Textual Practice 10:3 (Textual Practice 103)

Editor Alan Sinfield (Sussex University) Deputy editor Lindsay Smith (Sussex University) North American associate editor Jean E.Howard (Columbia University) Reviews editor Peter Nicholls (Sussex University) Editorial board Isobel Armstrong John Barrell Gillian Beer Homi Bhabha Fred Botting Malcolm Bowie Rachel Bowlby Joseph Bristow Laura Chrisman Teresa de Lauretis Jonathan Dollimore James Donald John Drakakis Terry Eagleton

John Frow Paul Hamilton Terry Hawkes Linda Hutcheon Cora Kaplan Declan Kiberd Siobhàn Kilfeather Ania Loomba Anne McClintock Sally Munt Richard Ohmann David Rogers Simon Shepherd Jenny Taylor

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Contributions should be double spaced, and two copies should be sent. Address: Alan Sinfield, Textual Practice, Arts B, Sussex University, Brighton BN1 9QN, England. Books for review should be addressed to Peter Nicholls, Arts B, Sussex University, Brighton BN1 9QN, England. Advertisements. Enquiries to Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE, UK; e-mail [email protected] Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three Xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £70.00; UK personal: £26.00; Rest of World full: £75.00; Rest of World personal: £26.00; USA full: $75.00; USA personal: $45.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP10 5BE. Sample copy requests, e-mail [email protected] ISSN 0950–236X © Routledge 1996

ISBN 0-203-98622-9 Master e-book ISBN

Textual Practice

Contents Volume 10 Issue 3

Articles The diasporic imaginary: theorizing the Indian diaspora Vijay Mishra

421

‘Laodamia’ and the moaning of Mary John Barrell

445

Tragedy and the nationalist condition of criticism Thomas Docherty

470

Melodrama as avant-garde: enacting a new subjectivity Simon Shepherd

494

Bisexuality, heterosexuality, and wishful theory Jonathan Dollimore

508

Reviews Rosalind E.Krauss, The Optical Unconscious Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists Lyndsey Stonebridge

524

Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor Garin V.Dowd

530

Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity Peter Carravetta, Preface to the Diaphora Nicholas Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism Massimo Verdicchio

533

Laure, The Collected Writings Sharon Black

543

Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams Roger Sales

547

v

Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism T.E.Hulme, The Collected Writings of T.E.Hulme Paul Edwards

551

Abstracts and keywords

559

Index

565

The diasporic imaginary: theorizing the Indian diaspora* Vijay Mishra

In the arcade of Hanuman House…there was already the evening assembly of old men…pulling at clay cheelums that glowed red and smelled of ganja and burnt sacking…. They could not speak English and were not interested in the land where they lived; it was a place where they had come for a short time and stayed longer than they expected. They continually talked of going back to India, but when the opportunity came, many refused, afraid of the unknown, afraid to leave the familiar temporariness.1 In the larger narrative of global migrations and diasporas I would want to situate a diaspora of which, in complex ways, I have been/ am a part. This is the Indian diaspora of around nine million about which not much of a theoretical nature has been written. In the lead essay in the foundation issue of the journal Diaspora, William Safran for instance devotes a mere twelve lines to the Indian diaspora and not unnaturally oversimplifies the characteristics of this diaspora.2 Unlike most other diasporas whose first movement out of the homeland can no longer be established with absolute precision, the Indian diaspora presents us with a case history that has been thoroughly documented. This is largely because the Indian diaspora began as part of British imperial movement of labour to the colonies. The end of slavery produced a massive demand for labour in the sugar plantations and Indian indentured labourers were brought to Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa. There were also movements of labour to East Africa, Sri Lanka and Malaya to work on the railways, tea and rubber plantations respectively. This narrative of diasporic movement is, however, not continuous or seamless as there is a radical break between the older diasporas of classic capitalism and the mid- to late twentieth-century diasporas of advanced capital to the metropolitan centres of the Empire, the New World and the former settler colonies. Since these are two interlinked but Textual Practice 10(3), 1996, 421–447

© 1996 Routledge 0950–236X

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historically separated diasporas, I would want to refer to them as the old (‘exclusive’) and the new (‘border’) Indian diasporas. Furthermore, I would want to argue that the old Indian diasporas were diasporas of exclusivism because they created relatively self-contained ‘little Indias’ in the colonies. The founding writer of the old Indian diaspora is, of course, V.S.Naipaul. The new diaspora of late capital (the diaspora of the border), on the other hand, shares characteristics with many other similar diasporas such as the Chicanos and the Koreans in the US. The new Indian diaspora is mediated in the works of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Meera Nair, Rohinton Mistry, M.S.Vassanji, Gurinder Chadha, Meera Syal and others. These writers/film-makers speak of a diaspora whose overriding characteristic is one of mobility.3 Where the diaspora of exclusivism transplanted Indian icons of spirituality to the new land—a holy Ganges here, a lingam or a coiled serpent there—the diaspora of the border kept in touch with India through family networks and marriage, generally supported by a state apparatus that encouraged family reunion. Diasporas of the border in these Western democracies are visible presences—‘we are seen, therefore we are’, says the Chicano novelist John Rechy4—whose corporealities carry marks of their hyphenated subjectivities. But elsewhere too, in Fiji or in Singapore, the state insists on diasporic identifications as its citizens, for demographic calculations and, in Fiji, for racialized electoral rolls, are always ethnic subjects. In Singapore the government prides itself on its CMIO (Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other) model of ethnic taxonomy which valorizes and transcodes, along racially essentialist lines, the specificities of communal experience even as the nation-state struggles to establish the primacy of the transcendent Singaporean citizen. For these hyphenated bodies (in spite of the enlightened ethos of citizenry) an extreme form of double consciousness occurs whenever the views of the dominant community begin to coincide with the rhetoric of what Sartre once observed as the racist question about the presumed ultimate solution of diasporas: ‘What do we do with them now?’ For diasporas this question always remains a trace, a potentially lethal ‘solution’, around which their selves continue to be shaped. Before continuing with the archaeology of the Indian diaspora in some detail I would want to pause here to advance a general theory of the diasporic imaginary that could act as a theoretical template for the rest of this paper. The diasporic imaginary and its pretexts The diasporic imaginary is a term I use to refer to any ethnic enclave in a nationstate that defines itself, consciously, unconsciously or because of the political self-interest of a racialized nation-state, as a group that lives in displacement.5 I use the word ‘imaginary’ in both its original Lacanian sense and in its more flexible current usage, as found in the works of Slavoj Žižek. Žižek defines the imaginary as the state of ‘identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing “what we would like to be”’.6 In a subsequent application of this theory to the nation itself, Žižek connects the

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sublime idea of what he calls the ‘Nation Thing’ to the subject’s imaginary identification with it. The ‘nation’ (as the ‘Thing’) is therefore accessible to a particular group of people of itself because it needs no particular verification of this ‘Thing’ called ‘Nation’.7 For this group the ‘nation’ simply is (beyond any kind of symbolization). Now in this construction of the ‘Nation Thing’ the nation itself is a fiction since it is built around a narrative imaginatively constructed by its subjects. The idea of the homeland then becomes (and here the terms ‘imaginary’ and ‘fantasy’ do coalesce), as Renata Salecl has pointed out, ‘[a] fantasy structure, [a] scenario, through which society perceives itself as a homogeneous entity’.8 We can follow up Salecl to make a more precise connection between a general theory of homelands (which is what I have done so far) and a theory of the diasporic homeland. Salecl refers, after Lacan, to fantasy as something that is predicated upon the construction of desire around a particularly traumatic event. The fantasy of the homeland is then linked, in the case of the diaspora, to that recollected moment when diasporic subjects feel they were wrenched from their mother(father)land. The cause may be the traumatized ‘middle passage’ of slave trade or the sailing ships (later steamships) of Indian indenture, but the ‘real’ nature of the disruption is not the point at issue here; what is clear is that the moment of ‘rupture’ is transformed into a trauma around an absence that because it cannot be fully symbolized becomes part of the fantasy itself. Sometimes the ‘absence’ is a kind of repression, a sign of loss, like the Holocaust for European Jews after the war, or the Ukrainian famine for the Ukrainian diaspora. To be able to preserve that loss, diasporas very often construct racist fictions of purity as a kind of jouissance, a joy, a pleasure around which anti-miscegenation narratives of homelands are constructed against the reality of the homelands themselves. Racist narratives of homelands are therefore part of the dynamics of diasporas, as imaginary homelands are constructed from the space of distance to compensate for a loss occasioned by an unspeakable trauma. The hypermobility of postmodern capital and ideas, and especially their ready dissemination on electronic bulletin boards (the internet, etc.) have the effect of actually reinforcing ethnic absolutism because diasporas can now connect with the politics of the homeland even as they live elsewhere. The collapse of distance on the information highway of cyberspace and a collective sharing of knowledge about the homeland by diasporas (a sharing that was linked to the construction of nations as imagined communities in the first instance) may be addressed by examining the kind of work Amit S.Rai has done on the construction of Hindu identity.9 His research explores the new public sphere that the Indian diaspora (or any diaspora for that matter) now occupies as it becomes a conduit through which the conservative politics of the homeland may be presented as the desirable norm. In Rai’s exploration of six internets—soc.culture.indian, alt.hindu, alt.islam, soc.culture. tamil, su.orig.india, and INET—he finds that many of the postings indicate a desire to construct India in purist terms. It is an India that is Hindu in nature and one in which secularism is simply a ruse to

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appease minorities. In its invocations of important Indian religious and cultural figures —Vivekananda, R.C.Dutt, etc.—the subtext is always a discourse of racial purity (‘we must go to the root of the disease and cleanse the blood of all impurities’, said Swami Vivekananda) and the sexual threat to Hindus posed by the Muslims in India. The double space occupied by the diaspora (multicultural hysteria within the US and rabid racial absolutism for the homeland) is summarized by Rai as follows: Finally, this textual construction of the diaspora can at the same time enable these diasporics to be ‘affirmative action’ in the United States and be against ‘reservations’ in India, to lobby for a tolerant pluralism in the West, and also support a narrow sectarianism in the East.10 Although Rai’s conclusions may be suspect—the postings need not lead to the correlation he discovers—it should be clear from the foregoing that diasporas construct homelands in ways that are very different from people of the homelands themselves. For an Indian in the diaspora, for instance, India is a very different kind of homeland than for the Indian national. At the same time the nation-state as an ‘imagined community’ needs diasporas to remind it of what the idea of homeland is. Diasporic discourse of the homeland is thus a kind of return of the repressed for the nation-state itself, its pre-symbolic (imaginary) narrative, in which one sees a more primitive theorization of the nation itself. Thus both the Jewish and gypsy diasporas—two extreme instances of the diasporic imaginaiy— have been treated by nation-states with particular disdain because they exemplify in varying degrees characteristics of a past that nation-states want to repudiate. For Franz Liszt the gypsy diaspora was a ‘crisis for Enlightenment definitions of civilization and nationalist definitions of culture’.11 The Jews, equally a problem but with an extensive sense of history and civilization, carried all the characteristics of an ethnic community (ethnie) and thus were both an earlier condition of the European nation-state as well as its nemesis.12 If the gypsies were read as the absolute instance of a nomadic tribe (‘a dirty gypsy’ is a term of abuse in both Hungary and Romania), the profound historicity of the Jewish people gave the Jewish diaspora a specially privileged position in diasporic theory. Diasporic theory then uses the Jewish example as the ethnic model for purposes of analysis or at least as its point of departure.13 But Jewish diasporas were never totally exclusivist—‘not isolation from Christians but insulation from Christianity’ was their motto, as Max Weinreich put it14—and met the nationstate half-way in its border zones. Jewish ‘homelands’, for instance, were constantly being re-created: in Babylon, in the Rhineland, in Spain, in Poland and even in America with varying degrees of autonomy.15 Movement ceased to be from a centre (Israel/Palestine/ Judaea) to a periphery and was across spaces of the ‘border’. Against the evidence, Zionist politics interpreted the Jewish diaspora as forever linked to a centre and argued that every movement of displacement (from Spain to France, from Poland to America) carried within it

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the trauma of the original displacement (such as that from Judaea to Babylon).16 In retrospect one can see how readily such a logic would erase the idea of nation as ‘palimpsestic text’ and replace it with the idea of nation as a racially pure ethnic enclave. In a very significant manner, then, the model of the Jewish diaspora is now contaminated by the diasporization of the Palestinians in Israel and by the Zionist belief that a homeland can be artificially reconstructed without adequate regard to intervening history.17 The theoretical problematic posed here is not simply Zionist. In no less a novel than George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the ‘Jew’ signified world-historical questions of exile. We need to keep the Palestinian situation in mind in any theorization of diasporas even as we use the typology of the Jewish diaspora to situate and critique the imaginary construction of a homeland as the central mythomoteur of diaspora histories.18 The reason for this is that displaced Palestinians and their enforced mobility force us to distinguish between the Zionist project of Israel and the historically deterritorialized experiences of Jewish people generally. Echoing Max Weinreich, the latter point is made by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin,19 who reread the Jewish diaspora through a postcolonial discourse where Jewishness is seen as a disruptive sign in the mosaic of history and an affirmation of a democratic ethos of equality that does not privilege any particular ethnic community in a nation.20 Against the Zionist fictions of a heroic past and a distant land, the real history of diaspora is always contaminated by the social processes that govern their lives. Indeed, the features of diasporas found in the writings of Gellner, Hobsbawm, Smith and Safran21 become an ‘insufferable’ aspect of their lives only when a morally bankrupt nation-state asks the question, ‘What shall we do with them?’ As the exemplary condition of late modernity, diasporas ‘call into question the idea that a people must have a land in order to be a people’.22 Of course, the danger here is that diasporas may well become romanticized as the ideal social condition (though many multicultural nations must come to terms with it) in which communities are no longer persecuted. As long as there is a fascist fringe always willing to find racial scapegoats for the nation’s own shortcomings and to chant ‘Go home’, the autochthonous pressures towards diasporic racial exclusivism will remain. To address real diasporas does not mean that the discourses which have been part of diaspora mythology (homeland, ancient past, return and so on) will disappear overnight. Under a gaze that threatens their already precarious sense of the ‘familiar temporariness’, diasporas lose their enlightened ethos and retreat into discourses of ethnic purity that are always the ‘imaginary’ underside of their own constructions of the homeland. The old Indian diaspora: ‘the familiar temporariness’ Postcolonial theory has drawn its source texts as well as its cultural dynamism from diasporic archives.23 Most of the claims about the need for a vigorous postcolonial intervention into the project of modernity, however, have taken the

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form of interventions from the diaspora within the West or from what I have called the new Indian diaspora of the border. This diaspora has been seen as a powerful source for diasporic discourses of disarticulation (abandonment, displacement, dispersion, etc.) as well as a ‘site’ for the rearticulation of an intercultural formation through which global migration, the positioning of identities, the nature of the bourgeois subject (have diasporas been instrumental in decentring the bour geois subject in the first place?) may be interrogated. However, the homogenization of all Indian diasporas in terms of the politics of disarticulation/rearticulation with reference to Britain, America or Canada has led to the fetishization of the new diaspora and an amnesiac disavowal of the old. Though less visible these days than the new in the story of modernity, the old Indian diaspora nevertheless constitutes a fascinating archive that can be placed relatively unproblematically alongside the ‘normative’ Jewish experience, because in this instance too a by and large semi-voluntary exodus of indentured workers began to read their own lives through the semantics of exile and dispersion (‘exile is the nursery of nationality’, wrote Lord Acton24). Without meaning to transvalue uncritically the old Indian diaspora—though transvalue we must in the long run—what is striking is the relative absence of critical cultural histories of this diaspora.25 Neither Hugh Tinker’s sister volume to his magisterial A New System of Slavery26 nor K.L.Gillion’s sequel to his pathbreaking study of Fiji’s Indian migrants27 places the story of indenture in the preexistent narrative(s) of diaspora. Indeed, what we have here is one of many subaltern historicities waiting to be reopened. Begun in the 1830s with a first consignment of indentured labourers to Mauritius, the system of indentured labour was to continue until 1917, by which time around a million people had been transported from India (largely from the Hindi-speaking North) to Mauritius, South Africa, Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam and Fiji to help produce the pre-eminent stimulant, sugar, ‘an indispensable additive to sauces and pastry’, for the swelling ranks of a tea-drinking and chocolate-eating leisured class in the West.28 Large numbers of South Indians came to work on the tea estates of Sri Lanka and on the rubber plantations of Malaysia. Small numbers of Punjabis (mainly Sikhs) went to East Africa, Canada and California as well. Many Gujarati Indian free traders also came in the wake of indenture. I have little to say about these latter groups.29 What interests me are the old Indian diasporas of the sugar plantations, because they do make up a single group of dispersed and territorially disaggregated bodies who share many of the characteristics of the so-called ideal type of the Jewish diaspora mentioned by William Safran, though it must be added that their diasporic unity is post facto because the indentured labourers ranged from the aboriginal Dhangars of Chota Nagpur to the caste-conscious Rajputs and Brahmins of Oudh. In another respect too the original migrants of this diaspora constitute, collectively, a remarkable archive because their emigration passes have been preserved. In the archives of Suva, Georgetown, Port Louis, Port of Spain and at the Documentation Centre in Durban one can read the names of the

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migrants, their caste, their parents’ names, their skills, if any, their religion and so on. Here is an example of a typical emigration pass written for Dhowray, an indentured labourer on the first ship to Fiji in 1879: MAN.

Ship’s Name Leonidas Ship’s No. 410 Fiji Emigration Agency CALCUTTA, the 28th February 1879 Depot No..................................... Name,.......................................... Caste,.......................................... Father’s Name,............................ Age,............................................ Zillah,.......................................... Pergunnah,................................... Village,........................................ Occupation,................................. Name of next of Kin..................... If married, to whom,.................... Marks,.........................................

572 Dhowray Bahalia Naipaul 25 Soultanpur Mosaferkhana Dihirioura Laborer Naipaul Father Dihirioura – 5–5

Certified that I have examined and passed the above-named as a fit Subject for Emigration, and that he is free from all bodily and mental disease and has been Vaccinated. Sgd. Surgeon Superintendent. Sgd. Depot Surgeon I hereby certify that the man above-described (whom I have engaged as a laborer on the part of the Government of Fiji where he has expressed a willingness to proceed to work for hire) has appeared before me and the Protector of Emigrants, who has explained to him all matters concerning his duties as an Emigrant, according to Section XXXVIII of the Indian Emigration Act No. VII of 1871. Sgd. Protector of Emigrants, Calcutta. Sgd. Govt: Emigration Agent for Fiji Since almost all the members of the old Indian diaspora can trace their lineage back to a name on one of these emigration passes, the act of displacement meant that they were entering, for the first time, a form of historical subjectification for which in their homeland there was no precedent. Inadvertently the subaltern enters Western imperial history because the emigration passes break away from

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an ‘ahistorical’ continuum and start another in which a documentary archive becomes decisive. However, in spite of a lot of personal documentation (much more than one would find on a birth certificate, for instance) what the emigration passes do not indicate are the sources of the diasporic subject: widows escaping from real or implied sati, women coerced into marrying older men, men who had been excluded from inheritance, boys brought up by stepmothers, men and women who may have defied the severe norms of a largely illiterate heterosexual society and, finally, the role of professional Indian recruiters, who received the princely sum of £3 per recruit, as complicit functionaries of the Raj.30 These are the occluded, material history of the old Indian diaspora found in the margins of the emigration passes. I don’t think we can overlook this other history of the diaspora. Given the relationship between the ‘recruiters’ and their Victims’ (many later migrants recalled the false promises made by these ‘recruiters’, though one suspects that real or imagined belief in being tricked is part of the narrative of a lost homeland anyway31), and given the wretched conditions of transport, it is hardly surprising that memory is often mediated by realities which many Europeans involved in these voyages (doctors, captains) compared to the middle passage of slavery.32 The indentured labourers were transported in the hulks of ships, 300 to 400 to a ship in the first fifty years, twice that number in subsequent years, single men and single women divided by married couples and children in the between decks, for a journey that would last at least three months. There was a sense of collective drama as one post was left for another. Labourers waded through knee-deep water after reaching the lagoons on lifebuoys. The repetitive nature of this disembarkation meant that people could refer to it as the moment of origin or genesis in the new land. Apart from the bonding possibilities of this act, the colonial documentation of the event meant that for the first time Indian subalterns became historical subjects. Since, as we have said, their names, their villages, their castes and their parents’ names were recorded on emigration passes this motley crowd entered for the first time the regulative history of the Empire. Yet there is no subaltern Marlow who has recounted the first encounter with these outposts of Empire, even though scattered and fragmented oral accounts of some of the indentured labourers have survived in folk stories and songs. All that remained was the memory of the passage and a loss that could only be sustained through the categories of myth. The sailing ship (and after 1880 the steamship) became as important a site for purposes of legitimation as the motherland itself. The bonds created through the jahaji bhai (‘ship brotherhood’) confraternity led to social configurations that were not unlike those of the village networks in India, but much more radical because this was the first space in which the Indian labourers had to face the reality of losing caste as a consequence of crossing the kalapani, the black sea. Another spatial connection in this old diaspora was established through the uniform nature of the food. Since food rations on the sugar plantations were identical for all indentured Indian labourers throughout the colonies, food linked the old Indian diaspora from Surinam to Mauritius to Fiji.33 The weekly rations

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made up of rice, dhal, sugar, tea, dried fish, atta (flour), salt, oil and half a pound (about 250 grams) of mutton on weekends produced an indenture cuisine that has survived to this day. First meal: black tea, roti with fried or curried vegetables or a chokha (cooked aubergines) Midday meal: boiled rice with dhal and bhaji (vegetables) Evening meal: roti and tarcari (curry) with black tea Midday meals (weekends): usual midday meal with fish and/or mutton There is a particular food called dhal-puri that is made of dhal (lentils) placed between two layers of flour rolled into a large roti or pancake, like a fajita, that clearly grew out of the limited culinary combinations possible on a staple diet based on the weekly rations. In Trinidad the dhal-puri is sold in shops called ‘Bus (t) Up Shut’ because, as they explain in Trinidad, when you crumple a dhal-puri in your hand, it opens up. The move from dhal-puri to the calypsonian ‘bus(t) up shut’ is part of the larger process of creolization or hybridization that leads to interracial interactions between diasporas, in this instance between Afro-West Indians and East Indians of Trinidad. As a fast food available in the ‘Bus(t) Up Shut’ shops, the dhal-puri is an ‘essential item on social/festive occasions irrespective of ethnicity’.34 What one begins to see is the immense social mobility of culture-specific food. It is precisely this fluidity—and the contaminated/ contaminative space occupied by the Indian diaspora and diasporas generally—that makes essentialist readings of diasporic histories (readings along regressive nationalist lines) so difficult to understand. In the old Indian diasporas Indians transformed the physical and cultural landscapes to such an extent that these landscapes are now meaningless without reference to them. Names of places, the vocabularies of local languages, as well as the existence of so many exotic flora and fauna (mango, mynah, bulbul, mongoose, jackfruit, and many more) attest to their enormous impact. In this respect the old Indian diasporas ‘read’ these landscapes in ways in which the new have only just begun to do. In the wake of military coups (Rabuka’s in Fiji) and repressive regimes (Burnham in Guyana) the old Indian diaspora, once freakish travellers because rural Northern India had no significant tradition of travel beyond those of itinerant singers, sadhus and ghummakars,35 has now become one of the most mobile communities in the world.36 Many of the issues canvassed here come together in the works of V.S.Naipaul, the founder of a creative discourse for the Indian diaspora of exclusiveness. Central to Naipaul’s diasporic discourse is an agitation about home. As he says in A Turn in the South (1989), ‘Howard had something neither Jimmy nor I had, a patch of the earth he thought of as home, absolutely his’.37 In his magnificent A House for Mr Biswas (1961), memories are not simply ‘internalized and endlessly reproduced’ but progressively ‘mediated’.38 In this novel, descendants of Indian indentured labourers (the Tulsi extended family) insulate themselves

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within the thick brick walls of Hanuman House, itself a spatial metaphor of an epic that they memorially reconstructed. In this space are located metonymic fragments of the Tulasidasa vernacular Ramayana (composed in Samvat 1631 or 1574 CE:)39 Tulsi, the matriarch named after the author of this Ramayana, Lanka, the kitchen area at the back named after Ravana’s kingdom, and so on. In the words of Amitav Ghosh, the house celebrated in V.S. Naipaul’s novel becomes ‘an infinitely reproducible space’ that is never left behind.40 Infinitely reproducible space, yes, but the space of the novel is also an arena where the history of the old diaspora is played out (the work’s connections with Naipaul’s own personal history is obvious) as well as some of its peculiarly diasporic tendencies. Mr Biswas’s rejection of the Tulsi matriarchal household is as much a reaction against the very un-Indian system of ‘the ghardamada or the son-inlaw in his in-laws’ family’.41 The mobility of the space of India, and its reconstructions through acts of pseudo-sacralization (after Mircea Eliade) explains why the classical linear narrative of return one associates with the Jewish diaspora is replaced by a spatiotemporal dimension in which the Tulsi house in A House for Mr Biswas aspires to the lost ‘condition’ of India while at the same time replicating that space.42 Centres and peripheries—motherlands and diasporas—thus enter into relationships of mutual reinforcement as well as uncanny displacement. This hawker-like capacity to carry one’s ancestral baggage around, this capacity for re-spatialization, however, needs to be tempered by an account of the strong reverse millennarian trend, the double consciousness, of the old Indian diaspora. V.S.Naipaul care fully brings the space of the ships and the memory of the passage into the Tulsi household itself though not through any extensive contextual rememoration of the event. Instead, the Indian past exists in the rituals of religion and eating (the Tulsi household’s breakfast of biscuits and tea was not uncommon on the ships), in the names of the characters and in the extended family structure that insulates the community. However, Amitav Ghosh’s case for a complete spatial displacement does not mean that India is therefore completely erased in Trinidad just because local symbols overtake those of the motherland. On the contrary, strong millennarian world-views remain. Conflating nativism and the idea of the sacred, millennarian world-views steadfastly refuse contamination and hybridity: everything has to be re-imaged through concepts of purity. In the old Indian diaspora the Hindus even created the Ramayana (Tulasidasa’s version) as the book for the Hindu diaspora when in fact Hinduism has no one book; it is polytheistic in every sense of that word. But to accept myths as fact (as present-day Mauritian Indians are trying to do through cultural amnesia) is to forget that diasporic communities are always hyphenated: notice the hyphenated ethnicities of the Fiji-Indian, the Trinidadian-East Indian, the Mauritian-Indian, etc. The hyphen is that which signifies the vibrant social and cultural spaces occupied by diasporas in nation-states as well as their everpresent sense of the ‘familiar temporariness’. It also reminds us of the contaminated, border, hybrid experience of diaspora people for whom an

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engineered return to a purist condition is a contradiction in terms. And these questions get inflected differently in the new Indian diasporas of late capital. Here the routes are more complex as the metaphor of travel is not keyed in the space of ships; rather the ship is only one of many means of transport. Legitimate permanent residency visa holders get mixed up with travellers who cross borders (West Indies-Canada-America; Mauritius-France-America) or who are in transit from one place to another. The cultural logic of the new Indian diaspora has to be located in the idea of the hyphen itself, in what may be called the epistemology of borders. Whereas the Fiji-Indians had no identity problem as such because, at least before Rabuka, the Fijian state was not officially defined in terms of any privileged race, the new diaspora must make meaning of the hyphenated subject within a nation-state that always privileges the citizen who is not hyphenated.43 To theorize the new Indian (or for that matter any late modern) diaspora, one has first to think through the semantics of the hyphen. The law of the hyphen and the new Indian diaspora In classical epistemologies, the law of genre and the law of the hyphen are mutually exclusive: where the law of genre aspires to the condition of purity (‘thou shalt not mix genres’), the law of the hyphen jostles to find room for the space occupied by a cipher that is yet to be semanticized, the dash between the two surrounding words. It is a law that has been applied to literary forms which fail to fit into generic taxonomies of literature (tragi-comedy, Gothic-romance, etc.). Within a nation-state citizens are always unhyphenated, that is, if we are to believe what our passports have to say about us. In actual practice the pure, unhyphenated generic category is only applicable to those citizens whose bodies signify an unproblematic identity of selves with nations. For those of us who are outside of this identity politics, whose corporealities fissure the logic of unproblematic identification, plural/multicultural societies have constructed the impure genre of the hyphenated subject. But the politics of the hyphen is itself hyphenated because in the name of empowering people, the classification indeed disempowers them, it makes them, to use a hyphenated term, ‘empoweringlydisempowered’. In her recent book, Kamala Visweswaran44 makes an interesting diasporic intervention by briefly recounting the experience of children born to the second wave of Indian (read ‘East Indian’ throughout) migrants to the United States. These migrants (the 1960s in the States, Britain and Canada, the 1970s in Australia) had to raise their children in the West without, as Gauri Bhat notes, ‘Indian friends, Bharatanatyam dance classes, Karnatic music recitals, Hindu temple societies, or Hindi films’.45 The children growing up in this vacuum culture now constitute the first wave of US-born Indians in colleges, universities and the professions. But precisely because of their ‘vacuum’ upbringing they are the ones who are most aware of the relationship between diasporas, ethnicity and the nation-state and of the struggle to possess the ‘hyphen’. Their race to occupy the space of the hyphen —Indo-Americans, Indian-Americans, Hindu-Americans,

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Muslim-Britons—signals the desire to enter into some kind of generic taxonomy and yet at the same time retain, through the hyphen, the problematic situating of the self as simultaneously belonging ‘here’ and ‘there’. But as we have seen, the ‘belonging there’ part of the equation cannot be linked to a teleology of return because this belonging can only function as an imaginary index that signifies its own impossibility. On the other hand, diasporic space as the space of the border, a space that is always contaminated, now engenders the possibilities of exploring hybrid, crosscultural and interdiasporic relationships. Note, for example, the impact on British Asian Bhangra (derived from a Punjabi folk form) of Caribbean reggae and the soul and hip-hop styles of black Africa, which are in themselves highly complex hybrid music, and of Bombay film music.46 The music of Apache Indian, though already under fire from the ‘Asian Cool’ scene in Britain,47 is a case in point. Asian bands such as KKKings, Fun‘Da’Mental, Kaliphz and Loop Guru (postRavi Shanker music crossed with cyber-religion) are further evidence of Gilroy’s persuasive argument that cultural commodities travel swiftly, criss-crossing geographical boundaries, creating new vibrant forms.48 Black reggae and rap music exemplify this kind of cross-fertilization, though between white rock and punk there has been no easy synthesis of these two languages because each has been ‘imprisoned within its own irreducible antinomies’.49 But this does not disprove the Gilroy thesis which is really about trans-diasporic identifications; nor does it disprove that diasporic cultural forms ‘are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments’.50 Recently in the British IndianPakistani diaspora, even classical forms such as the Sufi qalandari dance and singing have been crossed with contemporary music with rare success by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.51 In the works of Bharati Mukherjee and Hanif Kureishi the schismatic break with India of the old diaspora is replaced by the idea of a homeland that is always present visibly and aurally (through video cassettes, films, tapes and CDs). The old diaspora broke off contact —few descendants of indentured labourers know their distant cousins back in India—the new incorporates ‘India’ into its bordered, deterritorialized experiences within Western nation states. The old Indian diaspora broke away from an oral history and entered imperial history as landless people became documented subjects on emigration passes. The people of the new Indian diaspora, recounts Mukherjee in her novel Jasmine, are of a different order: But we are refugees and mercenaries and guest workers; you see us sleeping in airport lounges; you watch us unwrapping the last of our native foods, unrolling our prayer rugs, reading our holy books, taking out for the hundredth time an aerogram promising a job or space to sleep, a newspaper in our language, a photo of happier times, a passport, a visa, a laissez-passer.52

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There are names mentioned, countries, airports: the Middle East, Sudan, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Paramaribo, Florida. Unmarked jumbos, leaking trawlers, the modern and the Conradian in a journey out of one heart of darkness into another. In her works people of the Indian diaspora are part of a global odyssey as they renegotiate new topographies through the travails of travel. For women, in particular, the collective horror of a double oppression present in the old sugar plantations (‘Cane Is Bitter’ is the title of one of Samuel Selvon’s stories)53 is replaced by the constant abuse of their bodies as illegal migrants. Nevertheless, there are a number of facile equivalences that Mukherjee seems to maintain in Jasmine and in her other works that do not quite fit the real lives of diasporas. Following on Susan Koshy’s essay these equivalences lead to three basic oversimplifications.54 The first is a celebration of American assimilation rendered through the master narrative of the American romance: a girl from outside falls in love, traverses American space (Iowa’s flatness reinforces this sense) and triumphs. The narrative of a triumphant feminism is possible because American assimilation is so totally democratic that Jasmine’s ethnicity is never an impediment, which of course is a gross oversimplification of the degrees and levels of compromise (of their cultural baggage generally) that women of colour have to undergo in America. There are also, as Susan Koshy suggests, crucial erasures of differences between ‘refugees like Du, illegal entrants like Jasmine, and the post-1965 wave of middle-class, highly educated professionals from Asia’.55 Finally there is little by way of a contestation of the idea of a subject. The norm seems to be the Western bourgeois subject, without its Enlightenment capacity for self-reflection. Cultures can assimilate only if they recognize this lack and compensate for it through a narrative of assimilation. The mobility that Bharati Mukherjee writes about has a more interesting history in the Indo-Pakistani (or South Asian) diaspora of Britain which is itself a product of a much larger movement of labour from the former colonies to European metropolitan centres from the mid-1950s (the expansion of the motor car industry) to the early 1970s (the oil crisis of 1973), a period during which European governments supported and even encouraged businesses and large corporations to seek cheap labour from abroad.56 It seems clear that the design was to get people in as guest workers who, even after acquiring citizenship, would function very much like Abbé Sieyes’s ‘passive citizens’ to be distinguished from ‘active citizens’. In the cultural sphere active citizens represent the nation-state (in films, fiction, etc.) while passive citizens can participate but not offer themselves as models of the nation.57 When the nation, however, discovered that its passive citizens need to be integrated—European cities now house something like sixteen million non-Europeans, about two million of whom live in Britain—its policies collided with a prior theory of the national subject and with the hyphenated identities of its passive citizens because the nation-state’s integrationist policy had no effective theory of multiculturalism. The conflict between a presumed passive citizenry and an actively engaged

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hyphenated subject in diaspora as a border zone, as an intermediate, increasingly mobile idea, forms the energizing context for Hanif Kureishi’s films. Race, postcoloniality and panic dis(b)orders: Hanif Kureishi Bodies after all do matter. In Hanif Kureishi’s films about London suburbia, race and postcoloniality, these complex agendas are hoisted upon diasporic bodies on display. The Indian diaspora, especially, has had its bodies (as ‘passive citizens’) displayed only to itself through the sanitized modalities of Bombay (Bollywood) popular cinema.58 Diasporic cinema of Kureishi’s or Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1995) gives the diaspora not only images of its own self but also images that require high levels of proactive critical engagement in the first place. Moreover, these bodies are now exposed to general public consumption and are no longer commodities that circulate, like Bombay films, only in the diaspora itself. Hanif Kureishi’s films effectively began this process of engagement.59 Both My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) explore the complex mechanics of politics, sexuality, culture, race and capital in the British-Pakistani diaspora. The terms ‘Pakistani’ and the racist ‘Paki’ are here used for that million strong group of people who migrated to Britain from the Indian subcontinent and from the overseas Indian diaspora (the old diaspora of exclusivism) from the 1960s onwards. More specifically beneath the gaze of a much more sinister and prolonged form of racism under Thatcherism this diaspora began to articulate their lives through the schizophrenic discourses of exile. Kureishi writes: And indeed I know Pakistanis and Indians born and brought up here who consider their position to be the result of a diaspora: they are in exile, awaiting return to a better place, where they belong, where they are welcome. And there this ‘belonging’ will be total. This will be home, and peace.60 The cinematic energy of My Beautiful Laundrette (MBL) may be located between the new brand of resurgent racism under Thatcherism and the desire for fictitious homelands on the part of the Indian-Pakistani diaspora. The two are interrelated, each feeding upon the other, each implicitly responding to the nationalist agendas of the other, and both getting the more complex ways in which ethnicity, race, class and power interact so fatally wrong. In Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (SRGL) these complex interactions are exposed as the diasporic imaginary is deconstructed to show how the gaze of the Other gets mediatized through the body itself. In the inner-city suburbs of Britain, diasporic purities can neither sustain nor redeem. But in MBL, where the lyrical vision is much tighter and where gay sexuality attempts to transcend racial barriers, Kureishi’s immediate concern is with the twilight zone of the British hybrid, both racially

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and socially. Hanif Kureishi’s reading of the diaspora does not offer simple oppositions, a secure older diasporic generation against a misguided new one, an ancient dharma against language games, family enterprise against the individual (Salim berates Omar for not relying on the family), the ‘stick to your own kind, one of your own kind’ argument popularized through the reactionary liberalism of Roger Scruton (The Meaning of Conservatism) and Enoch Powell against nonconformity and the postcolonial hybrid. Indeed, the new cosmopolitanisms of Europe will make these essentialist oppositions quickly out of date. Against these binarisms Kureishi stages the triumph of the hybrid, the power of the in-between to express the new and to occupy a space from which a critique of the old may be mounted. But as the representation of the unspeakable, the articulation of social interactions made more unpresentable because of the race factor, MBL is a major postcolonial text that takes as its departure point the racial implications of Adela Quested’s panic amidst the ‘boum boum’ of the Marabar Caves, E.M.Forster’s own homosexuality and, more importantly, the many gay relationships that the Empire spawned as white men and women compromised God and King for native delights. In Kureishi, the centre of the text is to be located firmly in the narrative of bodies. So as to heighten the immense radicality of this move, Kureishi chooses the Omar-Johnny homosexual relationship over any number of heterosexual ones (Rachel–Nasser, Tania-Johnny, Tania-Omar) as the core of his cinema. Representations of sexuality and race are necessarily at the centre of Hanif Kureishi’s works because these representations signify the presencing of the diasporic body (as real, tangible, material things) in racialized Britain. Unlike Rushdie, who comes to England as a migrant and keeps his links to his Indian homeland intact, Kureishi is the first-generation British hybrid, born in fact before coloured migrations really got under way. The year of his birth, 1955, would be almost identical with one of Rafi’s (the corrupt Pakistani politician in SRGL) own student years in England. Thus what we have here is the hybrid moving through a complex series of racist British discourses, from the assimilationist discourse of the 1950s to the new, though equally racist, multicultural discourses of the 1970s and beyond. What reverberate powerfully in MBL and SRGL are the more subtle versions of racism that began to articulate themselves since the 1971 immigration act which restricted the right to abode in Britain to ‘patrials’ thereby bringing an end to ‘primary black immigration’.61 In these versions—especially strong during the Thatcher ascendancy—the discourse of racism was grafted on to homophobic rhetoric (and vice versa) to endorse the idea of the national good so powerfully captured in Thatcher’s voiceover towards the end of SRGL. The manner in which the two—homophobia and racism—were deployed and effectively homogenized through a seemingly nonracist, non-sexist discourse is one of the great triumphs of the Thatcher era and explains why people who may have otherwise voted for Labour continued to support Thatcher. She very successfully presented herself as the upholder of precisely those colonial virtues the diaspora least wished to hear about. To get

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our perspective on Hanif Kureishi right we must look at the debates around the British new racist movement. In what follows I am deeply indebted to Anna Marie Smith’s insightful essay.62 The late 1960s saw the emergence of a new racism in Britain for which Enoch Powell was the best-known, but not the only, spokesperson. In what seemed like a remarkable reversal of old Eurocentric and imperialist readings of the black colonized as racially inferior, the new racists began to recast races on the model of linguistic difference. This ‘difference’, however, had to be anchored somewhere, and the easiest means of doing this was by stipulating that nations were not imagined communities constructed historically but racial enclaves marked by high levels of homogeneity. Thus a race had a nation to which it belonged. The British had their nation and belonged to an island off the coast of Europe, and so on. In the name of racial respect and racial equality, this version in fact gave repatriation theorists such as Enoch Powell a high level of respectability in that, it was argued, what Powell stood for was not racism but a nationalism which the immigrants themselves upheld. The case is seductive and, on the surface, alarmingly persuasive but what the argument simplified was the history of imperialism and the massive displacement of races that had taken place in the name of Empire. Nowhere was this more marked than in the Indian, African and Chinese diasporas of the Empire. More importantly, however, the new racism was used to defend Britishness itself, to argue that multiculturalism was a travesty of the British way of life, which was now becoming extremely vulnerable. The only good immigrant was one who was totally assimilable, just as the only good gay or lesbian was someone who led a closet life. Writes Anna Marie Smith: Only the thin veneer of deracializing euphemisms has shifted over this period, with blatantly racist discourse on immigration being recoded in discourse on criminality, inner cities’ decay and unrest, anti-Western terrorism, and multiculturalism. Indeed, the fundamentally cultural definition of race in the new racism allows for this mobile relocation of the racial-national borders to any number of sociopolitical sites.63 What the establishment does, for example, is to construct a new ‘sociocultural imaginary’ based on the work ethic and a white British familial nation. It becomes clear that Kureishi’s decisive intervention takes place precisely when the Thatcherite agenda of new racism and the British state is at its strongest. While recounting the development of SRGL, Kureishi wrote in his diary: 21 May 1987 Frears [Stephen Frears the director] and I were both moaning to each other about the Tory Election broadcast that went out yesterday. Its hideous nationalism and neo-fascism, its talk of ‘imported foreign ideologies like socialism’ and its base appeals to xenophobia.64

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More importantly, however, Kureishi does the unspeakable act of forcibly representing two discourses that had been useful means of misidentification and collusion on the part of the establishment. The political imaginary (vote for Thatcher because she alone knows the middle cause that would save Britain from the multiculturalists, vote for Thatcher because she mediates between the ‘white fascists [the National front] and the black extremists’)65 now becomes a very real world in which the homosexual and the black heterosexual function in the same economic and social twilight zone. It must be said that Thatcher did not present this as a clear-cut ideological position; on the contrary, Thatcherism encouraged such a high level of apathy among the British by creating unemployment and rewarding those whose support she needed that people simply did not put their minds to ‘productive political uses’.66 To open a cinematic space for the conjunctures outlined above, Kureishi uses the (diasporic) body as the border zone where transgressions occur. So Kureishi now stages, from the establishment’s perspective, extreme aberrations: black and white homosexuality; black and white heterosexuality; black upon white upon black heterosexuality. On top of all this he stages the most ‘venomous homophobic representations’ during the Thatcher years, that of the black lesbian. In SRGL the black lesbian category itself is blasted open even further through the lesbian relationship of the Afro-British and the Indian- (or Asian-)British. What happens to the diasporic body, that element in the British Asian life that had been totally repressed or replaced by the imperial discourses of cultural extraneity or religious fundamentalism? At the time of the most virulent expressions of the new racism, British television and film also produced some of the most elaborate accounts of India and the Empire. From The Jewel in the Crown to A Passage to India, the diaspora’s real history within Britain was being deflected on to an epic past that endorsed the civilizing values of the British. As Lord Halsbury stated during a reading of a bill prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality in Britain, ‘We have for several decades past been emancipating minorities who claimed that they were disadvantaged. Are they grateful? Not a bit. We emancipated races and got inverted racism.’ He went on to use the same analogy to criticize homosexuals. At home the diaspora were no longer in need of emancipation of the type suggested by Lord Halsbury. But they were still being seen, as Halsbury saw homosexuals, as people whose bodies should remain closeted, whose corporeal identities should remain hidden or cosmetically represented through a nostalgia for the Raj. In both MBL and SRGL the counter-discursive move on the part of Kureishi is in fact to make bodily contacts a feature of the diaspora and to rewrite, in short, narratives of native bodies as they interact with the Other. From Nasser’s relationship with Rachel and Tania’s self-exposure at the party, to the sex scenes in MBL and SRGL, one experiences a move away from the new racist assumptions about the diaspora to the complex ways in which the bodies of the diaspora now interact with itself and with the emergent colours and races in Britain. In staging these relationships, Kureishi disrupts the silent (‘unpresentable’) multiracial sexuality of the past (and that of Rafi and Alice)

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with the more complex and raw (almost savage) sexuality of the postcolonial diaspora. It is this staging (marked so dramatically in the condom over the carrot scene, and Rafi’s incongruous placement in it, in Rosie’s three types of the human kiss and in Vivia and Rani’s lesbian love scenes) that disrupts the calculus of the new racism but also establishes conjunctures between racist and homophobic discourses at the heart of Tory British culture. Kureishi’s staging of the narratives of the Indo-Pakistani diaspora in Britain brings out the complex dynamics of diasporas of the border. It is also the staging of the scene of the return of the repressed in the British nation-state whose own history had been enacted elsewhere: ‘The trouble with the Engenglish’, stutters S.S.Sisodia, ‘is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.’67 But the lifting of the lid on the repressed narrative of the diaspora, the giving of voice to people whose history had been snatched away from them and whose bodies were never given artistic representation as real, lived bodies in the nation-state, also means that a key missing element in modernity —the epistemology of border culture—can be retheorized. Here Ramón Saldivar’s demand for the ‘unique positionality of Chicano subjects’ is an important analogy to keep in mind. Whereas we can use the normative narratives of immigrant experience to ‘provide the etiologies of identity’ for the Indian diaspora of exclusivism, the new Indian diaspora’s bordered, transcultured subjects are, as Saldivar argues, ‘metaleptic figures (who) exist on a much more problematic and unstable ground of heterogeneous determinations and crisscrossed negations’.68 Conclusion: postmodern ethnicity Towards the end of The Satanic Verses one suspects that the author himself intercedes to distinguish between selves who wish to remain ‘continuous’ and those who are creatures of ‘selected discontinuities’.69 Diasporas of exclusivism —the old Indian diaspora—for reasons linked to the nature of late nineteenthcentury imperialism remained largely ‘continuous’. In these self-enclosed societies (Naipaul defends the subject matter of his Trinidadian novels precisely on these grounds) diasporas, in Rushdie’s words, ‘wished to remain… continuous’. In the later diaspora—the new Indian diaspora—of border culture the ground of being for diasporic subjects is not only unstable but openly contaminated. Gibreel, Rushdie’s ‘continuous’ subject, recasts the sacred text of Islam in the hope of connecting with the master inter-text. Saladin, the subject of ‘selected discontinuities’, is the unreliable pastiche through whom Rushdie writes ‘a love-song to our mongrel lives’.70 Recent diasporic theory has come to read diasporas as exemplary social, cultural and even political conditions of late modernity. It is an attractive argument if only because it moves diaspora theory away from the earlier semantics of fossilization and the ‘fragment society’ to one where we begin to see diasporas as deterritorialized peoples for whom belonging is not linked to the

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control of the nation’s social, political and cultural myths. Lest we accept this as the normative diasporic condition (after Boyarin and Boyarin, Clifford and even Gilroy), the study of our two Indian archives reminds us that diasporas never really lose the essentialized narratives of exile, homeland and return. The diasporic subject like Edward Said’s ‘exile’ knows that ‘in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity.’71 Though neither the achievement of a new homeland nor a return to the old ever really happens (the Jewish example is an exception here), the language of reverse millennarianism is periodically invoked whenever the community itself feels threatened or is afraid that its practices of insulation have been unsuccessful. Thus the old Indian diaspora replicated the space of India and sacralized the stones and rivers in the new lands. But the new also retreats into its religious texts and draws strength from its priesthood when it finds the discourses of liberalism ineffectual. The Rushdie Affair is the most dramatic instance of this because the publication of The Satanic Verses was seen as a massive threat to the diaspora’s own walls of insulation. It was therefore hardly surprising that the language used for lambasting Rushdie was almost identical with the language of separatism and return that characterized the old Indian diaspora. The democratic impulse of diasporas thus has an underside that explodes, under duress, under the imaginary gaze of the Other, into the semantics of exclusivism and separatism: ‘the tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One’, writes Salman Rushdie in The Moor’s Last Sigh.72 At these moments the fantasy structure of the homeland appears as the imaginary haven, as the sublime sign, an absence, to which diasporas return for refuge. In this respect the Indian diaspora plays out its own repressed narrative of resistance to individuation, resistance to forced removal from the mother. In the old Indian diaspora this absence had become a true fantasy because India had no real, tangible existence in the socio-political consciousness of the people. Its ‘reality’ existed only in colonial newspapers that few could read and even fewer could afford.73 In addressing the Indian diaspora as two interrelated diasporic conditions (of exclusivism and border), I have gone beyond a purely heuristic desire for a neat taxonomy. I have drawn attention to the complex procedures by which diasporas renegotiate their perceived moment of trauma and how, in the artistic domain, the trauma works itself out. It remains to be said that the diasporic imaginary is a particular condition of displacement and disaggregation; it is a theoretical template through which we can understand what is becoming a defining feature of the late modern world. This is not to say that the nation-state is dead; rather the narrative of diasporas confirms that postmodern ethnicities are here to stay. After all, the postmodern nation-state is a complex socio-economic formation with multiple cultural repertoires in which diasporas are always provisionally and problematically inserted. Murdoch University

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Notes * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Feminist Studies/Cultural Studies Colloquium Series, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2 February 1994 and at the 7–8 August 1995 Workshop on Diasporic and Multicultural Approaches to South Asian Studies held at the Australian National University. I would like to thank Ien Ang, Abigail Bray, Iain Chambers, James Clifford, Christopher Connery, Vijayandran Devadas and Krishna Somers for dynamic interactions. 1 V.S.Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 193–4. 2 William Safran, ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, 1. 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 83–99. Dispersal, collective memory, sense of alienation, sanctity of the ancestral homeland and a belief in its restoration, definition of the self in terms of identification with this homeland, are seen as the six key characteristics of diasporas. It is obvious that Safran uses the Jewish model as the norm. Although Safran concedes that the Indian diaspora is a genuine diaspora in several respects (the characteristics imputed to this diaspora are, however, oversimplified: middlemen role, long history, integrationist and particularist foci), he does not take up many of its self-evident features (homeland myth, insecurity). 3 The South Asian (‘Indian’) diaspora is conservatively estimated at nine million: Europe 1,500,000 (1,300,000 in Great Britain), Africa 1,400,000 (1,000,000 in South Africa), Asia 2,000,000 (1,200,000 in Malaysia), Middle East 1,400,000 (largely guest workers in the Gulf States), Latin America and the Caribbean 1,000, 000 (largely in Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam), North America 1,200,000 (900,000 in the US), the Pacific 450,000 (300,000 in Fiji). These figures, slightly modified, have been taken from Benedict Anderson, ‘Exodus’, Critical Inquiry 20. 2 (1994), pp. 326–7, fn 23. 4 [Debra Castillo] ‘Interview with John Rechy’, Diacritics 25. 1 (1995), p. 113. 5 James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology 9. 3 (1994), p. 310. 6 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 105. 7 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 210–12. I owe this and the next reference to David McInerney. See his ‘Nations before nationalism? A response to Colonising Nationalism’, Political Theory Newsletter 7. 1 (1995), pp. 48–55. 8 Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 15. 9 Amit S.Rai, ‘India on-line: electronic bulletin boards and the construction of a diasporic Hindu identity’, Diaspora 4. 1 (1995), pp. 31–57. 10 Rai, p. 42. 11 Katie Trumpener, ‘The time of the gypsies: a “people without history” in the narratives of the West’, Critical Inquiry 18. 4 (1992), p. 860. The Third Reich killed 600,000 gypsies, almost one-third of the total population of European gypsies. In Romania, Slovakia, Germany and Hungary they still exist in the margins of mainstream cultural life. 12 Anthony D.Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 22–30, 117.

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13 It need hardly be repeated that the word ‘diaspora’ is directly linked to Jewish history and until recently was identical with it. See Deuteronomy 28.25: ‘thou shalt be removed into all kingdoms of the earth’ [Authorized Version]. 14 Quoted by Clifford, p. 326. 15 Anthony D.Smith, p. 117. 16 The breakdown of the Jewish population of about thirteen million is as follows: the US (5.6 million), Israel (4.4 million), the former Soviet republics (750,000), France (530,000), Russia (410,000), Canada (350,000), Britain (300,000), Australia (100, 000), Germany (52,000), with smaller numbers in Latin America, New Zealand and Asia. 17 In 1914 the population of Palestine was around 690,000 of which fewer than 60, 000 were Jews. 18 follow Edward W.Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1980) at this juncture. 19 Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, ‘Diaspora: generation and the ground of Jewish identity’, Critical Inquiry 19. 4 (1993), pp. 693–725. 20 The difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews complicates a single narrative of Zionism. 21 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 22 Boyarin and Boyarin, p. 718. 23 This is obvious in the works of the master theoretician of postcoloniality, Homi Bhabha. See his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 24 Quoted by Anderson, p. 315. 25 See Brij Lal, The Girmitiyas. A History of the Fiji Indians (Canberra: South Asia Monographs, 1983); K.L.Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962); B.Brereton and W.Dookeran, East Indians in the Caribbean (New York: Krauss, 1982); Morton Klass, East Indians in Trinidad (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1988); Dwarka Nath, A History of Indians in Guyana (London: Dwarka Nath, 1950); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). 26 Hugh Tinker, The Banyan Tree. Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 27 K.L.Gillion, The Fiji Indians. Challenge to European Dominance 1920– 1946 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1977). 28 Eric R.Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 333. 29 See N.Gerald Barrier and V.Dusenberry (eds) The Sikh Diaspora (Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1989). 30 Sir Henry Cotton, ‘Indian indentured labour to other colonies’, The Indian Emigrant, July 1915, p. 372. Quoted by Rhoda Reddock, ‘Indian women and indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago 1845–1917: freedom denied’, Third UWI Conference on East Indians in the Caribbean, 28 August-5 September 1984, University of West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad. 31 Two key terms that have entered the lexicon of the old diaspora are ‘girmitiya’ and ‘arkhati’. The first is a neologism formed from the ‘agreement’ signed by the indentured labourers, the second is formed from the word ‘recruiter’. See Klass,

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32 33

34

35

36

37 38

39

40 41

42

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pp. 9–10 for an account of the extent to which third-generation Trinidadian Indians also began to accept as true the stories of deception played on their grandparents. Tinker, A New System of Slavery, p. 118. See ‘Appendix to Enclosure No. 17: Dietary Scale of the Mauritian Emigration Depot for Each Adult, signed by H.Burton, Colonial Emigration Agent.’ No date. Mauritian Indian Museum, Moka, Mauritius, BIA/I. G.M.Sammy, ‘Transitional changes and merging of the eating pattern of the Trinidad East Indian’, Third UWI Conference on East Indians in the Caribbean. This section on food is from my ‘New lamps for old: diasporas migrancy borders’, Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 2. 1 (1995), p. 153. See Sanjay Srivastava, ‘Awaras, ghummakars and LTC wallas: reflections on home and mobility in Indian life’. Paper delivered at the Diasporic and Multicultural Approaches to South Asian Studies Conference, ANU, Canberra, 7–8 August 1995. The Afro-American intelligentsia has remained remarkably silent about the despotic nature of so many Afro-West Indian and African governments, and in particular of their treatment of people of the diaspora. See Cheddi Jagan, The West on Trial (Berlin: Seven Seas Books, 1980), p. 367. V.S.Naipaul, A Turn in the South (London: Viking, 1989), p. 3. Kavita Panjabi, ‘Border writing: the multidimensional text’ (review), Letras femininas 19. 1–2 (1993), pp. 140–3. Quoted by Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, ‘Desiring B/ orders’, Diacritics 25. 1 (1995), p. 101. The standard critical edition is Shambhu Narayan Chaube, Ramcaritamanasa (Kashi: Nagripracarini Sabha, 1948). The vulgate is readily available in innumerable editions. For a reasonably good translation see The Ramayana of Tulasidasa, trans. F.S.Growse (rpt Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978). The Hindu Samvat calendar is fifty-seven years ahead of the Gregorian. Amitav Ghosh, ‘The diaspora in Indian culture’, Public Culture 2.1 (1989), pp. 73– 8. J.C.Jha, ‘The Indian heritage in Trinidad,’ in John La Guerre (ed.) Calcutta to Caroni: East Indians in Trinidad (St Augustine: University of West Indies Extra Mural Studies, 1985), p. 3. See Paul Gilroy, ‘Cultural studies and ethnic absolutism’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A.Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 187–98 for a diasporic theory linked to the concepts of ‘scatter’ and ‘evolution’. For an examination of the hyphenated subject in Britain see Tariq Modood, Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship (Oakhill, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1992). Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Gauri Bhat, ‘Tending the flame: thoughts on being Indian-American’, COSAW Bulletin 7. 3–4 (1992), p. 2. Quoted by Kamala Visweswaran. Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture. Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 191. Gina Morris, ‘…so what is this Asian Kool?’ Select 48 (1994), pp. 48–52. I owe this reference to Jeremy Barth.

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48 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 49 Dick Hebdige, Subculture. The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 70. 50 Clifford, p. 307. 51 For the strength of cultural music and music as affirmation of cultural difference see John Baily, ‘The role of music in three British Muslim communities’, Diaspora 4. 1 (1995), pp. 77–87. 52 Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), pp. 100–1. 53 V.S.Naipaul, The Middle Passage (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 66. 54 Susan Koshy, ‘The geography of female subjectivity: ethnicity, gender, and diaspora’, Diaspora 3. 1 (1994), pp. 69–84. 55 Koshy, p. 79. 56 Maud S. Mandel, ‘One nation indivisible; contemporary Western European immigration policies and the politics of multiculturalism’, Diaspora 4. 1 (1995), pp. 89–103. 57 Mandel, p. 95. 58 The introduction of Hindi (Bombay) films in the diaspora with the arrival of the ‘talkies’ (Alam Ara, 1931) was a crucial factor in the continuation of culture and in the construction of the imaginary homeland as a homogeneous entity. In Fiji, cinema probably prevented the loss of Hindi/ Urdu outright. The West Indies was not so lucky even though Bala Joban (1934), the first Hindi film shown there, had a great reception. See Ranjit Kumar, Thoughts and Memories (Port of Spain: Imprint Caribbean Ltd, 1981). 59 See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘In praise of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid’, Critical Quarterly 31. 2 (1989), pp. 80–8. 60 Hanif Kureishi, London Kills Me. Three Screenplays and Four Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 35. The script of My Beautiful Laundrette was first published in 1986, that of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid in 1988, both by Faber & Faber, after the release of their filmic versions. 61 Anna Marie Smith, The imaginary inclusion of the assimilable “Good Homosexual”: The British New Right’s representations of sexuality and race’, Diacritics 24. 2–3 (1994), p. 69. 62 Anna Marie Smith, pp. 58–70. 63 Anna Marie Smith, p. 62. This quotation and the paragraph that precedes it also appear in my ‘Postcolonial differend: diasporic narratives of Salman Rushdie’, Ariel 26. 3 (1995), p. 20. 64 Kureishi, ‘Some time with Stephen’ in London Kills Me, p. 186. 65 Anna Marie Smith, p. 66. 66 Terry Eagleton, Ideology. An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 35. 67 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988), p. 343. 68 Ramón Saldivar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 283. Quoted by Gutiérrez-Jones, p. 103. 69 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, p. 427. 70 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Viking, 1991), p. 394. 71 Edward W.Said, ‘Reflections on exile’, Granta, 13 (1984), p. 166. 72 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 408.

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73 The situation changed with better cable networks, the growth of literacy and the development of newspapers in the vernacular. In Fiji the Hindi weekly newspaper Fiji Samachar began in 1924 followed by Shanti Dut in 1935. Both these newspapers carried news from India.

‘Laodamia’ and the moaning of Mary John Barrell

I Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia’ was written in late October 1814 and first published the following year. As soon as the poem appeared, Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth to tell him how ‘original’ he had found it: ‘original,’ he explained, ‘with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation.?1 It is probably because ‘Laodamia’ is, as Lamb points out, so apparently unWordsworthian that the poem has not seemed of much importance to twentieth-century critics. To a number of his early admirers, however, the poem was one of Wordsworth’s greatest achievements. Henry Crabb Robinson described it as one ‘in which men rejoice on account of the sympathies and sensibilities it excites in them’, and he was surprised to find that Wordsworth himself did not value it so highly.2 De Quincey found ‘Laodamia’ ‘exquisite’, and arguably the more so for not being written in ‘the idiomatic language of life’ that had characterized Wordsworth’s earlier poems.3 Haydon thought it one of Wordsworth’s ‘finest things’, and Hazlitt seems to have admired the poem more as he came to like Wordsworth less.4 In recent years, ‘Laodamia’ has come to be thought of, in particular by Jean Hagstrum, Lawrence Lipking, Donald Reiman, and Judith Page, as a poem which invites us to think about Wordsworth and masculinity, and it is in those terms that I want to talk about it too.5 But my account of it differs, I hope, from theirs, in attempting to describe the version of masculinity it offers as, precisely, a version, a historically specific account of what it was to be a man. I shall be arguing that in ‘Laodamia’ Wordsworth articulated a heroic version of masculinity and of the attitudes towards male and female sexuality it involved which has its roots in a classical republican account of Textual Practice 10(3), 1996, 449–477

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heroism and which came increasingly to be questioned in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I will be suggesting how Wordsworth responds to the gathering doubts about the value of this notion of masculinity in his revisions of the poem, and I will try to show how the poem could be used by early Victorian readers to express an account of masculinity which was directly critical of the account developed in ‘Laodamia’. As part of this enquiry, I want to use the poem to set up the terms in which to talk about how Wordsworth’s own masculinity was constructed by two, in particular, of his younger admirers, Benjamin Robert Haydon and Thomas De Quincey— remarks that would have been added, had space permitted, to recent attempts I have made to write about the anxieties of gender in the work of both men. I will attempt to describe the deep anxiety of Haydon and De Quincey about their own masculinity, the way Wordsworth figures in that anxiety, and the suggestions implicit in their writing about how notions of masculinity may have been changing in the period between the writing of the poem and the years around 1840, when the passages by Haydon and De Quincey I will mainly be referring to were written. II Laodamia was the wife of Protesilaus, the ruler of a small kingdom in Thessaly. Shortly after their marriage, Protesilaus left his wife to join the expeditionary force assembled at Aulis in preparation for the siege of Troy. When finally, by the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Greek fleet was able to sail, it did so under the shadow of a prophecy that the first man to disembark on the Trojan shore would be killed. Protesilaus, worried that the other Greek captains would hang back from the shore, determined to be the first to leap on to the beach. He was first, and Hector killed him. There are different versions of what follows; but in the version of the myth followed by Wordsworth, when Laodamia heard of his death, she pleaded with the gods to be allowed to see her dead husband once more. Protesilaus was duly conducted from the underworld by Mercury, and was allowed to stay with his wife for three hours. When the time was up, and Protesilaus died again, Laodamia, unable to support the prospect of a life without him, also died. She was believed to have died of love, and passed into classical and medieval literature as the type of the devoted and loving wife. According to Pliny the Elder, the grave of Protesilaus was planted with trees which when Pliny was writing were still alive, despite the fact that every time they grew tall enough to see across the Hellespont to Troy, they withered away, and had to grow all over again. According to Wordsworth, it was ‘the incident of the trees growing and withering again’ which had prompted his own poem.6 Wordsworth’s account of this myth begins from the assumption that Laodamia’s motive in desiring Protesilaus’s return was primarily sexual. As soon as Protesilaus appears she tries to embrace him; her hands get no purchase on his now insubstantial form, but still she attempts to persuade him to lie down with her on their marriage bed for one final ‘nuptial kiss’.7 Protesilaus at first

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responds to his wife’s flagrant sexuality with stern disapproval. He advises her to govern her passion, and to accept the exigencies of fate. Laodamia threatens that if the consummation she desires is denied her, she will die and follow him to Elysium; and Protesilaus, though he repeats his condemnation of her ungovernable passion, then teaches her that its fervour is the very means by which she may attain the spiritual love and peace enjoyed in Elysium. The strength of desire, Protesilaus explains (lines 145–50), is so far in excess of its capacity to be satisfied on earth that it can be fulfilled only by spiritual pleasures; sexual passion, though apparently a purely selfish emotion, may become so powerful as to annihilate the self, and prepare us for the truly selfless love enjoyed by spiritual beings. He no longer advises her to reconcile herself to life on earth, but to look forward to their reunion in Elysium. This exchange has entirely filled the three hours allowed for the interview. Mercury reappears, leads Protesilaus away, and Laodamia herself expires in a trance of passion. Protesilaus’s account of the uses of desire is apparently validated when Laodamia is translated herself to Elysium; at least, she is in the first version of the poem, but, as we shall see, in later versions of the poem she is punished for the very passions which at first appear to have earned her spiritual reward. There is no classical precedent for this version of the myth whereby Laodamia is consumed by a desire to make love with the shade of her dead husband, and Protesilaus is represented as having transcended sexual in favour of spiritual love. To Ovid in the Epistles from Pontus, Laodamia is simply the type of the perfectly faithful wife. To Ovid in the Heroides, and to Catullus, Laodamia is an ardent lover, but in both texts she is represented at the period between Protesilaus’s departure and the discovery of his death—the question of her nourishing impious desires towards her dead husband never arises.8 But for a number of other classical authors, it is Protesilaus who cannot reconcile himself to the loss of Laodamia and the pleasures of sexual love. According to Eustathius, Protesilaus initiates the lovers’ brief reunion, because, having angered Aphrodite, he cannot rid himself of his desire for Laodamia even though he is dead. For Lucian too it is Protesilaus who prays for the reunion, by which he hopes to persuade his wife to join him in death. In Propertius, Protesilaus is represented as yearning to embrace his wife once more; and whereas in Wordsworth’s poem Laodamia’s embraces fail because insubstantial form cannot be embraced by substance, in Propertius’s elegy it is the insubstantial embrace of Protesilaus that cannot get a grip on his wife’s body.9 The nearest classical precedent for Laodamia’s impious desire occurs in book VI of the Aeneid, where she is briefly glimpsed not in Elysium, as in the first version of Wordsworth’s poem, but in the Mourning Fields, a region on the outer margins of Orcus, among women who have died for love, who cannot reconcile themselves to death, and whose yearnings do not leave them even in death.10 Virgil’s mention of Laodamia—it is three words long—was to become increasingly influential on Wordsworth’s poem as it was revised over the thirty

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years following its first publication, but there are some intriguing allusions to this book of the Aeneid even in the version of 1815. The moment, for example, where Laodamia is shown by Wordsworth attempting to embrace her husband’s shade probably derives not from Protesilaus’s attempt to embrace Laodamia in Propertius, but from the futile attempts of Aeneas to embrace the shade of his dead father: what is in Virgil a sign of the filial piety of his epic hero becomes for Wordsworth the behaviour of a woman unhinged by desire.11 Wordsworth’s account in his second stanza of the transformation of Laodamia’s body as she eagerly awaits the answer to her prayer is derived from Virgil’s account of the transformation of the terrifying Sybilline priestess Deiphobe, the prophetess who helps Aeneas to gain entry to the underworld, and who is driven to frenzy as she attempts to resist the inspiration of Apollo. ‘Suddenly,’ writes Virgil, ‘neither her face nor her complexion was the same as it had been, nor was her hair braided; but her bosom heaves, her heart swells with savage frenzy, and she seems taller than before’; but more of this in a moment.12 III We have seen that at the end of the poem, as it stood in the 1815 version, Laodamia (lines 158–63) is ‘delivered’ by death from ‘the galling yoke of time’, and translated to Elysium. Her love, we are told, was ‘in reason’s spite’, but not criminal; the very depth of her love appears to redeem its unreasonableness. By dying of love, indeed, Laodamia seems to have followed Protesilaus’s doctrine to the letter; she has transcended desire by the very intensity of desire. This deliberate exculpation of Laodamia, however, bears all the marks of what Freud described as negation. The very terms of the assurance that she was without crime seem to speak of an anxiety that she is indeed somehow a criminal. On the one hand we are invited to judge Laodamia gently, presumably because the intensity of her passion is a mark of her wifely devotion. On the other hand we are still invited to judge her, apparently because she has acted out of passion and in spite of reason. This insistence that Laodamia is up for some kind of judgement can rest only on the notion that the question of her criminality arises out of her sexuality. It is for this that Protesilaus has reproved her earlier in the poem, and nothing she does thereafter, and no attempt to re-present passion as a part of the divine purpose, can quite wash away the crime of a woman who has so openly acknowledged her sexual desire. That the sexuality of women is a threat to masculine virtue is of course a commonplace of heroic art in general, and of heroic poetry in particular. It is in these terms that Ovid represented Laodamia’s love for Protesilaus in the Heroides, and that Virgil represented Aeneas’s rejection of Dido.13 The founding text of English heroic or history painting, Shaftesbury’s essay on the choice of Hercules, represents masculine virtue as similarly founded on the renunciation of sexual pleasure, and the story of how Hercules chose virtue in preference to pleasure had been endlessly repeated throughout the eighteenth century. It was

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an especially appropriate topic in wartime, and ‘Laodamia’ was written in the year of uncertain peace between the abdication of Napoleon and the ‘Hundred Days’. From the 1790s onwards the heroic decision to embrace one’s public duty rather than one’s wife or lover was attributed to heroes on both sides of the revolutionary conflict. Wordsworth himself had already offered such an account of heroism in his poem ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’, which when it was published in 1807 he represented as inspired by the death of Nelson. The poem, written in one of the nearest approximations Wordsworth ever attempted to the heroic couplet, attributes to the true hero, along with the usual catalogue of public virtues defined by classical republicanism, a determination not to be seduced from the paths of glory by the temptations of sexual desire or happy domesticity. The virtue of the happy warrior, it claimed, cannot be ‘betrayed’ by thoughts of ‘tender happiness’; the warrior himself becomes ‘even more pure As tempted more’; his erotic desires are fulfilled not in bed but in battle: faced with the call to action, he is, says Wordsworth, ‘happy as a Lover’. Protesilaus’s situation is different, of course, from that of other heroes faced with the need to renounce the pleasures of sexuality, in that he has already performed the heroic act of renunciation. But his account of the pain it cost him, and his claim that his renunciation would be of no value if it were rewarded by the renewal of the very joys he had renounced, establish the poem as one which teaches this first lesson of heroic art, and which warns women that in times that call for heroic action it is their duty to make a similar sacrifice. It was this, no doubt, that led Hazlitt to describe ‘Laodamia’ as a ‘classical and manly composition’, and to quote some of Protesilaus’s loftier pronouncements on sexual passion as an antidote to the ‘effeminate indulgence of nervous sensibility’ too common among men of letters.14 ‘It is/ he wrote, ‘a poem that might be read aloud in Elysium, and the spirits of departed heroes and sages would gather round to listen to it!’15 Wordsworth’s anxiety about Laodamia’s sexuality appears to have become more urgent between his receipt of the original proofs of the poem and its publication. It was then that he added the second stanza with its allusion to the ravings of Deiphobe, the stanza which invites us to visualize the effects of passion on the body of Laodamia. The stanza seems to have forced its way into the text to enable it to acknowledge something about Laodamia’s sexuality which is not quite disclosed by the rest of the poem: that it is to be feared as well as admonished. Heroic stories of sexual renunciation often seem to mean more than they say; the problem they disclose may not be that women might want sex at the wrong times, when the hero’s duty calls him to duties higher than those of a husband, but that they might want sex at all, as if heroism is not an occasional duty but a continual state of bristling readiness, continually endangered by the terrifying power of women to induce the ‘softness’ by which effeminacy is characterized in the language of classical republicanism. This softness may be imagined as the

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debilitating effect of sexual pleasure or as an anticipation of impotence. In the 1815 text of ‘Laodamia’, Protesilaus tells his widow that the gods approve ‘the fervor, not the impotence of love’ (line 76): the line is apparently intended to reprove Laodamia for her vain attempt to embrace a shadow, but it can evidently be read as redescribing Protesilaus’s own inability to respond to that embrace, and perhaps for this reason it disappeared from the later versions of the poem. These remarks may allow me to repeat the suggestions of some earlier readers of the poem that if its origin, as Wordsworth later said, was in Pliny’s trees, alternately growing and withering, he may have had in mind some notion of the tendency of women to effeminate, to soften by one means or another the masculinity of the hero.16 To the hero, portrayed in the terms I have described, his enemies are his friends, men who generously offer him the opportunity of glory; his true enemy is woman. Laodamia does not rave like Deiphobe: as her breasts swell and her body enlarges, she appears to have borrowed not the frenzy but the calm, the repose of a priestess. So speaking, and by fervent love endowed With faith, the suppliant heaven-ward lifts her hands; While, like the sun emerging from a Cloud, Her countenance brightens,—and her eye expands, Her bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows, And she expects the issue with repose. (1815 version, lines 7–12) The origin of these lines, however, is in an image of woman as mysteriously powerful, and as Wordsworth transforms Deiphobe into an object of desire she does not cease to be an object of terror. The language of the stanza seems to suggest that the power of women is located not only in their power to induce softness where hardness should be, but in their own equivalent or more than equivalent of phallic power, the ability not only to enlarge themselves but in doing so to reproduce: the changes that take place in the body of Laodamia resemble the signs of pregnancy, and her repose looks like the disconcerting— for men—self-containment of the pregnant woman, who, as the poem puts it, ‘expects the issue’, as if awaiting the birth of a child, with an impenetrable calm. It may not be a coincidence that at the same time as this stanza was added to the poem, Protesilaus was made to tell Laodamia (lines 101–2) that death involves a second, a purer birth, which he has witnessed but which is at present quite beyond her power of conception. Walter Savage Landor attacked these lines —the words ‘witness’, he suggested, and ‘second birth’, ‘come stinking and reeking of the conventicle’; they are the language of ‘godly butchers in Tottenham-court Road’ and ‘sugar-bakers’ wives at Blackfriars’.17 At first Wordsworth defended the phrase ‘second birth’ from Landor’s attack;18 but by 1827 the lines containing it had disappeared, to be replaced by what might

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almost be a description of the poem itself: in Elysium, claims Protesilaus, the heroic arts are revived, and pursued in a ‘graver mood’ and with a ‘finer harmony’. If the creative power of women is arguably doubly threatening to Wordsworth, first as a man and second as himself a creator, it may have offered some reassurance to assert that the most heroic, the most manly branches of art are valued and cultivated in the more spiritual environment of Elysium. IV ‘Laodamia’, Wordsworth remarked in 1843, ‘cost me more trouble than almost anything of equal length I have ever written’,19 but in fact it was not the poem as a whole that was troublesome; it was Laodamia herself. The 1815 version of the poem survived almost unchanged through all the editions published in Wordsworth’s lifetime, except for the second last stanza, which, in edition after edition and manuscript after manuscript, rethinks the question of how and why Laodamia’s passion should be rewarded or punished. By the version of 1827, what was once negation had become positive assertion: Laodamia had become a criminal, and nothing could redeem the fact that she has loved her husband so unreasonably or so shamelessly. She is now punished, it seems, in spite of the fact that she has died in obedience to the pious teaching of her husband, for a crime which that obedience cannot redeem; for the terrifying intensity of her sexual desire. Her sentence is eternal damnation. According to Benjamin Robert Haydon, the suggestion for this change came from the person in the best possible position to know what punishment was due to the unworthy wife of a heroic husband —it came from Mary Wordsworth. Apparently she persuaded William that Laodamia ‘had too lenient a fate for loving her Husband so absurdly—at her petition he corrected the conclusion.’ The correction was first made in 1820, though not published until seven years later. Wordsworth read the new version to Haydon soon after he had made it, and Haydon tells us that ‘While Wordsworth repeated this in his chaunting tone, his wife sat by the Fire quite abstracted, moaning out the burthen of the line, like a distant echo. I never saw such a complete instance of devotion, of adoration.’20 I don’t know which is more intriguing, the moaning of Mary, or Haydon’s interpretation of it as the sign of her devotion to a husband dedicated to his high calling. If Mary’s moans, uttered in response to the poem as revised at her own suggestion, were indeed the cries of devotion, it may have been the devotion of a wife who has taken on herself the guilt of what has become a difficult marriage, who punishes herself to spare her husband the guilt of punishing her, and who adores him at the cost of despising herself. No punishment can be too severe for such a wife, if she hopes to become worthy of her husband. In the years after the publication of the 1827 version Wordsworth changed his mind once again about the punishment Laodamia deserved. In a letter to his son John, he points out that ‘As first written the Heroine was dismissed to happiness in Elysium. To what purpose then the mission of Protesilaus—He exhorts her to

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moderate her passion—the exhortation is fruitless—and no punishment follows.’ Consequently, he explains, in his first revised version of the poem, he had consigned Laodamia to everlasting perdition as Virgil had done. But Wordsworth acknowledges that his opinion of Laodamia’s actions has been unsettled again by Julius Hare. As far as it is possible to understand Hare’s anxieties from Wordsworth’s account of them, it seems that he objected to Laodamia’s everlasting torment on the grounds that she was not ‘a voluntary suicide’. That Laodamia required to be punished, and punished severely, was certain, but the punishment, Hare insisted, should be one ‘stopping short of the future world’.21 In the original 1815 version of the poem, Laodamia’s death was apparently her reward; in the second, and, as Wordsworth believed, more Virgilian ending apparently suggested by Mary, it had become part of her punishment. But since any plausible degree of fidelity to the original myth required Laodamia to die, Wordsworth was hardly in a position to accept Hare’s advice and to punish her on earth, presumably by the deprivation of the sexual pleasures she so urgently desired. He compromised, therefore, by consigning her to a temporary purgatory: from 1832 onwards, Laodamia was given a fixed sentence, condemned to spend an ‘appointed time’ apart from the happy shades in Elysium, with whom however she would eventually be united. But as her punishment became less severe, her crime became more flagrant: by the 1840 version, her passion is described as ‘desperate to a crime’. What is more, her death has now become the very crime that Hare had denied it to be.22 Laodamia had insisted on dying of her criminal passion, in spite, apparently, of having been repeatedly exhorted, reproved and warned that the intensity of her desire would be the death of her.23 From now on Wordsworth seems to have lost all memory of Protesilaus’s advice to Laodamia that she should seek reunion with him in Elysium, though that advice, and his assurance that she would transcend her passion by means of its very excess, were never removed from the poem.24 In his later revisions and attempts at revision Wordsworth remains exasperated by Laodamia’s obstinacy: she has not followed but ignored Protesilaus’s other advice, that she should govern her passion; she has has been ‘fruitlessly’ reproved, ‘in vain exhorted’, and has still insisted on dying. But now, as his exasperation increases, Laodamia’s crime becomes, once again, less flagrant; or rather, it becomes increasingly unclear whether she has committed a crime at all. She is punished ‘as for a wilful crime’, or ‘even as for a wilful crime’, and it is impossible to know whether these lines seek to indicate that she had indeed committed such a crime, or that she was being punished as if she had. In Book VI of the Aeneid Laodamia is discovered in a region of the underworld not far from those who have been executed for crimes they did not commit. When death eventually rescued Wordsworth from the troubles Laodamia had brought him, her fate may not have been so far from theirs.25 According to Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth in 1815 did ‘not much esteem his Laodamia, as it belongs to the inferior class of poems…on the affections’; it was not a work which exhibited the ‘mere power’ of the imagination.26 Accordingly,

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in the collections of 1815 and 1820 ‘Laodamia’ was consigned to the list of ‘poems founded on the affections’. In the 1827 collection, however, ‘Laodamia’ was exalted into the class of ‘poems of the imagination’, and at about this time Wordsworth informed Mrs Alaric Watts that ‘Laodamia’ and ‘Lycidas’ were the two ‘finest elegiac compositions in the language’.27 It may be no accident that these changes in Wordsworth’s classification of the poem and his estimation of its value coincided with the first published version in which Laodamia was punished, not rewarded for her love, a change which introduced into the poem the sonorous tones of severe but scrupulous justice: ‘By no weak pity might the Gods be moved.’ When in 1843 Wordsworth discussed the poem with Isabella Fenwick, he said that it had been written ‘with the hope of giving to it’—he means to the myth—‘a loftier tone than, so far as I know, has been given to it by any of the Ancients who have treated of it’.28 By now he is evidently describing it as a poem of the imagination, and by now it seems perfectly evident that the price of its admission to that lofty category had been paid by Laodamia herself. What Crabb Robinson had described as the ‘mere power’ of the imagination had won out over the presumptuous power of a troublesome woman. V The long sequence of Wordsworth’s attempts to find an ending for ‘Laodamia’ needs to be understood in terms of the long period of time over which it unfolds. The various endings tend to be read as if they might as well have been written over thirty weeks or thirty days, not thirty years; or as if they happened in a kind of biographical time entirely insulated from historical time. But they are not simply changes; they are responses to change, evidence of Wordsworth’s awareness that the classical republican version of heroic masculinity was coming to seem more and more the sign of an insecure, not a confident masculinity. Read in these terms, Wordsworth’s problem with ‘Laodamia’ resembles the problem of how to protect the heroic grandeur the poem had acquired in 1820, when Laodamia was first consigned to eternal damnation, from the sense that a heroism that elevated the self-sacrifice of men by sacrificing women was becoming increasingly difficult to admire. The manoeuvres that this involved— the mitigation of Laodamia’s punishment; the redescription of her crime to justify her punishment; the half-acknowledgement that she may not have committed a crime at all; the determination nevertheless to keep her punished—all this looks to me like a sequence of concessions and affirmations made in response to the declining authority of the poem’s account of heroic masculinity. By the 1840s, some of Wordsworth’s greatest admirers were beginning to find ‘Laodamia’ an embarrassment. In 1846 Sara Coleridge wrote a long commentary on Wordsworth’s poetry for the use of one of her correspondents. The only individual poem she discussed at any length was ‘Laodamia’, and she found it utterly repellent. She was especially outraged by the ‘want of feeling, of delicacy, and of truthfulness’ in the representation of Laodamia herself: the speeches put

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into her mouth, she complained, were ‘unmatronly and unwifely, bold and unfeminine’; and she demanded to know ‘by what right’ Wordsworth imputed to her ‘such grossness of character’, and why he wrote of her ‘in this hard, forced, falsetto style?’ ‘How angry would the bard be,’ she exclaimed, to have his own wife described in such ‘broad, coarse abstractions…!’29 There are three related charges in Sara Coleridge’s indictment of the poem, charges which tell us something about the changing evaluation of Wordsworth’s poetic career, changing ideas about the function of poetry, and changing notions of what could be admired as manliness. Her commentary on Wordsworth foreshadows what was shortly to become a general agreement that Wordsworth’s earlier poems, culminating in the Excursion, were far superior to his later work. This judgement would often be articulated as a question of style, and the charge that ‘Laodamia’ is written in a ‘hard, forced, falsetto style’ relates to what was a developing sense that Wordsworth’s best, his earlier poems exhibited not style, but a lofty disdain of style. When we read Wordsworth, remarked Bagehot, we ‘think neither of him nor his style’.30 ‘It is style/ wrote Arnold, ‘and the elevation given by style, which chiefly make the effectiveness of Laodameia’; but at his best and most characteristic, Arnold famously claimed, Wordsworth ‘has no style’, and ‘when he seeks to have a style he falls into ponderosity and pomposity’.31 Answering her own question about why Wordsworth, in this poem, had ‘wilfully divested himself of every tender and delicate feeling in the contemplation of the wife and the woman’, Coleridge too suggests the answer is to be looked for in the seductions of style, in Wordsworth’s desire to include in the poem ‘a few grand declamatory stanzas, which he knew not else how to make occasion for’. Second, Coleridge argues that ‘Laodamia’ failed to perform the redemptive function which poetry was increasingly expected to perform. This was not a matter of the ending, for she was discussing the first, the 1815 text of the poem, and makes no reference to the punishments later invented for Laodamia. Her objection is that in order to exalt the chastity of Protesilaus, the hardness and austerity of his version of masculine heroism, the poem represents the behaviour of Laodamia as merely gross, whereas it should have been understood as an expression of her need to reassure or persuade herself that the shade standing before her was in fact a substantial presence, her beloved husband returned from the dead.32 ‘If Laodamia really longed to be reunited with her husband,’ she argues, ‘only for the sake of his “roseate lips” and blooming cheeks, she would deserve censure and contempt,’ and would be ‘quite unworthy of that deep sympathy and compassion’ which the poem’s ending claimed for her. ‘But the true reason,’ writes Coleridge, of her…reluctance to part with him is…that she is chained to the sphere of outward and visible things, while he is gone, Heaven knows whither, and that except through a sensuous medium, she can have no communion with him, none of which she can be conscious, not the highest and most

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spiritual. Love can have no other fruition than that of union. The fervent apostle longs to be dissolved and to be with Christ. The offensiveness of the poem is thus to be understood in its determination ‘to sever the sensuous from our humanity, instead of retaining it and merging it in the sentimental’: ‘so long as sense is divorced from our higher being,’ Coleridge acknowledges, ‘it is, indeed, a low thing, but may it not be redeemed, and by becoming the minister and exponent of the other, be purified and exalted?’ But it is also evident that for Coleridge, ‘Laodamia’ represented an ideal of masculine heroism which by the 1840s has come to seem too single-minded: too absolute in its renunciations, too selfish in its quest for individual glory, and too heedless of the calls of private duty and the legitimate claims of domestic affection. As we shall shortly see, the late career of Benjamin Robert Haydon is evidence enough of how anachronistic—how absurdly self-dramatizing—the classical republican version of heroism had come to seem by the mid-nineteenth century.33 Thus where Hazlitt had found manliness in the poem, Coleridge found ‘puerility’, the forced accents of a boy, one who believes he must renounce ‘every tender and delicate feeling’ if he is to sound like a man. In 1848, two years after Sara Coleridge’s attack on ‘Laodamia’, the poem’s various endings were discussed once again by Julius Hare, whose objections to the poem had not been met by Wordsworth’s decision to modify Laodamia’s punishment. Like Coleridge, Hare takes it for granted that it is the duty of poets wherever possible to redeem the sinful, not to condemn them, and he claims therefore that the sentences passed on Laodamia were in violation of this duty. If the poem asserts the Platonic doctrine that passion can be transcended by its very intensity, argues Hare, the poem’s ending ‘directly falsifies this assertion’. Protesilaus, he insists, should not have been charged with the utterance of so many divine truths, when his sermon was to be as unavailing as if he had been preaching to the winds. The impotence of truth is not one of those aspects of human life which a poet may well choose as the central idea of a grave work. (my emphasis)34 Hare also accuses Wordsworth of an ‘arbitrariness’ of judgement, in condemning Laodamia for precisely the same behaviour as in the first version had earned her a reward. He points out that in none of the later versions of the poem had Wordsworth’s description of Laodamia’s behaviour been altered so as to justify this sudden reversal: thus ‘if she was “without crime” before, she must be so still: if she is “not without crime” now, she must have been from the first.’ What is more, the decision first to reward and then to punish her is, Hare argues, ‘contrary to the order of things, both human and divine’.

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They who have been condemned, may be pardoned: but they who have already been pardoned, must not be condemned…. Man has an instinct in the depths of his consciousness, which teaches him that the throne of Mercy is above that of Justice, that wrath is by nature transient, and that a sentence of condemnation may be revoked, but that the voice of Love is eternal, and that, when it has once gone forth, the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.35 Elsewhere, Hare, like Coleridge, has suggested that the question of punishing Laodamia should never have arisen. Here, however, his point seems to be rather different: the issue is not Laodamia’s innocence, but Wordsworth’s inclemency. In the end, Hare’s preference for the 1815 version of the poem leads him to repeat what Coleridge had exposed as the false logic even of that version: ‘Laodamia is innocent, so judge her gently.’ In this logic we can hear the expression of a typically masculine version of what I have been referring to as a characteristically early Victorian notion of manliness, as something which manifests not its weakness but its moral strength when it appropriates to itself the feminine qualities of tenderness, of mercy, and allows the weaknesses of women to be pardoned.36 It is a manliness which has learned what Mary Wordsworth may have already known in 1820, that the failings of women—of middle-class woman at any rate—may be as effectively punished by compassion as by punishment itself. The best account of that early Victorian notion of manliness which Coleridge and Hare are in different ways appealing to is given by Cora Kaplan in a remarkable essay on childhood and race in Britain in the 1840s.37 At one point Kaplan focuses particularly on the treatment in Jane Eyre of St John Rivers and the necrotic whiteness continually associated with him, a kind of pallor mortis reminiscent of the moment in ‘Laodamia’ where Protesilaus’s body is briefly revealed not as a warm object of desire but as a frozen corpse. Rivers’s appearance and character are evoked by images of ice and snow, his figure ‘all white as a glacier’, his temperament ‘chilling’, ‘frozen’, ‘frigid’, ‘cold as an iceberg’, his anger like ‘the fall of the avalanche’.38 But he has also the whiteness of the Grecian statue he resembles: his skin is ‘colourless as ivory’, his face ‘chiselled marble’, and as Jane comes to know him better, his whole body becomes ‘no longer flesh, but marble’, and his kisses feel like ice or marble.39 Kaplan comments: Whiteness as frigid…phallicism represents an aberrant extremity of the human; Rivers calls his own ‘cold, hard’ ambition ‘a human deformity’ (441), and the text represents his ability to terrorize, his incapacity for warm familial affection or deep love as at least as frightening as Bertha’s racialised animality.

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It is not of course that early Victorian Britain had no use for the marble whiteness which was the exterior sign of Rivers’s qualities and temperament: as the mark of a Christianized version of classical republican heroism, it was still thoroughly serviceable in the empire which is Rivers’s chosen destination, and the destination, whether chosen or not, of so many of those boys whose upper lips would be stiffened at the new public schools. Abroad, Rivers’s hardness and whiteness could be read as the signs of the dispassionate ethic of public service of the white race. The novel’s last glimpse of Rivers imagines him in India, and describes him in the zealous language of Christian heroism, invoked without irony or embarrassment.40 But at home—within the family, or within the imagined boundaries of middle-class England—what Jane recognized as Rivers’s ‘heroic grandeur’ has become an inhuman self-sufficiency, incapable of deep affection, and capable of inspiring in Jane at most a ‘strange, torturing kind of love’.41 The point becomes most evident in the last pages of Jane Eyre, where Rochester punishes himself by contrasting the physical perfection of Rivers and his own recent mutilation, and Jane, kissing the burnt stump of his arm, chooses to take it as the sign of his new domesticability—as if the phallus must be burnt off to encourage the growth of a new kind of manliness in its place. VI Whatever anxieties about female sexuality may be disclosed by the textual apparatus of ‘Laodamia’, the poem seems to have appealed to the younger male admirers of Wordsworth’s poetry—with the notable exception of Julius Hare— as a consummately ‘manly’ poem, and an appropriate expression of the manliness they attributed to Wordsworth himself. It spoke of a masculinity which, though irresistibly attractive to women, was itself entirely and heroically independent of any need to seek sexual gratification—was dead, indeed, to bodily desires, just as Protesilaus’s body takes on the appearance of a corpse as soon as Laodamia’s desire has been aroused to its beauty. To Hazlitt, Wordsworth was ‘reserved, yet haughty’; he seemed to have ‘no unruly or violent passions’, or to have entirely suppressed those passions in early manhood;42 and the version of masculinity which Wordsworth seems to have represented in particular to Haydon and De Quincey was, I want to suggest, exactly like that represented by the dead Protesilaus: an austere and impenetrable selfcontainment, an absolute elevation above desire or need. In their different ways both men show themselves in some degree dependent upon Wordsworth for their own happiness and security, and however that need originates, it seems to emerge, under the pressure of Wordsworth’s own perceived masculinity, as a need for him to validate their own manliness. As and when Wordsworth appears to them to refuse to gratify this need or to betray the confidence they have placed in his exemplary manliness, their own insulted masculinity attempts to take what small revenge it can. If this general narrative of need, rejection or betrayal, and revenge, which seems to repeat itself so often in the relations between

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Wordsworth and his younger admirers, is sufficiently familiar, some of its particular manifestations are less so, and tell us a good deal about how his masculinity was constructed by the generation younger than his own. When in 1842 Hyman, the son of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ridiculed his father’s admiration for Wordsworth, Haydon reproved him by pointing out that as he had not read Wordsworth’s finest poems, he had no right to his opinion. Wordsworth’s ‘finest things’, according to Haydon, were ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ and ‘Laodamia’.43 To modern readers of Wordsworth this will seem an oddly miscellaneous list: if ‘Laodamia’ seems out of place alongside what are now regarded as indisputably among Wordsworth’s greatest achievements, still more so does ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’, which Wordsworth himself regarded—or perhaps I should say, came to regard—as barely a poem, and admirable, as he told Harriet Martineau late in life, only as ‘a chain of extremely valuable thoughts’.44 For Haydon, however, the poem may have had a particular resonance, in that for him it could be taken to describe the proper character of the creative artist as well as of the military or the naval hero: the sacrifices each was obliged to make, the dangers each was required to face, and perhaps most of all the slights that each had to put up with. Haydon repeatedly figured the true artist, and himself pre-eminently, as a military hero: the painter wielded his brush for the honour of his country as the military hero wielded the sword.45 The artist-hero hoped for glory, but could not achieve it by compromising his integrity, and when his achievements went unrecognized he showed the same fortitude as characterized his deeds of valour. This fantasy of the artist not just as hero but as warrior appears to have been shared with Wordsworth in the formative months of their early friendship. The two men first met in May 1815; it was in December of 1815, little more than a year after writing ‘Laodamia’ and the publication in the Edinburgh Review of Jeffrey’s wounding review of The Excursion that Wordsworth wrote his first sonnet to Haydon, which stated that the high calling they both followed required a ‘mind and heart… Heroically fashioned’ to withstand the assaults of the enemies to their achievement.46 Two years later, when Wordsworth sat for Haydon, he read him ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the poem of the happy warrior, and Haydon described him in his journal in terms which stressed his austere masculinity and his heroic destiny.47 In 1816 he wrote in his diary: ‘If ever I loved any man with a fullness of Soul, it was Leigh Hunt…. If I ever adored another it was Wordsworth.’48 As he saw more of Wordsworth over the next few years, Haydon began to conceive occasional doubts about the heroic character of the poet,49 but as his own career went into its irreversible decline, and as Wordsworth’s reputation became finally established beyond question, he clung to their friendship, drawing reassurance from the fact that Wordsworth too had once been a heroic genius scorned, and from the belief that he himself would be remembered, if for nothing else, for the three sonnets that Wordsworth had at one time or another addressed to him.50

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Haydon’s admiration of ‘Laodamia’ should probably be understood in terms of his and Wordsworth’s representations of the artist as hero, and it was perhaps because Wordsworth could be assured of a sympathetic response from Haydon that the first revised ending of the poem, in which Laodamia was irrevocably damned, was first communicated to him. Haydon’s notion of heroism was cast in the austere terms of the theory of art to which he owed allegiance, the stern classical republicanism of Shaftesbury’s ‘Judgment of Hercules’ or of the radical Irish painter James Barry. As the classical republican theory of history painting became increasingly impossible to maintain in the commercial world of early nineteenth-century art, no one clung to it more tenaciously and more desperately than Haydon, who could not conceive of history painting except in classical republican terms and the account of masculinity on which it was founded. For Haydon, history painting involved an absolute dedication to the pursuit of virtue, and an insistence that virtue could be achieved only from a position of independence, of self-chosen exclusion from the corrupt sources of patronage and influence. It involved also a renunciation of sexual pleasure (or a posture of renouncing it) as endangering the firmness of the hero’s resolve, a renunciation the more heroic in Haydon’s case in that he believed himself to be irresistibly attractive to women, and the possessor of an awesome sexual potency. Haydon’s fantasy of his potential potency was usually invoked when most put at risk, as it was by the rejection in the 1830s of his sexual advances to the writer and (as she later became) the feminist Caroline Norton, an event he was to redescribe—it preyed upon his mind for years—as his own heroic refusal of her libidinous sugges tions. This redescription of himself, however, as sexual hero, as a new Protesilaus, did little to conceal from his Diary the degree to which his confidence in his own masculinity had been seriously threatened. Throughout his accounts of Norton, she appears as the type of a masculine woman: as Mrs Siddons, as Sappho, as Minerva, as Cassandra—and more to the point for our purpose, as one of the Sybils of Michelangelo, and as ‘a priestess of Delphos’.51 It may be in the context of the wound caused by Mrs Norton that we should understand Haydon’s inclusion, in December 1842, of ‘Laodamia’ as one of Wordsworth’s finest things: for it described perfectly at once the power of the threat she represented to his self-esteem, and the heroism with which—as he was still claiming the following year, in two embarrassing letters to Elizabeth Barrett Barrett—he had rejected her advances.52 In the revised version first communicated to Haydon himself, the poem also provided an appropriate punishment for the sybilline temptress who had sought to penetrate his impenetrable resolve. The year 1843 was one of humiliation for Haydon. His huge painting of republican virtue, Curtius leaping into the Gulph, was exhibited at the British Institution, and though it found a few admirers it was ridiculed by some of the most influential art critics, who found the style of heroism it represented absurdly melodramatic. It was the year in which Haydon failed to secure a commission to participate in the scheme for the decoration of the newly rebuilt Houses of

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Parliament, a scheme which he himself had initiated. It was also the year in which Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate, an acceptance of patronage, a fall from heroic independence, which, especially following his own failure to secure the patronage of Parliament, Haydon decided he could not forgive. In May 1845 Wordsworth in his capacity as laureate attended a palace levée in borrowed court dress.53 Haydon was disgusted at this final abandonment of his once democratic principles—not that he shared them, but he now, at least forty years too late, pretended to believe that Wordsworth’s claim to heroic independence obliged him to stand by the radical beliefs of his youth. ‘What would Hazlitt say?’ he asked his Diary, invoking Wordsworth’s worst, dead enemy as the appropriate judge of his integrity. In this entry, Wordsworth is still ‘Dear old Wordsworth’ to Haydon, but the phrase is prophetic of the small and private revenge Haydon was about to wreak. By Haydon’s account of the levée, Wordsworth, ignorant of the appropriate protocol, went down on both knees at the Queen’s approach when chivalry had determined that one was enough. Once down, he found himself unable to rise, until pulled to his feet by the Earls of Liverpool and De La Warr. Haydon chose to interpret the borrowed and illfitting coat, shoes and stockings, and the borrowed wig and sword, as emblems of Wordsworth’s borrowed and ill-fitting monarchical principles: Wordsworth was ‘A Court impostor!’. ‘Napoleon,’ he wrote, ‘crowning himself & Wordsworth on his knees unable to rise before the Queen, after his early democracy, are beautiful specimens of the consistency of Genius.’ Haydon described the event in two drafts of a poem, which taunt Wordsworth with the charge of apostasy, and equally with the unheroic sin of being old. In 1842, Wordsworth’s advanced years had seemed to Haydon the mark of a loveable venerability, and had not impaired what Haydon described, on measuring him prior to painting Wordsworth on Helvellyn, as his ‘heroic proportion’;54 it was in 1842 that Haydon included ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ among Wordsworth’s ‘finest things’. But now Wordsworth’s frailty becomes not an object of respect or veneration, but of derision. The second draft of the poem begins by taunting the poet with the image of Thee on thy knees at Court, spell bound… Not rising & not able, a scorn for Courtiers Till Liverpool & De La Warr Took pity, & lifted up the poor old laurelled Bard, Prostrate & feeble & betrayed & weak, With sword & buckles, stockings, shoes, & coat he’d borrowed. It ends with a formal valediction to the lost leader: Farewell old Friend, no longer friend of mine,

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For thy betrayal of the great & sacred Cause Of Intellectual independence of all Authority & Royalty & power. It was probably about now that Haydon, looking back through his diaries, amended the entry of 1816 to read, ‘If I ever adored another it was not Wordsworth’ (my emphasis).55 This revenge remained private, however; though he deplored Wordsworth’s acceptance of the laureateship to Elizabeth Barrett Barrett56 and no doubt to others, he remained on terms with ‘Dear old Wordsworth’ until his own suicide the following year. VII In Haydon we can see one of Wordsworth’s younger acolytes refusing to throw over the version of heroism embodied in Protesilaus, and using it, indeed, in the face of his own failures, to exalt his own masculinity at the expense of Wordsworth’s. In the series of essays by De Quincey, written for Tait’s Magazine in 1839–40, which describe his first meeting with, and gradual estrangement from Wordsworth, we can see something of the terms on which it became possible, and necessary, for one of his younger admirers to escape the effects of what seemed to him the threat implicit in Wordsworth’s heroic masculinity, and to develop, in the process, a different account of how to be a man. In 1803 the 17-year-old De Quincey had written Wordsworth a letter of intense and abject hero-worship, soliciting Wordsworth’s ‘notice’ of him without which, he asked, ‘what good can my life do me?’57 Wordsworth’s thoughtfully cool reply ended by inviting De Quincey to call in at Grasmere should he ever find himself in the vicinity. In one of the essays for Tait’s, De Quincey describes his repeated attempts to summon up the courage to respond to what he chose to regard as an invitation. First in 1805, and then again the following year, he journeyed to within eight miles of Grasmere, but found himself too timid to proceed; it was not until 1807, when the opportunity to escort Mrs Coleridge and her children to the Lake District provided him with the chance to represent his appearance in Grasmere as accidental, that he was able to overcome his fears.58 De Quincey abandoned his first two attempts to meet Wordsworth partly out of fear, partly out of what he represents as a guilt whose origin he does not offer to explain. ‘The very image of Wordsworth,’ he writes, ‘as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as before Elijah or St Paul.’ After gazing down at the vale of Grasmere, he ‘retreated like a guilty thing, for fear I might be surprised by Wordsworth, and then returned faintheartedly to Coniston, and so to Oxford, re infectâ’.59 This second sentence refers perhaps almost playfully to the Immortality Ode— High instincts before which our mortal Nature

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Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprized— reinforcing the sense of De Quincey as a child about to be discovered by its father in the commission of some guilty act. Less playfully, however, the account of these approaches is saturated in the language which, over and over again in De Quincey’s writings, or so I have argued elsewhere, appears to evoke a primal fantasy of secretly watching, in breathless excitement and in terror of being discovered, some scene or action which should not be watched.60 The fullest evocation of this primal fantasy occurs in Suspiria de Profundis where De Quincey describes what he came to regard as the founding event of his psychobiography, the visit he paid at the age of 6 to the room where his sister Elizabeth was lying dead of hydrocephalus, her head dissected and bandaged. That scene too was abandoned in guilt and terror, when De Quincey ‘slunk like a guilty thing’ from Elizabeth’s room;61 its echoes emerge everywhere in De Quincey’s writings, on all kinds of apparently unrelated subjects, and is connected with the fear, among other things, of himself being disfigured, dismembered, and so infantilized and or feminized. The guilt associated with it is described in Suspiria as having been reawakened by the terrifying sounds, which appeared to disclose his secret guilt, which echo round the Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s, a saint who, here compared with Wordsworth, is represented on more than one occasion as inspiring De Quincey with some inexpressible fear of being found out.62 The burden of guilt he carries is figured repeatedly in his writings as an infection; and here, in the context of describing himself retreating from the vale of Grasmere like a guilty thing, the phrase ‘re infectâ’, ‘leaving the thing undone’, seems to carry the surreptitious meaning, like ‘a thing infected’.63 Throughout the account of his approaches to Wordsworth, De Quincey represents himself as feminized by the anticipation of the meeting, once imagining himself as Eloisa about to see Abelard,64 and twice describing himself in terms that may remind us of ‘Laodamia’. His timidity he explains as in part the result of his fear that he was too inarticulate to engage with Wordsworth in a conversation worthy of the occasion. At that age, he explains, whenever he attempted to speak of any subject on which his feelings were profound or his thoughts complex, he ‘laboured like a sybil instinct with the burden of prophetic woe’65—the most famous description of a sybil so burdened is of course Virgil’s account of Deiphobe, adapted by Wordsworth to describe the effects of desire upon the body of Laodamia. Of his third visit to the Lakes, when he found himself less than a minute away from meeting Wordsworth face to face, he writes: Coleridge was of opinion that, if a man were really and consciously to see an apparition…in such circumstances death would be the inevitable result; and if so, the wish which we hear so commonly expressed for such experience is as thoughtless as that of Semele in the Grecian Mythology, so natural in a female, that her lover should visit her en grand costume, and

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‘with his tail on’—presumptuous ambition, that unexpectedly wrought its own ruinous chastisement! Judged by Coleridge’s test, my situation could not have been so terrific as his who anticipates a ghost—for, certainly, I survived this meeting; but, at that instant, it seemed pretty much the same to my own feelings.66 Semele was induced by the jealous Juno to pray that her lover Jupiter would appear to her in the form in which he appeared to Juno herself. She did so; the god appeared to her in the form of the God of Thunder, and she was consumed by his thunderbolt. Like Semele, like Laodamia, De Quincey has prayed to see the apparition of his or her lover; and the intensity of his desire, and the sense that the inequality between the two men is being experienced as the inequality of sexual difference, may be reinforced by the mysterious attribution of a ‘tail’ to Jupiter the Thunderer. The tail was excised from a later version of this passage, perhaps out of delicacy, perhaps out of revenge. The visit to Elizabeth’s room was abruptly curtailed when the terrified little De Quincey heard the sound ‘of a foot (or so I fancied) on the stairs’; it was at this moment that he hastily kissed his sister and ‘slunk like a guilty thing with stealthy steps from the room’.67 The image of a footstep, as threatening the imminent discovery of the secret observer, is one of the most often repeated themes in De Quincey’s writings.68 Now, passing through the gate of Dove Cottage, he hears ‘a step, a voice, and, like a flash of lightning,’ he sees the figure of Wordsworth.69 Unlike Semele, as De Quincey has already pointed out, he survives this meeting with the God of Thunder; the story of the meeting, in which De Quincey has invested so much more than he pretends to understand, appears to function as a reparative narrative, a reworking of that primal fantasy in which his guilt and fear will vanish, and his masculinity will be vindicated by being acknowledged by Wordsworth. Accordingly, Wordsworth is now ‘no longer…a being to be feared: it was as Raphael, the “affable” angel, who conversed on the terms of man with man, that I now regarded him.’ But even now that he has met Wordsworth, the memories of Elizabeth persist. Elizabeth is described by De Quincey as wearing a ‘tiara’ or an ‘aureola’ on her ‘ample brow’—an image which seems to conceal, at one time or another, her head swollen with hydrocephalus, the bandage around her dissected head, or the wound that the bandage conceals; and Wordsworth too, he writes, even after this meeting, ‘did not cease for years to wear something of the glory and the aureola which…invests the head of super-human beings’.70 This image of the halo is always elsewhere in De Quincey’s writings an attribute either of damaged women or of those whose gender is indeterminate. It is almost as if, at the point at which he is recognized by Wordsworth, or so he claims, as truly a man, De Quincey attempts to impress the stigma of femininity on to Wordsworth himself; indeed, in representing Wordsworth as Abelard, he has been doing so from the very moment of their meeting.

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This apparently reparative narrative, in which De Quincey represents himself as healed, restored and above all forgiven by meeting the object of his ‘yearning’, conversing with him ‘man to man’ and even feminizing Wordsworth as Wordsworth had feminized him, is no more successful than any other of the narratives by which De Quincey attempts to find a happy ending for what is evidently a narrative of trauma. In this version, the allusion of reparation is managed by representing his ‘self-blame’ and ‘self-contempt’71 as the result simply of his fear of Wordsworth, now triumphantly overcome, and not as a symptom of that deeper and earlier wound whose echoes and whispers can be heard throughout the story. The anxieties evoked in him by the anticipation of meeting Wordsworth appear to be exacerbated rather than soothed by their acquaintance, and throughout these essays for Tait’s Magazine he seems to respond to them in part by attempting to find some way of questioning Wordsworth’s own masculinity. On the one hand, he represents Wordsworth as something less than entirely masculine. He takes some pleasure in describing Wordsworth’s body as unimpressive, even mean, in comparison with that of more manly men, and invokes Dorothy’s opinion to confirm his own.72 He describes at length the effects of premature ageing upon Wordsworth’s appearance.73 Approvingly but perhaps also mischievously, he represents Wordsworth’s ‘austere’ and ‘severe’ masculinity as having been tempered and softened by Dorothy’s ‘sexual sense of beauty’.74 On the other hand, as this last remark suggests, he can also represent Wordsworth as only too much a man, badly in need of the kind of softening that Dorothy could induce. He speculates with jocular waspishness about how Wordsworth ever came to be married, since he was incapable of approaching a woman in the humble posture of a lover— incapable indeed of looking at women except by looking down upon them, lecturing and admonishing them, treating them in short as children;75 and he recalls with anger how Wordsworth treated his own opinions as ‘childish prattle’.76 He accuses him, as Hazlitt did, of an egotism which, just as it was unconscious of needing others, was unconscious of the needs of others, and made him incapable of ‘an equal friendship’.77 Through all De Quincey’s more or less mild and timorous attempts at revenge, the memory survives of that apparently equal, man-to-man relationship that he believed he had briefly enjoyed on his first meeting with Wordsworth. The real causes, he decides, of his sense of Wordsworth’s injustice to him, were such as between two men could hardly have arisen; but, wherever there are women… I hold it next to impossible that occasions should not arise in which both parties will suspect some undervaluing, or some failure in kindness or respect.78 Throughout their lives Wordsworth and De Quincey were entirely dependent upon the services of women to make possible the fantasy of an independent, selfsufficient masculinity that the one appeared to have achieved and the other so

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long desired to achieve. De Quincey is to be found in both voices of the poem ‘Laodamia’; not only in the yearning and despair of the heroine, but in the hero who believes that his male enemy is his friend and his true enemy is woman. I do not think there is any point where we can stop the dialogue between these two voices, to give either of them the last word. But the more I puzzle over these essays from Tait’s, the more I begin to wonder whether they do not show De Quincey as reaching for a new, a characteristically early Victorian notion of masculinity, one that seeks to inoculate itself against the charge of unmanliness by appropriating qualities hitherto identified as feminine. There is a moment in De Quincey’s account of the days following his sister’s death when he hears himself being reproved for his ‘girlish’ tears: ‘that word “girlish”,’ he records, ‘had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart—that a girl was the sweetest thing I, in my short life, had known’.79 The mark of femininity continually operates in De Quincey’s essays as a kind of black spot, to be passed on as soon as you find it in your hand; and, like Haydon, he can seem quite at home with a hard, heroic masculinity, unencumbered by compassion, when he is writing about abroad, about the empire especially. But there is also arguably a kind of uneasy openness in the way De Quincey represents himself as feminized by Wordsworth, which can be taken as implying that Wordsworth’s sense of his masculinity is even more anxious than his own, and that the assertion, the acting out of an uncompromising, unqualified manliness, whether by Wordsworth himself or by someone like Haydon, is even more a symptom of anxiety than those which De Quincey frankly acknowledges in himself.80 University of York Notes 1 Lamb to Wordsworth, 16 April 1815 in Edwin W.Marrs, Jun. (ed.), The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), vol. III, p. 140. 2 Edith J.Morley (ed.), Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Authors, 3 vols (London: J.M.Dent, 1938), vol. I, p. 167. 3 David Masson (ed.), The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889–90), vol. 11, pp. 296–7. 4 Willard Bissell Pope (ed.), The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–3), vol. II, p. 234; for Hazlitt, see below, p. 454. 5 Jean Hagstrum, The Romantic Body: Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 87–9; Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and the Poetic Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 136–44; Donald H.Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), pp. 183–215; Judith W.Page,’ “Judge Her gently”: passion and rebellion in Wordsworth’s

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“Laodamia’”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33. 1 (Spring 1991) pp. 24–39. Fenwick note, quoted in William Knight (ed.), The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London: Macmillan, 1896), vol. I, p. 1. All quotations from ‘Laodamia’ are taken from the 1815 text and its apparatus of later revisions in Carl H.Ketcham (ed.), Shorter Poems 1807–1820 by William Wordsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, ‘The Cornell Wordsworth’, 1989), pp. 147–52, 360–9. Catullus LXVIII; Ovid, Heroides XIII; Ep. ex Pont, III. i, p. 110. Ovid’s poem about Laodamia in Heroides is in the form of a letter from Laodamia to Protesilaus whom she supposes still to be detained at Aulis. In it, she begs him, as she seems to have done in the past of Wordsworth’s poem, not to expose himself to danger, and to ensure he returns safely; but though she dreams of embracing him once more on the nuptial couch, it is his substantial body, not his ghostly form that she desires. There is an excellent discussion in Lipking, pp. 141–2 (the best modern account of the poem) of the complex nature of Wordsworth’s debt to, and ‘rebuke of’, the version of the myth in Heroides. Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, 27.19 and 28.23; Propertius I. xix, pp. 7–12; for Eustathius, see OCD ‘Protesilaus’. Aeneid VI, pp. 440ff. Aeneid VI, pp. 700–2. Aeneid VI, pp. 47ff. The correspondence between Laodamia and Deiphobe is briefly mentioned in Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (New York: W.W.Norton, 1963), p. 62, n 20, and is more extensively discussed in Lipking, pp. 138–9; but I owe to Harriet Guest the insight (see below) that, buried in Wordsworth’s Virgilian description of Laodamia, is an image of pregnancy. When in the late nineteenth century the Rev W.A.Heard (Knight, vol. VI, p. 10) compared ‘Laodamia’ with the Aeneid, he found in both a ‘complete freedom from unmanliness’, discoverable chiefly in a shared notion of heroic piety: The pious man believes in a destiny, or order transcending his own will: to exalt any passion, however innocent, above this, is a rebellion; to intensify any passion, so as to disturb the appropriate calm of resignation, is to act irreverently against the gods. Lesser duties must give way to greater: love of wife must give way to love of country, and the sorrow of bereavement must not obscure the larger issues of life. P.P.Howe (ed.), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1967), vol. XVI, p. 253; vol. XII, p. 318. Hazlitt, vol. XI, p. 90, and see vol. XVI, p. 253. Lipking, p. 142 and (especially) the account of the meanings of ‘impotence’ in Reiman, pp. 212–14. Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations. Third Series. Dialogues of Literary Men (London: J.C.Nimmo, 1883), p. 37. The criticism is put into the mouth of Porson, who is represented in conversation with Southey. See Knight, vol. VI, p. 9, Wordsworth to Landor, 21 January 1824. Fenwick note, quoted in Knight, vol. VI, p. 1. Diary, vol. II, p. 464. Ernest de Selincourt (ed.), Mary Moorman and Alan G.Hill (rev), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), vol. III, pp.

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22

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215–16. Hare later wrote a long critique of the changes to the ending of ‘Laodamia’, which is discussed below (see pp. 457 and 461–2). Both Lipking (p. 140) and Page (p. 33) treat Laodamia’s death, in its earlier as well as its later versions, as in effect a suicide. To do so however seems to ignore the transition, as the poem got older, from the versions in which her death is described in the passive mood (‘removed’, ‘delivered’) through those which described her, more neutrally, as ‘departing’ or ‘perishing’, to those which represent her as ‘perishing’ in spite of being admonished. As W.A.Heard argued, ‘not only did Laodamia’s yearning for the restoration of her husband to life show a failure to recognise the fixity of eternal laws, but her death was…in reason’s spite; it was, after all, self-will, and could not win the favour of heaven.’ In his commentary on the final version of the poem, Heard gently misparaphrases the 1827 version, which represents Laodamia as loving ‘in reason’s spite’: Laodamia, he suggests, died in reason’s spite, and the effect is to suggest that her crime is indeed that of a voluntary suicide, who wilfully allowed her passion to prey upon her to the extent of depriving her of life (Knight, vol. VI, p. 10). See Hare, p. 308. As Lipking (p. 138) points out, ‘Virgil specifically emphasizes that the heroines of the Mourning Fields are victims and describes Dido’s own fate as unjust (iniquo)’. Morley, vol. I, p. 167. Alaric Alfred Watts, Alaric Watts: A Narrative of his Life (London: Richard Bentley, 1884), vol. I, p. 240, quoted in Lipking, p. 138. The anecdote refers to c. 1825, when the change condemning Laodamia to eternal unhappiness had already been decided upon, though not yet published. Quoted in Knight, vol. VI, p. 1. All quotations from Sara Coleridge are from Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge (London: Henry S.King, 1873), vol. II, pp. 52–7. Walter Bagehot, ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, pure, ornate, and grotesque art in English poetry’ (1864), in Bagehot, Literary Studies London: J.M.Dent, and New York: E.P.Dutton, 1911), vol. II, p. 320. R.H.Super (ed.) The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. IX, English Literature and Irish Politics (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1973), pp. 53– 4. In 1823 Landor (vol. III, p. 38) had admired the ‘warmly chaste morality’ of the poem, a phrase which twenty years later must have looked oddly oxymoronic. See my essay ‘Benjamin Robert Haydon: the Curtius of the Khyber Pass’, in Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays British Art 1700– 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 284–90. Hare’s discussion of the poem appeared in the second series of Guesses at Truth, first published in 1848; quotations are from [Augustus J. and Julius C.Hare], Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers (London: George Routledge, n.d.), pp. 307–11. It was very probably Arnold’s memory of Julius Hare’s discussion of ‘Laodamia’ that led Arnold to object to Wordsworth’s ‘tinkering’ with the ending of the poem, and to retain the 1815 ending in the hybrid text of ‘Laodamia’ he published in his 1879 selection of Wordsworth’s poetry. For Arnold on Wordsworth’s ‘tinkering’ see George W.E.Russell (ed.), Letters of Matthew Arnold (London: Macmillan, 1895), vol. II pp. 157–8; for commentary on Arnold’s hybrid text of ‘Laodamia’, see Leon Gottfried, Matthew Arnold and the Romantics (London: Routledge &

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Kegan Paul) 1962, p. 72. For Arnold’s criticism of ‘Laodamia’, and some other early criticisms of the poem, see Richard D.McGhee,’ “Conversant with infinity”: form and meaning in Wordsworth’s “Laodamia”’, Studies in Philology, 68. 3 (July 1971), p. 357n. W.A.Heard claimed to find in ‘Laodamia’ exactly what Hare and Coleridge could not, a ‘tenderness’ alongside that ‘complete freedom from unmanliness’ that Wordsworth shared with Virgil (Knight, vol. VI, p. 11). But though he disagrees with the other two in his account of the poem, he shares the same notion of manliness as more manly when (to some degree) tenderized. Cora Kaplan,’ “A heterogeneous thing”: female childhood and the rise of racial thinking in Victorian England’, forthcoming in Diana Fuss (ed.), Human, All Too Human (New York: Routledge, 1996). Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Q.D.Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 403, 421, 468, 437–8. Jane Eyre, pp. 371, 404, 436, 424. Jane Eyre, p. 477. Jane Eyre, p. 441. Hazlitt, vol. XI, pp. 88–9. Haydon, vol. V, pp. 233–4. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Virago, 1983), vol. II, p. 237; but Martineau writes ‘valuable’ ‘valooable’ in imitation of Wordsworth’s accent. Though the poem was in fact very generally admired by the early admirers of Wordsworth—De Quincey, too, described it as ‘fine’, and Hazlitt quoted it with enthusiasm—neither of them would have accorded it the pre-eminence it enjoys in Haydon’s list (Masson, vol. II, p. 258; Hazlitt, vol. XX, p. 106). Where unattributed, facts and arguments about Haydon’s career and opinions are developed from Barrell, ‘Curtius’, where complete references will be found. Diary, vol. I, pp. 446, 491–2. Diary, vol. II, pp. 147–8. Diary, vol. II, p. 63. See Diary, vol II, pp. 173–6 and 312. Diary, vol. III, p. 536; vol. IV, p. 298; vol. V, p. 185. To the list of such descriptions given in Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture, p. 280, n 81, may be added Haydon, Diary, vol. IV, p. 122. Willard Bissell Pope (ed.), Invisible Friends. The Correspondence of Eliza-beth Barrett Barrett and Benjamin Robert Haydon 1842–1845 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 40–2, 45–7. All references to this incident are taken from Diary, vol. V, pp. 434, 441–5. Diary, vol. V, pp. 159, 162, 168. Diary, vol. II, p. 63 (my emphasis). See Invisible Friends, especially pp. 74–5. For De Quincey’s letter and Wordsworth’s reply, see Grevel Lindop, The OpiumEater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (London: J.M. Dent, 1981), pp. 102–4, 108–9. See De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 122–3, 125. Recollections, pp. 122–3. See John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: a Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991).

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61 De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 107. 62 See Masson, vol. III, pp. 295–7; for St Paul, see especially the reference in Suspiria to his words as used in the funeral service, in Confessions, p. 108. 63 For De Quincey and infections, see index entry under ‘infections and physical disorders’ in Barrell, The Infection. 64 Recollections, p. 207. 65 Recollections, p. 124. 66 Recollections, pp. 127–8. 67 Confessions, p. 107. 68 See index entry ‘fantasy’, in Barrell, Infection. 69 Recollections, p. 128. 70 Recollections, p. 207; Confessions, p. 99; and see index entry ‘involute’ in Barrell, Infection. 71 Recollections, p. 207. 72 Recollections, p. 136. 73 Recollections, pp. 141–2. 74 Recollections, pp. 132, 201. 75 Recollections, pp. 184–6. 76 Recollections, p. 376. 77 Recollections, pp. 381–4. 78 Recollections, p. 377. 79 Confessions, p. 111. 80 A version of this essay was given as the annual Wordsworth Lecture at the Wordsworth Centre of the University of Lancaster in May 1995. My thanks to Harriet Guest, Keith Hanley and Cora Kaplan for the great help each gave me in preparing it.

Tragedy and the nationalist condition of criticism Thomas Docherty

I In this paper, I propose a specific relation between criticism in modernity and the formulation of the emergent nation-state. The argument is that criticism as we know it depends upon an attitude which is, tacitly, nationalist in fact and origin. Further, the political nationalism in question is profoundly allied to an aesthetic or cultural theory whose determinant formation is that of tragedy, and specifically that aspect of tragedy usually identified in the concept of terror. The consequence for criticism and theory, ignoring its own topographical locatedness and its own debts to a tragic consciousness, is the occlusion of the object of criticism in the interests of the production of what is fundamentally (if silently) a nationalist identity for the subject, the critic herself or himself. Criticism has been most concerned to make a place for the critic which will offer the solace and assurance of the heimlich even when it seems to be most uncanny; and such solace can only be mediated in terms of the comforting legitimation of the critic’s practice in terms of its theoretical rather than topographical foundation, for any acknowledgement of the kind of locatedness of which I write not only relativizes the criticism but, more importantly and problematically, demands a justification of its otherwise tacit nationalist (some might say, racist)—even terrorizing—attitude. It should be made clear from the outset that I am not making the banal and mistaken claim for an equation of modernity (or Enlightenment) with terror (the Holocaust and associated results of nationalist fascism).1 My argument is a different and more complex one. It starts from a consideration of the Cartesian and theatrical roots of cultural modernity, and examines the late Renaissance production of subjectivity as the foundation of a critical consciousness Textual Practice 10(3), 1996, 479–505

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persisting from Descartes up to a kind of liminal point in the work of Baudrillard. The theoretical result of this will be the claim that modern criticism

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conspires to elide alterity—the Other—from history. In the second part, I turn to an examination of cultural relations between England and France in the late seventeenth century (more specifically in the period 1664–1668); and I consider Dryden’s response to the Second Dutch War and to Corneille. Here, we see the emergence of a new discourse in which the aesthetic and the political are fused— even confused—in a particular fashion which is specific to the emergence of modernity and its attendant criticism or theory. Further, I indicate the ways in which such theory becomes established through the elision of its specific historical Other: Africa. Finally, I bring together the conflicts over the neoclassical theory of tragedy and the emergence of this new discourse in an argument which shows that, even within the terror shaping modern—nationalist —criticism, there is the possibility of a different order of things, marked by tragedy’s counterpart of terror: pity, or, in the terms used here (and by Dryden and Corneille), love. It is this love, embarrassing to a criticism which pretends to be scientific, abstract, counter-metaphysical, which has been the more general casualty of the nationalism constitutive of modern theory.2 Modernity understands criticism primarily in terms of difference. For the modern, the possibility that a pronouncement about an aesthetic event or act will discriminate or distinguish—will ‘make a difference’—is a precondition for calling that pronouncement a critical statement.3 It is not enough to ‘appreciate’ a text or artefact and to evaluate it in neo-Arnoldian positive terms by ‘seeing it steadily and seeing it whole’ or ‘seeing it as in itself it really is’ (for it is argued that this is not in any case strictly possible): rather, the critic, insofar as she or he is critical at all, must strive to see the text in a neo-Wildean mode of negativity, ‘as in itself it really is not’.4 Hence, perhaps, the frequent vilification of much modern (twentieth-century, post-Wildean, paradoxical) criticism on the grounds of its ascribed innate aestheticism.5 At the most basic level, the modern critical orientation reveals as its foundation an intrinsic hermeneutic determination: modern criticism involves the insistent revelation of what had been covert, in an act of demystification whose purpose is to reveal the different within the same.6 For most, the specifically ‘modern’ project of criticism begins in the Enlightenment, whose objective is the gradual emancipation from myth and superstition through the progressive operations of a critical reason. The goal of the project—and what characterizes it as one aspect of modernization—is the production of the human as an autonomous subject, an agent of history rather than its victim.7 The autonomy in question is to be apparent in the subject’s capacity for making choices regarding her or his course of action; and such choices are seen to be free precisely because, or to the extent that, they are critical, that they make the specific difference in history which reveals —or, indeed, produces—the identity of the agent as an individual, individuated from the determinations of the social, and determining the course of her or his own history, even if, as Marx pointed out, not entirely under conditions of her or his own choosing.8

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It is thus that criticism, in modernity, is aligned with freedom; and it is also thus that criticism is established as the fundamental link between epistemology and ontology, between theory and practice, between pure and practical reasonings. For modern criticism, to know is to be in a position to do: savoir is the precondition of legitimate pouvoir; and the legitimacy of such power is guaranteed through the critic’s making of a reasonable, responsible (or, more pointedly here) answerable choice of action. In this, it is reason itself to which the critic is responsible, a reason which, because it is theoretically grounded or foundational, legitimizes the critical act; but answerability is also measured through the distance or difference established between the state of affairs prevailing before the critical intervention and that resulting from it. According to Peter Gay, the Enlightenment, governed by reason, ‘can be summed up in two words; criticism and power’;9 and the purpose of such criticism and power is the establishment and prioritization of difference. Yet this kind of thinking does not originate in the eighteenth century. One can trace a genealogy of such a critical attitude at least as far back as Descartes. It is Descartes who initiates philosophy— and who modernizes it—in terms of a series of formulations designed to overcome a hypothesized illusion in the face of which there is a requirement for the self-evident, for ‘clear and distinct ideas’ whose very clarity will guarantee the validity of actions or thoughts grounded upon such ideas. Cartesian philosophy is to empower through a criticism differentiating the (illusory—imaged or figural) given from the (logically— linguistic or discursive) self-evident or self-evidencing; and thus Descartes initiates that tendency in which the ostensible is seen as somehow intrinsically differing from itself, such differing being in fact constitutive of the very identity of the given object of contemplation as such. The modern is the site of this contest between the relative priorities of the sensually or empirically visual (the ‘evidence’) and of the discursively rational (which is considered to be occluded by the visual, but yielding to abstract mathematical logic); and what we call ‘representation’ (the funda mental issue of modernity) is nothing more or less than this tension between the ostensible priority of the visual as fact and the preferred priority of the linguistic as the ground of truth.10 I do not wish here to linger on the claims for the pre-eminently visual priority that has been given to philosophy and to modernity, for that has been more than adequately treated by Irigaray and (though admittedly with a different agenda) more recently by Martin Jay.11 Yet I will stress at the outset one important corollary of these and similar observations. Modernity is intrinsically linked to acts of demystification whose predominant aspect is visual; but what is this if it is not a specific kind of theatricality in critical philosophy? Such theatricality can be easily described; it involves the display of identity in the form of a visual difference (larvatus prodeo); or, in a word, it is ‘spectacular’ as well as being specular and speculative.12 The object of the critic’s contemplation finds its identity constituted through its specific mode of self-differing, through its selfrepresentation, in a word; and it is the task of the critic not only to see it as it

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appears, but also to see it as and for what it represents. The critic bears witness to a profound constitutive difference in her or his object of contemplation, seeing its ‘presence’ while also acknowledging what cannot be presented in unmediated form, its unpresentable absence or ground, and seeing both these things at once. Such ‘spectacular’ (or speculative, inventive, ‘economical’) philosophy is also, as Derrida has recently noted, ‘spectral’. It is a kind of ‘seeing things’, a ‘hearing of voices’ in the manner of Hartman in criticism, Joyce in his texts. It is, in short, a criticism indebted to a specific theatrical source with which modernity has been insistently obsessed: Hamlet, whose most famous soliloquy enacts the Cartesian realization that being is inescapable for one who thinks and who speaks her or his thoughts.13 Modernity thus knows criticism primarily as representation; and the representation in question is always governed by the critic’s attitude to his or her object. That object is always identified through difference; and what is this representation if it is not the production of an identity constituted in difference? For modernity, criticism is intrinsically ‘spectacular’ (or speculative), dramatic, theatrical. Descartes knows this when he dramatizes his own project in the protoBildungsroman form of the Discours de la méthode and the Méditations. In these texts, it is by now a truism to say that Descartes proposes his philosophy in a remarkably literary form, telling a story in which he presents himself as the hero of knowledge, risking the existence not only of the external world but also his own very existence.14 The story is intended to be terrifying; and Descartes is at some pains to stress that his stratagem is not suitable for everyone: If my work has given me a certain satisfaction, so that I here present to you a draft of it, I do not do so because I wish to advise anybody to imitate it… I fear much that this particular [design]…will seem too venturesome for many. The simple resolve to strip oneself of all opinions and beliefs formerly received is not to be regarded as an example that each man should follow… But like one who walks alone and in the twilight I resolved to go slowly.15 The method leads Descartes to assume that the world—the given— is ideological, in that it is misleading illusion or the determinant of a false consciousness: ‘I shall then suppose…[that] some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me.’16 Further than this, having doubted the existence of all exteriority, Descartes takes his story in the terrifying direction of self-annihilation: ‘I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things.’17 It is this presentation of the philosophy as a kind of horror-tract that makes it exciting and, despite Descartes’s proclamations to the contrary, exemplary.

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The terror arising from the story, however, is merely a tactical terror (as in the best exemplary horror-tales or theatrical tragedies). The Cartesian strategy is one in which the world’s meaning, if not necessarily its very being, is to be finally referred back to a self-present subject of consciousness, Descartes himself (even if, in a further twist of the tale, the veracity of this subject’s logic is to be grounded in a transcendent God). Descartes founds his philosophy basically upon a voice, an act of utterance, that paradoxically unspoken loquor (a verb hovering uncertainly between speaking and being spoken) governing the possibility of uttering the famous Cogito. In this, the text of the Méditations silently reduces the ontological to the linguistic. Geometer that he is, Descartes operates at the level of the linguistic— mathematical—abstraction; his proofs are guaranteed by a truth of linguistic selfcoherence, not by a truth guaranteed by correspondence to an empirical and nonlinguistic state of affairs. One might lay the same complaint here as Derrida does when faced (in ‘Force et signification’) with Rousset’s structuralism, that force is being reduced to form through a spatializing philosophy whose effect is to circumvent the material historicity of the object of contemplation which, in the Cartesian case, is the object-world itself in all its secular complexity. For Descartes, truth is a function of propositions (the articulation of clear and distinct ideas); and in this, he offers a model for the much later de Man, another philosopher who preferred to work at the level of the linguistic rather than at that of the factual.18 Having laid the linguistic foundation for his philosophy, Descartes can reconstruct exteriority, guaranteeing it essentially as a linguistic phenomenon (that is, as representation) dependent upon a speaking subject of consciousness whose very extreme asceticism is testimony to the truth of its propositions.19 This terror at the death of the author, then, is merely a protode Manic exercise in katharsis (which in de Man’s case might take the form of self-exculpations, ‘excuses’), instrumental in the production and conditioning of a subject purged of ideological (imagistic/ figural) blindness, and gifted with (linguistic) insight whose stringency derives precisely from its extremist, terroristic origins. This extremist terror has its counterpart in Shakespeare, in which the visual blinding of Gloucester vies for priority with the question regarding Lear’s rational capacities, capacities measured in part by his language; ‘What! art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears’ (4, 6). Such a tragic terror forms the basis for an essentially autobiographical criticism which predominates from Descartes to the present day and which is, predictably, most often described in terms of the neo-romanticism shaping and informing much twentieth-century theory.20 In short, one might propose (in an admittedly very general form) an explanation of the history of modern criticism through reference to an anxiety about exteriority, construed variously in different historical moments as, say, the world in Descartes: ‘nature’ for romanticism, ‘history’ for the post-romantic theory of the twentieth century, and so on down to ‘otherness’ for postmodernism. (Where I wish to evade the generalities involved

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in this proposition is in my claim, argued later in this piece, that the specific anxiety in question in the period from 1660 onwards in England is focused on the ‘nation’.) The modern critic is she or he who begins from the anxiety about her or his supposed object, be it a text or other aesthetic product whose source is independent of the critic herself or himself. The modern critic’s response to such a fear of otherness, or to this fear of the object-as-such, is the production of a specific kind of subject: a linguistic subject of consciousness characterized first by a presumed capacity for understanding of, and for the consequent appropriation of, objects, and subsequently by mastery or control over its recalcitrant Others. This tendency, however, has more recently been stalled in its otherwise stately and unquestioned progress. In the contemporary moment, Baudrillard rewrites Descartes, this time from the point of view of Descartes’s feared ‘evil genius’, the evil demon of images and illusions. In the earliest stages of his work, Baudrillard addresses the object and exteriority in a fairly conventional fashion. The contemporary world deals with its fear of the object through the practices of consumerism, commodity fetishism and archivism; and Baudrillard’s formative work is the analysis of a culture dominated by the forms of consumerism. The analysis is simple but forceful: in an exercise of its seductive power, the object controls the subject precisely at the moment when the subject believes itself to be in control of the world through the mercantile appropriation and semiotic comprehension of objects. Further, however, Baudrillard incorporates into his thinking Debord’s realization that the most important commodity in our times is the image itself; consequently, it follows that it is images—representations—that give, control, condition, organize and regulate subjectivity as such. Representation—indeed theatricality (parody, fakes, simulacra)—must occupy a central and guiding position in any subsequent socio-cultural analysis. What we witness in Baudrillard, fundamentally, is the mirror-imaging (a ‘fatal’ or evil representation) of Descartes. For the earlier (modern) philosopher, it is vital to establish the priority of the ‘I’ as a linguistic subject over the world of exteriority; in a postmodern moment, however, Baudrillard argues that this is a strategy always condemned to failure.21 For the contemporary, the problems and issues regarding the relation to exteriority remain the same; but Baudrillard has simply taken the threat of the evil demon of images more seriously, with the consequence that a fundamental priority is given, in his ‘fatal strategies’, to the object over the subject of consciousness, and with the consequence of a problematization of the very autonomy upon which modernity founds itself. Hence the quite necessary condemnation of Baudrillard by a leftist criticism which requires to maintain the notion of autonomous agency if it is to believe in the efficacy of critical consciousness itself. Let me say here simply that such condemnation is not (and has not yet been) entirely satisfactory; one must—and probably this is true especially if one is on the left—face and engage with the

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problematization of autonomy consequent upon the (perhaps nihilist, perhaps quietist) implications of even Baudrillard’s most extreme forms of postmodernism. The persistent problem with which these philosophies attempt to deal, and which Baudrillard’s work lays bare, can be characterized as a prevailing terror of alterity. The fear governing modern criticism is that the subject—indeed even consciousness itself—might not be entirely autonomous, that it might in some way be fundamentally dependent, contingent upon its others or, worse, upon objects (i.e. the fear is that Baudrillard might be correct; just as the fears of Descartes and of Milton were that Satan might be not only seductive, but fundamentally right and to be imitated). Further, the subject (in whatever guise) might not therefore be—contra Marx—the agent of history at all, and may even be incapable of understanding an exterior, empirical, material world. The dangerous alterity figured in the object as such must therefore be tamed, most commonly in post-Cartesian (i.e. modern) terms through the reduction of the empirical to the linguistic. It is from this desire to rein in the object that we can trace the ‘imperialism of consciousness’ foreseen in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, a dialectic in which the relation between the subject and object is displaced on to a more interpersonal relation between subject and subject, each vying for power and control of its others, fundamentally through the control of rhetoric or discourse. Here we have the beginnings of that power—knowledge nexus which begins, in class terms, by proposing the validity of a specific class-consciousness and a class-based agenda as normative and neutral, and which culminates in more explicit forms of colonialism, as Todorov has recently demonstrated with reference to de Tocqueville and others.22 Modern criticism is (among many other things, of course) that which deliberately attempts to absent the empirical Other—alterity —from history in an effort to legitimize the critic as an autonomous subject of language or discourse; modern criticism is thus profoundly semiotic and inherently aestheticizing in its determinations to find a form under which the force that is a recalcitrant alterity might be assimilated in the product of autobiography or subject-legitimation. A more direct way of absenting this Other—this Derridean ‘force’ —from history is, of course, through the political actions which culminate in war; and my contention is that it is in a war mentality that we see the condition of modern criticism emerging, most specifically in the late seventeenth century, to which I now turn.23 II In the late seventeenth century, a specific aesthetic battle was beginning to emerge in Europe, commonly known as the battle of the books contesting the relative merits and values of the ancient authors and the moderns. This is a historical instance of the emergence of a self-conscious cultural modernity, and

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it is linked to a moment of political modernization as well; for this aesthetic contest is engaged in the midst of much more pressing battles, those military conflicts which shape a modern Europe into emergent nation-states, governed broadly by the primacy of mercantilism and the ascendancy of the bourgeois classes, in a period going from the English Restoration through to the French Revolution, the latter of which articulates the modern nation-state itself understood as a ‘space of legitimation’.24 I wish to focus here on one particular military conflict in order to trace its intimate relation to the aesthetic itself in this emergence of an incipient modernism or cultural modernity. Dryden published Annus Mirabilis in 1667, and his Essay of Dramatic Poesy in 1668, though both were written during 1666 when Dryden was living in Charlton where he could escape the effects of the London plague. In both texts he attends to the recent conflict, the Second Dutch War, fought between 1665 and 1667. That war, ostensibly initiated by Charles (even if its origin is in fact more complex), was a disaster for England; and, at least until the scape-goating impeachment of Clarendon in 1667, Charles faced a mercantile population which required some form of appeasement. The first question one must ask is why a poet, who has since been described—not entirely unfairly—as ‘the age’s most enduring sycophant’,25 and who was an ardent supporter of Charles, would wish to linger over this war, even if in an attempt to justify or support Charles. The occasion of these two texts has been variously described. For some time, since George Williamson’s 1946 article in fact, it has been taken as a commonplace that the Essay was a product of a ‘notable exchange of opinion’, fundamentally that between Samuel de Sorbière, whose mocking Relation d’un Voyage en Angleterre produced Thomas Sprat’s defence of England and of the honour of the Royal Society in his response, the Observations on M.de Sorbier’s Voyage.26 Sorbière’s text is an often satirical attack on the English as a nation of fainéants and tribal xenophobes. His narrative includes attacks on religion and governmental politics, as well as on the incidentals of daily life such as the discourtesies suffered on being called a’French dog’ by urchins in the port of Dover and such like. The section of the text which would have been of most interest to Dryden as a critic would have been that dealing with theatre, in which Sorbière claims that the English plays would not pass muster in France: Mais les Comedies n’auroient pas en France toute l’approbation qu’elles ont en Angleterre. LesPoëtes se mocquent de l’vniformité du lieu, & de la regle des vingt-quatre heurs. Ils font des comedies de cingt-cinq [sic] ans, & apres avoir representé au premier acte le mariage d’vn Prince, ils representent tout d’vne suite les belles actions de son fils, & luy font voir bien du pays.27 In his response to this—and to Sorbière’s more general complaints —Sprat argues that he will not attack the French nation, but will limit himself to a personal attack on the credibility of Sorbière himself; indeed, it is Sorbière’s error,

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claims Sprat, to generalize about a nation from, for example, the behaviour of schoolboys behaving rudely to foreigners arriving in Dover (though he himself, in attempting to trivialize Sorbière’s complaint, generalizes about the behaviour of schoolboys everywhere). Sprat’s specific replies on the question of theatre amount to a claim that Sorbière is simply out of date, that what he mocks as English irregularity may have been the case under Elizabeth, but that now, ‘for these last Fifty years, our Stage has been as Regular in those Circumstances, as the best in Europe’.28 But the terms of Sprat’s response show a desire to defend not just cultural practices but also political entities and identities. Though lacking the easy availability of the concept of the modern nation, Sprat argues in a vocabulary constitutive of a nationalist case. For instance, he claims against the French that ‘as long as we exceed all the World, in the Fabricks of Strength, and Empire, we may easily allow him to object to us our want of those of Pleasure’.29 More pointedly still, he compares Sorbière unfavourably with English travellers: The English have describ’d, and illustrated, all parts of the Earth by their Writings: Many they have discover’d; they have visited all. And I dare assure him, that they have been always most tender of the Reputations of forein States, which they have gone to visit, as they have been most merciful in sparing the Natives blood, in those Countries which they have discover’d.30 Despite Sprat’s claims to the contrary, the terms of the debate are inescapably those of the nation-state. What is being compared is not just a stereotypical ‘national character’, but that much more important thing, national identity as formulated in the congruence of aesthetics and politics, art and public policy.31 Sprat and Sorbière are at odds over the relative centrality or place in the world of their two countries; and Sprat is more aware of this than Sorbière, for whom the travel book is primarily a kind of satire, an aesthetic or literary exercise (written at the request of the Marquis of Vaubrun-Nogent) rather than a singularly political gesture. Yet though the tone of both texts may be different, the governing ideology of both is profoundly patriotic; and Sprat’s response is undeniably and unmistakably political: ’Tis true that England is not the seat of the Empire of the world: But it may be of that which confines the world it self, the Ocean…. The time wherein we live is upon the recovery of an Universal peace; a peace establish’d on the two surest foundations of Fear, and Love.32 The incidental comparisons between national theatres is a part of a ‘war of letters’. The stakes of this war are neither merely aesthetic nor merely political; rather, the argument finds itself constantly arguing the one case in the terms of the other, fusing the two lexicons in what becomes the beginnings of a new

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discourse, the discourse of ‘national character’, itself a precursor of a more fully articulated discourse of nationalism such as we will see in, for instance, Burke.33 If the occasion of Annus Mirabilis is political, then so too is that of the Essay. Cedric Reverand sees in the Essay a parallel being drawn between the English military victory off Lowestoft at the start of the Second Dutch War and the English aesthetic victory over French theatre, seen, he claims, in the joy of a group of French people celebrating their ‘liberation’ from French dogma and rules at the end of the essay: the parallel between these two sets of events…argues that what these poetcritics decide out in the boat may be just as relevant to England’s greatness, just as significant in defining England, as what the English navy achieves with its guns.34 Once more, this analysis shows that it is an issue of patriotism or of an emergent nationalist consciousness which is at stake. In what follows I wish to theorize this more fully, and to argue for what might be the surprising turn in which we will see the specifically African roots of a modern European critical consciousness, a criticism firmly tied, through its autobiographical impetus, to questions of national literature and the morality of citizenship, and a criticism based in an anxiety about what we can identify as a specific geographical exteriority. In order to theorize this, however, one must first have in mind some more historical information (for which I am largely indebted in the following three paragraphs to the work of Bliss and of Hutton). The year 1651 saw the passing of the first Navigation Act in England, and, as Robert Bliss has pointed out, the effect of this Act exceeded its actual propositional content, for it ‘“nationalized” England’s trade, not in the sense of state ownership but because it was blanket legislation which on its face applied to all trades and equally to all Englishmen’.35 The space of the nation is thus formed, if only implicitly; and, almost incidentally, the proto-citizen is produced. If this is an example of nationalism in an emergent state, it is what Todorov characterizes as ‘internal’ nationalism: that is, it is not in the first instance concerned to establish the primacy of one nation-state over others, but rather to homogenize the internal relations of citizen to citizen such that all are equal before the law; and the state— rather than king or divine orders—becomes the space of legitimation or court of appeal for the citizen.36 Such an act of ‘nationalization’ reveals the absolute centrality of trading to the concept that England had of itself at this time, a concept explicitly echoed in Sprat’s rejoinder to Sorbière. ‘England’ is defined as that which is successfully mercantile. Yet the Dutch at this time are, paradoxically, more English than the English, for they are even more successful in trade, thus occluding what the Cartesian would see as the clarity of the idea of Englishness; and, more importantly, it follows that any war about trade at this time is, at least implicitly, a war about the quality of ‘Englishness’.37 The trade in question for both

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countries depended upon colonies, with the Dutch in control of the East Indies and also of the vital strategic port of New Amsterdam in the very midst of England’s American colonies through which tobacco was smuggled to deny the English the due taxation incomes, thus putting international relations between the two countries under stress. It was when the English, with governmental backing, claimed New Amsterdam in 1664, renaming it New York, that the Second Dutch War became inevitable; but this action itself resulted from earlier engagements off the coast of Africa. Aware of the growing Dutch presence on the coast of Guinea in the early 1660s, the impecunious Charles invested £6000 in the Royal Company of Adventurers Trading into Africa (later simply renamed the Royal African Company). In 1661, this Company staked a claim on exclusive trading rights along virtually the entire West African coastline; and, predictably, increasingly violent skirmishes broke out between English and Dutch ships in this area. The taking of New Amsterdam was a tactic meant to force a peace settlement to bring these naval conflicts to a close; but, when the Dutch recaptured all their previous holdings in a series of battles between October 1664 and February 1665, the Royal African Company turned to Charles, as a major investor, for official—political and national— support. The pressure to declare war became irresistible, and formal hostilities between these two major imperial powers, fighting over trade routes, began in March 1665. Essentially, then, the Second Dutch War—a war which, it is my claim, has an aesthetic/cultural as well as a military component—had its origins in the West Coast of Africa in a conflict over imperial control of trade routes and over colonial mastery in the Gulf of Guinea. As is now well known, the war seemed to begin promisingly for the English, with their famous victory, alluded to by Dryden, off Lowestoft on 3 June 1665; but things then degenerated as Charles pressed the very merchant ships on whose behalf the war was supposedly being fought into military service, while plague, ironically imported into Europe via a Dutch ship bringing goods from Smyrna, focused the attention of the people on a more immediate and dangerous threat to life. In commemorating this war, Dryden makes, in both Annus Mirabilis and the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, an interesting swerve away from the surface conflict. In the poem, the war is seen by him— indeed justified by him—in terms which might seem more apposite to an imperial war. Importantly, however, for Dryden this was not at all a conflict between the English and the Dutch, but rather a war between the English and the French (who, though entering the war as allies of the Dutch, actually made little military contribution to it). Dryden writes: Behold two nations [England, Netherlands] then, engaged so far That each seven years the fit must shake each land; Where France will side to weaken us by war, Who only can his vast designs withstand.

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See how he feeds the Iberian with delays, To render us his timely friendship vain; And while his secret soul on Flanders preys, He rocks the cradle of the babe of Spain. Such deep designs of empire does he lay O’er them whose cause he seems to take in hand… And, Dryden argues, This saw our king’ (lines 25–37), making the case for Charles as a perspicacious strategist forced into war by the presence of France in the background of the Anglo-Dutch conflict. Louis is the real—if ghostly or spectral—villain of Annus Mirabilis, just as the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu becomes apparent as the implicit villain in the Essay. This rather astute, if politically serendipitous, piece of analysis by Dryden forges the link between his own aesthetic activities as a writer and the political activities of the emergent imperial—or at least nationalist—powers, England and France. McKeon offers a yet more precise reading of Dryden’s message, which, he argues: is international, and not strictly imperial. He imagines a world economically one, a universal collective resembling a city like London but comprehending the entire earth…. The international scope of this utopian vision is only an extension of the collectivizing tendency of a zealous nationalism which recognizes the general necessity of mercantile operations.38 In the poem, Dryden reveals, necessarily indirectly, the stakes of the Essay: the link between aesthetics and politics forged through the construction of the nationstate, or, perhaps more pertinently, via the political strategies of colonializing war and the experiences of a terror located in the place of the geographical (and now geo-political) exterior, in this instance Africa, as a site for potential exploitation or financial speculation (and, of course, I intend ‘speculation’ here to refer not only to economic matters but also to that theatricality for which I made a claim as a founding condition of modern criticism and philosophy above). The stakes can only be revealed indirectly for two reasons. First, the very concept of the modern nation-state is unclear at this time, still awaiting full and proper delineation, with its attendant discourse. Todorov (in common with thinkers as diverse as Gellner, Hobsbawm, Said, Bhabha and others) has pointed out that the term of the ‘nation’ comprises notions of cultural as well as political —in the first instance, civic—nationalism; cultural nationalism being that which ‘is a path that leads towards universalism—by deepening the specificity of the particular within which one dwells’, while civic nationalism ‘is a preferential choice in favour of one’s own country over the others’39 and thus antiuniversalizing. Additionally, within political nationalism, there is a further

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conflict between what Todorov calls ‘internal’ and ‘external’ nationalisms, the former being characterized as a space of ‘the equality of all citizens’ determined internally, the latter being, once again, the setting of one nation in opposition to others. For Todorov, It is precisely the encounter between these two meanings, internal and external, cultural and political, that has given rise to the specifically modern entities of nation and nationalism.40 Dryden finds himself precisely at the moment of the emergence of this conflict, with the result that the only real terms available for the expression of his case are those of patriotism in which there is a fusion of the cultural with the political notions of nationalism. In the second place, Dryden is indirect because he sees that the real conflict in question in this newly emerging discourse of nationalism involves not the Dutch at all, but rather the French; and it is thus upon the latter that Dryden turns his literary and aesthetic guns. Consequently the emergence of modern criticism, tied firmly to the place-logic of the nation-state, is fought out in the Essay between Dryden and Corneille in what is essentially a rather recondite argument over the aesthetics of tragedy. It remains clear, however, that the historical source of this modern critical consciousness lies elsewhere, in an imperial and colonial contest in and over Africa, without which modern criticism could not fully articulate itself. It is in this indirect revelation of the stakes of Dryden’s argument that we can see what I claim to be at the root of modern criticism. The swerve made by Dryden, in shifting attention away from the Dutch to the French, serves more than a direct political purpose in terms of presenting a good image of the king. It directs attention away from Africa, and allows for the formulation of an argument whose constituents are all immediately recognizable as European. Africa is thus and at once constructed as the Other of a modern Europe and is simultaneously elided from a history now constituted by Europe in its own image. In Lyotardian terms, a differend is avoided and a tort committed. Dryden displaces the issues regarding the political materiality of Empire on to an argument over culture. In so doing, he maintains the emerging discourse of nationalism but elides Africa from the concerns of European culture. Africa remains simply as an object to be appropriated; its historical subjectivity or agency removed from historical concern. Yet this modern critical consciousness, with all its emergent nationalist baggage, is dependent precisely on the very African alterity which remains ‘forgotten’, reappearing only as oddity or exoticism until the next major rehearsal of these same political issues in the Berlin conference of 1884.

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III The cultural contest between England and France had been enjoined before Sorbière so irritated Sprat with his Relation d’un Voyage. In 1660 Corneille had published his plays in the three-volume edition, each volume prefaced by one of the Discours which outlined the terms and conditions proper to tragedy. The text of Corneille shares with the debate between Sorbière and Sprat one interesting intersec tion, for one particular attack made by Sorbière was not properly answered in an otherwise thorough riposte by Sprat. Sorbière complains that the English are difficult to understand because of the way they speak; and Sprat in fact concedes this claim: ‘the obscurity of our Speech being not only his complaint, but of many other Foreiners, I will not stand long in its justification’; but argues that it is a trivial point: ‘I will not regard this small objection, wherein there may be others, that agree with him.’41 Corneille, a provincial, was also aware of his verbal particularities. In his avertissement au lecteur in the 1663 and subsequent editions, Corneille advises the reader of certain innovations in orthography, made in order to facilitate proper pronunciation of the French; and, perhaps most pertinently to a Dryden aware of the Sorbière-Sprat controversy and aware also of the contest with the Dutch, Corneille indicates that he is following the Dutch example: L’usage de notre langue est à present si épandu par toute l’Europe, principalement vers le Nord, qu’on y voit peu d’États où elle ne soit connue; c’est ce qui m’a fait croire qu’il ne serait pas mal à propos d’en faciliter la prononciation aux étrangers, qui s’y trouvent souvent embarrassés par les divers sons qu’elle donne quelquefois aux mêmes lettres. Les Hollondais m’ont frayé le chemin.42 It is order and regulation such as this that characterizes the content of the three Discours; and it is the argument over such regularity that structures and determines much of Dryden’s Essay, written largely in response to the emergent international pre-eminence of Corneille. Corneille, by 1660 the foremost playwright and cultural authority in France, takes issue with Aristotle, arguing that the short-comings in his great theoretical predecessor are due to the simple fact that Aristotle had not seen the triumphs of French theatre (effectively, the plays of Corneille himself, explications and critiques of which substantiate, in practical terms, the theoretical arguments, which we may now call ‘subject-legitimizing’ or autobiographical, made in the discourses). Incidentally, though perhaps more importantly, Corneille also takes issue with the stringent orders of Richelieu, who, before his death in 1642, had demanded a strict maintenance of the neo-Aristotelian ‘rules’ regarding tragedy. For Richelieu—and also for Corneille—tragedy was not just a formal aesthetic exercise; it was also a practice that had a political determinant as a manifestation of a national culture, and therefore it demanded rigorous policing. Corneille

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agreed with the necessity for regulation, but argued that the rules should themselves be subject to modification in the light of practice (thus offering further legitimacy to his own theatre). Corneille sees that Aristotle’s elements of pity and terror, as aspects of tragedy, are so important that he must reserve a dominant place for them in his discussions. He begins from the proposition that tragedy is that kind of theatre which, through pity and terror, leads to the purgation of similar passions. The theoretical terms of his argument are extremely instructive, for they offer an instance of precisely the kind of relation to exteriority which, I claim, is intrinsic to a specifically modern critical consciousness. According to Corneille, Aristotle does not require the presence of both pity and terror; and thus, in suggesting that one of these is sufficient for tragedy, Corneille claims that he is not at odds with Aristotle: il est aisé de nous accomoder avec Aristote. Nous n’avons qu’à dire que par cette façon de s’énoncer il n’a pas entendu que ces deux moyens y servissent toujours ensemble, et qu’il suffit selon lui de l’un des deux pour faire cette purgation, avec cette différence toutefois que la pitié n’y peut arriver sans la crainte, et que la crainte peut y parvenir sans la pitié.43 Further than this, Corneille understands the terms in a fashion extremely germane to the terms of the present argument. Pity, he says, is that which is aroused when we watch the suffering of another; terror is aroused when we identify ourselves with the sufferer, seeing her or him effectively as our representative on stage. The pity in the face of an evil into which we see someone like ourselves fall brings about the fear that the same might happen to us. In short, this aesthetic terror is aligned with a process of identification in which an Other is seen as the representation of a subject: terror is brought about through a philosophy of identity in which difference—the Other—is seen as but an aspect of the same, ‘I’. Now, literary terror such as this, as my argument above has shown, is but one instance of a more general—political—condition of terror: terror arises when we fail to see the Other as singular, or whenever we reduce a radical alterity to a mere surface difference. In the terms recently advanced by Marc Guillaume in his discussions with Jean Baudrillard, terror arises when we reduce l’autre to autrui: dans tout autre, il y a autrui—ce qui n’est pas moi, ce qui est different de moi, mais que je peux comprendre, voire assimiler— et il y a aussi une altérité radicale, inassimilable, incompréhen sible et même impensable. Et la pensée occidentale ne cesse de prendre l’autre pour autrui, de réduire l’autre à autrui.44 In the case of the contest between Dryden and Corneille, between English and French theatre, the radical Other—that which is absented from history itself even

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as it is at the founding moment of modern critical consciousness—is, as we have seen, Africa, the battles over whose geography and topography lie at the source of these critical conflicts between emerging national cultures. Yet perhaps it would be true to say that Africa, around whose coastline we saw the battle for imperialist control of trade routes, is but one example of a more general anxiety about a geo-cultural alterity, manifested in an incipient general ‘exoticism’. Todorov points out that exoticism is a system in which ‘otherness is systematically preferred to likeness’;45 and that geographical remoteness forms an intrinsic aspect of exoticism: ‘it would not occur to anyone to idealize wellknown neighbors’,46 hence the peculiarity of a mutual anxiety shared by the English and the French, both of whom are engaged in acts informed by an exoticism in order to formulate the terms of their own national characters. The ‘locatedness’ I ascribe to criticism is perhaps also apparent in the very plays of Corneille and Dryden. Corneille’s great success in adapting from Spanish sources, especially in Le Cid (1637), develops a thematic interest in geo-political otherness continued in plays such as Rodogune, princesses des Parthes (c. 1645), Héraclius, empereur d’Orient (1647), not to mention the almost incidental exoticism of those of his plays set in the ancient world; Dryden, at the same time as engaging with the arguments advanced in Corneille’s discourses, is making plays such as The Indian Queen (1633–1634), The Indian Emperour (1665) and The Conquest of Granada (1668). My final refinement of this argument, following on from the foregoing evidences, is that modern criticism is itself conditioned by a specific tragedy germane to the formulation of a nation-state. For Dryden, one question shaping the Essay is how to justify English theatre against the pre-eminence of Corneille who, by this time, had effectively become a ‘national poet’, thus giving credence to a specifically cultural idea of the nation-state itself, and, almost incidentally, thereby demanding a concept of English theatre with its corresponding ‘national poet’. Along with others, but primarily with William Davenant, Dryden attempted to construct an earlier national poet than Corneille, producing—and adapting—Shakespeare for the purpose, as Dobson has convincingly argued.47 My claim here is that Dryden saw that the question of a national theatre effectively superseded the capacity of any individual to embody it: nationalism, though he did not use the word in its present sense, was a matter for a more generalized patriotism, and was best expressed in a terminology fusing the aesthetic with the political. The Essay makes a number of explicit comparisons between the theatre and the nation, imbricating cultural with political questions. The fortunes of national theatres are themselves aligned with the fortunes of nations in these ‘wars of the theatre’; Ben Jonson is described as one who ‘invades authors like a monarch’, in the ‘empire of wit’; new languages of poetry are produced from imperial battles; and, of course, the occasion of the fiction of the essay itself is 3 June 1665, ‘that memorable day in the first summer of the late war when our navy engaged the Dutch’.48

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Dryden is at pains to validate modern English theatre against both the persistence of a slavish repetition of the ancients and the threats to supremacy proposed by the French. In this, he sets up Shakespeare as a writer who is advanced as being ‘natural’ against the regulatory and formulaic Corneille and other French writers: To begin then with Shakespeare. He was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily…. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation. He was naturally learned. He needed not the spectacles of books to read nature. He looked inwards, and found her there.49 As Dobson has pointed out, this presentation of the ‘naturalness’ of Shakespeare was a common tactic of the period; but importantly, Shakespeare has to be ‘adapted’. He is adapted—that is, rewritten—by Dryden, Davenant and others to suit the necessities of the Restoration period, in which the norms of ElizabethanJacobean tragedy no longer have the same currency as they had, and when themes and issues of a seemingly more domestic interest, such as love, make a strong claim not, as they had heretofore, on comic but rather on tragic theatre. Such ‘love’, associated with the emergence of a strongly felt feminine presence in theatre and culture more generally, retains its stereotypical associations with the threats posed to masculine order by sexual irregularity and promiscuity;50 and, of course, the matters of aesthetic regulation of sexuality are thoroughly informed by matters concerning the political regulation of the monarch’s voracious sexuality, as evidenced by Rochester or by the comic playwrights of the moment, such as Congreve or Wycherley. The Essay provides many instances in which the specific irregularities of Shakespearean form are held to be superior to the rule-governed theatre of contemporary France (still misrepresented here as the France of Richelieu’s académie). Once again, it would be an over-simplification at this point to oppose simply the feminine and the masculine, the former to be associated with disorder while the latter is characterized as ‘regular’; rather, it is the case that the theatre—and more importantly, the theory—of the period formulates the questions of national culture in terms which are not, in the first instance, directly of a statepolitical nature. The result of these confrontations is that the age sees, in England especially, a supervention of comedy, especially domestic comedy, in which the French, it is claimed (and despite the obvious example of Molière), have neither expertise nor any national characterological predilection.51 Here we have Dryden’s fundamental protonational insight advanced in theoretical terms. He claims in his examen of Jonson’s Silent Woman that humour (and the term itself is undergoing an important semantic shift) is that which attends precisely to singularity; it is thus the perfect riposte to a tragic orientation in culture and

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criticism in which the potential singularity of l’autre is reduced to the comparability explicit in autrui, a comparability which marks the availability of otherness for taxonomical theorization: ‘humour is the ridiculous extravagance of conversation, wherein one man differs from all others.’52 In a strict sense, therefore, such humour is simply inimical to representation at all, and thus tends to evade the problems of the ‘specular’ in modern criticism. Semantically, ‘humour’ is moving away from its intimate relations to an elementary somatics and is approximating here to a sense captured in ‘mood’, ‘attitude’ or ‘inclination’. The humour in question is one seen in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters to a Gentleman (itself modelled on the Lettres d’une religieuse portugaise, written, aptly enough, not by a Portuguese nun but almost certainly, if anonymously, by the French diplomat, Guilleragues). Such an attitude is conditioned principally by the vaunted singularity and incomparability of the desired object. In its attention to such singularity, this humour is also akin to an emerging construction of ‘love’ seen as the ‘piteous’ counterpart of Cornelian terror. Both Corneille and Dryden make the case for the importance of love as an aspect of theatre, even of tragedy; but it is here that we see the understirrings of the prioritization in Dryden of pity over terror, the reiteration of the importance of love as that which thus denies the possibility of theoretical regulation. The argument can now return to the theoretical relation obtaining between tragic theatricality and the nation-state, a relation worked out through the mediation of cultural criticism. According to Clément Rosset, tragedy is properly to be thought of as factored and conditioned by change. There is no such thing as a tragic situation or state of affairs; rather, tragedy is that which describes the change between states of affairs. Rosset gives the example of the stonemason who tumbles to his death before our eyes. What makes this specifically tragic is the fact that there is an identification between differences, an identification between living and dead: Je suis le seul à avoir saisi le tragique de la mort, non parce que le maçon s’est écrasé à mes pieds, mais parce que je l’ai vu, en l’espace d’une seconde, vivant, mourant, puis mort…. Le tragique, ce n’est pas ce cadavre que l’on emporte, c’est l’idée que ce tas de chairs sanguinolentes est le même que celui qui est tombé il y a un instant, qui vient de faire un faux pas.53 Foe Rosset, ‘le tragique est et sera toujours le surprenant par essence’.54 In my description of the stakes of modern criticism, the pertinence of this is clear. The modern critic is she or he who is surprised by the essence of her or his text, always discovering that the essence of what is given as an object in a site of alterity is actually a covert form of the subject herself or himself (autrui and not autre; Europe and not Africa, say). The prime explicit example of this is, of course, Stanley Fish who, at the time when he advocated a form of reader-response

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criticism, finally identified his ideal ‘reader’ as not just any non-specific reader, but none other than the nameable Stanley Fish.55 Modern criticism, in order to accommodate its fear of alterity, its fear of the object-as-such (be it a text, nationstate or other individual) which threatens the autonomy of the subject, works to reduce that part of the object constituted by a radical alterity (l’autre) to a mere otherness (autrui), in which the self can always be recognized. The critic finds, in the object which is ostensibly proposed as the site of difference, an underlying site of the same. The result is that the modern is founded upon the production of a subject of consciousness characterized first by an assumption that the object-world is available primarily for the subject’s understanding and appropriation, and subsequently by a master over this subject’s ostensibly recalcitrant others who turn out not to be fundamentally Other at all. These others, in Rosset’s terminology, will ‘surprise’ the subject by their ‘essence’, an essence which will always be discovered to be not different, not ‘themselves’, but rather the same, ‘me’ (and, from one angle, it can be claimed that it is such thinking that excuses, silently, the barbaric acts of colonial appropriation carried out in its name). Thus we have in criticism precisely the anagnorisis constitutive of tragic terror; a recognition of the self in the Other, such that Cornelian identification and representation will take place. The structure of such criticism is thus (and like its politics) tragic. ‘English’ literature, ‘French’ theory, ‘American’ criticism and so on all depend upon this tragic structure in which the others of ‘England’, ‘France’, ‘America’, are constructed precisely in order to be elided from history. The theoretical ground of modern—we might as well say ‘tragic’—criticism depends upon a specific historical instance in which the national Other (the exotic colonies) are themselves elided from history in the interests of the protection of the English national identity at the close of the seventeenth century. The paradoxical result of this is that, in a specific sense, criticism has not even yet begun to happen for the simple reason that the object of criticism is constantly being circumvented in the production of a subject whose truth is guaranteed by autobiographical self-coherence (or subject-legitimation) rather than historical engagement. It will remain for a further piece of work to explore whether the modern critic’s embarrassment in talking of ‘love’, preferring discourses of sensibility, taste, desire, has precluded the possibility of a materialist and historical engaged criticism. University of Kent at Canterbury Notes 1 Zygmunt Bauman, in Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989) argues most precisely the relation between the Enlightenment and the Nazi terror.

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He points out that, structurally, the techniques used by the Nazis in the death camps (for example, the exercising of fear as a tool to ensure that victims would—entirely reasonably—inform upon each other) were the obverse side of the otherwise positive uses of an instrumental reason whose method had been most clearly described by the general tendency of Enlightenment thought. That is to say, there is no simple equation between Enlightenment and Holocaust, between Reason and terror; rather, it is the case that within Enlightenment reason there lurks an evil which, though repressed, can threaten to return in such a way as to overturn all the positive values of Enlightenment thinking itself. The argument (involving, thus, some of the theoretical reflections of Walter Benjamin on the relations between barbarism and civilization, as well as Freudian insights on the return of the repressed) is much more complex than the banal journalistic ‘equation’ of reason and terror. 2 It should be noted, in passing, that by ‘love’ I do not intend to evoke notions of ‘desire’, for this latter is, I suggest, itself a term which covers the embarrassment the critic feels whenever her or his subjectivity is under threat. The love to which I will return later in this paper is marked precisely by such a threat, in the face of which the scientism of a non-metaphysical discourse provides no solace. Hence my own anxiety when, for a most telling example (in what I think is an excellent study), Catherine Belsey, having explained the nature of her project in writing Desire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), asks; ‘What are the materials of this study? Experience? Perish the thought!’ (p. 10). On the one hand, I share Belsey’s scepticism regarding the accessibility of ‘experience’; on the other hand, I do not wish, in what follows or as a consequence, to avoid the embarrassment involved in thinking the notion of desire as the experiencing of love. For a socio-cultural view of the matter which must take experience into account (though treating it in a scientific fashion), see Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love, trans. Mark Ritter and Jane Wiebel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 3 On the centrality of discrimination such as this to criticism—and on its excessive sociological effects—see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984). For a more specific instance, demonstrating the work of such a critical consciousness in institutions, see G.E.Davie. The Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961) and The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh: Polygon Press, 1986), in both of which a critical intelligence, produced from a generalist education (actually the Scottish university system, but practically any ‘liberal’ as opposed to ‘vocationalist’ pedagogy), is seen to be central to the working of democracy itself. (For a further examination of this in terms of Scottish culture, see also Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon Press, 1989).) The kind of criticism in question here is that associated with Kant and with the later Frankfurt School. 4 Most recently, the paradigmatic literary example of this kind of attitude would be most typically exemplified in the writings of Alain RobbeGrillet, where the fixed and steady gaze upon an object (attempting to see it as in itself it really is) always transforms the object itself (what it is becoming identified with what it is not); and the most famous and most cited example of this is the ‘perfect/imperfect’ tomato in Les Gommes (Paris: Minuit, 1953), pp. 145–6.

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5 The attack on much contemporary criticism for its supposed neo-formalist aestheticization of politics is, of course, most heavily indebted to Benjamin’s essay, ‘Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 243. The debate in our time has unfortunately degenerated into the banalization of politics in which ‘political correctness’ has been set in contest with an equally vacuous banalization of culture called variously ‘the defence of the canon’ or ‘the defence of western/ traditional/family values’. Few have commented upon the political correctness which was always implicit in the forms of legitimization adopted by criticism itself prior to the eruption of this pseudo-debate. The political situatedness of aesthetic practices is much more complex—and much more important— than the pseudodebates that surround it in ‘theoreticist’ arguments would suggest. 6 See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprétation (Paris: Seuil, 1965), pp. 35–6. 7 According to Jürgen Habermas, it is the importance of this emergence of autonomy for the validation of modernity which a postmodern thinker such as Lyotard has ‘never understood’; and it is this which basically drives the wedge of difference between Habermas and Lyotard (conversation with the present writer, Dublin, 14 April 1994). 8 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), p. 9. On the intimate, if initially merely etymological, relation between criticism and difference, see Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). It should be noted in passing that freedom, in the kind of argument outlined, has been reduced to the extraordinarily circumscribed limitations of consumer choice, and that it thus has little to do with the autonomy it is supposed to exemplify. 9 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), passim. 10 This thinking initiates a tradition in French philosophy which culminates in JeanFrançois Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). Relevant to the kinds of argument at stake here is the work of the Chicago Laocoon group, perhaps most specifically that of W.J.T.Mitchell, in Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) and in Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Its literary root in English literature is quite possibly to be located in Shakespeare’s Othello, a play which explicitly asks its audience and viewer to set the quite clear and visible difference between Othello and the rest of the players in contest with the linguistic powers heard in Othello’s own rehearsal of the rhetorical power of narrative (which enabled him to win Desdemona) and Iago’s rhetorical manipulation of Othello in a gulling plot: it asks where we locate ‘truth’ in this play between what it sets up as the visibly obvious and the linguistically persuasive and logically verifiable. 11 See Luce Irigaray, Speculum (Paris: Minuit, 1974), and Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977); and cf. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). 12 Some new historicist work has picked up and developed this notion theoretically; see, for example, Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display (London: Methuen, 1986). 13 See Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993); and cf. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 55–6. On Hamlet as a first ‘modern’, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World,

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14

15 16 17 18

19

20

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trans. Albert Sbraggia (London: Verso, 1987), and see my own comments on the ghostly or spectral relation between hearing and seeing things in Docherty, Alterities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). On the ‘literariness’ of Descartes, see Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1962), p. 81; on Descartes as himself the ‘hero’ of the Discours de la méthode, see Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic and Modern (London: Secker & Warburg, 1962). See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 31ff., on the difference between the intellectual as hero of knowledge and as hero of emancipation. Descartes, Philosophical Works, rendered into English by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T.Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. 1, pp. 90–1. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. viii: ‘I have myself taken refuge in more theoretical inquiries into the problems of figural language.’ This statement, made in passing, could be applied to almost every intervention made by de Man in his work through deconstruction; cf. the further explicit articulation of this in The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), especially the title essay. On the notion of the loquor as the founding condition of the cogito in Descartes, see Thomas Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), ch.3. Beckett remains, of course, the greatest inheritor of the Cartesian example in which the deconstruction of exteriority is explicitly dependent upon a voice, not necessarily one’s own, which speaks the subject in neo-Heideggerian fashion as much as it speaks the text: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine’ (Company, (London: John Calder, 1979), p. 7). On the geometrization of structuralism and its consequent evasion of ontological force, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Force et signification’, in L’Ecriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Against my claims here, Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), p. 404, argues that it is in the eighteenth century that the absolutism of truth is measured for the first time by its austerity. His argument should also be set alongside that of Page DuBois, Torture and Truth (London: Routledge, 1991). On autobiography see Philippe Lejune, Le Pacte autobiograpbique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). For a recent series of engagements with the question of biography see David Ellis, ed., Imitating Art (London: Pluto Press, 1993). For a more recent exploration of autobiography see Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). If not condemned to failure, the strategy is condemned at least to a form of hypocrisy. The priority of the ‘I’ is a fiction sustained at the cost of various repressions, or (and perhaps worse) oppressions. In the case of this paper, the oppression in question is that of the victims of an emergent colonialism; the repression is of the nationalist impetus implicit in modern critical consciousness. See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially pp. 91–207.

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23 For a different theoretical explanation of the importance of a war mentality to criticism, indebted to the thinking of Paul Virilio, see Docherty, Alterities. 24 Todorov, On Human Diversity, p. 175. 25 Ronald Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 128. 26 George Williamson, ‘The occasion of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’, Modern Philology, 44 (August 1946), pp. 1–9; Samuel de Sorbière, Relation d’un voyage en Angleterre (Paris, 1664); Thomas Sprat, Observations on Monsieur de Sorbier’s Voyage into England (1665). 27 Sorbière, Voyage, pp. 167–8; long ‘s’ modified in transcription. 28 Sprat, Observations, p. 245; long ‘s’ modified in this and all subsequent transcriptions. 29 Ibid., p. 46. 30 Ibid., pp. 60–1. 31 For a useful historical survey of the ways in which cultural policy affects and effects the civic subject, see Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 32 Sprat, Observations, pp. 286–7. 33 On Burke, the French Revolution and national character, see Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England 1789–1832 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 34 Cedric D.Reverand II, ‘Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatick Poesie”: the poet and the world of affairs’, Studies in English Literature, 22 (1982), p. 381. 35 Robert M.Bliss, Revolution and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 59. 36 Todorov, On Human Diversity, p. 175. 37 On this kind of self-invention by the Dutch see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (London: Collins, 1987). 38 Michael McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 71. 39 Todorov, On Human Diversity, p. 172. 40 Ibid., p. 176. 41 Sprat, Observations, p. 219. For the attacks to which this weak response is made, see Sorbière, Voyage, p. 94 (on the incomprehensible Latin spoken by the English), p. 167 (on pronunciation in the theatre), p. 169 (on the laziness of the English whose lips hardly move when they speak: a’stiff upper lip’ to set against Irigaray’s lips which speak together, perhaps). 42 Pierre Corneille, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1963), p. 820. 43 Ibid., p. 832. 44 Marc Guillaume et Jean Baudrillard, Figures de l’altérité (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1994), p. 10. 45 Todorov, On Human Diversity, p. 264. 46 Ibid., p. 265. 47 See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 48 John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in John Dryden, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); for the allusion to the link between nations and their theatres see pp. 93–4; for the passages quoted see, in order, pp. 80, 111–12, 116, 74.

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49 Ibid., p. 110. 50 It is important to note that this ‘feminization of culture’ was not as straightforward as some contemporaries, such as Rapin, would have had their readers believe. More recently, critics such as Elaine Hobby and Moira Ferguson have rendered a greater complexity to these issues. See, for relevant examples, Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others (London: Routledge, 1992); Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity (London: Virago, 1988). Gerald MacLean, in ‘Literature, culture and society in Restoration England’ in MacLean, ed., Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 4, points neatly to one aspect of this complexity when he writes that ‘Women, though granted certain novel freedoms like that of professional acting, often found themselves subjected to gender codes that they had been busily undoing during the revolutionary decades.’ It is typically in the theatre of the male writers (Dryden, Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, Farquahar and others) that the stereotypical identification of woman with mobility is made. 51 Dryden, Essay, pp. 194–5. 52 Ibid., p. 113. 53 Clément Rosset, La Philosophie tragique (1960; Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1991), p. 9. 54 Ibid., p. 18. 55 See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 49.

Melodrama as avant-garde: enacting a new subjectivity Simon Shepherd

The Covent Garden playbill for 13 November 1802 announced ‘a New MeloDrame in Two acts, consisting of Speaking, Dancing & Pantomime, called A Tale of Mystery’. To someone who was thinking about buying a ticket the teasing word here is ‘Melo-Drame’. Performances which had speaking and dancing, plays with music and pantomimes were all pretty familiar. And various sorts of tales of mystery regularly emerged from the pens of Gothic writers. But to call something ‘Melo-Drame’ was to be foreign. There were plenty of English phrases which would have done instead. Melo-Drames, after all, were things the French were performing in front of mass audiences, in their revolutionary state. There was something about that word’s appearance on a Covent Garden playbill that was, in several ways, calculatedly un-English. The high priest of atheism The dramatist responsible for making the French connection was Thomas Holcroft. He figures mainly as a minor novelist in literary history; in political history, on the other hand, he is a member of the group of Jacobin artisans, associated with the London Corresponding Society, who faced brutal state repression in 1794. He had been one of those who had organized the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man. Alongside him in this venture, as in several others, was his close friend William Godwin. As part of their political activity they commented on each other’s works and debated together. Holcroft, whom Coleridge said was ‘the very High priest of Atheism, he hates God’, not only influenced Godwin’s religious beliefs (or lack of them) but also pushed him towards anarchism. There are, said Holcroft, ‘no good governments’, and further, marriage is evil, since ‘individual Textual Practice 10(3), 1996, 507–522

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property is evil’, and ‘Marriage makes woman individual property’.1 The elegance of this sort of logic led Holcroft and Godwin and their friends into

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somewhat tense relations with those values which, in contrast with the revolutionary French, represented proper Englishness. Godwin and his circle are used by Raymond Williams as an illustration of what he calls ‘class fraction’. They were part of a general formation which was ‘directly connected with the most progressive elements of the industrial bourgeoisie’, but the climate of the French Revolution, and in particular the English repression of 1794, produced crisis and realignment: ‘what had previously been an alternative tendency within the general social order, and in some respects a central tendency within the rising industrial bourgeoisie, was now, in this crisis, shifted into an oppositional tendency.’2 This crisis has effects on the cultural form which, Williams says, best defines their cultural identity, a new kind of novel. It moves towards a greater subjectivity just as Caleb Williams, fleeing from his master, increasingly imagines himself to be isolated in a world where his master’s influence, through its agents and spies, is everywhere. When readers come to share Caleb’s dread of the ‘eye of omniscience’ they find themselves positioned as victims, rather than owners, of something like the mechanism of surveillance with which the late eighteenthcentury state enacted its order. As Caleb flees, he comes to realize how much he cares about, and is closely linked to, the man who pursues him. For that man, like other older men in the story, feels less like a master than a father. At the end Caleb is confronted by the decayed form of what had been a benevolent father figure; for this figure, once cruel and omniscient, now guilty, corpse-like father, Caleb feels responsible. The transposition here of social class relations into familial ones works to make forms and structures of society feel like private relations, elements of the inner person. This process mimics the way in which, in Godwin’s words, government ‘insinuates itself into our personal dispositions, and insensibly communicates its own spirit to our private transactions’. The words come from the second edition of Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1796), which has as its main target Edmund Burke, who is also the model for Caleb’s ‘bad father’, Mr Falkland. The relationship between the two books is that, as Marilyn Butler puts it, the social conditions analysed in the one are lived out in the other.3 But the novel wasn’t a mere illustration, in that having imagined its fictional world Godwin then started to revise Political Justice. The transposition into private or familial relations, far from being an entertaining stand-in for analysis of class relations, is a method of re-engaging with them, embodying their contradictions in a manner that makes them at once sharper and more affecting. Caleb’s voice is later echoed, very precisely, by the villain of Holcroft’s play as he flees in terror through the mountains of the final scene.4 In his fantasies he imagines that ‘someone points me out’, and when the performer enacts a response to the mountains as if they are looking at him, as if he is under their surveillance, the villain’s moral status begins to shake and blur. This effect is carefully set up by Holcroft’s changes to the original French play written by Pixerécourt (which had a more literal translation from John Wallace).5

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For instance, he transforms the religious framework. Pixerécourt and Wallace have the villain Romaldi calling on God at the end: ‘have mercy on me, forgive my sins, accept my repentance!’ (p. 22). When his erstwhile victims, Francisco and Coelina, hear he is to face justice, they spontaneously kneel to thank heaven; to his past crime the key witness is a Venerable hermit’, Michaud. The high priest of atheism cuts the spontaneous kneeling, turns the hermit into an honest artisan (the miller Michelli), and largely excises God and heaven. This leaves the villain tormented by his own mind, imagining that voices pursue him and fiends tear him apart. The seeds of this are in the French text: Pixerécourt has his villain suddenly recognize the spot where he tried to kill his brother Francisco. Wallace ignores this completely, he doesn’t know what he’s got in front of him. Holcroft, however, radically extends it into a fantasy about being covered by the blood of one’s brother. So instead of seeing a man in an unproblematic relationship to an assumed order of justice outside of himself, the audience now watches a man who sees what no one else can see, tormented by the reality of his own illusions. Holcroft has thus introduced a very different sort of thinking about subjectivity and justice. This is then linked into a problematized representation of the social unit. Pixerécourt’s villain is taken off by the archers who have pursued him, leaving the propertied gentleman Dufour to recognize Francisco’s bravery, announce the marriage of Coelina and his son, and receive the female housekeeper’s embrace. The repeated gestures are of hugging and embracing, as the social unit closes itself. They dance and join in song. Wallace, centring on the marriage, changes the final scene to a pastoral grove. Endings, so ideologically and commercially loaded, are points of cultural resilience, and Holcroft had a struggle. A relic of the unifying musical drama finale lives on in his first version, in a song by the miller Michelli. It is, however, merely tacked on to a scene that has interested itself much more in division than harmony. Bonamo, the propertied gent, and his friend Dr Montano insist that the laws be obeyed and the villain be arrested; Francisco pleads for his brother’s life, and is joined in this by his daughter Selina and her lover Stephano: The injured brother forgives: Oh! let his prayers prevail! let my father’s virtues plead for my uncle’s errors.’ There is not—there cannot be—a dance. The bodies in the final image are not inscribed by the shapes of social union but by division between entreaty and judgement. By the time the play was printed the song had gone and the final dialogue had been stripped down to a pair of lines. The elements of the final tableau are now more tightly focused: ‘The Archers appear prepared to shoot, and strike with their sabres; when the intreaties and efforts of Francisco and Selina are renewed. The Archers forbear for a moment; and Francisco shields his brother. The music ceases’ (p. 40). The person who has now been removed from that tableau is Stephano, the landowner’s son, husband-to-be of Selina: the discourse of marriage—that ‘evil’—is effectively deleted.

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A radical mixture This concluding image is not a closure but a pause. The embraces and marital coupling are replaced by a triangular bonding which is grounded in moral opposites. Good brother (Francisco) shields bad brother (Romaldi) while daughter/niece (Selina) entreats for both. The division is not between good and evil but between implacable law and family unit. That unit’s difficult closeness is Holcroft’s invention. Pixerécourt has an armed Francisco identify his brother to Michaud and assist in cutting off his escape from justice. There is a lot of busy, insistently ‘physical’ action. Holcroft transforms it into something like the action of dream. His Francisco never fires, never agrees to identify Romaldi (and physically prevents Selina from doing so) and tries to obstruct his arrest. Much of the feeling here is constituted by a sequence in which Romaldi threatens to shoot Francisco, who offers his body to receive the shot; Romaldi hands over the gun and offers his own body; Francisco finally throws the gun away. The mutual surrendering, the mutual touching of a gun that can never be used, make the scene as much erotic as violent—Holcroft directs that the whole thing ‘passes in a mysterious and rapid manner’. While it’s going on, between both men kneels Selina, already incorporated into this relationship of violence and surrender, potency and castration. In this final scene, ideas about order, justice, morality and family are made difficult, and that difficulty is emphasized by the audience’s subjective engagement. In this respect the melodrama produced by the Godwin circle is doing a rather more disturbing job than the novels. For while Caleb Williams relies on connecting the reader emotionally with its central figure, Tale of Mystery has the sympathy move between a set of positions that are difficult to reconcile. Furthermore, the novel reader is left to imagine the physicality of Caleb whereas Holcroft’s problems are inscribed onto the real bodies that occupy the space, here and now, in front of the audience. The French play’s happy ending, like so many others, had produced those gestures of embrace which seem to show the body as the natural articulation of justice, where individual impulse spontaneously seeks social bonding, where each body has a self-sufficiency. By contrast the gestures of entreaty that are part of Holcroft’s triangle recognize that it is part of the condition of the body to reach out, indeed to lack. The split between natural bonding and law stages itself in bodies which enact their decentredness (which was to be a regular feature of melodrama from the late 1820s into the 1840s). This is a pretty powerful medium for engaging with subjectivity. If the novels were new, so was the drama. The theatrical language that would speak the ‘Godwin’ values only came into being by distorting or breaking with other dramatic forms. But, while we can see this break against, say, the rounded solemnity of Pixerécourt, it is concealed by those histories of English drama that present melo-drama as a continuation of Gothic. Thus Paula Backscheider argues that in Holcroft’s final scene Michelli’s music replaces Romaldi’s, which mirrors

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‘the favorable balance between good and evil in the theatrical gothic world and the certainty of the pleasing resolution’6 —which not only badly misrepresents Holcroft’s ending but also conflates songs that operate as ideological containment with action music which expresses, as an original spectator noted, ‘state of mind’.7 Holcroft himself tells us, in fact, that he repudiated Gothic. The form with which contemporaries thought melodrama was most closely cognate was pantomime, which incorporated dumb show with music alongside other elements such as song, dance and comic turns. But early melodrama tended to push the elements into expressive synthesis while downplaying the comedy. So in James Kenney’s Ella Rosenberg The serious nature of the subject precluded the introduction of any of those traits of broad humour which generally characterize an afterpiece. But what was wanting on the score of farcical effect, was compensated by the glow of feeling which pervaded the piece, and entitled it to rank among the best of the melodramatic productions.8 Kenney, an Irish bank clerk, had made his theatrical name in 1803 with ‘farcical effect’, but he withholds that from his melodrama, which is as seriously subjective as we might expect from someone close enough to the Godwin group to marry Holcroft’s widow. Looking back at this material from the hindsight of 1832, John Genest could clearly discriminate between ‘jumbles of Tragedy, Comedy, and Opera’ (such as Colman’s Iron Chest) and the ‘mixture of dialogue and dumbshow, accompanied by music’ which he found Very interesting’.9 Painful as it is to (post)modernist realization, it was the melodramatic ‘mixture’ — the synthesis—rather than the pantomime montage of elements which in 1802 was both new and radical. The possibilities of this synthesis are demonstrated by the play that Genest thought was ‘the first and best’ of its type, Holcroft’s Tale of Mystery. The atheist democrat subjugates us to ‘mystery’ in a scene where the rational propertied gentleman Bonamo attempts to end mystery, by discovering the past of Francisco, the stranger who has been brought into his household. Francisco, however, is unable to speak. The interrogation is therefore arranged so that Francisco makes his answers either in dumb show or in written form, in which case they are read out by Bonamo’s son Stephano. The whole thing is watched by women, the housekeeper Fiametta and Bonamo’s ‘niece’ Selina. They hear a tale of past violence, but as it moves towards its climax it becomes less articulate: Francisco cannot describe some of the brutality, and then refuses to name the culprit. It is a laborious process, in which the most spontaneous, unmediated answers are precisely the unspeakable ones. As Bonamo questions, he becomes more unsettled the closer he gets to that which will not bear telling, and the scenic rhythm is arranged to ensure that the audience also becomes unsettled. The political effects of being synthesized into mystery are that the subjectivity, the ideological confidence, of the investigator—and spectator—become less

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rather than more secure. As the rattled Bonamo finally threatens Francisco with expulsion, the villain arrives. The mysterious stranger has his movements specified for him in great detail. He is required not just to reply when asked but to show and relive agonized memories: a basic question-answer rhythm is established against which flash unspeakable memories. These various actions are reinforced, rhythmically, emotionally, by music. An additional ‘musical’ effect is created by the use of the housekeeper’s voice: she responds with sudden instinctive guesses to the dumb shows. This could be a cue for a comically garrulous housekeeper, a role in which Isabella Mattocks, the actress playing the part, specialized. Which makes it the more emphatic when the comedy is withheld: ‘she proved herself capable of a seriousness and a feeling…’ said Leigh Hunt, ‘which no performer of mere farce could attempt to reach.’10 Holcroft has something else in mind. While the French play had her reading out Francisco’s replies, he excludes her, retaining only male voices for the question and answer. Consequently, as if from outside, as an intuited realization, accelerating the rhythmic crescendo, the woman’s voice breaks in. At that moment, showing its contempt for any notion of woman as individual property, the dramaturgy makes space for—makes the audience desire the space for—the sound of the woman’s voice. And in that voice we also hear the person of lowest social status seizing the moral high ground. It is an enactment which, in terms of dominant values, might be said to be un-English. Action men The sight of low status taking moral high ground was not in itself un-English. Radical artisan culture criticized state authorities from a standpoint that was both moral and patriotic, defending English freedom against a corrupt administration. The theatrical pleasure that supposedly suited such Englishness consisted of excitement like that of Holcroft’s interrogation scene. The literary critic James Boaden advised anyone adapting a French play to speed it up. For the two nations had different tastes: ‘a mercurial people, like the French…so overflow the measure of stage DECLAMATION; and a grave, if not sombre nation, as we are, delight in brisk and complicated ACTION.’11 Theatre is the opposite of life, but somehow fixes national identity. A French play could thus open with a two-and-a-half-page speech describing past events. Which won’t do in England. So when James Cobb ripped off Elizabeth Gunning’s fairly literal translation of Pixerécourt’s Wife with Two Husbands, he opened with a chorus of banditti, scenic effects involving Mount Etna, a rivalry between two men and a comic, patriotic Irishman.12 His stage was brisk and complicated, not occupied by just one important figure. The brisk stage was also a masculine stage. Elizabeth Gunning’s figure, however, was a woman; for it is her point of view, her anxiety about being trapped between men, that is central. Gunning’s dramaturgy is organized so that the audience feels with the

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woman who is surrounded by male relatives to whom her real identity is unknown. Her subjectivity is presented as something alienated, insecure, split within itself— she knows she is not the woman her father thinks he touches. That ‘French’ emphasis on the female, or feminized, recurs in several of the first English plays to call themselves melo-drames—Holcroft’s Lady of the Rock, Kenney’s Ella Rosenberg, Hewetson’s Blind Boy (the boy played by a woman)—starting with Holcroft’s disempowered Francisco. But the recommended way of making plays properly English effaces this subjectivity. Thus in James Cobb’s rewrite of the scene in which the wife is surrounded by alien male relatives he uses his invention, the Irishman, to upstage the woman. When the comic Irishman then becomes embarrassed about his behaviour, it is an image of anxious subjectivity with the anxiety turned into joke. The attraction of Cobb’s formula was that it played to the apparent malecentredness of his audience. Artisan culture, however oppositional, fought for working practices organized around the closed shop and exclusion of women. In this world what was un-English about Holcroft’s interrogation scene was not its action, nor its moral sentiment, but its foregrounded female voice. Proper Englishing masculinizes: the comedy man upstages the anxious woman; James Cobb gets performed and Elizabeth Gunning doesn’t. James Cobb was also Secretary to the East India Company; who was Elizabeth Gunning? Melo-drame was masculinized for its audience by those who were—or wanted to be—above that audience. When Robert Elliston, an actor recently arrived in town, was offered a chance to star at Drury Lane, he knew what to do. He took one of the successful French things, a Pixerécourt melo-drame, called it The Venetian Outlaw (which sounds so much more active than The Man with Three Faces), and replaced one of those miserable woman’s story openings with a scene between two men. One of those men, the outlaw himself, tells how he had been banished by a corrupt state but has now returned, the true patriot, to save his country.13 This is stuff that might well appeal to the moral patriotism of artisan culture. Elliston himself then appeared in his own play as the true patriot, thereby producing himself as the star. But his real ambition was to be a manager. So, acting the true patriot, in a rather different sense, he dedicated his play to the King. With a theatrical panache worthy of any manager the baddies become ‘reformers’ and the moral patriotism loyally re-packaged as monarchism. This manoeuvre is shadowed, somewhat ironically, by the man whose work Elliston plagiarized in order to construct his star vehicle. James Powell had first translated The Venetian Outlaw (and invented the title); he sent it to Drury Lane, then heard no more until Elliston staged it. But it was not as a purveyor of theatrical pleasures that Powell had his major impact on artisan culture. He was employed as a government spy and agent provocateur. These activities were not, however, wholly inconsistent with those of manager Elliston or company secretary Cobb. For in the years when the government was using ‘church-andking’ mobs to redefine and challenge the patriotism of radicals, the theatre’s

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affection for properly English action contributed, in its own measured way, to the repression of popular politics. The relationship between theatrical pleasure and national identity is thus a place for political contest. For Boaden’s paradox might be unpicked to produce a drama which does not oppose its audience’s life because it does not offer them identity which is against their class interests. Holcroft, a man who quarrelled with theatre managers, a man on whom Powell might spy, created a drama which dislocated action from Englishness and moral righteousness from monarchism. It is done by privileging that which, by its very exclusion, is unlikely to be drawn into the contradictory compromises—the ‘female’ voice. And, because pleasure is a battleground, the play has to be designed to be popular. For the Jacobin Holcroft there is a delight in being able ‘by a well told tale, to fix the attention, rouse the passions, and hold the faculties in anxious and impatient suspense’. A play like this, however new, will enable the dramatist, from his place in the intellectual vanguard, to fix, rouse and then hold his audience in an attitude to dominant ideology that remains anxious and impatient. The electric influence This definition of the role of the artist readily finds its echo in the theoretical model of art and society elaborated by a French socialist, a contemporary of the Godwin circle. Henri de Saint-Simon suggested that artists will lead the ‘march’ of progress, ‘they will make society pursue passionately the rise of its well-being’. As the metaphor indicates, the concept of political leadership is based on a military model. That concept was then extended to include artistic leadership. So it was with complete logic that Saint-Simon’s disciple Rodrigues could annexe a somewhat unlikely military term and announce, in 1825, that ‘It is we, artists, that will serve as your avant-garde’.14 We might say that Holcroft’s melo-drame wants also to lead the march: it consciously breaks with preceding theatrical models, motivated to do so by the need to articulate a political analysis promoted by his own radical circle, and in its performance deliberately addresses and develops popular opinion within a more general progressivist formation—and hence is avant-garde. But nobody else might say this. In the chapter in which he deals with the Holcroft-Godwin ‘fraction’, Raymond Williams describes features of the avant-garde. Central to his definition is the metropolitan base, with its key features of relative cultural autonomy and internationalization: thus an avant-garde will consist of a high proportion of immigrants, sharing no language but that of the metropolis as they develop forms which ‘reflect and compose’ kinds of consciousness appropriate to metropolitan and international development. As it stands, this description does not appear wholly strange when applied to the artisan Holcroft—or the Irishman Kenney—seriously engaging with French culture, and refusing theatre language which had a specifically nationalist focus. But Williams was not set up to think

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about the Godwin circle in this way, since his description had been based on avant-garde movements ‘between the 1890s and 1920s’.15 Melodrama cannot be thought of as avant-garde because, it seems, it is in the wrong period. In its work on the avant-garde, literary theory has become fixated on the period which Williams specified.16 That concentration is enabled by the word avant-garde’s slide from adjectival status to that of a noun. As a noun, even where it is ‘an’ avant-garde, it is defined by reference to an ideal type— ‘the’ avant-garde. The ideal does not consist of an abstracted set of relations between intellectual leadership, new art forms and progressivist politics—it has little to do with the word vanguard. Instead it is fixed as a fairly concrete instance of the development of industrial capitalism, which makes itself felt in repeated concerns with, say, the metropolis, reproductive technology and the loss of artistic aura, battles against specific aspects of bourgeois aesthetic autonomy. Much of the work is haunted by a sense of capitalism’s efficacy in creating alienated mass art.17 This means that even where the avant-garde is trying to reconnect art and life, to make a utopian politics, it has to do so in a way which shows its scepticism about the easiness of mass forms—the phrase Williams uses for his metropolitan avant-garde styles is ‘specific and distanced’. ‘The’ avantgarde, to put it crudely, seems to be literary modernism, those forms which present literary theory with that which is simultaneously literaryest and modernest. This whole package of values ensures that melodrama, even if its period were right, must still fail as a candidate. What is wrong is signalled—or should we say constituted?—by its institutional status in the academy. Literary theorists often write books about drama, where that drama shows itself amenable—which melodrama does not—to literariness. Melodrama has appeared mainly in ‘theatre history’, as illustrative back-up in accounts of performers and theatres and audience ‘taste’. As art text, melodrama is, bluntly, neither adequately serious nor sufficiently difficult. It is notorious for working with simplistic moral binaries in which the good always triumph; and hence it supposedly encourages the audience to escape into a fictional world which is incompatible with everyday life. It is, briefly, entertainment, mass art, and hence belongs with the enemy. Holcroft thus did his radical reputation no favours in the academy when he created such a popular play. But the example of Robert Elliston’s patriotic efforts should give us pause here over what we think is evidenced by the making of popular art: Elliston was trying to reproduce current formulas that would work effectively. Holcroft’s activities, by contrast, put pressure simultaneously on the audience’s ideological limits and on the theatre’s technological resources. For his follow-up melodrame, The Lady of the Rock, he took a story that seemed too difficult to dramatize: ideologically, ‘an audience would not at present listen to a husband, who should complain of the crime of being barren’, and technically, one of the incidents, ‘that of exhibiting the distress of the lady on the rock, appeared too difficult for stage scenery’.18 For a theory of the avant-garde that defines its

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mind-set according to the formal features it displays, Holcroft shows here a critical relationship with already available cultural means, a disinclination ideologically, and hence formally, to be ‘limited by the period style, an already existing canon of permissible procedures’.19 The evidence of formal contestation derives from the effort to persuade an audience to listen to what they cannot at present tolerate—in other words, by another definition, Holcroft is behaving like a member of an innovative cultural and political group. Holcroft had rejected some of his scheme for The Lady of the Rock as impermissible: he had intended to ‘teach parents the vice of encouraging their children to be spies, when I conceived and gave a sketch of a lovely little girl, innocently betraying her mother, for whom she had the tenderest affection’. This is a long way from easy moral binaries. But the decision to work within a more tolerable frame could itself have had a political, rather than commercial, motivation. Of all the pleasures in which the soul of man most delights that of sympathy is surely the chief. It can unite and mingle not only two but ten millions of spirits as one. Could a world be spectators of the sorrows of Lear, a world would with one consent participate in them: so omnipotent is the power of sympathy… Pride and suspicion are its chief enemies; and they are the vices that engender the most baneful of the miseries of man. To be able to work on people’s feelings can lead them ‘out’ of themselves, ‘beyond the narrow limits of prejudices and prepossessions’.20 In short, the theatre can perform two simultaneous functions which literary modernism is apt to regard as contradictory —it can unite people in shared feeling and also displace them ideologically. This is perhaps why, in his list of the ‘weapons’ available to the avant-garde of artists who will lead towards a socialist utopia, Rodrigues gives theatre the pre-eminent place: the theatre stage is open to us, and it is mostly from here that our influence exerts itself electrically, victoriously. We address ourselves to the imagination and feelings of people: we are therefore supposed to achieve the most vivid and decisive kind of action.21 The new melo-drame advertised at Covent Garden addressed imaginations and feelings in such a way as to make it very popular, much revived and imitated. The world of spectators in November 1802 presumably included many who were conscious of, if not actually active within, the demand for political liberties against the repressive practices of the late Georgian state. This discourse sufficiently permeated London’s public sphere that it had an almost counterhegemonic effect, spoken as it were in its affirmation of its own moral authority.22 When these spectators watch a dramatic scene in which the morally correct person compels a recognition of her truth, when the dramaturgy has

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organized the audience into wanting her to speak out, to claim her naturally rightful position, then that audience presumably experience a moment not only of being united and mingled, but also in a sense victorious. Such a scene occurs at the end of Act 2 when the housekeeper, Fiametta, compels the master to repent his mistakes. A big picture is made of it: the woman has forcefully inserted herself into a scene that was hitherto all-male—her employer, his friend and son; in front of them she tells her employer to repent, and as she says the line other things begin to happen—‘Now the distant thunder is heard, & the rising storm perceived.’ In Wallace’s translation the moral initiative had remained with the propertied gentleman; Holcroft organizes it so that the all-male group has to break up, the master obeys the female housekeeper, he falls to his knees in her presence. It is her voice that has the authority of thunder. And it is that sort of effect which presumably made this scene not just victorious but electric. For, with the finally acknowledged righteousness of her position, a new space opens up. The thunder sounds from a distance that is well beyond, and much greater than, the parameters of the country house. That distance is not yet scenically represented, although it is aurally implied. The voice of righteousness announces in advance the change from the country-house setting to a new space beyond; the transformation of what we might call the stage’s visual hegemony has yet to happen, but it will. What is electric about this, however, derives not from a cognitive understanding of the new space’s possible meaning but from a felt change within the spectator. Subjectivity is partly constructed visually —I am at the place from where the world is viewed.23 Sudden changes to perspectival arrangements, alterations to the regularity of distances, produce new subjective bearings. While this is happening to the spectators the body of the woman changes its relation to the space around it. From being an intruder, at the margins of the male group, Fiametta has become central, the performer to whom two of the men are audience. And as the third man sinks to the ground in front of her, while her muscles are all poised in the tension of a large gesture, a gesture not of finality but of expectation, her very presence seems to intensify. It is a metaphysical effect grounded in physical skills: it produces physical responses. When the narrative has done its work of locking audience focus on to Fiametta, since she will speak what they both know and want, then the moment of her accession to a newly powerful presence is a moment at which the body feels itself in a utopian centredness around which the rest of the world will rearrange itself. It is her moral authority which enables the housekeeper to defy class authority. In general terms, the action of righteous speaking out would be recognized by many in the audience as a political shape. Democratic campaigns had been fought over the right to assemble and to publish. Many of those campaigns themselves took the form of ritualistic or semi-theatrical demonstrations, putting pictures, rhymes or slogans into print. They were enactments of speaking out. As such they seem to indicate that the political shape was not just intellectually known but physically lived, a mode of bodily experience. This implies that in a scene where

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a housekeeper defies her master the effects are not just electric because of how they impact upon the subjectivity of the watchers, but that in making that impact they connect with something that is already physiologically known, and hence the electric effect comes also to seem victorious. For these sorts of reasons, I would guess, the new melo-drame succeeded in uniting a world of spectators in sympathy with it. It has to be a guess because we are dealing with a variety of notional bodies from 1802. But somehow those bodies have to figure in the analysis. Merely to demonstrate that the thing was new is both relatively easy and mainly confined to matters intellectual. To demonstrate why it was popular, and particularly why it was exciting, is more difficult. Not to take the risk, however, is to back off from describing the point of connection between a vanguard of progressivist art and its mass following. That, surely, is one of the key distinctions between early melodrama and those somewhat élite bohemian adventures which are more usually designated avantgarde. Notes 1 For the Godwin-Holcroft relationship (and quotations), see Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984). See also E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963, reprinted 1980). 2 Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981), pp. 75–7. 3 Marilyn Butler, ‘Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams’, Essays in Criticism 32 (1982), pp. 237–57 (from whom the quotation from Political Justice comes). Caleb Williams was first published, with an ending changed from manuscript, in 1794. 4 Thomas Holcroft, A Tale of Mystery—A Melo-Drame (London: R. Phillips, 1802); manuscript submitted for licensing 4 November 1802. 5 John Wallace, Caelina; or, A Tale of Mystery (London: printed for Wallace, 1802): Wallace says that his text had been refused by Covent Garden management, so its publication, ‘for his own satisfaction’, is designed to coincide with the Holcroft performances. 6 Paula R.Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 174. 7 The Monthly Mirror quoted in Paul Ranger, ‘Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast’: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750–1820 (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1991). 8 Biographica Dramatica; or, a Companion to the Playhouse, ed. D.Baker, I. Reed and S.Jones (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1812), vol. 2, p. 191; Ella Rosenberg, Drury Lane success, autumn 1807. 9 John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage (Bath: Thomas Rodd, 1832), vol. 7, pp. 233, 579: The Iron Chest (1796) was a dramatization of Caleb Williams, without acknowledging Godwin.

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10 Leigh Hunt, Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (London: John Hunt, 1807), p. 155. 11 James Boaden, The Voice of Nature: A Play (London: James Ridgway, 1803), p. iv. 12 Elizabeth Gunning, later Plunkett, The Wife with Two Husbands (London: H.D.Symonds, 1803); James Cobb, The Wife of Two Hus bands (London: G. & J.Robinson, 1803). Manuscripts submitted for licensing published by Readex from the British Library: Lord Chamberlain’s Plays. 13 James Powell, The Venetian Outlaw, His Country’s Friend. A Drama (London: M.Allen, 1805); R.W.Elliston, The Venetian Outlaw (London: C. & R.Baldwin, 1805). 14 Saint-Simon and Rodrigues quoted in Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: AvantGarde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 102, 103. See also Donald D. Egbert, ‘The idea of “avant-garde” in art and politics’, The American Historical Review 73 (1967), pp. 339–66. 15 Williams, Culture, pp. 83–4. 16 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 3–15, traces the history of ‘avant-garde’ from Saint-Simon to argue the loss of its transformative potential, its depoliticization, in the modern period; by ‘the’ avant-garde, however, he means art from the early twentieth century. See also Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968); Peter Bürger, Theory of the AvantGarde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Russell A. Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Berman criticizes Bürger’s argument for overlooking ‘a historical connection to a broader concept of modernity’, and cites Heinrich Mann’s invocation of Rousseau ‘as a model for young German writers of 1910’ (p. 45). 17 Walter Benjamin’s work on perception in relation to reproductive technologies and the modern city is central to most of the work listed above: Huyssen, in After the Great Divide, says, ‘It is in Benjamin’s work of the 1930s that the hidden dialectic between avantgarde art and the utopian hope for an emancipatory mass culture can be grasped alive for the last time’ (p. 14); mass culture as the opposite of emancipatory was theorized by Benjamin’s contemporary Theodor Adorno. 18 Thomas Holcroft, The Lady of the Rock—A Melo-Drame (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1805). 19 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 18. 20 Thomas Holcroft, Hugh Trevor, ed. Seamus Deane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, first published 1794–7, reprinted 1801), pp. 302, 303. 21 Calinescu, Faces of Modernity, p. 103. 22 The idea that English radicalism was partly shaped by a defence of a ‘moral economy’ as opposed to a new ‘free market’ has been promulgated in the work of E.P.Thompson; for an account and critique of Thompson’s analysis in general, see Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982); on artisans in particular, see I.J. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Folkestone: Dawson, 1979). There is

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considerable debate over the idea between historians of the early nineteenthcentury ‘crowd’. 23 See Roger Caillois’s work as used by Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 33– 4, and Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 88–91, who connects it with work by Merleau-Ponty and Lacan. See also Simon Shepherd, ‘The blind leading the blind’ in Nineteenth Century Theatre (forthcoming).

Bisexuality, heterosexuality, and wishful theory Jonathan Dollimore

Bisexuality has become visible and controversial yet again, only now with its critics and defenders as never before. Recently, bisexuals have been variously characterized as promiscuous, immature, undecided, treacherous, cowardly, and carriers of AIDS into the straight community. Conversely, and even more recently, they are being hailed not only as one of the most politically radical of all sexual minorities, but provocatively and sexually postmodern as well. Defended desires Some of bisexuality’s most perceptive and incisive recent defenders include Sue George, Elisabeth Däumer, Clare Hemmings, Jo Eadie and Nicola Field.1 Their documentation of the hostility expressed by some gays towards bisexuality makes dismal reading not least because it suggests that, in relation to bisexuality, some of those gays endorse kinds of discrimination which they themselves experience and rightly protest against. Eadie suggests that the lesbian and gay wish to exclude bisexuals is based on the fear of contamination and miscegenation; he says, contentiously, ‘bisexuality is a miscegenate location’ (p. 158). Clare Hemmings makes a similar point, paraphrasing the gay hostility to bisexuals as follows: I’d never sleep with a bisexual because they bring men into the lesbian community/are responsible for the spread of HIV/always leave you for someone of the opposite/same sex/can’t be trusted etc. (p. 130) For both Eadie and Hemmings, the main problem is the current dominance in lesbian and gay culture of identity politics; the objec Textual Practice 10(3), 1996, 523–539

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tions to this have been put many times, but rarely as succintly as by Susie Bright: ‘It’s preposterous to ask sexual beings to stuff ourselves rapidly imploding social

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categories of straight or gay or bi, as if we could plot our sexual behaviour on a conscientious, predictable, curve.’2 Given the increasing hostility towards identity politics, it is important to try to be adequately aware of its psychic, social and political investments. Notoriously in human history, those who have made progress have then wanted to deny the same rights to others. To the extent that it sometimes entails this, identity politics become the ground of a turf war in which the rhetoric of liberation is a cover for self-empowerment of a politically conservative kind. An apparent case in point, cited by Eadie and others, concerns the announcement by Brett Anderson, the lead singer with the group Suede, that he was a bisexual who had not so far had any homosexual experience. A writer in the gay Pink Paper snarls in response: ‘a “bisexual who’s never had sex with a man”…stinks as bad as a white boy blacking up.’3 But gays’ response to bisexuality is rarely that crass, for the very good reason that other lesbian and gay writers have contributed greatly to developing the libertarian, anti-discriminatory perspective which makes it seem crass, and would be the first to reject its exploitation of anti-racism for new discriminatory purposes of its own. Another scenario is both more typical and more significant: identity politics are often most invested when the fortunes of a minority have improved, but not securely; in some cases the identity remains precariously dependent upon that improvement, and in a context where hostility not only remains, but has actually intensified, in part as a response to the increased social visibility which the emerging identity entails. Identity politics are inseparable from a consolidation of this ground recently gained and precariously held. Such consolidation is inevitably also a struggle for survival, which includes a struggle for the means of continuing visibility. In the field of sexuality this overlaps with another, and to me equally significant aspect of this consolidation: such politics are a defensive formation not only against discrimination, but against desire itself. We protect ourselves against those instabilities intrinsic to desire and which threaten to dislocate us psychically and socially, even, or especially, when our sexuality or object choices are relatively settled. An endearing instance of this is given by Sukie de la Croix, a gay man, who meets a straight African-American woman called Troy. She was hot, she was raunchy and she scared the shit out of me. Why? Because she raised some heterosexual feelings in me that I thought had disappeared years ago…. It took me years to sort out my true sexual identity, and the last thing I need at this point in my life is to do a turnabout. Four days later he is still sufficiently worried to confide in a friend. The friend laughs and reveals the ‘truth’: ‘Troy is no woman. Troy is a man. And honey… I don’t mean part-man, I mean all-man!’ Sukie exclaims: ‘Oh god, the relief, the

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blessed relief!’4 At one level this story illustrates that momentous irony around which so much modern thought revolves: we are defined as much, if not more, by what our identity excludes as what it includes, and our desire, in all its perversity, is drawn to the very exclusions which constitute it. But we should not conclude too quickly that Sukie is just being haunted by his excluded other. Can we confidently say ‘who’ or what Sukie ‘really’ desired in this scenario prior to the point of his friend’s disclosure about Troy? I cannot, and I am not sure that he can either. Was this desire really heterosexual, or was it bisexual? Is it not just possible that he was being other than consciously disturbed by his own homosexuality? And even assuming we could decide, what difference does his friend’s disclosure actually make? In short, gay identity, as distinct from homoerotic fantasies of identification, far from being the direct social counterpart of our desires, may in part be a protection against them—including those desires sanctioned by the identity. In this respect gay identity may be closer to straight identity than some like to imagine. Surely Sukie is saying as much when he implies that the years-long struggle to achieve what he calls a ‘true sexual identity’ entailed an organization of desire which was also a policing of it (or, less contentiously, a willing imposition of restrictions upon it)? If so, then at the heart of a new-found and hard-won gay identity there re-emerges not so much heterosexuality or bisexuality as an old-fashioned notion of restraint—something to which, at other levels, the discourses of sexual liberation have been vociferously opposed. The problem with identity politics is not so much its need for restraint and exclusion as its refusal to develop an adequate political understanding of that need, preferring instead a self-righteous language of self-evident authenticity. And this is one reason why gay hostility to heterosexuality and bisexuality may end up, as Jo Eadie puts it, sustaining a ghetto gay mentality, impeding political alliances. This, he adds, is ‘a luxury of those whose oppression is apparently so restricted to sexuality that alliances are not an issue’. Even more to the point is his further contention that the demonizing of heterosexuality polices those within gay spaces as effectively as it keeps the straight identified out of them (p. 155). Being sexually postmodern Both Jo Eadie and Claire Hemmings write compellingly about this hostility. From their respective articles one can draw three implications. First and most obviously, the problems that bisexuals experience are mainly a consequence of discrimination by society— straight society, but increasingly also the lesbian and gay community. Second, and relatedly, intrinsically, bisexuality as a form of desire is relatively problem-free. Third, a sexual orientation free of aversion, restraint and the need to exclude is the ideal, and bisexuality is the closest there is to it. All three implications have a prima facie plausibility, especially the third: bisexual desire does after all cross what is perhaps the most fundamental binary organizing desire as exclusion, namely the homosexual/heterosexual divide.

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Even so, I would question all three implications. But perhaps I have oversimplified their argument; it is after all true that both Hemmings and Eadie regard the bisexual as a figure of instability. This is Hemmings: The ‘I’ in ‘I am bisexual’ is not simply an insubstantial assumption of fixed identity, as in ‘I am lesbian’—rather, it signifies transition and movement in itself. To say ‘I am bisexual’ is to say ‘I am not I’… The process of being/becoming bisexual [is] one that is ever re-centring, re-emerging and re-creating the ‘I’. (p. 129) Unstable, yes, but not in a self-threatening way: this is a liberating, dynamic state of unfixity, and one which seems oddly secure in its very instability. This is mainly because the instability is represented as simultaneously a state of freedom for the bisexual and a subversion of the more rigid identities of others. Thus Hemmings’s need to prove that bisexuality is ‘politically and theoretically viable’ is inseparable from her insistence that ‘the bisexual body’ is ‘a figure of subversion and disruption’. Actual bisexuals are theorized as ‘revolutionary double agents’ who can not only diassemble fixed gender relations, but may also have new insights into the tenuous nature of the oppositions which sustain them (pp. 118, 131). To me this sounds like bisexuality passing, if not closeted, as postmodern theory, safely fashioning itself as a suave doxa. The main problem is not these writers’ overt political intent; what gives most pause for thought is the assumption that bisexuality, a form of human sexuality with histories and contemporary cross-cultural expressions so extensive as seemingly to implicate us all—even to the point of making the idea that it needs defending seem half absurd—must be theoretically ‘reconfigured’ to become, in Hemmings’s words, ‘politically and theoretically viable’. Eadie too sees bisexual politics as about ‘dismantling the entire apparatus which maintains the heterosexual/homosexual dyad’. Now this was of course a classic ambition of lesbian and gay theory, and remains so for some in that tradition. But not, according to Eadie, for the most influential current advocates of that theory: on the contrary, they are promoting a ‘dominant lesbian and gay sexual epistemology’ which now wants to ‘cement’ rather than dismantle the straight/gay binary (pp. 142, 144). Eadie endorses Donna Haraway’s argument against an oppressive homogeneity in favour of difference or what Haraway calls ‘infidel heteroglossia’ (p. 157), and the imperfect, always partial and perhaps incoherent identity which that seductive phrase implies. If this sounds risky, Eadie exhorts us not to lose our nerve: ‘we can profit from that incoherence’; this very uncertainty will enable new communities of difference. Hemmings likewise affirms a bisexual erotics of difference which actively dismantles binary means of identifying difference and which would challenge a Freudian structure of desire, without being left with ‘a mass of tangled signifiers’ (pp. 135, 136). But what, I wonder in passing, about being left with a mass of tangled desires and

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identifications?5 I cannot help but feel that the more theoretically sophisticated this celebration of difference becomes, the more experientially unconvincing it also becomes. In that sense it is wishful theory. Reflect on some of the metaphors for the alleged subversiveness of the bisexual: the revolutionary double agent (Hemmings); the infidel (Eadie, via Haraway); hybridity (Eadie, via Bhabha); miscegenation (Eadie). Taking the last first, there may be some who are understandably anxious at such a casual appropriation of racial history for sexual subversiveness. I only want to register that what is excluded in this appropriation is any sense of the psychic difficulty of being in a ‘miscegenate location’, to use Eadie’s phrase. As for the double agent, we might recall that he or she is someone whose political fate has included torture, incarceration and murder (a fate, incidentally, more applicable to the history of the homosexual than to that of the bisexual). But again my point would be that there is no sense of the manifest psychic dangers inherent in being the double agent, even assuming that those real physical dangers have been metaphorically evaded. The physical dangers facing the infidel have if anything been worse, although her chances of maintaining psychic integration are somewhat better, assuming that she can adhere to a dissident faith which has marked her out as infidel in the first place. I suggested earlier that identity politics might be in part a defence against the instability, the difficulty of desire itself. I am now suggesting that the new theoretical version of bisexuality presented by Hemmings and Eadie might be a similar kind of defence. But again I am perhaps misrepresenting the theory. After all, and commendably enough, both Hemmings and Eadie want us to embrace difference. We know of no more intense kinds of desire than those which transgress the borders between the different. But at a cost: difference is fraught with difficulties for desire which already has difficulties of its own. For example, it is here that we discover that our fantasy lives rarely live up to our political ideals. This is not necessarily a cause for guilt or even apology. Arguably, any sexual politics that cannot embrace the inevitable political incorrectness of at least some of our desires is useless. And as Marjorie Garber suggests, it may above all be bisexuality that compels us to confront the fact that ‘eroticism and desire are always to some degree transgressive, politically incorrect’,6 and even that fantasy, in virtue of its psychic mobility, may also be inescapably bisexual (pp. 31–3). Again and again, Garber’s remarkable and extensive documentation of bisexual eroticism in ‘Everyday Life’ (subtitle) crucially confronts us with the challenges and difficulties of the actual desiring encounter with difference, as distinct from the comfortable theoretical invocation of it. Desire and identification: two scenarios In illustration of this consider two sexual scenarios, the one resonant with a partial meaning of what it might mean to be gay, the other with an equally partial meaning of what it might mean to be bisexual. Far from being the proving

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ground of identity, these scenarios are places where it is compromised so immediately as to suggest this to be the rule of desire rather than its exception. The gay scenario: the adoration which a self-identified gay man feels for another male as he goes down on him may or may not be implicated in the politically offensive constructions of phallic masculinity in our culture (it depends on the moment, the man, the scenario). But this gay man discovers that gay pride includes not feeling guilty about the fact that it might be, and not feeling the need to apologize for it if it is. Here a political identity conflicts with the very desire it sanctions. And I wonder—only in passing—if this kind of conflict is not the source of relatively new kinds of anxiety which are often punitively displaced under the sign of ‘sexual politics’? The bisexual scenario: a bisexual male partakes of a threesome in which he watches a man fucking with a woman. His identifications here are multiple: he identifies with the man (he wants to be in his position, having sex with the woman) but he also wants to be her. And I mean be her: he does not just want to be in her position and have the man fuck him as himself (though he wants that too); no, he wants to be fucked by the man with himself in the position of, which is to say, as, the woman. He knows of no pleasure greater than to be fucked by a man, but in this scenario he also wants to be the woman; he wants to be fucked by the man in a way that he imagines —fantasizes—only a woman can be. Maybe he desires the man through her. And in this same scenario there is a further kind of pleasure where desire and identification are inflected by voyeurism: for our bisexual male the sexual attractiveness of the male is heightened by the fact that the latter is apparently desired by the woman; he excites the more because he is desired by her. If he is a thoughtful kind of bisexual he might pause to wonder about the relative degree of sexual objectification in this encounter: is the woman more objectified than the man, and should the fact that the history of voyeuristic objectification is different for women than for men give him pause for thought— or might he reassure himself with the queer celebration of all desire as objectification? But perhaps such considerations are displaced by something more urgent: in this scenario, desire circulates between sexual subject positions but not necessarily as a free flow; there may be a tension, conflict even an impossibility here. Put simply, this bisexual male may desire to be where he cannot be, and desire to become what he cannot become. Here his identity as a coherent sexual subject is very much in question. It might be said that this makes the bisexual a damaged subject; to which it might be replied that we are all damaged, and life itself, which is the source of the damage, is also an exercise in damage limitation—hence identity politics. Alternatively we might reflect that although we are all damaged, we are not all damaged in equally interesting ways. Bisexuals, like homosexuals, are definitely interesting, which is why I want to save them from, rather than for, postmodern theorizing or wishful theory. Nothing I have read in the postmodern defences of bisexuality even hints at the fact that bisexuality may on occasions resonate even

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more acutely than homosexuality or heterosexuality with the difficult, fascinating complexities which ineradicably mark any desire which is alively responsive; on the contrary, its dominant narrative is the rather simplistic one of achieving freedom and completeness in and through an overcoming of social discrimination. Eadie tells us that he encounters, ‘with alarming regularity’, bisexuals who are anxious about their identity as bisexuals: Monogamous [bisexuals] feel they should be having more relationships, and [bisexuals] in multiple relationships feel they are perpetuating a stereotype. [Bisexuals] who have had primarily same-sex relationships feel they are expected to have opposite-sex relationships, and [those] in opposite-sex relationships feel they have not proved themselves until they have had a same-sex relationship. (p. 144) Again, for Eadie, the problem is exclusively socio-political: all these people have been made to feel, socially and politically, that they should be doing something different. And they have been made to feel this by the implicit demands of identity politics, and the straight/ gay dyad, both of which lesbians and gays are oppressively endorsing. Eadie is undoubtedly right to some extent: identity politics can be normative and coercive and certainly make people feel anxious about their sexual practices or lack of such practices. But it is not as simple as that. As so often, a plausible but partial social truth obscures a psychic reality which is inseparable from the social but not reducible to it.7 Identity, we know, is formed socially—not so much by the immediate present as its relation to the past. So too is desire; to an extent that we can never exactly know, desire is constituted by the history of our identifications. Sexual identity is most effectively dislocated by even a preliminary understanding of how it, along with the desire it speaks for, comprises these identifications. History is the outside of desire but also its inside, with the consequence that desire has the potential to be inherently difficult, politically embarrassing, and dangerous to all parties concerned. Again, our fantasy life proves as much. I do not mean this in an essentialist, transhistorical way. On the contrary, desire is unpredictable exactly because history, in all its contingency and fixity, its indistinguishable mix of the social and the personal, so radically informs it. I could elaborate this as the abstract for some time, but anyone who has been wrecked by sexual infatuation or unrequited desire knows it; likewise with anyone who remotely identifies with Tristan or Isolde, Romeo or Juliet, Catherine or Heathcliff. And if that list sounds too straight—and it need not, depending on who you are and who you are identifying with—then there are homoerotic texts which convey even more acutely what it is to have one’s identity wrecked by desire: the Greek lyric poets, including Sappho’s famous fragment,8 James Baldwin’s Giovanni, Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach and so on.

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For all its radical affect, there is something predictably safe about the new bisexual politics, not least its apparent reluctance to concede that desire always retains the potential to disturbingly unfix my identity, and not only that of my oppressive other. Hemmings speaks of bisexuality in terms of ‘the variety of personal and political positions that a person may choose to occupy’ (p. 25, my emphasis). But surely desire can also wreck the rational subject presupposed by such choices? Desire can unfix identity in ways that are liberating; it may compel me as a gay person to come out, and to experience that incomparable elation which derives from swopping an inauthentic straight identity for an authentic gay one. Desire can also unfix identify in ways which liberate by destroying an existing identity without replacing it with another. Do not imagine that this is a moral warning against desire; I am only remarking one of its seductive aspects disavowed by much sexual politics. But when identity is destabilized by desire we should not underestimate the potential cost. It is then that we can become flooded by apprehensions of loss endemic to our culture and which it is partly the purpose of identity to protect us against. In this sense too, identity can be as much about surviving, even evading desire, as about expressing it. Wishful theory Having mentioned wishful theory more than once I need to say what I mean by it. At its worst this is the kind of theorizing which gestures towards difference, yet from a perspective which remains intellectually totalizing and reductive; which is self-empowering in a politically spurious way and which, despite its ostentatious performance of a high sophistication, tends to erase the psychic, social and historical complexities of the cultural life it addresses. None of the advocates of the new postmodern/bisexual politics produce wishful theory in this worst sense, but they sometimes borrow from it. Critical theory originally sought to integrate theory with praxis. But what did that mean, exactly? For some of the Frankfurt School it entailed a commitment to emancipation inseparable from rigorous historical analysis—praxis as the pursuit of philosophy by other means. Marx said, famously, that hitherto philosophers had sought only to understand the world; now they were to change it too. But if anything the effort to change the world itself required an ever greater effort of understanding. To change in the direction of emancipation meant above all that one had to understand the ideological conditions which prevented change. Whatever we may now think of the Frankfurt School, its sustained analysis of the historical conditions which prevented change has to be respected. Arguably, those who now completely reject Marxism have abandoned not only any serious intention of changing, but also the serious commitment to understanding. Certainly an aspect of the tradition of cultural critique has been lost: the effort to understand the historical real as we inherit it —in Marx’s words, those historical

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conditions we do not choose and which profoundly affect the choices we do make. Let me be more specific. There is a particular model of social struggle which has been influential in recent theory. Very briefly, it concentrates on the instabilities within the dominant, for instance, identifying ways in which the marginal is subversive of the dominant, especially at those points where the dominant is rendered unstable by contradictions intrinsic to it and which include the fact, disavowed by the dominant yet apparent within the subordinate, that the two are connected in complex ways. If this model originates with Hegel, its modern form has been deeply influenced by, among other movements, Marxism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It is because I have been influenced by this account of social struggle, and remain persuaded by it, that I cannot subscribe to what I regard as a wishful theoretical use of it most pronounced in some strands of postmodernism. Bits and pieces from diverse theoretical sources are expertly spliced together, often with the aim of demonstrating a repressive dominant always allegedly on the edge of its own ruin and about to be precipitated over the edge by one or other marginal cultural practice. These practices—pornography, cross-dressing, sadomasochism, to name just a few—are first appropriated, then theoretically reworked as radical, subversive, avant-garde or whatever. Scepticism about such a radicalization in no way implies disrespect for such practices; on the contrary, such scepticism may be the precondition for a more thoughtful encounter with them. The result of such theoretical reworking is not so much a demonstration of the intrinsic instability of the social order, or its effective subversion by forces within or adjacent to it, but an abstract, highly wrought representation of it—a theoretical narrative whose plausibility is often in inverse proportion to the degree to which it makes its proponents feel better. To that extent, wishful theory is also feel-good theory. And if, as Rudiger Safranski has argued,9 modernity remains inside the old problematic of freedom and unfreedom, this is nowhere more so than in wishful theory, where individual freedom is emphatically denied, only to be endlessly replayed in fantasies of subversion, disruption, disturbance. And the same ‘sublimation’ of freedom might be discernible in the fact that so much theoretical denial of freedom is written from a masterful, omniscient subject position. The contrived narratives of wishful theory insulate their adherents from social reality by filtering it, and this in the very act of fantasizing its subversion; so much so that in some contemporary theory, the very concept of subversion has become a form of disavowal. Theory is deployed in a way which is usually selfexonerating, hardly at all in a way which is self-questioning. This kind of theory can be quickly updated because it is so tenuously connected with the real. Drop this bit of theory, splice in that and the whole thing can be modified to correspond to intellectual fashion. Want some political street cred? Then dial in a bit of postcolonialism and/or queer theory. Even better, since we hear they may soon be passé, try to be the first to theoretically deploy the work of an obscure front-line intellectual from some war-torn part of the world. It is difficult to be

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against fashion; as someone once said, you have to forgive it because it dies so young. But what, in the context of wishful theory, has died with it is the theoretical commitment to engaging with the cultural real in all its surprising diversity and mysterious complexity. What does heterosexuality want? RP: [Judith] Butler: RP:

This leads us to the question of heterosexuality I don’t know much about heterosexuality! Don’t worry, it’s a theoretical question10

I began with an account of how some advocates of the new bisexual politics deploy theory to make bisexuality into a radically destabilizing force; I close with an instance of how theory is being used, equally implausibly, to represent heterosexuality as the epitome of a wretchedly destabilized sexual identity. The writer in question, Judith Butler, is someone who earns respect as the most brilliantly eclectic theorist of sexuality in recent years. Yet her influential account of heterosexuality as elaborated in Gender Trouble also borrows from wishful theory. This is how she summarized her argument in an article published a year later: heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating…its own phantasmatic idealization of itself—and failing. Precisely because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself.11 Two pages later she reiterates the same point equally emphatically: ‘heterosexuality is an impossible imitation of itself, only now adding the crucial additional factor that it is homosexuality which precipitates heterosexuality into this state of high ontological insecurity, not to say contradiction: The parodic or imitative effect of gay identities works neither to copy nor to emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that is, that it ‘knows’ its own possibility of becoming undone: hence, its compulsion to repeat which is at once a foreclosure of that which threatens its coherence. That it can never eradicate that risk attests to its profound dependency upon the homosexuality that it seeks fully to eradicate. (pp. 22–3, emphasis in original)

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Here is a version of that model of subversion described earlier, now being played out between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Let us assume for the sake of argument that heterosexuality is a monolithic evil and that the most urgent task in the late twentieth century is to secure its overthrow. Even with these assumptions, indeed especially with them, Butler’s description of it seems to me to be hopelessly wrong, first, because she gives us a representation of heterosexuality that is at once universalized, essentialized and reductive, far removed from the diversity of what most people are, and what they might do. This might be said to be legitimate, given that Butler is talking not about individual subjects as such but about concepts or discursive constructions; the problem is that she crudely ‘psychologizes’ these constructions in terms that could only be applicable to some individuals who live under its sign—yet who have been excluded from it by virtue of its discursive abstractness. Second, because the terms of that psychologizing—that is, the idea that heterosexuality is at heart paranoid, impossibly imitating itself, knowing it can only ever fail; that it is panicked by its own impossi bility, etc.—do not correspond to any plausible discursive or materialist history of heterosexuality or homosexuality. On the contrary, it erases that history in all its stubborn contingency and surprising complexity. Further—and this is something generally missed by those who have mis/ appropriated her work for a facile politics of subversion— in Butler’s account gay desire usually figures in an intense relationship to heterosexuality—so much so that it might be said to have an antagonistic desire for it; reading Butler one occasionally gets the impression that gay desire is not complete unless it is somehow installed subversively inside heterosexuality. Again, my point is not so much that Butler’s argument may be offensive to straights or gays or both: I willingly disregard that consideration for now, if only because of the increasing tendency in gender politics to accumulate cultural capital by occupying the high ground of the offended, and then launching into the punitive critique which it is supposed to license, and which is sometimes seemingly prompted more by professional ressentiment than cultural engagement. My point for now is that, as a generalized description of how homosexuality and heterosexuality relate, Butler’s account strikes me not as offensive, but obviously and verifiably wrong. Nor am I concerned to rehabilitate heterosexuality; rather, I am suggesting that heterosexism is more likely to be aided than undermined by an argument that deploys totalizing reductions to erase the complexity and diversity of heterosexual identifications and desires. On the more specific relationship of heterosexuality to homosexuality, it is not just the advocates of bisexuality, including those who, for other reasons, I have been critical of here, who write much more perceptively about it. Lynne Segal writes engagingly of how she ‘became “straight”’ through identifications made available by the novels of James Baldwin:

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Situating myself in the place of the desiring male longing for the body of another male, homosexual imagery provided the perfect —seemingly the only possible—route into sexual pleasure, into having it both ways, as every straight woman, at least in masturbatory repose, must want and need.12 She remarks too that the attraction of the male homosexual as an identificatory figure for the heterosexual female can hardly have been unusual, and finds confirmation of this in Cora Kaplan’s observation that women readers, whatever their sexual bias, could take up shifting and multiple fantasy positions within [Bald win’s] fictional narratives: that possibility, itself wonderfully if not terrifyingly liberating, allowed an identification not just with specific characters but with the scenarios of desire itself.13 By the time she had written her later book Bodies that Matter (1993), Butler had in part changed her arguments but also claimed, plausibly enough, that Gender Trouble was misunderstood and misappropriated. But on this question of the fundamental relationship of straight and gay there seems to be no major change; the same argument is confirmed in the fascinating interview cited earlier: One of the reasons that heterosexuality has to re-elaborate itself, to ritualistically reproduce itself all over the place, is that it has to overcome some constitutive sense of its own tenuousness.14 She adds that to take up a particular sexual position always involves becoming haunted by what’s excluded. And the more rigid the position, the greater the ghost, and the more threatening it is in some way…one is defined as much by what one is not as by the position that one explicitly inhabits. But this is accompanied by an insistence that all sexual subject positions are equally tenuous, equally open to being thus haunted by what they exclude. Butler is plausibly sceptical of those who claim that their own exclusions are a matter of indifference—for example, the straight person who claims that he or she has an attitude of indifference to homosexuality—‘I haven’t thought about it much, it neither turns me on nor turns me off. I’m just sexually neutral in that regard’ (pp. 34–5, emphasis added). We are indeed often haunted by what we exclude, and the person who claims that he or she is not may well be performing a disavowal. But, as the remarks of Segal and Kaplan indicate, these are not the only options: fantasy correlates even less to sexual subject positions than does sexual behaviour15 but is at the same time inseparable from, and constitutive of, them. What that means for the thoughtful is that their sexual subject positions are not

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necessarily petrified identities forever haunted by what they ruthlessly exclude; they may actually facilitate access to scenes of sexuality which are always already, and pleasurably in-formed by what in other respects they exclude. Or to put it another way, for fantasy, exclusion/inclusion is one of the most unstable of all binaries. Further, by way of trying to avoid speaking of desire in a totalizing way—another tendency now endemic to theory and epitomized by the fact that we hardly ever speak about desire in the plural—we should recall that desire is not only haunted, but radically enabled, by its exclusions; all desire, says Leo Bersani, involves exclusion: ‘I have always been fascinated—at times terrified— by the ruthlessly exclusionary nature of sexual desire’ (Homos, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 107). In Bodies that Matter Butler now writes even more compellingly about melancholia and the inherent difficulties of desire. If anything, the inscription of homosexuality inside heterosexuality becomes more insistent; for example, we are told that drag does not oppose heterosexuality, nor will the proliferation of drag ‘bring down’ heterosexuality; rather, drag ‘allegorizes heterosexual melancholy,’ a melancholy which is ‘constitutive’ of it (of heterosexuality that is, not drag—p. 235, emphasis in original; p. 237). Heterosexual identity is now construed in terms of the homosexuality it excludes only to then experience as absence and loss; this produces a culture of heterosexual melancholy, one that can be read in the hyperbolic identifications by which mundane heterosexual masculinity and femininity confirm themselves. The straight man becomes (mimes, cites, appropriates, assumes the status of) the man he ‘never’ loved and ‘never’ grieved; the straight woman becomes the woman she ‘never’ loved and ‘never’ grieved. It is in this sense, then, that what is most apparently performed as gender is the sign and symptom of a pervasive disavowal. (p. 236, emphasis in original) Or, as she previously put it: ‘In this sense the “truest” lesbian melancholic is the strictly straight woman, and the “truest” gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man’ (p. 235). This is of course such a theoretically exquisite irony that it seems churlish to wonder whether it is true, or whether Butler is not herself partaking of the hyperbole she has just discerned in that ‘mundane heterosexual masculinity and femininity’. University of Sussex Notes 1 Sue George, Women and Bisexuality (London: Scarlet Press, 1993): Elisabeth Däumer, ‘Queer ethics; or, the challenge of bisexuality to lesbian ethics’, Hypatia 7. 4 (Fall 1992), pp. 91–105; Joseph Bristow and Angelia R.Wilson, eds, Activating

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2 3 4

5

6

7

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Theory: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Politics (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993); Clare Hemmings, ‘Resituating the bisexual body’, in Bristow and Wilson, pp. 118– 138; Jo Eadie, ‘Activating bisexuality: towards a bi/sexual politics’, in Bristow and Wilson, pp. 139–70; see also Eadie’s ‘We should be there bi now’, Rouge 12 (1993), pp. 26–7; Nicola Field, Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia (London: Pluto Press, 1995). See also Bisexual Horizons: Politics, Histories, Lives, ed. Sharon Rose et al. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), and Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Cited in Garber, Vice Versa, p. 83. Cited in Eadie, p. 168, originally appearing in Pink Paper, 18 April 1993, p. 14. Sukie de la Croix (Pink Paper, 23 July 1993), cited by Field, who finds in his story a fear of bisexuality which ‘to some extent…mirrors homophobia’ (Over the Rainbow, pp. 133–4). The ways in which desire may be inflected by identification are multiple. At the very least we might tentatively wonder whether we ever simply desire the person we love, or whether our desire, in part at least, is also an identification with him or her. If so, who are we identifying with— someone completely different from us, or someone obscurely familiar to us: an actual parent or sibling perhaps, or maybe the parent or sibling we wanted but did not have? And if this sounds too incestuous for those of us with identifications well outside of the ‘family romance’, we might still wonder whether, for example, the person desired might resemble the person we once were; or the person we always wanted to be; or the person others wanted us to be; or the person we would still like to be? My point is that the processes of identification may be most complex in some expressions of bisexuality, conscious or othenwise: ‘But bisexuality! You are certainly right about it. I am accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as a process in which four individuals are involved. We have lots to discuss on this topic’ (letter from Freud to Fliess, 1 August 1899, cited in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, trans. and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Garber is giving an account of a conference at which a lesbian ‘observed matter-offactly that one of her most erotic turn-ons was male-male pornography. Many women at the conference (myself included) nodded agreement; more than a few men, older and younger, looked stunned’ (Vice Versa, p. 31). More recently, Eadie had found this to be a problem for him too: ‘I found it very hard recently to acknowledge that I wanted a monogamous relationship because I was so committed to myself as “a person who has multiple relationships”.’ This occurs in a perceptive piece describing Eadie’s misgivings about the way the bisexual community, as it becomes stronger, seems to be deploying the same discriminatory tendencies it has hitherto suffered from, especially the tendency to self-define in terms of binary division and exclusion (‘Being who we are’ in Bisexual Horizons, pp. 16–20, especially p. 18). Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up (cited in Ann Carson, Eros: the Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) ‘Limb-loosener’: this metaphor was common in Greek writing about desire and signalled the unwelcome yet irresistible unbinding of the

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9 10 11 12

13

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defended self which desire entailed. In short, a fascination with the way desire undermines rather than confirms identity goes back at least this far. Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 309. ‘Gender as performance: an interview with Judith Butler’, Radical Philosophy 67 (Summer 1994), p. 32. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and gender insubordination’ in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 21. Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure (London: Virago, 1994), p. 234; Segal’s book is, more generally, an indispensably thoughtful defence of female heterosexuality against the reductive accounts of it to be found in the sexual politics of recent decades—feminist, lesbian-feminist, gay and otherwise. Cora Kaplan, ‘“A cavern opened in my mind”: the poetics of homosexuality and the politics of masculinity in James Baldwin’, in Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellus Blount and George Cunningham (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 32. (p. 34). This interview, given in 1993 and published the following year in Radical Philosophy, serves as an excellent introduction to Butler’s work up to that point. She remarks that ‘the popularising of Gender Trouble— even though it was interesting culturally to see what it tapped into, to see what was out there, longing to be tapped into—ended up being a terrible misrepresentation of what I wanted to say!’ (p. 33). ‘It is becoming clear that there is no straightforward relationship between selfproclaimed sexual identity and sexual behaviour’ (‘Heterosexual behaviour in a large cohort of homosexually active men in England and Wales’, P.Weatherburn et al., AIDS Care 2. 4 (1990), cited in Field, Over the Rainbow, p. 140).

Reviews

Rosalind E.Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, 1994), 353 pp., £15.50 (paperback)

Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 272 pp., £11.95 (paperback) Lyndsey stonebridge

Photography, according to Walter Benjamin’s frequently cited homology, first revealed the existence of an optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis revealed the instinctual unconscious. After Althusser and the critical turn towards psychoanalysis in the 1970s, Benjamin’s comparison between the technology of modernity and Freud’s science of human desire was subtly re-figured: the unconscious, famously, became political (as, for example, in Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, 1981). And while many continued to insist that if in the political unconscious men and women and their circumstances appeared, perhaps not quite upside down in the camera obscura of false consciousness, then certainly beside themselves, this arose as much from historical life process as from the splitting of the ego, for others the future for literary and cultural theory lay with a psychoanalysis newly equipped to take on both desire and history. In the current critical climate, however, there is a growing suspicion that in its rapid ascent within humanities studies psychoanalysis might be forgetting itself: forgetting its own history, forgetting that it is a part of what it claims to speak about, forgetting, indeed, that there can be no psychoanalysis without the transference. The two October books reviewed here offer different defences against what could be called psychoanalysis’s own historical amnesia: Rosalind E.Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious which takes us back to Benjamin’s homology in order to propose not only a new version of modernist art, but also a way of doing an art history that has learnt its lessons from psychoanalysis; and Joan Copjec’s more avowedly polemic Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists which takes to task those who would charge psychoanalysis with an uncritical ahistoricism. It may seem odd that psychoanalysis should need such a defence when much of its critical appeal inheres in its provocative redefinition of the historical field. There can be no history of struggle which is not at the same time a history of psychic struggle. In registering this, for many, psychoanalysis continues to reach the parts of human experience that other critical discourses, notably structuralism and Marxism, appeared to occlude. But if the case for a psychoanalytic history has now been made—most cogently and eloquently, it could be suggested, by feminism—this does not mean that the case has been won. One does not have to be anti-psychoanalysis, for example, to suggest that reading the history of

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psychic struggle is not the same as conflating history into the psyche, or to insist that social and cultural production and psychic production are not analogues but distinct and necessarily conflictual phenomena. On the contrary, to be cautious about how many adjectives the unconscious can carry (‘political’, ‘optical’—at what point does the first begin to collapse back into that animus of psychoanalytic politics, the ‘collective’?) is to be positively pro-Freudian. One of the many strengths of The Optical Unconscious is Krauss’s refusal to let a generalized psychoanalysis roam roughshod over different categories. There may be something in Benjamin’s comparison between photography and psychoanalysis, Krauss argues; and certainly when at the end of ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, writing of fascism, Benjamin notes how the camera is able to discern mass social movements, he may well be on the same territory that Freud uncovered in his work on group psychology: but fundamentally Freud would have been baffled by the idea of an optical unconscious. The visual field revealed by the camera does not have an unconscious (p. 179): there is no straightforward analogy. Given this care about categories, what then of Krauss’s use of the term ‘the optical unconscious’, which stretches from Benjamin’s homology and which, she says, should be heard to rhyme with the political unconscious (p. 27)? The optical unconscious is the name Krauss gives to the construction and articulation of a protest against the idea that human vision might be master of all it surveys. Another name for such visual mastery is modernist formalism, October’s long established bête noire. But Krauss is doing something a little more complex than simply knocking formalism. By remaining within the logic of the visual field constructed by a variety of differing modernist artists, critics, critical theorists, thinkers and art historians, Krauss reads that field as a site of ideological conflicts and repressions: which is why ‘optical’ is meant to rhyme with ‘political’. There is a canniness about what it means to attempt a history of modernism in all this. Aware that the opposition between formalism and historicism is ultimately unproductive, Krauss refuses either to concede to a formalist reading or to damn the credo of modernist autonomy as a dupe of history. This is why, to begin with, she eschews narrative history and prefers instead to think of the visual logic of modernism in the form of a graph, more precisely of the structuralist four-field Klein graph whose pluses and minuses here neatly map out the topography of a field of visual perception (figure-ground, non-figure, nonground). The Klein graph spells out the logic of a hegemonically dominant form of modernism: one that can be seen in Mondrian, for example, and which was given theoretical and ultimately moral and cultural authority by the likes of Roger Fry and later Clement Greenberg with, on the way, guest appearances by Picasso (but not consistently) and others. It thus offers an ‘axis of a re-doubled vision: of a seeing and a knowing that one sees, a kind of cogito of vision’ (p. 19): in effect the graph lays out the structural co-ordinates of formalist visual mastery that Krauss wants to unhouse. This unhousing, or the uncanniness of this way of not doing art history, emerges when Krauss superimposes Lacan’s L-Schema over the

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Klein graph. Through the L-Schema Lacan demonstrates that the subject is not the master, but the effect of the structures—here those of visual perception—that precariously hold it in place. With this topological sleight of hand, the scene is set for Krauss to argue that the cogito of vision beloved of modernist formalism only appears at the cost of the repression of what conditions it: it is therefore an effect of the optical unconscious, ‘a thousand pockets of darkness’ (p. 21) which speak of the ego’s non-coincidence with the visual field. The optical unconscious, then, is the other scene of visual perception ‘fouling its logic, eroding its structure, even while appearing to leave the terms of that logic and that structure in place’ (p. 24). Its avatars are, among the artists, Giacometti, Duchamp, Ernst, Picasso (but not consistently), Dali, Pollock and Eva Hesse and among the theorists, Freud, Bataille, Breton, Caillois, Lyotard and Lacan. These are the proper names of Krauss’s counter-history to mainstream modernism: a counter-history, however, which insofar as it can be called history is done so in a strictly psychoanalytic sense. It is the logic of nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, that reigns methodologically supreme here, as Krauss restores a dimension of opacity and temporality both to modernist art and to its history. Wise to the lures and licks of the transference, this works best when she writes on specific case histories. The chapter on Max Ernst is an exemplary case in point. Refusing the art historical impulse to make sense of Ernst by narrativizing the work, Krauss raids the pictures and the archives to produce, most appropriately, an Ernst collage: a procedure made all the more effective by the extremely high quality of the book’s production. Such cut and paste amounts to a meticulous argument for Ernst’s construction of an optical unconscious. The Master’s Bedroom’s use of the ready-made, for instance, emerges as a homage to a ‘ceaseless return to the already-known’ (p. 53). Read alongside (but not subsumed under) Freud’s ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ and Ernst’s own transferential relation to The Wolf Man’ and Leonardo, Krauss shows how his dedication to seriality repetition and the automaton place him at the centre of surrealism’s critique of modernist formalism. This is of course also Krauss’s own project, as becomes explicit when the repressive nature of her own art-historical formalist education is explored in the chapter on Pollock, Greenberg and Eva Hesse. ‘Spare me smart Jewish girls and their typewriters’ (p. 309), Greenberg once lamented: a throwaway comment, which Krauss gives proper psychoanalytic treatment by taking its theoretical and historical implications seriously (Greenberg is not spared). Given that The Optical Unconscious proposes a method of psychoanalytic historiography, such explicitness about the author’s own transferential moorings is an absolute requirement: indeed, it is part of what makes the book so compelling. But, perhaps inevitably, this does beg a question about the other counter-histories that are left in the dark. Roger Fry, for example, as one would expect is toppled from his position as master modernist. But when Virginia Woolf makes a guest appearance on the side of Krauss’s critique, the limits of the book’s historical range come into view. It is not only that there is more to be said about Woolf’s relation to Fry. There were other avatars of the

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unconscious who transformed this version of modernism in response to specific political and social exigencies, namely Hanna Segal and the women analysts grouped around Melanie Klein during the Second World War. In bequeathing the optical unconscious to surrealism and Lacan, Krauss is after all telling a familiar story—albeit with a new theoretical eloquence. It is perhaps because she has so effectively opened up the possibility of a psychoanalytic history, that one can now ask for the transferential relations between institutions, national cultures and competing ideologies of sex and art to be given more serious attention. Otherwise the relation between the political and the optical unconscious risks remaining, strictly speaking, a half-rhyme. Joan Copjec, as her title, Read My Desire, suggests is, like Krauss’s avatars, another champion of the unconscious. The book’s more provocative subtitle, Lacan against the historicists, makes it clear in which direction that desire is to be read. Where Krauss suggests the possibility of a psychoanalytic history, Copjec challenges the assumptions of those who would historicize without psychoanalysis. ‘Historicism’ in Copjec’s book is a wide category. At times it goes under the name of Foucault (particularly the earlier Foucault); more often it is attributed to ‘Foucauldians’ who, in Copjec’s view, subsume too much under the positivity of the social, ground being in appearance and who, most seriously, are incapable of reading desire. The stakes of such psychoanalytic illiteracy are high for Copjec, for it brings with it an implicitly ahistorical blindness to the dimension of the real, the Lacanian mark of the impossibility of the relation between the subject and social (or historical) representation. Copjec, then, pastes the Lacanian L-schema over historicism in much the same way as Krauss superimposes it over the Klein graph. The result is a rigorously argued corrective to current mix-and-match tendencies in cultural theory. Copjec’s cogent critique of the ways and means that film theory has turned Lacan into ‘a “spendthrift” Foucault’ (p. 19), for example, offers an important lesson on the perils of conflating desire with social representation. Psychoanalysis’s narcissistic subject is not, Copjec insists, the same as the subject of panoptic power. While the latter ‘snuggle[s] happily’ into social representation, the former ‘is seen to conflict with and disrupt other social relations’ (p. 23). This is an important move not least because it demonstrates how the relation between the psyche and the social is never sewn up once and for all, and how the relation between the subject and the social is based on the failure of social and symbolic representation. For Copjec, the modern subject fails to fit into the social, just as it refuses to be reduced to a historical narrative (whether that of film noir, detective fiction, vampirism or eighteenth-century discourses on breast-feeding). To be blind to the fault-lines of desire that inscribe that failure, Copjec demonstrates convincingly, is not to grasp but to be duped by history. Read My Desire then is not, as it might first appear, a renunciation of history. It is rather a call for us to learn how to read those historical effects that cannot be subsumed under empiricism (p. 68). Whether Copjec will finally convince those who never thought of Foucault as a straightforward historicist in the first place

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or, indeed, persuade ‘historicists’ to take on psychoanalysis is another matter. The objet a, argues Copjec, has a ‘historical specificity (it is the product of a specific discursive order), but no historical content’ (p. 56). That specificity however remains elusive to the extent that it begins to bleed into generalizations which, on the surface, might make even the most faint-hearted historian blush. It is one thing to insist that history cannot tell the whole story, but another, perhaps, to forget that Lacanian psychoanalysis itself is only a part of that story. It is telling, then, that for Copjec, Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ is practically analogous with an inscription of Lacan’s version of the symbolic relation, insofar as both inscribe an indexical marker of repressed desire across social representation (the scene of the crime in Atget’s photographs, the real in Lacan’s case). The analogy works brilliantly, but it also runs close to driving the opposition between psychoanalysis and history further apart (precisely how, in historical terms, can we think of Benjamin as describing Lacan?) whereas, as Krauss shows, it is the unsettling of the two that now needs to commence if psychoanalysis is to throw off its ahistorical and determinist reputation and history is to learn how to read desire. University of East Anglia

Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 168 pp., £12.95 (paperback) Garin V.Dowd

‘Incredulity towards meta-narratives’: Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern position vis-à-vis the grand narratives sketched out in the Enlightenment progress fantasy and in the discourse of modernity could equally be used to describe the intervention represented by Paul Virilio’s most recently translated book. Virilio’s terse warning (which is of course by no means his first) comes at a time when, as Brian Massumi points out in his User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ‘capital…surfaces as a fractal attractor whose operational arena is immediately coextensive with the social field’ (p. 132). Figure and ground are becoming indiscernible, artifice and nature fuse into hyper-reality: as the hoary cliché has it, the centre does not hold. Virilio’s incredulity is directed at a new meta-narrative: that which underwrites cyberspace as the final frontier, bringing the very concept of frontier or boundary into obsolescence. With ‘the loss of the terrestrial horizon of our world proper’, and thereby ‘the loss of all measure’, postmodernity has left behind all vestiges of the Cartesian matrix: now extension and information (mind) are coterminous. Spatio-temporal co-ordinates no longer sketch out the contours of a topography wherein one can read the ‘story’ of a trip from point a to point b, from here to there, from subject to object, from fort to da. A postmodern Little Ernst does not use a reel attached to a length of string in order to manufacture an identity. There is, as Virilio states here, no more terminus (no fort, no other side of Ernst’s cot-curtain), which leads him to claim that the ‘pathology of movement’ characteristic of ‘the art of the motor’ currently being perfected in the guise of ‘absolute speed’, takes place ‘no longer between here and there, but between being there and no longer being there’ (p. 85). Real time supersedes real space. Virilio’s incredulity is directed not so much at cyberspace ‘itself’ (as if such a phrase were possible) as towards those attempts to underwrite it in terms such as Virtual democracy’ and Virtual community’, the former term utilized by Newt Gingrich et al., the latter associated with the ‘techno-communitarianism’ of Howard Reingold. The ‘Red Alert’ sounded by Virilio in Radical Philosophy 74 is therefore merely an update on the reflections collected here. For much has happened in cyberspace since Virilio wrote this book in 1993. Tentatively introduced to a wide audience (in the shape of feature articles in the national

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press) around this time, the internet and cyberspace have quickly become labels (in Virilio’s view) for a potentially devastating techno-scientific fundamentalism. The combined and complementary obsessions with speed (of micro-processor) and volume (of memory) are indicative of what Virilio sees as the ‘dyslexic perception’ (p. 72) to which such fundamentalism subjects its adherents: ‘(R) apidity is always a sign of the precocious death for the fast species’ (p. 81). A reflex—a click on the mouse—is sufficient to keep operational the prosthetic space beyond the interfacial threshold of the computer screen. For the moment. But it prompts Virilio’s vision of a dystopian future featuring ‘the terrorist aesthetic of optical impact’: ‘what has become accidental, apparently contingent, due to the velocity with which the image can be presented (or the information transmitted), is the announcement, which will soon be reduced to a simple frequency signal’ (p. 73). Deprivation of delay in response therefore may lead to the installation of a new tribunal of reason not requiring human involvement (the vision machine described in Virilio’s eponymous book). As one has come to expect from Virilio’s work, this book abounds in insightful illustration of some of the most fundamental mutations in epistemology, ontology, politics and corporeity which the new technologies of perception and transmission have already and could in future occasion. Hence his portrait of Hollywood (already seen in his War and Cinema) which, he asserts, gave birth to ‘a mobile people entirely victims of the [film] set’ (p. 79). In achieving the ‘industrialisation of perception’ Hollywood pulls off the ‘ultimate coup d’état’. Modern transport, since it contracts space and subjects geographical displacement to the rule of time, allied to the effects of globalization—the mutation of local and global into glocal—makes one, Virilio states, lose all sense of departure. One is never going away from somewhere but is always already there (Lyotard’s ‘future anterior’ is decidedly the postmodern tense according to Virilio) in one’s glocale. Likewise, his image of the tourist and his or her corporeal ergonomics (how best to kill time) is succinct and viciously comic. The tourist too is a ‘victim of the set’. He or she is fed into the mechanism of the resort, while the ‘loss of the thrills associated with the old voyage is compensated for by in-flight entertainment’. Another comparable mutation is brought about by sport, and especially by those sports which demand a high degree of physical conditioning and/or assistance by chemicals, diet and performance enhancing technological prostheses. Considering the statements of the speed skier Dr Michael Prüfer (‘you don’t think, you only think about going fast!’), whose feats are assisted by an aerodynamic ‘second skin’ which takes several hours to apply, Virilio concludes that ‘sport leads to cerebral imbalance’ (p. 95). The overall vision of modern sport evoked here could be used to make a mockery of the frequent outbursts of indignation and moralizing which occur when this or that athlete breaks a record with the assistance of performance-enhancing drugs: such ire is

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disabled by the fact that physics has already superseded chemistry as we head for ‘the imminent production of biotechnological SUPERVITALITY’ (p. 121). How ludicrous the faux-humanist criticism of sporting ‘cheats’ becomes when one realizes that the new sports or the modern incarnation of established sports are merely the intensification of the subjugation of the human body at the core of the so-called Olympian ideal (which supposedly is the polar opposite of the chemical strategy). In tennis, new racket and ball technology renders the game almost obsolete as a real space visible performance: the high-velocity serve only becomes visible through the mediation of the prosthetic vision offered in slow motion play-back. However, while the prosthetic dispositif—be it technochemical to enhance player performance or visual to retrieve the sport from the threshold of invisibility—increasingly takes over, that takeover must be seen as merely the intensification of elements already central to the development of the sport from colonial resort pastime to international professional industry. ‘Scientific’ training programmes, streamlining of promising children, the total subjugation of the still-developing body to the art of the motor: run, serve faster. All of this is in line with Virilio’s incontrovertible dictum: ‘The one variation the motor is capable of: acceleration.’ The most prolonged consideration of biotechnology comes when Virilio considers the case of the artist known as Stelarc, whose faith in the emancipatory force of the literal cyborg is revealed as relying upon a discourse not a million miles away from that of the Enlightenment project. Thus Virilio dissects ‘the crescendo of Stelarc’s symptomatic rave’ and finds it to be little more than the catwalk for the display of a new type of technological lingerie. We need to be careful, he states elsewhere in the book, of the ‘glad rags of ideologies of progress’ (p. 35). Virilio is quick to stress that this is no cautionary tale. It is already here and now. The Gulf War showed this beyond doubt: the informatic ‘dissuasion of perceptible reality’ (p. 141). As the millennium approaches, and as the world loses thinkers of the calibre of Foucault, Guattari and, most recently, Deleuze, who will be left intellectually to combat what Virilio calls the ‘possible industrialisation of forgetting and lack’ (p. 145) facilitated by the postmodern Fourth Estate? The Art of the Motor is no Luddite paean to a supposed pre-technological utopia. That is not to deny Virilio’s almost total pessimism. This book can perhaps be thought of as a calling card left at the doors of ‘dyslexic’ perception beyond which, smart card in hand, a new post-human general (the nihilistic inverse of Nietzsche’s Superman) watches reruns of smart-bombs hitting their targets before they have left base. To this dystopian image, Virilio’s book seems to respond, like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, ‘the horror, the horror’.

Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller, with an Introduction by Bryan S.Turner (London: Sage, 1993), 173 pp., £11. 95 (paperback)

Peter Carravetta, Prefaces to the Diaphora (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1991), 345 pp., £28.50 (hardback)

Nicholas Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 128 pp., $19.95 (hardback) Massimo Verdicchio

The demise of deconstruction, as no longer a viable theoretical paradigm for interpretation and understanding, appears also to have marked the end of a critical phase to which, and for many reasons, we give the name of ‘modernity’. The coming on the scene of post-modernism, or postmodernity, has raised since its inception many questions as to its theoretical acceptability. One could mention the Marxist critique of Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism. A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), which rejects outright all postmodernist claims as well as that of a postmodern age in no uncertain terms: ‘the various claims for the existence or emergence of a postmodern era are false’ (p.5). Or even Christopher Norris’s critique in What’s Wrong with Postmodernism. Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), which is the latest and most critical response challenging the theoretical legitimacy of postmodernism, where Norris questions the all too easy closures of thinkers like Baudrillard and Lyotard amongst others, whose ‘postmodernist’ thinking is resolved in ‘collapsing every last form of ontological distinction or critical truth-claim’ (p. 23). On the ‘pro’ side there is no shortage of works that have tried to define the theoretical parameters of the new ‘post’ modern critical mode. We could cite at random from the critical reflections of Iain Chambers in Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) to Margaret A.Rose, The Post-modern and the Post-industrial: A Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), while Andrew Milner, Philip Thomson and Chris Worth’s Postmodern Conditions provides a collection of writings that not only attempts to assess the postmodern condition but also takes its distance critically. The three works under review propose yet other perspectives on the question of modernism and postmodernism. The works by Carravetta and Zurbrugg deal specifically with the issue of postmodernism, the former in the attempt to delineate a theory of postmodernism and where we can expect it to go, the latter in the attempt to salvage it from expectations of an early demise by post- modern theorists and to provide sound evidence that all is well with postmodernism. Buci-Glucksmann’s work, as the subtitle The Aesthetics of Modernity indicates,

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deals with the aesthetics of modernity, yet her work is pertinent to a discussion of postmodernism since her theory of modernity is, in more than one sense, a post-modern one. Carravetta’s Prefaces to the Diaphora fits eminently into this line of works on postmodernism while departing from them in significant and radical ways. His is an ambitious project which has its starting point in a critique of Nietzsche’s modernism and aphoristic philosophy and in a rereading of a complementary text, D’Annunzio’s Maia (Part One). These initial critiques lay the groundwork for a reinterpretation of postmodernity (not postmodernism) in terms of a theory of interpretation as diaphoristics (see Part Two). In Part Three, Carravetta surveys the major postmodern theoretical texts of Lyotard and Vattimo on the way to a conclusion that anticipates the possibility of a ‘philosophical criticism’ grounded in a joint critique and reassessment of both Vico’s rhetoric and Heidegger’s hermeneutics. The overriding principle of this provocative study is the notion of diaphora understood in its wider meaning of ‘dialogue’, denoting a form of critical intertextualization between two types of discourse that are otherwise mutually exclusive. ‘The Diaphora then intends to signify a movement akin to a dialogue between and among forms of discourse that, although typically exclusive of one another, are made to relate and transfer signification from one semantic/ hermeneutic position to another’ (p. xi). The intertextual dialogue informs not only the critical methodology of Carravetta’s work, as when Vico and Heidegger are made to dialogue in a mutual critical exchange of their philosophies, but also the terminus ad quem of this same methodology which Carravetta calls diaphoristic interpretation, and which has its fulfilment in a notion of allegory understood as discourse of, to the other, or as movement toward the other. The diaphoristic perspective informs first of all Carravetta’s critique of Nietzsche and of his philosophy centred on aphorism, Carravetta’s critique focuses then on the passage in Nietzsche from the alienating and nihilistic form of the aphorism, in the early works, to the dialogical and communicative form which informs, instead, the allegorical narrative of Thus Spake Zarathustra. The other key concept put into question by Carravetta in his reading of Nietzsche is irony. Together with aphorism, irony is the other modernist concept which stands in the way of a truly postmodernist thought. ‘If we bear in mind the traits of aphoristic writing…then irony becomes one more obstacle to remove before a truly non-Modern(ist) philosophical poem could be written.’ Following Vico’s notion that irony’s development comes rather late, Carravetta dismisses irony as non-constitutive of ‘original attributes of language-use’ (p. 54). Carravetta further clarifies his position on irony by stating that irony can have no place within an ethically and socially driven philosophy: ‘in the last analysis, irony is the trope of a defeatist, supercilious, uncommitting posture, an instrument of devastating critique, but hardly suited to an aesthetic or a philosophy concerned with ethical and social possibility, and planning, or any “constructive” effort’ (p. 257, n. 19).

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The possibility of finding an ethical and social philosophy steers Carravetta towards allegory understood as ‘a primordial I-Thou relation—the basis of a communal “we”—as well as the speaking of the Other—allegory as “otherspeaking”’ (p. 47). For Carravetta, Nietzsche ‘explodes’ into the allegorical mode also as a result of the ‘ultrameta-physical and alienating’ mode of discourse of the aphorism. This is because Nietzsche wants ‘to reach an audience, recover the temporality of the utterance, and yet be critical and creative at the same time’ (p. xii). Carravetta’s reading means to situate Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra at the critical edge of modernism and to salvage this work as a postmodernist text. The same critical thrust is behind the reading of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Maia. The choice of this work is not arbitrary. Carravetta not only regards it as ‘a version of the Zarathustra book’ but calls it an ‘authentic’ Nietzschean work because it subverts the commonplaces of modernist aesthetics and metaphysics. ‘I believe the Dannunzian oeuvre, and this particular poem especially [Maia], discloses the phenomenological-hermeneutic horizon for the comprehension of the epoch of the decline of Modernity and therefore of a particular conception of Being (p. 101, emphasis in original). One of the places where the overcoming of modernity takes place is the notion of allegory and, more precisely, in what Carravetta calls the ‘sublation’ of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The issue revolves around the figure of Ulysses who, condemned to Hell by Dante, resurfaces in the text of D’Annunzio’s Maia. Within the ontotheological perspective of the Commedia, Ulysses, who symbolizes the eternal burning of the ‘fire of reason, of intellective imagination’ (p. 105), is not simply condemned but his destiny, the destiny of reason, is said to be ‘finite’ and ‘self-annihilating’ (p. 105). In D’Annunzio’s Maia, however, reason is once again triumphant as Ulysses reappears, this time to stay. ‘[Ulysses] is once again called to life, but this time it is to stay alive, through the constant permutation of masks, through existential, historical, and mythological personifications!’ (p. 106). D’Annunzio’s Ulysses is the new Prometheus reborn from the ashes, transformed and purified. The realm of the new Ulysses is now on earth and amongst the living and it is here, in this world, that he will fulfil the Dionysian impulse embodied in D’Annunzio. The work of D’Annunzio as a whole can be said to be very much in line with postmodernist authors like Musil and Joyce, who similarly put into question the premises of late modern aesthetics and ideology (p. 128). The key word in every case is allegory which allows for the recovery of the ‘temporal dimension of the aesthetic utterance’ (p. 129) from the ‘dead end of symbolism and of poetic modes mired in irony and parody’ (p. 129) which characterize equally modernism and the avant-gardes. Carravetta also attempts to resolve the confusion between post-modernity and other modernist avant-gardisms. His critique of the avant-gardes is clear in the insistence on the plural in ‘avant-gardes’ since, in his view, there is not a single phenomenon like the avant-garde that deserves special theoretical treatment, but many types ‘as can be perceived by the thick of isms that constellated our cultural

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history during the last two centuries or so’ (p. 134). The avant-gardes are understood within the context of Husserl’s crisis of European culture as symptomatic of that very crisis, rather than as revolutionary movements which brought about that crisis. Carravetta gives credit to the avant-gardes for having made headway within social, ethical and linguistic domains but he also adds that their experiments were doomed because they sought to return to an origin or to a principle. Thus the tools they used to combat tradition became the tools which the establishment used against them. They initiated no dialogue with the intellectual middle class, with the educated classes, whose role was precisely the dissemination of information and the education of the masses. Perhaps the failure of the avant-gardes, Carravetta suggests, is to be sought in their basically ‘plebeian’ faith in humanist-Enlightenment values such as ‘the primacy of selfdetermination, progress, even reason?’ (p. 144). Postmodernity, therefore, cannot be an avant-garde movement, an ‘-ism’, a ‘postmodernism’ (p. 138). In his ‘Cryptohistory of the post-modern’, tracing a history of the term ‘postmodern’ from its origins to the present with discussions of Ihab Hassan, William Spanos and Richard Palmer, the author provides his own Version of postmodernity’ by dating the beginnings of postmodernity, or of the post-modern epoch, to early August 1945, the day of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a historical event which compelled the intellectual to rethink and review his world and his values. At a more theoretical level, postmodernity is characterized by a desire to move away from a conception of language as symbol towards ‘inclusion’ and ‘heterogeneity’, namely towards ‘allegory’ which, as I indicated earlier, is for Carravetta one of the cornerstones of postmodernity. ‘Allegory here stands for a mode of thinking which would allow a narrative process to evidence uncodified meanings—as Signifieds—as potentially dialogical and prone to conflation of Being and experience’ (p. 164). The most important thinkers who preside at the origins of Carravetta’s diaphoristic or allegorical hermeneutics are Vico and Heidegger. The key author is of course Vico, whose notion of allegory and critique of irony Carravetta espouses and champions throughout the work. The emphasis placed on Vico is perhaps the strongest that any reader of Vico has made to date, especially in terms of Vico’s relevance to modern hermeneutics. ‘I will argue’ he says, ‘that Vico’s rhetorical hermeneutics expresses and embodies the recto and verso of a theorymethod relation from which there is no escape and whose various configurations, realignments, and ruptures throughout history constitute the very fiber of Homo Humanus the interpretive being’ (p. 242). As for Heidegger, Carravetta sees shortcomings in a theory of cognition that does not fully take advantage of the fact that it partakes of the linguistic act, and does not fully utilize the awareness that comes from the mere act of perception, from the basic paradox of communication which is ‘alternately eristic and heuristic’ (p. 244). Thus Heidegger is ‘decidedly unreceptive to the question of what is knowable…which means [that his poetic ontology] refuses to consider the very possibility of knowing, be it historical, ideological, scientific, and so on’ (p. 244).

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With Vico, instead, we are on the threshold of Postmodernity ‘without having to suppress or forget either the formal(istic) epistemological distinction between entities and Being (Descartes), or the ontological difference between entities and Being (Heidegger)’ (p. 245). The importance of Vico resides in having established the axiom that ‘even before one can evaluate or pass judgment upon something, one must know it!’ (p. 245). Carravetta alludes to Vico’s notion of verum ipsum factum whereby one can only know those things one has made, so man can only know the world of institutions and, by extension, history, because he has created them. The last key notion with which Carravetta deals is the problem of temporality which, both in Vico and Heidegger, is not related to consciousness (as in Descartes) but is rather ‘dynamic and equiprimordial to the coincidence of Being and Language’ (p. 250). This temporality is the link between rhetorics and hermeneutics and is best understood as that which embodies ‘the presencethrough-time…of the real possibility of a speaker speaking and a listener listening’ (p. 250). Temporality not only allows for the passage from metaphor to allegory but also makes discursivity, or allegory, possible as the dominant mode of Vico’s history and ethics. Allegory, which in Vico is ‘equiprimordial to the instancing itself of human language’ (p. 251) and which, as ‘other-speaking’, allows one to speak about that which one cannot speak, is that ‘figure of thought’ which ‘tells’ of the real, social world and which, transcending the real individual, requires that ‘he/she be there to tell and/or to listen’ (p. 251). Carravetta’s Prefaces to the Diaphora, as the title indicates, is essentially a Preface, a preface for a book to come on the theory of postmodernity, on Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, on D’Annunzio’s Maia; in short, on a theory of diaphoristics as a theory of postmodernist interpretation. In waiting for these books, Carravetta’s Preface to the Diaphora stands as probably one of the most thoughtprovoking and interesting theoretical statements on postmodernity to date. Carravetta’s book speaks directly to the other two under review, since the work of Nicholas Zurbrugg tends first of all to confound the disclaimers of postmodernist critics like Jameson that postmodernism is dead and has run its course. This book takes as its starting point the hypothesis that the present tendency to define postmodern culture negatively, in terms of ‘schizophrenia,’ ‘superficiality,’ and so forth, derives from overliteral and undercritical responses to some of the more seductive overstatements by European theorists such as Benjamin, Barthes, Bürger, Baudrillard, BonitaOliva, and Bourdieu. (p. xi) This negative tendency that the author identifies as the ‘B-effect’ characterizes present postmodernist critics in Europe and in America. It is against this group

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that Zurbrugg takes up arms to oppose a group of positive theorists of postmodernism, most of them postmodernist artists, which he refers to as the ‘Ceffect’, mainly John Cage and other avant-garde artists (p. xii). Zurbrugg resorts to the ultra-short critical essay, sometimes the length it takes to confront two quickly sketched points of view, to examine a variety of contrasting viewpoints on postmodernism, of those who see it as dead or close to its demise and those who, instead, bask in the sun of positive creativity which postmodernist techniques seem to provide. Zurbrugg does not seem to be concerned that all those belonging to the B-effect are critics and those who belong to the C-effect are (postmodernist) artists. John Cage, to be sure, is quoted as a theorist of postmodernism, but he is also an artist and his own theorist. However, this does not discredit Zurbrugg’s enterprise which is to oppose, to the alarmist conclusions of critics like Jameson, Eagleton, Lyotard and Habermas, the very positive and creative work of such artists as Cage, Anderson, Ashley, Glass, Monk, Rainer and Robert Wilson, among others, for whom postmodernism is far from dead. Zurbrugg’s technique of opposing the Beffect critics to C-effect artists makes clear the age-old discrepancy between theory and practice, between those who theorize on art and those who actually produce it. However, this is not a point which Zurbrugg makes, and perhaps does not wish to make. The point he does make is that the B-effect is in part due to the oversensitive response of postmodernist critics to the apocalyptic writings of European modernist and postmodernist theorists. Zurbrugg calls the B-effect the ‘theoretical virus’ that has affected postmodern critics ‘the needlessly catastrophic sense of critical and creative crisis culled by lesser bricoleurs, such as Bürger, Bonita-Oliva, and Belsey, from the writings of such European sages and semi-sages as Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Rourdieu’ (p. 7). Against the B-effect, Zurbrugg asserts the longevity and resilience of postmodernism which still has many more interesting things awaiting it ‘before we go out’ as the ‘postmodern condition extends its parameters into the post-post-modern condition’ (p. 169). The ‘arresting’ critiques of those who would wish its demise are simply the result of the ‘misanthropic symptoms of our times’, while the reality of the postmodernist adventure, as Zurbrugg comments with Cage, is far more ‘inarresting’ (p. 170). Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity is a far more ambitious and complex work and positions itself astride the above two works. Although it is not a work that promotes postmodernism, as do the earlier two, it does offer a theory of ‘post’ modernity as modern baroque aesthetics. It also shares with Carravetta’s project the shift towards allegory, but not at the expense of irony. Carravetta’s work is a critique of modernist philosophers which looks forward to allegorical representation, or diaphoristics, as a theory of postmodernism to come. Zurbrugg’s work tends to sever the theory from the practice because the former is blind to the future that informs the practice. BuciGlucksmann’s study relies instead on a modernist critic like Walter Benjamin to extrapolate a postmodern aesthetic theory which does not reject its past

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modernity but discovers in it a continuity and difference with the present. In other words, she falls back on the sages of modernity, as Zurbrugg defines them, Benjamin, Baudelaire, Lacan, Barthes, to characterize ‘something like a baroque paradigm’ asserting and establishing itself within ‘modernity’ (p. 141). The provocative and oxymoronic title of her work ‘baroque reason’ identifies the inherent reason of the unconscious and of utopia at the heart of the baroque, and thus at the heart of modernity. It is the index of the proliferation of the signifier beyond all signifieds. ‘At the risk of appearing still more paradoxical, we might say that baroque reason brings into play the infinite materiality of images and bodies. And this being so, it always has to do with otherness as desire’ (p. 139). This otherness is the feminine, the allegory of the feminine, or allegory as the feminine. A feminine, however, not to be confused with attributes of modesty, mystery and motherhood, but a feminine ‘caught up in the surplus materiality of bodies, in an excitation which cracks appearances and consigns them to… deformation and transfiguration’ (p. 133). The status of the feminine as that body which is at once real and fictitious is what ultimately distinguishes modern baroque from baroque allegory. As Benjamin pointed out, the modernity of modern baroque consists precisely in its different relationship to the feminine, to the divine and to death. Whereas seventeenth-century Baroque contemplated death from the outside, modernity (in this case Baudelaire) also views it from the inside (p. 103). ‘In leaving the external world for the inner world…modern allegory shakes off some of the limitations of the baroque and establishes itself against the background of a dual disappearance.’ With the radical secularization of time with no transcendence and no future, where the ever-new is ever-the-same, the possibility of baroque salvation or transcendence disappears. Thus the body of the feminine is what embodies the ‘sadistic and perverse impulse of the allegorical gaze’ (p. 103). The feminine body, and that of the prostitute in Baudelaire, provides ‘the metaphor for the extremes of desire and death, vitality and lifelessness, life and corruption’ (p. 104). The baroque is the index of a diversity at the heart of modernity. In opposition to modernity’s plenitude of meaning, reality, truth and centrality of the subject, the baroque stands as a ‘“postmodern” conception of reality’ where the instability of forms denounces the ‘reduplicated and reduplicable structure of all reality’ (p. 134). Buci-Glucksmann’s study of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the Baroque and on Baudelaire bring her to a different form of postmodernism from Carravetta’s. Both identify allegory as the cornerstone of the new modernity, and as the trope that displaces the Hegelian dialectic of reason. Their difference is in their notion of allegory which Carravetta derives from Vico and defines as antiironic. Buci-Glucksmann derives it from Benjamin and Baudelaire and is very much ironic. Baroque allegory is always the allegory of a crisis, of a catastrophe. Rather than transcending the fragment, as Carravetta conceives the allegorical, Baroque allegory privileges the fragment over the whole. ‘Only the fragment is capable of showing that the logic of bodies, feeling, life and death

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does not coincide with the logic of Power, nor with that of the Concept’ (p. 71). Carravetta’s conception of postmodernism looks forward to the plenitude of a future without irony, whereas Buci-Gluckmann’s denies the very possibility of a future. Here Benjamin’s Angel of History is the perfect allegory for this crisis of perception, for this rupturing of time. The “storm blowing from Paradise” is progress which perpetually moves into catastrophe, ruin and mutilation’ (p. 89). This storm, conclude Buci-Glucksmann, has not finished blowing. ‘Benjamin sees in it more than ever the alchemy of our contradictions: our nowtime’ (p. 89). Carravetta’s study conforms more to Zurbrugg’s more optimistic conception of postmodernism in opposition to the apocalyptic versions of the B-effect critics, who wallow in doom and gloom and prophesy an early demise of postmodernism. Only time will tell. University of Alberta

Laure, The Collected Writings, trans. from the French by Jeanine Herman (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995), 314 pp., $13.95 (paperback) Sharon Black

Jeanine Herman’s timely translation of the poetry and prose of Colette Laure Lucienne Peignot (1903–1938) coincides with a peak of anglophone academic interest in the work of Laure’s most famous lover, Georges Bataille. The Collected Writings spans genres including autobiography, poetry, pornographic, political and philosophical contemplation, and private correspondence, dating from Laure’s late teens to her last days. It also includes a lengthy biographical essay by Laure’s devoted nephew, the graphologist Jérôme Peignot; appendices and a potted biography by Bataille; and a piece on Bataille and the death of Laure by Marcel More. These fragments accumulate to provide a tantalizing picture of a woman passionately engaged with her times. The volume opens with Laure’s own account of her formative years, ‘Story of a little girl’, with the footnote that this title has been selected from alternatives (‘Sad privilege’ or ‘A fairy tale life’) by Bataille and Michel Leiris. Laure was born into a wealthy bourgeois family who resided in the Paris suburbs, close to the psychiatric hospital of Sainte-Anne. The First World War exacted a heavy toll from the Peignots: Laure’s father and his three brothers were all killed within two years of each other, and the loss plummeted Laure’s mother into an orgy of mourning and Catholic devotion from which she never recovered. (Their sacrifice is commemorated in the naming of the rue des Quatre Frères Peignot in the 15th arrondissement.) Laure provides a number of telling examples of the way in which her mother’s dogmatism ruled the lives of those around her. On one occasion, having caught her housekeeper allegedly stealing coal from the cellar, Mme Peignot took the woman to the police station. When the housekeeper’s young daughter came to enquire why her mother was late home from work, she was informed by the lady of the house: ‘Your mother is a thief and I shall have her put in prison.’ Left alone all night, the daughter flung herself in desperation from her window on the seventh floor (p. 12). In a similarly heartless episode, while on leave from serving with the Alpine troops, and having been found sobbing in a corner of the Peignot home, Laure’s godson was told by her mother, ‘Chin up! a true soldier doesn’t cry’ —one month before he too died in action (p. 20). Laure writes ‘I inhabited not life but death’ (p. 6) and this phrase reappears in both poem and prose form at several points in The Collected Writings.

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In addition to multiple bereavement, Laure endured a living death in illness: the first signs of the tuberculosis which would eventually claim her life occurred during childhood, when she became the prisoner of her mother’s ministrations. However, this stifling beginning perversely nurtured her rebellious spirit: she tells of how she flung a Lourdes medal back in the face of the sister who had tried to slip it under her pillow, when her family were in fear for her survival. Laure’s propensity for sacrilege was reinforced at this time by the behaviour of the family priest, who is only identified as ‘l’abbé D‘by Jérôme Peignot, and who subjected both Laure and her sister Catherine to insidious sexual assaults. Laure describes her only escape at this period, from her mother, her home, and her sick body, as living ‘in a sort of interior dream…a debauchery of the imagination’ (p. 23). Inevitably, Laure broke out into ‘true life’. Her brother Charles —whose name alone is enough to conjure up images of ‘Parisian orgies’ for Bataille—tried to introduce her into his set. At the home of Charles Peignot in Louveciennes, Laure met Crevel, Aragon, Picasso, Buñuel, but sensed the social charade: ‘a ridiculous spectacle in which I could play no role, I was anxious to go back to my books’ (p. 23). However, Peignot’s wife Suzanne, an early recipient of letters reproduced in The Collected Writings, attributes Laure’s restlessness to the lack of a man in her life, and suggests marriage as the formula to ease Laure’s ills. At this place and time Laure meets and attempts to elope with her first lover, sure in the knowledge that marriage is not the key to her fulfilment. Laure and Jean Bernier met in 1926: he was nine years older than her and involved with another woman. Although their relationship was chronologically short-lived, it marks a definitive point in Laure’s life. She broke away from her family and their bourgeois morality, and followed Bernier to Corsica in April 1927. Sadly, upon arrival Bernier did not want her. A partial rendering of this affair is given in L’Amour de Laure, published under Bernier’s name by Flammarion in 1978 (an unreliable account consisting of his diaries of the time and some of Laure’s letters, released for publication by the recently widowed Mme Bernier). Weakened by tuberculosis and the complications of an ectopic pregnancy and back alone in Paris, Laure attempted suicide, but the bullet intended for her heart ricocheted off her ribs, and Charles and Suzanne had her quietly transferred to hospital. Poor health did not prevent Laure from living as excessively as her nature dictated: she moved to Berlin where, as Bataille lasciviously relates in his ‘Laure’s life’, she became the sexual slave of an ageing doctor called Eduard Trautner. (Laure destroyed all but one page of her writing from this time.) She then learned some Russian and departed for Leningrad and Moscow, where she lived with the writer Boris Pilniak (who was executed by Stalin, probably in 1937, partly because of his foreign friends). In a further bid to mortify her flesh Laure opted to live in a remote village among the muzhiks during winter. This almost killed her too, and Bataille reports that she had to be brought back to Paris by her brother. Her ‘Notes on the Revolution’, inspired by the journey to Russia, slip

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between abstract political and economic argument, from comments on what she is reading in Pravda, to anecdotal evidence of the brutality of collectivization. Upon her return, Laure took up with Boris Souvarine, France’s leading (oppositional) communist at the time; it was from Souvarine to Bataille that she eventually transferred her affections. (Souveraine pays tribute to Laure in the 1983 Prologue to the reedition of La Critique Sociale, the journal which he founded and Laure funded from 1931 to 1934: another unreliable, selfjustificatory memoir, but illustrated with several photographs of Laure not seen elsewhere.) Bataille left his wife and daughter for Laure in 1934, after having shadowed her and Souvarine across the Austrian Tyrol. (Souvarine had her committed to a santorium upon their return to Paris— his last attempt to ‘protect’ her.) Four years later, Laure died from tuberculosis in Bataille’s bed in the house they shared in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. One of the fragments included for publication by Bataille states, The God—Bataille/BATAILLE/To replace God’ (p. 203). In ‘My diagonal mother’, Jérôme Peignot contextualizes his odd love for his aunt with reference to Bataille, discerning traces of Laure in Guilty, Eroticism, and particularly L’abbé C and Blue of Noon: ‘Laure was undoubtedly present in the strongest places in Bataille’s books. How had I not thought of it earlier?’ (p. 292). Following ‘Story of a little girl’ in The Collected Writings is a section of poetry and prose fragments entitled ‘The Sacred’, with notes by Bataille and Leiris; this was originally a private edition of Laure’s writing printed shortly after her death and distributed among her friends. On first reading these papers (which Laure was attempting to put in order as she was dying), Bataille attests to their independent formulation. Laure insists that the sacred lies in communication. Bataille writes, ‘I had only arrived at this idea at the very moment I expressed it, a few minutes before noticing that Laure had entered the throes of death’ (p. 254). ‘The Sacred’ includes a reproduction of one of André Masson’s drawings for ‘Acéphale’, the secret society and eponymous journal which Bataille formed in 1936. Although ‘Acéphale’ is generally assumed to be an exclusively male group (with the rare exception of Isabelle Waldberg), Leiris suggests that Laure was instrumental in its creation; her writing clearly shows that she was familiar with the rituals pertaining to the group’s activities. ‘The sacred’ also includes a piece entitled ‘Libertinage: the stages of “Laure”’, a poem in which a broken female voice discusses a seemingly Bataillean concept of eroticism—‘In the toilets the summits’—with the inverted commas suggesting pseudonymity (p. 69). Jérôme Peignot discusses reading his aunt’s handwriting crosshatched with the script of Leiris and Bataille (p. 306), and refers to her as both Colette and Laure. His testimony acknowledges the friction between the Peignot family and Bataille, staged across Laure’s dead body (a photograph taken of Laure just after she died included in the Pauvert 1977 edition of her work is omitted from this translation). Laure herself writes, in one of her untitled pre-1936 poems:

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From this invisible window I saw all my friends divide my life between them in shreds they gnawed to the bones and not wanting to waste such a lovely piece fought over the carcass. (p. 46) The front cover of the City Lights Collected Writings shows a pair of splayed, stockinged female legs protruding upside-down from a black palette, the blurb on the back cover stating ‘Laure was a revolutionary poet, masochist, Catholic rich girl’—which is all very exciting but does not seem to do justice to the material. Read in the context of her publication history she is the posthumous creation of Bataille, aided and abetted by Leiris, but she simultaneously manages to elude them. One need only read her brief description of a bullfight she attended in Spain (p. 63) to recognize afresh the ridiculous element of the erotic imaginings of both Bataille and Leiris when tackling the same subject. The unique voice of Laure emerges in The Collected Writings as a challenge to the primarily maledominated avant-garde milieu in which she moved. University of Sussex

Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams (London and New York: 1995), Routledge, 333 pp., £19.99 (hardback) Roger Sales

When the ambitious young Raymond Williams had homework to do, his parents discreetly went out for a long walk so that he could have the peace and quiet that was thought to be essential for him. Except for the perhaps inevitable blip in his second year as an undergraduate at Cambridge, Williams got down to his homework steadily and successfully throughout the rest of his life. The daily grind on the old typewriter was essentially the same. It did not matter whether he was teaching adults in Sussex, students back in Cambridge or holding a visiting professorship in the United States. The actual routine of writing may not have varied very much, and yet the nature of the homework itself underwent important changes. Academic work was increasingly done alongside creative writing, journalism and political pamphleteering. Fred Inglis notes that Williams was a prolific journalist in both his student and army days, which helps to explain the success of his later work for the Guardian and the Listener. Perhaps Williams’s greatest single achieve ment was to show others, through his own unflagging example, how literary criticism could and should be informed by other forms and styles of writing. It has become relatively commonplace now for academics to introduce elements of autobiography into their writings. When Williams first started doing this it had the shock, and real excitement, of the new. Although Inglis tends to exaggerate the stories about Williams’s neglect of students at Cambridge, he is still probably correct to see the life as being essentially a writer’s life. This presents the biographer with two problems, one general and the other more particular. First of all, writers often lead particularly dull lives and Williams, with his homework routines undertaken in not so splendid isolation, was no exception to this rule. Even so, Inglis is not interested in looking at Williams’s private life in any detail. What was the nature and extent of Williams’s break with his mother which happened as a result of his marriage? What can be made of the fact that he did not like his wife to wear lipstick? This biography does not answer such questions. Apart from its early chapters dealing with childhood, the emphasis is on the professional rather than on the personal. Inglis’s version of Williams is of a driven man whose professional commitments and concerns always dominated his more personal life. This may have been the case but not, I think, to the extent that Inglis would like us to believe that it was.

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Although the biography offers glimpses of a sadness bordering at times on melancholia, it is too discreet or perhaps just too embarrassed to probe any further. The second problem which confronts Inglis in writing this particular writer’s life is that Williams was by no means naturally gifted as a writer. Inglis suggests that Williams found it difficult to say ‘no’ and thus wrote too much. Perhaps there are elements of truth in this but, by itself, it does not really solve the enigma of Williams’s popularity as a writer. Here was somebody whose prose was often, to quote Inglis, very ‘murky’ indeed and who was capable of producing, to quote his biographer again, an ‘unreadable book’ like Marxism and Literature. Koba is described as an ‘awful play’. And yet here also was a writer whose books continue to inspire university students, as well as reaching out to a more general readership. One of Williams’s books was transcribed by his wife from recordings of a lecture series, and it may be that the appeal of his writing in general owes something to its conversational tone and cadences. A lengthy biography like this one should have worked harder to establish more precisely why such a writer, as writer, achieved the popularity that he did. Inglis, who admits to having felt uncomfortable in Williams’s company on one occasion, may be too squeamish to look in detail at personal matters, and yet his biography still contains some potentially sharp criticisms of its subject. Williams’s early enthusiasm for the Soviet Union is seen as being particularly naive. The person who taught many of us to use a term like culture in a broad sense is shown to be quite narrow at times in his own interests. He may have written about drama in performance, but preferred watching films and television to going to the theatre. He apparently had little interest in art or music. Despite his insistence on materialism, he did not work on material cultural texts such as buildings. Although he did indeed pioneer the academic study of film and television, he still paradoxically retained an essentially Leavisite belief in the primacy of the written text. His undoubted radicalism when writing on such issues as class and community was too inflexible to accommodate easily radical work on gender and sexualities that was emerging towards the end of his career. Inglis’s biography is to some extent built around the many interviews he conducted with Williams’s former students and colleagues. One student from his adult education days remembers his ‘kindness’, a colleague from the same period recalls his ‘courtesy’. Although the picture that emerges from these interviews is not necessarily a uniform one, they nevertheless still convey the sense of somebody who might be very withdrawn and yet could still reach out to help others. This would not be particularly remarkable in itself and only becomes so because kindness and courtesy were almost conspicuous by their absence in the madhouse that used to masquerade as the Cambridge English Faculty. Inglis quotes Q.D.Leavis’s dilemma when a new professor was appointed: she wanted to tell him to go to hell but then realized that ‘with your wife, you already live there’. Inglis does not ask nearly enough questions about why Williams should ever have wanted to return to Cambridge, which he himself was to describe as

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one of the ‘rudest’ places on earth. The biography is nevertheless good at conveying a sense of Williams’s sanity and humanity when he had the thankless task of trying to organize the Faculty. Although this is essentially a biography of Williams the driven writer, Williams the patient bureaucrat also emerges strongly in the chapters dealing with his time back at Cambridge. Stephen Heath remarked upon Williams’s ‘utter lack of cynicism’ in a memorial address that was indeed very memorable. Again, such a personal quality might not have become so noticeable in another environment. Just reading Inglis’s account of squalid little Cambridge sideshows such as the MacCabe affair should induce profound cynicism in most readers. Perhaps Heath’s remark, quoted by Inglis, goes some way towards explaining Williams’s popularity as a writer. The prose could be murky and the theories sometimes muddled (Inglis explores in some detail the conceptual problems with Keywords), but the commitment and conviction, untinged by cynicism or too much pessimism, still shine quite clearly through. Williams emerges from Inglis’s biography as what might be described as a ‘conviction’ academic and writer. This is why a book like The Country and the City, which openly embodies many of Williams’s convictions, can still surprise undergraduates while helping them, as writers, to find their own voices. Inglis underestimates the importance of this book, as well as being unconcerned with the later work on William Cobbett and John Clare. His objection seems to be that Williams’s strong convictions about class and community lead to over-determined readings which in turn support a clear thesis. For readers rather than fellow professionals this clarity of conviction, if not always of expression, is likely to be seen as a strength rather than as a weakness. Williams knew more than many of his contemporaries did about how to hold audiences that were not captive ones, with fifteen years’ experience in adult education and a lot of journalism to his credit. He talked, sometimes conversationally and at other times more self-consciously rhetorically, about himself, his beliefs and convictions, and his reactions to cultural events past and present. Although it helps, it is not necessary to share his particular convictions to recognize that the homework he sat down to do almost every day in ‘crowded, cramped and rather cheerless studies’ has transformed the way in which English literature is studied, taught and written about. This is not just to draw attention, as Inglis does, to how his homework laid some of the theoretical foundations for cultural studies. It is also to emphasize the more general point that he developed a style of academic writing, that included elements of autobiography, creative writing and journalism, which has been inspirational for many who did not share his particular political convictions. Speaking of autobiography, I should perhaps say that I was one of Williams’s research students in the early 1970s, working on John Clare and other workingclass writers. My first book was published in a series which he edited and, after his death, I dedicated another book to him. This is the first biography that I have reviewed which is about somebody I knew, not well but who still had a profound

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influence on me. It has not been an easy task and presumably there were times when Inglis’s own knowledge of Williams was more of a hindrance than a help. At this more personal level I can say that the biography captures very well the person whom I knew: withdrawn certainly and some times difficult to reach, but still a model supervisor who was genuinely excited by my ideas and discoveries. He treated his research students as equals and I never remember him talking down to me. When I was having difficulties with a particular chapter, he talked very frankly and freely about pieces of writing that had given him trouble. At the time of his death I had just started writing a book on Christopher Marlowe, which had its origins in a long conversation we once had together about drama in a dramatized society, a subject which seemingly had little to do with the thesis I was currently supposed to be writing. Once again, the word conversation crops up when I think about Williams. I, and many of Inglis’s interviewees, had the rare privilege (perhaps not appreciated at the time as much as it should have been) of being able to talk to him about our work as well as about his own current research. Readers of his books have always been able to hear that part of the conversation in which he talks to them about, and shares with them, his convictions and beliefs. University of East Anglia

Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism; vol. 1, The Women of 1928; vol. 2, Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), xliii+318 pp., £14.99 (paperback); xviii+217 pp., £12.50 (paperback)

T.E.Hulme, The Collected Writings of T.E.Hulme, edited by Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), xxxvi+489 pp., £60.00 (hardback) Paul Edwards

Bonnie Kime Scott’s two-volume study of modernism has great ambitions, but exactly what they are is difficult to specify. The title, The Women of 1928, marks Volume 1 as some sort of response to Wyndham Lewis’s phrase, ‘the men of 1914’, and both volumes can be taken as a reply to studies devoted to those men, such as Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. That masculine version of high modernism is particularly suited to narrative and biographical exposition because Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Lewis were each crucial presences in the others’ histories, and in each other’s works, as Dennis Brown’s Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group showed. In setting up her alternative grouping, Scott faces the difficulty that there are no comparable connections among her trio of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West and Djuna Barnes. They had almost nothing to do with each other apart from a minimal, uneasy relationship between West and Woolf. This would not matter if Scott had not chosen a biographical approach for her first volume. But she wishes to trace the ‘web’ or network of mutual support and connection from which her writers were able to make a ‘leap’ into their own version of modernism— ‘to haul in beauty and life’, as Scott puts it, in a characteristically ungainly phrase. The biographical items Scott has collected from various archives are assembled by topic into chapters covering the chosen three’s troubled family backgrounds, their relationships with women who helped them personally (or by example) to become confident writers, their feminist commitments and their relationships with Edwardian male writers and with ‘the men of 1914’. Despite a long preface that expatiates on the significance of her governing metaphor of the web and which lines up various big names as theoretical support (‘Kristeva is also sympathetic with the theories of the carnival and the dialogic, which she construes as polyphonic, in the work of M.M.Bakhtin. The spider seems to me highly compatible with the carnival…’), Scott’s book is completely lacking in theoretical underpinning. Thus when she writes, for instance, that ‘Joyce was more an exemplum of modernism than one of its movers or makers’, the reader can do no more than wonder at the number of questions begged in such a short sentence. Another example requires fuller quotation. It concerns Rebecca West’s relationship with Lord Beaverbrook:

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West challenged him to cover cases concerning supposed Communist agents such as Alger Hiss more closely in his paper…and expressed suspicion of his attitudes toward Communism to friends. She was on the lookout for threats to Western security. West warned him about a book by Alan Moorhead, written with the encouragement of the Minister of Supply, that she thought threatened to split American and British intelligence efforts in 1952. Their final exchange was over a gift from him, awarding her discretion in The Vassal Affair, published in 1963. In writing on the spy trial of a civil servant in the British Admiralty, she had been judicious in reporting the role of his newspaper. In the past, Beaverbrook had always awarded her with roses. This time he sent a case of his finest claret, one of two remaining at the end of his life. The division ‘one for you and one for me’ was unusually egalitarian…. She replied, with typical spirit, that accepting it was the ‘nearest I have come to bribery and corruption during my long career, and I like it’…. Her concern with power politics stretched usual conceptions of the woman writer, to the extent that Gloria Fromm has categorized this aspect of her writing as masculine. Is this included as a charming anecdote, or as evidence for Fromm’s point? The breezy inconsequentiality of this oddly phrased narrative is not the result of my cutting (parenthetical citations of sources are all that I have omitted). Scott seems simply unaware of the issues that her material raises. Later on in the book she commends West’s ‘remarkable ability to move on with history’ (shown in her criticism of Lewis’s ‘Enemy’ persona as inappropriate in the late 1920s—by which time, according to Scott, ‘many of the male modernists were feeling a loss of vitality’). In Volume Two Scott amplifies her point: As an author who wrote in eight different decades, adapting to the changing political, economic and artistic character of each of them, West is of strategic importance in these changing times, when we no longer wage a cold war against Communism but confront reasserted nationalism, neoNazis, and feminist [sic] backlash. A lot of questions would need to be addressed before judgements of this kind could begin to make sense, let alone be argued over. The big questions hanging in the air throughout the first volume, though, are why concentrate on these three writers in particular— what unites their work into an identifiable type of modernism, and how does this relate to masculine constructions of the movement? Volume Two, Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes ought to contain the answers, but it does not. The quality of the postmodernism brought to bear on the questions can be gauged by Scott’s conclusion about West’s aesthetics: ‘In the course of her work she shares many delights with us—environments of productive intellectual discussion,

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beauty, and art.’ The readings aren’t post-anything, but merely assemble data and judgements about the texts, topic by topic. When a critical crux arises, Scott skirts it by enumerating the varied conclusions of other critics. She complains about Hugh Kenner’s insensitivity to the gender implications of metaphors, but reads with little sensitivity herself. Quoting Woolf on reading Eliot (‘As I sun myself upon the ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so on from line to line, like an acrobat flying precariously from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorums, and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through midair, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book’), she reflects that Woolf ‘is more caring of her readers than Eliot’. But surely Woolf’s piece of critical kitsch is actually an example of what real modernists despised, precisely the justification for their contempt for the established culture of their time? So in what sense are these three writers really to be regarded as modernists? There seems to be no reason to regard West as one, but a good case could be made for Djuna Barnes. Woolf wanted to be a modernist, of course, but was right to suspect her own incapacity. Scott solemnly quotes Rhoda from The Waves: There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Melodramatic bombast of this kind is hardly modernist—indeed, it was mocked over three hundred years ago in The Rehearsal. Woolf declared herself the enemy of the ‘merely conventional’ in novels, but was in fact rarely able to escape the confines of the ready-made, the preconceived and the unimagined: Percival’s retinue ‘are always forming into fours and marching in troops with badges on their caps; they salute simultaneously passing the figure of their general… But they also leave butterflies trembling with their wings picked off.’ It is ironic that, aspiring to the ineffable, against her will her writing participates in the numbing cultural process of encoding experience as a relentless parade of meanings. At her best she does manage to create something beyond the preconceptions of her well-spoken omniscient narrators and to achieve genuinely ‘modernist’ effects, but plodding critical commentary tends to obscure rather than illuminate this achievement. ‘Modernism’ is a useful critical term, and must be reshaped and ‘refigured’ in critical—and feminist—debate if it is to remain useful, but it is not persuasively refigured in these two volumes. T.E.Hulme is one of the most important figures in the ‘masculine’ figuration of modernism. In Michael Levenson’s A Genealogy of Modernism, indeed, he is the key figure in the development of modernism in England, and it is easy to see why he should seem so central. Ezra Pound learned the principles and practice of

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imagism from him (though imagism would not have become a movement without Pound as impresario). Hulme was one of the main channels for the spread of Bergson’s ideas in Britain—and the importance of Bergsonism in modernism (of whatever gender) is still underestimated. Politically, Hulme is the very model of a male modernist, endorsing Action Française, and putting his name to the translation of Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence. (Typically, most of the work was actually done by somebody else; Hulme was a lazy man, and also a great planner of unwritten books and promiser of discussions in forthcoming articles that never arrived.) Hulme’s anti-democratic authoritarianism was also characteristically modernist in being more European than English. He imported from Germany an aesthetic (Wilhelm Worringer’s) for modernist visual arts that had far more explanatory power than the formalism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Finally, he was happy to fight in the First World War, and wrote a series of articles denouncing the pacifism of Bloomsbury. Wyndham Lewis called him ‘Hulme of Original Sin’, and it is true that Hulme’s fundamental belief in the limitation of humanity explains a lot about the development of his thought. In his earliest writings he criticized language in orthodox Nietzschean or Bergsonian fashion as a misleading guide to truth. Most language is a set of fixed ‘counters’ or tokens, while reality is more difficult to grasp and represent. Hence the poetry of the ‘image’. What is unusual, however, is Hulme’s depressing characterization of reality as ‘cinders’, rather than as some creative élan vital. And though he was to expound Bergsonism (in a series of meandering articles for The New Age) and commend it for freeing us from the nightmarish limitations of mechanism, what his soul really seems to have been hot for was certainty in the dusty answer he had first thought of. The contradiction between his Bergsonism and his ‘classical’ anti-romanticism, authoritarianism and anti-humanism has often been noticed—not least by Hulme himself, who went to the trouble of consulting Pierre Lasserre about it, and reproducing Lasserre’s reply in one of the articles on Bergson. Michael Levenson traces in Hulme’s writing a coherent development out of this contradiction, but Karen Csengeri thinks Levenson has misread him. Since Hulme was not an original philosopher, and produced no new philosophical ideas or arguments, the precise fluctuations of his views are not intrinsically significant, however. His ‘final’ position, expounded in a series of articles called ‘A Notebook’, was reached by erecting barriers between the various discourses he needed to recognize as valid, so that, for example, his Bergsonism should no longer have any ethical connotation, his religious absolutism should be invulnerable to Bergson’s critique of language, and all philosophical views could be considered in isolation from the arguments philosophers used to support them (and vice versa). Of course, it is impossible to introduce absolute discontinuities into discourse in this way without chopping up your ‘self’ at the same time; T.S.Eliot’s enthusiasm for Hulme’s writings when they were first selected and presented by Herbert Read in 1924 was therefore entirely appropriate, for such a

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dismemberment of the personality was the basis of Eliot’s theory and practice. Insofar as Hulme wished to make what he called a ‘critique of satisfaction’ (which, with a little latitude, could be interpreted as an ideological critique of the canons by which arguments are deemed to have authority), he can be considered to be a forerunner of deconstruction. And his separation of discourses can be seen as an essential precondition for a totally relativistic postmodernism. But his work also shows, in a pristine state, as it were—before the complexities of history made it anything more than an intellectual paradox—the flip-flop relationship between linguistic scepticism and political or religious absolutism that was typical of modernism. Hulme’s writing remains an essential way into an understanding of the modernist Zeitgeist, and hence of its postmodern offshoots, though he expresses that Zeitgeist too clearly and honestly to be a mere product of it. I have used scare-quotes when referring to Hulme’s ‘final’ position. He was killed by a German shell at Nieuwpoort in 1917, while serving in an RMA battery only a few hundred yards from where Wyndham Lewis was installing howitzers with another artillery regiment. Lewis, who had already written Tarr and Enemy of the Stars, and painted some of the most important British modernist canvases, survived, and his reputation has never recovered from what he did in his subsequent career. Hulme, on the other hand, regarded himself as having hardly even begun the major work he was destined to achieve; he never reached a final position, and all his prose writings have an air of being the provisional statements of someone who has not had time to think things through. The negative symptoms of this are carelessness in writing and rashness in promising systematic discussions next week. Positively, what it means is that he is always sensitive to what lies behind thought and impels the thinker to develop an argument in a particular direction, and to what it feels like to think (or need to think) a particular thing. This has its own dangers, but they are seen more in the prose of Ezra Pound than in that of Hulme himself. Hulme’s worst influence was probably in convincing Pound that hunches and strongly felt intuitions were their own best ‘canons of satisfaction’ and required rhetorical support rather than empirical or logical testing. Hulme’s only real finished work was his poetry (though he had abandoned the medium by 1910). He made some odd pronouncements, such as that poetry was a substitute for a superior faculty that would hand over sensations bodily and immediately (virtual reality?) or that a poet’s sincerity could be judged by the number of images in his work. Both these ideas are obviously wrong, but they need to be understood in the context of Hulme’s ambition to write ‘body-poetry’ that would have a religious dimension: ‘To be asked to sit on one’s hands with one’s toes nearly in one’s mouth seems to express some new mood not got in poetry.’ Images were an index of sincerity because in his own work they were the expression of his ultimately religious apprehension of the world, which was physical as much as spiritual, ‘or else heaven would be awful, a vast mixture of abstract terms, mind, good, Rot, Virtue, sex’. The root of Hulme’s religious

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feeling, which he later attempted to express in his prose writings on original sin, seems to have been his experience of Canada, where he spent several months in 1906 travelling over the prairies, supporting himself as a farm-labourer and lumberjack: ‘The flats of Canada are incomprehensible on any theory. The world only comprehensible on the cinder theory.’ He explained in a lecture that ‘the first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada’. The visual experience of the prairie does not enter Hulme’s few finished poems. But it can be traced (surprisingly) behind the image that concludes the wonderful little ‘fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night’, ‘The Embankment’: Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie. Hulme’s drafts mention the gods as ‘the blanket makers in the prairie of cold’, sleeping in their blankets. These drafts are placed under the heading, ‘Religion is the expansive lie of temporary warmth’. Another poem, ‘Madman’, uses an image of the ocean to convey this same sense of chilled isolation within an unthinkable expanse. This poem was probably further refined to become ‘The Man in the Crow’s Nest’: Strange to me, sounds the wind that blows By the masthead, in the lonely night Maybe ‘tis the sea whistling—feigning joy To hide its fright Like a village boy That trembling past the churchyard goes. Nothing else in Hulme’s writing is as effective as some of these wry little masterpieces. This is one of the reasons why Karen Cseng eri’s edition of his works, though welcome as what she accurately calls ‘the first more or less complete collection’, is not altogether satisfactory. Hulme published six poems, but Csengeri prints eight (two having been published by Michael Roberts in the 1930s). But several drafts, fragments and other complete poems also survive, and were published in the 1950s in Sam Hynes’s selection of Hulme’s Further Speculations. Alun Jones’s The Life and Opinions of T.E. Hulme contained more, and Jones went back to original manuscripts and recorded variants. It is his transcription of The Man in the Crow’s Nest’ that I have quoted. In the new edition we are simply given Roberts’s version, the last line of which reads That, shivering, past the churchyard goes’. Jones records that he can find no authority for Roberts’s substitution of the word ‘shivering’; and it could be added that the ‘correct’ punctuation of the line also detracts from its effectiveness. In the other

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poem first published by Roberts, Jones reads ‘fixedly’ for Roberts’s ‘finally’, and ‘arching’ for his ‘along’. Csengeri’s notes record none of this. Nor does she enunciate the editorial principle behind her decision not to record it nor to print Hulme’s other poems, such as ‘Madman’. She does explain that she has excluded Hulme’s letters from the collection because they are of biographical interest only, or have topical interest in their context only. But my quotations about ‘bodypoetry’ actually come from a letter (printed by Jones), and much of what Csengeri has chosen to publish is interesting precisely because of its topical context. Editing texts is a surprisingly difficult thing to do, as much like juggling as it is like the pettifogging drudgery it sometimes resembles. Karen Csengeri has certainly done a reasonable job, and has provided full and authoritative texts of materials that earlier editors tidied up. But we would expect, at this price, from this publisher, a complete Hulme, not a ‘more or less’ complete one. The Collected Writings of T.E.Hulme makes available writings that are indispensable to an understanding of modernism, and for that we should be grateful. Anyone who wants to study Hulme as a poet will still need to consult Jones’s 1960 study, and anyone who wants to study the development of his thought in detail will need to consult his correspondence in The New Age (Csengeri provides a useful bibliography). Whether other manuscripts still survive unpublished (such as the letters written from Canada), she does not tell us. Bath College of Higher Education

Abstracts and keywords

The diasporic imaginary: theorizing the Indian diaspora Vijay Mishra Fractured, ‘scattered, damaged’ (after Salman Rushdie) disaggregates of races criss-crossing the globe in large numbers rupture the imagined homogeneity of nations. Diasporas are such ‘disaggregates’ of races for whom the space of habitation is always linked to the space of absence, the imaginary homeland that has been left behind. This article theorizes the state of the nine million strong Indian diaspora by looking at it as two interlinked but historically separated diasporas: the old Indian diaspora of ‘exclusivism’ and the new Indian diaspora of ‘border’. The diaspora of exclusivism grew out of the demands of nineteenthcentury classic capitalism when labour had to be moved from one part of the empire to plantations in the colonies. The new diaspora of border is very much a feature of late modern capital and is characterized by the movement of people from the former colonies to the metropolitan centres of Empire, the New World and the ex-settler colonies. Although current diasporic theory sees diasporas, with considerable romantic exaggeration one suspects, as the exemplary condition of late modernity and/or as cultural formations whose own discontinuous and fractured histories context the hitherto unproblematic and largely linear histories of nation states, any serious examination of the two Indian archives (the old and the new) indicates that diasporas are complex formations linked on the one hand to the politics of the nation-state and on the other to their imaginary homelands. The paper uses the texts of Naipaul and Kureishi in particular to examine how these two Indian diasporas constitute what the paper calls the ‘diasporic imaginary’, a term used to refer to an ethnic community in a nation-state that defines itself, for whatever reason, as a group that lives in displacement. Textual Practice 10(3), 1996, 575–578

© 1996 Routledge 0950–236X

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Keywords Diasporas, exclusivism and border, indenture, homeland, the law of the hyphen, race and racism Tragedy and the nationalist condition of criticism Thomas Docherty This article proposes a relation between the construction of the modern critical consciousness and the emergence of the modern nation-state at the end of the seventeenth century. The nexus of aesthetic criticism and political nationalism is to be found in arguments concerning the nature of tragedy and national cultural supremacy, primarily between England and France, Dryden and Corneille. The key element for the theoretical understanding of the stakes of this criticism is the function of terror in tragedy. The modern is shown to be determined by a terror of alterity in general, and specifically by a terror regarding the object of criticism; and the consequence of such terror is the production of a critical consciousness which is primarily concerned with criticism as an act of self-legitimation, an act of validation of the identity of the critical subject at the cost of the object. This is shown to persist from Descartes to Baudrillard. The historical specificity of the argument relates to the conditions of an emerging nationalist consciousness at the time of the Second Dutch War. England (Dryden and Thomas Sprat) is seen to be struggling to legitimize itself as a nationalist and proto-imperial power against France (Corneille and Samuel de Sorbiere), which has similar aspirations. Yet the struggle between these two for cultural dominance, ostensibly fought out in arguments about national theatres, actually occludes the proper object of controversy: Africa, over which there is precisely a terror of alterity. The modern critical consciousness is seen to elide its other—Africa—in the construction of its own genealogy. Finally, the possibility of a counter to such fear of alterity— which is nothing less than a fear of material history itself—is shown to be immanent in the emerging cultural construction of the ‘humour’ of love. Keywords Tragedy, Africa, modernity, love, terror, Dryden Melodrama as avant-garde Simon Shepherd The first work to appear in English called a ‘melo-drame’ was written by Thomas Holcroft, a friend of William Godwin. The melo-drame propounds radical views such as are associated with the Godwin circle. To this end it has to

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develop a new stage language, not only reworking the original French text on which it was based, but also breaking with contemporary modes such as gothic drama and pantomime. As staged event the melo-drame was perhaps a more forceful vehicle for Godwinian ideas than was the novel. The intention of Holcroft was to communicate to, and work upon the emotions of, as large a number of people as possible. The melo-drame is thus a work which breaks with past forms in order to communicate radical insights to a popular audience, and in so doing to advance their understanding. In this sense it is avant-garde. That recognition is, however, inhibited by a theorization of the avant-garde that bases itself almost exclusively on artistic movements of the early part of the twentieth century. In terms of the original formulation, by utopian socialists, of a concept of the artistic avant-garde, melodrama fits. The element which potentially proves most obstructive to its categorization as avant-garde, namely its mass popularity, can be shown to be a consciously avant-garde strategy. The new theatrical language of melodrama directly engages, and provides a body for, the progressivis timpulses of its audience. Keywords Artisan, avant-garde, body, Holcroft, melodrama, subjectivity Bisexuality, heterosexuality, and wishful theory Jonathan Dollimare This essay considers the controversies surrounding bisexuality, especially gay and lesbian hostility to it, and the theoretical and political defences of it. It is sceptical of the way a new bisexual politics is refashioning bisexuality as perfectly postmodern, and suggests that such accounts share something with the identity politics they are so adamantly against: both involve defences against the instability, the disruptiveness of desire itself. For all their radical affect, there is something predictably safe about many of the recent defences of bisexuality, not least their apparent reluctance to concede that desire always retains the potential to unfix my identity, and not only that of my oppressive other. This leads to a critique of so-called ‘wishful theory’; that is, the kind of theory which, at its worst, gestures towards difference yet from a perspective which remains intellectually totalizing and reductive; which is self-empowering in a politically spurious way, and which, despite its ostentatious performance of a high sophistication, tends to erase the psychic, social and historical complexities of the cultural life it addresses; which fabricates eclectic theoretical narratives whose main effect seems to be to insulate their adherents from social reality, in the very act of fantasizing its subversion (always the subversion of the other). This theory, which is usually self-exonerating, is hardly ever self-questioning.

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Keywords Bisexuality, heterosexuality, identity politics, theory, wishful theory, desire, fantasy.

Notes for contributors

Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English, to Alan Sinfield, Textual Practice, Arts Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN. It will be assumed that authors will keep a copy. Submission of a paper to Textual Practice will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. In order to ensure both the widest possible distribution and the most secure protection for the articles in TP, contributors will be asked to assign copyright to the journal. This will not restrict contributors’ republication of their own work, after twelve months have elapsed. The manuscript Submissions should be typed in double spacing on one side only of the paper, preferably of A4 size, with a 4cm margin on the left-hand side. Articles should normally be of between 7000 and 8000 words in length. Tables should not be inserted in the pages of the manuscript but should be on separate sheets. The desired position in the text for each table should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. Photographs Photographs should be in high-contrast black-and-white glossy prints. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained by authors before submission, and any acknowledgements should be included in the captions. References These should be numbered consecutively in the text, thus: ‘According to a recent theory,4…’, and collected at the end of the paper in the following styles, for journals and books respectively: John Hartley and John Fiske, ‘Myth-representations: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), pp. 12–33. Christopher Norris, The Deconstructive Turn (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). Proofs Page proofs will be sent for correction to the first-named author, unless otherwise requested. The difficulty and expense involved in making amendments at the page proof stage make it essential for authors to prepare their typescripts carefully: any alterations to the original text are strongly discouraged. Our aim is

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rapid publication: this will be helped if authors provide good copy, following the above instructions, and return their page proofs as quickly as possible. Offprints Twenty-five offprints will be supplied free of charge.

Index Volume 10

Lindsay Smith The shoe-black to the crossingsweeper: Victorian street Arabsand photography 29 Alan Sinfield Diaspora and hybridity: queer identities and the ethnicity model 271 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Diasporas old and new: women in the transnational world 245

Articles John Barrell ‘Laodamia’ and the moaning of Mary 449 Nicolas Brown ‘There are fairies at the bottom of our garden: fairies, fantasy and photography 57 Peter Buse Sinai snapshot: Freud, photography and the future perfect 123 Bryan Cheyette ‘Ineffable and usable’: towards a diasporic British-Jewish writing 295 Romita Choudhury ‘Is there a ghost, a zombie there?’ Postcolonial intertextuality and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea 315 Thomas Docherty Tragedy and the nationalist condition of criticism 479 Jonathan Dollimore Bisexuality and wishful theory 523 Lucy Hartley ‘The sign in the eye of what is known to the hand’: visualizing expression in Charles Bell’s Essays on Anatomy 83 Sarah Kember ‘The shadow of the object’: photography and realism 145 David Marriott Bordering on: the black penis 9 Vijay Mishra The diasporic imaginary: theorizing the Indian diaspora 421 David Norbrook The Emperor’s new body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the politics of Shakespearecriticism 320 Simon Shepherd Melodrama as avantgarde: enacting a new subjectivity 507 Lindsay Smith Introduction 1

Reviews Timo Airaksinen The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade 201 David B.Allison, Mark S.Roberts and Allen S.Weiss Sade and the Narrative of Transgression 201 David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (eds) Milton and Republicanism 573 Marleen Barr Lost in Space 173 Emily C.Bartels Spectacles of Strangeness 179 Leo Bersani Homos 387 Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn (eds) The Invisible in Architecture 405 M.Christine Boyer The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments 405 Christine Buci-Glucksman Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity 549 Massimo Cacciari Architecture and Nihilism and The Necessary Angel 359 Peter Carravetta Preface to the Diaphora 549

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Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory 398 Joan Copjec Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists 541 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari What is Philosophy? 217 G.N.Devy After Amnesia 215 John Docker Postmodernism and Popular culture 184 Susan Edmunds Out of Line 197 James Fairhall James Joyce and the Question of History 371 Horace L.Fairlamb Critical Conditions 184 Susan Stanford Friedman (ed.) Joyce: The Return of the Repressed 371 Henry Louis Gates Jr Colored People 165 Sokratis Georgiadis Sigfried Giedion: An Intellectual Biography 405 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang and Linda Rennie Forcey (eds) Mothering 207 David Theo Goldberg (ed.) Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader 398 Harriet Hawkins Strange Attractors 173 Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds) Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period 179 Tracey Hill and William Hughes (eds) Contemporary Writing and National Identity 381 T.E.Hulme The Collected Writings of T.E.Hulme 566 Fred Inglis Raymond Williams 562 Leonard Jackson The Dematerialization of Karl Marx 368 Fredric Jameson The Seeds of Time 184 Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E.von Mücke (eds) Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century 375 Linda A.Kinnahan Poetics of the Feminine 197 Rosalind E.Krauss The Optical Unconscious 542 Laure The Collected Writings 558 Pierre Macherey The Object of Literature 201 J.Hillis Miller Topographies 212

Carl Plasa and Betty J.Ring The Discourse of Slavery 207 Diane Roberts The Myth of Aunt Jemima 207 Jonathan Sawday The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture 375 Bonnie Kime Scott Refiguring Modernism 566 Jorge Semprun Schreiben oder Leben 191 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Outside in the Teaching Machine 228 Paul Virilio The Art of the Motor 546 Scott Wilson Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice 393 Jenny Wolmark Aliens and Others 173 Tim Youngs Travellers in Africa 223 Nicholas Zurbrugg The Parameters of Postmodernism 549