Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas

POSTMODERNITY, ETHICS AND THE NOVEL

Until the late 1960s, a concern with the morality of fiction was central to AngloAmerican theory and criticism of the novel. In recent years, however, there has been a marked decline in this tradition, for which the rise of literary theory has often been blamed. In this accessible and ground-breaking study, Andrew Gibson resists the latter accusation. Taking the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas as a starting point, he draws on a range of contemporary theorists to argue that an ethics of fiction is currently emerging out of literary theory itself. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel presents a lucid account of complex philosophy and contemporary theory. It explores Levinas’s thought in detail, provides an extensive discussion of its implications for the study of the novel, and illustrates its case with reference to a wide range of modern and postmodern fiction, including work by Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys and Salman Rushdie. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel is an essential study for anyone concerned with the ethical significance of reading today. Andrew Gibson is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory and Director of the MA in Postmodernism, Literature and Contemporary Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London.

To Robert and Gerlinde

P O S T M O D E R N I T Y, ETHICS AND THE NOVEL From Leavis to Levinas

Andrew Gibson

London and New York

First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 1999 Andrew Gibson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gibson, Andrew Postmodernity, ethics, and the novel / Andrew Gibson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English fiction – 20th century – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 2. Postmodernism (Literature) 3. American fiction – 20th century – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 4. French fiction – 20th century – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 5. Didactic fiction – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 6. Criticism – History – 20th century. 7. Ethics in literature. I. Title. PR888.P69G53 1999 809'.93353 – dc21 98–51149 ISBN 0-415-19895-X (hbk) ISBN 0-415-19896-8 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-00718-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17385-6 (Glassbook Format)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vii ix

Introduction

1

PART I

Dissolutions

23

1 Narrative and alterity Narrating subject and narrated object James, Cather and the Zwischen Excendance Crossing the present: some postmodern fiction

25 25 29 36 41

2 Ethics and unrepresentability From Leavis to Levinas Heart of Darkness and the limits of representation Ethics and the postmodern sublime Negativity and melancholia

54 54 57 66 76

3 Ethics and ‘the dissolution of the novel’ Multiplicity and fission The circuit-breakers: Johnson, Pinget

85 85 91

Bowen and ‘the sphere of the common’

99

v

CONTENTS

PART II

Events

109

4 Proustian ethics

111

Levinas and Proust

111

The double logic of the Recherche

117

Marcel’s others

123

5 Ethics of the event: Beckett

134

Ethical saying

134

The force of interruption: Beckett’s later prose

140

Badiou and Beckett

146

PART III

Responses

159

6 Sensibility

161

A brief history of modern sensibility

161

Levinas, Bataille: sensibility and expenditure

164

Suffering and ‘staging’ in Rhys

167

Cornell, Nin and ‘fissures in reality’

173

7 Reception and receptivity

186

Phenomenology and the ego

186

Blanchot and ‘the innocence of reading’

189

The ‘split-space’ of reception

194

Karatani, Rushdie: reading East to West

201

Bibliography

213

Index

225

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many friends and colleagues helped me greatly with this book, often more – or in more obscure ways – than perhaps they realized or than I was able to tell them at the time. I am particularly grateful to my colleague Robert Eaglestone, whose knowledge of Levinas – more expert than my own – was invaluable to me; who read much of the book, and provided me with a fund of useful comments and suggestions. I am also very grateful to others who found time to read and offered such illuminating responses to individual chapters: Alain Badiou, Steve Connor, Drucilla Cornell, Simon Critchley, Tom Docherty, Jonathan Dollimore, Patricia Duncker, Elaine Ho, Nick Royle and Yoshiki Tajiri. Many other people gave me needed advice or helped in conversation or in other ways, including Laura Chrisman, Martin Dzelzainis, Peter Hallward, Robert Hampson, Eddie Hughes, Luce Irigaray, Betty Jay, Laura Marcus, Jamie Russell and Kiernan Ryan. Parts of this book were first given as papers at the twenty-first International Conference of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) at the University of Kent, 1995; at the third ESSE Conference, University of Glasgow, 1995; to the Samuel Beckett postgraduate seminar, University of Reading, 1996–98; to the Graduate Colloquium in English at the University of Sussex, 1996; at the ‘Literature and Ethics’ conference at the University of Aberystwyth, 1996; at the conference on ‘Contesting Conservatism: Jane Austen and the Ethics of Modernity’ at the London University Centre for English Studies, 1996; to the graduate seminar at the Institut d’Etudes Anglaises et Nord-Américaines, Université de Paris-Sorbonne IV, 1996; to the English department postgraduate seminar at University College London, 1997; to the research seminar in English at the University of Kent, 1997; and to the research seminar in the English Department at Royal Holloway, 1998. I am grateful to

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Hugh Epstein, Monika Fludernik, John Pilling, Ian Littlewood, Tony Inglis, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods, Andrew Hadfield, Mary Evans, François Gallix, René Weis, Tim Armstrong and others who made these presentations possible; and to all those whose responses to and questions about what I had to say were so useful to the development of the book, especially Richard Brown, Wolfgang Wicht, Janet Montefiore, Judith Hawley and John Deamer. My thanks, too, to Talia Rogers, Jason Arthur, Caroline Cautley and Elizabeth Jones at Routledge for their zest, enthusiasm and commitment to and hard work on this project.

viii

ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Levinas Except where listed here or cited in notes, all translations from Levinas’s and other French texts are my own. AT AV CPP DE DF DL DV EDE EE EN HAH IH LC LR MT NLT NP OB OS QLT

Altérité et transcendance (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1995) L’au-delà du verset (Paris: Minuit, 1982) Collected Philosophical Papers, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993) De l’évasion (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982) Difficult Freedom, tr. Séan Hand (London: Athlone, 1990) Difficile liberté: essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976) De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: Vrin, 1982) En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1987) Existence and Existents, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988) Entre nous (Paris: Grasset, 1991) Humanisme de l’autre homme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972) Les imprévus de l’histoire (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994) Liberté et commandement (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994) The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) La mort et le temps (Paris: L’Herne, 1991) Nouvelles lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1996) Noms propres (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981) Outside the Subject, tr. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone, 1993) Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1968)

ix

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

SMB SS TeI TI TIHP TO

Sur Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1975) Du sacré au saint (Paris: Minuit, 1977) Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961) Totality and Infinity, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, tr. André Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995) Time and the Other (and Additional Essays), tr. with an introd. by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987)

x

INTRODUCTION

It is time to go back to Leavis. To start a book on the novel in such a way is to court yawns of boredom or disbelief, wry smiles, ironical jeers. It is also a distinctly unpromising way of beginning a book with the subtitle From Leavis to Levinas, even an illogical one. I mean the point, however, in one (qualified) sense only. Leavis thought that novels had effects on those who read them – that, ethically, it mattered which novels you valued and how you valued them; how you read them, too, the kind of commentary you produced about them, because commentary itself was a mode of valuation. There was an ‘intellectual importance’ to ‘the literary-critical study of creative works’ in themselves, Leavis wrote, which was precisely moral and even redemptive.1 I would want to sustain and argue for a sense of the ethical importance of novels in themselves, of reading novels, of valuing certain novels in certain ways, of the theory and criticism of the novel. Even here, of course, in this initial assertion of agreement, it should be apparent where I differ from Leavis: I use the word ethics throughout this study, rather than his preferred term, morality, for reasons I shall turn to shortly. Almost from the very start, then, the paths of postmodern theory and what Alasdair MacIntyre would call the ‘modern moralist’ diverge.2 All the same, whilst this book should make it sufficiently clear how very remote from Leavis’s is my conception of the ethical value of and in literature, on one point I am sympathetic to him, and to the distinctively English tradition that he represents: in their own particular manner, novels perform an ethical work, or can be made to, and it is worth trying to enable that work to take place. I want to stress this moment of agreement, partly because, as a moment of identification with an English intellectual and critical tradition, it is almost unique in this study though nonetheless important to it. But I also stress it because I want to reaffirm literary ethics in the face of the two developments

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INTRODUCTION

in the subject that, at least in England, have been most responsible for the recent neglect of ethics, the new positivism and the ‘politics of English’. My interest is in what, following Robert Eaglestone, I call ethical criticism, and ethical criticism asks questions of both these developments.3 Positivism is a comparatively straightforward issue: in England in the 1990s, there have been changes to the priorities in research funding; new possibilities are being made available by a rapidly improving new technology; and research agendas are increasingly determined by criteria imported from other disciplines. Combined with a pragmatic ethos, these factors have been making it steadily more advantageous to engage in tending and developing the archive or in the production of positive knowledge. I’m not going to dismiss this work. The refinement of the apparatus is extremely useful, and the pressures in question are in any case formidable. The ethical critic is nonetheless bound to wonder whether there may not be certain ironies to this situation. Isn’t a future imaginable in which the ‘classics’ and related texts, at least, will be available in more or less perfect form, in multiple (or hypertext) editions produced to the very highest scholarly standards; but a future in which there is a steadily diminishing sense of who is to read these texts (let alone their opulent footnotes and accounts of variants) and why? If the experts’ knowledge and elaboration of an ever-growing range of scholarly contexts for literary works is becoming awesome, is anyone sure that it matters, except to one set of specialists or another? It is in relation to the tendency in question that the reaffirmation of ethics seems to me to be most crucial, as it would have done to Leavis. Without an ethics, can the scholar be sure of the point to his or her work? It might, of course, be argued that, however questionable the justification for the scholar’s work, the justification for the critic’s, at least, is clear: it is political. Such a justification has been commonplace over the past three decades. My contention, however, is that this justification is increasingly looking open to question. In England, in particular, it was the politicization of English in the early 1970s that was largely responsible for the quick demise of the Leavisite project and, until very recently, the apparent eclipse of ethical criticism.4 The ostensible superiority of political criticism lay in historicization and demystification, a power as critique that was simply unavailable to Leavisism and humanism, shackled as they were by the terms of an ahistorical and unselfconscious discourse. The conviction of that power produced an extraordinary surge of compelling and distinguished work whose value is hardly to be doubted. I merely wonder whether such work has finally justified the automatic privilege sometimes claimed by political over ethical criticism. My question is partly a familiar postmodern one:

2

INTRODUCTION

wasn’t the supposed ethical superiority of political work too heavily mortgaged to ‘grand narratives’ to be sustainable in the long run? But also, more crucially: whilst ‘the politics of English’ needs no justification in terms of contributions made to knowledge, such contributions have self-evidently not been sufficient justification for political critics themselves. In ethical terms, therefore, after three decades, shouldn’t the value of the ‘politics of English’ also be tested on its own ground, in terms of effectiveness? And here, isn’t it the case that Baudrillard’s logic of the simulacrum has been at its most insidious, ferocious and inexorable, at least in England? How is it possible not to be aware of a blatant (and very painful) irony, in that the decades that have seen the radical politicization of English as a discipline have also witnessed a period of sustained reaction in the larger culture which (pace Blairites) shows no signs of abating? Can English really still be cast as ‘oppositional’ with any confidence or hope? Has it not even become, as a Lyotard or a Baudrillard might argue, ‘effective in opposition’ in the parliamentary sense – in other words, in its own small way, more helpful to established power than an opposition qua opposition can afford to admit? Political criticism has long claimed the moral as well as the epistemological high ground. Indeed, it was on that claim that, in its resistance to the humanist tradition, the ‘politics of English’ was virtually founded. But can that claim be maintained any longer, or can it only be made on the basis of a supposed political authenticity which continues to sidestep the most appropriate test, practical, political consequences? When Terry Eagleton pours scorn on post-structuralism for supposedly playing into the hands of corporate business, or on theory and postmodernists for being indifferent to malnourished bodies, can he explain how a Marxism nursed in and protected by the academy decisively frees the political critic from the complicities and neglects for which he or she takes others to task?5 How does The Ideology of the Aesthetic work more effectively to relieve the misery of the third world than The Postmodern Condition? What is the crucial ethical distinction between the two? Of course, the question of political effects is nothing if not complex: there have been gains, notably in terms of a politics to which Eagleton, for example, would grant only scant importance: the politics of the academy and ‘postmodern politics’, the empowerment of the culturally disenfranchised. But all the same, doesn’t the relationship between radical English departments and a depressingly, stubbornly conservative culture now demand some sober thought? Shouldn’t anyone in the 1990s who categorically insists on the ethical (as distinct from the epistemological) superiority of political work consider quitting the academy for the public arena?6

3

INTRODUCTION

Was the naivety really all on the side of the critics who claimed that the largest effects that literary criticism could hope to have were ethical, and therefore modest? In addition to rethinking the question of their scope, I wonder whether theory and criticism might not also usefully rethink the temporality of their knowledge and the latter’s possible effects; rethink them, that is, in terms, not of direct relevance and immediate efficacy, but, more austerely and patiently, in the spirit of Derrida’s later writings, in relation to an undecidable future, or a utopian hope which cannot know exactly what it might anticipate. That hope would not be teleological, and would not proceed on the assumption of a determinate logic binding what is to come to ‘our present’. This distinction between two temporalities is also the distinction between political criticism and the ethical and ethico-political work that interests me. In the end, however, it seems to me that, even as it has invoked political modes of understanding, much of the literary criticism of the past three decades, in fact, has arguably been ethical. Politics has been a way in which, for a number of years, criticism has construed its own existence as a crucially ethical project. Literary criticism may even be one of the loci where the political becomes ethical. It may therefore in principle be likely to function according to a different temporality to political work. Arguably, if this were to be more fully acknowledged, if the practice of taking the ethical for the political were to start to fade, the gains might be twofold: a larger number of acute, genuinely political minds might be drawn to engage more fully in immediately political work, which might itself become more effective as a result; and literary criticism would content itself with an ethico-political role, contained, even marginal, but not wholly insignificant. Insofar as it is bound to the urgent, political temporality that inspires and constrains Eagleton’s work, literary criticism will never be sufficient. Deconstruction more shrewdly suggests that insufficiency and complicity – in particular, the impossibility of categorical or decisive separation from the excoriated other – may be the conditions ethics must reckon with. In that respect, I agree with Steven Connor, whose insistence on the inescapability of paradox in ethics is behind a lot of what follows in this book: the point is ‘not to purge’ paradox, ‘either by reining back one’s sceptical critique, or by leaping into some magical sublation beyond the antagonism of suspicion and affirmation’, but rather ‘to find productive ways of living and thinking within and through’ paradox.7 The ‘politics of English’, then, has hardly shown us – precisely in terms of its political effectivity – why we should see its productions as decisively different – ethically different – from any other academic work that is duly on its way to the archive. If critics are to claim that literary criticism is anything more useful than ‘a

4

INTRODUCTION

contribution to knowledge’, it arguably has to be according to a different temporality to that of the immediately political world, an ethical or ethico-political temporality. This latter is, I think, the condition of literary theory and criticism. It is an ethicopolitical temporality as I have just specified it that I hope constantly to be invoking in this book. If this temporality, however, is very different from that of the ‘politics of English’, it is equally not that of Leavis and humanism. It has no stable base in constants or universals. It is here that my brief identification with the Leavisite project abruptly gutters and dies. For the ethics and the ethical temporality which interest me emerge from contemporary theory, and this study is precisely concerned with the elaboration of a postmodern or post-theoretical ethics of the novel. Of course, I am hardly the first to argue for a return to ethics in literary theory and novel criticism. The idea has been getting aired for some years, not only by humanists and those Daniel Schwarz has referred to as ‘neohumanists’ (PS, p. 188), but also by moral philosophers and postmodern theorists and deconstructionists. Predictably, perhaps, the former have tended to revert much more substantially to the Leavisite project than I can. Not surprisingly, they have also cast theory as inimical to ethics. Obvious examples would be Colin McGinn, defending the ‘moral thinking’ that ‘lives and breathes on the page’ in fiction against ‘the relativism and formalism that afflict so much of contemporary literary studies’; Frank Palmer, asserting what he himself unashamedly admits to be even a pre-Leavisite faith in the idea ‘that fictional characters are to be regarded as human beings’ in the teeth of the linguistic emphases of structuralism and deconstruction; and S.L. Goldberg, who simply sweeps theory aside as irrelevant in its ‘abstraction’ to human concerns before vigorously reaffirming what is principally the Leavisite cause.8 David Parker and (more familiarly) Wayne Booth, however, have produced more interesting cases, partly because they have engaged more fully and knowledgeably with what they take to be the opposition. Both note the marked decline in confidence in ethical modes of reading fiction in recent decades, and both blame theory for that decline. In The Company We Keep, Booth argues that, in our period, ethical criticism has suffered ‘theoretical ostracism’.9 It has been anathema to anyone taking ‘modernist dogmas’ for orthodoxy (CK, p. 38). If theory is indifferent and even hostile to ethics, however, it is so, for Booth, because it is relativistic and unable either to countenance or promote stable values and standards. Most of all, for Parker, it is theory – specifically post-structuralism – that has led to the eclipse of other discursive possibilities, especially ethical ones. Parker admits the force of theory, in this respect; in particular, the degree to which it has indicted ethical criticism for depending ‘on the misrepresentation of

5

INTRODUCTION

historically contingent and culturally relative values as timeless and universal ones’.10 Nonetheless, he argues that the view of ethical value dominant since the rise of theory leaves the reader ‘unconstrained by any substantive account of textguidedness’ in ethical judgment (ETN, p. 29). The advent of theory and what Parker calls its ‘neo-Nietzschean’ challenge has made reading narrative merely a straying in a moral wilderness (ETN, p. 32). Novels can no longer offer directives which tell us about the way people are and how to discriminate amongst them. Theory has stripped us of our faith in the constancy of moral structures, of novels as underpinned or determined by, even finally identical with those structures. The same or similar arguments have been steadily appearing elsewhere. The shared hope of humanists and ‘neo-humanists’ would appear to be that theory is now decisively on the wane and, in a post-theoretical age, novel critics may quietly return to a more cautious, less imperious, more authentically liberal version of humanist morality. Furthermore, as a Parker or a Schwarz is happy to note, if the ethical drive appears to have faded from novel criticism, by one of those strange, anachronistic twists in postmodern interdisciplinarity, in the same period, moral philosophy has increasingly allotted major ethical significance and a key ethical role precisely to narrative and the novel and even to novel theory and criticism. In Situating the Self, for example, Seyla Benhabib argues for a reconstruction rather than any further postmodern dismantling of the ‘moral and political universalism’ that she takes to be a legacy of modernity.11 Her case is for an interactive as opposed to a legislative universalism, one that is shorn of metaphysical illusion but born of negotiation between historical and cultural contingencies. For Benhabib as for Habermas and Apel, the ‘universal’ in question here is a discursive, communicative concept of rationality; and the ‘communicative rationality’ in question is in large measure precisely a question of narrative. For the contingencies of communication are selves, and the defining condition of the self is understood as the projection of a narrative into the world. Ethics and rationality now belong in the space where narratives interact. In the context of this study, however, as for other literary theorists and critics, the more relevant figures are MacIntyre, Rorty and Nussbaum, because all have been concerned with narrative fiction.12 Take the importance of Jane Austen in MacIntyre’s historical study of moral theory. In Austen, MacIntyre finds a continuation and even a renewal of an ethical tradition in the teeth of what he calls modern morality, the tradition in question being one of thought about and practice of the virtues that stem from Aristotle. For MacIntyre, in a world increasingly given over to the meagre substitutes of modern morality in the public and most of

6

INTRODUCTION

the private spheres, Austen identifies the social space – the household – ‘within which the practice of the virtues is able to continue’ (AfV, p. 239). She unites Christian and Aristotelean themes in a determinate social context. She turns away from the emptily competing, modern catalogues of the virtues in the eighteenth century and restores a teleological perspective. She thereby becomes ‘the last great effective imaginative voice’ of the Aristotelean tradition (AfV, p. 240). What is remarkable, here, is precisely how far MacIntyre reads and prizes Austen as a moralist with a value of a specific kind that has been so largely neglected by literary criticism for more than three decades. Like MacIntyre, Rorty and Nussbaum have both been concerned with the ethical power of fiction – even as opposed to the ethical power of modern philosophy – whilst noting what they take to be an absence of ethical concern in much contemporary literary criticism. Thus Rorty argues, for instance, that Proust’s final, ethical superiority to Nietszche and Heidegger has to do with genre, in that ‘novels are a safer medium than theory for expressing one’s recognition of the relativity and contingency of authority figures’: For novels are usually about people – things which are, unlike general ideas and final vocabularies, quite evidently time-bound, embedded in a web of contingencies. Since the characters in novels age and die – since they obviously share the finitude of the books in which they occur – we are not tempted to think that by adopting an attitude toward them we have adopted an attitude toward every possible sort of person. By contrast, books which are about ideas, even when written by historicists like Hegel and Nietzsche, look like descriptions of eternal relations between eternal objects.13 For Rorty, it is specific, limited and finite moral practices that are of principal importance in ethics, rather than foundations or universal principles; and it is literature and especially the novel that would seem to him best to articulate this sense of ethical practice. Thus he argues that The novelist’s substitute for the appearance–reality distinction is a display of diversity of viewpoints, a plurality of descriptions of the same event. What the novelist [as opposed to the philosopher] finds especially comic is the attempt to privilege one of these descriptions. …

7

INTRODUCTION

What he finds most heroic is not the ability sternly to reject all descriptions save one, but rather the ability to move back and forth between them.14 The novelist presents us with individuality and diversity alike without any attempt to reduce either to the terms of a singular scheme or totality. The novel thereby becomes the form for and expression of an ethics of free, democratic pluralism. For Nussbaum, too, literature is a primary vehicle for ethics in a postphilosophical age. There are ‘certain truths about human life’ that ‘can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist’.15 It is literature and the novel, for example, rather than philosophy, that best express contradictions between significant values or systems of value (‘the existence of conflicts among our commitments’).16 They also best capture the ethical importance of contingency and the passions, and admit the priority of the particular over the general. Philosophy lacks this focus on the concrete, sacrificing it to ‘systematic considerations’ (FG, p. 13).17 For that very reason, the novel is faithful to difficulty both intellectually and ethically, laying open to view ‘the complexity, the sheer difficulty of human deliberation’ (ibid.). Above all, however, it advances ‘the conversation among readers that is necessary to the Aristotelean project, whose aims are ultimately defined in terms of a ‘we’, of people who wish to come together and share a conception of value’ (FG, p. 14). Of course, Rorty and Nussbaum might arguably be seen as delivering philosophy over into the hands of literature. Indeed, Putnam sees their arguments as a sign that ‘the great pretensions of philosophy have collapsed’.18 But, for my purposes, it is more interesting to note how many of Rorty and Nussbaum’s insistences are reminiscent of the liberal humanist tradition of novel criticism. The emphasis on concretion or particularity in the novel is very close to being Leavisite. The emphasis on complexity and diversity of or contradictions in value recalls some of the classic liberal cases for the novel that were made in the 1960s, like Barbara Hardy’s and W.J. Harvey’s. Rorty and Nussbaum are by no means ignorant of contemporary developments in literary theory. The reverse: they may have read, not just their Derrida and de Man, but their Brooks, Jameson and Ricœur. Nonetheless, in their own accounts of the novel, they appear to turn away from later theory to an earlier tradition as explicitly instanced by Rorty in the names of ‘Leavis, Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom’

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INTRODUCTION

(CIS, p. 80). In other words, for all their knowledge of post-structuralism, Rorty and Nussbaum’s effective sense of the novel and the ethics of fiction is rather prestructuralist. The philosopher may feel that he or she is on new ground. Most literary theorists or critics will not. For the likes of Booth and Parker, it is precisely the mixture of the kudos of philosophy with a mode of reading fiction that is uncontaminated by theory that is what makes a resort to the philosophers so attractive. For Booth and Parker wish to continue a classical tradition of ethical criticism of fiction; to see it reemerge unscathed, if necessarily refined and complicated by the questions raised for it by postmodernity. Parker likes Rorty and Nussbaum because they appear to be able to sustain a faith in a classical conception of fictional ethics whilst accepting that an ethical foundationalism is no longer possible and ethical universals no longer thinkable. For this is precisely the kind of double-bind that Parker himself attempts to negotiate, as does Booth. On the one hand, for example, Booth’s account of fictional ethics in The Company We Keep is by intention both pluralist and pragmatist. As Connor puts it, Booth’s ‘conviction of the irreducible plurality of human experience and of ways of understanding it lead him throughout to be suspicious of definitions that prematurely generalize’ or give expression to supposedly foundational principles (TCV, p. 18). Booth argues, instead, that ethical value is generated ‘through acts of continuing conversation, in which judgments about literary texts are tested by and against other judgments, and judgments of other texts’ (ibid.). This is what Booth means by his term ‘coduction’. Yet, at the same time, he wants to assert that ‘the ethics of criticism is more obviously of universal concern than most other “ethics”. The ethical effects of engaging with narratives are felt by everyone in all times and climes’ (CK, p. 38). This means, incidentally, that he does not want anyone ‘coducing’ who is not already aware of what the right values must in the first instance be. So, too, Parker, whilst agreeing that there is no way back from what theory has taught us, also wishes to assert that ‘there is no escape route from certain old thoughts, either’ (ETN, p. 3). For Parker, there is no return ‘to the relative theoretical innocence of the 1950s and 1960s’ (ibid.). Yet his enthusiasm for thinkers like Rorty and Nussbaum relies precisely on the fact that the possibility of such a ‘return’ is what they appear to offer. This paradox – the return that is not a return – is evident throughout Parker’s book. On the one hand, he refuses any nostalgic relapse into ‘essentialist or universalist’ notions of ‘conscience’, ‘human nature’ or moral value (ETN, p. 45). On the other hand, like Booth, he connects the idea of ethics to an

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INTRODUCTION

essentialist conception of ethos and concentrates precisely on texts favoured by the Leavisite tradition (Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Lawrence’s major fiction). He claims not to think in terms of moral ‘codes’ or ‘systems’ but constantly describes novels in such a manner. For the characters in any given novel always either represent or are characterized by some quality or qualities; and such qualities may ultimately be drawn into relation to each other, diagrammed, as it were, precisely, as the foundation for the building itself. Of course, not all the humanist critics who have recently engaged with the philosophers have been quite so enthusiastic for them. Goldberg, for instance, has argued his more classically Leavisite case on the basis of the argument that ‘literature and literary criticism form a distinctive and irreplaceable way of thinking’ (p. xiii) which moral philosophy cannot match, caught as it is in ‘a theory thought out in the abstract and then applied from above’ (p. xvii). He thus takes MacIntyre’s account of Mansfield Park to task for reading the novel ‘as simply exemplifying or instantiating the prior moral ideas Jane Austen is supposed to share with Aristotle and MacIntyre’ (p. 281). The trouble is that, as so often with Goldberg’s kind of moral criticism, his conviction that Edmund is ‘fatuous’ or that Austen observes ‘the shoddy, self-deluding, socially advantageous semblances of love that pass muster with many women’ (p. 283) seems as much the product of ‘prior ideas’ (or a prior discourse) as MacIntyre’s, simply ‘ideas’ or a discourse that are far less obviously meditated. Here, in a nutshell, I think, is a crucial limitation of the older moral criticism, one that cannot be surmounted from within it. At some stage or other, it must revert to an apodictic ‘wisdom’ that, as a mode of knowledge, carries negligible conviction. In the end, it is at least an unwillingness to hear their own discourse self-reflexively, to get the measure of its blindspots, that seems equally a problem with the work of those who are seeking a return to the tradition, if in modified form. So, too, the concepts of ethics to which Rorty, Nussbaum, Booth and Parker are all committed necessarily make of the return a return to metaphysics, for all their more or less cautious ways of seeking to move beyond the latter. As I have tried to show in the cases of Booth and Parker, they repeatedly slip into difficult or paradoxical positions, where the paradoxes are neither managed, nor worked with, in Connor’s sense, nor taken as the site of a struggle, which is my intention in this study. But not only that: what the philosophers and critics in question also continue to share with the whole classical tradition of ethical criticism of the novel is a belief that, at some level, ethics is a totality or involves totalities, whether of value or perception. Equally, it seems to me that a Parker or a Nussbaum

10

INTRODUCTION

sustains the assumption that ethics is only thinkable in terms of certain uniform characteristics or consistent features. This, precisely, is an ethics that cannot allow for radical difference, heterogeneity, the thought of the incommensurable. So, too, Parker may say that ethics can no longer be thought in terms of categories. But it is nonetheless true that, at a certain level, for all the thinkers and critics I have discussed, there must always be clarity and distinction in ethics, or, to use a common term in ethical discussions, discrimination. Such an ethics self-evidently always either relies on or produces determinations. It shrinks from imagining that there might be an ethical dimension to the relation to the indeterminable itself. Even more strikingly, perhaps, the ethics of the novel as classically conceived and as sustained by Rorty, Nussbaum, Booth, Parker and Goldberg seems to me to involve a particular form of what Albrecht Wellmer has called ‘radical surpassing’ and seen as characteristic of modernity.19 Wellmer understands ‘radical surpassing’ as a movement whereby the given is transcended, observed from an olympian height, constantly shadowed or overlooked by an ideal space. I would argue that classical ethical criticism has always understood narratives and criticism alike as involved in this movement. The ethical position always exists beyond or on a different plane to its object. That is exactly what is involved – to give a single instance – in Lukács’s, Girard’s and Goldmann’s view of a ‘supersession’ of the novelistic world as ‘aesthetically constitutive of fictional creation’.20 In that respect, the classical and commonplace conception of what novels are and how they work, ethically, may be thought of as very specifically modern, and having precisely such hold on us, today, as modernity continues to have. But the most crucial problem with the criticism I have been discussing is the extent to which it ignored all the various problematizations of narrative and narrative ‘form’ – problematizations that have been very precisely postmodernist, that could not have emerged without the modern novel – in novel theory from the 1960s onwards.21 Take MacIntyre for example: he succeeds in reading Austen as, ethically, a paradigmatic Aristotelean only by ignoring how far an Aristotelean aesthetics has seemed so radically open to question to contemporary novel theorists and literary critics.22 Similarly, if, for Rorty, the novel is in essence a pluralist, liberal, democratic literary form, this is partly because no single being or Supreme Judge stands for or holds the truth in it. But, as I have argued elsewhere, this is crucially to ignore questions of narration: of ‘omniscience’, for example, in one of Rorty’s favourites, Dickens.23 Almost invariably, the moral philosopher’s grasp of narrative theory is pre-Barthesian, which effectively facilitates if it does not

11

INTRODUCTION

determine the conclusions to which he or she comes.24 It is precisely the apparent philosophical authentification of pre-structuralism that attracts Booth, Goldberg, Parker and Schwarz to Rorty, MacIntyre and Nussbaum. The theorists and critics avail themselves of the latter – or of the debate as cast by the philosophers – to skirt a lot of the inconvenient problems that continue to haunt the theory of the novel in the wake of structuralism and post-structuralism. This is the case, above all, with regard to three issues: narration, representation and the unity of the work.25 My allegiances, then, are neither with the moral philosophers nor with the (neo-) humanists. They are rather with those, like Geoffrey Galt Harpham, who have argued for a close relationship between theory and an ethical criticism.26 The Anglo-American philosophers who are important for this study are thinkers like Simon Critchley and Drucilla Cornell who have been promoting the cause of a deconstructive ethics.27 I also follow in the wake of various theorists and critics (Connor, Eaglestone, McCance) who have recently been exploring the possibilities – and sometimes the problems – of a post-theoretical, ethical criticism.28 This study bears particular family resemblances, too, to two books much concerned with a fictional ethics arising out of theory, both of which require some comment, in this context: J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading and Adam Zachary Newton’s Narrative Ethics.29 I admire Hillis Miller’s deconstructive work on the novel, and share Connor and Critchley’s liking for The Ethics of Reading. But, as Connor points out, it is odd to find Miller ‘so dogmatic and portentous in his assertion of the compelling ethical force of deconstruction; time and again, the sky darkens with the evocation of implacable laws, unconditioned absolutes and irresistible necessities’ (TCV, p. 21). This does not suggest to me (nor, I assume, to Connor) that Miller decisively ‘fails’ in his project, but rather that Miller’s struggle can be – perhaps needs to be – undertaken again, in a different mode, with different resources. In large measure, the problem, as Critchley points out, is that ‘Miller understands ethics in its traditional determination as a region of philosophical inquiry and not in the more radical Levinasian sense’ (ED, p. 47). I shall shortly start to clarify this ‘sense’ of ethics, and mean it to be abundantly evident throughout this book. To some extent, Newton’s book is valuable in shifting the ethics of the criticism of fiction in precisely this direction. Whilst he is rightly critical of structuralist narratology, however, Newton also wants decisively to maintain a distinction between ethics and deconstruction, attempting rather to ‘braid’ Levinas together with Bakhtin and Cavell to produce a dialogical conception of ethics. Insofar as his study is Levinasian, it relies chiefly on Levinas’s concept of the

12

INTRODUCTION

Saying and Said and two principal texts well known in translation, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. By contrast, this study does not privilege what Critchley has called the linguistic turn in Levinas’s ethical thought. The concept of the Saying and Said is important only in the fifth chapter. I seek rather to range widely through Levinas’s work, endeavouring to deploy a number of different aspects of it as means to producing what, following Bauman, Wyschogrod and others, I call a postmodern ethics, whilst also calling Levinas into question from a number of different angles.30 Most importantly of all, however, Newton is much concerned to elaborate a phenomenology of reading, relying on what he calls ‘a phenomenological model of narrative exigencies and effects’.31 I would hope radically to depart from such a model, for reasons that will become clear in my last chapter, where I deal specifically with reception theory as a phenomenology. But why a ‘postmodern ethics’, and why Levinas? Actually, in this instance, I take my description of the postmodern condition from MacIntyre (who no doubt would not appreciate my terms). John Gray is surely right to assert that MacIntyre’s argument for a return to pre-modern modes of moral thought – as exemplified, for him, in Jane Austen – is far less compelling than his diagnosis of the predicaments of contemporary morality.32 MacIntyre argues that, from the late seventeenth century onwards, ‘morality’ becomes the name for ‘a particular sphere in which rules of conduct that are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own’ (AfV, p. 39). As this distinction between the moral and the other spheres becomes a received doctrine, so, too, the project of an independent, rational justification of morality becomes culturally central. This Enlightenment project finds a form, for example, in the Kantian dream of an ‘essence of reason’ as laying down ‘principles which are universal, categorical and internally consistent’, rules of morality which are binding on all beings (AfV, pp. 44–45). Yet the Enlightenment project also entails both a secular rejection of Catholic and Protestant theology and a philosophical rejection of Aristotelean teleology. It thus cuts away the very bases on which the universality of morality had thitherto depended. Moral judgments become mere ‘linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices’ (AfV, p. 60). Furthermore, once the authority of moral precepts becomes a question of reason – a question that can be reasoned about – the precepts can no longer have any final authority. Thus the Enlightenment thinkers inherit ‘incoherent fragments of a once coherent scheme of thought and action’, and commit themselves to an impossible, quixotic task (AfV, p. 55). In fact, the Enlightenment project produces a moral culture that is snared in a profound irony: the universalism of

13

INTRODUCTION

that culture’s moralities is constantly belied or set at issue by their very proliferation. Thence derives what is, for MacIntyre, our disastrous moral situation today. We inhabit a culture in which moral debates are confrontations ‘between incompatible and incommensurable moral premises’ and moral commitment is ‘the expression of a criterionless choice between such premises’ (AfV, p. 39). Equally, moral debates are characterized by their shrillness, indignation or, to use a more philosophical term, by ‘emotivism’. Moral discourse takes on an insistence which is a function of the very absence of any rational, commensurable grounds for agreement. The insistence in question is also directly proportional to the moralist’s awareness of the impossibility of winning universal and unqualified assent. In John Gray’s phrase, we are left with ‘a fragmented moral vocabulary embodying no coherent conception of the human good’ (EW, p. 7). As Gray puts it, again following Nietzsche, there is only ‘incommensurability and undecidability among a plurality of moral and other perspectives’ (EW, p. 151). The most striking feature of moral debates is thus their interminable character; interminable, not just in that ‘such debates go on and on – although they do’, but also in that ‘they apparently can find no terminus’ (AfV, p. 6). In Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, MacIntyre actually specifies this as a conspicuous feature of contemporary academic practice. Contemporary morality requires ‘a conclusive termination of rational debate’ that ‘appeals to a standard or set of standards such that no adequately rational person could fail to acknowledge its authority’. But today’s academy must lead to the conclusion that there is no such standard, that there ‘is no theoretically neutral, pre-theoretical ground from which the adjudication of competing claims can proceed’.33 Postmodernity would thus be the (not necessarily contemporary) condition in which we arrive at – and must work with and through – a more and more developed awareness of moralities as myriad, groundless, incommensurable and interminable. Within postmodernity, the academy becomes the very paradigm of this predicament. The problem with MacIntyre’s position – as opposed to his diagnosis – is that he appears still to credit what, with reference to Aristotle, Derrida calls ‘the reliability of the stable (bébaios), that on which virtue depends’.34 But can Aristotle or Aristoteleanism really offer us a privileged point of vantage au dessus de la mêlée? Can Marx? Can any single thinker or thought? Is this not to continue with a fantasy of ‘radical surpassing’? One response to the situation in question is that chosen by Leona Toker and the contributors to the volume of essays on literature and ethics called Commitment in Reflection: criticism as a pluralist but non-relativist mode of ethical reflection which recognizes the incommensurability of the ethical

14

INTRODUCTION

principles both of individuals and of communities. The trouble with such a position on its own is that, for all its attractions, the pluralities envisaged will insistently threaten to stand in relation to foundationalism and universalism as petits threaten to stand in relation to grands récits: the scale may no longer be global and horizons may be more precisely determined, but nothing requires that the structures of thought involved of themselves be or be made more open (to transformation, diversification, singularization, etc.).35 Would a plurality of fundamentalisms be much good? It is precisely here that I would want to insist – as Toker does not – on the crucial distinction between ethics and morality: not in that ethics offers a privileged vantage-point above plural moralities, but in that ethics is different in character to morality.36 Here I’m following two brilliant accounts of the difference, Harpham’s, and Cornell’s in The Philosophy of the Limit. Intriguingly in the context of MacIntyre’s arguments, Harpham suggests that ethics holds close to the ‘yearning for convergence, rationality, closure, transcendence’ (GR, p. 1, my italics). But it also ‘sustains an august reticence, a principled irresolution’ (GR, p. 55). Its element is ‘the strictly undecidable’ which ‘suffers determination by morality’ (p. 56). Ethics is ‘properly dis-interested’ and, as such, precedes and governs our political and moral ‘interestedness’ (GR, p. 55).37 It is born free, but also bound everywhere by morality ‘to particular communities, institutions, codes, and conventions’ (GR, p. 58). This does not mean that we can or should shrug off the ordinary, difficult world of moral choices for the lofty, high-minded indeterminacies of ethics, abandoning commitments for what Bernard Williams calls the ‘intellectualist satisfactions’ of ‘a refined indecision’.38 In an argument that is close to the one I sought to develop earlier in relation to the ‘politics of English’, Harpham rightly insists that the determination of ethics by morality is to be neither slighted nor denied. We are moral as we are political because we are historical beings, and no movement ‘beyond morality’ is properly conceivable (as these opening pages will have already shown). Ethics nonetheless operates a kind of play within morality, holds it open, hopes to restrain it from violence or the will to domination, subjects it to a ‘kind of auto-deconstruction’.39 In Harpham’s phrase, this latter ‘typifies’ the realm of the ethical (GR, p. 28). For the paradigm of the latter is ‘the compromised binary’ (GR, p. 48). In the terms of Derrida’s engagement with Kierkegaard in The Gift of Death – an engagement conducted partly via Levinas – the ethical recognition is not of the Kierkegaardian either/or, but of ‘the paradox of Abraham’.40 Thus ethical work remains distinct from either political or moral work, even as it continues to inform them. So, too, Cornell associates ethics (as

15

INTRODUCTION

articulated by Adorno and Levinas) with the undetermined, and morality with deontology, with the determination of the undetermined as duties, obligations, systems, rules, norms, ‘a right way to behave’.41 Ethics is the excess that cannot be known positively within any given system of morality, the aporia that limits any attempt to collapse the good into positive knowledge. What is most remarkable about Cornell’s case is the fact that ethics thereby becomes inseparable from ‘the full disruptive power of the imagination’ (PL, p. 35). In Cornell’s thought, the imagination regains its status as a crucial ethical power, a status that I intend it to have in this study, too. The power in question, however, is not the moral power of the imagination as understood by humanism. It is not a power of ‘deep comprehension’ of what is already there, but rather one of speculation and adumbration, a power to break up the given, to admit and elaborate the possible. The imagination is crucial in producing what, with Adorno in mind, Cornell calls the ‘redemptive perspectives’ that ‘displace and estrange the world’, so that ‘we are made aware that we are in exile’ (PL, p. 16). As I have already indicated, it is to the work of Emmanuel Levinas that this study turns for a relevant, sophisticated, many-sided, non-foundational ethics. Of course, there is nothing particularly new about the resort to Levinas; but I hope to take more and more varied facets of Levinas’s philosophy into account than have most attempts to deploy his work in the service of an ethical literary theory and criticism. This is not the place to give a detailed account of Levinas’s thought. That account will emerge in successive chapters as it is relevant to my concerns. But I ought to give a few reasons for my decision. First, as I’ve said, Levinas’s ethics is non-foundational. It does not proceed on the basis of or in the hope of establishing a secular, objective, universal morality on securely rational foundations. Second, it does not give primacy to cognition. In Levinas’s now famous phrase, the ethical relation is the first relation. Ethics is not a question of knowledge. It does not consist in a resort to categories, principles or codes that are assumed to be knowable prior to the ethical relation, prior to the immediate encounter with what is outside us. Third, Levinas’s ethics is non-ontological. To think ethically is to think ‘otherwise than being’. The ethical relation does not presume an exteriority comprehensible in terms of hypostasized essences, static identities or wholes. Fourth, the ethical relation is always both immediate and singular, a question of responsiveness and responsibility to what is at hand. In this respect, Levinas gives priority to praxis, articulation and event, to signification rather than significance, to Saying rather than Said. Fifth and last for now, the ethical relation is not only non-cognitive. It cuts radically across what Levinas calls the naive,

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INTRODUCTION

arbitrary, spontaneous dogmatism of the self which insists on reducing exteriority to the terms of cognition. Indeed, Levinas has described his work as a whole as directed against what Spinoza called the conatus essendi, the assumption of the ‘right to existence’, of the automatic good of freedom, in Levinas’s particular sense of the word – though also, perhaps, in Rorty’s. What follows, however, is not just an exposition of certain Levinasian concepts and an explication of a number of texts in their light. Instead, I try to proceed in the awareness of how frequently the philosopher of alterity has been taken to task for his blind spots, the specific forms of an obtuseness to the very other by whom Levinas claims to set such store. The problem of the significance of woman in Levinas’s thought – of Levinas and gender or sexual difference – is one that feminist thinkers have insisted on, and is particularly important in what follows. But so, too, for instance, is the question of Levinas’s Eurocentrism, especially in the last chapter. Equally, I’ve wanted to put Levinas in contact with what John Champagne has called ‘the ethics of marginality’ as it is emerging out of gay studies.42 In general, each chapter tries to stage a confrontation between Levinas and ‘his other’, another theorist or other theorists. The intention is to challenge, ask questions of, extend or complicate the boundaries of the Levinasian project by allowing a different kind of theory to cut across it. If this pattern is recurrent in my book, however, the latter also has a more linear structure. I suggested earlier that theory has raised questions for three principal themes that have always been central to the study of the novel: narration, representation and the unity of the work. The moral philosophers and neo-humanists have largely ignored these questions, just as did a more classical criticism, but without the historical excuse. Accordingly, in Part I, I go back to a contemporary problematics of narration, representation and unity – to a large extent, by a Levinasian route – in order to consider its ethical implications.43 In Part II, I attempt to extend and deepen the modes of ethical reading developed in Part I with specific reference and close attention to the work of two novelists, Proust and Beckett. In Part III, I consider how far a non-cognitive, Levinasian ethics of fiction might also be an ethics of affect, with reference to two key, related concepts, sensibility and receptivity. The novels that I use as examples throughout the book are modern and postmodern. The reasons for that should be obvious. For a traditional, moral criticism of the novel as exemplified in Leavis, the key texts were largely nineteenthcentury. By and large, such criticism either avoided modern fiction, presented its crucial concerns as other than moral or passed more or less negative comment on its moral implications. By contrast, the case implicit in my book is that, for the

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INTRODUCTION

ethical critic, it is twentieth-century texts that are of cardinal importance. In fact, the difference between ethical and moral criticism will be reflected precisely in the texts they respectively privilege. In just two instances, James and Conrad, and specifically in the case of Heart of Darkness, I return to authors and texts that were canonical for the Leavisite tradition, in order both to reclaim them from that tradition and to make my differences with it as clear and explicit as possible. In this respect, one very significant influence throughout the book, though less in evidence than Levinas, is Lyotard’s work, and, in particular, his ethical and ethicopolitical reading of the avant-garde. As I have already said and as this study repeatedly insists, ethics refuses to give priority to the backward look at the already given (which is not to suggest that it repudiates the historical, as I hope to make clearer, later). It is precisely at this point that ethics and the avant-garde – or ethics and the explorations of modern literature and art – might appear to coincide.

Notes AL AfV CIS CK EA EAA EC ED ETN EW FG GR LK LLMP PL PS SiS TCV

Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature, S.L. Goldberg After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth thics and Aesthetics: the Moral Turn of Postmodernism, Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung (eds) ‘Ethics, Aesthetics and Alterity’, Herbert Grabes Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Robert Eaglestone The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Simon Critchley Ethics, Theory and the Novel, David Parker Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, John Gray The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Martha Nussbaum Getting It Right: Language, Literature and Ethics, Geoffrey Galt Harpham Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Martha Nussbaum ‘Literature and the Limits of Moral Philosophy: Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Project’, Gerald L. Bruns The Philosophy of the Limit, Drucilla Cornell ‘Performative Saying and the Ethics of Reading: Adam Zachary Newton’s Narrative Ethics’, Daniel R. Schwarz Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, Seyla Benhabib Theory and Cultural Value, Steven Connor

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INTRODUCTION 1. F.R. Leavis, The Living Principle: ‘English’ as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977), p. 51. 2. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981; second edition, London: Duckworth, 1996), hereafter AfV, passim. 3. Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), hereafter EC. 4. Daniel Schwarz gives different reasons for a similar eclipse in the States. See Daniel R. Schwarz, ‘Performative Saying and the Ethics of Reading: Adam Zachary Newton’s Narrative Ethics’, Narrative, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 188–206, hereafter PS; p. 194. 5. Terry Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, in Against the Grain (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 131–47, p. 134; and The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 71. 6. For other recent efforts to maintain the ethical as well as the epistemological superiority of Marxism specifically to postmodernism, see for instance the work of Mark Cole and Dave Hill; in particular, ‘Resistance Postmodernism: Emancipatory Politics for a New Era or Academic Chic for a Defeatist Intelligentsia?’, in Karamjit S. Gill (ed.), Information Society: New Media, Ethics and Postmodernism (London: SpringerVerlag, 1996), pp. 330–41. Note for example the attack on Derrida, p. 337. 7. Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), hereafter TCV; p. 16. 8. Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. vi, 173–74; Frank Palmer, Literary and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. viii, 8; and S.L. Goldberg, Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), hereafter AL, p. 1. For J.J. Mooij, the reversion is rather from ‘aestheticism’ to the kind of moral concern exemplified in Ian Gregor and Brian Nicholas’s The Moral and the Story (1962). See J.J. Mooij, ‘Literature and Morality: the Primacy of Ethics’, in Bjørn Tysdahl (ed.), Literature and Ethics (Oslo: University of Oslo, 1992), pp. 99–114. 9. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), hereafter CK; p. 25. 10. David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), hereafter ETN; p. 29. 11. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Oxford: Polity, 1992), hereafter SiS; p. 2. 12. Interestingly, insofar as the joint concern here is an individualist ethics, both Grabes and Bredella would want to add Foucault’s name to the list. See Herbert Grabes, ‘Ethics, Aesthetics and Alterity’, hereafter EAA, in Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung (eds), Ethics and Aesthetics: the Moral Turn of Postmodernism (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996), hereafter EA; pp. 13–28, pp. 20–21; and Lothar Bredella, ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: Incommensurable, Identical or Conflicting?’, in EA, pp. 29–51, pp. 33–34. 13. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), hereafter CIS; pp. 107–8. 14. Rorty, ‘Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens’, in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 66–84, p. 74.

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INTRODUCTION 15. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), hereafter LK; p. 5. 16. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), hereafter FG; p. 13. 17. For an early example of the (increasingly common) argument for the concrete moral particulars of literature as opposed to ‘abstract philosophical theories’ as that argument emerges specifically in moral philosophy, see R.W. Beardsmore, ‘Literary Examples and Philosophical Confusion’, in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 59–73, p. 72. 18. See Parker, ETN, 35. 19. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Polity, 1991), p. vii. 20. See Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 4. 21. Grabes points out, for instance, how far MacIntyre and Nussbaum’s account of narrative as a rendering of the unity of individual lives involves a reversion to ‘a premodern aesthetics of harmony’; and how far, too, Rorty is obliged to resort to ‘an antiquated Inhaltsästhetik’. See Grabes, EAA, pp. 15, 17. One moral philosopher who provides an interesting exception to the rule (of philosophical indifference to structuralist and post-structuralist theory of the novel) is Edith Wyschogrod. See her use of narrative theory – and her interest in a ‘narratological ethic’ – in Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Not surprisingly, her work has been ignored by neo-humanists. 22. Gerald L. Bruns argues that narrative is actually ‘the linchpin of MacIntyre’s moral theory’ and that MacIntyre’s view of it is chiefly Aristotelean and pre-modern. See Bruns, ‘Literature and the Limits of Moral Philosophy: Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Project’, hereafter LLMP, in Leona Toker (ed.), Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 245–78, p. 254. 23. See my Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 192–93. 24. A similar point might be made about a study which considers the relationship between philosophy and narrative in a rather different way, Jonathan Rée’s Philosophical Tales: An Essay on Philosophy and Literature (London: Methuen, 1987). 25. Geoffrey Galt Harpham points out in particular how far Nussbaum and MacIntyre’s Aristoteleanism leads them to see narrative unity as providing the key to self-knowledge and the good. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting It Right: Language, literature and Ethics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), hereafter GR; p. 158. 26. As Dominic Rainsford points out, Harpham sees ethics as the point at which theory and literature intersect or ‘entail one another’. Rainsford, Authorship, Ethics and the Reader (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 2. Cf. Rainsford’s own account of Derrida and Blake, pp. 214–24. 27. See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell,

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INTRODUCTION

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

1992), hereafter ED; and (for instance) Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (London: Routledge, 1991). Connor, TCV; Eaglestone, EC; and Dawne McCance, Posts: Re Addressing the Ethical (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); and Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also William J. Eilos, Narrative Ethics (Avebury Studies in Philosophy; Aldershot: Avebury, 1994). Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); and Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Towards a Postmodern Ethics: Corporeality and Alterity’, in Hoffmann and Hornung (eds), EA, pp. 53–68. Newton, ‘Humanism with a (Post)Social Face: A Reply to Daniel Schwarz’, Narrative, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 207–21, p. 211. See John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995), hereafter EW; pp. 147, 152. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), pp. 172–73. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, tr. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 22. I would except Bruns’s essay from the reservations I have about Toker’s volume. In the end, Bruns’s Bakhtinian argument contra MacIntyre is that the novel does not offer a resolution to the ‘crisis of rationality’ but produces such a crisis itself; not apocalyptically, however, as in MacIntyre, but creatively, as a way of keeping conceptual schemes loose, porous, irreducible, unserious and responsive to singularity. See LLMP, p. 273. In his recent Life in Fragments, which takes a rather different direction to Postmodern Ethics – and to Harpham, Cornell and myself – Bauman also distinguishes between ethics and morality. But he presents ethics as legislative, rule-bound, modern and moribund, and morality as contingent, constructivist and postmodern. It would be hard for him to do this if he’d read much traditional literary criticism. See Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Harpham is actually discussing Levinas in this passage. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana/ Collins, 1985), p. 169. Cf. Connor’s recent call, not for ‘a move beyond rationality, nor any kind of relaxation of, or reversion from it, but the incitement of a condition of permanent, responsible catastrophe within it’. Connor, ‘After Cultural Value: Ecology Ethics, Aesthetics’, in Hoffmann and Hornung (eds), EA, pp. 1–12, p. 12. I am not sure that I follow Connor, though, in his (Gillian Rose-influenced) argument for the ‘continuing paradoxical necessity of the subject and the ethical modes of its egological preservation’ (ibid.). As parts of my first and the case in my third chapter should make clear, I am more interested in the ethical preservation of ‘catastrophe’ as an incomplete (and perhaps uncompletable) ‘work’ within subjectivity, morality and form alike. Derrida, The Gift of Death, tr. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 78. See in particular the footnote, pp. 78–79.

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INTRODUCTION 41. Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (London: Routledge, 1992), hereafter PL; p. 13. 42. John Champagne, The Ethics of Marginality: A New Approach to Gay Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 43. It is the fact that I want to continue with the problematization of these issues – to give that problematization an ethical inflection – that distinguishes my project from other narrative ethics (and the many other ethical readings of novels and novelists) that are concerned with the redemption of difference and of silenced voices in narrative, though this book should make it very clear how much more compelling I find such work than that of the humanists and neo-humanists. Examples would include Kate Fullbrook, Free Women: Ethics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990); Mark Ledbetter, Victims and the Postmodern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body: An Ethics of Reading and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1996); and Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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Part I DISSOLUTIONS

1 NARRATIVE AND ALTERITY

Narrating subject and narrated object The encounter with alterity is central to Levinas’s thought. To begin simply: the other whom I encounter is always radically in excess of what my ego, cognitive powers, consciousness or intuitions would make of her or him. The other always and definitively overflows the frame in which I would seek to enclose the other. But that means that the frame itself is broken or disintegrates. Levinas often writes of the delusion of the possibility of possession of the other. As I fail to ‘capture’ or ‘possess’ the other, so the mechanisms by which I have sought possession come into question. They reveal themselves to be always modes of reduction. The more or less stable structure of my frames for the world appears as a function of my will to identity, of my will to persist in my being or, in a phrase of Pascal’s that Levinas is fond of using, my conviction of my right to a place in the sun. My selfassertiveness – my confident trust in my terms of reference – amounts to an imposition of force and, as such, is unethical. What lies outside me neither asks for, requires nor justifies such an imposition. As I fail to ‘capture’ the other, too, the encounter with the other becomes an occasion to which I must rise again. In this instance, however, I no longer seek to bring the other to terms. Rather, I offer myself to the other, with a gesture that Levinas expresses in the phrase ‘Here I Am’. The will to know the other or to approach the other in terms of knowledge becomes responsiveness to and responsibility for the other. The ego is deposed, gives up its drive to sovereignty and enters into ethics, into social relationship, dialogue, disinterestedness. Ethics is constituted as what Levinas refers to as an ‘incessant dégrisement [disenchantment] du Même enivré de soi’ (MT, p. 25). But

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what concerns him is not a disenchantment with a world that fails to correspond to the subject’s expectations, but a disenchantment of the self that seeks to contain the world within its perspectives. Levinas’s ethics might partly be described as a disenchantment of subjectivity. On this account of them, the crucial features of Levinas’s thought have a significant bearing on the ethics of narration. Narration might seem principally to be a mode of activity in which a subject takes another, others, the world as the object or objects of knowledge and claims possession of them. However, a range of distinctions seems necessary. Narration is not one thing. It is possible to think of it as an arrangement or play of different language games, in Wittgenstein’s terms, or genres of discourse or phrase regimens, in Lyotard’s. Representation is one mode of narrative discourse and/or knowledge, analysis another, judgment still another, and so on. The ethical question raises itself in different terms in each case. All the same, in a Levinasian context, the narration of a story appears as a particular kind of ethical concern. The important, formal distinctions between narratives or modes of narrative are not merely formalist. They do not describe a given narrative form as simply a reflection or embodiment of an ethics primarily found elsewhere in the narrative text, though this was how a whole Anglo-American tradition of novel criticism as represented by – say – Barbara Hardy and Wayne Booth understood distinctions between modes of narration. Rather, in the context of an ethics for which ethical and epistemological questions are inseparable, distinctions between modes of narration are also the crucial ethical distinctions. Thus ethical distinctions would be involved, for example, in differentiations between more or less ‘omniscient’ narrators; between an ‘omniscient’ third person narrator and one who professes only a limited or partial knowledge of the world narrated; between a third person narrator-character who is absent from the world narrated and one who is a character in the story he or she tells. Each of these distinctions – distinctions between what is apparently known and what is presented as beyond the frame of narratorial knowledge – has an ethical dimension. Indeed, the relevant distinction ultimately expresses the ethics of the text in question. To consider such distinctions in full would require a book in itself. Rather than opting for a sketchy survey, I’ve chosen to develop my case by attending to a single type of narration, the last type I described, that in which the narratorcharacter also features in the story. For the type in question arguably constitutes a radically different kind of example to the others, and is particularly helpful in giving a specific focus to so large and unwieldy a topic as this chapter’s. It (the type of narration) frequently raises questions of gender. I shall concentrate on those, too, partly to set limits to the discussion, but also because the significance

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of an ethics of alterity emerges precisely in relation to those questions. There is a radical distinctness, then, to the mode of narration that Genette called extradiegetichomodiegetic, narration as delivered by a narrator-character, though I would want to extend Genette’s category to include focalized narration, narration which adopts a particular character’s point of view, Jamesian reflector-narration.1 The distinctness of the mode in question has to do with what it makes of the subject–object relation; how far it formulates that relation in a manner that corresponds to its problematization in contemporary thought. The extent of that problematization is well known: in Noms propres, Levinas himself writes of the history of the theory of knowledge in contemporary philosophy as being the history of the disappearance of the subject–object relation. The subject can no longer be conceived of as closed up in itself, set in a structural opposition to a world onto which it peers out and of which it constructs a knowledge or representations. Such a conception of the subject is now outmoded, an abstraction or illusion. The subject must rather be understood as always in relation in the first instance, from the start. Whether with Husserl and intentionality, Heidegger and being-in-the-world and Miteinandersein, Bergson and duration or Levinas himself, the subject either always already has a pre-reflective engagement with the world or is projected beyond the instant of its own subjectification (NP, p. 32). In this context, if narrator-character narration is radically distinct from the other kinds of narration I described, it is because it is dual. The narrator is also an experiencer. He or she is engaged, involved in the world narrated. Thus narration as reflection appears to supervene upon prereflective experience. The ethics of narrator-character or focalized narration thus entails a play of levels and dimensions as – say – the ethics of omniscient narration does not. Within the category of narrator-character itself, there are obviously further distinctions. What kinds of play between levels are possible, for example? What are the modes of relation between narrator as narrator and narrator as character or focalizer, and what is the ethical import of the differences between these modes? To specify the issues with reference to gender: there is surely an ethical distinction to be made, for example, between two novels in which the narratorcharacter is male whilst the most important character in his story is female, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and A Lost Lady. You might wish to make a conventional moral distinction between the Jim Burden who so values Ántonia and her womanhood, and the Niel Herbert who ultimately devalues Marian Forrester and hers. But such a distinction has to be radically offset against the ways in which Jim’s and Niel’s narratives are respectively presented to us as modes of knowledge.

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For all his romantic admiration for Ántonia, Jim’s narrative is a means by which he wholly converts her into meaning or symbolic depth, as in the passage where Jim ‘rounds off’ his portrait: She lent herself to immemorial attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or a gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things… It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.2 Of course, it is possible to read this passage as an act of generosity matching Ántonia’s, a generosity (Jim’s) in striking contrast to Niel Herbert’s lack of it in the later novel. But the fact that the passage ends with that last small paragraph as the ‘finishing touch’ is significant. It is the gesture of completion whereby Ántonia is finally enclosed and made Jim’s own. My Ántonia: Jim’s narrative is the means by which he arrives at a comprehensive possession of Ántonia. In A Lost Lady, by contrast, precisely the point about Marian Forrester is that she is ‘lost’ to Niel. At the end of the novel, this is literally true: she has ‘gone West – people supposed to California’ and thus become a ‘shade’.3 But Mrs Forrester has always escaped Niel’s frames of reference, notably in her sexual and passional life, which the novel indicates is beyond Niel’s powers of representation and comprehension. Cather makes this glaringly obvious in the account of Mrs Forrester’s adulterous excursion with Frank Ellinger (LL, pp. 59–64). Here, there is a major break in the ‘focalization’ of the narrative, which is otherwise entirely through Niel. Indeed, at this point, the novel is ‘refocalized’ twice, once through an impersonal, third person narrator, and a second time through an otherwise negligible character called Adolph Blum. To complain about this sequence as a flaw in the novel’s seamless self-consistency is simply to resort to a conventional valuation of a purely notional narrative unity over epistemological and ethical issues. That other perspectives radically cross Niel’s, here, is precisely the point. The reader is given a direct and immediate sense of the drastic limitations to Niel’s cognitive horizons, limitations that the reader can subsequently repeatedly divine elsewhere. Niel’s narratorial ‘possession’ of a world breaks down at precisely the moment when another man is ‘possessing’ Marian. Some while later, of course, Niel will be present as narrative focalizer but equally excluded from possession, in the scene where he brings flowers to place on

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the windowsill of Marian’s room and hears her and Ellinger laughing behind the closed shutters. It is as Niel encounters the limits to his possession of the woman, both as man and narrator, that his bitter disillusionment with Marian begins, and he opts for a different mode of possession, one that aspires to superiority but is in implication a confession of drastic weakness: moralism. ‘ “Lilies that fester,” he muttered, “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” ’ (LL, p. 84). The mode of ethical reading I have just employed has at least one advantage over a more familiar one: it does not need to resort to any account of Cather’s supposed ‘attitudes’ or show the existence or non-existence of moral irony in Cather’s text. To a much greater extent than is often assumed, the degree of irony in narrative texts like A Lost Lady is actually undecidable. Not so with the epistemological issue in Cather’s novel, however, nor with the ethical question that is inseparable from it. Yet the model I have used thus far is nonetheless limited in at least two principal respects. In the first instance, whilst it actually problematizes or presents Cather as problematizing the subject–object relation, it does not actually make the latter disappear, as Levinas says it has disappeared for contemporary philosophy. To some extent, this is clearly a problem with Levinas’s thought as I have so far described it. The ethical encounter with alterity takes place as the subject–object relation founders. Yet the situation in which this happens is nonetheless one in which a subject confronts an entity that it would seek to take as its object. Furthermore, with regard to gender, there is a problem in that, as feminist critics of Levinas have pointed out, insofar as the encounter between self and other is gendered, in Levinas the subject is male and the object female. Whether or not the subject succeeds in possessing the object, the structure of the relation separates a male from a female principle and suggests that the crucial ethical experience is that of the male subject.

James, Cather and the Zwischen There is, however, another, less familiar, perhaps rather marginal strand to Levinas’s work – to his accounts of certain thinkers – which imagines the ethical encounter in slightly but significantly different terms. The difference necessarily involves questions of gender. This ‘second strand’ is evident, for instance, in Levinas’s essays on Lévy-Bruhl in Entre nous and on Buber in Noms propres. In the penultimate section of the Lévy-Bruhl essay, Levinas begins by suggesting that, if contemporary philosophy has put an end to the Aristotelian notion of substance, it has thereby also put an end to a particular conception of exteriority. He then continues:

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Since the primary experience of being is situated at the level of emotion, exterior being is deprived [dépouillée] of the form which assured thought of a familiarity with it. The subject thus finds itself confronting an exteriority over to which it is delivered, for that exteriority is absolutely foreign, that is to say, unforeseeable and, by that token, singular. The unique character of situations and instants, belonging to no type [sans genre], their naked existence, is thus the moderns’ great theme. For its part, the I, delivered over to being in this fashion, is ejected from its home within itself and into the realms of an eternal exile, loses its mastery over itself, is overflowed by its own very being. It is a prey to events which have already determined it from the start [en proie à des événements qui l’ont d’ores et déjà déterminé].

(EN, p. 58) There seem to me to be at least two important differences between the emphases in this passage and those that are most common elsewhere in Levinas’s work. First, here Levinas suggests that the primary experience of exteriority is affective. This, of course, is of a piece with his emphasis on the priority of pre-reflective consciousness. Here, however, it is affective experience and not the breakdown of the movement of cognition that appears to be the key to the ethical encounter itself. It is in the affections that I experience the world in its strange, unforeseeable singularity. The cognitive intelligence can only betray that singularity back into the hardened, familiar forms of sameness which leave the subject inadequate to the other. Second, the ethical encounter here is not ‘structured’. Nor does it gain its significance as its structure breaks down. It is understood as an event. Affectivity and the event: these will be key terms elsewhere in this book. Yet, at the same time, Levinas is still writing in terms of a subject deemed to exist prior to but also therefore as a prey to (en proie à) events. In another passage in the same essay, however, Levinas takes a rather different direction, in elaborating on the notion of affectivity held in common by Lévy-Bruhl and contemporary thought and quoting from Lévy-Bruhl’s Carnets: It is not necessary to take it for granted that ‘beings are given first, and then enter into participations. For them to be given, for them to exist, there must already be participations. A participation is not only a mysterious and inexplicable fusion of beings who, at one and the same time, conserve and lose their identity … Without participation, they

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would not be given in their experience [données dans leur expérience], they would not exist …’ For the individual, participation ‘is a condition of his existence …’

(EN, pp. 54–55)4 Here, precisely, as an event, the ethical encounter is a ‘participation’ before it can be construed in terms of entities – subject–object, man–woman – that may be deemed subsequently to emerge from it. The event itself has priority. So, too, in Levinas’s reading of Buber and Buber’s concept of the Zwischen. As Levinas underlines, Buber does not think of the self as a consistent substance, but as a relation: ‘It can only exist as an I interesting itself in a You or as an I seizing hold of a That [un Je saisissant un Cela]’ (NP, p. 33). The I–You relation would of course seem to be the cardinal relation with alterity and being, the I–That relation the secondary relation of objective knowledge. Except, of course, that, in Buber, the I–You relation is not a relation with being. The ‘event’ of the I–You encounter is being. There is no more fundamental ontology than that encounter: The ‘between-the-two’ [L’‘entre-les-deux’], the interval between the I and the You, the Zwischen, is the site where the work of being takes place.

(NP, p. 36) It is precisely in this concept of the Zwischen, says Levinas, of the fundamental ontology of the interval ‘between the two’, that I must abandon ‘la notion d’un être-contenu, d’un être-réalisé’ and – most significantly, in this context – ‘d’un être narré’ (my italics), narrated being. An ontology of the two and not the one, of the interval and the relation: this finds echoes, of course, in a range of contemporary theoretical discourse, particularly discourse on gender and, most notably, perhaps, in Irigaray’s recent work.5 Narrative theory has been unable to think the Zwischen, the ‘entre-lesdeux’, the median ground, the event of narration as a self–other relation. Yet narration can actually be thought of in terms that are the reverse of those of the most familiar theoretical categories: of an encounter that is a ‘participation’ before it is construed into entities.6 Insofar as those entities are describable as male and female, too, the issue at stake is the boundary not just between theoretical categories but between genders. Insofar as narrative in at least certain texts or parts of texts may be thought of in terms of ‘participations’ rather than strata, gender differences may be radically problematized if not destabilized. In what is, for me, the most

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memorable and important passage in Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes of gender in terms of the ‘illimitable et cetera’: The theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc.’ at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated ‘etc.’ that so often occurs at the end of such lines? … It is the supplément, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all. This illimitable et cetera, however, offers itself as a new departure for feminist political theorizing.7 The point is made, of course, in the context of an eminently Levinasian discussion of ‘the language of appropriation, instrumentality and distanciation germane to the epistemological mode’ as belonging ‘to a strategy of domination that pits the “I” against the “Other” and, once that separation is effected, creates an artificial set of questions about the knowability and recoverability of that Other’ (GT, p. 144). As regards the contingency of the epistemological mode and the ‘artificial’ separations that it institutes: the categories produced by current thought about narrative are part of that ‘mode’. Suppose I try to think about narrative outside a ‘language of appropriation, instrumentality and distanciation’ which sets an author at a distance from a narrator, a narrator at a distance from a character, and then presents the first as appropriating the second, or using the second for certain ends. Might not the ‘illimitable et cetera’, the endless mobility of gender identities, be much more in play and at stake in narrative than has so far been acknowledged? Take the Jamesian reflector as an example. When James discusses the question of the reflector in the Prefaces, he comes back repeatedly to what, in the preface to The Princess Casamassima, he calls ‘the unreality of the sharp distinction’.8 In that particular preface, the appropriateness of the use of the reflector is linked precisely to the need to present what James calls the ‘human mixture’, the ‘abyss of ambiguities’ aright, to give a sufficient picture of ‘the exposed and entangled state’ (LiC, pp. 1090–91). There is no appreciation save by ‘intimacy’ or, as James puts it, a ‘melting together’ (LiC, p. 1091). Indeed, in his late essay ‘The New Novel’, reflecting on Conrad’s Chance, James writes admiringly of the ‘fusion’ of or a ‘reciprocity’ between what he (James) calls the ‘primary author’ and the

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narrator.9 Of course, he never wholly surrenders to an affirmation of the author– reflector relation as a full participation. Even as he tells us that he ‘shakes off’ the ‘muffled majesty of authorship’ in The Golden Bowl, he also asserts that the majesty of authorship still reigns (LiC, p. 1323). Equally, for James, the ‘abyss of ambiguities’ with which the use of the reflector is associated does not include ambiguities in gender, though there are moments in the Prefaces that do seem to point in that direction. Yet it is nonetheless clear that the category of the reflector is one which destabilizes the identity principle; and it is also surely the case – though James cannot say it – that reflector trouble may mean gender trouble, too. Take for example a locus classicus for thought about the Jamesian reflector, Maggie Verver’s monologue at the beginning of Part 4 of The Golden Bowl: This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it – that was what she felt.10 James blends what David Smit calls ‘Narrative Report’ and ‘Free Indirect Thought’ so completely that it is not clear whether the metaphor is Maggie’s, the author’s or narrator’s.11 The most crucial points are the phrase ‘or perhaps’ and the hyphen followed by ‘that was what she felt’. Both suggest the movement of deliberative thought of a kind associated with character rather than author. But need they? Might the deliberative moments not be the author’s own, articulated almost self-reflexively? There is no telling. As reader, I engage with an aporia which also governs the passage as a whole and is equally an aporia of gender. Is the voice that I hear at this point male or female? It hovers, hesitates, is either, neither, both. As such, it breaks to open vistas of Butler’s ‘illimitable et cetera’. Not for long, of course: as Smit points out, at the beginning of the next paragraph, a distanciated, masculine, narratorial voice establishes itself as solidly in place: If this image, however, may represent our young woman’s consciousness of a recent change in her life – a change now but a few days old – it must at the same time be observed that she both sought and found in renewed

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circulation, as I have called it, a measure of relief from the idea of having perhaps to answer for what she had done.

(GB, p. 274) This is Maggie ‘represented in a receptacle’, much as she sees herself, later, as ‘represented in those receptacles’ in which her father keeps his objets d’art (GB, p. 374). The voice, here, however close to Maggie in a sense, is nonetheless also emphatically separated from her by power, as her father is.12 The ambiguous voice of the reflector, by contrast, crosses and blurs the boundaries between categories on which such power depends. In the preface to The Tragic Muse, James describes the play of reflectors as confusing the issue of ‘which of the situations concerned’ in this particular novel ‘predominates and rules’. Sherringham’s? Nick’s? Miriam’s? None of them, exactly. There is rather a ‘multiplication of aspects’ in the novel (LiC, p. 1112). This ‘multiplication’ is one consequence of James’s ways of handling his reflectors, and the multiplicity may easily become that of gender itself. What happens, finally, if I apply a model which insists on the ethical significance of the Zwischen to Cather’s two texts? The question is partly answered by Butler’s own essay on Cather in Bodies That Matter. Butler reads some of Cather’s texts as resisting ‘sexual coherence’, engaging in ‘passages across gender and sexuality’.13 These latter are not necessarily intentional, nor free and frank, nor consistent: Butler is well aware that ‘Cather has appeared not to put herself in a legible relation to women and lesbianism’ (BTM, p. 143). Cather’s ‘challenge’ thus takes place ‘within the norms of heterosexuality that the text also mocks’ (BTM, p. 162). Yet what is prohibited ‘nevertheless and insistently speaks through the very displacements’ that prohibition produces. There is thus a kind of irregular disturbance of the gender categories to which Cather’s novels officially adhere. Butler emphasizes the importance, for example, of the framing narrator in My Ántonia who introduces Jim Burden’s story and to whom he gives it to read. As the framing narrator cedes the narrative to Jim, says Butler, ‘a feminine authorship appears to yield in favour of a masculine one’, and I am thus asked to recognize that ‘a displacement of identification’ is ‘the very condition for the possibility’ of Cather’s fiction (BTM, pp. 148–49). There are indeed signs that the framing narrator is female. But there are also indications that this narrator may be male. He/ she and Jim agree, for example, that growing up in a little prairie town unites them in ‘a kind of freemasonry’. The gender of the framing narrator must finally be indeterminate, and it is indeterminacy rather than femininity that is being displaced at the outset of the novel, as though Cather is indicating the artifice of the gender categories according to which that novel will otherwise proceed.

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The fact that it does proceed according to them, however, means that My Ántonia will only serve Butler’s case in a limited way. She cannot read its narrative mode subversively, and has to resort to a symptomatic reading at the level of content. In the narrative of A Lost Lady, gender relations are arguably put into question in more complex and unsettling ways. In the first instance, according to Byatt, Cather first ‘attempted a mixed narration, then to tidy the whole tale into Niel’s first person, then made a decision to revert to her original, more asymmetrical method’ (LL, p. xii). In other words, Cather painstakingly worked her way through to a narrative method which would actually make for irregularity, and which would free her from the comparatively simple structure of an observing male subject predominantly occupied with an observed female object. This partly involves the use of a narrator outside Niel who begins the novel, for instance, and introduces him. This narrator is not characterized, and can be identified with Cather, in the sense that the narrator in The Golden Bowl can be identified with James. She is not just the voice that tells as Niel ‘focalizes’, however. At moments, at least, she also speaks for a community and as its memorialist. She speaks, not just of and for Niel as ‘he’, but also of and for ‘us’, ‘you’. In other words, her ample, fluid voice dissolves and enlarges categories where Niel tends to narrow and fix them. Hence there is an extent to which Niel’s voice may blur into or be overtaken by hers, is always potentially open to invasion by a narrative alterity which makes us unsure as to where Niel begins and leaves off. The boundaries of Niel’s gendered identity as narrator (and indeed as character) are unsure. Take this passage, for instance: Where Mrs Forrester was, dullness was impossible, Niel believed. The charm of her conversation was not so much in what she said, though she was often witty, but in the quick recognition of her eyes, in the living quality of her voice itself. … Nothing pleased one more than to provoke her laughter. Then you felt you were getting on with her. It was her form of commenting, of agreeing with you and appreciating you when you said something interesting – and it often told you a great deal that was both too direct and too elusive for words.

(LL, pp. 66–67) The last three sentences would appear to be the female memorialist’s, the first two Niel’s – except for that phrase ‘in the living quality of her voice itself’, which appears to fall between the two, and cannot with certainty be claimed by either.

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Here, again, I can only read the narrative as uncertainly gendered, or – better – as a weave which insistently if sporadically belies the very clarity and firmness of the gender categories on which Cather’s characters so often appear to rely.

Excendance Intermittently, then, novelists like James and Cather problematize the relationship between narrating subject and narrated object. That relationship repeatedly raises or overlaps with the question of gender relations, which means that the two are problematized together. I call this problematization ethical. It constitutes a refusal to conform to a concept of narrative as the decisively ‘seen’ decisively said, as apophansis delivered apodictically. Such a conception of narrative has comprehensively dominated narrative theory. Yet some of James’s and Cather’s work suggests that novels may occupy a more liminal zone which I shall later describe in Derridean terms as the ‘spectral’. What is ethical, here, is precisely the extent to which narrative is put into question as a kind of ‘frame of knowledge’ whose conditions are separation, distanciation, structures of opposition. It seems possible to re-imagine narrative in terms of constitutive ambivalences, exchanges and substitutions. An entity deemed to be identical with itself no longer holds the other at bay, at a ‘knowing’ or scrutinizing distance. It rather enters into composition with, is invaded by or questioned in relation to this other. Indeed, the ethical stake, here, is precisely the question of the limit, boundary or borderline, the categorical distinction. I am suggesting, then, that there is an ethical space in narrative for Butler’s ‘illimitable et cetera’, understood as ‘the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all’. What I want to do now is to link the excess in question to that designated in Levinas by the term excendance. The concept of excendance is crucial to Levinas’s early philosophical text De l’évasion (1935). Levinas was later to claim that De l’évasion was marked by his presentiment of the Nazi horror.14 If so, there is surely a connection between the political concerns that underlie De l’évasion and the fact that it has been seen as Levinas’s exodus (as ‘exodique’).15 As an ‘exodus from being’, the beginning of a long journey that will culminate in the major philosophical works, De l’évasion is concerned with the movement or process that precedes the encounter with alterity. Levinas articulated this movement or process before he articulated the encounter with alterity itself. As Marie-Anne Lescourret indicates, De l’évasion expresses the imperative of escape, but is not as yet clear as to the means (EL, p. 117). But escape from what, exactly? According to Levinas, from the idea of being. The

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subject is traditionally conceived of as emerging into full subjecthood in opposition to brute being, a construction invariably flattering to the subject and its will to power (or, in Difficult Freedom, its will to success).16 But Levinas turns this structure round. We are learning – not least, from modern literature – that being is not a quality of the exterior world to which we are opposed as full subjects, but is rather the principle of our own self-sameness or self-insistence. As such, it is a limitation from which we immediately seek an escape (hence the term ‘evasion’, which can mean escape, in French). It is this drive to escape being as the principle of selfhood that is designated by excendance: Thus, to the need for escape, being would not only appear as the obstacle that free thought would have to surmount, nor as the rigidity that, inviting one into routine, demands an effort of originality, but as an imprisonment from which it is a question of escaping [dont il s’agit de sortir].

(DE, p. 73) Excendance is the spontaneous and immediate desire to escape the limits of the self, a desire generated as those limits are experienced in their narrowness, even their sheer absurdity. It is thus a principle of unease within and inseparable from the self that is of a different order to being and more profound than it. Evasion is the ethical impulse towards or openness to the other that effects a release from the confines of the self.17 Excendance is also opposed to fascism; or rather, fascism seeks to overcome or annul it. In ‘Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’Hitlérisme’, Levinas suggests that fascism magnifies and celebrates self-confinement, the fact of being riveted to a single body. It sees the essence of spirit as consisting in this condition. What is at stake is a supposed physical self-sameness that is also a self-consistency through time.18 An acceptance of being, a blindness or resistance to ‘evasion’, a desire to expunge all weakness, self-disquiet and self-antagonism are what qualify a person or ‘civilization’ as in fact barbaric. But the need implied in self-disquiet is not privation, and its solution is not satisfaction, but rather ‘complaisance dans l’insatisfaction’. For ‘le fait d’être mal à son aise est essentiellement dynamique’ (DE, p. 78). This dynamism is ethical: it turns us incessantly elsewhere, outside; not towards death, the timeless or supernal (this would be the drive to transcendance, not excendance) but towards the other. This is Levinas’s secular, demystificatory, materialist message.19

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For Judaic as opposed to Christian tradition, shame is not born of sinfulness. It is rather the inevitable response to the miserable fact that one is oneself and nothing else. But why bother with the concept of excendance, here? Because it annihilates the conception of the subject as it has prevailed in so many of the branches of our knowledge, including literary criticism and, indeed, ethics as it has traditionally been conceived. For, in the terms of De l’évasion, epistemologically, the subject is never available to observation. Excendance is the description of the minutiae of a genetic process: there is simultaneously unease, discomfort, even a sensation of embarrassment, in the multiple senses of the word, and a flight towards the other. The subject is always and immediately a composition with exteriority. Excendance is precisely that movement towards or reaching out to the exterior. There is more involved, here, than a familiar conception of ‘the dissolution of the subject’, the subject in process, the subject as a play of presence and absence or a multiplicity. Here the subject is not so much multiple as immediately and categorically multiplied. It is always on its way outwards, moving towards what is other, at once and definitively, as if from an unendurable, shameful solitude. Hence, too, excendance is also always anachronic.20 For if it means composition with the contemporary, it has its origin in a situation which cannot exactly be understood as of the moment. The present is not exactly a circumstance we inhabit, but one into which we continually cross. Here, ‘evasion’ is not simply a response to the self as being, but the character of the world in its becoming (AT, p. 28). Subjecthood can only be conceived of, not merely as radically and definitively incomplete, but as intrinsically a projection towards the future, un sujet-à-venir. The subject is only thinkable as already on its way elsewhere and, in that respect, primordially ethical. But the movement in question cannot be willed and is at no one’s disposition. Indeed, Levinas hinges a powerful critique of Husserl on the fact that, in investigating the intentionality of consciousness, Husserl claims that he is seeking to discover ‘worauf sie eigentlich hinauswill’, the object towards which consciousness wills itself to go (AT, p. 39). It is precisely thus – through an insistence on will – that Husserl manages to sustain an unquestioning faith in the unity and presence of the subject. But, for Levinas, neither knowledge nor experience is to be understood in terms of an ‘auf etwas hinauswollen’ (AT, p. 37). For such a conception of consciousness always implies as its corollary an object there to be grasped, the Lebenswelt as given (AT, p. 37). It neglects the non-intentional dimension to consciousness as ‘durée revenue de toute intention – elle n’est pas acte mais passivité pure’ (AT, p. 41). This is consciousness as ‘lapse’ (laps) as instanced in the ageing process; temporality as a process of elapsing which cannot

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be frozen into a frame and escapes (evades) all possibility of representation. Levinas gives an account of this non-intentional consciousness which is also precisely a description of the movement of excendance itself: Duration as pure duration, as non-intervention, as being-as-insistence, as being-on-the-tip-of-one’s-toes [comme être-sur-la-pointe-des-pieds], as being without daring to be; instance of the instant without insistence of the I and already a lapse, which ‘leaves as it enters’ [instance de l’instant sans l’insistance du moi et déjà laps, qui ‘sort en entrant’]! … without intentions, without aims, without the protective mask of the personage contemplating itself in the mirror of the world, reassured and posing [se posant]. Without name, titles or place in the world. A presence which fears presence, which fears the insistence of the identical I and is naked of all attributes.

(AT, p. 42) Duration ‘comme être-sur-la-pointe-des-pieds’: consciousness is fissured precisely in that contemporaneousness is divided. For the ‘instance’ of consciousness ‘leaves’ [sort] even as it enters [‘en entrant’]. The ethical relation, it would seem, is implicit in the very structure of temporality itself. The intractable fissure in the instance of consciousness makes impossible any categorization of the subject in terms of full being. This would logically include any categorization in terms of gender. To put one’s trust in gender categories is to retreat into a reassertion of the principle of self-sameness. Equally, to assume a gender is to seek to return to that principle, of the separateness of the single body as celebrated by fascism. But Levinas repeatedly tells us that any such dream of return is always futile.21 From the start, we are irretrievably caught up in the movement of excendance and the indeterminacy of categories that it generates. In that respect, we will simply never know our gender – however much we assume it – and it is with that recognition that an ethics of gender may begin. To insist on gender categories is precisely to ensure and even to intensify a continuing confusion of and about them. For Alan Sinfield Feminine and masculine are cultural constructs, obviously with the primary function of sustaining the current pattern of heterosexual relations. Of course, very many heterosexuals are not respectively masculine and feminine, or not in certain respects, or not all of the time.

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As usual, ideological categories fail to contain the confusions that they must release in the attempt to achieve control.22 Yet hasn’t most gender and queer theory – quite rightly – been less concerned with a philosophical interrogation of the concept of gender than with a political critique of power relations? Does not Butler insist, for instance, on the need for the identity categories I have called in question, even whilst aware of their risks (BTM, p. 228)? Theorists like Butler and Sinfield are actually caught in an intellectual dilemma. The identity principle is crucial to their work as political practice. But that work would not have been possible had there not been fierce opposition, not just to the categories of identity produced by the dominant culture, but to the practice of identification itself. From this derive all the debates around the relative value of what J.K. Gibson-Graham rather awkwardly calls ‘strategic essentialism’ and ‘strategic non-essentialism’ as exemplified in feminist, gay and lesbian identity politics, on the one hand, and deconstruction and deconstructive ethics, on the other. Gibson-Graham argues the continuing need for both practices.23 Even if the second is only a utopian trace, it nonetheless needs to be maintained as such. For if it is utopian, it is so as, for Levinas, ethics is always utopian. Concerning itself with an ‘ought’ rather than an ‘is’, it holds open a breach in the present and looks towards the future. Ethics cuts radically across the present in that it is the principle of a future knowledge which cannot be produced in itself, but may be speculatively anticipated. At the same time, it will look with interest at any destabilization of the identity principle produced by current gender theory. Transexualism, hermaphroditism and Judith Lorber’s account of cultures that, historically, have not thought gender in binary terms would all be examples of this.24 But the two most significant such instances are bisexual theory and drag, the second, of course, having already attracted Butler’s attention. Clare Hemmings has set out to theorize bisexuality as precisely what gets left out of the current hetero/ homo divide, challenging the traditional boundaries of both, but also disputing the very existence of the boundary. Bisexuality is the recalcitrant offender par excellence, intolerable to the Church of England and queer theorists alike.25 In fact, bisexuality is a sexuality irreducible to the static category which throws into question the epistemological habits (‘knowing what one is’, the apophansis expressed apodictically) that are crucial both to heterosexism and queer theory. In bisexuality, the I constantly re-emerges in different terms, is constantly re-created and resituated. Sexuality is always and only a dynamic, a composition or negotiation

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with the outside. Effectively, bisexuality is excendance in a concrete mode whereby sexuality constantly escapes both the terms of being and the structuration of sexuality in the binary terms of either/or. Jonathan Dollimore’s deconstructive account of Freud on the ‘polymorphous perverse’ presents ‘the social’ as ‘marked by an interconnectedness so radical [of civilization and the perversions] that it has to be disavowed in most existing forms of social organization’.26 If this is the case, then, in Hemmings’s account of it, bisexuality marks the limits of that disavowal, an acknowledgement of homosexuality as integral to the very heterosexual culture that seeks to repress it or hold it at bay.27 The bisexual’s emphasis is close to Butler’s discussions of ‘drag’ and ‘crossing’. For Butler, the woman in drag blurs and destabilizes the terms of ‘a prevailing truth-regime of “sex” ’. Gender is revealed as neither ‘a purely psychic truth, conceived as “internal” and “hidden” ’, nor as ‘reducible to a surface appearance; on the contrary, its undecidability is to be traced as the play between psyche and appearance’ (BTM, pp. 233–34). Like bisexuality, drag is distinguished by ‘play’, by a movement towards the other, by a practice of reversal in which the ‘inside’ and its supposed unity and stability is precisely what is fled from (‘evaded’). Indeed, drag is the instant in which the present of gender is doubled up and divided from itself, in which the contemporaneousness of gender is fissured. By that token, drag is also an ethical representation of the ‘truth’ of gender.

Crossing the present: some postmodern fiction28 In drag and bisexuality, then, the present is ‘crossed’, in more senses than one. The chimerical character of gender as the truth of presence is put on display. There is ‘discontinuity’, a revelation of the ‘temporal and contingent groundlessness’ of the ‘substantial ground of identity’ (GT, p. 141). Drag and bisexuality expose that ‘resistance to identity’ that lies ‘at the very heart of psychic life’, in Jacqueline Rose’s well-known phrase.29 But time is also at issue, here, as Butler’s phrase suggests. The temporality of gender is shown to be different, and it brings with it an ethics that is different in emphasis to Rose’s. For, as Allison Weir points out, for Rose, resistance to identity also requires the resumption of difference into identity, in order that the subject can ‘realize and articulate a coherent ethical position’, speak and be heard.30 But this is also a resumption of time as becoming and excendance into time as being. If Joseph Bristow is right, and there is only a ‘precarious break between “homo” and “hetero” ’ that the dominant culture strives

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to keep as distinct as possible,31 then ‘homo’ and ‘hetero’ may be understood in more senses than one here. The ‘break’ is as precarious and uncertain as that between the structure of repetition and the play of difference. But how is my account of excendance connected to a discussion of the ethics of narration, of relations, specifically, between narrating subject and narrated object? I would suggest that narratorial relations in certain kinds of fiction are characterized by excendance and its temporality, what I’ll call the movement of ‘crossing the present’. In particular, this temporality is traceable in a range of contemporary or postmodern fiction. The novels I’ll be considering work to promote the ethical self-disquiet and self-antagonism, the ‘movement outwards’ that Levinas sets in ethical opposition to fascism. They do so, precisely, in relation to questions of gender. In postmodern fiction, gender is increasingly emerging, not just as a more or less ambivalent state, but as an activity, a performance, a becoming, or a site where identities may intersect, proliferate and undo one another. In Butler’s terms, here, gender emerges as an insistent repetition within which there are always potentially productive differences, an ‘instability’ which ‘is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition’.32 The activity or process in question is irreducible to the terms of a singular present or presence. There are always what Butler calls ‘gaps and fissures’ in it (BTM, p. 10). The present of sexuality and gender is incessantly traversed or – precisely – ‘crossed’. In other words, gender is never contemporary with itself. Take for instance Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory and Patricia Duncker’s Hallucinating Foucault. At the end of The Wasp Factory, there is a comparatively crude moment of gender shock or crisis: Part of me still wants to believe it’s just [my father’s] latest lie, but really I know it’s the truth. I’m a woman. Scarred thighs, outer labia a bit chewed up, and I’ll never be attractive, but according to Dad a normal female.33 Ethically, this realization might seem only to create problems, in that murder and obscene violence are the centre of the world of The Wasp Factory, and Banks’s novel appears ultimately to prise masculinity and violence apart, to transfer responsibility for murder and mayhem to the feminine; except, of course, that it also appears to suggest that the violence has resulted from the absence or repression of the very female element which finally intrudes into the novel. ‘My greatest

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enemies are Women and the Sea,’ says murderous Frank, at the beginning of the third chapter: These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made.

(WF, p. 43) The crucial point, however, is surely, not just that Frank must admit the feminine, but also that he must think masculine and feminine together. What he has built is not exactly destroyed. He does not lose all sense of the reality of the (masculine) performance: But I am still me; I am the same person, with the same memories and the same deeds done, the same (small) achievements, the same (appalling) crimes to my name.

(WF, p. 182) But he can now think identity and non-identity together, and it is this that makes for the possibility of ethical transformation at the end of The Wasp Factory. At the beginning of the novel, Frank has idealized the single, self-intent male body: I saw myself, Frank L. Cauldhame, and saw myself as I might have been: a tall slim man, strong and determined and making his way in the world, assured and purposeful.

(WF, p. 48) This Frank has cast himself as ‘the unchallenged lord of the island’ (WF, p. 139). But his interior world is finally invaded by those catalysts – unease, selfdisquiet, self-antagonism, nausea – that, in De l’évasion, are the beginning of ethics, but which trauma has nullified, in Frank’s case. In The Wasp Factory, then, there is an eventual narrative coincidence of subject and object, identity and non-identity, a supposedly untainted interiority held resolutely together with an exteriority that has been held at a distance with equal resolution. Hallucinating Foucault enacts a similar process, a process, again, that ends in ethics. It is a powerful, feminist novel about the necessary queering of the

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contemporary bourgeois, soidisant heterosexual and, above all, English intellectual. Crucially, Duncker does not situate the (initially heterosexual) protagonist’s homosexual love as part of a ‘learning experience’. Hallucinating Foucault is not a Bildungsroman. If anything, as a feminist novel about masculinity and male experience, it is more in the tradition of the ironic version of the Bildungsroman that goes back at least as far as Mann’s Der Zauberberg and beyond, and is concerned less with Bildung than Entbildung; not formation, but the breaking down of what has been formed. It is thus very important that Duncker’s novel is indifferent to the question of whether the protagonist has ‘finally turned out to be gay’ or whether his love for Paul Michel has been a stage in his (basically heterosexual) development, that the novel makes both notions seem equally banal. Hallucinating Foucault is not about the more or less triumphant or anguished discovery or confirmation of identity. It is rather about the crumbling of identity and the emergence of the possibility of transformation together. It is about ‘evasion’, rather than the arrival at a destination. One of Paul Michel’s novels is called L’évadé. L’évadé pleads the cause of a Levinasian ‘flight from being’, insisting as it does ‘that the only escape is through the absolute destruction of everything you have ever known, loved, cared for, believed in, even the shell of yourself must be discarded with contempt’.34 By the same token, Hallucinating Foucault is about the becoming of sexuality, sexuality as an event that continually threatens to escape any categorical identification. Hence the closing emphasis on indeterminacy, obscurity, solitude – the neither/nor, rather than the either/or – in the figure of the protagonist’s dream (HF, p. 177). Like Michel himself, both narrator and novel come to embrace what Michel calls ‘the hostility of difference’ (HF, p. 114). The crucial moment here, of course, is the crisis or, better, the transformation in the protagonist’s sexuality: I had a terrible sensation of urgency. Paul Michel took his time. He talked to me quietly I had no idea what he was saying. I ceased to understand anything except his hands upon my body. Then I lost all control of myself. I fell headlong down a tunnel that had no end.

(HF, p. 144) But there is another, subtler moment of crisis, too, which comes near the end of the novel, when Paul Michel tells the protagonist of the boy who was his first love. It emerges, of course, that the ‘boy’ was in fact an ‘ambiguous’ girl in whose sex – but nothing else – Paul Michel was ‘deceived’ (HF, p. 161). ‘She’, of course, was the lover who sent the protagonist in search of Michel – or rather, in her

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terms, to Michel’s aid. The protagonist is confounded in the recognition that the girl who was Michel’s boy has made of him the boy who ‘became Michel’s girl’. Furthermore, as Michel himself says, they have become interchangeable. ‘Well, you’ve been through it, I see,’ she says, briskly, when she arrives from England. ‘But she didn’t specify what it was that I had so unsuccessfully traversed,’ he adds (HF, p. 167). Traversal or crossing is very much what Duncker’s riveting novel is finally about. The protagonist has indeed been double-crossed. After such knowledge, what forgiveness, if not a Junior Research Fellowship and a job ‘at one of the London colleges’ (HF, p. 176)? Like both Levinas and Paul Michel, Hallucinating Foucault promotes an ethics of loss: grief, confusion, emptiness and recovery through praxis (the narrator’s work) which is also a surrender to the other: the novel ends, not with the protagonist at all, but with Foucault’s and Paul Michel’s chronologies. In both The Wasp Factory and Hallucinating Foucault, then, gender is understood – is narrated – as excendance, a movement or becoming in which the critical juncture or ethical moment is precisely the collapse of identity and the flight to the other. In neither case, however, is this articulated principally through disruptions or equivocations in the relation between narrating subject and narrated object. By contrast, Gordon Burn’s Alma Cogan is an attempt to produce a narrative from within an intermediate position that I earlier described in terms of the Zwischen, but with the latter interpreted in performative terms or converted into drag. Part of the novel is told by an Alma Cogan artificially revived, ventriloquized, made to live on after her death into the 1980s and 1990s by an implied male author. The novel provides analogies for its narrative indeterminacy in the male figures who are, in a sense, responsible for ‘keeping Alma alive’: the ‘tender of the flame’ and ‘hoarder of my life’, ‘biografiend’ and ‘fetishizer’ Francis McLaren, who is indeed precisely like Burn himself in being a ‘stasher’ and ‘storer’ and ‘considerer of trifles’, Cogan’s ‘sammler’;35 and Cogan’s transvestite ex-cleaning ‘woman’, Ricci Howe, who does a drag act in which he is billed as ‘Mr Ricci Howe appearing in the gowns of Miss Alma Cogan’ (AC, p. 169). The narrative itself is partly a mode of drag in which the relationship between language and narrative progression and gender is radically destabilized. Alma Cogan denies us the possibility of assuming that a particular use of narrative language can in itself be identified with a particular gender (and, indeed, much of the narrative detail appears to come from a McLaren-like figure, rather than from Cogan herself). It (Burn’s novel) is extremely conscious of itself as an act of ventriloquism. But ventriloquism, like drag, puts gender categories at risk in that it exposes their inessentiality, their existence through and as performance. In a way, the most revealing moment in Alma Cogan is a walk-on appearance by Tony

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Hancock, who pokes ‘his head into an empty room’, sees one of Alma’s dresses ‘standing on its own’ and finds it ‘as disturbing as the occasion he glimpsed Peter Brough’s dummy, “Archie Andrews”, hanging on a hook behind a door’ (AC, p. 171). Alma Cogan is a name that deserves the inverted commas as much as does that of Archie Andrews. What Hancock properly sees is Alma Cogan and her gender as prop and accessory, a sign without a body, abandoned to the pure realm of the semiotic. In Butler’s terms, gender exists as repetition here, chiefly in that, as performance, it can be appropriated by another. It is striking that the success of Ricci Howe’s act makes Alma feel ‘disembodied’, as though Ricci is now more Alma herself than she can claim to be. In fact, the novel is about Alma Cogan as a system and apparatus: the system and apparatus of her stardom; of the archive, after her death; and of Alma’s gender. The latter can be mimed out again in a different time and place by a male performer or even – after death – by a male author. Burn’s novel thus loosens the supposed fixity of gender positions in a narrative process that one might describe as gender equivocation. But does it engage us in the temporal production of gender, the contemporary as the moment of ‘crossing’? As a fuller example of such an engagement, I want rather to turn to Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Ackroyd’s novel works, of course, by asking us to sympathize with the woman accused of murder, Elizabeth Cree, at the expense of the man deemed to be her victim, her husband John, because we gather from John’s diary that he has been that far more notorious and extreme murderer, the Limehouse Golem. The shock comes when we find that Elizabeth is in fact responsible for all the murders and has impersonated her husband as diarist. Dan Leno thus provokes its reader into asking awkward questions about the assumptions according to which s/he has understood a particular discourse as gendered, as free from any troubling taint of alterity. In Ackroyd’s novel, a particular discourse opens itself up to the possibility of gender reversal, of being ‘read both ways’. Here, again, gender is a semiotics, a role that can be repeated with a more or less subversive difference but that has no authentic, inner life. The obvious objection is that, in Dan Leno, gender trouble is associated with psychosis and murder, which hardly seems likely to promote the cause of a postmodern (or any) ethics. But sympathy and moral judgement – liking nice Dan Leno and condemning nasty Elizabeth Cree – are not what are really placed at issue by Ackroyd’s novel. The reader encounters a world in which gender instability is a constitutive principle, from the scene at the beginning of the novel in which the prison governor Stephens dresses up in Elizabeth Cree’s gown and lies down on the carpet in it to the central position in the novel of Leno the female impersonator himself. Ackroyd’s novel

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gestures towards a conception of gender as what Dan Leno calls ‘monypolylogue’,36 as exemplified in Elizabeth’s stage act: The ‘Older Brother’ had become a great draw. … Everyone knew that I was also ‘Little Victor’s Daughter’, but that was the joy of it. I could be girl and boy, man and woman, without any shame.

(DLLG, pp. 152–53) Of course, the act is not just a stage act: Elizabeth takes it ‘out into the streets of London’ to ‘see the other world’ (DLLG, p. 153). The music hall and its shifting ‘medleys’ are not merely an image of the outside world (DLLG, p. 177), but make explicit the ‘medleys’ of that world itself. In both Alma Cogan and Dan Leno, a destabilization of gender categories is inseparable from a destabilization of narrational categories. In Alma Cogan, the boundary in question is that between male implied author and female narratorcharacter. In Dan Leno, it is the boundary, in Genette’s terms, between diegetic male and metadiegetic female narrators, the terms of these two categories finally being reversed. Narrative veers towards and threatens to incorporate the other which it narrates, as though it could only have set out to narrate the other in the first place because the other was always part of it from the start. In Winterson’s Written on the Body, this becomes what I would call a utopian writing of gender. Winterson has edged towards such a writing in successive texts, but it is only in Written on the Body that questions of gender and of narrative are effectively fused. In Sexing the Cherry, the novel’s Rabelaisian mode allows Winterson a free masculinization of the feminine in the figure of the Dog Woman, whilst the Menippean and fairy tale elements equally make possible a feminization of the masculine, in Jordan’s case. Jordan’s development also pointedly involves registering a female critique of and resistance to the masculine which, again, further helps to problematize male identity. The novel is clearly concerned to interrogate, cross and obscure the ‘great division’ between heroes and home-makers.37 What Winterson cannot find, at this stage, is an appropriately composite or equivocal form of narrative, which means that the ‘great division’ disappears only incessantly to reappear again, as though the graft obstinately keeps refusing to take. She had actually come closer to a successful graft in the earlier novel The Passion. Here, as in Sexing the Cherry, the novel is structured around male and female narrators, male and female principles: Henri and Villanelle, Napoleon and Venice, linearity and the labyrinth, the will to conquer and ‘the unpredictable, the out of control’.38

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At two key moments, too – when Henri deserts from Napoleon’s army and abandons the militaristic principle (P, p. 71), and when he is taken to San Servolo as a lunatic (P, p. 142) – his narrative is invaded by or segues almost imperceptibly into Villanelle’s, as though to underscore what appears to be a crucial confounding of gender identity at these points. Yet ultimately Henri remains inside San Servolo and Villanelle remains outside. In a sense, the ‘great division’ could not be reasserted more emphatically. In Written on the Body, however, this has changed, notably with regard to its ungendered, bisexual narrator. This aspect of the novel has provoked controversy. Valerie Miner has argued that Winterson’s way of raising ‘identity questions’ in Written on the Body seldom takes her ‘beyond the gimmick’.39 But what Miner sees as a ‘gimmick’ is surely an exacting practice which looks trivial only if we seek to turn it into a ‘content’ (the basis of Miner’s objection; but the narrative method in Written on the Body involves not the production but rather the emptying out of a content). On the other hand, Cath Stowers has suggested that ‘although Winterson’s narrator is not simply portrayed as a lesbian’, s/he nonetheless ‘fulfils the aims of a lesbian aesthetic’.40 That a lesbian aesthetic in some sense powers the novel is evidently plausible. But this surely hardly means that, whilst Written on the Body deconstructs lesbianism as ‘essentialist being’, it also reconstructs it as a ‘subject position’. Here, for all her praise of Winterson’s efforts to release us ‘from the stultifying binary of heterosexual authoring and narrative’, Stowers has merely replaced the latter with a lesbian binary (JJ, p. 152). In the end, her problem is actually the same as Miner’s: she cannot quite come to terms with Winterson’s attempt to escape the identity principle itself. But the novel’s treatment of gender is inseparable from that attempt. Written on the Body is deconstructive rather than (and not as well as) reconstructive, and as such, it is utopian and ethical. What Stowers does not see is that there is a utopian space in Written on the Body, the ‘enchanted place’ in which identity no longer counts and is no longer an appropriate category. Insofar as this is a question of the narrative mode of the novel, that utopian space becomes the reader’s, too. Written on the Body insistently proceeds by a kind of ‘narrative crossing’. This is the case, not only in that we are always unsure of the gender of the narrator, but in that we are likely to be led into narrative identifications that are not only conflicting but multiple, since questions of sexuality as well as gender are in play. The novel is precisely an education for the reader unable to rest content without the certainties of identification. In Written on the Body, narrative surfaces no longer

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serve as indications of identities beneath them. Rather, narrative generates a host of moments in which identifications cross, when the narrative present is divided from itself. In Winterson’s text, the repetition intrinsic to narration is an index only of an indeterminate source or origin. What breaks down is the assumption that any language game whatsoever is automatically gendered, or automatically signifies a gender. At any moment, gender in discourse is only an equivalent of Alma Cogan’s dress as seen by Tony Hancock. At the same time, and as a result of Winterson’s narrative practice, an acute sense of the historical and cultural contingency of the gendering of discourse emerges. Yet this is true only on one level of reading. On another, Written on the Body is precisely concerned with gender and sexuality as a becoming irreducible to categorical description. It is concerned with what Winterson calls the movement to the ‘uncharted and unseen’ place, a movement she identifies with love and saintliness but, in the novel’s terms, also breaks the boundaries of gender.41 This insistent movement away from subjectification and objectification alike is the ethical movement of excendance. It is the movement out and towards alterity which, in Written on the Body, is the movement in which gender itself is caught up. No practice or activity, here, can ultimately be identified as gender-specific, and to identify a gender is quickly to have one’s identification thrown into question by a contradictory set of signs. The major question I have tried to broach here is: what would a narrative ethics look like if it turned away from an established model of narrative that always structures the latter in terms of a distanciation of an observing subject from its object? What happens if I abandon a concept of narrative which appears to oppose a hermetic, self-contained, homogenous, narratorial space to a diffuse and heterogeneous narrated space, with the first unstintingly reducing the second to its terms? What if, instead, I start to imagine narrative in the mode of excendance as a movement outwards, a relation, an engagement or composition with an exteriority in which interior, exterior and the boundary between them do not ‘stay the same’, but are ceaselessly renegotiated? What might the ethical consequences of such a practice be? I’ve tried to indicate a few of the latter with reference to questions of gender. I’ve suggested, for example, that the postmodern novel has been exploring the limits of the narrative representation of gender, the narrativization of gender. For Jonathan Dollimore, the major ‘sexual dissidents’ all subvert the ‘depth model of identity’. In Genet, for example, ‘authentic selfhood is denied and then reconstituted in a perverse, parodic form – and then denied again, transformed from other to same and then back to a (different) other’. In What the Butler Saw,

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Orton deploys cross-dressing, gender confusion and hierarchical inversion as part of a ‘transgressive commitment to inversion and the critique of authenticity’.42 By comparison, the novels I’ve been looking at might presumably be dismissed, in this respect as in others, according to a view of postmodern fiction as conservative and self-consciously derivative. But this would be to neglect how far they work to destabilize and confound the kind of familiar narrative categories with which I began this chapter, to dismantle certain narrative forms as kinds of epistemological apparatus, and, in the process, to deconstruct gender as a mode of knowledge. Narrative becomes a play or movement in which the categories of gender are opened up to the alterity they appeared to exclude, in which gender has no distinct, determinate or final form. Equally, it is possible to read these texts as finally injecting what Dollimore calls ‘transgressive reinscription’ into mainstream culture. The process is ethical. If, to return to the beginning of this chapter, ethics is an ‘incessant dégrisement du Même enivré de soi’, the novels in question challenge and displace the self-intoxication that is gender identity. Narration becomes an ethical evasion of or a resistance to the reductions of gender. In such a narrative practice, gender politics and postmodern ethics come together and are inseparable.

Notes AC AcT BTM DLLG EL GB GT HF JJ L LiC LL P RBB SC

Alma Cogan, Gordon Burn Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Politics, Joseph Bristow and Angelia R. Wilson (eds) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’,Judith Butler Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, Peter Ackroyd Emmanuel Levinas, Marie-Anne Lescourret The Golden Bowl, Henry James Gender Trouble, Judith Butler Hallucinating Foucault, Patricia Duncker ‘Journeying with Jeanette: Transgressive Travels in Winterson’s Fiction’, Cath Stowers Levinas: L’utopie de l’humain, Catherine Chalier Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, Henry James A Lost Lady, Willa Cather The Passion, Jeanette Winterson ‘Resituating the Bisexual Body: From Identity to Difference’, Clare Hemmings Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson

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Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, Joseph Bristow (ed.) The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks

WF

1. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, tr. Jane E. Lewin, with a foreword by Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 248. 2. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (London: Virago, 1980), p. 353. 3. Cather, A Lost Lady, introd. A.S. Byatt (London: Virago, 1991), hereafter LL; pp. 174–75. 4. Levinas is quoting from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Carnets (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), pp. 250–51. 5. See in particular Luce Irigaray, J’aime à toi: esquisse d’une félicité dans l’histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1992); and Etre deux (Paris: Grasset, 1997). 6. For an attempt to explore the implications for narrative theory of certain intermediate terms, see my own Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 215 and passim. 7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), hereafter GT; p. 143. 8. Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), hereafter LiC; p. 1091. 9. James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 148–49. 10. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, with an introd, by R.P. Blackmur (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963), hereafter GB; p. 273. 11. See David W. Smit, The Language of a Master: Theories of Style and the Late Writing of Henry James (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 110–11. 12. Cf. Adrian Poole, Henry James (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 122–29. 13. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), hereafter BTM; p. 163. 14. See Catherine Chalier, Levinas: L’utopie de l’humain (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), hereafter L; p. 159. 15. See Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), hereafter EL; p. 211. 16. The phrase ‘will to success’ is my own. But a critique of what it signifies is clearly evident in Difficult Freedom. See Levinas, DF, pp. 226, 282. 17. How close this is to the emphases in Levinas’s later work can be gauged from HAH, p. 49. 18. See ‘Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’Hitlérisme’, in IH, pp. 27–41. 19. A careful reading of Difficult Freedom and Du sacré au saint will make clear how precisely Levinas associates his own work with Judaic tradition, and specifically – in part – with a practice of demystification. See for instance DF, p. 14, and SS, passim. 20. For Levinas’s use of the term, see for instance DF, pp. 226–28. The complex version of Judaism that evolves in Difficult Freedom – as in the passage referred to – partly involves an account of Jews as anachronistic, both of and not of their time.

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DISSOLUTIONS 21. See for instance AT, p. 32. 22. Alan Sinfield, ‘Should There Be Lesbian and Gay Intellectuals?’, in Joseph Bristow and Angelia R. Wilson (eds), Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Politics (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), hereafter AcT; pp. 16–29, p. 22. 23. See J.K. Gibson-Graham, ‘Postmodern Feminist Social Research’, in Nancy Duncan (ed.), Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 234–44. 24. See Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 25. Clare Hemmings, ‘Resituating the Bisexual Body: From Identity to Difference’, hereafter Hemmings, RBB; in Bristow and Wilson, AcT, pp. 118–38, p. 123. 26. Jonathan Dollimore, ‘The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing (London: Roudedge, 1992), hereafter SeS; pp. 9–25, p. 22. 27. For a much fuller account of recent proponents of bisexuality, see Dollimore, ‘Bisexuality, Homosexuality and Wishful Theory’, Textual Practice, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1996), pp. 523–39. But Dollimore takes the bisexuals to task for indulging in ‘wishful theory’: ‘the more theoretically sophisticated this celebration of difference becomes, the more experientially unconvincing it also becomes’ (p. 527). What dies with ‘wishful theory’, says Dollimore, ‘is the theoretical commitment to engaging with the cultural real in all its surprising diversity and mysterious complexity’ (p. 533). For all the brilliance and vitality of Dollimore’s arguments, however, in the terms of the questions I raise for the ‘politics of English’ in my introduction, I am not convinced of the distinction between ‘wishful theory’ and good, hard-headed, realistic, politically engaged theory. I am not sure that all interesting theory is not ‘wishful’ – in other words, ethical. 28. For an extended version of the ensuing discussion, see my ‘Crossing the Present: Narrative, Alterity and Gender in Postmodern Fiction’, in Roger Luckhurst and Tony Marks (eds), Literature and the Contemporary (London: Longmans, 1999). 29. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), p. 91. 30. Allison Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 137. 31. Joseph Bristow, ‘Introduction’, SeS, pp. 1–8, p. 5. 32. BTM, p. 10. Butler herself would not associate gender with ‘becoming’, since – for her – to do so would be to postulate it as a nature prior to its social construction, even if a nature understood as ‘a set of dynamic inter-relations’ (p. 4). 33. Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (London: Abacus, 1990), hereafter WF; pp. 181– 82. 3 4 . Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1996), hereafter HF; pp. 16–17. 35. Gordon Burn, Alma Cogan (London, Minerva, 1992), hereafter AC; p. 175. 36. 36 Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (London: Minerva, 1995), hereafter DLLG; p. 150.

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N A R R AT I V E A N D A LT E R I T Y 37. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1996), hereafter SC; p. 131. 38. Winterson, The Passion (London: Vintage, 1996), hereafter P; p. 71. 39. Valerie Miner, ‘At Her Wit’s End’, The Women’s Review of Books (April, 1993). 40. See Cath Stowers, ‘Journeying with Jeanette: Transgressive Travels in Winterson’s Fiction’, hereafter JJ, in Mary Maynard and June Purvis (eds), Heterosexual Politics (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), pp. 139–58; p. 150. 41. Winterson, Written on the Body (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 80. 42. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 313–15.

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2 ETHICS AND UNREPRESENTABILITY

From Leavis to Levinas With postmodernity, then, epistemology presses forward as, if not the defining instance of a narrative ethics, at least intimately connected with one. Questions of narratives as modes of knowledge, better, as expressions, even simulacra of modes of knowledge; questions of what is ‘known’ in a given narrative, who by, about whom or what, from what perspective, articulated in what terms, qualified in what manner, all appear as questions with an ethical bearing. That bearing was largely ignored by a modern theory and criticism of the novel which simply took for granted the meaning and point of terms like ‘omniscience’, ‘focalization’, ‘reliability’ or ‘unreliability’ in narration, and so on, as if, at some level, at least, it were self-evident that a stratum of objectivity or given truth could be attributed to a novel; as if questions of prior determination and therefore of the reduction of an exteriority were not involved. This indifference to the epistemological question in its full scope, along with an indifference to the implications of the linguistic turn for novel theory, were what marked out modern criticism of fiction as specifically modern. But there is a third, related feature which distinguishes a modern from a postmodern theory of fiction. Modern criticism was of course reluctant to problematize the mimetic premise, or problematized it only within certain limits. Of all the unexamined assumptions on the basis of which a traditional ethical criticism of fiction proceeded, one of the most crucial was the assumption that, in fiction, ethics and representation are inseparable. Such an assumption makes it impossible for a novel to have an ethical dimension outside its mimetic project. In effect, ethics always appears in a relation between two planes: the plane on which

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representation takes place, whether understood as the author’s, narrator’s, reader’s or culture’s, or a mixture of them; and the plane of the represented. This relation may have various and complex forms. It nonetheless remains constant. The work of fiction will not be articulated as itself a mode of relation or negotiation. In this account, ethics cannot subsist in a novel other than in relation to the ‘world’ depicted, a world determined as single and unitary. It is of course the characters who ‘inhabit’ that world, understood as clearly defined and represented entities, that are chiefly important. Hence, for example, the dearth, even now, of ethical readings of Beckett’s work, where such entities cannot be imagined to exist, where discourse supervenes upon and destabilizes representation, and where the ethics in question may effectively be considered as a discursive ethics. The issue is one that needs to be addressed on a variety of different levels in a variety of different kinds of text. At the same time, we cannot simply move beyond an ethics tied to the mimetic premise, decisively, all at once. For the mimetic premise is so much a part of our inheritance that an ethics of fiction that sought comprehensively to set it aside would find it immediately reappearing, if only as the necessary point of reference for the new departure. The point is to think the ethical interinvolvement of representation and anti-representationalism, to locate an ethics in their complex interdependences, their engagements, collusions, struggles with one another. Heart of Darkness, for instance, is a predominantly representational text that obstinately insists on the limits to representation and insistently dwells on the significance of those limits.1 As far as Conrad’s text is concerned, the question is: what is the meaning, in a representational text with obviously ethical concerns, of a kind of faltering or failing of its representational project; and does not that faltering or failing recast its ethics far more radically than has often been thought? The link in criticism of Heart of Darkness between ethical questions and questions of representation is a long-established one. It goes back as far as Leavis. Leavis detected two kinds of writing in Conrad’s novella. The first, ‘strong’ one involves an art of ‘objective correlatives’, evoking ‘a whole wide context of particularities’ which convey ‘values’ and ‘carry specificities of emotion and suggestion’.2 This is Conrad’s ‘art of vivid essential record’ (GT, p. 176). It is an intensely particular art, but also an art in which the ‘essential’, whilst never ‘separable from the thing rendered’, is nevertheless always implicit within the latter (GT, ibid.). Characteristics are ‘embodied’ in particulars, then; but the relationship implied in ‘embodiment’ is somehow mysteriously effaced, as though particularity and essence were one and the same thing (GT, p. 179). What runs counter to this ‘strong discourse’ in Heart of Darkness is a discourse whose consequences are ‘little short of disastrous’ (ibid.). This discourse involves an ‘adjectival and worse than superogatory insistence on “unspeakable rites”,

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“unspeakable secrets”, “monstrous passions”, “inconceivable mystery” and so on’ (ibid.); an insistence on Conrad’s part on ‘the presence of what he can’t produce’ which finally only betrays an ‘absence’ or ‘nullity’ (GT, p. 180). In other words, what radically flaws Heart of Darkness and weakens its ethical force is its insistence on the limits to representation and the power of the unrepresentable. Leavis’s essay on Conrad was first published in 1941.3 But his conception of the novel and how it works (or succeeds) is still current to some extent, at least in England. First, Leavis assumes that a novel’s ethical power is inseparable from a kind of mimetic adequacy (‘an art of vivid record’). Certainty in and of representation is the sine qua non of ethics in narrative. Second, the moral power of fiction is inseparable from the latter’s certainty as to moral knowledge, the clarity of its moral categories. Whatever the complexities in play, for Leavis, Conrad has a firm, secure, confident, prior consciousness of the moral qualities as they are, unalloyed, beyond any modification or transformation by local context, contingency or history. Conrad knows ‘greed’, ‘stupidity’ and ‘squalor’, for example, as they exist in their self-sameness, for all people, under all skies. In this ‘art of essential record’, the categories exist prior to their specific embodiments and their articulation in a specific language. Third, for Leavis, the ethical power of a given novel is inseparable from its fusion of clearly defined category and vividly recorded particular (‘an art of vivid essential record’). The particular is numinous, pregnant with a significance that both precedes and will outlast it and is not for an instant to be confused merely with the conventions of the language in which it is articulated. Thus the ethical power of great fiction is inseparable from ontology on the one hand and cognition on the other. But Heart of Darkness can be read in the reverse direction. Its ethical force is intricately linked to what it does not or cannot say; or breaks off from saying.4 For Levinas, as we have already seen, ethics cannot be constructed on a foundation of essences and is not a question of cognition. The ethical relation takes place in an immediate realm where the relation to or encounter with the other is antecedent to knowledge, and brings with it the burden of responsibility to the other. To proceed towards the other on the basis of what is deemed to be prior knowledge is at once to have neutralized an exterior complexity and liberty. By the word ‘comprehension’, writes Levinas, ‘we understand the fact of taking [prendre] and of comprehending [comprendre], that is, the fact of englobing, of appropriating’ (TI, p. 70). This appropriation as denial of the ethical relation emerges as what Levinas calls ‘ontological imperialism’, in the expression of the naive, arbitrary, spontaneous dogmatism of the self which directs the understanding at its thitherto obscure object as a clarifying ‘ray of light’ (TI, p.

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44), delivering being out of secrecy – out of its heart of darkness – and thus neutralizing in encompassing the other. This, says Levinas, is ‘the very movement of representation and of its evidence’.5 Representation, totalization, ontology are all exercises in what Levinas calls freedom. The latter is to be identified – again – with the Spinozan conatus essendi, the ‘right to existence’ defined as the engine of all intellection. For Levinas, however, ‘freedom’ or the conatus essendi is an egology and a principle of violence. It is so precisely in representation itself, which takes as its premise a correspondence or adequation between thought and being, and thereby endorses the illusion of the sovereign and creative intellect. Cognition and representation, then, are both an exertion of violence, what Levinas calls negation, a denial of the independence of existents. Thus a significant ethics can have nothing to do with any transcendental sanction, any abstract principles or rules. For such principles or rules will always have set terms in advance for the encounter with the other. An ethical priority emerges, not as my knowledge dominates the other, but as the moral height of the other dominates me and all the terms – being, essence, identity, principle, the same – in which I would seek to encompass her or him. The other overflows all ideas I can have of him or her, and the consequence is shame; shame at the sheer contingency or radical smallness of the ideas in question. What shames me, above all, is the principle of infinity as revealed in the other. Levinas understands this infinity, in the Cartesian sense, as always overflowing the thought that thinks it. The ethical relation, then, is a relation to infinity rather than the thought of totality, and begins precisely as the other in its infinity exceeds my representation of it, in the faltering or failing or ‘ruin’ of representation.6

Heart of Darkness and the limits of representation7 Such an account of ethics has large implications for both the ethics of reading and the ethics of fiction.8 It suggests we might grow more thoughtful, for example, about the ways in which novels themselves address questions of representation and its limits. There is more at stake in the issue than has usually been supposed in all the various, prolific, postmodern discussions of self-reflexivity and so on. In one of its aspects, Heart of Darkness is pervaded by two discourses, the Kurtzian and Marlovian. They are not to be identified with single characters, however. Indeed, to identify them thus would precisely be to repeat a familiar process whereby the ethics of Conrad’s text is constructed around persons understood as

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homogenous entities. In Levinas’s terms, Kurtzian discourse is ontological. Kurtz is persistently associated with the word ‘all’ and the concept of totality: You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my – ’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness bursting into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him.9 Kurtz’s urge is precisely towards the domination of the whole: ‘By the simple exercise of our will,’ he writes, ‘we can exert a power for good practically unbounded’ (HD, p. 83). If everything supposedly belongs to Kurtz, ‘All Europe’ has also ‘contributed’ to his ‘making’ (ibid.). His drive is towards total possession, and he also serves as a kind of summation. The meaning of his story cannot be separated from the will to totalize. In this respect, the ethical issues with which Conrad is chiefly concerned are inseparable from the limits of a particular and culturally specific epistemology. Thus, in the phrase ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ (HD, p. 84), I would underline the relatively inconspicuous second word. If it gives the idea of ‘extermination’ full weight and makes its meaning wholly explicit, the word also emphasizes a totalizing habit of thought and perception without which the idea of extermination itself is impossible. What hangs over Kurtz’s deadly sentence is partly a question about the very reflexes that lead anyone to think peoples or races as wholes. Kurtz’s last words equally function as the statement of a grim totality. The ironic tone to the passage strikes as much at the very act of summary judgment – that queer native custom – as it does at the nature of the judgment passed. Marlow insistently and repetitively emphasizes how far the Kurtzian predicament and the sombreness of Kurtz’s closing moods are inseparable from the habit of thinking totality: ‘The horror!’ … It is not my own extremity I remember best – a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things – even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I have been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps this is the whole difference;

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perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! (HD, pp. 113–14, italics mine) The ‘wisdom’ with whose conviction Marlow ironically toys, here, is of a piece with the ‘knowledge of unexplored regions’ with which Kurtz is also associated (HD, p. 115). Its totalizing aspiration – its overbearing grandiosity – finds an appropriate vehicle in grandiloquence. Kurtz’s will to mastery manifests itself as a will to dominate through language and discourse. For Levinas, the corruptions of ontology are precisely and pointedly evident in rhetoric. Rhetoric is unscrupulous, calculating, a function of the intelligence that has designs upon and seeks to subdue others. The rhetorician takes the ‘position’ of the person ‘who approaches his neighbour’ with a ‘ruse’ in mind: Rhetoric, absent from no discourse, and which philosophical discourse seeks to overcome, resists discourse … It approaches the other not to face him, but obliquely – not, to be sure, as a thing, since rhetoric remains conversation, and across all its artifices goes unto the Other, solicits his yes. But the specific nature of rhetoric (of propaganda, flattery, diplomacy, etc.) consists in corrupting this freedom. It is for this that it is preeminently violence, that is, injustice – not violence exercised on an inertia (which would not be a violence), but on a freedom, which, precisely as freedom, should be incorruptible. (TI, p. 70) Rhetoric closes off all possibility of dialogue with the other in her or his irreducible difference. Rhetoric is the violence which refuses to listen, refuses exchange, assimilation, hybridization, self-reflexivity. By contrast, conversation maintains the ethical relation with the other and the possibility of unsaying what is said, and philosophical discourse seeks to avoid violence in turning away from rhetoric. Kurtz is clearly no philosopher, in Levinas’s sense. As Marlow says, he is rather a discourser: I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn’t say to myself, ‘Now I will never see him’ or ‘Now I will never shake him by the hand,’ but, ‘Now I will never hear him.’ The man presented himself as a voice … Of all of his gifts the one that stood out pre-

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eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words. (HD, p. 79) Kurtz’s famed ‘magnificent eloquence’ (HD, p. 95) is precisely a rhetoric that permits no encounter with the other. Humanistic at first, it can speedily reverse into the opposite of humanism. Humanism and nihilism appear as twin sides of the same coin, insofar as both are inextricable from a rhetoric that speaks totalities. Indeed, in Kurtz, a totalizing rhetoric serves as figure for an egology finally revealing itself as insane catastrophe. ‘My ivory’, says Marlow, mournfully. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my …’ It is thus that ‘everything belongs’ to Kurtz (HD, p. 81). In Heart of Darkness, then, the Kurtzian principle is one of grandiose and summary representation which seeks to encompass and articulate the whole. As such, it is by no means confined to Kurtz. The kind of totalizing discourse most obviously associated with Kurtz is one from which no European character is free. The chief accountant, the brick-maker, the general manager, the Russian harlequin: each of them is disposed to discoursing on the whole. In a sense, Heart of Darkness takes as its principal theme the Heideggerian nightmare, the impending triumph of Western metaphysics as it is ensured by and properly indistingnishable from the triumph of Western power. It is thus appropriate that all the European characters in the story should be representative of or instrumental to the spread of Empire whilst also doggedly articulating or reproducing an ontological discourse that insists on the priority of existence over existents, of the idea over embodiment, enactment, materiality.10 Everywhere, ontology provides the justification imperialism seeks, serves as the latter’s torch and sacred fire. Here Marlow’s wonderful, wicked, brief, parodic sketch of the Scottish sailmaker stands as comment on the European enterprise itself: I knew once a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people on Mars. If you asked him for some idea how they looked and behaved, he would get shy and mutter something about ‘walking on allfours’. If you as much as smiled, he would – though a man of sixty – offer to fight you. (HD, p. 49) The vignette functions as a kind of comic reductio ad absurdum of the kind of certitude shared by the Europeans in the story, a certitude that, ethically, is

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profoundly disabling. In Heart of Darkness, no-one escapes ontology. Nor is the latter by any means the preserve of the less attractive characters. Indeed, part of the subtlety of Conrad’s achievement arguably has to do with his recognition that, if ontology and the thought of totality spread everywhere, they do so at the expense of the more familiar moral distinctions – between liberal enlightenment and benighted reaction, for instance – that might otherwise be sustained. Above all, Marlow himself is by no means offered to us as having somehow moved beyond ontology. In the first narrator’s terms, he is not only a ‘wanderer’ but also a ‘seaman’: Most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship; and so is their country – the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself. (HD, p. 18) Part of Marlow’s mind has precisely the ‘stay-at-home order’ of the seaman’s, in which home is always with one and sameness prevails over difference. In particular, the oracular, generalizing Marlow is unable to escape the totalizing principle, the assumption of the one truth, the conviction as to universals. This is strikingly evident, of course, in his view of women (HD, p. 28). Marlow’s problem is in large measure his implicit faith in a singular knowledge whose necessary consequence is the assumption that others are excluded from it. This Marlow enters a lady’s room and finds that it looked ‘just as you would expect a lady’s drawing-room to look’ (ibid.). ‘Belief’ must be opposed to ‘acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags – rags that would fly off at the first good shake’ (HD, p. 63). In bluff, virile terms, this Marlow asserts that one must ‘meet that truth with his own true stuff’ (HD, p. 63). He knows about Geist in that he knows what an ‘absolutely pure’ spirit might be (HD, p. 90). It is therefore not surprising to find him suggesting that, if the colonial enterprise is to be redeemed, it will be only by the ‘idea at the back of it’ (HD, p. 20, italics mine). The predicament of this Marlow is partly a matter of the limited – not to say banal – range of his spatial metaphors for knowledge. But then, part at least of the originality of Heart of Darkness has to do precisely with the connection it repeatedly establishes between the mentality that

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sees truth in terms of what is ‘within’ or ‘inside’, as ‘hidden’ (HD, p. 60) or buried, and its discovery as an unearthing or penetration (HD, p. 62); and the drive ‘to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land’ (HD, p. 55). It is hard to be certain, then, how far the totalizing principle as exemplified in Kurtz is not in fact a projection of Marlow’s own drive to totalization. This is one of the story’s most significant ironies. It is Marlow, after all, who is responsible for conveying the Kurtzian principle to us, in what is at times a grandiloquent rhetoric that is hardly distinguishable from Kurtz’s own. Everything that Kurtz says in the story is actually in double quotation marks. It is speech incorporated into Marlow’s speech. In a sense, Kurtz is absorbed into Marlow’s very substance, is even the corruptive principle within that substance; except, of course, that there is an aporia as to the ‘origin’ of the tale. Kurtz is both the pretext for and in that sense the origin of Marlow’s story, and yet also its product. It is precisely here that the other discourse in Heart of Darkness becomes important. What pervades ‘Marlovian’ discourse is a sense of epistemological dead-end, of determinate limits to knowledge and representation, the irreducible mystery of the world encountered by the cognitive intellect.11 In this discourse, representation itself is constantly threatened by the ‘unfathomable enigma’ (HD, p. 71) whose mention so dismays Leavis. In Levinas’s terms, this is a discourse that starts from the principle of infinity. What most obviously balks understanding, in Marlow’s case, is Africa, ‘the silence of the land … its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life’ (HD, p. 48). But equally, once recognized for what it is, the fact of ineluctable mystery radiates everywhere. If Africa is irreducible to European terms then, equally, Europe must be imagined as a source of perplexity to Africa (HD, p. 33), Europeans themselves are ‘improbable, inexplicable and altogether bewildering’ to each other, and so on (HD, p. 90). In fact, in Marlow’s terms, the amazed encounter with alterity – an alterity that will subsequently be brusquely subdued – lies at the very root of the European experience. It is precisely the recognition of the encounter with alterity that baffles all representation, making it ‘impossible’, for instance, ‘to convey the lifesensation of any given epoch of one’s existence’ (HD, p. 50). Indeed, the encounter with alterity seems to ask for full expression in terms that go beyond anthropomorphism into the further reaches of time and space: ‘prehistoric earth’ on the one hand; on the other, the ‘unknown planet’ (HD, p. 62). The Marlow who finds those terms is most certainly a ‘wanderer’ rather than a seaman (ibid.). Yet there is an ample measure of the seaman’s as there is of the wanderer’s disposition in Marlow, and this mixture is also there in Heart of Darkness itself.

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Marlovian discourse does not somehow ‘overcome’ or ‘resist’ or neutralize the ontological discourse in Conrad’s tale. Rather, it gnaws away at it, like an unease that cannot be stilled, providing an insistent reminder that ontology itself has a history, that ontology is itself a discursive construction. Marlovian discourse deconstructs Kurtzian discourse. It does not destroy ontology. It leaves ontology standing, but as a hollow shell. It indicates the finitude of ontological discourse, its lack of purchase on the real. This is partly the consequence of the modes of ironic play which Marlow adopts during the course of his narration. In Heart of Darkness, Marlovian discourse might be said to open up an ethical space in which alterity is registered precisely as it persistently and forever exceeds cognition and indicates the limits of ontology. But this is by no means simply a question of a Conradian ethics of discourse. On another level, that ethics is also ‘dramatized’, not least in the final encounter with the Intended. Before that encounter, under Kurtz’s spell, Marlow comes close to rejecting Levinasian infinity, the ‘totalizing vision’ towards which he moves being the vision of Kurtz the despairer. Part of Marlow’s problem is his aptitude for double voicing as indicated by those double quotation marks. For if the advantage conferred by such an aptitude is a disposition to irony, the disadvantage is a propensity for being submerged or absorbed. Hence Marlow’s conviction that all wisdom ‘and all truth, and all sincerity’ may in fact have been ‘compressed’ into Kurtz’s summary judgment (HD, p. 113, my italics). This Marlow – now back in Europe – is no longer a baffled intelligence on the threshold of the wilderness. He is rather caught up once more in a European agonistics of knowledge which Conrad specifies as a conflict with all those ‘intruders’ whose ‘knowledge of life’ is to him ‘an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew’ (HD, p. 114). For Levinas, of course, the ethical relation is concrete and personal. It is first and foremost an encounter with a face. The ‘situation where totality breaks up’, writes Levinas, is precisely ‘the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other’ (TI, p. 24). The face is ‘a living presence’, expression (TI, p. 66). As such, in its mobility and multiplicity, it escapes any ‘form’ to which I might seek to reduce it or its possessor. It cannot be ‘contained … comprehended, that is, encompassed’ (TI, p. 194). The principle of irreducibility – of infinity itself – is experienced in the face of the Other and its unmasterable ‘foreignness’ (TI, p. 194). The ‘epiphany of the face’ involves an experience of its ‘nakedness’ or destitution as supplication or demand (TI, p. 75). The face asks me for a response. It engages me in responsibility, because it requires that I give. It commands me from an

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absolute height, and its ‘mastery’ of me (ibid.) is inseparable from the impossibility of my mastering it. The ‘generosity’ in question manifests itself in the first instance as communication, in language. Language breaks out of us in response to the other and his or her destitution. As Blanchot describes it, the Levinasian imperative insists that ‘I will not speak of the other or about the other but I will speak … to the other’.12 For the primary feature of language is ‘the interpellation, the vocative’ (TI, p. 69). Thus the encounter with the face and through language has an absolute ethical priority over cognition and representation. For to speak in response to the other is always, in the first instance, to refuse to reduce the other to terms, to greet him or her in his or her difference. The crucial point about Marlow’s final encounter with the Intended is that, in what Levinas calls the face to face, Marlow turns aside from the notional priority of ‘the things I knew’. He abandons his own conclusive truth, the truth he has represented and produced in his own narrative and to which his narrative has led, in the service of a higher claim, the immediate demand of the other. If, from the start, for Marlow, the Intended appears as an unreal figure or ‘Shade’ (HD, p. 122), it is precisely because she comes to him as a face of whose appeal he is immediately and agonizingly aware: She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk … This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. (HD, p. 119) The destitution or ‘awful desolation’ (ibid.) of the face of the Intended is something to which Marlow cannot but respond. Equally, ‘the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my lips’ repeatedly summons Marlow into speech (ibid.). But, more remarkably, it compels him into an acknowledgement of the absolute priority of the other, as he not only repeatedly responds to the need of the face, but surrenders his own knowledge and truth to it. As the ethical demand persists, so the clarities of enlightenment begin to fade: ‘You knew him best,’ I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief and love. (HD, p. 120)

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The significance of the final lie thus becomes evident: it is in no respect a defeat for Marlow. It gives priority to the face and the need to respond to the face. Marlow gives up his knowledge in favour of the other’s need, and thus resorts to a very different conception of ethics and justice to the patriarchal one that has hitherto dominated the novel: It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. (HD, p. 123) But finally, how adequate a response is such a reading of Heart of Darkness to the questions – of race, gender and the colonial enterprise – that it raises today? Achebe has insisted that what should be the ‘real question’ in Conrad’s story – ‘the dehumanization of Africa and Africans’ as the result of an ‘age-long’ European attitude – never really gets mooted at all.13 Is an account of Heart of Darkness which reads its self-deconstructive movement in ethical terms an adequate rejoinder to Achebe’s argument? Undoubtedly not. But perhaps Achebe’s case should not exactly be ‘answered’. However compelling his account of Conrad’s complicities in certain respects, it has at least one feature in common with liberal and equally with conservative accounts of Heart of Darkness: it assumes that, in principle, the story speaks of and addresses a whole, claims the attention of a whole readership. Yet Conrad himself puts such totalizing discourse radically into question. Contemporary thought has repeatedly suggested that the cruelties and injustices of imperialism and patriarchy and the miseries that have been their consequence may finally be inseparable from Western ontology, from a habit of thought that deems it possible and necessary to speak of and therefore master the other as whole, to reduce the other to the terms of the same. In Heart of Darkness, in playing Kurtzian discourse off against Marlovian discourse, Conrad plays the thought of being and the representation of being against the thought of an alterity that overflows all ideas and representations of being. In that respect, he begins to deconstruct a discourse upon which imperialism depends for its conviction and survival, the ‘idea at the back’ of the ‘conquest of the earth’ (HD, p. 20). It is precisely in that practice that I would want to locate the more significant ethics in Heart of Darkness.

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Ethics and the postmodern sublime Of course, this reading of Heart of Darkness has not managed somehow to ‘free’ the text from its representationalism. I have merely tried to isolate a strand of antirepresentationalism, a cautionary insistence on the limits to representation within the novella, and then to work it back into the text, to see how it shifts the disposition of the representational whole. Representational texts are haunted by the question of epistemological closure, of the epistemological limits of their project, of the grounds for their representational authority. The question may be raised obliquely, it may be metaphorized or allegorized, it will seemingly be ‘contained’ within the frame of representation itself, as, indeed, it is in Heart of Darkness. It will nonetheless continue to exert a certain pressure upon the novel as mimetic endeavour, to inflect that endeavour in a direction that it has not proposed for itself. It is precisely within this resistance to the mimetic from inside the mimetic that I have sought to locate an ethics which, whilst not exactly running counter to any ethics derived from a representational reading, has at least one clear advantage over the latter, in that it raises the question of the possible violence of mimetic authority. Furthermore, my reading takes that question itself to be part of and intrinsic to any ethical hermeneutics. Heart of Darkness, however, is not a work of fiction in which we are invited to experience the wholesale ‘ruin of representation’ itself. What if any ethics can be associated with an art that refuses to produce or reproduce a world? I shall try to answer this question in several different ways in ensuing chapters. Initially, however, I want to consider non- or anti-representational narrative in a specific theoretical context, turning, not to Levinas, but to a discussion of Lyotard’s later work. There are several reasons for doing this. The first has to do with Levinas’s antipathy to art and suspicion of the aesthetic. Robert Eaglestone has demonstrated how far Levinas’s critique of representation, his conviction that ethics is of a different order to representation, that ethics has nothing to do with the production or use of representations, is actually inseparable from a more general distrust of art. For ethics stems from the face-to-face relationship, guaranteed by an assumption of presence. To suggest that presence is only represented in material forms, to confuse the issue of presence with the issue of how presence is represented, is to challenge the actual face-to-face relationship with the Other. (EC, p. 99)

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This might seem still to leave anti-representational art available to ethical reading. It might even seem as though anti-representational art is likely to be ethical art; and, indeed, Eaglestone points out that the artists and artworks that Levinas discusses at length, and often approvingly, tend to be ‘non- or antirealist’ (EC, p. 100). But there is a problem here in that, as Eaglestone amply shows, Levinas refuses to grant an ethical dimension to language as it is used in any work of literature, representational or anti-representational. For Levinas, as Eaglestone says, a work of art is not what he thinks of as ‘true language’ but ‘a language-event or language-work’ (EC, p. 122). Language in Levinas’s sense is only language if the interlocutor is actually present. Levinas stresses that the materiality of language, language works, are different from the ‘languageness of language’. Language-works only have access to the ‘languageness of language’ if they are supported by the face. (EC, p. 123) In fact, Levinas restores the etymological sense to the word language, what matters, above all, being language as it is ‘tongued’ to another. This is bad news for anyone hoping to bridge the gap between Levinas and art without support from elsewhere, and there are good reasons for turning specifically to Lyotard, here. First, there is the extent of Lyotard’s debt to Levinas, the extent, even, to which Lyotard’s work can be read as a continuation of Levinas’s project. Lyotard has been explicit about the significance of Levinas’s work for him. In Peregrinations, for example, he confides that Levinas’s books were his ‘companions for twenty years’.14 Second, Lyotard shares Levinas’s intransigent and principled commitment to anti-representationalism. This commitment has been well demonstrated by Hans Bertens, who rescues The Postmodern Condition from the charge of neo-conservatism, for example, by arguing that such readings leave out its anti-representational stance.15 Because Lyotard is so fiercely anti-representational, too, he sees what others call postmodern aesthetics – pastiche, simulation, Jencksian eclecticism, the return to the figurative in postmodern writing and art – as fraudulent and debased. His commitment is necessarily to a postmodernism that repeats with variations the modernist confrontation with the impossibility of representation, but also specifically ‘puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms’.16

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As Bertens suggests, Lyotard’s critique of representationalism is inseparable from his struggle against consensus. For Lyotard, emancipation depends on the perpetuation of dissensus, that is, on a permanent crisis in representation, on ‘an ever greater awareness of the contingent and localized – the unstable – nature of all norms for representing the world’.17 But what does ‘emancipation’ mean, here? Surely, the diligent protection of difference from discourses that would seek to assimilate it to the Same. It is precisely in such (ethical) terms that Lyotard’s account of the postmodern sublime has to be understood. Lyotard’s reasons for not sharing Levinas’s distrust of art are closely related to the specific politics of his version of Levinas. For the Heideggerian in Lyotard, what Heidegger calls the Gestell becomes the regime of the Great Monad, the megalopolis, Capital triumphant and so on.18 Under this regime, the nakedness of the face-to-face encounter which, for Levinas the humanist, has an uncomplicated purity, is regulated, mediated, muffled, subsumed by the systems of communication within which it takes place. Language is no longer a response to an alterity immediately before me. In Moralités Postmodernes, Lyotard resorts to Bergson to establish an account of contemporary culture as threatening to annul the very condition of Levinasian ethics: Bergson said, conversation is conservation [conversation, c’est conservation]. This is the case with the majority of the interviews, discussions, dialogues, round tables, debates, colloquia for which our world is so avid. They serve to assure us that we are indeed ‘on the same wavelength’ and that everything is going fine … What boredom!19 The relationship that, for Levinas, is ethically cardinal has become a matter of the emission and reception of messages, a structure functioning in terms of the right to be informed and the right to be heard (MP, p. 109). It is in danger of being swallowed up by the Rortean empire of meta-conversation or pragmatic communication which is part of the system of exchange and its ‘pseudo-rationality’ that Capital spreads everywhere (MP, p. 131).20 For Levinas, the ‘epiphany of the other’ signifies in itself, beyond all context or mediation (Levinas, HAH, pp. 50– 51). For Lyotard, however, almost anything now that may appear to exist ‘outside’ the system of communication – imagination, critique, incertitude, indeterminacy,

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speculative thought – is actually left open by the system itself as a space within it, is necessary for the system to function with maximum efficiency, and is therefore also controlled by it.21 This ‘outside’ therefore never really has any alterity. (‘Tout est étranger, et rien ne l’est’, MP, p. 28). Here, precisely, postmodern culture dramatically threatens the very basis of Levinas’s ethics, since the very possibility of the encounter with radical difference has arguably been lost and replaced with a simulacrum, as in Baudrillard’s famous example of the Tasaday, the Philippino tribe extracted from the jungle and then returned to it, ‘museumized’. Lyotard thus retains, is even passionately committed to, much that is most important in Levinas’s ethics, but sees Levinas’s humanism as ineffectual and outmoded. It might be objected, here, that Levinas himself is also a critic of classical humanism.22 But he is so only from the vantage point of a supposedly more authentic humanism, in that he complains that what others call humanism has never been humanist enough, that it has not really been interested in humans, but only in ‘l’inanité de l’hommeprincipe’ (HAH, p. 81). For Lyotard, on the other hand, the contemporary relationship with humanism must be irremediably belated (I, p. 1), and Man is only Man by virtue of what ‘exceeds’ Man (‘l’Homme n’est Homme que par ce qui l’excède’, MP, pp. 33–34). What ‘exceeds’ Man is ‘the inhuman’. But, Lyotard’s concept of the latter is two-sided. On the one hand, it is the regime of advanced Capital that currently structures what we understand as the human that is in fact ‘the inhuman’. But the ‘inhuman’ is also something closer to what Deleuze means by ‘becoming’, a play of forces within which development is not a human invention, but ‘invents’ humans itself (MP, p. 87). Ethical work resists the first ‘inhuman’ in the name of the freedom and sense of possibility that is attached to the second (I, p. 7). As in Levinas, ethics is therefore resistance to totalization and closure, but also has a specific, political dimension that Levinas does not grant it. Hence Lyotard’s antirepresentationalism is quite different to Levinas’s. Where Levinas’s antirepresentationalism takes its bearings from a particular, ethical valuation of the encounter between two human beings, Lyotard’s is crucially a hostility to and distrust of systems of representation understood as the ‘generalized aesthetics’ of the megalopolis (MP, p. 28). For Lyotard is intensely fearful of the immense power of representationalism within the culture of advanced capitalism. Indeed, he takes representationalism itself to be a feature of the pseudo-rational consensus which Capital seeks to engineer and sustain. It is precisely in this ethico-political context that Lyotard’s commitment to the aesthetics of the avant-garde and the sublime needs to be understood. Of course, avant-garde aesthetics as they interest Lyotard are not representational. In a well-

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known phrase from The Postmodern Condition, avant-garde artists are rather ‘witnesses to the unpresentable’ (PC, p. 82) or allude ‘to the unpresentable by means of visible presentations’ (PC, p. 78, my italics). This is their ethical and political responsibility For the unpresentable is what lies beyond the consensus and cannot be assimilated to it. Most crucially of all, the avant-garde functions by way of allusion to what cannot be presented. It does not bring the unpresentable back ‘inside’ established systems of representation. It leaves the unpresentable ‘outside’, and contents itself with gesturing towards it, or registering its power as a force that deforms or distorts established forms. In other words, it insists on alterity as an absolute principle which can in no circumstances be brought to terms. Lyotard thus insists that what is unpresentable is not to be dominated and controlled, as representation dominates and controls its object and, for Levinas, the subject in its egoism seeks to dominate and control the other. Rather, the unpresentable cannot be thought in itself. But since, for Lyotard, Capital is always amoral, an unprincipled and irrational monstrosity, and since consensus and its systems of representation exist within Capital, what is unpresentable under Capital now, Capital triumphans – unpresentable as itself, uncontaminated – is the Good. The art of the avant-garde must in fact be understood as bearing witness to an ethical and political Good. If it does not and could never undo Capital itself, it nonetheless undoes the ‘metaphysics of capital’ and its ‘technology of time’ (I, p. 107). And why else, after all, would artists surrender the securities and rewards of representationalism or Jencksian ‘transavantgardism’? Nothing less than an ethical responsibility can require this, ‘la responsabilité de résister et de témoigner, que les avant-gardes ont assumés pendant un siècle’ (PPE, p. 137).23 But, the ethical responsibility of the avant-garde and the ethics of its antirepresentationalism are closely connected to the concept of the postmodern sublime, on the one hand, and, on the other, a specific melancholia.24 For Lyotard, the question of the sublime has a clear ethical dimension. He argues, for example, that ‘there is no sublime’ without ‘the development of the speculative and ethical capacities of the mind’ (P, p. 41, italics mine). In particular, in Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime, Lyotard not only provides his fullest account of the sublime, but also gives extended consideration to the question of its ethics.25 In Lyotard’s account of it, the experience of the sublime breaks the adhesion of thought to what it thinks it knows, and what it thinks it knows is inseparable from what it thinks it ‘sees’, from representation. In the sentiment of the sublime, there is a failure of the power of synthesis on which representation depends, of the capacity of synthesizing the given ‘en une seule fois’ (LAS, pp. 37, 137). The sublime involves an experience of

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dissociation, incommensurability, a ‘legitimation crisis’ in thought (LAS, p. 39). The faculty of reason admits an idea – infinity, for example – and demands that the faculty of imagination present it. But the imagination is bound to fail in the attempt and thus, in Kant’s terms, an abyss or Abgrund opens up between imagination and reason. It is here that the sentiment of the sublime is generated. Two different faculties – the theoretical and the practical, speculative reason and knowledge through understanding and presentation – turn out to be irreconcilably heterogeneous to each other (LAS, p. 56).26 As presentation and representation, thought is therefore made to experience its own limits; it experiences the ‘inanity’ of the assumption that there can be any finality to the forms it takes (LAS, p. 98). This is what Lyotard means when he says that the sublime is ‘counter-final’ (in Kant’s terms, zweckwidrig). Equally, it cannot be subsumed into a teleology or any ‘grand narrative’. It has no future (LAS, p. 73). It is the constant possibility of the experience of the powerlessness of forms, of the limits of what Kant calls the Darstellungsmögen, the faculty of presentation or imagination. Thus the Kantian sublime emerges from an almost Freudian theory of forces as a dynamic in which the faculties are pitted against one another (LAS, p. 81), Kant’s Widerstreit. Troublesomely, Lyotard asserts that the sentiment of the sublime cannot be translated into an ethical sentiment, at least, not directly (LAS, p. 158). In Chapter 7 of the Leçons, entitled ‘Esthétique et éthique dans le beau et le sublime’, he argues that, in Kant, the disjunction between the aesthetic and the ethical is apparently beyond appeal. But there is nonetheless the possibility of what Lyotard calls a fragile ‘passage’ from the aesthetics specifically of the sublime to ethics (LAS, pp. 199–201), and it is perhaps this sense of ethical possibility that keeps Lyotard’s conception of the postmodern sublime so radically distinct from the technological postmodern sublime more beloved of American theorists from Jameson to Tabbi.27 In the first instance, the experience of the sublime has certain analogies with the ethical encounter with alterity as Levinas describes it. For there is loss involved in the Kantian quarrel of the faculties, the Widerstreit that is the sentiment of the sublime. This loss is at least analogous to an ethical loss, the loss of ‘la jouissance-de-soi du moi empirique’. There is always a defeat of the empirical will, in the sublime, a humiliation of the presumptuous or narcissistic self.28 So, too, there is a failure of the Darstellungsmögen as a feature of the empirical will, of the subject’s persistence in its subjectivity. Though the experience of the sublime is clearly of the subjective order, there is properly no ‘subject of the sublime’ (LAS, p. 37). But the point is not that the subject and its powers of representation are overwhelmed by a grandeur or force, by the formless or the Ungeheuer, the

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monstrous. What supervenes upon the subject and its Darstellungsmögen, again, is rather the power of reason – understood as the faculty of pure ideas – to which imagination is powerless to respond. This is what Kant means by ‘subreption’, the movement of the sublime sentiment in which the experience of what might be felt as horror is translated into wonder.29 Imagination breaks down, and there is a forfeiture of self.30 But the mind hears the voice of reason, die Stimme der Vernunft asserting itself as grace, and what is glimpsed is a strange, new, non-subjectified power, ‘l’Idée, l’absolu de la puissance, la liberté’ (LAS, pp. 91, 149). For reason, here, is like the imagination in being a power to conceive, but unlike it in that it can conceive objects which cannot possibly be presented in experience and are not a function of the empirical will (LAS, p. 128). Reason, in fact, has no part in the utilitarian ‘good for’ (wozu gut) as opposed to the ethical ‘good in itself’ (an sich gut, LAS, p. 199). In the sublime, thought is supreme, and supreme as the rational recognition of the limits to any given foray of the imagination’s. These limits are the conditions of sense and of the constitution of subjectivity, and their fracture is an ethical sacrifice, and a very painful one, since to surrender all adherence to one’s representations, to the products of one’s imagination, is to court psychic disaster (LAS, pp. 219, 228). The sublime subject is thus not a full subject attending to nature. That is the subjectivity that experiences the beautiful. In the sublime experience, the subject is subjected. It is afflicted, says Lyotard: by obligation, the law, a demand that comes from outside the finite (historically determined) horizons of its (the subject’s) representations (LAS, p. 224). As with the avant-garde, reason finds its interest in the disorganization of the given and the defeat of the understanding and imagination. Here, thought almost grasps the Idea of its true destination, insofar as the latter is graspable, a destination that is ethical (LAS, p. 226). it is precisely here, in the concept of an ethical destination produced by reason through the disorganization of the given, that the extent to which Lyotard’s ethics of the sublime is also a politics becomes clear. In privileging the ‘Idea of reason’, the experience of the sublime maintains the possibility, at least, of certain ethical and political ideals in a culture in which they can find no concrete realization, and in which, at present, any representation is also likely to be a betrayal of them. In other words, the sublime gives precedence to an ‘ought’ over an ‘is’. In what is, politically, one of the most significant passages in the Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (LAS, pp. 167–74), Lyotard expresses the point in terms of the distinction between conditional and unconditioned time, chronos and kairos, and the Kantian distinction between müssen and sollen, empirical causality and ‘causalité libre’, free causality. What happens ‘inevitably’ (müssen) does so only within the world of chronos, within

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the empirical order and according to empirical principles. But in itself it did not have to happen (sollen). In time as kairos, there is no logic of inevitability to what happens, but only an (inhuman) logic of the event, which kairos itself and not some agent must be thought of as deciding. Every sollen can of course be reduced to a müssen, to the particular, finite terms of an actual, historical world. But the dynamism of time as kairos is not exhausted in this process. Nor, indeed, is it represented in it. The imagination deals only in the world as chronos and müssen, and representations are of this world. As kairos and sollen, however, the world is an ‘Idea of reason’ and unrepresentable. The recognition of the limits to representation in the experience of the sublime is a recognition of the limits to empirical causality as these are designated by ‘causalité libre’. In a moment of extreme and immediate violence, the subject is effectively forced to admit what he or she is otherwise so effectively inhibited from admitting, that what ‘is’ does not ‘have to be’. That is why the crucial significance of the sublime and the avantgarde, for Lyotard, is ethico-political. In both, there is a dramatic shattering of forms (nothing less dramatic could possibly offer any kind of resistance to the logic of the simulacrum). In both, there is an assertion of a principle of final and irreducible alterity, the other as the last possible word. Both are disintegrative and, for that reason, profoundly disturbing. But in both, an ‘Idea of reason’ prevails within and over disintegration, and the possibility of liberty, creativity and change is powerfully asserted. Thus a commitment to the sublime is also a commitment to an idea of progress, though not one that forms part of any grand narrative: With the aesthetics of the sublime it can be argued that a kind of progress in human history is possible which would not be only the progress of technology and science available to mankind. It is indeed not a progress of the beautiful, of the taste in beauty, but of the responsibility to the Ideas of reason as they are negatively ‘presented’ in the formlessness of such and such a situation which could occur. (P, p. 41) It is precisely as a ‘negative presentation’ of ‘ideas of reason’ that we should be concerned with the work of the avant-garde. In certain avant-garde texts, we find a decisive movement beyond what we might think of as the limits of the Conradian sublime – a sublime that can only occupy specific sites, that is a ‘contained’ sublime – to the properly postmodern sublime. If the relevant concept of the

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sublime today involves the nullity of the aisthesis and the confrontation with the inconstancy of every object (MP, p. 34), then Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons would appear to serve as an excellent example. Stein’s text gestures insistently towards the unrepresentability or unavailability of the object. Its full title is Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms: Studies in Description.31 This indicates a particular, representational project as the book’s raison d’être, one seemingly confirmed by the specifications in the many subtities, by the list of topics with which the second section is prefaced, and so on; except that the book never has any appearance of conforming to the project: EYE GLASSES. A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley. A CUTLET. A blind agitation is manly and uttermost. (TB, p. 21) Stein’s text at once withdraws from the representational practice to which it refers us. Indeed, it refers us to that practice only to ironize it, to insist categorically and at once on its impossibility. The vestige of a representational project is there only so that the work can be grasped in its function as allusion to the unpresentable. But how might we characterize the unpresentable in Tender Buttons? What kind of ‘sublime’ is it, and what ‘Idea of reason’ might it be thought to summon up? The unpresentable in Tender Buttons is the proper infinity of language or meaning; more precisely, the indeterminacy of the relationship involved in description, an indeterminacy that is not the result of the effort to describe, but precedes it. The ‘Idea of reason’ in Stein’s text is the indeterminable variability of the mode of knowledge that is description, the constant possibility of its transformation. To put it differently: Tender Buttons exemplifies the condition of phrasing as Lyotard repeatedly articulates the latter: to link is necessary, but how to link is not.32 It is precisely this absence of necessity that Stein’s text takes as cardinal: There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. (TB, p. 9)

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What glimmers here is what Foucault so famously celebrates in his account of Borges’s ‘Chinese encyclopaedia’ at the beginning of The Order of Things: the heteroclite, an infinite number of possible cognitive orders equivalent to the infinity of possibilities that radiate around a given phrase, around the activity of linking. The heteroclite is Stein’s sublime, and it dramatically interrogates all predication, denotation, determination, evocation. Imagination is powerless, since, within the order of the heteroclite, a particular image has no privileged status. Multiple logics – repetitive, associative, echoic, even commonsensical – flicker and quickly fade, as though overwhelmed by the sheer force of potentiality. Here, Stein clearly emerges as one of Lyotard’s modern writers and artists ‘[who] multiply infractions of the rules of concatenation’ in classical rhetoric and poetics, precisely because such artists ‘accord more value to seeking out the event [la recherche de l’événement] than to any concern with imitation or conformity’ (PEE, pp. 63–64). But why should we take Stein’s art to be ethical, here? I want to go back to that Kurtzian phrase of Marlow’s: ‘I had full information about all these things.’ Tender Buttons puts the Kurtzian principle into reverse. It refers us to many ‘things’ – ‘objects, food, rooms’ – about which it gives us no ‘information’ at all. In effect, it reverses the kind of values that underlie an ‘information culture’. Tender Buttons takes the mention of ‘things’ as a series of pretexts for a play of discourse which refuses to appropriate things, to convey the illusion of laying hold of them, grasping them, mastering them: Claiming nothing, not claiming anything, not a claim in everything, collecting claiming, all this makes a harmony, it even makes a succession. (TB, p. 37) Stein’s is a renunciation both of the Kurtzian principle at its most elementary and of rhetoric, of discourse as a claim upon the world, the Darstellungsmögen as a power to ‘put something there’. The illusion of a subjectivity that will undertake such an activity – authorial, narratorial, even textual – is not one that Tender Buttons will grant us. Here it is ‘impossible … to discover a solid structure of something like a self’ behind a play of ‘forces, motions, drifts not yet invested in or bound to determined objects’ (P, p. 31). In the abasement of the presumptuous self, reason tells us that what ‘is’ does not indeed ‘have to be’ anything in particular. An ‘Idea of reason’ asserts itself in the very collapse of the text as representation. There is an insistence on the principle of freedom in the very flow of la prose libre.

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Negativity and melancholia My account of Stein finds an ethics in a kind of negation. Ethics of the negative – or ethics in the negative – has a certain currency at present.33 The logic of the simulacrum is characterized by its seemingly inexhaustible positivity, its apparently endless power to convert the negative into the positive. Within the Gestell, everything must have its use, radicalism or conservativism, dissent or conformity, conviction or nihilism. The cardinal sins are futility, diffidence, incapacity, impotence. Conversion to the positive is clearly a feature of the process that Baudrillard has described as implosion. But if Capital only knows the positive and converts all things to the positive, then the positive is also suspect everywhere, and an obstinate persistence in negativity – Dostoevskean, for example, or Beckettian – becomes a feasible mode of ethical protest. In this respect, as an activity that tends to care for, foster and nourish if not actually produce the futile, art has a peculiar and significant function within the culture of the Gestell. Lyotard increasingly concerned himself with an ‘ethics in the negative’: In the aestheticizing megalopolis, the philosopher finds or rather loses himself in the position of safeguarding or having regard [prendre garde ou … avoir égard] for the nothing which is the absolute … He loses his way [se perd] as intellectual in and for the city since the latter is losing its way. He loses himself as a master of concepts and assemblages [édifices] of concepts. (MP, p. 35) Effectively, the postmodern, ethical philosopher joins the avantgarde artist in tending the ‘empty centre’, in protecting it from the relentless advance of positivity. One means of attempting to do so is the philosopher’s ‘phraseophilia’ (‘Ce serait sa manière, immonde, d’être au monde’, ibid.). The point would seem to be that the postmodern philosopher may yet prevent discourse from congealing into hardened forms which make it possible to assume that we do indeed have ‘full information’ about ‘all things’. The energy and creativity, the unresting vitality with which he or she commits him- or herself to ‘phrasing’ will at least continue to resist the illusion that a particular or given or historically determinate set of ‘linkages’ are necessary. This, however, is a melancholic mode of responsibility to an ‘Idea of reason’. From early on, Lyotard specified one of the two dispositions towards which the

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avant-garde and the philosopher attached to it will tend as melancholic (the other being jubilatory).34 By the time of Moralités Postmodernes, however, he was writing of melancholia as the ‘postmodern affection’ itself (MP, p. 94). Melancholy pits the thinker against the imminent prospect of the accomplishment of the ‘civic paradise’ which will know no exteriority. The melancholic is incredulous. If he or she preserves anything, it is the intimation of different horizons for thought to those accepted alike by the regime of Capital and its most powerful opponents. The melancholic wanders through the postmodern museum – with its confident assurances of an ever-increasing knowledge, of a possession of the past that is ever more complete – in courteous disbelief (MP, pp. 146–48). This is Kafka’s melancholia, above all, and it has its own extremely specific tone and mood. It insists that, for all its knowledge of the facts, its celebration of success and performativity, its faith in the spread of its own light, modernity can no more achieve universality than did any system of thought before it (PEE, p. 33). Postmodern thinkers and artists will tend to respond to modernity with modes of life and thought – withdrawal, solitude, excess – that are not themselves consonant with, produced by or justified within its system (MP, p. 177). They will also struggle to bear witness to the decline or the smothering of the event which, in our age, is the decline of politics itself (PEE, p. 136). But their position is fragile, vulnerable, even absurd. The melancholic’s withdrawal, again, is Kafkan not Nietzschean and, unlike the position of the modern moralist, liberal, left or right, has no compensatory self-satisfactions or even self-identifications to offer. It involves a renunciation of the demand for enrichment, justification, even pleasure, merely in the interests of the right to the negative (MP, p. 53). Yet this right has to be maintained. For it may be only in the negative that both the ‘Idea of reason’ and radical difference can now be effectively preserved. If we are responsible to alterity and to the ‘Idea of reason’ and are obliged to tend them, melancholy will therefore necessarily be the ethical price of that obligation. It is thus that I would want to understand the specific mode of melancholy evident in the early fiction of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Lyotard himself gives Céline as an example of a postmodern melancholia which insists on a kind of disappointment particular to the megalopolis (MP, pp. 35–36).35 The megalopolis aggravates the hope or dream of the absolute or universal. But it equally – and more and more blatantly – aggravates the inevitable failure to produce a finality of any kind. A particular kind of ‘misery’ is generated in the gap between the hope and the failure, and it is to that misery that Céline bears witness. Lyotard’s view of Céline, however, involves a reading of the latter’s texts that is comparatively

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orthodox, representational and partly at odds with what is most radical in his (Lyotard’s) own aesthetics. There is another way of reading Céline that does not sidestep the problematics of representation, but is nonetheless concerned with ethics in what I take to be a Lyotardian way. To see the early Céline as an example of ethical melancholy carries obvious risks. Yet if one of the responsibilities of a postmodern ethics is to resist all reductions of ethics to questions of stable identities, by that very token, it would be important not straightforwardly to assimilate the Céline of Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (a left-leaning anarchist) to the anti-Semite and collaborator that Céline later became. To divide and partly rescue Céline from himself, to refuse simply to ‘follow through the connections’ between differing Célines according to what is presumed to be a self-evident logic of identity, can thus be constituted as itself an ethical labour. For it resists the later Céline, not by confronting him, and thus running the risk of replicating his appalling violence, but by attending to what Kristeva would call the ‘stranger’ within him, saving and protecting its difference, and thus refusing the very principle of the later Céline’s violence, which itself began in a disastrous repudiation of the claims of difference. Voyage au Bout de la Nuit cannot be thought of as a representational novel, not, at least, in the classic sense. It does not offer an account of an external world. It is rather the narrative of a delirium; furthermore, a delirium that is not ‘placed’ from the vantage point of an external world. In the Voyage, there is no reality to be known beyond the delirium, nothing to be represented as outside it. But this does not make it a novel about a particular inwardness or a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novel. Nothing in the Voyage definitively indicates that the narrative is to be read as the product of a derangement. We rather encounter what Allen Thiher has called the novel as delirium.36 Narrative becomes a ‘plague of fantasies’ – to use a phrase of Zizek’s – beyond which there is only the Real as Zizek himself understands it, a Real that resists all efforts to bring it to terms whilst also warping such terms as are deployed.37 Célinian melancholy might thus be thought of as a melancholy of the withdrawal of the real in and behind délire. To suggest that the Voyage should be read in terms of the concept of delirium is hardly new. Yet what is striking about Céline criticism is how far an anti-mimetic mode of reading tends to coincide with a commentary on the supposed moral vacuum in the novels which proceeds as though they were mimetic. If critics have been scrupulous in recognizing that Céline’s novels do not conform to a realist logic, they have also been curiously reluctant to consider the implications of that recognition for questions of the novels’ ethics.

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Thus Sturrock, for instance, argues that, through Bardamu, Céline produces a relation between realism and fantasy, truth and mendacity that is undecidable.38 Bardamu is too committed to the power of his imagination to allow it simply ‘to be dictated to by what it sees’, as in realism (C, p. 63). His is therefore a narrative given over to misrepresentation, to the transforming power of ‘false representation’ (C, p. 62). Yet, at the same time, he is engaged in a ‘wilful denigration of the world’ that puts him ‘outside the sphere of serious ethical discussion’ (C, pp. 78, 61). It seems to me, however, that the relationship between delirious narrative and ethics in the Voyage must be granted its own specific mode of construction. The implication of the Voyage is that delirium holds the only relevant truth about the real, which is that the latter is unrepresentable in itself because altogether beyond ethics and therefore insupportable. The representational apparatus simply does not function in the dark. If, as Bardamu suggests, no-one truly cares about morality, in spite of all their protestations to the contrary, then the real does indeed become a delirium, and the only feasible ethics lies in the articulation of the impossibility of ethics. The ethics of the Voyage is a work of mourning: mourning sanity, decency, reason, and, with them, ethics itself. But even that ethics (of mourning) is either unsustainable or, at best, absurdly irrational. For its logic can only turn death into an ethical imperative, and survival into a sin, and Céline’s response to this predicament is always clear: if ‘il faut choisir: mourir ou mentir’, the choice has always been made from the start.39 Such is his black inversion of the picaresque. This means that ethics is not only always and definitively otiose, but also always paradoxical, and therefore a source of unceasing trouble, pain, angoisse. Indeed, pain is the ethical obligation, for ethics is the act of tending what I referred to earlier as the empty centre, of bearing witness to the unpresentable, understood, here, as an ethical world. The delirium of the Voyage, then, appears as a disorganization of the given according to an ‘Idea of reason’ – ethics – which cannot in itself be made to appear, and is a cardinal instance of what Lyotard calls ‘negative presentation’, what I have referred to as ‘ethics in the negative’. This emerges particularly clearly in the section of the Voyage that deals with colonial experience and is set in colonial Africa, not least if we put Céline’s account alongside Heart of Darkness. It is surely mistaken to understand the sequence as an expression of ethical indifferentism (it is not principally an ‘expression’ of anything).40 Conrad’s presentation of the colonial experience in Heart of Darkness charts the collapse of a species of reason, even hovers on the brink of that collapse itself, but without departing from or abandoning reason. Céline’s mode of treating

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the same subject is more brutal and shocking. Colonialism is vileness and insanity, tout court, and Céline will not convert it into any other terms than its own: It was then that one saw the whole of the white man’s revolting [angoissante] nature displayed in freedom from all constraint, under provocation and untrammelled; his real self as you saw it in war. This tropic stove brought out human instincts in the same way as the heat of August induces toads and vipers to come out and flatten themselves [s’épanouir] against the fissured walls of prison buildings … It’s then that the wild unbuttoning process begins, and degradation triumphs, taking hold of us entirely … you catch sight in the white race of what you see on a pretty beach when the tide goes out; reality [la vérité], heavy-smelling pools of slime, the crabs, the carcasses and scum. (JEN, p. 98; V, pp. 112–13) This is not an expression of an abstract misanthropy. Its very particular instance is French colonial society. Delirium is the only mode of narrative appropriate to colonialism. For colonialism is a delirium, a madness in which reason is reduced to the status of dream, and becomes the unpresentable, even the sublime: Such vital energy as was not sapped by malaria, thirst and the heat of the sun was consumed by hatreds so bitter and insistent that many of the residents [colons] used to die in their tracks, poisoned by themselves, like scorpions. This state of virulent chaos, however, was encircled by a serried cordon of police, like crabs in a bucket. It was in vain that the officials whined; the governor could always recruit as many shabby levies as he needed to keep his colony in order, as many as there were defaulting Negroes driven by penury [misère] in their thousands towards the coast, bankrupted by traders [vaincus du commerce] and searching for a crust to eat. (JEN, p. 110; V, p. 125) Given such a vision of corruption, it is hardly surprising to find Bardamu telling us that it is precisely as a result of the colonial experience that he finally and categorically despairs of the possibility of a positive ethics. In Heart of Darkness, it is precisely Marlow’s recognition of the limits of representation that makes it possible for him finally to sustain an ethical faith in

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the teeth of the colonial experience. What is at issue, here, is neither love, nor personal relations, nor a woman’s saving grace, nor some sort of transcendent mystery, but the constant, unalterable, ethical demand of alterity itself; of what is always in excess of any given system of representation. Céline’s Voyage is more intransigent: in a world without ethics, the real becomes a delirium. Yet the very fact of delirium – the very fact that Céline refuses to authenticate or underwrite a self-standing reality as and in itself – is what serves as testimony to the ethical impulse. Céline’s refusal to grant colonialism (or world war) the dignity of objective reason – the refusal to grant colonialism or war the status afforded by the very reasonability of representation – is unstinting and therefore compelling. Near the beginning of the Voyage, there is a two-sentence paragraph which is almost unique in kind and which is a key to the Célinian melancholy: La guerre en somme c’était tout ce qu’on ne comprenait pas. Ça ne pouvait pas continuer. (V, p. 15)

The war, in fact, was everything that one didn’t understand. It couldn’t go on. (JEN, p. 11) This represents a last, brief, tiny flicker of a positive ethics that virtually expires as the novel starts, and the innocence of the protestation is precisely an indication as to why that ethics cannot survive. Henceforth, there will only be delirium. If Céline went so wrong, later, it was because delirium lost its relation to an original absence, and no longer stood where reality had once been. It became reality itself.

Notes A C CR EC GT HD I IP

Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation, Thomas Docherty Céline: Journey to the End of the Night, John Sturrock Conrad’s Romanticism, David Thorburn Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Robert Eaglestone The Great Tradition, F.R. Leavis Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad The Inhuman, Jean-François Lyotard The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, Hans Bertens

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DISSOLUTIONS JEN KS LAS MP P PC PEE TB V

Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art, Paul Crowther Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime, Jean-François Lyotard Moralités postmodernes, Jean-François Lyotard Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event, Jean-François Lyotard The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Jean-François Lyotard Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms, Gertrude Stein Voyage au bout de la nuit, Louis-Ferdinand Céline

1. See for example James Guetti, ‘Heart of Darkness and the Failure of the Imagination’, Sewanee Review, Vol. 73, No. 3 (1965), pp. 488–504; Peter Brooks, ‘An Unreadable Report: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, Reading for the Plot (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 238–63; and Robert Hampson, ‘Heart of Darkness and “The Speech That Cannot Be Silenced” ’, English, Vol. 39, No. 163 (Spring 1990), pp. 15–32. 2. F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), hereafter GT; p. 174. 3. ‘Revaluations:Joseph Conrad’, Scrutiny, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1941), pp. 22–50, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1941), pp. 157–81. 4. Note David Thorburn’s response to Leavis in Conrad’s Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), hereafter CR; though Thorburn can no more resist the assumption of essences than Leavis. 5. By contrast, the process of mapping implicit in Marlow’s narrative in Heart of Darkness replaces a blank with a darkness. See Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985). 6. See Levinas, ‘La ruine de la représentation’, in EDE, pp. 125–36. 7. For a much extended version of this section of the chapter, see Andrew Gibson, ‘Ethics and Unrepresentability in Heart of Darkness’, in Andrew Gibson and Robert Hampson (eds), Conrad and Theory (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 113–37. 8. For an excellent account of some of these implications, see Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), hereafter EC. 9. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. with an introd, and notes by Robert Hampson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), hereafter HD; p. 81. 10. For an important account of the relevance of an emphasis on materiality to an ethics of alterity, see Thomas Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), hereafter A. 11. Cf. Thorburn: ‘as Kurtz’s eloquence and Marlow’s tormented narrative indicate, art itself and even the grounds of Western epistemology are challenged by the darkness’ (CR, p. 124). 12. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Our Clandestine Companion’, in Richard A. Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 41–50, p. 45.

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E T H I C S A N D U N R E P R E S E N TA B I L I T Y 13. Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in Heart of Darkness; an Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. R. Kinbrough (London and New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 251–62. 14. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), hereafter P; p. 38. Lyotard’s debts to Levinas are many. For Levinas and the concept of incommensurability, see ‘Discussions, or “Phrasing after Auschwitz” ’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 360–92, p. 385. For the influence of the Levinasian il y a, see The Inhuman, tr. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: Polity, 1991), hereafter I; p. 106 and passim. 15. Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1996), hereafter IP; p. 126. 16. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), hereafter PC; p. 81. See Bertens, IP, pp. 132–33. 17. Bertens, IP, p. 127. He is quoting from David J. Herman, ‘Modernism Versus Postmodernism: Towards an Analytic Distinction’, in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (eds), A Postmodern Reader (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 157–92, p. 163. 18. For a clear instance of this particular debt Lyotard (unlike Levinas) owes to Heidegger, see P, p. 21. 19. Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes (Paris: Galilée, 1993), hereafter MP; p. 58. 20. See also Lyotard, Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris: Galilée, 1988), hereafter PEE; pp. 82, 109. 21. See for instance MP, p. 71. 22. For Levinas’s critique of humanism, see HAH, pp. 9–11. 23. Lyotard’s valuation of the avant-garde, of course, has not gone unchallenged. See for instance Paul Crowther, ‘Les Immatériaux and the Postmodern Sublime’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Judging Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 192–205, p. 197. 24. In Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime, Lyotard actually suggests that the aesthetics of abstract art and minimalism historically derive from the aesthetic of the sublime. See Lyotard, Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (Paris: Galilée, 1993), hereafter LAS; p. 98. 25. For an illuminating account of the Kantian sublime as an ethical concept which does not deal with Lyotard but gives some indirect indication of how he has inflected Kant in the direction of his own preoccupations, see Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), hereafter KS. 26. Cf. Crowther, KS, p. 41. 27. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 34–38; and Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. ix–x and passim. 28. See LAS, pp. 212ff. 29. Note that it is a movement. Part of Lyotard’s point is precisely that there is a

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30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

failure of the power of simultaneous presentation, in the sublime, but not of successive or accretive presentation (LAS, p. 137). Lyotard points out that ‘subreption’ originally means obtaining a privilege by a forfeiture, by concealing a circumstance which would deprive one of it. See LAS, p. 91. Not according to the frontispiece, at least, to the 1970 edition, but according to the ‘List in Belles-Lettres published by Claire Marie’. See Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (New York: Haskell House, 1970), hereafter TB; p. 79. See for instance PEE, p. 63. One obvious example of this would be Thomas Docherty’s arguments for a link between ethics and a ‘new Pessimism’ (as opposed to the ‘damaging structural Optimism’ that has so ‘limited’ Marxism). See A, p. 2; and After Theory (second edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), passim. For an example in recent literary criticism that is much concerned with narrative though without a grasp of the larger theoretical context, see Catharina Wulf, The Imperative of Narration: Beckett, Bernhard, Schopenhauer, Lacan (Chichester and Portland, Or.: Sussex Academic Press, 1997). See PC, p. 80. To understand Céline’s melancholy as postmodern is less problematic than it might sound: that Céline is asking questions about the Enlightenment project long before the advent of postmodernism proper has been amply demonstrated by Kristeva, amongst others. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). See Henri Godard, La poétique de Céline (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). See also Philippe Sollers, ‘Le rire de Céline,’ in Théorie des Exceptions (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 112–14. Allen Thiher, Céline: The Novel as Delirium (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1972). Slavoj ŽiŽek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997). See also The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), and The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1997). John Sturrock, Céline: Journey to the End of the Night (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), hereafter C. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, introd. Henri Mondor (Pléiade; Paris: Gallimard, 1962), hereafter V; p. 200; and Journey to the End of the Night, tr. John H.P. Marks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), hereafter JEN; p. 176. Efforts like Philip Watts’s to resist readings of Céline in terms of ‘a postmodern aesthetic’ by situating his texts primarily in relation to questions of historicity and ideology are surely equally open to question, unless one recognizes from the start how very problematic the Célinian aesthetic is, and how limited our knowledge of how to read Céline still is. See Philip Watts, ‘Postmodern Céline’, in Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon and Thomas C. Spear (eds), Céline and the Politics of Difference (Harvard and London: University Press of New England, 1995), pp. 203–15.

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Multiplicity and fission The argument in Chapter 2 has brought me to a point that is sufficiently crucial to this study to need underlining: a postmodern ethics will not emerge on the basis of a concept of a ‘shared world’. It is bound to recognize the power of a past, a tradition or a community, or a given form of solidarity; or, in the case of literary criticism, of values shared by a given ‘interpretive community’, involved in a ‘common pursuit’, and so on. But it does not refer back to such a point of reference in the first instance. It rather assumes such points of reference must be suspected insofar as they are determined by and underwrite certain modes of domination, power and interest. A postmodern ethics, in fact, will insist on producing or discovering rifts, gaps, distances, differences, not in order to break up all sense of community but – unendingly – in the interests of a community to come whose values are still to be formulated, a solidarity that has yet to be created. That is not to deny (as if one could) the force of a particular construction of community in the here and now. Self-evidently, I have to choose allegiances. But I’d nonetheless ask whether an ethics – or an ethical criticism – can proceed primarily on the basis of such a choice, whether it should not exist precisely to supplement the latter, to maintain the Lyotardian ‘empty centre’, the moment of choice and the conditions (of the question) which made choice possible. This is not to give ethics priority over politics, but to repeat my assertion of the difference between the two, however much they may inform one another, and to assert the usefulness of ethical as distinct from political work. In other words, I doubt whether a politics

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can function other than in terms of a kind of conviction or certitude which it is the responsibility of ethics to hold in abeyance. Here, again, I need to make explicit an assumption that has been current in this study from the start: however equivocally, whatever the extent to which it recognizes the problems and paradoxes involved, a postmodern ethics will aspire to reticence, dubiety, critical modesty; not, that is, as ‘virtues to be practised’, but as they characterize a set of epistemological procedures. Part of what such procedures call in question is the availability of knowledge of the whole. To deploy a phrase of Heidegger’s that Derrida is fond of quoting: ‘All cannot be thought in one go.’ Postmodern ethics places at issue, not only the thought of totality, but the unitary base that makes it possible. The thought in question would include the assumption of a unitary base for rectitude, for instance, since rectitude, of course, is not complete or whole. To some extent, the problem has to do with a certain conception of what wholeness is, a privilege afforded the whole over the parts, whereby the parts that add up to a whole are also deemed to be comprised in the whole. The classical conception of narrative and representation puts them forward as two such wholes, and it is as such that I asked certain questions about them, in my first two chapters. In this chapter, however, I want to raise the question of unity itself – in this instance, the unity of the text – and to raise it, again, precisely as an ethical question. Here, too, Levinas will engage us in a relevant line of thought. In ‘De l’un à l’autre’, for example, he suggests that a nostalgia for unity has haunted philosophy since Plotinus. In Plotinus himself, this nostalgia is manifested in the concept of the ‘One’, the supreme transcendent reality or ‘hypostasis’. Levinas focuses on Ennead V, which tells us that the One is the ‘unity’ within whose bonds ‘this world of plurality and variety is contained’.1 Philosophers have insistently dreamt of a return from the multiplicity of being to the ‘One’ from which multiplicity itself has been deemed to derive. The philosopher lives and works in a state of ‘separation’ from a source ‘beyond being’ with which he aspires to coincide. For Plotinus, such a coincidence takes place in those privileged instants when the distance of the mind from the unity of the One is abolished and, with it, all multiplicity, all plurality and number. Thus neoplatonism exalts a consummate unity supposedly beyond being. Furthermore, the act of knowing itself – cognition – is modelled by analogy with this dream of a return: Knowledge as a return to presence, that is to say, to being; as a return to a multiplicity of ideas, certainly, but also always to the reassemblage of these ideas, to their synthesis, to the unity of their apprehension, to

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their com-prehension; and, in this comprehended co-presence [cette coprésence comprise], a return to the place of sense itself, where temporal dispersion passes precisely for a lack of intelligibility or its degraded image. Thus, in effect, a secondary status is conferred on time, the status of pure appearance, in conformity with the neoplatonic scheme. (EN, p. 146) For Plotinus, the very activity of knowing always betrays a deficiency. But Intelligence can nonetheless know the whole, even if that knowledge is only a second-order version of the actual experience of the One. Levinas invites us to suppose that the basic frame of this neoplatonic schema has been preserved into modernity, not least by Descartes (EN, p. 147). Within such a frame, dispersal, multiplicity, diachrony, becoming, always have a secondary or degraded status. Temporality is subordinated to an eternal present. It is only with Bergson that we break with this scheme. For Bergson tries to think time outside the limits of the return and union with the ‘One.’ In doing so, however, he delivers us to incompleteness as the irremediable condition of thought. Henceforth, thought must live with loss, with deficiency, with lack of presence or what Derrida calls spectrality as its very elements. An experience of its own inadequacy – of inadequation – becomes intrinsic to thought itself. The emphasis on inadequation, of course, comes to us from many different directions in contemporary thought and art. This study insistently returns to, finds itself embroiled in and having to struggle with various forms of inadequation. Indeed, it is perhaps the epoch characterized by the problematics of inadequation inaugurated – for Levinas – by Bergson that defines the context for a specifically postmodern ethics. For Levinas, the dream of a return to or knowledge of the unity of the One has lost its power. The philosopher is left with a world much closer to that of the ‘primitive mind’ as described by Lévy-Bruhl.2 This world is not a stable entity (‘posé, solide, indifférent au spectacle qu’il offre’). Nor is it endowed with a nature. It is not eternal through all change, with its changes regulated according to an immutable formula (EN, p. 52). As suggested in the first chapter, it is rather a world of events, relations or ‘participations’ which must be understood as prior to perception, cognition, theoria (EN, p. 55). We are always in the world before we think it, always participants in it in particular ways. Multiplicity does not stand in a secondary relation to an original unity: notions of unity are themselves secondary in relation to an original and irreducible multiplicity. The modern novel and modern painting are illustrations of this. In its profusion of monstrous forms, for example, modern painting

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seeks the compossibility of what is not compossible [la compossibilité du non-compossible]. Nothing imposes a choice upon the artist any longer, and the imagination thus finds itself independent of the faculty of perception whose categories it breaks. (EN, p. 56) The world no longer exists in any supposed unity as an exterior, objective entity. It does not determine the artist’s choices for him. Rather, any unity will be produced only in an imaginative act of participation. Unity is no longer a given, a deep structure or transcendent reality, but an epiphenomenon, a transient coincidence of disparate elements in one particular kind of form. Such a reversal of aesthetic priorities clearly has an ethical significance, for Levinas. It also has an ethical significance for the novel. In the passage I have just quoted, however, Levinas stresses the assemblage of a unity less than he does a process of disintegration or dissolution. This latter is the consequence of the imagination’s discovery that it is not in thrall to perception. The discovery leads to a breakdown of the perceptual categories themselves which takes place with the recognition of the priority of the multiple. The modern artist’s imagination works to return us to a sense of prior multiplicity precisely in its dissolution of the comparatively stable forms of perception. The process in question, of course, is not a dissolution ‘into’ something, dissolution as an extinction in union with the One. The process in question is rather a dissolution ‘of’ something. The experience involved is not an experience of the supra-temporal. It is rather a heightened experience of time itself, time as Bergsonian becoming; and of subjectivity as inextricable from that time. It seems to me, then, that, for Levinas, ‘dissolution’ is not to be conceived of as a static condition or final end. It is an active principle and a form of intellectual work, to which there is no conclusion. Thus, in this chapter, ‘dissolution’ appears as a median term between a given form and its annihilation. In this respect, it bears certain resemblances to Derrida’s concept of ‘spectrality’.3 As an active principle, Levinas associates dissolution, not only with modern art, but with certain thinkers. Part of what Levinas admires in Jean Wahl, for example, is summed up in a quotation from Wahl in Levinas’s ‘Being a Westerner’:4 We are no longer in fact concerned with stable forms presented once and for all, but with moving forms, subtle relations constructed by the mind in the course of its free workings. (DF, p. 47)

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Wahl’s achievement as a thinker lies partly precisely in his dissolution of stable into mobile and, above all, subtle forms, where the quality of mobility becomes inseparable from the particular subtlety envisaged. It is precisely in such a subtlety of form – in such a grasp of form as a question of ‘subtle relations’ in Levinas’s exact sense – that I shall locate an ethics of dissolution in the novel. For Wahl, conceptual thought must be dissolved back into prephilosophical experience. Hence what Levinas terms the ‘marvellous pointillism’ of Wahl’s thought (OS, p. 71), a ‘pointillism’ that is a matter of staying close to the experience of the philosopher in its freshness prior to becoming hardened into a system, before being buried in the depths of an intellectual construction, before the dulling of its sharp, burning punctuality. (OS, p. 73) What matters is Wahl’s fidelity to prephilosophical experience prior to its construction into thought. But it is only from the side of thought, as it were, that such fidelity is possible. The latter will thus manifest itself as a dissolution within system or form, just as Seurat’s atomization of visible form takes place within the contours of that form itself. This is crucial to my argument, here: if multiplicity comes first, if it has priority over the One, it is not to be grasped as such, in a bold, decisive shrugging off of the tradition and its legacy. The movement from conceptual thought to the prephilosophical is not to be accomplished in a single ‘leap back’, if it is to be ‘accomplished’ at all. It is rather, precisely, a ‘movement’, a practice and labour. The necessity for that labour is ethical. Levinas detects a similar dissolution of conceptual philosophy in the work of Franz Rosenzweig, whom he describes as refusing to conceive of any mode of existence whatsoever as merely ‘a moment’ in a ‘system’ into which it is ‘frozen’. The mode of existence in question must rather be thought of as opposing the ‘inexhaustible newness’ of ‘instants’ to such thought (OS, p. 54). Conceptual philosophy imprisons the instant in a petrified system. Yet the experience of the newness of the instant – prephilosophical experience – is no mere stammering precursor of the philosophical adventure. Quite the reverse: the former always transgresses or exceeds the ‘immobility’ of the latter’s ‘concepts and limits’. The ‘new thinking’, says Levinas – Rosenzweig’s, Wahl’s, his own – refuses any recourse to the unity of system and rather moves from reduction to irreducibility:

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Man is not a simple singularizing of the species ‘man’, definable by an ethos and principles; he dies for himself, he is ipseity positing and conceiving of itself on the basis of itself. He is, beyond that absorbing ethos, his irreducible singularity. (OS, p. 55) It is by working towards the thought of ‘irreducible singularity’ that we can hope to counter the ‘sovereign categories’ of philosophy as their totalizations have held sway ‘from the Ionian isles to Jena’ (ibid.). But, if man is not definable ‘by an ethos and principles’, I need to be more specific about the kind of ethics adumbrated in my median term, the ethics involved in the process of dissolution. In a lecture he gave on Heidegger in 1975, Levinas speaks of the need to recognize that ‘l’humain n’est pas une raison universelle simplement incarnée ou individuée mais signifie une intrigue propre’. Levinas continues: the emergence [surgissement] of the human is perhaps the rupture of the epoch of being by the relation of the one to the other (the domain of ethics) which would not be a level above being, but rather the gratuity in which the conatus, in which perseverance in being is undone [qui ne serait pas un étage audessus de l’être, mais la gratuité où le conatus, où la persévérance dans l’être se défait]. (MT, pp. 31–32) Here, the theme of the ethical defeat of self-intentness in the relationship with the other is connected to a crucial emphasis precisely on the ‘intrigue propre’, the ethics of the immediate, local, particular encounter which can never be guided by a principle known in advance. This ethics is radically distinct from one that relies on a metaphysical concept of the particular instance as an embodiment or individuation of an entity beyond it, not least in positing the ‘ethical domain’ as existing, not above or beyond being, but at the point of dissolution. It is at this point that a ‘perseverance in being’ falls apart or is undone. The encounter with alterity dissolves self-intentness insofar as the latter is (seemingly) pure repetition, a dogged confinement to self-sameness, a blind will to reduction that is also a will to unity. Furthermore, since the encounter with alterity is incessant, the process of dissolution is constantly repeated. Thus subjectivity does not impose its terms upon the world with ‘une aspiration à l’unité encore à faire’ (ibid.), but is rather

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caught up in an unending dialectic between the loss of identity and its makeshift resumption, undergoing the reduction that is identity only again to suffer what, in a footnote to Entre Nous, Levinas calls the ‘fission’ of the self (EN, p. 84),5 ethical dissolution. In dissolution, identity yields to a condition that is more crucial than itself: the condition of being ‘hostage’, of being caught in a participation, a responsibility from which there is no release. Violence cannot be understood within this condition, but only as a mode of severing from or a radical denial of it. The ethics sketched in here raises questions for modes of reading fiction that assume an original and fundamental unity to the text. This unity may be intentional or not, authorial or not, the account of it may be formalist, new critical, structuralist, thematic, philosophical or, indeed, moral. The imperative at stake in it begins to look less a textual than a psychological, political and cultural one. The assumption of the unity of the text has ethical consequences. By the same token, so does the effort to prise such unity apart, to hold back from synthesis and what Levinas would call its ‘ontological plenitude’ (DF, p. 47). To ‘hold back’ in this way would be to treat a text – to return to Wahl’s phrase – as a mobile and subtle complex of relations, as always caught up in a play of composition and fission, of repetition and difference. Such an attitude would posit the experience of plurality, radical surprise, radical interruption of given horizons as a characteristic feature of our experience of a fictional text. The ethical significance of the novel would then lie in its function, not as a form of unitary cognition, but as a form which works radically to surpass and, indeed, dissolve any given set of cognitive horizons. Such work, however, is to be regarded as iterative and unceasing. My ethical model for the text, then, is not one in which particularities are embodiments or illustrations of a stable, pre-existing ground or system, of prior values or principles, but one in which the movement onwards of the text, what Bakhtin calls its ‘eternal unfinishedness’,6 the unlimited multiplicity at work within it, is of cardinal importance. Yet horizons insistently return, or recompose themselves. There is no smoothly effective way of reversing the tradition and categorically establishing the claims of multiplicity over the One. Rather, multiplicity must be grasped as movement, and Bakhtin’s ‘unfinishedness’ as Levinas’s ethical ‘incompleteness’.

The circuit-breakers: Johnson, Pinget An ethics of the novel which emphasizes multiplicity and the movement of the dissolution of cognitive horizons will tend logically to give a significant place to works in which the form of the novel itself appears to dissolve: anti-novels or what Barthes called textes-limites; texts that were particularly common in the

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period of the so-called ‘death of the novel’ as it ran approximately from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. In retrospect, of course, the theory and criticism of such novels that emerged at the time now looks problematic. Predictably enough, the novel did not die. The period of the anti-novel or self-reflexive novel has been followed by a return to representationalism, if often representationalism of a kind that has been characterized by particular forms of self-awareness.7 This may incline some to think, no longer in terms of an opposition between representationalism and anti-representationalism, but in terms of their complex relations and interdependences, the modes of their mutual (textual and historical) engagements.8 The double-bind in question is closely connected to the one which impels me to theorize ‘dissolution’ as work and movement, rather than in terms of means and end. The theory of the novel that was contemporary with the ‘anti-novels’ themselves tended to confine itself to two major emphases. First, there was a concern – as exemplified in work by Josipovici, Lodge, Hassan and Ricardou – with the epistemological status of the new novel, self-reflexivity, the limits of language and fictional form, the artificial and conventional nature of the models of perception and cognition provided by the novel. The second emphasis was on the alleged politics of the new novel or, as Barthes called it, the ‘writerly’ text as a radical and even utopian challenge to a politically normative realism. But the fact that the novel did not die effectively put an end to the teleological model of the development of the genre on which the projection in question had depended. It has become increasingly clear, from the work of Robert Alter onwards, that the anti-novel or self-reflexive novel is not best understood as itself a distinct genre or subgenre, but rather as a peculiar if drastic extension of the novel’s insistent drive to surpass all cognitive horizons, its unmasterable, endlessly repeated declension from adequatio to inadequation. The principle of the anti-novel is persistently if irregularly evident in the tradition of the novel, and is testimony to the insecure hinterland inhabited by the genre of the novel itself, the ease with which the representational novel can shuttle into its obverse. Second, the concept of the ‘dissolution of the novel’ may now be reworked as signifying, not a shift in the form of the novel towards a specific kind of political radicalism, but a peculiarly scrupulous ethical moment in the tradition of the genre. In other words, the immediately postwar decades see the novel take an epistemological that is also a distinctively ethical turn. This ethical turn, however, is now concluded, and remains with us as one mode of ethical thought or practice in the novel as – say – Kant’s is one form of ethics. But how does an ‘ethics of dissolution’ operate in particular novels? My examples, here, will be texts by B.S. Johnson and Robert Pinget. Johnson’s texts

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are not only obviously self-reflexive but instances of ‘macaronic dabbling’, to adapt his own arch phrase in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.9 Johnson’s narrative strategy partly involves a strenuous effort to make his texts irreducible to a single plane, logical, representational, formal, thematic or discursive. This is not to say that such planes are not given as reference points within Johnson’s text; rather, that they have a kind of virtual status, that the limits within which the text is reducible to them is self-evident. Christie Malry is characterized by sudden swerves: the swerve in the middle of the book which takes Malry from one sphere of concern and activity to a very different one; the swerve at the end which abruptly leaves him cancerridden and brings him to an absurdly arbitrary death; the swerves between registers, from one idiom to another (including historical idioms); the swerves from one kind of chapter format to another; and so on. In fact, in Johnson’s novels, we encounter precisely the plurality, the narrative technique of radical surprise, of repeated and radical interruption of given horizons which I proposed earlier as open to ethical reading. Nothing we have previously been granted will quite equip us for the text’s next move, which thus precisely announces itself in its own singularity, as something that cannot be foreseen or brought back to terms that have already been given. This is particularly obviously the case with Travelling People, where, in a mock-Elizabethan style, Johnson explicitly remarks on his own distaste for a single narrative mode: ‘I think that I am no more tied to one order of writing … than a Gardener is bound but to sow one sort of seedes in a great plot of his Garden ground’.10 Each chapter employs a different style and set of conventions, interior monologue, letter, extracts from a journal, film script and so on. Equally, the metadiscourse of which the interludes between chapters are allegedly composed stands at a kind of variable distance from the narrative, serving rather more obviously as a commentary on it at certain points than at others. In the introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs?, Johnson argues that, as a mode of storytelling, the novel has been definitively superseded by the cinema and television. In particular, he discusses the fate that befell poetry after it ceased to be the dominant form in which narratives were told: poetry did not die when storytelling moved on. It concentrated on the things it was still best able to do: the short, economical lyric, the intense emotional statement, depth rather than scale, the exploitation of rhythms which made their optimum impact at short lengths but which would have become monotonous and unreadable if maintained longer than a few pages.11

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Johnson tends precisely to produce novels effectively as if they were collections of disparate ‘short, economical lyrics’, with widely varying rhythms – and voices, tones, modes, perspectives, etc. – which precisely have their impact ‘at short lengths’. The effect is of a proliferation of instances which are incommensurable or, at least, cannot be clearly brought back to and stabilized upon a single foundation or common ground. Thus the typographical variations which are so marked a feature of Johnson’s texts are not merely superficial or playful. Johnson was obsessed with the idea that the experience of books is, in the first instance, material, and that the material experience of the thing determines the experience that follows it, that the material conventions of the book sketch in the ground for other, more complex cognitive and perceptual grids involved in reading and interpretation. In fact, Johnson’s typographical experiments are the most concrete embodiment possible of a principle of multiplicity evident everywhere in his work, and bring his novels as close as a printed text can come to that principle in its sheer materiality, arriving at a kind of ‘pointillism’ of the narrative text. In Johnson, sentences and even individual words may start to come apart, letters come unstuck from each other, and spacing becomes a variable, in a ‘dehiscence’ of the printed page, to use a Beckettian term.12 Heterogeneity no longer has a degraded or subordinate status. Writing itself appears as a heterogeneous practice, a becoming, breaking up the regularities, the modes of order on which the assumption of the unity of the text – its synthesis into a ‘being’ – depends. Reading Johnson is always a question of the ‘intrigue propre’, the immediate, local, particular encounter, in which the particular is no longer subordinate to the entity of which it is a quality, mode, aspect, facet, feature or embodiment. The text as a mode of ‘perseverance in being’ – as the latter is inseparable from the activity of representation itself – constantly falls apart, reforms, to be undone again. The text mimes out what Levinas calls the incessance of the ethical encounter. But does this advance quite far enough beyond the derivative existentialist clichés to which Johnson himself tends to resort when he theorizes about his own work? I suggested earlier that, at its subtlest, the ethical condition is an interminable oscillation or complex poising between composition and fission, the resumption and repeated loss of frames. To put it differently: Lyotard has written of modern art as conveying a sense of form as ‘une combinaison fortuite parmi d’autres possibles’.13 So, too, in Levinas, any given unity is a transient or surface phenomenon, a singular emergence out of multifariousness. Johnson’s novels offer

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a set of planes that are in an intricate relation with a matter that resists being defined by them. This is precisely exemplified in House Mother Normal. On one level, the novel has the coherence of a series of simultaneous interior monologues around a particular sequence of events in the geriatric ward in which the ‘story’ is set. Here, however, monologue itself disintegrates as the novel progresses, in a movement that is graspable only as work, an activity within monologue itself. The first two monologues are relatively clear and coherent. By contrast, the last two geriatric monologues are mere random scatterings of words (no more than thirtynine on any given page), with very occasional lapses into lucidity and agony, followed by a final slump into a vacancy denoted by blank pages which, in the last case, at least, suggest either brain death or actual death. In these last two monologues, the threads which have provided a notional unity to the other monologues – the song, repeated, if with variations, the two phrases with which each monologue concludes, and so on – disappear. As we move progressively closer to a mind and body on the point of final disintegration, so too the text disintegrates, on a formal and material as well as a representational level. In this manner – as a disintegrative process within a set of forms and representations – Johnson struggles textually to convey the unsubsumable particularity of the material instant. As one of the characters puts it, more succinctly, ‘you can never know until you are’.14 The ethical force and immediacy of pain is not to be muted in a reference away to a prior scheme. Yet, at the same time, if pain and loss are unpredictable occasions, they are so only in relation to prior formations. They are radical breaches in a continuity without which they would not be themselves. But the practice of dissolving the novel is rendered with considerably more sophistication in The Unfortunates. The Unfortunates comes to you in a wrapper in a box. Once you take it out of box and wrapper, the book literally starts to come apart, since it is composed of twenty-seven sections, of which only the first and last sections are indicated as such. Furthermore, since the separate sections of the novel have no spine or hard cover, they themselves are tending progressively to come apart. In the long run, what will presumably happen is that any given copy will disintegrate into an aggregation of discrete pages – or what Johnson calls ‘rampant cells’ – inside a coffin-like box which will nonetheless continue to hold the increasingly fragmented parts together.15 This is significant, of course, in that the book is also a memorial: to Johnson’s friend Tony whose sudden, premature death of cancer is the principal subject of The Unfortunates. The Unfortunates, however, is an extraordinary memorial in that it does not seek categorically to

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separate its condition as such from the condition of what it seeks to memorialize, the monument from mortality or the fugitive. Dissolution is recognized as intrinsic to and the very condition of monumentality. The form that is subject to disintegration – of which disintegration is a part, but which it also tears apart – is both that of Tony’s body and that of the book that tells us about it. The point is emphasized in that Tony’s skin is described as ‘yellowing’ in illness, just as the pages of the British Library copy, at least, are starting to yellow. What Johnson refers to as the ‘unnatural’ and ‘unsyntactical’ pauses in Tony’s breathing and speaking as he sighs to ‘the limits of his lungs’ are likewise made part of the text. But of course The Unfortunates does not really tell us about Tony’s illness and death, in the usual sense. First, the moments where Johnson touches on Tony’s decline are mixed in with a mass of other material; second, Johnson wanted twenty-five of the twenty-seven chapters to be read in random order, ‘the circuit-breakers falling at hazard’; at hazard, but, nonetheless, breaking a circuit of which each reading is still a repetition. The Unfortunates effectively frees us from the geometrical models – linearity and circularity – according to which repetition has commonly been imagined. Repetition itself becomes a complex multiple. Of course, the order of the chapters will necessarily be random for any reader after the first, and Johnson asks the first reader to shuffle the pack if any suspicion of an intended order – Johnson’s own or the publisher’s – enters his or her mind. Thus, for any given reader, Tony’s decline and death are secreted at an unpredictable place in the text. They appear according to no logic, temporal or other, and have the force of unpredictable events, an irreducible singularity. But that singularity occurs only as the circuit is accomplished once again, both once and again. Thus Tony becomes a ghost, a spectre, a revenant; the condition of spectrality, according to Derrida, being precisely ‘repetition and first time’ together (SM, p. 10). The epitaph the narrator/Johnson proposes for Tony’s grave is simply ‘He gave freely’, and there is a sense in which the novel urges an ethic of ‘free giving’, of what Derrida calls the ‘incalculability of the gift’ (SM, p. 23): ‘free giving’ as a giving without constraints; a liberal scattering as opposed to a measured distribution or judicious, composed generosity. But ‘free giving’ is subject to a double-bind. The Johnsonian term contrasting to ‘giving’ would be ‘imposition’: the imposition of ‘the order of a bound book’, the imposition that is knowledge, the imposition of an explanatory frame on events, and so on. Johnson’s achievement is both to make such imposition minimal and also to underscore its necessity, as the frame that must be there in order to be broken, the structure that must be disrupted (or ‘give’)

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in order for the gift to be possible. In Pinget’s Le Libera, Passacaille, Cette Voix and Fable, there is likewise a studied fracturing of any ‘imposition’, any aesthetics according to which a given novel would give itself out as an imposition on exteriority. But, unlike Johnson’s, Pinget’s ethics is one of self-denial, of withdrawal from the consolations of ‘imposition’. Pinget has written of his ‘disgust’ with the novel in its classic form.16 He has equally expressed his sense of his own endeavour as an ‘idiotically moral’ one.17 Here writing becomes a mode both of protest and of ascesis or renunciation, of letting the world be, of backing away from it, rather than moving towards it to capture or subdue it. Yet the world must also be conjured first. It is surely very important that we should have a sense of Pinget’s Touraine in his work, the local landscape and inhabitants. For in Passacaille, for instance, the features of Touraine must appear in order to be multiplied, contradicted, dissolved, in order for Pinget to be able to act out the movement whereby he leaves them to themselves. In a repeated gesture, what is outside the text appears within it in order to be left in its exteriority. Pinget has expressed a ‘distaste for every kind of development’, as he puts it in the author’s note to Le Libera. There is far more at stake, here, than an antinovelist’s supercilious and elitist disdain for plot. We might rather think by way of analogy with the effects of a commercial development on a landscape. For Pinget, ‘development’ has connotations of appropriation, domination and reduction. The refusal to let a work like Passacaille ‘develop’ – the repeated injunction to ‘revenir sur ses pas, tourner, retourner, revenir’ – is precisely a resistance to the process whereby the novel claims and covers yet more fresh fields.18 In Passacaille, narrative becomes a singular form of meditation; but a meditation that leads nowhere, does not proceed according to a programme and has no goal. Thus the narrative movement forward is also a recoil back and further into the text itself, working against the lures to projection (to development) that nonetheless continue to beckon. The corollary of this is that, insofar as we glimpse anything resembling a ‘fictional world’ in Passacaille, it is a world of ‘ghosts’ and ‘phantasms’, terms that are recurrent in the novel. The process, however, is very different in Le Libera. At one point, the narrator remarks that yes it certainly was odd, this network of gossip [ce réseau de bavardage] and absurd remarks had conditioned our existence to such an extent that no stranger coming to live in our midst could have resisted it for long.19

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More than anything else, Le Libera is a ‘réseau de bavardage’, a network of little snatches of narrative gossip, a hubbub of voices in the act of telling stories. The following passage is characteristic: Francine asked old Lorpailleur if she remembered a certain Vernes whom we used to see about but who’d disappeared since, used he not to frequent the Dumans at that period, broaching the question by way of a deliberate mistake, Ducreuxs said old Lorpailleur, the Ducreuxs at that period quite so, I thought it was the Dumans said Francine who are related through Madame Maillard to Madame Poussegrain, perhaps replied the schoolmistress, actually it all comes back to me now, Madame Maillard was a Pinson, by the way what happened to young Alfred, she was referring to the son who had gone abroad some ten years previously, trying to change the subject, but Francine didn’t let go [ne lâchait pas prise], she came back to the aforementioned Vernes, do you know anything, because she had heard from Henriette that old Lorpailleur on her way to the newspaper office had passed and greeted the accused. (L, p. 92; LMD, p. 85) The key phrase, here, is ‘Francine ne lâchait pas prise’. The legion voices in Le Libera seldom ‘lose their grip’ on their narratives, or do so only rapidly to regain it, such is their hard, self-intent ‘perseverance in being’. But, since the different voices partly recycle the same or similar material in different combinations and permutations, the world of the novel insistently emerges only to break down or be undone. The novel itself becomes the ‘point of dissolution’ at which ‘perseverance in being’ comes apart. The pieces at our disposal belong to any number of different jigsaws, any one of which, even were there the possibility of reconstituting it, would be only a single, crude picture. Pinget has written of his work as engaged in a ‘quest’ for ‘a tone of voice’ (LMD, p. 211), but, in Le Libera, the search involved is not for an autonomous or authorial voice, but rather the voice appropriate to a supergossip, the incessant, indeed obsessive voice of the gossip of all gossips whose power infinitely to recycle narrative gossip may finally put an end to the latter, and its claim to any purchase on the world. This quest cannot cease. But it is thus that the voice in Le Libera breaks down the world behind the text and declares its ethical distance from – its ethical repetition of – the attitude which insists that, at all costs, Francine must maintain her ‘grip’.

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A similar point might be made about Fable and Cette Voix.20 In all these four Pinget texts, there is a drive to multiplication that is also a unstinting struggle for deliverance. The title of Le Libera is of course no accident. But deliverance from what? Pinget observes that his only strength as a novelist is the fact that he never knows ‘at the outset’ what he is going to say ‘I maintain,’ he says, ‘that this composition is, with every new departure, unforeseeable’ (LMD, pp. 213–14). The ‘new departures’ in question are the shifts in direction that occur from page to page. The deliverance at which Pinget aims is an ethical freedom from the backward look of representation and the unity it apparently grasps; from a trap, however, to which he continually surrenders in order to declare himself free. The deliverance in question is therefore not thinkable as a future point at the end of a trajectory or line. It is an ever-present possibility that is inseparable from work, from present activity. ‘Whether I use the present or the past,’ Pinget has written, ‘I am in the future … I know nothing of what was before.’21 The desire for deliverance and Pinget’s disgust for development are thus only seemingly at odds. Along the path that constitutes ‘development’, the future is always determined from the outset by the categories of being, and therefore represents nothing new. But, for Pinget, the incessant reversions are also always disrupted by the ‘new’ and ‘unforeseeable’ departure. There is and can be no pure reversion to what is already defmitively fixed and known. There is equally no decisive or radical break with reversion, no pure or cataclysmic production of the new. Both text and reading are ceaselessly troubled by an irreducible alterity, an orientation away from the past and the unity of being to the future and the multiplicity of becoming that nonetheless repeats a past in a certain way. It is in such a practice of double writing that the ethics of Pinget’s practice consists.

Bowen and ‘the sphere of the common’ My argument so far has had quite a lot in common with Andrew Benjamin’s account of the avant-garde, notably in Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde and What is Abstraction?, which has insistently worked with a conception of what he calls original dis-unity or anoriginal heterogeneity. Benjamin’s concern, again, has been to take dis-unity ‘as an original presence rather than as a secondary effect’;22 or, better, as ‘anoriginal’ in that the recognition of a heterogeneity that ‘comes first’, in precluding the possibility of unity, and thus in not being a founding moment can never, within the classical determinations of the word,

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function as an origin. And yet there is nothing prior to heterogeneity. (AMA, p. 10) For Benjamin, there is no absolutely singular event, no radical coupure that is productive of the absolutely new. The event rather supervenes upon what is already there, what Benjamin calls the given; as ‘displacing’ or ‘distancing’ the given, as a difference within repetition. The event is therefore always complex, heterogeneous, plural. Alterity does not stand in simple opposition to the Same and does not emerge as or in radical discontinuity. It does not overcome what is prior to it, but appears as the latter is reworked in being repeated, for, in being reworked, what is repeated becomes ‘more than itself’ and thereby indicates, ‘retroactively, that it was never just itself’, never self-identical, that it was always a ‘plural event’.23 But the encounter with alterity must involve at least a minimal relation or structure of recognition. There is no alterity ‘outside of the complexity marked by paradox’ (PE, p. 19). It is this point that has been lying behind my account of Levinas, Johnson and Pinget. As Benjamin suggests, the work of art is necessarily a ‘site of anoriginal heterogeneity’ (PE, p. 24), not least in that it sanctions – permits, enables – its own reworking in the repetition that is interpretation. The production of the new and of alterity is a strategy internal to specific works that resist the spirit of post-Cartesian modernity precisely in that they repeat the anoriginal complexity of the event, do not claim at once to overcome the given, do not eschew the presence of the historical within their own adventure. Turn this round, and it means that the project of the avant-garde will be a dissolution of the given that nonetheless is not (and can never be) a wholesale destruction of it. We are back with Levinas’s metaphor of pointillism. As for the philosopher as critic: he or she will draw out, or, better, avail himor herself of the heterogeneity of the (avant-garde) work of art. He or she repeats it with a difference, and thus bears witness to (its) anoriginal dis-unity, as in Benjamin’s account of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish extension to the Berlin Museum or of Celan’s poetry.24 One particularly helpful and relevant example is his account of Jasper Johns’s Flag.25 Benjamin argues that what is crucial to Johns’s painting of the American flag is precisely the question of adequation. What Johns most exploits is the consciousness that Flag is not the flag, that the painting as a specific ‘combination of materials’ is formally distanced from the flag (WA, p. 35). It is the element of abstraction within the painting that produces the distance in question. Thus distanced, the painting comes to question the flag as emblem, the very

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possibility of its having a single meaning or representing a totality or coherent constituency. Again, the question is one of work: Flag works to refuse the possibility of identity and identification, to raise them as problems, to inscribe a principle of a difference that is both historical and internal to American culture into what can be taken as a whole only at the price of repression and exclusion. Flag institutes a dissolution of a whole that must nonetheless be maintained, even if only as a ‘secondary effect’, if the work is to work. It is as such that the meaning of Flag – its work – is ethico-political. The production and exposure of an ‘anoriginal heterogeneity’ is a project that is particular to the avant-garde. Yet Benjamin is committed to saying – cannot help saying – that the condition of any work of art is an original and irreducible disunity. The consequence of this, as Benjamin himself is quite willing to state, is that any work of art can be reworked in a manner that determines, elaborates or specifies that condition. There must therefore be more or less radical and more or less postmodern kinds of hermeneutic. The differences will depend on whether and how far there is an interpretive will to ‘rework’ the work; that is, the ‘classical’ work or, as Benjamin would put it, the work as it is given by tradition. The character and the degree of the ‘reworking’ would be precisely ethical, in that upon them would depend the question of how far and in how complex a manifestation alterity is allowed to emerge as a difference within a repetition. An abstract instance – though a crucial one – of what an ethical, postmodern hermeneutic might mean would be Benjamin’s argument that any interpretation that takes heterogeneity to be anoriginal, whilst constrained by the need to confront representation as the tradition, will also necessarily displace it. A concrete example of such a reworking would be Benjamin’s distinguished meditation on Giovanni Bellini’s The Young Woman at her Toilet (AMA, pp. 36–37). But if anoriginal heterogeneity is the condition of the work of art, then, in principle, any novel will testify to it. It should be possible, with whatever difficulty, to rework any given text in a manner that will produce an ‘effect of dissolution’ and thereby bear witness to the irreducible complexity of the novel as event. One striking example of this kind of reworking, sustained across the æuvre of a novelist ‘whose work has been taken (however tacitly) to embody the very bulwark of the conventional and “proper”, of traditional realism and conservative “society” ’, is the book from which I took the title of this chapter, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle’s admirable Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel.26 In Bennett and Royle, in fact, ‘the dissolution of the novel’ has two aspects. On the one hand,

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it is something that ‘happens’ in Bowen’s work. Bowen’s novels ‘figure a dissolution of the novel as such’ (EB, p. xix). On the other, it is a kind of operation carried out upon those novels which could by implication be carried out upon the work of any given novelist. The dissolution of the novel is a practice, then, which operates within the critical space between reading subject and literary object. It works to loosen ‘novelness’, not as either a property of the text’s or as an expectation or a construction of the reader’s, but rather as something that exists in the relation between the two. The practice of dissolution does not work to destroy ‘novelness’, however. Bennett and Royle are clear that to ‘stage’ the dissolution of the novel is to put aside assertions about the actual ‘death’ of the novel. At the same time, it is both to remark on and effect a process of persistent ‘traversal’ or ‘invasion’, the ends of which are ethical:27 People in Bowen are only alive to the extent that they are traversed by death, only ‘real’ to the extent that they are traversed by figuration, by fiction. What Bowen calls ‘the boundaries of the self’ must be constantly subject to invasion and incursion in order for a subject to be thought: the boundaries of the self must be in abeyance, riven … by the fictional, the phantasmagoric, the spectral, the remembered. (EB, p. 22) The ‘dissolution of the novel’ thus involves the raising of an ethical question of and for identity; an ethical question which should not be taken for a negation or destruction, since identity is precisely what is produced in being traversed. As I shall suggest again in my discussion of Proust, identity only emerges in the most intimate relations with what it claims to exclude, with that against which it claims to define itself. This is what Bennett and Royle argue, for example, with reference to Bowen’s To the North. They also suggest that what is at stake in the novel is what they call ‘a logic of going’ which not only exceeds the characters, the very principle of their identity, indeed, of identity as self-sameness but also ‘exceeds every figuration, every instantiation’ (EB, p. 39). The novel is traversed – as, in its terms, are life and experience – by the unceasing work of a movement which remains unassimilably other, a movement which can only be figured through a ‘third presence’ but which necessarily and ceaselessly eludes that figuration, that stilling. (EB, p. 26)

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This is evident even in the syntax, ‘which precisely conveys non-arrest, mobility and heterogeneous or discontinuous accumulation’ (ibid.). The movement in question is ‘the unceasing movement of otherness’ which ‘can never in fact be present-toexperience’ (EB, p. 27). It is possible to wonder, here, whether, in spite of the reference to Bowen’s syntax, the postulation of a kind of unpresentable Heraclitean subtext does not actually relate the question a little too narrowly back precisely to representation or the represented world. As later with Blanchot, I would prefer to emphasize an active together with a passive principle, a praxis inseparable from becoming. To the North, then, is a dissolving unity whose coherences are rendered phantasmal in dissolution (but not annulled. The novel is not unreadable.). What dissolves with those coherences is what Levinas calls ‘the sphere of the common’ (TO, p. 102). The sphere of the common is that foundation or ground that others are deemed to share with us, but the assumption of which is precisely a betrayal of them, a totality which denies what Levinas calls the radical anarchy of the diverse.28 The assumption of the sphere of the common is humanist and, by the same token, its dissolution is crucial to a post-humanist ethics. Novels have so frequently been (or put themselves forward to be) read as if the existence within them of such a foundation were self-evident that it’s worth risking a polemical generalization: the specific ethical significance and value of a novel today is likely to lie in the profundity and complexity with which it calls ‘the sphere of the common’ in question (which is not a simple or singular activity). But I’d also heed Benjamin’s caution: any emergence of alterity must always involve ‘a minimal structure of recognition’, a minimal relation, at least, to what has preceded it. At some level or other, novels cannot but adumbrate a common sphere, what criticism calls a ‘world’. A novel that dispensed with all the consistencies that make up a world – even supposing they are reducible to questions of naming – would no longer be a novel or be readable. What matters, however, is how far and in what respects ethical fractures appear in the world in question; for example, in To the North. In a way, and on more than one level, Benjamin’s point is well captured in a passage from Chapter 8 of Bowen’s novel. The picnic among the remains of the Roman villa arranged by Lady Waters is drawing to a close: As that chill stole up the valley, and the woods with their gold outline, in which evening announced itself by a whisper, receded in darkness and mystery, Gerda slid closer to Gilbert to lean on his shoulder for natural warmth. The smoke of their cigarettes, wavering up, melted. The dead

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house, less than a plan in masonry, tightened its hold on the fancy, saying how brief is fancy, the living eye with its colours, the heart with its quickness to clothe an unknown hill.29 The chill steals up, the woods recede, Gerda slides close, the smoke wavers up and melts: the passage is an example of Bennett and Royle’s ‘logic of going’ that is also very much about spectrality and spectres, about what is or has become ‘less than a plan in masonry’, the paradoxical presence of the immaterial, a word that recurs in the novel.30 It is also, of course, a chilly passage; except that, at this very precise moment, for instance, Gerda and Gilbert draw close as they do nowhere else. A more obscure and paradoxical process is at work that stems from the constitutive instability of Bowen’s ‘world’. This latter repeatedly appears to be on the point of proliferating into a multiplicity of worlds, of becoming plural. But the plurality in question, though intimated, finally remains obscure, at the edge of apprehension. In other words, Bowen’s is a ‘world’ of continuing, unabated, interminable but contained dissolutions. The ‘unknown hill’ is quickly ‘clothed’ by a ‘fancy’ whose very brevity allows the hill as quickly to slip back into obscurity again. This is crucial to the way Bowen offers people to the reader: as poised on the edge of or between ‘worlds’, or ‘in transit’ from one ‘world’ to another. The features of a given world may ‘disappear’ (TN, p. 8), become ‘full of vacancy’ (TN, p. 52), grow ‘brittle’ and ‘flat’ like ‘so much canvas’ (TN, p. 11). The dead may threaten brusquely to intrude, with an everyday casualness, as Henry does to Cecilia (TN, p. 49). ‘Space and time’ may ‘shiver into radiant atoms’ (TN, p. 151). But equally, worlds are what bring ‘colour’ to the empty screen, as when Pauline is waiting for her uncle in his flat: She stretched out on the divan, one hand under her cheek, and, as Julian still did not come and the windows darkened, reflected that she was an orphan, had had a French great-aunt and a troubled family history, had been confirmed when she was thirteen, was alone in her rich uncle’s flat five stories up, and that her favourite poet was Matthew Arnold. These dramatic facts of her life fully coloured an hour’s blankness. (TN, p. 53) In To the North, everything is Heideggerian Stimmung, a mood or disposition towards ‘the world’ that, in the terms of Being and Time, cannot be separated from

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or set in opposition to the world itself.31 Stimmung is the strange, fragile mode in which the subject may be made aware of the radical historicity of his or her own subjectivity. For the subject can know no intuition of the eidos, only the fleeting embrace of the eidolon. Stimmung is the very principle according to which the narrative of To the North is conducted: [Cecilia] wished it were midnight, but it was four o’clock. Nothing else paused; elsewhere London was humming. She thought: ‘I will not telephone; I will not look to see if the post has come.’ Her life became visible in the hour like water poured into a glass; momentarily no one cast a shadow, momentarily not a bell rang … She dissolved like breath on a mirror and trailed away like an echo when no-one speaks again. (TN, p. 172, italics mine) This is about Stimmung, it also is narrative as Stimmung. Narrative pauses, here, eddies, dissolves (and then reappears) as Cecilia does. The effect is frequent, in To the North. Momentum stalls. The familiar self-consistencies are set at risk, and people encounter the uncanny, in the Heideggerian rather than the Freudian sense, as when Emmeline finds she has ‘stepped in Paris clear of the every-day … into the region of the immoderate, where we are more than ourselves’ (TN, p. 237). What Bowen means by ‘region’, here, is what I have tried to indicate with the term ‘world’. In To the North, one of the simplest – but also most shocking – moments of transition from one ‘region’ to another actually hinges on a single phrase. Twothirds of the way through the novel, Pauline goes to greet at the door a Cecilia unknown to her, and discovers an ‘elegant, haggard young woman’ (TN, p. 207). At the point, the reader is bluntly thrust up against a trauma that is read in the face but has thitherto been smothered under all the suave obliquities with which both Bowen and Cecilia herself have handled the latter’s grief. What is briefly adumbrated is the virtual ‘world’ of an alternative self-construction for Cecilia that is also available to the reader. To the North, then, is much concerned with things ‘so brief’ as hardly to lose their character as ‘an event’ (TN, p. 15). In various ways, it is a very precisely focused novel, with a limited number of characters who engage in a narrow range of relationships and belong to a particular milieu that is exactly specified. This ostensible ‘common sphere’, however, actually lacks foundations and is deprived of security and permanence. Repetition and identity are insistently flawed by fissures and disconnections, continually threatened by a principle of dissolution

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that is constantly at work in the novel, but never reaches an end. The world of To the North exists as what Bowen herself calls ‘a shadowy continuity’ (TN, p. 49), a spectral world, ‘distraught but perpetual, like an afterworld’ (TN, p. 8). It has what Derrida calls the ‘logic of the ghost’ which ‘points towards a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that opposes effectivity or actuality (either present, empirical, living – or not) and ideality (regulating or absolute non-presence)’ (SM, p. 63). It is thus that Bowen’s work is ethical. In a way, a key moment – though a slight one, again – would be Markie’s surprise at finding Emmeline ‘rattled’, a surprise she herself shares (TN, p. 88). Markie’s surprise – and his belief that Emmeline will be able to explain – is rooted in an assumption of a common sphere in which temporal sequence, logic, psychology and self-identity all correspond to one another. But Bowen dissolves that sphere, making all experience of the other an encounter for which no rule can be formulated beforehand, and which cannot be calculated in advance. Insofar, then, as judgment is predictive and already knows what it is going to find – insofar as judgment operates from a single base and assumes a ‘common sphere’ – judgment must be set in abeyance. What reading Bowen encourages in its stead is what Derrida calls a particular relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated. Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant. (SM, p. 65) The surprise of the arrivant, if – like any ethics – postmodern ethics is difficult, part of the difficulty is one of which Derrida and Bowen are both aware, which is the difficulty of living with precisely that surprise.

Notes AMA

Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde, Andrew Benjamin

CM

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, B.S. Johnson

EB

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle

L

Le Libera, Robert Pinget

LMD

The Libera Me Domine, Robert Pinget

PE

The Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger, Andrew Benjamin

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Robert Pinget: The Novel as Quest, Robert M. Henkels Jr Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Jacques Derrida To the North, Elizabeth Bowen

WA

What is Abstraction?, Robert Benjamin

1. The Philosophy of Plotinus: Representative Books of the Enneads, tr. Joseph Katz (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Inc., 1950), p. 9. 2. See ‘Lévy-Bruhl et la philosophie contemporaine’, EN, pp. 49–63. 3. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf, with an introd. by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), hereafter SM. 4. DF, pp. 46–49. 5. In his remarkable essay on the Jewish poet Agnon in Noms propres, Levinas identifies such a ‘fission’ with the ‘traditional Jewish “universe” ’. See NP, p. 21. 6. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. Michael Holquist, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 93. 7. For some account of this, see Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 105–23 and passim; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 16–19, 21–25, 133–53; and Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (second edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 131–32. 8. See my own discussion of the return to representationalism in Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 69–73. 9. B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (London: Collins, 1973), hereafter CM; p. 105. 10. Johnson, Travelling People (London: Transworld, 1963), p. 43. 11. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (London: Hutchinson, 1973), pp. 11–12. 12. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, tr. with a foreword by Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 49. 13. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris; Klincksieck, 1985), p. 70. 14. Johnson, House Mother Normal (London: Quartet, 1973), p. 19. 15. Johnson, The Unfortunates (London: Panther, 1969), unpaginated. 16. Cf. Pinget’s expression of the need for deliverance: ‘O libera, libera nos de malo. Libera nos de libris.’ Quoted in Robert M. Henkels Jr, Robert Pinget: The Novel as Quest (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1979), hereafter RP; p. 171. 17. Robert Pinget, The Libera Me Domine, tr. Barbara Wright (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972), hereafter LMD; p. 214. 18. Robert Pinget, Passacaille, (Paris: Minuit, 1969), p. 47. 19. Pinget, Le Libera (Paris: Minuit, 1968), hereafter L; p. 145; LMD, p. 136.

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DISSOLUTIONS 20. Pinget, Fable (Paris: Minuit, 1971); and Cette Voix (Paris: Minuit, 1975). 21. Quoted Henkels, RP, p. 164. 22. Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge, 1991), hereafter AMA; p. 8. 23. Benjamin, The Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger (London: Routledge, 1993), hereafter PE; p. 16. 24. Benjamin, Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 103–54. 25. Benjamin, What is Abstraction? (London: Academy Editions, 1996), hereafter WA; pp. 32–37. 26. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), hereafter EB; p. xiv. 27. Cf. Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) for an account of the ethical dimension to a similar argument, particularly at pp. 138–39. 28. See ‘Humanism and An-archy’, CPP, pp. 127–40. 29. Elizabeth Bowen, To the North (London: Gollancz, 1932), hereafter TN; p. 80. 30. In an obvious way, spectrality is a recurrent concern in the novel. Cf. the account of St John’s Wood, p. 16. 31. See for instance Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 27–29.

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4 PROUSTIAN ETHICS

Levinas and Proust I ended the last chapter with a cluster of significant terms: singularity, event, the arrivant and, of course, alterity. They have been crucial to my case thus far. Yet the trouble with such terms is that they inveterately turn out to be self-smothering. What they designate is lost in being designated insofar as designation itself is a repetition of the same. The unforeseeable and unrepeatable specificity of the situation to which ‘alterity’ is intended to allude, for instance – the subject’s encounter with the other – is itself imperilled in the philosopher’s or theorist’s insistent repetition of the term, and the homogeneity that appears to be conferred on the experience within that repetition. This is the more so in the present context, given the currency of the terms in contemporary academic discourse which, as so often, threatens to eclipse the power of the very thing it claims to be promoting. There is no way of immediately leaping clear of the general problem, not, at least, in language. But there are different degrees of acquiescence in the linguistic or discursive nullification of the singular. First, there is the question of how language is used, the kind of discourse I choose to produce, to work with or on. Second, there is the question of the specific character of my concern, of what I have chosen to approach (in this case, ‘literatiness’). And third, there is the specificity of my concern in itself, a particular novel, for instance, or œuvre. It is with these three questions in mind that I shall now turn to two writers (Proust and Beckett) and five works (Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and four short Beckett texts). For if I want my terms to illuminate these works, I also want to use the latter to work against the tendency to inertia in my terms. In fact, there are few

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novelists whose work is likely to do this more effectively than the two I have chosen. In the case of Proust, then: what is the Proustian experience par excellence? Not the famous experience of involuntary memory, I think. Though the latter is self-evidently crucial to Proust’s novel, it is also a particular instance of something else. The most characteristic experience in and of À la recherche du temps perdu – insistently repeated, always with a difference – is the experience of alterity. But there is a problem, here, at once, in that the term ‘alterity’ immediately threatens to shrink the Recherche to a hopelessly inadequate, formulaic expression. To write about ‘Proust and alterity’ is summarily to flatten out what is, in the Recherche, a concern of immense complexity elaborated with the most extraordinary subtlety. It is precisely reading Proust that forces home a realization of how far the philosophical and critical articulation of the concept of alterity is always in danger of self-destructing. If a philosophy of alterity must necessarily lay emphasis on the irreducible particularity of the ethical encounter, it would seem as though, in principle, that philosophy should logically grant pride of place at least to certain novels, above all, perhaps, the philosophical novel as produced by Proust. The Recherche, then, may not only be read as producing a novelistic equivalent of Levinas’s ethics of alterity. In its sumptuous particularity, it even offers a radicalized version of that ethics. To read the Recherche in ethical terms is not merely to formulate it as an example or illustration of Levinas’s philosophy. It is to recognize, too, that, whilst Proust’s novel is constantly illuminated by Levinas’s thought, it also constitutes a complement and a challenge to that thought. In fact, the Recherche may be read as a powerful extension of Levinasian ethics into domains before which the philosophical vocabulary falters and fails. There are good reasons, of course, for linking Proust and Levinas. Proust is the most significant novelist and perhaps the most significant literary figure in Levinas’s work. In particular, he is the only novelist to whom Levinas devoted an (albeit short) essay.1 The account that Levinas gives of Proust in this essay is actually remarkably ambiguous, multi-faceted and even contradictory. But most of its facets are relevant to an ethical account of the novelist, providing they are placed in a certain relation to each other. To some extent, Levinas appears to be caught in the essay between his ethical scepticism with regard to art and the recognition of his own closeness to Proust. The ambiguity doubtless has much to do with Levinas’s quarrel with Sartre and Sartrian ethics. The problem, here, is that Levinas is taking issue with Sartre in two ways at once. On the one hand, the essay provides a sceptical account of the aesthetic realm which is also an ethical riposte to the Sartrian concept of la littérature engagée. On the other hand, Levinas seems to want to defend Proust against Sartre’s critique of the latter from the vantage-

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point of his (Levinas’s) own ethics. For Levinas, Proust is a faithful witness to being as the latter overflows all hypostasizing frames (LR, p. 162). We might note, here, that this is precisely a consequence of the meditative intentness which is so conspicuous and pervasive a feature of the Recherche. Reality unrelentingly ‘exceeds its definition’ in a ‘movement’ which endlessly intrudes into Proust’s world and ‘continues to sparkle beneath the gaze of reflection’ itself. For its part, reflection is an ‘inner life’ that ‘looms forth from an insatiable curiosity about the alterity of the Other’ (LR, p. 163). Thus, in the case of Albertine, Marcel finds that To know what Albertine does, what Albertine sees, who sees Albertine, is of no interest in itself as a form of knowledge, but is infinitely exciting because of its fundamental strangeness in Albertine, the strangeness which mocks knowledge. (ibid., italics mine) But, for Levinas, this is not to argue that Proust occupies himself with a fundamentally modern theme of ‘solitude and the breakdown in human communication’, a problematic which Marcel will solve only in turning gratefully to involuntary memory and to art. Rather, Proust is concerned with the conditions in which love of the other is possible. As other, even as Marcel’s captive, Albertine dies incessantly to Marcel both in her ‘evanescence’ and in her ‘ability to withdraw into herself’ (ibid.): But the perpetual daily death of the Other does not throw beings into incommunicable solitude, for it is precisely this death that nurtures love. Ontologically pure, this Eros is not a relation built on a third term, such as tastes, common interests, or the conaturality of souls, but has a direct relation to something that both gives and refuses to give itself, namely to the Other as Other, the mystery. (LR, p. 164) Insofar as what Marcel calls his love is indeed a possession of or fusion with Albertine, it is not in fact a love at all. This is the more the case in that the Albertine Marcel possesses actually bores him. And yet Levinas argues that, really, ‘this non-love is precisely love’. For the boredom of possession must itself ineluctably evolve into ‘the struggle with what cannot be grasped’ (LR, p. 165). Thus, for Levinas, ethics or love begins at precisely the point where Albertine as other escapes confinement by Marcel as subject. Of course, escape from

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confinement is a literal and decisively significant event in the novel. As such, however, it is also the novel’s own cardinal moment of self-troping. For confinement and escape from or resistance to confinement, the overflowing of confining forms, is key to the Recherche and to the experience of reading it, an experience which Levinas allows us to apprehend as unremittingly ethical. In the first instance, that experience is most obviously expressed in relation to sexual possession or possession of the beloved, the desire for such possession and the failure to achieve it. That theme determines a macrostructure: in its larger blocks, the novel follows through one frustration, disappointment or failure in love after another. But with the exception of the Albertine volumes, it is not Marcel’s experience of alterity as a lover that dominates the detailed texture of the Recherche. It is rather the moment of what I would call the Proustian shock, surprise or reversal. In this moment, we are witnesses to an instance of what Riffaterre calls ‘the whole system of desire, of possession, of the self’s absorption of its prey’ as this system is ‘endlessly repeated in the Proustian narrative’.2 What the desire encounters is a radical, unpredictable and irreducible resistance to it. Thus, in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, we happen on the series in which selected items would be the disappointment with Berma,3 the abrupt discoveries of Monsieur de Norpois’ perversity (RTP1, 470, SLT2, 59) and Cottard’s medical expertise (RTP1, 490, SLT2, 82), Marcel’s first meeting with Bergotte (RTP1, 537–38, SLT2, 139–40), the disappointment with Balbec (RTP2, 21, SLT2, 274) and so on: in each case, what founders and comes apart is an imaginary construction of the other, the assumed possession of an exteriority which is duly shown to be illusory Each of the other volumes in the Recherche develop analogous but distinct series of this kind. The terms of the constructions and the occasions of their demise may indeed be very different: that is my point about a particularity in the Proustian, philosophical novel not available within philosophical discourse itself. But from the early revelation of Françoise’s great devotion to Marcel’s ‘tante Léonie’ to the late revelation of Saint-Loup’s homosexuality, what does not change is the structure of the encounter with alterity. Proust repeatedly tells us that that encounter cannot be regulated, foreseen or dominated in advance. Marcel will of course insist that it is an irremissible source of anguish (RTP1, 37, SLT1, 34). But it is also the seed of the most extraordinary and unexpected regenerations and renewals. Thus, for example, back in the GrandHôtel in Balbec in Sodome et Gomorrhe, Marcel bends to take off his boots and finds himself afflicted by a ‘bouleversement de toute ma personne’ (RTP3, 152, SLT4, 158), a memory of his grandmother which brings her back to him transformed from the woman that mundane recollection has set before him. And it is precisely

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that grasp of another grandmother that awakens him, not only to an awareness of her goodness and her kindness, of ‘une existence, une tendresse’, but to the fact that they are ‘survivantes en moi’ (RTP3, 155, SLT4, 182). As an alterity to his grandmother occurs to Marcel’s mind, so too does Marcel recognize himself as other; indeed, the two experiences are not properly distinguishable from each other. The consequence is a marked shift in some of Marcel’s most intimate relationships, notably a new compassion for his mother in her grief and suffering, and a new, firmly grounded love for Françoise that is ‘du genre le plus fort, celui qui a pour base la pitié’ (RTP3, 174, SLT4, 205).4 Yet if the irruption of alterity – its power to resist the enclosures of the subject – can be redemptive, Marcel also insists, at the beginning of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, for instance, that no prior morality can prepare us for the encounter. For our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard [au dépourvu] and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application [mise en œuvre] of these same virtues. (RTP1, 424, SLT2, 2) Equally, situations may repeatedly arise requiring virtues unknown to us, virtues of which we have no knowledge or experience. Love and compassion can therefore only emerge as both unattended and singular events. Thus, for all the fact that the consequences of Marcel’s grandmother’s death will be profoundly ethical, as indeed will the consequences of Albertine’s death, for Marcel, in both instances, the ethics to be derived from the Recherche is self-evidently not one that hinges on such recognitions. Rather, in the first instance and more and more pervasively, the Recherche will come to recommend an ethics of patience before and immediate responsiveness to the event in a situation where no response can be ordained beforehand. It is an ethics inseparable from Proustian aesthetics and is incompatible, above all, with the ‘amour-propre’, the unflinching resort to ‘inculcated principles’ (‘principes d’éducation’) or ‘mental habits’ (‘habitudes intellectuelles’) of the ‘bâtonnier’ and his friends at the Grand-Hôtel in Balbec, characters the price of whose virtues is deadness to all unfamiliarity (to ‘les formes de la vie qu’on ne connaît pas’), and therefore to all revelation (RTP2, 38, SLT2, 295–96).

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The structure of the encounter with alterity in Proust takes many different forms. In Proust’s terms, the desire to subdue the world to our terms is indefatigable and hydra-headed. If it is the desire for possession that founders upon alterity, it is equally the desire for knowledge: Proust repeatedly equates the passion of the lover with the passion of the scholar or scientist. Equally, one of his subtlest discoveries is that what founders in the encounter is a linguistic passion or a passion for language: what comes to an end is a habit of saying the other to oneself in words that bring pleasure, a habit finally exposed as narcissism. In this as in its other aspects, Proust’s treatment of the encounter with the other is that of what Walter Benjamin finely called a ‘merciless deglamorizer of the ego’.5 At the same time, in Proust’s terms, the encounter with alterity is a crucial feature of the inner life. This constitutes a second emphasis in Levinas’s essay. Proust’s analyses, writes Levinas, taking issue quite explicitly with Sartre in this instance, translate ‘that strangeness of self to self which is a spur to the soul’ (LR, p. 163). What counts, here, is the way in which the self ‘seizes’ and is bowled over by an ‘inner event … as though it were encountered in another’ (ibid.). Alterity is understood, not merely as a feature of an exterior world or of the relationship between subjectivity and that world, but as intrinsic to subjectivity itself. The life of the mind, writes Proust, is episodic in its variety and full of vicissitudes (‘pleine de péripéties’, ‘riche en épisodes’, RTP1, 181, SLT1, 253). It is ‘peu chronologique’, its sequence frequently interrupted by anachronisms (RTP2, 3, SLT2, 253). Subjectivity is a formation that is sustained by habit. But habits are temporary and unstable constructions, and fortunately so, if an openness to the event is to be conserved. Subjectivity is always open to invasion by earlier selves, to interruption by their distinctive trajectories. The mind is always and definitively an imbrication of selves and times within which there is the constant possibility of ‘véritable soulèvements géologiques’ (RTP3, 464, SLT4, 553). The extent to which the mind may be ‘dépassé par lui-même’ (RTP1, 45, SLT1, 52) is as much a mainspring of Proustian ethics as the constant exposure of the mind to a surplus in exteriority which it cannot reduce. Indeed, in the case of Albertine as we saw earlier, in the case of his grandmother, Marcel will ultimately be overwhelmed by the experience of the two together. For, in Albertine disparue, he will finally understand, not only that Albertine was never and could by definition never have been in his possession, but that he himself was never in possession of himself in relation to her. What he took for the boredom of intimacy was nourishing something else, something far stronger than the boredom and the desire for other women which it provoked, and which will overwhelm him: ‘la pitié pour la douleur’, ‘compassion for suffering’ (RTP4, 12, SLT5, 488).

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Here precisely is Levinas’s point: that, in Proust, non-love reveals itself to be love, that the one reverses into the second. Love, compassion, pity, ethics will be learnt primarily in a reversal of familiar constructions. If alterity is what overflows confining structures, if it is what cannot be reduced to the terms of habit – for instance – it can also only be registered in relation to those terms. Proustian ethics are well summed up in Levinas’s account of the constitution of ethics, as quoted in my first chapter, as an ‘incessant dégrisement du Même enivré de soi’ (MT, p. 25). There is nothing in the Recherche if not an incessant and unrelenting disenchantment of subjectivity, of the ego as a principle of self-sameness and self-intoxication. But for the event of the ethical encounter to be possible, there must nonetheless be a subjectivity there in the first place to collapse or recognize its limits; a subjectivity, too, that, as Proust repeatedly says, will recoil again from the encounter and recompose itself only to founder once again. It is because there is a relapse back from the Proustian shock or surprise into habit, consistency, diurnal formulations that the shock is possible again. In that respect, Proustian ethics might be thought of as a liminal ethics, an ethics arising out of a condition of irreducible restlessness in which subjectivity can neither be definitively assumed nor definitively abrogated. In other words, Proustian ethics expresses itself as a tension, an oscillation, an aporia, as – to return again to Chapter 1 – a rhetorical mode of excendance.

The double logic of the Recherche In his account of Proust in Allegories of Reading, de Man presents the Recherche as governed by an aporia or double logic, an ‘alternating motion’ or ‘vibration between truth and error’ according to which the novel becomes ‘the allegorical narrative of its own deconstruction’ which is also the allegory of its own reading.6 Thus ‘À la recherche du temps perdu narrates the flight of meaning, but this does not prevent its own meaning from being, incessantly, in flight’ (AR, p. 78). The incitement to read the Recherche in terms of a double logic – or, better, a deconstructive play of two logics – remains very suggestive. But de Man’s conception of that play seems to me to be limited by his Nietzschean preoccupations, his understanding of the logics at stake. Blindness and insight, truth and error: these are not just all too evidently de Manian concerns. They refer Proust’s epistemological obsessions away to hermeneutics rather than ethics. De Man’s principal illustration of the Proustian aporia is specifically what he calls Proust’s ‘perilous shuttle between metaphor and metonymy’ (AR, p. 72). On the

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one hand, in Proust, metaphor establishes a ‘relational link’ between ‘two entities’ that becomes so strong that ‘it can be called necessary’ (AR, p. 62). Metonymy, by contrast, is the contingency of the casual encounter of two entities. Metonymy in the Recherche continually undoes what metaphor has assembled. Metaphor seeks as constantly to reassemble what metonymy has undone.7 In her recent book on Proust, Kristeva effectively recognizes the context in which the question of metaphor and metonymy needs to be placed. In particular, ‘the analogical is the ontological’, she writes, of metaphor in the Recherche. Proustian metaphor brings together appearances, but it also reveals the profundity of being. Analogy passes through the visible until it achieves a ‘transparent unity’, where things become ranged in an order quite different from that which the intelligence necessarily imposes; they are ‘converted into one and the same substance’, with no ‘impurity’, and life acquires depths.8 Metonymy is the principle of adjacency, contingency dispersal, even what Kristeva calls ‘polytopia’ (PST, p. 25). Metaphor, by contrast, is the assertion of identity, of things being ‘one and the same substance’. Unlike de Man, Kristeva sees metonymy as subordinate to metaphor in the Recherche. Metonymy in Proust’s narrative syntax, she writes, for instance, ‘takes charge of the links formed by metaphors and draws them out, in the form of their psychological equivalents which are characters, across the enormous extent of the work’ (PST, p. 68). Thus she herself ignores her earlier evocation of character in Proust as polytopia and monstrosity, in which ‘characters’ are – and she is quoting Proust himself – ‘simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years’, touching ‘epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days’ (PST, p. 25). But at the same time she also recognizes, as de Man does not, that there is more at stake in the play of metaphor and metonymy than rhetoric on the one hand or hermeneutics on the other. What is in question, in fact, here, is a play of two logics intrinsic to the relationship between metaphor and metonymy in the Recherche. Kristeva, I think, has some conception of this, but does not see the play in question as deconstructive. In this respect, she remains a modern critic.9 On the one hand, there is a unitary logic to Proust’s novel which insists on the single foundation, the common point of reference, the singular site to which diversity and difference can always be brought back, what Proust calls the ‘partie commune’ between two things (RTP3,

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522, SLT5, 4). On the other hand, there is a logic of multiplicity which insists on incommensurability, the heterogeneity of selves and times to one another, and so on. This is the Proustian logic according to which, in Beckett’s words, ‘the most trivial experience … is encrusted with elements that logically are not related to it’ and ‘the short journey of [Marcel’s] lips to the cheek of Albertine creates ten Albertines, and transforms a human banality into a many-headed Goddess’.10 It is the logic which, in Deleuze’s terms, produces great creations who appear less as characters than as prodigies, monsters, fabulous beings analogous to the strange hybrids of the ancient world. Thus Albertine ‘is the same and different, in relation to the hero’s other loves, but also in relation to herself. There are so many Albertines that we should give a distinct name to each.’ So, too, the very least we can say of Charlus is that he is complicated, retaining ‘all the souls which compose him in the complicated state, so that the “many young girls” within him may or may not appear, may or may not form a connection with Charlus the man, and so on’.11 The play of these two logics is evident everywhere in the Recherche, at every level, not just in the slippage between metaphor and metonymy. It is a play that – pace Kristeva and many others – is not resolved or resolvable, unless, that is, one constitutes as strictly linear a work that presents itself as, ambiguously, both linear and circular. We have already noted aspects of this play and aporia: in the will to construction, possession, knowledge in the Recherche as both necessarily shattered by the irruption of alterity and necessary to, a condition of the shattering revelation; in the Proustian aporia of inner and outer. The same aporia is also there in the evocation and deployment of involuntary memory, which, paradoxically, is the supreme unifying power within the Recherche that is also precisely what makes possible the literary production of time in its full multiplicity. The aporia goes as far as the very mode of the Recherche itself as novel, Proust’s so-called ‘subversion’ of ‘the tradition of Balzac and Flaubert’ (PP, p. 2);12 not, strictly, as a subversion at all, but as a deconstruction of that tradition, since the form of the novel according to that tradition is both sustained and radically hollowed out. On the one hand, it is of course impossible not to read the Recherche as a portrayal of a society. On the other hand, it insistently tells us that there is no society there, no life save the inner life; that the novel is phantasmagoria, an instance of that resort to private mythology to which, in Proust’s terms, we are condemned; that consciousness always intervenes between the subject and exteriority (‘just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded [se fait toujours procéder] by a zone of evaporation’, RTP1, 83, SLT1, 98). On the one hand, Marcel will inform

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us that the image is ‘le seul élément essentiel’ in the structure of our emotions, that we repress real people in the interests of the image, that they are simply not available to us beyond the image (RTP1, 84, SLT1, 99). On the other hand, Marcel produces a narrative involving notation, knowledge, even judgment of an exterior as though the above case had not in fact been made at all, and responds with irony when Françoise sobs over the mental picture of ‘une malade-type’ (‘prototype patient’) she has culled from a book, yet is indifferent to the real sufferings of the kitchen maid (RTP1, 120, SLT1, 146). But this, after all, is a representational novel whose opening pages insist that the very impression of an apparent definition and immobility to objects or phenomena – a definition and immobility on which, in some sense, representationalism depends – may after all be merely the result of our conviction that they (the objects or phenomena) are themselves and not something else (RTP1, 6, SLT1, 8). Indeed, Proustian ethics manifests itself partly in a concern with such convictions as they harden in the mind and impede it by their ‘inamovibilité’ (RTP1, 73, SLT1, 87). Proust sounds like a realist when he tells us that certain attitudes and actions reveal ‘le caractère profond et caché de quelqu’un’ (RTP1, 125, SLT1, 151); when he suggests that art is a ‘mirror’ and genius ‘reflecting power’ (RTP1, 545, SLT2, 149); when he asserts that art arrives at ‘la règle morale de tous’ (RTP1, 548, SLT2, 153). This is the Marcel whose desire for possession is also a particular artistic desire, the desire to obtain ‘une vue totale et un tableau continu’ (RTP2, 16, SLT2, 268). But, against this Marcel, we should set the one who appears clearly to discriminate between creation and observation, and suggests that ‘in the state of mind in which we “observe” we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create’ (RTP2, 127, SLT2, 403). This Marcel tells us that art is production rather than reflection; that representation is confounded by the mobility of things, ‘leur dissémination, leur fuite’ (RTP2, 299, SLT2, 610); that to think character as essence is to cease to attend to others and prefer an ‘arbitrary simplicity’ to ‘the multiformity of each individual’ (RTP2, 269, SLT2, 573);13 that society’s outsiders throw any conception of a general moral law starkly into question. The novel even posits two modes of reading to match the two modes of writing, the one unitary and idealist (because it is rapid), the other careful and meditative, arriving at an ever graver, more refined awareness of concrete multiplicity (RTP2, 155, SLT2, 436). It is in this context that I would want to depart from Girard’s brilliant account of Proust, an account that in many ways is still compelling today. The terms of my difference with Girard are worth emphasizing. For it is a difference between a reading that remains within the horizons of modernity and one that aims at least to explore the possibility

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of going beyond those horizons. On the one hand, Girard’s reading of the Recherche is indeed an ethical reading that, in certain respects, is obviously close to mine. In Proust, of course, Girard detects a triangular structure of desire. Like the other ‘great novelists’, Proust reveals ‘the imitative nature of [modern] desire’, its dependence on a mediator (as, for example, Bergotte is a mediator of Marcel’s desire for Berma).14 He (Proust) is a critic of what Girard calls the vaniteux and the latter’s insistence on his originality, spontaneity and ‘subjectivity’; more generally, of ‘the illusion of autonomy to which modern man is passionately devoted’ (DDN, pp. 14–15). The disease of the vaniteux is precisely what Girard calls metaphysical desire, is even metaphysics itself: the imperative need to reduce concrete heterogeneity to a coherent unity whose terms are those of the vaniteux himself. The vaniteux is thus sealed up in him- or herself, and the cure is the lesson that the novelist has learned, and towards which a given protagonist makes his or her slow and painful way: the lesson of detachment that comes with inevitable disappointment and the frustration of desire. It is a lesson that also teaches sympathy and the importance of the viewpoint ‘of the other side’ (DDN, p. 233). None of this seems irreconcilable with a Proust who insists that our lasting loves can only be for what resists confinement, and not for what we suppose we have confined. But Girard’s understanding of Proust does not involve an awareness of how far a Proustian ethics is intrinsic to the workings of the Recherche. In the end, Girard’s Proust is in important ways a traditional Proust. Like the Proust of the Lyotard of Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants,15 he is a novelist intent on the clarity and unity of ‘bonnes formes’. For Girard, there is no play of logics in Proust’s novel, but a single, steely logic which pits ‘beliefs’ or ‘myths’ against truth, ‘mensonges romantiques’ against ‘vérités romanesques’. For all the apparent divisions within selves in Proust, says Girard, ‘there is always an essential sameness’ to a given self, for ‘every person has only one form of desire’ (DDN, p. 236). And if there is always a sameness to desire, there is always a sameness to what it meets with. Hence, despite his insistence that Proust cannot be reduced to conformity with ‘the old realist and positivist conception of the art of the novel’ (DDN, p. 237), for Girard, to see the viewpoint ‘of the other side’ is actually always to see one thing. It is to recognize the barber’s basin, where the deluded modern Quixotes see only Mambrino’s helmet. The problem, here, is that, for Girard, there is a clear distinction, in the Recherche, between interiority and exteriority. Proust insistently refuses his readers this distinction. In the Recherche, exteriority is never clearly separate and itself. We do not know it as it is distinct from the construction of an ‘inside’. By the same

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token, there is no outside from which the world of the Recherche can be seen, definitively known and judged. ‘Metaphysical desire’ is thus not finally the object of a narration. It is always likely to appear inside the narration, too. Equally, the ‘opposite’ of metaphysical desire – the obstruction on which it must persistently come to grief – is not a world of objective being. It is time as multiplicity and becoming, the constitutive instability of entities in time; an altogether less definitive world, and therefore one in which metaphysical desire will irresistibly reassert itself, in the seemingly unending recurrence of a double movement. But why consider this double movement as ethical? At the very end of ‘The Other in Proust’, Levinas gives what he takes to be a Proustian paradox another twist. Proust’s despair, he writes, ‘is an inexhaustible source of hope’: This is a paradox in a civilization which, in spite of the progress made since the Eleatic philosophy, still sees unity as the very apotheosis of being. But Proust’s profound lesson, if poetry can contain lessons, consists in situating reality in a relation with something which for ever remains other, with the Other as absence and mystery, in rediscovering this relation in the very intimacy of the ‘I’, and in inaugurating a dialectic that breaks definitively with Parmenides. (LR, p. 165) Levinas’s abstract terms, here, allow us to see why Proust’s project may be deemed ethical, whether it is concerned with the movement of character through time, or a relationship between subjectivity and the exterior world, or features on other levels of the Recherche, including the textual. Reversibility is evident in the Recherche on all levels. Any given formulation is liable, at the very least, to develop cracks and fissures, as though it were on the point of yielding to the pressure – whether from an outside or within – of something that it had failed to contain, to the imperative, the demand of the other. Any formulation: it is a measure of Proust’s awesome, intransigent sophistication that he is willing to trap Marcel: Alas for my peace of mind, I had none of the detachment that all these people showed. To many of them I gave constant thought [De beaucoup d’entre eux je me souciais]. (RTP2, 42, SLT2, 300–1)

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However ‘constant’ Marcel’s thought for others, here, ethics deconstructs itself, in that Marcel asserts his openness to experience only via a founding certitude as to the ‘closure’ of his fellows’ minds. (Among other things, this is bound to make us rethink the account of the ‘bâtonnier’ and friends that I cited earlier). It is important to cavil, however, with Levinas’s assertion of a ‘definitive’ Proustian break with the past. The Recherche does not break with the thought of unity definitively, once and for all, nor work its way towards a final, decisive break. The inauguration of the break must rather be understood as endlessly reiterated, if in many different forms. The Proustian aporia unrelentingly questions the foundation for and justification of what Derrida calls the decision, the activity of definition or separating out that is nonetheless evident everywhere in the novel.16

Marcel’s others Thus, in the famous passage that opens Sodome et Gomorrhe, recounting Charlus and Jupien’s sexual encounter and developing an analogy between it and the bumble-bee’s visit to Madame de Guermantes’s orchid, the scene is predicated on certain forms of unity: in particular, the composed, unitary sexuality of the soidisant heretosexual narrator whose very self-possession is apparently what allows him to produce a sagely knowledgeable, objectifying and distancing discourse on Sodom, with the analogy even affording that discourse the status of ‘certaines lois de la botanique’ (RTP3, 9; SLT4, 8). What happens, of course, as the passage develops is that it cannot be maintained within the unitary structure of observing heterosexual and observed homosexuals.17 As Marcel dwells on ‘la beauté des regards de M. de Charlus et de Jupien’ (RTP3, 7, SLT4, 6), as he finds an analogy for their courtship in Beethoven’s music, as he compares their obscure intelligence of one another to that of the gods, the polarization of identities which has apparently made the discourse possible begins to break down in a manner that leaves us uncertain as to where the true source of excitement really lies, in the scene. Not that Proust by any means leaves the scene there: the distancing voice rallies, repossesses itself, returns to its rationalizations, implicitly reasserts that its investment in the scene has to do with a certain, detached expertise, ruminates on whether homosexuality is curable or not, backtracks, assures us of its liberal humanity, the fact that it is others who call homosexuality a vice, and so on; but also reverts, as if hypnotized, to images of male youth in bed, with ‘the young woman, the girl, the Galathea barely awakened to life in the unconscious mass

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[l’inconscient] of this male body in which she is imprisoned’ (RTP3, 22, SLT4, 24). The oscillation in the passage between control and turbulence is an oscillation between a composed subjectivity and one that cannot finally persuade itself of the definitive nature of the borderline between interiority and exteriority, unitary self and radical other, identity and the outside from which it would distinguish itself in its self-sameness. Here, I’d suggest, is Proustian ethics in practice. It is a practice which notably has a crucial bearing on three of Proust’s most famous themes, homosexuality (and other forms of ‘transgressive’ sexuality), Jewishness and snobbery.18 Critics have of course repeatedly suggested that the Proust of the Recherche seeks to sanitize Marcel and make him respectable precisely by stripping him of these three aspects of the author himself and transferring them to a range of other characters.19 Thus Proust attempts to project parts of himself into an exteriority where they can be contemplated with detachment; observed, analysed, ‘known’, sagely assessed from a benevolent distance, listened to with the ‘oreille exercée’, the ‘trained ear’ that Marcel says he has for the likes of a Charlus (RTP3, 63, SLT4, 74).20 But this argument misconstrues a procedure of extraordinary ethical scrupulousness and subtlety. For what Marcel projects ‘outside’ himself also inexorably reappears on the ‘inside’. On the one hand, a unitary logic of identity seeks to expunge the other from the self by isolating it, placing it elsewhere. This is the idealist logic of mastery and selfpossession. On the other hand, the logic of multiplicity – materialist, affective, sensual – is a logic of the event, of unexpected combinations and fusions, which does not conform to the categories of interiority and exteriority.21 Here, what is known as an ‘outside’ may be thus known precisely because it is already a feature of an ‘inside’.22 As Proust provides one side of Marcel the theorist with a discourse on observation and reflection which makes him sound like a realist novelist, so, too, he also provides him with a moralizing discourse.23 He is not shy, for example, of applying the moralist’s vocabulary to unorthodox sexualities. He will refer to homosexuality as a sickness or an intolerable defect, to Charlus’s progress as a ‘déchéance morale’, a ‘moral degeneration’ (RTP3, 712, SLT5, 231), and so on. Yet the Recherche itself is of course, if intermittently, a richly homoerotic novel.24 It is so, too, in a number of different modes, with something like the complex multiplicity that Marcel ascribes to Charlus’s sexuality. First, there is simple sensuousness, as in the many and various descriptions of beautiful men, particularly among the serving class. Second, there is camp, a more frequent feature of the novel than has

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commonly been recognized, and surely the most interesting way of reading Marcel on the hawthorns in Du côté de chez Swann, for example. 25 What Marcel distinguishes as a feature of the ageing Charlus – the unpredictable and involuntary lapses into a camp that he would once have had under control – is precisely what identities him with Marcel’s own narrative. Third, there is ‘girlishness’ (Marcel’s response, as narrator as well as character, to the moment in Le côté de Guermantes when Saint-Loup arranges his cloak ‘en châle léger et chaud’ around his shoulders, RTP2, 705; SLT3, 475). Fourth, there is oblique affection for and fellow-feeling with homosexuals (Marcel’s response to being announced at the Princesse de Guermantes, which runs in intimate parallel with that of the Duc de Châtellerault, RTP3, 37–38; SLT4, 42–43). Fifth, there is louche excitement (the fascination with the lavatory in the Bois de Boulogne in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs), and so on. If Proust’s characters do indeed grow into Deleuze’s fabulous beings, it is partly in the extent to which they are amalgamations of man and woman or girl, the perception of character as such an amalgamation being a repeated feature of Marcel’s observations on others. But as character and narrator himself, Marcel exists as the most complex and multifarious amalgamation of them all.26 The fact that he frequently seeks to pass off erotic responses in other terms – in particular, as purely aesthetic responses – only further complicates the process of hybridization involved. The ethical predicament in which Proust thus leaves us – from which he will never free us, can never free us, which it is his ethical commitment precisely to sustain – is encapsulated in the painful recognition at which Marcel finally and painfully arrives in brooding on Albertine: that his understanding of Albertine’s affections and sexuality may be predicated on and an extension of aspects of his own. What will haunt the whole account of Marcel’s love of Albertine, in the end, is the suspicion that ‘our attention, always attracted by what is characteristic of ourselves, notices it more than anything else in other people’ (RTP2, 102; SLT2, 373). The suspicion that we come to know and judge others only as extensions of ourselves will persist throughout the Recherche, without ever having the stamp of certainty. It is precisely the hesitation, the reflective care induced by that suspicion that is characteristic of Proustian ethics. In fact, in ethical terms, one question that insistently haunts Marcel and the Recherche is whether a moral antagonism towards the other, moral critique of the other, perhaps even critique itself, may not be founded in a measure of recognition of oneself in or identification with the other. The distance the moralist establishes between himself or herself and the other thus appears to be inseparable from a

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more or less furtive inner recoil or self-distancing. So much is relatively obvious. But there is yet another level of subtlety to Proust’s analyses. For the moralist may go a stage further. Any intuition of his or her own complicities and the ironic futility of his or her efforts to extricate himself from them may themselves be projected on to the other. This is partly the purpose that Legrandin serves for Marcel. Like Bloch’s, Legrandin’s role is no more clearly that of novelistic character than of scapegoat. Legrandin does not exist more decisively in an objectively realized, exterior world than as a function in a psychomachia. Hence the evident irony of Marcel’s observing that Legrandin can tell a snob so readily because it takes one to know one (RTP1, 127; SLT1, 154).27 Such a reflection – that what we know of our own passions we must learn from the way we perceive those of others – can necessarily only redound on Marcel himself. Indeed, one way of reading Marcel’s progression in the Recherche is as characterized by an evergreater cunning in the effort to lift himself clear of the disdained other. That effort, however, must always remain vain. Marcel snobbishly presents the snobs at the Grand-Hôtel at Balbec as envying himself. He not only takes pleasure in the status that his grandmother’s connection with Madame de Villeparisis gives him in these snobs’ eyes, but – and this is another and repeated twist in the way the novel works – slyly engages the reader in the same response. In a similar way, in the restaurant scene towards the end of Le côté de Guermantes, he lures the reader into complicity with his own relief and gratitude at being plucked by Saint-Loup from the ‘banquette … déjà pleine de monde’ opposite ‘la porte reservée aux Hébreux’ and set down amidst the young aristocrats (RTP2, 695; SLT3, 464). The double movement is everywhere: as the recognition of multiplicity versus the drive to unify and totalize; as the separation of an exteriority from an interiority, but also the reduction of the first to the second, or the projection of the second as the first. This same double movement notably persists into Le temps retrouvé, where Marcel’s repudiation of the vanity and idleness of the social world is obviously predicated, in some measure, on a distaste for the promiscuous mixing of the classes in postwar Paris and the resulting dilution and decline of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In the case of Jews and Jewishness, of course, the matter would seem to be more straightforward: Marcel cannot be both a gentile and a Jew as, for Proust, he is clearly a snobbish critic of snobs, or a heterosexual male with profound, ambivalent and complex homoerotic affections.28 The ‘double movement’ is

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apparently simplified into a contradiction, or contradictions: between the Marcel who is a sympathetic, humane, intelligent supporter of Dreyfus and critic of the anti-Semites and the Marcel who is deeply uneasy at the possibility of being mistaken for a Jew or associated with Jews and is even inclined to anti-Semitism himself, as in his negative treatment of Bloch, his family and the Jews at Balbec.29 Here, again, the Recherche seems less committed to the morality of the liberal Dreyfusard than it is given over to an ethics that is ironic and deconstructive. There is a Marcel anxious not only to distance himself from Jews but to conceive of them in the unitary terms which are those of the very nationalism and antiSemitism he claims to despise, taking ‘race juive’ and ‘famille française’ as having the force ‘des lois naturelles’ which are ‘la cause première’ of traits of character (RTP2, 246; SLT2, 545). But, against this Marcel, we must set another whose identification with Jews, individually and collectively; is also crucial to the Recherche: the young boy whose grandfather remarks that his strongest attachments to friends appear to be to Jews (RTP1, 90; SLT1, 107); the Marcel who sees himself in Swann; indeed, the Marcel who sees Swann, the Jew within, as the very inspiration of his novel (RTP4, 493–94; SLT6, 280–81). But perhaps the most striking instance comes at that profoundly significant moment in the novel when, just after Mademoiselle de Stermaria excuses herself from Marcel’s invitation to dine with him in the Bois de Boulogne, he gives way to his grief: I caught sight of a huge bundle of carpets, still rolled up, and propped against one end of the sideboard; and burying my head in it, swallowing its dust together with my own tears, as the Jews used to cover their heads with ashes in times of mourning [dans le deuil], I began to sob. (RTP2, 688; SLT3, 454) The grief, of course, far exceeds the immediate occasion for it. Marcel has just noted that, had it not been for Mademoiselle de Stermaria’s excusing herself, it might indeed have been her he loved. The way is now left open for his passion for Albertine and a long, labyrinthine journey through pain and self-torment. It is precisely with a full awareness of the decisive nature of the moment – decisive for the rest of his life – that Marcel adduces the image of Jewish mourning. The course of his love will breed an identification with Jews which he will never either finally seal or decisively leave behind him. Here the otherness that, elsewhere, is alternately feared and contemplated with benevolent concern is admitted as something deeper

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than either irrational fear or moral benevolence: as a part of the self that is as intimate as one’s most intense and enduring sorrows. Proust’s deconstructive ethics takes on a particular inflection, however, in the long, winding passage through the struggles with his love for Albertine. The question of the narrative voice is of crucial importance, here. La prisonnière and Albertine disparue hollow out a classical, grave, sage, generalizing voice, but without superseding it. It is made to absorb the terms of the double logic. It still seeks to articulate a generality to experience, and remains pervasive. But Albertine continues incessantly to escape the voice’s terms as, indeed, she escapes its tone (as in her abruptly brutal allusion to buggery, for example).30 Experience is forever in excess of the voice, is always to hand with a fresh surprise or shock, in a manner that means that the voice is forced to tack, revise, take new directions, surrender itself to multiplicity and contradiction. The logic of multiplicity gnaws away unstoppably at the unitary logic of the voice, but without ever destroying that second logic. In a certain sense, unitary logic almost survives unscathed. The difference is that it now appears in the terms of a derangement. It survives, but in a uniquely distorted form. For the Marcel of the Albertine volumes is mad. In this respect, the fact that Albertine’s sexuality is predominantly lesbian is of crucial significance. For here, a peculiarly striking gap opens up between the meditative discourse and the specificity of its object. As a lesbian, Albertine must be all the more decisively beyond Marcel’s possession. But equally, and even more importantly, as a lesbian, she is radically heterogeneous to the terms of his ‘wisdom’. If the lesbian Albertine does not belong ‘à l’humanité commune, mais à une race étrange qui s’y mêle’ (RTP4, 108; SLT5, 602) then what force can the voice that seeks to confer a generalized significance upon her – or Marcel’s relationship with her – possibly have?31 How can we grant Marcel’s ‘we’ – the ‘we’ of common humanity – any real credence, here, since it excludes Albertine herself, on whom the whole discourse claims to be founded? It is precisely because Albertine cannot be confined within the terms of that discourse that another kind of discourse emerges in parallel to it, a discourse of monstrous supposition or delusion involving a kind of delirious apprehension as to the power and vitality of lesbian sexuality. Behind it, there lurks a self-proclaimed heterosexual’s fear that same-sex love may after all be the real thing; or, at least, that it may give rise to an incomparable range and variety of pleasures and intensities. Thus the alterity that the generalizing discourse seeks to subdue constantly re-emerges to threaten it all over again. For the specific instance, on Marcel’s own admission, exists beyond the frontiers of the discourse itself. It

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can therefore only be projected in the terms of a fantasy and not produced in those of a knowledge. Here, if anywhere, at its baldest, an obstinately unitary logic is pitted against an object that is irreducibly heterogeneous to the discourse and its terms. It might seem, however, as if what I have described as the deconstructive logic of the Recherche is finally resumed into a higher unity in Le temps retrouvé. Don’t involuntary memory, art and writing produce a resolution of the impasse around which that logic turns?32 Are the terms of such a resolution not scattered back through the novel? It is certainly clearly the case that, for the Marcel of Le temps retrouvé, art is intimately allied to a final perception of wholeness, dealing with ‘the essence of things’ (RTP4, 450; SLT6, 224), with profound truths (RTP4, 474; SLT6, 254), with ‘real life, life at last laid bare’ (RTP4, 474; SLT6, 253), with ‘laws’ which the individual in question does not perceive, but which the artist surprises within the individual (RTP4, 450; SLT6, 261), with what is fundamental (RTP4, 564; SLT6, 371) and timeless (RTP4, 509; SLT6, 298). As a triumph of memory, art is also a triumph of metaphor, affirming the extra-temporal in fusing past and present moments (RTP4, 450; SLT6, 222). But its extra-temporal and quasi-spiritual existence also afflicts Marcel with something close to moral horror, in that he starts to fear that, as artist, he has merely used others for his own purposes (RTP4, 481; SLT6, 262–63). Not surprisingly, Proust’s vocabulary becomes more religious in such passages, his reasoning more theological. Yet the ‘theological’ Proust is inseparable from a Proust who in a sense ‘grounds’ the former’s ‘theology,’ even as the ‘theologian’ implicitly claims to ‘ground’ him; a Proust for whom involuntary memory is a force not for unity but for dispersal and self-dispersal, self-loss. In the first instance, involuntary memory is precisely in-voluntary, unwilled, an overwhelming of self by other so powerful as to threaten loss of consciousness, an emergence of a stranger who comes to trouble one, as Marcel says (RTP4, 463; SLT6, 240). The surrender that the approach of the stranger entails becomes a principle in Marcel’s relation to the exterior as to the inner world, and is as much the principle with which the novel will begin as that of generality or law. Indeed, the two principles cannot be separated. Second, involuntary memory establishes the unifying connection with the past only for that connection in turn to produce an ever more elaborate and sophisticated account of the multiplicity of time. In that respect, the logic of unity and metaphor breeds alterity and metonymy, makes the emergences of the last two more complex and prolific. Finally, the affirmation of involuntary memory (and art) in Le temps retrouvé is both unitary and conclusive only insofar

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as we consider the novel in its linear and teleological aspect. But the end of the novel also sends us back to the beginning and to multiplicity all over again. Insofar as the novel is cyclical, the conclusion is there precisely to be dissipated once more. It is therefore not surprising to find that the classical aesthetic discourse in Le temps retrouvé is inseparable from another which appears to reverse its emphases, to insist on the necessary heterogeneity of art and of the experience of art. It tells us that no uniform depiction of life will much resemble reality because of ‘la différence qu’il y a entre chacune des impressions réelles’ (RTP4, 448; SLT6, 221). Memory is not an intuition of similitudes and therefore productive of totality, but a storehouse containing a thousand vessels, each ‘rempli de choses d’une couleur, d’une odeur, d’une température absolument différentes’ (ibid.). The distinctness of different events will resist any homogenizing treatment: Marcel recognizes that the principle of self-difference will necessarily inhabit his work, that successive parts of it will necessarily require ‘une matière distincte, nouvelle’ (RTP4, 449; SLT6, 222). Indeed, it is not the sequence alone that must be rendered heterogeneously: images, impressions and sensations are to be rendered as they are in themselves, ‘multiples et différentes’ (RTP4, 467; SLT6, 245). Art actually registers or produces a multiplication of worlds, since it is faithful to ‘la différence qu’il y a dans la façon dont nous apparaît le monde’ (RTP4, 474; SLT6, 254). Furthermore, this multiplication of worlds has another, virtual existence in the work, since, far from giving an account of fixed, objective laws, the work is but a means, ‘une espèce d’instrument optique’, through which each reader discerns worlds for himself and becomes ‘le propre lecteur de soi-même’ (RTP4, 489–90; SLT6, 273). Marcel will even suggest that his work is never stable at all, but is ‘en perpétuel devenir’ (RTP4, 619; SLT6, 443). It is precisely insofar as it both recognizes and elaborates a constitutive multiplicity that art not only achieves its goal in contemplation, but is redemptive and ethical. For it thus involves a better awareness of ‘la vie des autres’ (RTP4, 474; SLT6, 254). This awareness, however, is not to be achieved according to the old humanist principle of putting oneself ‘à la place des autres’ (RTP4, 564; SLT6, 371), which must actively be struggled with, for reasons which should be obvious, by now. Better awareness lies in a finer sense (and rendering) of the limitless proliferation of worlds and their incommensurability. In striving for such an awareness, too, art not only reflects people back to themselves, but reflects them back as they have never seen themselves, as both actuality and potentiality, person and event, subjectivity and its other.

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Notes AR CR DDN HIP HL MH MP PP PSC PST RTP SLT

Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust, Paul de Man ‘ “The Culture of Redemption”: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein’, Leo Bersani Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, René Girard History and Ideology in Proust: ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ and the Third French Republic, Michael Sprinker ‘Homosexuality and Lesbianism in Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe’, Lucille Cairns ‘The Mapping of Homosexuality in Proust’s Recherche’, Edward Hughes The Morality of Proust, Malcolm Bowie Postmodern Proust, Margaret E. Gray ‘Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet’, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Proust and the Sense of Time, Julia Kristeva À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

1. ‘L’autre dans Proust’, first published Deucalion, 2 (1947), pp. 117–23, reprinted in NP, pp. 149–76; tr. ‘The Other in Proust’, LR, pp. 160–65. 2. Michel Riffaterre, ‘On Narrative Subtexts: Proust’s Magic Lantern’, Style, Vol. 22, No. 3 (1988), pp. 440–66, p. 121. 3. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al. (4 vols, new Pléiade ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89), hereafter Proust, RTP; 1, 440–41; In Search of Lost Time, tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright (6 vols, London: Vintage, 1996), hereafter Proust, SLT; 2, 22. 4. Bersani and Sprinker persuasively suggest that Marcel’s grandmother’s death is structurally, thematically and aesthetically crucial to the Recherche. See Leo Bersani, ‘ “The Culture of Redemption”: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein’, Critical Inquiry 12 (Winter, 1986), pp. 391–421, hereafter CR, pp. 399–402; and Michael Sprinker, History and Ideology in Proust: ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ and the Third French Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), hereafter HIP; pp. 126–27. 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’, in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt (London: Collins/Fontana, 1970), pp. 203–19, p. 212. 6. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), hereafter AR; pp. 72, 76. 7. The question of metaphor and metonymy in the Recherche has been important in criticism at least since Genette. See Gérard Genette, ‘Métonymie chez Proust’, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 41–63. 8. Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, tr. Stephen Bann (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), hereafter PST; p. 65.

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EVENTS 9. On the defining characteristics of modern Proust criticism, see Margaret E. Gray, Postmodern Proust (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), hereafter PP; p. 13 and passim. 1 0 . Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), pp. 55, 34. 11. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, tr. Richard Howard (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 66, 4, 120. 12. See Gray, PP, p. 2. 13. Cf the specific accounts of how such multiformity appears in RTP2, 270; SLT2, 575. 14. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, tr. Yvonne Freccero (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), hereafter Girard, DDN; p. 14. See also pp. 30, 36. 15. Jean-François Lyotard, Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris: Galilée, 1986), pp. 32–33. But Lyotard takes a very different and more interesting line on Proust elsewhere. See for example Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986), pp. 175–76. 16. For Derrida on the decision and its ‘madness’, see for example The Gift of Death, tr. David Wills (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 77 and passim. 17. Cf. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s brilliant account of the Recherche as a whole as both adopting the perspective of the closet and rendering the closet itself a spectacle. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet’, hereafter PSC, in Epistemology of the Closet (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 213–51, especially p. 223. More generally, cf. also Descombes’s account of a play of perspectives in the Recherche which cannot be accounted for by the sophistication even of Proust’s own theoretical discourse. Vincent Descombes, Proust: philosophie du roman (Paris: Minuit, 1987), passim. 18. Insofar as this is a list of alterities, Edward Hughes adds the colonial other to it, arguing that ‘in À la recherche, writing homosexuality means calling up images of a shelved colonial history In both cases, alterity … acquires a moral superiority’. Hughes, ‘The Mapping of Homosexuality in Proust’s Recherche’, Paragraph, Vol. 18, No. 2 (July, 1995), pp. 148–62, hereafter MH; p. 156. 19. Gide, for example, accused Proust of an ‘artistic hypocrisy’ imposed on him ‘by respect … for the proprieties’. André Gide, Journals, tr. Justin O’Brien, 4 vols (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 2, 409–10. 20. See for instance George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), p. 268. 21. Bowie describes the two logics differently: Freud and Proust confer ‘unusual epistemic privileges upon “aberrant” configurations of desire; both were impassioned relativists in their surveys of sexual behaviour yet had recourse to the strong-minded categories of their age in their moments of moral or intellectual exhaustion’. Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 67. See also Hughes, MH, p. 149. 22. In the case of the homosexual theme, cf. Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of ‘enabling incoherences’ and ‘unstable dichotomies’ in the Recherche that emerge as ‘contested sites ineffaceably marked by the turn-of-the-century crisis of homo/heterosexual definition’, PSC, p. 226.

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PROUSTIAN ETHICS 23. For an exact placing of the complexities of this voice in relation to French literary tradition, see Bowie, The Morality of Proust (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), hereafter MP; p. 2. 2 4 . Lucille Cairns understands this doubleness as a conflict between a negative presentation whose epistemological basis (in nineteenth-century Zwischenstufen theory) morbidifies the homosexual, and a ‘contestatory subtext’ dominated by ‘the disruptive mechanisms of defence, vindication and valorization’. See Lucille Cairns, ‘Homosexuality and Lesbianism in Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe’, French Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1 (January 1997), pp. 43–56, hereafter HL; pp. 44–45. For Bowie, on the other hand, Marcel is ‘unflinchingly convinced’ that homosexuality is a vice, but also sees sexuality in its multiplicity as ‘the theatre of mobile desire’, writing about it with a shocking, sensuous, seductive immediacy which eroticizes his moral vocabulary (MP, p. 3). 25. I mean camp in Sontag’s sense – conflating homosexuality, aestheticism and a style involving exaggerated emphasis – rather than Meyer’s (‘queer parody’). See Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp” ’, in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), pp. 275–92; and Moe Meyer (ed.), ‘Introduction’, The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1–22, p. 1. See also Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (London: Tauris, 1996), pp. 3–5, for a relevant historical account of the meanings of the term. 26. Cf J.E. Rivers’s account of Marcel’s sexuality in Proust and the Art of Love: the Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Life, Times and Art of Marcel Proust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), especially pp. 207–14. 27. Cf. Kosofsky Sedgwick’s use of and commentary on the last phrase, PSC, p. 222. 28. Though of course, as Compagnon points out, Proust insists on an ethical link between Jewishness and homosexuality. Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp. 65–107. Hughes agrees: ‘the choice of the label “la race maudite” to identify homosexuals provides a central overarching metaphor which brings Israelite and sexual “outcast” together’ (MH, p. 157). 29. For the suggestion that the contradiction between pro- and anti-Semitism was to some extent Proust’s own, see for example Ronald Hayman, Proust: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1990), pp. 286–87. See also Albert Sonnenfeld, ‘Marcel Proust: Antisemite?’ I and II, French Review, Vol. 62, No. 1 (October 1988), pp. 25–40, and Vol. 62, No. 2 (December 1988), pp. 275–82. For a valuable account of Marcel as embodying ‘the intersection of anti-Semitism with Dreyfusism’, see Sprinker, HIP, p. 115. 30. Cf. Sprinker’s argument that ‘within the terms established by the Recherche, lesbianism is an unassimilable value’, an argument conducted with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick precisely over Albertine’s reference to buggery. See Sprinker, HIP, pp. 147–48; and Kosofsky Sedgwick, PSC, pp. 239–40. 31. For Cairns, the answer is that Proust simply treats lesbianism much ‘more censoriously’ than male homosexuality (HL, p. 54). But her criterion –sympathetic and ‘credible’ representation (HL, p. 53) – derives from a conventional aesthetic logic and is that of the modern moralist. 32. For the classic view of the Recherche as describing a repeated cycle of desire and its frustration which will only come to an end with Marcel’s experience of involuntary memory and his discovery of his vocation as a writer, see Girard, DDN, pp. 297–98, and Bersani, CR, p. 406.

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5 ETHICS OF THE EVENT: BECKETT

Ethical saying In this chapter, I want to pursue a theme that has often been implicit and from time to time explicit in the previous chapters: the extent to which a postmodern or post-Levinasian ethics of the novel might be an ethics of the event. As the event cannot be predicted beforehand, as it has no preordained structure and is not reducible to prior rules, so an ethics of the event will evidently not be a question of ethics as already given, but will be intrinsic to the event itself. Initially, I shall give this theme specificity by considering the ethics in question primarily in terms of literary language. At a later stage, however, I shall draw on the work of Alain Badiou to consider the possibility of an ethics of more scope, of a kind of narrative ‘fidelity’ to the event. My examples throughout will be drawn from Beckett. In the previous chapter, I struggled to give material substance to the concept of alterity as it manifests itself in a literary text, arguing that, in literary theory and criticism, the term always threatens to fall back into the very bloodless abstraction that it purports to resist. Behind my discussion of Proust lies an insistent question: how can I read, and write about my reading, in a manner that preserves the singularity, the unforeseeability and, with them, the ethics of the encounter as event; the principle of self-difference and the heterogeneous sequence that I claim to find in the Recherche? The answer, of course, is that I can’t and didn’t, in the last chapter, not wholly, at least. Insofar as I accomplished the task, it was always in terms of a double-bind. The play of and between unitary and differential logics that I discovered in the Recherche is precisely replicated in the terms in which I articulated that discovery, the one logic always shadowing the other In particular,

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the effort that I have just mentioned to think of the event of alterity in its ‘material substance’ has always already involved a kind of ‘ghosting’ of the latter. For, obviously enough, ‘materiality’, here, has only a metaphorical status. The only materiality that literary texts properly ever have – the sheer materiality of the book and language – is not what has been at stake; which means that what I designate by ‘material substance’, above, finally resolves itself back into another idealism. It is useful to recall the Lyotardian caution, here: that there is a constitutive density (épaisseur) and difference to the materiality of the given which is of another order to the discursive, and is not to be read.1 Yet the material given also inhabits and can be indicated within, not least as a disruption of, discourse. This, too, is a Levinasian concern, and one which allows him to give a radical extension to his ethics, in which what is now crucially at issue is an ethics of the event, understood principally as the event of and in language. It is precisely to the ethics of the event in literary language, as promised at the beginning of Chapter 4, that I want to turn now. In his later work, Levinas is much concerned with a distinction between the Saying (le Dire) and the Said (le Dit). Here language ‘is not reducible to a system of signs doubling up beings and relations’ (OB, p. 35). Rather – in its function as denomination, as designation or constitution of identities in the verbal, sensory or temporal flow – language necessarily involves idealization, producing ‘the ideality of the same in the diverse’ (ibid.). As Simon Critchley puts it, in the Said, ‘all entities are disclosed and comprehended in the light of Being’.2 The production of the Said would thus constitute [an identity], and recuperate the irreversible, coagulate the flow of time into a ‘something,’ thematize, ascribe a meaning. It would take up a position with regard to this ‘something,’ fixed in a present, re-present it to itself, and thus extract it from the labile character of time. (OB, p. 37) In language as Said, the world as becoming is ‘immobilized and fixed’ and thus annulled (OB, p. 23). The passage of time is always synchronized as a connection between present and past is established in the recollection of the word itself. That recollection serves as the basis for future manifestations of the Same. In language as Said, the sensible has thus always already been said. In this respect, language has always proposed, ordered or constructed experience beforehand. The world is not first recognized for what it is and then ‘given meaning’ by language. Rather, in its constitution of entities, language as Said is always meaning from the start.

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But recallable time is not the essence of time: the lapse of time is also something irrecuperable, refractory to the simultaneity of the present, something unrepresentable, immemorial, prehistorical … The immemorial is not an effect of a weakness of memory, an incapacity to cross large intervals of time, a beyond the said. It is diachrony that determines the immemorial. (OB, p. 38) We apprehend this unrepeatability of time – the eventuality of time – as a feature of bodily life, not least, in the simple process of ageing. Time puts the identical ‘out of phase with itself’ (OB, p. 34). Levinas finds a striking figure for this: time as becoming might be conceived of in terms of a Dufy painting, ‘where the colours spread out from their contours and do not rub up against them’ (ibid.). This is not to say that the principle of time is one of disintegration, according to which all things fall apart, but rather to institute the more difficult concept of time as instituting a play of the other within the same. The term ‘essence’ can never designate a nameable content, thing, occurrence or action. Temporality itself is essence. Language as Said reduces this ‘essence’ to the merely ontological, to the designation of self-identical beings. Yet being does not persist through but is rather exposed by time – exposed in particular to the event of the other, to whom I am ‘called’ to be responsive and responsible. Thus the ethical relation cannot be articulated in language as Said, but is rather the relation involved in language as Saying. ‘The Saying,’ writes Critchley, is my exposure – corporeal, sensible – to the Other, my inability to refuse the Other’s approach. It is the performative stating, proposing, or expressive position of myself facing the Other. It is a verbal or nonverbal ethical performance, whose essence cannot be caught in constative propositions. It is a performative doing that cannot be reduced to a constative description … The Saying is the sheer radicality of human speaking, of the event of being in relation with an Other; it is the nonthematizable ethical residue of language that escapes comprehension, interrupts philosophy, and is the very enactment of the ethical movement from the Same to the Other. (ED, p. 7)

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Saying signifies prior to any identification, precedes and is more fundamental than any given Said, than the Said itself. Saying is my exposure to alterity, my response to the unforeseeable event of the other – no matter how familiar he or she may be, how far he or she appears to be ‘the same’. As such a response, it is quite different from ‘a taking up of attitudes’ (ibid.). Saying is a risking or uncovering of the self which is also always a deposing or destabilization of the scornful, imperialistic ego. Saying is never indifferent. It is the declaration ‘Here I am’ [‘Me voici’] answering ‘for everything and everyone’ (OB, p. 142), and it is disinterested, for, in it, the bases of any position for or fixity to the self are consumed. Saying is ‘otherwise than being’. But it is also the ‘extraordinary everydayness’ of my responsibility to and for others (OB, p. 141). Here, too, Saying becomes indistinguishable from animation, from bodily life as it is devoted to responsiveness, to expression and to giving, and as it is open to possible wounding. Saying, indeed, is the ethical articulation of the irreducibly contingent materiality of the subject. Thus Saying is in itself my proximity and also a commitment to the other, though a commitment I cannot but make, a goodness that I do not choose as a free subject. In its gravity, in the fact that it is always prior to being, in its ‘primordial enigma’ (OB, p. 10), it is always a taking charge of the other. In Saying, I not only signify the other but also substitute myself for him or her. This activity matters more, in ethical terms, than how I signify the other or what I substitute for the other. Hence goodness cannot be represented and cannot be described as an entity, but is rather ‘the frankness, sincerity, veracity of saying’ itself (OB, p. 15). As such, it is inseparable from patience and pain, and the only absolution I can expect from it is an absolution from identity. Yet there are problems, here, for anyone engaging in the effort to connect this aspect of Levinas’s thought up to literature. I want to return briefly to Levinas’s distrust of art, for it takes on a specific complexion in the context of discussions of the Saying and Said. In particular, Levinas conceives of the aesthetic domain as a ‘pre-eminent’ example of the ‘fixed identities’, the ‘synchronized presences’, the ‘totalizing closure’ of the Said. In art, he argues, the Said is reduced to pure theme, ‘to the beautiful, which supports Western ontology’ (OB, p. 40). On the one hand, art as a constant process of ‘renewal’ would seem to modulate essence, to break it down in temporalizing it. The colours, forms, sounds, words in the individual work of art are ‘realized as a pure how’, a casting of the essential into the terms of a specific practice. Yet, for all that, quiddity and essence remain behind the artistic production or performance like a shadow cast by them or, better, a model on the basis of which they take shape. Hence art is always ‘essence in dissemination’ (OB, p. 41), and, as such,

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remote and exotic. The work of art is ‘without a world’, because it is outside or apart from questions of proximity, responsibility, the ethical relation. This is equally evident in exegesis and its metalanguage. As essence disseminated, the work of art always has fixity, and the fixity of the work calls forth a metalanguage as its complement or mirror. Levinas would scarcely see the point of a ‘deconstructive (literary) criticism’, or of a postmodern hermeneutics (Fish, Docherty). Metalanguage will always make the time of the work’s essence ‘be heard’ (ibid.); and that time is not time as becoming but as ‘quasi-eternal duration’: eternally Laocoon will be caught in the grip of serpents; the Mona Lisa will smile eternally. Eternally the future announced in the strained muscles of Laocoon will be unable to become present. Eternally, the smile of the Mona Lisa about to broaden will not broaden.3 Thus art evades the world that summons us to Saying and to the future, to mortal responsibility in the mortal present, and this might seem to be superlatively the case with narrative. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas repeatedly conceives of the Said in narrative terms. For narrative precisely ‘designates and sanctions’ identities, presents and synchronizes them, assembles time ‘into a conjucture’ (OB, p. 42). The ‘time narrated’ becomes ‘a reversible time’, and is always in some degree linear and homogenous. Narrative cannot truly produce time as event, as irrecuperable singularity or difference. Narrative is therefore not Saying. But can philosophy itself be that? Is Levinas’s philosophical writing? Or are textuality and Saying mutually exclusive? If the Saying is betrayed in the Said, is it not always betrayed in the philosophical text? Philosophy deals in concepts, in ontology. Levinas’s philosophy turns Saying itself into a concept. Surely, as Levinas himself suggests, ‘the correlation of the Saying and the Said, the subordination of the Saying to the Said’ is the price that all ‘manifestation’ demands, including philosophical manifestation (OB, p. 6)? There is seemingly no more of an escape from the order of the Said in philosophy – including the philosophy that seeks to challenge that order – than there is in narrative. The general terms of this problem, of course, are indicated in Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. According to Derrida, an inexorable ‘necessity’ appears to impose itself on Levinas: ‘the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it’.4 Levinas appears to be ceaselessly and irresistibly overtaken by the very forms of thought that he attempts to repel. In other words, as Robert Bernasconi and David Wood point out, Levinas is not

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strictly ‘successful’ as a philosopher, though, equally, his work throws into question the very value of ‘success’ in philosophy.5 Levinas responds to this dilemma in three principal ways. The first is to turn his back on it. If the Saying is betrayed in the Said, at the same time, it cannot be properly rendered in terms of the order of the Said, and therefore produces a turbulence in that order. What is Said is at least disrupted by the enigma that lies beyond it, and therefore by its own impotence. Second, philosophy always ‘unsays’ itself: The greatest virtue of philosophy is that it can put itself into question, try to deconstruct what it has constructed, and unsay what it has said … Now what I am interested in is precisely this ability of philosophy to think, to question itself. And I wonder if this capacity for interrogation and for saying (dédire) is not itself derived from the preontological interhuman relationship with the other … [T]he best thing about philosophy is that it fails.6 It is precisely as the tradition invariably breaks down – as a given attempt to totalize meaning inevitably fails – that philosophy testifies to an irreducible alterity. If the Saying is continually betrayed in the Said, the Said can also never quite free itself from the terms of its Saying. Third, and most importantly, there is Levinas’s own effort, in his writing, to reduce the Said to the Saying and thus disrupt the limit that divides the ethical from the ontological. In Critchley’s terms, this represents a ‘deconstructive turn’ in Levinas’s own work. It is a strategy for ‘exploring the ways in which the Said can be unsaid, or reduced, thereby letting the Saying reside as a residue, or interruption, within the Said’ (ED, p. 8). Critchley gives great weight to this strategy, suggesting that Otherwise than Being itself ‘is the performative aspect of ethical writing … a form of writing that, with an explosion, destroys all other books in the world’ (ibid.). But can this claim be sustained? Does Otherwise than Being really resist ‘the economy of the Same, and logocentrism’ and go ‘generously unto the other’, as Critchley puts it (ED, p. 118)? Critchley argues for the heterogeneity of Levinas’s texts, suggesting that they are composed of discrete parts which – by virtue of their very discreteness – maintain themselves in a relation of alterity to one another. This, says Critchley, is precisely the way in which the later Derrida comes to see the Levinasian text.7 For both Critchley and Derrida, Levinas’s later writing maintains a residue of unsaid Said within the Saying. Language is ‘unbound’ from the start and is therefore

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‘capable of being bound to the otherwise than Being, the wholly other’ (ED, p. 122). But Critchley and Derrida can only show that this happens in a practice of ethical interruption of the text which institutes a play of textual binding and unbinding. They concentrate on three particular phrases in Otherwise than Being, ‘en ce moment même’, ‘dans cet ouvrage’ and ‘me voici’, contending that, strategically used, such phrases interrupt the ontological Said with the ethical Saying and deny the closure of the Said. In addressing the reader and specifying the moment of address, these phrases break the thread of the discourse, the time of ontology, the consistency of identities through that time. They reduce the ontological Said to a local, contingent phenomenon that can only be repeated with a difference. These are powerful, even compelling readings of Levinas’s text. But do they do more than posit the ethical moment in writing (writing as Saying) as cutting across ontology, and thus as secondary to it? Critchley’s image for Otherwise than Being is of a single thread with a series of knots running along its length, the knots representing the moments of ‘the ethical interruption of essence’ (ED, p. 125). But does that not maintain the text in an essence as a linear and singular and therefore ontological construct? Is ‘heterogeneity’ really what is at issue here? Can the philosophical text, if it is to remain philosophical – if it is to say anything at all – ever ‘be otherwise’?8

The force of interruption: Beckett’s later prose The question has to do with the limits to what is possible within a philosophical discourse and vocabulary. They are limits to the production of particularity. What I intend by the latter term should not be confused with the old, Leavis-style insistence on the value of the particulars of ‘concrete life’. I am thinking of the particularity – not connected with representation – that is indicated, in a Beckett text, by the words ‘Watt’ or ‘Molloy’, as compared to the terms ‘essence’ and ‘ontology’ (and ‘alterity’ and ‘event’) in a philosophical text. In the latter, does not the particular event of Saying arrive only as a disruption of the order of the Said? Doesn’t Saying always ‘come after?’ In certain literary texts, by contrast, language properly hovers in an enigmatic, indeterminate or undecidable space between Saying and Said, a claim that Derrida and Critchley would make for Levinas, but not one that I am sure can be sustained. This is because a literary text begins in particularity at a level impossible in the philosophical text. Here I must return to and take radical issue with Levinas on narrative. Linearity and homogeneity are not essential conditions of narrativity, as modernist and postmodernist texts

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have abundantly shown. It is rather in narrative that particularity may be most insistently recast in a manner that also insistently refines and subtilizes our perception of it. To put the matter differently: perhaps one of the cardinal functions of art today is to give us access to an intuition of the event that otherwise threatens to seem increasingly unavailable. I will show what I mean by briefly considering the question of Saying and Said in three of Beckett’s later works. Almost at the very beginning of Company, a voice announces a proposition which is seemingly to govern the text as a whole: ‘To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past’ – ‘a past’, we might note, and not necessarily the speaker’s.9 The voice may or may not be providing ‘fiction’ or ‘fact’ or ‘information’ appropriate to the addressee. The point is, not that the resolution of such problems is undecidable, but that the text gives us no indication of the pertinence of the questions themselves. Thus only ‘a small part of what is said’ is opened up to questions like ‘verifiability’ (C, p. 7), for they pertain only to the Said. Company is scarcely concerned with questions of ‘verifiability’ in the ontological realm. What it engages us in, above all, is the ethical question of stating. In the brute indifference of the addressed other to the voice’s ontological descriptions, what is placed at issue is ontology as rhetoric, a rhetoric that may sound authoritarian. Here, in a kind of suspension of the Said, in the lack of any determinate relation between the proposition and something deemed to be its object, we have a procedure whereby, in Critchley’s terms, ‘the Said of language is reduced to its Saying’ (ED, p. 123).10 But this is to approach Company only at the level of the ‘proposition’. Even before the proposition is announced, however, Company has instigated a particular discursive practice within which the proposition and all its subsequent developments are to be contained, beginning, precisely, with Saying: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine’ (C, p. 7). Here, at once, there is a Said, with a figure posited as being addressed by someone else. But as Locatelli points out, Beckett’s opening line is of course ambiguous, its Said also a Saying, for it is partly the reader who is ‘in the dark’ and is being called on to ‘imagine’ (UW, p. 164). The voice addressing the reader is clearly not to be thought of as ‘stemming from the same source’ as that of the voice addressing an other. The text thus begins in a vertiginous relation whereby what is a Said in one of its aspects is articulated as a Saying in another, with an artfulness beyond the bounds of the philosophical text precisely insofar as the latter must always be purposive. Company constantly threatens to dissolve its terms back into the vertigo in question:

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For why or? Why in another dark or in the same? And whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all. In the same dark as his creature or in another. For company. Who asks in the end, Who asks? And in the end answers as above? (C, p. 32) Here if anywhere we have a reversibility or undecidability in the relation of Saying to Said which is more than just a question of ‘cutting across’ ontology, constantly haunts and threatens to dissolve the terms of the ‘proposition’ in Beckett’s text, and has carefully been placed as prior to those terms. Critchley claims to find it ‘from the start’ in Otherwise than Being, but, in Levinas’s text, it is surely rather caught up in a process of intermittence, whereby the text moves away from ontology towards proximity and immediacy, only to move back again. Here reversibility can have only specific and limited places and functions, given the linear development that characterizes the philosophical project. In Company, however, the reversibility in question is there from the start, is indeed identified as crucial to Beckett’s project and its movement. Take this passage from the description of the father’s ‘tramp in the mountains’ on the day of his son’s birth: He at once hastened to the coachhouse some twenty yards distant where he housed his De Dion Bouton. He shut the doors behind him and climbed into the driver’s seat. You may imagine his thoughts as he sat there in the dark not knowing what to think. (C, p. 17) Who is being addressed, in the last sentence? The reader? The ‘you may imagine’ (rather than a bald ‘imagine’) makes it seem likely. But the sentence comes in a passage which began with the voice addressing its addressee. Furthermore, we were told earlier that ‘Use of the second person marks the voice’ (C, p. 9; i.e., the voice that addresses someone within the text). Most of the passage has used the third person, which is characteristic of the ‘cankerous other’, the observing narrator addressing the reader. There is clearly a drastic aporia of voice, here, which returns us to the Saying, the more so, since the Said in question is in some sense not properly or fully Said, and needs to be completed by the other (reader or addressee), but with no completion apparently possible, since s/he is asked to

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imagine unthought thoughts. What is at issue, here, is not what is Said, but responsiveness to and responsibility for it. So a ‘saying about’ repeatedly reveals itself as a ‘saying to’. Company ‘signifies prior to any world, signifies the proximity of the same and the other, in which the implication of the one in the other signifies the assignation of the one by the other’ (OB, p. 137). This is nowhere more evident than when the voice considers naming the hearer H: Is it desirable? No. Would he gain thereby in companionability? No. Then let him not be named H. Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You. (C, p. 29) The last word need not constitute an address to the reader, may also refer to the hearer. But it is surely not possible to overlook the ‘interruption’ of the discourse, in Levinas’s terms: And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the discourses are stated, in saying it to the one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside all it includes … This reference to an interlocutor permanently breaks through the text that the discourse claims to weave. (OB, p. 170) As I have underlined, however, it is the ambiguity or simultaneity of reference that is decisive for Company, in that the ambiguity introduces or confirms, not only an undecidable relation between Saying and Said, but also an undecidable and irreducible relation between the reader and the voice’s hearer. Does the hearer in some sense ‘stand for’ or represent the reader? Perhaps. But he would do so, not as a ‘figure of my humanity’, but in the instant itself in which I encounter him, for there is an intersection of two times: the time of the Said, fixed, annulled, ontological time, and the time of the Saying, ethical time, an unrepeatable time in which a particular reader is addressed as and in a particular instant, and must offer a particular response. In Company, ethical time constantly breaches ontological time. A suspension of the Said is also what is involved in the notion of the ‘ill said’

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in Ill Seen Ill Said, which invokes a liminal region where the Said insistently lacks determinacy definition and certitude, and clarity emerges only to yield to obscurity: Silver shimmers some evenings when the skies are clear. Close-up then. In which in defiance of reason the nail prevails. Long this image till suddenly it blurs.11 Blurs and blurring are common, as with the ‘animal ovines’ described as ‘[i]nnumerable white scabs all shapes and sizes … They are white and make do with little’ (ISIS, p. 10). The text itself ‘comes and goes’, appears and disappears, not least as black print intermittently emerging from a white background. The Said itself will not congeal, not even into a uniform process of ‘coming and going’.12 Rather, it is thin, etiolated, lacks ‘mass’ (ISIS, p. 24), is even contradictory: Next to emerge from the shadows an inner wall. Only slowly to dissolve in favour of a single space. (ISIS, p. 21) What is missing, in Ill Seen Ill Said, what is mere ‘vicissitude of hardly there and wholly gone’ (ISIS, p. 37), is what Levinas calls the ‘apophansis’ as we noted it earlier, the assemblage of the formally seen and its presentation in the formally said. The production of the apophansis always ‘limits what is thought to essence and reminiscence … that is, to synchronic time and representation’ (OB, p. 155). What exists beyond the apophansis or cannot be reduced to its terms is the ‘haze’ that, in Ill Seen Ill Said, Beckett curtly remarks on as ‘sole certitude’ (ISIS, p. 48). There is a refusal of the terms of the apophansis which keeps the responsibility of Saying insistently before us, and itself constitutes a response to the crucial question of how to reduce the betrayal of the Saying in the Said. This response is produced precisely with reference to an other, in this case, the old woman with whom the text is in some sense ‘concerned’. Ill Seen Ill Said actually struggles not to ‘say’ the other, not to produce the other as Said, but rather to leave her half-said, to let her be in some dim hinterland where she is not brought to full presence and seen and articulated with clarity. There is thus a close relation between two key ‘ideas’ in the text, ghostliness and gentleness. That Ill Seen Ill Said sets its subject before us only as obscure phantom is precisely the mode in which its gentleness is expressed. In Worstward Ho, again, Beckett achieves a reduction of Said to Saying. In the first instance, in that crucial little phrase ‘Say on’.13 For Worstward Ho might

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indeed be thought of as trying to say the ‘on’ of time as movement. This time, however, is not recallable time, time as a linear development that happens to entities, but unrepeatable time, time as lapse, diachrony, becoming. As Steven Connor suggests, Worstward Ho seems to resist the agglutination of elements into larger unities, carefully maintaining the separability of its semantic particles – though we should observe here that the principle of reversibility and auto-cancellation itself always seems to require a minimal but nevertheless crucial degree of binding.14 Thus when we happen on the sentence ‘No future in this. Alas yes’ (WH, p. 10), the point is indeed that, alas yes, there is a (non-futural) future in the text, and the second sentence creates it, precisely in being ‘out of phase’ with the first one. Worstward Ho is not a text that claims to disclose entities at all, and does not posit a time in which the Said precedes and is articulated in the Saying: Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. (WH, p. 7) For Levinas, Saying is not a translation of thoughts into words. To conceive of it as such would be to assume that he who does the saying is ‘for himself’, first, rather than ‘for the other’, and at home with himself, as a substantial, self-consistent subjectivity (OB, p. 78). Saying is rather what characterizes a subjectivity whose principle is non-coincidence: Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. (WH, p. 8) Connor notes that, in Worstward Ho as a whole, it ‘is unclear whether to “fail better” means to fail more comprehensively, in a way that approximates more closely to total failure, or whether it means to fail less comprehensively, to fail in such a way as to reserve some measure of success’ (TCV, p. 84). Equally, in the passage I have just quoted, it is impossible to be sure of the difference between

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‘failing better’ and ‘failing worse’, to ascertain which is required and which nauseates. Subjectivity in Saying, here, is articulated precisely as irreducible difference or antagonism between alternatives, does not exist as a Said, emerges as fractured in the Saying, as a transgression of identity, in the insistence with which it registers, reaches or opens out to or substitutes itself for the other. This is evident, above all, in Worstward Ho’s particular obsession with address, with itself as a mode of address. Right from the start, Worstward Ho declares itself as Saying, as a relation between the voice and another. At times, of course, that relation is cleady dialogic: Whose words? Ask in vain. Or not in vain if say no knowing. No saying. No words for him whose words. Him? One. No words for one whose words. One? It. (WH, p. 19) At times, the relation seems to involve an appeal to the reader. At all events, what is involved is the constitution of the text and subjectivity as a movement in which the one repeatedly substitutes itself for the other or takes the other for itself.15 In other words, what is constantly at issue is the ethical relation, the word ‘say’, the Saying, not the Said.

Badiou and Beckett But in identifying an ethics of the event with utterance, the emergence of language, I have ignored the possibility of there being other ways of reading Beckett’s work in terms of such an ethics. That was of course deliberate, a consequence of my concern to avoid conferring what, at the beginning of the chapter, I called a metaphorical status on the materiality of the event. Yet dispense with that scruple, and it is clear that Beckett’s prose requires us to be witnesses to the occurrence of events in other ways. The abrupt and enigmatic appearance of the chief protagonist at the beginning of Watt – a novel full of such incidents ‘of great formal brilliance and indeterminable purport’ – would be just one example.16 Indeed, Alain Badiou deals with the event in Beckett, not as linguistic, but as something that happens and then requires to be named – the ‘sudden noise’ in Ill Seen Ill Said, for instance.17 If, as I have argued, Beckett may be closely associated with a discursive ethics in prose in which the immediate appeal of the Saying displaces and even refuses the ontological fixity of the Said, it is also possible to place that activity as the most

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radical aspect of an elaborate practice according to which, at a number of different and at varying levels in Beckett’s work as a whole, the event arrives to destroy identity and ontology. If I have argued for the primacy of a discursive ethics, in Beckett’s work, the fact that it is a part, however crucial, of a larger complex is indicative. There is a tenacity to Beckett’s maintaining an ethics of the event which one might claim as exemplary in its radical consistency. It is that exemplary consistency – the consistency with which Beckett produces a breakdown in the consistent, and which I take to be ethical – that I want to go on and consider, now, with reference to Badiou’s work, and specifically his Ethics.18 Badiou’s ethics begins in a proposition that will take us back to my third chapter: the multiple is the law of being.19 One is just a number, a presentational fiction. There are only multiples. Each multiple is a multiple of multiples, and so on: there is no point at which this recession can be said to end, save ‘la vide’.20 Thus the infinite – as the most general form of multiplicity – is not transcendent but immanent and ordinary (E, p. 25), and experience of any kind constitutes an encounter with alterity. Alterity is mundane: Infinite alterity is quite simply what is there [ce qu’il y a]. Any experience is an extension into infinity of infinite differences. Even the supposed reflexive experience of myself is not at all the intuition of a unity, but a labyrinth of differentiations. (E, p. 26)21 For Badiou, the event is what comes to supplement being, the multiplicity of a given situation, in that it both pertains to that situation and yet is also outside and detached from the latter’s ‘rules’ (E, p. 61). It is an occurrence of what has hitherto been inexistent and has therefore had no name, what Badiou calls a chance exempt from nomination.22 Badiou gives as examples the encounter of Eloisa and Abelard; the French Revolution in 1792; the creation of Galilean physics; Schoenberg’s invention of the twelve-tone system; and so on. There are four categories in which the event properly takes place: the political, amorous, artistic and scientific (E, p. 39). In each category, the event – of love, emancipation, invention, creation – appears as the rupture of an established order, making the impossible possible (E, pp. 38, 36). The event arrives as a supplement to the multiple of a given situation, constraining us to decide on a new way of being which conservatism would decree to be impossible (ibid.). What is crucial, here, is that Badiou understands ethics as consisting, not just, as I have suggested throughout this study, in an openness to the event, but in the decision to stay faithful to it, in what he calls fidelity. Fidelity

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is the ‘process’ of continuing with a situation from the point of view of the event that has come to supplement it (‘du point de vue du supplément événementiel’, E, pp. 38, 60). It is the determination to think a world according to the principle of what has come to change it, to make it new. This fidelity to the event ‘constructs’ what Badiou calls a vérité (E, p. 60) and describes as ‘le tracé matériel, dans la situation, de la supplémentation événementielle’ (E, p. 38).23 Ethics arrives as a supplement to the subject, making the subject more and other than he or she has thitherto been; or rather, better still, it even ‘induces’ a subject. This subject, however, is not the subject of and in psychology, the Cartesian reflexive or the Kantian transcendental subject. It is a subject as composition or becoming. Vérité is not savoir (E, p. 49), not an object of knowledge, but a kind of hole made in knowledge. It does not destroy a previous knowledge, but rather traverses and fractures both the latter and the subject as he or she is known to himself or herself. Insofar as he or she enters into a new composition, a new subjectivity, he or she exists ‘à son propre insu’ (E, p. 42). A vérité is also distinct from the realm of what Badiou calls opinion, the realm customarily occupied by the human animal about its ordinary business and according to which it sustains itself in social life. Ordinarily, the human animal comports itself in terms – again – of Spinoza’s ‘perseverance in being’; the pursuit of interests, self-preservation. But this perseverance is the law of one’s being only insofar as one knows oneself. The experience of the event and the ‘process’ of a vérité do not fall under this law. Ethics consists precisely in a fidelity to the interruption constituted by the event, in a continuing resistance to the law: The ethics of a vérité is therefore easily stated: ‘Do everything you can to make what has exceeded your perseverance persevere itself [faire persévérer ce qui a excédé ta persévérance]. Persevere with the interruption. Seize in your being what has seized and broken you.’ (E, p. 43) Ethics is perseverance in what has broken one’s perseverance in being. But this must also mean a pitting of the will against itself. Thus ethics manifests itself as a vital conflict most easily grasped as occurring between the principle of interest and the principle whereby one becomes a subject. In a phrase of Lacan’s that Badiou returns to repeatedly, the ethical injunction is ‘ne pas céder sur son désir’ (‘do not give way on one’s [your, its] desire’, ibid.). This might seem to require that one distinguish and privilege the ‘one’ constituting itself in the wake of the event, a subject in process, from the ‘one’ prior to the event, a subject constituted

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by doxa. But the first does not displace the second in a neat, sequential order. The second does not only come prior to the event, but subsists afterwards: As we have already said, every vérité deposes knowledge as constituted [dépose les savoirs constitués] and is therefore opposed to opinion … But opinion is the cement of sociality. Human animals maintain themselves with it, all without exception, one cannot do otherwise. (E, p. 46) It is not possible simply to step outside or have done with the realm of opinion. We might therefore think of ethics, to adapt a phrase of Beckett’s, as a condition of ‘furious restlessness’, as purgatorial, according to Beckett’s conception of purgatory (‘a flood of movement and vitality released by the conjunction’ of two opposed ‘elements’ that is endowed with ‘the cyclic dynamism of the intermediate’).24 In the ethics of the vérité, the question is: how am I to continue to exceed my own being, to remain true to the shock of an event that came to me from beyond the terms of my knowledge but will not simply thrust me clear of them? How am I to remain true to ‘son désir’, its desire, my desire as what I do not know about myself? How do I continue to will something that I could not have willed to start with, that could only have come to me through an encounter, that could only have been something that happened to me? The title of Badiou’s book on Beckett – Beckett: l’increvable désir – suggests a reading of Beckett as the very paradigm for his (Badiou’s) ethics, Beckett as a writer who is peculiarly inflexible in his determination not to give up on desire, his desire, desire as an unknown event by which he is ceaselessly traversed. This is a Beckett characterized by what Badiou calls acharnement, furious or obstinate persistence (B, p. 13). Badiou’s Beckett is intent on tracking down, isolating and sustaining the ‘pure point’ of the event, the fact – again – that what is said emerges from a singular faculty of saying that cannot itself be reduced to a said (B, pp. 33– 34). This Beckett works tenaciously at articulating the importance of the subject’s opening itself up to alterity. Yet, for Badiou, it is only after How It Is that such self-exposure occurs in Beckett’s work. Furthermore, Badiou has little or no interest in the question of the textual event, in Beckett’s work, in Beckett as writing the event, conceiving of the event in Beckett only as the object of a possible representation. In this respect, Badiou works in an opposite direction to the earlier sections of this chapter. As I said earlier, his Beckett is chiefly interested in the question of nomination, of how to name or give sense to the event (B, p. 39).

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There is a limiting residue of unreconstructed mimetism here. But in Beckett’s work, if anyone’s, the event itself cannot be thought of as confined to a single representational level of the text. Furthermore, it would seem as though, for the Badiou of the Beckett book, Beckett’s concern with the event is not a particularly ethical one. Indeed, Badiou is inclined to see Beckett as more concerned with happiness than ethics. It is Badiou’s earlier account of Beckett in Conditions that seems closer in some of its emphases to L’Éthique. Here, Beckett after How It Is is concerned with the narrating subject as a multiplicity that is supplemented by the event, the encounter with the instantaneous surprise of the other. The later Beckett turns his back on the (established) novelistic (order) with a view to exploring the occurrences of the subject, its possible positions, the variety of its dispositions in relation to the event.25 He is increasingly concerned with the event and alterity as they fissure and displace the solipsistic closure of the cogito (CS, p. 344). The later Beckett, Badiou argues, has turned away from the question of being in itself to the question of how one might name what arrives, the event in its incalculability, nomination as establishing and sustaining a vérité.26 The event is withdrawn from the order of the visible. The nomination of the event must therefore be correspondingly withdrawn from the established orders of signification. Nomination thus belongs to the realm of the vérité, not that of opinion or knowledge. The moment at which the name arises sees the inauguration of a vérité, and this latter is other than the established order of being which it is conservatism’s sole concern to sustain. In the Conditions essay, then, there is the outline of an ethical reading of Beckett. Badiou sees it as relevant only to the later prose, however, and it has only limited connections with his own Ethics. But Beckett’s work is more largely available to a reading in terms of Badiou’s ethics than Badiou himself appears to recognize, and such a reading is particularly relevant to some at least of Beckett’s earlier work. Fascinatingly enough, the last substantial section of L’Éthique, entitled ‘L’Innommable’ (‘The Unnamable’) allows us to see with particular clarity how far Badiou’s is a profoundly Beckettian ethics. Let’s begin at the beginning, now. This is the very beginning. Of the first Text for Nothing: Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on.27 The first two words could be taken as a gloss on the whole of Texts for Nothing. Something happens, there is the suddenness of an event. The event arrives as a supplement to a given situation. That there is such a situation already is made clear

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in the second sentence: ‘Someone said, you can’t stay here’. The narrators in the Texts for Nothing all intermittently call fragments of pasts to mind, and those fragments appear to be there precisely to sketch in a preceding situation, though it is a situation that is at once drastically modified by the event itself. There is no pre-text for the event, however, only a blank space, a void, precisely as, Badiou argues, there is nothing beyond the multiple or multiples of a given situation: no essence or foundation, no singular being or condition of being, no entity that is available to ontology beyond multiplicity. I shall return to this shortly. As the narrator of the tenth Text has it, ‘there was something once. I had something once. It may be thought there was, so long as it’s known there was not’ (TN, p. 104). To go back to those first two words in the first Text: the second of them denies the first. Or rather, it turns in into an event of language. Pace Badiou, the event does not arrive to be nominated. It is as language that the event appears as supplement. The event of language, too, is also an event in language, and appears precisely as a disruption of an established order, an established order of signification. The narrators of the Texts for Nothing intermittently remind us of their distance from Spinoza’s human animal, or, as the narrator of the seventh Text calls him, ‘X, that paradigm of human kind, moving at will, complete with joys and sorrows, perhaps even a wife and brats, forbears most certainly, a carcass in God’s image and a contemporary skull’ (TN, p. 94). But the narrators repudiate the terms of X’s knowledge and his sociality, as in the tenth Text: No, no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death, you’ve got to go on without any of that junk, that’s all dead with words, with excess of words, they can say nothing else. (TN, p. 105) It is precisely that ‘excess’ of dead or bankrupt language that the narrators’ ‘ill saying’ must arrive to interrupt. But how is it possible to conceive of a series of texts in which, to quote the narrator of the sixth Text, ‘nothing leads to anything’ (TN, p. 90) in terms of what Badiou calls a fidelity? Fidelity to what? What is the vérité to which these narrators owe their allegiance, in which they and the Texts for Nothing could be said to persevere? It is hard to think of the narrator who starts the eleventh Text so strikingly as characterized by any acharnement:

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When I think, no, that won’t work, when come those who knew me, perhaps even know me still, by sight of course, or by smell, it’s as though, it’s as if, come on, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun. (TN, p. 107) The project self-destructs in its inception. But, of course, it is precisely that process of foundering or implosion, perceptible everywhere in the Texts for Nothing, that makes for ‘suddenness’ and thus redeems the event.28 It is what makes possible the narrators’ expressions of surprise, for example, at what they find the event of their writing has made of them: My keepers, why keepers, I’m in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it’s to make me think I’m a prisoner, frantic with corporeality. (TN, p. 89) It is precisely the Texts’ lack of a coherent articulation – of a coherent recollection, not least of themselves – that makes possible a kind of attention to the possibility of the event, the arrival of the event, writing itself as that arrival. In fact, the question Badiou identifies with Ill Seen Ill Said in particular – ‘Is something happening?’ (CS, p. 347) – is evident in the Texts, too, as the second narrator’s inquiry, for example, into ‘What exactly is going on’ (TN, p. 76). It is important to focus for a moment on the extraordinary fact that, on one level, the narrator is asking the reader’s question for him or her. The point is surely that the reader’s form of bewilderment at and attention to the text as event is precisely what the text requires and ‘is about’, in whatever limited sense one can give that phrase. There is, then, a remarkable fidelity in the Text for Nothing, and they do indeed persevere in a vérité, but the vdritd they establish and sustain does not take exactly the kind of event specified by Badiou (the French Revolution, etc.) as its point of departure. Rather, Beckett’s fidelity is to the event of the event itself. Beckett’s acharnement consists precisely in an intransigent and furious determination to preserve the event, principally as the event in and of language; to save it from hardening into a logic, for example, or a story. If we return, now, to Badiou’s account of how a vérité is sustained, we may be able a little better to understand the weird, inverted, paradoxical logic of the Texts for Nothing and other works of Beckett’s. As we have seen, Badiou insists that a vérité is not the product of a conscious knowledge. It rather breaks up and distorts such knowledge. Insofar as it is a condition of transformed subjectivity, it is not properly known to the

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subject. The event is not to be grasped as the result of ‘persistence’, of a conscious application. If it were graspable as such, it would no longer be the event. It is not to be projected, planned for, anticipated or produced. It happens as an interruption of a previously constituted subjectivity. The event can thus be willed only in a conflictual mode, in the mode of a resistance to, negation or, to use a Beckettian term, dehiscence of a prior will.29 As Beckett puts it in his essay on Joyce: No resistance, no eruption … [R]esistance is provided, the explosion duly takes place and the machine proceeds. (DBVJ, p. 22) Thus the narrator of the eighth Text may hope for ‘a story for me somehow, of having come from somewhere and of being able to go back, or on’ (TN, p. 96), and the narrator of the sixth Text may seem. representative in telling us, with a forlorn sense of his own Beckettian impotence, that ‘a little resolution is all that is needed to come and go under the sky’ (TN, p. 90). In the Text for Nothing, all the same, it is precisely in the constant collapse of resolution – a collapse that is in the obvious sense unwilled, that brings dissatisfaction and distress – that the arrival of the event is possible. For all the narrators’ insistent self-cudgelling, the most constant feature of the Texts is the breakdown of the project.30 But it is in that breakdown that another persistence forms, a persistence in writing the event; and it is in that mode that these narrators conform to Badiou’s Lacanian injunction, and do not give way on their desire, that their desire emerges as properly ‘increvable’. It is thus that they are ethical and sustain a vérité. In the Trilogy, the Unnamable knows that, for all his recalcitrance, those he refers to as ‘they’ have made him ‘a mine of useless knowledge’ and left him ‘confoundedly well informed’.31 So, too, the narrator of the sixth Text knows that the world will always ‘be there again, in my head, with me much as in the beginning’ (TN, p. 90). But the ‘much as’ is important. Subjectivity after the event is not identical with the subjectivity that existed before it. It has entered into a new composition. We get the exact measure of this in the derisive irony with which the narrators in the Texts tend to treat any attempt to foist a full humanity upon them: Ah yes, I hear I have a kind of conscience, and on top of that a kind of sensibility, I trust the orator is not forgetting anything, and without ceasing to listen or drive the old quill I’m afflicted by them, I heard, it’s noted. (TN, p. 92)

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Such irony is an exact index of how far, according to the Text for Nothing, the event arrives as a displacement and distortion of what Badiou calls ‘opinion’. This of course is in large part why, for Beckett as for Badiou, the protection of the event – its extension into a vérité – is of cardinal ethical importance. In the end, it is in an insistent writing of the event that the Texts for Nothing constitute resistance to what Badiou understands as evil. Evil has three principal aspects: the production of a pernicious simulacrum of a vérité (as in fascism); the betrayal of, rather than a fidelity to, a vérité (Galileo’s recantation); and the totalization of a vérité, the assumption of its total power: this would grant a total power to the linguistic subject, the capacity to name and evaluate all the elements of the objective situation on the basis of the evolution of a vérité [à partir du processus de vérité]. Grown stiff and dogmatic (or ‘blinded’), the linguistic subject would claim to be able to name the totality of the world according to his own axioms – and thus to transform the world. (E, p. 74) Badiou suggests that such a move to totalization is born of the conviction that it is possible to annihilate the opposition, to put an end to ‘opinion’, to the situation that preceded the event. In its turn, however, such a conviction is born of the belief that the subject of a given vérité possesses an absolute power of nomination, the power to signify the totality (E, ibid.). What must be maintained against such a temptation is that as the product of the evolution of a vérité, the linguistic subject does not have the power to give a name [n’a pas pouvoir de nomination] to all the elements of a given situation. (E, p. 76) There will always be an element in any given situation that is not available to nomination in terms of a vérité, that is only to be nominated in terms of the ‘opinion’ that the vérité challenges. Even more crucially, there is the tie between the event and ‘le vide de la situation antérieure’ (E, p. 61). Any given situation whatsoever is at once both ‘full’ and ‘empty’, precisely as, as I said a little earlier, the very opening of the first of the Texts for Nothing refers us away to a prior situation that we are contradictorily told is both a ‘past’ and a blank or void. In any

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given situation, then, says Badiou, there is always an element that is properly ‘unnamable’, and to seek to force a name upon the latter is to surrender to the principle of ethical ‘disaster’ (E, p. 77). By the same token, to preserve the unnamable in its unavailability is cardinal to ethics. ‘This evening,’ says the narrator of the fourth Text, ‘I say this evening, perhaps it’s morning‘ (TN, p. 83). ‘I’m here,’ says the narrator of the eighth Text, ‘that much at least is certain, it’s in vain I keep on saying it, it remains true. Does it? It’s hard for me to judge’ (TN, p. 96). Nomination is followed by a withdrawal from or at least an interrogation of nomination: as though what haunts the writing of the event, the event of nomination is precisely an ‘unnamable’ that remains inaccessible to or is excluded by it. In this respect, the Texts for Nothing are ethical in the highest sense. The Texts for Nothing are characterized, then, by a tireless and vigilant fidelity to the event. That is the character of their vérité. It is the vérité that Beckett pursues throughout his work, in one mode or another. It is here, I think, that an ethical reading of Beckett that construes the arrival of the event as the interruption of the Said by the Saying must be subsumed into a larger scheme which sees the production of such interruptions as but one (albeit extremely significant) aspect of the Beckettian vérité. If there is an unceasing fidelity to the event in Beckett, however, there is, equally and necessarily, an unceasing fidelity to the unnamable, to that which remains outside nomination – and thus to the void. For the void is what guarantees that the event will continue to arrive. Simon Critchley has recently reminded us of the continuing importance of Adorno’s account of Beckett as a writer whose work is distinguished by a kind of ‘weak messianic power’.32 If Beckett chooses a via negativa for his messianism, according to Adorno and Critchley, it is because he is scrupulous in his refusal of discredited positivities, and the extent to which, in Adorno’s phrase, these latter conspire ‘with all extant meanness and finally with the destructive principle’.33 ‘Although the Enlightenment project might have left us with presque rien’, writes Critchley, Adorno does not leave us with nothing. On the contrary, the task of thinking is to keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be, an otherwise that is persistently but obliquely offered by Beckett. (VL, p. 24)

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It is indeed this ‘opening’ to a possible ‘otherwise’ that is crucial to Beckett’s writing the event, and constitutes a Beckettian ethics.34

Notes B BWB C CS DBVJ DL E ED IB ISIS SBS TCV TN TPTN UW VL WH

Beckett, l’increvable désir, Alain Badiou Beckett Writing Beckett: the Author in the Autograph, H. Porter Abbott Company, Samuel Beckett Conditions, Alain Badiou ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce’, Samuel Beckett ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’, Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney L’éthique: essai sur la conscience du mal, Alain Badiou The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Simon Critchley Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature, Thomas Trezise Ill Seen Ill Said, Samuel Beckett Samuel Beckett et son sujet: une apparition évanouissante, Michel Bernard Theory and Cultural Value, Steven Connor Texts for Nothing, Samuel Beckett Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Andrew Gibson Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize, Carla Locatelli Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Simon Critchley Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett

1. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), p. 9 and passim. 2. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), hereafter ED; p. 7. 3. Levinas, ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, LR, pp. 129–43, p. 138. For an account of Levinas’s view of narrative in the context of a similar and widespread scepticism about the latter in postmodern theory, see my Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), hereafter TPTN; pp. 185–86. 4. Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, tr. with an introd, and additional notes by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 79– 153; p. 111. 5. Robert Bernasconi and David Woods (eds), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London: Routledge, 1988), ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–4; p. 2. 6. Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’, hereafter DL, in Richard A. Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 13–34, p. 22.

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E T H I C S O F T H E E V E N T: B E C K E T T 7. See Derrida, ‘En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici’, in F. Laruelle (ed.), Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980), pp. 21– 60. 8. Cf. the questions that, for Trezise, Beckett and Beckettian ‘literature’ raise for the philosophical project. Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), hereafter IB; pp. 30, 34. 9. Samuel Beckett, Company (London: John Calder, 1980), hereafter C; p. 7. 10. Carla Locatelli also connects this aspect of Levinas’s thought with Beckett’s later prose, specifically in a discussion of Worstward Ho. See Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), hereafter UW; pp. 230–31. 11. Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said (London:John Calder, 1982), hereafter ISIS; p. 19. 12. Cf. Bernard’s account of an ‘entre-deux utopique “où il y a tout” ’ in Beckett’s later prose, specifically How It Is, and the identification of that space with a ‘présent infinement subdivisé … le temps du fading’. Michel Bernard, Samuel Beckett et son sujet: une apparition évanouissante (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), hereafter SBS; p. 215. 13. Beckett, Worstward Ho (London:John Calder, 1983), hereafter WH; p. 7. 14. Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), hereafter TCV; p. 83. 15. Here as elsewhere, of course, my argument follows in the wake of Trezise and Connor’s groundbreaking studies. These latter took drastic issue with the tradition of existentialist and humanist readings dominant in Beckett studies before the late 1980s, and thus indicated a new direction for criticism. See Trezise, IB; and Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). In particular, Trezise sees Beckett as radically questioning the phenomenological understanding of subjectivity as conceived precisely as ‘a separation from exteriority’ (IB, p. 9). His account of intersubjectivity in Beckett as ‘a relation not subsequent but rather prior to separation’ (IB, pp. 24–27) – a conception of it that, for Trezise, makes Beckett seem close to Levinas (IB, pp. 147–48, 168–69) – is of especial relevance, here. For recent examples of the persistence of the tradition, see H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: the Author in the Autograph (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), hereafter BWB; and James Acheson, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama and Early Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1997). 16. Beckett, Watt (London: Calder, 1963), p. 70. 17. Alain Badiou, Beckett, l’increvable désir (Paris: Hachette, 1995), hereafter B; pp. 39–46. 18. This articulation of the paradoxical status of the event in Beckett is finally more convincing and more useful than Bernard’s. See SBS, pp. 224–26. In resorting to Badiou, I also take issue with Bernard’s account of Beckettian temporality in relation to the concepts of aion and chronos as deployed in Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense. See SBS, pp. 171–230. Bernard reduces the importance of the concept of the event in Deleuze’s discussion, and strips the latter of its ethical and political force. See in particular p. 211, fn. 36. 19. For Badiou, in this respect, methematics, rather than literature or philosophy, is the science of being. For language cannot extricate itself from the presumption of the One. See the introduction to Badiou, L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988).

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EVENTS 20. Badiou, L’éthique: essai sur la conscience du mal (Paris: Hatier, 1993), hereafter E; p. 25. For a more extensive account of Badiou’s thesis and its reliance on Cantor and set theory, see my TPTN, pp. 189–92. 21. This might sound close to Levinas. But Badiou’s differences with the latter are apparently fierce. See E, pp. 19–25; and Simon Critchley, “How Not to Give Way on Your Desire: Notes on Alain Badiou’s Ethics’, Parallax no. 26 (1998), pp. 97–100. As Critchley says, the atheist Badiou’s principal objection to Levinas is that his ethical philosophy is necessarily and inescapably religious. But it is also possible to read Levinas in the mode of what Critchley calls ‘atheist transcendence’, the mode I have adopted throughout this study. See Critchley, ‘Il y a – Holding Levinas’s Hand to Blanchot’s Fire’, in Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed.), Maurice Blanchot: the Demand of Writing (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 108– 22. As should be clear at various points of my account of Badiou, his ethics frequently appears to be rather closer to Levinas’s than Badiou himself would wish to think. 22. Badiou, Manifestes pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 87. 23. Badiou prefers vérité to be translated as ‘truth’, but, in the context of my own arguments, the word may mislead. I have therefore retained the original French term throughout. 24. Beckett, ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce’, in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber, 1972), pp. 1–22, hereafter DBVJ. 25. Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992), hereafter CS; p. 345. 26. The concept of the vérité is touched on only in two short paragraphs, in the Beckett book (B, p. 46). 27. Beckett, Texts for Nothing, in Collected Shorter Prose 1945–1980 (London: John Calder, 1984), hereafter TN; p. 71. 28. Cf. Bernard, who argues that, in the Texts for Nothing, discourse identities itself with the performative act ‘qui épuise son sens dans son énonciation’ (SBS, p. 84). 29. It is here that my insistence on ‘perseverance’ is radically at odds with Abbott’s recent assertion of Beckett’s ‘persistence in difference’, an assertion sustained over against what Abbott calls the postmodern or ‘postromantic, posthumanist, post-Heideggerian Beckett of the nineties’. See BWB, pp. 50, 24. 3 0 . Cf. Leslie Hill’s view of Beckett’s writing as ‘not made of intentions, but intensities’. Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 162. But Hill’s emphasis on ‘indifference’ as the ‘one end’ that Beckett’s work pursues (ibid.) seems to me to be puzzling, and even inconsistent with the above view. It also reinstitutes the concept of the Beckettian project. Cf. for instance p. 82. 31. Beckett, The Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979), p. 290. 32. Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), hereafter VL; p. 22. 33. Quoted Critchley, VL, p. 24. 34. Cf. Richard Begam’s sophisticated account of the double logic of deconstruction, in Beckett as in Derrida, as both deconstructing the metaphysical paradigm from ‘within’ and exploring the possibility of radical, Nietzschean alternatives ‘outside’ it. My version of Beckett here follows Badiou in laying more emphasis on the second activity than Begam is prepared to. See Richard Begam, Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 23, 150– 51,184–85.

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Part III RESPONSES

6 SENSIBILITY

A brief history of modern sensibility Beckett’s fidelity to the event, then, is paradigmatic in its rigour and intransigence, in the persistence of its commitment to what undoes all persistences. But this, the most crucial of Beckettian paradoxes – the determination not to give up on what disempowers, on what calls self, will and ego most radically in question – makes strenuous if not inexorable demands. Such a postmodern ethics may appear to reinstitute the paternal command, the categorical imperative or superego. Doesn’t it threaten a return to constraining insistences on discipline and duty (constraining in that a dutiful response to alterity is clearly not a sufficient response)? How does such an ethics differ, in this respect, from a Christian or a Kantian ethics? Is it not a deontological ethics, and thus at odds with the critique of deontology as articulated by Cornell that I accepted in my introduction? What makes such an ethics postmodern at all? Is it desirable to conceive of an allegedly postmodern ethics in such terms? Need such an ethics be formulated in such a way, or proceed from such a point of departure? An openness to the event is surely not in principle to be imagined as an arduous self-dedication. Lyotard has rather repeatedly described it in terms of passibilité, a disposition, even, paradoxically, a will to be moved. It is precisely the power of being affected rather than affecting that, in the closing section of this book, I shall be putting forward as the relevant ‘point of departure’. Isobel Armstrong has recently been calling for an aesthetic, to emerge in the wake of post-structuralism and post-modernism, that would be properly ethical in that it would be ‘free from the rage of the ego to possess the world through symbol by rejecting alterity’.1

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Crucially, what Armstrong sees as cardinal to such an aesthetic is precisely a process whereby ‘the power of affect’ is rethought ‘in a cognitive space’.2 Armstrong’s italics are very important, here: her case is principally against the epistemological delusions endemic to a supposedly detached, objective (predominantly masculine) rationalism within which the category of the aesthetic is actually ‘the last bastion of the private self hubristically conceived as omnipotent creator … the ultimate aggrandisement of the transcendent subject as master of its world’ (WBM, p. 63). Armstrong insists that a specific construction of ‘reason’ must be made to yield to its other, and to become other, itself, in the process of yielding.3 But this is not to argue for emotivism, a ‘culture of feeling’ or a return to impressionism. Indeed, the ethical dangers of any celebration of a naive, untutored responsiveness or argument for what Empson once called a ‘doctrinaire irrationalism’ should be self-evident.4 My last two chapters, then, set out towards an ethics of affect, but with what I mean to be a pronounced, sustained, deconstructive caution. It may even seem as though little progress is being made. In particular, I want to reconsider two key concepts in past and recent literary theory and criticism, sensibility and reception. I shall argue that, radically rethought, both concepts may now take on an ethical significance. Sensibility is a richly suggestive term, not least historically In particular, of course, from the early eighteenth century onwards, it meant quickness or acuteness in emotional apprehension, a particularly keen susceptibility to emotional influence, indicating a specific kind or quality of emotional capacity, ‘the soft sense of the mind’ that Mackenzie regarded as feminine or feminizing.5 This is sensibility as a disposition to refined or delicate emotion, including compassion. In fact, the more significant conception of sensibility implies Bildung (in a very particular sense), an education in or formation of feeling. At its most sophisticated, the concept of sensibility invokes a subtilization or complexification of feeling, a mode of feeling in the midst of feelings. But, at the same time, the term properly designates an ethical faculty. Sensibility is to be understood as distinct from cognition in that it does not direct itself at an object with the intention of mastering it, but is rather characterized by a mode of openness and attentiveness. It might effectively be thought of as a capacity for being mastered, a receptiveness which even precedes cognition and makes cognition possible. But there is a problem with the history of sensibility, and that is the very currency the term enjoyed in Anglo-American criticism from the 1920s to the late 1960s. The principal source of the modern concern with ‘sensibility’ is of course T.S. Eliot’s 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in which Eliot famously argued

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the existence of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in the seventeenth century, according to which the ‘unification of sensibility’ in the poetry of the early decades gave way to a situation in which later poets ‘thought and felt by fits’.6 A Milton, a Dryden, and subsequently a Gray, Tennyson or Browning can only either feel or think, never both together. Eliot’s theory spawned innumerable articles over four decades which argued the case for or against a dissociation of sensibility in the work of innumerable writers. In retrospect, however, the popularity of the concept can be seen as representing, not a new valuation of sensibility nor its rethinking in a cognitive space, and certainly not the ‘shattering’ of the rationalist subject which Armstrong favours (TH, p. 410), but precisely a new abstraction of sensibility, and thereby a decisive gain for the cognitive intellect within modernity. For there is no question but that Eliot privileges cognition over sensibility. For Eliot, a unified sensibility is one in which the real power and control are always with thought, in which thought supervenes upon feeling, in which a given ‘mode of feeling’ may always be ‘directly and freshly altered’ by ‘reading and thought’ (TMP, p. 286).7 The point is still clearer in the apparent source for Eliot’s concept of sensibility, Rémy de Gourmont’s Le Probléme du Style, where de Gourmont argues for ‘le raisonnement au moyen d’images sensorielles’ as opposed to ‘le raisonnement par idées’, not so much categorically distinct activities as distinct modes of the same activity. Indeed, the former mode is to be preferred partly because it actually involves a repudiation of feeling in the service of intellect: ‘le sentiment inutile,’ writes de Gourmont, ‘est rejeté comme une cause de trouble et l’on obtient ces merveilleuses constructions qui semblent des pures œuvres intellectuelles’.8 What we see, then, from de Gourmont to Eliot to Middleton Murry, Read and the numberless hordes of Eliot’s followers, is not a sustaining emphasis on sensibility within modernity, but rather a decisive triumph over and subjection of sensibility, a modern transformation, intellectualization, even professionalization and thereby a comprehensive derogation of sensibility, the effects of which are still widespread. This shift is part of a larger movement of thought that gives us the code of the new ‘toughness’, Empsonian rigour and discipline, analysis as ‘hard’ interrogation, and, later, finally produces the scholarly blockbuster, research as information overkill and/or pre-emptive strike, as in the work of Richard Ellmann. Yet at the same time, the word ‘sensibility’ also retains something like its older sense, still means something like susceptibility. As such, however, it has become a negative term, designating a power of feeling that remains after the fall, after the cataclysm of dissociation, an altogether cruder and more negligible faculty. This is

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sensibility as recalcitrant to thought and intellect, and therefore a difficult and dangerous force. The two meanings of sensibility for modernity are nowhere more evident than in Leavis, who repeatedly oscillates between them: sensibility as in ‘the line of wit’, unified, urbane, mature, poised, fine and complex, ‘supremely civilized’, ‘toughly reasonable’, endowed with ‘a spirit of good sense’,9 and ‘sensibility’ as in Shelley: ‘ecstatic dissipation’, ‘emotion in itself, unattached, in a void’, ‘the kind of inspiration that works only when critical intelligence is switched off’.10 This latter is a ‘sensibility’ antipathetic ‘to any play of the critical mind’ and thus given over to ‘viciousness’, to ‘the grosser, the truly corrupt gratifications’ (R, pp. 202, 207). It is sensibility as dangerous lure, a chronic and disastrous weakening of will and intellect. Whether sensibility is assimilated to intellect, however, or represented as a force for degradation, the effect is always the same: a relegation of sensibility in relation to cognition and critique. In fact, sensibility – the power to be affected – repeatedly turns out to be the problematic other of criticism as will to power, a will that is actually that of criticism itself, but that it insistently descries in the literary work. The advent of theory hardly changes this configuration at all. Rather, the modern subjection of sensibility is precisely completed by theory, not only because of the triumphant prioritization of intellect in the theoretical discourses dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, but because the concept of affect that is dominant in theory – in Foucault, Deleuze and much of Derrida and Lyotard – is of affect as ‘force’ or ‘libidinal economy’, repeatedly theorized in post-Nietzschean, Dionysian, unremittingly virile terms as an active violence, a movement outwards towards an object, rather than susceptibility or openness to the event. In effect, theory presides over a final eclipse of sensibility. The term virtually vanishes from all but the most conservative critical discourses for two decades and more.

Levinas, Bataille: sensibility and expenditure Over against this neglect, however, I would want to explore the persistent, ethical significance of the concept of sensibility in Levinas’s work, connecting it with a similar persistence in Bataille. For Levinas, the concept of sensibility is intimately linked to a notion of the subject ‘independent of the adventure of cognition, and in which the corporeality of the subject is not separable from its subjectivity’ (OB, p. 78). ‘As a sensibility of flesh and blood’, I am ‘on the hither side of the amphibology of being and entities’ (OB, p. 79). Sensibility has the prephenomenological anteriority that I considered in my first chapter. It comes before

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cognition and ontology alike. Thus Levinas reverses the modern formulation of sensibility as it appears in Eliot and Leavis. In Levinas’s earlier work, however, sensibility is conceived of as ungenerous. It does not ‘make its way outward’ (TI, p. 135). It is rather the very ‘mode of enjoyment’, the mode in which ‘the sensuous element … is savoured, is assimilated’ before that element is ‘taken as so much data for cognition’ (EE, p. 19). Sensibility is not open to the infinite, but is rather a movement that ‘comes incessantly from me’. It is thus not only ‘essentially naive’, but fundamentally and irreducibly self-sufficient, ‘the very narrowness of life’ (TI, p. 138). It is the mode in which the ego wraps itself up in itself. In the later Levinas, however, the concept undergoes a radical transformation, becoming, not a closure of the self upon itself but ‘a pre-originary susceptibility’, a ‘pre-original involvement’, ‘the incessant event of subjection to everything’ (CPP, pp. 146– 47). As sensibility, ‘one is always coram, disturbed in oneself to the point of no longer having any intention’ (OB, p. 92). This means that sensibility does not and cannot ‘congeal into a structure’ (OB, p. 82). It is irreducible to a state and not conceivable as an entity. It appears as a ‘for the other’ that is ‘total gratuity’, a ‘breaking of interest’ (OB, p. 96). This is not a question of ‘the psychological event of compassion’ (CPP, p. 146), however, but a constant ‘exposure to the other’ that is made ineluctably, ‘without holding back’ (OB, p. 15). It is characterized by an ‘immediacy on the surface of the skin’ (OB, p. 64). Levinas associates it with ‘uncovering’ (CPP, p. 146), exposure to wounds, vulnerability: vulnerability, however, explicitly construed, not as a passive reception of stimuli, but as a positive ‘aptitude’ (ibid.). Hence sensibility cannot be distinguished from the power of suffering: it is ‘the nakedness of a skin presented to contact, to the caress, which always … is suffering for the suffering of the other’ (ibid.). A substitution for the other, then, is ‘proper to sensibility’ (OB, p. 77), and the latter has ‘the very modality of dis-interestedness, the form of a corporeal life devoted to expression and to giving’ (OB, p. 50). Once again, it is opposed to the ‘scornful subjectivity’ of the ego (CPP, p. 146), to the ‘imperialism of consciousness’ and its intransigent grasp of the world (OB, p. 92). In Levinas’s conception of sensibility, indeed, we witness an insistence both on the death of the subject and on the birth of a new subjectivity. Sensibility itself becomes ‘the subjectivity of the subject’; but only in involving ‘a defection or defeat of the ego’s identity’ (OB, p. 15). As sensibility, subjectivity has only the fragile, ambivalent status of a being that never returns to itself. ‘No one is at home.’ The ego is always held hostage. What Levinas means by sensibility bears an interesting relation to Bataille’s concept of an unrestricted or general as contrasted to a restricted economy, to his

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theorization and valuation of exuberance, excess, expenditure without reserve. In Bataille’s terms, Levinasian sensibility is a kind of radical economy of the self that is profoundly distinct from the more familiar economies determined by modern Christianity, capital, ‘practical judgment’ and ‘utility’. As Richardson suggests, Bataille consistently maintains that there are ‘essential psychological and sociological characteristics which respond not to self-interest, but to a principle of pure expenditure and loss’.11 As, for Levinas, sensibility is in some sense prior to cognition, so, too, for Bataille, expenditure is prior to accumulation and production, prodigality or generosity to calculation, the general to any restricted economy. There is a will to give which has priority over the contrasting drive, the will to withhold or retain, and which is the ‘material basis’, the play or sheer ‘effervescence of life’ itself.12 Furthermore, to insist on a shift in emphasis from ‘the perspectives of restricted economy to those of general economy’ is to gesture towards the possibility of ‘a Copernican transformation: a reversal … of ethics’ (AS, p. 25). This latter precisely involves a new valuation of sensibility or, more accurately, in Bataille’s terms, ‘archaic sensibility’: The sun gives without ever receiving. Men were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they associated its splendour with the act of someone who gives without receiving … In former times value was given to unproductive glory, whereas in our day it is measured in terms of production. Precedence is given to energy acquisition over energy expenditure … But, dominated though it is by practical judgment and Christian morality, the archaic sensibility is still alive. (AS, p. 29)13 Bataille goes on to suggest that archaic sensibility reappears in ‘the romantic protest against the bourgeois world’ (ibid.). But the important point is evident enough. With the rise of bourgeois culture, loss, display, the sumptuary spectacle must either be sacrificed to ‘the economic principle of balanced accounts’ or take place ‘behind closed doors’.14 (The process is precisely dramatized in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.) The regime of good sense insists with ever greater rigour on reserve, calculation, practical judgment, the will to retain or withhold. Sense takes the side of taboo as contrasted with transgression, work as opposed to eros, as a rational economy to which ‘detachment’ is crucial and which promises a delayed reward, deflecting the subject from ‘immediate solicitations’ and ‘the violence of

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desire’.15 Equally, the very ‘mode of existence’ of ‘discursive thought’ increasingly becomes that of ‘project’, a utilitarian, calculative thought that looks to ends and puts existence off ‘to a later point’.16 Nonetheless, however insistently repressed by modernity – by modern Christianity and utilitarianism – sensibility remains more fundamental than either, and continues a kind of clandestine work. It remains for a postmodern ethics to reassert archaic sensibility within the rational economies, to put the sensibility back into sense.

Suffering and ‘staging’ in Rhys The beauty of Levinas’s conception of sensibility seems to me to be hardly contestable. It is remarkable not least for its emphasis on bodily apprehension. The questions proliferate at once: how might this concept of sensibility contribute to a postmodern mode of ethical reading? What difference might it make to reading novels? How might sensibility be described insofar as it manifests itself in literature? What are the modes of its insertion into literary texts? How does it manifest itself differently in different texts? How is sensibility articulated against other modes of relation to the world – not least cognition – in literary texts? How do the differences between these articulations involve questions of ethical value? What kinds of transformation are needed in our theoretical and critical discourses in order for us to be able to articulate questions of sensibility? Yet, from the outset, the beauty of Levinas’s conception of sensibility needs not only to be profoundly sustained but also, if not interrogated, at least set in certain proportions or given certain limits. One obvious problem with it is its apparent universalism. Levinas never appears to ask the question ‘Whose sensibility?’ What differende might context or positionality make to the ethical value of sensibility? Does not an ethics that privileges vulnerability run the risk of acquiescing in and confirming the threat of violence, exploitation, immiseration and oppression to which vulnerability is constantly exposed? Is not Levinas’s ethics of sensibility an ethics of more importance to oppressor than victim; in fact, a partial ethics? Won’t all the familiar questions of positionality be involved in any adequate reflection on the place and value of sensibility in any given literary text? To focus specifically, again, on gender relations: some feminist scholars (Chanter, Ainley, Chalier) have discovered in Levinas a wholesale feminization of philosophy.17 Chanter suggests, for instance, that Levinas is of crucial importance in conferring a philosophical positivity on the invisibility and suffering that have

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historically been women’s. But isn’t she in danger, in the very act of an ethical valuation, of freezing that invisibility, that suffering and the power relations that produce them in place, as though they cannot be changed, only revalued? Irigaray’s account of women’s déréliction – a destitution or lack of an identity that has still to be made – is well known.18 For Irigaray, one of the ways of negotiating déréliction is the ‘masquerade’, a play of provisional identities as part of a progress forwards.19 A Levinasian ethics, by contrast, an ethics which collapses identity into sensibility, would seem to be an ethics of déréliction itself, an ethics of some importance insofar as it might be acknowledged by men, but one which arguably threatens to confirm women in a position of subordination and deprivation. For the present, then, the value of sensibility is finally undecidable. As I have already underlined, Isobel Armstrong writes of thinking affect in a cognitive space. So too, crucially, in his most important work, at least, Bataille does not actually oppose general to restricted economy, expenditure to retention, excess to moderation, any more than he opposes sex to work. Rather, he sees their complex interdependences and fragile states of equilibrium, their need for completion by the other.20 As contrasted with the understanding of the term in the Eliotic and Leavisite traditions, Levinas’s might indeed be thought of as a ‘feminized’ conception of sensibility. Insofar as it is made into an ethical value in literary criticism, it may also tend to privilege a canon of female writers. But there is an immediate danger, not only of hypostasizing sensibility as ‘essentially female’, but, in doing so, of confirming an order in which sensibility is likely to be proportional to powerlessness. In other words, there is always a problematics of sensibility. This is nowhere better articulated than in the work of women writers themselves. In Jean Rhys’s fiction, sensibility is privileged, intensely valued as an ethical mode of attending to the world, valued above other such modes. But it is also articulated through discursive practices which call in question the particularity of its cultural construction, of its place in a given web of social relations. The heroines in Good Morning, Midnight and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie might be thought of as heroines of sensibility. They live primarily as sensibility, as subject to ‘the winds of emotion and impulse’.21 In Rhys, sensibility is precisely valued in contrast to a kind of closure within the cognitive endeavour that characterizes the men in her world, in particular, and that all too easily breeds Bataillean calculation and mean prudence. ‘He had more than once allowed himself to be drawn into affairs which he had regretted bitterly afterwards,’ thinks Mackenzie to himself, ‘though when it came to getting out of these affairs his business instinct came to his help’ (ALM, p. 19). Julia, by contrast, is above all susceptible, open to affect, in sudden,

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surprising and sometimes obscure ways: ‘But much too strong – the room, the street, the thing in myself, oh, much too strong.’22 Rhys’s heroines are characterized by their power of constant involvement, of gratuitous disinterest, their disposition to self-expenditure. It is precisely this – Levinasian sensibility, expenditure without reserve – that Mackenzie cannot credit in Julia: Almost he was forced to believe that she was a female without the instinct of self-preservation. And it was against Mr Mackenzie’s code to believe that any female existed without a sense of self-preservation. (ALM, p. 20) Sensibility is not to be confused with compassion, though Rhys’s heroines are susceptible enough to others’ pain, as when Julia suddenly and reasonlessly cries ‘for the old woman with the bald head, for all the sadness of this damned world, for all the fools and all defeated’ (ALM, p. 25). For compassion implies distance and a measure of deliberation, and Rhys’s women are actually given up to an unwilled and unrelenting exposure. This is less effectively registered in Julia’s tears for the old woman than in all the tiny, incidental vignettes of women’s pain, grief, anger, drudgery and difficulty the novel is strewn with. Julia simply registers all these little moments ‘on the surface of her skin’, the point precisely being that the moments in question are not given any peculiar emphasis or marked significance. For to endow them with such weight would be to opt for a kind of static focus which would at once betray the movement of sensibility itself. Here, too, as in Levinas, the power of sensibility is intimately tied to a noncoincidence in subjectivity, a dissolution of anything that might be grasped as identity. ‘I have no pride,’ says Sasha, ‘no pride, no name, no face, no country’ (GMM, p. 48). The corollary, however, is a raw, acute vulnerability, where exposure to affect is also constant exposure to the sheer random violence of suffering. The exemplary woman of sensibility is also in danger of becoming the exemplary victim, constantly prey to casual cruelties and wanton injustices. Here, surely, I seem to be tracing the limit to Rhys’s ethics of sensibility: the drive to selfexposure inexorably leads the woman to degradation, defeat and tragedy. Indeed, under patriarchy, it is never clear that the will to self-exposure is not in fact inverted power, power wedded to hopelessness and therefore issuing in a will to self-destruction. But, of course, Rhys does not need me to trace the ethical limits of sensibility in her work. She traces them herself. Whilst sustaining a commitment to sensibility as ethical value, she also refuses to grant it any finality. In fact, Rhys

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puts sensibility into play as part of what Irigaray means by ‘masquerade’. Here, I am taking my cue from Nancy Harrison. For Harrison, openness or susceptibility is characteristic of Rhys’s heroines. But the texts are also marked by a particular practice which Harrison calls ‘staging’. ‘Staging’ is the most important of the gender-specific, formal strategies in novels by modern women writers. The novel becomes a performance, a ‘gestural presentation’ of the lives of the characters in which discourse is perceived as shaping those lives on the page. Rhys’s novels, thus, are best thought of as ‘spectacular’, as exhibiting a gestural significance in their very self-display In Harrison’s version of it, though, is ‘staging’ fully distinct from the more familiar forms of self-reflexivity in modern and postmodern fiction? Her account of it might appear to posit the formal strategies in women’s writing as activating a reflexive critical intelligence taking sensibility as its object. This in turn would take us back to that ‘play of the critical mind’ that, for Leavis, is the most crucial ethical activity in a novel. Doesn’t this bring us back precisely to the relegation of sensibility to secondary status that has been characteristic of the Anglo-American critical tradition? But Harrison argues that ‘the self-consciousness of the woman writer is different from the self-consciousness associated with male novelists in this century’: The performative aspect of the woman’s novel, the feminine gesture that distances for perspective and at the same time invites the reader to personal participation, allows the drama of women’s writing to surface in form as well as content. For the woman reader, the woman’s novel invokes an audience whose response is communal, though private – ‘communal’ because it is perceived by each reader as private and personal.23 The first part of this quotation, however, is surely more compelling than the second. Within a conception of Rhys’s performative strategy as paradoxically a mode both of invitation and distanciation, narrative contradictorily draws us into the world of a story that it also tells us is not whole, or not the whole story. This is surely an appropriate description of what is most distinctive in Rhys’s narratives. But how can Harrison be certain that Rhys’s novels also generate a communal response? How can a novel evoke a communal response because it evokes a personal one, other than in terms of the universal truths of the human (or female) heart? Doesn’t this argument merely resort to a familiar metaphysics that always

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sees the general ‘within’ the particular? Here, Harrison is open to the kind of critique that Drucilla Cornell directs at Rorty and Gadamer: she fails to take account of the play of difference across identity, and can therefore still believe in a ‘we’ who share a tradition or a conversation.24 As Cornell insists, explicitly agreeing with Levinas, the basis of ethics cannot be ‘identification with those whom we recognize as like ourselves’ (PoL, p. 66). If Harrison is resistant to the thought of difference, she is so, not least, to the self-difference of Rhys’s texts. She reads the Rhys text as fundamentally self-identical, and as summoning the reader herself to an act of identification. But textual or narrative self-difference is surely crucial, not only to Rhys’s strategy of ‘staging’ but to her treatment of sensibility and the suffering that is so often its consequence. The constant slippages in narrative focus, angle or point of view in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, for example, are not mere instances of reflexive distancing whereby Rhys informs us that sensibility is only one attitude towards the world. Sensibility is Rhys’s commitment. Rather, in breaking up the narrative, in converting it into a series of ‘gestural presentations’, the shifts and slippages disrupt, displace, even deconstruct the flow of sensibility itself. As Julia herself refers to her life as made up of ‘disconnected episodes’ (ALM, p. 129), so, too, the narrative in which she appears is ‘episodic’: The central heating was not working properly and she felt cold. She dressed herself and then went and stood by the window to make up her face and to put kohl on her eyes, which were beautiful – long and dark, very candid, almost childish in expression. Her eyes gave her away. By her eyes and the deep circles under them you saw that she was a dreamer, that she was vulnerable – too vulnerable ever to make a success of a career of chance. (ALM, p. 11) There is a check in or revision of the narrative, here, in the shift from third to second person narration, the transition from free indirect discourse to an exterior point of view and the abrupt ‘deepening’ effected by the second paragraph. Narrative breaks of this kind occur throughout the novel, ensuring that sensibility manifests itself insistently, but also unpredictably and often fleetingly. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, sensibility has no consistency, ‘no identity’, and is brought to no completion. Paradoxically, the disruptions of the flow of sensibility ensure its continuing mobility and free passage. Pace Harrison, suffering in Rhys is

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intensely particular. But it is also always likely to enter into composition with other possibilities and is never final: Julia had abandoned herself. She was kneeling and sobbing and wishing she had brought another handkerchief. She was crying now because she remembered that her life had been a long succession of humiliations and mistakes and ridiculous efforts. Everybody’s life was like that. At the same time, in a miraculous manner, some essence of her was shooting upwards like a flame. She was great. She was a defiant flame shooting upwards not to plead but to threaten. Then the flame sank down again, useless, having reached nothing. (ALM, pp. 94–95) Julia’s assertion of her ‘essence’ is precisely a particular, defiant ‘gesture’, in Harrison’s specific sense. As gesture, it underlines the conditional character of Julia’s suffering whilst not in the slightest denying its force. In Rhys, then, narrative serves insistently as both a record of and an escape or movement on from suffering. Conversely, suffering itself has both a drearily repetitive and yet also a provisional aspect. There are divisions and shifts in the narrative voice and mode in Good Morning, Midnight, too: ‘Now, where shall we go?’ He puts his arm through mine and says, in French: ‘Now, where?’ Well, what harm can he do to me? He is out for money and I haven’t got any. I am invulnerable. There we are, arm in arm, outside the Closerie des Lilas and when I think of my life it seems to me so comical that I have to laugh. It has taken me a long time to see how comical it has been, but I see it now, I do. ‘You must tell me where to go,’ he says, ‘because I don’t know Paris.’ (GMM, pp. 64–65) Once again, the separation of different paragraphs and distinct tones is familiar. It constitutes a refusal to ‘put everything on the same plane’, in Rhys’s phrase (GMM, p. 12). But if the experience of the heroine of sensibility is presented on different planes, the effect is to render it both searingly vivid and spectral. Ghostliness recurs in Rhys’s novels as both theme and metaphor. Her heroines

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repeatedly meditate on their own ‘ghostliness’, the dream-like unreality or arbitrary strangeness of their lives. If Rhys’s narrative practices shift constantly from one mode of representation to another, the result is that representation itself is increasingly traversed by a principle of instability. ‘If I could get to the end of what I was feeling,’ says Julia, ‘it would be the truth about myself and about the world and about everything that one puzzles and pains about all the time’ (ALM, p. 41). But representation in Rhys starts out from the premise that there is no such truth and no such end, no end to the life of sensibility. In thus inserting the principle of spectrality into the practice of representation, Rhys’s novels continue to argue the need for ethics and for justice. In other words, behind all the suffering in Rhys’s world, there is an obstinate insistence on the unreality of what is represented and the possibility of what Sasha calls ‘a world that could be so different’ (GMM, p. 89).

Cornell, Nih and ‘fissures in reality’ Far from being reducible to mere narrative self-consciousness, then, ‘staging’ may be glossed, in the terms of Drucilla Cornell’s ethical feminism, as an original articulation of the material suffering of women in a kind of writing that is adequate to women’s difference, disrupts the tyranny of ‘established reality’ and continually affirms the possibility of a different version of a given story. Sasha’s word is ‘could’ not ‘might’. Rhys’s concern is with what Cornell has repeatedly referred to as ‘the unerasable moment of utopianism’ (PoL, p. 8). For Cornell, this latter is chiefly guarded in specific practices of writing associated with Derridean deconstruction, postmodern ethics, ethical feminism and certain women writers and novels by women. Rhys’s is one such practice. It keeps alive a version of the woman’s story which recognizes how far sensibility, vulnerability, expenditure without reserve do not of themselves have to mean humiliation, exploitation and victimization. The implication, nonetheless, is that an ethics of sensibility is not sufficient in itself, that it must have a proleptic dimension. This case is more explicitly evident in the more extravagant, flamboyant, even ecstatic mode of ‘staging’ to be found in the fiction of Anaïs Nin. A more protracted account of Cornell will be helpful in making this clear. Cornell articulates the world inhabited by women as a hinterland or middle ground between fiction and fact, representation and materiality, writing and ‘the fundamental empirical reality of actual women’.25 This world is quite distinct from what Cornell calls ‘reality’, the real as historically constructed by patriarchy. It is thus that Cornell justifies a writing committed to the ‘elaboration of the

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suffering of women as unique to women’. There can be no ‘indifference’ to the specificity of that suffering (BA, pp. 4, 6). But there is also the constant danger, in the production of narratives of women’s lives and sufferings, in the very expression of women’s difference, of lapsing back into the terms of the masculine imaginary or the masculine symbolic, and thereby also into ‘the law of the replication of existing gender identity’ (BA, p. 9). In particular, if the writing of women’s history is extremely important, the backward look involved in such writing risks a continuing imprisonment within ontology, foundationalism and their foreclosure on possibility. The crucial point is that, as ‘the feminine is precisely what is denied the specificity of a “nature” or a “being” within the masculine symbolic’, so ‘the Other to the gender hierarchy is not now a reality’.26 An adequate feminist ethics will therefore be extremely attentive to the ethical significance of questions of representation and discourse. An engagement with ‘the full disruptive power of the imagination’ is finally crucial to ethics (T, p. 35). The challenge to patriarchy must also be a challenge to established modes of representation and writing, insofar as these have always evolved under and therefore been contaminated by patriarchy. Ethics, then, is ‘beyond accommodation’ with the masculine symbolic (T, p. 64). Ethical feminism will therefore look to the Good as the latter might lie beyond the deconstruction of foundationalist philosophy. In that respect, ethical feminism deals in a utopianism that specifically opens up with postmodernity (BA, p. 18). But ethics itself will always be concerned as much with what is to come as with what has been. Since ‘the Good is beyond any of its current justifications’, in any appeal ‘ “back” to what has been established’ we must also ‘look forward to what might be’ (PoL, p. 110). It is precisely thus that – with brilliant clarity – Cornell reads Levinas: The call of the Good in Levinas’s sense commits us to the not yet of what has never been present, cannot be fully recalled, and therefore cannot be adequately projected in an all-encompassing positive description of the Good or of Justice. (PoL, p. 94) Ethics cannot be confined to the description of values deemed to exist prior to any account of them. Thus in literature as in jurisprudence, representation that is both feminist and ethical will seek to give a name to hitherto unnamed and unnoticed ‘harms’ (of which date rape in law would be a simple instance, PoL, p. 21). Ethical feminism recognizes the performative nature of language and adduces new

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metaphors, providing terms where none existed before. It insistently thinks the possible, is intrinsically concerned with ‘the imagined ethical expression of another mode of being with the Other’ which is ‘given play as the embodiment of an explicitly utopian longing’ (PoL, p. 8). Of course, it is crucially important to break the silence that has kept the history of women, ‘in all its variations, from being heard’. But ‘we also need to recognize explicitly the “should be” inherent in accounts of feminine sexual difference’ (T, p. 59). The goodness and justice that ethical feminism ardently desires are not to be found in the past and can only be imagined, as, at the present time, the good and rational society – the society that is just to women – seems appallingly remote. Here ethical feminism resembles and draws on deconstruction and even shares its temporality: we are prisoners of the most dismaying and extraordinary madnesses beyond which there is no immediate and decisive progress. For that very reason, ethical feminism and deconstruction alike must continue to invite us to ‘new worlds’ – however far off these latter may seem – as part of the very commitment to reason (PoL, p. 107). Both enjoin an obligation to patient labour in the preservation of the unerasable, utopian moment. In this respect, Cornell’s case interestingly resembles some of Christopher Norris’s recent arguments, but is ultimately far more compelling than the latter, caught as they are in the discursive traps of an Anglo-Saxon moralism. Both deconstruction and ethical feminism do not so much break with as radically reformulate the Enlightenment project. They express a desire for what lies, not beyond the Enlightenment itself, but beyond ‘the current definition of Enlightenment ideals’ (PoL, p. 11, italics mine). Thus ethical feminism produces a challenge to the containment of women which also keeps open the future of sexual difference, holding a consciousness of suffering in tension with creativity and hope. Indeed, ethics in itself is a function of imperfection or – in a term of Cornell’s that was also in play earlier in this study – ‘inadequation’. It is precisely their insistence on inadequation that makes ethical feminism and deconstruction utopian (BA, p. 107). For that insistence is also an insistence on the emergence of future constructions, and therefore on creativity and the possibility of radical transformation. This is a marked emphasis in Cornell’s account of the women novelists who have attracted her attention. In Cornell’s terms, for example, in Marguerite Duras’s women, we get the measure of a suffering that ‘tracks women down in a masculine-dominated society. Mourning becomes an all-encompassing despair or grief because there can be no location of feminine identity’ (BA, p. 57). Yet, at the same time, for Duras, ethically, the absence of such a location is also an opening or opportunity. Duras turns aside from the search for female identity

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itself and looks ‘to the subversive power of the holes in discourse’ that point beyond the order of the masculine symbolic to a feminine that is shut out of it and has still to be articulated or created (T, p. 79). Likewise, in Cassandra, Christa Wolf articulates a female past that is not exactly an expression of ‘the truth of woman as she is or was’. It is rather a mythical past and, as such, a celebration ‘of the utopian potential of the feminine’ (T, pp. 109–110). Myth is one instance of a mode of narrative that is suited to the ethical feminist in that it inhabits a hinterland between actuality and possibility: the world presented in myth cannot be separated from the metaphoric power of language (T, p. 109). Fantasy is another such narrative mode in that it affirms ‘the feminine as performance’ and evokes ‘a different way of being altogether that challenges gender hierarchy’ (BA, p. 19). So, too, modes of narrative that disrupt ‘the linear narrative of masculine discourse’ and its orientation ‘towards the coherent expression’ of a pre-ordained message can be deployed in elaboration of ‘a utopian ethical moment from within women’s actual experience’ (BA, pp. 43, 45, 47). In Rhys’s work, the effort to preserve that ‘utopian moment’ functions chiefly as a refusal to let the utopian horizon disappear utterly. It insistently breaks up the threnody, refusing to let grief have the last word, proclaim itself as the ineluctable fate of sensibility. By contrast, Nin’s fiction effects a more sustained balance between ‘ethical moment’ and ‘actual experience’. Nin herself is abundantly explicit about the importance of the utopian drive in her work, the need to try ‘to create a world in which one can live’.27 This is crucial to what is made of sensibility within the fiction. There is a point to specifying Nin’s fiction, here. In the 1980s and 1990s, most of the criticism has concentrated on the Diary.28 That preoccupation, however, merely corresponds to a critical disposition in favour of positive description or the backward look, documentary, reportage or narrative aspiring to the condition of either. Its corollary is deafness to the kind of narrative mode exemplified in the fiction. For the mode of that fiction – notably the five novels that make up Cities of the Interior – is one, again, that holds ‘actual experience’ in tension with utopian possibility. Sensibility, suffering and the relationship between them are elaborated precisely in the terms of that tension. The emphasis on an art which looks towards the future, in which representation is powerfully transformed by the proleptic impulse, is recurrent throughout Nin’s essays and theoretical work. As Deduck suggests, the essays insistently stress the construction of ‘the world of tomorrow’ as opposed to what Cornell calls ‘reality’ and Nin calls decadence, defining it as ‘the systematic repetition of forms’. 29 At the same time, they repudiate mimesis both in the neo-Aristotelean sense and as what Nin calls

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‘photographic realism’. For the mimetic premise ‘discounts all possibility of change, of transformations, and therefore does not show the way out of situations which trap human beings’.30 The diary form ‘[exposes] constantly the relation between the past and the present’ (NF, p. 159). By contrast, the novel is a mobile construct in which ‘the lens of the camera eye … each time catches new aspects, new territories of experience’ or new ‘elements’, on which the reader is therefore ‘forced to concentrate’.31 This is not to say that the novel should deal in fantasy or dispense with experience, that it can cut itself off from ‘the chamber of horrors we call history’ (IFSM, p. 17). It rather simultaneously inflects the genre backwards and forwards: backwards, in that it returns the novel to its ‘original’ function as evident in ‘the Italian novella’; forwards, in that that function itself is the production of ‘the never-before-experienced’ (NF, p. 90). It is thus that the novel may become ‘a dynamic form serving as a catalyst for future transformation’ (Deduck, RR, p. 90). Such a ‘dynamic form’ tends to open up ‘fissures in reality’; not just in ‘reality’ as Cornell understands it, but in the reality to which the novel in some sense remains tied.32 Within this reality, what chiefly traps Nin’s women is precisely the problematics of sensibility. The protagonist in House of Incest, for example, lives primarily as sensibility, being given to ‘loving without knowingness’ and possessed of a power of ‘secret soft yielding’ (HI, pp. 178, 182). House of Incest is a prose poem on sensibility as an intensity or even a surplus of ethical consciousness, on ‘hearing far too much and seeing more than is humanly bearable’ (HI, p. 188). Yet here, once more, openness to affect is also constant exposure to violent and arbitrary pain. Nin’s women might appropriately be described as prodigies of sensibility. The erotica are not perhaps the best example of this.33 Yet Nin’s own preface to Delta of Venus precisely stresses its distinctiveness as a ‘feminine treatment of sexual experience’ where ‘masculine language’ – in Cornell’s terms, the masculine symbolic – has proved ‘inadequate’.34 Indeed, where such a transformation of erotic discourse is discernible in Delta of Venus and Little Birds, it is so inasmuch as the writing takes on a utopian dimension. Nin was well aware that the world of pornography is essentially rarefied: the exclusive focus on ‘the sexual life’, she wrote, ‘is not natural’.35 Having recognized that fact, however, what she does is to take the artificiality of the pornographic mode and both feminize and transform it precisely by shifting it decisively in a utopian direction. In effect, Nin’s erotica produce a world in which women can venture all without risking exploitation, pain, rejection or domination. The lavish accounts of sexual feeling, the rush and profusion of passionate and erotic precisions, the luxuriant

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dwelling on modes of openness and responsiveness are versions of the movements of sensibility as seen from a utopian perspective. But the very condition of pornography in Nin’s transformative version of it is that sensibility can be sheltered from eventual devastation. This is what separates the pornography from the serious fiction. While the former illuminates the latter, it does so only in a minor mode. Sensibility is arguably the most distinctive feature of the women who dominate the novels of Cities of the Interior. A ‘power of absorption’ and ‘receptivity’ – a ‘principle of great love, as a hunger of the eyes, skin, of the whole body’ – go hand in hand with an acute ‘vulnerability and sentience’ and the capacity of experiencing ‘the pain of the whole world’.36 Sensibility does indeed take on extraordinary dimensions, becoming ‘mythical’, in Cornell’s sense: You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this … What the soul so often cannot say through the body because the body is not subtle enough, you can say. (CI, p. 434) Thus Donald to Sabina, in A Spy in the House of Love. Sensibility is given a Levinasian priority over the cognitive endeavour to which patriarchy commits itself. ‘in the drunkenness of caresses history is made, and science, and philosophy’ (CI, p. 277). But sensibility is necessarily and profoundly ethical: ‘No hurt will come from me,’ thinks Lillian to herself. ‘No judgment. No woman ever judged the life stirring within her womb’ (CI, p. 53). Nin’s women have no truck with what Cornell calls the myth of impenetrability, of the self-enclosure involved in ‘the relegation of the Other to pure externality’ (PoL, p. 54). For Cornell, the denial of ‘the “trace” of the Other’ in oneself involves a ‘hubris of the myth of safety’ and a choice of certainty as opposed to generosity. If such an option is at all available to Nin’s women, it is so only transiently. In Nin’s world, the denial of selfdifference, of the stranger within, is principally masculine and equally manifests itself as a denial of sensibility and its ethical power. In this respect, Nin’s most sustained account of the collision of masculine and feminine principles emerges in the middle section of Winter of Artifice. What troubles Stella is precisely her father’s self-enclosure, his refusal to recognize her, to ‘take her in’. That selfenclosure is matched by the systemic self-enclosure of the masculine symbolic, the ‘man-made world’ which offers Stella no place other than on its own terms.37 The father is condemned to fixture:

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It was something like pain for him to move about easily in the realm of impulse. He was now as incapable of an impulse as his body was incapable of moving, incapable of abandoning himself to the great uneven flow of life with its necessary disorder and ugliness. (ibid.) The daughter, by contrast, is associated with a principle of fluidity which insistently takes her out elsewhere, towards the other, and indeed towards her father: To leap out freely beyond the self, love must flow out and beyond this wall of confused identities. Now she is all confused in her boundaries. She doesn’t know where her father begins, where she begins, where it is he ends, what is the difference between them. (WI, p. 91) It is precisely on this contrast – a contrast that never lapses back into essentialist or oppositional logic, since one of its terms is never stable – that Winter of Artifice hinges its critique of patriarchy, and the defeat of sensibility that is the inseparable accompaniment of patriarchal authority. Elsewhere in Nin’s fiction, the division between genders is less clearcut. The men rather suffer from the Vronsky syndrome: beyond a certain point or at a critical juncture, they fail to keep pace, a failure obliquely expressed by Tolstoy in the detail of Vronsky’s fall in the horse race in Anna Karenina. In Cities of the Interior, beyond a certain limit, Nin’s men recoil into detachment, return to a principle of self (or self-sameness). This movement may effectively be involuntary. It nonetheless represents a failure in sensibility relative to the heroines, as in the case of Jay and Lillian and the collapse of their relationship in Ladders to Fire: No noise, no care, no work undone, no love scene unresumed, no problem unsolved, ever kept him awake. He could roll over and forget … He just rolled over and extinguished everything. (CI, p. 54) Nin’s men are hardly the less loveable for this failure, to the heroines. And yet, for all their closeness to Nin’s women, they remain infected by a patriarchal

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principle that correspondingly infects their relationships and limits their power to give. Furthermore, if we extrapolate from that infection to its larger social context, we arrive at the ‘bigger world full of cruelties, dangers and corruptions’ that Djuna senses just outside her room (CI, p. 168). This latter is Rhys’s world, the world of ‘the father, authority, men of power, men of wealth’ where ‘one sells one’s charms, one’s playfulness, and enters a rigid world of discipline, duty, contracts, accountings’ (ibid.). Out there, with an exact and remorseless logic, suffering lies in wait. But equally, the rarefied world of the room, the private space, the ‘city of the interior’ cannot remain immune. For the possibility of suffering at once invades with the other towards whom sensibility is ineluctably turned. The fate of sensibility in this respect, its parallel consequences in both public and private worlds, is nowhere better demonstrated than in The Four-Chambered Heart. Djuna is finally driven desperate by giving unstintingly, first to her lover Rango, then to him and his wife. She flees to England for rest, only to be awoken on the boat by the fearfully needy grand blessé de guerre, who immediately and instinctively feels that she is the very ‘woman I can talk to’ (CI, pp. 316–17), and drains her of those scant resources she still has left. Faced with the seeming inextricability of sensibility and suffering in the world she evokes, Nin responds with a variety of differing narrative and aesthetic strategies. Rather than ‘fleshing out’ her fictional world and bestowing an ‘authenticity’ upon it, she works to strip it of ‘reality’ and ‘conviction’, to open up those ‘fissures in reality’ that I referred to earlier. She thereby attempts to preserve a sense both of utopian possibility within the world she evokes, and of the latter’s contingency. Thus for example with her abandonment of the principle of linear development. In her introduction to Cities of the Interior, Nin herself points out that the separate books are interchangeable in position, like the parts of a mobile, and can be read in any order (CI, p. xii). The effect is precisely to deny the conviction of a fixity (to the text, in this instance) that is preordained and always requires the backward look, a conviction that is apparently well-nigh intrinsic to the masculine imaginary. The abrupt breaks and lateral shifts in Nin’s narratives likewise introduce a principle of irreducible self-difference which means that neither narrative present nor narrative future is likely to be entirely comprehensible in terms of narrative past. So, too, with characterization: Nin’s women are not altogether separate, ‘fully individualized’ figures. They are always becoming, do not petrify into being, exist primarily as sensibility precisely for that reason. The heroines thus continually cross boundaries and threaten to resemble each other more than they do themselves. But the shifts and transformations in narrative mode, the digressions and narrative excursions can have another consequence, too, as with the account of the sirocco in Ladders to Fire (CI, p. 36).

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Since it is Djuna’s feelings that are really at issue in this passage, what the latter makes possible is a remetaphorization of the woman’s experience which – again – becomes an exploration of the boundaries of the masculine symbolic. The struggle to remetaphorize is evident everywhere in Cities of the Interior. In that respect, the novels look forward, not just to a qualitatively different world, but to a new expressive repertoire that it will call forth. The dominant style and discursive mode in Cities of the Interior markedly privilege abstraction and generality over empirical documentation, the symbolic over the literal and, in Genette’s terms, the ‘iterative’ over the ‘singulative’ and ‘summary’ over ‘scene’. This reflects Nin’s commitment to what she calls ‘mythological’ as opposed to ‘factual’ discourse. ‘You never ask the kind of question I hate’, says Sabina to Lillian in Ladders to Fire, ‘What city? What man? What year? What time? Facts. I despise them’ (CI, p. 97). The novels turn negligently aside from questions of ‘factuality’ and empirical precision. In effect, they are characterized by a strenuously feminist anti-positivism which drastically reduces the status of positive knowledge so that ‘only the important dates of deep feeling may recur again and again each time anew through the wells, fountains and rivers of music’ (CI, p. 238). In other words, Nin’s novels offer us the life of sensibility as the significant life. At one point in The FourChambered Heart, Djuna rails against novels promising experience and then remaining on the periphery, reporting only the semblance, the illusions, the costumes, and the falsities, opening no wells … Teaching nothing, revealing nothing, cheating us of truth, of immediacy, of reality. (CI, p. 272) The ‘reality’ in question, here, might seem to be a visionary one. But the word does double duty. What all the novels referred to in the quotation have also avoided is the reality of ‘the crises, the pitfalls, the wars, and the traps of human life … the naked knowledge of the cruelties that take place between men and women in the pit of solitary nights’ (ibid.). No passage more clearly gives us both an account of the problematics of sensibility in Nin’s work and an indication of the connection between it and the aesthetic strategies she adopts. These strategies do not merely serve to register or display the problem. Rather, they set to work on it, deconstruct it, explore its limits along with its possibilities. In that sense, like Cornell’s, like Rhys’s, though in a less ambivalent mode, Nin’s work constantly reaches towards a future in which the fate of sensibility – like that of women themselves – might be constitutively different.

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In Rhys’s novels, then, there is a ‘staging’ of the problematics of sensibility that works to keep hold of ‘the unerasable moment of utopianism’. In Nin’s fiction, a deconstructive elaboration of sensibility holds open an utopian horizon. These are just two particular instances of analytical distinctions that could doubtless be multiplied, principally with regard to the work of women novelists. This is because, historically and for historical reasons, the ethics – and the ethical predicaments – of sensibility have more frequently been women’s concerns. Don’t men need to turn to and learn from the ethics of sensibility in women’s writing? May not such writing now be a primary means of sustaining political hope? The questions seem the more pressing in the context of Cornell’s warning, as long ago as 1991, that we are presently seeing the gender hierarchy ‘restored’, and ‘anything associated with the feminine … disparaged, devalued, feared and, ultimately, repudiated’.38 One of the problems with a literary theory and criticism that seeks to identify itself with a grand political project is that the conviction and sense of urgency inspired by the latter are likely to serve as a seemingly imperious justification – again – for a deontological morality as distinct from an ethics. As I suggested in my introduction, Eagleton’s work would be a conspicuous example of this. A more reflective concern with sensibility may be one way of countering this drive. Indeed, it is the literature of sensibility – principally as practised by women writers – that may now be one of the most crucial means of keeping alive a plausible, radical vision. The difference to that vision is the extent to which it begins in openness rather than closure. Above all, however, it is a vision that begins in ethics.

Notes ALM

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Jean Rhys

AS BA CI DoV GMM HI IFSM JR NF

The Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption, Georges Bataille Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law, Drucilla Cornell Cities of the Interior, Anaïs Nin Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys House of Incest, Anaïs Nin In Favour of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, Anaïs Nin Jean Rhys and the Novel us Women’s Text, Nancy R. Harrison The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin

PL

The Provocation of Levinas, Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds)

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The Philosophy of the Limit, Drucilla Cornell Revaluation, F.R. Leavis

RR

Realism, Reality and the Fictional Theory of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Anaïs Nin, Patricia A. Deduck Selected Essays, T.S. Eliot

SE T

Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference, Drucilla Cornell

TH

‘Textual Harassment: the Ideology of Close Reading, or How Close is Close?’, Isobel Armstrong

TMP

‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T.S. Eliot

WBM

‘Writing from the Broken Middle: The Post-Aesthetic’, Isobel Armstrong Winter of Artifice, Anaïs Nin

WI

1. Isobel Armstrong, ‘Writing from the Broken Middle: The Post-Aesthetic’, Women: A Cultural Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 1998), pp. 62–96, hereafter WBM; p. 72. See also ‘So What’s All This about the Mother’s Body? The Aesthetic, Gender and the Polis’, in Judith Still and Michael Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 218–36. 2. Armstrong, ‘Textual Harassment: the Ideology of Close Reading, or How Close is Close?’, Textual Practice, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1995), pp. 401–20, hereafter TH; p. 403. 3. For an indication of how Armstrong herself has such a principle condition her practice, see her Charlotte Brontë’s City of Glass (the Hilda Hulme Lecture, 1992; London: University of London Senate House Printing Services, 1993), pp. 11–19. 4. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), p. 15. 5. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 116. 6. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, hereafter Eliot, TMP, in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), hereafter SE, pp. 281–91, p. 288. 7. Eliot, ‘Philip Massinger’, SE, pp. 205–20, p. 286. 8. See Rémy de Gourmont, Le problème du style: questions d’art, de littérature et de grammaire (third edition, Paris: Société de Mercure de France, 1902), p. 70. For the influence of de Gourmont on Eliot, in this respect, see F.W. Bateson, ‘Contributions to a Dictionary of Critical Terms II: Dissociation of Sensibility’, Essays in Criticism, Vol. 1, No. iii (July 1951), pp. 302–12, pp. 305–8. 9. F.R. Leavis, ‘The Line of Wit’, in Revaluation (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1978), hereafter Leavis, R, pp. 17–45, esp. pp. 37–38. 10. Leavis, ‘Shelley’, in R, pp. 191–224, pp. 200–201. 11. Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 69.

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RESPONSES 12. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), hereafter AS; pp. 21, 10. 13. Compare MT, p. 34 for a Levinasian account of a similar conception of the generosity of being in Heidegger. 14. Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–39, ed. and tr. Allan Stoekl (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 117, 124. 15. Bataille, Eroticism, tr. Mary Dalwood (London: Calder and Boyars, 1987), p. 41. 16. Bataille, Inner Experience, tr. with an introd. by Leslie Ann Boldt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 46. 17. Tina Chanter, ‘Feminism and the Other’, in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas (London: Roudedge, 1986), hereafter PL, pp. 32–56; Alison Ainley, ‘Amorous Discourses: the Phenomenology of Eros and Love Stories’, in PL, pp. 70–82; and Catherine Chalier, ‘Ethics and the Feminine’, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, Re-reading Levinas (London: Athlone, 1991), pp. 119–29. 18. See Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984), p. 72 and passim. 19. On the female masquerade, see for instance Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 135–36. 2 0 . Cf. Steven Connor’s account of Bataille’s work as foreshadowing Derrida’s ‘deconstructive project’, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 71–80, especially p. 79; and Derrida’s own deconstructive account of Bataille, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: a Hegelianism without Reserve’, in Writing and Difference, tr. with an introd. and additional notes by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 251–77. 2 1 . Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), hereafter ALM; p. 18. 22. Rhys, Good Morning; Midnight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), hereafter GMM; p. 108. 23. Nancy R. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), hereafter JR; p. 4. 24. Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (London: Roudedge, 1992), hereafter PoL; p. 35. 25. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (London: Roudedge, 1991), hereafter BA; p. 3. 2 6 . Cornell, Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 1993), hereafter T; p. 6. 27. Anaïs Nin, ‘The New Woman’, in In Favour of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), hereafter IFSM; pp. 12– 19, p. 12. 28. See Philip K. Jason, ‘Introduction’, The Critical Response to Anaïs Nin (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 1–7, p. 3. 29. Patricia A. Deduck, Realism, Reality and the Fictional Theory of Alain RobbeGrillet and Anaïs Nin (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), hereafter RR; p. 33.

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SENSIBILITY 30. Nin, The Novel of the Future (New York: Macmillan, 1968), hereafter NF; p. 199. 31. Nin, Diary, Vol. V (London: Peter Owen, 1974), pp. 55–56. 32. Nin, House of Incest (London: Peter Owen, 1974), hereafter HI; p. 191. 3 3 . The erotica were written to order – as Nin understood matters – for a male ‘collector’, and Nin herself seems to have agreed to republish them only at the instigation of badgering males. See John Ferrone, ‘The Making of Delta of Venus’, in Sharon Spencer (ed.), Anaïs, Art and Artists: A Collection of Essays (Greenwood, Florida: Penkevill, 1986), pp. 35–43. 34. Nin, Delta of Venus (London: W.H. Allen, 1978), hereafter DoV; p. xvi. 35. Nin, Little Birds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 70. 3 6 . Nin, Cities of the Interior, introd. Sharon Spencer, with a pref. by Gunther Stahlmann (London: Peter Owen, 1978), hereafter CI; p. 28, 12–13. All references to the five novels are to this composite edition. 37. Nin, Winter of Artifice (London: Peter Owen, 1974), hereafter WI; p. 71. 38. Cornell, ‘The Philosophy of the Limit: Systems Theory and Feminist Legal Reform’, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 68–94, p. 69.

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7 RECEPTION AND RECEPTIVITY

The last chapter considered how far a postmodern or post-Levinasian ethics might emerge as an ethics of affect. One recurrent emphasis in this book has been on the extent to which, in Levinas’s terms, the primary experience of exteriority is itself affective. Such a claim follows logically from Levinas’s emphasis on the priority of pre-reflective consciousness. It may even be 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. For there is an intimate link between affectivity and the event: it is in the affections that we experience the world in its strange, unforeseeable singularity, that, to go back to Derrida and Andrew Benjamin, we experience the new anew. In other words, what concerns us here is reception. Given the currency of that term in the literary theory of the past three decades, the extent to which theory and criticism have concerned themselves with the question of the reader and what the reader does in the process of ‘reception’, the implications of a postmodern ethics (of affect) in this context are clearly not negligible. I’ll be pursuing some of them in this final chapter.

Phenomenology and the ego In tune with much in this book, as I began with a return, so I also want to end with a beginning: at the age of twenty-four, Levinas produced The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. After nearly seven chapters of patient, scrupulous exposition of Husserl’s phenomenology, just a few pages from the end of the book itself, there is a striking shift in its case. Levinas begins to wonder how far Husserl’s phenomenology remains merely an egology:

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The phenomenological reduction, as we have interpreted it so far, does not reveal concrete life and the meaning that objects have for concrete life. Concrete life is not the solipsist’s life of a consciousness closed upon itself. Concrete being is not what exists for only one consciousness. In the very idea of concrete being is contained the idea of an intersubjective world … The reduction to an ego, the egological reduction, can only be a first step toward phenomenology. (TIHP, p. 150) This passage is an early sign of a trajectory that will take Levinas beyond phenomenology to his conviction of the priority of ethics. But it also reveals what is, for Levinas, the ethical inadequacy of Husserl’s return of perception, knowledge and meaning, of Sinngebung, to an origin in the constituting ego. Husserl misses precisely the interrelationship – the relationship of self and other – that precedes the supposedly originary, constitutive ego, the primary, ethical significance of intersubjectivity. Indeed, Levinas will later associate the phenomenological reduction with violence.1 The phenomenological reduction, in fact, is a strenuous repression of difference in the interests of a transcendent ego. The ‘world’ it ‘constitutes’ is merely egological, and must itself be deconstituted by the approach of the other. My contention in this chapter is that Levinas’s critique can also be extended to reception theory in its classic form, from Wolfgang Iser to more empirical, recent versions.2 The Levinasian critique provides an effective account of the ethical inadequacy of such theory. My argument has an obvious and immediate justification in that the latter grows directly out of phenomenology.3 In effect, reception theory is challenged at its very bases by postmodern ethics. I want to take issue with the renewed interest in reception theory as concerned with an ethics of ‘commitment in reflection’, as Toker has recently put it.4 In the light of a postmodern ethics, reception theory is rather exposed, precisely, as an egology whose very foundation is the assumption of a singular, homogenous, unitary, coherent reading consciousness. Yet this is not true in the simple or obvious sense. In The Implied Reader, Iser argues that the literary work does not exist independently of what the individual reader makes of the text.5 ‘The text only takes on life when it is realized’ (IR, p. 274), in the reader’s ‘concretizations’ of it. As Tompkins says, this is the fundamental premise of reception theory and reader-response criticism.6 Yet the work as it is ‘concretized’, says Iser, ‘is not to be identified either with the reality

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of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader’ (IR, p. 275). Surely, then, as Freund suggests, according to reception theory, reading actually dissolves the subject/object dichotomy? Not so, as the Levinasian critique of phenomenology helps us recognize. Iser’s concept of ‘concretization’ is clearly derived from Husserl’s theory of intentionality: as Sinngebung, meaning-giving, in André Orianne’s words, intentionality ‘consists in the synthesis of an ideal identity through the multiplicity of conscious Erlebnisse’ (TIHP, p. xxxviii). Reading means concretization of the work out of the infinite potential of the text as, for Husserl, Sinngebung means synthesis of an identity out of the infinite potential of experience. Equally, and increasingly, for Iser, grasped in itself, ‘concretization’ becomes ‘an anthropological category’,7 making possible what his later work refers to as ‘human self-exegesis’ (TIHP, p. xiii). This is equally the case with other versions of reception theory.8 So, too, as Levinas himself puts it, the ultimate goal of phenomenology is selfawareness, the ‘self-awareness’ (Selbstbesinnung) of cognitive life (TIHP, p. 129). The self-awareness in question in Husserl, of course, is not the same as any supposed self-knowledge gained by a thinking and reading subject. The ‘realm of its constitution’, writes Levinas, is not psychological consciousness. It is pure or transcendental consciousness and, for Husserl, it has an ‘absolute existence’ (TIHP, p. 143). Iser’s version of this is the reading mind understood as ‘the focal point’ at which the literary text finds its coherence.9 The coherence in question, of course, will vary from reading to reading, from individual mind to individual mind. What will not is the principle of coherence itself. For it is as much a transcendental principle as is Sinngebung or sense-giving for Husserl. It is the Levinasian rather than the Derridean critique of Husserl that interests me more, here, precisely in that it gives the question an immediately ethical dimension. For the most crucial problem with the Husserlian theory of consciousness, for Levinas, is surely the fact that Husserl continues to attribute consciousness to a pure ego in the world, posited as an ‘absolute certainty’. By the time he writes Totality and Infinity, Levinas is thinking of that ‘certainty’ as an aspect of the ‘ontological imperialism’ for which he has started to take phenomenology to task. For if the other is ‘irreducible to the I’, it is therefore irreducible to the activity of sense-giving, to the structure of the phenomenological reduction (TI, pp. 42–45). Thus Levinas’s ethics actually puts phenomenology and the concept of intentionality into reverse. The pure ego does not impose its sense on the world, and grasp its own humanity – at once singular and universal – in doing so. Rather, alterity approaches the ego from outside and immediately and radically interrogates it. It is precisely here that we can recognize the ethical limits of reception theory, its failure to think affect. For reception theory has never really been about receptivity. It has been concerned with production (the production of meaning) not reception

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or openness to alterity. For Levinas, part of the trouble with phenomenology is that Husserl conceives of intentionality in terms of direction. Consciousness always directs itself at an object, like a searchlight on a criminal. The same conception of consciousness is at issue in reception theory: Two people gazing at the night sky may both be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough, and another will make out a dipper. The ‘stars’ in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable. (IR, p. 282) The astronomical image is just another version of what is, for phenomenology, the vector of cognition. But Levinas turns that vector around. In Levinas’s ethics, the other approaches consciousness and, as it does so, overflows the horizons within which consciousness seeks to confine it. In Husserl, intentionality is conceived of as essentially ‘virile’, as masterful, outgoing, active, dynamic. So, too, ‘concretization’ in Iser is not a consequence of receptivity, but an act of virile self-assertion. By contrast, ethical receptivity in Levinas’s work is not an egology at all, but the end of egology itself.

Blanchot and ‘the innocence of reading’ To some extent, at least, Levinas’s critique of phenomenology coincides with Blanchot’s, which is itself specifically connected to a theory of reception. For Blanchot, too, the problem with phenomenology is its insistence on the primacy of the subject, specifically as source and ‘origin’ of all the ‘determinations’ of consciousness,10 What is crucial here, for Blanchot, is precisely a concept of enlightenment: a conviction of ‘a primary light that originates in the Subject with which a beginning occurs’ and is directed by ‘the exigency … of a meaning’. Language itself is always the ‘expression’ of that meaning, ‘a meaning that precedes it’ (AW, pp. 251–52). The egology of the phenomenological reduction, then, is inseparable from a myth of ‘[t]he visible, the evident, elucidation, ideality, the superior light [clarté] of logic’ (ibid.). But for Blanchot, literature is not part of this collaboration, and it is precisely in its function as radical anomaly that the ethical status of literature is manifest (though, as Levinas points out, Blanchot is seldom explicit about the ethical dimension of his thought; SMB, p. 23). In the first instance, the literary work is not to be traced back either to an enlightened and

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enlightening subject or to the supposed demands of a significance that calls at once to hermeneutics. Indeed, insofar as the work is to be ‘traced back’ at all, it is rather to an original obscurity or division which phenomenology is powerless to name or illuminate. We know this obscurity through and as désœuvrement, usually translated as ‘idleness’, ‘worklessness’ or ‘unworking’.11 Paradoxically, Blanchot’s conception of the passive ‘idleness’ of the literary work cannot properly be grasped save through acknowledgement of its coexistence with this active principle. 12 Désœuvrement is the principle of ‘unworking’ within the work that never allows it to constitute itself qua work, which means that the work ‘affirms itself’ in the dismantling of any ‘stability’ whatsoever, including its own:13 the essence of literature is to escape every essential determination, every affirmation which stabilizes or even realizes it: it is never already there, it always has to be rediscovered or reinvented [elle est toujours à retrouver ou à reinventer].14 Hence the literary work will be forever ‘idle’, ‘perpetually in want of authority’, as Hill puts it, ‘forever at odds with the prospect of power’ (I, p. 6). Here, again, as Levinas says of Blanchot, art does not trade in illumination and escapes the ‘categories of daylight’ – ‘Le Monde, le Pouvoir, l’Action’ – which, for Hegel, for example, constituted the whole extent of the human (SMB, p. 11). The work’s mode of being is spectral, says Blanchot, opposed to what he calls imperious repetition, the peremptory shout, the rigour of the commandment, the royal reason which requires and never doubts (LV, p. 268). This mode of being is désœuvrement as the movement in which the text is ceaselessly traversed by difference. The work’s mode of being is actually an impoverishment which is not amenable to the phenomenological reduction, stands as a rebuke to phenomenological – and egological – presumption and thereby constitutes an ethical challenge to the latter. The obscurity of désœuvrement offers an irreducible, ethical resistance to the ‘je peux’ of enlightened knowledge (SMB, p. 9). The work, then, is ineluctably given over to self-difference or incessance, a term which implies endlessness, undecidability and ceaseless busy-ness. For Blanchot, ‘a written text necessarily negates the presence of both its author and reader in opening itself to an unlimited horizon of future readers’.15 All books are always ‘livres à venir’. Blanchot’s reflections on reading are closely connected to this argument and his critique of phenomenology. For Blanchot, désœuvrement characterizes the torment of the writer and the freedom and ‘lightness’ of the reader together. Both are caught up in the same ‘innocence of becoming’.16 The act

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of reading casts no light on the obscurity of the text, never ‘illuminates’ it. For Iser, by contrast, the text may be an inexhaustible resource. But the act of reading always opens up a Heideggerian ‘clearing’ in that inexhaustibility. It demarcates and clarifies a coherent space. Blanchot’s less imperious reader confronts, is even haunted by the inexhaustibility or liberty of the text: In general, in contrast to the writer, the reader feels himself to be naively superfluous. He does not suppose that he is creating the work … He feels that he doesn’t exhaust it, that it remains quite beyond his most intimate approach: he does not penetrate it, it is free of him.17 Thus Blanchot emphasizes the distance between reader and text as signifying the irreducibility of the text to the reader’s terms.18 The work in its fullness is always and in principle inaccessible. It is authors rather than readers who claim to have access to this fullness which readers travesty or fail to grasp. Blanchot cites Montesquieu’s despairing, bitter plea for a reader who will not judge a work which has taken twenty years to complete ‘par la lecture d’un moment’ (EL, p. 262). But this insouciance or légèreté – as opposed to the gravity of creation – is characteristic of reading and inseparable from it. Not, however, that the reader will necessarily remain aware of his or her sense of inexorable distance from the text: ‘il semble qu’il soit très difficile de préserver un tel intervalle’ (EL, p. 270). This is perhaps supremely the case with that least ethical of readers, the specialist, in that the primary activity in which he or she is involved is interrogation, requiring of the work that it yield up its secrets, ‘les conditions de sa création’ and so forth (EL, p. 272). But this is to make demands of the work, rather than heed its demand. The specialist reader is a Ulysses who has himself tied to the mast in order to listen to the Sirens’ song with impunity, priding himself on ‘le pouvoir de la technique qui toujours prétendra jouer sans péril avec les puissances irréelles’ (LV, p. 11). At all events, the specialists’ myth of the possibility of a privileged access to the author merely occludes what Blanchot calls the ineradicable ‘innocence’ of reading. Thus the feature most constitutive of reading is not ‘concretization’ but a kind of effleurement, what Barthes thought of as skimming.19 Blanchot raises questions about categorical and emphatic distinctions between modes of reading that skim surfaces and those that supposedly plumb depths.20 For he takes effleurement to be the very mode of the reader’s engagement with the text. The work, ‘dans la lecture, arrive toujours pour la première fois à la présence, lecture unique’ (EL, p. 271). At the same time, it always includes an appeal to ‘le lecteur encore infiniment futur’ (EL, p. 267). The ‘true reader’ is thus not duped by a conviction of expertise

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and intuits the contingency – ‘l’expérience hasardeuse’ – of his or her own reading, which ceases ‘de lui paraître nécessaire pour redevenir une possibilité parmi d’autres’ (EL, p. 272). At the same time, it is precisely because it involves a sense of any given reading as already destined to fade or infected by absence that the distance between text and reader is difficult to sustain. ‘True readers’ are rare. Hence the continuing power of a conception of reading – Iser’s, for example – according to which ‘la lecture … s’empare naturellement de l’œuvre … veuille la “saisir”, réduisant, supprimant toute distance avec elle’ (EL, p. 274). For Iser, reading involves the production of a sense and coherence that have no objective status. For Blanchot, too, the text exists as indeterminacy, not least because of the historicity of readings. It appears to be ‘définitivement faite et pourtant inachevée’ and complicit with ‘des variations infinies du devenir’ (EL, p. 275). But, for Blanchot, with each new reading, the work is born again and differently Each new reading is a distinctive experience or re-enactment of the ‘naissance unique’ of the text’s language. The experience of the text and the experience of the unrepeatable singularity of one’s own reading are not distinct. Reading is not an experience of ‘une chose commençante’, as Iser would have it, but of ‘la force du commencement’ itself (EL, p. 276). We might think of Iser’s as a ‘strong’ and Blanchot’s a ‘weak’ conception of reading.21 But it is Blanchot’s that is ethically the more significant conception. For his work constitutes a far more radical refusal to think of reading as either appropriation or domination. If Blanchot’s reader does not forage through texts in pursuit of their secrets, nor does he or she construct Gestalten out of the text. He or she is rather responsible for and responsive to the good of the text as other, whilst also being delivered over to the work of difference. As reader, I am no longer myself: What I possess through fiction, I possess, but on condition of being it, and the being through which I approach it is that which dispossesses me of myself and of all being [l’être par où je l’approche est ce qui me dessaisit de moi et de tout être]. (LV, p. 253) Literature is ‘le vide même [qui hante le monde des choses]’, and one hears its call only in agreeing to be changed oneself, ‘une décision qui livre à l’indécis celui qui la porte’ (EL, p. 253). The reader is subjected to a transformation for which the trope is Beckett’s The Unnamable and which occurs according to

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the demand which has drawn one outside oneself, has dispossessed one, delivered one to the outside, making of one a being without a name, the unnamable. (EL, p. 259) This is Blanchot’s ethical allegory of reading, in which what is crucial is what he calls the ‘porousness’ of the reading subject. Here, precisely, the concept of reading as an egology comes finally to an end. In Blanchot as in Iser, there is a practice as well as a theory of reception. His account of Marguerite Duras’s The Malady of Death in The Unavowable Community, for example, involves a mode of reading that determines itself as a betrayal of the work and chooses to turn on itself, betraying its own betrayals, betraying itself as a mode of betrayal. Hence a kind of ‘irony of reading’. This takes on a particularly interesting movement in Le Livre à Venir. For the writer, writing is a ‘migration infinie’, and its consequence is an experience of alterity as involuntary dispossession (LV, p. 56). But in his essay on Proust, for example, Blanchot is not simply concerned to ‘express’ the writer’s dispossession. He also seeks to mime out dispossession as process. Thus the essay on Proust moves from an account of a familiar Proust intent on rendering ‘l’intemporel’ to a Proust who is also faithful to ‘le temps destructeur’ and the experience of time as becoming. But this self-difference is not given the clarity of a form or the structure of a formal proposition. Blanchot rather has Proust ‘drift’ to the point where he becomes another. This is no carefully managed, strategic transition from a less to a more ‘authentic’ Proust. For the first Proust can suddenly re-emerge from the second, too. What is at stake, here, is a rhetoric or discourse of ethical commentary. Blanchot refuses criticism as will to power, as mastery and control of its object. Instead, at a certain point in the Proust essay, ‘something appears to happen’, an event that cuts across it and that mimics the irruption of alterity in the Recherche itself. The relationship of critic to text, again, involves an effleurement, even a caress. It contents itself, precisely, with affect, with particular and fleeting contacts with a texture, to adapt a phrase that Levinas finds for Blanchot (SMB, p. 56). As such, it is remote from the emphasis on the ‘hard grasp’ that Iserian theory has in common with so many dominant forms of Anglo-American criticism. A key instance, however, of Blanchot’s practice of reception would be his reading of Kafka in L’Espace Littéraire. This may seem a perverse idea: Blanchot concentrates on the Diaries rather than the fiction. Indeed, this is commentary that effaces itself, commentary as a prolegomena that allows the texts their ‘liberty’

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by consciously and respectfully adopting a position on their periphery. Towards the end of the essay, however, Blanchot does in fact turn to The Castle and (more fleetingly) The Trial. The question, again, is how to heed ‘the work’s demand’, rather than making demands of it. Blanchot responds in two ways: first, by reading the novels as allegories of their own writing that, again, also become allegories of their own reading. As artist, says Blanchot, Kafka finally set aside the demands of the world and its truth for those of the work. But the critic is not concerned to replicate the eventual passage from the first to the second. He rather describes that ‘passage’ in terms of its traces or manifestations in the world. It is thus that Blanchot reads K. in The Castle: From the beginning, he is therefore beyond salvation [hors du salut], he belongs to exile, the place where not only is he not at home [chez lui] but where he is outside himself [hors de lui] … where beings seem absent, where everything that one thinks to lay hold of slips away … [E]verything is false and inauthentic as soon as one halts there, everything gives way as soon as you support yourself on it [tout vous manque dès qu’on s’y appuie], and yet the foundation to this absence is always given anew as an indubitable, absolute presence. (EL, p. 89) This is precisely an allegory of the condition of writing as seen from the side of the world; hence also an allegory of (mis)reading. Like the specialist, K. is intent on bringing writing to terms. He suffers from what was, for Kafka, the original sin, impatience, and therefore persists inflexibly in the direction of extreme error. He wants unity too soon, thinks he can be finished with the indeterminate, retreats to the principle of ‘figuration’ which, whilst appearing to capture an exteriority, will actually serve forever as an insurmountable barrier between him and it. In that respect, The Castle becomes an allegory of the ethics of criticism. Equally, whilst he starts out from Kafka’s ethics, Blanchot also insistently reflects the latter back on to his own commentary; as if commentary – and this would seem to be Blanchot’s point everywhere – had no point at all, save as it immediately became an ethical practice.

The ‘split-space’ of reception However compelling Blanchot’s epistemological critique of phenomenology may be, though, he nonetheless resembles Iser in assuming a homogeneity or consistency

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to the activity of reading, at least. Blanchot reverses the terms of the phenomenological vector of cognition, rather than breaking with the structure that opposes them. For Blanchot, what is at stake is finally a question of opposites: reading itself (where a certain process is bound to take place) or error (like the specialist’s). But if texts are inexhaustible and all readings unrepeatably singular, whether or not one grants the specialist reading, for instance, the privilege that the specialist grants it, why should its singularity be deemed not to count? Like Iser, in fact, Blanchot cannot conceive of or trust to reading as a multiple activity in which there must be self-difference, even for the single reader. Désœuvrement and incessance are effectively granted the status of textual laws which equally determine the laws of reading. But the space of reception is surely a fractured or heterogenous space, in which what is at issue is not only what we make of the text (or the text makes of us) but the mode of that making itself. Blanchot’s theory of reading has little to say about the possible relevance of questions of time to questions of reception. By 1982, in ‘Diachrony and Representation’, Levinas is arguing that the concept of intentionality relies on an assumption of ‘the consciousness of an ego identical in its I think, aiming at and embracing, or perceiving, all alterity under its thematizing gaze’ (TO, p. 97). But both the identity of the cogito and the presence of the object before it are inextricable from the assumption of an ‘essential now’, maintenance. What Levinas says of phenomenology will hold good, again, for reception theory: it performs an ‘egological work of gathering the diverse into presence or into representation’, but only on the basis of a privilege accorded to the present at the expense of past and future. This is not to say that there is no question of movement or change involved, here. For reception theory, text/reader relations are mobile, dynamic, even dialectical, never finished. Yet as in phenomenology, Finite thought is split in order to interrogate and answer itself, but the thread is retied. Thought reflects on itself in interrupting its continuity of synthetic apperception, but still proceeds from the same ‘I think’ or returns to it. (TO, p. 100) The principles of universal reason and egological interiority are inexorably sustained precisely on the basis of the constancy of the ‘essential now’, which is equally intrinsic to Blanchot’s sense of the singularity of reading. For Levinas, however, time is not to be thought in such terms. What matters, as we have seen at an earlier stage, is ‘the event in the heart of an instant’ (EE, p. 18). This ‘event’

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separates any instant whatsoever from another, flaws all continuity and impairs all synthesis, and guarantees the principle of unforeseeability, metamorphosis, radical change. But ‘the alterity of another instant’, writes Levinas, cannot be found in or grasped by a subject in its self-relationship. Temporality itself is a relationship with an alterity that cannot be reduced to a presence, above all, in the encounter with the other, whose time itself is different to and not simultaneous with mine. To think time thus is to think it ethically. It is also to think it in Lyotardian terms of incommensurability. But reception theory can hardly begin to function within such a thought. Classically, it has always vitally depended on the assumption of whole presence. This is the case, not just with Iser but with Bleich and Holland; or, for example, with ‘standpoint theory’, even in Sandra Harding’s sophisticated version of it, a version which thinks identity in terms of contradictions. For a ‘standpoint’ remains precisely that: a coherent position, however embroiled in contradictions, from which the reader as presence launches him- or herself at the text in an act of assertion or appropriation.22 If there is an exception, here, it is Jauss. Most reception theory assumes that reading a text is an act of completion: homogenization, coherencebuilding, the production of sameness out of difference. Jauss’s historical emphasis, however, allows him to conceive of reception as having a double aspect. Robert Holub misses precisely this ambivalence when he accuses Jauss of dismissing objectivism only to relapse into it.23 For Jauss, works of art ‘incorporate the open horizon of the future into the story of the past’.24 The work exists in a dialectical relationship ‘between the production of the new and the reproduction of the old’. Any work of art demands what Jauss calls a ‘horizonal change’. It both appeals to the ‘horizon of expectations’ of a readership contemporary with it, and turns towards ‘the horizon of yet-unknown experience’ (TAR, p. 25). It thus has both an ‘actual’ and a ‘virtual significance’ (TAR, p. 35). It is in no way simply bound to ‘the classical function of recognition’, the backward-looking gaze that recognizes a pre-given truth (TAR, p. 31). For it also appeals to what Bakhtin calls that ‘still latent, unuttered, future word’ which constitutes the ‘overwhelming part’ of reality.25 The divided character of the work at its historical inception – the divided reception to which it at once appeals – must also remain for all its historically successive mediations. The knowledge of any given text that is made possible by a particular horizon of expectations will always be shadowed by a perplexity, even a bafflement before a countervailing obscurity that only an unknown future can illuminate. Like Blanchot’s, then, Jauss’s concept of reception is actually quite distinct

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from the phenomenological reduction whereby a masterful ego subdues a literary text to its own terms. Rather, for Jauss, reception is always traversed by historical alterity. Yet for all Jauss’s insistence on ‘the noncontemporaneity of the contemporaneous’ in culture, like Blanchot, again, he never conceives of the act of reception itself as inhabited by different temporalities. It is here that Bhabha’s version of postcolonial theory is significant for reception theory and its ethical redirection. Bhabha himself owes much to Levinas, not least the latter’s insistence on ‘introducing into the heart of subjectivity a radical and anarchical reference to the other which in fact constitutes the inwardness of the subject’.26 ‘What is theoretically innovative,’ writes Bhabha, ‘and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of original and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences’ (LoC, p. 1). How far might hybridity be taken rather as rule than exception? Doesn’t ‘the truest eye … now belong to the migrant’s double vision’ (LoC, p. 5) in that such ‘double vision’ may also be recognized as internal to the supposed ‘narratives of original and initial subjectivities’ themselves? Bhabha does not explicitly posit a theoretical equivalent in terms of reception of ‘the ambivalent point of textual address’. Yet he describes the ‘you’ addressed by Adil Jussawalla, for example, as ‘continually positioned in the space between a range of contradictory places that coexist’ (LoC, p. 48). In fact, a concept of a ‘split-space of reception’ to match what Bhabha calls ‘the split-space of enunciation’ is clearly implicit in his work. So, too, he implicitly questions the ‘logics of synchronicity’ in both instances. If the ‘enunciative split’ has a ‘temporal dimension’ in the disjunction between the subject of a proposition and the subject of its enunciation (LoC, p. 36), then, by implication, a similar disjunction is present in reception, too. In the split-space of reception, ‘the “I” in the position of mastery is, at the same time, the place of its absence’ (LoC, p. 47). Here, perhaps, reception can cease to be what Levinas reproaches intentionality with being: ‘the gathering of alterity into the unity of presence’ by the cogito, and therefore merely ‘a moment of egoism’ (TO, pp. 101, 98). A ‘split-space’ is produced for reception not least by much of the kind of postcolonial and postmodern writing that most interests Bhabha. Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet, for example, does not imply a singular reader whose stable position – whose certainty as to his or her site – permits reception as phenomenological reduction. It rather insistently raises the question of cultural identity and the latter’s boundaries not only ‘within the text’ but as a question of reception. As a novel in English about Chinese characters, its appeal would appear to be to the

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Western reader, not least in Mo’s explanations of how a Chinese community functions. At the same time, however, Sour Sweet consistently and strategically estranges a non-Chinese from the non-Chinese who figure in the novel, like the outlandish English creatures whom the Chinese waiters laugh at because they drink wine or beer with their Chinese meals.27 Lily’s view of English discipline, for instance, is as either lax to the point of non-existence or ferocious – like beating Hong Kong workers senseless with truncheons and then giving them free medical treatment. (SoS, p. 247) The point is precisely the oddity and the incompatibility, from one cultural perspective, of value-systems that are apparently congruent enough from another. On one level, then, the reader appealed to in Sour Sweet is not Western. As the English social world is very largely closed off from the Chinese characters in the novel, that world is negated and closed off for the reader, too. But the reader appealed to cannot be Cantonese, either, not least because of language. Not only is the novel written in English. We are repeatedly reminded that much of it is in effect a translation from what, in their original language, are more expressive utterances. Sour Sweet is apparently written in English precisely for the sake of a Western reader, but might equally be thought of as declaring that it is the lesser novel for it. Yet the Western reader must confront a series of textual gaps which, far from being ‘filled in’, on the phenomenological (Iserian) model, do not and cannot prompt the Western reader to ‘acts of completion’. For the book repeatedly refers away to a cultural tradition with which the Western reader will hardly be familiar. Take the occasional use of the simple word ‘homely’: in Sour Sweet, its connotations are effectively undecidable. What can be ‘homely’, for example, about a dish of ‘chopped cow’s lungs, sweet-breads and intestines, with coriander and parsley’ (SoS, p. 32)? ‘Homely’ appears to be a translation of a not wholly translatable term. It is not, in fact.28 But the Western reader nonetheless lacks part at least of the relevant code and is in fact not competent to ‘complete’ the text. What is produced is a kind of aporia of reception. Yet, at the same time, when Red Cudgel is described as being keener on seeing Chen’s father buried ‘splendidly’ than cured ‘unflamboyantly in a mundane Western way’, the appeal would seem to be to a Western reader ‘over the heads’ of the Chinese (SoS, p. 67). Here, then, reception

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cannot be conceived of as an activity of concretization whereby a unitary subject produces a homogeneous meaning in a stable space. A more appropriate metaphor would be the Moebius strip: reception as loop in which one side repeatedly twists over and merges into the other, as, for instance, in one of the finest and most cunning moments of the novel, on the very last page, Mo reveals that his recondite sources for all the arcane Triad lore have in fact been penned by Westerners. To read Sour Sweet is not to produce determinations out of indeterminacy. It is rather to inhabit a ‘split-space’, to enter into composition with an indeterminacy that is constitutive of the text and ineradicable.29 Or, in Lévi-Strauss’s words as quoted by Bhabha, Mo’s novel ‘enables us to coincide with forms of activity which are both at once ours and other’ (LoC, p. 163). The effect is ethical: in Rimbaud’s famous phrase as redeployed by Levinas, ‘I is an other’, and this ‘means alteration, alienation, betrayal of oneself, foreignness with regard to oneself and subjection to this foreigner’ (CPP, p. 145). Similarly, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, the narrator is a Japanese widow whose husband was English and who has long been domiciled in England. The book begins and ends in England and the narratorial language is English. A Pale View of Hills arguably appeals to a Western reader as a kind of corrective to impoverished Western conceptions of an Eastern life and culture, as an oblique and sophisticated act of resistance to the uncomprehending invasiveness that Ogatasan takes to be characteristic of the American conqueror.30 It is presumably at the Western reader, too, that all the explanations of locations in Nagasaki and the discussions of various aspects of husband/wife relations in postwar Japan are directed. When Jiro accuses a friend of being unable to get his wife to obey him, for instance, the friend replies that ‘it’s her personal right to vote any way she pleases’, and Jiro’s father expresses astonishment that a wife could possibly vote for a different party to her husband’s choice (PVH, p. 63). The reader is implied as in a position to take certain democratic and egalitarian values more readily for granted than the Japanese characters appear to. Yet a radically different mode of address in Ishiguro’s novel also suggests an intimate communion with a Japanese reader familiar with the culture, for whom various kinds of explanation are unnecessary. It is this reader that the narrator informs that she has ‘never ventured north to the agricultural areas of England’ (PVH, p. 47), and that there is an English fondness for the ‘idea that our race has an instinct for suicide’ (PVH, p. 10). Or is it? Is the appeal not over the shoulder of this apparently Japanese reader to the Western reader whose stereotype stands in need of correction? Reception, again, becomes a split-space where – to go back to Jauss’s terms – a virtual shadows an

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actual reader, identities twist round into each other and the reading subject becomes a profoundly ambivalent construction. Not surprisingly, the novel actually begins with a question of naming which serves as an analogy to the reader’s predicament: Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name and I – perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past – insisted on an English one. He finally agreed to Niki, thinking it had some vague echo of the East about it. (PVH, p. 9) In fact, we start the book only to encounter an uneasily but creatively resolved aporia. The ‘paradox’, here, the awkward (but also inventive) ‘compromise’ is a figure for the ‘split-space’ that Ishiguro’s readers will necessarily have to inhabit, in which they must yield to the other. This is a world in which, it almost goes without saying, a Japanese housewife may have a more subtle and intimate feeling for Chopin and Tchaikovsky than an English piano teacher in the Home Counties (PVH, p. 50). Reception, here, then, is no longer an egology, but a disintegration of egology. It is therefore telling that, at the end of the novel, a shift in pronouns ensures that the anglicized Japanese narrator briefly blurs into and becomes indistinguishable from the Japanese woman whose recollected story she has partly been recounting. Finally, however, the question is crucially one of different temporalities. Ishiguro’s implied Japanese reader is familiar with a particular sense of time: of cultural traditions that have been destroyed by apocalypse and then ambiguously resuscitated in a troubled, changing world. The implied Western reader is an embodiment of a triumphant, contemporary, Western modernity whose effects are most immediately evident in the behaviour of Niki, the narrator’s Anglo-Japanese daughter. These two times are incommensurable. The reader oscillates between them, in a radical disruption, in Bhabha’s phrase, of the ‘logics of synchronicity’ which ‘traditionally authorize the subject of cultural knowledge’. So, too, in Mo’s text, the representation of a contemporary English scene and the deployment of a contemporary English vernacular is repeatedly displaced or broken up by fleeting vistas of a time – of Chinese life and tradition – with which the former are not commensurate, and to the expression of which they are inadequate. Take Lily’s uncertainties about the British tax system:

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Were tips taxed? Was it worked out on the numbers in the family? On the windows you had? She remembered the heavy taxes in Kwangsi and Father dressing them in the poorest clothes when officials visited. It could hardly be the same here. And did the collector take a squeeze? (SF, p. 162) In one of its aspects, the passage exploits cultural difference to comic ends, but only so long as the reader avoids recognizing that his or her own position as reader is itself a mirror-image of Lily’s. If Lily is bewildered by English custom, here, the English reader is surely left equally perplexed as to the full sense of the traditions and usages that lie behind Lily’s efforts to comprehend. If Lily is caught up in what Bhabha calls ‘the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation’, then so, too, is the reader, in a different mode. The effect, to quote Levinas, is to deny the reader the possibility of ‘gathering … all alterity into presence and the synchrony of representation’ (TO, p. 100).

Karatani, Rushdie: reading East to West The clashing of different temporalities that is part of the reception of these two novels lies beyond the scope of Iser’s, Jauss’s and even Blanchot’s conceptions of reading. All three remain Eurocentric in their willingness to take the part for the whole, their reluctance to engage with the disjunctive work of difference in reception. Sour Sweet and A Pale View of Hills make of reception what Bhabha describes as ‘the representative postmodernist experience’, an ‘impasse or aporia of consciousness’ (LoC, p. 49). Mo’s Western reader, like Ishiguro’s, is neither one thing nor the other, but is caught up in a play of phantom identities that may even seem to make a phantom of cultural identity itself. Here, perhaps, in Pascal’s phrase so prized by Levinas, the ‘sovereignty’ of the Western ego may begin to ‘recognize itself as “hateful”, and its “place in the sun” as the “image and beginning of the usurpation of the whole world” ’ (TI, p. 107). But I want finally to suggest another possible theorization of a ‘split-space’ of reception as it emerges from an engagement with the work of Karatani Kojin. To respond to Karatani’s work is a way of beginning to split the theoretical space of reception, to imagine a future in which theory itself would be decisively and irrevocably decentred, in which centres and margins would always be subject to a play of transposition. ‘The Centre has a special kind of blindness,’ writes Jameson,

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‘which the margins, for all their discomforts, do not have to cope with.’31 This looks like humility but is actually a double olympianism: the superstate theorist’s and the guilt-ridden liberal’s. Karatani’s theory is not a challenge delivered from margin to centre. His message to Western theory is that its implications are most finely grasped from the perspective of a culture to which the West itself has always been marginal. Karatani is not a postcolonial theorist but a non-Western theorist, and his work proclaims a limit to the triumphalism of Western theory, a triumphalism sustained even in its agonized self-interrogations. The theme of a ‘split-time’ runs like an insistent thread through Karatani’s work. Kohso Sabu has stressed the importance of Karatani’s distinctive conception of tandokusei or singularity, one inspired by but not to be confused with those available in Western philosophy and theory. Kohso quotes a remarkable passage of personal recollection: Ever since I started reading philosophy in my teens, I always have felt that ‘this I’ was missing in what I read. Regardless of the way it is presented – subject, existence, human being and the like – philosophical discourses invariably deal with the ‘I’ in general terms. The ‘I’ is nothing other than something attributable to the millions of persons to which ‘this I’ does not belong. Therein lies the reason for my never being able to familiarize myself with philosophy, and why I always felt alienated from it. However, my concern was not about ‘me’ and it does not imply that ‘this I’ is special … What is at stake here is the ‘this’ in ‘this I’ and not the consciousness, I. Therefore, instead of saying that ‘this I’ has been omitted from the philosophical discourse, one could put it in another way; that ‘this thing’ has been omitted from the philosophical discourse.32 The reasons for Karatani’s alienation from Western philosophy are serious. Singularity is what philosophy, theory, ‘construction’, formalism or, as Karatani has it, ‘architecture’ can never reckon with, the fragment of the event or instance which cannot be written and from which theory is at once in retreat. For philosophy and theory remain wedded to the Platonic project of thought as ‘architecture’ which ‘enables one to resist or withstand all “becomings” by reconstructing them as “makings” ’ (AM, p. xxi). Postmodernism has involved a shift from architecture to text as privileged metaphor, one that ‘favors becoming over making’ (AM, p. xxiii), Marx’s

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Naturwüchsigkeit over poiesis. But, for Karatani, the postmodern project has failed in that, for all its post-Derridean refinements, it has remained ‘entrapped’ within ‘architecture’ and an ‘apodictic discursive space’ (AM, p. 157). Any exterior to ‘formal systems’ is therefore ‘non-existent’ for theory (AM, p. xxxvi). The question here is immediately ethical. For, as Wittgenstein shows us, formalism inexorably tends ‘to exclude the otherness of the other, that is, the contingency of the relation to the other’ (AM, p. 131). Karatani suggests three responses: first, a multiplication of formalisms; second, the privileging of real architecture over architecture as metaphor; and third, and most important for my purposes, the effort to think formalization at the point at which it draws a veil over its own ungroundedness. This, precisely, is to think two temporalities, the temporality produced within and by formalization, and the temporality it at once conceals, the time of its emergence. This ‘split-time’ is captured in Karatani’s concept of tento. Tento is most easily defined as the movement that fabricates ‘a necessity in an accidental event’ (AM, p. 86), and thus the moment at which one temporal logic is substituted for another. But it is also the immediate erasure of the substitution itself, and therefore a moment of what Karatani calls ‘schismogenesis’ (AM, p. 91). Tento is the ruse by which ‘the architectonic’ has always ‘concealed the absence of its own foundation’, its own essential historicity (AM, p. 56). But it is also the ‘originary forgetting’ of historicity, the immediate deployment of a new ‘origin’.33 Here Japan becomes the centre of attention precisely because modern Japanese literature and culture compel a perception of tento where the West cannot.34 A striking example would be the emergence in Japan of patriarchy – and therefore feminism – at the very end of the nineteenth century, specifically with the Meiji government’s enactment of the Civil Code in 1898 (OJML, p. 171). In Karatani’s account of it, at least, it is precisely in Japan that patriarchy as tento can be grasped with peculiar accuracy: patriarchy, that is, again, as a precisely historical phenomenon that gives itself out at once as ahistorical, that substitutes a new (and vast) span of time for the time of its emergence. Karatani wishes us to think historicity in terms of an architectonics or process of formalization which at once disguises the specifically formal nature of what is produced. For Karatani, it is possible to articulate tento in a number of different ways, at a number of different levels and in relation to many different kinds of phenomena. Reading might clearly be one of these. First, in reading as conceived of by reception theory, making is always privileged over becoming as a kind of formalization or ‘architecture’. Second, reception theory conceives of making as a constant resistance to or struggle with textuality as becoming. The struggle or

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activity of resistance is never finished and must be unendingly resumed. But it is nonetheless an activity in which making constantly rises superior to or subdues becoming, enlightenment constantly triumphs over obscurity and the spirit proves victorious over refractory matter. Third, what is lost in this account of reading is precisely the emergence of making itself from the becoming against which it ostensibly pits itself.35 For this reason, reception theory can never entertain the possibility of thinking the radical historicity of reading. Yet, in Karatani’s terms, how far we can think the latter at all would appear to be open to question. Two possibilities suggest themselves. The first is the approach to reception that emerges in Thomas Docherty’s work, particularly Alterities.36 Like Karatani, Docherty is much concerned with singularity and its resistance to any mode of thought which ‘prioritizes the abstract or conceptual over the sensuous and material’.37 This leads him to an emphasis on ‘the singularity and specificity of the text and of the textual event’ (A, p. 35). It also generates a concern with modes of reading which deny the reader ‘the illusion of having a stable position from which her or his own identity is guaranteed’ (A, p. 50). For Docherty, it is not only a question of modes of reading but also, crucially, of kinds of text, of the postmodern novels which – he argues – turn character itself into a ‘series of instantiations of subjectivity’ and an ‘endlessly proliferating heterogeneity’ (A, pp. 62–63). Such modes of characterization thereby grant the novel an internal historicity which earlier modes of characterization denied, and require a ‘chronopolitical’ mode of reading. The postmodern text denies the reader the possibility of becoming ‘a fully enlightened and imperialist subject with full epistemological control over the fiction’, and imbricates her or him in a textual that is also a temporal and historical predicament (A, p. 65). Like the postmodern character, the postmodern reader is ‘endlessly displaced and “differing” ’: To read postmodern characterization is thus to begin to construct the ethics of alterity, to replace a philosophy of Identity with that of Alterity, to discover what it means – without yet representing what it means – to speak always from the political disposition of the Other. (A, p. 68) This is a compelling way of thinking reception as radical historicity. But Docherty does not problematize the concept of the radical break as Karatani does. Karatani rather points us towards a sense both of reading itself as tento and of a

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‘split-time’ of reception. For, if we adopt Karatani’s terms of reference, reading appears as an activity in which the text ceaselessly emerges in a radical historicity that is also ceaselessly erased. The temporality of any given formalization of a text will not be the time of its becoming. The question then is, not how we impose order on the text as becoming, as reception theory assumes, nor how we read the becoming of the text in itself, but rather how we can start to think the points of junction of the two times, of becoming and making in reading. Docherty’s model of the narrative text and of reading is predominantly linear. ‘The ethics of alterity’, he writes, ‘disposes a reading subject-in-process towards a historical futurity in which she or he constantly defers the production of identity or of an empirically determined self-present selfhood’ (A, p. 41). This makes of the ethical encounter with alterity something that happens ‘along the way’, as part of a sequence or unfolding. But Karatani reminds us of the extent to which the encounter with alterity may also happen ‘in depth’, in the Deleuzean, not the humanist sense. The case we may derive from this is for reading as what Deleuze would call a singularization out of the text understood as a multiplicity.38 In fact, many narrative texts make of the experience of reading a movement in which the text as becoming or virtual multiplicity insistently haunts the activity of formalization. The Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake would be an obvious example, here. Pace Iser, reading Joyce is not a matter of producing ‘concretizations’ out of sets of potentials. In Joyce, any formalization of the text at any given moment excludes, not only other possible formalizations of the same kind, but other textual worlds and times which demand quite different modes of formalization. Alterity is always a multiplicity, and the ethics of reading involves not only a stark experience of the insignificance of one’s own formalization of the text, à la Blanchot, but an experience of the drastically limited horizons within which any formalization must take place. Take for example the moment at the end of Chapter 13 of Ulysses (‘Nausicaa’) when Bloom has ‘just a few’ winks before starting on his wayward journey home: O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met him pike hoses for Raoul de perfume your wife black hair heave under embon señorita young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me bread van Winkle red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return tail end Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in her next her next.39

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We will be likely first to understand these lines as a description of a mind that is now half-asleep, has gone slack, is free-associating, given over to random thoughts. Equally, it would appear that there are various, complex, psychological negotiations in process, here, to do with Bloom’s feelings about Molly, Boylan and (to a lesser extent) Gerty. Yet on another level, the thoughts are not random nor the associations free. Much of what crosses Bloom’s mind has been in it earlier in the chapter: Mrs Bracegirdle (U13.857), Grace Darling (U13.1069), the señorita (U13.1208–9) and so on. Thus the reader begins to reconstitute the novel in the terms of another textual ‘world’ in which psychological experience is not simply given to us in its immediacy, but arranged and orchestrated in relation to a psychological past. Furthermore, the lines not only recall a psychological but also a textual past. The phrase ‘young eyes’, for instance, partly echoes the reference to Gerty’s ‘young guileless eyes’ at 13.745. But there the phrase was a narrator’s, not Bloom’s, nor in Bloom’s mind. So here a third textual ‘world’ – in which the text is artfully organized by what Joyceans have sometimes referred to as an ‘Arranger’ – emerges with, again, its own temporality. The ‘world’ of the Homeric analogy also ushers in a distinct temporality: Bloom is dozing, as Odysseus falls asleep once safe on Nausicaa’s island, and the theme of the Odyssean nostos (and its analogues in the stories of Enoch Arden and Rip van Winkle) is evident enough. Here, Joyce engages Bloom as textual phenomenon in a different relation to those Bloom has with his immediate or past psychic life or with the novel’s Arranger. There is, then, a proliferation of textual ‘worlds’ around this passage. There are links, too, with other chapters: echoes of Chapter 4 (‘Calypso’), proleptic references to Chapter 18 (‘Penelope’), these latter also being references back, since they are concerned with a time before 16 June 1904. Equally, the passage recycles the chapter’s residues, rather as Freud thought dreams did the day’s. To consider the passage in terms of these different relations is repeatedly to situate it within new and different horizons. It is possible to produce a list of these textual ‘worlds’, but not a comprehensive or determinate one, or one that gives the ‘worlds’ themselves a precise and determinate form. Most importantly, it is impossible to hold all these ‘worlds’ together in the act of reading. In fact, at any point in Ulysses, most of its ‘worlds’ remain virtual. Each word in Ulysses serves as a kind of node from which radiate an indefinite number of ‘worlds’. The act of formalization endemic to reading reveals itself as actually akin to the experience both of historical limits and of the impossibility of going beyond them; the impossibility of thinking both what is interior and what is exterior to those limits. Reading as ethical experience becomes

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a question, not so much of the irruption of alterity as of an (affective) respect for alterity in its unassailable multiplicity and distance. Of course, it might be objected that it is easy enough to make my case with reference to Ulysses. But Ulysses is paradigmatic rather than an isolated instance. How does my argument affect theories of the reception of realist novels or postmodern texts? The former will require a more extended consideration than is possible here. I shall close with a reading of The Satanic Verses, because, first, it is a novel that can be read along Docherty’s lines; second, it is of course a novel that is much concerned with alterity and the experience of alterity; and, third, a postmodern ethics might seem bound to engage with Rushdie’s novel, if only by way of taking issue with the violence that always threatens to emerge out of so many contemporary moralities (and not just fundamentalist ones). The Satanic Verses is concerned with and is itself a plurality: of worlds, cultures, languages, voices, styles. Rushdie identities this plurality with what he calls ‘Indianness’ rather than ‘Englishness’ (‘for was not the entire national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best and leave-the-rest?’).40 The Satanic Verses is a text with no single foundation. In Docherty’s terms, it makes of reading an encounter with a succession of singular and specific events, depriving the reader of a stable locus for the constitution of identity. This is most blatantly obvious in the abrupt movements in the novel between realism and fantasy or countermyth, and in the corresponding discursive shifts. But the plurality of worlds is also articulated as a plurality of times or ‘continua’: ‘The modern city,’ Otto Cone on his hobbyhorse had lectured his bored family at table, ‘is the locus classicus of incompatible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the omnibus. One universe, on a zebra crossing, is caught for an instant, blinking like a rabbit, in the headlamps of a motor-vehicle in which an entirely alien and contradictory continuum is to be found. And as long as that’s all, they pass in the night, jostling on Tube stations, raising their hats in some hotel corridor, it’s not so bad. But if they meet! It’s uranium and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom.’ (SV, p. 314) Rushdie’s concern with ‘alien and contradictory continua’, however, is not principally a question of the temporalities of incompatible lives. In this respect,

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with its focus on Gibreel and Saladin Chamcha, Rushdie’s novel is less ‘plural’ than – say – Manhattan Transfer. Its engagement with diverse ‘continua’ is rather a question of freewheeling play. The Kunderan image with which the novel begins – of ‘levity’ pitted against ‘gravity’ – is a figure for the book. The latter works to stop us coming down to ground and finding our settled place there. But this is not simply a question of Rushdie moving us on from one world to another, from London to Bombay and so forth. The point is rather that London, for example, is not just plural but a multiplicity. London exists only as it is imagined; which means that it exists, not only as London, but as ‘proper London, capital of Vilayet’, as ‘Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville’ and so on (SV, p. 4). By the same token, the London of The Satanic Verses exists within a complex set of historical limits internal to the text which the latter can indicate but beyond which it cannot pass. What is true of Rushdie’s London is true of the novel itself. Early on in it, Rushdie meditates on the paradox of newness: How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? (SV, p. 8) These lines perhaps echo Barthes’s conception of the writer as merely a ‘mixer’ of elements. But the movement of thought corresponds to that traced in the concept of tento. Rushdie repeatedly attempts to think the elusive point of juncture which also concerns Karatani, and to make it part of reading The Satanic Verses, chiefly as a mode of resistance to modes of thought – Islamic fundamentalism, Mrs Torture’s ‘British’ nationalism – that forget the moment of tento in the historical projection of the instance as the whole. Hence Rushdie’s many small narrative aporiae, most obviously exemplified in the self-cancelling phrase that he associates with old Indian stories, ‘It was so, it was not’ (SV, pp. 35, 275 and passim). If they introduce a kind of ‘flicker effect’ into linear narrative, they also suggest an actual narrative haunted by virtual ones, as ‘the real thing’ (Mahound’s verses) is haunted by its ‘diabolic opposite, not godly but satanic’ (SV, p. 123). The Satanic Verses works to redeem the virtual narrative, if only as a spectre. Such work is a conspicuous feature of anti- and post-colonial narratives from Joyce to Rushdie and beyond: actual history is shadowed by its excluded other, history in the negative, virtual history.41 Rushdie asks us to think the point of juncture of two temporal logics. Virtual history is the story that did not come to pass, but which nonetheless calls the ‘logic’ of the actual narrative in question as fortuitous

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and violent, like all ‘formalisms’. In its multiplicity as in its plurality, The Satanic Verses is radically at odds with the ‘terrifying singularity’ (in Rushdie’s sense) of Mahound or Mrs Torture (SV, p. 102). For their ‘dangerous’ message is always ‘one one one’: not just singularity as opposed to plurality, but also singularity in sequence, singularity as the single-track truth of history as it unfolds. It is precisely to Mahound’s monological history that Rushdie counterposes his novel as a ‘dream’ which constantly ‘shifts’, is ‘always changing form’ as, alternately, ‘statement and repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses’ (SV, pp. 108, 123). In this respect – in its self-transformations or self-refashionings, its will to become another novel – The Satanic Verses is peculiarly ethical. Rushdie makes of reception an openness to time as original division or ‘schismogenesis’. This understanding of reception has recently been clarified for us by magic realism in particular. The predicament is partly Saleem’s in Midnight’s Children, ‘the condition of the spirit in which the consequences of acceptance could not be denied, in which an overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for flight’.42 In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Wise Children or Slaughterhouse Five, for example, the question of the relative status of actual and possible histories – ‘it was so, it was not’ – is set constantly before the reader and crucially determines the relevant mode of reception. The ‘magic’ is there to displace and disrupt the temporal logic that ‘realism’ might appear to present as ungainsayable, inexorable, transhistorical. I can’t see Rushdie as engaged in a (moral) struggle with himself over the issue of whether or not ‘magic’ (or myth) is an evasion of history.43 Here, the site of reception is a point at which the magical and real are always exchanging terms, the one revealed in its unforeseeable, unexpected emergence (Naturwüchsigkeit), the other bound by laws (poiesis). Rushdie is concerned with the moment when ‘the real thing’ is challenged by its ‘diabolic opposite’, the godly by the satanic verses, homogeneity by radical alterity; with tento – and reception – recast, perhaps, as the ethical moment itself.

Notes A

Alterties: Criticism, History, Representation, Thomas Docherty

AM

Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, Karatani Kojin

AW

‘Atheism and Writing: Humanism and the Cry’, Maurice Blanchot

DHB

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature, Timothy Clark

EL

L’espace littéraire, Maurice Blanchot

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The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, Wolfgang Iser

I IR LoC

‘Introduction’, Leslie Hill The Implied Reader, Wolfgang Iser The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha

LV OMJL

Le livre à venir, Maurice Blanchot Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Karatani Kojin

PVH SoS

A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro Sour Sweet, Timothy Mo

SV

The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

TAR TPTN U

Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Hans Robert Jauss Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Andrew Gibson Ulysses, James Joyce

UC

The Unavowable Community, Maurice Blanchot

WD

The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot

1. See Levinas, ‘L’œuvre d’Edmond Husserl’, in EDE, pp. 7–52, p. 36. 2. See for instance Elaine F. Nardocchio (ed.), Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992). 3. See Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 137. 4. Leona Toker (ed.), Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (New York and London: Garland, 1994), p. xv. 5. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), hereafter IR; p. 279. 6. Jane P Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism:from Formalism to Post-Structura lism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. ix. 7. Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), hereafter FI; p. 297. 8. Notably Louise Rosenblatt’s, which is currently showing signs of revival. See her Literature as Exploration (1938; New York: Noble and Noble, 1968). See also John Clifford (ed.), The Experience of Reading: Louise Rosenblatt and ReaderResponse Theory (Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook, 1991). 9. Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 16. 10. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Atheism and Writing: Humanism and the Cry’, hereafter AW, in The Infinite Conversation, tr. with a foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 246–63, p. 251. 11. This last is preferable because, in the French, the term has an active connotation. Cf. Pierre Joris’s introduction to his translation of Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), hereafter UC; pp. xi–xxv, pp. xxii–xxv.

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RECEPTION AND RECEPTIVITY 12. Blanchot has discussed the interinvolvement of activity and passivity at length. See for example the discussion of patience, passivity and subissement in The Writing of the Disaster, tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), hereafter WD; pp. 13–19. 13. See Leslie Hill, ‘Introduction’, hereafter I, in Carolyn Bailey Gill, Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–20; p. 2. Cf. Sarah Kofman on art as a threat to the mastery of speculative philosophy, Mélancolie de l’art (Paris: Galilée, 1985), p. 15 and passim. 14. Blanchot, Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), hereafter LV; p. 244. 15. Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), hereafter DHB; p. 69. 16. See Steven Shaviro, Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille and Literary Theory (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), p. 143. 17. Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), hereafter EL; p. 269. 18. Cf. Blanchot on imagination’s power to distance as what creates ‘the space of literature’ or contremonde, La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 69. See also DHB, p. 77. 19. Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp. 20–24. 20. For an example of such distinctions, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (London: Harvard University Press, 1979). 21. For Blanchot on ‘weakness’, see for instance WD, p. 21. 22. See Sandra Harding, ‘Reinventing Ourselves as Other: More New Agents of History and Knowledge’, in Linda S. Kauffman (ed.), American Feminist Thought at Century’s End (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 140–64. 23. Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 61. 24. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. Timothy Bahti, introd. Paul de Man (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), hereafter TAR; p. 61. 25. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, introd. Wayne Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 90. 26. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), hereafter LoC; p. 15. 27. Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (London: Abacus, 1983), hereafter SoS; p. 29. 28. I am grateful to Elaine Ho for this information. 29. See Gianni Vattimo on ‘oscillation’ as a principle of postmodern art, ‘Art and Oscillation’, in The Transparent Society, tr. David Webb (Oxford: Polity, 1992), pp. 45–61. 30. Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (London: Penguin, 1983), hereafter PVH; p. 65. 31. Fredric Jameson, ‘Foreword’, Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, tr. and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), hereafter OMJL; pp. xix–xx. 32. Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, ed. Michael Speaks, tr. Kohso Sabu (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), hereafter AM; pp.

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RESPONSES xxii–xxiii. Cf. Levinas on ‘l’unicité de l’unique … l’unicité d’autrui’, IH, p. 199. 33. The quoted phrase is not Karatani’s but William Haver’s. See ‘Introduction’, OMJL, p. 7. 34. The reasons for this are amply given in OMJL. 35. Cf. the section ‘Reception Theory and the Anthropological Dyad’ in my Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), hereafter TPTN; pp. 244–54. 3 6 . But cf. Thomas Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and After Theory (second edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). 37. Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), hereafter A; p. 25. 38. For a more protracted account and deployment of these terms, see my TPTN, Chapter 5, pp. 200–9, 240–42. 39. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), hereafter U; 13.1279–85. All references hereafter are to chapter and line number in this edition. 40. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking Penguin, 1988), hereafter SV; p. 52. 41. For a detailed reading of Ulysses as such a novel, see my forthcoming Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Oxford University Press). 42. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 431. 43. For the view I refer to here, see Fawzia Afzhal-Khan, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 157 and passim.

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INDEX

Beckett, Samuel 55, 76, 94, 111, 119, 134, 156–8, 161; Company 141– 3; How It Is 149–50; Ill Seen Ill Said 143–4, 146 : gentleness in 144, obscurity in 143–4; Texts for Nothing 150–5; The Unnamable 192; Watt 146; Worstward Ho 144–6 Begam, Richard 158 n34 Bellini, Giovanni 101 Benhabib, Seyla 6 Benjamin, Andrew 99–101, 103, 186; anoriginal heterogeneity 99–101 Benjamin, Walter 116 Bennett, Andrew 101–4 Bergson, Henri 27, 68, 87, 88 Bernard, Michel 157 n12, 158 n28 Bernasconi, Robert 139 Bersani, Leo 131 n4 Bertens, Hans 67–8 Bhabha, Homi 197, 200–1 bisexual theory 40–1, 52 n27 Blair, Tony 3 Blanchot, Maurice 64, 189–95, 201, 210 n12, 211; désæuvrement 190, 195; innocence 190–1; légèreté 191–2 Bleich, David 196 Booth, Wayne C. 5, 9–12, 26 Bowen, Elizabeth: To the North 101–5 Bowie, Malcolm 132 n21, 133 n24 Bredella, Lothar 19 n12 Bristow, Joseph 41 Brooks, Peter 8

Abbott, H. Porter 157 n15, 158 n29 Achebe, Chinua 65 Ackroyd, Peter: Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem 46–7 Adorno, Theodor 16, 155 Afzhal-Khan, Fawzia 212 n43 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef 107 n5 Ainley, Alison 167 Alter, Robert 92 alterity 17, 25–9, 35–6, 45, 50, 62–5, 69, 71, 77, 90, 100–1, 103, 106, 111–17, 134, 137, 139, 147, 149–50, 161, 178, 188–9, 192–3, 196–7, 201, 204–5, 207, 209 anti-positivism, feminist 181 Apel, Karl-Otto 6 apodictic discourse 10, 36, 40 apophansis 36, 40, 144 Aristotle 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 20 n25, 29 Armstrong, Isobel 161–3, 168, 183 n3 Austen, Jane 6–7, 11, 13; Mansfield Park 10; Sense and Sensibility 166 Badiou, Alain 134, 146–58; fidelity 134, 147–9, 151–5; vérité 148–9, 151–5, 158 n23 Bakhtin, Mikhail 12, 90, 196 Banks, Iain: The Wasp Factory 42–3, 45 Barthes, Roland 11, 91–2, 191, 208 Bataille, Georges 164–7, 168, 184 n20 Baudrillard, Jean 3, 69, 76 Bauman, Zygmunt 13, 21 n36

225

INDEX Dos Passos, John: Manhattan Transfer 208 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 76 Dufy, Raoul 136 Duncker, Patricia: Hallucinating Foucault 43–5 Duras, Marguerite 175; The Malady of Death 193

Bruns, Gerald L. 20 n22, 21 n35 Buber, Martin 29, 31 Burn, Gordon: Alma Cogan 44–5, 47 Butler, Judith 32, 33, 34–5, 36, 40–1, 42; and drag 40–2 Cairns, Lucille 133 Cantor, George 157 n20 Carter, Angela: Wise Children 209 Cather, Willa: A Lost Lady 28–9, 35–6; My Ántonia 28, 34–5 Cavell, Stanley 12 Celan, Paul 100 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 77, 84; délire 79–81; Voyage au Bout de la Nuit 78–81 Chalier, Catherine 167 Champagne, John 17 Chanter, Tina 167–8 Compagnon, Antoine 133 n28 Connor, Steven 4, 9, 12, 21 n39, 145, 157 n15, 184 n20 Conrad, Joseph 73; Heart of Darkness 55–66, 79, 80–1 conservatism 4, 150; as decadence 176 Cornell, Drucilla 12, 16, 21 n36, 161, 171, 173–8, 181–2 Critchley, Simon 12, 13, 135–6, 139–41, 155, 158 n21 critique 126 Crowther, Paul 83

Eaglestone, Robert 2, 12, 66–7, 82 n8 Eagleton, Terry 2–4, 182 Eliot, T.S. 162–3, 165, 168 Ellmann, Richard 163 Empson, William 163 Enlightenment project 13–14, 155, 175 ethical criticism 1–2, 5–6, 9, 16, 21 n43, 193–4 ethical feminism 173–82 ethico-political, the 4, 18, 69, 72, 85, 107 ethics: differentiated from morality 1, 10, 13–16, 21 n36, 29, 77, 91, 124–6, 175, 182, 207; discursive 55, 135–46, 151–5, 174–5, 193, 207; postmodern 5, 13, 50, 85, 106, 161, 167, 173, 187, 207 ethics and: the academy 14; affect 17, 30, 161–4, 186, 193, 207; the anti-novel 57, 91–9, 140–56; antirepresentationalism 54–7, 66–75, 78–81, 92, 120, 150, 173, 174, 176–7; aporia 16, 33, 36, 62, 117, 123–5, 134, 142–3, 200–1, 209; the avant-garde 18, 69–70, 73–5, 83, 100–1; Capital 68–70, 77, 166–7; Christianity 38, 161, 166–7; colonialism 65, 79–81, 132 n18; deconstruction 4, 12, 15–16, 40, 48, 50, 63, 117–19, 122–3, 126, 134, 139–42, 158 n34, 162; dialogue 12, 25, 31; ‘dissolution’ 38, 88–91, 92–8, 101–6, 169, 200; doxa 148–9, 154; the ego 17, 21 n39, 25–6, 37, 57, 60, 71–2, 98, 117, 121, 161–2, 165, 186– 90, 193, 195–7, 200–1, 207, 209; epistemology 25–9, 32, 54, 58, 66, 86–7, 92; the event 16, 30, 44, 72,

Deduck, Patricia A. 176–7 de Gourmont, Rémy 163 Deleuze, Gilles 69, 119, 125, 157 n18, 164, 205 de Man, Paul 8, 117–18 deontology 16, 161, 182 Derrida, Jacques 4, 8, 14, 15, 36, 86, 88, 96, 106, 123, 132 n16, 139–40, 164, 184 n20, 186, 188, 202 Descombes, Vincent 132 n17 Dickens, Charles 11 Docherty, Thomas 82 n10, 84 n33, 138, 204–5, 207 Dollimore, Jonathan 41, 49–50, 52 n27; transgressive reinscription 50

226

INDEX Gadamer, Hans-Georg 171 Galileo 147, 154 Genet, Jean 49–50 Genette, Gérard 27, 131 n7, 181 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 40 Gide, André 132 n19 Girard, René 11, 121–2, 133 n32 Goldberg, S.L. 5, 10, 11, 12 Goldmann, Lucien 11 Grabes, Herbert 19 n12, 20 n21 Gray, John 13, 14

75, 77, 87, 89, 93, 95–6, 100–1, 106, 111, 117–19, 124, 130, 134–6, 141–3, 146–55, 157 n18, 164, 186, 192–3, 195–6, 204; fascism 36–7, 39, 42, 154; gender 26–9, 31–6, 39–50, 167–8, 173– 6, 178–82; imagination 16, 174; inadequation 87, 92, 175; loss 45; melancholia 70, 76–8; multiplicity 10–11, 34, 38, 75, 86–9, 91–100, 103, 104, 117, 119–20, 124–5, 128–30, 147, 196–8, 205–9; narration 11–12, 26–9, 20 n21, 26–9, 31–6, 42, 45–50, 54, 139–40, 151–3, 170–3, 180–1, 208; negativity 76–7, 79–80, 155; paradox 4, 10, 79; patriarchy 61, 65, 162–4, 167–82, 189; rationality 6, 13, 21 n35, 21 n39, 68–9, 162, 166–7, 195; receptivity 17, 165, 177–8, 186, 188–9, 192–3, 197, 204, 207, 209; selfdifference 11, 33–4, 37, 41–4, 78, 85, 90–1, 101–2, 105–6, 119, 134, 139, 145, 165, 169, 172, 176, 178, 190, 195–8, 201; sensibility 17, 161–82; sexualities 34, 39–45, 47–8, 123–5, 132, 133; ‘spectrality’ 36, 88, 96–7, 102–6, 144, 172–3, 190, 201; subjectivity 21 n39, 25–7, 37–8, 41, 71–2, 75, 88, 90, 105, 117, 130, 145–6, 148, 150, 152, 157 n15, 161, 165, 169, 198, 204, 207, 209; the sublime 66–75, 83; subtlety 89, 182; temporality 4–5, 38–9, 41–2, 46, 49, 72, 87–9, 119, 122, 129, 135–6, 143, 145, 196–7, 200–1, 204–9; theory 5–6; utopianism 4, 40, 48–9, 155–6, 173–82 ethics of: generosity 64, 96, 139, 165–7, 168–9, 178–80; marginality 17

Habermas, Jürgen 6 Harding, Sandra 196 Hardy, Barbara 8, 26 Harpham, Geoffrey Gait 12, 15, 20 n25, 21 n36 Harrison, Nancy 170–1; staging 170–3 Harvey, W.J. 8 Hassan, Ihab 92 Hayman, Ronald 133 n29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 7, 90 Heidegger, Martin 7, 27, 60, 76, 86, 90, 104–5, 183 n13, 191 Hemmings, Clare 40–1 Hill, Leslie 158 n30, 190 Hillis Miller, J. 12 Holland, Norman N. 196 Holub, Robert 196 Homer: The Odyssey 206 Hughes, Edward 132 n18 humanism 2, 5, 6, 10, 12, 16, 21 n43, 69, 103 Husserl, Edmund 27, 38, 186–9; and intentionality 27, 38, 162, 165, 188–9, 195 incommensurability 11, 14, 15, 71, 82 n14, 94, 196 Irigaray, Luce 31, 168; déréliction 68 irony of reading 193 Irving, Washington 206 Iser, Wolfgang 187–9, 192–5, 201, 205 Ishiguro, Kazuo: A PaleView of Hills 199–201

Fish, Stanley 138 Foucault, Michel 75, 164 Freud, Sigmund 71, 132 n21 Freund, Elizabeth 187 Fullbrook, Kate 22

James, Henry 27, 36; The Golden Bowl

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INDEX 158 n21, 167–8; disenchantment 25–6, 117; the encounter 25, 30–1, 36–8, 68, 71, 90, 94, 112–17; enjoyment 165; Eurocentrism of 17; évasion 36– 9, 44; excendance 36–9, 41–2, 45, 49, 117; the face 63–6; freedom 17, 57; gender 17, 39–40, 167–8, 174, 178; identity 25–6, 32, 39, 137, 169, 188; infinity 58, 62–3, 65; Judaism 38, 51–2; language 64, 135–40; narrative 138, 140–1, 156 n3; ontology 16, 56–7, 59–64, 65, 91, 135–7, 164–5; pre-reflective consciousness 27, 30–1, 89, 164– 5, 186; representation 56–7, 66, 70; responsibility 16, 63, 137–8; responsiveness 16, 64, 137, 165, 187–9; rhetoric 59–60, 62; Saying and Said 135–40; sensibility 164–5, 167–8; the subject-object relation 27, 29, 49, 187–9; totality 57–63, 65, 87; unity 86–91, 95, 100; vulnerability 165, 167–8; the Zwischen 30–1, 45, 87, 91 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 29–31, 87 Libes kind, Daniel 100 littérature engagée 112 Locatelli, Carla 141, 157 n10 Lodge, David 92 Lorber, Judith 40 Lukács, Georg 11 Lyotard, Jean-François 3, 26, 66–79, 82 n14, 83, 85, 94–5, 132 n15, 135, 161, 164, 196; passibilité 161

33–4, 35; Prefaces 32–4; The Princess Casamassima 32; The Tragic Muse 34 Jameson, Fredric 8, 71, 201–2 Japan 203 Jauss, Hans Robert 196–7, 199, 201; horizonal change 196 Jencks, Charles 67, 70 Johns, Jasper: Flag 100–1 Johnson, B.S. 100; Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? 93–4; Christie Malry’s Own Double- Entry 93; House Mother Normal 95; Travelling People 93; The Unfortunates 94–6 Josipovici, Gabriel 92 Joyce, James 153, 208; Finnegans Wake 205; Ulysses, ‘Nausicaa’ chapter in, 205–7 Jussawalla, Adil 197 Kafka, Franz 77; Diaries 193; The Castle 194; The Trial 194 Kant, Immanuel 13, 71–3, 83, 161 Karatani, Kojin 201–5, 208–9; tandokusei 202; tento 203–4, 208–9 Kierkegaard, Søren 15 Kohso, Sabu 202 Kristeva, Julia 78, 118–19 Kundera, Milan 208 Lacan, Jacques 148, 153 Lawrence, D.H. 10 Leavis, F.R. 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 15, 17, 55–6, 62, 140, 164–5, 168, 170 Leavisite tradition 1–2, 8, 10, 18 Ledbetter, Mark 22 Lescourret, Marie-Anne 36–7 Levinas, Emmanuel and: 13, 16–18, 25–7, 29–31, 32, 36–9, 40, 42, 51 n19, 56–9, 62–4, 66–71, 82 n14, 86–91, 94–5, 100, 103, 112–17, 122–3, 134–42, 156 n3, 164–9, 171, 174, 178, 183 n13, 186–90, 195–7, 201, 211 n32; animation 137; art 66–8, 137–8; cognition 16, 25–6, 56–7, 62, 86–7, 91, 164–5, 186, 188–9, 197; criticism of 17, 29, 68, 112, 123, 138–41,

McCance, Dawne 12 McGinn, Colin 5 MacIntyre, Alasdair 1, 6–7, 11–12, 13–15, 20, 21 n35; emotivism 14 Mackenzie, Henry 162 Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain 44 Márquez, Gabriel García: One Hundred Years of Solitude 209 Marx, Karl 14, 202 Marxist criticism 2–4, 19 n6 materialism 37, 82 n10, 95, 124, 134–6, 146, 166, 204

228

INDEX and: involuntary memory 112, 129, love 113; A la recherche du temps perdu 111–30 : double logic in117–23, 126, 128, ending of 129–30, homosexuality in 123–5, 132, Jews in 126–8, lesbianism in 128–9, 133 n31, metaphor and metonymy in 118–19, 129, 131 n7, reversibility in 122, snobbery in 126 Putnam, Hilary 8

Middleton Murry, John 163 Miner, Valerie 48 Mo, Timothy: Sour Sweet 197–201 modernity 1, 6–7, 54–5, 77, 100, 121–2, 162–4, 166–7 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de 191 moral philosophy: and the novel 6–12, 17, 20 n21 narrative 6, 11; focalization in 27–8, 35, 54; levels 33, 47; omniscient narration in 11, 26, 54; reflector in 27, 32–4; theory 11–12, 20 n21, 26–7, 36; unreliable narration in 54; voice 34–5, 128 ‘neo-humanism’ 5, 6, 12, 17, 21 n43 new positivism 2 Newton, Adam Zachary 12–13 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 14, 77, 117, 158 n34, 164 Nin, Anaïs 173–4; Cities of the Interior 176, 178–82; Deltaof Venus 177, 184 n33; Diary 176; House of Incest 177; Little Birds 177; Winter of Artifice 178–9 Norris, Christopher 175 Nussbaum, Martha 6–12, 20

Rainsford, Dominic 20 n26 Read, Herbert 163 reception theory 186, 187–9, 194–8, 201, 203–4 Rée, Jonathan 20 n24 Rhys, Jean 167, 170; After Leaving Mr Mackenzie 168–9, 171–3; Good Morning, Midnight 168–9, 172–3 Ricardou, Jean 92 Richardson, Michael 166 Ricœur, Paul 8 Rorty, Richard 6–12, 17, 20 n21, 171 Rose, Gillian 21 n39 Rose, Jacqueline 41 Rosenzweig, Franz 89 Royle, Nicholas 101–4, 108 n27 Rushdie, Salman: The Satanic Verses 207–9

Orton, Joe 50

Sartre, Jean-Paul 112–13, 116 Schoenberg, Arnold 147 Schwarz, Daniel 5, 6, 12 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 132 Seurat, Georges 89 Sinfield, Alan 39–40 Smit, David 33 Sontag, Susan 133 n25 Spinoza, Baruch 17, 57, 148, 150 Sprinker, Michael 131 n4, 133 standpoint theory 196 Stein, Gertrude: Tender Buttons 74–6, 83 n31 Stowers, Cath 48 Sturrock, John 79

Palmer, Frank 5 Parker, David 5, 9–12 Parmenides 122 Pascal, Blaise 25, 201 phenomenology 13, 186–9, 194–8 Pinget, Robert 100, 107 n16; Cette voix 99; Fable 99; Le Libera 97–9; Passacaille 97 Plotinus 86–7 ‘politics of English’ 2–5, 15, 52 n27, 85 postcolonialism 196–201, 207–9 postmodernism 1, 6, 11, 42, 67, 71, 76–7, 100, 101, 121, 161 postmodernity 9, 13–15, 54–5, 68–9, 76–7, 174, 201 post-structuralism 9, 12 Proust, Marcel 7, 102, 134–5, 193;

Tabbi, Joseph 71 Tennyson, Alfred Lord: ‘Enoch

229

INDEX Arden’ 206 Thatcher; Margaret 208–9 Thiher, Allen 78 Toker, Leona 14–15, 187 Tolstoy, Leo 10; Anna Karenina 179 Tompkins, Jane 187 Trezise, Thomas 156–7

Watts, Philip 84 n40 Weir, Allison 41 Wellmer, Albrecht 11; radical surpassing 11, 14 Williams, Bernard 15 Winterson, Jeanette: The Passion 47–8; Sexing the Cherry 47; Written on the Body 47–9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 26, 203 Wolf, Christa: Cassandra 176 Wood, David 139 Wulf, Catharina 84 n33 Wyschogrod, Edith 13, 20 n21, 22

universalism 6–9, 15, 77 Vattimo, Gianni 211 n29 vector of cognition 189, 195 Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse Five 209

Zizek, Slavoj 78, 15 Wahl, Jean 88–9, 92

230