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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Textual Ethos Studies–or Locating Ethics Anna Fahraeus
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The Novel, the Social and the Event: An International Ethical Encounter Nancy Glazener
35
Execrable Speech: Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre Nicholas Chare
53
The Grotesque on Fleshing Out the Subject of Ethics Sara Cohen Shabot
67
Playing Ball With God: Breaking the Law in Breaking the Waves Becky McLaughlin
85
Post-textual Ethics: Foucault’s Rhetorical Will Stuart J. Murray
101
Shakespeare’s Othello: Jealousy and Hermeneutics Michal Pawel Markowski
117
The Ethics of Modality in Pauline Smith’s The Sisters Myrtle Hooper
133
Telling Stories: Alterity and Ethics in John Banville’s The Untouchable and Shroud Pietra Palazzolo
145
“All this tractate is but a dream”: The Ethics of Dream Narration in Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night Per Sivefors
161
Reading Kristeva and Beyond: Psychoanalysis As Textual Ethics Linda Belau
175
Bodily Formations and Reading Strategies in John Donne’s Metempsychosis Siobhán Collins
191
Checkpoint Syndrome: Violence, Madness, and Ethics in the Hebrew Literature of the Intifada Adia Mendelson-Maoz
209
The Uses and Abuses of Children: Fairy Tales and the Pornographic Victoria Best
229
Representations of Rape in Apartheid and Post-apartheid South African Literature Anne Reef
245
Nightwood and the Limits of Representation AnnKatrin Jonsson
263
David Mamet’s Altered Ethics: Finding Forgiveness or Something Like It, in House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and State and Main Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack
281
“Your otherness is perfect as my death”: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Li-Young Lee’s Poetry Zhou Xiaojing
297
The Look of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas, Léo Bronstein, and the Interhuman Intrigue Chris Thompson
315
A Mind Poised Between Desires: The Ethos of T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism David Watson
333
Sentimentality in Postmodernist Fiction: From Ethical Problem to Ethical Possibility Jakob Winnberg
349
Notes on the contributors
365
Index
371
INTRODUCTION TEXTUAL ETHOS STUDIES—OR LOCATING ETHICS ANNA FAHRAEUS
In August 2003 I attended the first bi-annual conference of the British Shakespeare Association in Leicester, England. It had attracted the foremost European scholars and many international names in Shakespeare Studies and the sessions were well-attended and lively. Yet, while participating in the seminar on Cultural Exchange I had the strong sense that several people present were resistant or expected a different focus to the discussion than the panel members—a focus that they opposed. The discussion was harnessed on deck and never seemed to really get off the ground. Whereas we, the panel members, came prepared to discuss the ethos of Shakespeare’s texts in light of new ethical perspectives, there seemed to be a more or less general assumption that what we wanted was to focus on the ethicality of the texts or to deal with the relationship of morality to the texts. The confusion that resulted led to a desire on my part to define my own position on literature and ethics and to consider, on a more general level, what the attitudes of different researchers are in relation to distinguishing an interest in ethics and texts that focuses on ethos from one that focuses on ethicality. The different perspectives on ethics that are present in texts are both worth exploring and important to try to understand, and it is not surprising that the concern with ethics is receiving renewed force in discussions of representation, especially in relation to gender and ethnicity, in an academic environment that has shown itself more than willing to engage with political issues on varied fronts. The focus on textual ethics can be seen in particular in the growing concern with the links between material and discursive forms of repression and usurpation. Ethics is recognized as deeply embedded in discussions of power, of voice and agency, and in textual concerns with the effects of presence and absence, as well as aporias—points at which a final interpretation is foreclosed in a text. As a field, modern ethical criticism is defined as this explicit concern with the relationship between ethics and texts. Critics interested in this relation usually focus on one of four things— and sometimes on more than one of the four at the same time: the overall ethics of reading; the ethics of writing; on how a text promotes or contributes to a positive ethics; and/or on how ethics is operative in the text. In this
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collection, our aim is specifically to highlight the fourth concern within ethical criticism because it is often obscured in theoretical discussions, which tend to focus either on meta-critical concerns or positive ethical value in relation to texts.1 This fourth current can usefully be defined as a concern with the operational ethos of texts because the emphasis is on the peculiarities of the text as much as on how it participates in the production or reproduction of a specific ethical universe. There is a basic recognition that a text’s ethos can be multiple and/or contradictory, and that in texts ethos is—in at least one of its incarnations—invariably textual. In this collection, even those essays that focus on the ethics of criticism or writing, or on positive ethical value in texts they have chosen, emphasize how the ethos position(s) in their texts are specifically represented. A second aim with this collection is to emphasize the inclusiveness of ethical criticism with reference to type of texts and to their ethics. The idea has been that it is not only the different but the heterogeneous qualities— including the negative, questionable, non-realistic and non-rational—that are available in literature, and in texts more generally, that make many of them significant as objects of critical study. In reading about ethical criticism and the relationship of ethics to texts it is easy to come away with the impression that somehow what is being sought after or produced—at least in relation to literature—has to be, or ought to be, positive. Whether it is to assume and focus on the morally educative power of the aesthetic specifically or that the emphasis is placed on cultural texts that can be seen as, to at least some extent, participating in ethical discourse, i.e. in the promotion of a positive ethics, the opening statement in Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics seems to implicitly permeate the theoretical landscape. His work seems to have posited the baseline for what ought to be studied and how texts should be discussed (or read) both in the Anglo-American and in the continental tradition of ethical criticism: “Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims” (2000: 3). This presupposition of the desirability of a positive value in the relationship between a study of literature and ethics can be seen in, for example, Wayne C. Booth’s focus on “good literature” and Martha Nussbaum’s project of bringing novels into moral philosophy with the purpose of searching in them for a viable ethics.2 1
The term “text” in relation to this collection is broadly defined as a narrated unit, as a text is not an objective description, but represents a series of linguistic and structural choices in the construction of an account. This is as true whether the text is nonfictional or fictional. 2 Cf. Booth, 1988, and Nussbaum, 1990.
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Positive value is also frequently tied to the ethics of reading. In his book Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Robert Eaglestone, for example, frames his discussion of ethical criticism within the larger debate on what the objective of criticism should be. He asks the pertinent question, “Does criticism, a strange form of ‘inquiring, learning, knowing and reasoning’, have ethical obligations?” (1997: 1).3 Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s book Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society likewise places criticism itself under the magnifying glass in relation to ethics. Debating how to achieve and write criticism that is ethically sound is important and the objective of this collection is not to undermine that—in fact, there are essays in the collection that share this concern (cf. Belau, Chare). Yet, it is important to state that the concern with the ethicality of interpretation is a meta-critical concern, and for many critics, it can be seen as a second-level concern in the relationship between ethics and texts. It can, therefore, unfortunately result in an over-emphasis—particularly in relation to literary texts—on the critic’s relation to the text and derail, or more or less overshadow, the analysis of the ethics in/of the text itself. I say that this is unfortunate because such analyses are often based on attitudes that are, in themselves, more or less unexamined value judgments about the text. In connection with this it is illuminating and disturbing to look at the three arguments Harpham accounts for with regards to the relationship between ethics and literature. The first he terms the defense of the “apologists for literature” who state that ethics “represents a hidden essence of literature;” the second is the idea that literature is resistant to the “rationality, regularity, universality, obligation” of ethics; and the third that “literature actually exposes the shadowed, chiaroscuro character of ethics itself” and that it cultivates “a generous and humane respect for life in all its strivings and imperfection [...] literature tries, it is said, to develop an ethic more ethical than ethics” (1999: ix-x, emphasis in original). These three arguments are all equally disturbing in so far as they remain unexamined in a given instance of reading. Is literature, and the text under study, given a preeminent standing as inherently ethical? Is literature—and thus any given literary text—interpreted as somehow outside the realm of ethics? Though placing literary texts outside the realm of ethics seems altogether an outdated 3
Eaglestone discusses the tensions in ethical criticism within the larger framework of the anti-theory debate and the uncertainty which characterizes “the academic discipline which teaches criticism: Literary Studies, English, English Studies, Literary Criticism.” He sees ethics as having been central to the inception of criticism but that those conceptions of ethical belief have disappeared in the wake of modernist and postmodernist theory. He looks at the theories of criticism put forth by F. R. Leavis, René Wellek and Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Geoffrey Hartman.
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Romantic relation to the aesthetic, the question of whether a text can be interpreted as being outside an implied or given ethic is open, as is the question of its relationship to a constructive inter-human ethic. In different ways, all three of these questions are addressed to varying degrees in each of the following essays. The dual aim for this collection from the beginning has been to promote the desirability of defining what is meant by ethics in each act of interpretation and to not circumscribe the discussion to texts that necessarily have a positive or straightforward relationship to ethics. Each essay in this volume thus attempts to look for the ethos of a specific text or texts, and many of them have deliberately chosen to focus on atypical texts in relation to ethics. The aim of each essay, however, remains the same: to interrogate the ethics of the piece(s) under consideration and to not accept prima facie statements of its ethical value or its relationship to ethics. Nancy Glazener’s essay opens the collection proper with a look at the textual affiliations between the two critical traditions in ethical criticism: the Anglo-American tradition through Martha Nussbaum, and the continental tradition through Alain Badiou. Glazener sums up the oft-repeated counteraccusations between these two strands as “epistemological naivety and uninterrogated liberalism” on the part of the Anglo-American critics and “obscurantism” and relativism or “the slippery role of practice” on the part of the continental critics. In response, Glazener focuses her discussion on the ethics of the texts produced by two representative theorists. She demonstrates that it is possible to argue for points of contact between the two strands of ethical criticism. She does this, in part, by emphasizing the necessity of sidestepping critical prejudice and remaining open to the idea that “even those working within the privileged metaphors of the Enlightenment, grapple with the limits of the figures and concepts they have inherited.” In reading Nussbaum’s critique of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Glazener differentiates between “ethical worldview” and “ethical stance” indicating the multiple levels on which ethics operates in Nussbaum’s text and the unexpected gap that exists between these levels. Glazener views Nussbaum’s text as both propounding a normative view of the characters, of the past in James’ novel and as open to—in fact actively searching out—knowledge or awareness that disrupts that same continuity.
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A ‘Center-’less Ethic or Postmodern Responsibility If both the Anglo-American or analytic tradition and the continental tradition are exponents within one field, ethical criticism, can a generalized differentiation be made between traditional ethical criticism and late 20thearly 21st century ethical criticism that encompasses them both? I would say that it can. It is not a reliance on French or continental philosophy nor is it an issue of finding ethical value in texts nor of responsibility—neither the desire to assign it nor assume it. The legacy of an older tradition remains in the desire to deal with the ethics of the text and with responsibility. What seems to be the main difference is the issue of a center for ethics, of whether or not a core value system is assumed. What characterizes postmodern ethical criticism is a center-lessness but this is wrongly interpreted if it is equated with an absolute relativism. There is a strong recognition that while there is no longer one universally accepted or unilaterally taught ethics in the West, there is a demand and a need for ethics that invokes both a sense of duty and obligation. One truth in this case does not cancel out the other. Both exist together. The critical extension of this recognition is that in lieu of adopting an understood shared ethic, there is a focused attention on specificity and contingency in discussing the relationship of ethics to a text. This need is increasingly recognized by both the Anglo-American and the continental tradition in ethical criticism. Two cases in point are Michael Weston’s Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good (2001), and David S. Cunningham’s Reading is Believing: The Christian Faith through Literature and Film (2002). Though Weston’s study is written from varying philosophical perspectives, and Cunningham’s is written from a Christian perspective, both critics pay strict attention to defining the ethical framework in which they are operating. Weston’s work is aimed at seeking a rapprochement between the two traditions in ethical criticism and looking at their common interest in defining the “good life.” Cunningham’s analyses are written within the framework of Catholic theology. He carefully defines and makes the Apostles’ Creed an explicit part of his discussion in relation to literature and filmic texts as he looks at how different works highlight the nature of faith. He defines the concepts and terms he uses instead of assuming an understanding of them based on a shared cultural heritage on the part of his reader. Both Weston and Cunningham, however, also posit positive ethical value as the objective behind their interest in the texts or approaches they interrogate. This collection departs from that as a necessary qualification for an interest in a text’s relationship to ethics. That said, it does not veer away from the question that the methodologies used by Cunningham and Weston
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implicitly underscore and that the concern for ethics in relation to texts has brought back into focus: the importance of the critic’s position and thus his or her relationship to their text and an interpretation of it. This issue can be seen as having arisen as an extension of the discussion of the relationship of the author to a non-critical text, fiction or non-fiction. It is most frequently tied to responsibility. Yet the assumption of a writer’s responsibility for his text assumes that he has full control over it. Without advocating a complete disavowal of responsibility for the writers under discussion, the aim of this collection is to showcase approaches that pay attention to the potential violence and the productive aspect of interpretation as well as the implied or direct prejudices of the text. It is commonly recognized that intentions themselves can be subconscious or conscious but ambivalent, and intended representations can be contaminated by expectations of a text’s future response. Life would be easier if morally corrupt or unethical texts (texts that are racist, sexist, exploitative) were always easily discernible and always consistent. It would also be easier if some ethically powerful texts were more straightforward. Unfortunately, or fortunately, texts are multi-layered in meaning through the nature of language, and many are furthered complicated through choices made by the author with regard to, for example, structure, perspective and narrative persona(e). The distasteful or morally corrupt, however, is not outside the purview of ethics even if it is the negative side of ethics. To argue that a text is unethical or morally corrupt and make it the object of a critique raises ethical issues of complicity as it contributes to its dissemination, but ignoring texts that are considered unethical also has ethical implications. Non-action is itself an action. The relative neutrality of this framing of the author and his or her text is thus not motivated by the dubious desirability of promoting the misconstruction of postmodern morality that Zygmunt Bauman refers to in his Postmodern Ethics: What has come to be associated with the notion of the postmodern approach to morality is all too often the celebration of the ‘demise of the ethical’, of the substitution of aesthetics for ethics, and of the ‘ultimate emancipation’ that follows. Ethics itself is denigrated or derided as one of the typically modern constraints now broken and destined for the dustbin of history. (1993: 2)
In both a general and a specific sense—in this context as relating to the responsibility of the author for his/her text—this volume looks towards a reconceptualization of the basis for an understanding of ethics. Bauman suggests that the key is, to some extent, balance:
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[...] the novelty of the postmodern approach to ethics consists first and foremost not in the abandoning of characteristically modern moral concerns, but in the rejection of the typically modern ways of going about its moral problems (that is, responding to moral challenges with coercive normative regulation in political practice, and the philosophical search for absolutes, universals and foundations in theory). (1993: 4, emphasis added)
If normative regulation and the search for absolutes characterize the modern approach to moral problems, what does the rejection of these approaches amount to? As Bauman’s work stresses the concern with ethics remains. It has, however, become reconceptualized as a field of study, which is to say that its object has been reformulated. A major recognition in this reformulation is the idea of cooperation—or complicity in the creation and dissemination of meaning. Dealing with what a text means and how it does what it does (to make a given interpretation plausible) has thus become about acknowledging the balance in responsibility as a critic between one’s own role and that of the text and its author. One view of this is expressed by Jacques Rancière, who stresses this idea of shared responsibility when he explains why the “educative value” of an aesthetic work is not straightforward. The work lacks the autonomy to serve as “educator” on its own. Instead the autonomy resides in the “mode of experience” itself, which is to say that it resides in the encounter between subject and aesthetic object; an encounter wherein the subject too loses “a certain autonomy” to the heterogeneity of the aesthetic experience (2002: 2). It is in allowing this to occur, in attempting to see the text outside one’s own idea of what it should or ought to say according to a specific theoretical model, that presents the challenge to the critic. This designates any value to be gained from reading as process not a finished product to be discovered; a process which is not wholly in the control of the object (or its creator) or the subject. Rancière posits that it is the multi-temporality of the process of, for example, reading—his argument is not limited to text aesthetics—that makes heterogeneity salvageable from art. The temporal and local nature of the process is the reason behind the differentiation of ethos as the object of study that this collection aims to illustrate. None of the essays present a discussion of texts in relation to a generalized ethics. The production of ethos—as a position or manner of relating to the world in terms of an ethics—occurs in the encounter with the text. This means that the ethos of a text is not seen as (wholly) autonomously present and extractable without the subject but as heterogeneously produced in the temporal process of reading. This, in turn however, does not mean an absolute relativity as the critic too loses
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autonomy in the experience of reading—which is to say that she cannot make it mean anything she wants without straying into unethical territory. In his essay in this collection, Nicholas Chare discusses Julia Kristeva’s use of Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), in her Powers of Horror, and the vehement response it has generated. He specifically points out the contradiction in Jennifer Stone’s negative response to Kristeva’s writing: Stone abjects Powers of Horror, she is inclined to vomit at the writer’s perceived attraction to fascism. She reads with her stomach. This reaction is of note because Kristeva describes abjection—which is characterized by a feeling of disgust—as possessing a moral aspect during the first chapter of Powers of Horror. Stone’s sentiment might be understood as a manifestation of what could be called a ‘visceral ethics’.
Chare does not rest his case on a facile defense of the aesthetic that rejects its political impact, instead he engages the questions raised by Kristeva’s critics. This occasions a return to Kristeva’s use of Céline as well as a discussion of the difficult issue of ascription of responsibility for the meaning of a text. On the one hand, Chare’s essay can be seen as justifying the “permanent quarantine” or censorship of what is perceived or accepted as “morally reprehensible.” He even extends the arguments against Kristeva when he raises the relevant issue of the complicity of the condemnatory essay because it repeats what it is seeking to “to hold to account.” On the other hand, Chare performs an ethos reading of the same pamphlet. He argues that not only is the content ethically questionable but the style of writing is itself representative of a “putrid poetics.” He writes a strong condemnatory essay but confronts this contradiction in his own writing and seeks to interrogate how the process of writing about a text like Céline’s, which is “anti-semitic, fascist, misogynist, and racist,” is to be done and what the effects are of different ways of discussing and referring to it. Kant and the Nature of Knowledge A wider issue that Glazener implicitly touches on is how current ethical criticism almost invariably shares ground with issues explored within earlier philosophical thought, particularly rationalism in the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of mind. For ethos readings as analyses of how value is structured in a given text or for a given person or character, Kant’s ideas relating to how we know what we know have a broader impact than his
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moral philosophy; an impact that is perhaps not always recognized as traceable back to Kant. Rationalism, broadly speaking, advocates reason as the source of all knowledge and truth or certainty. René Descartes’ dualistic thought rested on his granting a pre-eminent status to the “rational soul” or mind and relegating the body to an “earthen machine” in gaining knowledge (Zimmer 2005). He began work on a major opus, The World, in which he focused a great deal of attention on the independent capacity of the body, but withdrew it for fear of offending Catholic authorities, and instead published a much shorter work, Discourse on Method, in which he argued for the independent capacity of the soul and his famous thesis, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). He proposed that the ability to mentally conceive of perfection presupposed its existence. Not surprisingly, Descartes’ writings are not without their own internal contradictions (cf. Murray). Despite the focus on reason that his work generated, the nature of man as corporeal led to continued discussions on the mind and its relationship to the body. Benedict de Spinoza is one of the philosophers, who picked up the mind-body problem. His discussion of the relationship of mind to matter in Ethics sheds light on the currency of late seventeenth century ideas to the modern debate. It is often stated that like Descartes, Spinoza was a Rationalist and that he devalued sense perception. However, Spinoza’s conceptualization of substance—he believed there is only one— makes it impossible for the mind and the body to be distinct entities, and this marks his theory as definitively different from Descartes’. Thus the statement that he articulates a distinction, between sense or the imaginative perception of the body and intellectual perception, that gives preeminence to the latter, is an oversimplification that dislocates the core of his thought, the monism of substance. The physicality of things and of the self is the problem. It leads to an inseparability of the self from the external object. Spinoza admits that the body contributes to perception and understanding. His complaint is that the body’s perception of things is inadequate and prejudiced: “that the ideas, which we have of external bodies, indicate rather the constitution of our own body than the nature of external bodies” (1997, IIP16C2). To arrive at the intellect’s greater capacity for reliability, he shifts the object of understanding from singular to common things. The adequacy of intellectual perception and human understanding is thus tied in Spinoza to generalities and abstractions. The fact that the body’s knowledge is imperfect is an unavoidable consequence of the limitation placed on the self through the physicality of the body, and uncertainty is thus a condition of mortality. The combination of the two claims in Spinoza, that knowledge gained through the body is unreliable and that the body is
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inseparable from the soul, leads to the logical conclusion that there is an opening in his argument for scepticism. Spinoza himself draws a further conclusion. He rejects free will as a delusion: “[e]xperience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined” (IIIP2S). The clarity of Spinoza’s acknowledgement of the body as a perceiver and transferer of knowledge, albeit imperfect, raises questions as to the precise nature of that knowledge and the manner of its transference. Though less concerned with the relationship of knowledge to the soul or the physical properties of the body, John Locke pursued the question of how knowledge is acquired vigorously in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He argued for the mind as a blank slate at birth and that it progressively gained deeper and deeper impressions as ideas were repeatedly encountered. Though the mind can compare and combine simple ideas into complex ones, it cannot move outside the knowledge gained through experience, whether direct sense experience or through reflection. Locke advocated an acceptance of uncertainty and yet instead of accepting scepticism and revelling in doubt, he proposed the praxis of calculating probabilities: a hypothesis should be erected and followed until it was replaced by something better. What seems like common sense now, changed the intellectual world. As important—or perhaps more importantly from the point of view of the relationship of texts and ethics, Locke contributed through his own methodology and language use to irrevocably secularizing the search for truth and the philosophy of mind. It was in part this secularization that lay behind George Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s Essay. Though an empiricist like Locke, Berkeley was determined to recoup the loss of religious belief and certainty in what he saw as a materialist system (Cooper 259-260). His criticism focused on Locke’s language stating that the arguments were self-contradictory. His objections can be applied to Spinoza’s argument on adequate or reliable understanding as well, because what he was criticizing was the reliance on abstraction and generalities (Berman 5). While Locke argues for primary qualities (e.g. solidity) as inseparable from the object, and secondary qualities (e.g. color) as only imperfectly comprehensible, Berkeley opined that what was true of the secondary properties was equally true of the primary ones. Berkeley argued for the relativity of experience, which is to say that he pointed out that what seems solid to one may be less solid to someone else. Berkeley, however, went so far as to deny the existence of matter. His esse is percipi (to exist is to be perceived) is therefore to be taken literally. For Berkeley, things continue to exist when we do not perceive them because God
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perceives them. Our imperfect comprehension of matter is actually our imperfect comprehension of God’s ideas that he wills us to share, matter is , in itself, irrelevant to explaining how we perceive or comprehend things (Cooper 263). Though he can be difficult to understand for the modern mind, Berkeley’s main point—minus its theological aspect—that there is no existence without perception, by which he means mental acknowledgement and conceptualization, is actually a forerunner to constructivist thought. Kant’s position—transcendental idealism—can be seen as a modified version of Berkeley’s constructivism. Objects are modified and knowledge as well as reality are constructed through the mind. However, there is also a parallel secularized modifaction of Spinoza’s monism, as matter is brought back into play. In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued for the idea that our knowledge is only of impressions—things as they appear to our senses—and not of things as they are in themselves independent of our perception of them (42). This is the epistemological idea that lies behind the modern extended concern that there can exist a self as well as a subject— which is basically the mind’s perception of the self. This issue is reflected in many current readings that focus on identity and subjectivity, and naturally relates to formulations of ethics and the issue of responsibility. The fact that Kant believed both that all knowledge must come through the senses and simultaneously that all knowledge was not necessarily derived from experience has also been important for the development of the philosophy of mind and current discussions on the nature of knowledge (41). The nature of knowledge pertains directly to how we are to understand the structuring of a common ethics. Kant argued that the mode of human perception and reflection might itself have a kind of structure;4 that this mode is a way of organizing information about objects, which in some way influences the way we experience them. This means that the mind is more than a passive recipient of information. It plays an active role in experience. It does not merely register information, it organizes it, interprets it and structures what is experienced through the senses in some way. Knowledge presupposes the mind’s active participation and reception modifies objects in the process. It is in this sense that the mind constructs its object, by bringing a modified version of it into being. Kant makes differentiations in rational knowledge. Basically he defines understanding, which can be gained through analytic judgment, as requiring nothing outside the concept itself to be understood. This is implied in the 4
See particularly “The Architectonic of Pure Reason,” Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (1787).
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statement “All bodies are extended,” i.e. through their spatial character all bodies connect to other things.5 There is also rational knowledge, which can never be universal or a priori because it is based on synthetic judgments that require sense experience for confirmation (48-49). An issue that this raises is reflected in asking to what extent Kant believed rational knowledge to be an unconscious structuring as opposed to a process of conscious reasoning. In “The Architectonic of Pure Reason,” for example, Kant writes: It is unfortunate that only after we have spent much time in the collection of materials in somewhat random fashion at the suggestion of an idea lying hidden in our minds, and after we have, indeed, over a long period assembled the materials in a merely technical manner, does it first become possible for us to discern the idea in a clearer light, and to devise a whole architectonically in accordance with the ends of reason. (655, italics added)
Here he seems to say that there is a process that occurs outside conscious thought that enables us to structure things and comprehend how they fit together. It suggests an opening for the involvement of the senses, and their connection to knowledge is very much a part of the current discussions relating to ethics and has been evident in literature since the Romantics even though it fell into disrepute in theoretical discussions and has remained so until fairly recently. The role of the body relative to knowledge and the construction of ethos or dispositions related to subjectivity and identity as well as responsibility to the other, is a central issue in trauma theory and in ethics generally. It is not only a matter of being embodied; it is about the role of the mind relative to the body and our senses. The body is not only an object of knowledge but a producer of knowledge. Sara Cohen Shabot’s essay focuses on the role of the body in the creation of subjectivity and in identification, or the creation of identity. She discusses how the body’s basic inescapability and its ultimately exceeding nature deny complete assimilation within absolute systems and compels the reformulation of knowledge. Her concern is with the body’s representation— both actual and its metaphoric properties—and how the body’s representation impacts on understandings of the aesthetic and by extension on the relationship of aesthetics in general to ethics. She focuses specifically on how the properties of the body can be seen as providing a means to envision a 5
Wittgenstein uses the same idea generalized in the Tractatus: “Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things” (2.0121).
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constructive ethics or “grotesque philosophy” of intersubjectivity that can generate a new epistemology. Becky McLaughlin’s reading of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves starts with the physical, bodily reaction of her students to the film. It makes them sea-sick. Using psychoanalytical theory she begins by asking why this is the case and what response their reliance on their strong physical reaction to the film may be masking. It becomes apparent that their physical response has a counterpart in the film, in which Bess’ body becomes a graphic cipher of her ethical stance toward life. McLaughlin argues that the disjunctive form of the film is tied to its narrated content but also inextricably to the parallel form of Bess’ body and the context of its violation. The film communicates through its physical forms, and through the physical reaction it engenders in the audience. Agency and Non-sense Kant’s conclusion that some of the properties that we ascribe to objects may actually have more to do with the person doing the perceiving than with the objects themselves, seems self-evident now and is a primary concern in metacriticism, or the concern with the role of the critic in the production of interpretations. Its relevance to ethical criticism is apparent in the concern with the ethics of reading (interpreting) and writing. The failure of transcendental metaphysics to achieve certainty did not mean for Kant, however, that nothing transcends the capacity of reason to understand it. There are things reason does not comprehend. This has implications when you consider that he saw human will as, in part, a non-sensible object.6 The preface to the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason actually begins with the sentence, “Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions, which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all
6
In the section entitled “The Ultimate End of Pure Reason” in The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant differentiates between a will that is “purely animal” and “free will” stating that the latter’s “freedom can be proved through experience.” In fact, Kant argues that reason is what gives us “the power to overcome the impressions on our faculty of sensuous desire.” He specifically cites the ability to call up “representations” that convince us to act in certain ways (633).
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its powers, it is also not able to answer” (42). The idea of the will as a partially non-sensible and therefore to some degree incomprehensible part of being human has returned within the concern for ethics in relation to subjectivity and also with texts. It relates very much to the issue of autonomy and thus to responsibility. Kant’s proposition that the will is not something we can fully know has within it an unfinished aspect, an indefinite-ness. This is disturbing because ethics is a matter of the choices we make in how we relate to ourselves and others, and this is very much related to will, to agency. This discomfiting thought of the possibility that we might not consciously control all our choices brings us back to issues and texts that disturb or disrupt somehow. Stuart J. Murray’s essay pushes the examination of Descartes’s concept of will to its textual limit, relates it to Foucault’s model of ethics in which the will “ultimately unseats our comfortable subjectivity,” and envisions through the affinities between their work the conceptualization of a new ethics. Murray looks at the relationship of will to the mind but also to the body in Descartes’ writing. He draws the conclusion that it is in Descartes that the will becomes problematized and ceases to be either alignable solely with the body and the irrational or with the mind and rational. He discusses the body as operated in part by a will that lies outside conscious control. Michal Pawel Markowski’s essay reforms Descartes’ discussion of the will and its relationship to reason in relation to Othello and the inevitably thwarted will to fully comprehend the other and the resultant mad jealousy that ensues from this failure. Markowski moves in his discussion between Shakespeare’s tragedy and the Western hermeneutic legacy. He questions whether it is not time to reevaluate the negative attitude and dismissal of jealousy and the physical manifestations of its affect, and instead begin to take seriously its value as signifying the epistemological brink—or break—at which it is impossible to deny the contingency of human existence. Wittgenstein and Language The turn to language basically occurred after Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), he dealt with the problem raised by Kant: the excess reality that lies outside the grasp of human reason. This idea of excess is not an evaluative designation of something superfluous that
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exceeds the bounds of the normal or the sufficient. Rather, in this context excess is simply that which exceeds full stop; it is a surplus. Wittgenstein argued that language in its logic shows the limit of thought. This meant that what can be thought can be said, but also importantly that what cannot be thought cannot be said (2002: esp. 3.13). Hence, Wittgenstein accused metaphysicians of asserting that language reflects reality in a clearer way than is logically or empirically possible. Wittgenstein did not turn away from the fact that the word and what it corresponds to is not an inevitable relationship—since there exist realities to which there are no corresponding words. This lack of causality has disturbing consequences for his discipline. In Tractatus proposition 5.641, he states: “The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it.” This “philosophical self” is the collective self or what is normally referred to as man or the subject. The “limit of the world” is the equivalent of what there is to know about humankind and the metaphorical universe we live in. Wittgenstein’s argument is that being able to talk about “a part of it”—a part of what it means to be human and about the world7 we live in—is not enough for the philosopher, and to do so creates an illusion, a self-deception of knowing more than can be known.8 It is to attempt to describe what lies outside reason’s ability to describe. A form this excess can take is mood or modality. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has defined ethos usefully in its relation to an intersubjective ethics as specifically “a modality of being” or “manner” that comes to be assumed and appropriated as part of an identity (Agamben 1993: 28, 22). For Agamben, ethos does not exist as a transcendental, stable entity outside intersubjectivity, but is defined in human relations by the “how” rather than as a pre-existing what. This shift in conceptualizing ethos highlights it as performative, and as a process, its homogeneity—especially over time—becomes suspect. This way of reading ethos can be used, of course, in looking at persons and cultures as well as looking at characters in fictional works, but it also relates to Aristotle’s definition of ethos as the appeal related to ethics in the language and style used by the speaker. 7
Wittgenstein states clearly “That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.” (Wittgenstein’s emphases, 5.62, 151.) 8 Wittgenstein would later attempt to resolve the contradiction of the aims and the limits of philosophy in Philosophical Investigations, 1953. What is important here, however, is that the questions he raised in the Tractatus are still current in spite of his later work.
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Agamben’s focus on manner is similar to Aristotle’s definition of ethos as something that is constructed on a technical level and that is reflected through a mode or manner of speaking. As a category of logic modality is the classification of a rhetorical strategy or linguistic unit on the basis of whether it asserts or denies the possibility, impossibility, contingency, or necessity of its semantic content. It is commonly accepted that the semantic content of a statement can say one thing while the excess modality of its expression says something else entirely or adds a surplus. Irony is a mood. Sarcasm is a mood. Mood and modality in all its different forms affects the interpretation of ethos and can be the focus of an ethos reading. It is thus possible to see modality as a secondary level within the text that can have a separate ethos from that of the characters or the events. This has been widely known and commonly accepted in literary studies for a long time. The crux for modern ethical criticism is the application of modality to non-fictional texts and that it has equal validity in the political reading of fictional texts. This is Booth’s point in his discussion of his colleague’s averse reaction to having Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the required reading for his class. Modality is an excess that complicates a reading of ethics in or of a narrative as a story and as a single act of narration. While all the essays in this collection focus on discursive strategies or effects in texts, two essays deal directly with modality as choice as the focus of their analyses. Myrtle Hooper’s focus is linguistic. In literary analysis the concern in regards to language is often with semantics or connotation, but Hooper argues for a basis in understanding the import of language as inscribed by modal verbs—which are related to the classifications of logic as designating possibility, probability, contingency, necessity etc. She sees specific linguistic choices as constitutive of an ethics—or rather an opening to a constructive ethics. Implicit in her essay is the theoretical work of the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha. His theory of Third Space relates directly to her argument as it points to how human interaction—including language—acts to displace the histories that constitute that interaction, sets up new structures of authority and enables new political initiatives, in part because human interaction can require or give unexpected impetus to new modes of thinking. It is this type of development—though she does not use Bhabha—that Hooper sees traces of in Smith’s “The Sisters.” In her essay, Pietra Palazzolo looks at the act of narration and the voices in John Banville’s The Untouchable and Shroud in relation to responsibility and how the complexity of this issue is heightened by the fact that the novels are fictive representations of actual historical events. Her stated object of focus is the modalities of Banville’s recasting of two actual events. She is not
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interested in their faithfulness but in how the narrative choices pertain to the issues of alterity and ethics. She argues for the texts as interventions in ethics that are “manifested at several levels: visual, linguistic, socio-cultural, political, historical.” Her reading has a Levinasian cant in that she argues for the centrality of language to an understanding of alterity. Language and Derrida Derrida’s influence is widespread in literary studies in general and is markedly evident in ethical criticism—either implicitly in analyses or as an object of critique. The type of reading associated with Derrida is usually referred to as deconstruction but has also been described usefully as a “working through (or in, or with, anything but a deconstruction of)” the text (Jackson 2001: 36). Jackson’s desire to distance himself and his reading from deconstruction can be seen as a result of the negative connotations associated with the term; the idea that deconstructive analyses rip texts apart and neither find nor leave anything useful behind. This is paradoxical because Derrida is interested in essences—though they remain elusively out of reach (cf. Belau’s discussion of the “kernel”). It is the impossibility in describing the essential nature of anything that runs through his work, making it about the process of getting there—without ever arriving, but this does not negate that there is a there in the first place. This can be seen in the link that Jackson makes between his own position and John D. Caputo’s claim that Derrida’s interests are not about the event, for example, of revelation “but rather in a philosophical structure or possibility that underlies this event” (1997: 194). Derrida is most frequently associated with his term différance, which entails both difference and deferral in the relationship between a sign and the object it signifies. Definitive meaning is continually postponed. What makes Per Sivefors’ essay stand out in this collection is that his interpretation of Thomas Nashe’s “All this tractate is but a dream” presents it as an early modern text that maintains a face-to-face relation to two opposing Others. Nashe’s tract deals with a topic that is ethically neutral to the modern Western mind, the nature of dreams. The topic was, however, not ethically neutral to the early modern mind, and Sivefors uses Nashe’s pamphlet on nightmares as an opening to explore how a text can function as a reflection on or arena for strongly competing values. Sivefors addresses how Nashe’s rhetorical strategies can be seen as contributing to an interrogation of the different value systems if a final definitive meaning in the text is allowed to remain deferred.
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Negativity and the Realization of Ethics To stop at the concept of différance and the deferral of meaning is to misread Derrida in relation to ethics. His texts do not support an absolute relativism. Despite his theory about the nature of language, his writing does not indicate an acceptance of relativity that nullifies the idea of the existence of ethics, but encourages the recognition that irreducible paradoxes—what he refers to as “aporias,” a word taken from the Greek system of logic—demand the assumption of personal responsibility, of personal decisions in the act of reading. In Against Ethics (1993), Caputo provides a Derridean formulation of the nature of our relationship to ethics as always more or less complicit but as nevertheless necessary. Despite its provocative title, Caputo’s book is a brilliant reading of Derrida’s writing as based on an existentialist philosophy with all that this implies of both anxiety and responsibility in the face of the freedom to choose.9 This opening for an active ethics can be seen in Derrida’s explication of his own position: One could multiply the examples of this double duty [presented by aporias]. [...] It would be necessary to recognize both the typical or recurring form and the inexhaustible singularization—without which there will never be any event, decision, responsibility, ethics, or politics. These conditions can only take a negative form (without X there would not be Y). One can be certain only of this negative form. As soon as it is converted into positive certainty (‘on this condition, there will surely have been event, decision, responsibility, ethics, or politics’), one can be sure that one is beginning to be deceived, indeed beginning to deceive the other. (Aporias 1993: 20, emphasis added) .
The deception of both the self and the other takes place because an assertion of knowledge is inevitably a reduction. By their nature aporias “exceed” the singular response and thus the taking of any decision will lead to “error, recklessness, the unthought, and irreponsibility,” which then appear as the “very presentable face of good conscience” (1993: 20). However, the fact that for Derrida, making a decision or being responsible is irreducibly tied to irresponsibility does not negate the necessity of answering the call to duty. In fact, the existence of irreducible contradictions or aporias, in for example a text, is itself such a call. Derrida is not a moral deontologist (which is to say that he does not believe in universal principles of right and wrong) but nor is he an advocate for an absolute relativist position in practice. Derridean readings work with the idea of how a 9
Caputo comes out for ethics or what he calls “quasi-ethics” but against ethics as designatable articles of faith.
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text opens itself to different interpretations by composing and decomposing itself, and in this way requiring the reader to make an active responsible choice—or to state why this is not possible or preferable. The “undecidability” itself “demands decision” and is itself the constituting force of the ethical in Derrida (Kronick 1999: 39).10 Derrida deals with this by emphasizing that “event[s], decision[s], responsibility, ethics or politics” are “conditions” that “can only take a negative form.” Thus any position taken must be phrased as a negative. Two essays in this collection deal specifically with approaches in texts that manifest a Derridean choice of actively not choosing. Linda Belau discusses Julia Kristeva’s writing on melancholy and abjection and focuses on ethics as a need that only the negative can fill. She formulates a psychoanalytical view of Kristeva’s writing as a textual practice with a strong implicit ethos. Belau argues that the writing itself foregrounds that “[i]t is precisely the function of the negative that grounds ethics and annuls the emergence of the pathological.” She illustrates how the approach Kristeva uses can be seen as marked by its own failure and “a necessary repetition around a missing kernel,” a kernel that must remain missing in order for ethics not to deteriorate into a reductive conformity. Belau stresses that, at the same time, Kristeva’s writing reinforces that the striving towards an ethics is equally important and must remain in order for the negativity not to become perversion. The active choice to not choose can also be the adoption of a specific critical strategy that actively strives to identify the multiplicity of meaning, uncertainties and apparent inconsistencies as not by necessity nullifying—or indicating failure—but instead as contributing to a complex picture of the value system or ethic espoused by the text. In her essay, Siobhán Collins rejects the relative consensus among the critics that John Donne’s Metempsychosis is incoherent and a failed poem, and finds instead openings within the text to see it as his “most extended poetic exploration of metaphysics.” She argues for textual evidence within the poem for a dual and ambivalent ethos that forestalls a final resolution between the spiritual and the physical/sexual but also forestalls a “collapse into a sceptical and extreme relativism.” The end result, Collins posits, is an invitation to “wonder” with Donne, to contemplate the relationship of body and soul without a guaranteed or a presupposed outcome.
10
The quotes within the quote are taken from Derrida, 1981: 220 and 1988: 116.
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Violence The issue of responsibility in relation to representation—and indeed signification—is inextricably tied to the issue of violence. The idea of text and reader as separate and uncontaminated entities in the process of reading is an illusion. Any literary criticism that applies theory to a text as a method of speaking for the object of study subscribes to an ontological practice that is violent in its basic premise of separateness, which amounts to an assumption that influence or power can be unilateral; the claim to understanding a text or another person is a form of power.11 Instead, the aim should be to maintain a face-to-face relation with the text that does not absorb it into a theoretical framework but lets its excess be there and complicate the reading.12 This idea of an invitation is recurrent in postmodern ethics (cf. Winnberg). It has a dark aspect, however. How is the invitation posed by the violent Other to be approached (cf. Thompson)? Levinas seems to say that s/he cannot be denied. This collection is aimed at accepting the challenge that, as part of the construction of a modern ethics of human relations, a faceto-face with the violence in society is required. The point is not to excuse or condone violence, but to refuse it the power of the monolithic and of the radical nature of the absolute other. Levinas’ position too appears more to be about the impossibility of evading the existence of violence in all human interactions, and the importance of interrogating it rather than denying its existence. The idealization of the other is, for Levinas, an abdication of responsibility that is as violent in its own way as the idealization of the self— which creates a violent hubris. Though all of the readings in this collection perform readings on the intersection between the aesthetic and ethics, they do so with material that varies in the degree of its connection to actual cultural phenomena or historical realities and to the intensity of the response the texts generate. Three essays in particular stand out for their treatment of social material that is very politically sensitive and highly controversial. Adia Mendelson-Maoz’s essay is concerned with the current Israeli politics of the Occupied Territories. She discusses the ethos presented by a trend in Israeli poetry and its representation of the effects of working in the occupied territories. Her focus is on specific poets and their work and its rawness, on the perpetrator as victim of his own violence, and on how this
11 For a very brief but thought-provoking overview of what Levinas has meant for criticism in general, see Frederick Young, 2002. 12 Cf. The “surplus” of the other in Jill Robbins, 1999.
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type of poetry, as a part of Israeli culture, both reflects and reflects on Israeli society. Against the backdrop of a general discussion of the representation of sexualized children, Victoria Best compares and contrasts Nicolas JonesGorlin’s Rose Bon-Bon (2002) and Jean-Pierre Enard’s Contes à faire rougir d’honte les petits chaperons (1987). She also looks at the reception of the two works in France. What is of special interest to Best is the similarity of basic content (sexualized children) and yet the radically opposed response the two novels have attracted because of their difference in form, and the relevance of this discrepancy to an understanding of modern ethics in relation to children and to how they are represented. Anne Reef’s essay looks at rape in South African literature against the backdrop of the extraordinarily high incidence of rape in South Africa. Reef’s aim is not to arrive at a definitive stance that should be adopted but instead to discuss the complexity of the issues involved in relation to the issue itself and its representation, e.g. the dual bind that silence imposes on rape survivors, the issue of gender and writing, race and perpetrators and their victims, and the responsibility of interpretation. From the Human Other to Language as Other: Levinas There are many introductions to the work of Levinas and many recapitulations of his theories in relation to ethics but one of the most succinct overviews of his contribution is Jill Robbins’ opening paragraph in Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature: Within recent Continental philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas has decisively renewed the question of the ethical. In a manner somewhat analogous to Heidegger’s retrieval of the forgotten question of being, Levinas repeats and revisits an entire philosophical tradition from the vantage point of the forgetting of the ethical. The tradition, he argues, habitually suppresses alterity, subordinating it to the totality. Interpreting the other as a necessary moment of the same, that is, in an all too dialectizable manner, it would reduce the absolutely other to the other of the same. (1999: xiii)
This idea of the other and of the same and the relation between the two occurs in different ways and in different formulations in Levinas’s work. One way of understanding the crucial relevance of his writing on the self and the other towards a reconceptualization of the effects and ethical implications of human interaction is to go through the writings of Bhabha. In his essay “DissemiNation,” Bhabha reflects on the effects of a clash between
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nationalism and national culture in a way that bears a marked resemblance to Levinas’ distinction between Said and Saying. Bhabha designates nationalism as the pedagogical view of culture, “the homogenous and horizontal view associated with the nation’s ‘imagined community’.”13 This pedagogical view is analogous to the Said. He designates “national culture” as the performative view, where culture is produced in the daily acts of individuals (1994b: 145). It is in the performative view of culture that an image of contradiction or difference emerges as daily acts diverge from the expected. This performative view also forms part of the Said. Bhabha asks the question, “how do we understand such forms of social contradiction?” (153). In answer to his own question, he purports that there is “a disjunctive time” or “split” between the two—the pedagogical and performative or the two forms of Said—that creates the conceptual ambivalence or difficulty in pinning down exactly what is meant by a nation’s culture, and that the emergence of this in-between space is creative. It is this space that he calls “the interstices” or “Third Space” and for Bhabha it is an enunciatory space because it “provides the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood— singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity” (1994a:1). Levinas’ Saying is the equivalent—and precursor—of this terrain, this Third Space. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas designates Saying as specifically the site where exposure to the other takes place and as a “no place” or “utopia” (Davis 1996: 76-78). Saying is at the center of ethical relations because it forms the basis for how the subject is constituted through and by the other—and this is one point, where it is useful to not know whether the Other in Levinas’ original text should be translated with neighbor, language, or even God (as in a transcendent will). Bhabha’s theory is helpful to understanding Levinas primarily because it facilitates a concrete understanding of how two instances of Said can differ and how their interaction produces an effect that alters the perception of both. Two originary moments—or subjects—do not meet and make a third but are displaced and ruptured by the clash of their meeting in Bhabha and similarly, two instances of the Said can clash and displace each other exposing or creating a new avenue for thought within a text. It is this productivity that is reflected in Saying. Several readings in this collection focus to varying degrees on Levinas and his reworking of ethics, but each critic that has chosen to look at Levinas or Levinas’ concepts does so for different reasons and in different ways. In 13
Bhabha’s pedagogical aspect of a nation’s culture is comparable to what in Foucault’s terminology is a nation’s dominant discourse or prevailing structures of thinking that permeate all national institutions—public and private.
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her essay, AnnKatrin Jonsson argues that a position on ethics emerges in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood through a narrational excess that “un-Says” the already Said and thus destabilizes previous representations or images. The narrational excess functions to expose what lies outside the ability of the other characters to know about Robin. In a sense, Jonsson focuses on the irreducible distance between the characters, the gaps that they cannot or fail to fill. The novel is a graphic display of the inevitable failed mastery of the other. In their reading of David Mamet’s work, Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack focus on the term alterity. They suggest that Levinas’s concept of exteriority is necessary to understanding how he uses alterity, and emphasize how Levinasian alterity (as opposed to alternate formulations of this concept) is irreducible to difference and otherness, and is instead a state of being in relation to the other. Alterity is not the other but is produced in me in confrontation with the other. Against this backdrop, Davis and Womack discuss the relational asymmetry and emotional complexity of Mamets’ work. Zhou Xiaojing explores Levinasian alterity as language through the Asian American perspective in Li-Young Lee’s poetry. Zhou looks at alterity’s relation to socially constructed otherness, as well as its effects on the self in the form of the lyric “I” in Lee’s work. In her reading she retains Levinas’s emphasis on language as constitutive: “‘the relation between the same and the other [...] is language [...] primordially enacted as conversation’ (TI, 39). Language reveals the other, the ‘vision’ of the face is inseparable from this offering language is (TI, 174)” (Eaglestone 1997: 121-122).14 In his essay, Chris Thompson focuses on Levinas’ negative attitude to art, an aspect of Levinas’ work that is particularly perplexing and provocative because of the compelling and self-justifying status his philosophy of the self and the other have attained within literary analysis. In his approach, Thompson looks at Levinas’ Totality and Infinity in conjunction with the lesser-known Fragments of Art, Life, and Metaphysics by Léo Bronstein. Both texts, Thompson argues, treat the ethical encounter as fundamentally only conceptualizable in aesthetic terms. Thompson finds in Levinas’ writing, especially on the properties of metaphor, a position on the aesthetic as an illusion, “the experience of which produces forms of sensation that instantiate what lies beyond the terms of the illusion itself.” Both the possibility that identity can be divided into a self and a conscious subjectivity, and the limitations of this thinking subject spread outside philosophy to literature in Modernist writing. Both issues influence readings 14
TI refers to Totality and Infinity.
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of texts related to ethics in very real ways—from feminist readings to ecocriticism to man’s relation to machines and the ethics of the internet. In his book Narrative Ethics (1995) Adam Zachary Newton specifically argues Modernism’s renewed concern with the limits of the self and its knowledge, in light of the then new scientific and biological theories of Darwin and Freud, can be seen in how “formal innovations in the novel dovetail with an increased anxiety about what it means, simply to render oneself, and to affect others, narratively” (1995: 31). Newton makes the case for an ethics of the story-telling arena in which he argues that the act of narration and the act of listening or reading both implicitly engage ethics. He holds that the poems, short stories, and novels of which he offers readings are “built around an armature of intersubjective relations accomplished through story.” The ethical is this relation; it is “narrative as relationship and human connectivity [...] narrative as claim, as risk, as responsibility, as gift, as price. Above all, as an ethics, narrative is performance or act” (1995: 7). Since his focus is on texts “in which a kind of genealogy of [self-conscious] anxiety can be tracked,” which he designates as “novels and short fiction of the mid to late nineteenth century” (31), this impacts on his theory for “an intersubjective paradigm of narrative ethics” (31). Is it possible to broaden his paradigm to include other texts from other time periods? Is it desirable? In any case, Newton engages deconstruction and usefully points out that it is not a monolith, that there are many practices of deconstruction. In his discussion he is mainly concerned with Paul de Man’s formal deconstruction, which he interprets as stopping too soon, as being too cautious and as creating a repeating loop that “plays and replays ad infinitum” (38). It is a valid risk. Though insisting finally that deconstruction and ethics part company, Newton concedes that deconstruction is not characterized by “an indifference to answerability; it is at best a scrupulous hesitation, an extreme case occasioned by the treachery of words and the dangers of easy answers” (7). In this collection, David Watson argues for this type of rhetorical anxiety in relation to the self and the formulation of an ethical theory in T. S. Eliot’s writing: If one aspect of Eliot’s discourse conforms to an understanding of ethics that views it as a self-directed enterprise involving the formation and cultivation of the self, then the other side of it is suggestive of an ethics centered on the relationship between the self and other, in which the self is called on to respond to the unforeseen presence of an other.
Watson argues that central to the dualism in the ethos of Eliot’s writing is an unstable sense of identity, a sense of “rootlessness.” Watson ties the idea of
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how the self is presented in Eliot through rhetorical strategies to Michel Foucault’s theories about how the self must be continually re-constructed as if it is a work of art and with an acceptance that each construction is provisional (cf. Murray). Eliot’s writing becomes not only an avenue towards understanding his critical attitude towards the writing process, but towards conceptualizing subjectivity itself as a process. Cohen Shabot makes the related theoretical point that an understanding of the conceptualization of the subject in a given theory of ethics is important to comprehending that theory. What this often entails is an explicit disentangling of the subject from relevant ideologies—sometimes located in the text, sometimes only extra-textually. Though this occurs more or less across the board in this collection in different ways, two examples stand out: Mendelson-Maoz’s discussion of the ethical complexities involved in representing rape and its survivors in South African fiction, and Best’s discussion of the deceptive relationship of representation to professed ethics in reference to the sexualization of children. In a theoretically-speaking lateral move, Jakob Winnberg argues, in the final essay in this collection, that it is the “the indeterminacy and vacillation” that characterizes the postmodern subject, which effects an opening that may let sentimentality “transcend the self-indulgence and solipsism of the modern ego and reach an intersubjective sphere of engagement with the other.” His essay implicitly addresses how attitudes towards sentimentality have ontological and ethical repercussions and the relevance of this to an examination of the ideologies related to sentimentality in a text versus the ones we (as readers) have adopted. Winnberg performs in part a deconstructive reading of Levinas in order to argue for the equal standing that should be granted to the “sentimental other” and to advocate a move towards a qualified acceptance of the value of sentimentality as essential for the conceptualization of a postmodern ethic of relation as well as of representation. Conclusion The essays in this volume all seek to theorize and articulate differing conceptualizations of the way representation and ethics intersect and complicate each other. The aim of the collection as a whole is specifically to highlight how different aspects of textuality or rhetorical strategies influence ethos and affect readings; and to illustrate the varying perspectives that can be used to localize how texts engage or invite an engagement with ethics. We have also wanted to give prominence to the study of atypical texts that
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represent different attitudes toward the violent, the disordered, the traumatized, the psychotic, and the sentimental in order to encourage—or provoke—further discussion of the relevance of these types of texts to ethics. Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (1993). The Coming Community, trans. by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P. Aristotle (2000). Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. Roger Crisp, New York: Cambridge UP. Bauman, Zygmunt (1993). Postmodern Ethics, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell. Berman, David (1999). Berkeley, New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994a). The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. —— (1994b). “DissemiNation,” The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 139-170. Booth, Wayne C. (1988). The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Berkeley: U of California P. Caputo, John D. (1997). The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion, Bloomington: Indiana UP. —— (1993). Against Ethics: Contributions to A Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP. Cooper, David E. (1996). World Philosophies, Oxford, Blackwell. Cunningham, David S. (2002). Reading is Believing: The Christian Faith through Literature and Film, Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos P. Davis, Colin (1996). Levinas: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Derrida, Jacques (1993). Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. —— (1988). Limited, Inc., Evanston: Northwestern UP. —— (1981). Dissemination, London: Athlone. Descartes, René (1999). Discourse on Method and related writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke, London, Penguin Books. Eaglestone, Robert (1997). Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt (1999). Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Durham and London: Duke UP. Jackson, Ken (2001). “‘One Wish’ or the Possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the Gift, and God in Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 52, Issue 1, 43-66.
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Kant, Emmanuel (1973). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Palgrave Macmillan [online]. Available from: http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr/cpr-open.html [acccessed May 2005]. Kronick, Joseph G. (1999). Derrida and the Future of Literature, Albany, NY: State U of New York. Levinas, Emmanuel (1999). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Locke, John (1975). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon P. Newton, Zachary (1995). Narrative Ethics, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP. Nussbaum, Martha (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford UP. Rancière, Jacques (2002). “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review, 14, Mar-Apr., 133-152. Robbins, Jill (1999). Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, Chicago, Il.: U of Chicago P. Spinoza, Benedict de (1997), The Ethics, part II, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, May, [online]. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs /etext97/ 2spne10.txt [acccessed May 26, 2005]. —— The Ethics, part III, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, May, [online]. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/3spne10.txt [acccessed May 26, 2005]. Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Young, Frederick (2002). “Levinas and Criticism: Ethics in the Impossibility of Criticism,” Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, ed. Julian Wolfreys, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 238-255. Weston, Michael (2001). Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good, London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2002). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), London and New York: Routledge. Zimmer, Carl (2005). Soul Made Flesh: How the Secrets of the Brain Were Uncovered in Seventeenth-Century England, London: Arrow Books.
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THE NOVEL THE SOCIAL, AND THE EVENT: AN INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL ENCOUNTER NANCY GLAZENER In this essay, Glazener argues that the classic realist novel occupies a zone of contention between Anglo-American and continental traditions in ethical philosophy. Instead of looking for obvious points of contrast, faulting “the Anglo-Americans for their epistemological naivety and uninterrogated liberalism and the continentals for their obscurantism and the slippery role of practice in their work,” she identifies stylistic and epistemological affinities between the two traditions, as embodied in ethical writings by Martha Nussbaum and Alain Badiou. Glazener argues that the difference between the traditions can be seen as a matter of what Foucault has called “doxology,” the study of polemics and opinions, whereas an archeological approach can reveal their epistemic commonalities (Foucault 1973: 200).
I dwell in Possibility— A fairer House than Prose— More numerous of Windows— Superior—for Doors— Emily Dickinson Art is the setting-into-work of truth […]. Art happens as poetry. Martin Heidegger Since the end of the nineteenth century, ‘poetry’ has deliberately maintained the balance between sociality and madness, and we view this as the sign of a new era. Julia Kristeva
It is hard to know precisely which writers Emily Dickinson would have linked to “Possibility” rather than “Prose” (1960: 327), but for Heidegger, Kristeva, and a number of continental thinkers writing in the wake of Nietzsche, the privileged canon of poetry consists of certain nineteenthcentury European poets—Hölderlin and Mallarmé, especially—avant-garde writers from the turn of the century—symbolists and Surrealists—and certain modernists and postmodernists (Heidegger 1993: 202; Kristeva 1984: 215).
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Writings counted as poetry, in this strong sense, have been credited with bold epistemological investigations, ethical and political interrogations that push thinking beyond the constraints of representation, subjectivity, and narrow rationality. This is, for example, the point Kristeva makes in countering “sociality” with “madness.” Poetry and certain kinds of non-realist prose have been held up as the privileged vehicles—privileged even to supplant philosophy, in some accounts—for the most fundamental and urgent inquiries into and beyond the conceptual confines of modernity. The intellectual formation marked here by Heidegger and Kristeva (in spite of their differences) takes literature seriously as a means of thinking, mainly because twentieth-century philosophy and its border disciplines— certain strands of linguistics and psychoanalysis—came to understand language as the volatile, convoluted medium and precondition of thought and subjectivity. This new view of language was made possible only by a radical break with theories of language premised on representation and reference. As the poem by Dickinson indicates, prose in the form of the classic realist novel can easily pass for thinking inside the box—the box of historical inscription, or the box of social reproduction—whereas only poetry or experimental prose that could be treated poetically, in spite of not having left representation utterly behind, might seem porous enough to foster discovery and invention. Not surprisingly, then, classic realist novels occupy a zone of contention within the recent resurgence of interest in ethics and the arts. Within the continental tradition I have sketched, classic realist novels have been of little interest, but the category of ethics and its chief support, the subject, are being adventurously rethought. Within the mainly humanist and Aristotelian branch of the Anglo-American tradition, though, the classic realist novel has long been and still is a mainstay of ethical criticism as well as of the forms of historical and political criticism that have thrived in recent decades by taking up novels as indices of history or engines of social reproduction. As is the case in most of the international plots of Henry James, the distinctions I am making between Europeans and Americans or continentals and AngloAmericans are unstable: after all, there may well be more Heideggereans in the US academy than on the European continent, and the tradition I will call Anglo-American has continental allies (most notably, Jürgen Habermas) and occasionally reveals continental influences. However, the two traditions are distinct though sometimes parallel: the “turn to ethics” in the continental tradition was sparked by Michel Foucault’s last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, published in French in 1984 (1990; 1998), in which Foucault famously shifted his attention from fields of power relations to technologies of the self, and in the Anglo-American tradition an analogous shift can be dated by the publication of key essays by Martha Nussbaum in the early
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1980s, essays later collected in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). The significant contribution of Nussbaum, an Aristotelian, was not to salvage or redefine ethics. Rather, despite working within an Aristotelian tradition not markedly committed to the epistemological role of language, Nussbaum recommended a mode of philosophical reading that would take literature seriously as a form of ethical reflection. It is easy to contrast the Anglo-American renewal of ethical attention to literature with the continental reconstruction of ethics predicated on poetry as a mode of thinking. After all, not only do the philosophical coordinates of these two intellectual formations diverge; their characteristic styles also clash. On the Anglo-American side are moral earnestness, faithfulness to the obvious but taxing, unflagging attention to forms of responsibility, and the presupposition that civil society and the state both depend upon the thoughtful selflessness of the individual. On the continental side are a love of surprise and paradox, a preference for the unpredictable grasp of the elusive, and the unsettling of categories such as the individual, responsibility, and politics. It would be easy to fault the Anglo-Americans for their epistemological naivety and uninterrogated liberalism and the continentals for their obscurantism and the slippery role of practice in their work. However, I will argue that the difference between these positions may be merely a matter of what Foucault has called “doxology,” the study of polemics and opinions, whereas an “archeology” (which I will sketch in this essay) can reveal the ways in which these are “interlocking and simultaneous forms” of knowledge, sharing an episteme (Foucault 1973: 200). Recognizing this epistemic commonality can help us to gnaw away at an important impasse in our current ethical thinking. In spite of the enshrinement of the social in the Anglo-American tradition represented by Nussbaum and the tendency for the continental tradition to dismiss utterly the institutions and academic disciplines that organize and investigate social life, an effort to find new ways of thinking the social may be at work in both traditions. An important resource for this effort is that most social of literary forms, the classic realist novel. Nussbaum vis à vis Badiou Despite the parallels between Foucault’s and Nussbaum’s renewals of ethics, the continental philosopher that this essay will counterpoise to Nussbaum is Alain Badiou, who has developed an explicitly ethical version of the Heideggerean category of “event.” Like a number of other recent French thinkers, Badiou deploys this term “event” in more or less the spirit of
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Heidegger’s term Ereignis, signaling the surprising and unpredictable potential of thinking to break free of what has been known, a freedom made possible by the fact that thought (or its medium, language)—though not an idealist fantasy—will never coincide with truth: that we will never, once and for all, reach a conclusive knowing, even though we may be seized often by thinking. An event, in this sense, constitutes not a new happening—not a new item in a series already projected—but a new paradigm or the occasion for a new paradigm’s advent, part of thought’s continuing and endless struggle to emerge. Badiou links ethics indissolubly to epistemology, identifying an ethic of truths in the form of fidelity to truth-processes. Rather than locating ethics in codified social behaviors or, as Badiou argues about the advocacy of human rights, in the vulnerability of the human body, Badiou locates ethics in the potential of human beings to think (2001: 18-39). If a situation—a fundamental unit for Badiou, conceptualized according to mathematical set theory and bypassing the distinction between substance and relation (Feltham and Clemens 2003: 8)—is “what there is,” an event is a supplement to the situation in the light of which it can be radically re-thought (2001: 25). Thus, he would replace “‘concern for the other’” with an attention to “hitherto unexplored possibilities for our situation, and ultimately for ourselves” (2001: 33). A human animal exists in a situation; a subject (which might be collective or trans-individual) is formed when an event sets in motion a truthprocess to which the subject is faithful. Its fidelity is its being taken up by, or its inauguration by this truth-process. Thus, the problem of the subject’s agency—the subject’s power to decide and choose, in an act of genuine thinking rather than socialized or determined behavior—is replaced in Badiou’s philosophy by the problem of the emergence of the new, which in this case produces a subject not governed by a common definitional paradigm (Feltham and Clemens 2003: 8). An event contingently and undecidably provides the occasion for the emergence of a subject, who is radically new. The lynchpin of Badiou’s doctrine of the event is the particular way in which its truth-process is precluded from being final or totalizing. The event emerges from the “void” of the earlier situation, rather than from its “plenitude” (2001: 68-71). Indeed, the difference between a truth-process deriving from a void and one deriving from a plenitude is the difference between good and evil, and under the latter heading—that of “simulacrum, or terror”—Badiou includes the Holocaust, which he frames as a dangerous simulacrum based on valorizing a plenitude of the preceding situation: namely, a certain conception of “the German people” understood to be destined for “domination” (2001: 71, 73). In addition to this form of evil, Badiou identifies two others: the betrayal of a truth, in which one denies that
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a truth-process to which one has previously been faithful was ever a truth; and the mistaking of a truth as complete and adequate (2001: 71). If thinking never reaches an end, then the ethic of truths must be faithful to the nature of thinking by never pretending that there has been a last word. The first form of evil, the simulacrum, consolidates the power of a strand or moment in thought, rather than finding the occasion for thinking in the naming of the unthought of a situation; the third form of evil, which is analogous to the first, insists impossibly on the timeless adequacy of a truth. The second form of evil falsifies the history of thinking and its power to form subjects, since a truth which has been exhausted was nonetheless a truth. The ethic of truths, Badiou insists, is “asocial”: the subject of truth, accordingly, does not have socio-economic interests and cannot be characterized, as an ethical being, by their renunciation (2003a: 70; 2001: 54). Here Badiou’s conception, following a position sketched by Nietzsche and pursued especially productively by Foucault, differentiates ethics from the curbing of desire, self-interest, or other vital or expansive tendencies of the individual that are enacted in shared social space. In this way, continental ethics avoids any structure of forbidding or self-forbidding which would generate obedience and transgression as its main ethical options. Badiou’s work is also part of a widespread attempt to reformulate ethics, politics, and epistemology without relying on the Enlightenment category of the individual, the privileged object of the social sciences. Badiou’s reliance on mathematical set theory adds to the impression that his philosophy has moved as far as possible away from the dominant categories of social knowledge and thereby from the social itself; indeed, he presumes there is “an insurmountable, properly ontological […] clash between post-evental fidelity and the normal pace of things, between truth and knowledge” (2001: 54). However, it is hard to detach Badiou’s four domains of the event from the social, understood as the collective historical circumstances under which knowledge and culture are organized and institutionalized. The domains are love, politics, art, and science, and Badiou’s examples from each are remarkably conventional: It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ my situation. If I want to be faithful to the event of the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ then I must at least practise politics (in particular the relation with the workers) in an entirely different manner from that proposed by the socialist and trade-unionist traditions. And again, Berg and Webern, faithful to the musical event known by the name of ‘Schoenberg,’ cannot continue with fin-de-siècle Romanticism as if nothing had happened. After Einstein’s texts of 1905, if I am faithful to their radical novelty, I cannot continue to practise physics within its classical
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I will leave aside for now the case of love, but the other examples Badiou invokes dovetail unsurprisingly with dominant historical narratives. Other examples—Galileo’s inauguration of “mathematical physics,” Aeschylus’ manifestation of the possibilities of tragedy, the French Revolution of 1792 (2003a: 62), and Saul’s transformation into the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus (2003b: 17)—similarly reinforce familiar understandings of what counts as an event, as does Badiou’s autobiographical account of having been seized and made subject by May 1968 (2001: 124). These events, though not reducible to whatever meaning they held or hold in popular opinion, cannot be detached from the social. The institutionalized domination of Romantic music contributed to the force of Schoenberg’s innovation, after all, and Galileo famously challenged and was repressed by the Roman Catholic Church through its considerable political power. If the events marked by Schoenberg and Galileo were events in thought, they were also events in the institutionalization of thought and its official history: in the capacity of thought to permeate, mobilize, and collaborate with social formations and to participate in power relations that are to some extent social. Indeed, even Badiou’s insistence that an event must proceed on the basis of the unnameable void of a situation seems likely to derive from an unelaborated belief that true thinking must serve the mobility of (social/political) power relations rather than their consolidation. The doctrine of the event presumes that any established truth is ripe for supplanting, perhaps in keeping with Walter Benjamin’s insight that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1969: 256). It is hard to assess the lurking presence of the social here or to make sense of Badiou’s assertion that “the truth-process passes through the language of the situation” (2001: 81)—unscathed?—in light of Badiou’s blanket dismissal of the social, evidenced, for example, in his severe contrast between “opinion,” the “cement of sociality” which is suitable only to be circulated, and “truth,” which requires an “encounter”: “The Immortal that I am capable of being cannot be spurred in me by the effects of communicative sociality, it must be directly seized by fidelity” (2001: 50-51). It is easy to hear in this assertion a quarrel with Jürgen Habermas’ “discourse ethics,” a quarrel so fundamental (and shared by so many other post-Heideggereans) that Badiou does not even directly address it. Habermas believes that political change can be effected by people’s continuing efforts to learn about each
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other’s views by means of rational critical discourse.1 Habermas has criticized the degradation of public opinion in contemporary life, but he wishes to promote social and political institutions designed to foster rational critical discourse. In short, although truth is not a category prominent in his philosophy, Habermas’ position represents a faith that the categories of social knowledge, which mediate an individual’s understanding of her interests, desires, or utopian longings, are workable: that even though new dimensions of the interests and new possibilities for their discursive disclosure might emerge over time, the emergence will be grounded in the social and will in turn revise it. Badiou’s position, which is predicated on thinking as a break with established social knowledges, utterly denies any continuity between social knowledges and truth (2001: 43). From Badiou’s vantage point, Habermas endorses a simulacrum in which the ongoing process of consensusbuilding extends and consolidates the plenitude of identities or positions that initially enter into the communicative process. In other words, the practice of discourse ethics would probably constitute for Badiou a form of evil. Martha Nussbaum locates herself in a tradition which includes Habermas, and like him she presumes and prefers a “pluralistic liberal society” (2001: 415).2 Like Habermas, though, and like Badiou, Nussbaum wants to help transform the world, although her understanding of transformation is not structured fundamentally by the negation of the social. Indeed, Nussbaum’s penchant for developmental metaphors points to a conservative Romanticism in her work, an aesthetic and ethical fascination with the organic and the teleological that might seem to be utterly incompatible with the unpredictable irruption of an event that invents a new subject. An archeological reading, however, must not be a reductive one: rather than circumscribing Nussbaum with the terms I have described, I want to pursue a certain instability or ambivalence in her work that keeps her from being so neatly contrasted with the continentals. First, however, I want to home in on Nussbaum’s project by focusing on the essays which forged her claims for the philosophical study of literature. Nussbaum follows the lead of many readers of James’ The Golden Bowl in finding at its heart a problem of ethical or political perception, grasped or missed by one or more characters; it is beyond this metacritical essay’s scope to offer a full reading of The Golden Bowl, but some sense of the novel is 1
The position I describe is developed throughout Jürgen Habermas’s writings, but an especially useful introduction to his work is Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 1993. 2 On Nussbaum’s intellectual kinship with Habermas, see “Humanities, Past and Future,” 2004.
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important to an understanding of Nussbaum’s position. The novel concentrates on four characters: Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie, wealthy American expatriates; Prince Amerigo, Maggie’s fiancé and then husband; and Charlotte Stant, Maggie’s impoverished friend who is revealed gradually to be someone Amerigo previously loved. After Maggie is settled with Amerigo, joining her wealth to Amerigo’s title, she brings Charlotte to visit in the hope that her father will find companionship, and Adam marries Charlotte. But after the birth of Maggie and Amerigo’s son, Maggie and the baby spend their days increasingly with Adam, sending Charlotte and Amerigo as their social representatives to the various events that compel the Ververs’ sponsorship. Charlotte and Amerigo begin or resume an affair, as Maggie realizes only when she discovers, through a coincidence, that Charlotte and Amerigo had once shopped together and examined a gilded crystal bowl, which Maggie purchases years later and which has a hidden flaw. In the final chapters of the novel, a set of curious transactions among the characters determines that Adam and Charlotte will go back to America against Charlotte’s wishes, while Maggie and Amerigo remain in England. Betrayals, discoveries, and sacrifices abound in the novel, evoked by some of James’ most oblique and subtle language. Nussbaum’s “Flawed Crystals: James’ The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy” argues against Maggie’s quest for moral perfection; it also argues that novels embody an indispensable strand of moral philosophy, one that cannot be replaced by conventionally academic forms of philosophical writing. The essay’s sequel, “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” develops Nussbaum’s claim that “the novel can be a paradigm of moral activity” by tracking the collaborative interactions of two pairs of characters (1990: 148). The ethical worldview that Nussbaum derives from The Golden Bowl in these essays is Romantic and liberal; the ethical stance she envisions need not be. Drawing on the novel’s Edenic metaphors (based on Adam Verver’s name and the drama in which Maggie, the woman made “from” him, encounters fateful knowledge), Nussbaum’s first essay calls the “world” of The Golden Bowl “a fallen world—a world, that is, in which innocence cannot be and is not safely preserved, a world where values and loves are so pervasively in tension with one another that there is no safe human expectation of a perfect fidelity to all throughout a life” (1990: 133). The terms “fallen” and “innocence” signal a lament, not a critique. Carolyn Porter’s reading of The Golden Bowl as a complex exploration of reification in late capitalism, or Thomas Peyser’s reading of the novel in the context of turn-of-the-century US imperialism could offer a more precise account of the industrial wealth and acquisitive predations that characterize the Ververs’
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“world” (Porter 1981: 121-164; Peyser 1998: 135-168). Elsewhere, however, Nussbaum more critically links the idea of “innocence” to Maggie’s impossible attempts at moral perfection, which fail because of her incompatible fidelities to her father, her husband, and Charlotte. These incompatible fidelities arise because of the developmental requirement that she “separate” from her father, previously her exclusive object of devotion (1990: 128). Nussbaum’s reading here depends heavily on exactly a kind of social knowledge that Badiou would find suspect. The developmental plot Nussbaum sketches depends on a highly normative reading of Maggie’s gender identity; it also naturalizes an Oedipally-charged family structure and particular understandings of marriage and heterosexual love. These norms make James’ plot intelligible, of course, but because Nussbaum does not acknowledge their specificity and contingency, she believes that she makes discoveries about “a human being’s relation to value in the world […] fundamentally” and about what Maggie needs to do “[t]o be a woman” (1990: 133-4), which for Nussbaum means, to be more fully human within the defining parameters of a gender. Nussbaum’s approach in these essays is founded on the Aristotelian idea that “ethics is the search for a specification of the good life for a human being,” a search which “cannot […] in any way be cut off from the study of the empirical and social conditions of human life […]” (1990: 139). Her second essay insists even more vehemently on the fundamentally social character of novels: “The novel […] is a cultural construct that itself helps to constitute its readers as social beings. […] The novel takes its stand with Aristotle, that human beings are fundamentally social […]” (1990: 166). Nussbaum’s grasp of the social in both essays is unempirical and ahistorical, and her grasp of the literary does not extend much beyond the level of character. Nevertheless, Nussbaum’s emphases on “intuitive perception” and “improvisatory response” (1990: 141) may well constitute an ethical stance of eagerness to be faithful to the emergence of the new. Improvisation and the Event Nussbaum values novels for depicting and exploring the kinds of “mystery and risk” which she believes play an important part in “our moral lives” (1990: 142). The mystery and risk both derive from the particularity of a novelistic world, which (due to a paradox of representation) can evoke the particularity of our real circumstances without, of course, exactly replicating them. For both Nussbaum and Badiou, ethical action is a gambit: a decision whose correctness, appropriateness, or desirability can in no way be
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guaranteed. Nussbaum links the capacity to undertake such gambits with maturation, contrasting Maggie’s initial, immature desire “to be told ahead of time exactly what’s right and when” with her later recognition that she must improvise without a script: “this is what adult deliberation is and should be. And there’s no safety in that, no safety at all” (1990: 138). Underlying his account of the impossibility of justifying one’s fidelity to an event is Badiou’s designation of risk-taking as one of the four fundamental desires— one might say conditions—of philosophy, one which modern life makes difficult: “Life is devoted to calculating security, and this obsession with calculating security is contrary to the Mallarméan hypothesis that thought begets a throw of the dice, because in such a world there is infinitely too much risk in a throw of the dice” (2003a: 41). One can hear Jean-Paul Sartre, unacknowledged by Badiou or Nussbaum, in this requirement to act without justifications, and the touch of Sartre marks a key instability in Nussbaum’s argument, for a belief in the undecidability that grounds deliberation is tonally and conceptually remote from the cherished Aristotelian practice of steering for a mean between imaginable extremes. In according ethical value to the newly and barely thinkable, Badiou and Nussbaum are quintessentially modern. The modern craving for the new is a complex and multiform phenomenon, however, and it is worth noting that neither Badiou nor Nussbaum jettisons the already-thought as if it were yesterday’s fashions. Even though Badiou is eager for the event that derives from the unthought of a situation and thereby leaves behind the established understanding of that situation, the second form of evil he outlines is the betrayal of truth, the retrospective insistence that the “Immortal in myself” brought into being by the truth “never existed” (2001: 79). He makes clear, moreover, that one event need not supersede another: we may have been produced as subjects by the French Revolution as well as by May 1968, and indeed we may not have finished being faithful to the truth-process set in motion by either event (2003a: 67). Nussbaum similarly insists that the kind of ethical improvisation she recommends is “responsible to the history of commitment and to the ongoing structures that go to constitute her [an ethical actor’s] context” (1990: 156). Modern fascinations with novelties and generative powers cannot be utterly separated from capitalist practices of marketing and investment—indeed, the desire to separate them might partake of the fantasy of moral purity that Nussbaum critiques—but Badiou’s or Nussbaum’s commitments to novelty do not preclude the past’s capacity to structure and inhabit the present. Nussbaum’s and Badiou’s versions of the new are importantly distinct from each other, though. For Badiou, an event is a break which cannot even be conceptualized in the conventional terms provided by logic and spatial
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relations (negation, inversion, effect, sequence, etc.). It is a newness in the categories of thought. Nussbaum’s emphasis on the new, implicit in her attention to the power of enhanced perception, is much more conventionally rooted in her Aristotelian attention to the particular, so that she calls for “the sustained exploration of particular lives that a text such as this one makes possible” (1990: 139). Her uncritical reliance on norms surfaces often. Nevertheless, her work teeters on the brink of a more radical commitment to the new. For example, the phrase she takes from James to characterize ethical responsiveness, “finely aware,” could fit either an empiricist scenario (in which awareness brings more adequate perception of what is) or a Badiouesque model of openness to the as-yet-unthought that might be triggered by particulars. Evidence for this latter possibility might be found in the culmination of her first essay on The Golden Bowl, which suddenly raises the possibility that Charlotte’s effacement at the end of the novel constitutes an uncanny residue, or supplement unsettling the claims for responsiveness and vision previously made on behalf of Maggie and readers who follow her (1990: 145). Moreover, Nussbaum emphasizes the importance of a reader’s being prepared “to alter his or her prima facie conception of the good in the light of the new experience,” experience which is presented (via James) as something “created” rather than merely put forth by the world (1990: 141, 153). Nussbaum’s language of development and maturity, evoking normative transitions that can be captured by terms such as “separation,” is deeply at odds with her attraction to new apprehensions that disrupt and supplant old beliefs. In this respect, Nussbaum’s interest in The Golden Bowl is significant, for James struggled throughout his writings to render the effect of a leap in thought: She [Isabel Archer Osmond] sits up, by her dying fire, far into the night, under the spell of recognitions on which she finds the last sharpness suddenly wait. It is a representation simply of her motionlessly seeing, and an attempt withal to make the mere lucidity of her act as “interesting” as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate. (1984a: 57)
It might be objected that “recognitions” and “seeing” cannot designate anything like an event: the re-cognized is, strictly speaking, the alreadythought, after all, and the predominance of the visual delimits Enlightenment empiricism. By the same token, Nussbaum’s reiteration of “perception” and “responsiveness” might be disqualified from genuine novelty. These points are indisputable, on their own terms: but they do not manifest an appropriate
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sense of the figurative, polyvocal, and intricately historical nature of language. If we sort all the terms for thinking according to whether they are utterly loyal to the insights of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their heirs, and if we consider any divergence to signal an unambiguous and deplorable intellectual regression, then we have substituted the trading of passwords for a genuine engagement with writings not informed by this continental tradition. We must be open to the possibility that a range of thinkers, even those working within the privileged metaphors of the Enlightenment, grapple with the limits of the figures and concepts they have inherited. Henry James was one of the most famous exponents of the novel as the genre of observation. The kind of observation James celebrated was always in tension with the purely visual: it comprised powers of inference, speculation, and interpretation (offering a punning relationship between sight and insight), and it thrived on the interplay between the optical (as a privileged but limited mode of cognition, one which could be located in an individualized vantage-point) and the linguistic (which could evoke and defy optical possibilities, and which could summon up and exceed an individual’s speech or consciousness). In his manifesto “The Art of Fiction,” James famously urged the prospective writer to be “‘one of the people on whom nothing is lost’”—people who have “[t]he power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern […]” (1984: 52). This advice is preceded by an anecdote about a fellow writer who was credited with representing in a novel “the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth,” even though the basis for her account had been merely a “glimpse,” through an open door, of young Protestants finishing a meal. Her literary performance, though not explicitly characterized as naming the void of a situation, is most certainly characterized by James as a leap or break, especially with positivist understandings of experience. The anonymous writer’s glimpse resulted in a novel, which I called a literary performance because I want to link this productive glimpse with Nussbaum’s emphasis on improvisation and with the widespread academic interest in performativity kicked off by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Although Butler’s account of performativity is at the center of her landmark text, whereas Nussbaum only sketches improvisation, their accounts converge in revealing the apparently consistent and the apparently continuous to be riddled with disjunctive invention. Butler reframes the apparent being or becoming of gender as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance […]” (1990: 33). Nussbaum, as we have seen, normalizes gender, but she focuses in her second essay on
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complications to perception and action that resemble Butler’s emphasis. As I have stressed, perception is active and constructive for Nussbaum: she cites Aristotle’s claim that “‘the decision rests with perception’” to emphasize perception’s active share in thinking (1990: 141). Perception is also mediated, to the extent that Nussbaum claims that the very metaphor through which Adam is represented as perceiving Maggie—that of a sea creature bound on her own adventures—is “a moral achievement in its own right”: “here is where his sacrifice, his essential moral choice, takes place” (1990: 151). In this way, Nussbaum joins epistemology to ethics as well as perception to performance. Moving closer to Butler, Nussbaum emphasizes that Adam’s decision to return to America cannot be separated from its enactment, and that its ethical significance cannot be captured in the form of a logical proposition: The general sacrificial idea—that he will go off to America with Charlotte—is in itself no solution. For it to become a solution it has to be offered in the right way at the right time in the right tone, in such a way that she can take it; offered without pressing any of the hidden springs of guilt and loyalty in her that he knows so clearly how to press; offered so that he gives her up with greatness, with beauty, in a way that she can love and find wonderful. (1990: 150)
Nussbaum’s sentimentalization of this bond between father and daughter, especially since they are controllers of wealth who control much about their Apostles’ fates, marks a tremendous blind spot. However, just as Butler reveals ongoing performance—and a potential for action and subversion—at the heart of gender, Nussbaum unravels the categories of perception and decision to reveal the ongoing construction of their possibility by their participants. Badiou’s inclusion of love among his four categories of the event is not entirely compelling—a better account appears in his study of Saint Paul, which does not presume that the subject of love would be a classic dyad and which sketches the potential for early Christian love to undercut established social relations (2003b: 89)—but it seems to proceed from an analogous desire to find even in private interpersonal relations permeated by social roles a defamiliarizing and generative volatility. Given the loose association of ethics with the personal and politics with the public, the turn to ethics that animates both Badiou and Nussbaum might bespeak a widespread desire to rethink possibilities for action that have been formulated within a collective public context (as revolution and protest, for example) at the micro-level, even if ultimately the modern distinction between public and private will not adequately name this difference.
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The critique Badiou could make of novels generally is that they simply recirculate opinion and shape it aesthetically. Yet one way of framing the interest of James’ novels, especially the novels of his late career, is that they use the trappings of representation (such as characters, quoted speech, renderings of internal thought processes, and the evocation of plausible settings) to achieve effects that cannot be understood in terms of representation. James’ novels put language drenched in social meaning (such as James’ recurrent economic metaphors) to ends that are not exclusively social. In other words, James’ novels might be read as performing the social or even improvising with respect to the social. Perhaps the relationship of thinking to the social can be something far more complicated and promising than mere negation. The point of my argument is not to install James with Joyce and Mallarmé in a canon of modernist and proto-modernist writers who can be read as negating and protesting the social, however. James’ importance here stems from the continuities between his work and that of more conventional novelists. He demonstrates a commitment to the social as well as something akin to Badiou’s notion of fidelity to an event. The relationship between an event, for Badiou, and a single work of literature is not easy to determine. Badiou follows Heidegger in believing that “poetry” (fitting the canon I described at the outset) has in some instances acted “in relay with philosophy;” however, he insists on a productive separation between philosophy and poetry, a separation that “liberates the poem […] as a singular operation of truth” (2003a: 96, 98). Given Badiou’s cultural examples—Aeschylus as the bearer of tragedy and Schoenberg of atonal music—it is easy to imagine that literary modernism might count for him as an event, although perhaps one could break with Badiou’s usual practice and resist encapsulating modernism in a single work or author. The Golden Bowl and Henry James are unlikely touchstones for modernism, anyway, although James’ later work has sometimes been identified as transitional between realism and modernism. Suppose, though, that what a normalizing, progressivist literary history names as a transition might sometimes mask an event. For example, Sharon Cameron offers a way of reading a rupture running throughout The Golden Bowl, a rupture in which the materials of a thematic reading of a novel are juxtaposed with a repeated staging of a problem of reference which would call them into question. She identifies The Golden Bowl as taking up the problem of assigning meaning in light of the disconnection between thought and the world: the problem, for instance, of interpreting Charlotte’s assertion to Amerigo, “‘You don’t refer… I refer’” (Cameron 1989: 88-90, 93; James 1987: 116). Cameron understands the book’s exploration of reference to be unapologetically separate from the “officially sanctioned thematic of the
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daughter’s too close connection to the father, and from the rectification of this wrong by the aggression of another one” (1989: 119). One need not insist on this separation: indeed, the problem of reference as Cameron outlines it may resonate with the problem of filial connection (whether Maggie refers, as heiress and daughter, to her father) and the problem of later actions referencing back to previous ones. The kind of rupture Cameron describes may also run through other novels: through Joyce’s Ulysses, which bubbles semiotically even as it represents Dublin and The Odyssey; but also through endless numbers of novels, famous or forgotten, in which novelistic representation is both employed and undermined, problematized, or interrogated. (This hypothesis could account for the proliferation of critical essays that reveal various classic realist novels to be self-subverting, selfdeconstructive, or proto-postmodern.) These ruptures might constitute, not a timeless deconstructive plot about the unfixity of meaning, but specific stagings and versions of a gap and relationship between novelistic representation (grounded in the social) and nonrepresentational dimensions of language that endow thinking with a power to bypass the social. Badiou has announced his intention to develop his thought in order to address “how truths appear” as distinct from “their being” (2001: lvii, lviii). It might be possible to conceive of a truth’s mode of appearing as a social and historical multiple—as an effect of unwitting collaboration—without dissolving its singularity and radical novelty: without reducing it to the demographic of a generation or an artistic school, for example. From this perspective, a novel such as The Golden Bowl might mark emergent subjectivities made possible by a number of events: among them, representation (having emerged in some archaic era); the more recent advent of novelistic representation in particular; companionate marriage (colliding with novelistic representation to produce marriage plots); a critique of capitalism; and a critique of imperialism. By viewing The Golden Bowl as part of an ensemble, one need not claim it as a unique evental site; by viewing it as instrumental to multiple subjectivities—and to situations as well as events—one can view it as operating within as well as against the register of representation. If Cameron’s reading of The Golden Bowl can be sustained, then both this novel and Nussbaum’s essays about it manifest and worry a rift between thinking and the social. Nussbaum’s ambivalence about the social marks it as a significant problem for her. She insists upon the social nature of ethics and the desirability of formulating norms at the same time that she is highly suspicious of the general, which she seems to equate with the codification of obligations according to social roles, as in the vapid generalization that she offers to demonstrate a bad readerly inference, “‘All daughters should treat
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their fathers as Maggie treats Adam here’” (1990: 166). Like Badiou, who believes in the universal claims of ethics but not any “ethics in general” (2001: lvi), Nussbaum values not the general but the universal, and she sees the universal tendency in ethics as “not a principle, but a direction of thought and imagination” (1990: 167). Her interest in “getting the tip” (a phrase she borrows from a passage about Bob Assignham), a transaction between persons about a particular that results in a valuable but unpredictable kind of learning, bespeaks this same interest in moving between particulars and something universal but not via the more or less social route of generalization. Nussbaum’s norms tend to consist of highly figurative accounts of receptive ethical stances; they could in this respect be compared to Badiou’s ethical exhortations: This ethics combines, then, under the imperative to “Keep going!”, resources of discernment (do not fall for simulacra), of courage (do not give up), and of moderation [réserve] (do not get carried away to the extremes of Totality). (2001: 91)
Like Nussbaum’s, Badiou’s language here struggles to pry a fidelity to thinking out of the clotted discourses of social convention. The separation of philosophy from the social sciences, part of modernity’s tendency toward analytic subdivision and elaborate disciplinary specialization, might constitute precisely the sort of dangerous simulation against which Badiou warns (Foucault 1973: 346). Post-Nietzschean philosophy has developed a powerful critique of the social sciences as bearers of some of the Enlightenment’s most pernicious tendencies; Badiou warns ominously in this regard that “Averages, statistics, sociology, history, or polls are not capable of teaching us what the history of a truth is” (2003a: 53). However, it is possible that philosophy has also grown monstrous, both because of its isolation from the social sciences and (in the Anglo-American strand in which Nussbaum can be located) because of its underscrutinized reliance on them.3 One misses in Nussbaum’s allegiance to the social a consideration of the possibility that vivid feeling and strong attunement can be vehicles of a socialization which blocks and circumscribes a subject’s access to the new. However, one also misses in Badiou’s repudiation of the social any recognition that the fidelity of a subject of truth must be performed 3
Nussbaum, who has collaborated with economist Amartya Sen in criticizing certain forms of economic thought, and who makes use of his provocative conception of “capacity” in her later work, has so far still stopped short of developing the disciplinary implications of attentive thought’s potential to undermine received truths. See Nussbaum, 1995: xv, 44-7; Nussbaum, 1999.
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in a social world: that Webern and Berg, loyal to an event named as “Schoenberg” and constituted as subjects (or jointly as a subject) by that event, must invent and enact the terms of their loyalty on social terrains. An event for which James, Nussbaum, and Badiou might be understood to lay groundwork could not, of course, be the restoration of some kind of wholeness transcending these disciplinary rifts. But it may be possible for us to think toward the onset of an event which could derive from the void of the current distinction between philosophy and the social sciences, an event which would not be the triumph of either but the possibility of something new.4 Nussbaum’s work and Badiou’s might mark two doxologically divergent but archeologically parallel attempts to stage an encounter between philosophy and the social: the social terrains of norms, affects, identities, perceptions, and performances (for Nussbaum) and the social institutions and media that shape our access to events (for Badiou). Bibliography Badiou, Alain (2003a). Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, London: Continuum. —— (2003b). Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford UP. —— (2001). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter (1969). Illuminations, New York: Schocken. Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Cameron, Sharon (1989). Thinking in Henry James, Chicago: U of Chicago P. Dickinson, Emily (1960). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Boston: Little, Brown. Feltham, Oliver, and Justin Clemens (2003). “An Introduction to Alain Badiou’s Philosophy,” Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, London: Continuum, 1-38. Foucault, Michel (1990). The Use of Pleasure, New York: Vintage. —— (1988). The Care of the Self, New York: Vintage.
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It is important to bear in mind that analytic philosophy, dominant in the US, departs from the Heideggerean and Aristotelian traditions I have sketched. The task of assessing whether analytic philosophy, too, is fraught by desire and contempt for the social is beyond the scope of this essay.
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—— (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage. Habermas, Jürgen (1993). Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin (1993). Basic Writings, San Francisco: Harper Collins. James, Henry (1987). The Golden Bowl, New York: Penguin. —— (1984a). The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, Boston: Northeastern UP. —— (1984b). Literary Criticism, New York: Library of America. Kristeva, Julia (1984). Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia UP. Nussbaum, Martha (2004). “Humanities, Past and Future,” Research Universities and the Academic Disciplines, AAU Centennial Meeting, Oct. 16, 2000 [online]. Available from: http://www.aau.edu/aau/ Nussbaum10.00.html [accessed 26 May 2004]. —— (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP. —— (1999). Sex and Social Justice, New York: Oxford UP. —— (1995). Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Boston: Beacon. —— (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford UP. Peyser, Thomas (1998). Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism, Durham, NC: Duke UP. Porter, Carolyn (1981). Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP.
EXECRABLE SPEECH: LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE’S BAGATELLES POUR UN MASSACRE NICHOLAS CHARE This essay explores the ethical implications of Julia Kristeva’s use of the work of the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline in her book Powers of Horror. It focuses particularly on Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre, and considers it as an example of psychotic writing. Chare explores the justification of the negative critique Kristeva has suffered for using the text by considering the status of the pamphlets in relation to the politics of their author, and then through a reading of Bagatelles pour un massacre informed by Judith Butler’s work on hatespeech, drawing in particular on her notion of “reappropriation.”
“Je suis le bouc” wrote Louis-Ferdinand Céline at the end of the Second World War, “I am the scapegoat” (Alméras 2000: 7). Céline is the pseudonym of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961), one of France’s most important authors in the inter-war years. His first book Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) published in 1932; was a bestseller. It follows the life of the character Ferdinand Bardamu, beginning with his experiences in the First World War—through journeys to French colonial Africa and the United States of America—and ending with an account of his time as a doctor working in one of the poorer districts of Paris. The book is based loosely on Destouches’ own life. From his first-hand knowledge of the sufferings of the Parisian poor, Destouches might have been expected to sympathize with socialism but instead he identified increasingly with right wing politics in the run up to, and during, the Second World War. Between 1936 and 1942 Céline wrote four “pamphlets” or ostensible satirical tracts. The first, Mea culpa, is an attack upon communism and the USSR. The remaining three, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L’école des cadavres (1938) and Les beaux draps (1941) are all primarily anti-semitic diatribes. In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva devotes an entire chapter to the pamphlets entitled “Ours to Jew or Die,” in which she argues that to isolate these writings from the rest of Céline’s work would constitute an “ideological stance, not an analytic or literary position” (Kristeva, 1982: 174). Kristeva’s decision to use the pamphlets to support the arguments that she advances about the role of modernist literature in the twentieth century has provoked
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much criticism. This essay will explore how justified this negative reaction is, firstly by way of a consideration of the status of the pamphlets in relation to the politics of their author, and then through a reading of the matter of Bagatelles pour un massacre informed by Judith Butler’s work on hatespeech, drawing in particular on her notion of “reappropriation.” It will begin by situating Kristeva’s ideas about Céline’s writings in relation to the entirety of her thinking about abjection. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, first published in French in 1980 and then subsequently translated into English two years later, has been highly influential across many disciplines. The concept of abjection as it is developed in Powers of Horror has proved useful in fields as diverse as anthropology, art history, criminology, film studies and literary studies.1 In the book Kristeva uses the writings of the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline as the mainstay for her argument that in the contemporary Western world, literature has replaced the sacred as the site where abjection is sublimated. In brief, for Kristeva abjection is a key process during the formation of the subject. It is the action of separation which is a necessary precursor to the mirror-stage. Lacan describes the mirror-stage as a drama “whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation” (Lacan 1977: 4). The child exists within a somatic maelstrom— a mess of bodily functions—and lives only as its insides. The mirror provides the child with a passport to the outside, the reflection it affords anchors the fragmented body-image to “a form of its totality” that exists exterior to it (Lacan 1977: 4). This is not, however, the first journey the infant undertakes. Lacan does not delve deeply enough into the pre-history of the subject. He accounts for the stage at which the child “is” but “is” only as “frustration,” “is” as a body that baffles and bewilders but which is felt as a singular insufficiency. I am not up to the task of being me but I know that I am. The child is already a desiring being, a wanting self-sufficiency. The time of maternal plenitude has passed and will shortly become the past.2 Kristeva seeks to explain how the child separates from the mother in order for the 1
See for example, Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity, 1999; Ockman’s Ingres’ Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line, 1995; Valier’s “Punishment, Border Crossings and the Powers of Horror,” 2002; “The Picture of Abjection: Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration,” Chanter, 2004; Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine, 1993; and Gustafson’s Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers, 1995. 2 Lacan’s description of the child’s entry into a state of anticipation also suggests the beginning of a sense of futurity for the infant. The mirror stage does not solely bring the child outside of itself but also outside of the present. There is no looking back for the infant once looking forwards and backwards become possibilities, once the reflection has supplemented the child’s rhythmic temporality with a linear one.
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mirror-stage to take place; she describes how for the infant prior to the “that’s me in the mirror” of the mirror-stage there must also be a recognition of “that’s not me” in relation to the mother. Abjection “is a precondition of narcissism.” “Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, abject” (1982: 13).3 Abjection, a series of partial and provisional separations from the mother that make the mirror-stage possible, is repressed by the subject. Without this repression the subject would have to confront its own brittleness. “The more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recognize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed” (1982: 13). Kristeva emphasizes that the abject is a part of us but a part of us that it is dangerous to acknowledge, it is a part of us that must be kept apart, that must be managed. This management role was previously performed by the sacred. Abjection “accompanies all religious structurings” and the “various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions” (1982: 17). In the predominantly secular society that exists in the contemporary Western world, the role of purification falls to the artist. The “aesthetic task” in the present “amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless ‘primacy’ constituted by primal repression” (1982: 18). This is the terrain of the abject, a terrain over which great modern literature unfolds: “Dostoyevsky, Lautréamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Céline” (Kristeva 1982: 18). Céline writes back to the mother out of which he became, unwriting the symbolic in the process. Such a challenge to the symbolic function could potentially lead to psychosis but Céline’s texts are “able to master this latent psychotic state” through their “literary devices and writing style” (Kristeva 1996: 231). Modernist writing, as exemplified by Céline, must of necessity touch the void that is psychosis. The modernist aesthetic functions to sublimate the abject, that which would otherwise destroy the subject through overwhelming the symbolic and rendering the subject psychotic. The abject is that which exceeds the rational; it is the force of unreason that Michel Foucault describes in the conclusion to Madness and Civilization, a force that must be cathected. “There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art—the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth” (2001: 274). The work of art plays out psychic violence in language rather than in reality. Kelly Oliver writes of this cathection that “poetic murders are better than real 3
The emphasis in this quotation and in all subsequent quotations is that of the original author.
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murders” (1993: 102). The defence of Céline is that he writes hatred rather than enacts it. Oliver, whilst troubled by Kristeva’s use of Céline, is willing to give the thinker the benefit of the doubt. This benevolence is not universally shared. For example, Jennifer Stone writes in her essay “The Horrors of Power: A Critique of Kristeva,” that Kristeva “has no political or ideological bearings when faced with Céline’s cadaver” and accuses her of having a “hypnotic and nauseating fascination with fascism” (1983: 47). Stone abjects Powers of Horror, she is inclined to vomit at the writer’s perceived attraction to fascism. She reads with her stomach. This reaction is of note because Kristeva describes abjection—which is characterized by a feeling of disgust—as possessing a moral aspect during the first chapter of Powers of Horror. Stone’s sentiment might be understood as a manifestation of what could be called a “visceral ethics.” In her book Reproductions of Banality Alice Yaeger Kaplan also expresses disquiet with Kristeva’s “rescue of Céline” (1986: 108). The “aesthetic links in Powers of Horror are specifically to prehistorical, authorless forms of language production, which means that the ‘historical context drops out of the picture’” (1986: 109). This presents severe problems for any effort to understand of the nature of Destouches’ fascism. For Kaplan, Kristeva’s approach is an ahistorical one which reduces fascism to the status of an aberration which can be readily dissociated from an aesthetically radical modernist agenda.4 Kaplan wants an approach that places Céline’s writings in their historical context, and pays closer attention to how the pamphlets were received and read in France when they were published. She points out that the fascist appreciation of Céline’s texts extended beyond their subject-matter to the syntax itself. Kaplan quotes from a review of Bagatelles pour un massacre written by the journalist Lucien Rebatet in 1938, in which he describes how he and his newspaper colleagues at Je Suis Partout performed collective readings of parts of the pamphlet. Rebatet writes: “let us read Céline in chorus[…] I want to make you hear[…] this joyous and formidable voice” (1986: 126). In 1938 Bagatelles pour un massacre existed not just as printed pages, but as a shared 4
Stone shares Kaplan’s concern with the lack of attention Kristeva pays to the historical circumstances within which the pamphlets were produced. “Céline’s political pamphlets, when read in a 1980s context, may seem to be divorced from the social conditions which led to their emergence and which made their racist programme possible. But if one considers the historical place of production of these anti-semitic writings, one cannot miss the signs to the factories of genocide” (1983: 46). Kristeva would understand both fascism and modernist literature to be symptoms of the identity crisis precipitated by our era having put ‘rationality into question’ (1996: 230). The pamphlets are indubitably of their time.
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experience, and the sound of the prose was celebrated as much as the content. Kristeva fails to adduce the importance of Destouches’ personal politics. Nor does she pay sufficient attention to the way in which his work was received. Stone is critical of Kristeva for engaging with a contagious text, for catching Céline’s right wing politics. Kaplan, on the other hand, is troubled by her failure to engage with the politics of Destouches and his contemporaries. The names Céline and Destouches are used interchangeably here, but are they the same? Kaplan and Stone raise important questions about the relationship that exists between the writer and the written, the writer and the reader, and the reader and the written. For Stone, Céline is the source of a disease (fascist politics) for which his pamphlets are the carriers, retaining the potential to infect their readers. Kaplan however does not suggest that Kristeva has become contaminated by the politics of the pamphlets but rather that her way of reading them is irresponsible precisely because she avoids engaging with those politics. For Stone, Céline and Destouches seem to be one and the same whereas Kaplan opens up the possibility that, whilst Destouches is tied to a historical moment, Céline is not. Céline can be read out of context. Kaplan sees this reading out of context as highly problematic but not without value. This essay will subsequently consider the ethics of such a reading (perhaps there is even an ethical responsibility to read certain texts out of the original context of their enunciation) as part of its discussion of Judith Butler’s work, but first it is necessary to focus on the status of meaning in relation to the text. Meaning and Morality Any ethics related to the text would seem to need to be grounded upon the responsibility for meaning. We measure the content of any text against the ethical template we have inherited, and then judge it as either good or bad. We form an opinion of the text based upon what it means to us, but where does that meaning originate? Does meaning come from the writer, the written or the reader? Or does it emerge somewhere in-between? Both Kaplan and Stone emphasize the importance of an attention to historical context in any reading of the pamphlets. This does seem to suggest that meaning is contingent; in any given text it is not something that is inherent and unchanging. Meaning shifts with the moment. A context is, of course, not itself inherent and unchanging, and indeed it may even be argued that it too is authored. This would seem to privilege the reader as the locus of meaning. The reader decides the context within which the text should be read. The reader also decides how the text will mean. This understanding of the
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practice of reading calls for a contextual ethics. The context Kristeva produces for her reading is not sufficiently historical for Kaplan and Stone, hence it is an unethical one. Stone however does seem to hold out the possibility that the text contains something of the politics that produced it, that its politics transcend the historical moment within which it was produced. Its history is a part of it, not apart from it. Kristeva is seduced by the content of Céline’s writings, she does not produce that content. Stone does not countenance the possibility that the pamphlets written in the name of Céline might not be fascist. This is either because Destouches, as a fascist writing at a time when fascism was in the ascendancy, has permanently infected the words he used with his own political ideas, or because the words in the pamphlets have a particular and perpetual politics of their own; either the author and his time have some authority, or language is itself authoritative. The latter understanding would, for Foucault, be an example of the reintroduction of an author-function by a sleight of reading, in which “the empirical characteristics of the author” are transposed into the text in the form of “a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 1998: 208). The words possess a unique hidden meaning if only you work hard enough to tease it out. Both Foucault and Roland Barthes have, in their different ways, radically challenged the notion of authorial intention. Their ideas about the status of the author form part of the structure of the commonplace in contemporary literary theory but I feel that it is worthwhile rereading old writing here, especially given Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s own professed fears about his inability to control the text he “authored.” In Bagatelles pour un massacre he writes of his fear that his work will be plagiarized: Si mon petit ou gros navet contient quelque authentique substance, émotive, lyrique, il sera par eux promptement décortiqué, dégluti…Les Juifs sont plutôt mal doués pour les arts, biologiquement, du fond même de leur nature.5 (Bagatelles pour un massacre, 69)
Céline is afraid that the body of his text will be skinned, that what he writes will be taken from him and incorporated into the work of others. He is frightened that the “Jews” will steal from his own work to make up for their own lack of originality.6 Here, as occurs several times elsewhere in the 5
“If my minor or coarse penny dreadful has any originality to it, sentimentally or stylistically; it will swiftly be stripped and swallowed by them… The Jews are really no good at the arts, it’s biological, and goes to the heart of their character.” (My translation) 6 What Céline means by the term Jew is complicated. The figure of the Jew becomes
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pamphlets, Céline is projecting aspects of his own behaviour onto others. Kaplan has revealed that Bagatelles pour un massacre is “but a hastily compiled collection of references that lend the text an erudite veneer that is pure simulacrum” (1995: 37). The author has liberally stripped from the work of others to furnish his own text. His pamphlet is “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture,” (Barthes 1977: 146) with a marked emphasis on weaving the material written by Céline’s anti-semitic literary precursors into the end product. His pamphlet is not his own. If the politics of the pamphlets exist in the words on the page then this politics precedes Céline. The writer “can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” (Barthes 1977: 146). This kind of understanding of writing seems to invite an abnegation of responsibility on the part of the author: I write what is always already written, therefore I never really write. Writing is unoriginal, the writer acts as conduit not creator. Céline is afraid that his work might be appropriated by another just as he has misappropriated other people’s writings. He does not explicitly express the concern that his work will cease to mean in the same way if it is “resited” by someone else somewhere else, but I think we can entertain the possibility that this is what is troubling him. I will return to this anxiety around appropriation later. Barthes did not continue to maintain the polemical position he appeared to endorse in the essay The Death of the Author in 1968. By the time he gave the lecture Leçon (1978) almost ten years later, there was a clear emphasis on the importance of the figure of the author. In Leçon Barthes states that although the politics of the author are unimportant, the way the author uses language is of great consequence. If we take the linguistic displacements that writers carry out into account, then from this perspective Barthes argues that Céline is just as important as Hugo, and Chateaubriand as Zola (1978: 17). For Barthes, the style of the text can undermine and counteract the content. He writes that it is “à l’intérieur de la langue que la langue doit être combattue, dévoyée: non par le message dont elle est l’instrument, mais par le jeu des mots dont elle est le théâtre”7 (1978: 16-17). In this sense the hatred ostensibly contained in the pamphlets might be said to be confounded by the means of its communication. The style blunts the subject-matter, or perhaps the medium muddies the message. All language is inherently fascist almost all encompassing within the pamphlets. Africans, aristocrats, freemasons, Soviets and surrealists are each enjuivés or “jewified” at some point. It is this quality which has rendered these texts by Céline impervious to a “thematic political analysis” (Kaplan 1986: 108). 7 “it is inside language that language must be fought, misled: not by the meaning for which it is the vehicle, but by the play of words for which it is the stage.” (My translation)
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because it insists on saying something, but this fascism can be fought through the means by which things are said (1978: 14). As mentioned earlier, however, far from offering an escape from fascism, Kaplan suggests that the style of the pamphlets is in fact integral to their ideology. It is the rhythm of the prose as much as its purport that gives the pamphlets their politics. Style is political, and the style of these pamphlets is one that is allied to fascism. A Putrid Poetics If we accept that the style as well as the subject-matter of the pamphlets is morally reprehensible, then does this mean that what we might call Céline’s “putrid poetics” should be placed into permanent quarantine? Kaplan and Stone are critical of Kristeva because she is not condemnatory enough of the ideological content of the pamphlets. Is it therefore ethically sound to engage with a work like Bagatelles pour un massacre as long as writer distance their politics from the politics of the work? Is commentary permissible if the requisite tone of disdain is maintained throughout, so long as it is made explicit that Céline’s politics are objectionable? Would this kind of reading be an ethically acceptable one? Or would this kind of reading merely help to fortify the fascist politics it seeks to censure? The citing of passages from Céline’s pamphlets within the context of a critical essay could be understood to provide a source of reinvigoration for those passages. Céline is still worth writing about, even in a negative sense. The condemnatory essay is always, in some sense, complicit with that which it seeks to castigate. It must repeat the writing it wishes to hold to account. An outright denunciation of the content of the pamphlets also sentences hundreds of pages of words to a singular meaning. A simple proscription of the pamphlets as anti-semitic and fascist serves to confirm them as such. The possibility that language might resist the politics it was intended to support is not entertained. Kaplan and Stone seek to preserve the pamphlets in their fascist context and thereby perpetuate that context. They do not consider the possibility that parts of the pamphlets could be made to mean differently if they were taken out of context. In her book Excitable Speech (1997), Judith Butler describes how the contexts of the speech act are “never fully determined in advance” and explains that there is always “the possibility for the speech act to take on a non-ordinary meaning, to function in contexts where it has not belonged” (1997: 161). Through the process of “reappropriation” (the putting into play of the speech act in more favourable contexts) a negative term can undergo an affirmative resignification. Butler illustrates this process through a
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discussion of the term “queer” in the final chapter of her book Bodies that Matter (1993: 223-242). Can what Butler writes about the performative be applied to Bagatelles pour un masscare? There is a significant difference between a single term and several hundred pages of text. As discussed earlier however, Céline himself seemed troubled by the possibility of reappropriation. We might understand his reluctance to acknowledge his influences in Bagatelles pour un masscare – the silent citations throughout the pamphlet – as a manifestation of his desire to preserve the illusion of intention in his work. The hatred in the pamphlets, which Kaplan and Stone accord such authority to, accumulates that “force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices” (Butler 1993: 227). Hatred exists as quotation. The hatred in the pamphlets succeeds because it draws upon the accumulated force of its previous expressions. Kaplan and Stone do nothing to challenge this cumulative power by their attitude. Kristeva at least refuses to unquestioningly promulgate a politics of disapprobation in Powers of Horror, as demonstrated by her desire to read the pamphlets outside of their usual context. She therefore instigates a rupture in the usually uninterrupted line of citational descent which lends Céline’s language its perceived power. Like speech acts, the written word is separated from its future effects by a gap. Kristeva works within this gap. She does not assume a position of sovereignty in relation to the pamphlets, the reader is not rendered master of meaning here. Kristeva exercises her agency within the constraints of a language which always already antecedes and constitutes her. Butler believes that agency begins where sovereignty wanes. “The one who acts (who is not the same as the sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset” (1997: 16). The act of “reappropriation” is not the birth of the sovereign reader. The reader who writes hate-speech out of context, who writes hatred in order to contest it, does not have ultimate control over the language they employ. This absence of control is part of the “subversive promise” of agency (Butler 1993: 241). It is our ethical responsibility to make good this promise. But there is the matter of the pamphlets. The Matter of the Pamphlets Céline prohibited the republication of the pamphlets and his descendants have continued this interdiction (Alméras 2000: 7-8). This voluntary suppression took place to prevent the pamphlets from continuing to cause harm after the war. Bagatelles pour un massacre sold well prior to this self-
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censorship, with Céline estimating that he earned 60,000 to 80,000 old francs in royalties from the pamphlet (Alméras 1995: 76). Despite the fact that by the end of the war 75,000 copies of the work had been sold in France alone, it is now difficult to find and gain access to the work (Hewitt 1999: 171). This has helped to contribute to its mythic status (Godard 1998: 96). The more the work is engaged with the less the legend of its evil brilliance can continue to gain currency. In this sense projects like those of Kaplan and Kristeva are both of value, in that they contribute to the ongoing operation of debunking the fictions that surround Céline’s pamphlets. It would appear improper however to advocate a reprinting of the pamphlets if it were to become permissible, nor is the quotation of parts of the works (in whatever context) entirely unproblematic. Little attention in any of the writings about the pamphlets is given to the materiality of these texts, the matter of the words themselves and the surface upon which they are inscribed, the printed page. To read the original pamphlets is a very different experience from reading about them. The dialogue between the reader and a copy of Bagatelles pour un massacre is one beyond words. The pamphlet exceeds the words that are a part of it. The words are bounded by margins, floating above and between the yellowing paper upon which they are printed. The yellow paper… yellow… a colour “associated with degradation and discredit” and also the colour associated with ageing (Connor 2004: 164). The pamphlets are growing old. The eyes that scan across the page see this discolouration, this sign of the paper in decline. The eyes see the broken corners of some pages. They register the insult of the insult of the white threads that bind the pages together, their unsettling appearance of newness. The fingers feel the textured and relatively thick paper. It is dry and fragile. There is a smell to reading that exists in excess of this feeling and seeing. There is the dry smell that bespeaks the maturity of the paper. At the moment—when Céline’s prose is read in its original type-setting—the pamphlets exist as a state of decay. They are dying. This experience of the pamphlets is lost when extracts from them are read in quotation. Citations from the pamphlets, in or out of what is perceived to be a suitable context, provide the prose with a renewal, a rejuvenation. This is where the limitations inherent in transposing Butler’s ideas onto a text like Bagatelles pour un massacre are revealed. To cut any of the text from its ageing moorings and to paste it into a publication in the present, is to smooth the wrinkles that bear testimony to its past. The print on this page, in its haecceity, in its here and nowness, obscures the original paper in its now and thenness. Butler is sensitive to this problem of reinvigoration. The one who recites hate-speech is responsible for the manner in which that repetition is carried out (1997: 27). It would seem in this instance that the responsible act
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would be not to repeat Céline’s prose. Outside the increasingly fragile pages of the pamphlets, the passages Céline composed or appropriated gain a new lease of life. It is true that they may be made to mean differently yet this attempt at reappropriation is also open to failure. The writer cannot control the response of the reader. The content of texts like those by Kaplan and Kristeva, which contain quotations from the pamphlets, may be deployed against the grain of the usage they were originally intended for (as a condemnation of fascism, or as an illustration of the psychic underpinnings of modern literature, respectively). Any citations will always exceed the parameters set around their interpretation in the present. The act of quotation, the work of repetition, always entails a loss, something is invariably left behind. This loss is what occasions the potential for resistance in repetition. The loss is necessary for there to be any hope of change. This privation at the heart of repetition should therefore usually be understood as a positive characteristic, in the case of the pamphlets however, perhaps the loss is greater than the gain. It is not only the age of the prose that becomes buried in the action of citation though. There are other forfeitures. The quotations from the pamphlets reproduced in books about Céline are likely to be unfaithful to the way the text they apparently simply reiterate actually appeared on the page. The technology of the printing press has advanced greatly since the Thirties and Forties. In 1938 the mediation of the printing process, the gap between the writer and the reproduction of his writing, created a significant possibility for errors to occur. Here error acts as a form of resistance. The printing press is supposed to repeat the writer’s words over and over again but there is always the potential for this process of reproduction to go astray. It is these strayings from the typescript that are also lost when Céline is cited in the present. The context within which the pamphlets were written was never one in which intention would be fulfilled by the end product. In the copy of Bagatelles pour un massacre which was referenced for this essay, the printed characters on the page were often imperfect.8 The “i” would sometimes occur solely as a dot, or as a line without a dot. It was either a head without a body, or a body without a head. Other letters also appeared in varying degrees of degradation. This damage was caused either by the incomplete inking of the plates during the printing process, as seems most likely, or possibly by damage to the plates themselves. To give a sense of the scale of this partial printing, on page 326 (chosen at random) the letter 8 This particular copy is held in the Special Collections section of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. I am grateful to the staff in Special Collections for their help and assistance.
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“i” is damaged in the words ‘tennis,’ ‘civilisation,’ ‘parfait,’ ‘animale,’ ‘Juif,’ and ‘air.’ On page 332 the end of two lines of text is missing, I underscore the missing sections: Quel théâtre pour cyclopes? …cent décors échelonnés, 9 t___plus grandioses… vers la mer… Mais il se glisse, piaule, piroue___
The citing of Bagatelles pour un massacre in the present purifies the pamphlet, excising these imperfections that are omnipresent in the original. To reproduce these incomplete passages as complete is to conceal what is a material manifestation of the gap that exists between intention and eventuality. There is an incomplete correspondence between what Céline wants to say and what is eventually said in Bagatelles pour un massacre. This resistance at the level of the matter of writing itself, the ink that refuses to collaborate with the author, is also lost when parts of the pamphlet are reprinted. An ethical reading of the work would be one which drew the reader’s attention to its physical condition (an elaboration of the contextual ethics mentioned earlier). The pamphlets exist in the present but not as they did in the past. It is important to age them, to acknowledge the changed circumstances in which they are now read. It is also equally crucial to draw attention to the way the pamphlets undermine the message they are supposed to convey, but not at the level of style, rather through the very substance out of which they are made. The damaged “i’s” draw attention to the absence of the I in the text, the lack of authority within the writing. The ink refuses to be limited by intention. This refusal in the matter that is print, matters because it highlights the possibility of refusal in general. The pamphlets are antisemitic, fascist, misogynist, and racist, but never perfectly so. The inconsistencies in the ink act as an invitation to a further contesting of the content, a rewriting of hate against itself. This would be the right response to the pamphlets. Bibliography Alméras, Philippe. (1995). “Céline’s Masquerade,” Céline and the Politics of Difference, eds. Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon and Thomas C. Spear, Hanover: UP of New England, 64-83. —— (2000). Je suis le bouc: Céline et l’antisémitisme, Paris: Denoël. 9
“A theatre fit for Hercules? …a hundred stage-sets spread out, t___ more imposing…towards the sea…gliding, padding, piroue___” (My translation).
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Barthes, R. (1977). “The Death of the Author,” Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, 142-148. —— (1978). Leçon, Paris: Seuil. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” London: Routledge. —— (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1937). Bagatelles pour un Massacre, Paris: Denoël. Chanter, Tina (2004). “The Picture of Abjection: Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘The Celebration’,” parallax 30, 10:1, 30-39. Connor, Steven (2004). The Book of Skin, Ithaca: Cornell UP. Creed, Barbara (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Ferguson, James (1999). Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley: U of California P. Foucault, Michel. (1998). “What is an Author?” Aesthetics: The Essential Work 2, ed. James Faubion, London: Lane. —— (2001). Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, London: Routledge. Godard, Henri (1998). Céline scandale, Paris: Gallimard. Gustafson, Susan E. (1995). Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing’s Aesthetic and Dramatic Production, Detroit: Wayne State UP. Hewitt, Nicholas (1999). The Life of Céline: A Critical Biography, Oxford: Blackwell. Kaplan, Alice Yaeger (1986). Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. —— (1995). “Sources and Quotations in Céline’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre,” Céline and the Politics of Difference, eds. Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon and Thomas C. Spear, Hanover: UP of New England, 29-46. Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP. —— (1996). Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman, New York: Columbia UP. Lacan, Jacques (1977). “The Mirror Stage,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge, 1-7. Ockman, Carol (1995). Ingres’ Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line, New Haven: Yale UP.
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Oliver, Kelly (1993). Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind, Bloomington: Indiana UP. Stone, Judith (1983). “The Horrors of Power: A Critique of Kristeva,” The Politics of Theory, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diane Loxley, Cochester: U of Essex, 38-48. Valier, Claire (2002). “Punishment, Border Crossings and the Powers of Horror,” Theoretical Criminology, 6:3, 319-337.
THE GROTESQUE ON FLESHING OUT THE SUBJECT OF ETHICS SARA COHEN SHABOT This essay asks what kind of ethics we would obtain if we conceptualize the subject as a grotesque subject, constituted by a grotesque body. Cohen Shabot argues that the grotesque subject, provided with a grotesque body, constitutes a clearly material, concrete subject, which in turn emphasizes elements such as hybridity, plurality, excess, waste, openness and a constant connection between itself and the world, between itself and its others. Cohen Shabot claims that if we accept Foucault’s idea that bodies are created by power and that, at at the same time, they constitute a way to resist and create new forms of power, we can relate to the grotesque subject as lending itself to a new way of conceiving a resistant subjectivity, opposed to classical and modernist ideas of subjectivity and to the ethics which derives from either ideal.
There is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. J.M. Coetzee Independence is a political term. Life does not know independence, only coexistence: whether pacific or violent, whether synthetic or disruptive, there is only coextensive, coeval, coarising all around. To forget this constitutive conjunction is a political and ethical choice. It is a ‘decision’ in the most radical sense: that is, a cutting, a dividing, a de-termination which parses the world into disjunctive realms. Ed Cohen The grotesque unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements. Mikhail Bakhtin
Is it really possible to put our selves in the other’s position? If so, how relevant is this step in the process of developing an ethics and in becoming moral subjects? In her discussion of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), Marjorie Garber elaborates a possible interpretation of Coetzee’s text in
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which The Lives of Animals seems to be mainly a text on the value of literature, that is, on the value of language and metaphors, of poetic imagination, rather than a text on animals (1999: 73-84). Taking Garber’s reading as a point of departure Coetzee can be seen as an author for whom the poetic imagination, the power to imagine ourselves other than we are, and to think by way of literature and metaphors constitutes a basic pre-requisite of being moral, of being ethical subjects. Otherwise, why would Coetzee present the poetic imagination in his book as an alternative to philosophical thought, or, more bluntly put, why would he not rather write, instead of a novel, a philosophical text, which is the more common, more expected thing to do when trying to engage in a debate and argue for or against certain ideas, as Coetzee clearly does in The Lives of Animals? Coetzee is not, of course, the first author to opt for literature to present philosophical arguments instead of writing a more traditional philosophical treatise. In fact, the tendency to use literature as a mode of philosophical intervention has developed widely mainly within the last century through, for instance, philosophers such as Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir and, more recently, Derrida, Cixous, and Irigaray. Nevertheless, I think that the same thing that has been said about Coetzee’s text, may also be said about writings by these other philosophers: when writing philosophy as literature, there can be no doubt that, aside from the value of the posed argument itself, something very important is being said about the power of literature and of the poetic imagination in creating or in giving life and making a philosophical argument true. In the specific case of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, then, what is being said in this regard is that the degree to which we can be moral subjects is directly connected to the degree to which we can imagine ourselves in the position of the other. This process of using the imagination, though, cannot— in Coetzee’s eyes be a pure philosophical process but rather it has to be a poetic, literary process, necessarily inhabited by metaphors and literary figures (Garber 1999: 73-84). I would like to base this essay on a slightly amplified or a more radical version of Coetzee’s theory regarding the intimate connections between ethics and aesthetics, between the possibility of being moral subjects and the imperative of imagining poetically. Thus, I would like to argue not only for the importance of imagining ourselves in the position of the other when trying to be moral subjects, but, more radically, I would like to argue that imagining ourselves always already as others in ourselves might enhance the possibilities of our becoming moral subjects, truly and deeply committed to our own destiny and to that of the other.
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The way in which we define our own subjectivity, the way in which we describe our being-in-the world, is of cardinal importance when defining and describing the ethical relations among subjects. Foucault argued, in several of his works, that subjects are not given, but made, and that these subjects are always embodied subjects, products of specific historical situations and social practices which invest these embodied subjects with the power to act and to think and behave in certain ways.1 Taking this Foucauldian idea as point of departure, we could go further and say that the fashion in which embodied subjects are created, that is, the specific contents and forms with which powers invest such subjectivities, constitute in fact one of the most meaningful elements within the development of an ethical theory: if subjects are made, if they are a product of history, culture and society, we should ask why they are constructed in a certain fashion and not differently, and we should be aware that epistemological, aesthetic and—most importantly— ethical values are at stake when answering this question. Thus, it seems that ethical positions participate in a de facto manner in the construction of any specific kind of subjectivity and that there are, consequently, important ethical consequences to the way subjectivities are constructed. I will argue that an ethical theory cannot be truly understood without a previous comprehension of the kind of subjectivity that it is based on. Moreover, I will argue that a specific way of conceptualizing subjectivity, in this case the subject conceptualized as grotesque, might contribute to the development of a complex, rich and positively ambiguous ethics. In the following, I will propose the grotesque subject as presenting a figuration, a position or inherent ethos through which the subject as it has been conceived mainly by phenomenological and postmodern theories might be better understood and exemplified. Later on, I will deal with some of the ethical consequences this conceptualization of the subject as grotesque might carry, attempting to draw, through this, the ethical picture that could derive and develop out of a subjectivity conceived as grotesque. Phenomenology, Postmodernity and the Critique of the Subject Phenomenology and, later on, postmodern theoretical thought, have carried out a deep critique of the concept of the subject and its identity as it appears in different classical and modern philosophical theories. The new subject that phenomenology and postmodern thought try to present is above all created as a consequence of its being-with-others, thus, intersubjectivity turns out to be 1
See, for example, Foucault, 1977: 25, 27, 212; 1982; 1984.
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one of the key concepts needed in order to understand this construction of the subject’s identity. Consequently the subject must be understood as constantly re-emerging from its intersection with the world outside itself and with others. A monolithic, closed, immutable Cartesian subjectivity is no longer possible. This new subject is an embodied subject, and it is also a subject that is historically, socially and culturally defined. It is the subject that this chapter will exemplify and explain through the figuration of the grotesque. Phenomenology and postmodern philosophy, in general, can be analyzed in a new way by looking at them from the perspective of the figuration of the grotesque. This can be done by showing how the new subject proposed by these philosophies may be better understood by comparing it to the grotesque subject. I argue that the grotesque figuration succeeds in presenting the subject the way phenomenology and postmodern thought has tried to, namely, as embodied, as strongly rooted in concreteness and as clearly intertwined with the world and the others. The Grotesque Subject and the Problem of Representation The grotesque has been described, by its different analysts, as a concept which—referring originally to visual art—mainly addresses bodies and concrete subjects.2 The grotesque bodies are hybrid bodies,3 a mixture of animals, objects, plants and human beings. This is the reason why the grotesque has been recognized as a concept pointing to monstrosity,4 irrational-confusion 5 or absurd,6 and deformed-heterogeneity.7 C. J. Jung, for instance, describes a mythological-grotesque character, the Trickster, as follows: God, man and animal at once. He is both sub-human and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is unconsciousness. […] He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other. He takes his anus off and entrust it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite his phallic qualities: he can 2
Cf. Bakhtin, 1965; Harpham, 1982; Kayser, 1963; Kuryluk, 1987; Thomson, 1972; Yates, 1997. 3 Cf. Kuryluk, 1987: 17, 75, 76, 319; Harpham, 1982: 11, 21, 62; Thomson, 1972: 50; Yates, 1997: 16. 4 Cf. Cohen, 1996; Garland Thomson, 1996; Harpham, 1982: 8; Kuryluk, 1987: 302; Luther Adams, 1997; Wright, 1968: xxx; Yates, 1997: 7. 5 Cf. Clayborough, 1965; Wright, 1968: x. 6 Cf. Kayser, 1963: 37, 53, 184-188; Yates, 1997: 18. 7 Cf. Kuryluk, 1987: 303, 304; Thomson, 1972: 26, 27; Yates, 1997: 42, 44, 55-56.
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turn himself into a woman and bear children. From his penis he makes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his original nature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of a god. (quoted in Harpham 1982: 53; emphasis added)
Another illustrative example of a grotesque character can be found in a fragment of classic literature, when Ovid describes Scylla, who is poisoned by Circe, her enemy: There Scylla came; she waded into the water, Waist-deep, and suddenly saw her loins disfigured With barking monsters, and at first she could not Believe that these were parts of her own body. She tried to drive them off, the barking creatures, And flees in panic, but what she runs away from She still takes with her; feeling for her thighs, Her legs, her feet, she finds, in all these parts, The heads of dogs, jaws gaping wide, and hellish. She stands on dogs gone mad, and loins and belly Are circled by those monstrous forms. (quoted in Harpham 1982: 16; emphasis added)
The grotesque subject, provided with such embodied and open subjectivity, is unrepresentable or unknowable by way of any normal system of knowledge or representation, that is, by any system governed by rational principles, and which in consequence looks for a clear framing of its object of research. As such, the grotesque subject becomes a clear example of phenomenological and postmodern conceptualizations of the embodied subject. Grotesque bodies are totally opposed to the classical bodies represented, for instance, during the Renaissance: grotesque bodies are not clean, closed, well-defined, clear-cut, beautiful bodies striving for symmetry and order.8 The grotesque body is the “uncanny” body par excellence, a body which defies clear definitions and borders: it is in the middle ground between death and life,9 between subject and object and between one and many.10 Its 8
On grotesque bodies as opposed to the classic bodies represented during the Renaissance, see Bakhtin, 1965: 24-25. 9 On the grotesque as uncanny, as in-between life and death, see Thomson, 1972: 35; Kuryluk, 1987: 318. 10 This should be understood as a consequence of the grotesque hybridity and of its conflictive essence. On the Grotesque as conflict, see Harpham, 1982: 45; Thomson, 1972: 11, 18, 20, 60; Wright, 1968: xxxviii; Yates, 1997: 44-45.
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ambiguity is obvious: it is not one single body, but, simultaneously, not lost in the homogeneity of an undifferentiated wholeness. The grotesque body (as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, for example) is a differentiated body, but which, at the same time, remains intensively connected to the world and to its others. Such an exceeding body,11 which constantly outgrows itself and escapes from its own skin, constitutes a body that cannot be framed. The exceeding body cannot be contained absolutely, that is, it cannot be disconnected from the rest of the world or from its others. It finds itself in a constant and intensive intertwining and intermingling with its outside. The grotesque body grounds its connection to the world on the very condition of human subjects: the embodied subject is, in itself, open, fragmented and connected to the world and to others: The grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking and defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body. […] This specially strikes the eye in the archaic grotesque. (Bakhtin 1965: 26; emphasis added)
It is precisely this figuration of the grotesque body that helps to ground the subject in corporeality and in gender—though the gender identity is ambiguous —that in fact protects this subject from becoming a neutral, desexualized (or hyper-sexualized) subject. This kind of grounding in fleshedspecificity protects the grotesque subject from a possible escape from embodied existence and corporeality altogether, which is present in classic and modern—including specifically Cartesian—representations of the subject, and even in some well-intentioned postmodern figurations, as in some cases, that of the cyborg.12 11 Excess is a central feature of the grotesque. On the grotesque as essentially excessive, see Bakhtin, 1965: 320- 321; Harpham, 1982: 31; Kuryluk, 1987: 302; Thomson, 1972: 38-39. 12 I am referring here to science-fiction representations of the cyborg which tend, even if not in a clearly intentional way, to try to escape the “fleshed-body,” and to become—as in classical and modern representations of the subject—a “pure mind.”
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This kind of embodied existence presents an ontological picture which points to a plurality within totality, that is, an image of reality which stresses interconnectedness and unity (the grotesque subject as open to the world, intertwined with it), but which at the same time also emphasizes difference, heterogeneity and multiplicity; the grotesque subject is hybrid and plural, open to the world but still a subject, as it does not lose itself in the world. This ontological picture is clearly and essentially intersubjective. The grotesque world constitutes an ambiguous, mixed reality, which can easily cause anxiety. It is a fragmentary and complex reality, plagued by multiple relations and in which clear hierarchical relations derived from welldefined binary oppositions, are not viable. Having this picture of the grotesque bodies and the grotesque world in mind, we can understand the grotesque ontology as described above, namely, as an ontology that embraces change, fluidity and disorder. Such a picture of the world, i.e. way of describing ontological existence subsequently results in, I argue, an epistemology which is best characterized by a clear incapacity to represent and be represented through classic means of representation. If reality is in fact fragmentary, non-homogeneous, hybrid, fluid and constantly changing, then, it will be impossible to represent it (to know it) at least through the use of tools belonging to the systematic, logic and discursiverational thought. How could it be possible to frame and capture a reality which is essentially contradictory, deformed and framed only by blurred, highly permeable boundaries? Such a reality cannot be represented or known by an Identity Thought (a thought which negates everything that exceeds the law of identity), nor through any system—given that a system is, in principle, always framing and thus immobilizing. Moreover, one of the most important features of a rational system of thought is to clean the object of study from its excesses, that is, from what is not necessary for such an object to have or to be. This is the philosophical move par excellence, evident in, for example, Okham’s Razor, which calls for an elimination of all which is not absolutely necessary within a system, and which is a major principle within philosophical thought. The grotesque, then, will allow representation and knowledge only by means of deformation, intersubjective hybridity and excess. This kind of epistemology shows, paradoxically, the impossibility of representation or the impossibility of knowledge through an all-encompassing-system, a system
On this phenomena, see for instance the analysis of Doane, 1999; Sofia, 1999; Springer, 1999.
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that can absorb and contain all, without leaving any residues, without polluting itself, so to speak, with any redundant excesses. Ambiguity and the “Supplementary Representation of Reality” One more reason why the grotesque and grotesque ontology is unrepresentable by means of a philosophical system is its ambiguous essence, its constantly being in-between.13 This fact prevents the grotesque from possibly being explained by any binary divides: the in-between is the middle ground that cannot be contained by a concept and its opposite. From this perspective, the grotesque may be seen as similar to the Derridean Undecidable (1972: 42-43), which never really belongs to any clear frame, not even to the one proposed by dialectics. The grotesque will be better understood, then, as a demand for an epistemology that searches for a supplementary representation of reality. By “supplementary” I understand, again, a Derridean conceptualization of being and knowledge as opposed to hierarchies and binary systems. A supplementary representation of reality points, as the grotesque does, to a fragmentary reality where parts are added one to another, integrated into each other, but that never complete one another. In other words, there is no original core or main essence that is completed by marginal sub-parts. Every fragment of the grotesque world is independent in the sense that it does not lack anything and does not have to be completed. Each element is irreducible to any other. This is mainly due to the fact that excess and residues are an integral part of the grotesque world. If the excess cannot be cleaned out, this means that there is no possibility of abstraction, of reductive thought where some parts are contained by others, broader and more abstract than they are in themselves. Particularity and concreteness cannot be erased, since they are precisely the ones giving meaning to the grotesque. Thus, grotesque elements cannot be summarized and reduced to their relevant elements. This means that one cannot be abolished by means of the other. Every element in the grotesque world is equally essential or equally marginal, and this is also what does not allow the grotesque to name things (and to represent them by names). When accidents are not differentiated from essences, then naming— which definitely functions as an essence/accident differentiation tool—cannot work. Consequently, the grotesque subject cannot be fully identified or
13
On the grotesque as being “in-between” see note 10 on the grotesque as conflict and hybrid. See also Cohen, 1997; Harpham, 1982: 53.
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named (it is not a human, nor a plant, nor an animal, it is neither male nor female; neither one nor many). The Grotesque: An Embracing Figuration In sum, the ontology and epistemology presented by the grotesque essentially deal with difference in the sense of concreteness, specificity, particularity and irreducibility to general principles. The reality represented by the grotesque emphasizes at the same time interconnectedness and heterogeneity; it emphasizes intersubjectivity. This means that the grotesque figuration functions as an instance of phenomenological and postmodern ontologies and epistemologies. Moreover, I argue that other figurations that have been used in order to flesh out phenomenology and postmodern thought are in fact contained by the figuration of the grotesque. Clearly, the monstrous and the abnormal—which have often been used to describe the postmodern condition—are at the core of the ethos of the grotesque.14 Nietzsche, for example, described the Dyonisian world as provided from clearly grotesque features (1967: 549-550) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty theorized in similar terms the world as flesh, which constitutes a central concept in phenomenology, and which can also be seen clearly as a concept preceding the postmodern description of an intersubjective reality (1968: 137). The Deleuzian rhizome may also be seen as contained within the grotesque description of the world.15 It is also possible to identify, within the space of the grotesque, the features of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject (1994: 4) and other important conceptualizations of the postmodern such as the queer subject (Butler 1999) and the cyborg (Haraway, 1991). As we have seen, the grotesque deals with the many implications of excess (a concept 14 On monstrosity and abnormality as postmodern features, see Cohen, 1997; Foucault, 2000; Garland Thomson, 1996; Grosz, 1996; Stacey, 1997. 15 “The second kind is very different, molecular and of the ‘rhizome’ type. The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no longer forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It belongs to a smooth space. It draws a plane that has no more dimensions than that which crosses it; therefore the multiplicity it constitutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency of its own. These are multiplicities of masses or packs, not of classes; anomalous and nomadic multiplicities, not normal or legal ones; multiplicities of becoming, or transformational multiplicities, not countable elements and ordered relations; fuzzy, not exact aggregates, etc. At the level of pathos, these multiplicities are expressed by psychosis and especially schizophrenia. At the level of pragmatics, they are utilized by sorcery” (Deleuze, Guattari, 1988: 505-506).
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which has been explored as a postmodern figuration by Georges Bataille (1985: 97)), and it is also the terrain par excellence of Julia Kristeva’s abjection: “It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982: 4; emphasis added). Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and the Ethics of Ambiguity The grotesque ethics is mainly an ethics of ambiguity. This is why it is helpful to present it linked to other attempts to recognize ambiguity as central to an ethical and a philosophical project. Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity, outlined mainly, but not only, in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, was greatly influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ambiguity, mostly developed in his The Phenomenology of Perception and later on in his last, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible.16 Both Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir considered ambiguity the central element of a phenomenological and existentialist description of reality and of the relations of individuals among themselves and the world they inhabit. At the basis of both Merleau-Ponty’s and Beauvoir’s philosophical projects is the idea that there are no clear-cut divisions between humans as embodied subjects and the rest of the world. Our being intimately, carnally mingled, intertwined with the world, constitutes the root of our ambiguous existence, and shapes our epistemological and our ethical conditions. It is our situation as embodied subjects that connects us ineluctably with other subjects, objects, and the world as a whole. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: Now why would this generality [Sentient and Sensible], which constitutes the unity of my body, not open it to other bodies? The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching. […] Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes interweave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly: this is possible as we no longer make belongingness to one same “consciousness” the primordial definition of sensibility, and as soon as we rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient. For, as overlapping and fission, identity and difference, it brings to birth a ray of natural light that illuminates all flesh and not only my own. (1968: 142; emphasis added) 16
On Merleau-Ponty’s and Beauvoir’s mutual influence see for instance Heinamaa, 2003a; Heinamaa, 2003b; Langer, 2003.
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Thus, we are basically ambiguous: we are subjects and objects at the same time, “touching” and “touched,” “sentient” and “sensible.” We are in the world, but we are not the world: we are temporal, finite—which constitutes in itself, according to Beauvoir, a necessary condition for being moral. I will return to this later. In contrast, the world will keep existing when we are gone (Beauvoir, 1948: 12-22). We are fleshed subjects, who relate to the world, to objects and other subjects, by way of our embodied subjectivities, through our carnal eroticism and sexuality, through our ineludible fleshed existence. “Unlike pure consciousness,” says Monika Langer, paraphrasing MerleauPonty and Beauvoir, “we ‘blend’ with, and compose, a common situation— an intersubjectivity. Further, we feel the need for others’ recognition” (2003: 101). Being flesh, then, is what allows us to be part of the world, to be materially and concretely part of it. Also, this is what in fact allows us to be subjects open to others and to the other’s concrete, specific situation; we share our carnality and, consequently, we are also able to share our condition of being alive and, at the same time, of being mortal. Had we been “pure consciousness,” with no body (a kind of Cartesian or Platonic ideal), we would be a totally different kind of being, a kind of god, who, among other things, would not have any need for ethics. This is precisely Beauvoir’s point when she describes the main character of her novel All Men are Mortal, Fosca, a man who has revealed he is immortal. On this Barbara S. Andrew comments: Immortality allows Fosca to stand outside human reality. He cannot risk his life for a cause or dedicate himself to loving one person. He will live forever; his life cannot be risked, his beloved will be left. He forgets the significance of others’ existence, the importance of each individual’s freedom. And so he forgets where value springs from, and he is no longer part of the human world. His own freedom no longer has meaning. As such, he views himself outside morality. He is surely outside an embodied ethic. He is also outside ambiguity, because the limitations of his bodily existence are no longer meaningful. Thus he cannot participate in making meaning. (2003: 36-37; emphasis added)
Both for Merleau-Ponty and for Beauvoir, being embodied subjects, open through our bodies to the world and to others, constitutes an absolutely necessary condition for being the human beings that we are and for being moral human beings, creatures in need of an ethics to behave according to. Thus, following Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, we could say that losing the flesh-and-blood body would mean a return to the Cartesian subject, a subject that can separate herself from her mind, and that, as a consequence, maybe even could throw her body away. To think about ourselves as possible disembodied creatures, irremediably brings with itself a feeling of
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omnipotence that makes us forget the most meaningful experiences of human life, those that make us the historical, cultural and social creatures with existential worries and questionings that we actually are. Such experiences are precisely the corporeal ones—the pleasant, such as the enjoyment of food, moving our bodies, having sex or dancing; and also the painful, such as sickness, growing old and, finally, dying. These are all embodied experiences that constitute our phenomenological being-in-the-world (avoiding them may mean avoiding pain, but it also certainly means avoiding life itself). Avoiding or escaping from the fleshed body means leaving behind all the elements that constitute the embodied existence. Moreover, it seems that imagining ourselves as Platonic ideals, transcendent incorporeal beings, might bring with itself the danger of giving legitimacy to the undertaking of a struggle to achieve perfect beings, a struggle that can be so easily associated with fascist or racist ideologies. Embodied existence describes our way of being in the world. We are situated in the world as embodied subjects and it is through our bodies that we participate in the world of objects and of other subjects. This is the reason why, if we want to propose a figuration that represents our experience of being in the world, we must search for figurations that successfully express our presence and our situation in this world as incarnated subjects. This means we must search for a figuration to describe subjectivity as formed by the elements which can be seen as inherent in embodied existence and its being in the world. Such an embodied subjectivity is and should be described, for instance, as gendered, mutable, and perishable. In order to avoid describing this ambiguous subjectivity through old and obsolete philosophical paradigms, which made of the subject an abstract concept, alienated from his/her body, and from the rest of the world— through the artificial, arbitrary binary divides mind/body and subject/object—a new figuration should present incarnated beings as open to the world and, above all, as de facto provided with an ambiguous existence. We are in the world, our boundaries are blurred, our bodies are open. There is no true division between ourselves and the world. We are, as Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir state, ambiguous beings, hybrid creatures, subjects and objects at the same time, inseparable from the different scenarios in which we act. We are also ambiguous beings regarding our ways of existing: our gender, our looks and our thoughts constitute an ever-changing flux that can never be absolutely defined or contained by an abstract, purely conceptual, incorporeal subjectivity. This is the reason why any figuration that desires to present such an ambiguous being, must try to avoid, above all, a return to forms of being that escape or deny the body and its imperfect features. I propose the grotesque body as a figuration that may represent such an embodied,
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ambiguous, hybrid, open and permanently changing subjectivity. The grotesque body expresses a perfect description of the non-closed human subjectivity, of the open and connected-to-others embodied subject. On this, Bakhtin’s commentaries on grotesque bodies appear, again, as highly illustrative. Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as an “unfinished and open body” which is “blended with the world, with animals, with objects” (1965: 26-27). The grotesque body constitutes, for Bakhtin, “the most vivid expression of the body as not impenetrable but open” (1965: 339). Towards a Grotesque Ethics I see the grotesque as a new and unexplored paradigm of intersubjective reality and of difference. The creation of a grotesque philosophy would mean the creation of a philosophy of difference and intersubjectivity. The figuration of the grotesque and of the grotesque subject clearly emphasizes elements which are opposed to the logic of the Same, to a way of thinking that privileges the original, the essential, the true, above the copy, the exceeding or the fake. The grotesque presents the possibility of creating a new epistemology, whose uniqueness of which is reflected in its capacity for knowing reality on the one side as whole, interconnected, intertwined and total, and on the other as plural, heterogenic, dynamic, fluid and changing. The grotesque has the power to portray reality as an intertwined, intersubjective totality and, at the same time, as absolute difference. This can be explained by the fact that even though the grotesque constantly plays with mixture, distortion and intermingling, it is never lost in total confusion; it does not ever become homogeneous. The grotesque reality is always heterogeneous, always differentiated. George Santayana expresses precisely this idea when defining the concept of the grotesque: until the new object impresses its form on our imagination, so that we can grasp its unity and proportion, it appears to us as a jumble and distortion of other forms. If this confusion is absolute, the object is simply null; it does not exist aesthetically, except by virtue of its materials. But if the confusion is not absolute, and we have an inkling of the unity and character in the midst of the strangeness of the form, then we have the grotesque. It is the half-formed, the perplexed, and the suggestively monstrous (quoted in Harpham 1982: 15; emphasis added).
This new grotesque epistemology, I argue, might function as the basis of a particular, radical and phenomenological ethical approach.
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A grotesque thinking makes use of multiple characteristics in order to build systems which present the subject as necessarily embodied and its relation to others as non-hierarchical and non-binary. Within this grotesque context, as I formerly explained, the subject’s relations to others are based on complete heterogeneity and difference, but clear boundaries between essential and marginal cannot be drawn within them. Consequently, clear hierarchical relations, that usually precede domination relations, cannot be imposed within these relations. This is one of the central points of departure for a grotesque ethics. The degree to which we can be moral subjects is directly connected to the degree to which we can imagine ourselves in the position of the other. This process of using the imagination, though, cannot be a pure philosophical process but it rather has to be a poetic, literary process, necessarily inhabited by metaphors and literary figures. I argued that the grotesque might function as such a figure of imagination, which allows us to be the other, and even to be others to ourselves. The way we imagine ourselves is a political and an ethical choice, with ethical and political consequences. We can choose to imagine ourselves differently. Imagining ourselves not as closed, stable, rigid, unchangeable individuals, limited and separated from the rest of the world with clear boundaries, but rather as open, hybrid, plural, intertwined with the world, grotesque creatures, might construct us as complex and rich ethical beings. The grotesque moral persons will think of themselves already as others in themselves, as plagued with difference, heterogeneity, excesses and multiplicity, as intimately intertwined with the world they are part of. Imagining, constantly (re)creating ourselves in the grotesque manner, might help us to accept more easily our own deformities, our own defects and excesses, as well as those of the others. Imagining ourselves as grotesque figures, might save us from the struggle for perfection and from the willing to destroy or annihilate ours and, mainly, other’s difference(s). I believe, lastly, that grotesizing ourselves could get us closer to the existentialist ethical ideal according to which each other desires the freedom of the other. In de Beauvoir’s words: “Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity” (1948: 71). As grotesque, as being radically intertwined with the flesh of the other, we will definitely fight for the other’s freedom, since it will be our own freedom—our own flesh—that will be at stake.
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Conclusion The grotesque thinking is strongly opposed to any philosophy of the Same, to any philosophy which privileges presence, logos or being over non-identical, perishable or mutable phenomena. No unique criteria, no metaphysical logos will serve as the principle by which every difference and accidental presence will be measured and considered as normal and proper, or as abnormal and improper. The grotesque position or philosophy and, in consequence, the grotesque ethics is, above all, a philosophy and an ethics of difference. The figuration of the grotesque privileges embodiment above disembodied consciousness and excess and hybridity above clean, measured, well equilibrated and perfectly defined spaces. This privileging of embodiment, excess and hybridity is what essentially connects the grotesque with singularity, heterogeneity and difference. It is the body, and its excesses, that composes the site par excellence of absolute difference. The body functions as the individuation principle, as the clearest principle of particularity and singularity. It is the body which constitutes us as singular beings and draws the limits within the particular minds which, according to the majority of classic and modern Western philosophers, are essentially the same for all individuals. Emphasizing the embodied nature of subjectivity means emphasizing the temporary, the accidental, the finite; it means a return to the historical, to the contextual, to the cultural. Thus, an embodied subjectivity appears as the paradigm of the anti-philosophical when the philosophical is understood as an attempt to represent “the Same,” i.e. the eternal, the universal, the general and the a-historical. The excesses of the body (and excesses in general) also constitute an important way of representing difference, and they are an important element of the grotesque figuration or position. The excess is that which is cleaned or eliminated when we try to overcome difference. The need for erasing excess has been overwhelmingly present in philosophy.17 The grotesque is plagued 17
Several important Western philosophers deal with concepts which made obvious their interest for erasing excess, for clarifying concepts and for getting rid of all which was not absolutely necessary for their system of thought. Plato’s main task in his dialogues was, for example, that of clarifying concepts that appeared to be blurred or ambiguous. Descartes introduced the concept of “clear and distinct ideas,” which turned to be a basic concept not only for his philosophy but also for most of the philosophical thought after him. Also Spinoza pretended to erase all excess when he tried to create his system of ethics, rigged by geometry principles, and Kant’s Categorical Imperative presents the same characteristics when it emphasizes the necessity of getting rid of all which might interfere with the rational decision of making the good. Some postmodern philosophers have criticized this tendency.
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with excess, and, consequently, it is plagued with difference. The excessive constitutes the concrete and the irreducible par excellence. Neither philosophy nor science can abstract, reduce or generalize excess, since excess is, by definition, resistant to reduction. There is no way to deal with difference, heterogeneity and otherness except by renouncing the aim of reaching the eternal and absolute, of reaching a-historical and universal abstract knowledge. Dealing with the particular, the irreducible, the accidental and the finite, as the grotesque does, means dealing with difference. That which exceeds us, that which threatens our sameness, our normality, our well-defined and protected presence in the world, constitutes the different. It is precisely this alterity, this absolute otherness into which, at the same time, we are totally immersed and from which in fact we obtain our existential meaning—the one which I propose can be made tangible, made flesh through the figuration of the grotesque. Bibliography Andrew, Barbara S. (2003). “Beauvoir’s Place in Philosophical Thought,” The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 36-37. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965). Rabelais and His World, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Bataille, Georges (1985). Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Manchester: Manchester UP. Beauvoir, Simone de (1948). The Ethics of Ambiguity, Secaucus, NJ: Citadel. Braidotti, Rosi (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia UP. Butler, Judith (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Clayborough, Arthur (1965). The Grotesque in English Literature, Oxford: Clarendon. Coetzee, J.M. (1999). The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann, Princeton: Princeton UP.
Bataille, for instance, develops his Heterological Theory of Knowledge basically by going against this philosophical obsession of purifying thought from residues (1985: 97).
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Cohen, Ed (2001). “Poesis, Autopoesis, Autopoethics,” Culture Machine 3 [online]. Available from: http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/ Cmach/ Backissues/j003/Articles/Edcohen.htm [accessed April 17, 2005]. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (1996). “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Monster Theory Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 3-25. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone. Derrida, Jacques (1972). Positions, London: Athlone. Doane, Mary Ann (1999). “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine,” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 20-33. Foucault, Michel (2000). Los Anormales: Curso en el College de France (1974-1975), Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica. —— (1984). “Truth and Power,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 51-75. —— (1982). “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester, 208-228. —— (1977). Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Garber, Marjorie (1999). “Reflections,” J. M. Coetzee The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 73-84. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie (1996). “Introduction: From Wonder to Error– A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, New York: New York UP, 1-22. Grosz, Elizabeth (1996). “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freak as/at the Limit,” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, New York: New York UP, 55-68. Haraway, Donna J. (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminist in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association, 149-181. Harpham, Geoffrey G. (1982). On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature, Princeton: Princeton UP. Heinamaa, Sara (2003 a). “The Body as Instrument and as Expression,” The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 66-86. —— (2003b). Towards a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Kayser, Wolfgang (1963). The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Indiana: Indiana UP. Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia UP. Kuryluk, Ewa (1987). Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, Evanston: Northwestern UP. Langer, Monika (2003). “Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Ambiguity,” The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 87-106. Luther Adams, James (1997). “The Grotesque and Our Future,” The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, ed. James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 69-74. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968). The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston: Northwestern UP. —— (1962). Phenomenology and Perception, London: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967). The Will to Power, New York: Random. Sofia, Zoe (1999). “Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View,” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 55-68. Springer, Claudia (1999). “The Pleasure of the Interface,” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 34-54. Stacey, Jackie (1997). Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, London: Routledge. Thomson, Philip (1972). The Grotesque, London: Methuen. Wright, Thomas (1968). A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, New York: Ungar. Yates, Wilson, (1997). “An Introduction to the Grotesque: Theoretical and Theological Considerations,” The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, eds. James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1-68.
PLAYING BALL WITH GOD: BREAKING THE LAW IN BREAKING THE WAVES BECKY MCLAUGHLIN McLaughlin’s essay compares filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves to a philosophical treatise that attempts to teach us how to behave as ethical subjects. She argues that von Trier’s Bess takes up the same ethical stance as Sophocles’ Antigone, willingly making the journey into the realm of at (Gr. ruin, folly, delusion) in order to honor the man she loves. What is at stake in both von Trier’s film and Sophocles’ drama is the integrity and sacredness of the beloved’s body. In both cases, powerless, young women defy the leaders of their community, representatives of the word and/or the law, putting their own bodies on the line in order to preserve, protect, or heal the body of another. While Bess’ actions, like Antigone’s, appear to be self-destructive or mad, they cannot be reduced to the unethical or the irrational.
The Computer, the Unconscious, and the Affective Response In an interview with Stig Björkman, filmmaker Lars von Trier mentions the difficulty he encountered getting financial backing for his 1996 film, Breaking the Waves, and gives credit to a computer for the support he finally received from the European Script Fund: The readers there had been heavily criticised for their work. So to defend their activity they undertook a computer analysis of around ten of the projects they’d received. It was claimed that a computer would be able to ascertain a project’s artistic and commercial significance. And Breaking the Waves got top marks! That’s quite funny. The right ingredients were probably there: a sailor and a virgin and a romantic landscape—everything that the computer loved. (Björkman 1996: 12)
Perhaps the “right ingredients” were there, but the way von Trier mixed these ingredients received mixed reviews from human audiences. Victoria Nelson, for example, lists a number of knee-jerk responses to what she calls the film’s “paradox of warring axioms”: “Church bells ringing in heaven, how unspeakably corny! Not to mention the ‘miracle’ of Jan’s recovery, presumably as a result of Bess’ ultimate and fatal sexual adventure. Miracles
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and bells, the pastel sentimentalism of a turn-of-the-century postcard or Italian roadside shrines, an unholy alliance of 1940s Hollywood movie kitsch with organized religion—quel horror!” (Nelson 1997: 231). Although the movie generated plenty of interested viewers, it also, as Nelson remarks, “garnered a rather heated grassroots critical response that runs, ‘It’s great until the last third, which is over the top, and the ending, which is way over the top and ruins it’” (228).1 Like the unconscious, which is incapable of engaging in repression or the fear that gives rise to it, the computer responded positively to what von Trier himself calls “a curious mixture of religion and eroticism and possession” (14), a mixture that made it impossible to recruit big name actors for the leading roles. As von Trier says, “They were afraid of the nature of the film. […] The well-known actors we turned to didn’t dare put their careers on the line—for example Helena Bonham Carter pulled out of the production at the very last minute” (14). The fact that the computer loved the film’s ingredients while humans reacted negatively to them suggests something about the way the film operates on its audience and directs us toward a fruitful way of reading it. As Lacan has pointed out, the unconscious is structured like a language, but it does not indulge in the same kind of language we use in everyday interpersonal activities. Both the difference and the relationship between the two can be understood through the image of trains running along parallel tracks. One train is spoken words and the other, unconscious “thought” processes that occur at the same time as enunciated speech but function independently of it. Occasionally, one train jumps the track and collides with the other, producing what we call a slip of the tongue. While conscious thought is grounded in the realm of meaning, the unconscious has little if anything to do with meaning. What it registers, through analysis, is truth. A slip of the tongue may result in the utterance of a nonsense word, but when deciphered, this utterance may lead to a truth known only at the level of the unconscious. An astute reader of Lacan, Bruce Fink explains unconscious knowledge in this way: “The unconscious is not something one knows, but rather something that is known. What is unconscious is known unbeknownst to the ‘person’ in question: it is not something one ‘actively’, consciously grasps, but rather something which is ‘passively’ registered, inscribed, or counted. […] This kind of knowledge has no subject, nor does it need one” (Fink 1995: 23, emphasis in original). In the case of Breaking the Waves, this “unknown knowledge” was precisely the 1
I do not mean to imply that Nelson herself gives the movie a mixed review. She obviously holds the movie in high esteem.
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film’s artistic significance, a significance that was not actively or consciously ascertained but passively registered by a non-subject such as a computer. With its “paradox of warring axioms” and its “unholy alliance” of kitsch and organized religion, Breaking the Waves is a filmic slip of the tongue, and what von Trier and the computer seemed to register, which the financial backers and well-known actors did not, was something we might call the truth: that great art only comes at the price of great risk—“With every dab of paint, I risk my life,” said Cézanne—and that this movie had to be made whether careers were put on the line or not. Because the ego is always defensive, self-protective, and bent on avoiding risk, it was probably responsible for von Trier’s recruiting problems. Ultimately, however, the absence of well-known actors operated in the movie’s favor since their presence might have undercut the very thing that makes the movie work: its amateurish, home-video quality. Paradoxically, what makes the movie work is also what provokes most criticism from audiences. My film students, for example, say the movie makes them feel sea sick, and this physical effect is accompanied by an emotional affect, frustration in some cases and anger in others. Although I am no longer surprised by this kind of reaction, the first time I encountered it, I was not only surprised but dismayed. I had just seen Breaking the Waves and been deeply moved by its terrible beauty. Thus, when I asked a friend of mine whether he liked it, I was expecting to share mutual admiration for von Trier’s work. Something else happened instead. “Like it?” he snarled, his face turning an ugly red. “I hated it. It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen! Such an amateurish use of the camera. It was like watching a badly made home video!” Because the angry critique went on and on, my friend expressing a rage that hardly seemed warranted, I felt that his response called for a more critical interrogation of the film on my part. Obviously, Breaking the Waves does not elicit a mild response from its viewers, but what puzzled me was why it had excited this kind of aggressivity in someone who seldom behaves with aggressivity, why by merely mentioning the film I had become the object of an unexpected verbal attack. After a good deal of thought and several viewings, I came to the conclusion that the film was working on him in ways he was not conscious of and that one affect was masking another, more unsettling one. A brief discussion of the psychotic may shed some light on my friend’s hostile reaction. Freud uses the image of the patch to explain the origin of the psychotic delusion: “the delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world” (Freud 1979: 215). We can understand this rent as castration, the mark of the divided subject, a rent we all suffer, a rent that is
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paradoxically made by our insertion into the symbolic network as well as covered up or covered over by it via the acquisition of language. Because the psychotic is not properly sutured, however, he or she uses the delusion as a kind of substitute suture. But it is a substitute that does not work very well, for what it gives rise to is the aggressivity that accompanies “captation by the imago of the human form,” a form that Lacan argues is “invested with all the original distress resulting from the child’s intra-organic and relational discordance during the first six months, when he bears the signs […] of a physiological natal prematuration” (1977: 19). In analysis, images of the fragmented body often arise when the progress of the analytic work has brought about in the analysand a certain level of aggressive disintegration— that is, when the delusion ceases to work as a patch and the fabric falls apart. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that my friend is a psychotic but rather that his viewing of Breaking the Waves worked in the way of an analytic session, uncovering the rent (that is, castration) that we normally keep covered through repression (that is, the neurotic’s patch) and giving rise to a mild form of aggressive disintegration. Because the movie is precisely about our plight as castrated subjects, the sexual (non)relation, and what is at stake in real love (real in the Lacanian sense of the word), it creates anxiety that sometimes masquerades as rage and manifests itself as aggressivity. We might, then, read my friend’s response thus: in the face of his own cut, brought home to him at the level of the unconscious, he cut the film. For if we have learned nothing else from psychoanalysis, we have learned that the ego is not particularly creative. It responds as if only two possibilities exist, to annihilate or to be annihilated. Hence its defensive posture and my friend’s defensive gesture. To be more concrete, let us focus on the reason he stated for disliking Breaking the Waves: its amateurish, homemade-movie quality. Although the film insists on drawing attention to or exposing its filmic apparatus, this has the odd effect of making the events appear disturbingly realistic rather than fictional. Instead of allowing us the reassuring luxury of telling ourselves it is only a movie, just the work of someone’s imagination, its amateurish, homevideo quality suggests a documentation of real events that are being videotaped by a rather inept camera operator, perhaps an idle bystander who has simply been handed the camera and told to press the button. The viewer is made acutely aware of the materiality of the film through its grainy, slightly fuzzy texture, an occasional loss of focus that blurs faces and objects, and the frequent bobbing of the camera as if held by an unsteady hand. One might say the film continually shudders in order to show its audience how to respond, for as Jane Malmo points out, Aristotle used the Greek word phrittein to describe what happens to the spectator of a tragedy: “he is made
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to ‘shudder’. […] The spectator cannot help his response; his feeling overwhelms him, and in his shudder he expels what he cannot absorb” (1994: 81-82). The shudder describes von Trier’s editing style, too, for the transitions between shots are anything but smooth. They are sharp and jolting. They produce uneven seams, puckers, and wrinkles, not subtle linkages. In this respect, von Trier’s editing is reminiscent of Eisenstein’s. For Eisenstein, “the cinematic cut is like the rupturing of the cell when it splits in two. Editing is done at the point that a shot ‘bursts’—that is, when its tensions have reached their maximum expansion. The rhythm of editing in a movie should be like the explosions of an internal combustion engine” (Giannetti 2002: 159-160). Or the explosions of cresting and breaking waves. To make matters worse, von Trier’s film is a textual body upon which is imposed a number of markers or cuts in the form of glossy tableaus with chapter headings such as “Bess Gets Married” or “Life With Jan”—each of which operates like a label in a family photograph album. There is a tension, then, between the raw physicality of the film’s material substance and motion, and the picturesque but static artificiality of the tableaus. The use of these tableaus, or chapter headings, can be seen as an attempt to impose order on a life that exists somewhere beyond the normal social order, to make sense of an act that makes no rational sense, to contain something far bigger than the container. But while Nelson proposes that “[t]hese emblematic frames tell us exactly how to read the film” (1997: 229), one could argue that they successfully fail to tell us how to read the film’s central character, Bess McNeill, for she partakes of the “real,” a register that exists outside of or apart from our reality, that is, a register that “ex-sists” in the Heideggerian sense.2 Although the root meaning of the term in Greek is “standing outside of” or “standing apart from something,” says Fink, “it also came to be applied to states of mind that we would call ‘ecstatic’” (1995: 122). An example of the ecstatic overflow produced by Bess can be seen in moments when the film’s reality spills out into the viewer’s reality— moments when Bess looks directly into the camera, once sticking her tongue out as if in playful mockery of the camera operator and thus breaking one of the usual conventions of Hollywood filming by making the operator of the camera—and, by extension, the viewer—part of the diegesis. We are accustomed to seeing this sort of inclusive look when watching a porno flick, but even though von Trier says he had the Marquis de Sade’s Justine in mind 2
According to Fink, translators of Heidegger’s Being and Time first introduced the word “ex-sistence” into French: “Heidegger often played on the root meaning of the word, ‘standing outside’ or ‘stepping outside’ oneself, but also on its close connection in Greek with the root of the word for ‘existence’” (1995: 122).
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as he was directing Breaking the Waves, Bess is not Justine, and the film is not pornographic. Perhaps we would be more comfortable if it were, however, for what Bess gives us access to is not the jouissance of the idiot, as Lacan playfully refers to “organ pleasure,” but that Other jouissance in which “an ordinary object is elevated to the status of the Thing” (Fink 1995: 115). According to Lacan, this Other jouissance, generally associated with feminine jouissance, gets beyond neurosis via love. In love, one gives what one does not have—in Bess’ case, the inviolable body. Her body is obviously not inviolable, and yet she offers it as if it is. Her body suffers, and we see this suffering clearly registered when she vomits on the side of the road after giving a man a hand-job at the back of a bus; when her face is contorted in an agony of disgust, her lipstick smeared, her fancy hairdo knocked askew, and her red hot pants crumpled around her ankle as she couples with a man from the local pub; and when her small body is lacerated, bruised, and bleeding after her encounter with the sailors. Hers is not the body of O or any other S & M porn star, for it does not continue to look desirable during nor does it magically repair itself after each moment of abuse. It becomes more and more abject until, in an astonishing reversal of terms, it becomes sublime: a provincial, “feeble-minded” girl from northwest Scotland takes on the profoundly noble status of an Antigone.3 Perhaps the movie is “way over the top,” as Nelson’s viewers argue, but given the film’s subject matter, it could not have been constructed in any other way and still have managed to achieve such powerful results. What we call form and content are inextricably bound, the form giving meaning to the content, and the content echoing that meaning back via the form. Like the tension that exists between the film’s diegetic body and the tableaus that cut that body up, Bess’ body, which receives multiple and fatal stab wounds, is the stage upon which a violent battle between the word (representative of law and community) and the flesh (representative of justice and the individual) is enacted. She defies the word—“How can you love a word?” she asks the church elders—pitting it against the flesh, and so it is her body that must be mortified by the avenging “angels” aboard the ship. And while it would seem that the word wins out (one could argue that Bess’ adulterous immorality is punished by her death), the recovery of Jan’s body at the end of the film suggests otherwise, as do the bells. But of those more will be said later. Perhaps the reason many viewers find the movie so difficult to watch and such a cause of consternation is that it attempts, like a philosophical 3
Stephen Heath suggests something similar in his discussion of feminine jouissance and the God face. See his article “God, Faith and Film: Breaking the Waves,” 1998: 107.
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treatise, to teach us how to behave as ethical subjects. This is a hard lesson, one that we do not necessarily want to learn because it means giving up the familiar comfort of our symptoms, ambivalences, misrecognitions—in short, our ego defenses. According to the model of ethics proposed by Lacan, in order to assume the status of an ethical subject, we must come to be where foreign forces once dominated. We must subjectify the otherness. “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden,” said Freud, which Lacan has translated as “where the Other pulls the strings (acting as my cause), I must come into being as my own cause” (Fink 1995: xiii). It is probably safe to say that most of us have suffered at the hands of an/Other, but instead of remaining the object of external events, instead of continuing to articulate our pain from the position of object, instead of making statements such as “Something bad happened to me” or “They did this to me,” we must place ourselves in the subject position. We must say, “I was,” “I hurt,” or “I cried.” For even if we are alienated in and by a language that is not our own—in other words, even if we are castrated—there is the possibility of coming to terms with that alienation through language. By making it our own. Rather than continuing to blame the Other for whatever ails us, we can make ourselves both cause and cure. This, I would argue, is precisely what von Trier and Bess do. They remain steadfast subjects in the face of great opposition from the big Others who pull the strings. Love, Death, and At
Although von Trier says his original title was Love is Omnipresent, he might very well have called his film Another Antigone, especially given the fact that it was from Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Gertrude that he received inspiration. At first glance, comparing von Trier’s film to Sophocles’ drama may seem like comparing apples and oranges, but if we do the work of deciphering von Trier’s slip of the tongue, what emerges in the character of Bess is the same sort of ethical stance taken by Antigone. The back story to Antigone is as follows: the two sons of Oedipus have become rivals for the ruler-ship of Thebes. Eteocles, refusing to give up the throne, exiles his brother, Polyneices, who recruits a military force in Argos and leads an attack against Thebes. In the ensuing battle, the Thebans defeat the Argives, and the brothers kill each other, leaving their uncle, Creon, to rule the city. As the play opens, we learn from Antigone the fate of the two brothers: “Creon has given / An honored burial to one, to the other / Only unburied shame” (Wilkie and Hurt 1988: II: 21-23). In other words, not only has Antigone been refused the right to mourn but also Polyneices has been
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refused proper burial rites—this because, in the eyes of the state, he has become an outsider and, worse still, an outlaw. When Antigone announces to her sister that she intends to bury her brother despite Creon’s edict, which declares that anyone caught attempting to bury the traitorous dead shall be put to death, Ismene expresses grave misgivings: O think Antigone! We who are women / Should not contend with men; we who are weak / Are ruled by the stronger, so that we must obey / In this and in matters that are yet more bitter. / And so I pray the dead to pardon me / If I obey our rulers, since I must. / To be too bold in what we do is madness. (1988: II: 61-67)
Like Ismene, Bess’ mother warns Bess of the penalty breaking church law entails: “Have you any idea what it’s like to be cast out? You will have nothing, Bess. I’ve known strong men and women to wither away after being cast out, and you are not strong. You’re a feeble girl. T’would kill you, Bess!” Clearly, Antigone and Bess know well in advance the terrible fate that will follow their mad acts, and yet both women choose to act anyway. It is the radical madness of their acts that link their stories, for both women die in order to honor the men they love. To understand these stories as narratives depicting a patriarchal scene in which the “little woman” stands by her man would be a mistake, however. In both cases, to stand by one’s man is precisely a defiance of the patriarchal fathers, and given the tremendous power wielded by the patriarchy in both ancient Greek society and the isolated Presbyterian community of which Bess is a member, it is surely madness to act against its interests—a special kind of madness that Derrida associates with an “infinite ‘idea of justice’ […] irreducible in its affirmative character, in its demand of gift without exchange, without circulation, without recognition or gratitude, without economic circularity, without calculation and without rules, without reason and without rationality” (1992: 25). In this idea of justice, continues Derrida, we can recognize, “indeed accuse, identify a madness” (1992: 25). What fascinates us about Bess and commands our respect and admiration is that in defying the law, she, like Antigone, “lays bare the violence of the legal system, the juridical order itself” (1992: 33). While we are certainly chilled to the bone by the depraved brutality Bess meets with aboard the big ship, what is more disturbing still is the violence of the church, which is manifested in the stoning of Bess by the children who chase her and call her a tart, by the church elder’s refusal to give Bess aid when she lies hurt and exhausted by the church door, and by the burial rite in which she is consigned to hell. It is Bess’ idea of justice— one that operates without what the community would call reason or rationality—that finally exposes the injustice of the church. And, thus, the
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repressive church becomes the mirror image and/or the double of the vicious sailors. They are, one might say, cut of the same cloth. Although Antigone begins with death and Breaking the Waves with a wedding celebration, the joy we see in the first two “chapters” of the film soon gives way to grief when Jan is forced to return to the oil rig where he is employed. Bess reacts to his departure as if it is a death rather than a temporary separation. She seems to understand existence in the same way a child does who can make things “gone” by closing its eyes. For unless Jan’s bodily presence is before her, it really is as if he has died. Bess’ only comforts in the days that follow his departure are a small transistor radio and a calendar on which she marks off the days until his return—two objects that function as relics and/or the remaining fragments of a beloved but dead body. We know these objects are not simply reminders but remainders when the calendar turns up missing and Bess accuses Dodo of having stolen it. Because of the extremity of her agitation over the missing calendar, she might as well be accusing Dodo of having robbed Jan’s grave and stolen his bones. And it is through her agitation that we come to understand how Bess comprehends certain abstractions such as the passage of time, for her reaction to the loss of the calendar suggests that unless she finds the particular calendar on which the days have been marked off, she will have to begin again from day one. That is to say, the marks Bess makes on the calendar have, for her, the magical effect of canceling out the days that intervene between the present and future, and if the calendar is lost, then so too are the cancelled-out days. In short, one calendar cannot substitute for another. Appropriately enough, the cross-like marks Bess makes on the calendar are different from the X’s one might expect to see, and they are placed beside the numbers, not through them. The calendar resembles nothing, then, if not a graveyard. Each day of Jan’s absence is a “dead” day, registered by Bess’ own grave marker. When Dodo finally retrieves the missing calendar, we watch as Bess puts the ripped pieces together again, an act that will later be repeated when she attempts to put Jan back together again. We also learn in this scene that after Bess’ brother died, Bess had been institutionalized. The implication is that her reaction to Jan’s absence is the same as her reaction to her brother’s death. In both cases, she has been forbidden to mourn because any sort of emotion, affect, or excess is frowned upon by the community. Thus, we see emerge one of the central parallels between Antigone and Bess: both have been forbidden to mourn the loss of a brother, and so, figuratively speaking, both brothers remain unburied and continue to haunt the living. Once the connection is established between Bess’ behavior at the loss of her brother and the departure of Jan, we realize that Jan has come to stand in for Bess’
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unmourned and thus “unburied” brother, especially after Jan’s body has been paralyzed—that is, once he comes to occupy the marginal space between two deaths. Like Polyneices, who is biologically dead but symbolically alive, Jan is biologically alive but symbolically dead, still breathing but hardly able to participate in the institutions that make up the symbolic universe we occupy. And it is into this marginal space between two deaths, what the ancient Greeks call at, that Antigone and Bess must go in order to honor the dead. Part of what is at stake for Antigone is the integrity of her brother’s body. As long as it lies unburied outside the city gates, it is, in the words of the blind prophet Tiresias, a mangled corpse “[h]allowed with funeral rites by dogs or beasts / Or birds who bear the all-polluting stench / To every city having hearth or altar” (1988: II: 1012-1014). Or, as Antigone remarks, “his wretched body / Shall lie unmourned, unwept, unsepulchered. / Sweet will he seem to the vultures when they find him, / A welcome feast that they are eager for” (1988: II: 27-30). The same is at stake for Bess. In all of the scenes showing Bess and Jan interacting, the focus is on their bodies, not their conversation. This is also true of the scenes showing Jan’s interaction with his male friends. For example, just prior to the scene in which Jan’s accident occurs, he and his friends on the oil rig have been in the shower room, listening to music and frolicking about in the nude, playing the silly but obviously pleasurable games men play in that situation and generally reveling in their bodies. As they pass a joint around, the transistor radio they are listening to continually falls off the narrow shelf on which it has been placed, leading one of the men to hurl it into a shower stall. In the scene that follows, an explosion causes a heavy piece of equipment to strike Jan’s head. Although he is taken by helicopter to a hospital and operated on immediately, the surgeons are not successful in their efforts to repair his body, and we soon learn that not only is he completely paralyzed but also, as his condition deteriorates, incapable of speech. Thus we shift rapidly from a scene that foregrounds the body to a scene that grounds the body, grounds it in the sense of holding it hostage. When the radio breaks, the music stops. And why does the radio break? Because the music is simply too big. After Jan’s accident, the body takes on even greater importance, its centrality to this particular set of human relations becoming painfully clear on two occasions: first, when Jan asks Bess not to wear the dress he bought for her but to wear something loose that doesn’t show off her figure. As he explains to her, it is too painful to be able to see her body but not be able to make love. Second, when Jan’s friends come to visit him in the hospital. They file into the room, oozing merriment, but when they set an unopened can of beer on Jan’s bedside tray and he makes no move to take it, they realize that their friend has lost the use of his limbs. Immediately, they come
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to his rescue, opening the beer and holding it to his lips, but, to everyone’s dismay, the frothy liquid spills down his chin and disappears inside the stiff plastic collar supporting his neck. This visit comes to a hasty conclusion when Jan says, “I’m not really supposed to have visitors.” The relief at being let off the hook is palpable; his friends leave the room as if fleeing for their lives. And so the stage is set for what will be seen as Jan’s “sick” or perverted request. “I’m finished, Bess,” he tells her abruptly. Again, the implication is that the body is of primary importance. If he cannot make love to his wife or raise a beer can to his lips, he is as good as dead. Out of concern for Bess’ happiness, then, he makes the following suggestion: “You could take a lover without anybody noticing, but you can’t divorce me. They’d never let you.” The “they” he refers to here is the group of church elders who make all of the important decisions for the members of the community and who, in fact, must be petitioned for permission to marry. “Can you tell us what matrimony is?” they ask Bess. And, then, because Jan is an outsider, they ask a follow-up question: “What have the outsiders brought us of value?” Bess replies without hesitation, “Their music.” To the elders, this may sound like an innocent enough response, but what they fail to understand is the relationship between making music and making love—both of which are means of ecstatic transport for Bess and both of which she is willing to die for. Because Jan’s music is, to put it crudely, in his balls (“He is a great lover,” she tells Dr. Richardson), Bess makes waves in order to keep the waves (that is, sound waves and orgastic waves) breaking.4 Despite the fact that Jan cannot make love and the church elders will never grant her a divorce, Bess violently rejects Jan’s suggestion. So Jan changes his tactics but not his ultimate goal, which is to find a sexual outlet for his young wife. The next time Bess comes to visit, he begins making the case in this way: “Love is a powerful thing, isn’t it?” Bess seems to recognize this as a rhetorical question that will be used to make an argument for something she does not want, but she cannot disagree with the initial premise, and so she nods mutely. Undeterred by her silence, Jan forges on: “If I die, it will be because love cannot keep me alive. But I can hardly remember what it’s like to make love, and if I forget that, then I’ll die.” After pausing to allow Bess to digest what he has said, he continues. “Remember our telephone conversation? We made love without being together. I want you to find a man to make love to and then come back here and tell me about it.” “I can’t,” says Bess quite simply. But when she says, “I can’t,” we are not to 4
Stephen Heath argues that von Trier’s title “finds one prime meaning here, picking up conventional descriptions of female orgasm as waves breaking” (1998: 97).
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interpret this as “I won’t,” for that would suggest obstinacy. The point is this: although Jan was able to “make love without being together” because he understands fantasy and the metaphorical nature of language, Bess does not. In fact, during the scene to which Jan refers, Bess maintains throughout the conversation a wide-eyed, child-like expression, which suggests a sort of disbelief or amazement at the disembodied voice she hears through the telephone receiver. “I can hear you breathing,” she says. “Can you hear me?” For Bess, the question lurking behind this rather simple one is much more complex: how can Jan be absent and present at the same time? And so when Jan argues that in making love to another man Bess will be making love to her husband, it sounds to her like a contradiction in terms. “I love you,” she says. “I don’t love some other man.” It is not until Jan convinces her that he wants her to do this for his sake and not for hers that she is willing to consider the proposal. “This morning,” says Jan, “when I told you to get a lover, it wasn’t for your sake. It was for my sake. ‘Cause I don’t want to die. I’m afraid’.” We know this is a specious argument because in an earlier scene Jan had attempted to commit suicide. He is not afraid of his own death; what he fears is that Bess will become, as he has, one of the living dead if her sexuality (her music) is allowed to wither and die. While Bess’ first attempt to do Jan’s bidding is unsuccessful, the scene depicting this attempt prepares us for the scene in which Bess tries rather awkwardly to narrate a sexual fantasy for Jan. Since Dr. Richardson is at hand, connected to Jan’s body via the surgery he has performed, it is not surprising that Bess would choose him as the object of her first “adulterous” foray. In this scene, Bess is dancing to an Elton John song while Dr. Richardson sits and watches. A moment passes in which the music blares, and then Dr. Richardson says, “Bess, stop dancing and talk to me.” Because she appears to ignore him, he says again but this time more urgently, “Bess, talk to me.” The emphasis is on the word “talk.” Finally, she registers his request, replying, “Give me five minutes,” and disappears into an adjoining room. When Dr. Richardson appears in the doorway, he finds Bess lying on the bed completely naked. She smiles pleasantly at him and whispers, “You can touch me now. You can have me now.” Dancing to music, one body touching another, one body “having” another: this is Bess’ version of talking. The fact that she and Dr. Richardson do not actually make love presents a difficulty when Bess tries to narrate a sex scene, for she cannot use words that have no connection to a real bodily experience. “I’m lying on my back, all naked,” she tells Jan. Then she pauses as if struggling to think of what might come next in the narrative. Each statement is followed by a similar pause, an occasional “uhm” of delay, and the most simple of coordinating conjunctions: “And he comes in and he sees me… and he kisses my
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breasts… and he enters me… and he’s making love to me—gently… he’s coming.” And thus, as the film progresses, we see that Bess understands Jan’s request in terms rather different from those in which he has made it. When Jan says he does not want to die, he is speaking metaphorically, but Bess interprets his words literally. Bess participates in sexual acts with the same conviction that those who believe in transubstantiation eat the communion wafer. It is not a symbolic gesture, nor is it one that operates in the field of the imaginary. When she has sex with other men, she is not imagining Jan in their place as one might in sexual fantasy. Nor is she able to substitute word for act via (sexual) narrative. For Bess, each sexual encounter is the same as taping one piece of the torn calendar to another. In other words, for Bess, no substitutions are possible. Given the repressive nature of the community to which she belongs, it comes as no surprise that Bess is soon banned from the church and her mother’s home because of what the elders perceive to be immoral sex acts on her part. After she has made her first visit to the big ship and been frightened by the brutality of the sailors, she hurries to the church, where she hopes to find comfort. Instead, she finds one of the male elders preaching a doctrine she cannot accept: “there is only one way for us, sinners that we are, to achieve perfection in the eyes of God: through unconditional love for the word that is written, through unconditional love for the law.” “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” says Bess. “You cannot love words. You cannot be in love with a word. You can love another human being. That’s perfection.” As soon as the church fathers recover from their surprise at hearing Bess speak, they turn her out of the church, saying, “No woman speaks here.” This scene makes it clear to Bess that the church is not her ally, and so she inserts her body where the church inserts the word. Although von Trier labels the final chapter of the film “Bess’ Sacrifice,” her return to the big ship must be seen as what Slavoj i ek calls a “feminine act” rather than a sacrifice, for the sacrifice remains directed at the Other, its question the anxiety-producing “Che vuoi?” or “What does the Other want of me?” According to i ek, “every act worthy of this name is ‘mad’ in the sense of radical unaccountability: by means of it, I put at stake everything, including myself, my symbolic identity” (1992: 44). As Bess is ferried out to the big ship for the second time, she is no longer operating within the economy of the church, no longer trying to be good, no longer making bargains with God. Instead, she is responding to what Malmo calls the Justice that comes from Dike: “As the female deity who orders the life of the world, Dike is the way of all nature, the pulse and rhythm of the universe. The law of Dike is the law of destiny, coming before even the law of the gods” (1997:
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154). Like Antigone, who loves her brother because of his radical singularity, Bess loves Jan because Jan is Jan. What Bess loves is the thing that is in Jan more than Jan, the object small a, which has no content but around which identity circulates. This is why Bess loves Jan whether he is fully or partially paralyzed, mute, “sick,” or perverse. This is why Bess replies, “I love you no matter what is in your head,” when Jan writes in unsteady letters, “Let me die. I’m evil in head.” As Malmo says of Antigone, It is this incarnate uniqueness that Antigone addresses when she calls Polynices, “Kasigneton kara”—“beloved head, beloved face of my brother.” In its cherished physicality, its one-and-only-ness of bone, skin, and expression, the body, but most of all the face, confronts us with the truth of how the ethical demand, the inescapable summons of Dike, comes not from some law of universality or logos, but from the call of a unique other and from the law of desire. (1997: 155)
Surely we can hear Bess echoing Antigone’s “Kasigneton kara” as she makes the journey into at, from which she returns the mangled corpse that Sophocles’ blind prophet describes as hallowed with funeral rites by dogs or beasts, both of which are appropriate terms for the men aboard the ship who kill her and the men of the church who consign her to hell as they lower a coffin full of sand into the ground. Bells, Balls, and Miracles bell, v.t.; belled, pt., pp.; belling, ppr. to attach a bell or bells to; to furnish or equip with a bell or bells. to bell the cat; to undertake a hazardous task: from the fable of the mice resolving to put a bell on the cat, to guard them against his attack. bell, v.i.; [ME. belle, from AS. bellan, to roar.] to call or make a peculiar sound, as that of the deer in the rutting season. The wild buck bells from ferny brake. (Sir Walter Scott) Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary
After Jan has buried Bess at sea, which is certainly a more appropriate resting place for her body than the church yard, he is roused from sleep by an excited friend who pulls him onto the deck of the ship and points skyward. There, they and we see a giant pair of bells ringing Bess’ soul into heaven—at least, that is how some viewers understand this final image. If we return to the
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beginning of the film, however, another way of understanding the bells emerges. When Bess and Jan are exiting the church after their marriage ceremony, one of Jan’s friends looks at the minister expectantly and says, “Ring the bells, then!” “Our church has no bells,” replies the minister as the camera focuses on the empty bell tower. This needs emphasis: there is a bell tower with no bells, as if at one time the bells had been there but had been removed for some mysterious reason. Shortly after this exchange between Jan’s friend and the minister, the subject of bells comes up a second time, and Bess says to Jan in all the rapture of new love, “Let’s put the bells back again.” And for a second time the camera focuses on the empty bell tower. Consequently, when a pair of bells appears in the sky at the very end of the movie, we realize that the discussion of bells (the word) and the actual appearance of bells (the thing) are the framing moments of the film and that this is what the movie has been about all along: putting the bells back, “belling” the body. If the empty bell tower represents castration, the two swinging bells suspended in the heavens bellowing out their joyful noise like a deer in rutting season are the lost balls. And what do bells do, after all? They call the faithful to come. Bibliography Björkman, Stig (1996). “Naked Miracles,” Sight and Sound, trans. Alexander Keiller, Oct. 1996, 11-14. Derrida, Jacques (1992). “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, New York: Routledge, 3-67. Fink, Bruce (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton: Princeton UP. Freud, Sigmund (1979). “Neurosis and Psychosis,” On Psychopathology, trans. James Strachey, New York: Penguin, 209-218. Giannetti, Louis (2002). Understanding Movies, 9th ed, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Heath, Stephen (1998). “God, Faith and Film: Breaking the Waves,” Literature and Theology, 12: 1, 93-107. Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: W. W. Norton. Malmo, Jane (1997). “The Jouissance of Justice,” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, 1, 153-158.
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—— (1994). “Towards a Limitless Love: From Symptom to Sinthôme in Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture / Theory / Politics, 23, 81-95. Nelson, Victoria (1997). “The New Expressionism: Why the Bells Ring in Breaking the Waves,” Salmagundi, 116-117, 228-237. Sophocles (1988). Antigone, trans. Theodore Howard Banks, Literature of the Western World, ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt, 2nd ed., 2 vols, New York: Macmillan.
i ek, Slavoj (1992). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out, New York: Routledge.
POST-TEXTUAL ETHICS: FOUCAULT’S RHETORICAL WILL STUART J. MURRAY In this essay, Murray argues for a concept of will that underwrites ethical behaviour, thereby challenging the view that ethics is the domain of an altogether free and rational subject. He begins with a reading of Descartes, whom we usually expect to align ethics with reason, but Murray sets out to demonstrate that even in Descartes a self-recursive and errant will underlies rationality. Murray deploys this notion of the will to help understand Foucault’s discussion of free speech or parrhesia, and argues that it is here that a rational and textual ethics gives way to an ethics (or ethos) founded in errancy, rhetoric, and a style of life.
This essay challenges the view that ethics is the exclusive domain of a free and rational Cartesian subject, a subject whose ethical choices are believed to proceed from knowledge and truth. It also begins to imagine how we might discuss ethics without resorting to theism and humanism—those foundational, grand narratives upon which a traditional view of ethics relies. I turn to the late work of Michel Foucault, who argues that ethical life relies on the kind of relations that obtain between subjects, and foremost in the very relation I have to myself. Foucault’s ethics is often summed up as a nonprescriptive and non-universalizable “care of the self.” And yet, what it is to be a “self” in this instance shares little with Cartesian subjectivity as it is typically formulated; I argue, rather, that the ethical self is a particular modulation of the will—a will which cannot be said to proceed on the basis of knowledge and truth. At issue in Foucault’s “care of the self” is the self’s relation to itself (“un rapport à soi”), and moreover, in that self’s capacity to stylize a life for itself, to create new relations, new styles of life. The self–self relation is thus both aesthetic and ascetic (from askesis)—literally, an exercise, a manner of work on the self. In this view, the self strives to be free to refuse those entrenched identities by which it is defined, and through which it achieves social recognition and political intelligibility. How, Foucault asked, can the self “get free of itself [se déprendre de soi-même]” (1985: 8)? As a provisional answer, the self must become a work of art, it must work to break free from the norms within which this self is inscribed and made viable
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(literally, liveable), and open itself to the possibility for becoming otherwise. This is not a purely rational endeavour; it is an injunction to become something new, something perhaps not yet imagined or imaginable, ultimately in the effort to reshape social and political institutions through a care of the self. As a way into the wilful dimension of ethical life, consider the following example offered by Foucault. In 1979, Foucault wrote a series of controversial journalistic essays discussing the events of the Iranian Revolution in which the secularist and post-colonial Shah was overthrown and replaced by a religious leader, the Ayatollah. In an essay titled “Is It Useless to Revolt?” Foucault reflects on the act of revolt itself. His description is fascinating. For the man who revolts, he writes, “there is no explanation”; “his action is necessarily a tearing that breaks the threads of history and its long chain of reasons” (1981: 5). It is thus impossible to answer the question Foucault poses in his title—is it useless to revolt?— because this would import a kind of reason that makes no sense to the one who revolts. Foucault argues that revolt is not a choice based on the strategies or calculations of a rational, sovereign subject; the “I” does not revolt with epistemic certitude, but through a powerful will to be otherwise. Revolt is the promise of something to come, a future possibility, “that moment,” Foucault writes, “when life will no longer barter itself” (1981: 5). Unsurprisingly, we find religious themes operating here: “the promises of the beyond, the return of time, the waiting for the saviour or the empire of the last days, [and] the indisputable reign of good.” Taking up a religious rhetoric, then, the one who revolts is “‘outside of history’ as well as in it” (1981: 6). So, while from the outside the revolution is an historical event, its life-force or manner of being lived also exceeds or transcends history while allowing for historical rupture. The “I” is located outside of history, but also inside: through its actions, the “I” suspends chronos in a moment of kairos1—lending the “I” a significance greater than history or reason can contain. The revolt is a speech act in which the biological life of the body is risked, but through its self-sacrifice, the “I” risks a life symbolically greater than itself, face-to-face with the uncertainty of death, projecting itself into a future of uncertain possibility, reason suspended indefinitely. The “I” goes forth without epistemic certitude, heeding the call despite overwhelming odds, to bring about an uncertain and as yet inchoate possibility, spurred on by a life and a will that seem to come from the promised future. 1 Kairos is a Greek term which roughly means the opportune or highly propitious moment for the occurrence of an event—a sacred break into or rupture of profane chronology.
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In this brief depiction of revolt, what is at stake is the subject’s capacity to craft for herself a new subjectivity, to make for herself a new and better life. Significantly, this work on the self is uncertain, groping; it does not proceed according to a system of categorical knowledge. The relation she has to herself—what Foucault calls a “self-stylizing”—is an inevitably errant relation, marked by an insuperable opacity. Errancy is not simply the mistake or error that results from uncertain knowledge or a lack of truth, but it is an erratic self-stylizing, a wandering, a becoming. Indeed, I shall argue that such errancy informs our ethical life and the kind of will that will inform this life as it is lived in the public sphere. This chapter has three sections. First, I turn to Descartes because he serves as a kind of modern touchstone for rational subjectivity, setting the conditions for truth and knowledge as that which is “perceived clearly and distinctly” or “by the natural light of reason.”2 It is precisely this foundation that I am challenging here, particularly insofar as ethical life is concerned. Thus, rather than shoring up a subject of truth and knowledge, my reading of Descartes excavates another mode of subjectivity that lies buried in his work. I am calling this the subject of will—a will that is decidedly neither cognitive nor conceptual, an embodied will that is marked by errancy and a fundamental unknowingness. Second, I turn to a discussion of Foucault on the virtue of free speech or “parrhesia.” Here my concept of will is cast as properly rhetorical: this is a problem of the speaking subject whose capacity to tell the truth has a wilful dimension, and whose narrative “I” along with the language it speaks must fall under scrutiny. Foucault demonstrates that the ethical subject is not a true “subject” in the Cartesian sense, not a subject who would self-knowingly stand in possession of its own will, but the errant modulation of will itself. Thus, Foucault suggests a very different model for ethics—a model which does not presume a subject, but which relies on a form of will that ultimately unseats our comfortable subjectivity. Third, my discussion of “ethical life” concludes by briefly returning to the question of life itself: what kind of relation prevails between life and the possibility of truth and error? If error or errancy is decisive for the life of the subject as she crafts for herself a new subjectivity, how will we now understand self-knowledge, and what kind of rhetorical or communicative practices will foster an ethical life? To begin, I turn to a reading of Descartes on the subject of will, and I shall argue that despite his best efforts to shore up a cognitive subject of 2
I am referring here to Descartes’ lumen naturale, along with his famous dictum: omne illus verum est, quod clare et distincte percipitur.
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knowledge, the Cartesian subject is nevertheless underwritten by a will that is neither cognitive nor conceptual. Here in Descartes I propose to demonstrate a lesson that might have been derived more readily from Schopenhauer (1966)3 or from Nietzsche (1967)—an unruly and intransigent will that is not wholly in the subject’s control—a will that has theoretical implications for the project of truth and for the place of the human subject within this project. A Cartesian Kind of Error In his famous Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes employs a method of hyperbolic doubt as a kind of reality testing. We are called to critically examine our everyday belief systems by putting out of play our epistemological prejudices and habits—in effect, we must submit what we ordinarily hold as true to a kind of proto-phenomenological epoché. We must suspend belief. Why? Because we have each been mistaken, have held false opinions to be true, and, given such human error, Descartes is led to ask: how can we know what we know, and know it with certainty?4 Undoubtedly, we are familiar with the epochal shift in subjectivity that Descartes is said to inaugurate. Descartes proposes that the philosophical subject is a kind of shorthand for a sovereign, rational, autonomous, and supposedly free-thinking stuff. But in an Enlightenment world, freed from the regular intervention of a Mediaeval God, the existence of evil, human error, and illusion are no longer theological problems to be answered by theogony or faith. Effectively, with the Enlightenment, the problem of error has become a human problem, cast in human terms. Descartes reasons that God could have allowed (or even have caused) human error and illusion, but he resorts to the fiction of the evil genius to explain this possibility. The evil 3
Schopenhauer writes: “It is therefore the will that gives consciousness unity and holds all its representations and ideas together, accompanying them, as it were, like a continuous ground-bass. Without it the intellect would have no more unity of consciousness than has a mirror, in which now one thing now another presents itself in succession, or at most only as much as a convex mirror has, whose rays converge at an imaginary point behind its surface” (1966: 140). 4 Although beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth mentioning Descartes’ famous distinction between morale par provision and morale definitive—provisional morality and definitive morality. Until such time as a definitive morality could be established textually, Descartes argued, a provisional morality would have to suffice to guide human behaviour. Curiously, however, Descartes believed that we would not have long to wait, suggesting that a definitive morality would be established—textually codified, as it were—by the end of his lifetime. Here we can glimpse Descartes’ faith not just in human reason, but in the power of the text itself.
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genius here acts as a rhetorical extension of what God would be, if He were evil. There is just one problem, however: there is still no way for humans to know with certainty that God is not the evil genius, which has the same rhetorical effect—God might just as well be an evil genius.5 The cloud of unknowing results in the same existential doubt. After all, what response is there to a god whose justification and whose grace rely on the caprice of divine election? This is a god to whom we cannot appeal with any certainty to guarantee our salvation. This crisis was, arguably, one great impetus toward modern secularism, in which human scientific progress replaces the rhetorical function of Christian eschatology. In response to a god who does as he or she wills, humans constructed a counter-world of elementary rationality and manipulability—and they found some comfort in such a regular world. Was this epochal shift—this human self-assertion—was this an assertion of human reason? Or was it an assertion of a human will to power, to wrest power from the gods? The decidedly modern distinction here between human will and human reason or knowledge is not obvious, and I wish to muddy this distinction somewhat because we take it too much for granted. In Descartes, the relation between will and reason lacks strategic clarity, as I shall argue below. What is the relation between knowledge and will? Is this relation a form of knowledge or is it a form of will?6 Perhaps it is neither; but which has the upper hand? And more importantly, where can we locate the subject here, if at all? Philosophy tends to favour a discussion of knowledge as the true “first philosophy,” and it frequently ignores questions of the will when grappling with Descartes. Philosophers leave the will to those rogues, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, preserving for themselves a kingdom of pure reason, free from the exercise of will. Thus we learn almost as a philosophical axiom that Descartes aligns the “I” with the res cogitans, a “thinking thing” or “thinking stuff.” But what does it mean to be a thing that thinks? In Meditation Two Descartes answers directly: “A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses” (1993: 20). But these myriad activities will soon become overly expansive, messy, and too imprecise. By Meditation Four, it is the body, along with its will and its affects, that has become the source of all error—a demonization of the will that goes hand in hand with the exaltation of reason into Truth. And at first blush, this characterization seems to fit well into Descartes’ famous mind– 5
For the argument in this paragraph I am indebted to Hans Blumenberg. Cf. Blumenberg, 1985: 184. 6 The same link was sought for the relation between mind and body, for Descartes ultimately situated in the famous question-begging pineal gland.
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body dualism, where an unextended thinking stuff (res cogitans) is paired with a wholly other, extended stuff (res extensa). But matters soon become less discrete. Returning to the question of truth and error, not surprisingly, here the mind appears to become the source of all truth for Descartes, while the body, along with its messy volitions and affects, the source of all error. The one is described as good and godlike, while the other is, arguably, cast as evil. Let us suspend our moral judgment for a moment and look at the fascinating argument as Descartes presents it, for his language is telling. Descartes claims that God does not wish to deceive me; he writes, “[God] assuredly has not given me the sort of faculty with which I could ever make a mistake, when I use it properly” (1993: 36). But this is a circular argument, to be sure, and Descartes further complicates matters by introducing normative constraints—I must use my faculties “properly,” which suggests yet another, higher, reason to guide my reason. What, then, is the source of human error? Given Descartes’ strict mind–body dualism, we might quickly move to indict the wilful body, but matters are not so simple because Descartes claims that the power of willing is also a power he “got from God.” Consequently, our will is also “perfect in its kind” and, “taken by itself, [not] the cause of my errors” (1993: 39). The manner in which the will maps onto the body is therefore not straightforward. And thus far we can only be clear that the will is not simply and unilaterally the source of human error. To repeat: what, then, is the source of human error? Descartes’ answer is perplexing and bears some consideration. He writes: [My errors] are owing simply to the fact that, since the will extends further than the intellect, I do not contain the will within the same boundaries; rather, I also extend [the will] to things I do not understand. Because the will is indifferent in regards to such matters, it easily turns away from the true and the good; and in this way I am deceived and I sin. (1993: 39)
Remarkably, the will is said to “extend” further than my intellect, so the will is an extended thing (res extensa), like the body—and, if we hold to a strict mind–body dualism, because the will is extended, it must be of the body. But then it seems absolutely redundant for Descartes to write that the will “extends further” than the intellect. After all, the intellect is meant to be entirely unextended, in which case we could safely assume that everything extends further than it. And in this case, all will would extend further than the intellect. But Descartes cannot allow this either, because a good will—and there is a strong moral component here—a good will is that will that intersects with the intellect. Indeed, he argues that a good will is “contained” by the intellect—but this intellectual “container” is also a perplexing
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metaphor for what is again meant to be entirely unextended.7 How can what is unextended “contain” anything at all? At times, the will seems to mediate between the mind and the body, somehow able to intersect with each while being neither one nor the other fully. And sometimes the will seems foundational; for instance, at the beginning of the meditations, when Descartes performs a kind of epoché which is none other than a sovereign act of will—“Descartes” himself willing away his prejudices, his body, the dressing gown, the fire in front of which he warms himself, all empirical data, intellectually willed away in order to arrive at truth. Once these distractions are stripped away (or so the argument goes), Descartes hopes to prove that the intellect stands as foundational or initself, and as such a foundation, it is supposedly free from error and illusion. But ironically, he can only arrive at the certainty of knowledge through an act of will—an act of will that restrains that selfsame will, that wills itself to be contained by reason, a will willing away the will in a gesture that is, arguably, more self-recursive and more originary than the self-reflexive cogito and its error-free reason. Descartes writes: “for as often as I restrain my will when I make judgments, so that [my will] extends only to those matters that the intellect clearly and distinctly discloses to it, it plainly cannot 7
A similar discussion arises in Descartes’ Discourse on Method, in which he discusses the ways we know with certainty that other men are conscious minds and not mere bodies or automata. There are two ways: the first is the human capacity for language and the second relies on “reason” as a kind of Aristotelian organ-izing soul. Of this second, “organic” test for reason, Descartes writes: although […] machines might execute many things with equal or perhaps greater perfection than any of us, they would, without doubt, fail in certain others from which it could be discovered that they did not act from knowledge, but solely from the disposition of their organs: for while reason is an universal instrument that is alike available on every occasion, these organs, on the contrary, need a particular arrangement for each particular action; whence it must be morally impossible that there should exist in any machine a diversity of organs sufficient to enable it to act in all the occurences [sic] of life, in the way in which our reason enables us to act (1992: 42–43; emphasis added).
“Acting from knowledge” depends on a kind of “particular arrangement” or proper proportionality of the organs, directed by the organizing soul—an Aristotelian characterization. For Descartes, this arrangement has a moral valence: the soul must order or “contain” the body’s deviant and discordant organs. (Foucault will depict such morality as imprisonment: “the soul is the prison of the body” [1979: 30].) Although the word “will” is not used here, Descartes is concerned with the will as the moral interface between an organizing soul and organized body, where the failure to organize correctly is the result of a weak will, and a weak will the source of moral turpitude.
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happen that I err” (1993: 41–42). The grammatical “I” operating in Descartes’ sentence is rhetorically ambivalent, for it is unclear who “I” am who practises self-restraint in order to make judgments, or who judges in order to practise restraint. We must wonder who the narrative “I” indexes here—is it Descartes or his reader, and do we imagine that it is clearly “his,” Descartes’, “I” that is operating, or “my,” the reader’s, “I,” both self-evident and able to act without any further ado, as it were; or, on the contrary, is the “I” spectral, futural, neither uniquely “his” nor “mine,” but who acts in such a way that the “I” is woven into a rich tapestry of all it will become and whose wisdom is worldly, and not quite so clear, distinct, or plain? Is there an ethical injunction in these lines? The intellect issues a “restraining order,” yes, but by what (or whose) authority? We might say by the authority of what is “clear” and “distinct,” in the effort at full disclosure, perhaps, but “I” would need to know clearly and distinctly in advance in order to guide my restraint so that, in a circular logic that defies temporality, finally, “I” could be said to know clearly and distinctly. For both will and intellect there is a spectral “not-yet” which frustrates the primacy of both, unveiling a necessary kind of faith at work whenever I think, I am. Descartes attempts to set universal truth-conditions for the “I’s” knowledge, apparently insulating himself from critique, since in order for us to perceive the truth or falsity of Descartes’ own statement, the “I” would nevertheless need to performatively meet these very truth-conditions if it is to guarantee the certainty of its knowledge. But who this “I” is who acts is not altogether clear. Reading Descartes rhetorically, we find a narrative subject at work—a narrative subject of will who threatens the certainty of the Cartesian mind. This “I” is not simply and unequivocally bodily; nor is its will. Instead, we find the “I” taken up in a discourse that doubles it, returning it to itself through will, but also through Descartes’ language of command that would set forth strict truth-conditions: “I” will restrain my will, and “I” will will my will not to be “indifferent” in regard to its errors; in other words, I will will my will to be “contained” by my intellect, extending it only to those things that “I” understand. The “I” who speaks and the “I” who is spoken are not quite the same; there is a space opened up by language for becoming and for the subject’s self-stylizing of herself. This relation of the self to itself is mediated by a language that necessarily allows for multiple “I’s,” ensuring that Descartes’ truth-conditions do not command the authority of divine fiat—and that the “I” is free to refuse Descartes’ command in its multiple modes of being and becoming. Without belabouring the point too much, we might even see a proliferation of subjectivities—the “I” who issues the restraint, the “I” who restrains, and also the “I” who is restrained but who wills not to be.
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My discussion thus far suggests that Descartes was not altogether successful in “containing” the “I” intellectually, but that this “I” is also contained by a will that reflects on itself, trumping the law of reason. Moreover, the “I” is indexed through a language which has rhetorical effects, including commanding the “I,” guiding the “I,” but also providing the very means by which the “I” will be available to itself as a subject of will or of knowledge, and as a subject who is always in a mode of becoming, responding to ethical concerns. Reading Descartes rhetorically, then, we discover a multi-faceted “I” who is less concerned with answering Descartes’ truth-conditions or with the so-called truth of what exists. Instead, we find an “I” who is intimately concerned with a rhetorical how. By this how I mean the work of speech and language in general—those very terms by which the “I” is given to itself, and through which it is able to craft for itself a new subjectivity. This work also means that the subject is able to reflect upon, take up, and influence the prior and enabling conditions for the possibility of its speech, having a say in who it is who speaks, who is spoken, and how. At this point, it should be clear that the position of the subject in the relation between thinking and willing, when it is conceived as a strictly epistemological (or thinking) relation, as Descartes forcibly does, ends in an aporia—a Cartesian kind of error we have long held as truth. I have addressed Descartes because it is with him and with post-Enlightenment modernity that the will becomes problematized, forcibly thought rather than understood rhetorically, or by its effects, and its wider context. For me, it is Foucault who dramatizes the Nietzschean insight that the relation between thought and will is not an epistemological relation of truth, but a volitional (or willing) relation of the will itself as this unfolds in language. At this juncture, then, I turn to Foucault’s Berkeley lectures from the fall term of 1983, for it is here that the theory of the subject is reformulated in a particularly suggestive manner as a speaking subject whose speech has ethical implications. I hope to show that Foucault offers us—tentatively—a way out of the Cartesian aporia. Foucault and the Subject of Belief At the beginning of his lectures on the Greek virtue of parrhesia, a term which means freedom or frankness of speech, Foucault makes a very important distinction between different types of subjectivity. He wants to capture the kind of subject which haunts Descartes—the rhetorical subject of will, as I have been describing it. Foucault says:
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He immediately adds that “parrhesia, in this Greek sense, can no longer occur in our modern epistemological framework.” This might be Foucault’s challenge to us to find a speech wherein the possibility of parrhesia is not altogether foreclosed. I am especially interested in the non-epistemological framework within which such speech occurs, and with the kind of subjectivity that is associated with this speech. Foucault is talking about the coincidence between belief and truth—a coincidence that is for the Greeks not epistemological but a “verbal activity” underwritten by will. It is in part because of the will that the body is able to speak in such a way that it bears an excess, and is able to reflexively influence the conditions of its very speech. Thus, in parrhesia, this is not an epistemological relation, and the influence of the parrhesiastes on his or her own conditions of speech and intelligibility does not simply entail rational persuasion; instead, it draws on an ethics of the will, a will which strives toward future freedoms. We might say that this wilful subjectivity is “purposive”—it has purpose or aim, but a purpose that is not rigorously tied to rational intent.8 This is true because it occurs in language, which is never perfectly or exactly referential, and because the subject’s speech involves her whole attitude, her relation to the world and to others, her mode of becoming, and her “style of life.” To clarify, the parrhesiastes speaks what she believes to be true, but for this to be a true act of parrhesia, she must speak out in a rhetorical situation where her very speaking places her in danger or at risk. Usually, the audience does not want to hear what she has to say (even if that “audience” is herself), but she says it anyway, and this, Foucault suggests, is a virtue. Remarkably, Foucault insists that the act of parrhesia does not issue from a grammatical 8
I think Nietzsche is in agreement here. For him, the will is associated with the command, but in such a way that it exceeds and therefore critiques the command— through language. Nietzsche writes: “‘Willing’ is not ‘desiring,’ striving, demanding: it is distinguished from these by the affect of commanding” (1967: 353). What is commanded? It is intentional, but in a fictive and inventive intentionality, not in a rational or cognitive intention. He continues: “There is no such thing as ‘willing’, but only a willing something: one must not remove the aim from the total condition—as epistemologists do. ‘Willing’ as they understand it is as little a reality as ‘thinking’: it is a pure fiction” (1967: 353). The intentional will is thus affective, and the aim— what I am calling the “purpose”—must not be abstracted from the “total condition,” a life-condition (rather than a truth-condition) whose rational content cannot be abstracted from it perfectly.
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subject: there is no sense of a self-evident or self-perspicacious “I” operating here, nothing like a mentalistic subject typical of the Cartesian mind. “I” do not speak! And so we must not presume a pre-constituted grammatical subject. In a very important respect, the act of speaking itself is the enabling condition for the belief, for it is in the very situated act of speaking—not in the grammatical “I” or in the narrative of the speech itself—that the subject believes. We are asked to imagine that the parrhesiastes is not a rational substance who preexists her belief and who would then come to “hold” the belief, but that this belief might be said to preexist her—calling her into being in the moment that she owns it and owns it by saying it and acting on it, putting her life or reputation on the line, risking her skin, literally or metaphorically. In this sense, through this act, we can say that she is instituted as a subject, and is not a ready-made or pre-constituted source from which the belief would issue as if fully formed. The belief owns her, as it were; she does not “will to believe,” as if the will were now the apt metonym for the rational subject, as if the will would somehow also preexist the belief; she does not “will to believe” because this would presume yet another belief on the basis of which it could be said that she wills. Instead, she just believes. And it is from the belief and on its basis that she wills it, that she is a willing subject instituted by the belief, and that she wills it specifically as a belief, with temporal extendedness, the real possibility of error, as a volitional body with all its phenomenological “thickness,” and specifically not willed as a thought that would reinscribe her as a thinking substance. Again, belief takes place through an act of speaking that firmly commits the speaker to the socius, a kind of will submitted to and imbricated with the will of the community, and not the kind of free-thinking enjoyed by the subject on account of her grammatical positionality. The subject of belief is both the subject who speaks and the subject whose speech binds her through her action to what is spoken; she is subjectivated by a belief that calls forth what Merleau-Ponty calls a speaking speech (parole parlante), a belief that can be said to speak. Thus, the subject speaks herself into being by virtue of a belief that speaks, speaks through her, and in speaking, she wilfully commits herself to an often unforeseeable course of action and set of consequences. As I mentioned above, this will is self-recursive, a kind of self-stylizing or selfsubjectivation that allows for social and political commitments, but it can also foster critique and refusal, allowing some leeway for a subject to stylize herself anew, to choose other modes in which to be a subject who believes. Importantly there is no short-circuit through an independent epistemological framework. Foucault says that the parrhesiastes speaks not what she thinks is true, but what she knows is true (2001: 14). There is an
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immediacy to the truth that is expressed and felt through a bodily knowledge, by putting her body on the line, risking life and limb, risking her reputation. For Foucault belief and truth coincide in the verbal activity, but this is not just speech, plain and simple,—it is demonstrated in the style of life that the speaker leads: “In the Greek conception of parrhesia […] truth-having is guaranteed by the possession of certain moral qualities: when someone has certain moral qualities, then that is the proof that he has access to truth—and vice versa” (2001: 15). Hence, if there can be said to be a “proof” for the authenticity of the parrhesiastes, Foucault tells us it was his courage—not just a matter of the heart—le coeur—but the heart as a metonym for the lifeforce of the whole body. The speaker’s language also embodies a creative or poietic force that will influence and yield life itself. At this juncture, it is worth remarking that we have returned to a notion of life. In a rhetorical question whose formulation might easily be ascribed to Nietzsche, Foucault asks us: “Should not the whole theory of the subject be reformulated, seeing that knowledge, rather than opening onto the truth of the world, is deeply rooted in the ‘errors’ of life?” (1998: 477). The subject, then, must be reformulated in the direction of what I have called a subject of will; significantly, the will has no truck with truth or with various economies of knowledge based on truth. The will wills despite reason, without calculating the odds beforehand. The will represents a different kind of knowledge rooted, as Foucault says, in error, in the errors of life, a living errancy. Life, and its errors, are always overdetermined; and as we see with parrhesia, it is ultimately in staking one’s life, through an act of will that is incalculable, that we have some kind of guarantee for what will count as truth or error. In the next and concluding section, I shall elucidate the concept of life as that ultimate value which is the will’s own, drawing out the implications for a “reformulated” subjectivity. Conclusion: Life’s Errors I have been arguing for a notion of error that is not epistemological, an error that is not simply a rational or cognitive mistake. Error implies a straying or a deviation from a rule or a norm. From the Latin errare, error means to wander, exiled perhaps, from the certainty of some truth, from the certainty of knowing that one knows. It takes a certain act of will to be able to sustain a condition of unknowing. And if we are straying or deviating from a rule or a norm that will circumscribe the intelligibility of who we are as subjects, it also takes a certain courage to risk being otherwise than what one is supposed to be. Such error or errancy informs the life of the self—a self who will be
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errant in her wilful self-stylizing, her errancy the sign of her very livingness. We might see here how the rhetorical expression of life, through the will, it not a mere linguistic representation; instead, our living speech is overdetermined by a life-force, and participates directly in this original lifeforce or vitalism. It is this very life that the parrhesiastes places at stake (or at risk) in her speech, and which is mobilized as the self stylizes itself in new directions. In this sense of the term, we can imagine “error” as a kind of political activism, a productive activity, a mode in which the “I” refuses to be governed by a certain set of norms. To be in error, in this sense, would be to refuse the terms of truth by risking one’s life, by daring to live one’s life otherwise. This would not amount to mere resistance, not simple disobedience, but outright refusal of the very terms through which intelligibility and truth are bestowed, and social and political recognition are granted. There are many examples of such error: political dissidents and revolutionaries are but the extremes. I began with the example of the one who revolts. We glimpsed a subject who is not merely engaged in a local resistance, but who is practising a larger refusal of the way he is governed, a refusal of the kind of life he is able to lead, with a view toward a new and better life. So, what is at risk in the way one chooses to live—and in one’s ethical choices—relies on the value of life itself. This life is refracted, if you will, through the will—a will and a life that exceed the rational limits we might impose on them. Here we open instead onto an ethical domain that is a mode of rhetorical invention, of creation in speech and in language. The will opens onto and creates future possibilities of being and of being otherwise. Foucault conceives this as an act of “liberation”—a word he repeats in many contexts, and with deadly seriousness. The kind of “subject” I have been glossing is a subject of will, not a subject who is produced discursively or textually, not a Cartesian subject, but a self whose ethical relation to itself is ever in question—a self that is not unilaterally formed by traditional grand narratives. This is a self who strives but who has not yet arrived, who has not yet achieved an identity in these terms, and who cannot be captured as a piece of knowledge or as truth. It is unquestionably a volitional and embodied self whose life exceeds it, making it a life worth living, worth preserving, worth fighting for, and even worth sacrificing. To ask, “who wills?” or “who is ethical?” or even “what is ethical?” is to ask the wrong question in the wrong way; such an approach would re-install a subjective “who” who would all too gladly be the bearer of its will and who would oversee its ethical projects. We must instead learn the terms by which to ask the more important—and critical—question of how I shall live an ethical life. And this kind of questioning is vital; it cannot be
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answered in advance, nor can it be rendered into prescriptive ethical codes. I hope I have begun here to suggest the work of a somewhat new paradigm for ethical subjectivity—one that continues to value self-knowledge, and one that also considers the knowledge I have of myself as essential in my relations to others and for my ethical comportment in general. Yet, the knowledge I have of myself is also a relation of will: it is not an epistemological certitude: it is embodied, it is marked by life’s errancy, and it bears a certain opacity to itself. While there is a robust philosophical tradition that looks upon the language of rhetoric, literature, and the other arts with grave suspicion, I think the argument must be made time and again that philosophy does not have the last say on who I am. I must also examine those ways that my being is otherwise communicable or remains incommunicable altogether; I must acknowledge those ways in which I exceed my iterability, and how this itself might yield a more productive model for subjectivity and subjective life in the contemporary scene. If I am to know myself, to somehow answer the question, “Who am I?”, I will therefore need to account for the very conditions under which I am able to say who I am; and, if I have begun to inquire into these conditions of being, then I have begun an ethical project in which new ways of being, new freedoms, and new possibilities for my life— and our life together—can be conceived. Bibliography Blumenberg, Hans (1985). The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Descartes, René (1992). A Discourse on Method, Meditations on the First Philosophy, Principles of Philosophy, trans. John Veitch, London: Everyman. —— (1993). Meditations on First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Distinction of the Soul from the Body are Demonstrated, third ed., trans. Donald A. Cress, Indianapolis: Hackett. Foucault, Michel (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Random. —— (1981). “Is It Useless to Revolt?” trans. James Bernauer, Philosophy & Social Criticism 8: 1, 1–9. —— (1985). The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Random.
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—— (1998). “Life: Experience and Science,” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: New Press, 465–78. —— (2001). Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967). The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1966). The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York: Dover.
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SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO: JEALOUSY AND HERMENEUTICS MICHAL PAWEL MARKOWSKI This essay considers Shakespeare’s Othello as having at its core a focus on the process of interpretation and the role it plays in human relations. Markowski emphasizes how Iago uses the word bookish in connection with the word theoric as mere prattle without practice. If jealousy is unbookish, Markowski argues, it should be seen as something which exceeds a theoretical, contemplative, disinterested and distanced view. Markowski further argues that jealousy sheds light on what is going on in the process of reading or interpretation, how the Other places us under an obligation that is at the same time a doublebind: we are forced to either distance ourselves or annihilate the Other by stripping away difference.
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! William Shakespeare From heresy, jealousy and frenzy, good Lord, deliver us. Robert Burton
The aim of this essay is to join jealousy and hermeneutics in a reciprocal relationship. Jealousy should be considered as a form of hermeneutics and hermeneutics—and this may appear somewhat out of the ordinary—as a form of jealousy. Moreover, hermeneutics is, at least in its traditional form, a peculiar form of paranoia, which sheds a suspicious light onto the whole legend of Western hermeneutics. Interestingly enough, in this double discourse of hermeneutics and jealousy there is a certain madness (or delirium) present in both cases, which stems from the human incapacity to deal with the traffic of signs. The dilemma is simply this: either we are sentenced to jealousy because of our exclusion from the desired, or we have to affirm our jealousy, stripped of its violent aspect, because of our contingency. On the one hand, we do not know the meanings of other wor(l)ds, and thus we are—in a way—jealous of them; on the other hand, the distance between the other and our awareness of that distance cannot be bracketed off, and we must continue interpreting, because otherwise we would be caught in the trap of egological consciousness. This is the very
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essence of the well-known problem of hermeneutics, and it may be useful to reshape it in the context of jealousy, and, what is more surprising, in the context of paranoia. Othello’s Madness “So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief!” (Rymer 1956, 265). For obvious reasons Othello is the focus of this essay, because jealousy in Shakespeare’s play helps us understand some problems connected with the mysterious relationship between passion and interpretation. Thus, we learn the origin of jealousy: Desdemona. Alas the day! I never gave him cause. Emilia. But jealous souls will not be answered so; They are not ever jealous for the cause, But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster Begot upon itself, born of itself.1 (III: 4)
Jealous souls are “jealous for they’re jealous,” says Emilia, referring to the surprising essence of jealousy. Jealousy is not concerned with external reality, it does not have its source in the behavior of other people (“I never gave him cause”), but it stems from the inner space of a human being where it is born—and then it is “[b]egot upon itself, born of itself.” Jealousy is a perfectly autonomous passion, for it is not subject to any external power, and it grows according to its own rules. But is Othello jealous simply because he is jealous, and not because there are suspicious signs which suddenly appear in his world, signs which he cannot understand, and thus turns them round and round desperately looking for their “true” sense? Othello seems to be jealous because he does not know what all the signs around him mean—what the handkerchief in Desdemona’s hands points to, or what Cassio’s laughter signifies. But the fact is that he does know their significance and this is precisely that upon which Iago builds his stratagem: As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad; And his unbookish jealousy must conster Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures, and light behaviors Quite in the wrong. (IV: 1) All quotations from Othello are taken from W. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, edited by A. Kernan, 1963. 1
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Othello is looking at Iago and Cassio trying to hear what they are saying, and he must “conster” the sense of this conversation “[q]uite in the wrong.” Cassio’s smiles and gestures will be misread (overinterpreted) as signs sent toward Othello. Both reader and spectator know this; they are supposed to know what is going on here, what the true sense of Cassio’s deeds is. Iago knows perfectly well that the effect of this miscomprehension will be the sheer madness of jealousy: “Othello shall go mad.” One could ask, however, if this “savage madness” (IV, 1) is not the very reason behind the hermeneutical investigation of the true sense of signs: “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of Holy Writ” (III, 3). The words used by Iago when describing Othello’s jealousy are “unbookish jealousy.” The word “bookish” appears in this tragedy at the very beginning, also used by Iago, who astonishingly tries do depreciate his future accomplice: And what was he? Forsooth, a great arithmetician, [...]That never set a squadron in the field, Nor the division of battle knows More than a spinster; unless the bookish theoric, Wherein the tongued consuls can propose As masterly as he. (I: 1)
Iago uses the word “bookish” in connection with the word “theoric.” He thinks theory bookish, detached from practice: “mere prattle without practice.” Most importantly, if jealousy is “unbookish,” then it should be seen as something which exceeds a theoretical, contemplative, disinterested and distanced view. We can talk about jealousy only insofar as the distance between reality and the self is going to disappear. The I cannot inertly gaze upon the world, since the world is not subject to the contemplative eye and affects the passions of the I. Whatever is contemplated keeps its integrity safe and shuts itself in the temple of its pure autonomy. As Heidegger states, “contemplari means: to partition something off into a separate sector and enclose it therein.” He then quotes convincingly the famous etymological dictionary compiled by Ernout and Meillet, where we read: “contemplari dictum est a templo i. e., loco, qui ab omni parte aspici, vel ex quo omnis pars videri potest” (1977: 166).2 If theory/contemplation was primarily intended to keep something at distance—a look that sunders and 2 “contemplari is derived from templum, i.e, from [the name of] the place which can be seen from any point, and from which any point can be seen” (trans. from “Science and Reflection,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt).
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compartmentalizes—jealousy, on the contrary, must be considered as a violation of the world’s autonomy, the destruction of the distance which makes us separate from it, the distance from which every part of it can be perfectly seen—omnis pars videri potest. In Iago’s dictionary the two contradictory attitudes toward the world are theory and jealousy. In a much later philosophical lexicon by Kant, this opposition will be constituted by the subject of an aesthetic experience oriented toward disinterested contemplation, and by the subject of interested, heteronomical actions, which are based on concepts (as in knowledge), or tend towards producing some effects in the world (as in morality). Both knowledge and morality suppose some “interest” in the use of the world for their (intellectual or moral) purposes, and this is why they are not theoretical in the strict sense of the word, meaning a perfect disinterestedness of contemplation. In Kant’s dictionary, only the aesthetic experience is fully theoretical, because the beautiful cannot be used—at any price. Thus, if interpretation can be understood as having an interest in the use of something, as an experience which abolishes the distance between me and reality, we cannot reconcile contemplation and usage, exactly in the same way as we cannot reconcile theory and interpretation. According to these two lexicons—Iago’s and Kant’s—jealousy appears to be a certain “usage” of the world, a usage that excludes the world’s strangeness and involves passions. In this usage, an aesthetic distance disappears and the necessity of interpretation emerges. Jealousy is the hermeneutical phenomenon as such, because in the passionate intercourse between the self and the world, which comes up instead of a theoretical or indifferent view, the exigency of interpretation appears to prove that the signs do not mean what they say, that a given sense is not simply given but rather given for interpretation, or overlooked. When everything is still possible, the exigency of interpretation comes to the fore: “I think my wife be honest, and think she is not; / I think that thou art just, and think thou art not” (III, 3). This ambiguity is unbearable, and the jealous character will keep doing his best to eliminate all discrepancies in the text he reads, to put an end to this destructive ambiguity, which makes him or her unquiet. As Othello says, “Men should be what they seem” (III, 3), and he then dreams about the perfect union between that which exists and that which is perceived, between essence and appearance, between things and signs. Probably, when this preestablished symmetry is broken, when the signs do not cover the things any longer, then the necessity of interpretation becomes urgent, which means that if that desired state of language is essentially a utopian one, interpretation as such can be considered as the emblem of our timely existence exposed to the danger of manifold signs.
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There are, however, two ways of erasing this dangerous ambiguity from the face of the world. Either we abandon the ambiguity and hurriedly get back to the firmly established ground of theory (what the philosophers from the Cartesian and Kantian tradition mostly do), or we make some final attempt to clarify the unclear reality (which characterizes hermeneuts of all sorts). Either we maintain perfect indifference toward intruding signs and puzzling events, or we totally destroy their disturbing strangeness by unifying discrepant orders. “I’ll have some proof [...] I’ll not endure it. Would I were satisfied!” (III, 3) Othello’s story indicates how difficult the first option is and how difficult it is to stave off interpretation. “I see you are eaten up with passion” (III, 3). Desdemona’s death and her husband’s suicide are strong proof for the fact that interpretation—which here is identical with jealousy—also leads to the destruction of an interpreter. Hence, as a hermeneutical phenomenon, jealousy takes place in the space surrounded by perfect indifference on the one side and total aggression on the other. It finds its place exactly inbetween two extreme orders and is irresistibly attracted to them: toward the complete loss of passionate interest, on the one hand, and the violent exaggeration of interest on the other. In both cases, no differences are sustained because jealousy does not tolerate differences and does its best to sublate them. The jealous one suffers from being separated from the world, which is hermetically closed to him, and is confused in the face of the world, which he cannot enter. The alterity is both incomprehensible to him and dangerous—this is why he will do anything to cancel it. Again, this is to be done in two ways: either one can lose any interest in it and withdraw into a safe place of disinterested contemplation, or one can destroy it and thus get rid of the problem of troublesome signs. Since in both cases jealousy and interpretation alike are going to be eliminated, it is not only jealousy that cannot exist without interpretation, but interpretation is, indeed, a form of jealousy. However, there is still another possible explanation. If jealousy and interpretation are born from the sufferings of being separated from the desired world, they almost naturally tend to eliminate this disconnection, and thus are intent on doing away with them. Both jealousy and interpretation share this paradoxical status, which makes them consider themselves as something to be expelled. The jealous person and the interpreter have a simple choice: either they are who they are and then suffer from the fact, or they try to recover and then cease to be at all. Understood in this way, jealousy makes clear what is going on in the process of interpretation: we are obliged to interpret texts, but their otherness forces us either to stay apart from them at a distance that changes us into indifferent theorists, or to annihilate alterity in the rage of stripping them of their differences. These are
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the two poles of every act of interpretation. Interpretation, just as jealousy, either results in a remote theory, or gravitates toward a dialectical movement of invalidating dissimilarity. In both cases an in-difference is the final goal. The Unbearable Loss The story of the knot of love and jealousy has many beginnings, and any one of them would be as good as any other. Descartes appears here simply because his treatise on the passions of the soul elegantly fits my argument concerning interpretation. According to Descartes, love is “an emotion of the soul,” which tends to “join itself willingly to objects which appear to it to be agreeable” (1911: 366). This will is to be understood as the consent by which we consider ourselves from this time forward as united with what we love, so that we imagine a whole of which we conceived ourselves as only constituting one part, while the thing loved constitutes another part. (1911: 366)
Obviously, the opposite of love is hatred, in which a human being feels “separated from the objects which present themselves to it as hurtful” (1911: 366). In love the soul unites itself with some other “thing;” in hatred there is separation. Jealousy, however, seems to be somewhere in-between those extreme passions. According to Descartes, jealousy is “a species of fear which is related to the desire we have to preserve to ourselves the possession of some thing” (1911: 408) Jealousy is therefore fear—fear of a certain loss. Given that the union with the thing loved is the supreme good, jealousy is the fear of being separated from it, or, more generally, the fear of the loss of unity. Clearly, the modern interpretation of the Aristophanesian myth of the androgyne, as told in Plato’s Symposium, is at stake here, but with one important addition. If love forces us to reunite with our lost second half, jealousy as the fear of being separated must precede love and cannot be its side effect. Jealousy emerges wherever there is a danger of loss, wherever there is a threatening possibility of dissent and division, wherever plurality and non-transparency hold sway. It seems that this unifying model of love, which supposes the unconflicting passage between the two halves, is the ground upon which the entire Cartesian epistemology is built. It is wellknown that epistemological certainty is guaranteed in Descartes by the absolute self-evidence of the intellect, which reflects upon itself immediately and is absolutely present to itself in the act of thinking. The one who loves and the one who thinks (in Descartes the word cogitatio embraces thoughts and feelings as well: all modes of voluntas and affectus, all actiones and
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passiones3—the will and affect, all actions and passions) are placed, according to Descartes, in the same position: sense is not disseminated into multiple meanings, for it finds its ultimate legitimization in the timeless, noncorporeal unity of the cogito. When this moment of absolute alliance with “loved things” passes away, when the fear of the loss of absolute transparency appears, when the first fearful signs of betrayal come to light, the epistemological cogito transforms itself into the hermeneutical one. This is where the modern philosophy of interpretation comes into play for the first time: with the emergence of jealousy as the horror of separation from the fullness of sense. Shortly before Schleiermacher announced his hermeneutics founded on full understanding, Descartes had unconsciously opened up the space of the differend which, quite recklessly, put the safeguarded cogito into the madness of interpretation. This happens when—and this is still the same paragraph from The Passions of the Soul, devoted to jealousy—“we examine even the minutest subjects of suspicion, and take them to be very considerable reasons for anxiety” (1911: 408). The fear of the loss of the plenitude of sense: such would be the hermeneutical version of jealousy. The loss of the plenitude of sense is also the loss of evidence, which is transformed into suspicion: signs begin to separate themselves from what they apparently referred to, and in this obscure sphere an intransigent distrust begins to hold sway. It is not true that suspicion—as the basic principle of interpretation— came forward only with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, as common opinion has it. It is true, however, that it was they who evaluated this principle in a positive way for the first time. For Descartes, interpretation in a Nietzschean or Freudian manner would have been absolutely unthinkable, because it would have had to be grounded in the separation of the latent from the obvious, of the superficial symptom from deep reason. Such a divide denies the desired unity between sign and meaning, which is equivalent to the necessary unity of sense. There is no difference between a thought and its object, between ego cogito and cogitatum—such is the Cartesian definition of thinking. There is no difference between me and the loved thing—such is the Cartesian definition of love. There is an unbridgeable distance between me and the thing at my disposal, which threatens my sense of possession—such is the Cartesian definition of jealousy. If jealousy follows the possible loss of what is possessed, it must come into being whenever sense is irrevocably lost and we still desire to reign over it. Here the following alternative appears: either sense is at our disposal and we do not have to be afraid of its loss (this is how Descartes determines love) or it escapes us and gives way to the fear 3
As recalled by Heidegger in The Age of the World Picture, 1977: 150.
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of separation or exclusion (his definition of jealousy). If love has nothing to do with interpretation, because everything is obvious and nothing keeps appearance and truth apart, then jealousy—entangled in an interminable chain of unclear events and signs—is condemned to interpretation, or becomes interpretation. This is a curious situation, however: on the one hand, the jealous person must interpret because signs are deprived of their previously explicit meanings, and therefore nothing is obvious; and on the other hand, he suffers from interpretation, because he has been deprived of the desired unity. There is inscribed in jealousy a kind of nostalgia for a destroyed unity of sense, a unity that has to be restated and made habitable anew. This is impossible, of course, for once we lose the totality of sense, we cannot put the shattered signs together, and this turns out to be a painful sentiment, a feeling of vanished happiness. From this point of view, Othello’s crime is the only solution: one cannot get back to the “pre-jealous” state, because the madness of signs cannot be tempered. What can be tempered is only one’s own madness, and this may happen only in murder, which in its violence is contrary to interpretation. Othello murdered his wife so as to avoid further efforts at interpretation, which would have prolonged his suffering forever. “I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss” (V, 2). So says Othello at the moment of his suicide, falling down on the strangled Desdemona. Does this mean that we have been drawn here by a truly fatal dilemma: either love or jealous murder? This dilemma can be reshaped in the language of theology, the source language of hermeneutics, as follows: either to jubilate with the presence of the Lord, or to weep in our wasteland, where no support is possible and the only word to describe our situation is a curse? This analogy is quite legitimate, because in the Western tradition one cannot practice a philosophy of love without reflecting on the Supreme Being. This double gesture is common to all philosophers from Plato to Levinas, but it is especially remarkable in Hegel, who—following Christian philosophers, such as Augustine or Aquinas— could not avoid the question of love while speaking about God. This is why his definition of love as being-in-the-other is valid both in the case of human relationships and concerning the bonds between God and man: I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other—and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. (Hegel, 1988: 418)
From this point of view, jealousy is associated with suffering from not having peace with oneself, or with falling into pieces. If love can be defined
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in this tradition as being-outside-ourselves in the form of some joyful ecstasy, jealousy can be delineated as an impossibility to break the walls of our solitary being separated from the other. As such, jealousy expresses a vehement inconformity with our contingency. Certainly, we must interpret, because we are at a distance from the “thing loved,” but we dream about the world without such restrictions, exposed exclusively to our clear comprehension. In this interpretative perspective, there are two ways of escaping jealousy. The first one leads to a lost love in which there had been no discrepancy between me and the “thing loved,” when I felt myself as having peace with myself. The second one leads to non-being, to a state of absolute in-difference. The most radical solution to this dilemma is—as in Shakespeare—a crime driven by jealousy, which puts an end to the hell of separation. But is it really a dilemma we are confronted with? Violated Otherness Thus, jealousy has its origin in the conflict between absolute participation and the bitter feeling of the impossibility of its fulfillment. Strictly speaking, this is a conflict between two impossibilities: the impossibility of regaining the lost love and the impossibility of living in separation. It is precisely here that hermeneutical madness starts, in the difference between true meaning and deceptive appearance. The world has lost its transparency, and now everything turns out to be more obscure than before. And when other things strike you, instead of suggesting new ways of increasing her love, they indicate more of your rival’s advantages. You see a pretty woman galloping in the park, and the rival is immediately famed for his fine horses which can take him ten miles in fifty minutes. This mood can easily turn to fury. (Stendhal 1975: 112)
What does this fury or “delirium of signs” consist of? (Deleuze 2000: 138). What is the difference between love and jealousy? It is determined not only by referring to the supposed unity between lovers, as in Hegel, but also by referring to the integrity of meanings. Love suspends the hermeneutic imperative, which appears whenever incomprehension comes to the fore.4 4 “It is one of the remarkable features of the movement of understanding that the incomprehensible, the foreign, and the irreducibly other—each of which sets understanding into motion in the first place—can be brought to rest at the end of this movement […], can be stabilized into an object of representation, thematized by a subject, and thus made into a cognized, controlled, reduced other of this subject”
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Love does not tolerate incomprehension, since all gestures, all signs point to the obvious meaning shared by lovers, uncontaminated by suspicion. This suspension of the hermeneutical imperative is a kind of semantic faith, which makes all things meaningful and thus knowable. Jealousy appears when signs have lost their transparency and the hiatus between essence and appearance renders our essential control impossible. And here is the most important issue. It is not the case that jealousy is inevitably involved with interpretation. It is the case however, that jealousy appears, as Descartes rightly admitted, when the fear of the loss of something—something which apparently has been at our disposal—begins to haunt our minds. The hermeneutical interpretation of jealousy needs some correction, then. Undoubtedly it is the awareness of giving up an ideal participation in the plenitude of sense (the depressing consequence of the Fall) followed by the dissemination of signs—inevitably exposed to multiple interpretations. But it is also—and maybe primarily—the awareness of losing control over meanings and an aversion to anything that can signify something other than that which we wish it to signify. These two explanations of jealousy are not contradictory, because they are very close to each other in the fact of excluding otherness. On the one hand, otherness is but an obstacle on the way to unity—extra unitatis non est salus. On the other hand, the other eludes my attempts to set otherness down, because it is not up to me to make him or her meaningful, it is not me that the other depends on—the other is “something” rather out of control that begins to live independently. Anyway, in both cases jealousy is precisely this fear of otherness, which excludes me from the world of the other, which prevents me from breaking in, which makes me crazy for not being able to subject the other to my power. The other is out of my reach, because this other is prior to my consciousness and not a product of it. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we “explicate” them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, applied to us, they nonetheless express worlds that exclude us and that the beloved will not and cannot make us know. (Deleuze 2000: 9)
Deceptive signs hide the existence of the unknown, incomprehensible, inaccessible worlds in them. The jealous hermeneut suffers not only from not having at his disposal the plenitude of sense, but also from being conscious of the definitive exclusion from the world over which jealously keeps a close watch. “Jealousy is no longer simply the explication of possible worlds enveloped within the beloved […], but the discovery of the unknowable
(Hamacher 1999: 5).
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world,” perceived from an inaccessible point of view (Deleuze 2000: 139). We read in A Lover’s Discourse: The other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know. (Barthes 1978:34)
For the jealous one, the only instrument is a violation, by means of which he invades a hermetically closed space in order to deprive it of its fearful strangeness, to conquer it and make it his own. This is exactly how Marcel acts in Proust’s novel. He makes Albertine come to Paris, closes her up in his apartment and subjects her to severe discipline. He is jealous, because Albertine does not let him come near her and keeps some inaccessible erotic secrets in her. Her world seems to him to be sealed off almost completely, and this inaccessibility drives him crazy. There are, of course, some rivals involved here, others who know her secret and share it with her, but they are not important in themselves but only insofar as they have an access to that forbidden space. After Hegel, and especially after his French commentators, it is a philosophical commonplace to say that jealousy would not be possible without this necessary mediation of the others, who expand our desire and make it triangular. I desire—so the story goes—only that which is desired by the other, so in the last instance what I desire is another desire, and not any peculiar object. This is true, but it does not undermine the essence of jealousy. I am jealous not because I am not the only one, but because I am not admitted to the closed world of the person I love. The object of this jealousy is not the other as such, but the other’s ability to be more in the know than I am. I can feel envy against such an other, but I cannot be jealous, for jealousy is a matter of being kept off at a distance by something desired. And this is evident in the field of hermeneutics. If, according to Schleiermacher, the main problem of classical hermeneutics is to eradicate misunderstanding (1974:82), then the jealous person is not jealous, not because there are others who understand something better than he does, but because he does not understand at all and strives to feel comfortable with something totally alien. The only solution to the problem of not being “let into” is very often a violation—which of course brings no effects. A totally different scenario has been proposed by Barthes: It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around the secret, but instead, a kind of
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Michal Pawel Markowski evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever. (1978: 135)
In this play of mystery and evidence Barthes rejects the hermeneutical imperative and admits the unknowable character of the other. This makes him happy, and this feeling is very close to joyful contemplation deprived of any desire and of every interpretation. “To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as god” (1978: 135). A Lover’s Discourse oscillates between two extremes. On the one hand, the loving subject dreams about the perfect communion, or “total union” (1978: 228), with the loved being. On the other, he confirms his separation. These two contradictory attitudes save us from jealousy but make interpretation impossible: Signs are not proofs, since anyone can produce false or ambiguous signs. […] Since nothing assures language, I will regard it as the sole and final assurance: I shall no longer believe in interpretation. I shall receive every word from my other as a sign of truth. (1978: 215)
When, however, any disturbance between me and the other blocks an easy passage from one body to the other, interpretation momentarily emerges, stirred up by the question “what does it really mean?” What is heard in this question is not the truth but anxiety. Paranoia Jealousy is first and foremost the suffering of being abandoned by the “loved thing” that made the dream of a perfect union possible. Consequently, it is also a feeling of being excluded from an unfamiliar world. In sum, it is a panic fear of separation which dooms us to entanglement in multiple chains of signs demanding interpretation. Such fear makes a contemplative or indifferent attitude toward this inaccessible world impossible while violent attempts against the closed space of a desired object become ineffective. The only “solution” to this impasse is to create substitutions totally dependent on the jealous one. This substitutive sphere, which blocks the appropriation of the reality principle by the subject, is constituted by fantasies, fictitious representations of the loved or lost thing, which make the subject capable of finding gratification exclusively within his boundaries. 5 According to Freud, 5
These representations are simulacra in the meaning intended by Lucretius: “As one
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such fantastic representation originates in perversion. Freud, however, stressed many times that the negation of perversion is neurosis (1977: 80). It is the negation of perversion because the “fantastic representation” is not cathexed by pleasure (as in perversion) and therefore does not satisfy the subject, but causes anxiety instead. If paranoia can be rightly determined as a systematic delusion or “chronic systematic insanity” (1973:473), which is nothing more than the consolidation of fantastic images, it has two faces: the perverse and the neurotic. As a matter of fact, jealousy is paranoia because it forms a rigid system of interpreting signs that covers the entire world with its consistency. As a paranoid, the jealous one oscillates between perversion (the delight taken from an image substituted for a real person) and neurosis (the painful experience of being rejected), and both of these altered states of consciousness prove to him the world’s removal, which he would wish to annul. From the psychoanalytic point of view, jealousy consists in the awareness of the loss of an object. Such awareness cannot come to terms with this loss and tries to stubbornly hang on to the object “in fantasy.” If, in the light of Freud’s theory of narcissism, the libido does not remain attached to objects in fantasy, but returns to the ego which becomes its very object, it should be stated that jealousy places itself between love—or the successful object-cathexis, where the object has, so to speak, consumed the ego—and narcissism, where the frustrated libido returns to the ego and cannot find its way back to objects. The jealous person is attached to an object in fantasy, and this fantastic image both makes him happy (since it is a loved object that is involved here) and causes anxiety (since distance remains untouched). And all of this befalls hermeneuts as well: they do not have access to the fullness of meaning, so they create substitutes and representations which testify to their consciousness of a loss of certainty. Perversion makes them enjoy it, neurosis makes them anxious. The necessity of interpretation which is associated with jealousy supposes then, on the one hand, the impossibility of the immediate experience of the object and, on the other hand, the impossibility of getting back to the former integrity of the subject. In this dangerous space— suspended between love and narcissism, delight and fear, on the threshold between a desired text and the consciousness of its elusiveness—interpretation rules indivisibly.
in dreams, who, thirsting, looks for water/but finds none that might cool his fevered flesh;/(he struggles to reach the fluid—vain mirage;/midway a roaring river he drinks and thirst)/so Venus deludes fond lovers with simulacra” (1977: 108). The simulacra are the Latin correspondents of the Greek eidola, or false images.
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Is it then possible to escape the paranoia of jealousy, the paranoia of interpretation? The answer is not easy, but perhaps whoever does not dream about the lost unity, whoever lets unknowable worlds exist outside our grasp, whoever does not suffer from the absence of some final interpretation—such a person will find, in the making of representations, no reason for fictitious pleasure or aggressive fear. On the other hand, whoever does not close himself in the narcissistic space of self-compensation, whoever does not feel himself happy in the “untouchable position of libido”—such a person will not fall into hermeneutic tragedy caused by the loss of access to the interpreted object. The question remains, however, whether such an attitude is possible at all, whether we can forget our dream about the plenitude of meaning, about the unmediated presence of sense. And, conversely, the question remains whether we can break the limits of ourselves, not being exposed to anything but ourselves. Probably, trying to escape the narcissistic space of selfcompensation we inevitably fall into the trap of paranoid jealousy, and the only movement we can do is back and forth, Fort und Da, between Freud and Derrida, between the absence of sense and the presence of the ego as the last instance of meaning. Does this mean that, after Plato,6 we should admit that jealousy—which oscillates between the impossible fullness of desired presence and the equally impossible emptiness of the I, kept at a distance from its desired object—is an indispensable feature of existence, an inevitable double of life, and should not be treated as something evil, generated by original sin? This is probably true, and every time we try to interpret because of the obscurity of the world, the sinister shadow of jealousy appears on the horizon, as a sign of despair, but also as a sign of our indispensable contingency. Bibliography Barthes, Roland (1978). A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Brisson, Luc (1996). “La notion de phthonos chez Platon,” La jalousie, sous la direction de F. Monneyron. Paris-Montreal, 13-34. Deleuze, Gilles (2000). Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 6
According to Plato, the human being is naturally jealous and envious. Because these qualities are not to be found in Gods and beasts, jealousy marks the in-between character of human beings, rooted in animality and aspiring to immortality (Brisson 1996 : 13-34).
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Descartes, Réné (1911). The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Freud, Sigmund (1977). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. J. Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7, London: Penguin. —— (1973). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Strachey. The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 1. London: Penguin. Hamacher, Werner (1999). Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves, Stanford: Stanford UP. Hegel, G. W. F. (1988). Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One Volume Edition, The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter. C. Hodgson, trans. R. F Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P. Heidegger, Martin (1977). “Science and Reflection,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper. —— (1977). “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper, 115-154. Kojève, Alexandre (1969). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. J. H. Nichols, Jr, New York: Basic Books. Lucretius (1977). De rerum natura./The Nature of Things, trans. Frank O. Copley, New York: Norton. Rymer Thomas (1956). “Othello, A Short View of Tragedy,” SeventeenthCentury Prose 1620-1700, ed. Peter Ure, London: Penguin. Schleiermacher, F. D. E. (1974). Hermeneutik, herausgegeben von H. Kimmerle, Heidelberg: Winter. Shakespeare, William (1963). The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, ed. A. Kernan, New York: Signet. Stendahl, Henry Beyle (1975). Love, trans. G. and S. Sale, London: Penguin.
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THE ETHICS OF MODALITY IN PAULINE SMITH’S “THE SISTERS” MYRTLE HOOPER This essay stresses that English is a language which encodes modality lexically. Word choice reflects possibilities, probabilities, consequences of actions, choices and decisions; registering ethics of judgement and conduct. Pauline Smith’s work has been criticised for propagating the myth of “Afrikaner as Israelite” and for representing an “enclosed world.” Yet in “translating” rural Afrikaners, Smith positions herself and her readers in relation to them. Hooper argues that through Smith’s frequent use of the locative mode which invites us to “behold” suffering or enduring subjects, she inscribes an ethos that is itself an opening for a positive ethics to emerge. “The Sisters,” particularly, uses modality to explore, interrogate and expose ethical matrices and dynamics of power.
The ethical turn takes place when I realize my enmeshment with the Other. H. P. Steeve Who am I that I should judge you? Sukey, in “The Sisters”
Pauline Smith was a South African writer, born in 1882 in Oudtshoorn in the Eastern Cape, the elder daughter of an English district surgeon. As a child she often accompanied her father in his work amongst the poor Afrikaner farmers of the Little Karoo, and so the geography of the region figures starkly in her fiction: its fertile valleys of well-watered land, and mountainous areas whose droughts and rockiness render them desolate and hostile to those who eke out a living on their arid soil. A number of critics have been interested in her use of language in her fiction: the ways in which she translates Afrikaans idiom into English (Coetzee 1981); the medium in which she represents the confined world of the Aangenaam valley and its inhabitants (Roberts 1984); the silence of the characters who populate the world of her stories (McCormick 1983); the limited powers of their conversation (Haresnape 1977); her “style” of poverty (Clayton 1983); her use of interrogative statements and her use of “free indirect discourse” (Cosser 1992). Studies such as these respond to the fact that Smith is a craftsman who takes great
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care with her use of language; and to the fact that Smith is an English speaker representing Afrikaners in English to an English readership. To my knowledge, though, nobody has yet essayed a specific study of her use of modal auxiliaries, which are an intrinsic feature of her style, and which are fundamental to the characterisation and the rendition of relationship in her fiction. The story I wish to consider here recounts the experiences of a young girl in a community whose farming activities are crucially dependent on access to water. The event that focuses relations and brings them to a climax is the marriage of the elder sister, Marta, to her father’s farming rival and creditor, in return for waiving his debt and releasing water into the furrow he has built from the Ghamka River. The story is narrated much later by the younger sister, Sukey, who tried in vain at the time to intervene. Its retrospective cast reveals her reconsidering her decisions and actions and those of the others around her. Her narrative is marked by a preponderance of modals; and it ends in conversational closure that renounces the voice she raised against her father at the time. However this might exercise feminist critics; the renunciation of voice has a powerful ethical effect because it registers a moral self-revaluation that undercuts comfortable resolutions, leaving readers with questions, not answers. It works recursively, enjoining us too to ask: “Who am I that I should judge?” The linguist John Lyons points out that modal auxiliaries are inscribed with speakers’ commitment to the truth value, or to the necessity, of the claims they make. As such, they carry traces of the relations that exist between speakers and listeners. My intention is to apply this theoretical understanding of modality to an understanding of Smith’s text—and to extend it by considering the ethical nature of these relations, and of the readers’ implicatedness as moral witness. Specifically I wish to show that the preponderance of modals, together with other linguistic features, reflects the ethical cast of the story and the processes of judgement that structure and damage the relationships portrayed in it. In 1968, in his Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, Lyons describes mood as “best defined in relation to an ‘unmarked’ class of sentences which express simple statements of fact, unqualified with respect to the attitude of the speaker towards what he is saying.” Traditionally, the term given to this “unmarked” mood is indicative, or declarative (1968: 307). In his later Language, Meaning and Context, he criticises the “intellectualist prejudice” which construes language as “essentially an instrument for the expression of propositional thought,” because the “method of traditional modal logic“ has the effect of objectifying modality (1981: 236). This is a serious shortcoming. In Lyons’ view, any theory of meaning which fails to account for the subjectivity of reference, deixis, and modality is condemned to sterility
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(1981: 242). The more productive question to ask is how modality functions in conversation, because “subjective modality is much more common than objective modality in most everyday uses of language” (1981: 237). Lyons coins two terms for the illocutionary commitment with which speakers make utterances: “epistemic commitment,” or commitment to the truth value of what is said, and “deontic commitment,” or commitment to the necessity that what is said should be, or should be done (1981: 190-191). Of course, levels of deontic commitment are influenced by the respective power and status relations of speakers and listeners. Children and subordinates do not usually tell adults and superiors what to do. Intriguingly, though, epistemic commitment is also thus influenced: even if the allegedly basic acts of making statements, asking questions and issuing commands are universal, they too are regulated, in all societies, by more or less culture-specific institutions, practices and beliefs. One recognizable dimension of cultural variation […] is that of politeness. It is impolite, in all societies, to speak out of turn […]. It is also impolite, in some societies, to be too assertive in the exercise of one’s locutionary and illocutionary authority […] to make a straightforward unqualified assertion or to issue a blunt and unqualified command. (1981: 188)
Assertion, says Lyons, is therefore quite unusual: “relatively few of our everyday statements have this neutral, dispassionate, totally non-subjective character,” and by no means all of the world’s languages allow their speakers to make assertions. English is a particularly rich language to study because it does allow speakers to make assertions, and because it encodes modality at the lexical level, by means of modal verbs (“may,” “must” etc.), modal adjectives (“possible” etc.), modal adverbs (“possibly” etc.) and modal particles (“perhaps” etc.) (1981: 238). The preponderance of modals in “The Sisters” is immediately evident in the opening paragraph: MARTA WAS THE ELDEST OF MY father’s children, and she was sixteen years old when our mother died and our father lost the last of his water-cases to old Jan Redlinghuis of Bitterwater. It was the water-cases that killed my mother. Many, many times she had cried to my father to give in to old Jan Redlinghuis whose water-rights had been fixed by law long before my father built his waterfurrow from the Ghamka river. But my father could not rest. If he could but get a fair share of the river-water for his furrow, he would say, his farm of Zeekoegatt would be as rich as the farm of Bitterwater and we should then have a town-house in Platkops dorp and my mother should wear a black cashmere dress all the days of her life. My father could not see that my mother did not care about the black cashmere dress or the town-house in Platkops dorp. My
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Myrtle Hooper mother was a very gentle woman with a disease of the heart, and all she cared about was to have peace in the house and her children happy around her. And for so long as my father was at law about his water-rights there could be no peace on all the farm of Zeekoegatt. With each new water-case came more bitterness and sorrow to us all. Even between my parents at last came bitterness and sorrow. And in bitterness and sorrow my mother died. (151, emphasis added)
The paragraph begins assertively, with three uses of the stative verb: “Marta was the eldest,” “she was sixteen,” “it was the water-cases.” The first two are simply factual; the third makes an interpretive claim that initiates the multiplicity of modals in sentences four and five: “could not rest […] could but get […] would say […] would be as rich […] should then have […] should wear […] could not see.” This preponderance of modals has important effects. Being in the past tense they evoke the powerful nostalgia in which the narrator becomes imbued as soon as she starts to tell her story. Second, their conditionality hints that the predictions her father makes will not be borne out by events. Third, they isolate the narrating voice. The story she tells is hers alone, and her interpretations are not supported here (or elsewhere) by any other person. Finally, they illustrate the gender divide that will be played out in the story. The shift to the non-modal assertion “did not care” involves a claim to awareness of her mother’s feelings that her father did not have. This awareness establishes her independence of mind, and differentiates her from her father to a degree we might not expect in so patriarchal a household. It also functions as what the psychologist Kenneth Gergen calls a “claim to warrant,” in the sense that she offers her interpretation as being truer than her father’s. “If one’s linguistic construction of the world prevails,” says Gergen, “the outcomes may be substantial […]. Whose voice prevails in a sea of alternatives may be critical to the fate of the person, relationships, family life, community.” One of the chief means by which people achieve voice is through “conventions of warrant […] rationales as to why a certain voice (typically their own) is to be granted superiority” (1989:74). Disparaging her father’s perception, Sukey asserts her own knowledge, “My mother was a very gentle woman,” and “all she cared about was to have peace in the house […],” and then makes a declaration of impossiblity, “for so long as my father was at law […] there could be no peace” (151). Subtle as these shifts between assertive and conditional are, they characterise Sukey’s narrative as her own construction of the way things were, which is at odds with her father’s, and which competes with it for acceptance by readers. It does so by laying claim not so much to the right to speak as to the right to assert the validity of her own interpretation, and the
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invalidity of her father’s. In doing so it involves readers ethically, since we are put in the position of arbiter of a bitter epistemological battle, which issues, ultimately, in Sukey’s choice of silence, a choice that is in effect no resolution at all. When Sukey first hears that Marta intends to obey her father, she weeps in her sister’s arms “until far into the night,” (154) because, as she sees it, Jan Redlinghuis is old, mad and sinful. Unlike Marta, Sukey is unwilling to comply. She does not confront her father directly, but goes alone and in secret to offer herself to Jan Redlinghuis in her sister’s place. In the conversation that ensues, she repeats directly to him the judgements she has made about him, concluding that “my sister Marta is too good for you” (154). Redlinghuis concedes the point, but rejects her offer, insisting, “All the same, Sukey de Jager, it is your sister Marta that I will marry and no one else. If not, I will take the lands of Zeekoegatt as is my right, and I will make your father bankrupt.” His ultimatum is reinforced both by the challenge, “Do now as you like about it,” and by the silence to which he then resorts: “And he put his pipe in his mouth, and not one other word would he say” (155). The choice of next action is thus left up to Sukey, forcing her into unwilling compliance with his decision that is, paradoxically, not unlike her sister’s complicity with her father. This is a pivotal moment in the story, registering the inception of a relationship between the two characters that persists to the end of the action. One of its effects is that Sukey adopts and repeats the modal patterns used by Redlinghuis, redirecting to God his challenge to her, reconfiguring it as Christian resignation. For his, “Do now as you like about it,” she prays, “Do now what you will with me.” For his, “If not, I will take the lands […] and I will make your father bankrupt,” she insists, “If He does not […] I will know” (155). Strikingly, there is a shift in address, which inverts the pattern set up in relation to Jan Redlinghuis. From talking to God she switches to talking about him, as if he were not there, or as if she dares him to demonstrate his presence. As the psychologist John Shotter puts it, “Firstand second-persons […] are, even if in fact non-personal or inanimate, always personified […] and are thus, so to speak, ‘present’ to one another, in a ‘situation’. By contrast, third-persons need not be personified […]; nor are they present as such to other beings or entities” (1989: 134). Talking about God as if he is not there enacts her denial of his existence. By rendering him non-personal Sukey seeks to place herself outside his power. Her bargaining with God does not succeed, and, in conversation with her father, she follows through on her threat: “Pa, pray if you like, but I shall not pray with you. There is no God or surely He would have saved our Marta. But if there is a God as surely will He burn our souls in Hell for selling Marta
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to old Jan Redlinghuis” (155). Although it takes a negative form, Sukey’s declaration that God does not exist seems to me another claim to warranted voice, since, as Dorothy Driver points out, her rejection of the power of God functions as a repudiation of the power of the father, which is rooted in Christian patriarchy (1995). Certainly, in denying God, Sukey gains considerable freedom of speech with her father and appropriates the power of the word over him. She achieves warrant, and uses it with resounding effect. “From that time,” she says, “I could do what I would with my father” (156). In addition to modals, this is particularly evident in the use of pronouns in their conversations, in what Shotter calls the “ethical logistics,” the “moral proprieties of the exchanges between ‘I’s and ‘you’s” (1989: 134). Her father tries to posit common involvement and share his sense of success when he asks her, “Is it not wonderful, Sukey, what we have done with the water that old Jan Redlinghuis lets pass to my furrow?” She follows his first use of inclusive “we,” but rebuts his claim to individual ownership of the furrow with a bitter, “It is blood that we lead on our lands to water them” (156). As her narrative unfolds there are fewer plural pronouns, and an increasing polarisation of “I” and “you.” When her father asks, “Is it not wonderful, Sukey, to see how Marta rides through the country in her new tent-cart?” she chides and threatens him: “It is to her grave that she rides in the new tentcart, and presently you will see it,” and, “It took you many years to kill my mother, but believe me it will not take as many months for old Jan Redlinghuis to kill my sister Marta” (157). Her prediction comes true. Having acquired Marta as his wife, Redlinghuis touts her round the countryside as a possession: “from the day that he married her his madness was to cry to all the world to look at the wife that Burgert de Jager had sold to him” (157). Marta offers no resistance, but enduring this public display debilitates and eventually kills her. She dies with salvation on her lips, asserting: “See how it is, my darling! In a little while I shall be with our mother. So it is that God has helped me” (159). Her sister is left bereft. Oddly enough, the crucial relationship of the story is not this sister relationship, nor even the father-daughter relationship which Driver emphasises. Rather it is the ambivalent, puzzling bond that develops between Sukey and Jan Redlinghuis. We have seen evidence of this bond in the way her first conversation with Redlinghuis shapes her conversation with God. We see it in other ways, too, in his ethical response to her, and in the aporias in her narrative which foreground this response. Although she goes often to visit her sister, she never reports the conversations she has with her. Nor does she report any conversation she might have heard between Jan Redlinghuis and her sister. It is as if he speaks about Marta in front of her, but never to
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her; nor does Marta seem to speak either to him or about him. The only person Redlinghuis communicates with on anything like a personal level is Sukey, and the details of their conversations are revealing: “‘Look now, Sukey de Jager’, he would say to me, ‘your father has sold me his daughter for his lands. Let him now look to his lands and leave me his daughter’. And that was all he would say about it” (156-157). In this repeated refusal to speak, “all he would say,” as well as in his repeated public display of his wife, Jan Redlinghuis enacts the blind will, the self-centred determination, the damaging insensitivity to others that Sukey labels “madness” (157) And yet his repeated injunction to her is to “look now.” A transliteration of the Afrikaans, “kyk nou,” this phrase is a standard formulation in both languages that links a visual process with the mental processes of consideration and reflection. Enjoining Sukey and others to “look,” Redlinghuis is calling on them to consider his actions. He is also, significantly, attempting to justify himself to them. He is offering an account, which suggests at least an awareness that his actions have ethical valence, that they are subject to moral scrutiny, though he is not at all willing to mend his ways. This ethical awareness comes to a climax when Marta finally collapses, and Redlinghuis for the first and only time initiates contact, sending for Sukey “across the river:” When I came to the house old Jan Redlinghuis was standing on the stoep with his gun. He said to me: ‘See here, Sukey de Jager! Which of us now had the greatest sin—your father who sold me his daughter Marta, or I who bought her? Marta herself who let herself be sold, or you who offered yourself to save her?’ And he took up his gun and left the stoep and would not wait for an answer. (158-159)
There are marked differences between this and their first conversation: Redlinghuis is standing not sitting; he has his gun in his hand not his pipe; and he terminates the conversation by taking up his gun and leaving, not by putting his pipe in his mouth and smoking. And yet the negative modal, “would not wait” connects strikingly with the earlier, “not one other word would he say.” Also like the first one, this conversation too is ended by Redlinghuis not by Sukey, giving us glimpses of the obduracy that refuses to engage with the responses of others. Specifically, his refusal to “wait for an answer” suggests both that Sukey might have ventured one if he had waited, and that it is his intransigence that prevents her from doing so. And yet his words have profound ethical effect: on his own ensuing actions, on the frame
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of mind of the other characters, and on the structure and the quality of Sukey’s narrative. In his discussion of conversation, Shotter formulates a concept he calls “joint action,” which is similar in some ways to H. P. Grice’s “co-operative principle.” He amplifies, following C. Wright Mills: “It is not so much how ‘I’ can use language in itself that matters, as the way in which I must take ‘you’ into account in my use of it” (1989: 141, my emphasis). Conversation, he says, “always involves an understanding of what a ‘you’s anticipated response might be. It is part of what it is for someone to attempt to mean something for someone else” (1989: 144-145). Such intersubjectivity does not require agreement or accord: “the disagreements we have are just as much ‘ours’ as the love we find ourselves in” (1989: 147). He continues, “when one person acts ‘into’ a jointly constructed setting rather than ‘out of’ his or her own plans or desires, an outcome is produced which is independent of any of the individuals involved and ‘belongs’ only to the collectivity they constitute.” This generates “shared resources for general use, shared ‘entities’ held in common,” which serve as “the rights and powers, the duties and enablements, the basic communicative ethics which regulate our ways of making sense” (1989: 147). In Sukey’s interaction with her father, and in her interaction with Jan Redlinghuis, the participants act into jointly constructed settings. In conversation with her father, Sukey generally has the last word, and their disagreements terminate in the playing out of her power over him. In conversation with Jan Redlinghuis, the power relations are reversed, and the old man clearly has the upper hand. Although he frequently cuts off their conversations, however, the fact that they recur, and the fact that he uses the locative, that he calls on her to “behold,” are indicative of the bond that draws them together, the moral hold she has over him that leads him to account to her. Ending their conversation, then, Redlinghuis heads off into the mountains. It takes six days for searchers to find his body. “God knows what madness had driven old Jan Redlinghuis to the mountains when his wife lay dying,” says Sukey, “but there it was they found him, and at Bitterwater he was buried.” That night her father comes to her, and acknowledges his sin: “It is true what you said to me, Sukey. It is blood that I have led on my lands to water them, and this night will I close the furrow that I built from the Ghamka River. God forgive me, I will do it” (160). With this admission before her, Sukey reflects, “It was in my heart to say to him: ‘The blood is already so deep in the lands that nothing we can do will now wash it out’.” Yet the rhetorical thrust of her reflection is towards contradiction, towards the “But I did not say this” that follows. Sukey does not speak what is in her heart—rather the vision of her sister comes before
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her, and it is as if Marta speaks for her: “Do now as it seems right to you […]. Who am I that I should judge you?” (160). Her last words are adopted from her sister, yet they do more than simply substitute her sister’s moral vision for her own. In the first place, there is a significant reversal of the direction of Marta’s address. Whereas her sister speaks about Jan Redlinghuis, Sukey here speaks to her father, resuming the moral accountability she abjured when first she switched to speaking about God instead of to him. Unlike her sister, she speaks directly to the person she declines to judge; and unlike her sister’s question, hers rebounds immediately back upon her as she speaks, as she questions her moral fitness to pass judgement. Whereas her sister’s moral position of humility and obedience was consistent and sustained, hers has changed: allowing her sister to speak for her, she renounces voice, she relinquishes the claim to warranted authority which was earlier so insistent. Nor does her response reinstate her father’s patriarchal authority, fundamentally because her father has come to acknowledge his error and her truth. They have reached a meeting point where neither is right and neither is wrong, where both share an understanding which belongs to the collectivity they constitute. The last dimension of the story I wish to consider before closing is the way in which we, as readers, are ethically constructed by it. In the first place, our moral imagination is captured very intensely by the old, mad, sinful Jan Redlinghuis. Hateful he may be, yet he has presence that registers in his effect on Sukey, and power that resonates after he has gone. In the second place, the story poses arresting questions and does not answer them: Jan Redlinghuis’ challenge to Sukey is symptomatic, but it is preceded by Marta’s plaintive questions to her before her marriage: “Who am I to judge Jan Redlinghuis? And can I then let my father be driven like a poor-white to Platkops dorp?” (153); by Sukey’s father’s inane invitations to her to share his wonder; and by her responses to him, also couched as questions, “What is now wonderful? It is blood that we lead on our lands to water them. Did not my mother die for it? And was it not for this that we sold my sister Marta to old Jan Redlinghuis?” (156). The rhetorical force of Sukey’s questions demands positive answers, but the story does not end in denunciation—it ends with her last question which scrutinises the ethical rights, duties, obligations and responsibilities bound up in being a person, “Who am I […]?” Earlier I claimed that the preponderance of modals has the effect of isolating the narrating voice. In conclusion, I must qualify this claim. In his discussion of conversation, Shotter cites Benveniste’s account that “pronominal forms […] function within an intra-linguistically constructed ‘positional field’, a field that is constructed and reconstructed, moment by
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moment, in and through one’s utterances” (1989: 140). In this sense, any use of the word “I” implies a “you.” In her last question, it is almost as if Sukey’s narrative transcends diegetic levels to address readers directly, to call on us for answers which are not forthcoming from her father. But this can only work with our cooperation. Sukey’s final question is a recursive one, both in the sense of acting back upon herself, of questioning her moral fitness to pass judgement, and in the sense of calling upon sympathetic readers to do the same. It involves readers in this moment of acute ethical awareness. It goes further. If we recognise, with Alison Tate, that utterances are fundamentally interactive and addressive (1994: 147), we might recognise, too, that the use of modals makes special demands on this intersubjectivity, this shared definition of reality, the joint action that occurs in conversation. Because they are the locus of conditional interpretations that encode speakers’ attitudes and beliefs, modals require a higher degree of co-operation, of shared understanding, of buy-in than other verbs. It is in this way that they work to construct an ethical position for listeners. This effect is reinforced by other linguistic features. Sukey’s voice is not like the “lyric I,” the voice “talking to itself or nobody” (Lindley 1985: 64). It does not function unto itself. Looking back, she is aghast at what she said and did in the past, and so her narrative is an expiation. And it is punctuated, intermittently, by affirmatives, which, read rhetorically, reveal a conscious invocation of a “you” to hear her address, to act as moral witness. Here are the instances: Yes, I tried to make a bargain with the Lord so that Marta might be saved. (155) […] Yes, I said that. (156) […] Yes, even before strangers would he say these things, stopping his cart in the road to say them, with Marta sitting by his side. (157) […] Yes, God forgive me, but I said that to my father. (158)
At each of these moments of insistence we hear Sukey responding to the doubt, or wonder, or mystification, of a putative listener who cannot quite grasp what she is saying, who must be persuaded if her narrative is to achieve the purpose it set out to. My claim is not that her narrative prescribes how we are to respond, nor even that her affirmatives answer the questions that have been posed in it. Rather it replicates in broader waves that moment of confrontation between her and Jan Redlinghuis that brought her such profound ethical shock, such anagnorisis. If we accept Levinas’s formulation
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that ethical responsibility is responding to the call that cannot be ignored, I suggest that we are invited by Sukey’s story to hear and respond the best we can, to choose to be that listener who must be convinced. We are called on to act into a jointly constructed setting with her, into the collectivity that her narrative seeks to constitute. We are urged to a point beyond judgement, to a point of self-reflexive involvement with her in the sin she has committed and the injury she has endured. We are called on to pose the same question to ourselves, to ask as she does, “Who am I that I should judge you?” (160). Bibliography Clayton, Cherry (1983). “The Style of Poverty: The Language of Pauline Smith’s Little Karoo,” Pauline Smith, ed. Dorothy Driver, Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 153-165. Coetzee, J.M. (1981). “Pauline Smith and the Afrikaans Language,” English in Africa, 8: 1, 25-32. Cosser, Matthew A. (1993). “A Question of Silence: The Deployment of the Interrogative Statement in Pauline Smith’s The Beadle,” English in Africa, 20: 2, 47-66. —— (1992). “Undercurrent Dialogue: Free Indirect Discourse in Pauline Smith’s ‘The Pain’,” English in Africa, 19: 2, 85-100. Driver, Dorothy (1995). “Pauline Smith and the Crisis of Daughterhood,” South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory and Criticism, ed. M. J Daymond, New York: Garland Publishing, 185-206. Gergen, Kenneth (1989). “Warranting Voice and the Elaboration of the Self,” Texts of Identity, eds. J. Shotter and K. J. Gergen, London: Sage, 70-81. Haresnape, Geoffrey L. (1977). “Pauline Smith’s ‘Desolation’ and the Worthwhile African English Text,” UCT Studies in English, 7, 99-103. Hooper, Myrtle J. (1999). “‘Desolation’, Destitution, Dereliction,” English in Africa, 26: 1, 33-43. —— (1997). “Naming the Father: Terms of Endearment, Sexuality and Servitude in The Beadle,” Nomina Africana, 10: 1-2, 67-78. —— (1991). “The Renunciation of Voice and the Language of Silence: Pauline Smith’s ‘The Schoolmaster’,” English Studies in Africa, 34: 1, 21-26. Lindley, David (1995). Lyric, London: Methuen. Lyons, John (1981). Language, Meaning and Context, Bungay: Fontana. —— (1968). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
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McCormick, Kay (1983). “Strangeness and Familiarity in The Little Karoo,” Pauline Smith, ed. Dorothy Driver, Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 166177. Roberts, Sheila (1984). “A Confined World: A Rereading of Pauline Smith,” World Literature Written in English, 24, 232-238. Shotter, John (1989). “Social Accountability and the Social Construction of ‘You’,” Texts of Identity, eds. John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen, London: Sage, 133-151. Smith, Pauline (1925). “The Sisters,” The Little Karoo, London: Cape, 151160. Steeve, H.P. (1995). “The Boundaries of the Phenomenological Community: Non-Human Life and the Extent of our Moral Enmeshment,” Becoming Persons, vol 1, ed. Robert N. Fisher, Oxford: Applied Theology, 777798. Tate, Alison (1994). “Bakhtin, Addressivity, and the Poetics of Objectivity,” Literature and the New Interdisciplinarity, eds. Roger. D. Sell and Paul Verdonk, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 135-150.
TELLING STORIES: ALTERITY AND ETHICS IN JOHN BANVILLE’S THE UNTOUCHABLE AND SHROUD PIETRA PALAZZOLO Focussing on John Banville’s The Untouchable (1997) and Shroud (2002), this essay looks at the possibility of performing readings relevant to ethics of historical events in the “enlarged” space of fiction. The two novels provide fictional versions of two of the most discussed scandals in recent history: Anthony Blunt’s exposure as the fourth man of the Cambridge spy circle and Paul de Man’s pro-Nazi wartime journalism. This essay illustrates how Banville’s subtle recasting of these two events constitutes an intriguing intervention on the complex issue of alterity and ethics, studying the novels’ exploration of a subjectivity “inmixed with otherness.” To this end, Palazzolo’s discussion focusses on the way the books examine exposure in its many forms (public/personal; historical/ethical), so as to reveal crucial intersections where the characters’ encounter with the many hosting and hosted others is best captured. Her analysis highlights the way in which these intersections depend on a notion of alterity that is mediated through the performative quality of language.
Geoffrey Halt Harpham’s article on ethics in the 1995 edition of Critical Terms for Literary Study links the public disclosure of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism (1987) to a turning point in literary theory that urged a reconsideration of previously neglected ethical issues and a re-reading of de Man’s own works. Harpham identifies a post-1987 period that developed in sharp contrast with “the Theoretical Era (c.1968-87),” and that advanced a “revised” notion of subjectivity: “a subject inmixed with otherness” (1995: 387). It is significant that Harpham’s essay on ethics was added to the second edition of the book, thus confirming the necessity to include an entry which could reflect more recent trends in literary theory. Indeed, the disclosure of de Man’s wartime journalism served to trigger renewed awareness of ethical questions which had persisted even in the preceding years, albeit channelled underground by deconstructionist approaches to literature.1 In recent years, 1
Simon Critchley has extensively argued for the ethical quality of deconstruction and the work of Derrida, by identifying its crucial links with the work of Levinas, 1992. See also his “Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?” where he elaborates on some of his
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together with mushrooming critical studies aimed at addressing this “revised” notion of subjectivity, fiction has greatly contributed to the debate, functioning as a befitting arena for the expression of these concerns with ethics. The selection of two novels by John Banville, The Untouchable (1997) and Shroud (2002), reflects my attempt to focus on ethics not as a series of moral codes and rules mirrored in narrative themes (Nussbaum 1986, 1990; Booth, 1988) but as the irreducible passage of alterity, which, as I argue, is best epitomised in writing and in the creative process as such.2 The focus of this essay, then, is not so much on the representation of the historical events referred to in the two novels—the public exposure of Anthony Blunt as the fourth man of the Cambridge spy circle on 15 November 1979 (The Untouchable) and the revelation of de Man’s pro-Nazi journalism reported in the New York Times on 1 December 1987 (Shroud)—but on the modalities of Banville’s recasting of these events as an intervention on the complex issue of alterity and ethics. Thus, the two novels can be conceived as an intriguing examination of the fundamental “inmix[ing of] otherness” into the notion of subjectivity. With no interest in exculpation, both The Untouchable and Shroud delve into the evasions of the human mind and the issue of agency by providing a fitting fictional arena for questions that history is not, perhaps, at liberty to pose. It is to the intriguing quality of this fictional arena that Miranda Carter refers in the prologue to her biography of Blunt (2001). Explaining her book as the result of her wish to compensate for the lack of compelling non-fiction studies, she also draws attention to the way the slippery nature of such a complex public figure has inspired some of the best fictional works: It is remarkable that Blunt, in addition to appearing as at least three characters in Louis MacNeice’s work, and providing the inspiration for the central figure in Brigid Brophy’s novel The Finishing Touch, has been the inspiration for two, very different, masterpieces: Alan Bennett’s allegory of identity and personality A Question of Attribution and John Banville’s novel The Untouchable, which gives a subtle and compelling voice to Blunt’s wilful silence. Non-fiction has, for the most part, served him less well. (2001: xviii) earlier pronouncements on Levinas’ ethics and the notion of the subject, 1999: 51-82. For other studies focussing on ethics and its relation to literary studies, see Miller, 1987; Eaglestone, 1997; Rainsford, 1999. 2 In contrast to neohumanist critics who argue for a more direct ethical correspondence between events depicted in fictional works and their relevance to the reader’s everyday life, my analysis aims to explore ethics as an intersubjective relation that is manifested in the demand that the other poses to the self beyond moral constraints.
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Banville’s peculiar take on these two controversial scandals in recent history is repeatedly cast as a way of questioning the authority of the narrative—the pervading subject of de Man’s study—thus shifting the emphasis from exculpation to examination, from political agency to the politics of language. More importantly, the books constitute an examination of exposure in its many forms (public/personal; historical/academic) and offer an intriguing fictional version of the events, of what happened but also of what was left unsaid. If after the public disclosure of Anthony Blunt’s collaboration with the Soviets, the scandal was measured by the outrageous responses it triggered,3 Paul de Man’s case was received with more complex and cautious attitudes that raised large ethical questions and resulted in the publication of a companion volume to de Man’s wartime journalism, which hosted a selection of often contrasting critical responses (Hamacher 1989), and the publication of various other studies (Norris 1988; Lehman 1991; Felman 1992). Cutting across several generic planes—biography, autobiography, memoir, historical novel, roman à clef—The Untouchable and Shroud afford a glimpse of Anthony Blunt and Paul de Man without making direct references to their lives. Unlike Banville’s Doctor Copernicus and Kepler where he provides a fictional biography of real historical figures, The Untouchable and Shroud exploit the larger latitude that is characteristic of the memoir and the novel, creating fictional figures, Victor Maskell and Axel Vander respectively, and greatly expanding on historical events. Shroud, for example, has much in common with books that advance a critique of critical theory, as in Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). Banville’s novel, however, constitutes a more subtle exploration of the ethical issues at play in de Man’s recent scandal, as envisaged by Harpham and, among others, Seán Burke, who commented on its (un-)timely reverberations: “At a time when critical theory thought to have dispensed with the idea of authorship, the posthumous revelation of de Man’s wartime writings brought the author back to centre stage” (1992: 1). The Untouchable and Shroud, however bear out the nuances of a “post-deconstruction subjectivity” (Critchley 1999: 72); not a sovereign subject but one exposed to an irreducible alterity.
3
Miranda Carter, for example, argues that after his exposure Blunt “became a man about whom anything could be said” and who was described as “the spy with no shame,” “an arrogant evil poser,” a “treacherous Communist poof,” to mention just a few of the many angry appellatives (2001: xiii).
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“The Queer Irish Spy”: The Untouchable Criticised for its liberty on historical events by commentators and reviewers alike, Banville’s recasting of Blunt’s life and scandal is crucial to my argument, as it heightens the narrator’s sense of alterity and embodies a befitting rendering of the ethical reverberations of Blunt’s past. The novel gets at the heart of the problem by making an “Irish Blunt,” Victor Maskell, narrate his memoir on the aftermath of his public unmasking. Son of an Ulster clergyman, Maskell is educated in England and later becomes one of its leading art historians. Moreover, unlike Blunt, he marries before realising his sexual tendencies, and is thus forced to lead a double (personal) life which matches the duplicity of his public commitments and aptly echoes in his well chosen appellative: “The Queer Irish Spy” (47). From the outset, then, the book traces a shift in perception in the commonly assumed duality of sameness and alterity,4 by focussing on a character who is an outsider on the inside, and whose peculiar personal traits have been fashioned on characteristics which are marked as English. The public responses to Blunt’s scandal are recast as an attack against the English, and Maskell’s own reasons initially explained as a case of hatred against the hosting country. Thus, The Untouchable marks out an enlarged fictional space where lost possibilities take place and are pondered, providing an alternative that was not given to the most harsh critics of Blunt, who were forced to come to terms with a case of internal betrayal from one of their most trusted men—as keeper of the Queen’s pictures and one of his distant cousins. The ethnic/racial connotation of Maskell’s treason is what is overtly acknowledged by most of the people who commented on the events and which is epitomised in his biographer’s angry remarks, Miss Vandeleur: “what did you think you would achieve by betraying your country and your country’s interests? Or was it because you never thought of this as your country? Was it because you were Irish and hated us?” (28). Lacking any attempt to atone for his treason, Maskell disturbingly questions fixed categories of identity (ethnic/racial, cultural, socio-political, national): “I never thought in terms of us, or the nation […] it was all no more than a striking of attitudes to make ourselves feel more serious” (33). Even his commitment to espionage is referred to as a response to “a frivolous impulse” and a “flight from ennui” more than the result of a belief in the cause, in sharp contrast to other more committed men of the spy circle (Boy and Nick, 4 For an extensive analysis of the subtle interplay of sameness and alterity in The Untouchable against the backdrop of Derrida’s recent study on the “question of the foreigner” see Palazzolo, 2003.
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for example) and to those engaged in what Maskell defines as a vulgar form of Marxism. This provocative attitude towards the public response to his act of treason, however, is not just a simplistic attempt to look at things from an amoral perspective, as it introduces a crucial opening into the ethical issues that it unveils. Although brushed aside with nonchalant flair, “the tricky question of nationality,” for example, is described as a “constant drone-tone in the bagpipe music of [his] life” (47) and is repeatedly pitted against sociocultural assumptions, thus engendering a series of amusing vignettes where Maskell’s Irishness is displayed as a haunting version of alterity within sameness. The shift, then, is from moralistic assumptions, the attempt to explain Maskell’s betrayal by his roots, to a careful mapping of a more complex notion of subjectivity that outdoes fixed categories and gestures towards the other. In contrast to the unfair perspective adopted by the media and people in general, Maskell introduces the idea of a self which is at once unitary and split in countless versions: In the public mind, for the brief period it will entertain, and be entertained by, the thought of me, I am a figure with a single salient feature. Even for those who thought they knew me intimately, everything else I have done or not done has faded to insignificance before the fact of my so-called treachery. While in reality all I am is all of a piece, and yet broken up into a myriad selves. Does that make sense? […] Why did you do it? that girl asked me yesterday, and I replied with parables of philosophy and art, and she went away dissatisfied. But what other reply could I have given? I am the answer to her question, the totality of what I am; nothing less will suffice. (34)
Maskell’s fascination with the world of espionage seems ultimately to be triggered by its power of disguise and adaptability, which is then transferred onto a personal level. It aptly accommodates his awareness of a slippery sense of things and the belief and fear that “nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems” (144). Similar to the narrator’s appropriation of Vander’s identity in Shroud, the life of a spy provides Maskell with a befitting stage where “you are never required to be yourself,” so that the instability of his condition is perceived as a role (life-as-performance). The careful construct of Maskell’s life starts to crumble when the balance between the instability of espionage and the stillness of his intimate life is threatened. The “little world” he has created for himself—“my books, my prints, my Bonington, my Death of Seneca”—epitomises his love of art and of the quietism of the later Stoics, whereas his collaborationist work as a spy links him to the “more vigorous form of Stoicism“ epitomised by Zeno: “in my life I have exemplified both phases of the philosophy. When I was required to, I acted, in full knowledge
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of the ambiguity inherent in that verb, and now I have come to rest—or no, not rest: stillness. Yes: I have come to stillness” (198). After the public unmasking of his work for the Soviets, Maskell’s many hosts—the English government, the Establishment, the Royal family—revoked the privileges he had been given, cutting their ties with a man they increasingly saw as a traitor. But unlike Blunt, Banville’s narrator is denied even the consolation of an intimate life or the peaceful retreat into the world of art as a shelter from public exposure: “The dreadful thought comes to me that perhaps I do not understand art at all, that what I see in it and seek in it is not there, or, if it is, that I have put it there” (317). Maskell’s Death of Seneca, the painting he treasured for his whole life, is sent for valuation and eventually pronounced a fake, and his friends and relatives, even his children, Blanche and Julian, shun him. As he puts it in the opening of the book, his memoir constitutes an attempt to “strip away layer after layer of grime” and get at his very soul: “My soul. My self” (7). His initial self-confidence, however, yields to the unsettling plurality that results from the self’s relation with the other, an otherness which starts encroaching upon his carefully compartmentalized lives: family man, gay, art historian, spy. More than resulting in a simple restoration of self-image, the writing of the journal turns out to be a process of discovery of his inaccurate mapping of other people, thus forcibly introducing the ethical reverberations of his attempted act of self-cleansing and reconstitution. Under the weight of his recurrent doubts, the selfsufficient world he fashioned for himself falters: “what is it, I ask myself, what is it that everyone knows, that I do not know?” (256). The title, The Untouchable, acquires a further significance if we think of Maskell’s position as both privileged and unfortunate: powerful and powerless. Despite his access to the highest levels of society (an outsider on the inside), he is regarded with scepticism and treated as a pariah (an insider on the outside). The text’s intervention on the question of alterity is manifested at several levels: visual, linguistic, socio-cultural, political, historical. The Untouchable also attempts a challenging variation on the motif of the informer in Irish literature by introducing innovative elements: a forceful link with the motif of spying which is addressed with a more playful, critical attitude—the use of a generic mixture of forms, as noted above, that best capture Maskell’s condition of inbetweenness. Indeed, the figuration of an “Irish Blunt” introduces a larger multivalence that is more akin to the figure of the secret agent as opposed to that of the domestic Irish informer, thus providing an ideal arena for pondering the notion of an enlarged subjectivity. In this way the self’s freedom from the constrictions of social life is revealed as an unlikely alternative throughout the novel, as Maskell’s
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memories of his native Ireland and past keep haunting him as ghostly figures that claim his attention. His response to this ethical demand is first to be blinded by his own strong stoic attitude and, towards the end of the novel, it is counterpoised by a sudden, uncontrollable outburst of rage which reaches its climax in Maskell’s relation to Nick—his brother-in-law as well as the person who betrayed him. On his last visit to Nick he loses control of the situation: “[I] began to upbraid him, coming out with all sorts of awful things—recriminations, insults, threats—that were no sooner said than I regretted them. But I could not stop; it all came out in a scalding, shameful flood, a lifetime of bitterness and jealousy and pain, gushing out, like […] like vomit” (399). Unlike in Shroud, where Vander’s response is differently deployed, as we shall see below, this alarming exposure to the other is a demand that proves unbearable for Maskell and that eventually triggers his suicide. Intimations of Exposure: Shroud I am not given to retrospective self-examination and mercifully forget what I have written with the same alacrity I forget bad movies—although, as with bad movies, certain scenes or phrases return at times to embarrass and haunt me like a guilty conscience. (de Man 1983: xii).
In contrast to The Untouchable where public exposure initiates the narrative, Shroud stages a number of uncanny intimations of exposure, all contributing to the effect of textual indeterminacy. Although in Shroud the historical event is re-channelled and modelled according to different patterns, the novel constitutes an intriguing counter-part to de Man’s persistent silence regarding his WWII journalism and to the hints of his political collaboration contained in some of his writings (for example, the preface to the second edition of Blindness and Insight, partly quoted in epigraph, and the private letter he sent to Renato Poggioli, the Director of the Harvard Centre).5 In 5
After being denounced anonymously to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, de Man sent a letter to Renato Poggioli, Director of the Harvard Centre, dated January 26, 1955. In this letter he claims that Hendrik de Man is his father, when in fact he was his uncle, and presents him as a highly controversial political figure for whose ideas and actions he cannot be held responsible. Thus de Man writes: “This sudden reflux of a past presented in such a light, when I had devoted the last seven years of my life to building an existence entirely separated from former painful experiences, leaves me weary and exhausted […] I hear now that I myself am being accused of collaboration. In 1940 and 1941 I wrote some literary articles in the newspaper ‘le Soir’ and, like
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addition, as some critics claim, these cryptic references reverberate across the range of issues tackled in de Man’s work overall. Shroud depicts an unlikely, difficult friendship between the Jewish protagonist, the unnamed narrator of the book, and the high-bourgeois Axel Vander, which is seriously put to the test during the Nazi occupation of Belgium and suddenly ends when Vander mysteriously dies. The narrator’s appropriation of his friend’s identity after his puzzling death is posterior to Vander’s writing of some controversial proNazi articles in a fictional journal, La Gazet, although the unsettling reverberations of his act of appropriation encroach upon the concept of ethical responsibility and narrative authority. Vividly rendered in a 95-page story of his “route of escape” from Belgium to America, the narrator’s recounting of these events challenges de Man’s well-known meditations on the uselessness of confession, by introducing a notion of ethical relation that haunts, as Levinas claims, the subject who is able to live “sensible qualities” (1988: 135), more than consciously knowing them. In Vander’s case, this relation affords, quite literally, a glimpse of a version of the other within the self. The text introduces a concept of authorship that goes beyond its death, since the narrator functions as an extension of the responsibility for the other that his friend had taken on with the writing of the articles, adding to the irony of the situation that it is a Jew who assumes responsibility for his antiSemitic articles. Addressed to an absent interlocutor, the deceased Cass Cleave—the girl who discovered his murky past while pursuing research in Antwerp and with whom he has an unlikely relationship in Turin—the confession provides the reader with the narrator’s version of the events, albeit weighed against his tendency towards self-aggrandisement. Rather than trying to use the confession to explain away his appropriation of Vander’s identity, he assumed responsibility for what he had, in fact, not done: written the articles. It is a responsibility he was bound to the moment he took his friend’s identity. Had he been exposed, he would have claimed the articles as his own, explaining that they carried Vander’s name only to secure publication. The transfer of focus from identity appropriation to the articles’ authorship is important for my argument. More than epitomising an attempt to minimise the moral aspect of the narrator’s act of appropriation by focussing on the “transfiguring fire” of an aesthetic ideal—his confessed unflinching support of the Nazi ideal for a Jew-free Europe: “It was all for love of the idea […] The people who turned my people into ash, they were the ones I hoped would win” (223)—I argue that this shift constitutes a passage from the process of most of the other contributors, I stopped doing so when nazi thought-control did no longer allow freedom of statement” (quoted in Lehman 1991: 199).
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self-fashioning to a greater sense of responsibility for the other (his friend as well as “the thereness of [his] world”) which is the underlying topic of the novel. His interest in the reasons why he took his friend’s identity, for example, is more an attempt to understand the ethical relation to the other than it is an attempt to atone for his actions: “What did it benefit me to take on his identity?” (284). From the start then, the novel displaces the notion of authority and authorship, inserting a caesura that interrogates its ethical concerns. Intriguingly, the narrator’s “real name” is never disclosed in the novel, so that the appropriation of his friend’s identity is, once again, put beyond any moral connotation. His name is, in fact, the only certainty in the delicate, precarious construct of his forged life: “The name, my name, is Axel Vander, on that much I insist. That much if no more” (7). The narrator’s use of Vander’s name goes back to a difficult moment in his native Belgium, when he luckily escaped deportation. On the day of a Nazi raid that caused the deportation of most Jews living in the narrator’s quarter, including his own family, he was travelling to Brussels by train, following the instructions on an anonymous note delivered to his door. On his return, knocking tentatively at the door of what used to be his house, he is welcomed by a red-haired Mr Schaudeine who inexplicably helps him cross the border through a worldwide network of “facilitators,” “friends,” “business associates” and “sympathizers.” (258). Although this is the first time the narrator uses Vander’s name, the actual assuming of Vander’s identity occurs later, though he can never remember when or how this complete identification with the other occurred. “[L]eft behind” (256) after the Nazi raid, his public past erased from social memory, the narrator becomes a floating signifier, fashioning himself into a unique blend of poses and behaviours that will allow him to host an identity that does not belong to him, his body at once a mediator and a borderline between self and other(s). Informed by the ethos of posthumanism, Vander serves as an intriguing testing ground for some deconstructive theories which, although pushed to the extreme, are never directly addressed in the novel but rather hinted at in the events recounted. His escape to America, for example, represents not so much his desire to make a new life in “the land of liberty and new beginnings” (289), but, unsurprisingly, the acknowledgement of the desire for pure emptiness: No cause would clamour for support, no ideology would require my commitment. I would be pure existence there, an affectless point moving through time, nihilism’s silver bullet, penetrating clean through every obstacle, shooting holes in the flanks of every moth-eaten monument of so-called civilization […] A passionate and consuming belief in nothing. (289)
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Interestingly, Arcady, the last stop in a series of restless trips westwards— from Europe to Manhattan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Nebraska and California—provides him with a geographical equivalent of the anonymity of the multiplicity of the self he is potentially endowed with in his space of inbetweenness, and his arrival there is described as “a spaceman[’s]” landing on “an unknown planet” (90). There he feels at home precisely because, paradoxically, he is alien to the place, never taking part in town life and thus able to endow the artificial townscape with the images of his mind. In contrast to the languid quality of exotic places where people seem to find a heightened sense of life, Vander is attracted to Arcady because it has the quality of “an anonymous patch of ground,” “some rank, exhausted nonplace” (50). It gives him the pretence of belonging without the burden of the past—the layers of history accumulating in the memory of people and echoing in the old cities’ cobbled streets and trodden paths. The people living in Arcady fit his need for anonymity because of their ability “to shrug [the past] all off” and look at the future as “their legend”: “There, everybody had previously been someone else, at some time, in some entirely other existence.” Ironically, Arcady’s inhabitants “flock” to Vander as to a timeless remnant of the past, scrutinizing him as “some ancient hallowed site of immemorial rituals, battles, bloody sacrifices” rather than place him in a specific time and context (91). He is a timeless figure that escapes fixed categories. The question that lingers throughout the novel, however, and that is forcibly borne out by Cass’ letter—hinting at her knowledge of his secrets—relates to the reasons behind the appropriation of his friend’s identity. Though several explanations are offered, none provides a plausible answer to the dilemma, which “remains” beneath the delicate construct of his perpetually self-negating elucidations. Apart from the necessity to escape Nazi-occupied Belgium, he provides two more interrelated reasons, based, this time, on personal escape: he wants to be Vander but, most of all, he wishes to escape his own self. Towards the end of his confession, this intricate reasoning emerges in one of the most convoluted passages in the book: It must be, simply, that it was not so much that I wanted to be him—although I did, I did want to be him—but that I wanted so much more not to be me. That is to say, I desired to escape my own individuality, the hereness of my self, not the thereness of my world, the world of my lost, poor people […] Yet, I have lived as him for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like to be the one that I once was… I pause in uncertainty, losing my way in this welter of personal, impersonal, impersonating, pronouns. (285)
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If, after the de Man scandal, deconstructive attacks on the idea of a unitary self seem a calculated denial of responsibility in human agency, then Shroud puts these crucial issues on centre stage, by subtly and critically exploring the multi-layered reverberations of exposure to otherness (public, personal, human, textual, etc.). Vander argues against the existence of the self yet is unable to discard completely the idea of “an enduring core of selfhood” immune to any threat: Was I more than a moving complex of impulses, fears, random fancies? I spent the best part of what I suppose I must call my career trying to drum into those who would listen among the general mob of resistant sentimentalists surrounding me the simple lesson that there is no self: no ego, no precious individual spark breathed into each of us by a bearded patriarch in the sky […] And yet… For all my insistence, and to my secret shame, I admit that even I cannot entirely rid myself of the conviction of an enduring core of selfhood amid the welter of the world, a kernel immune to any gale that might pluck the leaves from the almond tree and make the sustaining branches swing and shake. (27)
More than returning to a sense of unitary self (a pre-deconstruction notion of subjectivity), the novel gestures towards an enlarged sense of the selfhood that is nurtured, not annulled, by inconsistencies and misgivings. After years of successful deceit and carefully orchestrated lies designed to support his forged identity, Cass’ letter engenders a crucial opening into the otherness he is at pains to contain. The letter provokes a delayed intrusion into Vander’s timeless setting, the abrupt awakening into the nightmare of history that makes his “American dream” suddenly vanish: Now I was cloven in two more thoroughly than ever, I who was always more than myself. On one side there was the I I had been before the letter arrived, and now there was this new I, a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar. (13)
This revelation brings the formulaic impersonation of Vander’s identity into an alarming, heightened exposure to utterly unknown facets of his being, in ways which are similar to Victor Maskell’s post-scandal life in The Untouchable. Vander’s “cloven self” introduces a revised notion of subjectivity, “inmixed with otherness” and prey to a heightened sense of ethical responsibility. The exposure the letter envisages is something that he both feared and cleaved to all his life, engendering a number of contrasting feelings at the prospect of personal and public unmasking. It breaks the fragile and “violent equilibrium” that had sustained him for many years,
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always precariously balanced between fear and fury: “fury at being what I am not, fear of being found out for what I am” (106). More importantly, the novel plays on the concept and prospect of exposure, leaving it uncertain throughout as to whether Cass has betrayed him, introducing an indeterminacy that is buttressed by the careful recounting of Vander’s reaction to the letter. Despite the lack of specific information or direct threats, the letter has a devastating effect on him, signalling a crossing point from which there is no coming back. After the encounter with Cass in Turin, his personal, if not public, unmasking becomes unavoidable, forcing him to come to terms with his cloven self and with his drastically changed status. No more a “floating signifier” suitable for self-fashioning, Vander is now the result of his own identity-forging process, with a constructed past and a wide, expectant audience to his restless acting—“then, I was no one, now there are people” (11). This denial of identity-shifting as a comforting shelter from the threat of social exposure is in sharp contrast to Maskell’s stoical response to his public unmasking. Blunt’s ability to retreat into a solipsistic world made of a few friendly enemies, uncannily enacting Poussin’s predicament in his own writings about the painter,6 is denied to the ageing Maskell. The impossibility of using identity-shifting as an effective strategy against social constrains is a theme that occurs for the first time in Banville, thus gaining momentum when compared to an array of figures, in his previous works, who proved unable to stop performing and “merely be” (Gabriel Swan in Mefisto, Freddie Montgomery in the art trilogy, Alex Cleave in Eclipse). Unable to find shelter in the remains of his “old self” or move on with the “invention” of other forged selves, the Vander identity construct is perceived by the narrator as a cage, a bulky armour that does not protect him, but, paradoxically, makes him more vulnerable. His body hosts the very other he now wants to escape, so that he becomes a sort of reversed skin-ego, wearing his forged identity not so much on the outside as a protective armour against the notion of selfhood he thought he could put on hold, but inside out. Vander’s attempt at self-recovery implies a careful consideration of the demand that the other poses on him, in an uncanny, literal rendering of the notion of the other within the self. More than triggering any kind of soul-searching, however, Cass’ visit (both her letter and person) provides the ageing Vander with the possibility of redeeming something within himself. She represents, in his own words, “the only and last chance to be me,” turning their stay in Turin as “a test of [his] 6
“He lived only for his art and for the company of a very restricted circle of friends who really understood it” (quoted in Carter 2001: xviii).
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authentic being” as well as a serious engagement with the other, in its many guises. The pretension to deal with her easily, testing a number of old strategies at his disposal, “I would try charm, then threats” (37), vanishes when, prey to a sort of passive exposure, he is at last able to see her under a different light, both afflicted and fascinated by her otherness. Looking at her through the “three-quarters reflection” in the mirror of the hotel’s room, he muses: For a moment I was dazzled by the otherness of her. Who was she, what was she, this unknowable creature, sitting there so plausibly in that deep box of mirrored space? Yet it was the very she, in all the impenetrable mysteriousness of her being entirely other, that I suddenly desired, with an intensity that made my heart constrict. (335)
It is not just sexual desire he is after, although he seduces her on the very first day of their encounter, but, as he soon realizes, a more compelling desire to plummet into the intimacy of the other’s otherness: “What I lusted after and longed to bury myself in up to the hilt was the fact of her being her own being, of her being, for me, unreachably beyond. Do you see? Deep down it is all I have ever wanted, really, to step out of myself and clamber bodily into someone else” (335). The revelation of Cass as “being entirely other” provides Vander with a glimpse of otherness which is based on its singularity and which escapes his understanding (the self’s attempt to express knowledge of the other), offering him in a single stroke the possibility of escape and redemption. In this way, the chance of “buying back” some part of himself provided by Cass also gives him the possibility of easing the discomfort of his split condition. Indeed, the text’s playful take on the word “exposure” buttresses Cass’ crucial intervention on Vander’s life, presenting her both as imminent threat of his public unmasking and the person who triggers his reluctant but necessary exposure to the mystery of the other(s). As suggested above, the arrival of the letter signals a turning point in Vander’s life, as it engenders uncontrollable split versions of the self: the pre- and post-letter selves; the presence of an other within his own self who uses his body as an external access to the world; out-of-body experiences that split him at once into a storied subject (Vander) and befuddled onlooker (narrator/writer of the memoir); the figuration of a number of imaginary doubles that overlap, twist and vanish only to reappear in his mind under different guises (28, 53); the presence of doppelgängers (Dr. Zoroaster) and nemeses (Cass). This sense of splitting is further enhanced by the reference to the Turin shroud, both in the title and throughout the novel, and its persistent link to Vander. The shroud,
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like skin, can be conceived as a borderline between self and other, being and becoming, and, in the case of resurrection envisages the possibility of inhabiting a different dimension. In Vander’s case, however, the shroud functions as a “non-symbol” of transcendence, drawing attention to a point of bodily impasse which prolongs Vander’s agony indefinitely. Throughout the novel he is described as the reluctant spectator of a restless process of bodily decay and aging that turns him into a shrivelled dying moribund who spends his days talking to himself and “being stared at by passers-by” in Turin (5). Indeed, Turin provides a brilliant counterpart to his condition of inbetweenness, a “gesturing statue” that simply adds up to the “marble” and “monuments” of a city that “resembles nothing so much as a vast, grandiose cemetery” (5). As with most of Banville’s narrators, Maskell and Vander are engaged in the process of writing their memoirs; their writing, however, does not so much stem from the wish to atone for their actions but from an uncontrollable urge to trace their encounter with the other, an encounter which happens despite themselves and which pervades their narrative. Despite their attempt at explanation, either by means of erasure, removing the “toffee-coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling” (Maskell), or by telling a story which can be vouched for, resisting “gaudiness of tone” (Vander), the writing of their memoirs exceeds its own function, affording a glimpse of an ethical relation which is based on the awareness of the persisting demand that the other poses more than on any sense of obligation to it (Critchley 2002: 21). It is in the act of writing (the saying) that this encounter with alterity manifests itself, interrupting the narrative at points that become vulnerable, if not fully visible, to critical scrutiny (Eaglestone 1997: 170). My analysis of The Untouchable and Shroud has attempted to bear out these crucial intersections which are best captured in the performative quality of language more than in the situations depicted in the narrative. Maskell’s and Vander’s acts of narration then, enact a transfer from the stalemate of moralistic assumptions into the more complex ethical concerns that their actions engender, sprawling beyond the boundaries of the books. Maskell claims no jurisdiction on his “fictional memoir” in the end, saving it from the incinerator where he destroyed most of the incriminating documents and leaving it in the house to be found, most certainly, by his biographer, Miss Vandeleur. The narrator of Shroud perpetuates the Vander/de Man predicament with the sense of a relation to the other that touches the self without fully inhabiting it. After Cass’ departure and death, he is unable to leave Turin, powerless against the many threats that the city poses: the claustrophobic narrow alleys, the smell of commonplace activities in shops
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and squares, and the many shadows of history evoking in him the haunting sense of immemorial time (the holy shroud and other elements of Christian devotion). There he has disturbing chance encounters, both with people and ghostly visions; they are intimations of exposure to an ethical demand that, like de Man’s “scenes” and “phrases” in epigraph to this section, “return[s] at times to embarrass and haunt” him and that manifests its passage in different shapes. Bibliography Adair, Gilbert ([1992] 1993) The Death of the Author, London: Minerva. Banville, John (2002). Shroud, London: Picador. —— (1997). The Untouchable, London: Picador. Booth, Wayne (1988). The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Berkeley: U of California P. Burke, Seán (1992). The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Carter, Miranda (2001). Anthony Blunt: His Lives, London: Macmillan. Critchley, Simon (2002). “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, eds. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1-32. —— (1999). “Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?” Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought, ed. Simon Critchley, London: Verso, pp. 51-82. —— (1992). The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford: Blackwell. de Man, Paul (1988), Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943, eds. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz and Thomas Keenan, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. —— (1983). Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Eaglestone, Robert (1997). Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub (1992). “After the Apocalypse: Paul de Man and the Fall to Silence,” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, London: Routledge, 120-164. Hamacher, Werner, Neil Herzt and Thomas Keenan, eds. (1989). Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Harpham, Geoffrey Halt (1995). “Ethics,” Critical Terms for Literary Studies, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed, Chicago and London: U of Chicago P.
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Lehman, Frank (1991). Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, London: Deutsch. Levinas, Emmanuel (1998). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Norris, Christopher (1988). Paul de Man, London: Routledge. Nussbaum, Martha (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford: Oxford UP. —— (1986). The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Palazzolo, Pietra (2003). “Contentious Encounters: John Banville’s The Untouchable,” Ranam, 36, 79-90. Rainsford, Dominic and Tim Woods, eds. (1999). Critical Ethics: Text, Theory, and Responsibility, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
“ALL THIS TRACTATE IS BUT A DREAM”: THE ETHICS OF DREAM NARRATION IN THOMAS NASHE’S THE TERRORS OF THE NIGHT PER SIVEFORS In this essay, Sivefors deals with Thomas Nashe’s pamphlet on nightmares, The Terrors of the Night (1594). Sivefors argues that Nashe’s work, instead of developing the didactic and moralizing potential of dream accounts, explores the diversity and moral ambiguity of dreams through its own narrative. Rejecting the common early modern view of dream narration as an act of divination which intervenes ethically in the world, the work also refrains from investing the act of narrating dreams with a negative moral or political value. Thus, contextualizing the work from the point of view of early modern dream analyses and interpretations, this chapter suggests that Nashe’s work exposes the problems in seeing literary texts as didactic containers rather than arenas of competing ethical values.
To twenty-first-century, post-Freudian readers at least, the idea that dreams are caused by an excess of bile would have a distinct ring of oddity. Even worse, the claim that dreams tell us how to behave properly because they are divine in their origin would probably give rise to suspicions of lunacy. In this respect, compared to our own time, the sixteenth century accommodated a much wider range of beliefs as to what dreams are and what their moral significance is. While dreams could be seen as divinely inspired, there were also claims that they were, as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet puts it, “begot of nothing but vain fantasy.” The present chapter, however, will not primarily deal with dreams as a literary device in genres such as drama or poetry. Rather, it seeks to address how dreams were analysed and represented in more discursive forms of writing such as pamphlets and essays, and it does so by focusing on one particular text, Thomas Nashe’ The Terrors of the Night (1594).1 This work has been paid scant attention even by Nashe criticism, and when it has been in focus, it has often been scanned by historians of ideas or by literary critics 1
Quotations from The Terrors of the Night are taken from vol. 1 of R. B. McKerrow, ed. The Works of Thomas Nashe; page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
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hunting for yet another “source” for Shakespeare’s work.2 Though such findings should not be dismissed out of hand, The Terrors of the Night merits being considered on its own terms. Specifically, the present chapter concerns a vital but underrated aspect of the text: its ethic of narration. Mimicking the associative structure of dreams, The Terrors of the Night refutes both the idea of dream interpretation as morally valuable because dreams are divinely inspired, and the idea of dream interpretation as condemnable because dreams are mere insignificant by-products. By this tendency, the work also enables an ethic of reading that is incompatible with the common sixteenthcentury notion of reading as morally “profitable.” As a consequence, The Terrors of the Night challenges the idea of the literary text as a container of ethical values. Like many other of Nashe’s works, The Terrors of the Night closely reflects its own history of composition; it is dedicated, in the author’s simultaneously lavish and self-mocking style, to Elizabeth Carey, with whose parents Nashe spent the Christmas of 1593 at the Isle of Wight. The work, printed in 1594 but claimed by Nashe to have been written much earlier,3 may have been a compilation from previous material (Duncan-Jones 1998: 178). At the same time it differs from Nashe’s other works in that it seems more improvised, and features textual borrowings which are less detailed and less close to their sources than is usually the case in Nashe’s oeuvre.4 Moreover, unlike other discourses on dreams, and unlike for example Nashe’s own mind-numbingly didactic Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, the work features very little moralizing or expressions of the belief in divine providence one finds in many similar texts from the time. As G. R. Hibbard puts it, “the didactic moralizing [...] though not entirely dropped, becomes the most transparent of pretences and is clearly intended to be seen as such” (1962: 110). Instead The Terrors of the Night becomes a relentlessly 2 Jonathan Crewe’s Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship, 1982, for example, does not mention The Terrors of the Night at all, and Lorna Hutson’s otherwise wide-ranging Thomas Nashe in Context, 1989 only refers to it in two very brief passages. For the Shakespearean connections—with which the present chapter will not be specifically concerned—see Harlow, 1965; Holmer, 1995; Pasternak, 1978; and Tobin, 1985. Apart from the extended analysis in G. R. Hibbard’s Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction, 1962), very few works on The Terrors of the Night have appeared, although the discussion of Nashe’s style in Neil Rhodes’ Elizabethan Grotesque, 1980, is still valuable for an understanding of the work. 3 For the composition and publication of The Terrors of the Night, see Harlow, 1965; Duncan-Jones, 1998. 4 See Harlow, 1965: 40.
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associative exploration of ideas on dreams, building its rhetorical forte on anecdotes and ever-swelling stylistic embellishment. In the course of its forty-odd pages, it both reflects and rejects a great number of common ideas about dreams and their significance. For that reason, before I go into the specifics of the text, it is necessary to situate The Terrors of the Night in the context of early modern theories on dreams. In early modern England, beliefs varied as to what dreams really were— whether they were of metaphysical origin or not, whether some dreams could be divine while others were not, and so on. Somewhat simplistically, one might describe the two extremes—the metaphysical and the antimetaphysical stances—as the “Platonic” and the “Aristotelian.” Platonic philosophy, for example, had suggested that the world of sleep is somehow more “real” than physical reality itself, a view which for example Sir Thomas Browne shared in his Religio Medici: “We are somewhat more than our selves in our sleepes, and the slumber of the body seemes to be but the waking of the soule” (1977: 154). Early modern writers frequently explored similar paths; John Lyly’s Endymion (1591) represented its protagonist’s extended sleep in a neoplatonic vein, as a quest for wisdom through pure, undisturbed contemplation, and Philip Sidney similarly termed sleep “the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release” in his Astrophil and Stella (Duncan-Jones 1989: 168). Real life, this philosophical argument suggested, was actually nothing but vain dreaming, whereas sleep and dreams contained the key to a higher form of contemplative existence. A work like Francesco Colonna’s famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphilia, a part of which was published in English translation in 1592, suggested (according to its translator) that “all humaine and worldlie things are but a dreame, and but as vanitie it selfe” (Colonna 1969: fol. 1r). Similarly, George Chapman’s obscure The Shadow of Night (1594), previously thought to be referred to by Nashe in The Terrors of the Night,5 suggested that the material world is an ever-changing shadow and that the soul is only “awake” to visions of good and evil during sleep. On the other hand, there was what could be termed an Aristotelian view, according to which dreams had an essentially physical origin. Dreams were caused by stimulatory movements in the body and thus had no divinatory value, except, as Aristotle had claimed, as wish-fulfilment or completion of symptoms ignored during waking.6 In Nashe’s own time, Reginald Scot’s 5
See Bradbrook, 1936: 172-78. As G. R. Hibbard pointed out some four decades ago, Bradbrook’s case is weak, since the correspondences between the texts are “of a very loose and general kind” (1962: 119). 6 To some extent, this is a simplification; Susan Parman points out that there are early
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Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) plainly rejected the idea of divination through dreams or by any other means: “dreames, whatsoever credit is attributed to them, proceedeth of follie: and they are fooles that trust in them, for whie they have deceived many” (1930: 101). Though Scot distinguished between different kinds of dreams—such as “physicall” and “casuall” ones— he proposed, with a nod at Aristotle, that all dreams, even supposedly divine or satanic ones, have biological rather than metaphysical explanations: “those which in these daies are called magicall or diabolicall dreames, maie rather be called melancholicall” (1930: 103). Referring to the commonplace distinction between the four temperaments, Scot suggested that dreams were caused by an overflow of the black bile, or melancholy, a view which Nashe also referred to in The Terrors of the Night. Most writers, however, were not absolutely clear-cut in their view of dreams, and religious beliefs and persuasions of course had a great deal of influence on the way people conceived of dream phenomena. Robert Burton noted in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1628) that dreams sent from the devil were one cause of religious melancholy,7 and at least nightmares were often thought to have diabolic origins. True, the Reformation had brought about a belief that miracles had come to an end, and more severe Protestants usually seem to have cared little for the power of dreams to foresee the future or reveal the divine. Yet, even if unlikely, divine dreams were still thought to be at least possible, something which Protestant belief did not altogether deny. Indeed, as Keith Thomas contends, “religion [...] reinforced the ancient belief in the divinatory power of dreams.” In providential religious narratives such as biographies of Protestant saints dreams were “a staple ingredient” (1971: 129), and as a device in such stories they generally functioned to reinforce the stories’ moral or providential contents. Moreover, dreams and dream interpretation occupied a firm position in traditional lore, according to which there was a causal link between phenomena in dreams and phenomena in the real world (Fox 2002:182). Nashe himself recalls in a passage in The Terrors of the Night how “aged mumping beldams” in his childhood would affirm that “if one at supper eate birds, he should dreame of flying; if fish, of swimming; if venison, of hunting, and so for the rest” (369). As we shall see, Nashe was markedly sceptical towards such models; but there is no reason to believe that such scepticism was just the result of education, for even well-educated readers and writers often expressed similar ideas.8 A work like Thomas Hill’s Aristotelian fragments which seem to claim that “when the soul is isolated in sleep it assumes its ‘true nature’ and can foresee the future” (1991: 26). 7 Cf. Burton, 1932: 3: 325. 8 At the same time, the political establishment tended to see the popular practice of
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Pleasaunte Arte of the Interpretacion of Dreames (1576), which Scot condemned as “a vaine treatise” (1930: 103), provided a strictly schematic model for dream interpretation, including extensive lists of particular dream phenomena and their meaning. For example, if a man dreams of seeing or talking to a prostitute, this “signifieth deception or variances,” and—rather more obscurely—if a man in love “dreameth to have founde a birdes neaste, and that he reaching or puttyng his hand into the neast, feeleth it could [sic], it is a token of hasty or sodayne sadnes, and sorrowe” (quoted in McLuskie 1999: 154-55).9 Thus, apart from their ability to foresee the future, dream narratives provided what might be termed an ethical intervention in the world: by saying something about the outside world, they also provided a message on how all humans, not merely the dreamer, should behave. Other writers still tended to be more sceptical. Sir Thomas Browne even hinted in a proto-Freudian direction when he argued that dreams may provide the key to knowledge not so much of the external world as of one’s own psyche: “however dreames may bee fallacious concerning outward events, yet may they bee truly significant at home, & whereby wee may more sensibly understand ourselves” (1977: 477). From being signs of divine intervention or symptoms of bodily imbalance, dreams were now on the verge of becoming—as in the philosophy of Browne’s contemporary, René Descartes—an important source of knowledge regarding the human self.10 At the same time, Browne conceived of this understanding in moral rather than strictly analytical terms: to understand one’s psyche is also to educate it to do good things. Indeed, by leading a better life in the daytime one might even be able to sustain the soul through the dark periods of sleep and dreaming: “virtuous thoughts of the day laye up good treasors for the night” (1977: 475).11 Apart from being a source of information on the self, dreams dream divination as something that needed to be rooted out. Thomas Hobbes, for example, considered dream interpretation to be politically inexpedient since it makes people less suited as law-abiding citizens: “If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience” (1914: 8). 9 As McLuskie points out, modern, post-Freudian readers would identify the connection between love, woman and nest as “a sexual, physical correspondence” (1999: 155); Hill, however, interprets the image in more innocent, near-metaphysical terms: “that neast signified and is the place of byrth, and coldnes expresseth death” (quoted in McLuskie, 1999: 155). 10 For Descartes’ dreams and his interpretation of them, see for example Parman, 1991: 82-85. 11 Robert Burton similarly cites Ptolemy, the “King of Egypt,” who was advised by
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therefore also became an index of the ethical standard of that self. Browne provides a list of people whose courage in the daytime made them equally courageous in their dreams, beginning, unsurprisingly perhaps, with Martin Luther, who “was not like to feare a spiritt in the night, when such an apparition would not terrifye him in the daye” (1977: 477). The Terrors of the Night contains elements of most of the views outlined above; it represents, as Peter Holland observes, “no substantial attempt to discriminate among the competing theories” (1999: 145). Moreover, it does not attempt to explore the nature of dreams in terms of Cartesian introspection, nor does it establish a firm separation between body and intellect. Rather, in terms of subjectivity and selfhood, Nashe’s text suggests the early modern lack of clear boundaries between the body and the intellect. As David Hillman points out, “selfhood and materiality [...] were ineluctably linked in the pre-Cartesian belief systems of the period” (1997: 83), and the interior of the body—heart, liver, kidneys—was frequently thought to be linked to the production of mental experience.12 The Terrors of the Night characteristically defines dreams in terms of physical phenomena, as phlegm: “A dreame is nothing els but a bubling scum or froath of the fancie, which the day hath left vndigested; or an after feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations” (355), or, in a more explicitly Aristotelian fashion, as black bile: “When all is said, melancholy is the mother of dreames, and of all terrours of the night whatsoeuer” (357). Thus, while it is true, as Neil Rhodes argues, that Nashe “makes comically palpable phenomena which are essentially mental” (1980: 42), mental phenomena such as dreams in turn have a palpable, bodily origin.13 Appropriately therefore, The Terrors of the Night represents its inner dream world as one of clashing grotesque bodies. Nashe claims, expostulating upon the idea of melancholy: “euen as slime and durt in a standing puddle, engender toads and frogs and many other vnsightly creatures, so this slimie melancholy humor still still [sic] thickning as it stands still, engendreth many mishapen obiects in our imaginations” (354). Sometimes even recalling the crawling animal forms of a Bosch painting, Nashe’s account describes how people affected by melancholy “haue thought themselues birdes and beasts, with feathers, and hornes, and hydes; others, one of his dream interpreters that the best way to sleep quietly was “to have divine and celestial meditations, and to use honest actions in the day-time” (1932: 2: 102). 12 On this, see Maus, 1995: 195. 13 In fact, as if anticipating nineteenth-century psychopathology, Nashe even defines dreams as a form of somatic excretion: “manie of the gates of our senses serue for nothing but to conueigh out excrementall vapors, & afrighting deadly dreames, that are worse than executioners vnto vs” (357).
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that they haue been turned into glasse” (355). As Bakhtin knew, the grotesque body “is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects” (1984: 27). Hence, in Nashe’s carnival dream world the mind is liberated from the boundaries which governs it in the daytime: “no such figure of the first Chaos whereout the world was extraught, as our dreames in the night. In them all states, all sexes, all places are confounded and meete together” (356). The dreaming mind, then, is not so much amoral as premoral, a carnivalesque sphere where ethical judgements are set aside. However, while The Terrors of the Night depicts the dreaming mind as a world of chaos and ubiquitous sexual and geographical encounters, it does not enact these conflicts on the level of distress or fear.14 Rather, Nashe’s work revels in the presence of them. As Peter Holland observes, The Terrors of the Night “embodies the popular pleasure in talking and more particularly in writing about dreams” (1999: 145). Holland seems to suggest that Nashe’s work, for all its scorn for popular divination, shares the fascination of popular culture with dream interpretation itself. But there is also an important difference: it refuses to carry out that fascination in ethical terms. From one perspective, The Terrors of the Night does not claim that dreams have a moral significance to one’s everyday life. Although Nashe concedes that “the Saintes and Martirs of the Primitiue Church had vnfallible dreames forerunning their ends” (372), he takes the common Anglican position that such divine visions belong to the past and do not happen in his own time. From another perspective, the very force by which the narrative is carried out, the “enjoyment of its own act” (Holland 1999: 145), belies for example Scot’s idea that dreams and dream analysis are insignificant or vain and therefore morally damaging. In ethical terms, The Terrors of the Night hence occupies a neither/nor position: it rejects the view of dream narration as an act which 14
This is a phenomenon often ignored by new historicist critics dealing with issues of subjectivity and selfhood. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, in a discussion of The Faerie Queene, argues that “for Spenser the psyche can only be conceived as a dangerous, factionalized social world, a world of vigilance, intrigue, extreme violence, and brief, fragile moments of intense beauty” (1991: 144). To Greenblatt, Spenser’s perception of the psyche is mainly one of fear or distrust; if the psyche is in conflict, then it must also be perceived as predominantly threatening. Yet, one might suggest, such a conflict may be more baffling to the twentieth-century critic than to the sixteenth-century writer or reader. If taken as a general image of early modern selfhood, Greenblatt’s analysis is less than precise, something which, I believe, The Terrors of the Night illustrates: to Nashe, the act of narrating the psyche becomes one of sustained exhilaration rather than an aestheticized capturing of “brief, fragile moments.”
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intervenes ethically in the world (divination), but at the same time it does not invest the act of talking about dreams with a negative moral or political value (vanity and civil disorder).15 To explore this dual position, I now turn to a discussion of the relationship in Nashe’s work between dream beliefs and the act of narrating those beliefs. It is, of course, not news that dreams could be said to be fundamentally narrative in their structure. As Paul Ricoeur has suggested, dreams contain an excess of symbolically expressed meanings which refer to things that cannot be said otherwise.16 In this respect, the dream narrative resembles the literary text. Indeed, in its structure and use of narrative devices, The Terrors of the Night establishes links between the dreaming psyche and the act of narrating that psyche. The text, then, could be said to become a “dreamstate” of its own. This is of course not to say that Nashe’s work is a kind of protoSurrealist attempt at “automatic writing.” Apart from the question of how automatic for example André Breton’s Surrealist poetry really was, Nashe’s sixteenth-century writing of dreams is not so much a neutral verbal representation of them as the result of purposeful literary deliberation. Yet, as I will show in the rest of this essay, The Terrors of the Night, to quite an extraordinary degree, creates what might be termed a structural resemblance between its view of the chaotic state of dreaming and its own restlessly associative technique. In this respect, one could do worse than compare Nashe to that most restless early modern explorer of the self, Montaigne; for critics often point out that the rambling, ever-expanding structure of the Essais seems, to post-Freudian readers at least, to mirror the ramblings of the human mind. Montaigne himself claims that his cumulative way of writing his self has a direct bearing on the chaotic processes of his own “spirit,” which, he says, begets in me so many extravagant Chimeraes, and fantasticall monsters, so orderlesse, and without any reason, one hudling upon an other, that at leasure to view the foolishnesse and monstrous strangenesse of them, I have begun to 15
For the idea of dream interpretation as politically inexpedient, see the Hobbes quotation in note 9 above. 16 See Ricoeur, 1970. As Ricoeur points out, the problem of dream analysis is very much coextensive with the problem of language itself, since dreams can only be analysed when they are recounted or narrated. This forms a significant zone of overlap with the symbolic meaning of the literary artefact: “the dreamer, in his private dream, is closed to all; he begins to instruct us only when he recounts his dream. This narrative is what presents the problem, just like the hymn of the psalmist. Thus it is the poet who shows us the birth of the word, in its hidden form in the enigmas of the cosmos and of the psyche” (1970: 16).
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keepe a register of them, hoping, if I live, to make him ashamed, and blush at himselfe. (1892: 40)
Just as in The Terrors of the Night the mind in Montaigne’s writing ceaselessly and spontaneously conjures up grotesque creatures without any apparent order. Yet Montaigne’s idea of keeping a “register”17 of them does not entail the imposing of a strict logical order. Rather, as Rhodes suggests, Montaigne’s rhapsodic manner of writing suggests “a relinquishing of intellect in its structuralising capacity, and a surrender to the endless commotions of a sensitive, even febrile imagination” (1980: 19). Rhodes is surely right to say that The Terrors of the Night bears a closer resemblance to Montaigne’s associative rambling than for example Bacon’s “rigidly compartmentalised, purposeful writings” (1980: 19), because the narrative style of both Nashe’s and Montaigne’s works strongly suggests a sense that everything connects, that the phenomena they depict resist structuralisation. However, Rhodes neglects the no less striking differences between Nashe and Montaigne. Two such differences are especially important to my discussion here. First, Montaigne’s self-consciously low-key feat of introspection differs considerably from Nashe’s swaggering display of literary artifice. There is nothing low-key about The Terrors of the Night; its very apologies are carried out in a boisterous manner which clearly belies their purpose. Compare for example Montaigne’s preface: Reader, loe here a well-meaning Booke. It doth at the first entrance forewarne thee, that in contriving the same, I have proposed unto my selfe no other than a familiar and private end: I have no respect or consideration at all, either to thy service, or to my glory: my forces are not capable of any such desseigne […] I desire therein to be delineated in mine owne genuine, simple and ordinarie fashion, without contention, art or study; for it is my selfe I pourtray. (1892: 12)
with the beginning of The Terrors of the Night: A litle to beguile time idlely discontented, and satisfie some of my solitary friends heere in the Countrey, I haue hastily vndertooke to write of the wearie fancies of the Night, wherein if I weary none with my weak fancies, I will herafter leane harder on my penne and fetch the petegree of my praise from the vtmost of paines. (345)
17
Montaigne’s French text has “rolle,” which Rhodes translates “record”—a term which is somewhat less suggestive of “imposed order” than Florio’s seventeenthcentury rendering.
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The rhetorical structuring and explosive alliterations of Nashe’s writing immediately call attention to the text’s character of performance, its demonstration of artistic skill. Nashe’s subject matter becomes, as Hibbard points out, “the occasion for a display of literary artifice” (1962: 112). If Montaigne denies the presence of “art,” Nashe affirms it through the conscious ornateness of his language, wrought with “the vtmost of paines.” Montaigne’s and Nashe’s respective explorations of the human psyche lead them in different directions. In fact, if they both eschew moralizing, they do so for opposing reasons: Montaigne because he only (says he) writes for himself, Nashe because he does not write for himself. Nashe asserts that he has put together his pamphlet “for the recreation of my Readers.” That act itself requires performance and skill, for Nashe’s fastidious readers would be “loath to tyre with a course homespunne tale, that should dull them woorse than Holland cheese.” Therefore, he says, “heere and there I welt and garde it with allusiue exornations & comparisons” (382). If to Montaigne performance does not count, to Nashe it is ultimately the only thing that counts. The second difference, surprising though it may seem, is simply that dreams are not of any great interest to Montaigne. As Holland puts it, “dream becomes for Montaigne more conceptual than experiential, available primarily as a metaphor for a form of definition of existence rather than constituting an area of experience that needs documenting and analysing” (1999: 133). But while Montaigne draws the conclusion that dreams are the mere unsurprising by-products of one’s daytime concerns and therefore does not treat them at any length or seriously, Nashe—who also sees dreams as by-products—puts them at the centre of his, and the reader’s, attention. There is a paradox implied here: Nashe’s repeated and rhetorically wrought assertions on the insignificance of dreams and his own writing on them do in the end only serve to emphasize the significance of both. At the same time, as Lorna Hutson argues in her discussion of Nashe, the author fails to make the text a place of productive knowledge (1989: 53-54).18 The reading of the text then becomes its own pleasure, and in ethical terms Nashe’s dream narration therefore transcends the notion of dream stories as a container of negative or positive values that affect the world. What counts, for reader and writer alike,
18
As Hutson remarks, “reading ‘profitably’ in the Elizabethan sense required the reader to engage in the active cultivation of discursive providence: the ability to invent aptly from the recollected treasures of reading” (1989: 47). One might remark that the narrative style of The Terrors of the Night could not but frustrate such schematic forms of discourse. The goal of the text is—to use Nashe’s own words— “to weary none” rather than to engage the reader’s discursive providence.
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is instead the writer’s ability to associate further, to perform ex tempore, to combine new words in an unexpected way. The abundant verbal inventiveness of Nashe’s style is, of course, its most characteristic trait and one of the prime reasons for the recent critical attention paid to his works.19 But, as suggested above, what distinguishes The Terrors of the Night from Nashe’s other works is the explicitness with which its language parallels the state of mind it sets out to describe. As Hibbard observes, the narration of the work is “carried out in an apparently rambling and casual fashion in which one digression leads to another, and even digression itself, in anticipation of Swift, becomes the theme of further digression” (1962: 113). This digressive straying can be said to characterize dreaming too. Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper make the parallel between the verbal and the mental in Nashe’s text even clearer, though they fail to pursue the connection any further. Nashe, they only suggest, “provides a dizzying fantasia on the nature of dreams and manages to debunk them in vivid language that itself recalls the wandering, illogical and discursive character of dreaming” (2004: 6). Indeed, if Nashe says that a dream is nothing but a “bubbling scum or froth of the fancy,” he makes sure that this is precisely how the reader perceives his own writing too. Nashe repeatedly apologizes for the ephemeral quality of his work, which is, he says, “speedily botchd vp and compyled” (382). At the same time the physicality of the “scum” image reflects a quality of his own writing, which is, in Hutson’s words, characterized by its “insistent corporeality” and “exaggeratedly physical nature” (1989: 8). If, as I have observed, Nashe’s version of the human psyche is a world full of grotesque bodies and animals, the text’s vagaries even seem to bring the narrative voice in the same direction. After a lengthy aside on the cold climate of Scandinavia, he exclaims: “how come I to digresse to such a dull, Lenten, Northren Clyme, where there is nothing but stock-fish, whetstones, and cods-heads” (360). But Nashe does not leave the parallel between mind and narrative for the reader to observe; he actually spells it out repeatedly. Sometimes his apologetic comments suggest nightmare motifs: “I haue rid a false gallop these three or foure pages” (368). On another instance he apologizes for his meandering subject matter: “to say the troth, all this whole Tractate is but a dreame, for my wits are not halfe awaked in it” (360). Notably, Nashe’s work is not like a dream; it is a dream. In fact, the structure of the pamphlet, beginning with an invocation of Nashe’s dedicatee Elizabeth Carey, then continuing with the rambling account of dreams and dreamers and turning in the end to a longish anecdote of a “Gentleman of good worship and credit” 19
See for example Crewe, 1982; Hutson, 1989.
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(378), even seems to reproduce the psychic structure of the dreaming subject—in both senses of the term “subject.” Put in Freudian terms, the dedicatee might be said to represent the “superego,” whereas Nashe’s own rational “ego” is no match for the excessive vagaries of the irrational and emotional “id.” In any case, The Terrors of the Night calls for a reading act that bars the ethical potential of dream narratives from interpretive transcendence. That is to say, by identifying itself as a dream rather than a dream narrative, Nashe’s text becomes a discourse that reveals nothing but its own desultoriness, thus rendering the work “too particular to afford any knowledge of a more general application to the reader” (Hutson 1989: 52). This identification is sometimes explicitly contrasted to, and selfconsciously plays with, the notion of a morally profitable text and the act of reading it: “Come, come, I am entraunced from my Text, I wote well, and talke idlely in my sleepe longer than I should” (361). It should be pointed out that the word “text” had a more Biblical, didactic ring than it has now; besides connoting something which is ordered, literally woven together, the word was mostly used in religious and scriptural contexts and thus had a strong connotation of authority and stability in meaning. With respect to didactic content, however, Nashe seems to suggest that his own rambling, unstructured work is becoming an anti-text: given Hibbard’s point that the moralizing element of The Terrors of the Night exposes itself as mere pretence, and given my own point that digression is the prime narrative device of the work, then Nashe’s manner of writing virtually explodes his own notion of an ordered, didactic “text” from which he is “entraunced.” Differently put, digressions, which constitute the substance of the work, effectively hinder The Terrors of the Night from intervening morally in the world. Instead of a moral intervention with universalist claims, what we have is an infinite number of individual narratives. As Nashe says, In our sleepe wee are agasted and terrified with the disordered skirmishing and conflicting of our sensitiue faculties: yet with this terrour and agastment cannot wee rest our selues satisfide, but we must pursue and hunt after a further feare in the recordation and too busie examining our paines ouer-passed. (373)
It might seem suitable therefore that Nashe concludes his argument—and the whole pamphlet—in medias res, without any attempt at a grand conclusion: “Thus I shut up my treatise abruptly, that hee who in the daye doth not good workes inough to answere the obiections of the night, will hardly aunswere at the daye of iudgement” (386). In a last self-reflexive aside, the very act of reading Nashe’s text becomes frivolous, an act that cannot claim to be ethically commendable, since it does not contribute to one’s stock of moral accomplishment on the day of judgement. Yet, that act of reading also
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becomes endlessly enticing. The Terrors of the Night ultimately forces the reader to reconsider what reading is or should be, and it does so in selfconsciously ethical terms: if it is not a “good”—that is, morally profitable— work enough to read, why should we care? Focusing on a form of narrative that was usually filled with moral significance and transcendence, Nashe’s text transforms that narrative from being an ethical container to a performer of individual ethical values, and in the process of doing so it enables us to rethink some aspects of early modern subjectivity and the self’s relations to the world as well. Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana UP. Bradbrook, M. C. (1936). The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Raleigh, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Brown, Peter, ed. (1999). Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford UP. Browne, Sir Thomas (1977). The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Burton, Robert (1932). The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 vols, London: Dent. Colonna, Francesco (1592). Hypnerotomachia, trans. R. D. Facs, New York: Da Capo. Crewe, Jonathan (1982). Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Duncan-Jones, Katherine (1998). “Christ’s Tears: Nashe’s ‘Forsaken Extremities’,” Review of English Studies 49, 167-81. Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ed. (1989). The Oxford Authors: Sir Philip Sidney, Oxford: Oxford UP. Fox, Adam (2002). Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700, Oxford: Oxford UP. Greenblatt, Stephen (1991). Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, New York: Routledge. Harlow, C. G. (1965). “A Source for The Terrors of the Night, and the Authorship of I Henry VI,” SEL 5: 1, 31-47. Hibbard, G. R. (1962). Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hillman, David (1997). “Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body,” The Body in Parts: Fantasies of
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Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, New York: Routledge, 81-105. Hobbes, Thomas (1914). Leviathan, London: Dent. Holland, Peter (1999). “‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in the Renaissance,” Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Peter Brown, Oxford: Oxford UP, 125-46. Holmer, Joan Ozark (1995). “No Vain Fantasy: Shakespeare’s Refashioning of Nashe for Dreams and Queen Mab,” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation, ed. Jay L. Halio, Newark: U of Delaware P, 49-82. Hutson, Lorna (1989). Thomas Nashe in Context, Oxford: Oxford UP. McKerrow, R. B., ed. (1910). The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols, London: Sidgwick and Jackson. McLuskie, Kathleen (1999). “The ‘Candy-Colored Clown’: Reading Early Modern Dreams,” Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Peter Brown, Oxford: Oxford UP, 147-67. Maus, Katherine Eisaman (1995). Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, Chicago: U of Chicago P. Montaigne, Michel de (1892). The Essays of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, London: Nutt. Parman, Susan (1991). Dream and Culture: An Anthropological Study of the Western Intellectual Tradition, New York: Praeger. Pasternak, Ann Slater (1978). “Macbeth and The Terrors of the Night,” Essays in Criticism, 28, 112-28. Pick, Daniel, and Lyndal Roper (2004). “Introduction,” eds. Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper. Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1-21. Rhodes, Neil (1980). Elizabethan Grotesque, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ricoeur, Paul (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, New Haven: Yale UP. Scot, Reginald (1930). The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Montague Summers, London: Rodker. Thomas, Keith (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Tobin, J. J. M. (1985). “Nashe and Julius Caesar,” Notes and Queries 230: 4, 473-474.
READING KRISTEVA AND BEYOND: PSYCHOANALYSIS AS TEXTUAL ETHICS LINDA BELAU In Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva characterizes her writing as an ethical project, maintaining its assumption of a stance that embraces otherness, or what one might call difference itself. Arguing that Kristeva’s stance is concerned with the limits of language, this essay explores the ethics of writing in Kristeva’s work on abjection and melancholia. Pursuing the significance of Kristeva’s writing as an act of reading, this essay opens a tangential, yet absolutely necessary, meditation on reading through the works of Shoshana Felman, Paul de Man and Maurice Blanchot, pointing, ultimately, to the possibility of an emerging ethics (or an ethos) that is always inherent in Kristeva’s reading of abjection and melancholia. Emerging on the horizon of symbolization, this ethics encounters the limits of the symbolic register where Kristeva locates semiotic language.
The ethics of a linguistic discourse may be gauged in proportion to the poetry that it presupposes. Julia Kristeva
One fundamental premise of Kantian philosophy holds that the Ethical necessitates an absence of the Pathological. An ethical act or an ethical stance is one that is maintained without any concern for or trace of pathological considerations. In Kantian ethics, for example, all pathological motivations fall out of the horizon of the ethical because of a certain uncertainty or lack of guarantee: the subject can never know whether an act conforms to the categorical imperative. If one commits an act out of self-interest or even for altruistic purposes, the act is, according to Kant, tainted with a pathological motivation. And while such an act may be moral, it could not—according to Kant—be ethical. This, of course, puts ethics in a completely different realm from morality, for morality is always tinged with a pathological element. To put matters a bit differently and in the context of psychoanalytic discourse, morality always has some ego formation attached to it. With its insistence on ideal practices as well as its expectation of guaranteed results and stable identities, morality is typically limited to the imaginary register while ethics
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finds itself in the much more murky realm of the symbolic, where an act— and the meaning of this act—is only determined retroactively through the Other. In the symbolic register, in other words, one has no guarantee that his or her act will come off as expected. While much of philosophy has concerned itself with the difference between morality and ethics, nowhere has this distinction been more acute or apparent than in psychoanalysis. For it is in psychoanalytic practice, in the clinic, that some of the most pathological acts are exposed. And insofar as psychoanalysis is held out as a cure, as a means to improve the self, it can also function in the service of morality. Freudian psychoanalysis, including its contemporary articulations, has always worked to avoid the pitfalls of morality, elevating itself, instead, to the level of the ethical. It has always been an essential imperative in psychoanalytic practice to resist the pathological temptation to close the field of knowledge, to insist on a stable, totalized subject, to elevate itself to the level of an ideal. In both its theoretical and practical expression, psychoanalysis accomplishes this resistance at the textual level. This is because psychoanalytic theory and practice are both constituted in narrative. Language is the cornerstone of analytic experience, and attention to language, to the way words signify as much as to what they say, has always been of first importance to psychoanalysis. Freud‘s work on construction in analytic discourse, for example, draws on this very insight. By the time Freud wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he recognized that the talking cure or the straightforward interpretation of a patient’s narrative—correlating word to event—was not the way to get to the unconscious repressed material: Twenty-five years of intense work have had as their result that the immediate aims of psycho-analytic technique are quite 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. Psycho-analysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst’s construction from his own memory. (1966b: 18)
Freud recognized that simply interpreting the patient’s message and attaching some stable meaning to it limited analytic practice to the pathological dimension of the analysand’s symptom. Interpretation established an engagement with the patient at the level of the ego. Freud, however, was after something else. He was in search of the subject of the unconscious.
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With the introduction of the practice of construction into the analytic context, Freud also elevated the practice of reading the unconscious to an ethical act. There are, Freud tells us, certain scenes from infancy that are not reproduced during analysis as recollections. They are, rather, the products of construction.1 Since analysis offers no direct access to the time before the time of the subject—an epoch that nevertheless marks the subject in the most profound way—construction was the only technique at Freud’s disposal to access his patients’ unconscious recollections. As a practice of reading the unconscious, construction would jettison Freud beyond the art of interpretation and the efficacy of the talking cure. It would take him beyond the limits of the imaginary register and the realm of the ego to the symbolic dimension of the subject and ground psychoanalytic practice as an ethical rather than a moral undertaking.2 Even though Freud himself chose to refer to morality in his work and avoided the use of the term “ethics,” it is quite evident that he was working within the parameters of ethical considerations. The absence of the term itself may have something to do with the fact that Freud was always working to establish psychoanalysis as a science and, therefore, tried to avoid its confusion with philosophy. In his Preface to J. J. Putnam’s Address on Psychoanalysis, however, Freud praises the author for “demanding that as a science [psychoanalysis] should be linked on to a particular philosophical system, and that its practice should be openly associated with a particular set of ethical doctrines” (1966c: 207). While Freud would, for the most part, leave the specific question of ethics for others to sort out, it would not take much time for Jacques Lacan 1
See for example Freud’s “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” and the 1937 essay “Constructions in Analysis.” 2 Freud’s ethical engagement with his analysands was premised on his refusal of the role of the subject supposed to know; that is, the one who knows how to interpret the truth behind the symptom. From his earliest work in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, through the abandonment of the seduction theory and later in his work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud was always committed to a much more complex notion of the subject’s knowledge. With his discovery of the unconscious, Freud recognized early on that knowledge is more often frustrated and thwarted than guaranteed in the analytic scene. Rather than assuming that such frustration was either the analysand’s or the analyst’s shortcoming, Freud recognized that negation was, in fact, the very nature of the unconscious. Consequently he invented the analytic practice of construction in order to read the unconscious repressed. For a more sustained reading of Freud’s analytic practice and the role of construction as a practice of reading the unconscious repressed, see Belau “Trauma, Repetition, and the Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis.”
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and the French School to open Freudian psychoanalysis up to the question of ethics and the importance of philosophical inquiry. During the academic year 1959-1960, for example, Lacan’s training seminar was devoted to the ethics of psychoanalysis and its relation to the question of jouissance and sublimation.3 Although Lacan’s seminar works through both of these concepts with the support of philosophical discourse, opening psychoanalysis up to and connecting it with both ethical and ontological philosophy, it is another psychoanalyst who deals most systematically and overtly with the more philosophical and literary question of ethics and textual practice. Because she is an accomplished novelist, philosopher, literary theorist, linguist, and analyst, Julia Kristeva brings dynamic insight into the question of the ethics of psychoanalysis as a textual practice. Mostly known in the United States for her work in literary theory, Kristeva’s American critics often disregard the clinical aspect of her professional and intellectual profile. It is important to remember, however, that even though Kristeva has always offered us the most insightful analyses of various literary texts and philosophical figures, she is first and foremost a psychoanalyst. Entirely heterogeneous in her intellectual pursuits, Kristeva always returns to the question of ethics. Because of her commitment to thinking through the exigencies of language and linguistic variance, ethics, in Kristeva’s work, is always tied to what she calls poetic language.4 Ethics is—inherently—a matter of the text. According to Kelly Oliver, Kristeva “brings jouissance back into the foundation of ethics by founding ethics in jouissance […] Her concern is to link the ethical with negativity so that it will not degenerate into either conformity or perversion. Without negativity, ethics is mere conformity. And without ethics, negativity is mere perversion” (1993: 181). It is precisely the function of the negative that grounds ethics and annuls the emergence of the pathological. Without negativity, then, ethics is just morality. Because of the way that each is grounded in an absolute negativity, a radical annihilation of identity, Kristeva focuses on abjection and melancholia to think through ethics and negation. Since both the melancholic 3
While Freud did not use the term jouissance in his work, the Lacanian notion corresponds to Freud’s theory of the death drive or an enjoyment that exists beyond the pleasure principle. 4 According to Kelly Oliver, Kristeva’s early work “argues that poetic language is another model for ethics, an ethics that includes the negativity that challenges any fixed identity in order to prevent totalitarianism of symbolic Law” (1993: 8). For a more sustained analysis of Kristeva’s theory of poetic language, see her Revolution in Poetic Language.
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and the abject are constituted in and by a radical negativity, it is, therefore, impossible for Kristeva to characterize this abyssal essence directly. Instead, she must perform the very absence that constitutes the abject and the melancholic; she must, that is, undertake an act of reading and writing that concerns itself both with what she has to say about her subject as well as how she goes about saying it. In this sense, Kristeva must read like an analyst; she must read ethically. According to Oliver, Kristeva’s reading of ethics “can never be fully articulated or represented with symbols because it is driven by an element that is heterogeneous to the symbolic […] For Kristeva, texts can be ethical. She sees her own writing as an ethical project” (1993: 182). Turning an analytic eye toward her reading of abjection and melancholia, I would like to turn to Kristeva’s texts to consider how text and ethics implicate each other at the very limits of the symbolic register where Kristeva locates semiotic language. Toward the end of her primary textual meditation on abjection, Powers of Horror, hidden within the folds of what one might call her poetic prose, Kristeva makes a startling claim: Throughout a night without images but buffeted by black sounds; amidst a throng of forsaken bodies beset with no longing but to last against all odds and for nothing; on a page where I plotted out the convolutions of those who, in transference, presented me with the gift of their void—I have spelled out abjection. (1982: 207)
Kristeva’s statement gives the reader pause both because of the content of the statement as well as the form of its articulation. Not only does she deploy a rather straight-forward and objective use of language, a prose that stands in marked contrast to the more withdrawn style of the majority of her book, the claim itself, in its implicit insistence on its assumed guarantee of success, maintains abjection as an object, something to be spelled out, a concept that can be defined, described, and given over to us. Thus arises a seeming contradiction within Kristeva’s text, since she begins the book by claiming that abjection “does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine” (1982: 1). According to Kristeva, abjection is precisely that which escapes the parameters of description; it is that which cannot be assimilated into the realm of representation. One wonders about the meaning of such a contradiction. Is Kristeva confused? Has she missed her own point? Is she, in some strange, imaginary gesture, herself engaged with or as the abject? And how might this contradiction itself open on to the question of ethics? In Desire in Language, Kristeva characterizes her writing as an ethical project,
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maintaining its assumption of a stance that embraces otherness, or what one might call difference itself. Calling for a theoretical discourse “resting on the brink of fiction,” Kristeva declares that “such a stance is the only guarantee of ethics” (1980: ix). This guarantee of the ethical, however, is never finally and exhaustively guaranteed. This, according to Kristeva, is the demand of ethics, and only by not demanding that the ethical guarantee anything, is any guarantee that the ethical might emerge possible.5 Here we see how Kristeva is working with a negative definition of ethics that takes one beyond signification, perhaps to the order of what both she and Lacan name “the Thing.”6 Although Kristeva is clearly working within Freudian parameters, she indicates that she would differentiate her thought of the Thing from Lacan’s association between das Ding and word, maintaining instead an association between Thing and the impossibility of language. While Kristeva evokes a notion of “the instability of the symbolic function in its most significant aspect” in relation to the abject (1982: 14), she reserves another thought of the failure of signification for the melancholic. And it is only here, within the movement of this failure, that the negation proper to ethics might be performed as the impossibility of language. In Black Sun, Kristeva stages melancholia (or the melancholic) as a kind of linguistic condition exposing “that boundary where the self emerges […] fused with the archaic Thing, perceived not as a significant object but as the self’s borderline element” (1989: 15). And it is here, within the “identity” of the melancholic (or of melancholia), that Kristeva entertains perhaps as the principle of any notion of identity—the thought of a radical deprivation or absence she ultimately figures in relation to the failure of language: [...] deprived of meaning, deprived of values […] they experience both their belonging to and distance from an archaic other that still eludes representation and naming, but of whose corporeal emissions, along with their automatism, they still bear the imprint. Unbelieving in language, the depressive persons are affectionate, wounded to be sure, but prisoners of affect. The affect is their thing. (1989: 14) 5
I hesitate to use the term “demand” here since it opens up a whole Lacanian problematic concerning the ethics of desire, perhaps suggesting an implicit refusal of desire inherently lurking within the context of a refusal of demand. Insofar as it reflects a potential engagement with Kristeva’s comment in Powers of Horror that “there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects” (1982: 6), it may suggest another direction in which one might think a problematic of demand, desire and/or abjection as well as their relation to the ethical. 6 For Kristeva’s meditation on the Thing, especially as it relates to the linguistic predicament of the melancholic, see Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, 13-15. See also Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 43-70.
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For Kristeva, affect—an Other language where language is other to itself, absent to itself—betrays an intimate relation (or, in this instance, perhaps a non-relation) to the Thing. While the difference that emerges in Kristeva’s reading of Lacan undoubtedly marks a distinction in how each might constitute the relation of language to law or the symbolic order, it seems that both analysts would agree that the Thing is beyond the signifier, alien in its very nature, Fremde. The Thing corresponds to the objet a or the real that does not lend itself to signification, existing only as an absent presence as the failure of signification, where language, deprived of its communicative potential, collapses into itself, marking, in its radical alterity, its abject foundations. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan describes an artistic realm where “the object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing.” This, he tells us, is “the most general formula […] of sublimation” (1992: 112). Through the theory of sublimation, Lacan offers the possibility of thinking the impossible Thing in relation to the social or the realm of the object. And, insofar as Kristeva recognizes in the melancholic’s language of pure affect an artistic realm where the ethical might be engaged, the question of the social might also be implicated in her analysis of radical negation. Kristeva argues that the melancholic’s affective language might lend itself to another order of signification and, most importantly, to jouissance. Of course, this enunciation would not be stated in the way one would normally state this or that as fact or fiction. Its content would be characterized by something other than its cause. Its content, then, might be thought as something other than conceptual or intuitional meaning, something other than the effect of some subjective and/or linguistic intention. Thus, the problem of origins is evoked, for no cause-and-effect structure functions in the genesis of this language. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes, “there remains essentially in the function of cause a certain gap.” Following Lacan’s reading of Kant, one might argue, however, that nothing other than cause opens up in or as the melancholic’s address. This gap can command or determine no effective content to or for its form. It is in this sense that, according to Lacan, “the gap that the function of cause has always presented to any conceptual apprehension […] is a concept that, in the last resort, is unanalysable” (1978: 21). What Lacan calls cause, then, cannot be symbolized, but instead exists in what Kristeva calls the semiotic register. That is, in the gaps, spaces, interruptions or stutterings of language or, perhaps more to the point, at the limit of the symbolic where the failure of symbolization opens onto the
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horizon of the real.7 In this sense, the gap Lacan calls cause constitutes a material force that is the in-between of the symbolic as well as the inbetween of the symbol, the traumatic cut between signifier and signified. According to Kristeva, only poetics or sublimation engages that materiality. Sublimation expresses itself in an art form (which Kristeva usually refers to as poetic language but also designates as analytic discourse) that both embraces and is the abject form of subjectivity. That is, pure form without content or the ex nihilo that, for Lacan, is both the occasion for and the condition of what he calls the “first signifier.” In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes that this signifier “is in its signifying essence a signifier of nothing other than of signifying as such, or, in other words, of no particular signified” (1992: 120). As a form without content, the “first signifier” marks a void (which is not a simple absence or lack, but also must be thought in terms of an excess) that is the condition for the organization of the signifier and for signification as such. It is through sublimation that we might engage what Joan Copjec calls “an existence without predicate” or “a surplus existence that cannot be caught up in the positivity of the social” (1995: 4). That is, a pure form (signifier) without a content (signified), or the excess of difference when difference is thought as a kind of internal differing of the thing from itself. This relation might also be thought as the void that this signifier both indicates and encompasses—the nothing beyond that is its internal limit. For Kristeva, then, the possibility for an ethics, as well as its implication in and importance for the social, cannot be situated in the place of an object that awaits our apprehension. Instead, it exists in a beyond that must be thought as a between. An impossible beyond that emerges in the eruptions of language where the ethical shows itself, not as an other language, but as Other to language, where language, different from itself, demonstrates the chiasmic abyss of its figuration. The impossible beyond where the ethical emerges is both indeterminate and unrealizable insofar as it always occurs, in relation to language, retroactively. Thus, it is the condition for language 7
This horizon, it must be remembered, does not simply come about as an after-effect of the failure of the symbolic, for it is precisely this failure that the symbolic is always attempting to cover over. Paradoxically, then, this failure, which presumably comes after or as a result of the symbolic, suddenly emerges as the cause of the symbolic. Thus, a straight-forward cause-and-effect analysis fails to correspond to the complexity of the issue: the significance of relation remains obscure while any thought of an origin reveals an absent placeholder, itself emerging retroactively as its own loss. For a thoughtful and provocative analysis of this chiasmic relation between Lacan’s symbolic and real registers, see Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, 1995.
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emerging always and only after language has taken place, intervening as its own disruption. While listening to language and allowing its disruptions seems the best approach for engaging this Other side of language, such a strategy, perhaps, leads only to a misguided and ultimately utilitarian attempt to turn this something else, this beyond, into something—another object—that might be posited. Kristeva avoids the objectifying consequences of this approach by relying on the written text as a kind of mediator that can only withdraw. For, according to Kristeva, “the ethical cannot be stated, instead it is practiced to the point of loss, and the text is one of the most accomplished examples of such a practice” (1984: 234). But what might it mean for the ethical to be “practiced to the point of loss?” For Kristeva, the ethical emerges only in the context of—or perhaps beyond the horizon of—a performance. The performance of an impossible between that is beyond signification and memory as the agent of representation. Practiced to the point of loss, this performance is nothing more than a failed approach—a necessary repetition around a missing kernel that Kristeva names the Thing. As such, one might argue that it moves in the order of the real, offering the possibility of an encounter with jouissance— the Other side of language that never manifests itself but insists at the level of the Thing. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan suggests the possibility of an encounter with the Thing, insofar as it might be equated with the beyond-signification of the primary process. An encounter with or experience of the Thing must, according to Lacan, “be apprehended in its experience of rupture, between perception and consciousness.” It opens the space of a non-temporal locus, what Lacan, after Freud, calls “die Idee einer anderer Lokalität, the idea of another scene, between perception and consciousness” (1978: 56). How is this scene encountered? Lacan gives the example of waking from a short nap while hearing a knocking at his door. At the precise moment of this waking—not yet awake and no longer asleep, the moment he describes as “so immediately before and so separate”—Lacan states he is “knocked up,” using a phrase that, in the original French, appears in English (1978: 56). He is “knocked up” into and by the other scene of the real. Lacan’s decision to apply an English phrase that also has a curiously idiomatic connection to pregnancy seems intentional, especially in relation to a few brief lines from “The Signification of the Phallus,” where he describes an always-already mediated relation of self to the (m)Other. According to Lacan, the primordial relation to the mother is always “pregnant with that Other” (1977: 286), always in excess, always constituted by that in-itselfmore-than-itself, or what Joan Copjec describes as “in us that which is not
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us” (1995: 128-9).8 This pregnant, excessive relation to the Other, Lacan maintains, is characterized by “the intimate exteriority or ‘extimacy’ that is the Thing” (1992: 139). Opening up the space of psychoanalytic theory through an invitation to “read otherwise,” Shoshana Felman offers us another way to approach this extimate interiority. In Literature and Psychoanalysis, Felman asks us to think the possibility of a textual ethics through a practice of reading where two distinct terms, in their extimate relation to each other, expose how each is different from itself. According to Felman, these two terms “are different from each other, but, at the same time, they are also enfolded within each other, since they are, as it were, at the same time outside and inside each other, we might say that they compromise, each in its turn, the interiority of the other” (1982: 9). And it is precisely such a reading that might constitute the kind of extimate return beyond Lacan that Kristeva makes in her reading of melancholia. A reading, then, that opens Kristeva to another scene beyond Lacan in the same way that Lacan’s famous return to Freud is often thought as a repetition of Freud that works at the limits of his discourse, exposing and exploiting a failed encounter. In this sense, Lacan is not situated as some font of knowledge, as the subject presumed to know, whom Kristeva opens up and offers for our perusal, just as Freud can never become that kind of object for Lacan. In The Work of Fire, Maurice Blanchot writes that the practice of reading always entails some split in the reader. In the act of reading, two readers emerge, thus obscuring any possibility of a stable identity. According to Blanchot, “whoever stays with the story penetrates into something opaque that he does not understand, while whoever holds to the meaning cannot get back to the darkness of which it is the telltale light. The two readers can never meet; we are one, then the other, we understand always more or always less than is necessary. True reading remains impossible” (1995: 4). For Blanchot, it is precisely the non-space where these two readers never meet that emerges as the condition for the possibility of reading at all. For reading is not a simple interpretation of knowledge or information. Instead, it is an act. It takes place only within a failed performance, in the space where it collapses into itself: the space between (and beyond) the two readers. According to Blanchot, “the possibility of reading [emerges] within the impossibility of interpreting this reading” (1995: 5). Here reading becomes an endlessly repeated act.9 8
A gloss of Lacan’s famous definition of the objet petit a: that which is in you more than you,” see The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (263-276). 9 In this sense, reading functions in much the same way repetition does in the analytic scene. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, for example, Lacan
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Through a specific strategy of reading the melancholic, Kristeva embraces the ethical dimension of analytic engagement. In the same way that one might reflect on the split she undergoes as a reader of Lacan, Kristeva performs this same split in her reading of melancholia. In her affective and excessive reading of Lacan (via the melancholic), which is also an excessive and affective reading of the melancholic (via Lacan), Kristeva performs the extimacy of the Thing. Through the play of two very different discursive registers, Kristeva opens the possibility of impossibility within an act of reading. She does this specifically in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia through her reading of melancholia both as an object for psychoanalytic study and as an art form that necessarily exceeds the objectifying impulses of science. Kristeva begins Black Sun with a kind of poetic language that seems to iterate the linguistic predicament of the melancholic. Writing in a painfully elliptical style, Kristeva demonstrates what she is trying to define through a strategy of withdrawal. And, strangely enough, this is the section of the book one might call objective. That is, the melancholic is what is being described, objectified, and spelled out. One might think that it is within the logic of this contradiction that Kristeva is able to perform the other scene of language that the melancholic has come to signify. Signification is precisely the problem, however, for the other scene that Kristeva is working into exists on the side of the Thing, at the very limits of signification. Thus, withdrawal is not enough for Kristeva’s performance because a simple withdrawal never exposes an extimate relation to language; it never fails to meet its limit since it always maintains its limit as “beyond,” in the sense of an outside rather than a between. According to Paul de Man, this sort of strategy never fails to re-create the objectifying stance it presumes to dismantle: “The apparent resignation to aphorism and parataxis is often an attempt to recuperate on the level of style what is lost on the level of history. By stating the inevitability of fragmentation in a mode that is itself fragmented, one restores the aesthetic unity of manner and substance that may well be what is in question” (1984: ix). In order to approach the extimacy of the Thing that melancholia somehow indicates, Kristeva must push her discourse beyond the elements of a stylistic deferral. Therefore, in her reading of melancholia, Kristeva does not limit herself through an exclusive use of poetic language as she attempts to write the Thing. In order to pursue her performance and ground her ethical maintains that repetition evokes a “truly unique encounter,” which is no more concrete than a dreamscape. “Only a rite, an endlessly repeated act,” Lacan writes, “can commemorate this not very memorable encounter” (1978: 59).
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engagement, she shifts her style in the final chapters of her text where she describes the work of art as the quintessential melancholic form. In this part of the text, however, Kristeva approaches the work of art through a rather straightforward prose. Throughout her meditation on what she calls the “aesthetics of awkwardness,” for example, Kristeva herself never exploits the kind of elliptical, poetic language she uses in the first half of her text. Kristeva herself seems engaged in an act of disavowal as she explains that the affected rhetoric of literature and even the common rhetoric of everyday speech always seem somewhat festive: How can one speak the truth of pain, if not by holding in check the rhetorical celebration, warping it, making it grate, stain, and limp? There is some appeal, however, to Duras’ drawn-out sentences, lacking in acoustic charm, and whose verb seems to have forgotten its subject. (1989: 225)
In her characterization of that which comes closest to an authentic expression of the condition of the melancholic (the artistic realm), Kristeva paradoxically engages a language that is farthest from the opacity of expression that characterizes the melancholic. One can see this same rhetorical strategy in Powers of Horror. In her essay on abjection, Kristeva employs both a poetic as well as an objective prose to propel her meditation. And, just as in Black Sun, it is precisely this form of the text that engenders content beyond either definition or style. In the contradiction between these distinctive discursive registers, Kristeva pursues an excessive reading that undermines any presumption of a stable, objectified identity for either discourse, exposing an Other realm of language that is neither poetic nor referential. The text of Black Sun itself offers a strangely material instance of this “Other realm” in both the content as well as the form of the fourth chapter entitled “Beauty: The Depressive’s Other Realm.” Situated between the prosaic first part and the more objective second part of the text, this chapter engages a prose that is a strange combination of the two, and, as such, is a reflection of neither. In this sense, it marks both the difference of each mode of discourse from the other, as well as from itself, exposing what Blanchot refers to as “a surplus that one cannot account for” (1995: 20). In this chapter, Kristeva performs the Thing in the space that is the difference between two types of discourse, where each style, so to speak, in its relation to the other, emerges as different from itself. The melancholic, then, does not emerge out of the pages of Kristeva’s text. Instead, it retroactively engenders her text as a reading of Lacan, in the movement of return where both Kristeva and Lacan expose a certain Thingly element. That is, the extimate difference each text marks from itself in its relation to the other. Since the language of the melancholic cannot be readily
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contextualized, it must be performed within the parameters of a reading that always grounds itself in frustration. A reading whose failure is its very success as it maintains another place for the melancholic—the place of the Thing—exposing the absolute internal limit of the self that both constitutes and is constituted by subjectivity: abjection itself. According to Kristeva, the melancholy person “extols that boundary where the self emerges,” becoming “the bearer of a jouissance fused with the archaic Thing, perceived not as a significant object but as the self’s borderline element” (1989: 15). What Kristeva recognizes in melancholia is the possibility of an ethical relation. “Rather than seek the meaning of despair,” Kristeva suggests, “let us acknowledge that there is meaning only in despair” (1989: 5-6). Kristeva invites us to resist what she calls the “imaginative capability of Western man.” The impulse of the Western imagination, or the pathological insistence on seeking the meaning of despair, writes Kristeva, “is the ability to transfer meaning to the very place where it was lost in death and/or non-meaning” (1989: 103). This is a repression of the empty and excessive non-meaning, a denial of the ethical potentiality of melancholia and the Other side of language that the melancholic embraces through its disavowal of negation. Kristeva’s broadening of Freud’s Verleugnung considers disavowal as the rejection of the signifier. In this sense, Kristeva offers the situation of the melancholic, whose problem lies precisely in “not knowing how to lose,” for any loss entails a loss of Being (1989: 5). Not knowing how to lose, unable to cathect its losses, the melancholic, in its disavowal, affirms the impossibility of the Thing as the real object that was never lost. According to Kristeva, Depressed persons […] disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted. The denial of negation would thus be the exercise of an impossible mourning, the setting up of a fundamental sadness and an artificial, unbelievable language, cut out of the painful background that is not accessible to any signifier and that intonation alone, intermittently, succeeds in inflecting. (1989: 44)
Through attention to the melancholic, Kristeva’s engagement with language re-opens the reader to the non-all, the Other side of language that has been repressed through and by signification. The ethical demand of Kristeva’s praxis can be seen as paying heed to the originary impossibility of language embodied in the melancholic’s inability to disavow that excessive Thing which marks the limit of language. For this limit may be precisely what language never stops talking about, however negatively, as its own impossible possibility of existence.
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Bibliography Belau, Linda (2002). “Trauma, Repetition, and the Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis,” Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory, eds. Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic, New York: Other Press, 151-75. Blanchot, Maurice (1995). “Reading Kafka,” The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1-11. Copjec, Joan (1995). Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge: MIT Press. de Man, Paul (1984). Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia UP. Felman, Shoshana (1982). Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading Otherwise, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Freud, Sigmund (1966a). “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 17, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 50-52. —— (1966b). Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 18, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 7-64. —— (1966c). “Preface to JJ Putnam’s Address on Psychoanalysis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 18, 269-270. —— (1966d). “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 23, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 255-270. Kristeva, Julia (1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. —— (1984). Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia UP. —— (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP. —— (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardin and Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP. Lacan, Jacques (1992). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter, New York: Norton. —— (1978). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton. —— (1977). “The Signification of the Phallus,” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton. 281-291.
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Oliver, Kelly (1993). Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bin, Bloomington: Indiana UP.
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BODILY FORMATIONS AND READING STRATEGIES IN JOHN DONNE’S METEMPSYCHOSIS SIOBHÁN COLLINS This essay argues that the textual/sexual ethos of Metempsychosis is most evidenced in Donne’s use of rhetorical strategies and mnemonic devices to engage the reader. Metempsychosis is about sex, poetry and ethics, and incorporates notions of both spiritual transcendence and physical immanence. In this poem Donne narrates the soul’s various erotic exploits in its metamorphic journey “from her first making when she was that apple which Eve eat [sic], to this time when she is he, whose life you shall find in the end of this book” (Epistle 34-9). The strategies of reading Donne inscribes in Metempsychosis encourage the ideal (male) reader to recognize the soul’s appetitive bodily exploits as part of his own bestial heritage. This recognition, which depends on the reader’s acceptance of the interdependence of body and soul in the formation of self, has salvationist possibilities. However Donne’s depiction of the soul’s physical adventures manifests a deep, if ambivalent, commitment to the sexual body that challenges, but does not obliterate, the spiritual ethos of his poem.
The grotesque bodily sphere is described as the point of intersection and division between one body and another: “One body offers its death, the other its birth, but they are merged in a two-bodied image” (Bakhtin 1995: 230). This “two-bodied image” inundates Donne’s Metempsychosis (1601). In this poem, along with bestial sex, we find images of “mingled bloods” (502) signifying life, bodies swallowed by bodies that are in turn themselves swallowed (symbols of death and destruction), and the pulsation of life within life in the detailing of the intricate formation of the embryo within the womb—life and death as one in the process of becoming. Metempsychosis is comprised of an Epistle followed by fifty-two stanzas, of ten lines each, entitled “First Song.” In the Epistle the narrator proposes to map the progress of the soul, through all its bodily transmigrations, from its beginning in paradise to its final embodiment in contemporary England. What Donne does in Metempsychosis is explore the origins of the conflict between the transient body and the eternal soul, life and death, in the myth of Genesis, which he depicts in overtly sexual terms. This poem then traces the progress of the soul through a hierarchical scale of
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earthly being—plant, animal and human—detailing the sexual exploits of an increasingly cognizant fallen nature. The heretical Pythagorean doctrine is Donne’s controlling myth. Following the death of one bodily host the soul moves into another and so on over twelve episodes (detailing twelve various embodiments) the soul rotates in cycles of sin and degeneracy through corrupting time. Grotesque realism in Metempsychosis emphasizes the material and the bodily. In this poem Donne universalizes the particular and particularizes the universal in relation to appetite and desire, presenting a richer repository of contemporary cultural anxieties, fears and fantasies about sexuality than has yet been realized. Before commencing with my analysis of Metempsychosis, which will focus on how the text performs its own, sometimes ambivalent, textual/sexual ethos, I will first outline its critical reception. This will show how Donne’s emphasis on the penetrable and degenerative nature of the grotesque body, along with his authorial advice to the reader to seek the identity of the wandering soul’s last bodily host, has been misunderstood, resulting in an assumed incoherence within the text. Herbert Grierson, for instance, argues that Metempsychosis is not only incomplete but maintains a “vein of sheer ugliness” throughout, lacking both “invention” and “wit” and presenting episodes and details that are “pointless,” “disgusting” and “wantonly repulsive” (1912: 2:xx). I contend that critics read the text too narrowly as a commentary on specific socio-historical events, generating a negative and reductive evaluation of what in my opinion is Donne’s most extended poetic exploration of metaphysics. In the process of reading the poem’s ethical performance I will propose an identity for the wandering soul that involves a shift of expectation on the part of the reader and does not reduce any of the stanzas to futility. Grierson’s damning dismissal of Metempsychosis in 1912 is compounded by Douglas Bush’s inability to discern why Donne “dwells with mingled gloating and loathing upon a succession of animal couplings” (1945: 131). The influence of these earlier critics is evident in D. C. Allen’s argument that in the final analysis Metempsychosis is incoherent (1952: 8399). Janel Mueller’s essay pointedly eschews any attempt “to raise the esteem” of Metempsychosis but concentrates on making it a “more intelligible—and hence more tolerable failure” (1972: 109). Mueller consolidates earlier disparaging arguments with her conclusion that in Metempsychosis “the vision is of a world so bad […] that it is to be rejected, not reformed” (135). Ronald Corthell describes Donne’s poem as an “abortive epic,” which “celebrates deeds and persons unworthy of our esteem” and “falls short of sustained high seriousness” (1981: 101). Wyman Herendeen’s essay tries to justify the “irreverent, carnal and nasty”
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Metempsychosis by arguing, “In aborting his narrative, Donne concedes the incomprehensibility of our experience in the material world and the inadequacies of profane art” (2001: 5). Following Grierson, the vast majority of critics focus on the satirical elements of Metempsychosis in order to determine what contemporary historic individual was to be the soul’s last host, and thus the primary satiric target of Donne’s attack. The jury is still out: critics are divided between those who see the poem as an attack on Elizabeth as heretic, and those who consider that the target of the attack is Robert Cecil. All who engage in this analytic approach, however, understand Donne’s Catholicism, and his sympathies with the Earl of Essex, as his motivating factor for writing the poem. Donne certainly alludes to current history, religion and court politics in several stanzas of Metempsychosis. The dating of his poem, “16 August, 1601,” suggests that it was written six months after the execution of the Earl. The Epistle states that a particular historic identity for the meandering soul will be forthcoming at the end of the poem: However the bodies have dulled [the soul’s] other faculties, her memory hath ever been her own, which makes me so seriously deliver you by her relation all her passages from her first making when she was that apple which Eve eat [sic], to this time when she is he, whose life you shall find in the end of this book. (34-39)
Stanza 7 claims that the discovery of this identity will reward the reader’s patience: For the great soul which here amongst us now Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow, Which as the moon the sea, moves us, to hear Whose story, with long patience you will long; (For ‘tis the crown, and last strain of my song). (61-65)
As the Epistle “promises us a male protagonist” van Wyk Smith argues that the “great soule” is the “power behind the throne: sinister, influential, but nevertheless rather ridiculous. […] exactly […] the contemporary view of Robert Cecil” (1973: 143). However, van Wyk Smith depends for support for his thesis primarily on the whale and the ape episodes of Metempsychosis, reductively dismissing other episodes (à la Grierson) as “no more than witty inventions in the narrative continuum of a progress in decadence” (1973: 148). Kenneth James Hughes argues that the masculine pronoun could be recognized by Donne’s inner circle as “a final devastating insult aimed at questioning Elizabeth’s claim to femininity.” “[V]iewed from a political
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angle,” he maintains, “it is easy to consider Elizabeth male since she ruled like a man, equalling if not excelling her father in ruthlessness” (1982: 17). Also, and for the first time extending the hypothesis that Elizabeth was to be the soul’s last embodiment beyond the “evidence” of stanza 7, Hughes states that in Metempsychosis: The picture of “itchy” sexual desire coupled with the aversion to any physical contact is not a pretty one, nor is it intended to be, for it marks the culmination of the manifest sexual intent that has been developing from the beginning of the poem, all of which is focussed here on Elizabeth. (1982: 37)
Hughes’ focus on Elizabeth’s “problematical” sex life, and the difficulty of determining her gender, since “she ruled like a man” (and it is worth noting here that Hughes’ linking of masculinity with ruthlessness is less an early modern than a post romantic association) brings the theme of sexuality in the poem to the fore. However, his argument that Donne’s “sexual intent” in the poem is satirically focussed solely on Elizabeth reductively misses the poem’s philosophical exploration of sexuality and its ethical address to the reader. Paradoxically, and in keeping with its ethical concerns, the most instructive approach to the poem begins with the final stanza: Whoe’er thou be’st that read’st this sullen writ, Which just so much courts thee, as thou dost it, Let me arrest thy thoughts, wonder with me, Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest, Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blessed, By cursed Cain’s race invented be, And blessed Seth vexed us with astronomy. There’s nothing simply good, nor ill alone, Of every quality comparison, The only measure is, and judge, opinion. (511-520)
Donne’s mention of Cain and Seth as the founding fathers of all human endeavour draws the biblical myth to the fore as an explanation for human society today. The paradox that the poet asks the reader to consider is that out of good can come evil, out of evil, good. Donne’s description of his poem as a “sullen writ” stresses the profanity of both the author and his craft. The poem, as I shall show, is considered profane because it is the product of a soul infested with original sin. Donne’s rhetorical wit in Metempsychosis deliberately invites the reader to join with him in his reflection on what constitutes human identity. His address to the reader is to think on the history of the deathless soul’s progress through time and space, which the previous
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fifty-one stanzas have detailed, as a means towards understanding the self as partaking in body and soul, the physical and the spiritual. Metempsychosis, I maintain, is circular in design and thus complete. Donne’s instruction to the reader “to wonder with me” (513) either returns the reader to the soul’s divine origins in the myth of Genesis, or thrusts the reader back into the heretical Pythagorean myth that propelled the soul’s repetitiously appetitive and cyclical bodily movement on earth in the first place.1 The onus is on the reader whether the soul “lose or win” (500). I contend that Donne’s own poetic journey strives towards a heavenly cycle but is marked by a deep engagement with the sexual body, which challenges the transcendental spiritual ethos of his poem. In stanza 9, Donne collapses time in order to commence the soul’s story of her peregrinations from paradise to contemporary England, from innocence to guilt, and from the sacred to the profane: Prince of the orchard, fair as dawning morn, Fenced with the law, and ripe as soon as born That apple grew, which this soul did enlive, Till the then climbing serpent, that now creeps For that offence, for which all mankind weeps, Took it, and to her whom the first man did wive (Whom and her race, only forbiddings drive) He gave it, she to her husband, both did eat; So perished the eaters, and the meat: And we (for treason taints the blood) thence die and sweat. (81-90)
The phallic snake as symbol of original sin is one that regularly recurs in both Donne’s poetry and his sermons. The topos of the “then climbing serpent, that now creeps,” in Metempsychosis, metaphorically re-enacts the fall in sexual terms, which in turn gives rise to “all prophane Authors” doomed to create within the lifecycle of birth and death.2 The sexual overtones are no post Freudian projection: Donne’s description of the instant the fall took
1 The narration of the soul’s metamorphosis through twelve bodies over fifty two stanzas also suggests a complete cycle of time, incorporating, as it does, the number of months and weeks within a year. As such, Donne’s Metempsychosis can be seen as not only cyclical in nature, and thus complete, but also as partaking in the concern with temporality that preoccupied the age. 2 In Essays in Divinity, Donne describes the words of “all prophane Authors,” as “the seed of the serpent, that creepes’ symbolically contrasting them to “the Dove, that flies,” which is the word of God (Simpson 1952: 113).
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place is striking for its use of telescopic imagery and intimate bodily detail to bring to mind the precision of a transgressive and violent sexual act: Just in that instant when the serpent’s gripe, Broke the slight veins, and tender conduit-pipe, Through which this soul from the tree’s root did draw Life […]. (129-132)
The poet describes the serpent and the fruit in sexualized terms; the “t’ill then climbing serpent” (93) is reduced to a “worm” (110) after the Fall which also results in the death of the till then “ripe” (90) and “fair” (91) fruit. The soul, now “old” and “loose” (134) is dispatched into a morally declining Pythagorean cycle of change, corruption, and mortality. The vaginal fruit is the channel or “conduit” (122) through which the soul moves from the realm of eternity to that of promiscuity, mutability, and death. It is the fear of sexuality, of the material and the bodily, which re-enacts with fascination the first Fall throughout the narrative episodes of the poem. The Fall is re-enacted in the gaping mouth of the sparrow, the swan’s devouring of the fish, the whale’s “vast womb” (317) which “swallowed dolphins without fear” (316), the elephant as “tomb” (399) to the mouse, and in the “temperate womb” (494) which “stewed and formed” (495) the “mingled bloods” (493) of Adam and Eve. The fear of engulfment, of being swallowed and devoured by the gaping jaw/womb, of falling downward through the “open gate leading downward into the bodily underworld,” the fear of the immeasurable, the terror of chaos, of cosmic terror, saturates the images and feeds the ethics of Donne’s Metempsychosis (Bakhtin, 232). Motherhood is portrayed as the immediate consequence of the fall, and the contaminating source of its continuation on earth: […]. The mother poisoned the well-head, The daughters here corrupt us, rivulets, No smallness ‘scapes, no greatness breaks their nets, She thrust us out, and by them we are led Astray […]. (93-97)
Poison symbolically portrays corruption and pollution at the core of Christianity itself, where the breaking of bread is sacrosanct. Donne’s association of poison with the mother brings into relation betrayal, the female sexual body, and spiritual corruption. The sheer violent force of blame is encapsulated not only in the staccato effect achieved by the intense punctuation of this stanza but is heightened also in the isolated phrase, “She thrust us out” (96). The “us” in question identifies the male speaker’s
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anticipated reader(s) as male and assumes a common opposition to, and fear of, the female sex. Donne’s use of the sea as a metaphor for the maternal and the feminine draws the analogy that just as the sea betrays the fish in stanza 28—“So far from hiding her guests, water is / That she shows them in bigger quantities / Than they are” (271-273)—the maternal feminine body gives form and birth to carnal desires and betrays the soul. History is foreshortened as contemporary women are in this stanza “Rivolets” directly descending from Eve and taught by her to capture, betray, and corrupt “us.” Towards the end of Metempsychosis Donne collapses any differentiation between Eve and her daughters. After the Ape has been slain for attempting to seduce Eve’s daughter, Siphatecia, we are told that the soul “whether by this change she lose or win, / […] comes out next, where the Ape would have gone in” (491492). As it is Eve who next gives birth to Themach, the soul’s new “prison,” any remaining distinction between Eve and her daughters is finally dissolved. As a result of the Fall man’s punishment is, paradoxically, to love that which instigated the fall in the first place—the female sexual body. The sense that sexual transgression was fated to occur, indeed necessary to God’s plan for man’s punishment and redemption, involves the poet in a guilt ridden interrogation of sexual desire which he displaces onto the penetrable female body: […] ‘twould seem rigorous, She sinned, we bear; part of our pain is, thus To love them, whose fault to this painful love yoked us. (98-100)
The sense of injustice in, “she sinned, we bear” is expressed extremely hesitantly. The broken, tense, punctuation in this line, along with the conditional clause that precedes it, suggests that the poet is cautiously questioning God’s decision to punish man for the sins of the female. Donne’s tentative questioning of God’s justice gathers muscle as the narrative progresses into the next stanza, and results unexpectedly in an important, if brief, sense of solidarity between the sexes: So fast in us doth this corruption grow, That now we dare ask why we should be so. Would God (disputes the curious rebel) make A law, and would not have it kept? Or can His creatures’ will, cross his? Of every man For one, will God (and be just) vengeance take? Who sinned? ‘twas not forbidden to the snake Nor her, who was not then made; nor is’t writ
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In these lines Donne adopts the pose of a “curious rebel” in order to question who sinned. The end of the stanza asserts that not only Adam but Eve also is innocent of sexual transgression. However, both of them, “and we,” suffer penance and “endure for it.” This blasphemous stance introduces the notion of similarity rather than difference in relation to the plight of the sexes. It is the stanza’s heterodox views that neutralize for a moment the misogyny within the poem. We are all here on earth united through suffering; man, woman (and snake) are persecuted alike though innocent of any transgression. At this point Donne’s earlier focus of blame towards women, whom “only forbiddings drive” (86) and “whose fault to this painful love yoked us” (100), is conditioned and revoked by the recognition that male and female both are equally innocent and equally punished. Both sexes are restricted to the experience of fallen sexual love with its promise of pain and labour. Although the confidence the poet gathers, which allows him to challenge the ways of God, is shown to originate from a form of corruption and displaced onto the female and the rebel, the “silence” (120) that follows the question “[w]ould God […] make / a Law, and would not have it kept” (103-104) is pivotal and reverberates throughout the poem. In stanza 13 God’s seeming inability to protect the virginal fruit from the serpents “gripe” (121) connects the moment of sexual transgression with a somewhat violent “fate” “which God made, but doth not control” (2). Prior to the Fall, the apple is “Fenced with the law” (82). However the use of the adjectives “slight” and “tender” (122) to describe the apple creates an overriding impression of vulnerability and fragility, rather than culpability, as the fruit, “ripe as soon as born” (82), is susceptible to the serpent’s sexual advance despite the fact that it “hung in security [...] made by the Maker’s will from pulling free” (8889). Even though the poet distances himself from the blasphemous questioning of God’s justice, his appeal to the Holy Ghost, in stanza 12, to forcibly remove him from vain disputes, as “less is the gain” (112), suggests that his sense of injustice is very real and impossible to relieve without a violent attack on his rationality. Reason, as an attempt to understand why the innocent are punished, and dispute the ways of God, is exposed as impotent. Donne compares reason to “glassie bubbles, which the gamesome boys / Stretch to so nice a thinness through a quill / That they themselves break, do themselves spill” (115-117). The connection between heresy and sexuality is made explicit. The act of disputation is compared to masturbatory action that
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results in a premature and non-productive “spill,” displaying onanistic and orgasmic overtones. However, even as the poet moves beyond and dismisses the “gamesome boys” there is a sense in this extended conceit that Donne is held by the fantasy of an innocent playful sexuality that involves affinity between the sexes, which in being heretical is both vain and reckless.3 Before continuing with the story of the soul’s progress, the poet considers his “six lustres almost now outwore”(41).4 The “six lustres” may be read literally, as a reference to the age of the historic Donne, or figuratively: in the early modern period the age of thirty symbolically signified the age of prime manhood, at the height of fortune’s wheel. Sin committed after the age of thirty was considered to be graver than the same sin committed in one’s youth. With this in mind, the figurative serves to reinforce literal conceptions. The poet’s reticence to proceed with the soul’s narrative, his fear of engulfment by the soul’s accumulation of sin in its progress from Eden to contemporary England, takes on a personal pathos: To my six lustres almost now outwore, Except thy book owe me so many more, Except my legend be free from the lets Of steep ambition, sleepy poverty, Spirit-quenching sickness, dull captivity, Distracting business, and from beauty’s nets, And all that calls from this, and t’other whets, O let me not launch out […]. (41-48)
This stanza recites a dread of going forward with the narrative for fear of losing self and relinquishing will in the otherness of the soul’s story and sin.5 The fear of “going forth” and mood of entrapment and vacuity in stanza 5 contrasts with the vital energy and steely determination displayed by the bard as he self-consciously reflects on his proposed poetic journey in stanza 6: But if my days be long, and good enough, In vain this sea shall enlarge, or enrough Itself; for I will through the wave, and foam, 3
For a similar argument on the interplay between derision and desire in the depiction of onanism in early modern poetry see Dollimore, 2001: 104. 4 A lustre is five years. This suggests that the narrator poet was almost thirty years of age when writing this poem. Written in 1601, this accords with Donne’s birth year of 1572. 5 This consuming fear is rehearsed also in Donne’s Satires: “Shall I,” the voice of “Satire 1” quakes, “follow headlong, wild uncertaine thee?” (11-12).
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Siobhán Collins And shall in sad lone ways, a lively sprite Make my dark heavy poem light, and light. For though through many straits, and lands I roam, I launch at paradise, and I sail towards home. (51-57)
The sea voyage metaphorically relates to both the “dark heavy poem” and the narrator-poet’s life journey. The repeated use of the personal pronoun collapses the two into one. This journey is depicted as a struggle with hostile fate. However, secure in the knowledge that his starting point is paradise, the poet heroically determines to proceed with this voyage making his poem “light“ as he sails towards home. The designed cyclical nature of both the poem and the poet’s life journey is evident in the desired return to an original point, “I launch at paradise, and I sail towards home” (57). The verb “sail” brings to mind a flowing effortless movement that contrasts with the course of life’s journey on earth: “The course I there began, shall here be stayed, / Sails hoisted there, struck here, and anchors laid / In Thames, which were at Tigris, and Euphrates weighed” (58-60). The soul, having begun its journey in Tigris and Euphrates, the rivers of Eden, finds itself anchored on London’s river Thames struggling with a hostile nature. The soul’s progress from Eden to Earth is the subject of this “dark heavy poem” (55). It is also the subject of the bard’s quest for self-knowledge (36-39), the means by which he intends to “sail towards home” (57), or, in other words, strive to return to paradise. The poem, as a means to self-knowledge, will explore the soul’s fall and its peregrinations on earth, and thus will be dark and heavy. However this selfawareness will also be the means by which the soul can return to paradise, and it is in this sense that Donne promises to make his poetic journey “light, and light,” to give “something exemplary, to follow,” to bring something good out of evil (Epistle, 14). The paradox that evil can be the source of good is contained in Donne’s use of the heretical Pythagorean myth as a vehicle for Christian values. The poet assumes in his audience a familiarity with the myth: All which I will bid you remember, […] is, that the Pythagorean doctrine doth not only carry one soul from man to man, nor man to beast, but indifferently to plants also: and therefore you must not grudge to find the same soul in an emperor, in a post-horse, and in a mushroom […]. (Epistle, 22-27)
The soul’s progress is dependent on its metamorphic journey from body to body. Predominantly, Donne depicts the progress of the soul through the use of the beast fable. The soul commences its journey on earth in the body of a plant, travels through the bodies of ten beasts and finally enlivens a human embryo, which the poet details:
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The tender well-armed feeling brain, from whence, Those sinewy strings which do our bodies tie, Are ravelled out, and fast there by one end, Did this soul limbs, these limbs a soul attend, And now they joined: keeping some quality Of every past shape, she knew treachery, Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enow To be a woman. (502-509)
The balancing effect of the caesura pause in the middle line of this stanza— “Did this soul limbs, these limbs a soul attend”—draws attention to the mutual and central interdependence of body and soul in the formation of the self. The soul enlivens the body; the physical fleshly body clothes the soul and propels its movement on earth. The interdependence of body and soul is evident also in the Epistle: though this soul could not move when it was a melon, yet it may remember, and now tell me, at what lascivious banquet it was served. And though it could not speak, when it was a spider, yet it can remember, and now tell me, who used it for poison to attain dignity. However the bodies have dulled her other faculties, her memory hath ever been her own. (29-35)
As the “other faculties” have been “dulled” by the soul’s imprisonment in the bestial body, the relation of the soul’s progress relies largely on its memory. Donne tells us in his preface that it is “no unreadiness in the soul, but an indisposition in the organs works this” (28-29). The soul, entombed within the body of a beast, does not possess an ethical capacity. Although it does possess memory, it cannot reflect or pass judgement on that memory.6 Therefore, ethics play no part in the activity of the soul limited by the organs of a beast.7 Donne’s envy of the moral freedom of beasts is apparent in the intimate, collaborative and anticipatory perspective with which the poet views the ape’s shameless seduction of Adam’s daughter: He gazeth on her face with tear-shot eyes, And up lifts subtly with his russet paw Her kidskin apron without fear or awe. (477-479) 6
In De Anima, Aristotle distinguishes human from animal memory by the rational faculty of reflection and judgement (1985: III.ii). 7 Because they lack understanding and will, beasts, irrespective of their actions, remain innocent, untouched by original sin. Donne bemoans the human condition in a verse letter “To Sir Henry Wotton”: “Only perchance beasts sin not; wretched we / Are beasts in all, but white integrity” (41-42).
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The run on lines enact an erotic flight of fantasy that suggests an unconscious slip of identity between the ape’s “russet paw” and Donne’s hand. However, the ape’s lack of fear ignites the poet’s own and the sequence of identification is interrupted. Authorial control is asserted as the point of view quickly draws back and enlarges to include a philosophical perspective: “Nature hath no gaol, though she have law” (480). Fantasy turns to fear. As the seduction scene continues, the tone changes to an air of fascinated, yet detached, repugnance as focus (and guilt) are transferred onto the female’s sexual response, which foreshadows the ape’s death: That virtue, by his touches, chafed and spent, Succeeds an itchy warmth, that melts her quiet, She knew not first, now cares not what he doth, And willing half and more, more than half loth, She neither pulls nor pushes, but outright Now cries, and now repents […]. (482-487)
The rhythmic “Now [...] now” in the seventh line of this stanza has an accumulative effect. The first “Now,” in upper case, expresses Siphatecia’s sexual desire, the second “now,” in lower case, and associated with repentance, suggests both her sexual experience and knowledge. Siphatecia’s reaction to the ape’s sexual advance displays only limited use of the organ that should differentiate the human from the animal: “The tender well–armed feeling brain” (502). Donne’s detailed description of the formation of the human embryo, the soul’s last host, emphasizes that the human brain is “tender” because it partakes of the sensitive soul of beasts. However, it is also “well-armed” because it now has full use of all its faculties with which to judge and reflect on behaviour. Donne informs us that the soul keeps “some quality / Of every past shape” (506-507). Yet, a critic argues, “Nothing that happens to the soul in its progression has a rational or predictable quality to it” (Blackley 1994: 121). However, the narrative supports Donne’s statement: the soul displays an accumulation of self-conscious memory in its progress from body to body. For instance, the soul flees from “her too active organs” (222) in the body of the sparrow to the passive sexual instincts of the fish. Following the whale’s destruction by “[t]wo little fishes” (341), the soul, newly housed in a mouse, retains its memory of past experience: “This soul, late taught that great things might by less / Be slain, to gallant mischief doth herself address” (379-380). Memory is the quality that imposes a rational to the soul’s progress through a hierarchical, thus somewhat predictable, scale of being. In sharing the memories of the soul the narrator consciously absorbs the soul’s identity into his own. In absorbing the soul’s memories, that is its
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accumulation of sins from its first fall to its wanderings on earth, the narrator, “clothed but in beast’s skin” (“Satire 1,” 46), like Christ, takes on the world’s sins. Donne takes on the impurities of the fallen soul ever degenerating through time. This autobiographically conceived persona places himself in a sacrificial position as he reluctantly, but resolutely, becomes a receptacle for the sins of the world. One with the soul through experiential memory, the narrator shares in the limitations of the body, “the indisposition in the organs” (Epistle, 28), which propels the soul towards corruption and sin cyclically conceived. The soul’s degenerative progress, however, necessitates that its purest state is at its inception. Metempsychosis is concerned to probe the very origins of the soul’s memories, to the time “before the law / Yoked us” (3-4), to the original purity and innocence of the soul, in order to ignite vestiges of our divinity in memory. Such memory serves to restore confidence in our salvation through Christ and rectify the will. Donne displays an understanding of the self as partaking in both body and soul, with all the bodily limitations and desires that that entails. However, a memory and understanding of the origin of the soul, and the soul’s westward progress, marks a transference of desire, and with it, of will, to return eastward to the point of departure and complete a divine circle in the pattern of Christ. Memory, for Donne, is not only a rhetorical device but essentially ethical. Metempsychosis works to provide the source of group memory. Donne perceives all humanity as sharing the same essential nature, despite the progress of time. This “all,” Donne tells us in the third stanza of Metempsychosis, “are all derived” from Noah’s ark, “that cage and vivary / Of fowls, and beasts, in whose womb, Destiny / Us, and our latest nephews did install” (24-27). The satirical attack, so evidently foregrounded in Metempsychosis, is directed against “Us,” that is both poet and reader, indeed all of fallen humanity, which derived from “that floating park” (29). Thus Donne states in his Epistle: “As long as I give them as / good hold upon me, they must pardon me my bitings” (9-10). Donne does not exclude himself from his own satiric attack but considers himself to be “worse / than others” (6-7). This confession of his fallen nature assures and allures the reader into accepting whatever “bitings” lie ahead in the poem, since they will have “as good hold” (10) on the author.8 8
The metaphor of “bitings” is an ancient genre metaphor associated with satire. Donne writes in a sermon, “We make Satyrs; and we looke that the world should call that wit; when God knows that that is in a great part, self-guiltinesse, and we doe but reprehend those things, which we ourselves have done” (Donne’s Sermons, VII, 408). The conflation of satire with a diatribe against lust in the early modern period resulted not only from the false etymology of “satire” from the licentious “satyr” rather than “satura” but also from the increasing symbolic importance awarded to sexuality in
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The satiric intent in Metempsychosis is intensely personal and private (note the self-scrutiny that the autobiographical narrator subjects himself to) and also, at the same time, markedly public in its appeal to an audience. As Carruthers points out, “a rhetorical conception of ethics requires that its social and public nature be stressed” (1992: 181). Through the myth of Genesis and that of metempsychosis combined, the contemporary reader experiences a shift of expectation: instead of discovering a particular historic individual embodying the soul in the final stanza, the reader is called upon to reflect on “his” own inherited corrupt identity, which the previous fifty one stanzas have detailed. It is only in this sense that the Epistle’s directive to the reader—to discover the identity of the wandering soul—can be understood: “she is he, whose life you shall find in the end of this book” (38-39). The reader is expected to recognize the soul’s various erotic adventures as part of his own bestial heritage. Memory, as it engages with our own experiences, humbly recalls our sinful and fallible nature thus persuading us of the need for spiritual restoration.9 This does not allow any of the stanzas to be reduced to “pointless wit.” Through identity with the “deathless soul” (1) the reader is expected, in considering the origins of human civilization, to remember that though God is not in time, his ever present consciousness embraces the whole successive course of the world’s history. It is in this theological sense that Metempsychosis functions as an allegorical morality. Donne’s “First Song” invokes the seriousness of the spiritual role which the inspired poet/singer performs for society.10 Each episode in Metempsychosis re-enacts a moral chapter and freshly impresses it upon the memory through startling and grotesque sexual imagery.11 both political and theological spheres. Swift’s proposition that men wrote satire with two ends in mind: “private satisfaction” and “public spirit” (Levin 1980: 1-14), and Donne’s deep concern that what is satirized is not only internalized but ultimately derives from the self and makes “the times ill,” suggest that in the early modern period satire was considered not only as a literary forum within which one could justifiably explore, ridicule, and deride sexual desire, but also a form within which one could indulge in erotic expression for private satisfaction under the cover of public reform. 9 Memory, for Donne, as for St. Augustine, was the means towards salvation: “the art of salvation is but the art of memory” (Donne’s Sermons, II, 2, 73). 10 Knapp argues that religion authorized the newly emerging idea of the renaissance poet as one whose role in society could equal that of the priest, see 2003: 61-79. 11 It was memory, as opposed to the imagination, which was believed to offer access to the heart’s deepest and most profound labyrinth of experience. Only through an open heart, that is a willingness to process the memories contained within, could one come to know oneself. Memory and identity were one; proper exercise of the faculty of memory resulted in knowledge of the self , see Carruthers, 1992: 52-60.
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Although the poem’s episodic form and metaphorical structure stresses the bestial element of human nature, the sensory part of the soul, the narrative arc can only be fully realized by the reader’s engagement with, and “wonder” (513) at, the universal and normative nature of being in the world. The ideal (male) reader, through full exercise of the tripartite rational soul, transforms what is read to “his” own memory, “his” own experience, performs a cognitive ethical response, and undergoes a metempsychosis, that is a change of will / desire, a change in soul, which will enable him to “sail towards home” (57). However, the poem is not moralistic in the narrow sense of the term. The autobiographically conceived narrator does not engage in selfrighteous accusation or separate himself from the concerns of the poem. Neither does he preach absolute distinctions between good and evil but rather relies on a shared communal memory, and the individual’s own conscience, to persuade and delight: “I will have no such readers that I can teach” (Epistle, 22/3). To conclude: situated in the grotesque bodily sphere Metempsychosis cannot claim access to any absolute Truth. It appeals only to the reflective ethical judgement of the reader, who, it is assumed, shares a belief in a larger theological system. Despite lack of certainties the reader is invited to partake in a mental exercise the end result of which cannot be easily determined. It is a role that Donne, as poet, has himself, with trepidation, embarked upon: “how my stock will hold out I know not; perchance waste, perchance increase in use” (Epistle, 16-17). The equivocation in the Epistle is mirrored in the relativism of the concluding lines: “There’s nothing simply good or ill alone” (518). For Donne, to concede that opinion is all that we have with which to measure and judge is not to give voice to a sophist negation of any ethical stance. Rather, it acknowledges that in this profane world of becoming one can only strive toward an informed opinion, certainty and truth being the preserve of God’s “holy writ” (10). Because of the Fall all that partakes of this world contains contraries, nothing being either simply good or simply ill. The invitation to the reader to actively engage with the poet in considering the origins and hidden depths of human identity does not allow the final proposition of Metempsychosis to collapse into a sceptical and extreme relativism. What it does is return the reader to the deepest concerns of humankind, the conflict between good and evil, reason and faith, the body and the soul. The opposition of contraries, as we have seen, is complicated by Donne’s deep engagement with, yet ambivalence towards, the sexual body. There is no conclusion to the conflict within the confines of a “sullen writ” (511). Nevertheless, by encouraging the reader to identify himself as the soul’s last bodily host, the poet, with ethical intent, seeks to close the gap between body and soul, and ignite the episodic investigation into the nature
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of being in his reader’s heart and mind, “wonder with me” (513). The outcome is not guaranteed. Bibliography Allen, D.C. (1952). “The Double Journey of John Donne,” A Tribute to George Coffin Taylor, ed. Arnold Williams, Chapel Hill: UNC P. Aristotle (1985). The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. Princeton N. J.: Princeton UP. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1995). The Grotesque Image of the Body and its Sources in Bakhtinian Thought, ed. Simon Dentith, London: Routledge, 225254. Blackley, Brian (1994). “The Generic Play and Spenserian Parody of John Donne’s Metempsychosis,” Diss. U of Kentucky. Bush, Douglas (1945). English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660, Oxford: Clarendon P. Carruthers, Mary (1992). The Book of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Corthell, Ronald (1981). “Donne’s Metempsychosis: An ‘Alarum to Truth’,” Studies in English Literature, 21: 1, 97-110. Dollimore, Jonathan (2001). Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, New York: Routledge. Donne, John (1952). Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson, Oxford: Clarendon P. —— (1953-61). The Sermons of John Donne, eds. George R. Potter and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols., Berkeley: U of California P. —— (1996). The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith. London: Penguin. Grierson, Herbert (1912). The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols., London: Oxford UP. Herendeen, Wyman H (2001). “‘I launch at paradise, and saile toward home’: The Progresse of the Soule as Palinode,” EMLS Special Issue 7 [online]. Available from: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-07/herendeen.htm, [accessed Nov. 11, 2001]. Hughes, Kenneth James (1982). “Donne’s ‘Metempsychosis’ and the Objective Idea of Unreason,” Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages Bulletin XVIII, 1&2, 15-39. Knapp, Jeffrey (2003). “Spenser the Priest,” Representations, 81, 61-79. Levin, Harry (1980). “The Wages of Sin,” Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said, Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1-14.
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Mueller, Janel M (1972). “Donne’s Epic Venture in the Metempsychosis,” Modern Philology, 70, 109-137. van Wyk Smith, M (1973). “John Donne’s Metempsychosis,” Review of English Studies n.s. XXIV, 17-25, 141-52.
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CHECKPOINT SYNDROME: VIOLENCE, MADNESS, AND ETHICS IN THE HEBREW LITERATURE OF THE INTIFADA ADIA MENDELSON-MAOZ This essay discuses Hebrew texts written in Israel in light of the current Intifada that describe the reality in the Occupied Territories and reexamine the prototypical image of the Israeli soldier. The case in point is Liran Ron- Furer’s Checkpoint Syndrome (2003), an experimental work written as a collection of short poems, which depicts the conflict between the omnipotent Israeli soldier and the helpless Palestinian at the checkpoint, and follows the process of moral corruption experienced by many soldiers during their service. By putting together realistic pseudo documentary experiences with surrealist hallucinations, the text introduces an alternative presentation of the Horrible in accordance with the poetics of the extreme, where the borders between sanity and madness are often tested.
[…] suddenly I find myself kicking one of these guys and shouting at him, lie on your stomach, you piece of shit. And that guy, young but balding, hurries to oblige and rolls on his stomach and whispers to me, begging, like, blease, blease, dehilac, and I put my foot down on him and see this dark stain spreading on his ass. Come here, I scream, shaking with laughter, walla, don’t know what got into me, maybe joy because someone was that afraid of me, come here, Etzion: he was so afraid he shit his pants! And Etzion Morad stops stomping on the stabber and I see the stabber’s face, he must have lost consciousness, it’s totally mangled, like a big iron grate scraped it, no nose and no mouth, it’s all this red meat. And then, when we’re all laughing at that guy who couldn’t hold it in and shit, ya’ani, his pants, I suddenly feel that I have also peed in my pants. Yitzhak Ben-Ner (1989: 36-37)1
In Yitzhak Ben-Ner’s novel Delusion (1989), Holly, the protagonist—whose name might hint at his virtuous nature—finds himself cruelly kicking a Palestinian Arab. Initially, his friends had encouraged him to begin torturing the Palestinians, and as he recounts the incidents of the Intifada he seems to 1
Unless otherwise noted, all passages quoted in this paper have been translated from the Hebrew by Ofer Shorr.
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be thanking his comrades for drawing him close to them. The “straight-laced kid” from Tel-Aviv is surprised to discover the power he wields, and feels satisfaction when he sees that the Arab, out of fear, loses control over his bodily functions. Ben-Ner’s extreme text depicts the violence of the Israeli soldier in a direct and graphic manner, as a factor which will ultimately come back to harm Israeli society. Holly and his friends scorn the battered youth, who has lost control of his bowels. But at the same time it appears that Holly himself cannot control his own incontinence. Ben-Ner’s scene thus constructs an inverted picture—the violence not only denies the Arab victim his human dignity, but at the same time comes back to haunt the perpetrator—stripping the Israeli soldier of his humanity. Delusion is but one example of Hebrew literature written by Jews in Israel in light of the Israeli occupation and the first and second Palestinian Intifadas. This literature describes the reality in the Occupied Territories, and reexamines the prototypical image of the Israeli soldier. Following an introduction of modern Hebrew literature and its role in the formation of Zionist national and military objectives, and a presentation of major literary works published at the time of the first and second Intifadas, I will focus on Liran Ron-Furer’s Checkpoint Syndrome an experimental work, published in 2003 which depicts the meeting of the omnipotent Israeli soldier and the helpless Palestinian at the checkpoint, and describes the process of moral corruption experienced by many soldiers during their service in the Occupied Territories. By moving from realistic experiences to surrealist hallucinations, the text introduces an alternative presentation of the horrible in accordance with the poetic of the extreme, where the borders between sanity and madness are often tested. The development of modern Hebrew literature provides a dramatic example of the production of national imagination, whose construction involves, as Benedict Anderson has taught us, a writing and rewriting of historical memories and shared narratives that seek to shape the reader’s understanding of the nation and its identity (Hever 2002: 2). Since its resurrection at the end of the Nineteenth Century, modern Hebrew literature has had an important role in the consolidation of the Zionist enterprise, and the formation of a new national Jewish identity in The Land of Israel. In this respect, literature has played a significant part in shaping the image of the Israeli soldier. The literature written just before and in light of the 1948 war—which was seen by the Jews in Israel as a war of survival—constructed the heroic image of native Israeli Sabra.2 This period saw the writing of 2
The Sabras were the first Israelis—the first generation, born in the 1930s and 1940s,
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many Bildungsromane which portrayed the Sabra as a healthy, strong and hard-working young man, wholeheartedly committed to toiling for the country, whether it be in the fields, in the construction of roads and buildings, or in defence of the homeland (Shaked 1993: Vol IV, 71-72). The Sabra was perceived as a fearless warrior, possessing great intelligence, courage and a willingness to sacrifice his life in defence of the Jews in Israel. The Hebrew war poetry written in the 1940s and 1950s continued this trend, striving to strengthen the Zionist narrative by constructing an essentialist Zionist history, in order to give meaning to the war and the sacrificing of thousands of young soldiers on the “altar of the homeland” (Miron 1992: 29). The Zionist narrative, which justifies the use of military force in order to create a haven for the Jews, was unanimously accepted, so much so that even the publication of stories such as S. Yizhar’s “Hirbat Hiz’a” in 1949, which describes the senseless deportation and killing of Palestinian villagers, could not unravel the thick web of consensus. The story received a lenient and justifying critique, which emphasized the dangers posed by the enemy or blamed the soldiers only for their immaturity or indiscretion.3 Despite fledgling attempts to conduct a critical assessment of the Jewish-Arab relations in the Hebrew literature of the 1960s, as in the early works of A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz, the military realm remained for the most part unexamined. The first chinks in the armor began to appear after the Yom-Kippur War in 1973, and the political upheaval in 1977 continued this trend, initiating a literary response (Hever 1999: 116-121). The Lebanon War in 1982 gave rise to another trauma, which further weakened the Israeli consensus and led to a deeper reexamination of the goals of Zionism and their possible realization, casting doubt on the country’s just path. Many saw the Lebanon War as a “war of choice”—an unjust and preventable war, which constituted a criminal deviation from the declared humanist tradition of Zionism. The military establishment, hitherto a fortress of trust and admiration, was badly shaken with the foundation of the refusal movement— a group of officers and soldiers who announced their specific refusal to take part in Israeli military actions in Lebanon—and found itself on the defensive,
to grow up in the Zionist settlement in Palestine. Socialized and educated in the ethos of the Zionist labor movement and the communal ideals of the kibbutz and moshav, they turned the dream of their pioneer forebears into the reality of the new State of Israel. See Almog, 2000. 3 Yizhar’s “Hirbet Hiz’a” has not been translated into English. See Yizhar’s “The Prisoner,” 1975: 294-310. Shapira, 2000, presents a detailed description of the story’s reception.
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undergoing a reformulation of its values.4 The literary community, as always an important part of the cultural arena, immediately “enlisted” in the cause, yet this time it did not glorify the Israeli soldier, army and country, but described the Israeli army as a cruel oppressor. The committed poetry written by well-known poets such as Natan Zach (1984), Dalia Rabikovitch (1986) and Yitzhak Laor (1982, 1985), brutally depicted traditional Zionist roots as well as a graphic description of its victims. With the exception of a handful of works which dealt with the first Intifada, Hebrew literature abandoned many of its political elements during the 1980s and the 1990s. The Israeli identity crisis of the last two decades, embodied in the growing alienation between different social groups in Israel, and the formulation of the peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s, led Hebrew literature, or at least its secular liberal elements, to an escapist mode which Balaban describes as “a striving for a good and comfortable life while ignoring all ideologies (save for a general belief in the liberty and rights of the individual)” (Balaban 1995: 32). But this trend did not last long, and after the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2001, Hebrew literature again started confronting social and political problems, writing about the occupation and describing the chaos of values in Israeli society. Ben-Ner’s Delusion, written in 1989, at the time of the first Intifada, is one of the first Hebrew novels to describe the horrors perpetrated by Israeli soldiers toward Palestinians, and to examine the Israeli introspection. The novel consists of four parts, each narrated by a different character. The first part of the work, narrated by Holly, describes the gradual moral degradation of the Israeli soldier. The second part is narrated by Holly’s father, Oded Tzidon, a doctor who lost his wife in a shooting attack and who describes himself as a warrior for peace. The third part is narrated by Charul, a secret service agent searching for wanted Palestinians, and the final part is narrated by Michel Sachtout, an Israeli soldier institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. The work creates a distinct link between the figures of Holly Tzidon, the sadistic soldier, and that of the mentally ill Michel Sachtout, to the point where they seem to appear as one. This linkage sketches a process of collapse, in which all the qualities of the Israeli hero, as constructed by Hebrew literature, melt away. Thus, in Delusion, the brave hero moves between the image of a violent and brutal character which builds upon its sense of superiority over another human being, and that of a fragmented and terrified character, incapable of functioning in civilian life. 4
See Linn, 2002, for further inquiry into the phenomenon of moral disobedience in the Israel Defense Force. Also see Harden and Zehavi, 1985.
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Another view of the first Intifada is presented in Ronit Matalon’s novel Bliss, published in Hebrew in 2000, which describes the friendship of two women, one of whom is a photographer who documents life in the Occupied Territories, maintains ties with Palestinians and brings the images of the occupation to Tel-Aviv. This work expresses the repression of Israeli society, and describes the roots of violence which ultimately wrap themselves around the nucleus of the family and destroy it. Israeli reality in the time of the second Intifada, where terror strikes everywhere, is represented by Orly Castel-Bloom in her hallucinatory novel Human Parts (2002). The title Human Parts refers not only to the parts of people’s lives which the work portrays, but also, literally, to the body parts scattered on the road after a terrorist attack in the heart of Israel. Through her unique style, which moves between several language registers and constructs a chaotic and incohesive plot devoid of motivation, the author creates a banal description of death, even inserting humoristic elements into the bleeding mass of the novel. A. B. Yehoshua, who dealt with the subject of terrorism in his 2001 novel The Liberated Bride, also takes on the current situation in Israel, where random death strikes the inhabitants of Jerusalem. His latest novel, The Mission of the Head of Human Resources (2004), depicts a journey of spiritual and psychological dimensions in which the head of the department of human resources in a large bakery strives to return the body of a woman killed in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem to her homeland in Europe. In conjunction with the description of Israeli civilian reality during the second Intifada, in the last three years Hebrew literature has concentrated on depicting and examining the reality inside the Occupied Territories, or in the friction points between the Palestinian population and the Israeli soldiers. These texts posit at their center the Israeli soldier or the secret service agent, and reexamine their role and behavior. The submissions for the annual short story contest of the Israeli daily newspaper “Haaretz” point toward this trend. The winning story of 2003, written by Efrat Naveh, describes a group of Israeli soldiers in a helicopter carrying a dying Palestinian terrorist to the hospital. The narrator, overwhelmed by the firefight that took place minutes earlier in which his best friend was killed, tries to memorize the friend’s face while looking for an answer in the eyes of the wounded terrorist, whose life he should now be trying to save. The story deals with the moral and psychological dilemma of saving the one who killed your friend. Another story, written by “Bambi,” deals with an Israeli army unit during Operation Defensive Shield in the Jenin refugee camp, in 2002. The narrator, a reserve soldier, describes the banal and cruel manner in which he and his friends shoot a handicapped Palestinian, simply because he did not stop riding his wheelchair when ordered to.
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Both these stories try to locate the origin of misery and despair in Israeli reality, by presenting opposite views of the Israeli army and its operation during the Intifada: Naveh’s story takes a humane and moral approach towards the enemy—an adaptation of the traditional approach, which sees the army as holding established and lofty moral values. Bambi’s story, on the other hand, undermines the army’s morality by showing the brutality and inhumanity of the Israeli soldiers. These two extremes are astutely and meticulously exemplified in the texts of Ron-Furer, Roy Polity, and Asher Kravitz. Polity’s novel, Roof Rabbits (2001), which, as its byline states, is based on a true story from the first Intifada, describes the lives of Samir, a Fatah activist, and Ofer, an Israeli Secret Service (Shabak) agent, and the inevitably tragic encounter between them. The book constructs the Shabak agent’s character as sensitive and moral, yet at the same time reveals the terrible quality of the unequal relationship between the two. Ofer decides to exploit Samir’s distress, brought on by his cancer-ridden father’s desperate need of treatment in Israel, and demands he cooperate with the Shabak and disclose information regarding the resistance groups. He admits that “the whole affair was just shameful and unjust. Abu-Hamad was trying to save his father” (Politi 2001:406), yet Ofer’s confidence, based on his position as the “powerful side” in the conflict, leads him straight into the hands of his killer Samir, who is trying to avenge his honor. Kravitz’s I, Moostafa Rabbinovitch, published in 2004, portrays an Israeli sniper waiting for the right moment to shoot the right person. In this work, the writer also attempts to develop the protagonist as a moral being: the Israeli fighter vows not to kill. “I’ve decided to serve my life on this wretched planet without killing. I don’t want weighing on my conscience the responsibility for cutting down the soul of a human being which, according to the best of sources, was created in God’s image […] most people would find it very easy to adhere to such a vow. Not me. That’s how it is when you’re a fighter in Duvdevan” (2004:6).5 In contrast to these two works, Ron-Furer‘s experimental work Checkpoint Syndrome, published in late 2003 does not try to portray the Israeli soldier as carrying out a double role—an occupier, but at the same time a person of moral awareness. Checkpoint Syndrome depicts the Israeli soldier as devoid of awareness and describes, with unprecedented harshness, what goes on in the checkpoints built by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) in 5
Duvdevan (“Cherry”) is the nickname of an elite combat unit, whose members operate deep inside Palestinian areas, often disguised as Arabs and blending in with the local population. .
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the heart of the Occupied Territories, a meeting point of the omnipotent Israeli and the helpless Palestinian: I was really excited, first time at the checkpoint, we were all pretty nervous, talking nicely to the Arabs, checking every car thoroughly, the Arabs saw right away that we’re new, [………………] […] smiled at us with that smile of theirs […] pretty quickly we learned to work at the checkpoint, felt more comfortable, and the Arabs didn’t scare us so much anymore, we slowly realized that they are the ones who should be afraid. […] we can also make their lives very difficult. (6-7)
Checkpoint Syndrome is written in short, broken poetry-like lines and does not construct a linear narrative—each episode recounts a different experience, real or imagined. The text is divided into five sections, three of which are given a time and place: “Gaza ’97,” “Gaza ’98,” “Gaza ’99,” which correspond to the three years of military service (“The army conscripted me at age eighteen / and discharged me at age / twenty one” [94]). In between, there are two other sections: the first, entitled “Action,” describes an actual capture of a Palestinian suspect, and the second, entitled “Fantasies Pass the Time,” describes how the violence and the cruelty take over the domains of human imagination as well. The dominant sensation in the first section of the work is the boredom of the soldiers at the checkpoint—“Sometimes the boredom at the checkpoint can kill you” (8). The soldiers guarding the checkpoint typically come from combat units, and are trained to engage a defined opponent equal to them in strength. Their stay at the checkpoint—often lasting for days on end and usually consisting of seemingly endless cycles of four-hour guard duty, followed by four hour rest—turn the boredom into a powder keg. The search for “action” and the adjustment to the specific power relations, bring them to alleviate unnecessarily the friction with the Palestinian population passing through the checkpoint, and ultimately lead to the outbreak of violence.
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In the first section of the text, the provocation directed at the Arab population includes humiliation and torture which does not involve direct physical violence. When a taxi driver refuses to turn off the radio, “I take a bullet / out of my / magazine and start / to take the air out / of their rear tire” (10). Others are ordered to stand in line and sing an Israeli song, or are forced to get out of their car and bend to gather their ID cards, after a soldier flings them in the air deliberately. When the regimental commander is about to pay the company a visit and the soldiers need to tidy the checkpoint, “Shachar, the Yemenite bastard / stops this cab full / of kids, he bends over and says / something in Arabic to the kids, / eight little Arab children / get out of the cab / and start to / clean the checkpoint enthusiastically […]” (26). The soldiers, realizing all their schemes are successful while the Arabs “arrive at the checkpoint with / these huge smiles,” as if “trained,” begin taking booty from them—first shiny prayer beads, then cigarettes. In the second section of the work, “Action,” the text digresses to a description of physical violence perpetrated by the soldiers towards a Palestinian. The “action” begins with the news about a suspicious figure the soldiers track and catch. The narrator strikes the Arab and ties his hands while the other soldiers step on him. When he cries they continue to beat him until “our Arab / was in bad / shape we beat him up / pretty good” (50). The narrator feels elation at his ability to act violently and does not show any remorse, even when it turns out that “our Arab / just a/sixteen year old kid / mentally retarded” (53). The soldiers’ boredom and their constant urge to check the limits of their power in the first section of the work are replaced by an unrestrained outbreak of violence directed towards a mentally retarded boy in the second section; as described by Ron-Furer in an interview: “Our level of sensitivity was dropping and dropping. The more power-drunk we were, the more the level of cruelty rose and we became more sealed off” (quoted in Shalita, 2003: 17). The description of the “action” as an act of violence towards a mentally ill boy embodies the effects of the mental, emotional and moral distancing of the soldiers, who do not synthesize the meaning of their own behavior.6 Furthermore, it seems that the military masculine peer group encourages the violent actions, as a part of the boys’ wishes to adopt manly norms of roughness and aggression.7 Thus the author states that “we had a 6
See Grossman, 1995, for an analysis of distancing mechanisms in the military setting. See also Holmes, 1985: 276, 361; Ball, 1999: 220. 7 See Meisels, 1995: 98. UNESCO’s expert group meeting report, “Male Roles and Masculinities in the Perspective of a Culture of Peace” argues that “Boys’ peer group life, military training, and mass media often promote a direct link between being a ‘real man’ and the practice of dominance and violence” (1997).
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couple of guys who said it’s not nice and were classified as losers right away.” (quoted in Shalita 2003: 18). In the third section of the work, “Gaza ’98,” the violence becomes so routine that the soldiers almost compete among themselves who will carry out more “surprising” actions, “[…] Shachar / stood above / the Arab, took out his cock / and started pissing on / the Arab’s head” (62), while Dado forces an Arab to kneel on all fours and orders him to bark like a dog, while shouting at him “bad dog! Why /did you piss on the carpet?” (65). The description of the daily horrors at the checkpoint soon crosses over into the realms of fantasy and imagination, as witnessed in the fourth section of the work. This rifle, on me all day and I don’t even feel it on me, looks so natural walking around with a rifle, but I look at it now, thinking how much damage you can do with that thing, a picture appears in my head, to put the barrel of the rifle into a woman’s cunt, and shoot —wonder how it will look… (68)
Militarism, which encourages “manly” values of physical stoutness and emotional coarseness, is characterized to a large degree through the gender opposition between men and women, or between “men” and homosexuals. The intense preoccupation of the homosocial military society with the formulation of masculinity and sexuality, leads to diffusion of military language and violent references into the domain of sexual relations between men and women.8 Sex has a tangible presence in Ron-Furer’s text, through 8 Holmes describes the “overlap between the language of sex and that of battle” (1985: 57). Lieblich and Perlow, 1988, hold that the military service in Israel is perceived as essential to a boy’s right to belong to the inner circle of adult males.
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the description of the sexual relationship between the narrator and his girlfriend and his habit of masturbating while looking at pornographic movies and magazines, and later through his fantasies, reveries and passions. The fantasy of inserting the barrel of the rifle into the female genitals is maybe the harshest metaphor for sexual violence. Yet the author does not stop with this description, but goes on to describe, in great detail, the violent rape of a Palestinian woman, accompanied by her murder and defilement, then proceeds to a second rape image, this time of a pregnant Palestinian woman. The brutal images of rape are concluded with two scenes involving the narrator and his girlfriend. In the first, the narrator wants to ask his girlfriend if she thinks he is a good person, and in the second he tries to violently sodomize her, “she screamed in pain, / and I took it out right away / and started to say I’m sorry […] / […….]/ and I felt / like a rapist” (82). The book concludes with the section “Gaza ’99,” and the narrator’s declaration that he shot someone that day. In the midst of a demonstration, the narrator spots an Arab man who incites and directs the demonstrating children. He fires one bullet and wounds him: “I’ve waited for this since / basic training, in fact / to shoot someone, / the real thing” (87), he explains. After his friends “slap him on the shoulder / ‘way to go, dude! / you’re the man!’” (87), all he does is walk around the checkpoint and count the days until his discharge. Checkpoint Syndrome is but one example of a text of protest, written in the veins of committed Hebrew poetry and of the contemporary extreme in the Hebrew literature. Its poetic roots can be found in the committed poetry written by Natan Zach, a key figure in modern Israeli Poetry, following the Lebanon War. Zach’s committed poetry fuses brutality and banality: So there was a great exaggeration in the body count: some counted a hundred and some, hundreds and someone said I counted 36 burnt women and his friend said you’re not right, because only eleven and the error is deliberate and political, not accidental and since I’ve begun, I’ll also say this only eight women were slaughtered, because two were shot and one is in doubt and it’s not clear if she was slaughtered, raped or just stabbed in the belly and also about the children the last word hasn’t yet been said everyone admits that six were crucified and one tortured, before his head was bashed in… in these things one mustn’t exaggerate and should be wary: these are human lives for the reports, God forbid, may be wrong
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[………………………….] for the wish to be accurate is no less human than the wish to kill, rape, bash and exterminate your emery, rival, next door neighbor, the suspicious stranger, or just any man, woman and child in the world. (1984:60)9
This poem, “On the Wish for Accuracy,” brings discomfort not only because of the graphic descriptions of the horrors, but also because of its criticism towards the attempts to describe what happened, attempts which aim to bypass the moral and human aspect of the problem and thus, according to David Fishelov, “constitute a continuation and an indirect collaboration with the horror itself” (2002-2003: 184-5). In this respect, committed poetry criticizes not only the events themselves but also their representation, which is, influenced by the sort of introspection the society perpetrates—or does not—in regard to them. Ron-Furer’s text combines these two levels by forming a gap between the graphic descriptions of the horrors and the vague and humorous manner in which the soldiers perceive their actions. The radicalization of the situations and the soldiers’ lack of any critical examination create chaos and incoherence in the text. Checkpoint Syndrome’s radical nature builds on the contemporary extreme in the Hebrew literature of the last decades, particularly in the style exemplified by Orly Castel-Bloom.10 The new poetics of Hebrew literature strive towards a disintegration of a coherent world-view through a series of rhetorical devices such as shifting from an authoritative narrator to an unauthoritative and unreliable narrator; using “slim language,” with a deliberately narrow vocabulary, a colloquial style and basic grammar; “flattening” the psychological and emotional complexity of the characters; dissolving borders between the self and the world and between the private body and its environs; relinquishing a clear and linear plot, and creating implausibility in the description of the fictional world (Hever 1999: 142-170; Balaban 1995: 48-59). Emotional and spiritual abundance is replaced by the extreme which, in the spirit of post-modernism, aims at “[t]esting the limits of human experience […] with extreme states of mind and body— hallucination, madness, sexual excess—and deliberately violates social norms through scandalous or criminal behavior” (McHale 1987: 172). In its social context, the poetics of the extreme creates a relationship between the physical and the political: “The collective is arranged according to the individual, to his limits and physical proportions,” in Hannan Hever’s 9
Rabikovitch’s poem “On the Treatment of Children in Wartime,” 1986: 69-70, corresponds with Zach’s. 10 See for example Dolly City and Human Parts
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words (1999:153). A sharp example of this can be found in Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City: The baby was still lying on his stomach. I put him to sleep, even though I still didn’t know where I was going to cut […] I took a knife and began cutting here and there. I drew a map of the Land of Israel—as I remembered it from the biblical period—on his back, and marked in all those Philistine towns like Gath and Ashkelon, and with the blade of the knife I etched the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River which empties out into the Dead Sea […] drops of blood began willing up in the river beds cutting across the country. The sight of the map of the Land of Israel amateurishly sketched on my son’s back gave me a frisson of delight […] my baby screamed in pain but I stood firm […] I contemplated the carved-up back: it was a map of the Land of Israel: nobody could mistake it. (44)
Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City is the story of a Jewish-Israeli mother. Dolly is an extreme example of the “Yiddisher-Mama,” loving, overprotecting and unable to let her son live his own life, but she is also an Israeli patriotic mother, who takes upon herself the sacred mission of raising an Israeli soldier. This unbearable conflict is expressed through the metaphor of the baby’s body: The map of the Land of Israel, carved by the mother on her baby’s back, symbolizes the fact that his body belongs to the country; when he grows up he will serve in the Israeli army, patrolling the borders of this controversial map.11 Ron-Furer’s work is deeply rooted in the poetics of the contemporary extreme, characterized by harsh, anomalous and incoherent situations which often deviate from realism and create a sensual and cognitive dissonance. In this respect, not only does the work present extreme situations, but it also constructs them within a banal framework. In doing so, it tends to turn the horrific into the grotesque, and acclimatize the reader to the description in order to derive her, temporarily at least, of her judgment.12 In Ron-Furer’s work, as in Castel-Bloom’s, it is the physicality which builds up the extreme situations and conveys the emotional and mental illness. The narrator’s violence towards the Palestinian men and women, and later towards everyone in the world, is borne out of physical advantage. In 11
It is interesting to note that later on in the novel, when the son is an adult, Dolly looks at the map she had carved on his back and discovers, to her amazement, that it has “returned” to the ‘67 borders. The debate over the questions of the Occupied Territories is thus embodied through the physical and the personal. 12 See Mendelson-Maoz, 1998: 162-177. On the state of uncertainty and cognitive dissonance, see the term “negative capability” in Tsur, 1985: 144-145, and in Adamson , 1998: 101-102.
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contrast to the robust soldier, who “has a really / great body, with muscles / in his arms and this six-pack / in the stomach” (39), the Arabs are presented as grotesque and deformed, “an Arab midget on a cart” (32), “[…] the face / of a deformed boy, / and a big, stout body” (45), and the women are mainly portrayed pornographically. The soldiers act without moral awareness, and even when the narrator shoots the Arab and faces an inquiry, he admits to feeling nothing. The lack of any critical consciousness leads to a banal description of the terrible situations, some of which depict hallucinations of violence and rape; the repetition of these events and the absence of a linear narrative create circularity, as if we were in a warped world with no way out. The discord between the physical and the mental leads to madness, which is manifested from the very first pages of the book, in the author’s introduction: Hello to all you human beings the little slaves how are you I’m great I’m flying high above the world and don’t give a fuck about anything […] now I’m finally free and far away from all the crap you have there in you’re crappy country fuck I’m never going back now I’m free the crazy energies of Goa have opened up my head and my chakras I get your plans how you were pulling my leg and fucking with my mind I forgot what I was you stuck me in stinking Gaza and before that you brainwashed me with your guns and the training you turned me into dirt until I couldn’t think anymore and the only thing that kept me sane at the end was the drugs […] you used me like a robot and only now on some beach in Goa […] it all came together and I saw what you tried to do to me I was afraid of smiles you turned me into something else I wasn’t me it’s somebody else. (3-4)
This excerpt leads the reader into a distorted and impossible world. This is a world where the sane is the one who escapes reality, travels to India and takes drugs, and the insane is the one living in the country. Thus the oppositions between real and imagined, between sanity and insanity, between human awareness and robotic behavior, collapse in this work to create a world devoid of meaning and value. Yet in spite of the collapse of hierarchies and the dissipation of identity, this work displays a lack of acquiescence which is a necessary condition for any possibility of moral justification. Thus, in Adi Ophir’s words, it is this presentation of ethical nebulousness, this constantly rising threshold of sensitivity which characterizes contemporary culture, bombarded as it is with images of atrocities without any criticism, which constructs the moral viewpoint of the work (2000:115133). Ron-Furer’s biography illuminates the process which led him to write the book. Born in the Israeli city of Givataim in the 1970s, he went to the
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private and lucrative Thelma Yalin High School for the Arts, enlisted in the army and served in the Shimshon unit, which was solely designated for service in the Occupied Territories. Ron-Furer served in the territories during the late 1990s, not at the time of the Intifada, but the timing of the text’s publication makes it impossible to disassociate it from the current violence. Ron-Furer was not the typical fighter of his unit. He came from an artistic background, and was considered a moderate soldier. Nevertheless, his lengthy service led him to check the limits of his power feeling at ease with the new violence emanating from him. I was carried away by the possibility of acting in the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment and without oversight. [...] It gradually becomes coarser and coarser. […] the checkpoint became a place to test our personal limits. How tough, how callous, how crazy we could be […]. (quoted in Levy 2003)
After his discharge Ron-Furer traveled to India, like many other Israelis who wish to cut loose from Israeli reality after their service. He returned to Israel to study design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Since his release, Ron-Furer had felt that the memories of his service in Gaza were still haunting him, and that he could not continue living his life without doing something about it. Towards the end of his studies he decided to write the book, in order to break the Israeli code of silence: You can adopt the most hard-line political positions, but no parent would agree to his son becoming a thief, a criminal or a violent person [...] The problem is that it’s never presented this way. The boy himself doesn’t portray himself this way to his family when he returns from the territories. On the contrary—he is received as a hero, as someone who is doing the important work of being a soldier. […] no one talks about it around the dinner table. (quoted in Levy 2003)
Following the values he was raised upon, Ron-Furer joined the army wishing to do his part for the country. He continued serving in the army reserves and even took part in operational activities in the territories during the current Intifada. When he was called to serve at a checkpoint he did not turn to refusal, but rather to an army psychiatrist. Despite his radical book Ron-Furer is not politically committed, and does not feel comfortable “with the political affiliation connected to the refuseniks” (quoted in Shalita 2003: 93). Checkpoint Syndrome was received with shock both in Ron-Furer’s immediate environment and in the cultural and literary arenas: the manuscript of the work was rejected by several publishing houses, and Gvanim
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Publishing House, which ultimately decided to release the book, wrote on its back cover that it deliberated at length before making its decision, but ultimately felt that the book is important to understand the racist syndrome. Today I talked on the cellphone with my big sister. She’s this hotshot psychologist lives in Tel-Aviv with her husband. […………………………] […] she told me again that I need to be aware of what I’m doing, and remember that these are people who pass through the checkpoint and all that. She told me about these tests that were done on soldiers who were in the Intifada, […………………………..] and years later went into shock, and had problems […] (21-22)
In Ron-Furer’s work, the big sister represents Israelis who are aware of what is going on and are able to see the big picture, yet go on with their lives without taking action. The narrator mocks his sister “she doesn’t really understand what it’s like to be here” and calls her “the leftist psychologist”— ”we’re all good people there / in the company, we’re not Nazis / who like to hurt Arabs, / like my sister might think” (22). The package she sends in the mail does not include, as might be expected, “candies and treats,” but a pamphlet called “Checkpoint Syndrome” (79), which describes the risks of psychological damage done to soldiers who serve in the Occupied Territories. Ron-Furer’s text is an alternative to this pamphlet, as he replaces the sterile and professional vocabulary with his bleeding and violent descriptions. The descriptions of torture and cruelty, as well as the brutal fantasies, all given without reflexivity or awareness, reveal the critical position of the text, whereby involvement in the dynamics of the checkpoint may lead to the development of a violent syndrome from which nobody is immune, certainly not a young soldier in his twenties. Hence, the text takes a position on one of the burning questions in the Israeli discourse of the occupation—can the Israeli soldier maintain his humanity while partaking in the dynamics of the checkpoint? Does the occupation corrupt? This question has been the subject of heated public discussions in the Israeli media, by well known critics and politicians as well as ordinary people. “The IDF subjects itself to the highest moral standards, and
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successfully lives up to them […] it seems to me that you yourself were in great mental distress, which does not represent daily reality at all,” argues Mordechei Weiss in a letter to the editor (2003:10). “It was not the checkpoint that pissed on an Arab’s head, or joyfully hit a retarded boy,” writes Roy Liran referring to his personal experience, “that was you and your friends. The responsibility is your own, your group’s and your commanders’ at the time. My comrades in arms and I never did things like these” (2003:10). In contrast to the statements blaming the soldiers’ personal irresponsibility, there are the positions of the refuseniks. Shimry Tzameret, who is serving a lengthy sentence in a military prison for refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, contends that Israeli society is laid bare and wounded by “the checkpoint generation”: “That is the truth, those are the norms. And whoever thinks that they disappear the moment our soldiers cross the green line back into the country is mistaken. Violence against women and children, violence on the road, violence on the street” (2003: 10). Varda Cohen-Silver, in a letter to the editor, adds that “[t]hose boys are not to blame for becoming monsters, we, the generation of parents, are to blame”—the parents’ generation, which still adhered to the mythical view of the Israeli soldier as doing God’s work, which did not see how the state took the children and sent them to a place where force reigns. In this respect, CohenSilver recognizes the contemporary Israeli discourse, of which Ron-Furer’s text is a part, as “a struggle for the soul of Israel” (2003:10). Ron Furer’s text, Checkpoint Syndrome, and other works written in the shade of the current Intifada are part of the cultural and the political discourse in Israel, targeted to examine the heart of the Israeli identity. As hinted by Yitzhak Laor, one of the main political poets in Israel of today, in his poem about Leena Nablousi, they cannot give the victims consolation or relief: The poem about Leena Nablousi aged seven teen from Nablus who fled the armed soldier as from the bear made it up the stairs to the third floor was shot with one bullet right in the head and fell dead on the stairs there’s no point in writing this poem. What the children from Leena’s class need is not a poem. (1982: 47)
What the children from Leena’s class need is not a poem. And yet Yitzhak Laor has written it. He wrote it not for Leena’s class but for his Israeli readers. The Palestinians waiting at the IDF checkpoints do not need RonFurer’s text, either.13 His text—harsh, extreme, agitating—is read by Israelis, 13
Still, Ron-Furer’s text is used by the Palestinian Ministry of Information’s propaganda and appears on its website: http://www.minfo.gov.ps/feature/hebrew/22-
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which today find themselves at a crossroads, struggling to find their future and moral compass. Bibliography Adamson, Jane (1998). “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy,” Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory, eds. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 84-110. Almog, Oz (2000). The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, Berkeley: U of California P. Balaban, Avraham (1995). A Different Wave In Israeli Fiction, Jerusalem: Ketter [Hebrew]. Ball, Howard (1999). Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide, Lawrence Kansas: UP of Kansas. Ben-Ner, Itzhak (1989). Delusion (Ta’atuon), Jerusalem: Am Oved [Hebrew]. Castel-Bloom, Orly (2003). Human Parts, trans. Dalya Bilu. Boston: David Godine. —— (1997). Dolly City, trans. Dalia Bilu, London: Loki. Cohen-Silver, Varda (2003). “We are to Blame,” “Letters following the article ‘Shame’s Checkpoint’,” Yediot Achronot (Friday Magazine), November 28, 10 [Hebrew]. Fishelov, David (2002-2003). “Trends in the Poetry of the 80’s,” Achshav, 67/68, 174-191 [Hebrew]. Grossman, Dave (1995). On Killing, Toronto, Canada: Little, Brown. Harden, David and Alex Zehavi (1985). The Moral and Existential Dilemmas of the Israeli Soldie—Background Material for the Jewish Reader, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization. Hever, Hannan (2002). Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon-National Building and Minority Discourse, New York and London: New York UP. —— (1999). Literature Written Here, Tel-Aviv: Yediot Achronot and Chemed [Hebrew]. Holmes, Richard (1985). Acts of War-the Behavior of Men in Battle, NewYork: The Free Press.
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Kravitz, Asher (2004). I, Moostafa Rabbinovitch (Ani, Moostafa Rabbinovitch), Bnei Brak: Sifriat Poalim- HaKibbutz HaMeuchad [Hebrew]. Laor, Yitzhak (1982). Journey, Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim [Hebrew]. —— (1985). Only the Body Remembers, Tel-Aviv: Adam, 1985 [Hebrew]. Levy, Gideon (2003). “I Punched an Arab in the Face–A Soldier’s Testimony” (interview with Ron-Furer), Ha’aretz, November 27 [online]. Available from: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article 2213.shtml [accessed May 2004]. Lieblich, Amia and Meir Perlow (1988) “Transition to Adulthood During Military Service,” The Jerusalem Quarterly 47: 40-76. Linn, Ruth (2002). “Soldiers with Conscience Never Die–They are Just Ignored by Their Society. Moral Disobedience in the Israel Defense Force,” Journal of Military Ethics, 1: 2, 57-76. Liran, Roy (2003). “You are Responsible.” “Letters following the article ‘Shame’s Checkpoint,’” Yediot Achronot (Friday Magazine), November 28, 10 [Hebrew]. Matalon, Ronit (2003). Bliss (Sara, Sara), trans. J. Cohen, New York: Metropolitan. McHale, Brian (1987). Post Modernist Fiction, New York and London: Methuen. Meisels, Ofra (1995). “Before Recruitment,” Adolescents in Israel–Personal, Family and Social Aspects, ed. H. Plum, Even Yehuda: Reches [Hebrew]. Mendelson-Maoz, Adia (1998). “Extreme Situations—Horrendous and Grotesque—In the Works of Castel-Bloom and Kerrett,” Dapim Research in Literature, 11: 162-177 [Hebrew]. Miron, Dan (1992). Facing the Silent Brother–Essays on the Poetry of the War of Independence, Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: The Open University P and Ketter [Hebrew]. Ofir, Adi (2000). “On Post-Modern Writing and the Possibility of its Moral Justification,” Mikan Vol A, 115-133 [Hebrew]. Politi, Roy (2001). Roof Rabbits (Arnavonei Gagot), Tel-Aviv: Am Oved [Hebrew]. Rabikovitch, Dalia (1986). True Love, Tel-Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad [Hebrew]. Ron-Furer, Liran (2003). Checkpoint Syndrome (Tismonet HaMachsom), TelAviv: Gvanim [Hebrew]. Shaked, Gershon (1993). Hebrew Literature 1880-1980, vol IV, Tel-Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad and Ketter. [Hebrew].
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Shalita, Chen (2003). “Shame’s Checkpoint” (interview with Liron RonFurer), Yediot Achronot (Friday Magazine), November 21, 17-20, 93 [Hebrew]. Shapira, Anita (2000). “Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting,” Jewish Social Studies 7: 1, 1-62. Tsur, Reuven (1985). “Solving Riddles and the Quest for Certitude: Hebrew Critics Confronting Literature of Extreme Situations,” Hassifrut, 2: 34, 142-160 [Hebrew]. Tzameret, Shimry (2003). “Don’t You Believe?” “Letters following the article ‘Shame’s Checkpoint’,” Yediot Achronot (Friday Magazine), November 28, 10 [Hebrew]. UNESCO (1997). Expert group meeting report, “Male Roles and Masculinities in the Perspective of a Culture of Peace” Women and the Culture of Peace 24-28 September [online]. Available from: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0010/001096/109628eo.pdf [accessed May 2004]. Weiss, Mordechei (2003). “Maybe Therapy?” “Letters following the article ‘Shame’s Checkpoint’,” Yediot Achronot (Friday Magazine), November 28, 10 [Hebrew]. Yehoshua, Abraham B (2004). The Mission of the Human Resource Man, Bnei Brak: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad [Hebrew]. —— (2003). The Liberated Bride, trans. Hillel Halkin, Orlando: Harcort. Yizhar, S (1975). “The Prisoner,” Modern Hebrew Literature, trans. V.C. Rycus, ed. R. Alter, New York: Behrman, 294-310. —— [1949] (1989). “Hirbet Hiz’a,” in Four Stories, HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 35-88 [Hebrew]. Zach, Natan (1984). Hard to Remember, Tel-Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad [Hebrew].
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THE USES AND ABUSES OF CHILDREN: FAIRY TALES AND THE PORNOGRAPHIC VICTORIA BEST In this essay, Best asks questions such as: What constitutes the cultural guidelines governing the reception of the obscene? Why do some representations provoke hysteria whilst others are considered titillating? Best attempts to offer some possible responses to these questions via an exploration of the cultural fantasies that surround the vulnerability and desirability of children, and the eroticisation of fairy tales that occurs in both Nicolas Jones-Gorlin’s text, Rose Bonbon, and Jean-Pierre Enard’s Contes à faire rougir les petits chaperons.
There can be few more emotive subjects than the physical abuse of children. Whilst stringent laws exist to ensure the actual protection of minors, the judicial system is necessarily more ambiguous when it comes to representations of sexualized or eroticized children in the artistic medium. Censorship is, after all, still considered to be a crime against freedom of expression in the Western world. However, the recent controversy in France over Rose Bonbon (2002) by Nicolas Jones-Gorlin, a novel which inhabits the perspective of an unrepentant pedophile and depicts sexual and violent acts against children, has brought to the forefront the extreme complexity of the emotions this issue arouses. Rose Bonbon was published to widespread moral outrage, with two children’s rights groups, L’Enfant bleu and La Fondation pour l’enfance, calling for it to be removed from the shelves. Indeed, the publisher, Gallimard, did bow to legal threats, issuing the book with a warning on the jacket and then deciding not to resupply bookstores. Jones-Gorlin protested his astonishment at the strength of the reaction his novel provoked, not in terms of the issues it raised, but in the personalized nature of the attack. In an interview he described his experience as one akin to persecution : “Je me suis terré chez moi […] je pense qu’il y aurait eu un vrai lynchage médiatique si je m’étais montré […] Les premiers jours ont vraiment tenu de l’hystérie” [I went to ground at home […] I think I’d really have been lynched by the media if I’d shown myself […] the first few days were like a kind of hysteria] (Bontour 2002). The author received unexpected support, however, from the League of Human Rights, whose spokesperson for culture, Agnès Tricoire, argued that fact should be
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understood as separate from fiction, and that just as detective novels did not promote murder, so texts dealing with pedophilia did not equate to an apologia for child abuse. Beyond this defense of narrative, however, Tricoire added that the issue was particularly problematic because nowadays “L’enfant est le nouveau sacré, la nouvelle cause religieuse” [The child is the new divine, the new religious cause] (Joye 2002). This curious remark highlights the special place reserved for the image of the child in contemporary culture which is, I argue, a space of conflicting anxieties and desires, and which provides the reason why Jones-Gorlin received a response to his work that went beyond censure into something emotionally intense and alarming. This essay will consider what is at stake in representing children in sexual ways through readings of two very differently received literary texts on child abuse, exploring the strength of outrage such representations produce, and indicating how complex and contradictory our culture can be over one of its most sensitive issues. Jones-Gorlin is not the only author to have courted controversy over depictions of child pornography. When in 1936 Graham Greene reviewed Shirley Temple’s film Wee Willie Winkie (an unfortunate title if ever there was one) analyzing the misplaced sexuality of Temple’s performance and suggesting that her appeal was a pedophilic one, he was sued by Twentieth Century Fox and forced to close his journal Night and Day in which the review appeared. Nabokov’s Lolita, the obvious predecessor to Rose Bonbon, was equally met by a storm of moral protest. Indeed, Mary Riddell’s remark when reviewing the case of Jones-Gorlin’s novel appears both disingenuous and pertinent: “How weird, for example, that pedophilia, a subject that paralyses and obsesses British society, has received no particular fictional analysis since Lolita” (2002). Writers approach the topic at their own risk; to suggest that little girls may be prematurely sexual (Nabokov) or that little girls may be marketed as prematurely sexual in order to please the audience (Greene) is received as culturally taboo. However, such propositions have begun to attract the attention of cultural commentators. James Kincaid, an American professor of literature, has produced controversial research on the media representations of child molestation cases, suggesting that whilst contemporary American society genuinely cares about the mental health of the children concerned, “we also care about maintaining the particular erotic vision of children that is putting them in this position in the first place” (Jenkins 1998: 246). Kincaid explains that from the nineteenth century onwards, children have been equated with a number of “negative attribute[s]” such as liberty, purity and innocence, which have “become more and more firmly attached to what was characterized as sexually desirable” (Jenkins 1998: 247). He suggests that “[t]he physical makeup of the child has been
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translated into mainstream images of the sexually and materially alluring. We are told to look like children, if we can and for as long as we can,” with the result that, “we are instructed to crave that which is forbidden” (Jenkins 1998: 247-8). Kincaid aligns himself here with Graham Greene and his analysis of Shirley Temple’s charms. Nicolas Jones-Gorlin too claimed that one of the main targets of his novel was “l’obsession du jeunisme, la peur de vieillir” [the obsession with youth, the fear of growing old] (Bontour 2002). Such a viewpoint remains profoundly antipathetic to Western culture, however. Kincaid’s book received very hostile reviews; The Sunday Times declared him to be “a passionate champion of paedophilia” (Carey 1993) and the Daily Mail ran an article headed “Paedophile Book ‘Should Be Banned’” (Verity 1994). What makes the outrage surrounding Jones-Gorlin’s Rose Bonbon particularly noteworthy is that his is certainly not the only book to be published in France in recent times that deals with the delicate subject of child abuse. Sylvie Germain’s L’Enfant Méduse (1991) tells the story of young Lucie who becomes the prey of her abusive older brother, who has already raped and strangled a couple of girls in the immediate neighborhood. The experience results in Lucie’s anorexia, but also in her murderous rage that finds its fantastic outlet in a miraculous gaze, a Medusa-stare, that literally paralyses and finally kills her torturer. Christiane Rochefort’s La Porte du fond (1990) is a first-person narrative of extreme anger and denunciation that recounts a young girl’s abuse at the hands of her father. In an astonishing twist to the narrative, the girl then begins, of her own volition, an underage sexual relationship with her uncle whose moral character is ambiguous. Also notable is Louise Lambrichs’ À ton image (1996), a psychological roman noir in which the protagonist, a young medical doctor, clones a daughter who displays a precocious sexuality. When she slips into his bed one night he confuses her with his wife, but in post-coital horror at what he has done, he strangles her. These three texts were all acclaimed, with Lambrichs’ novel set to become a feature film. The reaction to these texts indicates that it is not child abuse or incestuous relationships in and of themselves which present the literary taboo. There are, however, some simple reasons why these novels should have been more palatable to the reading public. These are reasons which focus on the difference between issue-driven texts concerning sexuality that attract a reader’s judgment, and texts concerning sexuality that involve the reader in overly intimate ways, the latter providing the context for a pornographic reading. All three are more satisfyingly literary than Rose Bonbon, offering sensitive and detailed portrayals of their main protagonists, as well as coherent moral universes in which those who perpetrated abusive acts must face a form of justice.
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Equally these texts represent the apparent victims exercising their own agency and power. More tenuously, it is perhaps culturally easier to receive texts written by women about young girl protagonists, a gendered empathy resulting in a less objectified representation. Perhaps most pertinently, sexual relations are not represented explicitly. As a result these texts deal with the difficult topic of child sexuality and its abuse without justifying any charge of pornographic intent. However, none of these mitigations hold true for another text of quite self-evident child pornography that was first published in 1987, Jean-Pierre Enard’s, Contes à faire rougir d’honte les petits chaperons. In this novel, again issuing from the respectable publishing house of Gallimard just as Rose Bonbon did, a male narrator describes a series of pornographic encounters between himself, his girlfriend, the maid and his niece, Alice, a nubile and sexually curious 13-year-old. Essentially this novel provides a kind of “What Alice Did Next” after her adventures through the looking glass, with her penetrative sexual initiation as the finale. The text stages a series of sexual acts, each one delayed or interrupted by the narrator recounting a salacious rewrite of a fairy tale, and fairy tale characters provide metaphors throughout the text, with the narrator figuring himself as Sheherezade, the White Rabbit and even Cinderella at various moments. It offers a slick and humorous pornographic fantasy, yet my concern here is that it could be considered a far more dangerous and subversive text than Rose Bonbon precisely because it is so subtly inoffensive. It is interesting that this text should be quietly acclaimed whereas Rose Bonbon in its rather brutal and ludicrous offensiveness should produce such a violent and extreme response. There are, I think, questions that need to be considered about representations of a sexual nature that include children and precisely what constitutes the borderline between indecent and acceptable material; about the cultural guidelines governing the reception of the obscene, and this when it involves underage girls in particular. Why is it that in some cases such representations are horrific, and in others, entertainingly titillating? These questions cannot be answered without an exploration of the cultural fantasies that surround the vulnerability and the desirability of children, both those fantasies produced by adults and projected onto children, and those which speak directly to the child in question. One way of approaching these questions is through the medium of the fairy tale, which both Contes à faire rougir les petits chaperons and Rose Bonbon appeal to repeatedly, if in ironic and distorted fashion. The fairy tale is the traditional medium for transmitting the experience of adults to the naivety of children, and so it is again surprising to find such a safe and salvationary genre put to work in such an invidious context. Bruno
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Bettelheim championed fairy tales in his text, The Uses of Enchantment, as providing “great and positive psychological contributions to the child’s inner growth” (1991: 12). Fairy tales speak knowingly—and more importantly symbolically—to a child’s inner conflicts, so that “the child feels understood and appreciated deep down–his feelings, hopes and anxieties–without these all having to be dragged up and investigated in the harsh light of a rationality that is still beyond him” (1991: 19). Also important for Bettelheim is the fact that fairy tales portray evil and conflict, for he regrets the way that “the dominant culture wishes to pretend, particularly to children, that the dark side of man does not exist” (1991: 7). Indeed, Bettelheim’s book shows its age here, as the dominant culture of Walt Disney has produced a seachange in the way that contemporary children and their parents receive fairy tales. The emphasis in our current culture is still on the resilience and magical problemsolving abilities of the children, but equally children are divested of responsibility in the conflicted situation they initially find themselves in, and their fierce rage and fear are often sugar-coated and fantastically assuaged. Mass market repackaging of fairy tales often does try to pretend that the demonic in mankind does not exist, or can at least be easily outwitted. The current rise in the importance and visibility of children’s culture also means that fairy tales are deeply embedded into the Western world’s cultural conscious, with the result that the briefest of references will provoke an instant response of recognition and meaning-creation. Fairy tales nowadays are a kind of cultural shorthand for fantasies of rescue and tenacity, for a childhood world of reassurance where everything will turn out all right in the end, for thrilling adventures, for self-exploration and growth. The fun of fairy tales is nowadays emphasized rather than their more menacing underside. This formula is clearly at work in Enard’s Contes à faire rougir les petits chaperons. However, the self-exploration and growth in question is entirely of a sexual nature. The opening scenes of the narrative situate the action in a zone that rests uneasily between fantasy and reality: “Alice a changé depuis toutes ces histories au pays des Merveilles. Elle s’enferme dans la salle de bains. Elle se met nue et s’observe dans la glace. Elle voudrait bien voyager encore de l’autre côté du miroir. Passé douze ans, on ne sait plus comment faire” [Alice has changed since all those adventures in Wonderland. She shuts herself in the bathroom . Looks at her naked body in the mirror. She would really like to travel on the other side of the mirror again, but past twelve years old, no one knows how anymore] (7). Alice is still a fantasy character, but her predicament is represented with explicit reality. The Wonderland at stake here, the text implies, is an erotic one, the only possibility left for adults who want to engage on a fantastic journey and emerge transformed. In this way the text indicates the degree of fantasy
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involved in adult sexuality, but it also keeps a wary distance from the idea of a real thirteen-year-old girl. Alice sets off in search of her sister’s boyfriend, the narrator, and once she finds him, lifts her t-shirt to show him her breasts, removes her knickers, sits on his lap and cannot restrain herself from masturbating. The narrator maintains a veneer of contented victimization in the face of this sexual assault, wondering if a good spanking would solve the problem and then considering: “À la reflexion, ce n’est peut-être pas idéal pour la calmer” [On reflection, that’s possibly not the best way to calm her down] (11). Repeatedly the text makes us aware of Alice’s strength of will, her unrelenting sexual curiosity, her knowing sexual manipulativeness. As the narrative progresses, Alice manages to become increasingly involved in the sexual games of the adults around her, until the eventual loss of her virginity at the end of the novel. The resolution of Alice’s sexual precociousness is presented as a very happy ending indeed. Her sexual education has been comprehensive and satisfactory and there is no shade of guilt, doubt or fear amongst the protagonists. This is undoubtedly a fairy tale in itself, one written for an audience of men and whilst our teenage heroine is called Alice as an appeal to a certain type of humorously fantastic context, she could easily have been named Lolita instead. The cunning cleverness of this text lies in its implication that Little Red Riding Hood was also a Lolita-in-waiting. Enard’s rewritten fairy tales emphasize an eroticism that is banal and vulgar and playful, but not entirely misplaced. His rewrites include Pinocchio (whose growing nose is clearly open to a bawdy interpretation), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Three Little Pigs and Tom Thumb. There is nothing dark and menacing about the sexuality at play in these tales, even though part of the entertainment involved comes from destroying their sugary tweeness. Instead, as Snow White figures out how to accommodate all seven dwarves at once, or as Tom Thumb pleasures the Ogre’s wife, a certain cheery innocence is maintained in the tone and register and the sexualization, whilst relentless, has a certain bizarre aptness. It is interesting to note that the story of Red Riding Hood is not offered as a rewrite, partly perhaps because its own sexual preoccupations are already intrinsic to its organization. Yet there are other possibilities why this story should be fundamental to the collection, but not retold. One of the earliest versions, that of Charles Perrault, is clearly a tale of sexual precociousness that ends in disaster, as Red Riding Hood is eaten and the story draws to a close with a morality verse. As Jack Zipes argues, “We tend to forget that Perrault implied that a young girl, who was irresponsible and naïve if not stupid, was responsible for a wolf’s behavior and consequently caused her own rape” (1995: 26). This harsh line has been softened by the time the tale is written by the Grimm brothers, who introduce the rescuing
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huntsman to save both child and grandmother and help outwit the wolf. The Grimm version offers an Oedipal drama for Bettelheim to interpret, in which the child’s premature sexuality is simply checked by the reinsertion of a sheltering, responsible father figure. Bettelheim suggests that it is “much better, despite one’s ambivalent desires, to settle for a while longer for the protection the father provides when he is not seen in his seductive aspect” (1991: 181). The difference between the two tales seems essentially to be that Perrault considers the child old enough to be responsible for herself, whereas in Grimm she is not. The question of responsibility becomes an urgent one, when we understand that at the heart of Red Riding Hood we find what Bettelheim calls “the fascination which sex, and everything surrounding it, exercises over the child’s mind” (1991: 176). Or put another way, Djuna Barnes’ allusion in Nightwood that “children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!” (1961: 79). The tale of Red Riding Hood proposes that sexuality is nascent in all children, and that the fairy tale offers a medium through which this issue can be approached. Hence Enard’s saucy contes have a certain appropriateness that allows them to pass through cultural censors. Yet the question of the child’s responsibility for her own sexuality is rigorously silenced throughout this novel, while the adults who might be expected to protect her involve her instead in their erotic play. Repeated references to Alice’s sexual voraciousness stand as proof of her maturity, and the context of eroticized fairy tales asks the reader’s indulgence for what is in any case latent in the child. The tale of little Red Riding Hood, along with the other fairy tales that lie palimpsestically under Enard’s text are used to provide an appeal to comfort, fantasy and security in a scenario that would otherwise be fraught with potential trauma; they defuse the demonic nature of the sexuality that would otherwise be apparent here. Enard also employs another strategy in order to render Alice’s sexual initiation harmless and fulfilling. It is a striking feature of his rewritten tales that women feature abundantly as heroic, strong, demanding and sexually alluring. The magical, transformative power in these tales is always erotic, and that power is placed fully in the hands of the female characters. Males here are generally hesitant victims, or else resort to sexuality as a useful, selfprotective strategy. This runs counter to the usual organization of gender roles in the fairy tales. Discussing the rather unfortunate lot of princesses in traditional tales, Jack Zipes points out that “[t]he young ‘heroines’ obviously ready for marriage, are humiliated, degraded and besmirched. Their major virtue is patience and, to a certain extent, opportunism. They must wait for the opportune time to make themselves available to a man. Without a man, they are nothing. Only when they find their prince, who comes from outside to rescue them, can their lives assume meaning, and the meaning is marriage
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and departure for another realm” (1995: 39). Enard’s tales cast such humiliation aside and present women as sexually initiatory and powerful through their desirability. This is not so much a rewrite as a simple, if exaggerated, appeal to a different kind of fictional myth, and one that is also aimed directly at girl children. Valerie Walkerdine points to the musicals of Gigi, My Fair Lady and Annie, in which otherwise disadvantaged working class girls call upon the transformative power of their innocent desirability. The “eroticised little girl” as Walkerdine calls her, “is inscribed as one who can make a transformation, which is also a self-transformation, which is also a seductive allure” (Jenkins 1998: 263). This image is not confined solely to the stage. Walkerdine points to the way that in contemporary culture it has become increasingly pervasive, so that “popular images of little girls as alluring and seductive, at once innocent and highly erotic, are contained in the most respectable and mundane of locations–broadsheet newspapers, women’s magazines, television adverts” (Jenkins 1998: 263). Such images appeal to adults and children alike, informing little girls of the assets they must cultivate if they are to achieve recognition and power in their culture, and presenting children to adults as adorable and admirable in a way that seems entirely without victimization. What seems to be most at stake here is the pervasiveness of such images throughout our culture, their ultimate invisibility and the unchallenged status of their innocence. Yet to present a child as adorable is to invest in its image either a misplaced sexuality or a misplaced spirituality, both of which are too heavy a symbolic construction for a child’s narrow shoulders. Our current society, however, prefers to adore children, the message implicit in Agnès Tricoire’s remarks on the child as the new divine. Enard’s text offers, then, a highly palatable reconstruction of child sexuality because, although it is somewhat extreme, its foundations lie in a collusion with any number of fairy tales that pervade our culture concerning children, girl power, sexuality and happy endings. The way that culture has evolved the fairy tale to emphasize the glorified resolution, to diminish the warning they encapsulate for children, to increase the power assigned to female figures, but this through the ever more significant power of their physical desirability, is entirely in keeping with the fantasies that support Enard’s profoundly pornographic representation of the adventures of a girl child. Enard’s tale must be involved in a work of such cultural legibility that it fails to arouse any dissonant echoes in its readership; it is difficult, otherwise, to understand how such a text could be published with so little outward signs of public concern. Yet there is another way to consider the fairy tale, beyond the jolly and harmless developmental caper that Enard abuses so successfully. We can gain an entirely different perspective on his text when we consider the
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elements that his rewritings—and the current cultural climate surrounding popular children’s tales–conceal. Jack Zipes dismisses Bettelheim’s redemptive appraisal of the fairy tale and wonders instead why it is that we so resolutely focus on the happy ending rather than the terrible trials the child must endure in its quest. Neglect, abandonment, and abuse are all intrinsic to the child’s predicament, and we prefer to treat them in retrospect as didactic tools, rather than consider them as traumatic experiences. Zipes suggests we remember that fairy tales express an adult viewpoint on family relations, and not that of a child. “To a certain extent,” he argues, “they were told and written down to reveal the shame and guilt that adults felt over the centuries or to redress wrongs. More than anything, I believe, they reveal what the psychiatrists Alice Miller and James Hoyne have identified as ambivalent feelings many parents have towards their children—their desire to abandon them, and the shame they feel when they actually abuse them” (1995: 219). Fairy tales, then, become part of the strategies adults have developed to assuage or sublimate these uncomfortable feelings, part of the structure of uneasy control that asks children to take responsibility for themselves, to mistrust the world, and to rationalize the trauma of abuse. Zipes proposes that “[w]e refuse to discuss the trauma in the tales based on children’s real experiences of maltreatment because we want to believe that such trauma did not and does not exist. We want desperately to forgive the parent in us and happily resolve what can never be completely resolved” (1995: 222). The happy ever after ending protects the adult every bit as much as it intends to protect the child. But what if a tale existed that shattered the coherency and the consistency of the fantasy world of the fairy tale, that exploited a culture’s self-contradictory stance on the eroticized child, and played openly to its fears and anxieties for its most vulnerable members? With these thoughts in mind we can consider the much-reviled Rose Bonbon, by Nicolas Jones-Gorlin The text opens in the cinema at a showing of Snow White, a regular haunt of Simon’s where he can watch children. On this occasion he spots a young girl and is overcome with compulsive desire. In the street afterwards he approaches the mother and strikes up a conversation—“chaque phrase de cette pute voulait dire: viens me baiser, viens me baiser fort, je m’emmerde” [every sentence spoken by that whore said: come and fuck me, come and fuck me hard, I’m dying of boredom] (15)—which results in a trip to the ice cream parlor. When Simon attacks her daughter in the toilets he is caught and put on remand. Instead of being sent to prison, however, he is placed in a form of rehabilitation and given a small caravan in a deserted area. Here he meets Le Vieux, an elderly, wealthy man of influence who shares his feelings towards children (something he discovers through a conversation over their
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favorite fairy tale characters), and rationalizes child abuse to Simon: “Les enfants sont très séducteurs; ils cherchent l’affection des adultes. Il n’y a rien d’anormal à leur répondre” [Children are very seductive, they seek adult affection. There is nothing abnormal in responding to them] (62). He accuses society of hypocrisy, and goes on to prove his power and prowess to Simon by approaching a child in a burger bar and procuring an hour of his time from his ambiguously represented parents. The Vieux takes Simon in hand, buying him good clothes, taking him to a fancy restaurant and introducing him to his other influential pedophile friends. Over the course of the conversation there they decide to make a film— “Un film pour dire que l’amour libre entre une enfant et un adulte, c’est bien” [A film that says that free love between and adult and a child is a good thing] (83)—rejecting Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood in favor of a remake of Peter Pan. Needing an actor to play the lead part, le Vieux reinvents Simon as a star, Dany King, by placing him in a bizarre reality show in which contestants must survive in the (simulated) environment of outer space. Simon wins by playing to the audience’s need to see pain and suffering on their television screens, and goes on to star in the musical. So far, so ludicrous. He then commits an error by making an assault on Rose, a young niece of le Vieux. He has been warned off, but when he finds her in the bath, he cannot resist indulging in a sexualized rendition of The Three Little Pigs. Simon’s career suddenly falls apart as he is exposed as a pedophile by the press, and he is forced once again into hiding. He realizes that his downfall has been manipulated by le Vieux, just as his success was manufactured by him. In consequence, he sets off on a mission of revenge. This involves trawling provincial France for three other pedophiles, whom he recognizes without need of any formal communication, and who all instantly fall in with his plans. They kidnap a scout, Simon disposes of his companions, and he takes the scout to the Vieux, whose predilection for small boys he knows well. However, the child has been wired up as a suicide bomb, ready to explode once he is undressed. In the manner of cartoon heroes, Simon cannot leave well alone and returns to the hotel room because he has not heard the bomb go off; in the subsequent explosion Simon is paralyzed as well. This is clearly not a sensitive and insightful exploration of pedophilia. One of the most striking elements of the text is the increasing derangement of its fantasy frame. What is initially a story of some plausibility quickly veers off into the absurd and fantastic. Equally the focus shifts from Simon’s sexual feelings towards children, to his murderous feelings towards his onetime patron. This is, I would suggest, an indication of how alarmed the text is by its own material. The sheer ludicrousness of the novel, after the initial scene-setting of the first section, seems to imply a lack of responsibility
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towards the issues it raises, and a desire to distance itself from them through the realm of fantasy. Further evidence of this comes in the odd coda to the text, a tacked-on Note de la Rédactrice, which displaces the origin of the story from Simon to the journalist who comes to visit him in hospital at his request, in order to write his life history. Having listened to a very particular, very immediate narrative voice throughout the novel, it is a shock to the reader to discover that this voice was ventriloquised through a woman, who then undermines what she has written: “l’état de santé de Simon, dès la moitié du livre, s’est profondément degradé. Il ne parvenait plus à prononcer l’ensemble des mots, ses idées semblaient plus confuses et leurs enchaînements sans lien evident. La chronologie et la structure réelle du récit, elles aussi, ont été malmenées” [Simon’s state of health, from halfway through the book, went rapidly downhill. He could no longer manage to get all his words out, his ideas seemed more confused and the lack of causal links between them more evident. The chronology and structure of the account were also distorted] (169). The reader is left uncertain how to interpret these remarks; does this therefore mean that the fantastic second part of the narrative did not occur at all? That it was an invalid’s delusion? Or that part of it occurred, but not in the order or the manner in which it was recounted? And if any of this were true, would it affect in any way the judgment the reader could carry out on the main protagonist? Having raised so many questions without offering answers, all we can know for sure is that this coda seeks to undermine further the plausibility of the narrative, to remove it ever farther from the field of mimesis and absolute moral interpretation. This systematic disruption also occurs at the level of the discourse. Simon’s voice is highly stylized; a peculiar mishmash of street slang, idiom and English phrases, all combined in a high-octane, breathless dash along the sentences. According to the journalist’s coda, this discourse is one which she has attempted to tidy up, but it has not been possible to excavate an elegant French out of it: “Il a bien fallu que ma syntaxe se plie à son désordre mental” [It was indeed necessary to make my syntax flexible in order to accommodate the disorder of his mind] (168), she declares. The discordant, incoherent nature of the language is supposed to be an indication of Simon’s psychic disorder, and it is clearly under the banner of mental illness that this text wishes to place pedophilia. Yet if we examine closely the elements that compose Simon’s speech, we find a striking absence of emotion, and in its place, a cacophony of advertising slogans, idiom and cultural references. The intention would be to make Simon seem inhuman, to displace him from any possibility of subjectivity. But the effect is to put the language of culture itself on trial, to uncouple it from its human origins, put it through the liquidizer and parody it as the source and the manifestation of society’s
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sickness. The text’s internal malaise, its ugliness and incoherence cannot truly be attributed to the viewpoint of the pedophile as this character and the world he inhabits are so implausibly represented. Instead this odd, discontinuous textual world presents us with a fractured subjectivity created out of the sordid flotsam and jetsam of popular culture. Simon’s narrative voice and the tale it tells become a discordant anthem of jarring notes, a staccato rap that threatens at all moments to descend into senselessness, where it might risk revealing the fundamental discontinuities of cultural ideology itself. The relentless fragmentation of popular culture continues at the level of the text’s themes and preoccupations, and this is particularly notable in the use of fairy tales. Here they are reduced to the merest of sound bites, the briefest of references employed simply as a means of transaction between adult and child. They are stripped of all possible meaning, except their presentation of desirable images of young children, and then put to use as a slender means of communication between the generations, a narrow bridge of connection that gains a child’s attention and opens up a pathway to abuse. One of the reasons why this text feels so offensive is because it fails to create meaning out of the situations it represents. It wishes to maintain an intention to shock, but cannot quite bring itself to articulate the conclusions to its arguments. The exploitation of fairy tales, focusing on their demonic dimension but failing to link it to an understanding of their rationalization of childhood trauma, is an obvious case in point. The text abounds with disquieting representations of cultural failings whose danger the narrative seems fearful of outwardly expressing. Instead it remains at the level of anxieties, veering off into implausible fantasy, or disowning its own insights. Yet it represents a sordid, degraded society that treats children as desirable commodities; it represents adults as possessing the causal powers to create reasons for abusing children alongside the moral bankruptcy to actually do so; it represents desire unleashed and catastrophic, lacking any possible framework of comprehension. Its own discontinuities provide, despite itself, a powerful critique of a culture that prefers to run away from its deepest fears and anxieties rather than take responsibility for the dangers it has created. Unable to cohere itself into a penetrating indictment of a culture’s malaise, Rose Bonbon remains a dislikeable, frustrating and unpleasant text, exploiting society’s weakest spots without offering the intellectual or emotional framework to assimilate and heal them. Like the crazy discourse that has rebelled against the journalist’s attempts to contain it, this narrative remains at the level of threatening fantasy, its jagged and uncomfortable discontinuities repeatedly erupting through its attempts at aesthetic resonance.
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Most alarming of all, this is a text that contains no children. That is to say, the ones it features are little more than cardboard cut-outs, devoid of personality. Instead its focus is entirely upon the adults and the fantasies, desires and anxieties with which they invest their images of the child. It would seem that one of the most offensive messages that can be transmitted is that adults gain erotic pleasure from looking at children, and that this pleasure is potentially dangerous. It would seem that Graham Greene was sued for this reason, and that James Kincaid suffered media vilification for it as well. Rose Bonbon makes adults solely responsible for the abuse of children, whilst Contes à faire rougir d’honte les petits chaperons goes to some pains to suppress and disarm such a thought, and this is perhaps a significant reason why their public receptions should have been so strikingly different. It is not surprising that such a message would receive a profoundly hostile response; it touches on some of the most powerful and disturbing emotions in adult subjectivity, such as unresolved Oedipal issues from childhood, the painful demands of desirability culture places on subjects who long to be validated within it, the blackest and most unacceptable aggressions we harbor towards our own offspring. The pleasure adults may gain from eroticizing children is bound up with the most insurmountable and uncomfortable of power inequalities. Children will always give in to adults because they must be loved in order to survive; there is no possibility of social or psychic space for them otherwise. It is all too easy to make a child submit, either to the whims of an individual, or to the validating gaze of its surrounding culture. The responsibility that adults bear towards children is thus enormous. The power they possess over the child is already weighted so heavily in their favor, that it takes very little to turn a child into a complicit victim. As our society increasingly adores children, their desirability translating into a need to keep them safe at all times, so the responsibility parents bear towards children becomes ever more difficult to shoulder; it is simply too much to deal with. In this light, it may be that the hysteria that surrounds issues of pedophilia in the Western world is caught up in the paradoxical knot of sexual relations within which we bind our children. It represents the intolerable responsibility we bear towards our much-prized children, but its form comes from the implicit eroticization with which we surround their images. If our culture could find a way to love children less sexually, admire them less erotically, then perhaps it could be less excessively afraid of the threat of the pervert. This is in no way to condone any sexual abuse of children in any form whatsoever, but to propose instead that we reconsider the sexual power relations that structure our culture, and the myths of validation that our culture offers to children. The outrage provoked by Rose Bonbon is excessive compared to its material; its
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worst crimes are against good art, and so it is undoubtedly a terrible book, but not a really dangerous one, whilst Enard’s novel is more disturbing in its intentions and implications. But rather than attempting to censor such disturbing representations, we should perhaps consider them dispassionately and unflinchingly, as if we had nothing to hide. Bibliography Barnes, Djuna (1961). Nightwood, New York: New Directions. Bell, Vikki (1993). Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law, London and New York: Routledge. Bettelheim, Bruno (1991). The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, London: Penguin. Bontour, Brigit (2002). “Nicolas Jones-Gorlin: Pédophile, Jeunisme, la Figure de Janus” [online]. Available from: http://www.écrits-vain.com [accessed June 2004] Carey, John (1993). “The Age of Innocents,” Sunday Times, 7 March, 9-11. Enard, Jean-Pierre (1987). Contes à faire rougir les petits chaperons, Paris: Gallimard. Germain, Sylvie (1991). L’Enfant méduse, Paris: Gallimard. Herman, Judith (1981). Father-Daughter Incest, London: Harvard UP. Hutton, Margaret-Anne (1995). “Assuming Responsibility: Christiane Rochefort’s Exploration of Child Sexual Abuse in La Porte du fond,” The Modern Language Review, 90: 2, 333-344. Jenkins, Henry ed. (1998). The Children’s Culture Reader, New York and London: New York UP. Jones-Gorlin, Nicolas (2002). Rose Bonbon, Paris: Gallimard. Joye, Florence (2002). “La censure plane sur les artistes” [online]. Available from: http://www.LeCourrier.fr [accessed June 2004]. Kincaid, James (1998). “Producing Erotic Children,” The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins, New York and London: New York UP, 241253. Lambrichs, Louise. L. (1996). À ton image, Paris: Seuil. Riddell, Mary (2002). “The Fiction of New Fiction,” The Observer, 22 September, [online]. Available from: http://www.observer.guardian. co.uk [accessed June 2004]. Rochfort, Christiane (1990). La Porte du fond, Paris: Livre de poche. Thomas, Joyce (1989). Inside the Wolf’s Belly. Aspects of the Fairy Tale, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
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Edward, Verity (1994). “Paedophile Book Should Be Banned,” The Daily Mail, 8 March. Walkerdine, Valerie (1998). “Popular Culture and the Eroticization of Little Girls,” The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins, New York and London: New York UP, 254-264 Zipes, Jack (1995). Creative Storytelling. Building Community, Changing Lives, New York and London: Routledge.
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REPRESENTATIONS OF RAPE IN APARTHEID AND POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE ANNE REEF In her essay, Reef explores the representation of rape in apartheid and post-apartheid South African literature. Reef argues that inscribing rape into contemporary South African literature is an ethically complex action that is enmeshed in the ethics of representation in general and the ethics of representing violence in particular. She asserts that when authors represent rape in South African literature, realistically or metaphorically, their intentions are often read as ethically dubious because readers and nonreaders inevitably make judgments affected by their own extratextual cultural contexts and experiences.
Rape is, by definition, unethical. But even writing about rape—inscribing it into literature—is, unexpectedly, an ethically complex action. Certainly, examples of rape in literary texts in English literature abound: William Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece” (1594), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747), and W. B. Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” (1924) are some of the most famous ones. Representations of rape appear with striking frequency in apartheid and post-apartheid South African literature: Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee has written of rape several times, most famously in Disgrace (1999), Mark Behr ends The Smell of Apples (1995) with a rape, and rape is central to Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001); these are only a few examples. While the preoccupation of contemporary South African authors with rape is unsurprising given that South Africa has one of the highest incidences of rape in the world, the country’s authors use representations of rape to do more than realistically contextualize their novels; rape is, for example, a convenient and effective metaphor for colonialism and its concomitant strategies of possession, subjugation, and abuse. To inscribe rape into literature anytime, especially in contemporary South Africa, is to step into an ethical minefield. Unaware of the complexity of my subject, I started this chapter as a literature review designed to survey and synthesize what others have said about various aspects of the representation of rape in recent South African literature. However, I soon found that this prism exposed how the ethos of the manner in which a book is written or a story told may result in a disjuncture between the world within
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the text and that without it, creating ethical problems. In this chapter, I show how a literary work may express values that are at odds with the moral values that the work, indeed the author’s oeuvre, may have been designed to reflect. I look first at the background to rape in South Africa and then proceed to look at representation in literature generally, at representations of rape in literature, and then particularly at representations of rape in South African literature; this trajectory reveals mounting ethical complexity. I conclude by commenting briefly on this complexity and on my findings. A Background to Rape in South Africa The Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed apartheid South Africa as a country plagued by violence that both reflected and exacerbated its racial, class, and gender divisions. Women and children, especially those who were politically and economically disempowered and thus marginalized and silenced by the patriarchy, suffered violence within and without the home, devoid of meaningful recourse to restitution. Although the country’s postapartheid constitution purported to guarantee gender equality and protection for all, as well as access to a vote and a voice that would end victimhood, the situation has not improved for most women after apartheid. As Binaifer Nowrojee and Bronwen Manby state, in 1995, “South African women remained second class citizens” (1995: 2). Women’s and children’s activists like Charlene Smith concur that “the human rights abuses, and the contempt for the humanity of others that gave birth to apartheid has not left us. Black people are no longer the target for vilification—women and children are” (2001: 283). Rape is so great a problem in South Africa that it almost defies description. Statistics from various sources are available; some of these are reliable, others less so. Some are anecdotal or speculative, but, as the following selection shows, most are compelling: • •
• •
South Africa has the highest reported incidence of rape in the world (Graham 2002: 10, emphasis added). Only one in 20-35 rapes is reported (statistics from reporting agencies differ), suggesting that there were between 1,000,000 and 1,600,000 rapes in South Africa in 1998. Figures for 1999 are similar (Smith 2001: 74). “South African women’s organizations estimate that perhaps as many as one in every three South African women will be raped” (Nowrojee and Manby: 2). “75 per cent of those raped [in South Africa] will be gang raped by three to thirty perpetrators” (Smith 2001: 189).
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“In August 2000, the government stopped issuing crime statistics—by that stage officially there were sixty-five murders a day, a rape every twenty-six seconds” (Smith 2001: 76, emphasis in original).1
Although the cause of the high rates of crime and rape in South Africa are the result of complex interactions between various social, political, and economic factors in the past and in the present, most who write about rape in South Africa concur that apartheid was a causal and exacerbating factor: “The implementation of apartheid over forty-five years […] [caused] an economic and social crisis in South Africa that […] has led to extraordinarily high rates of violent crime” (Nowrojee and Manby 1995: 18). Similarly, Smith attributes violence and rape in part to “the mental havoc” (2001: 206) wreaked by apartheid—“the destruction of families and the witnessing of profound violence” (2001: 87). By 1995, proliferating violence against women in South Africa drew the attention of the New York human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, which commissioned an investigation. A host of problems that made South Africa in 1995 a hostile environment for its women were identified in the organization’s report, authored by Nowrojee and Manby. They identified some of the factors that contribute to the creation of the quasi purgatorial environment to which rape survivors must submit themselves if they attempt to report rape and see their rapist/s tried. Their findings uncannily corroborate the experience of Smith, an author and journalist. After being raped in April 1999, Smith committed herself, her skills, and her connections to drawing attention to the scope and effect of the problem of rape in South Africa in an effort to secure resources for fighting both the causes of rape and for appropriate emotional and physical treatment of “rape survivors,” a phrase she prefers to “rape victims.” Her book, by allowing readers to engage with the Human Rights Watch report with retrospection, reveals two discouraging 1
The ethics of statistical presentation come to bear here: A statistic regarding a rate is likely more meaningful in this context than one regarding a frequency. For example, to say that there is a homicide every minute in Canada, with its relatively small population, would point to a greater problem than would the statement that there is a homicide every minute in China, with its huge population. As such, one might argue that employing the frequency statistic is unethical because it is misleading. On the other hand, citing the rape frequency in South Africa has such great rhetorical impact that it compels the reader/listener to give the subject further attention. Because it is likely that the problem of rape in South Africa cannot be resolved or the situation ameliorated without significant outside attention and action, it may at this point be more important ethically to use this statistic than to discard it in favor of less emotive ones.
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trends. First, the incidence of rape in South Africa may have worsened between 1995 and 2000. Second, Smith extensively discusses rape as a possible death sentence for the rape survivor because of South Africa’s disproportionately high rate of HIV infection—she explains that the situation of rape increases the possibility that the infection will be transmitted. Human Rights Watch investigators had either ignored this issue or were unaware of its magnitude. Smith’s book provides a wealth of background and statistical information without conforming to any particular literary genre. While her rhetorical strategy as rape survivor and self-appointed spokesperson for rape survivors is to present the reader with moving and often harrowing personal testimony, an appropriate strategy for narrative representation is often less obvious to other writers who seek to inscribe rape into their work. The problems and ethics pertaining to representing rape in literature are best situated within the context of the problems and ethics relating to narrative representation in general. Literature and the Challenge of Representation The challenge of narrative representation, including its ethical difficulties, have been theorized by many writers, philosophers, and critics, including J. M. Coetzee, South Africa’s foremost novelist and the author of Disgrace, the novel around which all current critical discussion of rape representations in South African literature appears to coalesce. Coetzee often resists delivering his theoretical concerns and philosophies without mediation and, as Gareth Cornwell points out in “Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Coetzee has since 1996 expressed his ideas in narrative rather than discursive or expository form by speaking through the character of the fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of his latest novel Elizabeth Costello, who travels the world addressing different groups.2 Coetzee first spoke through 2
Elizabeth Costello is in part a Coetzee persona. “Elizabeth Costello” is almost an anagram of both “John Michael Coetzee,” the author’s given name, and the one he changed it to, “John Maxwell Coetzee;” I will discuss this further in another paper I am preparing. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the ways in which Coetzee’s narrators embody his philosophies, but the reader should note that Coetzee frequently establishes links between himself and his narrators; some of these are genuine, while others are red herrings. To align himself with a character partially through anagrammatic suggestion would be typical of this author, a linguist who is fond of employing word puzzles, etymologies (often false ones), palinodes, and similar postmodern devices in his work.
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Costello when he told the story, “What is Realism?” Coetzee/Costello’s central argument is that realism is no longer possible because “the wordmirror is broken” (Cornwell 2002: 309). The phrase “word-mirror,” Cornwell argues, is a reference to the notion of mimesis, which post-structuralism and postmodernism have rendered impossible through their commitment to the notion that linguistic signification is inherently unstable—“one cannot [any longer] gain access to an extralinguistic reality by perusing the sequence of words on a page.” Such realization is paradoxical because “none but the most naive reader of fiction ever believed in the literal truth of what he or she was reading” [...] but “no amount of self-conscious anti-realist intervention on the part of the author prevents the reader from construing an imaginary world as though it were real” (2002: 311). Costello’s position is that “literary realism is a sham because it pretends to offer us an unmediated version of reality. That exhibition of bad faith renders the concept [of realism] ethically dubious” (Cornwell 2002: 312). This insight has enormous implications for understanding the representations of violence and rape in any writing, not only South African literature. Another problem with a realist text, one identified by J. M. Coetzee himself, is that when describing violence, a work may allow the author and reader to indulge in what Rosemary Jolly calls the “pornography of violence” (1992-93: 54); this notion is central to her article “The Gun as Copula: Colonization, Rape, and the Question of Pornographic Violence in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands.” Coetzee’s sensitivity to the problem of representing any kind of violence in literature without making it alluring to the reader’s latent sadomasochistic desires was discussed in Jolly’s article published a decade before Cornwell’s. Already having recognized then that Coetzee had rejected realism, and having grappled with the representations of violence in Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands (1974), Jolly draws on Coetzee’s nonfictional theory to express her confidence that “implicit in his rejection of the realist mode is the desire to re-present the acts of violence that constitute a recurring subject in his fiction, without participating in the process of violation that those acts exhibit.” She further suggests that by repudiating realism, Coetzee tried to free himself and his readers from a malign history that “has ensured a present that remains essentially colonial and is characterized by its inability to sustain itself except through repeated acts of violation” (1992-93: 44). Jolly’s early recognition of Coetzee’s agenda makes it ironic that when Disgrace was published in 1999, Coetzee would be accused of writing a realistic novel that sought to repeat “the contours of a violent past” (Flanagan 2002: 388).3 3
The contentious plot content of Disgrace is interracial rape; the controversy over this
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As Coetzee and other writers and critics have realized, it is challenging for an author to select a narrative strategy that strikes an appropriate balance between levels of authorial mediation in a text. This difficulty is compounded by ethical implications when authors seek to inscribe violence into their work. One of the most difficult forms of violence to represent is rape. Representing Rape in Literature Rape in literature is, by definition and like everything else, a re-presentation and thus always mediated. The problems and ethics of such representation interest but also trouble some writers. Possible narrative strategies for representing traumatic experiences are discussed by Joseph Flanagan. He argues that “there are certain experiences so violent and terrifying that they are capable of destroying the normal mechanisms responsible for consciousness and memory” (2002: 388)—when this occurs, the subject suffers post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The problem of memory after trauma is thus not one of retrieval but encoding. Flanagan notes that the inaccessibility of the individual’s memory of trauma has been used theoretically to understand the recondite nature of historical knowledge in general because some view “History itself [as] inherently traumatic” (2002: 388, emphasis in original). He suggests that the aesthetic of postmodernism, which is one of “nonlinear form, [a] blurring of the distinctions between past, present, and future, [a] constant circling around aporias and double binds in lieu of a drive to a predestined conclusion” (2002: 389), represents history more accurately than realism does because the memory of trauma already conforms to the postmodern aesthetic model that he describes. This model is consistent with “unmediated repetitions of a trauma that has yet to be worked through or ‘distorted’ through symbolic textualization” (2002: 389), while a realist aesthetic implies that a trauma has been processed and thus perhaps perverted in some way. But Flanagan asks whether the less representative postmodern aesthetic is just as disingenuous as a realist one, and he suggests that if so, any distinction between the two kinds of memory collapses. Both the question itself and the affirmative answer to which it points reveal some of the difficult strategic and concomitant ethical difficulties authors face when they represent traumatic events like rape in their narratives. Other issues central to examining representations of rape in South African literature are raised by Flanagan, for example, whether a “traumatic novel is discussed in more detail later in this paper.
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history” can be expanded to a people (2002: 390). Such a concept allows that an individual subject’s memory may function as a repository for the (inherently traumatic) history of the group to which he or she belongs. Although Flanagan does not answer this question from a psychological point of view, his literary examples demonstrate that it is useful to authors to shift “the site of trauma [...] from the personal to the collective” (2002: 393). Through such authorial action, rape may come to be used as a metaphor. Briefly touching on the ethics of trauma representation in literature, Flanagan asks whether individual and historical trauma can be understood as only a metaphor, noting that “the very notion of historical trauma collapses any distinction between the victims and the secondary witnesses of trauma, allowing the latter to benefit from the former’s status as victim for selfserving purposes” (2002: 394). He points out, though, that in some cases empathy for prior victims is only evoked by the traumatic experience of the individual. While Flanagan does not discuss South African literature directly, both of his examples resonate with the texts of that country. For example, Mauritius author Lindsey Collen’s The Rape of Sita, set on the neighboring island of Reunion, convincingly offers the protagonist’s rape there “as a metaphor for understanding slavery and colonialism” (2002: 393); slavery and colonialism are traumatic experiences that the mechanisms of apartheid kept raw.4 Similarly, Flanagan’s other example, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is thematically concerned with the racial, economic, and gender prejudices and exploitation that compel South African authors too, prompting them to write rape into their narratives as real and metaphorical events. As a metaphorical event, sex in literature cannot be read meaningfully as representative of power without regard to race, according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Such a realization significantly complicates the ethics of sexual representation in ways that are beyond the scope of her introduction or of this chapter to discuss. Sedgwick, postulating that rape is “at the precise intersection of domination and sexuality” (1985: 9), supports her argument by examining Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Citing the graphic description of Scarlett’s violation by a black man, she points out that the principal component of the notion of rape is absent here: this is sex. To Scarlett and her society, though, the attack is rape, and the community responds to it as such with foreseeable violence. But sex accompanied by force is not absent from Gone with the Wind. Sedgwick notes that the novel’s only real rape is offered by Mitchell rather vividly: even though Rhett “had humbled [Scarlett], used her brutally” (quoted in Sedgwick 1985: 10); this is 4
Lindsey Collen, who was born in South Africa, lived in Mauritius at the time of writing.
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not recognized as rape because it is intraracial sex within the framework of marriage. In this novel, then, “rape and its meaning circulate in precisely opposite directions” (emphasis in original). Although Sedgwick does not draw a parallel between the racist, sexist society described by Mitchell in her novel and apartheid/post-apartheid South Africa, her comment that “the racial fracture is, in America, more sharply dichotomized than others except perhaps for gender” (1985: 10) is credibly extrapolated to the South African situation. Sedgwick’s views are shared by the South African critic Gillian Gane in “Unspeakable Injuries in Disgrace and David’s Story”: “Rape is always a political act—the exertion of male power over a female body; in a rape that crosses racial lines the issues are even more charged. When […] males of the subordinate race […] rape a woman of the dominant race, the rape is likely to inflame vindictive racial passions” (2002: 104). While Gane refers primarily to South African literature and specifically to Disgrace, her words also apply to the American society Sedgwick presents. The implications of whether a rape is represented in South African literature as inter- or intraracial have been discussed by Gane, as well as by Meg Samuelson in “The Rainbow Womb: Rape and Race in South African Fiction of the Transition” (2002). They would likely support Sedgwick’s view that, in real life and in literature, the relationship between sex and power is “the most volatile of social nodes.” For this reason, Sedgwick insists that “it is of serious political importance that our tools for examining the signifying relation [of sex to power] be subtle and discriminate ones” (1985: 10). Gane and Samuelson would, however, surely resist Sedgwick’s call to refrain from responding to “panic-inducing images of real violence, especially the violence of, around, and to sexuality” (1985: 10) for fear of rupturing the connection between the representation of rape and the panic induced by real sexual violence—promoting such disjuncture would, they imply, be unethical. Such is the concern too of Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver who, like Sedgwick, focus on literary representations of rape in Rape and Representation (1991). The overarching concept in Higgins and Silver’s work is that the politics of rape and its aesthetics are indistinguishable and that, in fact, aesthetic representations of rape bear some ethical culpability for the possibility of rape. That “rape and rapability are central to the very construction of gender identity” (1991: 3) is the core of their argument; they believe that narratives of male and female sexuality, difference, and power, socially constructed, have made women appear “‘essentially’ vulnerable and mute” (1991: 5). Higgins and Silver refuse to accept that rape is either natural or inevitable, and they advocate contumacy with regard to such extant schema, as well as modification of them. Their goal is to equip readers to
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reread rape by “taking rape literally” even though rape in literature has become “a metaphor or a symbol or represented rhetorically as titillation, persuasion, ravishment, seduction, or desire,” and, by taking rape literally, to expose how violence physically and psychologically scars the female subject (1991: 4). Such exposure, though, is dependent on who is designated the narrator; they note that in rape representations in literature, “the story that often gets told is that of an inability to tell the story” (1991: 5). Women’s silence characterizes the stories that are told, and many rapes are not related—rape in literature is often suppressed through narrative omission. “Rape exists as an absence or gap that is both product and source of textual anxiety, contradiction, or censorship” in the texts that Higgins and Silver discuss (1991: 3). An example of censorship aimed at silencing the female voice that seeks to narrate rape in literature is the situation that pertained to Lindsey Collen’s The Rape of Sita shortly after its publication in Mauritius in 1993. This novel “was plunged into a strange limbo: driven from circulation [in Mauritius] by Hindu fundamentalists, banned by the government, and temporarily withdrawn by [the author and her] publishers” days after it was published (Collen 1994: 210).5 Substantiating the argument that rape is a means of coercion, Collen received rape threats in response to Sita’s publication. Rape in South African Literature The removal of “the boundaries between art and politics, theory and practice, representation and power” (Higgins and Silver 1991: 7) that Higgins and Silver seek to achieve is executed by Charlene Smith. She writes “against the fear and pain that surround [rape],” all the while “acknowledging the anger,” as Higgins and Silver prescribe (1991: 7). Smith’s rape in 1999 and subsequent book established her as the spokesperson for rape survivors and the anti-rape movement in South Africa; she was also landed at the forefront of debate on the (un)availability of AIDS-fighting anti-retroviral drugs. Smith’s work forms part of a host of literary representations of rape in South African literature; in 1999 these representations spanned the genres of poetry, drama, newspaper journalism, the television show, and the novel. The reason for the profusion of rape narratives in 1999 is unequivocal to Paulette Coetzee and Crystal Warren: “Rape loom[ed] particularly large in the national psyche during 1999, both as horrific and frighteningly common 5
The Rape of Sita is one of Flanagan’s examples of a postmodern aesthetic used to represent traumatic memory.
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reality for large numbers of women and children and considerable numbers of men […] and as a charged symbol of past and present oppression, a national disgrace” (2000: 126).6 This word choice acknowledges both the realistic and symbolic/metaphorical function of rape representations in South African literature of the post-apartheid period. How fitting that P. Coetzee and Warren employ the word “disgrace” in their discussion of rape and South African literature in 1999. Disgrace was published in South Africa in 1999 and foregrounds, through representation and lack of it, the issue(s) of rape. Although the novel and its author have been lauded, the work has also proved controversial. Various examples representative of those voices expressing the feeling that Disgrace offers a discouraging vision of the new South Africa are cited by P. Coetzee and Warren, who do acknowledge that the novel “does express a certain bleakness of vision characteristic of […] Coetzee’s writing” (2000: 127). They share with other reviewers the perception that access to Disgrace feels easier than it does to its author’s earlier works, but they take a stand in Coetzee’s ethical favor by arguing that it is the novel’s apparent accessibility and realistic structure that has lured some into reading it as a realist text, a strategy they caution against in reading Coetzee’s work. They promote reading Disgrace “as an exploration of the failure of the liberal tradition to come to terms with the historical and present conditions of Africa” and they accept the idea that the book’s negative reception symptomizes that with which it clearly hopes to concern itself (2000: 127). This view is endorsed by Cornwell, who argues that while Disgrace appears to be a realist text, it represents instead “a deeply serious ethical gesture” that expresses Coetzee’s wish to engage more directly with the reality of the new South Africa and “with an imagined community of South African readers—a desire to intervene by exposing those readers […] to a radically different ethical perspective on situations and events with which they are all too familiar” (2002: 313). While events in Disgrace may appear realistic, their narrative purpose is not authenticity; instead, Cornwell, like P. Coetzee and Warren, argues that “at certain critical junctures an underlying symbolic or allegorical tendency in the novel emerges to subvert […] the credibility of the book’s mimetic pretensions” (2002: 314). Discussion of mimesis aside, critical material that both acknowledges the effects of violence and investigates the premises and claims implicit in readings of rape in South Africa are necessary, according to Lucy Valerie 6
The last name “Coetzee” is common in South Africa, mostly in families of Afrikaner origin. In order not to confuse Paulette Coetzee with her famous namesake, I refer to her as P. Coetzee.
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Graham. She berates South African literature critics for their inattention to how rape narratives have functioned within the discourse of race, as well as for their failure to consider how representations of political and sexual violence relate to each other—“only rarely has the complex discursive enmeshment between rape, representation and history been confronted” (2002: 10). Drawing on Higgins and Silver’s arguments, Graham advocates that the reader remain alert to the possibility that representation obscures suffering and by doing so, effectively dismisses the sexually violated body, a locus of brutality and subsequent pain, from the space occupied by the reader. Interestingly, it is to J. M. Coetzee and his ongoing concern with ethical sensitivity in writing that Graham turns for endorsement. She cites a question he posed in a 1992 interview: “is representation to be so robbed of power by the endlessly sceptical processes of textualisation that those represented in/by the text… are to have no power either?” (2002: 11). She notes Coetzee’s insistence that suffering offers undeniable ethical authority. Conveniently, the protagonist of Coetzee’s Disgrace, David Lurie, provides Graham with the words for an epigraph that, employing strong imagery, pithily states the problem that she and Coetzee seek to articulate, especially its ethical implications: “It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket” (quoted in Graham 2002: 9).7 Nevertheless, the reader should not lose sight of the fact that rape narratives may be equivocal because, since early in the 20th century, they have been used in South Africa to justify the apartheid laws that defined, dispossessed, and disenfranchised citizens who were not white. An example of a mythical rape narrative used for political ends is that of the “black peril,” the rampant raping of white women by sexually unrestrained black men. Graham refers to some of the many historians and critics who demonstrate that the panic that this notion engendered was disproportionate to rape statistics and was reflective of the social and economic anxieties of the white population; she makes the interesting suggestion that the publicity surrounding Charlene Smith’s rape falls into this tradition of media accounts of black men raping white women that have been sensationalized. It is in the light of such myths and the often destructive results of white responses to their circulation in the media that South Africa’s post-apartheid government, the African National Congress (ANC), voiced its dislike of Coetzee’s novel. Jeff Radebe, Minister of Public Enterprises, argued that in Disgrace, “J. M. Coetzee represents as brutally as he can the white people’s perception of the 7
The reader of both Graham’s article and Disgrace should note that although Lurie is in many ways a Coetzee persona, he is an ironic figure who cannot be deemed to speak reliably for the author.
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post-apartheid black man… without the restraining leash around the neck that the European had been obliged to place in the interests of both the native and society” (quoted in Graham 2002: 13). Embedded in the controversy regarding Disgrace is one of the concerns of this collection: how the ethical implications of issues within a text are not easily defined without prejudgments derived from the author’s status or an assumption of that author’s cultural values. Coetzee’s authorial status and the values that may be assumed from his prior oeuvre allow some readers to prejudge the ethical content of Disgrace, as for P. Coetzee and Warren, and Cornwell, while for other readers the ethos of the way in which the story is told and received in the world outside of the text or the author’s oeuvre undermines the author’s ethical sensitivity and acceptability. Here it is important to note that responses to a text are not limited to the readers of that text—one need only have heard about the content of a text or its plot line to formulate a response to it, especially when its author is a recognized cultural figure. Yet Graham views the ANC’s response to the novel as yet another political deployment of the rape myth in that it ignores the real problem of rape in society and does not take into account that Disgrace offers another encounter that Coetzee suggests the reader view as rape. Destabilizing the notion that his white protagonist David Lurie’s sexual encounter with Melanie is consensual, Coetzee says that it is “not rape, not quite that,” and he describes this sex as “undesired to the core” on her part (quoted in Graham 2002: 14). As represented in Disgrace, both Lucy, Lurie’s adult daughter raped by a group of black youths, and Melanie, the undergraduate student of color coerced into sex by her aging white professor, are silent and silenced when it comes to narrating their rape experiences. In the context of the Western literary canon, Graham, like Higgins and Silver on whom she draws, notes that there is a tradition of silence after violation. Here, the relationship between rape and representation is disturbing, especially because of ethical considerations. Silence after violation occurs outside of fiction too, however. Graham, as did Smith and also Nowrojee and Manby, points out that women who have suffered sexual violence often elect to remain silent for fear of further traumatization or societal stigmatization during their testimonies; she notes that few survivors of sexual violence testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in this regard. One exception was Lita Mazibuko, who described having been tortured and raped by ANC members during the liberation struggle; a litany of bizarre attempts to silence Mazibuko by both men and women is chronicled by Graham.
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Similarly, the silence of female rape survivors in two examples of postapartheid South African literature troubles Gane. She focuses on Disgrace as well as Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story, in which a woman of color is raped by fellow revolutionaries of color. Comparing these novels, she points out that in each, a woman who has been raped elects to remain mute about her ordeal, even though her secret is divulged to the reader. She notes that as the books struggle with truths that can be neither admitted nor spoken, the women’s “silence becomes a source of discourse [within and without that text]” (2002: 102). In these novels, the women come to symbolize the land and the nation that, though injured, withstands adversity and becomes the physical and metaphorical repository of futurity. Pointing out that an emergent nation gendered female is a trope in postcolonial literature, Gane expresses concern at the persistence of the pattern of women’s bodies, violated, silently blending into the scenery, and she expresses the sanguine expectation that if women can keep faith in the future of the new South Africa, they will do so in ways that exclude silence in the face of violation. The ethics of silencing the self or another, even if the self or other are fictional, are thus dubious, but, compounding the complexity of the situation, so too are the ethics of insistent exposure. In literature, as in life, one of the most insistent forms of the exposure of sexual activity, elective or coerced, is pregnancy. How the representation of rape in literature “distorts the realities of sexual violence in order to draw attention away from the violated female body—or the male body gendered female” also troubles Meg Samuelson, who focuses on pregnancy as a result of interracial rape (2002: 88). She identifies a significant pattern in representations of rape in post-apartheid South African literature, this being the propensity of authors to employ a paradigm that affixes rape to race by focusing on interracial rape that results in the birth of a mixed race child. Partially appropriating the title of “rainbow nation” that South Africa gave itself at the beginning of transition, Samuelson, in her title, calls the container of such pregnancy “the rainbow womb.” She asserts that interracial pregnancy post-rape, represented so frequently and compulsively in contemporary South African literature, does not mirror reality, where the vast majority of rapes are intraracial and few result in pregnancy. Although reticent to prescribe that literature comply with a specific social vision, she expresses concern that rape as a metaphor, inherently often in irrelation to reality, obscures and misrepresents transitional South Africa’s social and political realities, where rape is “an endemic—and proliferating—social disorder.” She is especially troubled by representations of rape that hide the “more urgent narrative of an ascendant violence against women, which, in a country wracked by HIV/AIDS, is often deadly” (2002: 88). Samuelson is the only literary critic cited here who
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recognizes that a rapist might deliver death to his victim by spreading that lethal virus, and that this provokes enormous anxiety in the already traumatized rape survivor; this is validated by Smith, who often says that a rape survivor’s fear of HIV infection can be more terrifying than the rape itself. The fate of the child conceived during an interracial rape in literature and the ambivalence with which authors have handled such children also concerns Samuelson. She offers examples of how such mixed race children are displaced by siblings of “pure” blood, as in Arthur Maimane’s Hate No More, or somehow killed and thus rendered sterile, as in Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die and Farida Karodia’s Other Secrets. For this she indicts authors who have placed such children within the plot of substituting mothers for rape victims whose “violated wombs become the privileged site out of which the rainbow nation will issue, as stories of their violation are subordinated to those of their swelling figures” (2002: 96).8 Samuelson is passionate about this problem and its outcome, concluding that, “not only does the metaphorical use of women’s bodies in much of this fiction deny and distort the reality faced by South African women, it also serves as an anchor, securing us to the past and preventing the nation from being imagined in terms beyond the all-too-familiar ones of blood and race” (2002: 97). This argument, though it differs in its basis, is similar to Minister Radebe’s opposition to Disgrace. Two subtle points, too easy to gloss over, are raised by Samuelson. First, she notes that the “violated body” in a representation of rape in South African literature need not be female, but may be “the male body gendered female” (2002: 88). This phrase, so similar in meaning to Higgins and Silver’s notion of “those placed by society in the position of ‘woman’” (1991: 2) takes into account the many representations of the rape of males that appear in recent South African literature. Representations of such rape often function as a metaphor for the patriarchy’s seduction of its sons into its ideological framework because without such inculcation, the sons cannot be conscripted into defending the patriarchy and its ideology, especially in the military context. This extraordinary insight is articulated by Afrikaner author, critic, and academic, Michiel Heyns, who, using what he identifies as somewhat florid phrasing, says: “The sons must believe that they want to wage the wars of the father; the fathers have to seduce their sons into 8
Samuelson does not discuss Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, which may have appeared after she had prepared her paper for publication, but this novel is an excellent example of the literary dynamic that she describes. One of the main characters, Michael, is the “bitter fruit” of Lydia’s rape by her and her husband Silas’ white torturer.
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complicity” (1996: 82, emphasis in original) While it is beyond the scope of this essay to further discuss Heyns’ ideas, it is worth noting that a brief footnote in his work citing Daniel Rancour-Laferrier connects Heyns’ “erotic patriarchy” to Samuelson’s notion of “the male body gendered female”: Rancour-Laferrier argues that “the hierarchical organization of interactions in a human male collective is a complex icon of males mounting and being mounted by one another... Giving orders is an icon of anal penetration, taking orders is an icon of being anally penetrated” (quoted in Heyns 1996: 103).9 A second point worthy of discussion is why the inscription of a mixed race child into a work might be an imperative for a post-apartheid South African writer. The theme of miscegenation has long been central to South African literature, as detailed by Peter Blair in “That ‘Ugly Word’: Miscegenation and the Novel in Preapartheid South Africa” (2003). He explains that miscegenation creates a bifold problem for the racist mind, first, that of the sexual union between white and non-white, and second, the possible result of that conjoining, mixed blood offspring. By explaining how and why the barriers to miscegenation in pre-apartheid and apartheid South Africa were perceived as being “biological, theological, and symbolic,” Blair also points out that “the opposite of miscegenation was only a short step from making an explicit link between sexual and territorial segregation” (2003: 585). By inscribing a mixed race conception and birth into a post-apartheid work of literature, South African authors, attempting to gesture against immoral and unethical behavior, thumb their noses at the ideological tenets of apartheid, but, as Samuelson implies, the symbolically positive existence of mixed race children in the context of the transition from apartheid to integration is undermined by their conception not through love, but through interracial sexual violence. As this discussion suggests, rape representations in South African literature need not conform to the discrete categories of the literal or the symbolic; they can function simultaneously as “embedded in life” (Coetzee/Costello’s term as quoted in Cornwell, 2002: 312) and as “allegorical or didactic” (2002: 320). This was recognized in Jolly’s study of Dusklands, Coetzee’s first novel. She offers insights into the psychology of one of the narrators, Jacobus, a Dutch colonist in South Africa in the early 1760s, noting that it is the violation of a figure who offers racial as well as sexual difference that triggers his erotic pleasure. A Bushman girl is thus the colonist’s “own desires alienated in a foreign body and pegged out waiting
9
Mountability and penetrability would gender a male body female in the context of this discussion.
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for [his] pleasure” (Coetzee as quoted in Jolly 1992-93: 49).10 Intercourse with Dutch girls is unsatisfying to Jacobus because Dutch girls, associated with property and power, are inviolable; the disempowerment of the Bushman girls, on the other hand, is the narrator’s invitation to abuse them. This is an example of a representation of rape in South African apartheid literature that, mediated through both the narrator’s fantasy and the author’s inscription of it into his text, presents rape as both a complex and powerful (real) desire on the part of a character, as well as a metaphor for, among other things, colonial appropriation, abuse, and destruction. This representation is consistent with Gane’s comment about David’s “not quite” rape of Melanie in Disgrace: “[It] is as if Melanie’s racial alterity both inflames David’s desire and bolsters his sense of his own entitlement” (2002: 103). Conclusion The Dusklands narrator’s fantasy of rape shows that sexual violence in South Africa has complex origins that exclude neither a colonial sense of entitlement to possession, subjugation, and use of the land and its inhabitants nor a compulsion to engage with and master alterity. Coetzee’s use of rape in that and other works, especially Disgrace, suggests that while he and other South African authors use representations of rape to do more than create realistic contexts for their novels, by doing so, they risk misinterpretation of the ethos of the world inside the text because of the ways in which the world outside the text imposes contexts of response by critics, readers, and even non-readers that affect these groups’ perspectives on what is ethical or unethical. Researching what others have said about representations of rape in South African apartheid and post-apartheid literature reinforces and consolidates some issues and also raises new ones that are unexpected, the most important of which are how writing and reading literature are enmeshed in real ethical dilemmas, and how writing and story-telling may create ethical problems even as they contrive to draw attention to them or solve them. Confounded if you do, condemned if you don’t—this seems to be the situation regarding writing about rape in South African literature. The ethical position of the writer compelled by internal or external forces to inscribe rape into his or her work is one of treading through a metaphorical minefield—no
10 The term “girl” is Coetzee/Jacobus’; in this context it inevitably connotes disempowerment resulting from immaturity and age discrepancy, as well as significant violability.
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inherently ethical agenda or acute awareness of situational evidence will necessarily protect the author from attack, expected or unexpected. Bibliography Blair, Peter (2003). “That ‘Ugly Word’: Miscegenation and the Novel in Preapartheid South Africa,” Modern Fiction Studies, 49:3, 581-613. Coetzee, Paulette and Crystal Warren (2000). “South Africa,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35:2, 125-32. Collen, Lindsey (1994). “The Rape of Fiction,” Censorship 4/5, 210-12 Cornwell, Gareth (2002). “Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Critique 43: 4, 307-22. Flanagan, Joseph (2002). “The Seduction of History: Trauma, Re-Memory, and the Ethics of the Real,” CLIO 31: 4, 387-402. Gane, Gillian (2002). “Unspeakable Injuries in Disgrace and David’s Story,” Kunapipi 24: 1-2, 101-13. Graham, Lucy Valerie (2002). “‘A Hidden Side to the Story’: Reading Rape in Recent South African Literature,” Kunapipi 24: 1-2, 9-24. Heyns, Michiel (1996). “Fathers and Sons: Structures of an Erotic Patriarchy in Afrikaans Writing of the Emergency,” ARIEL 27: 3, 81-104. Higgins, Lynn A. and Brenda R. Silver, eds. (1991). “Rereading Rape,” Rape and Representation, New York: Columbia UP, 1-11. Jolly, Rosemary (1992-93). “The Gun as Copula: Colonization, Rape, and the Question of Pornographic Violence in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands,” World Literature Written in English 32.2 and 33.1, 44-55. Nowrojee, Binaifer and Bronwen Manby (1995). Violence against Women in South Africa: The State Response to Domestic Violence and Rape, New York: Human Rights Watch. Samuelson, Meg (2002). “The Rainbow Womb: Rape and Race in South African Fiction of the Transition,” Kunapipi 24.1-2, 88-100. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1985). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia UP. Smith, Charlene (2001). Proud of Me: Speaking out against Sexual Violence and HIV, Johannesburg: Penguin.
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NIGHTWOOD AND THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION ANNKATRIN JONSSON This essay looks at Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood (1937) and reads its resistance to being inscribed into a clearly demarcated generic position as a refusal to allow content and form to set—to become thematized— as the text interrupts the subject’s dream of control and self-presence. Jonsson claims that Nightwood thus expresses a distrust of language and representation, but at the same time the novel makes an effort to point to the other-than-recognized, to represent, but differently, in order to avoid making the world and the other into a theme and a content of consciousness. Barnes’ novel thus attempts to conceive a different kind of subjectivity, subjectivity understood as corporeality and animality expressed through nudity, exposure, and non-conceptuality. Jonsson argues that Nightwood can therefore be said to express the ethical as the non-conceptual—as excess, sensibility, and (gestural) interruption. In a Levinasian sense, the ethical subject in Nightwood is sheer “exposedness to the other” (Levinas 1998b: 75).
The irrepressible question prompted by a first reading of Nightwood is: how is it to be a novel? Alan Singer Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else’s mind, so be careful of the minds you get into. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Like many other modernist texts, Nightwood (1937) resists attempts to be inscribed into a clearly demarcated generic position within the period. Donna Gerstenberger’s reading of Barnes as a “modern (post)modern” testifies to this resistance. According to Gerstenberger, Barnes’ work defies attempts to situate it, “resistive as it is to resting anywhere and to satisfying our desire for order” (1993: 33). However, whereas Gerstenberger sees Barnes as radically differing from other modernists, I understand Barnes’ works as responding to the same kinds of issues and dilemmas as other modernist writers, for example Joyce and Woolf. Nightwood also constitutes the kind of “crisis
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management” that carries the name of modernism.1 Criticism on Nightwood testifies to an ambiguity of the text, an ambiguity that informs the text on several levels—plot, character, and narrative techniques. In the case of Nightwood, this ambiguity can be described in terms of a narrational excess, of excessive and contradictory or juxtaposed imagery that seems to unsay, question, or open up the already said, as if the narrative itself, and not just its characters, enacts an encounter with that which is different and otherwise— with alterity. This narrational excess is ethical in the sense that there is a close connection among representation, epistemology, and ethics. Through its questioning of the already said or written, Nightwood indicates the constructed nature of knowledge, truth, and history, and asserts the impossibility of knowing and encompassing the other. This aspect is reflected in the words of the character Matthew O’Connor: “I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it” (97).2 The same can be said about the novel as a whole. It has a narrative; it is possible to strip it down to a bare story line: Felix Volkbein meets Robin Vote through the charlatan doctor O’Connor, marries her, but is left by her after their son’s birth. Robin then encounters Nora Flood and they live together happily for some time, but after a while Robin also leaves Nora. Robin eventually leaves her new partner Jenny Petherbridge, and she turns up at the chapel on Nora’s American property. All the while Felix and Nora try to understand and come to grips with Robin. But this is a story that does not really say anything about the distinctive character of the novel, its roundabout way of representing, as well as its unsaying, confusing, and obscuring of the previously stated. The unsaying or questioning of the already said in Nightwood, takes place in and through a complex conflict and collusion between representation—the notion that what is narrated represents or depicts the “real world”—and anti-representationalism—the questioning of the possibility of representing the world or the other, as both exceed the attempt to represent. Here, I adhere to part of Andrew Gibson’s claim concerning the ethical in narrative, as I locate the ethical in Nightwood in the interrelation of representation and anti-representation, as well as in the self’s relation to an other that exceeds representation (1999: 55-57). This means that the ethical is enacted also in terms of subjectivity shaped through an inescapable responsiveness to the world and the other. Although the ethics of Nightwood is best described in terms of narrational excess that unsays the already said, this excess has consequences 1
For a discussion of the term “crisis management” see Sara Danius, 2002: 53-54. Quotations are taken from Nightwood, New York: New Directions, 1961; page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
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for or informs the novel also on the level of plot, theme, and characters. The passages that characterize Robin, for example, never offer what one expects of a (traditional) characterization: the descriptions given are digressive and discontinuous rather than clarifying and consistent, and they also play with already formed ideas and “images” of the other. Nightwood thus suggests ways in which the other is made into an idea or a theme, at the same time that it indicates the impossibility of knowing and containing the other. This impossibility is played out in and through the novel’s “excessive” ending, as well. The ending unsays and questions the authority of Matthew O’Connor, who till the last chapter but one seems to function as a knowing guide for both the reader and the other characters. The questioning movement also involves Nora’s realization at the end that she cannot capture, possess, contain, or wholly understand Robin in her love of her; Robin resists or questions all attempts to make her into a static image, into representation. In this way Nightwood’s excess disrupts and destabilizes what could have been or become a logic of the text, as the disruption performs a questioning of the already said. Importantly, this excess and decentering also carry an ethical significance. As the novel questions the possibility of representing, and points to the mastering movement inherent in the subject’s attempt to know an other, it reveals something about the way in which narrative can be made to serve such a mastering movement. I will illustrate this by examining some of the characters’ attempts to represent and comprehend the other, notably Robin. The narrative veers away from, or exceeds such representations and comprehensions, and points in the direction of other possibilities, of other paths that thought and the other can take. The novel thereby questions a self-other or subject-object relation in which the other or the object is not allowed to signify. My contention is that Nightwood through its use of excessive, destabilizing, and shifting images avoids what could have become a telos— an ultimate object or aim of the text—and a logos—a reason and consistency—that would allow for clear-cut assertions concerning the novel. Through these moments of excess and instability, the text allows for the emergence of and encounter with the other, and for an encounter with ambiguity and equivocality. Barnes’s imagination thus allows for an emergence of and encounter with the other and the otherwise, since the images and associations of ideas that the novel calls up goes “beyond the classical categories of representation and identity” (Levinas 1994:146). In what follows I will indicate ways in which Nightwood enacts an ethics through an “excessive” imagery that questions static and imitative representation, as well as through its repeated gestures in the direction of what is otherwise. The focus is mainly on the way in which the narrative
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performs an ethics, but this narrative ethics also impinges on plot, theme, and character. Most importantly, Nightwood moves towards a conception of the face and the body as sign and expression, as nudity, vulnerability, and exposure. In this sense the novel’s conception of subjectivity approaches what Edith Wyschogrod describes as a “body of ethics,” a corporeal ethics that breaks with the view of the self as unitary (1996: 54). What emerges is a body-subject who registers alterity without converting it into a content of consciousness, and a body that is understood as a sensorium, as vulnerability and susceptibility. Relating (to) the World As suggested, the undecidability of the text—or a narrational excess and peculiar decentering of the narrative through excessive and often contradictory or juxtaposed images—works to unsay, question or open up the already said, as well as to disrupt and defer any teleological movement. Since the narrative itself seems to enact an encounter with what is otherwise, with alterity, the ethicality of the text is to be found not so much in the features of the characters as in the formal features of the text. The unsaying or questioning of the already said indicates a struggle between image-making or representation and anti-representation. Nightwood thus anticipates contemporary understandings of the subject’s relation with the world. Moreover, the novel elucidates these, demonstrating their ethical implications, implications connected to a new way of relating (to) the world and of perceiving the subject and its consciousness. One of the passages in Nightwood that clearly emphasizes the subject’s relation with the outside world in terms of interaction—and that consequently begins to outline an ethical relation between subject and world—is found in the third chapter of Nightwood, “Night Watch,” the chapter that introduces Nora Flood. The passage describes Nora at the opera, watching the stage and the scenes acted out in front of her there. The imagery depicting the interaction of Nora’s eyes with the scene around her seems both strange and contradictory: Whenever she was met, at the opera, at a play, sitting alone and apart, the programme face down on her knee, one would discover in her eyes, large, protruding and clear, that mirrorless look of polished metals which report not so much the object as the movement of the object. As the surface of a gun’s barrel, reflecting a scene, will add to the image the portent of its constructions, so her eyes contracted and fortified the play before her in her own unconscious terms. (52, emphases added)
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The image of the “mirrorless look” of Nora’s eyes, a look that is said to report the movement of the object, and that is compared to a gun’s barrel reflecting a scene, is ambiguous, as it may be read as a description of a narcissistic or “absorbing” way of perceiving and registering the outside. However, if one sees Nora’s mirrorless look as expressive of a view that acknowledges a dialogic relation between subject and object, then the word “mirrorless” takes on a new significance; it refutes any presumption of the subject’s plain reporting or mirroring of an object at hand, and instead indicates that the subject adds on to the object through the meandering of her/his (un)consciousness. This means that the relation to the object “is not something inserted between consciousness and the object; it is consciousness itself” (Levinas, 1998a: 13). What Nora perceives or registers is not just a static re-flected or re-presented object, but it is also supplemented by her “portent of construction.” Nora adds possible movements and inclinations to the scene before her, and thereby she seems to add time and the temporal to the scene. Instead of capturing an object in an ideal and static image, then, there is movement and diversity, and consequently the act of specular and imitative representation is halted.3 Moreover, it is not so much Nora as her very eyes—her “body”—that reflect the scene before her, as if Barnes were downplaying the role of consciousness and its intentions. This passage is but one instance of Nightwood’s discourse concerning the individual’s relation to the world and to others. By questioning a traditional view of consciousness as knowing, shaping, and controlling the world in and through perception, the depiction suggests an ethical move characterized by a constant discourse and interaction between subject and world, subject and other.
3
It is possible to read the passage as an expression of the way consciousness had come to be viewed as a “stream” by William James and Henry Bergson at the end of the nineteenth century. James and Bergson see the mind not as simply registering external objects in a mirror reflection of the world, but as a continuous stream of experiences, in which the personal element of the experience is an integral part (Schwartz 1985: 21-26). Here, however, the relation between subject and object is underscored, and not, as in Bergson, the consciousness turned in on itself, as a stream of sensations.
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The Other in Me: Encountering Alterity Nightwood is thus an ethical enterprise, for it unmakes the kind of subjectobject relation in which the former defines and delimits the latter, while at the same time problematizing other binary structures. The novel accomplishes this through an epistemological move, that is, through narrating and examining questions of otherness, the possibility of knowing the other and how to relate to the other, or rather, how to relate alterity. The novel offers several examples of the imperative as well as the impossibility of comprehending the other fully both concerning “personal” understanding and fictional or historical narrative. One such example conveys Felix Volkbein’s reflections upon the strange character of Matthew O’Connor: He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a pearl; so he would have to cover the doctor. He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself, though originally brought on by no will of his own. (36, emphasis added)
Here the subject/object distinction is problematized as the external makes its imprint on the subject, an imprint that compels a response. The passage demonstrates how far Felix is involuntarily shaped by his response to the other, at the same time that it is an indication of a desire to assimilate, absorb, understand, or grasp the other. The response becomes both itch and love. It is both a desire to assimilate and contain what seems incomprehensible, and a recognition of the otherness of the other person, all of which triggers the desire to give a response. The response that has to be given is there like a grain of sand, a grain that irritates and unsettles. Moreover, this relation to the other takes place as animation or incarnation— as a body exposed to that of an other. A “dephasing” occurs—that is, the self as same is prevented from coinciding with itself because the self’s animated, sensible body, which tends or stretches out towards the other, cannot coincide fully with the “theme” at which it aims (Levinas 1998b: 68-69).4
4
This tending towards should not be understood in terms of Husserlian intentionality, since intentionality in Husserl’s phenomenology does not and cannot escape thematization and determination, according to Levinas. Instead, it should be understood in terms of Levinas’ conception of ‘transcendental’ subjectivity, i.e. as a wresting of the ego from itself.
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Consequently, there is always a diachrony or non-simultaneity in the relationship between self and other, as the self cannot coincide with the other. Love and relations, then, presuppose an intrusion of the other on the self. In Nightwood’s portrayal of Jenny Petherbridge, however, such an ethical relation is excluded, since she is described as collecting other people’s destinies and squatting on their belongings (65-68): “She had a continual rapacity for other people’s facts; absorbing time, she held herself responsible for historic characters” (67). But the storyteller that Jenny Petherbridge becomes is one who makes other people into facts and themes, absorbing change and time and forgetting the possibilities that dialogue and communication offer: Hovering, trembling, tip-toeing, she would unwind anecdote after anecdote in a light rapid lisping voice which one always expected to change, to drop and to become the ‘every day’ voice; but it never did. The stories were humorous, well told. She would smile, toss her hands up, widen her eyes; immediately everyone in the room had a certain feeling of something lost, sensing that there was one person who was missing the importance of the moment, who had not heard the story; the teller herself. (66-67)
In a way, the novel pits Jenny’s storytelling against the kind of stories that the novel itself tells or wants to tell. These are stories that refuse logic and fact, or rather, they attempt to nullify the opposition between logical and illogical, fact and fiction, and they question the possibility to “tell” the other. The way in which different kinds of storytelling are thematized through the figure of Jenny Petherbridge thus underscores Nightwood’s anxiety about representation and stories. A Stop Between Uncertainties: Doubting the Image and the Word Nightwood persistently asks questions concerning essences and origins as it indulges in the process of image-making and representation. The first time Felix and the reader encounter Robin, she lies swooned on a bed, framed by a strange setting of plants and flowers, “faintly oversung by the notes of unseen birds” (34). Importantly, we get the “reading” of this scene before we are told of Robin’s presence, a presence that thereafter is evoked through numerous occurrences of “seem,” “as” and “as if,” suggesting ways in which preconceived meaning can form the image or notion of a person: The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of
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Here, Robin seems the heroine of a silent movie, carefully placed in a setting and preceded by an explanatory text. The cinematic appearance is further suggested by the narrator’s anticipation of an orchestra accompanying the image and setting. The narrative of Nightwood, then, points to the cultural construction of divisions, of dichotomies, calculations, and premeditations. Moreover, the narrative indicates the impossibility of grasping or thematizing the world and the other in its continual suggestions of further possibilities and inclinations. In the chapter “Watchman, What of the Night?” Matthew O’Connor is telling Nora Vote everything he knows about the night—the other of the day—into and in which Nora’s lover, Robin, moves: Well, I, Dr, Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor, will tell you how the day and night are related by their division. The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up. Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated. The Bible lies the one way, but the night-gown the other. The night, ‘Beware of that dark door!’ (80)
The whole chapter can be described as a meditation on the night and the night/day division, a meditation that carries over into meditations on other dichotomies through which the world is viewed and interpreted. The night/day division also becomes a metaphor for the dread engendered by the other in each of these dichotomies. O’Connor articulates the construction of the divisions and of the mindset that sees the first term in such binary structures as privileged and obvious and the second term as merely strange and abnormal. He goes on to express the need to make an effort, to go against oneself in order to acknowledge alterity, here expressed as the night: “[T]he
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Great Enigma can’t be thought of unless you turn the head the other way, and come upon thinking with the eye that you fear, which is called the back of the head” (83). Still, Nora has turned her head away from this “other way”—the obscurity of the night—fearing what it might reveal and conceal about Robin, not acknowledging the possibility that it might offer or communicate something: “I never thought of the night as a life at all—I’ve never lived it, why did she?” (82). However, to dare to turn the head the other way also implies a move beyond conventional social structures and patterns. The conventional is limited and unreliable and this is underscored further in the passage below, where Felix relates his experience and knowledge of Robin to Matthew. Here, language and representation is shown to be inadequate and deceptive: Strange, I had never seen the Baronin in this light before, the Baron was saying, and he crossed his knees. If I should try to put it into words, I mean how I did see her, it would be incomprehensible, for the simple reason that I find that I never did have a really clear idea of her at any time. I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. I had gathered, of course, a good deal from you, and later, after she went away, from others, but this only strengthened my confusion. (111, emphases added)
The inclination to make an image of the other can make this other into a comprehensible and contained object. Felix, however, suggests that he could not contain Robin in the image he made of her, for such an image would be but “a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.” Robin, the other, thus exceeds containment or thematization. The violation inherent in trying to contain or comprehend another is expressed throughout the novel, as when Matthew tells Nora that “[t]here is no truth, and you have set it between you; you have been unwise enough to make a formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known” (136). Nora, too, has made a symbolic representation of her lover Robin in order to capture and keep her, not realizing that the other evades the symbol and the static image. Instead of going from the unknown back to the known, Nightwood allows unfamiliarity, inclination, and contingency to emerge in and through the image. The narrative sets off, but does not return, as new and unfamiliar connotations and contingencies appear. The excessive elaboration of metaphor in Nightwood does not reconcile or mediate between tenor and vehicle, but splits the contextual field in which the metaphor emerges and points ahead instead of re-presenting and referring back. The metaphors thus break what could have formed consistent expectations about character and
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event. This implies that the metaphor effectively acts as the other—the otherwise—of the text, in such a way that the text does not return safely to itself as same, that is, to an already contextualized and autonomous meaning offering itself as logos and telos. 5 Barnes’s subversion of metaphorical structures can be described as an attempt to circumvent the representational dimension—the will to present again—inherent in the metaphor, but this is done both through a pointing ahead to a meaning not (yet) presented in the text and through the trace of something else that seemingly remains despite the representational dimension of the text. However, Barnes’ attempt to represent otherwise is also a realization of the limits of representation and images as such, subversive or not. Nightwood, then, voices a distrust of language and representation at the same time that it makes an effort to point to what is other than the familiar and accepted—to represent, but differently. There is a tension between language as said and as saying. A language of the said turns experience into an image, into representation that becomes static as it tries to present this image—of the other—as eternal, universal, and simultaneous, without recognizing that the representation betrays the saying and the other in its attempt to represent and contain. The other is (always already) moving on and away—never resting in the containment and synchronization of language or image. Nightwood portrays this impossibility of getting hold of the other: Why don’t you rest now? asked the doctor. Your body is coming to it, you are forty and the body has a politic too, and a life of its own that you like to think is yours. I heard a spirit new once, but I knew it was a mystery eternally moving outward and on, and not my own. I know, she said, now. Suddenly she began to cry, holding her hands. Matthew, she said, have you ever loved someone and it became yourself? (152, first emphasis added)
Nora seems to have realized that Robin is different and eludes her. The italicized “now” accentuates this insight and stands in opposition to Nora’s next utterance: “Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?” Nora eventually understands that she cannot make Robin into the kind of contained image she has tried to impose on her. However, this insight seems to cause her even more pain, as the control and mastery she tried to achieve have eluded her. Instead, what remains is the pain that is brought on by the rift in the self caused or provoked by the encounter with Robin, an encounter that leaves Nora susceptible and vulnerable. 5
See Alan Singer, 1983: 47-78; and Jonsson, 2005.
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For Levinas, the saying is heard or felt in and through the encounter with the other, with the face of the other. The saying moves—has to move— into language, and becomes correlative to the said. The saying is thus subordinated to the thematization and ontology of the said, which is the inevitable price of manifestation. There is a power of equivocation in the saying, however, which means that the saying, “in the enigma whose secret it keeps, escapes the epos of essence that includes it and signifies beyond in a signification that hesitates between this beyond and the return to the epos of essence” (Levinas 1998b: 9-10). There is a trace of something that remains despite representation and the said—an echo of a saying in this said, of a saying whose meaning cannot be assembled, and that is brought on by the approach of the other. Hence, through its excessiveness and resistance to thematization in content and form, through its indication of a dephasing or deposing of the subject, and through an indication of an approach of something else, Nightwood interrupts the subject’s dream of self-presence or perseverance in being. The trace of resistance, movement, and possibilities in the static representation,—of the saying in the said—is exemplified in the following passage relating Felix’s image of Robin: [Felix] felt that he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though static, no longer roosting on its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the wind; as if this girl were the converging halves of a broken fate, setting face, in sleep, toward itself in time, as an image and its reflection in a lake seem parted only by the hesitation in the hour. (38)
The image Felix gives of Robin expresses the trace of something else or other in the image. Although the saying is unavoidably betrayed in the said, there is nonetheless a trace of another kind of appearance, of that which eludes representation. There is a trace of the saying in the said. Representation is what takes place as soon as the other is put into language, is made verbal through spoken words (as said), since, according to Levinas, the moment when the other appears is already gone. Through temporalization— through retention and protention—language is trying to halt and capture the momentary, to make it present once again—to re-present. The other thus becomes “the eternal momentary” (127)—a phrase used by O’Connor to describe Robin.
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The Saying in the Said: Exceeding Representation The theme of representing, of making an image in order to contain and thematize, occurs also on the level of narrative strategies. At the very end of the penultimate chapter, “Go Down, Matthew,” we hear Matthew O’Connor’s prophecy: Now that you have all heard what you wanted to hear, can’t you let me loose now let me go? I’ve only not lived my life for nothing, but I’ve told it for nothing—abominable among the filthy people—I know, it’s all over, everything’s over, and nobody knows it but me—drunk as a fiddler’s bitch— lasted too long—He tried get to his feet, gave it up. Now, he said, the end— mark my words—now nothing, but wrath and weeping! (165-166)
But everything is not over. The last chapter and ending has the characteristics of a coda or odd tailpiece, but despite the words of Matthew O’Connor, these words do not constitute the end. The narrative continues to narrate the last encounter between Robin and Nora following Robin’s wanderings in the countryside surrounding Nora’s house. Once again knowledge and closure is questioned as the novel continues, denying Matthew any claim to authority and finality. Consequently the ending continues the movement that questions knowledge and closure. The questioning of Matthew’s wisdom begins in the chapter “Go Down, Matthew.” In this chapter, Nora does not just listen to Matthew talking as before, or partake in a non-sequitur dialogue; at one point she even questions him directly: “How should you know?” (151). Eventually, Matthew turns silent, and Nora continues to relate her story. At the end, he leaves her, perhaps unable to deal with being questioned and having to justify himself. Matthew’s language of seeming authority and knowledge is also questioned and halted at the end. His exclamation preceding the quotation above is significant in this context, as it hints at the limitations of his knowledge: “Why doesn’t anyone know when everything is over, except me? That fool Nora, holding on by her teeth, going back to find Robin! [...] But there’s someone else—who was it, damn it all—who was it? I’ve known everyone, he said, everyone!” (165, emphasis added). Matthew’s inability to recall the “someone else” draws attention to the excessive character of “knowledge,” that is, the fact that there is always something or someone making itself sensed that exceeds one’s ability to know and comprehend. Once more, this can be interpreted as an anguishing split caused by the questioning of the self by an other. The enigmatic ending also suggests resistance to thematization as “nothing but wrath and weeping.” Even if Robin’s return to Nora and her
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figurative sacrificial offering provoke many questions, Nora and Robin’s relation gets the final word in this chapter. Theirs is, however, a wordless encounter, and seems the enactment of an encounter—“a tableau” (Gerstenberger 1993: 39). However, the enactment is an image in excess, not because of any elaborate metaphors—since the language of the chapter is surprisingly straightforward and plain when contrasted with the language of earlier chapters—but because it overflows interpretations in the same way that Robin exceeds attempts to represent and contain her. Robin and the ending are offered to Nora and the reader as an image, but not as a contained and fixed image ready for dissection and final interpretation. The ending seems to express a yearning for relation and language as saying, as unanticipated proximity, immediacy, and, most significantly, as susceptibility or vulnerability—a proximity that surprises and overwhelms. Or rather, it yearns to be able to express the saying in the said. As Robin’s presence is given to the reader in a more direct way than before, it becomes an attempt to give a plain relation of an encounter. While the preceding chapters contain numerous comparisons—“as” and “as if”— the final chapter does not. Such a straightforward relation of an encounter recalls the nudity, vulnerability, and exposure that characterize the face-toface encounter with the other that precedes language and signification, and yet makes them both possible. This original encounter is pure exposure, in Levinas’s sense: “denuding itself of its skin, sensibility on the surface of the skin, at the edge of the nerves, offering itself even in suffering—and thus wholly sign, signifying itself” (1998b: 15). Although Robin and the ending are offered as image and representation, this is not achieved through traditional metaphorical structures that re-present an already formulated meaning. Nor is the ending pointing ahead to a meaning yet to come. It rather refers to a meaning not yet available. These features of the final chapter, then, seem to testify to the impossibility of assembling or assimilating what will come next—the impossibility of assimilating contingency. Nightwood ends not with Matthew O’Connor, then, but with Robin—“the enigma theory has not been able to reduce and control” (Altman 1993: 168). The questioning is not over, however. Strangely enough, the anguished meeting that takes place at the end is not really a meeting between Nora and Robin, but instead between Nora’s dog and Robin. Nora’s entry into the chapel is never described, only her plunge into the jamb of the door: “At the top of the hill she could see, rising faintly, against the sky, the weather-beaten white of the chapel; a light ran the length of the door. She began to run, cursing and crying, and blindly, without warning, plunged into the jamb of
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the chapel door” (169). When this happens, Robin is standing before a “contrived altar” with a Madonna and two candles: Her pose, startled and broken, was caught at the point where her hand had reached almost to the shoulder, and at the moment Nora’s body struck the wood, Robin began going down. Sliding down she went; down, her hair swinging, her arms held out, and the dog stood there, rearing back, his forelegs slanting, his paws trembling under the trembling of his rump, his hackle standing, his mouth open, his tongue slung sideways over his sharp bright teeth; whining and waiting. (169)
Robin begins going down at the moment when Nora’s body hits the wood of the jamb. She seems overcome by the animality that has been ascribed to her before. Importantly, the end questions the border between animality and humanity, a questioning that is present in the novel as a whole. Once more, the novel asks questions about binary systems and essences: Backed into the farthest corner, the dog reared as if to avoid something that troubled him to such agony that he seemed to be rising from the floor; then he stopped, clawing sideways at the wall, his forepaws lifted and sliding. Then head down, dragging her forelocks in the dust, she struck against his side. Then she began to bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. The dog began to cry then, running with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her, soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up then, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (170)
The dog tries to avoid the frightening encounter, but as Robin begins to bark there is a change expressed through the description of her bark as “obscene and touching.” At the sound of her, the dog answers by crying. Robin gives up, lies down, and starts to weep, whereupon the dog also lies down with his head flat along her knees. Thus the end that O’Connor predicted does not come about. There is weeping but no wrath, a kind of rest and proximity—between woman and dog, human and animal. In her discussion of hagiographic texts and postmodern ethics in Saints and Postmodernism, Wyschogrod refers to Derrida’s discussion of Heidegger and of his notion of the human. According to Derrida, Heidegger establishes the “superordinate character of the human [...] by excluding animality from the essence of man;” the animal does not possess a hand, only organs for grasping, and therefore it lacks “the capacity for thought, language and
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bestowing of gifts” (1990: 82). Moreover, the animal does not dwell, but only takes shelter as a response to some need: “they develop simple, unmediated relations to their environment” (1990: 82-83). In Nightwood’s questioning of the exclusion of animality from human existence, most noticeable in the depiction of Robin—the vagrant without a history—the novel gestures towards the kind of accepting of corporeal vulnerability that Wyschogrod sees in hagiographic accounts as well as in postmodern writings: “To accept corporeal vulnerability by divesting oneself of home and history so far as possible is to transcend the essence of man through its underside, by taking on sheer animal sentience” (1990: 83). This also entails a shift in the view of subjectivity, as the animal’s relation to the world has a non-conceptual character, and as animal existence is linked to an “unsheltered and destitute” existence (1990:86). The subject as thought, cognition, continuity, and will is questioned, and instead a subject of uncertainty, discontinuity, susceptibility, and excess emerges. This is where the ethical is located—as immediacy and proximity—as the other impinges on the self: “Immediacy is the excessive proximity, skipping the stage of consciousness, not by default but by excess, by the ‘excession’ of the approach” (Levinas 1987:119). The last chapter of Nightwood, “The Possessed,” depicts a state of possession or obsession, reminiscent of the kind of obsession Levinas describes, obsession as responsibility and as communication without words (1987: 120). The novel thus acts and enacts a “crisis” of meaning and representation: it indicates the impossibility of being in full possession of meaning, as well as the impossibility of being able to assemble and assimilate “reality” and the other into representations, images, and conceptions. Nightwood can be said to be non-referential in the sense that its representations are without clear meaning or reference, especially so the ending. The agonizing gestures of the last chapter suggest non-intentionality or non-representation, because the intention or meaning of the gesture remains unclear or hidden. Nightwood’s gestures—both physical and linguistic—can therefore be said to express the kind of non-intentionality that Walter Benjamin traces in the gestures depicted in Kafka’s work: “The greater Kafka’s mastery became, the more frequently did he eschew adapting these gestures to common situations or explaining them” (Benjamin 1992: 18). The gesture in Kafka’s texts “is an event—one might even say a drama—in itself. [...] Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as with El Greco [...] the gesture remains the decisive thing, the centre of the event” (Benjamin 1992: 117-18). My suggestion is that Nightwood becomes this kind of gestural disturbance of rationality in general and of narrative rationality in particular. This occurs in terms of the novel’s disturbance of itself, by virtue of its excess, unfamiliarity, and non-intentionality. The text does not return to an already
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contextualized and autonomous meaning offering itself as logos and telos: it does not return to itself as same. It also occurs in terms of the novel’s disturbance and questioning of a traditional relation between self and world, self and other. According to Levinas, “[s]elf-interruption is the trope for a form of ethical discourse in which the interruption is not reabsorbed into thematization and totality, namely, an ethical discourse that performs its own putting into question” (Robbins 1999: 145). However, since the saying, as soon as it becomes discourse, turns into the said, such interruption, such saying, is inevitably betrayed (Levinas 1998b: 168-69). Crucially, however, just as there is still movement and diachrony in Felix’s image of Robin, these disturbances and interruptions remain as knots in the said.6 The ending and the novel as a whole suggest an ethics through its depiction of a subjectivity that questions conceptions and essences, and that acknowledges otherness within and without. It suggests an ethics also through the interdependence and/or struggle between representation and antirepresentation, a seeming paradox, as the novel is given to the reader precisely as representation. Part of the ethical lies precisely here, however— in the way the novel raises questions about representation and its limits. Bibliography Altman Meryl (1993). “A Book of Repulsive Jews?: Rereading Nightwood,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13, 160-71. Barnes, Djuna (1961). Nightwood, New York: New Directions. Benjamin, Walter (1992). Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana. Danius, Sara (2002). The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics, Ithaca and London: Cornell UP. Gerstenberger, Donna (1993). “Modern (Post)Modern: Djuna Barnes among the Others,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13, 33-40. Gibson, Andrew (1999). Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas, London: Routledge. Jonsson, AnnKatrin (2005). Relations: Ethics and the Modernist Subject in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (forthcoming), Oxford: Peter Lang. 6
“The interruptions of the discourse found again and recounted in the immanence of the said are conserved like knots in a thread tied again, the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity” (Levinas 1998b:170).
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Levinas, Emmanuel (1998a). Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. and eds. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith, Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP. —— (1998b). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne UP. —— (1994). “The Transcendence of Words: On Michel Leiris’ Biffures,” Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 144-150. —— (1987). “Language and Proximity,” Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Neth.: Nijhoff, 109-126. Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Schwartz, Sanford (1985). The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Early Twentieth-Century Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Singer, Alan (1983). “The Horse Who Knew Too Much: Metaphor and the Narrative of Discontinuity in Nightwood,” A Metaphorics of Fiction: Discontinuity and Discourse in the Modern Novel, Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 47-78. Wyschogrod, Edith (1996). Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Theory, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. —— “Towards a Postmodern Ethics: Corporeality and Alterity,” Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism, eds. Gerhard Hoffman and Alfred Hornung, Heidelberg: Winter, 53-67.
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DAVID MAMET’S ALTERED ETHICS: FINDING FORGIVENESS, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT, IN HOUSE OF GAMES, THE SPANISH PRISONER, AND STATE AND MAIN TODD F. DAVIS AND KENNETH WOMACK In this essay, Davis and Womack explore ethical conceptions of forgiveness and empathy—especially in terms of their relationship to Levinasian alterity. Davis and Womack discuss David Mamet‘s films as fora for discussing alterity and the evolving place of forgiveness in continental philosophy. They assert that the films provide us with a timely study of emotional violence that refuses a deontological ethics and underlines humankind’s enduring need for embracing a genuinely altered ethics.
I think that Movies, with few exceptions, have always been trash. I would like to aver that this trash has, historically, been better spirited but, on reflection, I cannot. David Mamet, Make-Believe Town
When we speak about confidence games, we consider them almost entirely in terms of their artfulness, the cleverness with which their perpetrators succeed in the act of deception. We speak about con artistry as being “choreographed,” as something to be admired, as being the product of deft timing and intellectual skill. In his screenplays, David Mamet functions as the auteur behind many of contemporary cinema’s most intricately staged confidence games. Mamet asks his audience to revel in the well-timed sleight of hand, to set aside their ethical preconceptions in order to enjoy the mastery of his textual masquerade. In short, Mamet’s dramaturgy tempts us to lose ourselves in his films, to become conned along with his characters. As viewers of Mamet’s films ponder the implications of his con games—pulling back the veil, examining how the cloth was hung so deftly—the gravity of where these lies and deception take both his characters and audiences becomes clarified in terms of Mamet’s ethical intentions. Rather than being reduced to a simplistic moral code, Mamet’s ethical imperatives find their embodiment in his enduring interest in the mysterious nature of human
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relationships.1 As Mamet astutely observes, a dramatic work that functions as pure didacticism or as a morality play whose sole purpose is to impart onedimensional moral lessons about virtuous behavior simply cannot account for the rough edges of real life: “It might make a good tract,” he remarks, “it might make a good political platform, it might make a good speech. But it can’t be art” (quoted in Weber 2000: 136). For a work of literary art to transcend didacticism, it must necessarily challenge its audience by asking them to engage in an experiential narrative event instead of rehearsing an existing canon of laws.2 For this reason, Mamet self-consciously strives for asymmetry and misdirection in his plays. While reminiscing in his memoir South of the Northeast Kingdom about constructing stone walls at his home in rural Vermont, Mamet compares the act of building walls to his work as a writer: “My wall is falling, here and there, after twenty [years]. I did love building it. Here is an odd-shaped stone. Turn it this way or that, it will not square, set it aside, and now and then, by magic, its asymmetry completes an otherwise unbridgeable gap,” Mamet writes. “Perhaps all of us artists like to think of ourselves that way” (2002: 60). For Mamet, art’s complexity exists in its asymmetry, in its movement away from straight lines and towards the circuitous shapes that human existence inevitably takes. In his screenplays, Mamet illustrates his characters in the act of making complicated choices that will affect the direction of their lives. “Everyone from petty thieves to movie producers in Mamet’s canon,” Leslie Kane writes, “is judged by his or her behavior and viewed through the lens of ethical choice” (1999: 4). The complexity of these decisions ensures that such choices lack the clarity for which didactic or morality plays strive. In a Miltonic understanding of characterological free will, Mamet points out that “any of us has the capacity for atrocity—just as each of us has the capacity for heroism” (1996: 142). Hence, Mamet’s world—founded, as it is, upon a necessarily complicated textual ethics—exists somewhere in the
1 In South of the Northeast Kingdom, Mamet remarks that “there are those human senses that we all acknowledge, but which we cannot quantify. The girl at the stoplight turns as she feels your gaze. No conscious effort can bring about this result; it is a survival of a primal, an occult, powerful part of life. Similarly, there is a mystery in the evanescent. It surfaces, certainly, at birth and death, but it is present regularly, intermittently, just beyond, and different from a conscious knowledge” (2002: xv-xvi). 2 As Myles Weber observes, “By appealing only to the rational mind, the ‘problem play’ fails to grip audience members at a deeper level of consciousness. At most, it instills in them a sense of superiority to those characters whose actions they recognize as morally repugnant” (2000: 136).
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untidy median between absolute good and evil, the place where real human beings pursue their workaday lives. In this essay, we will explore Mamet’s ethical conceptions of forgiveness and empathy, particularly in terms of their relationship to Levinasian alterity. As Emmanuel Levinas suggests, forgiveness and empathy—an act or leap of faith—can only take place if a person is willing to imagine him- or herself in the life of another, taking on, imaginatively, the other’s joy and suffering, the other’s confinement and freedom. When this imaginative act of empathy occurs, the distance between the players is closed, and the violence that each might perpetrate upon the other is collapsed. In short, alterity occurs. The perpetrator becomes the victim of his own violence; the victim becomes part of her perpetrator. In this ethical and emotional shift, the possibility for renewal and redemption emerges. A reading of House of Games (1987), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), and State and Main (2000) affords us with a powerful forum for discussing alterity and the evolving place of forgiveness in Mamet’s textual ethics. As Jill Robbins observes in Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, Levinasian ethics “denotes the putting into question of the self by the infinitizing mode of the face of the other” (1999: xiii). In his screenplays, Mamet’s ethical imperatives include an expansive analysis of the self’s relationship to the larger worlds in which we live, as well as the ways in which those worlds impact the self’s capacity for comprehending otherness. Such philosophically vexed issues as forgiveness and responsibility are perhaps most usefully considered via Levinas’s conceptions of alterity, contemporary moral philosophy’s sine qua non for understanding the nature of our innate responsibilities to our human others. In “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Levinas discusses the ethical significance of other beings in relation to the needs and desires of ourselves. Our ethical obligations to others, Levinas reasons, find their origins in our inability to erase them via negation. Simply put, unless we succeed in negating others through violence, domination, or slavery, we must comprehend others as beings par excellence who become signified as “faces,” the Levinasian term that refers to the moral consciousness and particularity inherent in others. This “primacy of ontology,” in Levinas’ words, demonstrates the nature of the collective interrelationships that human beings share with one another (2002: 10). In “The Trace of the Other,” Levinas argues that “the relationship with the other puts me into question, empties me of myself” (1986: 350). More importantly for our purposes here, Levinas describes the concept of the face as “the concrete figure for alterity” (quoted in Robbins 1999: 23). The notion of alterity itself—which Paul-Laurent Assoun characterizes as “the primal scene of ethics” (1998: 96)—refers to our inherent responsibilities and obligations
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to the irreducible face of the other. These aspects of our human condition find their origins in the recognition of sameness that we find in other beings. This similarity of identity and human empathy establishes the foundation for our alterity—in short, the possibility of being “altered”—and for the responsibilities and obligations that we consign to other beings. In Time and the Other, Levinas identifies the absolute exteriority of alterity, as opposed to the binary, dialectic, or reciprocal structure implied in the idea of the other. Hence, alterity implies a state of being apprehended, a state of infinite and absolute otherness. In “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Levinas writes that “we can say that the alterity of the infinite is not canceled, is not extinguished in the thought that thinks it. In thinking infinity the I from the first thinks more than it thinks. Infinity does not enter into the idea of infinity, is not grasped; this idea is not a concept,” he continues. “The infinite is radically, absolutely, other” (1987: 54). Alterity’s boundless possibilities for registering otherness, for allowing us to comprehend the experiences of others, demonstrates its ethical forcefulness. Its exteriority challenges us to recognize an ethics of difference and of otherness. Such encounters with other beings oblige us, then, to incur the spheres of responsibility inherent in our alterity. When we perceive the face of the other, we can no longer, at least ethically, suspend responsibility for other beings. In such instances, Levinas writes in “Meaning and Sense,” “the I loses its sovereign self-confidence, its identification, in which consciousness returns triumphantly to itself to rest on itself. Before the exigency of the Other (Autrui), the I is expelled from the rest and is not the already glorious consciousness of this exile. Any complacency,” he adds, “would destroy the straightforwardness of the ethical movement” (2002: 54). In this way, the Levinasian concept of exteriority underscores the value of alterity as a means for engendering ethical knowledge. Drawing upon Levinas’s critical matrix of alterity, an analysis of Mamet’s screenplays accentuates Mamet’s considerable humanistic agenda for “altering” our interpersonal perspectives and endowing us with a means for registering otherness. In Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society, Geoffrey Galt Harpham observes that “ethics does not solve problems, it structures them” (1999: 37). In House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and State and Main, Mamet structures each work’s ethical dimensions by examining the notion of otherness in all of its variations and complexity. In Mamet’s world, the concept of alterity does not necessarily connote goodness per se. For Mamet’s characters, the recognition of otherness can occur in moments in which they make either positive or negative ethical choices. “There are a number of different kinds of Other,” David Corker writes. “There is the Other who is an integral part of oneself
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because it [involves] the as yet unacknowledged and un-integrated aspects of one’s own being; this is the Dialectical Other. There is the Other who is the negative reference group for one’s own identity—that is everything which one believes one is not [but may well be]. And there is the Other who is Alien in a more dramatic way because their difference is not able to be utilized as part of oneself” (2003). Corker’s schema usefully correlates with Mamet’s depictions of otherness in House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and State and Main, respectively. In each instance, Mamet portrays his characters in the act of achieving various states of otherness, as well as different levels of forgiveness with divergent purposes and outcomes. His characters frequently become altered in a Levinasian sense, although they apprehend alterity in radically different ways—and often in relation to the ethical particularities, or lack thereof, of their attendant professions. In House of Games, Mamet devises perhaps the most enigmatic character among his vast dramatic canon. In the film, psychiatrist and selfhelp author Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) engages in a desperate search for selfhood. By definition, her profession requires her to interpret otherness from a variety of vantage points; in this manner, she creates alternate story lines for her clients as a form of treatment. Played by Crouse with extreme detachment and stoicism, Margaret compulsively takes notes—as psychiatrists are wont to do—in order to capture the essence of another’s sense of self, an aspect that she struggles with in her own life. While her workaholic demeanor has resulted in a thriving practice and a bestselling self-help guide entitled Driven: Obsessions and Compulsions in Everyday Life, this same quality finds her grasping for an increasingly fragile sense of selfhood, a blank slate, of sorts, waiting to be inscribed. A visit to the aptly titled House of Games brings her into the orbit of Mike (Joe Mantegna), the flim-flam man who orchestrates a series of confidence games that will transform Margaret’s life. While on a mission to settle a gambling debt for a wayward client, Margaret agrees to help Mike fleece a cardsharp during a high-stakes poker game. In so doing, Margaret becomes unknowingly enmeshed in a larger scheme designed to cheat her out of her life savings. In the process, Margaret develops what she believes to be a friendship with Mike and his gang. She ultimately enjoys a romantic interlude with Mike, although it is difficult to tell where her love for the confidence game begins and her affection for the con artist ends. As Margaret ventures into the interior layers of Mike’s convoluted ruse, she begins to perceive psychiatry as a con game in its own right, a conclusion that finds her shifting allegiances and energies from her profession to the more seductive world—from her socially conflicted perspective—of the confidence game. She is particularly attracted by Mike’s capacity for reading the other. As a con artist, he gives
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her lessons about how to recognize a “tell,” the physical gesture that reveals a person’s intentions despite his or her best efforts to conceal them. In contrast with psychiatry—a profession whose validity she increasingly doubts—the con game explicitly works to change a person’s behavior with gratifying results. For Mike, the con exists as a depersonalized activity, as a business transaction devoid of pleasure or emotional connection. Unlike Mike, Margaret cannot differentiate between these two realms of meaning. As a psychiatrist, Margaret suffers from similar boundary issues—the very phenomenon that brought her to the House of Games in the first place. The otherness that Margaret seeks initially through her profession and subsequently via her relationship with Mike proves to be as illusory as any two-bit con game. Using Corker’s terminology, Mike functions as Margaret’s Dialectical Other because she remains unable to establish a unified sense of self that acknowledges or integrates fundamental aspects of her personality into its being. Margaret denounces her profession as a “sham” and a “con game” to a fellow psychiatrist because of her overarching compulsion to help her patients—all of her patients—to overcome their maladies. This unacknowledged aspect of her persona drives her ever deeper into the arms of the con men, who, from Margaret’s troubled perspective, never seem to fail at hoodwinking their clientele. Seemingly recognizing Margaret’s desire to change her life, Mike observes that she needs “somebody to come along, somebody to possess you, to take you into a new thing. Would you like that? Do you want that?” Later, he entreats her to “call yourself what you are.” Margaret’s telling response—“What am I?”—prompts Mike to provide the film’s most prescient advice—a lesson, incidentally, that Margaret is psychologically ill-equipped to absorb in any healthy fashion: “There are many sides to each of us,” Mike tells her. “Good blood. Bad blood. Somehow all those parts have got to speak.” When Margaret realizes the extent of her victimization within Mike’s highly structured con game, she self-consciously opts to eschew alterity—and its potential for bringing her sense of selfhood into bold relief—rather than follow Mike’s advice about learning to separate business from pleasure. In short, she refuses to see the other, thereby denying herself the possibility of experiencing empathy. By personalizing Mike’s duplicitous behavior, Margaret can no longer recognize the spheres of otherness that he purports to possess. Unable to reconcile the complexity of Mike’s various façades, Margaret fashions a con game of her own in order to exact revenge upon the Dialectical Other whom she intends to destroy. Simply put, she self-consciously chooses to kill Mike—to erase the face of his otherness—when he refuses to apologize for his profession: “You say I acted atrociously. Yes, I did,” he readily admits. “I do it for a living.” Mike seals his fate when he exposes Margaret’s own
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complicity in her descent into the shadowy world of the confidence game. “You learned some things about yourself that you’d rather not know,” he tells her. When Margaret kills Mike, she does so in an attempt to expunge the selfknowledge that Mike has revealed. Without the ethical counterpoint that Mike represents, alterity becomes impossible for Margaret because of the absence of sameness and her capacity for self-recognition. “All alterity is negated by murder,” Levinas reminds us. “Being myself,” he continues, “I already ask myself whether my being is justified, whether the Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of someone’s place” (2003: 28). When Margaret usurps Mike’s existence, she enters into the film’s most elaborate con game, a self-fulfilling ruse in which she succeeds in conning herself into believing that self-forgiveness mitigates any ethical responsibility or consequences. “When you’ve done something unforgivable, you must forgive yourself,” she avows. By forgiving herself without impunity, Margaret silences her good conscience—the “good blood” of which Mike speaks— and, in so doing, damns and diverts any possibility for genuine absolution, the kind of self-reflexive critique that allows for an authentic sense of emotional reparation. With The Spanish Prisoner, Mamet shifts his attention from the Dialectal Other to an Other, in Corker’s parlance, who functions as the negative reference group for shaping a character’s identity. The film depicts the priggish, albeit kindhearted Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) in an identity crisis of sorts that finds its origins in conflicting aspects of his personality. On the one hand, he comports himself as an earnest, hardworking businessman—“a real Boy Scout,” as one of the characters observes; yet on the other hand, he longs for the material rewards that he believes his ethical mindset and industriousness should merit. In short, he’s a perfect mark for the long con orchestrated by Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), a smooth-talking grifter who poses as a well-heeled entrepreneur replete with all of the extravagances and trappings of a prosperous lifestyle. In its cinematic representations, the long con requires the existence of a reference group with which the mark has little experience. Existing on the fringes of this group, the mark desires entrée into its ranks, often becoming so enticed by its wealth and privilege that his ethical perceptions seem murky, rendering him even more vulnerable to the con’s seductive façade. In the latter stages of developing the “Process,” a deliberately vague business scheme for establishing market supremacy, Joe finds himself rectangulated—for lack of a better word3—by his boss, Mr. Klein (Ben 3
In this instance, we extrapolate the idea of rectangulation from the concept of triangulation, the psychological term that denotes the manner in which two members
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Gazzara), who seems intentionally noncommittal about Joe’s compensation for the imminent success of the Process; by Jimmy, who suddenly materializes in Joe’s life as the manifestation of the affluent otherness that he desires with ever-increasing desperation; and by Susan Ricci (Rebecca Pidgeon), Joe’s congenial secretary who seemingly offers the possibility of romance, thus creating yet another diversion in his increasingly complicated life. Figuratively boxed in by his ostensibly conflicting relationships with Mr. Klein, Jimmy, and Susan, Joe is afforded with a litany of unsolicited advice from his triumvirate of new friends. “If we all do our jobs, we will each be rewarded according to our just desserts,” Mr. Klein tells him. Meanwhile, Jimmy counsels Joe to “always do business as if the person you’re doing business with is trying to screw you, because he probably is. And if he’s not, you can be pleasantly surprised.” Finally, Susan renders Joe’s outlook even more muddled, pointing out that “it just shows to go you, you never know who anybody is.” With growing paranoia about his fate as the inventor of the Process, Joe begins to doubt both the ethics of his profession and his apparently inconsequential role in its machinations. Only Jimmy and Susan, it seems, can offer Joe the possibility of being rewarded for his toil, as well as for transforming his life into something more substantial, more lucrative. Joe’s trusty colleague, attorney George Lang (Ricky Jay), unwittingly provides him with the catalyst for his naïve progress into the waiting arms of the flim-flam men: “Do you know what your problem is, Joe? You’re too nice. You do everything for everybody else, and nothing for yourself.” By highlighting his friend’s earnest devotion to principles of fairness and responsibility, George succeeds in making Joe’s negative reference group appear even more alluring. Determined to do something for himself for a change, Joe accepts Jimmy’s professed friendship and Susan’s increasingly flirtatious overtures.4 Waxing sincere in an effort to appeal to Joe’s Boy-Scout persona, Susan remarks that “I’m a helluva person. I’m loyal, and I’m true, and I’m not too of a relationship become enmeshed to the detriment of the third person’s interests and well being. In The Spanish Prisoner, Mr. Klein, Jimmy, and Susan work collectively to manipulate Joe, the highly vulnerable fourth corner of their rectangular relationship. 4 Mamet’s intricate characterization of Jimmy and Susan demonstrates his concerted effort in his screenplays to create round characters who defy our inclinations to reduce the irreducible, to nullify their complexity, and to erase their otherness: “I always want everyone to be sympathetic to all the characters,” Mamet notes. “Because when you aren’t, what you are doing is writing a melodrama with good guys and bad guys. Drama is really about conflicting impulses in the individual. That is what all drama is about” (quoted in Kane 2001: 65).
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hard to look at.” As with Jimmy’s wealth and largesse, Susan presents Joe with yet another possibility for changing his life. Joe is seduced by his encounters with one false other after another, each of whom belongs to a negative reference group in contrast with their mark’s most glaring weakness—his intensely ethical demeanor, particularly his steadfast desire for fairness and justice in his own life. In many ways, these aspects of Joe’s identity signal a lack of maturity on his part in terms of his personal ethical philosophy; indeed, a value system based upon recompense and retaliation only succeeds in creating a hollow, self-serving sense of equality. His devotion to justice renders him ill-equipped, then, to recognize the artificial boundaries inherent in the philosophical complexities of pursuing an ethical life under real-world conditions. Hence, we witness Joe in the act of discovering the painful truth about the duplicity of each member of his negative reference group. After Jimmy’s friendship is revealed to be mere sham and pretense in order to steal the Process—a feat that he accomplishes with the assistance of a group of con artists masquerading as undercover FBI agents—Joe’s world continues to unravel with the murder of George, an innocent bystander in Jimmy’s long con, as well as with Mr. Klein’s mounting pressure for Joe to retrieve the Process. Ultimately, Joe’s belief system—and the long con itself—collapses when he realizes Susan’s considerable role in his undoing. Only Mamet’s deus-ex-machina conclusion in the form of a pair of undercover federal marshals prevents Jimmy from killing Joe—and with Susan’s rather spirited approval, no less. Susan’s betrayal of him and his near-death experience force Joe into an ethical retreat from the corrupt value systems of his negative reference group and back towards the safer parameters of his self-contained, albeit unsophisticated philosophy of individuation and justice. Levinas contends that individuation involves a selfconscious effort to disconnect or disengage oneself from the other. As Levinas observes: Subjective existence derives its features from separation. Individuation—an inner identification of a being whose essence is exhausted in identity, an identification of the same—does not come to strike the terms of some relation called separation. Separation is the very act of individuation, the possibility for an entity which is posited in being to be posited not by being defined by its references to a whole, by its place within a system, but starting from itself. The fact of starting from oneself is equivalent to separation. But the act of starting from oneself and separation itself can be produced in being only by opening the dimension of interiority. (2003: 299-300)
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By re-asserting his sense of interiority—and thus completing his separation from the other—Joe fulfills his return to the more dependable confines of his emergent selfhood. As The Spanish Prisoner comes to a close, Susan begs Joe to rescue her from the fate that she and Jimmy, as his victimizers, have authored for themselves. “Can you help me?” she pleads. “You’re the Boy Scout. Can I be your good deed for the day?” Recognizing that Susan desires a form of forgiveness that he simply cannot provide, given the rigidity of his ethical system, Joe reverts to the flirtatious banter that characterized their relationship throughout the con. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to spend some time in your room,” he tells her. With the possibility of genuine alterity looming before him, Joe greets the face of the other with playful insincerity. He has seen the other alright—but he has also seen far more than his ethical system can stomach. As with House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main finds Mamet in the act of skewering the ethical failings of yet another profession—his own. In State and Main, Mamet dissects Hollywood’s questionable value systems within the relatively bucolic environs of smalltown America. Much of the film is focalized through the character of Joe White (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a neurotic playwright making his screenwriting debut as the author of The Old Mill, the Hollywood production that steamrolls its way into Waterford, Vermont, where it infiltrates nearly every facet of the townspeople’s lives. In many ways, the film’s director Walt Price (William H. Macy) functions as Joe’s ethical foil, contrasting movieland’s self-serving nihilism with Joe’s naïve belief in the limitless power of the pen. For Walt, language exists as an express tool for disguising the falsehood and insincerity that he peddles with veritable ease: “It’s not a lie,” he proclaims. “It’s a gift for fiction.” While Walt registers little, if any, remorse or self-consciousness for the repercussions of his serial duplicity, Joe obsesses at nearly every turn about the awesome responsibility that being an artist entails, especially a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright such as himself.5 As with his screenplay’s nineteenth-century-era protagonist, Joe is absorbed in a “quest for purity” of his own. At the beginning of State and Main, Joe consistently asserts the authority and autonomy of the self through his insistence that his screenplay cannot be distorted by the commercially driven desires of Hollywood’s shortsighted value systems. Hollywood functions as Joe’s Alien Other, in Corker’s postulation—the ethical counterpoint to his personal rage for purity. Simply 5
In this instance, Mamet is clearly referencing his own dilemmas as a Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright attempting to work within Hollywood’s ethically dubious system, while also striving to evade its myriad possibilities for self-corruption.
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put, Hollywood exists as the long con writ large. In short order, Joe discovers that the production of a Hollywood movie is a confidence game in itself, an enterprise that employs ethical compromise as the modus operandi of its business and creative practices. Joe’s ethical conversion involves an ironic shift from an inflexible belief in the power of art to allowing himself to be corrupted by Hollywood, a movement away from a self-contained philosophy of individuality towards a more balanced perspective of his place in the world. Joe’s ethical transformation begins, rather appropriately, when his typewriter—the symbol of his search for purity as an artist—is lost during the production’s relocation to Vermont. His search for a replacement brings him into the orbit of Ann Black (Rebecca Pidgeon), the owner of an independent bookstore who dreams of transforming Waterford into a viable arts community by revitalizing the Waterford Sentinel, the town’s defunct newspaper, and creating a thriving amateur-theatre scene.6 As with Joe, Ann is no stranger herself to the notion of compromise, given her engagement to local politician Doug MacKenzie (Clark Gregg), a shameless, self-promoting grandstander. Joe’s alterity emerges via the finite sense of Levinasian freedom that his budding relationship with Ann provides. Through her society, he comes to realize that his conception of absolute freedom and his misconstrued notions of purity originate from his fallacious idea of a limitless self. “Does the finitude of freedom signify the necessity by which a will to will finds itself in a given situation which limits the arbitrariness of the will?” Levinas asks. “In finite freedom, there can then be disengaged an element of pure freedom, which limitation does not affect, in one’s will” (1998: 123-24). For Joe, the writerly autonomy that he enjoys as a playwright allows him to dissociate himself from the Alien Other. Joe is altered via Ann’s artful ruse in the film’s final reel, a short con that allows him to commit an ethical transgression without any ultimate consequence. The film’s central crisis concerns the fallout from an accident at the corner of State and Main, where Joe witnesses a car wreck involving The Old Mill’s leading man, Bob Barrenger (Alec Baldwin), a lecherous B-movie actor with a penchant for seducing underage 6
Ann’s efforts in this regard find their origins in her attempts to entice her community into grappling with the nature and value of truth. As the motto for the Waterford Sentinel proclaims to its would-be readers: “You shall not bear false witness.” Likewise, Ann’s goals for establishing a working community theatre are indicative of Mamet’s own convictions about drama’s capacity for involving audiences in a larger search for authenticity: “The theater is a most useful political tool; it’s a place where we go to hear the truth,” Mamet observes. “The difference with theater is that people go to participate in it as a community endeavor; they seek that by nature” (Kane 1999: 33).
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girls. After Bob and his latest conquest, local high-school student Carla Taylor (Julia Stiles), emerge from the accident with minor injuries, Bob convinces her to leave the scene in a hasty effort to conceal their illegal liaison. Still reeling from his broken romance with Ann, Doug appropriates the incident in order to exact his revenge by destroying the movie production that brought Joe to Waterford in the first place. As the car accident’s only witness, Joe could tell the truth by testifying to Bob’s unlawful relationship with Carla. Conversely, he could lie about Carla’s role in the accident, thus preventing Bob’s imprisonment and saving the movie from ruin. Using the courtroom set of a community theatre production aptly entitled Trials of the Heart, Ann arranges for Joe to testify before a local actor portraying a judge.7 Motivated by self-interest and under considerable pressure from Walt and Marty Rossen (David Paymer), the movie’s merciless producer, Joe perjures himself. Almost immediately, Joe recognizes the extent of his falsehood, believing that his behavior has defeated his cherished quest for purity. Later, when Joe discovers Ann’s ruse, he realizes that her act of deception has given him a second chance to redeem himself no matter the consequences. “I thought that you needed to get it out of your system,” she tells him. In this manner, Ann’s miniature con game allows Joe to forgive himself for his perjury, as well as to move beyond his unyielding personal philosophy of freedom and individuality. As with The Spanish Prisoner, Mamet effects yet another deus-exmachina conclusion in State and Main through the eleventh-hour arrival of studio executive Howie Gold (Jonathan Katz), who brings $800,000 from Hollywood, which Walt and Marty use in order to buy Doug’s—and ultimately, Waterford’s—complicity. The film’s deus ex machina acts as an engine of universalizing forgiveness via which the town can coexist with Hollywood’s Alien Other. Perhaps even more significantly, this same engine affords Joe with the opportunity to negotiate a new philosophical system for himself in which he can work for Hollywood without being cannibalized by his association with its ethically vacuous dream factory. In contrast with the more cynical marks in House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, Joe enjoys a genuinely altered relationship with the ethically conflicted others who pock his personal universe. Yet despite Joe’s ultimate complicity in The Old Mill’s production, Mamet clearly refuses to demonize his protagonist.8 As the film 7
In this way, Ann takes a leap of faith—a generous, albeit risky maneuver, given the brevity of their relationship—and affords Joe with the opportunity for embracing heroism: “If we are happy, we want someone to be for us and to whom we can be a hero,” Mamet contends. “In misery, we strive to be or find a victim. In either case, we’re searching for a partner to share our idea of home” (1996: 115). 8 Writing for the Village Voice, Jessica Winter clearly disagrees with the notion that
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comes to a close, Mamet pointedly depicts Joe as an enthusiastic participant on the set who implicitly approves of The Old Mill’s greatest ethical faux pas—a ridiculous product-placement scheme cooked up by Marty involving an anachronistic advertisement for a computer company. Within nearly the same instant in which it foments a sense of communal forgiveness, Hollywood cannot help but betray the moment by reverting to the very same bankrupt value systems that drove it to the brink of ruin in the first place. In addition to exposing the long con that Hollywood perpetuates across the globe, State and Main reveals Mamet in the act of questioning the ways in which producers, directors, and screenwriters deliberately involve us—and often with the blessing that we evince by paying the price of admission—in a con game that inevitably reveals something about ourselves. Even more intriguingly, State and Main demonstrates Mamet, in a moment of metatextual exuberance, in the act of forgiving himself for participating in Hollywood’s ethically problematic system. Obviously, Mamet could not produce a film like State and Main without recognizing that he is complicit within the very system that he seeks to critique. How else could he succeed in getting his films made in Hollywood? Mamet’s depiction of Ann’s selfless generosity of spirit underscores his own struggle with the complexities of forgiving others and effecting self-absolution within—or perhaps in spite of—a system that is at once profoundly perverse and at the same time filled with so much possibility for interpersonal redemption. In this way, Mamet encounters the “paradox of the pardon of fault” that Levinas addresses in Totality and Infinity: “Why is the beyond separated from the below?” Levinas asks. “Why, to go unto the good, are evil, evolution, drama, separation necessary?” For Levinas, forgiveness entails “a rupture of continuity” followed by “a continuation across this rupture” (2003: 284). If nothing else, Mamet’s films demonstrate the other in the process of creating or facilitating this rupture. Only alterity, it seems, can afford us with a map for moving beyond the wreckage of our lives.
Joe can achieve alterity and yet remain complicit in the film’s production: “The interlocking hijinks and homespun non sequiturs attempt homage to Sturges, but surely Preston would have inverted Mamet’s scenario, in which our hero doesn’t have to confess an inconvenient truth but gets Brownie-points for wanting to.” She further writes that “[t]he narrative ends up a fatuous triumph of Machiavellian thought and action; State and Main is a Hollywood satire as cynical and thick-headed as its supposed targets” (2000).
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Bibliography Assoun, Paul-Laurent (1998). “The Subject and the Other in Levinas and Lacan,” trans. Dianah Jackson and Denise Merkle, Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, ed. Sarah Harasym, Albany: State U of New York P. 79-101. Corker, David (2003). “Otherness, the Other, and Alterity,” Knots [online]. Available from: http:// www.uea.ac.uk/eas/people/corker/knots/ otherness.shtml [accessed May 2004]. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt (1999). Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society, Durham: Duke UP. Kane, Leslie, ed. (2001). David Mamet in Conversation, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. —— (1999). Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet, New York: Palgrave. Levinas, Emmanuel (1999). Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, New York: Columbia UP. —— (1996a). Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, Bloomington: Indiana UP. —— (1996b). “Is Ontology Fundamental?” trans. Simon Critchley, Peter Atterton, and Graham Noctor, Basic Philosophical Writings, 2-10. —— (1996c). “Meaning and Sense,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, Basic Philosophical Writings, 33-64. —— (1998). Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. —— (1987). “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 47-59. —— (1985). Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. —— (2003). Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. —— (1986). “The Trace of the Other,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 345-59. Mamet, David (2001). “Celebrating the Capacity for Self-Knowledge,” Interview with Henry I. Schvey, David Mamet in Conversation, ed. Leslie Kane, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 60-71. —— dir. (2001). Heist, with Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Ricky Jay, Warner Brothers.
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—— dir. (1987). House of Games, with Lindsay Crouse and Joe Mantegna, Orion. —— (2001). “I Just Kept Writing,” interview with Steven Dzielak, David Mamet in Conversation, ed. Leslie Kane, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 31-38. —— (1996). Make-Believe Town: Essays and Remembrances, Boston: Little, Brown. —— (2002). South of the Northeast Kingdom, Washington, DC: National Geographic. —— dir. (1997). The Spanish Prisoner, with Ben Gazzara, Felicity Huffman, Ricky Jay, Steve Martin, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Campbell Scott, Sony. —— dir. (2000). State and Main, with Alec Baldwin, Charles Durning, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Paymer, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Julia Stiles, New Line. Robbins, Jill (1999). Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, Chicago: U of Chicago P. Weber, Myles (2000). “David Mamet in Theory and Practice,” New England Review, 21, 136-42. Winter, Jessica (2000). “Day for Naught,” The Village Voice, 20-26 [online]. Available from: http://www.village-voice.com/issues/0051/winter.php [accessed May 2004].
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“YOUR OTHERNESS IS PERFECT AS MY DEATH”: THE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF LI-YOUNG LEE’S POETRY ZHOU XIAOJING This essay argues that Lee enacts an ethics of alterity through “corporeal aesthetics” in his poems. Zhou’s reading explores Levinasian alterity, its effects on the self, and its relation to socially constructed otherness from the Asian American perspective in Lee’s poetry. She contends that Lee’s corporeal aesthetics allows the racially marked speaker to become part of the universal, without erasing its particularity, thus rearticulating the universal in terms of multiplicity and heterogeneity.
In the opening poem of his second volume The City in Which I Love You (1990), Li-Young Lee’s persona says: “on my father’s back, in borrowed clothes, / I came to America” (1990: 13). Rather than assuming the impersonal voice of the traditional “lyric I,” Lee often speaks in the voice of a particular, autobiographical “I” who is an immigrant, a refugee in exile, whose “blood [is] motley” and “ways [are] trespassed upon.” Speaking as a particularized and embodied subject, Lee’s “lyric I” articulates a passionate love and desire for the other whose alterity remains irreducible to the sameness of the self, or to the status of an object of knowledge. “Hew me to your beauty,” says Lee’s persona to his love, whose otherness “exhausts me” and remains out of reach like “impossible stars fading,” but “is perfect as my death” (1990: 52, 55). In asserting an erotic and metaphysical desire for the other through an embodied “lyric I,” Lee maintains what Emmanuel Levinas calls “the ethical inviolability of the Other” (1996: 195). Embedded in this self-other relationship is an ethics of alterity, which underlies Lee’s articulation of the self and its response to the other through a corporeal aesthetics. The ethical implications of Lee’s embodied subject and its relationship with the other need to be understood in terms of Levinas’ ethics of alterity, as well as within the social-cultural contexts of Lee’s poetry. For Levinas, the other is other because of its irreducible, ungraspable, and inassimilable alterity: “The other as other is not here an object that becomes ours or becomes us; to the contrary, it withdraws into its mystery” (1997: 86). “In positing the Other’s alterity as mystery,” Levinas emphasizes, “I posit alterity.” In so doing, Levinas is not concerned with an “existent,” but rather “with the event of alterity, with alienation” (1997: 87). He explains
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the event of alterity in terms of the approach of death: “This approach of death indicates that we are in relation with something that is absolutely other, something bearing alterity not as a provisional determination we can assimilate through enjoyment but as something whose very existence is made of alterity. My solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken by it” (1997: 74). Such an “event of alterity” entails a self-other relationship that disrupts the subject’s self-enclosure and undermines the sufficiency of the subject’s rational thought. Levinas insists on the irreducibility of the other: “If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power.” “Furthermore,” he adds, the relationship with the other is generally sought out as a fusion. I have precisely wanted to contest the idea that the relationship with the other is fusion. The relationship with the Other is the absence of the other […]” (1997: 90). The other can neither be grasped as knowledge, nor be assimilated into the oneness of the same.1 This concept of the other is fundamentally different from the social construction of the other in terms of deviance from the “norm,” or rather the self-same. In contrast to alterity, socially constructed otherness of the other such as the Jew, the Arab, the Negro, the foreigner, the Oriental, and the homosexual, among others, is defined within a binary scheme and power relations. These categories of otherness are not only represented as completely knowable, but also deemed as a threat or a pollutant to be excluded or contained, assimilated or destroyed. Levinas’s ethics of alterity, which posits that assuming knowledge of the other, or fusion with the other, violates “the ethnical inviolability of the Other,” poses a profound challenge to such formulations of otherness that repress or erase alterity. Furthermore, Levinas’ concept of the other in terms of the other’s alterity challenges selfcontained Cartesian subjectivity, and disrupts its circular knowledge that reinforces the self-same:
1
The use of “Other” (with an upper-case “O”) and the “other” (with a lower-case “o”) is inconsistent among writers. Some use both alternately, employing “Other” to refer to alterity, otherness in general, or to the socially constructed collective identity of others in relation to “us,” the self, the same; and “other” to refer to the other person, to particularized others. Other writers either use “Other” or “other” for both general and specific otherness. Translators of Levinas such as Alphonso Lingis and Richard A. Cohen always translate the Fench word autrui (referring to the other person) as the “Other,” and autre (referring to alterity, otherness in general) as “other,” regardless of the occasional capitalization of autre in Levinas’ writings. I use “other” in my writing, and keep the upper-case and lower-case variations intact in all my citations throughout this essay.
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A calling into question of the Same—which cannot occur within the egotistic spontaneity of the Same—is brought about by the Other. We name the calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics. Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the Other by Me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge. (Levinas 1996: 43)
It is precisely through an event as such that the ethics of alterity takes place in an encounter between self and other, whose otherness resists totality, subverts homogeneity, and calls into question the subject’s ability to grasp or absorb the other.2 Moreover, for alterity to pose challenge to sameness, for the same to “welcome” the other and to be transformed by otherness, Levinas suggests, the concept of the subject has to break away from the philosophy of ontology. In his introduction to Levinas’ Otherwise Than Being, Alphonso Lingis explains the necessity for this break: “Levinas opposes the ontological philosophy which accounts for subjectivity as a locus or moment engendered by the inner movement of Being for its own exhibition. He intends to show subjectivity as the locus where alterity makes contact, a locus finally created by this movement of alterity” (2000: xxii). This notion of subjectivity as the locus where the self encounters the other disrupts the Wordsworthian “lyric I’s” solipsism and autonomy of consciousness. Thus, Levinas’ ethics of alterity suggests that a reconceptualization of the subject or the “lyric I” in terms of its ethical relationship with the other, entails a recognition of the other’s irreducible otherness and an insistence on the other’s proximity that refuses to erase the nearness or difference of the other. This correlate between an embodied subject and its ethical relationship with the other underlies Lee’s corporeal aesthetics that resists social inscriptions of the body, while rendering his persona resolutely implicated in the social and the cultural, inevitably bound to others whose otherness remains irreducible. To emphasize the connection between an ethics of alterity and an aesthetics of the corporeal in Lee’s poetry, it is necessary to situate his poetics in the contexts of the social, as well as philosophical formulations of self and other.
2
There are a number of excellent studies of Levinas’ philosophy of ethics from different perspectives, for example: Tina Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger, 2001; Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, 1999; Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, 1993.
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Lee’s personal experience as a racial and cultural other shapes the ethics and aesthetics of his poetry. Bearing visible features of the other, Lee and his family experienced painful racial discriminations. The bodily and cultural differences of Asian Americans in the US have been regarded as markers of their completely knowable otherness which deviates from the “norm” of White America. In a conversation with David Mura, a poet, critic, and Japanese American, Li-Young Lee says that racism is manifest in “the refusal to deal with the particular” (Mura 2002: 98). In other words, the particularity, or rather the individuality and otherness, of the other is repressed, erased, or polarized with the universal which is often equated with Eurocentric culture or is supposed to be embodied by the white male “self” defined in terms of autonomy, rationality, and individuality. At the same time, Lee observes that racism can also operate as “a type of arrogance, an unwarranted assumption of knowledge of the Other” (Mura 2002: 98). Such knowledge of the other has been used to justify racist laws against immigrants who were defined as non-White. In 1866 during the debate over naturalization of Chinese immigrants, Representative Higby of California spoke for many of his fellow White Americans when he stated that he opposed naturalization of the Chinese because “[t]he Chinese are nothing but a pagan race. They are an enigma to me, although I have lived among them for fifteen years. You cannot make good citizens of them; they do not learn the language of the country; and you can communicate with them only with the greatest difficulty [...]” (Kim 1996: 22). Chinese immigrants’ resistance to assimilation was condemned as an undesirable racial difference that made the Chinese incompetent to be citizens of the United States. In 1869, Senator Hendricks at the 3rd Session during the 40th Congress stated: “They [the Chinese] are a people who do not or will not learn our language; they cannot or will not adopt our manners or customs and modes of life; they do not amalgamate with our people; they constitute a distinct and separate nationality. [...] they continue to be the ignorant and besotted devotee of absolutism in politics and the blind disciples of paganism in religion” (Kim 1996: 25). Defined as the deviant other of Whites, the Chinese were the first group among Asian immigrants who were singled out for exclusion from US citizenship on the basis of their abject inassimilable otherness. The historical legacy of racism in the form of “an unwarranted assumption of knowledge of the Other” continues to affect Asian Americans, as Lee’s prose-poem memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), reveals. Recalling his childhood experience as an immigrant in the US, Lee examines the implications of the ways in which his difference, including the difference of his accent, is perceived and judged by the dominant population of American native speakers of English. As early as age six when he learned
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to speak English, Lee noticed that not all accents were heard alike: “While some sounds were tolerated, some even granting the speaker a certain status in the instances of, say, French or British, other inflections condemned one to immediate alien,” an alien whose religion is dismissed as primitive superstition and whose inarticulateness, resulting from intimidation and oppression, is regarded as a sign of a speech disorder or stupidity (1995: 76). Hence “in public school or any other place where fluent English was current, I was dumb. Perceived as feeble-minded, I was, like my siblings, spoken to very loudly, as though the problem were deafness” (1995: 78). In addition, Lee was taunted by schoolmates with racist hearsay about his family: They say your house is always dark like no one lives there [...] They say your mother can’t speak good English and writes letters all day to a son she threw away in China twenty years ago […]. They say all you people have the same first and last names and your mother can’t tell you apart […]. They say you keep snakes and grasshoppers in a bush on your back porch and eat them. They say you don’t have manners, you lift your plates to your mouths and push the food in with sticks. Have you heard what they’re saying? Is it true you all sleep in one bed together? […] They say you don’t believe in God, but you worship the Devil. (1995: 86)
Underlying such stereotypes of the other is the kind of racism Lee speaks of—“the refusal to deal with the particular”: “a type of arrogance, an unwarranted assumption of knowledge of the Other.” In his poems, Lee counters such arrogance of racism through an embodied, vulnerable subject who responds to the particularity of the other by offering love, beauty, and compassion, while refusing to define the other or to claim oneness with the other. At the same time, the corporeality of the autobiographical “I” has the function of undermining social markings of his raced body. The following lines from one of Lee’s longest poems, “Always a Rose,” in his first volume, Rose (1986), are a salient example of an ethical self-other relationship: And there is one I love, who hid her heart behind a stone. Let there be a rose for her, who was poor, who lived through ten bad years, and then ten more, who took a lifetime to drain her bitter cup. And there is one I love, smallest among us— let there be a rose for him— who was driven from the foreign schoolyards by fists and yelling, who trembled in anger in each
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Zhou Xiaojing re-telling, who played alone all the days, though the afternoon trees were full of children. And there is one I love who limps over this planet, dragging her steel hip. Always a rose for her. And always a rose for one I love, lost in another country, from whom I get year-old letters. And always a rose for one I love exiled from one republic and daily defeated in another, [………………………………....] (1986: 41)
An embodiment of love and beauty, rose is the actual and symbolic offering of Lee’s persona to the other. At the same time, rose serves as the organizing principle of the poem, providing both cohesiveness and flexibility for inclusion of multiple narratives, characters, and themes. This method of composition enables Lee to acknowledge individual others one by one, and to attend to the particularity of each. In addition, rose in Lee’s poem is more than merely an image; it is a flower and an other whose “secret” is unknowable. Lee’s persona speaks to rose as an other: What are you to me? I’d tear you with my teeth! Speak, speaking-flower! Open me, thorn-flower! [………………………………….] Still you say nothing. So keep secret, secret. […] [……………………………….] 8. If with my mouth, if with my clumsy tongue, my teeth, [……………………………] if I adore you, Rose, with adoration become nonsense become praise, could I stop our dying? [……………………………………………………………….] 9. You sag, turn your face
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from me, body made of other bodies, each doomed. (1986: 43–44)
The speaker identifies with rose because of their material, dying bodies. But he claims no union or oneness with rose; nor does he assume knowledge of rose. Rather, he proffers love and affection: “I Love your nakedness. / Naked, shy flower” (1986: 45). Despite their shared bodily vulnerability, Lee’s persona and rose remain separate in their individual bodies: “among / the dying things / are you and I” (1986: 45). In identifying his persona’s gendered, racially marked body with the rose-body and all “the dying things,” and by emphasizing his persona’s mortality—part of universal humanity—Lee achieves the effect of resisting social inscriptions of the body through a corporeal aesthetics that renders the particularity of his persona’s body universal. While discussing the relation between the aesthetic and the political, David Palumbo-Liu contends that in Eurocentric discourses on the universal, “the aesthetic as a site of universal human being marked off the racial Other from its space.” In fact, “the aesthetic became used to substantiate the absolutism of racial difference” (1995: 191). Lee restores the humanity of the raced other through employment of an autobiographical “I” and a corporeal aesthetics that allows Lee’s racially marked speaker to become part of the universal, without erasing its particularity, thus rearticulating the universal in terms of multiplicity and heterogeneity. Joan Scott’s discussion of the paradoxical concepts and functions of the individual and the universal can shed light on the significance of the politics and ethics of Lee’s aesthetics. Scott contends that the concept of the individual entails two seemingly contradictory terms. “On the one hand, the individual was the abstract prototype for the human; on the other, the individual was a unique being, a distinct person, different from all others of its species.” The first definition has been employed in claiming universal human rights for all, and the second has been used to set the self apart from an other, who “provides the boundaries of the self’s existence, its distinctive qualities and characteristics” (1995: 2). This abstract individual, at once universal and singular, has been described as possessing, in Stephen Luke’s words, “a certain set of invariant psychological characteristics and tendencies,” which could function as measures of the norm to mark as other those “who were thought not to possess the requisite traits” (Scott 1995: 3). In addition, external bodily characteristics were regarded by some psychologists during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as telltale markers of intelligence and capabilities. Scott further observes:
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Zhou Xiaojing Psychologists like Cabanis used these visible surface differences to distinguish between those (white men) who exemplified the human through their reason and moral integrity and those (others—women, initially blacks as well) whose socalled “natural” tendencies precluded their ability to live up to the human prototype. Here then was one of the useful, even necessary, contradictions in the concept of the abstract individual: articulated as the foundation of a system of universal inclusion (against the hierarchies and privileges of monarchical and aristocratic regimes), it could also be used as a standard of exclusion by defining as non-individuals those who were different from the singular figure of the human. (1995: 3)
This contradictory concept of the individual operating as “a system of universal inclusion” of sameness, and as “a standard of exclusion” of difference sheds light on the fact that “until 1944, the common ground for individuality, as for citizenship, was masculinity” (Scott 1995: 2). In the United States, people of color were denied their individuality and their rights to citizenship on the basis of their “difference” of race or ethnicity: “Not only was individuality a masculine prerogative, it was also racially defined. The superiority of white western men to their ‘primitive’ counterparts lay in an individuality achieved and expressed through the social and affective divisions of labor that marked the institution of monogamous marriage” (Scott 1995: 6). Thus the difference of the racial other defined as inferior and undesirable in relation to the superior self of universal individuality embodied by the White man, is produced, maintained, and reproduced through regulations of the affective, the inscriptions of the body, and institutional control of sexuality. However, the body cannot be completely reduced to a social construction of identity or knowledge, as indicated by Elizabeth Grosz’s discussion of the implications of Michel de Certeau’s analysis of the textualization of the body: De Certeau conceives of this intertextuation of bodies as meeting limits imposed from two directions. On the one hand, there must be a certain resistance of the flesh, a residue of its materiality left untouched by the body’s textualization; on the other hand, there is another limit imposed by the inability of particular texts or particular languages to say or articulate everything—a resistance from the side of the flesh and from the functioning of representation. (1994: 118)
The resistance of the flesh to social inscriptions and the limit of representation make it possible for Lee to rearticulate the body through a corporeal aesthetics that renders the raced, gendered, or stigmatized body unknowable but also desirable and universal. In so doing, Lee destabilizes
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and transforms both the signifier of the universal (often embodied by White male) and its “deviant” other. It is worth noting that Lee’s corporeal aesthetics not only breaks away from the representation of “the aesthetic as a site of universal human being” from which “the racial Other” is marked off, or departs from the formulation of the “the aesthetic” as a standard to “substantiate the absolutism of racial difference” (to borrow Palumbo-Liu’s words again); it articulates an ethical self-other relationship. In fact, Lee’s corporeal aesthetics dismantles the binary construct of the self and its other through articulation of an alternative lyric subject. The articulation of an embodied subject in Lee’s poems involves a turning of the self toward the other—a gesture of opening the self to the other, of responding to otherness. As Lee says in an interview, “when I write, I am speaking to a human ‘other’ that is in everybody, not a specific somebody—a kind of greater everybody” (J. K. Lee 2000: 279). The “other” conceived as such is fundamentally different from the social construct of the gendered, raced, or objectified other of the self as the norm, the universal humanity usually embodied by the White man or Eurocentric culture. Lee’s concept of an equal other in everyone breaks down the binary in which the other is conceived only in a dichotomized relation to the self. By disrupting the self-other dichotomy, Lee undermines the hierarchy embedded in the binary, which characterizes the construct of the other in colonial or Orientalist discourses. While speaking of the legacy of colonialism in a postcolonial era, Rey Chow notes, “what remains constant is the belief that ‘we’ are not ‘them’, and that ‘white’ is not ‘other’.” She adds, “This belief, which can be further encapsulated as ‘we are not other,’ is fascism par excellence” (1998: 31, emphases in original). By insisting on speaking to an equal other, and refusing to speak for the other, or to domesticate otherness as knowledge, Lee unsettles the binarized, hierarchical self-other relationship. Lee’s poems enact encounters with alterity through a mode of speech which is similar to what Levinas calls “saying.” For Levinas, saying is an ethical response when an encounter with the other takes place in speech. “To say is to approach a neighbor […]. Saying taken strictly is a ‘signifyingness dealt the other,’[…]” which “does not consist in giving signs” (2000: 48). Saying in this sense departs from the kind of “lyric I’s” self-proclaiming as an autonomous creative subject. As Levinas explains: The “giving out of signs” would amount to a prior representation of these signs, as though speaking consisted in translating thoughts into words and consequently in having been first for-oneself and at home with oneself, like a
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Saying, then, is not a matter of expressing what “I think,” “I know,” or “I perceive.” Rather, it is “a condition for all communication, as exposure;” it is “the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability” (Levinas 2000: 48). This saying disrupts the self-contained “lyric I’s” solipsistic “inward turning,” which Harold Bloom considers characteristic of Wordsworthian Romantic poetry, of which the “true subject,” he notes, is “the poet’s own selfhood” (1983: 287). Rather than turning into the self, saying is an act of responding to the other as responsibility, an opening of the self to otherness, which renders the self passive, vulnerable, and susceptible in its encounter with alterity. It is like exile—leaving home, leaving the secure, familiar ground to encounter the unknown, to become “homeless.” Moreover, Levinas adds that saying reverts “the ego into a self” which has the “form of a corporeal life devoted to expression and to giving” (2000: 50). For only when the subject is embodied can suffering and offering be possible. “Then the for-the-other involved in saying must not be treated in terms of consciousness of [...] , thematizing intentionality, nor in terms of commitment” (2000: 50-51). In this sense, saying is intricately bound to the subject’s corporeality and sensibility that make the subject vulnerable and susceptible in its encounter with the alterity of the other. It is precisely to articulate a new subjectivity as such, and to avoid reproducing racial stereotypes that Lee develops a corporeal aesthetic. As he suggests in an interview about his poetics, “it was important for me to […] try to escape all stereotypical views of what an Asian is in America, what an immigrant is, what a man is, what a human being is. The only way I could escape those stereotypes was to defy my own rational thinking” (J. K. Lee 2000: 275). Lee seeks to break away from established identity stereotypes through an affective, corporeal aesthetics and an embodied subject whose spiritual interiority undermines the racial marking of his body. The “lyric I” as an embodied subject in Lee’s poems, such as “In the City in Which I Love You,” asserts a subversive, interventional new concept of the self and an ethical relationship with the other. In his interview with Bill Moyers, Lee says that he was inspired by the “Song of Songs”—one of his favorite writings—because of its “celebration of sexual love“ and its “scope and grandeur and intensity” (Moyers 1995: 265). In his discussion of “The City in Which I Love You,” Walter A. Hesford suggests a direct connection between Lee’s appropriation of the “luxuriant imagery of the biblical Song” and his aesthetics of exuberant expression. According to Hesford, Lee at a
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reading “compared the poet to the woman who anoints Jesus’ head with precious nard, her extravagant spilling proof that there is abundance in the world” (see Mark 14:3–9). Hesford adds, “Lee associates such giving over of oneself to extravagant expression with an Eastern vis à vis Western ethos” (1996: 39). Instead of attributing the affective exuberance of Lee’s lyric to a binarized ethos, I would argue that an ethical self-other relationship is embedded in Lee’s earthly sensuous aesthetics, in his persona’s erotic, metaphysical desire for the other. According to Levinas, desire which is fundamentally different from need as lack is crucial for an ethical self-other relationship: “Desire is desire for the absolutely Other.” Unlike need, desire for the other cannot be satisfied. “A desire without satisfaction,” Levinas adds, should be understood in terms of “the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other” (1996: 34). The irreducible proximity and alterity of the other are necessary conditions for the subject’s desire. In the final section of Totality and Infinity, Levinas discusses erotic love as a most intense form of desire. Caress, not assimilation or possession, most appropriately characterizes the self-other relationship in desire. As Colin Davis explains in his book on Levinas: “In erotic love neither self nor Other is abolished; both are in fact confirmed, since the Other is desired as Other, not as an other to be reduced to the Same. The loved one is caressed but not possessed” (1996: 46). It is precisely this self-other relationship in which the other’s alterity remain inviolable that Lee establishes through a corporeal aesthetics. In “The City in Which I Love You,” the speaker articulates this ethical relationship through an extravagance of language, which is a gesture of responding to the desired other. Moreover, as the title indicates, the city—a space where one encounters the other, including the exiled, the violated, the impoverished immigrants and refugees—enhances the vast diversity of the city populations and the challenges they pose to sameness. Against this urban background, the poem’s theme of love is particularly compelling in its ethical implications. Alluding to the quest for love and the celebration of both male and female erotic desire in the “Song of Songs,” and incorporating the motif of the quest for love from the biblical “Song,” Lee takes the reader on a journey of discovering the city in which his persona seeks his loved one. This journey is ultimately an ethical event of responding to the other as responsibility, of encountering alterity through desire: And when, in the city in which I love you, even my most excellent song goes unanswered, and I mount the scabbed streets, the long shouts or avenues,
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This city which the speaker calls “home,” yet in which he is “a guest,” is not restricted to one particular city in the United States. The references to violence and crime, including “the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches,” and “swastikaed synagogues,” have much larger ramifications for “the new, murderous century,” than specifying any one particular American city could. Nor is the speaker particularized only as an autobiographical poetI. Against the impersonal, social background of fear, hatred, and destruction of the other, and accompanied by the speaker’s feelings of dislocation and alienation as an immigrant in exile, the speaker’s pursuit of the other, and offering of love for the other becomes particularly poignant and significant in gaining a social and historical scope for an intensely personal relationship characterized by love and desire for the other. In contrast to the impersonal, alienating background of the city, Lee rearticulates the celebration of erotic love in the “Song of Songs,” and enhances its intensity and vulnerability for both male and female desire through a corporeal aesthetics that challenges the social stigma of bodily and cultural difference. In the biblical verse, the desire of both the male and female speakers is asserted by multiple voices, who sometimes assume the identity of women, and sometimes of men: “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not;” “Thou has ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck” (“The Song of Soloman” 1:3, 4:9). Even though there is only one male speaker in his poem, Lee refuses to turn the female into merely the object of male desire. In fact, the corporeal aesthetics and language Lee’s “lyric I” employs achieve the effect of what Levinas calls “announc[ing] the ethical inviolability of the Other” (1996: 195). Lee enables the loved female to be the subject of her desire, by letting the male speaker entreat her to pursue him, while offering his erotic love as a caress through voluptuous profuseness: My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
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The vein in my neck adores you. A sword stands up between my hips, my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil. The shadows under my arms, I promise, are tender, the shadows under my face. Do not calculate, but come, smooth other, rough sister. Yet, how will you know me among the captives, my hair grown long, my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon? In the uproar, the confusion of accents and inflections, how will you hear me when I open my mouth? Look for me, one of the drab population under fissured edifices, fractured artifices. Make my various names flock overhead, I will follow you. Hew me to your beauty. (1990: 52)
This erotic desire for the other is articulated through the kind of saying by which, Levinas contends, the subject is rendered vulnerable, “not in itself, at home with itself.” Saying as an ethical language gesture that turns the inside of the subject out toward the other, Levinas writes, could be understood as the subject’s act of “wounding or exiling itself” (2000: 49). This extravagant turning of the self to the other for the other makes it impossible for Lee’s “I” to assume domination over or possession of the loved one. As Lee’s persona pleads to the loved other: “Hew me to your beauty.” It’s worth noting that while resisting social inscriptions of the body through a corporeal aesthetics in articulating erotic desire, Lee’s persona identifies himself as “one of the drab population under fissured edifices,” whose “blood [is] motley” and whose voice is lost in “the confusion of accents and inflections.” This identification of the “lyric I” with those who usually exist in the margins of mainstream America and whose individuality becomes obsolete under a collective racial category, has the effect of restoring through a corporeal aesthetics the humanity of those who are deprived of it. In addition, Lee enacts an ethics of alterity by emphasizing the others’ proximity (“they are not me forever”) even though his persona identifies himself as one of the others (“Look for me, one of the drab population”). As he continues to acknowledge the suffering, persecution, and violation of
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others in numerous cities around the world, the speaker refuses to assume oneness with the other(s): In the excavated places, I waited for you, and I did not cry out. In the derelict rooms, my body needed you, and there was such flight in my breast. During the daily assaults, I called to you, and my voice pursued you, even backward to that other city in which I saw a woman squat in the street beside a body, and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face. That woman was not me. And The corpse lying there, lying there so still it seemed with great effort, as though his whole being was concentrating on the hole in his forehead, so still I expected he’d sit up any minute and laugh out loud: that man was not me; his wound was his, his death not mine. And the soldier who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette: he was not me. And the ones I do not see in cities all over the world, the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth: they are not me. Some of them are my age, even my height and weight; none of them is me. The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked, the ones who don’t survive, whose names I do not know:
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they are not me forever, the ones who no longer live in the cities in which you are not, the cities in which I looked for you. (1990: 53–55)
Even though he defines himself as “one of the drab population,” Lee’s “I” insists on the particular difference between the self and each of the others. As the speaker repeatedly says, “That woman / was not me;” “that man was not me;” “none of them is me;” “they are not me,” refusing to assume oneness with the other. In so doing, the speaker responds to the other without reducing the other’s alterity by absorbing otherness into sameness, thus maintaining the other’s proximity that is crucial to the ethnics of alterity. Equally important is the speaker’s embrace of the unknowable mystery of the otherness of the other—an elusive alterity that fascinates, ravishes, and remains unknowable: And your otherness is perfect as my death. Your otherness exhausts me, like looking suddenly up from here to impossible stars fading. Everything is punished by your absence. [………………………………] Where are you in the cities in which I love you, the cities daily risen to work and to money, to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts? […………………………………] Between brick walls, in space no wider than my face, a leafless sapling stands in mud. In its branches, a nest of raw mouths gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat. My hunger for you is no less than theirs. (1990: 55–56)
As the speaker’s desire extends from erotic love to hunger for the spiritual, the immaterial in “the cities daily risen to work and to money,” this poem has moved from erotic desire for a particular beloved one to an yearning that opens the self to all others and to alterity itself. Lee sustains this dynamic tension between the particular and the universal throughout the poem by simultaneously specifying and making abstract the speaker’s identity. By the end of the poem, the speaker again re-
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articulates his immigrant and exile identity. He emphasizes that it is by his banishment that he has come to love “you” whose otherness is perfect as his death: Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning. Noisy with telegrams not received, quarrelsome with aliases, intricate with misguided journeys, by my expulsions have I come to love you. [……………………………..] my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned, in league with stones of the earth, I enter, without retreat or help from history, the days of no day, my earth of no earth, I re-enter the city in which I love you. And I never believed that the multitude of dreams and many words were vain. (1990: 56–57)
A refugee, immigrant, new citizen of the United States, one of “the drab population” with “accents and inflections,” this speaker transforms the traditional “lyric I,” replacing its autonomous consciousness, its disembodied transcendental ego with an embodied subject, whose blood is “motley” and “ways [are] trespassed upon,” who is uprooted and exiled. This “I” is also a poet who “never believed that the multitude / of dreams and many words were vain.” Lee’s reinvention of the Romantic autonomous “lyric I” thus challenges and undermines the racial stereotyping of the other, which reduces the other’s alterity to a threat or an abject otherness to be domesticated, excluded, or erased. Lee’s poetry demonstrates more than the possibilities of critical intervention through an ethical response to otherness. In her book, Ethics After Idealism (1998), Rey Chow raises the question, “Does ‘otherness’ itself automatically suffice as critical intervention?” (1998: 30). Lee’s poems challenge us to rethink the meaning of otherness beyond social and ideological constructs. In her discussion of the relationship among ethics, feminism, and democracy, Ewa P onowska Ziabrek offers a provocative insight: “to respond to conflicts, injustice, and domination requires not only a critique of power/knowledge but also a therapeutic working through of the unspeakable racial traumas and the elaboration of an alternative ethics based on the responsibility for the Other’s oppression” (2001: 125). Lee’s poems enact such an alternative ethics as responsibility through a corporeal aesthetics that “caresses” the other(s)—“the violated, / the prosecuted
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citizenry” in cities around the world. But Lee’s poems entail more than “a therapeutic” function or a critique of power/knowledge. They offer an ethical self-other relationship that intervenes in a fundamental problematic concept of self and other, which operates in social and political practices regarding difference. Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s discussion of “European racism” might shed more light on the relevance of the ethics and aesthetics in Lee’s poetry to the social and political. Rather than perceiving the other as “other,” Deleuze and Guattari contend, racism reduces the other to a deviant version of the self: Racism operates by the determination of degree of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a lunatic…). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is to not be. […] Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence). (2003: 178)
It is precisely in countering racism as such that Lee’s passionate lyric enacts an ethics of alterity through a corporeal aesthetics. The historical weight and social exigency of the questions of otherness render the ethics of alterity necessary for Lee’s poetry, and perhaps even for social change. Bibliography Bloom, Harold (1983). Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, Oxford: Oxford UP. Chow, Rey (1998). Ethics After Idealism: Theory—Culture—Ethnicity— Reading, Bloomington: Indiana UP. Davis, Colin (1996). Levinas: An Introduction, Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2003). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana UP. Hesford, Walter A. (1996). “The City in Which I Love You: Li-Young Lee’s Excellent Song,” Christianity and Literature, 46: 1, 37–60.
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Kim, Hyung-Chan, ed. (1996). Asian Americans and Congress: A Documentary History, Westport: Greenwood . Lee, James Kyung-Jin (2000). “Li-Young Lee,” Interview, Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, ed. King-Kok Cheung, Honolulu: U of Hawai’i in association with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Los Angeles, 270–80 Lee, Li-Young (1986). Rose, Brockport, NY: BOA Editions. —— (1990). The City in Which I Love You, Brockport, NY: BOA Editions. —— (1995). Winged Seeds: A Remembrance, New York: Simon & Schuster. Levinas, Emmanuel (2000) Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Boston: Kluwer. —— (1997). Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. —— (1996). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Lingis, Alphonso (2000). “Translator’s Introduction,” Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, xvii–xlviii. Moyers, Bill (1995). “Li-Young Lee,” The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, eds. Bill Moyers and James Haba, New York: Doubleday, 257– 269. Mura, David (2002). “Dim Sum Poetics,” Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Moto: Poetry and Identity, Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 97 – 101. Palumbo-Liu, David (1995). “Universalism and Minority Culture,” Differences, 7: 1, 188–208. Scott, Joan W. (1995). “Universalism and the History of Feminism,” Differences, 7: 1, 1–14. “The Song of Soloman,” The Bible, Toronto: The Gideons International, 1:3 and 4:9. Ziabrek, Ewa P onowska (2001). An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy, Stanford: Stanford UP.
THE LOOK OF ETHICS: EMMANUEL LEVINAS, LÉO BRONSTEIN, AND THE INTERHUMAN INTRIGUE CHRIS THOMPSON This essay focuses on Levinas’s Totality and Infinity—a seminal text for recent engagements with ethical alterity—and the lesser-known Fragments of Art, Life, and Metaphysics by Léo Bronstein. Both texts, Thompson argues, treat the ethical encounter in fundamentally aesthetic terms. He asserts that this has significant consequences for readings of Levinas’ ethics and suggests that Levinas’ ethical philosophy actually rests on the condition—one he named in his 1947 essay on aesthetics—of “wandering about in sensation.”
Looking for painting is painting’s ethics. It is as oblique as the nape of the neck, as a site for raising questions of truth and being in the world. It must be approached before it is known, with the utmost attention to its utterance. Laura Lisbon
Drawing from Painting One chapter of Léo Bronstein’s book Fragments of Life, Metaphysics, and Art consists of a long letter composed by a fictional art historian to his dearest former student. In it he writes: “Space is the fragment in which the unseizable whole of life, material and moral, is transubstantiated or seized in the art of painting” (1995: 35). This may be at once the clearest and densest summation on record of the ethical possibilities of painting. To draw from painting would seem an improbable way to characterize the writing of Levinas, a philosopher who once argued—in an early essay entitled “Reality and its Shadow” whose sustained consideration of aesthetic experience and artistic labor makes it unusual among his writings—that “art, essentially disengaged, constitutes, in a world of initiative and responsibility, a dimension of evasion” (1987: 12). Yet Levinas’ use of writing to stage phenomenological fragments that permit the reader, borrowing Bronstein’s words, to “seize the unseizable whole of life, material and moral,” suggests that Levinas’ work may be, above all else, a painterly prose.
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The notion of a painterly prose provides a provocative way to examine Levinas’ disparaging of aesthetic experience on the grounds of its fundamental irresponsibility. “To make or appreciate a novel and a picture is to no longer have to conceive,” he argued, “is to renounce the effort of science, philosophy, and action. Do not speak, do not reflect, admire in silence and in peace—such are the counsels of wisdom satisfied before the beautiful” (1987: 12). His scorn was directed not at art in general, however, but at any art that imagined itself to be separated from the criticism that integrates the inhuman work of the artist into the human world. Criticism already detaches it from its irresponsibility by envisaging its technique. It treats the artist as a man at work. Already in inquiring after the influences he undergoes it links this disengaged and proud man to real history. Such criticism is still preliminary. It does not attack the artistic event as such, that obscuring of being in images, that stopping of being in the meanwhile. (1987: 12-13)
Levinas‘s insistence upon the saving grace of criticality underscores the Platonism of his position: an art left to itself corrupts the will to social responsibility, obscuring being in the image that arrests it. Moreover, in the modern moment, the poet cannot find the philosopher culpable for his banishment from the polis. Now “[t]he poet exiles himself from the city. From this point of view, the value of the beautiful is relative. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague” (1987: 12). Bronstein, like Levinas, had little patience for aestheticism. But he had a more nuanced understanding of its histories and its implications, which let him dismiss it without Levinas’ poecidal pathos. Bronstein wrote: “So I repeat: space in art is a moral space. So falls the ivory tower of the aestheticians. The ‘pure visibility’ worries of a painter are not aesthetic and conceptual worries only, they are human, moral worries” (1995: 37). Bronstein’s critique of aestheticism contends that artistic labor necessarily constitutes an ethical engagement. It is thus curious to find in this critique a positioning of the aesthetic that would appear to be more congruent with Levinas’ insistence upon the primacy of the ethical relation than we find in Levinas’ own writing on artistic practice. Indeed, his insistence upon art’s fundamental amorality seems to undercut the possibility of squaring ethical and aesthetic experience. If we permit the terms of Bronstein’s position to inflect a reading of Levinas’s aesthetic investments, we find in Levinas’ work a variety of evidence to suggest that he might have had but a tenuous attachment to his
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own assertion that “To make or appreciate a novel” invariably entails a renunciation of responsibility. For instance, the problem of responsibility as it is taken up in Totality and Infinity is very much a rumination on and elaboration of a particular passage from Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov—for which Levinas had great appreciation. In an interview with Florian Rötzer given near the end of his life, Levinas borrowed Dostoyevsky’s passage to articulate the central concern of his ethical philosophy, saying: “We’re all guilty of everything in relation to the other, and I more than all others. This ending, ‘more than all others’, is what is most important here, although in a certain sense it means to be an idiot” (Rötzer 1995: 59).1 The Fabric of Idiocy Levinas called upon the Western philosophical tradition to engage with its great “unthought” dimension, what he called the “search for the human or interhuman intrigue as the fabric of ultimate intelligibility” (1996c: 158).2 In this provocation, Levinas insists that the effort to recognize the transcendent, to find the transcendent intelligible in and as its transcendence, must also engage with “the human or interhuman intrigue which is the concreteness of its unthought.” This “unthought,” he warns emphatically, “is not purely negative!” That is to say—although critics have often cast his style and rhetorical method as a complex orchestration of negations3—Levinas’ drama The author wishes to thank Howard Caygill, Laura Lisbon, and above all Lauren Raiken. 1 In Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, Levinas casts this in radical terms: “I am responsible even for the Other’s responsibility”—though he followed with a caution that his were “extreme formulations which must not be detached from their context,” explaining that “[i]n the concrete, many other considerations intervene” (1998a: 99). 2 In this essay Levinas conjoins this task of phenomenology with two supplementary ones: “to guarantee […] against the surreptitiousness, sliding, and substitution of sense […] the signifyingness of a language threatened in its abstraction or in its isolation,” and “to control language by interrogating the thoughts which offend it and make it forget” (1996c: 158). 3 Jacques Derrida’s critique of Totality and Infinity in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” argues that “[i]t could doubtless be shown that it is in the nature of Levinas’ writing, at its decisive moments, to move along these cracks [in the surface of philosophy], masterfully progressing by negations, and by negation against negation” (1978: 90).
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of ethical experience, which unfolds as social existence (a “sociality which […] is a relation with the other as such and not with the other as a pure part of the world”), has a materiality, a palpable existence, a presence with which thinking must contend (1996c: 158). That “the human or interhuman intrigue” remains “unthought” for philosophy does not for this reason mean that it entails thought’s negation, nor that it must be approached as a wholly negative problem. Walter Benjamin’s conception of the role of criticism has a proximity to Levinas’ own which helps us calibrate the relationship between the concrete unthought and the aesthetic in Levinas’ thinking. Drawing from the German Romantic tradition, Benjamin imagined the job of criticism to be the elucidation of the ways in which the work of art could mediate or stage the relationship between the finite and the infinite (Benjamin, 1977). In Levinas’ variation, criticism’s task is to intervene in—quite literally to embody a resistance to—the enchantments of the profane: The most lucid writer finds himself in the world bewitched by images. He speaks in enigmas, by allusions, by suggestion, in equivocations, as though he moved in a world of shadows, as though he lacked the force to arouse realities, as though he could not go to them without wavering, as though, bloodless and awkward, he always committed himself further than he had decided to do, as though he spills half the water he is bringing us. The most forewarned, the most lucid writer nonetheless plays the fool. The interpretation of criticism speaks in full self-possession, frankly, through concepts, which are like the muscles of the mind. (1987: 13)
Perhaps it is possible to say that the effort of the critic for Levinas must be, by means of a lithe intellectual labor, to ensure that the profane stay just this side of shadows and seductions. The critic might thereby articulate the profane’s relation to its own unthought, the variety of hiddenness which it alone could articulate. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas would evolve this movement into the notion of “profanation,” which he defined as “the revelation of the hidden as hidden” (1998b: 260). In that book, by being cast as revelation, profanation is able to appear in and as love, which is not reducible to a knowledge mixed with affective elements which would open to it an unforeseen plane of being. It grasps nothing, issues in no concept, does not issue, has neither the subject-object structure nor the I-thou structure. Eros is not accomplished as a subject that fixes an object, nor as a pro-jection, toward a possible. Its movement consists in going beyond the possible. (1998b: 260-61)
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By the time of “Transcendence and Intelligibility” Levinas was taking pains to bind his theological concerns to his philosophical writings. But while he dared to follow that essay’s figuration of “the human or interhuman intrigue as the fabric of ultimate intelligibility” with the nearly gnostic suggestion that such a renewed phenomenology might even be “the way for the wisdom of heaven to return to earth” (1996c: 158), nevertheless the intrigue of ethical alterity remains as much a secular as a theological concern.4 In her philosophical memoir Love’s Work, published shortly after her death in 1995, Gillian Rose captured what was at stake in this intrigue: “I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing—in this sin of language and lips” (1997: 135). What does it mean to speak of this intrigue as, to capture it in the figure of, a “fabric?” To suggest that such a fabric would be bound to operate as a metaphor would hardly be troublesome within the terms of Levinas’ thought. For him metaphor was not a limiting trope. Rather it constituted part of “the marvel of language,” consistent with the dynamic sociality written into the notion of intrigue. Levinas argued that the possibility of developing a nuanced deconstruction of a particular metaphor’s “psychological, social, or philological history” in no way detracts from or dispels its marvelous capacity: “the beyond which metaphor produces has a sense that transcends its history; the power to conjure up illusions which language has must be recognized, but lucidity does not abolish the beyond of these illusions” (1996a: 56). The ability to demonstrate language’s capacity for the production of illusion, then—and to articulate the ways in which a particular metaphor embodies such illusions—can, perhaps must, exist alongside the capacity of these illusions to open to what is beyond them. The paradox of Levinas’ formula is marvelous in itself. It poses the idea of an illusion the experience of which produces forms of sensation that instantiate what lies beyond the terms of the illusion itself. This would, despite Levinas’ argument in “Reality and its Shadow,” seem a lucid description of certain varieties of aesthetic experience. How near this is to Bronstein’s formulation of the seizing of the unseizable in painterly space, the transubstantiation of the beyond into the painted fragment. It is difficult to imagine anything other than a profane and perhaps painterly prose being able to articulate, in language, the qualities of this 4
Alain Badiou attempts this when he reduces Levinas’ work to a purely religious imperative: “To put it crudely: Lévinas’ enterprise serves to remind us […] that every effort to turn ethics into the principle of thought and action is essentially religious” (2001: 23).
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metaphorical fabric by means of which to think the substance of the interhuman intrigue. But how to render the intelligibility of this fabric in a way that does not permit the warp and woof of articulation to close out the unthought? Gilles Deleuze, in his Expressionism in Philosophy, offers a useful model in his consideration of Spinoza’s notion of fabrica. This term captures both the structural and the operational dimensions of the body (fabrica) it designates. Deleuze writes: “Spinoza can consider two fundamental questions as equivalent: What is the structure (fabrica) of a body? And: What can a body do? A body’s structure is the composition of its relation. What a body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected” (1992: 218). This capacity to be affected Deleuze defines “as the aptness of a body both for suffering and acting” (1992: 383n14). There is a palpable proximity between Deleuze’s variation on Spinoza’s fabrica and the fabric of Levinas’s “interhuman intrigue.” The two concepts, posed in a relation with one another, could themselves compose a fabrica.5 We could also imagine an interhuman intrigue whose composition, and whose capacity for suffering and acting, would be equivalent in all respects to fabrica’s sentient materiality. But this fabric would have to be imagined in such a way that it could not only exist in spite of, but in fact to be consituted by, the tension between Levinas’ and Spinoza’s ostensibly irreconcilable philosophical orientations. That they are irreconcilable does not, however, mean that they are unable to operate as a body, or to unfold as an intrigue. Indeed, a proper intrigue would seem to demand such agitation. Spinoza’s ethical philosophy poses a notion of an absolute and infinite substance that decenters the human subject from its place of privilege. As Andy Goffey puts it, whereas “Descartes can be seen as setting out from the intrinsically modest nature of the human subject which is, as finite being, 5
While Levinas likened concepts to “the muscles of the mind,” a set of sinews by means of which the mind makes thinking happen, in their book What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose that each “concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its components, which is why, from Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting” (1994: 15-6). In both examples, the concept is an entity that carries within it a kind of action: in Deleuze and Guattari’s case, the cutting/cross-cutting movement of articulation; in Levinas’, the relays of flexion and release that constitute the movement of a thinking body. Articulation is a perpetual labor, because it always involves rethinking the problem that gives rise to the concept, and using the concept to reformulate the problem with greater clarity. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words: “All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges” (16).
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unable to know anything of God, Spinoza […] sets out, more or less, from infinity and affirms the integral knowability of God” as this infinite substance (1998: 68). This formulation of an absolute infinite substance entails a paradox, in that “one must maintain both that it is an entirely artificial construct, the product of an extreme formalism and that it is entirely unformed, natural” (1998: 72). This knowability of God could not be more abrasive to Levinas’s philosophy, which uses the figure of a fabric precisely in order to enable the opening to what is beyond it, and, crucially, beyond knowledge. For Levinas infinity always overflows the very idea one can have of it.6 The theological implications of a debate between infinity and infinite substance, while intriguing, are not at issue in this essay. Or rather, they are obliquely at issue, for by addressing the question of the ethical implications of this positioning, a certain kind of theology does unfold. This would reside in the question: if in the interpersonal intrigue we encounter the divine, what need have we for God (or, to come to it differently, has God for us)?7 So if we refrain from forcibly weaving these two notions, fabrica and the fabric of interhuman intrigue, together into a synthetic figure that would do violence to both—or perhaps worse, dilute them—how then to imagine the nature of the body that would sustain their relation? Another way to put this is to ask: given the differing ethical obligations of these two notions, what are the ethics of crafting, through the act of writing, the body that they would have to share? Perhaps, to follow Luce Irigaray, this body-sharing is every bit as carnal as it sounds; if so, the task then would be to articulate this body’s “aptness […] both for suffering and acting,” this fabric’s ability to be made and remade in and through sociality. There could be no clearer foregrounding of what is at stake in the relationship between text and ethics than this first sentence from Totality and Infinity: “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality” (Levinas, 1998b: 21). This book has become a crucial source for engagements with ethical alterity and its implications across a range of disciplines. Its availability has had the effect of producing a variety of cursory—and quite often, as Howard Caygill 6
In Totality and Infinity Levinas calls this movement “infinition”: “infinity, overflowing the idea of infinity” (1998b: 51, 59-60); here he also presents his thought as “the antipodes of Spinozism” (105; see also 119, 301-2). 7 In her “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” Luce Irigaray has asked this question in terms of an erotics of the ethical encounter: “But how are God’s commandments brought to bear in the relationship between lovers? If this relationship is not divinized, does that not pervert any divinity, any ethics, any society which does not recognize God in carnality?” (1991: 186).
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has noted, “sentimental” (2002: 1)—readings that have rarely done justice to its complexities. Primary among these complexities is the current in Levinas’ ethical philosophy that opens into a tolerance for and a sanctioning of violence. Totality and Infinity frames one of its key objectives as the attempt to think through a notion of peace that might be something other than simply the absence of or pause between wars. It begins this effort by asking, in the book’s second sentence: “Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?” (1998b: 21). If we are necessarily duped by morality, then the production of text can only operate in this economy of war and its precipitation, preemption, or postponement. Levinas’ consideration of the need to attend to the “permanent possibility of war” is rhetorical, posed in order to open the possibility of an eventual overcoming of the thinking that remains bound to war. He argues that this “lucidity” is confined to totality, and does not permit an engagement with the infinity that consists in the ethical encounter. War’s lucidity is foreign to the philosophy that would engage with the ethical encounter and underwrite the form of sociality proper to it. In 1982 Levinas was a participant in a radio broadcast with Philippe Nemo that followed that year’s execution by Phalangist militias of refugees in the Lebanese camps of Sabra and Shatila. Caygill has noted how, in his onair comments, Levinas’ mobilization of his philosophy in order to avoid a condemnation of the actions of the Israeli state demonstrated a “coolness of political judgement that verged on the chilling, an unsentimental understanding of violence and power almost worthy of Machiavelli” (2002: 1). He suggests that Levinas’ response to the Sabra and Shatila war crimes (which met with outrage by many Israelis and Jews in the diaspora and provoked an official inquiry that resulted in the dismissal of then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon) has to be seen as “a touchstone for his ethical and political principles as well as his views on Israel and the State of Israel.” In that interview Levinas found himself face to face with the following question: “Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the ‘other’. Isn’t history, isn’t politics the very site of the encounter with the ‘other’, and for the Israeli, isn’t the ‘other’ above all the Palestinian?” For Caygill, Levinas’ evasive answer “opens a wound in his whole oeuvre” (Caygill, 2002: 192): My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbour. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the
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problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong. (2002: 192)
Rather than judge this as a one-time wavering from an otherwise wholly consistent and stable philosophy of ethical alterity—a commitment to thinking and performing the responsibility for and the welcoming of the other which would seem, on the face of it, to have obliged Levinas to at least gesture at a condemnation of Sabra, Shatila, and Sharon—Caygill argues that Levinas’ response is in fact “rigorously consistent with his philosophy, which we have argued recognises the inevitability of war. To describe the other as enemy at this point is thus entirely consistent with such a reading of Levinas’ ethics” (2002: 192-3). Caygill’s study demonstrates that its openness to violence is a central current in Levinas’ work. This gives Levinas’ philosophy a volatility that many have sought not to notice. But far from enabling the argument that this in some way compromises his thought, the ability to see Levinas’ language of responsibility and obligation in a political optic permits us to experience his philosophy as something other than an impregnable moralizing discourse. It is here, in its most troubled form, that Levinas’ work, at its most visceral level, finally does succeed in its wish to open to the unthought beyond totality. His philosophy embodies and enacts—fabricates—the interhuman intrigue even as it makes this its object of study. This Text Which is Not One Text—in its structure and its capacities for interaction—is inadequate to the dynamism of the interhuman intrigue. To imagine that the concept of the text captures all that is or may be written, or produced as a cultural object, is to deaden writing. This is not to say that the accommodation of the interhuman intrigue and the adventure of sociality that it promises is beyond the scope of writing; there are forms of writing (including novels and letters, essays and poems) that do not permit themselves to be called “texts”—despite the habit of using this word to describe them. The words “text” and “textile” both share the same etymological root, the Latin texere, meaning “to weave.” Texts like textiles are created through a regularized and infinitely repeatable labor that weaves strands into a grid of warp and woof. The weave like the grid constitutes a totality in process; it exists before the construction of the fabric that embodies it, and so extends itself and instantiates its regularity in any and all directions and dimensions.
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If we are to speak of the interhuman intrigue as a fabric, we are better served by thinking of it as a nonwoven and aleatory one rather than a woven one. The material felt, in contrast to any textile, is a nonwoven fabric, a body without axes. It is created through the multiple, random interlockings of spiral strands of wool. With its breathable and irregular spaces, its crosslapped coiling textures, filaments and spiralling strands and clumps and bunches so finely integrated but impossible to plan or predict, felt does not enact the simplicity of the grid of warp and woof that constitutes woven fabric. Felt owes its consistency to its irregularity. And this owes to a process at once rigorous and haphazard. The felt-making process has a specific objective, whose imperfection has been perfected over millennia; this process itself involves a leaving-to-chance—even if it is a methodical and meticulous leaving-to-chance—of the combination of the fibers, textures, and interstices of wool. What if, similarly, there were works that could be seen to constitute a mass irreducible to the regularity of the grid, textile, or network? Works that had properties such that, like felt, the more they were pulled, tweaked, torn, and agitated—the more they were to suffer and act and be acted upon—the more structural integrity and affective capacity they would have? Would the materiality of felt provide a wholly different set of limits and aptitudes for a figural fabric that might permit us to probe with greater clarity the inescapably intimate cohesion that binds us in the interhuman intrigue? At the very least it is crucial, in any effort to think the interhuman intrigue, to refuse the stabilizing effect offered to the subject by the structure of the textual-textilic, which stands as a kind of linguistic analogue of the imputed and imposed grid of Cartesian perspectival space. To think instead in terms of a materiality of the nonwoven as the fabric for intersubjective experience permits, demands, a subject that is effectively lost in this space and so must craft a connection with it. This entails a practice of the art that French artist and poet Robert Filliou described when he wrote of “the art of losing oneself without getting lost” (1970: 24), an art of navigating a constantly shifting and buckling intersubjective space. It is, to use Filliou’s words again, an “art of peace” (Filliou, in Wijers 1996: 272-3)8 a peace that Levinas described “as awakeness to the precariousness of the other” (1996b: 167).
8
This reference is to Robert Filliou’s invitation to the 1985/6 “Art-of-Peace Biennnale,” which he conceived and helped to organize in Hamburg, West Germany.
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Reversion There are many ways in which Totality and Infinity and Léo Bronstein’s little-known book Fragments of Life, Metaphysics and Art appear to have been written for one another. The most important convergence is their concern to explore what it would mean to render intelligible a sociality predicated upon the notion of peace—that other great unthought. It is striking to read, alongside the first lines of Levinas‘s preface (“Does not lucidity, the mind‘s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?”), the concluding line of Bronstein’s own: “For conceived in war, this book is of peace” (1995: xx). Bronstein’s book consists entirely of letters written between fictitious characters. There is one particular passage from that book which is especially pertinent here; it comes from the letter mentioned at the beginning of this essay, by the art historian Philippe, written to his student Robert. Its elaboration of the relationship of the ethical and the aesthetic—unfolding as judgment and participation, each embodied respectively by the figures of face and profile, and operationalized in the corresponding play of convex and concave—makes it worth quoting at length: What I intend to say or to suggest here is this: Space is the fragment in which the unseizable whole of life, material and moral, is transubstantiated or seized in the art of painting. Because space is the most material concrete element of our visual consciousness. I mean the material space we see, not any abstract “meaningful” derivative space; I mean simply the banal yet astonishing phenomenon of extension, of distance, of three-dimensional visibility. The individual space structure with which, like the snail within its shell, an artist surrounds himself is his whole unbroken reality and truth, his triple level: lyrical — the hidden truth of his inspiration or his personality; epical — the hidden impact of his precise historical momentum; cosmic — his calculable and incalculable breaking through the stellar flow. Space in art is a choice, therefore a judgment. That is why I say space in art is a moral space. Those are big words, perhaps repugnant to the cultured up-to-date man, strictly and proudly confined to the words-must-make-sense frontier. But perhaps the words are not big enough, perhaps there should be no measure of words at all for such things: only contemplation, exalted (sic!) in “silence and secrecy.” […] And human, moral also are the opening of the face and the opening of the profile into space awareness, the opening in front of things visible, the opening among things visible. I call the first space structure space-image, the second
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Bronstein’s effort is at nothing less than providing the tools for calibrating the aesthetic and the ethical. This meshes strikingly with Levinas’ wish for a philosophy that would recognize “the power to conjure up illusions which language has,” but whose “lucidity” would nevertheless “not abolish the beyond of these illusions” (1996a: 56). The terms of Bronstein’s passage return us to the question raised above, namely how to imagine the structure and the nature of the body that would sustain the non-synthetic relation between fabrica and the fabric of interhuman intrigue. Here we recall the corollary of this question: given the differing ethical obligations of these two notions, what are the ethics of crafting, through the act of writing, the body that they would have to share?9 A first step in responding to this would be to dismiss the concept of text itself as the metaphorical underpinning of a writing that would explore the space between these two notions. In its place we would pose the notion that any interhuman fabric would necessarily be a nonwoven one. This shift permits Levinas’ fabric to open to the unknowable even at the level of its operative metaphor. Unbound by warp and woof, his writing—and the interhuman fabric it addresses and also constitutes—reveals itself as the producer and the product of an aleatory and ultimately unknowable but nevertheless enactable intrigue. This anchors a sinew between Levinas and 9
Here it is worth noting Frank Chin’s claim that “any question of language is a question of moral philosophy. Why do words get along together the way we want them to? Why do people? Those questions are the same. The languages are different” (1998: 403).
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Spinoza that would, at least under the rubric of a “human or interhuman intrigue as the fabric of ultimate intelligibility,” permit their ethics to commingle in and as a nonwoven fabric(a). Goffey notes that “Levinas has argued that nothing could be further from his own efforts to reverse the metaphysical—and ethical—prioritisation of the Same over the Other, as Spinozism.” But he remarks that, despite Levinas’ distanciation, “It is not clear how the transcendence of the Other, described by Levinas in terms of its incarnation in the face, could distinguish an other from Other, most particularly because it is so easy to extract a few sensible resemblances from a face, thus crushing its alterity under a wave of sameness” (1998: 72-3). But Goffey’s characterization elides the space within language— always, following Bronstein, a moral space—which Levinas, in a perfectly painterly gesture, manipulates by mobilizing several variable terms for alterity. Their confluence and associative ambiguity are integral properties in his writing. As Adriaan T. Peperzak notes, this variability and simultaneity is a “particular difficulty” for any translator who wishes to solve the rendering of Autre, autre, Autrui, and autrui, Levinas’ use of which is not always consistent. Among Levinas scholars it has become a convention to reserve ‘the Other’ with a capital for all places where Levinas means the human other, whether he uses Autrui, autrui, autre, or Autre. This convention has many inconveniences, however. For example, it cannot show the difference between Autre, when it is used to refer to God and when it refers to the human other. (1996: xiv)
Our objective is not on some simple level to reconcile Spinoza and Levinas, but to suggest that there is something to be gained from imagining, across the imperatives that separate them, a capacity for action that their relation makes possible. “But,” asks Goffey, “can we say that Spinozist nature marks the death of others?” For him the answer would be affirmative only to the extent that “we forget that Spinozist substance doesn’t ground [a subject],” that its “substance is quantity, and as it is not quantity in the sense of the extensive magnitudes dealt with by geometry, it must be an intensive quantity—a continuum of intensities. This experience forces thought by virtue of its unannullable intensity” (1998: 73). We might open a field of possibility by imagining this “unannullable intensity” together with Levinas’ existence which “can go beyond being” (Levinas, 1998b: 301). Even despite Levinas’ objections to the “Spinozist tradition,” perhaps its status as “intrigue” is itself
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an intensive property of sociality.10 Conversely, perhaps any thought forced by the experience of an “unannullable intensity” must be embedded in a convex (judgmental) or a concave (participatory) spatiality—which we could call a spatialized, fabricated ethics. At the close of Totality and Infinity, Levinas deploys precisely these terms, convex and concave, to reflect upon the mechanics by which the I identifies itself as the “same.” It is on the basis of this movement that the encounter with alterity becomes possible. This unfolds as the I beholds the “logical sphere” that is exposed to its gaze and, by means of this gaze, organizes this sphere into a totality. There is then, according to Levinas, a movement of reversion—a “reversion, so to speak, of convexity into concavity”—a kind of buckling in the “curvature of [intersubjective] space,” by means of which this logical sphere is inflected. This inflection produces the singularity of the I, its “ipseity” (1998b: 289, 291).11 What seems like an abrupt change into this geometric discourse accomplishes an important metaphorical illustration of a pivotal dynamic in Levinas’ philosophy. By means of the convex-concave reversion, he demonstrates that ipseity “does not consist in [the identity of the individual] being like to itself, and in letting itself be identified from the outside by the finger that points to it; it consists in being the same—in being oneself, identifying oneself from within” (1998b: 289). This buckling is crucial. It crafts the interiority without which the encounter with exteriority means nothing, and also elucidates the materiality of the intersubjective space—that continuum in which the I is able to recognize itself as the other’s other and thus able to inaugurate a properly ethical sociality: “the social relation, the idea of infinity, the presence in a container of a content exceeding its capacity, was described in this book as the logical plot of being.” Levinas goes so far as to suggest that “the entire analysis of interiority pursued in this work describes the conditions of this reversion” (1998b: 289). His designation of the “intersubjective space […] as ‘curvature’” implies that, rather than imagine sight to be fundamental to the 10
In his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda contrasts extensive properties—such as “length, area and volume […] amount of energy or entropy […] which are intrinsically divisible”—from intensive properties, “such as temperature or pressure, which cannot be so divided” (2002: 26). Deleuze contends “that an intensive property is not so much one that is indivisible but one which cannot be divided without involving a change in kind” (DeLanda, 2002: 26-7). 11 It is interesting to note that, in mathematical terminology, “inflection” designates “a change of curvature from convex to concave or vice versa” (Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1996).
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intersubjective encounter, it is in fact the encounter with alterity itself that frames and substantiates the phenomenon of sight and the acts of looking and seeing: That the Other is placed higher than me would be a pure and simple error if the welcome I make him consisted in “perceiving” a nature. Sociology, psychology, physiology are thus deaf to exteriority. Man as Other comes to us from the outside, a separated—or holy—face. His exteriority, that is, his appeal to me, is his truth. […] This surplus of truth over being and over its idea, which we suggest by the metaphor of the “curvature of intersubjective space” is, perhaps, the very presence of God. (1998b: 291)
Here again we find Levinas thinking sociality in prophetic terms, making “way for the wisom of heaven to return to earth” (1996c: 158). If Levinas can suggest that “[t]he face to face is a final and irreducible relation which no concept could cover without the thinker who thinks that concept finding himself forthwith before a new interlocutor; it makes possible the pluralism of society” (1998b: 291), he gives us license to ask whether there is ultimately any need for a God in the interhuman intrigue—even though we may rightly call this intrigue divine. To put it differently, the essential variability of Levinas’ Autre and autre, Autrui and autrui permits us to consider his writing, much like a painting, as a moral space where God is sought but not found and where, even within the terms of Levinas’ philosophy, it would matter little if he were. Wandering About in Sensation In his Existence and Existents, Levinas had suggested that the work of art could also serve as a site of alterity; it could derail intentionality, cause it to get “lost in sensation itself, and it is this wandering about in sensation […] that produces the aesthetic effect.” The work of art lends “the character of alterity to the objects represented which are nonetheless part of our world” (1978: 53).12 What would it mean to literalize this expression, “the character of alterity?” Levinas’ writing does indeed seem to make it possible for alterity to present itself as a dispersonified character—not unlike the “Mysterious 12
In his discussion of Existence and Existents, Howard Caygill links Levinas’ aesthetics and the theme of lostness in sensation opened in “Reality and its Shadow” to the theme of exhaustion and horror so crucial in his early philosophical writing (2002: 68).
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Companion” that Bronstein’s Philippe meets in the thrall of the aesthetic effect: “Whenever I am in the presence of a great—I mean, real or moving— painting, I am also in the presence of another presence in me and in the painting. I call this presence the ‘Mysterious Companion’” (1995: 18). In Book V of Bronstein’s Fragments we find ourselves faced with an incarnation of the Mysterious Companion, but this time not in the realm of the artwork. Yet this Companion gives the “character of alterity” an intonation of precisely the “inhuman and monstrous” dimension that Levinas discovered in aesthetic experience. Strangely this Companion appears, is exposed, in a short letter, addressed to a presumably fictional character, Mrs. Paul Berg. The letter reads: “The Secretary of the Army deeply regrets to inform you of the death of your husband on September 24, near Bologna. Further details will follow” (1995: 75). This is the only section of Bronstein’s book that has the audacity to be no more than one page long. These two numbing sentences constitute a doubled death sentence for Berg’s widow. The first makes her husband’s death official. It officially kills him with the banality of military efficiency: an interminable intelligibility. The second sentence puts to death that part of her that was his—to the extent that she shared it with him—implicitly registering its death. “Further details will follow”: Which ones? What good could they serve now? But of course for this reason she needs them all the more; “near Bologna.” How near? In a town that has a name, a place that she might visit or refuse ever to visit, a place with a name that might be hers to curse? Or in a nameless zone between fronts? Is it conceivable that the military would not have known the precise location of his death when it sent this first letter? How could they know enough to say “near Bologna” and not enough to say just where, precisely? And if they knew too little to say just where, with certainty, then why bother with the effort at specificity in the first place? She cannot do anything other than wander in this fog that is produced by the conjunction of the inhuman and the all-too-human, an affective and intellectual atopia that hovers between the cold facts stated in the letter and their promise of greater certainty to come. What more consequential certainty could there be than the one already delivered? Perhaps only the lucidity that sent him to his death in the first place. This soldier’s widow does not exist as a character in Bronstein’s book except as the imagined interiority that remains in the wake of the letter’s death sentence. It is not enough to say that the reader (at turns we and Mrs. Berg) or the author (again, at turns, the military clerk and Bronstein) imagines this interiority and makes it present by means of writing, or reading. Mrs. Berg is posed by the writing’s encounter with her. This writing poses her, conjures her in all of her actuality as an interlocutor. It does this much as
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the letter itself would in the world outside the book—a world that, if this character is real enough to exist as the imagined and traumatized reader that she must be in order for Bronstein’s letter to do its work, is and must be inseparable from the book. The delivery of this letter to the home of a woman whom it will have just made a widow also exposes her in a way that is at once faceless—sender and recipient will never meet each other—and intimate. What could be more intimate than to share with her, to force upon her, the secret of her loved one’s death? Who has not reread a hundred times that letter which delivers horrifying news, in the hope that we must have read it wrong, or indeed that, even though we know we have read it correctly, we might nevertheless find something in the space between the words that will permit a different reading, another conclusion, a passage out of the “inhuman interval?” Here amidst this ethical encounter—made possible by the concaveconvex bucklings of this fabric that suffuses the book and life, life and art— we can draw a distinction between space and interval. Space, the space in art that is a moral space, operates as “the fragment in which the unseizable whole of life, material and moral, is transubstantiated or seized.” The interval, on the other hand, that “eternal duration of the interval in which a statue is immobilized […] is the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring—something inhuman and monstrous,” does not permit us to seize or transubstantiate the whole of life. It faces us with it, the inhuman presence without which the interhuman intrigue is unintelligible. Bibliography Badiou, Alain (2001). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, London and New York: Verso. Benjamin, Walter (1977). The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London: Verso. Bronstein, Léo (1995). Fragments of Life, Metaphysics and Art, New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Caygill, Howard (2002). Levinas and the Political, London and New York: Routledge. Chin, Frank (1998). Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays, Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P. DeLanda, Manuel (2002). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles (1992). Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Zone.
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Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, (1994). What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia UP. Derrida, Jacques (1978). “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge. Filliou, Robert (1970). Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts. Ed. Kasper König. Köln and New York: König. Goffey, Andy (1998). “nature=x: notes on Spinozist ethics,” The Virtual Embodied: presence/practice/ technology, ed. John Wood, London and New York: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce (1991). “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford, Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Levinas, Emmanuel (1998a). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. —— (1998b). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. —— (1996a). “Meaning and Sense,” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 33-64. —— (1996b). “Peace and Proximity,” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 161-69. —— (1996c). “Transcendence and Intelligibility,” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 149-59. —— (1987). “Reality and its Shadow,” Emmanuel Levinas: Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Nijhoff. —— (1978). Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Nijhoff. Lisbon, Laura (1999). “Painting and Ethics (or looking for painting),” Beauty is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design, eds. Richard Roth and Susan King Roth, New York: G+B Arts International. Peperzak, Adriaan T. (1996). “Preface,” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, vii-xv. Rose, Gillian (1997). Love’s Work, New York: Vintage. Rötzer, Florian (1995). Conversations with French Philosophers, trans. Gary F. Aylesworth, New Jersey: Humanities. Wijers, Louwrien (1996) Writing As Sculpture, 1978-1987, London: Academy Editions.
A MIND POISED BETWEEN DESIRES: THE ETHOS OF T.S. ELIOT’S POETRY AND CRITICISM 1 DAVID WATSON In this essay, Watson explores the role played by criticism in the construction of the rhetorical ethos of T.S. Eliot’s writing. He examines the ambiguous relationship between Eliot’s poetry and criticism, showing that the ethos adopted in Eliot’s criticism revises his poetic personality by imposing order on what is unruly and chaotic in the poems. This essay illustrates that these revisions are indicative of an ethical problematic where criticism becomes the means whereby Eliot confronts otherness, and subjugates or expels the forces threatening his poetic self. It also argues that the task of Eliot’s criticism is self-fashioning: it installs an ethos designed to guarantee the autonomy and stability of the self.
If a writer wishes to give the effect of speech he must positively give the effect of himself talking in his own person or in one of his roles; and if we are to express ourselves, our variety of thoughts and feelings, on a variety of subjects with inevitable rightness, we must adapt our manner to the moment with infinite variations. Examinations of the development of Elizabethan drama shows this progress in adaptation, a development from monotony to variety, a progressive refinement in the perception of the variations of feeling, and a progressive elaboration of the means of expressing these variations. T.S. Eliot (1976: 38)
By the end of this passage from “‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama,” it is not entirely clear whether Eliot is talking about writing or acting. Certainly, in a text in which the word “adapt” recurs and where Eliot instructs his readers, implicitly, to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” (1963: 14), as if he is J. Alfred Prufrock, the facility with which a writer expresses gradations of feeling could well come to seem less a matter of talking in one’s own voice and more of assuming a role. Eliot’s readers are certainly invited to view the writer “talking in his own person,” as if engaging in a 1
This article has been produced under the auspices of a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the University of the Witwatersrand.
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solitary, off-stage confessional, as being monotonous, as lacking the expressive and emotional range of an author or speaker adept at assuming a dramatic persona. Even so, this is, from one point of view, always an option—the writer can speak in his own voice “or” in the voice of “one of his roles.” But, looked at another way and taking into account the privilege given to plural forms in the passage, this will provide the writer with merely “the effect of speech” and not an “infinite” variety of expressive means. “No artist,” Eliot states, “produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his personality” (1976: 114)—the self is potentially a trap, liable to imbibe the writer to the point of stagnation; better to give a performance that is disengaged, impersonal, “a continual self-sacrifice” (1975: 40). Better, according to him, for the writer to be doubled by a persona, a role, to present himself without representing himself. After all, the “progress”—the future— of an author depends for Eliot on this carnivalisation of the self. Perhaps this is why his writing can be at times exhilarating—always surprising the reader with new voices; and at time exhausting to follow—it never settles into a stationary representation of a voice or a self. Eliot’s evasions of his personality in his writing and the various permutations of his voice are subjects to get lost in, but for the moment, a more restricted point needs to be made. In Eliot’s writing, questions of the self are inseparable from questions regarding representation, questions of how figures shape and perform the represented self. He dissuades his readers from looking in the text for an authentic self, a straightforward picture of the author, and draws their attention instead to the roles the writer performs in a text. Eliot’s theorization of self-presentation forces his readers beyond the experiential, biographical content of his work to gain an understanding of his permeable voice.2 The roles he assumes in his texts function as intermediaries between the reader and the empirical author, but resist conveying us from text to author: I don’t believe that the relation of a poem to its origins is capable of being very clearly traced […] if, either on the basis of what poets try to tell you, or by biographical research, with or without the tools of the psychologist, you attempt to explain a poem, you will probably be getting further and further away from the poem without arriving at any destination. (1957: 98) 2
Cf. James E. Miller Jr., T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land, 1977, in which the author argues that excisions in The Waste Land cover up references to Eliot’s attraction to Jean Verdenal, for a different approach to Eliot’s writing. The reading presented here takes as a given, however, that Eliot “spells out” for his readers “the noncorrespondence between Identity and representations” (Jay 1983: 35), and attempts to remain faithful to Eliot’s interpretative demands.
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What is the reader left with after the interpretative claims of biography have been demystified? After this interpretative foreclosure, there remains a performance of a self, a self-presentation resistant to an interpretative nostalgia for “origins” with which to contend. Classical rhetoric would term this performance the ethos of the text—the qualities and characteristics of the rhetor as they are performed in discourse. Derived from Lysias’ ethopoiia, which focuses on how character is conveyed by language, the classical conception of ethos centered on how one presents a “good character” (Baumlin 1994: xii). Selected by Aristotle as “the most potent of all the means to persuasion” (Aristotle 1954: 9), the ethos of a text summons up the imaginary presence of the author, and brings the reader face to face not with the actual writer, but with his ambiguous rendering in the text. It fulfils the function of the author in the text—it presents itself as the origin of discourse and lends human authority to linguistic utterances. What has been called here Eliot’s self-presentations or roles are in fact different forms of ethos, While resistant to unveiling himself as an object for analysis, Eliot is far less recalcitrant regarding the multiple roles he assumes. At the same time that he makes himself an object of presentation, he engages in the theorization of this performance: the structure of his writing is such that we encounter simultaneously differing presentations of a voice or self and a self-conscious reflection on the origin, nature and limitations of these roles. This matter is important, because problems involved in conceptualizing the multivalent ethos of his work are central to Eliot’s writing. This point will be returned to, but first it is necessary to attend longer to the similarities between traditional rhetoric’s conception of ethos and Eliot’s theorizing of his self-presentation. His insistence that “we must adapt our manner to the moment” recalls nothing so much as the Protagorean notion of kairos—the suitability of language to its occasion (Untersteiner 1954: 197). Both the writer and the rhetor must respond with a timely utterance to the specificities of the discursive situation in which they find themselves. Their ethos is neither immutable nor dependent exclusively upon an antecedent moral reputation (Aristotle 1954: 9), but is to be continuously forged anew in a manner responsive to changes in their environment. The development of a writer’s ethos is not solely a matter of a willful and “progressive refinement” of his sensibility; the intentions of the writer are at the mercy of the “moment,” and his cultivation of his skills is a preparation for when he is called on to respond to an unforeseen presence. The notion of kairos calls then for a temporally sensitive ethos and for a temporalisation of the notion of ethos, which from here on is subjected to, and determined by, the exigencies of the moment. It is in this spirit that Eliot criticizes Philip Massinger for looking “at life through the eyes of his predecessors” at “the
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moment when a new view of life is wanted” (1976: 220). As this suggests, kairos is connected to the “new” and, beyond it, to notions such as renewal and modernity. Additionally, it also needs to be recognized that in the same manner classical rhetoric’s notion of ethos is linked frequently to ethical questions pertaining to the character assumed by the rhetor, Eliot’s multivalent ethos (and the related notion of kairos) needs to be situated within the complex and often contradictory ethical discourse suggested by his texts, a discourse startlingly similar in some respects to the work of Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas on ethics. One of Eliot’s recurrent strategies in his criticism is to make claims that are simultaneously descriptive and evaluative in nature. His reading of Massinger, for instance, contains propositions both on how Massinger wrote and on how he “ought” to have written. There are ethical implications to this discursive gambit—by distinguishing between “is” and “ought” (fact and value), he is inscribing a law, a code of conduct, which must be acquiesced to for the self to become an ethical subject or, rather, an ethical subject according to the terms employed here by Eliot. (Eliot acknowledges, indirectly, the difficulty of adhering to these demands through the provisional and qualificatory aspects of his style. It is as if his writing reflects the “frightful toil” [1976: 30] required to conflate “is” and “ought.”) Part of the problem in accounting for what constitutes a fitting or proper response to Eliot’s demands is that this response is rarely singular, but is often split and divided and calls up two different ethical orders that cannot be assumed a priori to be compatible. If one aspect of Eliot’s discourse conforms to an understanding of ethics that views it as a self-directed enterprise involving the formation and cultivation of the self, then the other side of it is suggestive of an ethics centered on the relationship between self and other, in which the self is called on to respond to the unforeseen presence of an other. Michel Foucault, some sixty years later, was to elaborate an ethics wherein “the idea of the self is not given to us” (1984: 351) but is to be constructed through “a sort of work” (1984: 360) whereby “we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (1984: 351). Foucault’s conception of ethics as a self-directed activity captures one aspect of Eliot’s ethos—the part concerned with how the self fabricates a role, making it thereby difficult to speak of an authentic, original self. This correspondence falters, however, when it comes to Eliot’s conception of kairos—the self’s readiness to respond to the demands of the other. Foucault, although recognizing the self’s allegiance to rules outside the subject, is not that interested in these codes (1984: 355), which, for him, remain consistent throughout the West in any case. However, for Eliot, the demands of the “moment” cannot be reduced to a repetition of the same; these obligations are “new” and surprising. Can it not be said that there is
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some proximity between Eliot’s thought and Emmanuel Levinas’ work on the responsibility one is called to by an other, a responsibility that is “my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the other” (Levinas 1984: 62)? Is it not possible to interpret Eliot’s call for the writer to respond to the “moment” as inscribing in his text an obligation similar to what Levinas describes as the necessity of responding to the other with a biblical “here I am” (Levinas 1981: 143)? It is doubtful whether one can fully associate the writing of Eliot with the ethics of Levinas, which is marked by aspects of Judaism and memories of the Holocaust. It is also difficult to find straightforward correspondences between a poet’s work and an ethics proclaiming that an artwork “does not give itself out as the beginning of a dialogue” (Levinas 1989: 131), and which asserts the incompatibility of ethics and aesthetics.3 Yet, there subsist traces of an ethos in Eliot’s writing obliging him to respond to a call of an unforeseen moment. Eliot’s ethos is poised between two different ethical codes. One centers on the self, one on the other; one presents the subject as the active agency of its own engendering, whereas an external agency determines the responses of the self in the other. Montaigne, in his “How Our Mind Tangles Itself Up,” provides a sketch of a subject trapped in a double-bind created by conflicting desires: “It is a pleasant thought to imagine a mind exactly poised between two parallel desires, for it would indubitably never reach a decision, since making a choice implies that there is an inequality of value” (1991: 692). Traces of such a conflict permeate Eliot’s writing. They are visible when he says the “progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (1975: 42). This apposition suggests a correspondence between “self-sacrifice” and “extinction,” but they are not synonymous. The latter calls for an escape from personality, which is the a priori necessity in Eliot’s work for the self to be able to assume a role, and by presenting this flight as illogically perpetual (Lee 1979: 48), Eliot is reminding his audience that there is a difference here between “is” and “ought.” Unlike “extinction,” a “sacrifice”—also presented as a continuous act, as if the sacrificial self can never be exhausted—takes place because an other must be satisfied. The terse apposition attempts to bring together two different aspects of Eliot’s ethos, his concerns for the cultivation of the self and his insistence on the necessity of being responsive to the other. Sometimes Eliot’s discourse privileges the notion that a poet’s ethos needs to be constructed through a rigorous process of self-formation. Thus in Dante, in whose writing “private belief becomes a different thing in becoming poetry” (Eliot 1976: 258), “every degree of the feeling of humanity, from 3
Cf. Robert Eaglestone’s “‘Cold Splendor’: Levinas’ Suspicion of Art.”
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lowest to highest, has […] an intimate relation to the next above and below, and all fit together according to the logic of sensibility” (Eliot 1976: 258-9) because, according to Eliot, Dante imposes a logical order on his feelings and emotions. At other times, it appears this ethos is formed by surrendering to forces outside the self: after depicting the self as lacking will and consciousness, as being unable to “stop or think” (Eliot 1963, V: 336) in “What the Thunder Said” from The Waste Land, Eliot speaks approvingly of how the “heart” responds gladly and obediently to “controlling hands” (1963 V: 420, 422). As these instances suggest, there is a tension in Eliot’s discursive ethos between inside and outside, between a self-determining agency and the acceptance of an obligation coming from outside the subject. There seems to be a tendency in Eliot’s discourse to avoid settling for a stable conception of the self: it is as if his poetry and criticism engage in a performance of discordant roles and self-presentations so as to avoid the sense of closure promised by a stable ethos. If it were not the case that, as will be discussed shortly, Eliot’s writing unsettles stable distinctions between criticism and poetry, it would be tempting to associate the tension visible in Eliot’s conception of the ethos a poet performs in writing with discursive tensions between his criticism and poetry. It appears, after all, that the critical faculties of a poet play a central role in the self-cultivation of a poet’s ethos. It is through what Eliot calls in the next citation “critical labour” that willful self-formation takes place: the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightening toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a talented and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism […] some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior. There is a tendency, and I think it is a whiggery [sic] tendency, to decry this critical toil of the artist; to propound the thesis that the great artist is an unconscious artist, unconsciously inscribing on his banner the words Muddle Through. (1976: 3031)
The first thing to be noted regarding this passage is that criticism shades here into poetic composition: criticism is the “the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing,” as Eliot puts it. No longer belonging to some indeterminate point in time when a poem is read and interpreted, criticism takes place in the writing of the poem. The acts Eliot associates with criticism (“sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing”) form a progressive series: raw material is selected, combined, structured and ordered, revised or removed, and, finally, read and
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judged. Taken as a series of tropes, this sequence progresses from metonymical selection to metaphorical association to more complicated acts of structuring and revisions, thereby describing a movement from formless linguistic material to a structured poetic utterance. There are some difficulties here in determining which aspects of poetic composition are not part of “critical labour.” What is also apparent is that criticism plays a central role in the formation of a poet’s textual ethos. Some writers “are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior” and these “others” appear to be for Eliot the “unconscious” artists society elevates unjustly. Eliot is not using the term “unconscious” here in a Freudian sense; it refers to a lack of self-reflection on the part of the artist, a tendency to speak directly without subjecting an utterance to the workings of a critical consciousness. It is the labors of criticism that distinguish the expressions of the “superior” writer, such as Dante, from that of those talking merely in their own voices. It would be a mistake to dismiss Eliot’s criticism as playing a superficial role in the construction of his poetic ethos. His ability to interact critically with his utterances is what makes it possible for him to cultivate a role and differ from himself. What type of role or ethos is developed when the poet makes himself the object of his criticism? Eliot’s critiques of Charles Baudelaire and William Blake are helpful in this regard; after all, he criticizes them primarily for their failure as critics. In his 1930 essay on Baudelaire, Eliot suggests that the formal perfection of Baudelaire’s poetry conceals “an inner disorder.” The interiority of the speaking subject—the poet—is exteriorized in Baudelaire’s poems, and the text imposes on this chaotic self a structuring “form of life.” Instead of repressing the “inner disorder” of the poet, however, this “receptacle” breaks under the pressure of the poet’s uncontrolled “feelings,” leading to a deplorable rupture of the vessel in which his self was to be subdued (1976: 424). Similarly, William Blake’s poetry suffers from not being “controlled by a respect for impersonal reason,” which invariably leaves him “naked,” “terrifying” and “inclined to formlessness” (1976: 319-20). Unlike Dante, Blake and Baudelaire are unable to separate private and poetic selves, and to achieve the disinterested intellectual ordering of the self Eliot prizes in Dante’s writing. His interpretations of Baudelaire’s and Blake’s poetry tend to linger on its bathetic qualities, as if the excess of emotions in their work is a personal affront to him. Emotions are daemonized as a menace to the poet’s ethos. Against this threat, Eliot defends the use of force, of “material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind”: the poet must be able “to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (1976: 289). His task, or that of any poet, is to discipline his material into “something precise, tractable, under control” (1976: 25). Julia Kristeva comes close to describing this process when she
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states that “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself, within the same motion which ‘I’ claim to establish myself” (1982: 3). This dialectic of expulsion and structuring is what Eliot described as the “critical labour” of a writer. This “labour” is the source of the order he wishes to impose on the poet’s raw material. It is the means whereby the self is evaded and the daemonic lingering in the mind is cured. At stake in Eliot’s critical writing is the capacity of criticism to keep the interior voices of the poet separate from his writing, and the possibility of constructing a role for the self through the active imposition of poetic form on the formless text of the mind, an ordering that is for him tantamount to an active evasion of the emotional content of the poet’s ethos. What has been described here as a tendency in Eliot’s writing to subscribe to a mode of interpreting a poet’s ethos as involving a structuring agency external to the self hardly figures in this account of the self-engendering of a poet’s ethos through “critical labour.” The ordering and disciplining Eliot recommends are active, self-directed actions, and they leave little room, apparently, for surrender to forces outside the self. As intimated in “Frontiers of Criticism,” the “critical labour” of a poet can only account for this influence of an external authority as an aporia in its account of a poet’s ethos: “I am even prepared to suggest that there is, in all great poetry, something which must remain unaccountable however complete might be our knowledge of the poet, and that that is what matters most” (Eliot 1957: 112). The primary problem of this passage is the nature of the “something” criticism cannot account for. Eliot’s decision to expand on this comment by referring to “our knowledge of the poet” rather than to “our knowledge of poetry” is instructive. Whatever this “something” is it refers to an aspect of the ethos a poet performs in a text. Taking into account that the “unaccountable” that appears inexplicably is “what matters most” in the poem, it is clear it does not refer to those unformed emotions on which criticism works. Part of neither the ethos constructed by Eliot’s criticism, nor the disavowed self, this “unaccountable” trace points away from the sphere of the “I” towards an external agency that resists the intellectual, interpretative force of criticism. Yet, even if this “unaccountable” agency remains an epistemological blind spot, it is not something wholly separate from the poet: its influence is felt in the poem and its presentation of the poet’s ethos. Epistemologically other, but not absolutely other, this “unaccountable” marks for Eliot the limits of the ethos produced by criticism and serves as a reminder that the self subsists in a network of forces that cannot be totalised by “critical labour.” Probably no text by Eliot has provided his critics with as many opportunities to ponder the limits of his criticism as The Waste Land. Consider, for example, the contradictory responses elicited by the “Notes on
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The Waste Land.” Added after the poem’s initial appearance, they conflate poetry and criticism by charting the genesis of many of the poem’s allusions in an apparently authoritative manner that has led Terry Eagleton to remark that “behind the back of this ruptured, radically decentered poem runs an alternative text which is nothing less than the closed, coherent, authoritative discourse of the mythologies which frame it” (1990: 150); the critical notes act, from this perspective, like a container or receptacle for the “decentered” text and its wayward significations. Ruth Nevo argues, however, that the relation between the notes and the poem is ambiguous; the notes “displace or replace” (1985: 102) the meanings of the text, adding thereby to our interpretative delirium. This argument suggests that, instead of illuminating the poem itself, the notes point, indirectly, to the limitations of a critical enterprise dedicated to exposing the hidden meanings of a text: they force the reader to recognize the presence of an unaccounted for “something” not interiorised by the criticism’s discourse. The broader ambiguities inherent in the relationship between Eliot’s poetry and criticism, and the tendency in his writing to blur this distinction at certain points are of lesser concern here than what the moments in his texts when the “critical labour” of the poet is frustrated reveal about his self-presentation, and, more specifically, about the tensions inherent in his presentation of a poetic ethos. The third section of “The Burial of the Dead” is exemplary in this regard. Not only do the ambiguities inherent in Eliot’s conceptualization of his ethos figure prominently in the passage, it also provides an illustration of how Eliot conflates poetry and the “critical labour” involved in the construction of a poetic ethos in his writing. Its central drama, the tale of the hyacinth girl and her lover, wherein Eliot plunges headlong into the ecstasies and failures of romantic love, is framed by two passages from, respectively, the first and last act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde that function as a critical commentary on the narrative they encapsulate: Frisch weht der Wind [Fresh blows the wind] Der Heimat zu [From off the bow] Mein Irisch Kind, [My Irish maid,] Wo weilest du? [Where lingerest thou?] ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’ — Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
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The framing device functions as a lens focussing our interpretation of the passage. By presenting “myth as a frame for temporal life” (Bentley and Brooker 1990: 69) it invites the discovery of correspondences between the tragic lovers from Tristan und Isolde and the modern lovers. What reading of the central episode does its frame suggest? This frame contains many of Eliot’s familiar suggestions regarding personality and emotions. His own voice is silenced by his assumption of the roles of a sailor singing to Isolde a song of a sailor pitying the woman awaiting his return, and of a shepherd reporting to the fatally wounded Tristan that there is no sign of ship bearing Isolde with her healing arts: desolate and empty the sea. In the interstices of these passages in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde consummate a disastrous and ecstatic love affair, and Isolde enters into an arranged marriage with King Mark. These passages foreground, however, the lack of communication and contact between these characters. The lovers are kept apart both by tragic events and by a rift created by Eliot’s selections from Wagner’s text. Eliot evades the passionate content of Wagner’s opera and foregrounds its tragic character. In his hands, the tale of Tristan and Isolde becomes a cautionary tale of tragedy arising from a dalliance with untrustworthy, better-suppressed emotions—a love potion lies at the root of their love affair, which brings about a set of contrived and irrational responses and events. The citations from Wagner reconstruct in The Waste Land the impersonal ethos encountered in Eliot’s criticism, which appears here again as a defense against emotions and a lesson in how to ward off tragedy. In other words, the lesson of Eliot’s framing device here bears a striking similarity to his claims regarding Dante, Baudelaire and Blake: he cautions against uncontrolled emotions and passions left undisciplined by logical thought, and, implicitly, takes up a position that calls for the avoidance of these aspects of the self. Moreover, by evading in his selection from the text aspects of Wagner’s opera that would suggest a more ambivalent response towards unconstrained feelings and emotions, Eliot (or rather the role Eliot assumes at this point in his poem) performs the same gesture that he recommends. The persona that quotes these selections from Wagner’s text is not only attempting to impose an interpretative frame on the tale of the hyacinth girl and her lover, but is also engaged in excising the emotional content from both Wagner’s and his own narrative. 4
Translation by George Williamson in A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot, 1965: 131.
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While the framing device Eliot employs here suggests a poetic ethos reminiscent of that encountered in his critical essays, the episode framed by the passages from Wagner appears to head off in a quite different direction. The easy eroticism of the hyacinth girl supplies that which is missing inbetween the passages lifted from Wagner: the emotions of a love affair. It is as if the repressed returns, as if emotional content cannot be excised without returning in a different guise. The movement from the “hyacinth garden” to the isolation of the lover who is “neither / Living nor dead” seems to suggest, however, some fall from grace5 or, at least, a repetition of the separation of Tristan and Isolde. Yes, from one point of view, the drama between the “hyacinth girl” and her lover functions as a rhetorical proof for the argument implied by the framing device: if the tale of Tristan and Isolde suggest that tragedy results from uncontrolled emotions, then this claim seems to be supported by the modern lover’s paralysis and silence. But, looked at in a manner that does not take the argument of the citations as an interpretative a priori, the words of the “hyacinth girl” disrupt the consistency of Eliot’s discourse. “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago” she states, thereby implying that the act that brought her and her lover together is repeated in the present. While Tristan and Isolde’s tragedy is demarcated temporally by the separation of the lovers and the opera’s tragic conclusion, no such end is in sight for the “hyacinth girl” and her lover. The apparent isolation and anxiety of the lover is contextualized as a passing moment in his relationship with the “hyacinth girl.” The lessons of the framing device are inverted here in a crucial way: emotional connections are privileged over a retreat into impersonality; passion is presented as containing and negating a potential separation. The significations of the words of the “hyacinth girl” burst through their interpretative and formal framework, leading to interpretations neither controlled nor authorized by the frame that would seem to contain it all. This complex interplay between frame and episode illustrates Eliot’s ambivalence regarding different forms of ethos. If the framing narrative is the preferential locus of interpretation, Eliot is propounding an ethos of impersonality, an ethos that goes hand in hand with the daemonization of emotions. However, if the hyacinth girl’s words are privileged then this impersonality is subordinated to an ethos emphasizing emotions and personal relationships. 5
Calvin Bedient, in He Do the Police in Different Voices, claims that once the “hyacinth girl” is “self-exposed” as a phantasmal figure, she “ceases to enchant the protagonist,” and both are expelled “from the hyacinth garden” (1986: 31-2). The interpretation presented here suggests that this scene is more ambivalent than Bedient allows for.
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The interior monologue of the lover allows for a further refinement of our understanding of this antithetical ethos. It begins with a dash followed by “Yet,” as if separating itself from the words spoken by the “hyacinth girl.” Calvin Bedient has suggested that this beginning “rescinds (recuts) the protagonist’s tie with the hyacinth girl” (1986: 48). But, taking into account the temporal narrative suggested by the “hyacinth girl,” is it not also possible to say that the lover is separating himself from the anonymous crowd who “called” her “the hyacinth girl?” All the anxieties of the lover are concentrated initially on his inability to define in terms of speech, sight and knowledge the experience in the garden. He might be able to look at the “hyacinth girl” with “arms full” and “hair wet,” but what escapes him is the ability to make this cognition his own—to interiorise it as the series of “eyes” and “knew” suggests—and transform it into knowledge or speech. Instead, he is confronted by an unknown, or “unaccountable,” “heart of light, the silence” that he experiences as an aporia in his critical faculties. The dilemma of the protagonist here doubles that of Eliot in “Frontiers of Criticism,” where he confronts the limit of criticism, and our dilemma in accounting for the relation between frame and episode in this passage. In each of these instances, a critical gesture is frustrated by its inability to give an account of what it encounters and attempts to encapsulate. It is not certain that the “critical labour” of the poet will be successful. It is this recognition that lies at the root of such claims by Eliot as “poetry is a constant reminder of all the things that […] are untranslatable” (1957: 13), and “the critical mind operating in poetry […] may always be in advance of the critical mind operating upon poetry” (1933: 30). As this passage reminds the reader, the fate of criticism is tangled up, in Eliot, with the destiny of the self: “I was neither / Living nor dead,” the protagonist exclaims. What type of ethos is implied by this proposition? To answer this it is necessary to attend to the relation between the protagonist and the “heart of light, the silence” deflecting his “critical labour.” “Looking into the heart of light,” into a source of illumination, is the equivalent of looking into the sun—blindness results. The lover’s descent into blindness arises from a confrontation with an agency outside himself. Similarly, it seems as if his silence duplicates and interiorises “the silence” produced by the “light”—”silence” is the product of a synaesthetic transfer translating blindness into an absence of sound. To say that he is in-between life and death is to say that he is determined and acted upon by an agency located outside the self. Here, at the “heart” of the aporia Eliot glimpses in criticism, he returns to the other dimension of his ethos—the aspect of his ethos that surrenders itself to the workings and intentions of the other. Interestingly, a certain leveling occurs in the passage between the “heart of light” and the “hyacinth girl” with “arms full” and “hair wet.” There are two
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instances of “looking” in the passage: first, the protagonist’s gaze is directed at the girl, then at the “heart of light.” In the first instance, sight is present as slipping away; in the second, that which is seen, what the lover is “looking into,” is unknowable. The “unaccountable” and the emotional are equalized by the similarities between their destabilizing effects on the self. In both instances, the only possibility open to the self seems to be to relinquish an autonomous ethos to the desires and determinations of an other—to “adapt” to “the silence”, to bring “hyacinths” to his lover. The shifts and turns in the discourse of the third section of “The Burial of the Dead” dramatizes Eliot’s complex and shifting poetic ethos, an ethos that resists incorporation into a univocal understanding of the poet and his work, and also of the role he adopts in his writing. Eliot’s performance of himself in his work causes his discourse to hover between different and conflicting versions of his ethos, without giving its full allegiance to one particular role, one particular “form of life.” In a letter Eliot wrote to Herbert Read (April 23, 1928) on his sense of rootlessness, he expressed the desire to write an essay that would reflect the experiences of a self without a stable sense of identity, perpetually lost in the roles he is called on to play: I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn’t an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn’t a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the USA up to a hundred years ago was a family extension. (quoted in Spender 1975: 16)
Literally speaking, Eliot never got around to writing this very confessional essay, but then he did not need to. Passages such as the episode from “The Burial of the Dead” discussed here duplicate and intensify this sense of a self lost in roles, of an ethos that cannot be pinned down, restricted to one “form of life.” The voice in his poetry, his ethos, serves as a reminder that the self is a fluid construct, that the “I” cannot make a home out of one performance, one self-presentation. It is easy to find in this rootlessness an optimistic fable of the liberation of the self from static and immobile conceptions of identity. This optimistic reading needs to be tempered, somewhat, by an awareness of the price exacted on Eliot’s ethics by this stance. The tensions in his ethos are primarily the product of the disruptive interaction of two different ethical codes, two different understandings of the self that appear to be irreconcilable. Between an ethics responsive to the other and an ethics focussed on the cultivation and presentation of the self there is, Eliot appears
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to be saying, a rift, a discursive space where they interfere with each other. His writing unveils nothing so much as the strain, difficulty and, perhaps, impossibility of thinking these two different ethics as a coherent ethos. Bibliography Aristotle (1954). Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, New York: Modern Library. Baumlin, James S. and Tita French Baumlin (1994). “Introduction: Positioning Ethos in Historical and Contemporary Theory,” Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. eds. James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin, Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, xi-xxxi. Bedient, Calvin (1986). He Do the Police in Different Voices, Chicago: U of Chicago P. Bentley, Joseph and Jewel Spears Brooker (1990). Reading “The Waste Land:” Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation, Amherst: U of Massachusetts P. Eaglestone, Robert (1997). “‘Cold Splendor’: Levinas Suspicion of Art,” Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 98-128. Eagleton, Terry (1990). Criticism and Ideology, London: Verso. Eliot, T.S. (1976). Selected Essays, London: Faber & Faber. —— (1975). Selected Prose, London: Faber & Faber. —— (1963). Collected Poems, London: Faber & Faber. —— (1957). On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber & Faber. —— (1933). The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London: Faber & Faber. Foucault, Michel (1984). “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon, 340-72. Jay, Gregory S. (1983). T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP. Lee, Brian (1979). Theory of Personality: The Significance of T.S. Eliot’s Criticism, London: Athlone. Levinas, Emmanuel (1989). “Reality and its Shadow,” The Levinas Reader, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Seán Hand, Oxford: Blackwell, 129-43.
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—— (1984). “‘Ethics of the Infinite’, Interview with Richard Kearney,” Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. Richard Kearney, Manchester: Manchester UP, 47-70. —— (1981). Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Nijhoff. Miller Jr, James E. (1977). T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land, University Park: Penn State UP. Montaigne, Michel de (1991). The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech, London: Penguin. Nevo, Ruth (1985). “The Waste Land: Ur-text of Deconstruction,” T. S. Eliot, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea, 95-102. Spender, Stephen (1975). T.S. Eliot, New York: Penguin. Untersteiner, Mario (1954). The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman, New York: Philosophical Library. Williamson, George (1953). A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot, New York: Noonday.
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SENTIMENTALITY IN POSTMODERNIST FICTION: FROM ETHICAL PROBLEM TO ETHICAL POSSIBILITY JAKOB WINNBERG This essay takes issue with the contention that sentimentality is ethically as well as aesthetically questionable, a contention that makes sentimentality especially problematic in postmodernist fiction; firstly, because postmodernist fiction is marked by a heightened selfconsciousness that ought to preclude the alleged crudeness of sentimentality, and secondly, because postmodernist fiction is increasingly seen as confluent with an ethics of alterity that would preclude the alleged self-indulgence of sentimentality. Winnberg, however, argues that sentimentality may be perfectly compatible with both self-consciousness and with an ethics of alterity. He demonstrates how, in postmodernist narratives like Graham Swift’s Out of This World, sentimentality can actually be seen as emerging as a route to the affective openness of “sensibility” that has such a decisive place in the thinking of Levinas. Ultimately, sentimentality has to be recognised, accepted and understood as a persisting, inescapable part of society that deserves a place in cultural representations without ensuing accusations of aesthetic or ethical irresponsibility on the part of the artist. Rather than a problem, sentimentality constitutes a possibility.
In Graham Swift’s novel Out of This World (1988), a novel of trauma, alienation and cynicism, the narration is split between an estranged fatherdaughter pair, Harry and Sophie. The pair take turns blaming each other and exculpating themselves in inner monologues, instead of picking up a phone or pen and paper and establishing a real dialogue. Communication has broken down and they seem to be locked in a stalemate. However, the novel gradually works its way towards the promise of happiness, the promise of reunion. Part of the promise of happiness is Jenny, who re-enchants the world for Harry after he has lost his wife in a plane crash and his father in a terrorist bombing, and after he has spent most of his adult life as a war photographer. Set to marry Jenny, Harry waxes romantic: “She makes me feel—hell, she makes me feel that I’m half my age, that everything is possible. She makes me sing, unapologetically […] She makes me feel that the world is never so black with memories, so grey with age, that it cannot be re-coloured with the magic paint-box of the heart” (141). Thus, the novel houses the same tension
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between disillusionment and re-enchantment, and between cynicism and sentimentality, as most of Swift’s other novels—a tension that has confounded reviewers and critics, from Ben Okri, who deemed Learning to Swim “full of perverse sentimentality” (1985), to Peter Widdowson, who, referring to the above passage from Out of This World, is forced to ask: “Is this just a slip in stylistic decorum on the part of a most poised writer, or is the mawkish and meretricious language of sentiment here a sign of authorial disavowal?” (1995: 13).1 In fact, having difficulty reconciling the cynical and the sentimental in the novel, Widdowson has already expressed doubt regarding Swift’s integrity and control as a writer: “whether the novelist or novel is conscious of this self-deconstructing subtext I do not know” (1995: 15). This doubt is however particularly striking as, a few pages earlier, Widdowson has referred to Swift as “the most self-conscious and sophisticated writer of what I may, perhaps, be now forgiven for calling ‘fictory’” (1995: 11, emphases added).2 If Widdowson had wanted to avoid contradicting himself, he might simply have accused Swift of surreptitiously smuggling sentimentality into his simulacral wasteland. That he does not is indicative of the extent to which sentimentality is considered at odds with self-consciousness and sophistication. Indeed, ever since sentimentality fell on hard times, the main problem with it put forward by its critics has been that it is both aesthetically and ethically questionable. Sentimentality has fallen out of favour because, as Deborah Knights puts it, “it is taken as a mark of decline (or worse) in moral or aesthetic sensibility” (1999: 411). As Robert Solomon points out, “sentimentality is not only excluded from most discussions of ethics but, when discussed at all, is condemned as a serious or a laughable ethical defect,” and it is the same “in literature as in ethics” (1997: 227). Typically, the word, “sentimentality,” is used about works of fiction that are excessively melodramatic or tear-jerking in their quest to arouse sympathy for unfortunate or victimised characters, or that paint too rosy a picture of the world. But it is also used in the sense of attributing “undue importance” to sentiments “in opposition to reason” (Kaplan 1987: 17). In both these senses, the sentimental stands in opposition to the reasonable, the informed, the sophisticated and indeed the nihilistic and the cynical. However, it also stands in opposition to the ethical, as it invites charges of self-indulgence and 1 Indeed, as David Malcolm notes, Swift has been criticised for “the use of melodramatic story material that makes too great demands on the reader’s emotions” (2003: 4), and some critics have found that “Waterland and Ever After are overly sentimental” (2003: 5). 2 Widdowson’s portmanteau word, “fictory,” signifies a blend of fiction and history, akin to what Linda Hutcheon means by “historiographic metafiction.”
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of a cognitive failure that precludes appropriate assessment of a given situation as well as, consequently, action appropriate to that situation.3 Yet, as Solomon argues, sentimentality “need not be an escape from reality or responsibility; quite to the contrary, it may provide the precondition for ethical engagement, not an obstacle to it” (1997: 226). It is this potential of sentimentality I wish to pursue here, but with a more particular question in mind: how can sentimentality be reconciled with a postmodern ethics and with a postmodernist aesthetic sensibility? In other words, if a postmodernist writer like Swift, who, as I and others have argued elsewhere,4 dramatises a postmodern ethics, can resort to sentimental passages like the one from Out of This World quoted above, then how can we justify not doubting his control as a writer or accusing him of lack of sophistication—not to say lack of ethical responsibility? In what follows, I show precisely how such reconciliation and justification can be accomplished, as I argue that sentimentality persists in postmodernity, and in postmodernist fiction, as a mode of affect that does not necessarily stand in opposition to a postmodern ethics, such as it has been conceived in the wake of Emmanuel Levinas.5 Nor does sentimentality, for that matter, stand in opposition to a postmodernist aesthetics—rather, it is such a postmodernist aesthetics that, to a great extent, enables an ethically viable space for sentimentality. In order to work our way towards a firmer support for this position, we need to begin by reminding ourselves that “sentimentality” was originally a neutral or even positive term, popularly used to signify something that was valued highly, namely something characterised by sentiment. The chief sense of “sentiment” was “a thought or reflection coloured by or proceeding from emotion,” but, significant to my purpose here, it also had the sense of “an emotional thought expressed in literature or art” (OED). However, the positive value attached to these terms, as well as to the related but not synonymous term, “sensibility,” was part and parcel of that culture of feeling which pretty quickly also became the object of debate and of critiques, in 3
Cf. Furtak, 2002; Kupfer, 1996; Richards, 1964. See Winnberg, 2003 and Craps, 2003; Craps, however, in his reading of Swift’s Last Orders, seems more wary of sentimental impulses, drawing attention to the ways in which the novel “critiques the noble gospel of sympathy” and illustrates how “the sympathetic imagination tends to subsume alterity” (2003: 416). I have no quarrel with this reading, except that I would like to stress that the novel simultaneously holds sympathy up as a possible virtue and that it does so successfully—whereas Craps views these two positions as “strictly incompatible” (2003: 417). 5 It goes without saying, then, that I find Fredric Jameson’s notion of the waning of affect in postmodernity and in postmodernism highly questionable. See Jameson, 1991, especially 10-16. 4
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books such as MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling.6 Involved in such critiques was the realisation that whereas “mental feelings such as compassion, pity, affection, sympathy, and so forth might, initially, have been taken as virtues, by the time the sentimentalist’s shallowness and effusiveness distort them […] we are left with sentimentality as the vice of easy virtue” (Knight 1999: 417). Consequently, the term “sentimentality,” or at least its cognate “sentimentalism,” was gradually reduced to pejorative use, signifying excessive indulgence in sentiment or insincere display of sentiment. So, for instance, Thomas Carlyle viewed sensibility as a positive term, whereas sentimentality signified sensibility put in the service of falsehood by way of dishonesty and excess. Significantly, this means that Carlyle reversed the earlier use of the terms that we find in Friedrich Schiller. For Schiller, writing at the time of Carlyle’s birth, it was sensibility that signified excess of feeling, whereas sentimentality meant self-consciousness in relation to one’s feelings, and sentimental poetry had elements of reflexivity and disinterestedness, in contrast to what Schiller called naïve poetry. It is this older definition of sentimentality found in Schiller that approaches what I would here like to call a “postmodern sentimentality.” Yet, by the early twentieth century, the pejorative use of “sentimentality” and its cognates had come to reign supreme and Schiller’s model had sunk into relative oblivion. Poetry became an escape from emotion in Eliot, and Brecht devised the alienation effect not least as a means of precluding a sentimentality that had to be construed as a decidedly bourgeois (false) consciousness. Granted, Eliot sparked a new interest in sensibility through his essay on the metaphysical poets, but, in Andrew Gibson’s words, this interest entailed “not a new valuation of sensibility nor its rethinking in a cognitive space […] but precisely a new abstraction of sensibility, and thereby a decisive gain for the cognitive intellect within modernity” (1999: 163). Even the “father of postmodern ethics,” Levinas, was initially sceptical of sensibility, viewing it as “ungenerous,” “not open to the infinite,” a “mode in which the ego wraps itself up in itself” (Gibson 1999: 165). In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that “sensibility […] is the mode of enjoyment” and “does not belong to the order of thought but to that of sentiment, that is, the affectivity wherein the egoism of the I pulsates” (1969: 135). In other words, Levinas maintains a Kantian conception in which sense, not sensibility, is the 6
See McGann, 1996, for a thorough discussion of the differences and similarities between the two concepts, sentimentality and sensibility, as well as of their joint historical genesis. See also Kaplan, 1987, especially 16-20. For a discussion of the satirical and (self-)critical elements of MacKenzie’s novel, see Barker-Benfield, 1992: 143-4.
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realm of ethics. But Levinas gradually moves through a reconception of sensibility to an appreciation of it as an ethical virtue, as it denotes an openness to the other, an affective receptivity. In Otherwise than Being, he states that “[t]he subjectivity of a subject is vulnerability, exposure to affection, sensibility, a passivity more passive still than any passivity […] an exposedness always to be exposed the more” (1998: 50, emphasis added). The importance of Levinas, and one reason for calling his ethics postmodern, hence lies in that he “reverses the modern formulation of sensibility,” placing sensibility “before cognition and ontology,” in ethics as first philosophy (Gibson 1999: 164-5). “It may even be,” Gibson hazards, “that it is affective experience and not the breakdown of the movement of cognition that finally appears to be the key to the ethical encounter.” Indeed, “it is in the affections that we experience the world in its strange, unforeseeable singularity” (1999: 186). Consequently, Gibson puts forward “the power of being affected rather than affecting […] as the relevant ‘point of departure’” for a postmodern ethics (1999: 161). In other words, Gibson recognises the inseparability of ethics and affectivity, rarely recognised ever since Kant’s attack on the moral sentiment theorists of the early Enlightenment.7 Those theorists, as well as many of their contemporaries among novelists—such as MacKenzie, Richardson and Radcliffe—in fact emphasised responsivity and responsibility and established the power of being affected as the point of departure for what may now be thought of as a decidedly modern ethics. That ethics is modern because it remains within the realm of egology. In other words, even if that ethics puts an emphasis on the power of being affected rather than affecting, the resulting affects are immediately translated into the proper affections of a virtuous ego, which is the victim of, or deliverer from, vice. What is more, that ego is not radically called into question as such in an openness to the particular event—what Levinas calls “the Saying.” Rather, the fixed ego whose essence is an impeccable rationality remains the ultimate governing principle. Indeed, moral philosophers such as Adam Smith saw emotion “as something which, when properly conceptualised, makes essential reference to reason and provides an important complement to it” (Mendus 2000: 1-2). Emotion, then, had to be assimilated by reason—to be granted its place in the brave new world of the Enlightenment, emotion had to be proven to be in the service of rationality; but this required that emotion was properly conceptualised, and even so it was still a complement to reason, something needed to complete the science of mind—not of body, and thus in accordance with Cartesianism. Besides being harnessed to rationality, emotion also had to be assigned a 7
Cf. Solomon, 1991: 2-3.
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function within morality, which was itself of course formulated according to the dictates of reason; indeed, Smith’s first book was titled The Theory of Moral Sentiments. From a contemporary perspective, then, the culture of feeling remains with moral theory, with principles—what Levinas would call “the Said”—inviting Marcus Aurelius’s impatience: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” Quippish as Aurelius’ statement may seem, and ancient as it is, it points in the direction of a Levinasian ethics, as that ethics places its emphasis on the incommensurability of the other and of the unforeseeable event, which cannot be contained within a frame of jurisprudence. Being good is irreducible to principles; ethics precedes essence. What is more, ethics requires sensibility to make us responsive to the other and thus to assume our responsibility for the other. Still, if a postmodern ethics not only makes room for, but fundamentally requires sensibility, then does it easily follow that it can accommodate sentimentality? Sentimentality has indeed been criticised for the very same reasons that Levinas was initially sceptical of sensibility: that it is a species of self-indulgence, the self closed in on itself in enjoyment rather than opened up to the particularities and complexities of the event and of the other—of the other as constant event, as it were. This is, for instance, the central point—albeit a point embedded in a different sort of discourse, hardly Levinasian—of Joseph Kupfer’s attack on sentimentality, a point which he makes most sharply: “A sentimentalized sense of self discourages activity and keeps us from dealing with the world directly. The distortion of and absorption in the self is dangerous for sentimental individuals and those with whom they interact” (1996: 543). It is worth pointing out that Kupfer’s critique is ultimately directed at the relatively rare case of the pathological individual who resorts to “portraying the real as flawless” (1996: 546). Sentimentality thus construed is evidently a vice because it “selects what we notice, how we think and feel about it, and whether we act on it” (1996: 559). But whereas Kupfer views sentimentality as a constant frame of mind rather than as an occasional attitude, the latter, I think, is the most common instance of sentimentality. Still, some of Kupfer’s quarrels with the act of sentimentalising need to be seriously considered, particularly as they point to both the ways in which sentimentality might be at odds with a postmodern ethics and the ways in which sentimentality might in fact be reconcilable with such an ethics. As Kupfer observes, “the psychology of sentimentalising begins in reducing complex situations to what can be recognised” and thus “limit[s] our receptivity to new experience” (1996: 544) and “[t]he sentimentalising process holds us back from acting in or upon the world. […] Sentimentality produces the passivity of inactivity by immersing us in our
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emotions.” Ultimately, “sentimental ruminations” may end up “sapping the force of such virtues as generosity which take us out of ourselves to consider others’ needs” (1996: 555). This is an interesting reversal of the eighteenth century notion of sentimentality, which generally held it to mean precisely the capability of generosity and openness to others’ needs. To Kupfer, then, sentimentality denotes only the most egological, subjective aspect of the cultivation of feelings. Indeed, Kupfer is not alone in holding this view; it is, as Knight notes, the standard view that “[b]ecause sentimentality is so keyed to our own responses, it leaves us preoccupied with ourselves (whether we realise this or not); nonsentimental responses—it is claimed—turn our attention away from ourselves toward objective situations, toward others.” In other words, “sentimentality leads us away from active, cognitive engagement with the ambiguities and complexities of the real […] toward the over-simplified, the distorted, the falsified, the fantasised, the fictional. Sentimentality encourages complacency” (1999: 417, emphasis added). On this account—even if its stress on the active and the cognitive puts it somewhat at odds with Levinas—the sentimental would clearly constitute the Said. And given Levinas’ antipathy to art and to representation, sentimental fiction would be doubly suspect. Yet, even if we choose to take sentimentality exclusively in this sense, can we exclude it from a postmodern account of ethics? For, how can the relation to the other resist becoming sentimental in the sense of a preoccupation with one’s own responses? Regardless of Levinas’s call for a kind of kenotic disinterestedness, the subject will, I think, in actuality be incapable of not feeling virtuous in its reception of the other, of not weeping for the other in compassion. Levinas’ point would be, I think, that the virtue and compassion in question are secondary to ethics as first philosophy, in which the other takes precedence—not that virtue and compassion are effaced as such and tout court. As Levinas would say, compassion, sympathy and tenderness constitute a kind of violence, in that they found themselves on a comprehension of the other, but they are also inescapably the ways in which the other appears to me at all—the alternative would be pure alterity, incommensurability, and thus solipsism, Camus’ “Absurd.” This is the main point of Derrida’s critique of the earlier Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics”—a point that was well taken by Levinas, as he subsequently developed his concept of amphibology in Otherwise than Being, positing the Said as that in which the Saying appears.8 The object of ethics as first 8 Cf. Derrida, 2001, especially 147- 67. As Derrida argues, “My world is the opening in which all experience occurs, including, as the experience par excellence, that which is transcendence toward the Other as such. Nothing can appear outside the
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philosophy is thus to do as little violence as possible to the other, not to do no violence at all, which would be impossible—hence Levinas’ stress on perpetual guilt, on the impossibility of ever resolving one’s relation to the other; in Levinas’ own words, “the more just I am, the more guilty I am” (1998: 94). Now, if I am always, beyond reprieve, guilty in the face of the other, then it follows that I am as guilty in the face of the sentimental other. In other words, if the sentimentality of the I as self-same constitutes violence against the other, then what of my response to the sentimental other who calls me to responsibility? In a deconstructive turn, turning Levinas against the Levinas who would construe sentimentality under the sign of the Said, we may say that openness to the other includes openness to the sentimental other, a careful response to the other’s sentimentality in place of dismissive scorn. We need to be attentive to the (un)Saying of the Said that sentimentality is always bad faith. More generally, we need to be wary of the acknowledgement of the call of the Saying congealing into a dogmatism verging on (an admittedly unexpected) fascism, which stifles the Said through which the vulnerable other not only can, but must appear. Indeed, as Solomon contends, “[i]f the tender emotions (pity, sympathy, fondness, adoration, compassion) are thought to be not only ethically irrelevant but ethically undesirable […] then it is not sentimentality that should be called into question but rather the conception of ethics that would dictate such an inhuman response” (1997: 234-5). Moreover, “no conception of ethics can be adequate unless it takes into account such emotions, not as mere ‘inclinations’ but as an essential part of the substance of ethics itself” (1997: 235). Not to do so would in fact amount to a violent policing of, not simply the borders of Reason taken as Same—for Reason may well consider inviting the proper emotions—but the borders of a restricted economy of emotion which has no room for the expenditure of sentimentality. Moreover, as Solomon argues, involved in the attacks on sentimentality is a “deep disdain for emotions as intrusions and for emotionality as vulnerability” (1997: 235). In other words, it is the anti-sentimentalist who is fundamentally egological, fending off the intrusions on the singular self and resisting exposure to the other. In fact, Solomon moves in the direction of the later Levinas’ conception of sensibility when he suggests that “[s]entimentality is ‘giving in’, and a preference for sentimentality suggests a perverse willingness to make oneself vulnerable” (1997: 235)—perverse, that is, to an egological rationalism, which “wants to preserve reason from the ‘intrusion’ appurtenance to ‘my world’ for ‘I am’” (164). Cf. also Eaglestone’s comprehensive explanation of amphibology, 1997: 137-46.
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of feeling, emotion, and so forth” and “wants to treat morality as a matter of rational principles” (Knight 1999: 418). Thus, in the final analysis, it is antisentimentality that turns out to be the attitude of the ego wrapped up in itself much more than sentimentality, as the latter at least constitutes a potential opening toward the other—anti-sentimentality proceeds from the insight that “sentimental emotions violate the autonomy of the individual. By responding with feeling to a situation or to a work of art or literature […] one makes oneself vulnerable” (Knight 1999: 416, emphasis added). The reluctance to respond with feeling is further explained by Dagmar Buchwald, referring to Ludwig Giesz: “The discovery that one has been governed by a mood […] is answered with an ‘anthropologically important feeling of disgrace,’ of ‘deficiency, impotence, passivity, dizziness, surrender.’ The reason for this feeling of disgrace is that ‘the possible freedom of existence always resists any surrender to any fixing state whatsoever—and be it bliss itself’” (1991: 48-9). As an alternative to this negative existentialist conception—decidedly modern and individualist— Buchwald offers us Otto Bollnow’s contention that “out of an attitude of ‘devoted absorption’ might spring ‘other and deeper’ ways of cognition” in which “the boundaries between subject and object become blurred” (1991: 48). Here we must note, however, that a generalised attribution of a positive value to a dissolution of the I, a devoted absorption, may easily be a sentimental fallacy, a sentimentalising view of a movement that actually dissolves the responsibility for the other by producing the ruse of merging with the other. Both Derrida and Levinas would be suspicious of such a movement.9 If the boundaries between subject and object become blurred, then the respect for the other as other is surely at risk. Yet, as surely, the violence effected by a reaching-out toward the other, toward each other, in a ruse of blurred boundaries must be preferable to the violence effected by the ego wholly turned in on itself in solipsistic, and complete, refusal of the other. Even so, sentimentality needs to be checked by a postmodern ethical awareness. It needs to recognise the importance of distancing itself from “the cult of feelings,” from sentimentalism. To advocate a yielding to affect must not be “to argue for emotivism, a ‘culture of feeling’ or a return to 9
They are not alone in this respect. For instance, in his discussion of the Christian philosopher Jan Pato ka in The Gift of Death, Derrida observes that Pato ka “[s]omewhat in the manner of Levinas […] warns against an experience of the sacred as an enthusiasm of fervor for fusion, cautioning in particular against a form of demonic rapture that has as its effect, and often as its first intention, the removal of responsibility, the loss of the sense or consciousness of responsibility” (1995: 1).
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impressionism. Indeed, the ethical dangers of any celebration of a naive, untutored responsiveness […] should be self-evident” (Gibson 1999: 162). Somewhat surprisingly, it is the very same postmodern subjectivity that Fredric Jameson sees as a route to the waning of affect that may foster an ethical imagination that effects a postmodern sentimentality. What is at issue in postmodern subjectivity is, as Calvin O. Schrag puts it, “a multiplicity of profiles and perspectives through which the human self moves and is able to come into view” (1997: 1). In postmodernity, “the self lives through a multiplicity of changing profiles and a plurality of language games in which it holds court” (1997: 17). There is a great difference between this postmodern notion of subjectivity and Kupfer’s modern notion of subjectivity, in which the sentimental attitude would permeate the subject since that subject is impossible to conceive of as anything but constantly selfsame. The important point, though, is that because of the indeterminacy and vacillation of the postmodern subject, its sentimentality may transcend the self-indulgence and solipsism of the modern ego and reach an intersubjective sphere of engagement with the other. The sentiments, and the sentimentality, in question are not those of the virtuous ego, victim of, or deliverer from, vice, but of the vulnerable self called into question and called to responsibility. It is this postmodern sentimentality, this postmodern ethics of sentimentality, that we find dramatised in a number of postmodernist fictions, and that, it turns out, is further enabled by a postmodernist aesthetics of pluralisation, relativisation and ironisation. For even if postmodernist fiction ventures at times into the territory of classical, subjective sentimentality, both that sentimentality and the more intersubjective sentimentality are kept in check by a relativist and pluralist imagination that is manifested in a number of postmodernist aesthetic strategies, such as self-reflexivity, intertextuality, fragmentation and non-closure. These strategies uphold the postmodern ethical imagination, since intertextual and metafictional devices in conjunction with narrative fragmentation and non-closure break up the ostensible autonomy and singularity of the narrator’s vision, opening it up to intimations of the unassimilable other. Thus, postmodernist fiction keeps complexity in view, never choosing, but forever postponing judgement, suspending both disbelief and belief, lodging belief in nihilism, indeterminacy in immanence. The effect of this approach is an ironic attitude that resists any kind of monism, that resists the final settling for either belief or nihilism, sentimentality or cynicism. We find this attitude in the self-conscious narrators of the novels of postmodern sentimentality: in Swift’s Waterland, Out of This World and Ever After, in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, in Jeanette Winterson’s Written
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on the Body, in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, and in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon. Whereas Winfried Herget says of an older mode of sentimentality that “[i]rony, above all, is alien to the sentimental purpose” (1991: 7), irony is integral to postmodern sentimentality. However, in postmodern sentimentality, sentimentality is not swallowed up by irony, but lodged in it. What is more, the terms may ultimately be reversed, irony may be said to be lodged in sentimentality. As Jean-Pierre Mileur bids, “let us consider for a moment that what hides in the language of irony is sentiment and that the history of irony is the history of the sentimental, masked” (1998: 205). Admittedly, this is not an unusual consideration. However, Mileur gets more radical as he turns to “exploring the notion that the sentimental is the type of which irony is a more specialised instance” (1998: 206). Astutely, he points out “that the presence of an unreflective sense that awareness makes a difference constitutes the sentimental at the heart of irony” (1998: 209); that is, irony sentimentalises awareness. Thus, in a deconstructive move, irony is shown to be dependent on sentimentality—but in a complete deconstructive neutralisation, the opposite also holds, and thus it is not possible to finally establish one of the terms as dominant. Significantly, we find this postmodern mode of sentimentality in two postmodern thinkers who once may have struck us as particularly disimpassioned: Barthes and Derrida. The Barthes who once proclaimed that “writing is a science, no longer of the human heart, but of human discourse” (1989: 21) eventually turned to reaffirming the sentimental discourse of the lover in the Fragments, and conceded in Camera Lucida that he “was interested in Photography […] for ‘sentimental’ reasons” (1993: 21). But sentimentality also pervades Derrida’s The Postcard and the eulogies collected in The Work of Mourning—in fact, following John D. Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, we may read Derrida generally as, not just homo religiosis, but also homo sentimentalis. Still, neither in Barthes nor in Derrida is it a case of a simple return of a classical mode of sentimentality; rather, they approach what I call postmodern sentimentality, as their writings are intertextual webs with elements of self-reflexivity and irony. For instance, in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Barthes wishes to replace a dry analysis of the lover’s discourse by an actual example of such a discourse—yet, he is immediately aware of the artificial nature that discourse will have: “The description of the lover’s discourse has been replaced by its simulation” (1990: 3, emphasis added), Barthes concedes, and “[i]n order to compose this amorous subject, pieces of various origin have been ‘put together’” (8). As for Derrida’s The Postcard, it is, as Diane Elam puts it, “both larded with philosophical allusions and with explicitly clichéd sentimentality” (1992: 149). The Work of Mourning is both surprisingly sentimental and expectedly
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self-conscious. For example, in his funeral oration on Levinas, Derrida says: “I hope to find a sort of encouragement to speak here […] with unadorned, naked words, words as childlike and disarmed as my sorrow.” Yet, immediately following the statement of this hope, there is a self-conscious, searching turn: “Whom is one addressing at such a moment? And in whose name would one allow oneself to do so?” (2001b: 200). It is through such irony and self-reflexivity that the text of postmodern sentimentality establishes, in Levinasian terms, a site of vulnerability, of the baring of one’s skin to the caress or wounding by the other, a site for the Saying—that which challenges me and calls me to responsibility—rather than the Said—that which preserves my self-sameness and complacency. But wedded with the emphasis on alterity in Levinas is a more traditional notion of mutuality. In the postmodernist text of postmodern sentimentality, sensibility in the classical sense comes up against sensibility in Levinas’ sense, the former being questioned and modified by the latter, but not sinking into oblivion. Hence, what Winfried Herget notes about the sentimental text is true of the text of postmodern sentimentality as well: it “relates author and reader on the basis of shared sentiments to achieve sympathy, and to move the reader from sympathy to compassion” (1991: 4). Yet, once again, postmodern sentimentality does not entail an unproblematic return of a classical mode of sentimentality. Whereas I would posit that Herget’s definition of “the sentimental text as a rhetorical construct whose aim it is to affect the reader, to move the reader—movere in the classical terminology— by means of pathos” holds for the text of postmodern sentimentality as well, the text of postmodern sentimentality would distance itself from the classical sentimental text which “uses the story merely as a means for the occasion of the sentiment” and whose “situations, actions and characters, in which the feelings are implotted, are prone to become stereotyped” (Herget, 1991: 4-5). Postmodern sentimentality rather fulfils the potential of sentimentality that Herget suggests: “Sentimentality goes beyond mere indulgence when it appeals to man’s responsibility as a social being. The person responding to the sentimental text feels part of the pathetic community which shares suffering as the conditio humana; a-pathos—apathy—would set the individual apart from human community” (1991: 9). This is true of the text of postmodern sentimentality too, which is about responsibility and suffering, the suffering of responsibility and the responsibility of suffering—and the responsivity of suffering. As Marianne Noble points out, “[s]entimentalism does not simply idealise the compassionate observation of another; it offers an intuitive and visceral understanding of the other’s fear and anguish. A state of union, then, is achieved through suffering, which is the mechanism enabling one to ‘enter into’ another person, as it were” (2000: 65). In their
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actuality these relations of same and other are woven into a tapestry of sentiments and sentimentality: longing, suffering, love, bliss. The longing and suffering in question are not a result of the failure of the ego’s project so much as of the failure of intersubjective connection; a connection which, when it succeeds, is the pinnacle of love and may approach bliss. We may return, then, to Out of This World, in which we find Harry so romanticised by Jenny: “When she turns fully to catch my glance and smile, secret pods of joy burst inside me. […] She’s beautiful. She’s incredible. She’s out of this world” (36). To my mind, this passage is neither a slip in stylistic decorum nor a sign of authorial disavowal, but a perfectly accurate depiction of a sentimentality that belongs to the realm of quotidian experience as much as disillusion and cynicism do. This depiction succeeds precisely because the novel balances it carefully by depictions of disillusion and cynicism. For, besides being a narrative of love and reconciliation, the novel is, as I stated at the beginning of this essay, a narrative of trauma, alienation and cynicism; as much a traumance as a romance. The novel portrays a world in which the terrorist acts of underground political groups are mirrored by the terrorist acts of the ever-present media. Indeed, when Sophie says that “everywhere can be a target” and “there aren’t any safe, separate places anymore,” she is referring to cameras, not guns or bombs (111). It is indeed her photo-journalist father’s camera that is the cause of their estrangement, as, the moment after the IRA bomb explodes and kills her grandfather, she sees her father somnambulistically reach for his camera and take a picture of the scene. Consequently, the Saying, the rupture, of the novel becomes one of romance, and the Said one of disillusion. It is indeed a very tangible act of Saying, of approaching the other, who responds in turn, that re-establishes Harry’s and Sophie’s communication, as Harry actually sends Sophie a letter: Dear Sophie. How can I tell you? How can I say this? Your father, who you haven’t seen for ten years […] is going to get married. […] And though we haven’t told anyone yet, and we haven’t fixed a day, I was wondering, we were wondering— I was hoping— If, after all this time—? If—? (82)
Faced with this letter—an act of language rather than a face-to-face—Sophie heeds the call of the other embedded therein: I haven’t seen Harry since that time I said goodbye to him ten years ago. And he hasn’t seen me. […] I really meant it, you see: Goodbye for ever. But now he writes me this letter […] and in the letter he says— (140)
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Yet, if both Harry and Sophie end up being able to suspend disbelief, it is with some cautious sense of scepticism and irony; as Harry puts it: Miracles shouldn’t happen. Picture-books aren’t real. The fairy-tales all got discredited long ago, didn’t they? There shouldn’t be thatched cottages still, tucked away among green hills. You shouldn’t be able to advertise in the local papers for an assistant and fall in love with the very first candidate who comes along. I should have gone on, in fairness, to consider Applicant Two and Applicant Three […] But I found out that, after all, I was still human. (79)
Sophie puts her newfound sentimental expectations in similar terms: The truth is I want it to be wonderful. Wonderful. I want to go. Can you believe that? […] I want him, and her, whoever she is (but I hope she’s as lovely as a princess), to be waiting at the airport. I want to throw my arms around him and feel his arms around mine. Harry Dad Father. […] And I want to hug her too and kiss her like a sister […] and say, I hope you’ll be happy with him, because I never was. Shit, I know this is pure theatre, I know this is like a bad movie, like the way it isn’t. But what’s the point of life, and what’s the point of goddam movies, if now and then you can’t discover that the way you thought it isn’t, the way you thought it only ever is in movies, really is the way it is? (145)
Sophie manages to break out of her cynicism and scepticism, to discard the cultural code that maintains that sentimentality and happiness are only manufactured by the entertainment or image industry. Breaking out of her forced independence, she is able to rediscover the force of interdependence: “He’s going to get married. He’s going to get fucking married. To some fucking girl. And he wants me to—He’d like me—He wants me” (99). Once again, it is against the backdrop of the novel’s cynical sense of numb simulation that such sentimental moments gain force and credibility. It is in this way that postmodernist fiction becomes the space in which sentimentality truly accrues and emerges as tenable, both aesthetically and ethically. Ultimately, in a world of such disillusion and alienation, of such simulation and mechanisation, as the world Swift’s novel represents, sentimentality must be seen as a good start—not an ethical problem, but an ethical possibility. Bibliography Barker-Benfield, G.J. (1992). The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain, Chicago: U of Chicago P.
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Barthes, Roland (1989). “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley: U of California P, 11-21. —— (1990). A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1993). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage. Buchwald, Dagmar (1991). “Suspicious Harmony: Kitsch, Sentimentality and the Cult of Distance,” Sentimentality in Modern Literature and Popular Culture, ed. Winfried Herget, Tübingen: Narr, 35-57. Craps, Stef (2003). “‘All the Same Underneath’? Alterity and Ethics in Graham Swift’s Last Orders,” Critique, 4, 405-20. Derrida, Jacques (1995). The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago: Chicago UP. —— (2001a). “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge, 97-192. —— (2001b). The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: Chicago UP. Eaglestone, Robert (1997). Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Elam, Diane (1992). Romancing the Postmodern, London: Routledge. Furtak, Rick Anthony (2002). “Poetics of Sentimentality,” Philosophy and Literature, 1, 207-15. Gibson, Andrew (1999). Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas, London: Routledge. Herget, Winfried (1991). “Towards a Rhetoric of Sentimentality,” Sentimentality in Modern Literature and Popular Culture, ed. Winfried Herget, Tübingen: Narr, 1-14. Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Kaplan, Fred (1987). Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature, Princeton: Princeton UP. Knight, Deborah (1999). “Why We Enjoy Condemning Sentimentality: A Meta-Aesthetic Perspective,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 4, 411-20. Kupfer, Joseph (1996). “The Sentimental Self,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4, 543-60. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. —— (1998). Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP.
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McGann, Jerome (1996). The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style, Oxford: Oxford UP. Malcolm, David (2003). Understanding Graham Swift, Columbia: U of South Carolina P. Mendus, Susan (2000). Feminism and Emotion: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy, Basingstoke: MacMillan. Mileur, Jean-Pierre (1998). “Revisionism, Irony and the Mask of Sentiment,” New Literary History, 2, 197-233. Noble, Marianne (2000). The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Fiction, Princeton: Princeton UP. Okri, Ben (1985). “Makers of Magic,” Review of Learning to Swim, The New Statesman, 29 November, The Postcolonial and Postimperial Fiction Web [online]. Available from: http://www.scholars.nus. edu.sg/landow/post/uk/gswift/swim/ltsrev4.html [accessed 17 June 2004]. Richards, I. A. (1964). Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Schrag, Calvin O. (1997). The Self After Postmodernity, New Haven: Yale UP. Solomon, Robert C. (1991). “On Kitsch and Sentimentality,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1, 1-14. —— (1997). “In Defense of Sentimentality,” Emotion and the Arts, eds. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 225-45. Swift, Graham (1988). Out of This World, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Widdowson, Peter (1995). “Newstories: Fiction, History and the Modern World,” Critical Survey, 1, 3-17. Winnberg, Jakob (2003). An Aesthetics of Vulnerability: The Sentimentum and the Novels of Graham Swift, Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
THE CONTRIBUTORS Linda Belau is Assistant Professor of English at The University of TexasPan American. She is the author of a number of articles on literary theory, particularly psychoanalytic theory and deconstruction. She has published an edited collection entitled Topologies of Trauma (2002) and is also editor of a special issue of Post Modern Culture (Winter 2001) on the question of trauma, experience, knowledge, and the limits of language. She is currently completing a book entitled Encountering Jouissance: Trauma, Psychosis, Psychoanalysis and is also at work on a second book on Jacques Lacan’s discourse theory. Victoria Best is Lecturer in French at St. John’s College, Cambridge. She specializes in twentieth century literature with particular research interests in the intersection of identity and narrative, psychoanalytic theory and issues of gender and sexuality. Her books include Critical Subjectivities; Identity and Narrative in the work of Colette and Marguerite Duras (2000) and An Introduction to Twentieth Century French Literature (2002). She is currently writing a book on fantasy and dream in modern French literature. Nicholas Chare is Lecturer in Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and a Visiting Lecturer in Art History at the University of Reading. He also teaches on the Masters in Psychoanalytic Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is a former editor of the international cultural studies journal parallax. He has published articles in a number of journals including Angelaki, Limina, parallax and the Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. His research interests include abjection, noise and performativity. Siobhán Collins is a Government of Ireland Scholar working on her Ph.D. at University College Cork. Her research interests include early modern philosophical notions of the sexual body and how discourses of sexuality are aesthetically represented in the poetry of John Donne. Her research is funded by the “Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Todd F. Davis is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. In addition to publishing numerous articles and reviews in such journals as Critique, College Literature, Studies in Short Fiction, Mississippi Quarterly, and Yeats/Eliot Review, Davis is the author of Ripe, a collection of poetry. He is the co-editor (with Kenneth Womack) of Mapping the Ethical Turn: A
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Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (2001) and The Critical Response to John Irving (2004), as well as the co-author (with Womack) of Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory (2002). Anna Fahraeus is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer in the English Department at Gothenburg University in Sweden. She is the editorial secretary for the Nordic Journal of English Studies, where she is also the guest editor with Per Sivefors for an upcoming issue on Renaissance drama. Her research interests include dramatic kind theory, early modern colonialism and rhetoric, and gendered violence in Shakespeare. She is currently working on a project entitled “Empire, Rhetoric and Violence in Titus Andronicus.” Nancy Glazener is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Reading for Realism: The History of a U. S. Literary Institution, 1850-1910 (1997). Her current book project, “Modern Hypocrisy: The Public, The Private, and The Secular in U. S. Literature,” analyzes hypocrisy as a site in which various public, private, and secular institutions of personhood—and of literature—collide. Myrtle Hooper is senior professor in English at the University of Zululand where she has taught for the past 20 years and has recently been seconded to the position of assistant vice-rector: research and outreach. Her doctorate was on silence in Southern African fiction, and she has published on various South African writers, notably Mofolo, Plaatje, Smith, Paton, Head, Rooke, and Coetzee; as well as on Joseph Conrad in The Conradian, l’Epoque Conradienne and Conradiana and most recently in Lord Jim de Joseph Conrad, ed. Nathalie Martinière. Present research interests include crossculturality and identity; privacy, politeness and power; and the ethics of reading. AnnKatrin Jonsson received her Ph.D. from Gothenburg University. She has worked as a lecturer at Gothenburg University and is currently working on a book project called “Exiles in Print: Modernism and the Little Magazines in Paris, 1920-1938,” as well as on the publication of her thesis, Relations: Ethics and the Modernist Subject in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Djuna Barnes‘s Nightwood (forthcoming 2005). She has also published on language methodology. Becky McLaughlin is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Alabama, where she teaches film, modern drama, and critical theory. She has published in journals such as Style, ANaMORPHOSIS, the Arkansas
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Review, Westview, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, and the Journal of Imagism. Her work on auto-theory also appears in Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, ed. Merri Lisa Johnson. Everyday Theory, a critical theory textbook co-edited with Bob Coleman, has just been released. She is currently at work on an edited collection, Big Sex: Academia and Sexuality, which explores the dialectical relationship between the academy and sexual identity/praxis. Adia Mendelson-Maoz teaches contemporary Hebrew literature at Haifa University, Israel. She received a Ph.D. in Hebrew Literature from Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and served as a post-doc research fellow, with the Rothschild fellowship, at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is concerned with literature in its intersection with ethics. She is currently examining the representations of moral problems in Modern Hebrew literature, in particular from the 1948 war to the Intifada of present days. Her essay “On Human Parts—Orly Castel-Bloom and the Israeli Contemporary Extreme” is forthcoming in Contemporary Extreme Novel, eds. Naomi Mandel and Alain-Philippe Durand. Stuart J. Murray received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis is titled, A Style of Life: Spectral Subjectivity and the Limits of Sacred Life. His work has appeared in English Studies in Canada, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Postmodern Culture, and Qui Parle. He is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Pietra Palazzolo is currently completing her Ph.D. at the University of Essex, UK. Her thesis examines the fiction of John Banville against the backdrop of contemporary critical theory as well as modern writers who have greatly influenced his work. She is the author of articles and reviews on John Banville and his works, Irish literature and essays on postcolonial literatures. Anne Reef was awarded an M.A. in English from The University of Memphis (2003), where she is now a Ph.D. student in Textual Studies and a part-time faculty member. She researches apartheid and post-apartheid South African literature, especially novels, and has a particular interest in the work of Mark Behr. Her doctoral dissertation is on the subject of rape in South African literature. Sara Cohen Shabot received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Haifa, Israel. She specializes in phenomenology and “philosophies of the
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body,” especially the concept of the Grotesque and the “grotesque body.” Her present work focuses on philosophical (mainly phenomenological) perspectives of the “grotesque body” and its connections to postmodernism, gender theories and, in general, to the conceptualization of the subject as embodied. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Lafer Center for Women’s Studies at The Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. Per Sivefors received his Ph.D. from Gothenburg University. He currently lectures at Blekinge Institute of Technology as well as the Programme of Renaissance Studies at the University of Gotland. His research is predominantly concerned with the early modern period, and his interests within that area include authorship, literary relationships and the history of literary language, as well as the intersection of theory and literature in early modern texts. His thesis, which he is currently preparing for publication, is entitled The Delegitimised Vernacular: Language Politics, Poetics and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe. Chris Thompson is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, USA. He has a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Recent publications include articles in journal Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2004), and Performance Research. He is co-editor, with Aimée Bessire, of Ingestation: Consumption and Contemporary Culture (2004), and is currently working on a book on Fluxus and Tibetan Buddhism. David Watson is a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Language and Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His Ph.D. thesis is entitled Critical Echoes: The Revision of Poetry in the Criticism of Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. He has also published on the work of Salman Rushdie and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and is currently working on the publication of his doctoral thesis and on a research project focussing on problems of identity and nationhood in the American Renaissance. Jakob Winnberg received his Ph.D. from Gothenburg University, where he presently has a position as Research Fellow in English Literature. He specializes in the theories and practices of modernism and postmodernism. He is currently working on a study of the aesthetics, ethics and politics of affect in postmodernist fiction. He is the author of An Aesthetics of Vulnerability: The Sentimentum and the Novels of Graham Swift (2003). Kenneth Womack is Associate Professor of English and Head of the Division of Arts and Humanities at Penn State Altoona. Womack has
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published widely on twentieth-century literature and popular culture. He serves as Editor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory and as Co-Editor of Oxford University Press’ celebrated Year’s Work in English Studies. He is the co-author (with Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys) of Key Concepts in Literary Theory and the author of Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community. Zhou Xiaojing is Associate Professor of English and Director of Ethnic Studies at University of the Pacific, California, U.S.A. Her publications include Elizabeth Bishop: Rebel “in Shades and Shadows,” a critical anthology, Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, coedited with Dr. Samina Najmi, and The Ethnics and Poetics of Alterity: Asian American Poetry (forthcoming 2005).
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INDEX
A abjection · 14, 25, 54-56, 76, 84, 175, 178-180, 186-188, 346 absence · 7, 61, 64, 87, 93, 130, 175, 177, 179, 180, 182, 221, 239, 253, 287, 298, 311, 322, 344 aesthetic · 8, 10, 13, 14, 18, 26, 29, 41, 55, 56, 69, 101, 120, 152, 167, 185, 240, 250, 252, 253, 297, 303, 305, 306, 315, 316, 318, 319, 325, 326, 329, 330, 349-351, 358 affect · 20, 30, 31, 87, 93, 110, 123, 171, 181, 239, 260, 282, 291, 300, 351, 358, 360 affective · 110, 181, 185, 304, 306, 307, 318, 324, 330, 349, 353 Agamben, Giorgio · 21, 32 alienation · 91, 212, 297, 308, 349, 352, 361, 362 alterity · 22, 27, 29, 82, 121, 145, 146, 148-150, 158, 181, 260, 264, 266, 268, 270, 281, 283, 284, 286, 287, 290, 291, 293, 297-299, 305307, 309, 311-313, 315, 319, 321323, 327-330, 349, 351, 355, 360 ambiguity · 72, 76, 77, 120, 121, 150, 161, 264, 265, 327 animal, animality · 38, 70, 75, 166, 192, 201, 202, 276 anti-semitic · 14, 53, 56, 59, 60, 64 anxiety · 24, 30, 59, 73, 88, 123, 128, 129, 253, 258, 269, 343 Aporia · 7, 24, 32, 109, 138, 250, 340, 344 Aristotle · 36, 43-45, 51, 107, 163, 164, 166 art · 13, 29, 31, 39, 54, 55, 58, 70, 87, 101, 120, 148-150, 156, 169, 170, 176, 177, 182, 185, 186, 193, 204, 242, 253, 282, 291, 315, 316, 318, 324-326, 329, 331, 334, 336, 351,
355, 357 Assoun, Paul-Laurent · 283 Aurelius, Marcus · 354 authentic · 112, 157, 186, 254, 287, 291, 334, 336 author, the · 12, 13, 48, 53-55, 58, 59, 64, 68, 147, 162, 170, 177, 194, 203, 213, 216, 218, 221, 229, 230, 246-251, 253-256, 258, 260, 261, 285, 290, 317, 330, 334, 335, 338, 360 autobiography · 40, 204, 297, 301, 303, 308 autonomy · 13, 14, 20, 119, 290, 291, 299, 300, 333, 357, 358 awareness · 10, 45, 117, 126, 129, 136, 139, 142, 145, 149, 158, 214, 221, 223, 261, 325, 345, 357, 359
B Badiou, Alain · 10, 35, 37-41, 43, 44, 47-51, 319, 331 Bakhtin, Mikhail · 67, 70-72, 79, 82, 144, 167, 173, 191, 196, 206 Banville, John · 22, 145, 146, 148, 160 Barnes, Djuna · 29, 235, 242, 263, 265, 267-279 Baudelaire, Charles · 339, 342 behavior · 38, 94, 101, 118, 213, 216, 219, 221, 234, 259, 282, 286, 292 belief · 9, 16, 40, 44, 104, 110-112, 149, 154, 162, 164, 166, 205, 212, 289, 290, 291, 305, 337, 358 Benjamin, Walter · 40, 318 Ben-Ner, Itzhak · 209, 210, 212, 225 binaries · 73, 74, 78, 268, 270, 276, 284, 298, 305 Blake, William · 339, 342 Blanchot, Maurice · 175, 184, 186, 188 Blunt, Anthony · 145-147, 159
372 bodies · 15, 18, 67, 70, 71, 73, 76-78, 85, 94, 107, 166, 171, 179, 191, 193, 195, 200, 201, 257, 258, 303, 304 body, the · 15, 16, 18-21, 25, 38, 46, 54, 58, 63, 67, 70-72, 76-78, 81, 85, 88-90, 93-99, 102, 105-107, 110-112, 128, 140, 153, 156, 157, 163, 166, 167, 191, 192, 195-197, 200-203, 205, 213, 218-221, 233, 252, 255, 257-259, 266-269, 272, 276, 299, 301, 303, 304, 306, 309, 310, 320, 321, 324, 326, 354 Bronstein, Léo · 29, 315, 316, 319, 325-327, 330, 331 Burke, Seán · 147 Butler, Judith · 46, 47, 51, 53, 54, 57, 60, 62, 65, 75, 82
C Carlyle, Thomas · 352 Cartesian · 70, 72, 77, 101, 103, 104, 108, 109, 111, 113, 121-123, 166, 298, 324 Cartesian subjectivity · 70, 101, 298 Caygill, Howard · 317, 321-323, 329, 331 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand · 14, 53-65 chaos · 168, 213, 333, 339 child, children · 54, 88, 93, 133, 219, 230-233, 235-238, 240, 241, 257259, 270 Coetzee, J. M. · 67, 68, 82, 83, 133, 143, 245, 248-250, 253-256, 259261 cognition · 46, 277, 303, 344, 353, 357 cognitive · 103, 110, 112, 205, 220, 326, 351, 352, 355 commitment · 44, 45, 48, 134, 135, 148, 153, 178, 191, 249, 306, 323 consciousness · 46, 76, 77, 81, 104, 117, 126, 129, 183, 204, 209, 221,
Index 250, 263, 266, 267, 277, 282-284, 299, 306, 312, 325, 338, 339, 352, 357 construction · 8, 18, 26, 31, 47, 69, 70, 136, 176, 177, 210, 236, 252, 267, 270, 298, 304, 323, 333, 339, 341 corporeal aesthetics · 297, 299, 303309, 313 corporeality · 72, 171, 263, 301, 306
D Dangor, Achmat · 245, 258 Dante · 337, 339, 342 Dasein · 287 De Beauvoir, Simone · 68, 76, 77, 78, 82 de Man, Paul · 30, 145, 147, 151, 159, 160, 175, 185 de Sade, Marquis · 89 death · 71, 72, 90, 92, 93, 96, 102, 121, 152, 159, 165, 178, 187, 191, 195, 196, 202, 213, 248, 258, 282, 297, 298, 310-312, 319, 327, 330, 344 deconstruction · 23, 31, 49, 153, 155, 356, 359 Deixis · 134 Deleuze, Gilles · 75, 83, 125-127, 131, 313, 320, 328, 331, 332 delusion · 16, 85, 87, 129, 239 Derrida, Jacques · 23-25, 32, 33, 68, 83, 92, 99, 130, 145, 148, 159, 276, 317, 332, 355, 357, 359, 363 Descartes, Réné · 15, 20, 32, 81, 101, 103-110, 114, 122, 123, 126, 131, 165, 320 desire · 7, 11, 19, 23, 39, 44, 47, 51, 61, 98, 122, 123, 127, 128, 153, 157, 169, 180, 192, 194, 197, 199, 202-205, 237, 239, 240, 249, 253, 254, 260, 263, 268, 286, 289, 297, 307-309, 311, 345
Index dialectic · 284, 340 Dickinson, Emily · 35, 51 domination · 38, 40, 80, 251, 283, 309, 312 Donne, John · 25, 191-207 dreams · 23, 120, 128, 129, 161-168, 170-172, 291, 312
E ego · 31, 87, 91, 123, 129, 130, 155, 172, 175-177, 268, 306, 312, 352, 353, 357, 358, 361 Eliot, T. S. · 9, 30, 279, 333-340, 342, 344-347, 352 embodiment · 81, 191, 194, 281, 302 emotion · 229, 241, 338-340, 342, 343, 350, 355, 356 Enlightenment, the · 10, 14, 39, 45, 50, 104, 353 epistemology · 10, 17, 20, 35-37, 69, 76, 104, 109, 110, 112, 114, 122, 137, 268, 340 Ereignis · 38 errancy · 101, 103, 112-114 Ethopoiia · 335 ethos · 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 18, 21, 22, 25, 26, 30, 31, 69, 75, 101, 133, 153, 175, 191, 192, 195, 211, 245, 256, 260, 307, 333, 335-343, 345 ethos, poetic · 339, 341, 342, 345 ethos, positioning · 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 23, 24, 26, 29, 39, 41, 42, 53, 59, 61, 67-69, 80, 81, 91, 109, 123, 130, 137, 141, 142, 150, 164, 167, 203, 214, 223, 230, 249, 258, 260, 263, 316, 342, 351 ethos, spiritual · 191, 195 event, an or the · 23-25, 37-41, 44, 45, 47, 48 excess · 20-22, 26, 29, 62, 67, 73-75, 81, 93, 110, 161, 168, 182, 183, 219, 263-266, 275, 277, 339, 352 exile · 284, 297, 306, 308, 312
373 experience · 13, 14, 17, 29, 45, 46, 57, 62, 78, 96, 110, 120, 129, 166, 170, 176, 180, 183, 193, 198, 202, 204, 205, 215, 219, 224, 229, 231, 232, 247, 251, 267, 271, 272, 287, 289, 300, 315, 316, 318, 319, 323, 324, 327, 330, 344, 353-357, 361 exposure · 28, 145-147, 150, 151, 155-157, 159, 253, 257, 263, 266, 275, 306, 353, 356 exteriority · 29, 184, 284, 307, 328, 329 extreme · 25, 30, 121, 122, 153, 167, 205, 209, 210, 218-221, 225, 229, 231, 232, 236, 285, 317, 321, 326
F fabrica · 320, 321, 326 flesh · 75-77, 80, 82, 90, 129, 270, 304 form · 9, 19, 21, 24-27, 29, 36-38, 41, 44, 47, 54, 57, 58, 63, 79, 88-90, 103, 105, 117, 121, 125, 138, 149, 150, 163, 166, 168, 170, 173, 179, 181, 182, 185, 186, 197, 198, 204, 205, 231, 237, 241, 248, 250, 263, 269, 273, 278, 285, 289, 290, 300, 306, 307, 322, 323, 338-340, 345, 357 Foucault, Michel · 20, 28, 31, 35- 37, 39, 50, 51, 55, 58, 65, 67, 69, 75, 83, 101-103, 107, 109-114, 159, 242, 336, 346 fragment · 71, 74, 315, 319, 325, 331 Freud, Sigmund · 30, 87, 91, 99, 123, 129-131, 174, 176-178, 183, 184, 187, 188
G Galileo · 40 gender · 7, 27, 43, 46, 47, 72, 78, 136,
374 194, 217, 235, 246, 251, 252, 259, 365, 368 Gibson, Andrew · 264, 278, 352, 358, 363 Grosz, Elizabeth · 304 grotesque, the · 19, 67, 69-76, 78-82, 166, 169, 171, 191, 192, 204, 205, 220, 221 Guattari, Félix · 75, 83, 313, 320, 332
H Habermas, Jürgen · 36, 40, 41, 52 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt · 9, 32, 70, 71, 72, 74, 79, 83, 145, 147, 160, 284, 294 Heidegger, Martin · 27, 35, 36, 38, 46, 48, 52, 89, 119, 123, 131, 276, 299 heterogeneity · 13, 73, 75, 80-82, 297, 303 historical · 22, 26, 36, 39, 40, 46, 49, 56, 57, 69, 78, 81, 102, 145-148, 150, 151, 210, 250, 251, 254, 268, 300, 308, 313, 325, 352 Husserl, Edmund · 83, 268, 279
I identity · 17, 18, 21, 28-30, 43, 56, 69, 72, 73, 76, 97, 113, 146, 148, 149, 152-156, 178, 180, 184, 186, 192-194, 202-205, 210, 212, 221, 224, 252, 265, 284, 285, 287, 289, 298, 304, 306, 308, 311, 328, 345 ideological · 53, 56, 60, 258, 259, 312 illusions · 21, 26, 29, 61, 104, 107, 319 image · 28, 55, 73, 86, 87, 93, 99, 129, 165, 167, 171, 191, 209, 210, 212, 214, 218, 230, 231, 236, 242, 265-267, 269-275, 278, 302, 316, 362
Index innocence · 95, 165, 198, 201, 236, 289 intentionality · 110, 268, 306, 329 interdependence · 191, 201, 278, 362 intersubjectivity · 19, 21, 30, 31, 69, 73, 75, 77, 79, 140, 142, 146, 324, 328, 329, 358, 361 Irigaray, Luce · 68, 321, 332 irony · 152, 359, 360, 362 irrationality · 20, 85, 172, 342 irreducibility · 24, 29, 74, 82, 85, 92, 146, 148, 284, 288, 297, 299, 307, 324, 329, 354 irresponsibility · 24, 224, 316, 349
J James, Henry · 10, 36, 46, 48, 51 jealousy · 20, 117-123, 125-130, 151 jouissance · 90, 178, 181, 183, 187 Jung, C. J. · 70
K Kairos · 102, 335, 336 Kane, Leslie · 282, 294, 295 Kant, Immanuel · 9, 14, 17-20, 33, 81, 120, 131, 175, 181, 353 Kristeva, Julia · 14, 25, 35, 36, 52-54, 56-58, 60-63, 65, 66, 76, 84, 175, 178-189, 339, 346 Kupfer, Joseph · 351, 354, 358, 363
L Lacan, Jacques · 54, 66, 86, 88, 90, 91, 100, 177, 180-185, 187-189, 294 language · 12, 16, 19-22, 24, 28, 29, 36-38, 40, 42, 45, 46, 48-50, 55, 56, 58-61, 68, 86, 88, 91, 96, 103,
Index 106-110, 112-114, 120, 124, 128, 133-135, 140, 145, 147, 158, 168, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178-183, 185187, 213, 217, 219, 239, 263, 271275, 277, 290, 300, 307-309, 317, 319, 323, 326, 327, 335, 339, 350, 358, 359, 361 Lee, Li-Young · 29, 297, 300, 314 Levinas, Emmanuel · 9, 26-29, 31-33, 124, 142, 145, 152, 159, 160, 263, 265, 267, 268, 273, 275, 277-279, 283, 284, 287, 289, 291, 293-295, 297-299, 305-309, 313-332, 336, 337, 346, 349, 351-357, 360, 363, 364 Lingis, Alphonso · 33, 160, 279, 294, 298, 299, 314, 332, 346, 347, 364 Lisbon, Laura · 315, 317 logic · 20-22, 24, 44, 73, 79, 108, 134, 185, 265, 269, 338 love · 37, 39, 40, 43, 47, 88, 90, 92, 94-99, 122-125, 127-129, 140, 149, 152, 165, 197, 198, 238, 241, 259, 265, 268, 282, 285, 297, 301303, 306-308, 311, 312, 318, 341343, 361, 362 love, erotic · 307, 308, 311 Lyons, John · 134, 135, 143
M madness · 35, 36, 55, 92, 117, 119, 123, 124, 125, 138-140, 209, 210, 219, 221 Mamet, David · 29, 281-285, 287-295 manner · 13, 16, 18, 21, 27, 39, 62, 69, 80, 101, 102, 106, 109, 123, 169, 172, 185, 210, 213, 219, 222, 238, 239, 245, 285, 287, 292, 333, 335, 341, 343, 357 masculinity · 194, 217, 304 materiality · 62, 88, 166, 182, 304, 318, 320, 324, 328 meaning · 12-14, 23-25, 40, 48, 57,
375 59, 60, 74, 77, 82, 86, 89, 90, 95, 120, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130, 134, 165, 168, 172, 176, 179--181, 184, 187, 211, 216, 221, 235, 240, 252, 258, 269, 272, 273, 275, 277, 286, 312, 320, 323, 339 melancholy · 25, 164, 166, 187 memoirs · 147, 148, 150, 157, 158, 282, 300, 319 mental illness · 212, 216 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice · 75-78, 83, 84, 111 metaphor · 29, 47, 107, 170, 197, 203, 218, 220, 245, 251, 253, 257, 258, 260, 270, 271, 272, 319, 326, 329 Milton · 282 mind, the · 14-18, 20, 23, 51, 73, 77, 78, 89, 105-108, 111, 123, 136, 140, 146, 149, 154, 158, 167-169, 171, 196, 199, 200, 204, 206, 219, 221, 235, 237, 239, 259, 263, 267, 271, 282, 318, 320, 322, 325, 337, 339, 340, 344, 351, 354, 361 Mitchell, Margaret · 251 modality · 21, 22, 133, 134, 135 modernism · 48, 264, 368 modernist · 9, 48, 53, 55, 56, 67, 263 monsters · 71, 169, 224 Montaigne, Michel de · 168-170, 174, 337, 347 mood · 21, 22, 125, 134, 199, 357 morality · 7, 12, 77, 104, 107, 120, 175, 176-178, 204, 214, 234, 282, 321, 322, 354, 357 myth · 122, 133, 191, 194, 200, 204, 236, 256, 342
N narrator · 136, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156-158, 191, 199, 203-205, 213, 216, 218, 219, 221, 223, 232, 234, 253, 260, 270, 358 Nashe, Thomas · 23, 161-164, 166-
376 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich · 35, 39, 46, 68, 75, 84, 104, 105, 110, 112, 115, 123 norms · 43, 45, 49, 51, 101, 113, 216, 219, 224 nostalgia · 124, 136, 335 novel, the · 10, 29, 30, 35-37, 41-43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 68, 77, 127, 146148, 151, 153-156, 158, 209, 212214, 220, 229-235, 238, 242, 248251, 253-256, 258, 259, 263-266, 268, 269, 271, 274, 276-278, 316, 317, 349, 351, 352, 361, 362 Nussbaum, Martha · 8-10, 33, 35-37, 41-47, 49, 50, 52, 146, 160
O obsession · 44, 82, 231, 277 ontology · 73-75, 273, 283, 299, 353 Ovid · 71
P pain · 78, 91, 151, 186, 197, 198, 218, 220, 238, 253, 255, 272 paradox · 37, 43, 85, 87, 170, 194, 200, 278, 293, 319, 321 Parrhesia · 101, 103, 109, 110, 112 particularity · 7, 26, 38, 39, 43, 45, 49, 50, 53, 54, 58, 63, 79, 81, 82, 93, 94, 101, 107, 161, 165, 172, 177, 182, 192, 193, 204, 230, 232, 239, 245, 248, 277, 297, 300, 301, 304, 308, 311, 317, 319, 325, 327, 345, 351, 353, 357 pathology · 25, 175, 176, 178, 187, 354 Pathos · 75, 199, 316, 360 phenomenology · 69, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 111, 315, 368 Phrittein · 88
Index Plato · 77, 78, 163 plurality · 67, 73, 122, 150, 358 poetics · 14, 60, 182, 209, 219, 220, 299, 306 poetics, a putrid · 14, 60 poetry · 26, 29, 35-37, 48, 161, 168, 175, 191, 195, 199, 211, 212, 218, 219, 253, 297, 299, 300, 306, 312, 313, 333, 337-341, 344, 345, 352 politics · 24-26, 37, 39, 47, 53, 57-61, 147, 193, 252, 253, 300, 303, 322 pornography · 90, 218, 231, 232, 236 postmodernism · 249-351 presence · 7, 30, 40, 78, 81, 82, 87, 93, 124, 130, 137, 141, 157, 167, 170, 181, 217, 269, 275, 299, 318, 328-332, 335, 336, 341, 359 private · 28, 47, 151, 168, 169, 204, 219, 222, 337, 339 psychoanalysis · 36, 88, 176-178 psychological · 213, 219, 223, 231, 233, 251, 287, 303, 319 psychosis · 55, 75 public · 28, 41, 47, 103, 138, 139, 145-151, 153, 155-157, 204, 224, 231, 234, 236, 241, 301
R racial · 148, 246, 251, 252, 259, 300, 303-306, 309, 312 racism · 300, 301, 313 rape · 27, 31, 218, 219, 221, 234, 245260 rapist · 218, 247, 258 rationality · 9, 36, 56, 92, 101, 105, 198, 233, 277, 300, 353 reader · 11, 25, 26, 45, 57, 61-64, 86, 108, 119, 146, 152, 167, 170, 171, 173, 179, 184, 185, 187, 191-194, 197, 203-205, 210, 220, 221, 231, 235, 239, 247-249, 255-257, 265, 269, 275, 278, 307, 315, 330, 334, 335, 341, 344, 350, 360
Index realistic · 88, 209, 210, 249, 254, 260 reason · 13, 15, 16, 18-21, 70, 74, 78, 88, 91, 92, 99, 101-107, 109, 112, 119, 123, 130, 163, 164, 169, 198, 205, 230, 241, 252, 253, 265, 271, 282, 304, 318, 330, 339, 350, 353, 357 refuseniks · 223, 224 religion · 86, 164, 193, 204, 300, 301 remains · 10, 11, 72, 73, 97, 114, 129, 130, 154, 156, 181, 182, 184, 231, 240, 249, 272, 273, 277, 286, 297, 299, 305, 311, 318, 319, 322, 330, 335, 340, 353 representation · 7, 18, 26, 27, 31, 36, 43, 45, 48, 49, 71, 73, 74, 113, 126, 129, 146, 168, 179, 180, 183, 219, 232, 236, 245, 248, 250-258, 260, 263-267, 269, 271-273, 275, 277, 278, 304, 305, 334, 355 repression · 7, 55, 86, 88, 187, 213 resistance · 63, 64, 113, 138, 176, 214, 263, 273, 275, 300, 304, 318 responsibility · 11-14, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24-27, 30, 37, 57, 59, 61, 143, 152, 155, 214, 224, 233, 235, 237, 238, 240, 241, 277, 283, 284, 287, 288, 290, 306, 307, 312, 315-317, 323, 337, 351, 353, 356, 357, 358, 360 rhetoric · 101, 102, 114, 186, 335 Ron-Furer, Liran · 210, 214, 216, 217, 219, 220-227 rupture · 48, 61, 102, 183, 293, 339, 361
S sacred · 54, 102, 195, 220, 357 Said, the · 28, 263, 274, 354, 355, 356, 360, 361 sameness · 82, 148, 149, 284, 287, 297, 299, 304, 307, 311, 313, 327 Saying, the · 353, 355, 356, 360, 361 scepticism · 16, 150, 164, 362
377 Schiller, Friedrich · 352 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky · 251, 252, 261 self, the · 15, 17, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 36, 101, 103, 108, 113, 119, 120, 146, 149-156, 157, 159, 165, 168, 173, 176, 180, 183, 187, 191, 195, 199-205, 219, 257, 264, 266, 268, 269, 272, 274, 277, 278, 283, 285, 286, 290, 291, 297-300, 303-307, 309, 311, 313, 329, 333337, 339, 340, 342, 344, 345, 352, 354, 356, 358 self-presentation · 334, 335, 341, 345 self-reflexivity · 107, 143, 172, 287 semiotic, the · 175, 179, 181 sensation · 29, 215, 315, 319, 329 sensibility · 76, 263, 275, 306, 335, 338, 349-352, 354, 356, 360 sentimental fiction · 355 sexuality · 71, 78, 96, 97, 191, 194, 197, 217, 235, 251, 252, 256 Shakespeare, William · 7, 20, 32, 117, 118, 125, 131, 162, 173, 174, 245 shame · 92, 147, 155, 237 sign · 23, 35, 62, 113, 123, 128, 130, 266, 275, 301, 342, 350, 356, 361 signified · 165, 182, 199, 283, 352 signifier · 153, 156, 181, 182, 187, 305 silence · 27, 95, 133, 137, 147, 151, 198, 222, 253, 255-257, 316, 325, 341, 343, 344 simulacrum · 38, 41, 59 singularity · 49, 81, 98, 157, 328, 353, 358 Smith, Adam · 353 Smith, Pauline · 22, 133, 143, 144 social construction · 298, 304 society · 26, 27, 37, 41, 55, 69, 92, 150, 194, 204, 210, 212, 213, 217, 219, 224, 230, 236, 238, 239-241, 251, 256, 258, 291, 321, 329, 339, 349 solipsism · 31, 299, 355, 358
378 soul, the · 15, 16, 21, 25, 99, 107, 122, 150, 163-165, 191-197, 199205, 214, 224, 308 Spinoza · 15-17, 33, 81, 320, 327, 331 strategy · 22, 23, 28, 31, 102, 157, 191, 237, 245, 250, 274, 336, 358 structure · 12, 17, 18, 23, 39, 43, 44, 58, 134, 140, 162, 168, 171, 181, 205, 237, 239, 241, 254, 270, 284, 318, 320, 323-326, 335 style · 35, 163, 186, 350, 361 subject, the · 13, 17, 21, 28, 29, 31, 36, 38-41, 47, 50, 54, 55, 61, 67, 69-75, 77, 79, 80, 86, 87, 90, 91, 99, 101-105, 108-113, 118-120, 126, 128, 129, 139, 145-148, 152, 157, 170, 171, 175-177, 179, 184, 186, 200, 213, 224, 230, 231, 245, 247, 249-251, 253, 263, 265-268, 273, 277, 297-299, 301, 305-309, 312, 318, 320, 324, 327, 336, 337, 339, 353, 355, 35-359 sublimation · 178, 181, 182 surplus · 20, 22, 26, 182, 186, 329 Swift, Graham · 171, 204, 349, 350, 351, 359, 362-364 symbol · 182, 195, 253, 254, 271, 291 symbolic · 55, 88, 94, 97, 168, 175, 176-182, 204, 236, 250, 254, 259, 271, 302
T textual ethics · 7, 101, 184, 282, 283 trauma · 18, 211, 235, 237, 240, 250, 251, 349, 361 truth · 11, 15, 16, 35, 38- 40, 44, 4850, 55, 86, 98, 101, 103, 104, 106110, 112, 113, 124, 128, 134, 135, 141, 177, 186, 205, 224, 249, 264, 271, 289, 291-293, 315, 325, 329, 362
Index
U ugly, the · 192, 240 unaccountability · 97 unconscious, the · 16, 18, 70, 86, 88, 176, 177, 202, 266, 338, 339 unity · 70, 73, 76, 79, 104, 122, 123, 125, 126, 130, 185, 339 universal · 18, 24, 50, 81, 82, 107, 108, 135, 192, 205, 272, 297, 300, 303, 304, 305, 311 universality · 9, 98
V victim · 26, 27, 210, 212, 224, 232236, 241, 246, 247, 251, 258, 283, 286, 290 292, 350, 353, 358 viewer, the · 86, 87, 90, 91, 99, 281 violence · 12, 26, 55, 92, 124, 167, 210, 213, 215-218, 221, 222, 224, 245-247, 249-254, 256, 257, 259, 260, 281, 283, 308, 321-323, 355357 visceral · 14, 56, 323, 361 vision · 29, 45, 140, 141, 192, 230, 254, 257, 358 Wittgenstein, Ludwig · 18-21, 33 vomit · 14, 56, 151 von Trier, Lars · 19, 85-87, 89, 91, 95, 97 vulnerability · 38, 198, 229, 232, 266, 275, 277, 303, 306, 308, 353, 356, 360 Wyschogrod, Edith · 266, 276, 279
Z
i ek, Slavoj · 97, 100
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