (Silence, p. 271) University of Technology, Sydney

NOTES 1 For the proceedings of this conference see Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 2 Peter Wollen, ‘Ways of thinking about music video (and post-modernism)’, in Colin MacCabe (ed.), Futures for English (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 168. 3 Iain Chambers, Popular Culture (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 12–13. 4 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 5 Ian Hacking, ‘Incommensurability’, in Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 70. Subsequent references are included in the text. 6 Rosalind E.Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 292.

• Carl R.Hausman, Metaphor and Art: Interactionism and Reference in the Verbal and Nonverbal Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 238 pp., £25.00 (hardback) CLIVE CAZEAUX

The idea that inventive metaphors can both create new meaning and discover unforeseen nuances in the world is deemed by Hausman to be a paradox. To create is to bring an object into existence whereas to discover is to introduce an object to the awareness of a community; there is nothing too bewildering in this analysis. The full perplexity of the situation for Hausman lies in the fact that, with creation, the object is not in the world before the event, whereas, with discovery, the object is in the world, though unattended, before the event. His proposed solution to the paradox is a synthesis of the work of Max Black and C.S.Peirce. His sympathy with Black’s interactionist theory of metaphor prompts him to submit the notion of a metaphorical referent: the idea that what is signified by a metaphor is something singular and determinate. The two conditions which define a referent are inspired by Peirce: uniqueness acknowledges that something new and individual is created by metaphor; and extraconceptuality acknowledges that something relevant to the world is discovered by metaphor. The introduction of a referent to solve the creativity paradox is an ingenious task for which Hausman deserves credit. However, his eagerness to deny any kinship which might exist between the metaphorical referent and Kant’s thing-in-itself, I claim, invites unnecessary complications. Furthermore, I assert that the creativity paradox, rather than being an ‘in the world’ consideration, in actual fact frames the possibility of determinate metaphorical meaning. Hausman stands alongside Black in the belief that metaphors create meaning. Metaphors here, for Black, and for the purposes of this review, are inventive metaphors, that is, metaphors which are on their first outing. Black’s interactionist theory promotes the creation of meaning by stressing the trilogistic nature of metaphor (pp. 34–5). A metaphorical expression is made up of two subjects: (in Black’s idiom) the primary subject, the word used literally, and the secondary subject, the word used non-literally. The third element which completes the metaphor is the interaction which occurs between the two subjects. Central to this theory is the idea that interaction provides the condition for a meaning which neither of the subject terms possesses independently of the metaphorical context. The primary subject is coloured by a set of ‘associated implications’ normally predicated of the secondary subject. From the number of possible meanings which could result, the primary subject sieves the qualities predictable of the secondary subject, letting through only those that fit. The interaction, as a process, brings into being what Black terms an ‘implicationcomplex’, a system of associated implications shared by the linguistic community as well as (or so Hausman thinks) an impulse of free meaning, free in that it is meaning which was unavailable prior to the

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metaphor’s introduction. Somehow, interaction admits a meaning that is not already deducible from or present in the lexicon of a community. Interactionism proposes to explain how metaphors create new significance rather than discovering significance latent within a system of predetermined meanings. The question which Hausman wants to answer is how the meaning created by metaphor can be significant. If metaphors create meaning which is significant, what is it that makes it so? What prevents metaphor from being constituted by the random conjunction of subject terms? It is unlikely that such a disorganized arrangement would enhance cognition of the world, except perhaps by chance, so how is it that metaphors can be appropriate? Hausman calls this predicament the paradox of creativity: The idea that metaphors can both create and exhibit insights concerning the world [i.e. discover] is paradoxical, that is, paradoxical insofar as they generate something that constrains them as does something already in the world. On the one hand, to create is to bring about something that was not in the world before the creation took place; on the other hand, to have an insight is apparently to discover something that was in the world, though unnoticed, before the creation occurred. (p. 82) To account for the paradox of creativity, Hausman introduces the notion of a metaphorically created referent: A metaphorical expression functions so that it creates its significance, thus providing new insight, through designating a unique, extralinguistic and extraconceptual referent that had no place in the intelligible world before the metaphor was articulated. (p. 94) Uniqueness and extraconceptuality or extralinguisticality (the last two terms are synonymous for Hausman) are the two conditions which the referent of every creative metaphor must satisfy, and it is their conjunction in a single expression which gives metaphor its cognitive value: Uniqueness is necessary to the idea that the referent of a creative metaphor is new and individual. Extralinguisticality is necessary to justify saying that a creative metaphor is appropriate or faithful or fits the world…. [And] it is the joining of these two conditions that is special to metaphors. There is something to which the expression is appropriate, some resistant or constraining condition: yet this condition is new. (p. 94) To explain how his metaphorical referent focuses meaning, Hausman draws on C.S.Peirce’s distinction between the immediate object and the dynamical object (pp. 209–31). Both objects are essentially agents of determination. Peirce’s immediate object is the concept of a particular upon which the abstract qualities in a verbal expression converge. The convergence occurs as an interpretive process through the reading of the expression. At the outset, the immediate object takes form as an embodied complex of abstract qualities, so the immediate object implicated within the straightforward expression ‘This red rose is large’ is a complex of the abstract qualities of redness, largeness and what it is to be a rose. The immediate object, as a process, is not complete until it has been transformed by the interpreter into a particular. In the example, the locus of meaning provided by the interpreter completes the immediate object as a large red rose. It should be

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stressed, though, that the immediate object in the example is not the large red rose but the concept of a particular upon which the abstract qualities of redness, largeness and what it is to be a rose converge. The process is the basis for how metaphorical meaning is focused by the condition of uniqueness in Hausman’s referent. The metaphor ‘Juliet is the sun’ (Cavell’s choice from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) can serve as an example to demonstrate the effect (p. 103). Both the referents of the primary and secondary subjects are familiar; ‘Juliet’ and ‘the sun’ each have a straightforward meaning which is understood prior to the metaphor. The effect of the metaphor though is not, as Black would have it, to colour ‘Juliet’ with some of the relevant associations from ‘the sun’; neither is it simply to admit that Juliet shares certain qualities with the sun, such as radiance, brilliance, the fact that she makes the day or that she gets up every morning. Rather, Hausman extends Black’s account so that the senses of both subjects interact not only to create a new meaning but also to create a new referent. In short, a brand new signification is injected into the reader’s cognitive awareness. Thus, as with Peirce’s immediate object, the expression’s meaning does not remain as a complex of associated implications but comes to fruition as a particular (intentional) object. The referent, though, cannot be described or individuated other than in terms of the metaphor itself; a description would only have antecedently available means to fall back on. The referent, we must remember, is unique. Hausman suggests that the only description that we can venture of the referent for ‘Juliet is the sun’, is, perhaps, Juliet-the-sun. The reference is verbally unreachable by any other means because of its other aspect, extraconceptuality. Peirce’s dynamical object is the extraconceptual presence which guides interpretation’s organization of the immediate object. Consequently, it serves as the precursor for the way in which the extraconceptual condition in Hausman’s metaphorical referent guarantees relevant meaning. The dynamical object is a centre of resistance which ensures appropriate classification. We can get a glimpse of this resistance if we return to our example. With the large red rose, Hausman explains, the constraints against embodying qualities that would constitute [the flower] as a tulip rather than as a rose are more relevant to certain kinds of classification than are the constraints that affect the inclusion of largeness and redness. (p. 217) So while classifications of the flower’s colour and size are perhaps not so vital to its make-up, the classification ‘rose’ is a definite description which cannot be denied. The dynamical object is useful to Hausman because it is not a textual thing or a physical thing but a condition. It is not the actual colour or shape of the flower but the inescapable fact that something is there for classification to be appropriate to. And this is what he wants for the extraconceptual aspect of his metaphorical referent. The referent is something there for a metaphor to be appropriate to. So in the metaphor ‘The tree breathes’ we have the otherwise unrelated subjects of the tree and breathing, but the extraconceptual referent carries the feeling of there being something more which gives the expression its cognitive value. And a similar presence assigns ‘Juliet is the sun’ a pertinence over and above the association of meanings. My dispute with Hausman is over the precise status of his extraconceptual condition. It wavers from being something there, actual but unknowable, to being a conceptual provision posited to exceed the limitations of a linguistic community. To label these extremes, we can say that the status of the extraconceptual condition is either material or verbal respectively. The discord is contained by the question of whether or not the ‘extra’ refers (materially) to another realm or (verbally) to something more than is conceptually available at the time. At some points, he says of the condition that it ‘adds an ontological dimension to the uniqueness’ condition (p. 107). Similarly, extraconceptual objects are said to ‘constitute a

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dynamic, evolving world’ (p. 117). ‘Extraconceptuality is necessary to justify saying that a creative metaphor is appropriate or faithful or fits the world’ (p. 94). However, these admissions of material status are all countermanded by Hausman assigning verbal status to the condition. ‘What the extraconceptual condition adds to uniqueness’, he claims, ‘is not substantiality but, rather, a controlling factor, a locus for the senses…. Its function is to constrain certain senses and resist others’ (p. 108; my emphasis). Extraconceptual objects, he continues, ‘are intelligible complexes of meaning which gain extraconceptuality’ by offering resistance or constraint (p. 193; my emphasis). My claim against Hausman is that extraconceptuality and all the ontological difficulties which come with it are unnecessary for a definition of his metaphorical referent. This argument is based on the interpretation of Kant’s thing-in-itself as a positive component in epistemology. Hausman inadvertently brings the thingin-itself to mind as a possible agent of redemption by explicitly denying that it has anything to do with his extraconceptual object. He disassociates his theory from transcendental idealism on the grounds that the thing-in-itself is an unknowable existent which cannot possibly ‘bear a direct, dynamic relation’ to the world (p. 186).1 For him, the thing-in-itself is a material consideration: something which is there but which is unknowable because it is never directly encountered in experience. Hausman’s intention is to give an account of metaphor which resolves the creativity paradox. I claim that if he had been aware of the thing-initself’s alternative status as a positive component in epistemology, he could have fulfilled his intention and successfully defined his extraconceptual condition simply by specifying his metaphorical referent in terms of the uniqueness condition. Transcendental idealism traverses the middle ground between all-out idealism and common-sense realism. It presents the world not as a figment perpetuated by the mind nor as an array of existents independent of the mind but as a world of appearances created by the mind in correspondence with the world of things-inthemselves. Controversy surrounds the doctrine because it is uncertain whether or not things-in-themselves are material or verbal entities. Whereas the former possibility encounters the objection raised by Hausman, the latter possibility, unexplored by him, encourages a more successful doctrine and has support from numerous commentators.2 Lauchlan Chipman argues for the verbal status of the thing-in-itself. The thing-initself, he avers, is not a goal before which the understanding should humble itself and strive towards but a contrast concept.3 Given that the concept of object has general application within a conceptual scheme, the thing-in-itself is the concept in virtue of which it is possible to distinguish a definite object from an indefinite appearance. For Kant, the objects of empirical knowledge are appearances. From the abidance of appearances, it is a viable conviction that there are things-which-appear. Now it will always be logically possible that there is more to what appears than what appears. This potentially infinite disclosure means that to invoke the thing-which-appears is to bring into play the concept of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears. As Chipman observes: However many appearances a given object has presented, it is always possible that it will present some further appearance. To deny this is to maintain that there are antecedently specifiable limits to the ways in which what is real may appear…. Thus whenever we speak of something appearing F, we implicitly invoke the concept of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears, for it is ultimately the possibility of this latter concept’s applying which distinguishes something appearing F from an F-ish appearance.4 Things-other-than-as-they-appear, Chipman suggests, are Kant’s things-in-themselves, for it is this annexe of possibility which preserves the in-itself. Only by entertaining a notion of the in-itself can we entertain the notion of a determinate thing which appears as distinct from a comparatively indeterminate appearance. Given that the concept of object has general application, appearances and things-in-themselves work in

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tandem to distinguish something appearing F from a F-ish appearance. The thing-in-itself is not some secluded, extraphenomenal particular but a condition for the possibility of objective judgement. Chipman’s thing-in-itself is essentially equivalent to the uniqueness condition, with the extraconceptual condition included as a necessary component. The parallel between Chipman and Hausman is justified by the fact that the thing-in-itself repeats the action of Peirce’s immediate and dynamical objects, the precursors of Hausman’s two conditions. It is the thing-in-itself’s capacity to determine an object as distinct from an appearance which initially strikes up the alliance. The thing-in-itself, in that it distinguishes something appearing F from an F-ish appearance, has the same focusing effect as Peirce’s immediate object. Our example brought the abstract qualities of redness, largeness and what it is to be a rose together as a large red rose. Similarly, substituting appearances for qualities, if a largish, reddish, roseish appearance is presented to us, only in virtue of having the concept of a thing-other-than-as-it-appears will we be able to conceive of the presentation as something appearing as a large red rose? Chipman reveals that the uniqueness condition already includes an extraconceptual element as a necessary component within it. This is evident from the fact that, en route to distinguishing something appearing F from an F-ish appearance, the thing-in-itself repeats the action of Peirce’s dynamical object. The dynamical object, if we recall, is the quality which ensures appropriate classification. So with the large red rose example, ‘rose’ is the primary classification and ‘large’ and ‘red’ are the secondary descriptions. A parallel striving for classification occurs with the thing-in-itself. We already have it that no matter how many appearances a given object has presented, it is always possible that it will present some further appearance. Now, though, Chipman adds, we might respond to any further appearance a given object presents by reclassifying the object in question; i.e., by assigning it to a different type…. [This covers] the point that although there is no upper limit to the number of appearances a given object which we have classified, perhaps correctly, as a rose might present, there could nonetheless be a variation in their character sufficient to incline us to call it, reasonably but perhaps wrongly, something other than a rose.5 With the thing-in-itself, as with the dynamical object, the initial object is imprecise: it is either, with Hausman and Peirce, a complex of abstract qualities or, with Chipman, an uncertain appearance. In both cases: there is a ‘something more’ for classification to be appropriate to; and the initial object is refined by the most appropriate objective description. What is significant is that the extraconceptual aspect of the thingin-itself occurs as a necessary stage within the objectifying process. We perceive a world of particular objects as opposed to a realm of indefinite appearances or sense data only because the concept of an object admits the possibility of an infinite disclosure. It is this something more which gives us the space to move from a diffuse appearance to the appearance of a particular object. The dynamical or extraconceptual aspect of the thing-in-itself then is a necessary condition for the possibility of its immediate or unifying aspect. The position of a uniqueness condition necessarily includes extraconceptuality. Designating the metaphorical referent as a unique object side-steps the need for a customized ontology and solves the creativity paradox. Unhelpful ontological pretensions are avoided because, from our parallel with Chipman, we can say that the metaphorical referent, like the thing-in-itself, is purely a theoretical resource. There is no need to set out an ontology to house the referent as it is simply an intentional object posited to explain how metaphors both create and discover. The notion of a unique referent admits creativity by affirming the interactionist hypothesis that the meaning of a metaphor is peculiar to the interaction which occurs between its constituent subject terms. No literal predication of the primary subject can replicate the

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meaning; neither can a successive metaphor reproduce its predecessor’s content. What is introduced is something new and unforeseen, something more than is conceptually available at the time. It is this supplement of possibility which grants metaphor its capacity to discover. To presume that talk of the appropriateness of metaphor incurs a one-to-one correspondence or a mapping relation between metaphor and the world is to take on board unnecessary ontological commitments. Such a presumption caused Hausman to distance his theory from transcendental idealism on the grounds that the thing-in-itself did not ‘bear a direct, dynamic relation’ to the world (p. 186). However, following Chipman, the in-itself is not an isolated absolute but the potentially infinite disclosure essential to our concept of a singular, determinate object. Consequently, how metaphor discovers is not a question of how new meanings square with the world but of how metaphorical meaning is possible at all. The appropriateness of metaphor, the constraining condition which Hausman borrows from the dynamical object, is the possibility of metaphorical meaning. We can see this if we look at how objective judgement is possible. A judgement of experience can only be made from a particular point of view. In order to profess any affinity with ‘the facts’, the judgement must include the provision that things could be other than as they appear from the experient’s perspective. Metaphor makes exactly the same provision. Relevance or appropriateness is assured because metaphor offers more than is presently visible from a community’s conceptual viewpoint. It is metaphor’s unparaphrasability which gives an instance its cognitive value. The possibility of determinate metaphorical meaning must presuppose the possibility of other, as yet, undisclosed meanings. This is the mechanism which affords metaphor its pioneering capacity. And this mechanism is sufficiently accounted for by the uniqueness condition. Designating the metaphorical referent as a unique object solves the creativity paradox. Hausman deserves credit for introducing the notion of a unique referent to solve the creativity paradox. Just by instituting the idea that the designation of a metaphorical expression is something particular, he is able to tap the extraconceptual resource intrinsic to metaphor; to entertain the notion of something definite, we have to entertain the notion that that something could be something else. He is right to introduce an extraconceptual condition but wrong to assign it ontological or ‘in the world’ status. The absence of consistency in his description of the condition testifies to the fact that any attempt to resolve the creativity paradox on an ontological basis is going to encounter difficulty. However, the paradox can be solved if we turn to the conditions of judgement and the possibility of determinate metaphorical meaning. The preliminary solution is to say that a creative metaphor introduces a new and unique meaning; the greater part of the solution comes with the admission that the meaning is never fully disclosed. University of Wales College of Cardiff NOTES 1 The quotation is taken indirectly from Hausman. He is actually praising his extraconceptual objects because they do what things-in-themselves do not, namely, ‘bear a direct, dynamic relation’ to the world. I think I am justified in turning this around into a criticism of the thing-in-itself. 2 See in particular, Lauchlan Chipman, ‘Things in themselves’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 33 (1972) pp. 489–502, and Nicholas Rescher, ‘On the status of things in themselves in Kant’, Synthese, 47 (1981), pp. 289–300. The argument in Daniel C.Kolb, ‘Thought and intuition in Kant’s critical system’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 24 (1986), pp. 223–41, amounts to the claim that the nature of knowledge itself demonstrates that we must employ the concept of a thing-in-itself. In J. F.Rosenberg, Transcendental arguments revisited’, Journal of Philosophy, 72 (1975), pp. 611–24, the thing-in-itself endures through Rosenberg’s notion of a conceptual core to promote the idea that concepts and their objects evolve through time. 3 Chipman, op. cit.

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4 ibid., pp. 496–7. 5 ibid., p. 496. I have changed the object in Chipman’s example from a dagger to a rose to assist my identification of the thing-in-itself with the dynamical object.

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