Textual Practice: Journal, Volume 8, Number 2 (Textual Practice)

Editor Terence Hawkes University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XB US associate editor Jean E.Howard Columbia University Postal address: Department of English and Comparative Literature, 602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York N.Y. 10027, USA Reviews editor Fred Botting Lancaster University Postal address: Department of English, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT Editorial board Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Malcolm Bowie All Souls’ College, Oxford Terry Eagleton University of Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Ania Loomba Stanford University, USA Editorial Assistant Louise Tucker

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three Xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University of Wales College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Fred Botting Department of English, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT Advertisements. Enquiries to David’ Polley, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £60.00; UK personal: £22.00; Rest of World full: £65.00; Rest of World personal: £24.00; USA full: $95.00; USA personal: $35.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP10 SBE. ISSN 0950–236X Phototypeset by Intype, London © Routledge 1994

ISBN 0-203-98812-4 Master e-book ISBN

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2 SUMMER 1994

Contents

Articles The post always rings twice: the postmodern and the postcolonial LINDA HUTCHEON

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Dead herrings: ‘You must have mistaken the author’ ORTWIN DE GRAEF

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Paradigms lost: chaos, Milton and Jurassic Park HARRIETT HAWKINS

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Prospero’s Books and the visionary page PETER SCHWENGER

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‘The life with a hole in it’: Philip Larkin and the condition of England NIGEL ALDERMAN

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The Heimlich Manoeuvre TERENCE HAWKES

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Reviews Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation DIETER FREUNDLIEB

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Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory TIM BRENNAN

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David Shepherd, Beyond Metafiction Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver Ian Reid, Narrative Exchanges Philip J.M.Sturgess, Narrativity NEIL CORNWELL

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Avital Ronell, Crack Wars LAWRENCE DRISCOLL

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David Lehman, Signs of the Times K.M.NEWTON

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Paula Marantz Cohen, The Daughter’s Dilemma Naomi Segal, The Adulteress’s Child

125

v

KATE FLINT Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (eds), Past the Last Post WARREN BUCKLAND

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Jacqueline de Weever, Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women’s Fiction CHIDI OKONKWO

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Richard Ambrosini, Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper Mark Wollaeger, Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism REYNOLD HUMPHRIES

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Geert Lernout, The French Joyce Derek Attridge (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce Vincent J.Cheng and Timothy Martin (eds), Joyce in Context ROSEMARIE A.BATTAGLIA

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Brian Rigby, Popular Culture in Modern France IAN BUCHANAN

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Molly Andrews, Lifetimes of Commitment WILLY MALEY

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The post always rings twice: the postmodern and the postcolonial LINDA HUTCHEON

(The Routledge Lecture, delivered on 22 May 1993 at the University of Wales College of Cardiff) On the contested cultural turf of today, not only are we not ‘past the last post’1 but the ‘posts’ seem to want to proliferate. Over the last decade, the ‘postmodern’ has become the polemical terrain of fierce debate as well as glib generalization; the ‘postcolonial’ may well face the same fate —but the stakes may be even higher. Debates about historiography and reflexivity, and their role in the politics of cultural representation, can likely never be innocent ones; nor can they be uncontroversial in either the postmodern or postcolonial arenas. These are shared issues, even if the articulation, interpretation, and deployment of them differ considerably. What most theorists (however they define the ‘post’s) seem to agree upon is that the reason for these mutual concerns is their common oppositional grounding in—or, rather, against— what has been generalized and usually demonized into this thing called ‘modernity’. Put in the admittedly reductive (but perhaps heuristically useful) terms of ‘cultural shorthand’: in most accounts these days, the movement from Renaissance humanism to the beginning of the ‘modern project’, to use Jürgen Habermas’s term, starts with the Cartesian and Enlightenment shift from scholasticism to what Stephen Toulmin describes as ‘a higher, stratospheric plane, in which nature and ethics conform to abstract, timeless, general, and universal theories’.2 On this plane—or so the simplified version of the story goes—connections between knowledge and objects of knowledge (nature, the self, history, society) are said to be objectively determined, providing a foundation which permits a systematization that works toward what is seen as an inherently progressive grasp of ‘truth’. Knowledge thus accrued is said to be not only culture-neutral, but valuefree. But, doubt and worries about contingency are just as much a part of the modern heritage and, of course, the debates over the politics of the ordering, legitimizing, system-building power of reason and method are themselves also part of the very history of modernity; they are also ongoing, however, with Habermas3 arguing that the ‘project of modernity’ has not yet been completed, that its moral imperative to free humanity from injustice and to extend equality to the oppressed through rational communal grounds of consensus has not yet been achieved. Yet, what Habermas sees as liberatory consensus, others have seen as inhibiting conformism, as an ‘obsessively legislating, defining, structuring, segregating, classifying, recording and universalizing state [which] reflected the splendour of universal and absolute standards of truth’.4 Those of us who are academics work within one of the major cultural institutions of modernity and, whatever our individual evaluation of the modern project, and whatever our personal position (consensual support or oppositional resistance), we participate in what has been called the ‘exercise of social control

© Routledge 1994

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through the meting out of learning, mediated and identified with the achievement of worth’.5 But these words were, in fact, written to describe the ideological and historical assumptions of curators of ethnographic museums, not university teachers. Both the museum and the academy in Europe and North America have traditionally shared an institutionalized faith in reason and method, not to mention an often unavoidable intersection with governmental agencies; together these have contributed to the ‘authority effect’ they each create.6 Not surprisingly, both institutions have come under considerable scrutiny from postmodern theory, intent on deconstructing that effect and its ideological consequences. Both could be said to work toward the acquisition of knowledge7 through collecting, ordering, preserving, and displaying—in their different ways—the ‘objects’ of human civilization in all its varieties. If it is the ideology of these processes of constructing meaning and significance that has provoked the postmodern critique, it is the nature of those very ‘objects’ that has initially brought the postcolonial into the academic debates—in literary criticism and anthropology especially— and, increasingly, into the discourse of museums, especially ethnographic ones. It is the latter that will be the focus here. Over the last few decades, museums have begun to see themselves as cultural ‘texts’ and have become increasingly self-reflexive about their premises, identity, and mission.8 Among the questions asked anew are: Do objects speak for themselves? If so, how? What objects have been collected, and why? What constitutes the so-called authenticity of an object?9 The history and economics of collecting have received much attention lately from many quarters, as have the current legal, ethical and financial constraints on acquisition, custody and disposal of ‘cultural property’.10 But the history of most European and North American ethnographic museum collections is one that cannot easily be separated from the specific history of imperialism.11 Not only were the objects collected often the spoils of colonial conquest (seen at the time as ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration’), but their acquisition and retention have been legitimated by the institutionalization of an ideal (and an ideology) of apolitical, detached objectivity and a positivist commitment to science.12 This connection between historical imperialism and what some now see as intellectual imperialism13 might best be understood within the context of the common denominator of what I too have here been calling —in admittedly reductive shorthand terms—modernity. In very general theoretical terms, it could be said that assumptions of neutrality and objectivity and of the value of rationality, empiricism, and technology are ‘modern’ assumptions that form the practical foundations of the post-Enlightenment public museum, even today. If museums are still structured on ‘rigid taxonomies and classification, whereby it was believed that artefacts could be laid out in a consistent, unitary and linear way’,14 it is because they are still in some ways the physical embodiments of modernity’s desire to make order and therefore meaning. What some see as the universalization inherent in the Enlightenment project15 works to smooth over gaps and unite fragments into a systematized cultural totality. One of the manifestations of this process is the display of diverse, culturally specific objects in highly aestheticized,16 (architecturally) late modernist galleries that effectively wipe out particularity of context or history. Of course, the very act of technically preserving objects from the ravages of time and decay (not to mention that of ‘restoring’ them to their ‘original’ state) could be seen as universalizing in its denial of change over time. This stewardship model of the museum as the guardian of the human heritage entails a going beyond this conservation function to include a scholarly and educational mandate, both for experts and for the general public. In the last twenty years or so, however, experts working in the field of ethnography have articulated in a museum context the postmodern view of culture as text, reminding us that such ‘texts’ are interpreted and contexualized by ethnographers themselves. To borrow from the title of one of Clifford Geertz’s influential books, the aim of ‘interpretive anthropology’ is ‘local knowledge’.17 What James Clifford has called a ‘conceptual shift, “tectonic” in its implications’18 in ethnography is, in fact, a response to modernity by the

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postmodern, with major postcolonial implications. Gone are the days, writes Clifford, when anthropology (conceived of as apolitical and neutral) could speak ‘with automatic authority for others defined as unable to speak for themselves.’19 The acknowledgement—at last—of the ‘unequal power encounter’20 that marks both the discipline of anthropology and, in a different way, colonialism itself, has brought the politics of representation to the fore. The universalizing urge of modernity then begins to give way to the postmodern cultural politics of difference, described by Cornel West as the drive to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing.21 What has been referred to (if not generally accepted) as the ‘new museology’ works in this contentious territory, asking what the different purpose of the museum would be if it gave up its modern claims of neutrality and objectivity and what the role of the spectator could be in the now acknowledged act of the interpretation of objects, objects which do not independently transmit meaning but, rather, are open to many possible constructions of meaning depending on things like the design of the display, the context in the institution, the visual semiotics engaged, the historical background presented.22 However, not only objects change meaning over time; so too does the museum itself as institution, for it too is a constantly evolving social artefact23 that exists in a constantly changing social world. The postmodern discourse of museums now includes concepts of community access and involvement, of two-way interactive communication models, and of empowerment through knowledge.24 There is talk of a desire to find ways to engage with living cultures rather than only with objects of the past, of a desire not only to inform but to provoke thought. This is the general context for the particular focus of this article: one museum exhibition that certainly did engage with its immediate community and that definitely provoked thought, not to say controversy. It was an exhibition that put into play those familiar postmodern discursive strategies of irony and reflexivity in order to attempt to deconstruct the ideology of Empire that determined its particular collection of African objects. It thus ran counter to the more customary (unavoidable, but usually discreet) indirect mention of imperial provenance that could be read as an attempt to ‘close its history at the end of the colonial era itself’.25 From 16 November 1989 to 6 August 1990, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada presented an exhibition entitled ‘Into the Heart of Africa’. This was the first complete (and thus long-awaited) showing of the small African collection of the museum, but what began with good intentions ended with picketing by members of the African Canadian community, court injunctions against them by the museum, encounters between demonstrators and police that led to criminal charges being laid, and the decision of Jeanne Cannizzo, the curator26 (a white anthropologist and expert on African art), to leave her part-time university teaching position for a complex set of reasons, including continuing accusations of racism. Yet this was an exhibition that attempted to be the opposite of the kind of thing one might find in an institution like the Royal Museum of Central Africa near Brussels, where a statue of Leopold II dominates a room ‘celebrating the triumphs of colonialism with the guns and flags of expeditions and the chests carried by native bearers, the plumed hats of the conquerors, models of their railway lines and the honoured names of those who laid down their lives controlling the natives’.27 Those guns and flags and plumed hats were present in the (similarly named) Royal Ontario Museum too, but the stated aim of this exhibition was to expose the imperial ideology of the people—Canadian soldiers and missionaries—who had borne them and who had brought back to Canada many African objects which, over time, found their way into the museum.

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The intention—at least, as articulated after the fact by museum authori ties—was to offer a (postcolonial) ‘critical examination of the Canadian missionary and military experience in turn-of-century Africa’;28 the mode of presentation was what museologists would have recognized as postmodern in its foregrounding of how objects changed meaning over time and in different contexts. But the self-evident difficulty of effectively deconstructing a museum from the inside became acute when that institution was viewed by at least some members of the African Canadian community as part of European modernity’s ‘attempt to measure, categorize and hierarchize the world with the white male on top. And all at the expense of the African, Asian and aboriginal peoples.’29 In a city like Toronto (and in a country like Canada),30 where the multicultural and multiracial mix is perhaps as great as anywhere in the world today, what cannot be ignored is the inevitable change in what the social meaning of a museum might entail. If, from the perspective of postmodernity, a museum is a means by which a society represents its relationship to its own history and to that of other cultures,31 then changes in that society should also be reflected in the institution, whose meaning—like that of the objects within it—is arguably a constructed and negotiated one. Canadian society has changed radically since the Second World War: outside Quebec, its once British majority has sometimes found itself, in large urban centres in particular, in a minority position. Such is the case in Toronto, where the influx of immigrants from southern Europe, South Asia, Africa, the West Indies, and the Middle and Far East has made the city multiracial as well as multiethnic. Since many of the new arrivals came from other Commonwealth countries, there was an inevitable new awareness of both similarity and difference in the experience of Empire. If colonialism can be defined as a broad form of structural domination,32 there are going to be many varieties of it: ‘to be one of the colonized is potentially to be a great many different, but inferior, things, in many different places, at many different times’.33 Many working in postcolonial studies today stress the distinctions even within communities, based on gender, class, race.34 Others have pointed to what are, in this particular case, important differences between kinds of colonies—for example, between so-called settler colonies35 like Canada and invaded ones like the many in Africa.36 Both may indeed partake of that ‘specifically anticolonial counter-discursive energy’ that some see as postcolonial,37 but there are important differences38 that are crucial to the responses to ‘Into the Heart of Africa’, differences that obviously involve the ‘unbridgeable [racial] chasm’39 between white and non-white colonies, as well as the related cultural and historical chasms between settler and subjugated colonies. In the latter, cultural imposition took place on ‘the body and space’ of Empire’s ‘Others’40 through military and bureaucratic power. While I do not in any way want to underestimate either the multiplicity of historical (and current) responses to Britain and Empire from Canadians of other than British backgrounds or the trauma of settler colonies like Canada, which have had to deal with the psychic and cultural (as well as economic) dependency of colonization and have struggled to articulate autonomy through constitutional or cultural means,41 I cannot help thinking that the problems at the Royal Ontario Museum a few years ago stemmed in part, at least, from the difference between Canada’s relation to Empire (as a settler colony)42 and that of Africa’s nations, invaded by European (and in this case, Canadian) powers and subjugated to them by military might or missionary evangelism. The term ‘postcolonial’ is simply going to mean different things because the experience of colonization has meant different things. While Canada may well want to position itself oppositionally as postcolonial today, in order to make what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘spaceclearing gesture’43 for its New World self-definition, this particular exhibition—with its focus on the Canadian role in the colonizing of Africa—forced an awareness of English Canada’s official historical position within Empire. Not everyone liked this new self-image: to use Albert Memmi’s strong terms, Canada was suddenly ‘disfigured into an oppressor, a partial,…treacherous being, worrying only about… privileges and their defense’.44 Canadians (or more specifically white British Canadians) were shown that

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their own history was not separable from the colonizer’s struggle to reconcile ‘the notions of political freedom cherished by [the] home country with the actual political suppression and disfranchisement of the colonized people’.45 Black Canadians, as we shall see, were positioned rather differently. But, as a nation, Canada was represented as having an uncomfortable dual historical identity as both colony and colonizing force. Such is the troubled and complex postcolonial setting for this exhibition; but there is a parallel and equally contested context that involves the postmodern as well: its ironic and allusive nature was identified early on as part of the problem. Irony and reflexivity have become almost hallmarks of the postmodern (though, of course, in no way restricted to it). The postcolonial and the feminist enterprises, among others, have also often turned to irony as what Richard Terdiman calls a ‘counterdiscourse’,46 as the rhetorical figure of the dialogic whose ‘function is to project an alternative through which any element of the here-andnow may be shown as contingent, and thereby subject the whole configuration of power within which it took its adversative meaning to the erosive, dialectical power of alterity’. As the ‘linguistic repository of difference’, irony, when seen as an oppositional strategy,47 can work to problematize authority, including the modern assumptions about museums’ structures and forms of historical authority. A related postmodern motif, one that recurs in much of the writing on the ‘new museology’, is a call to institutions to make themselves and their publics aware of the history of their collections and of the values embodied therein.48 It is argued that reflexivity about historical role and context can have the potential to raise important political, epistemological and aesthetic issues.49 The ‘metatext’ would make visible to the public the ways to read and make sense of a display as text, as well as offer the history of the choices leading to it.50 It seems to be assumed that such internal self-awareness would lead to a liberation from the constraints of modernity’s concepts of apolitical51 scientificity and authority, and thus free museums to take on what previously might have been considered risky or controversial subjects, because the public would now be made more aware and less complacent about what they expect to find in a museum. If combined with ‘wider historical experiences such as explorations of colonial relations’,52 it has been argued, new questions might be provoked. ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ certainly provoked many questions— about colonialism and the relationship between the politics of culture and the politics of meaning and representation53—but it was reflexivity itself, like irony, that came under fire.54 Actually, almost everything about this exhibition came under fire, from its focus to its subject matter— indeed, even its title. Depending on how you interpret Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the echoing of the novel’s title in ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ is going to suggest either an imperialist perspective or a critique thereof.55 From the start, then, this ideologically freighted doubleness encodes in microcosm the terms of the ensuing conflict over the show’s interpretation and evaluation of imperialism.56 The museum’s later stated intent was ‘to explore attitudes of the past but not, for a moment, to suggest that the ROM endorsed the biases of those times’.57 That there was considerable confusion about this intention was evident within a few months of the opening, however. Prior to this occasion, the museum’s small and fragmentary collection of 375 objects from Central and West Africa had remained in its basement for almost a century, available as a whole only to researchers, though isolated parts of it were displayed in some of the ethnography galleries. It was fragmentary because it lacked, in the curator’s words, ‘chronological depth, geographical concentration or ethnographic focus’58 and the reasons for this lay in the history of its acquisition. It had come into being largely through bequests from the families of Canadian missionaries and soldiers in the British African colonies at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. This is where the problems with the collection’s unrepresentative nature also began: military men often collected weapons and missionaries tended to bring home things like hairpins or combs or musical instruments that they could display when fundraising. In other words, this was

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not a full collection of a range of African objects; there could be little pretence that it would represent the cultural diversity, social complexity, or artistic achievement of the multiple peoples of Central Africa.59 For this reason, the decision was made to foreground in the exhibition both the material limitations of the collection and the history and politics of its coming into being in this one, specifically Canadian, cultural institution. The openly articulated intent was one familiar to postmodern anthropological theory: to focus on the imperial ideology of those who collected the objects (for which rich archival materials did exist), on how those objects came to enter this museum, and thus on the more general cultural assumptions of museums and of the disciplines of museology, anthropology, and history. In short, the focus was not to be on Africa itself. In addition, given this meta-museological conception, it would seem that the primary intended audience was perhaps more academic than general—an impression that was borne out by the catalogue. In accord with that ‘new museology’ being articulated during those very years, it emphasized what the curator later called the ‘transformational power of context’, the importance to the meaning and significance of objects of the circumstances in which they appear and are understood.60 The catalogue constantly called the reader’s attention to the history of objects, tracing the cultural transformations of each as its context changed (through what have been called ‘unanticipated appropriations’)61 from that of being used in African society to being collected by Canadian missionaries or soldiers to being exhibited in the Royal Ontario Museum (known as the ROM). But, as I mentioned, there was yet another transformation to come after the exhibition opened: from museum specimen to political symbol. A few months after the opening, an umbrella group known as the ‘Coalition for the Truth about Africa’ began picketing the museum, calling the show ‘a clear and concise attempt to mislead the public and to further tarnish the image of Africa and African people’.62 A handout distributed to visitors also stated that ‘Into the Heart of Africa’, ‘according to the ROM, is a portrayal of African history.’ And indeed, despite the catalogue and despite later statements of intent, the advertising brochure describing the exhibition did invite you ‘on an historical journey through the world of sub-Saharan Africa…. The rich cultural heritage of African religious, social and economic life is celebrated through objects brought back by Canadian missionaries and military men over 100 years ago.’ But this description seriously misrepresented not so much the material as the focalization of the exhibition: the focus was never intended to be entirely on Africa itself, but on the material manifestations of the ideology of Empire in Africa. Why, then, would the brochure mislead? One reason might be that this was the second one printed. At the cost of over $20,000, the first was scrapped when consultations with members of the African Canadian community led to complaints against what was called its ‘tired, stereotypical language’63 about Africa, language which ‘subtly recalled the glory of the Imperial Age’. But the fact remained that the second brochure, however closer it might have been to representing what the community would have liked the exhibit to be, actually proved seriously misleading with respect to the reality. In this way, the initial decision as to the focalization of the show became a primary point of contention. The first printed message at the entry to the exhibition openly stated that Canadians (implicitly, white British Canadians) were to be the focus, that their ‘experience of Africa, as seen in this exhibition, was very different from the way Africans perceived themselves, their own cultures, and these events’. The objects presented, it continued, ‘remind us of a little-remembered era of Canada’s past’. The first-person plural pronoun here was problematic, not only in its implicit exclusions (perhaps some African Canadians did indeed remember that past),64 but also because not all of those white European Canadians so ‘hailed’ by the pronoun wanted to be reminded of such a past. The museum’s news release about the exhibition mentioned that in the Military Hall section, ‘the visitor will be able to understand Zulu warfare from the other side of the battlefield’ (my emphasis), perhaps implying that the visitor, in this case, was expected not to be Zulu and perhaps even to be white as well as British or Canadian.

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Figure 1: Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

Certainly, the initial, almost empty (and, for me, imperial) blue rooms labelled ‘For Crown and Empire’ set up the historical relation of Canada to the British Empire in Africa in the last century (see Figure 1). A few objects (both African and imperial) were presented here in a traditional museum fashion, isolated in their beauty in glass cases, abstracted from their context and function. Although everyone connected to the museum65 insisted that the irony and reflexivity of the show were meant to signal the detachment of the institution from the imperial perspective being presented, the textual markers of that intention were less than clear and self-evident. In these first rooms, for instance, there was no semiotic signal to separate the African from the imperial, despite the later claims that the intent was to show the beauty of the African objects as a way of refuting ‘the 19th century [sic] Canadian supposition of barbarism’.66 But was one also to admire the shining, ribboned and plumed British-Canadian officer’s helmet similarly placed in a locked glass case? The curator may have intended here a kind of reflexive ‘ethnographizing’ effect,67 but the context of the museum as a whole (where such glass cases are un-ironized commonplaces) worked against the likelihood of such a result. The beauty of the objects and the emptiness of the room made this feel for some like a kind of holy place where Empire was being revered and admired.68 What jolted the viewer out of this mood, however, was the fact that, visible from the entrance, was an enormous, wall-sized enlargement of an image of a mounted British soldier thrusting his sword into the breast of an African warrior (see Figure 2). This was labelled (none too readably) ‘Lord Beresford’s Encounter with a Zulu’. The text posted nearby identified this as the cover of the Illustrated London News of 1879. As you can imagine, the impact of this kind of image is going to be different on a small catalogue page, where

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it is also reproduced, than it is on a large wall. As many commentators subsequently noted, the violence of this representation worked not to produce a response against jingoistic Victorian imperialism (as was intended),69 but to turn the tables against the exhibition itself for perpetuating precisely such representations. In today’s culture, where visual images may indeed make more of an impression than printed text, and in an institution visited by schoolchildren of all ages and races who just might not stop to read the contextualizing accompanying texts, the placing and size of this image were, at the very least, signs of semiotic inattention or inexperience. While the relationship of text to image is a general problem for all museum exhibits,70 here it proved critical because many African Canadian visitors could not bring themselves to move beyond this violent representation of their race’s history. After the contentious ‘Military Hall’ section over which this image loomed, a relatively small area called ‘The Life History of Objects’ constituted the only explicitly meta-museological part of the exhibition itself. The reconstituted front hallway of a Canadian house revealed the movement of African objects (such as spears and shields) from being spoils of war to becoming pure (if exotic) decoration—before being donated to the museum. This section indirectly raised questions about appropriation and exploitation, but did not offer any answers or even any extended commentary.71 This was more postmodern deconstruction than postcolonial expose, in other words, and the ambiguities made possible by its rhetorical strategy of indirection even allowed one visitor to suggest that, for her, this home setting was a kind of humanizing of the experience of imperialism.72 The next section took the form of a large, bright, white, cross-shaped room, labelled ‘Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity’, and in it were presented the artefacts collected by missionaries (who thought they were bearing ‘light’ to the ‘dark continent’, as texts explained). There were also photographs of these evangelical Christians with their African converts. The last and largest area of the exhibition was entered by way of a reconstruction of an Ovimbundu village compound from Angola, wherein some of the objects seen in cabinets elsewhere were inserted into a simulated context of use. The final large room, containing drums, masks, textiles, headdresses, weapons, and musical instruments (including earphones for listening to African music), was introduced by a reflexive message attesting to the impossibility actually to reconstruct another cultural reality in a museum. The artifacts you see here are displayed according to their ‘function’ or ‘form’ in a way that would be quite familiar to late nineteenth-century museum-goers, but not the people who made them. The things are theirs, the arrangement is not. Such a sign was intended to mark the change in interpretive emphasis at this point in the exhibition, as the theme changed from the history of the collection to the objects themselves which were said to ‘speak of the varied economies, political or cosmological complexities, and artistry of their African creators’.73 Yet the problem with calling attention to the fictional or artificial arrangement of the objects in this particular space became evident when you considered it in the context of the rest of this museum, where such traditional arrangements are still the norm for even the twentieth-century museum-goer. Given that, in Western culture, priority is usually signalled by position, there was yet another potential conflict between the intention—to show that ‘African cultural life and historical experience were not being reduced to a codicil of imperial history’74—and the fact that this section did come after the one that focused on imperial acquisition. The corridor leading out of the exhibition housed a scattered and miscellaneous collection of small photographs of Africans today, evidently in an attempt to give a sense that, although the collection may be historical, the realities of urbanization and industrialization have brought many changes to African society.

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Figure 2: ‘Lord Beresford’s Encounter with a Zulu’, Illustrated London News (1879) Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

Just outside the doorway was an African museum-store ‘boutique’ which eased the visitor back into Canadian consumer society, thereby coming full circle, since the initial (conventional) sign thanking

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corporate sponsors set up (for me, as for others) an ironic frame: if anyone should have been acknowledged as being those without whom this show would not have been possible, it was the Africans who made the objects displayed. Even my brief description (itself hardly innocent of bias) might offer some clues as to why ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ managed to engage so much strong emotion in so many very different people. As one critic remarked: What was most amazing was that the exhibition offended audiences from all parts of the political spectrum: missionaries whose colleagues were depicted in the exhibition, the descendants of colonial officers whose collections were shown…, and most strongly, Africans and people of African descent who saw the exhibition as racist and insulting. The exhibition was also offensive to some within another, some what less vocal group, that is, historians of Africa, art historians, and anthropologists working in universities and museums.75 One might add to that list even liberal, white Canadians who thought of themselves as multiculturally tolerant and even postcolonially oppositional. But what specifically enraged and offended people? The anger of many was provoked as much by the visual representation of verbal texts as by any actual objects or pictures.76 From the start, explanatory signs presented certain words framed in quotation marks. An interpretive conflict was set up at once: were these citations (and thus historically authenticated and validated) or were they to be read ironically? Words like ‘the unknown continent’, ‘barbarous’, and ‘primitive’ were placed in these quotation marks, but the problem was that so too were metaphors, titles, and some object descriptions. In other words, the proliferation of quotation marks made the visitor wonder whether those placed around words like ‘Dark Continent’ and ‘primitive’ could or should be read as intended both to signal ironic distance77 and also to act as accurate citations—in other words, to represent the colonial perspective that the postcolonial exhibition wanted to show it did not share.78 In the museum’s own initial news release, there was arguably some awareness that people might not know exactly how to interpret such quotation marks, for it added ‘what was then called by some the “unknown continent”’ (emphasis mine). The curator, in a later article, likewise wrote of ‘the alleged barbarity of “savage customs”’.79 Of course, inverted commas or quotation marks are a commonplace rhetorical technique (used to disclaim and to distance, while still echoing) in ‘new museological’ theorizing (and even, obviously, in this article): for instance, in a piece entitled ‘The future of the Other: Changing cultures on display in ethnographic museums’, Brian Durrans writes of ‘a world where the “primitive” other has long been the victim of imperial domination’.80 But when the context is not academic or museological, the interpretation of these ironizing quotation marks may differ. For some visitors to ‘Into the Heart of Africa’, they were simply disapproving disclaimers;81 for others they were a form of devious ‘sugarcoating’.82 One viewer, whose great-uncle was featured as one of the Canadian military, found that they created too subtle an irony, one ‘lost on those who can’t (or don’t) read the explanatory texts’. She added: ‘it is also a pretty limp way to examine a subject as grave as racially motivated genocide’.83 The Curriculum Adviser on Race Relations and Multiculturalism for the Toronto Board of Education went even further, stating: ‘In dealing with issues as sensitive as cultural imperialism and racism, the use of irony is a highly inappropriate luxury.’84 And yet… feminist, not to mention postcolonial, theorists have argued that irony is one of the most effective ways of dealing with precisely such difficult issues—at least when used oppositionally from within. But there was the rub: this irony was perceived as coming from a colonial source, even if a self-deconstructing one, and even if the irony was largely at the expense of imperialists not Africans.

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One instance of ironic citational signalling was mentioned in almost every public response to this exhibition:85 it was the relation between a missionary photograph of a white woman watching a number of black women doing washing and its caption—‘Taken in Nigeria about 1910, this photograph shows missionary Mrs. Thomas Titcombe giving African women “a lesson in how to wash clothes”. African labour was the mainstay of mission economies.’ To the Coalition’s interpretation—‘Did Africans not know how to wash before the arrival of Europeans?’86— one white Canadian reviewer replied: ‘An observant reader will note that the words “a lesson in how to wash clothes” are in quotation marks. The description is offered as evidence, not of the actual activity, but of Mrs. Titcombe’s intentions and sense of superiority.’87 But I hasten to add the obvious: the comprehension of irony has never been quite that simple. The curator might have intended the labels in this ‘Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity’ section to show ‘the sense of cultural superiority’ inherent in the missionary goals,88 but if, as Homi Bhabha has argued,89 colonial discourse contains both colonizer and colonized, caught in a problematics of indeterminacy and ambivalence, then does this sort of irony re-enact (even as it critiques) ‘an ambivalent mode of knowledge and power’?90 Does this particular irony embody manichaean dualisms or subvert them? Or does it depend on who is doing the interpreting? And, on a more pragmatic level, what about visitor expectations about the conventions of museum labelling? In an institution where the norm is that visual messages and verbal texts convey the same meaning, the risks taken through ironic disjunction here are great. And, of course, what if people do not read the labels at all?91 Another related and equally problematic part of the exhibition was a small white room where visitors could sit to watch a slide show and listen to a male voice give a 7-minute recreation (from missionary archives) of a magic-lantern illustrated lecture called ‘In Livingstone’s Footsteps’. This was presented as what a missionary might have said, in 1919, to his Ontario protestant congregation when fund-raising for his African mission. The fictional context was asserted orally at the outset and again at the end. In addition, outside the room was a notice that read: The sense of cultural superiority and paternalism that you will hear in this fictional narrative was characteristic of the missionary worldview at this time. So was the genuine spirit of adventure and the sincere belief that missionaries were bringing ‘light’ to the ‘dark continent’. But what if you did not read the sign? What if you missed the beginning or end of the long 7-minute tape? Well, you certainly heard the ‘cultural superiority and paternalism’, but without the ironizing, contextualizing frame. And, even more unfortunately, the paternalistic voice could be heard as you walked through this part of the exhibition, aurally framing your viewing, driving one exasperated visitor to exclaim that the ‘unctuous voice delivering highly derogatory commentary could have been that of the ROM’s director on his intercom for all I knew’.92 However didactic or heavy-handed93 some people might have found the ironies in the exhibition, it was not by any means a matter of their being paradoxically too subtle for the protesters; nor do I think the negative response was simply the result of willful misreading.94 One commentator felt that the ROM acknowledged the failure of the ironies but implied that it was the fault of an unsophisticated audience.95 The Coalition for the Truth about Africa, however, argued that the subtleties of irony could not compete with the power of images of subjugation.96 (Nevertheless, several of the demonstrators themselves used irony in their protests to claim a position—but this too was irony that was interpreted as differently from its intent as the exhibit’s had been.) For still others, the show’s ironies were both scholarly and subtle and therefore elitist.97 Irony has always been risky, but here the stakes were particularly high, especially for the institution: this was its first highlighted exhibit of this African material; the city was facing racial tensions

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over police shootings of black youths. Even if irony were appropriate here, the desirability of framing it less ambiguously became increasingly evident. Framing helps to delimit response, of course; nevertheless, response also depends on the particular audience doing the responding. The very indirection of the ironies here might well presuppose an audience (liberal, white, European Canadian) that can—or is willing to—read between the lines: that is, an audience that positions itself as postcolonial and multicultural, and not as colonial and racist. Is there not a danger, however, that even this audience might be lulled into thinking that the irony has done its critical work for it, and that it need only bother to question those words set apart in quotation marks?98 After all, there are no ironic quotation marks around the description of David Livingstone as a hero—though many Africans (were their point of view offered) might insist upon their appropriateness.99 Do the existing ironies implicitly rely too much on an audience that can be affectively and politically detached from the pain represented in the exhibition’s visual images?100 The issues of the so-called ‘misreading’ of irony and of the appropriateness of its very use on this occasion are issues which engage in complex ways the exclusionary potential of irony—and therefore of the anger it can cause. But the affective charge of anger can also extend to the target of the ironies, and, indeed, many did protest the stereotyped portrayal of the Canadian missionaries in the exhibit, arguing the case for their more complex and frequently oppositional relationship with colonial authorities.101 But this was a muted protest compared to the Coalition’s, which argued that African Canadian children came away from ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ with a negative impression of black history, with the idea that Africans did not know how to wash their clothes or comb their hair before the whites arrived.102 No one, to my knowledge, however, argued that white, British Canadian children came away embarrassed or traumatized to learn that their families had been guilty of everything from paternalism and exploitation to extermination. Yet columnists did note that, if the exhibition was hard on any group, ‘it was the white missionar ies and soldiers; their prejudices and ignorance are documented in some detail’;103 one black reviewer even suggested that the exhibit promoted racism against whites who were made to look ignorant and dangerous.104 As Robert Fulford summed it up: ‘old-time Christian missionaries are now almost beyond the range of human sympathy’.105 Irony has always been a trope that depends on context and on the identity and position of both the ironist and the audience. A feminist critic, writing in a book about women and comedy, can begin an article entitled ‘Jane Austen: Irony and authority’ with: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, right now, that language is involved in giving and taking both power and pleasure’,106 and expect that her readers (themselves self-selected and having at least read her title) will understand both the allusion to the opening of Pride and Prejudice and the irony. If it is true that jokes do not travel well because of the need for shared knowledge,107 then this is even more the case with irony. I would argue that discursive communities do not come into being as the result of people sharing irony together;108 they are what make irony possible in the first place. The many discursive communities to which we each, differently, belong can be based on things like language, race, gender, class, and nationality— but might also encompass all the other micropolitical complexities that constitute (or are made to constitute) our identities. The infinite variations and combinations possible are what make irony both relatively rare and in need of markers or signals. It is almost a miracle that irony is ever understood as an ironist might intend it to be: all ironies, in fact, might therefore be unstable ironies.109 Those deployed in ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ were received very differently by different discursive communities, as was the show as a whole. To a black lawyer and activist, the effect of seeing Africa through the eyes of those who colonized and killed was chilling;110 to a self-described ‘white Canadian liberal’, the exhibit was ‘a recognizable piece of British-Canadian history’—not a show about Africa and not about the

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present.111 Research on the complexity of how people experience an exhibit suggests that responses might be idiosyncratic, but that the general public (whatever that might be) is very likely going to respond differently from what professional critics and curators might expect.112 One of the reasons is that visitors usually belong to different discursive communities: they bring ‘a multiplicity of different attitudes and expectations and experiences to the reading of an artefact, so that their comprehension of it is individualized’.113 So too is their affective response to it. Where white Canadians might find the exhibit a self-searching, ironic examination114 of historical intolerance, black Canadians saw the ‘painful detritus of savage exploitation and attempted genocide’ and a perpetuation of racist attitudes of white superiority.115 Even the use of irony was read by some as belonging to a white culture’s model of discourse,116 and its use (and alleged incomprehension) seen as a replication of the missionaries’ attitudes.117 This kind of objection goes beyond the question of whether, in this particular case, irony was used well to question the very appropriateness of the trope itself. As a white Canadian visitor of European (though Italian, not British) background, I certainly felt that I was being ‘hailed’ by the references to ‘Canadians’ in the show, in the press releases, and in the brochure, where the late nineteenth century in Africa was described as a ‘turbulent but little-known period in history’. The point was made well by the critic who pointed out: ‘For whom…was this period merely turbulent, and to whom is the period so little-known?’118 The answer is: white Canadians…perhaps. The answer is not: the black protester who said, ‘All my life I’ve been looking for my roots, I come here looking for them —and you’ve shown me nothing.’119 The exhibition’s configuration of the imagined community called Canada, to use Benedict Anderson’s description of a nation,120 was a limited one, to be sure. But race was not the only issue. If position in ‘social space’ determines the point of view of each individual agent,121 then your perspective on ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ was not going to be separable from things like class and education. If, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, economic power is mobilized through symbolic power—which comes from having and accumulating ‘cultural capital’,122 then the very question of who it is who regularly goes to a museum becomes a relevant issue. Surveys in North America and Europe suggest that the most frequent adult museum visitors are well educated, middle-class,123 and relatively affluent.124 They may visit as tourists, volunteers, teachers (with student groups), self-educators, or researchers. The question is whether, despite this relative homogeneity, you should ever assume that visitors will necessarily share the ‘values, the assumptions and the intellectual preoccupations that have guided not only the choice and presentation of exhibitions, but also, more fundamentally, the selection and acquisition of objects’.125 When the audience includes African Canadians, from whose ancestors’ cultures came the objects displayed in ‘Into the Heart of Africa’, such a question is not a neutral one. Many commentators noted that the show seemed to be designed for and aimed at white, educated, liberalminded people with an interest in museums and anthropology;126 to assume any broader consensus about an exhibition of African objects was, perhaps, not to take sufficiently into account the growing black population of Toronto and the different discursive communities to which they might well belong127 (and along with those, the different expectations, different assumptions, different associations with museums in general). In an explanatory article written after the closing of the exhibition, the curator herself defined museums as social institutions which ‘cannot be divorced from the historical context in which they developed, and their collections occasionally reflect the violence and disruptive social forces characterizing the European colonization of Africa’.128 While that violence was made more than clear in some of the visual images within the exhibition, what was missing from it was this very kind of overt statement of judgement. ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ was, in other words, postmodernly deconstructive; it was not postcolonially oppositional. The indirection and obliqueness of its irony in fact worked to render the exhibition’s position

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ambiguous. The use of irony might well have been intended as a way of subverting the ideology of colonialism from within—and thereby also avoiding openly offending the missionary and military families (and their descendants) who had loaned and donated so much to the museum. This might have been a postmodern possibility; it certainly was not seen by most visitors as a postcolonial one. The very depiction of racism (in the past) was interpreted by some as—not only Eurocentric but—racist (in the present).129 The problem of embodying that which one is trying to analyse and the differences between endorsing and examining are pragmatic issues of crucial importance in postcolonial theory today. In this exhibition, Africans tended to be represented as passive, as victims, as physically smaller and positioned lower in pictures: this was because such indeed was the view of the colonizers. But the difficulty was that it was also the only view offered in the exhibition; so too was theirs the only voice. Presumably, the assumption was that the visitors would be able to distinguish between the voice represented on the labels (some in quotation marks) and the voice of the museum. There was much evidence of a certain confusion over this, however. After all, why should visitors assume, knowing all that these colonial collectors had given to the museum, that the institution was necessarily (or even likely) going to be ironic about or critical of them?130 The ideology of collecting itself has become a major interest of postmodern museology, it is true. Theorists have studied issues such as the gendered and historically specific way in which the passion to collect, preserve and display has been articulated, the role of collections in the processes of Western identity formation,131 and the representativeness and presentation of collections. There has been a certain amount of postmodern demystification of what I began by referring to as the modern—and often unacknowledged— institutional practices that, from a postmodern perspective, might be expressed in such terms as: ‘The collector discovers, acquires, salvages objects. The objective world is given, not produced, and thus the historical relations of power in the work of acquisition are occulted. The making of meaning in museum classifications and display is mystified as adequate representation’.132 It was in order to contest precisely this ideological position of modernity that the catalogue of ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ argued: A museum collection may be thought of as a cultural text, one that can be read to understand the underlying cultural and ideological assumptions that have influenced its creation, selection, and display. Within such a collection, objects act as an expression not only of the worldviews of those who chose to make and use them, but also of those who chose to collect and exhibit them.133 The catalogue directly addressed issues such as the museum as cultural ‘charnel house’ (p. 80), full of the remains of dead civilizations; the decontextualized museum display as ‘cultural vandalism’ (p. 84) and aestheticism (p. 88); and the danger of partial collections promoting stereotypes (p. 86). This was a postmodern document in that it worked to show how the ‘relations of power whereby one portion of humanity can select, value, and collect the pure products of others need to be criticized and transformed’.134 As I understand the term, to be postcolonial, however, the exhibition would have had to present and then make a judgement about the effects of colonization, not simply outline its intentions. Emblematic of the rhetorical strategy of the show as a whole was the curator’s later description of the Europeanization of African social structures, dress and habitation: ‘These changes would transform the women from producers of baskets, garden foods and pottery into consumers of soaps, spoons, forks, while tying them tightly to the developing mission economy.’135 Whether you read this as ironic would depend upon your valuing of soaps, spoons, and forks. Likewise, the subsequent statement that such practices ‘weakened alliances between lineages, discouraged the intergenerational and polygynous family, emphasized the loyalty of the couple to each other at the expense of kindred, and created a different concept of privacy’ would not necessarily be read as critical at all within certain discursive communities. Indeed, it would not be hard to

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read it as a (modern) authoritative-sounding assertion of anthropological or historical ‘fact’. A black writer responded to this strategy by saying that the exhibit ‘used the propaganda of the period without proper explanation or preamble. [The curator] did not want to manipulate the material, but she ended up implanting racist images because the critique of “intellectual arrogance” did not come through. People missed it.’136 Sometimes, they might have missed it because it was not adequately marked, because it remained ambiguous in its silence about the effect of such arrogance upon the Africans. Because the only perspective offered was that of the colonizers, you were indeed told that the missionary involved in the social transformations just described never understood the effect his changes of custom had on kinship alliances, for example, but you were not told what those effects actually were.137 As one anthropologist reviewing the exhibit remarked, it went to great lengths to remind you of the process by which objects arrived in the museum as the result of Canadians’ participation in an act of conquest, but: What about this conquest? Was it brutal, violent and shameful? Or should we, when passing the soldiers’ suits and the prizes the soldiers stole from sovereign African kingdoms, swell with pride and admiration for men who braved great distances and terrible dangers to subdue fierce natives? The exhibition is strangely silent here, as if there were no moral or political issues involved.138 For a museum to choose not to take an unequivocal stand might be interpreted as a postmodern refusal of any single, modern, ‘master narra tive’ of truth;139 but from a postcolonial perspective—given the position of authority of the institution—the possible reading was more problematic. What from a postmodern perspective might be read as irony or ambiguity becomes, from a postcolonial one, evasion.140 To go one step further, for those, like the Coalition, seeking the ‘Truth about Africa’, ambiguity within an institution associated with cultural and educational authority itself makes a kind of truth claim. In the face of the Coalition’s tactical desire for what might be called an emancipatory metanarrative articulated from a position of strategic essentialism,141 the institution (in press releases) fell back on very modern assertions of historical accuracy and curatorial expertise, thereby arguably undermining even the exhibition’s postmodern deconstructive intentions. However, it must also be said that, for this visitor, those intentions were not always consistently realized in the exhibition itself. The curator may indeed have believed that museums are fictional in nature, that ‘the meaning of their collection is generated in the interaction between the curator, the object, and the visitor’.142 But both within the structure of the exhibit and in the response to the protests, this particular museum did not live up to its definition as a ‘negotiated’ reality. There was none of the postmodern dialogic museum mode143 that postmodern theorists have argued should replace the impersonal, objective, distanced observermodel of modernity: there was no answering African voice in ‘Into the Heart of Africa’. While implicitly acknowledging that, in theory, ‘culture’ is indeed relational, ‘an inscription of communicative processes that exist, historically, between subjects in relations of power’,144 the exhibit nevertheless never let the other side be heard. One did hear the interaction between the museum officials of 1989 and the collectors of a century before,145 but none at all with the Africans whose objects are presented. This was ethnography (‘in which European metropolitan subjects present to themselves their others [usually their conquered others]’) and not ‘autoethnography’ (‘in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them’).146 Given the complex public stands taken by both sides on this issue of voice, more communication took place, on this occasion, through the press than face to face. Both the Coalition and the museum implicitly acknowledged, in different ways, that communication always involves political interaction and thus power differences.147 It is this postmodern truism that has led museological theory to advocate more community

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consultation and dialogue in the mounting of exhibitions.148 In Canada, by 1989, this had become particularly relevant in the wake of the controversy over the boycott by the Lubicon Lake First Nations of the Native art exhibition, ‘The Spirit Sings’, at the Glenbow Gallery during the 1988 Calgary Olympics.149 There have now been many recognized examples of more successful dialogue, however.150 For instance, a small gallery, the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, did consult with its community to discover what people felt they needed to learn about their past. One result, in the same year as ‘Into the Heart of Africa’, was ‘Jim Crow: Racism and Reaction in the New South’. Unlike the ironic (postmodern) Canadian exhibition, this one was frequently confrontational and even unpleasant in its (postcolonial) facing of racist attitudes.151 Museums are finding other reflexive ways to deal with both the postmodern and postcolonial implications of collecting and exhibiting. Having been given 100 pieces of African art from a private collection, the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology mounted a show in 1991 entitled ‘Fragments’, the premiss of which was that it is ‘neither possible nor ethical, in the 1990s, to exhibit Africa; what we can and do exhibit in “Fragments” are historic African objects valued by a Canadian museum and a Canadian collector’.152 In a postmodern challenge to the modern anonymous, expert narrative voice of labels and text, this exhibit offered instead a plurality of voices and perspectives on the care, handling, and collecting of African objects, as well as on Africa itself. In a more confrontational postcolonial vein, African American artist Fred Wilson mounted ‘The Other Museum’, an overt and bold critique of colonialism, stereotyping and racial misrepresentation. Visitors were given a brochure upon entering the gallery that explained this intention to expose prejudices, and even announced how irony would be used to label objects and parody the presentation of a natural history museum. In addition, the brochure’s style was itself a parody of a National Geographic magazine, and, at the entrance to the displays, an inverted map of the world signalled the entry into the realm of ironic inversion. The technique may at times have been rather obvious—Dan and Ibo masks were blindfolded and gagged with imperial flags—but there was little chance of mistaking the artist’s intent.153 It is also the case, however, that this exhibit was considered as art and viewed in an art gallery, not ethnography presented in a museum: visitors’ expectations about postmodern, politicized art exhibitions are never the same as those about anthropological or historical ones. It is not as if television and film have not represented images of imperialist conquest of Africans for years and in ways much more offensive than ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ with its reflexivity and indirection. But part of the heritage of modernity is that museums are places of special authority and respect, and therefore have special cultural responsibilities that come with their institutional positions of cultural and educational power within the communities in which they exist. No single postmodern exhibit is going to change this situation overnight, no matter how powerful its critique and deconstruction. If museums really are ‘historicalcultural theaters of memory’,154 then more than institutional memory will have to be dramatized on their stages. In deciding not to focus the Royal Ontario Museum exhibit on Africa itself, but on the Canadian emissaries of Empire who journeyed ‘into the heart of Africa’, the curator, one might argue, was actually being careful to avoid appropriation and to stay within the boundaries of her unavoidably white Canadian point of view. Yet, in some eyes, she managed to perpetuate the very situation she sought to critique, offering yet another example of the colonizing gaze. Yet, silence about the collection’s imperial origins was likely not the answer either. It seems to have been this choice of one single focalization that provoked much of the controversy. An American African Studies professor, Molefi Asante, is said to have compared the choice here to presenting the Holocaust from the viewpoint of the Nazis.155 There is no doubt that many felt that those once subjected to the gaze of Empire should have been given a voice. As Michael Baxandall once argued, ‘[e]xhibitors cannot represent cultures. Exhibitors can be tactful but stimulating impresarios, but

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exhibition is a social occasion involving at least three active terms’—makers of objects, exhibitors of those objects, and viewers.156 The ‘Epilogue’ to the exhibition catalogue reads with a sad irony in the aftermath of this initial decision about focalization: By studying the museum as an artifact, reading collections as cultural texts, and discovering the life histories of objects, it has become possible to understand something of the complexities of crosscultural encounters. In the same process, the intricacies of different cultural configurations are revealed in objects through which various African peoples have expressed not only their individual artistry but also their deepest communal concerns. Finally, by placing in context the relationships, however brief, problematic, and painful, that developed as Canadian soldiers and missionaries travelled into the heart of Africa, it has become clear that the past is part of the present.157 When a Canadian reviewer began her analysis with the words, ‘We consider ourselves a former colony, not a colonizing power,’158 she put her finger on how difficult it was for some members of the white, English Canadian community to see that past as ‘part of the present’. According to the Coalition, black Canadians had no trouble at all seeing the continuity; nor might Irish, Scots, Native or other Canadians. The curator intended (white?) Canadians to be ‘horrified by the Canadian participation in this history. Remember that until fairly recently, Canada was a part of the British Empire and participated fully in all aspects of it, including negative ones.’159 The exhibit certainly did place British Canadians (and Torontonians) right in the middle of Empire, citing James Morris’s Pax Britannica about 1897: ‘“Hundreds of thousands of British Canadians regarded the imperial saga as part of their own national heritage. The excitement of the New Imperialism was almost as intense in Toronto as it was in London”’160 (see Figure 3). To turn that around, today, the excitement of the new postcolonial critique is equally intense in Toronto (or in Canada as a whole) as elsewhere in the once colonized world, and perhaps for that very reason, there are times when a reflexive, ironic, postmodern challenge is just not strong enough—no matter how demystificatory it might be of modernity’s assumptions and even if there were not internal inconsistencies and difficulties.161 For Canadians—of all races—today, identity is even more than ever something to be seen, in Clifford’s words, ‘not as an archaic survival but as an ongoing process, politically contested and historically unfinished’.162 When the ‘post’ rings this time, the message delivered will be positional, and therefore inevitably transitional.163 But there will be no returning it to sender. University of Toronto NOTES I would like to express my thanks to all those who helped me, in their various ways, to think through the many issues raised by this controversial exhibition: the W.I.P.E. group, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Chandler Davis, Rebecca Duclos, Len Findlay, Marjorie Halpin, Adrienne Hood, Michael Hutcheon, Eva-Marie Kröller, Michael Levin, Eva Mackey, Shirley Neuman, Allan J.Ryan, Hayden White, Zhao Meichang, and the stimulating graduate students and faculty of the Museum Studies programme at the University of Toronto. A special thanks is due to all the participants in the 1990 seminar on the discursive politics of irony at the International Summer Institute for Structuralist and Semiotic Studies, Victoria College, University of Toronto. This seminar took place in June of 1990—as the demonstrators picketed across the street at the Royal Ontario Museum.

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Figure 3 Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum. 1 This is the title of the book edited by Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin: Past the Last Post: Theorizing PostColonialism and Post-Modernism (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). See review, p. 363 below. 2 Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), p. 35. 3 The most oft cited (and brief) statement of Habermas’s position is to be found in ‘Modernity—An incomplete project’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 3–15.

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4 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). p. xiv. 5 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, ‘Counting visitors or visitors who count?’, in Robert Lumley (ed.), The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 224. 6 Hooper-Greenhill, p. 225. Museums, even more than universities, perhaps, reinforce this effect by their architecture—imposing in size, age, dignity—and by the presence of security personnel. 7 On museums, see Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Objects of knowledge: A historical perspective on museums’, in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology (London: Reaktion Press, 1989), p. 22. 8 Some exhibits have, in fact, been quite radical in their reflexivity: for example, the Ashmolean’s ‘?Exhibition?’ (also known as ‘The Curator’s Egg’). See ‘Destruction or demolition?’, in Museums Journal (December 1992), pp. 20–1. 9 See Spencer R.Crew and James E.Sims, ‘Locating authenticity: Fragments of a dialogue’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Stephen D.Lavine and Ivan Karp (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 159–75. 10 See, for instance, Norman Palmer, ‘Museums and cultural property’, in Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, pp. 172–204. 11 See, for example, Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). For a more extended bibliography of work on Western colonial-era and contemporary representations of the ‘other’ in museum displays, see Mary Jo Arnoldi, ‘A distorted mirror: The exhibition of the Herbert Ward Collection of Africana’, in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D.Lavine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 454–5, note 2. 12 Brian Durrans, ‘The future of the Other: Changing cultures on display in ethnographic museums’, in Lumley (ed.), The Museum Time Machine, p. 155. 13 Charles Saumarez Smith, ‘Museums, artefacts, and meanings,’ in Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, p. 17. 14 Smith, p. 19. 15 Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 95. 16 Smith, p. 17. 17 Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). See also his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). More recently, see Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 18 James Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial truths’, in James Clifford and George E.Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 2. 19 Clifford, p. 10. 20 Talal Asad, ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 16. 21 Cornel West, ‘The new cultural politics of difference’, in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T.Minh-ha, Cornel West (eds), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 19. 22 See Smith, p. 19. 23 Stephen E.Weil, Rethinking the Museum and Other Meditations (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), p. xiv. 24 See, for instance, Elaine Heumann Gurian, ‘Noodling around with exhibition opportunities’, in Exhibiting Cultures, pp. 176–90. 25 Durrans, p. 150. 26 Throughout, I will refer to Jeanne Cannizzo as ‘the curator’ in order to put the emphasis on her institutional role and, implicitly, to remind the reader that curators do not work alone, but in conjunction with both museum administration and technical, design, and educational workers in the institution. I do not wish to downplay her

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personal role (or the consequences of the controversy); I do want to contextualize it, however. There appears to have been a split between intellectual intentions and institutional constraints and traditions. Naming her by her position will allow me to stress this point of conflict. Donald Horne, The Great Museum: The Re-presentation of History (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 222. John McNeill, then acting director, in the Globe and Mail, 21 September 1990, p. C9. The director at the actual time of the exhibit was Cuyler Young. Marlene Nourbese Philip, Toronto Star, 14 January 1991, p. A4. Since 1971, Canada has had an official government policy of what is called ‘multiculturalism’; in 1988 the ‘Act for the Preservation and Enhancement of Multiculturalism in Canada’ was passed. The term has always been accepted as a description of the demographic realities of Canada, but the policy and law have been seen in different ways. Some view it still as a federal government ploy to divert attention from Quebec separatist energies; others accuse it of assimilationist aims. The word and policy certainly gained currency when Canada’s unofficial selfimage as a northern nation was being challenged from within by the immigration of people from southern European and non-white nations, largely those of the British Commonwealth. The law has been called custodial, paternalistic, anachronistic, reductive, retentive; it has been said to create an enforced inclusiveness and a kind of ethnicity industry. But its defenders argue that, as an ideal of civic tolerance, it has liberal and liberating possibilities. It makes room for diversity and specificity as the defining characteristics of a nation that seems to feel it is in need of self-definition. Robert Lumley, ‘Introduction’ to Lumley (ed.), The Museum Time Machine, p. 2. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, ‘Colonialism, racism and representation’, Screen, 24, 2 (1983), p. 4. Edward W.Said, ‘Representing the colonized: Anthropology’s interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry, 15, 2 (1989), p. 207. See also his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). See, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 49, 62, 103, 163; Laura E.Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). To generalize, settler colonies are those in which new arrivals (in Canada’s case, from Europe) could be motivated by any number of reasons —from enforced exile to adventure; they often marginalized or exterminated the indigenous populations, rather than merging with them; they transplanted and internalized (while deracinating) Old World culture and traditions, including language, of course. See Helen Tiffin, ‘Commonwealth literature: Comparison and judgement’, in Dieter Riemenschneider (ed.), The History and Historiography of Commonwealth Literature (Tübingen: Gunther Narr, 1983), pp. 19–35; Diana Brydon, ‘The myths that write us: Decolonising the Mind’, Commonwealth, 10, 1 (1987), pp. 1–14. For a theory of the inevitable hybridity of the postcolonial, however, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Stephen Slemon, ‘Modernism’s last post’, in Adam and Tiffin (eds), Past the Last Post, p. 3. Among these is the relation settler colonies have with their aboriginal peoples, of course. In addition, each settler colony, like each forcibly colonized nation, has its own history that cannot be ignored. As the example of the USA and Canada reveals, it also matters whether a nation has fought for political independence or has evolved a form of government out of imperial institutions: breaks and ruptures force an articulation of difference and enable the creation of a discourse of identity. This may explain why Canada perpetually lives out its identity crisis. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, ‘What is post(-)colonialism?’, Textual Practice, 5, 3 (1991), p. 408. Slemon, p. 3; see also Tiffin, p. 31. One way to state the difference here is to see it as being the difference between being considered (or considering yourself) ‘inferior’ by metropolitan standards because your ‘official’ culture is generally seen as continuous with and derivative of Empire’s, and doing so because your indigenous culture is radically different from that of the imperial power (and thus suppressed). My thanks to Shirley Neuman for this concise and cogent articulation of the distinction.

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42 I am bracketing here Canada’s problematic and likely neo-colonial relationship with the United States, a nation whose cultural, political and economic hegemony and whose relation to multinational capitalism have rendered it one of the new imperial nations of the world. On this point, see René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, ‘Introduction: Allegorizing the New World’, in their edition of 1492–1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 10. 43 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the post- in postmodernism the post- in postcolonial?’, Critical Inquiry, 17, 2 (1991), p. 348. 44 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (New York: Orion Press, 1965), p. 89. 45 Abdul R.JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), pp. 4–5. See too Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the double role of the colonizer, ‘“in double duty bound”, at once civilizing mission and a violent subjugating force’, in ‘The Other question: Difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism’, in Ferguson et al., Out There, p. 71. 46 Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). The subsequent citations are from pp. 76–7. 47 Irony, of course, is a trans-ideological trope: it can be used to legitimate but also to undermine a whole range of ideological positions. It can be democratic; it can be elitist. As Susan Purdie remarks about jokers, ironists too can be seen to constitute themselves as discursively powerful. See her Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 128–49. On the specifically Canadian use of oppositional ironies, see Linda Hutcheon, Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991). 48 See, for example, in The New Museology: Smith, p. 20; Jordanova, p. 40; Philip Wright, ‘The quality of visitors’ experiences in art museums’, pp. 136–7. Elsewhere, see Weil, p. 52. 49 The counter position is that of Fredric Jameson who argues that ‘it is high time to abandon’ the concepts of irony and reflexivity as being of any use. See his Modernism and Imperialism (Derry: Field Day Theatre Co. Pamphlet no. 14, 1988), p. 64. 50 See Lumley, p. 13. 51 For example, see Paul Greenhalgh, ‘Education, entertainment and politics: Lessons from the great international exhibitions,’ in Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, p. 95: ‘museums are an intensely political phenomenon and we should acknowledge this fact with panache and honesty.’ 52 Durrans, p. 162. 53 See Gill Seidel, ‘“We condemn apartheid, BUT…”: A discursive analysis of the European Parliamentary Debate on sanctions (July 1986)’, in Ralph Gillo (ed.), Social Anthropology and the Politics of Language (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 230. 54 For some commentators, for example, postmodern deconstructive ways of thinking were deemed not yet part of the consciousness of the general public—though the increasing reflexivity of even television programming might contest such a view. See Enid Schildkrout, ‘Ambiguous messages and ironic twists: Into the Heart of Africa and The Other Museum’, Museum Anthropology, 15, 2 (1991), p. 17. 55 See Marianna Torgovnick, Traveling with Conrad’, in her Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 141–58. 56 According to the curator, Jeanne Cannizzo, writing after the fact, the title was also meant to signal that the exhibition would deal ‘with the past, with journeys, interaction and the disjunction between Canadian images and African realities’. See her ‘Exhibiting cultures: “Into the Heart of Africa”’, Visual Anthropology Review, 7, 1 (1991), pp. 151–2. 57 From a public letter of apology for the offence ‘felt by some’, written over six months after the close of the exhibition (issued on 1 March 1991). 58 Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 150. 59 As Cannizzo explained to the Toronto Star, 5 June 1990. 60 Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 151.

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66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90

Fisher, p. 96. Brochure handed out by members of the Coalition picketing in front of the museum. Hazel A.Da Breo, ‘Royal spoils: The museum confronts its colonial past’, Fuse, 13 (Winter 1989–90), p. 33. In the context of the Canadian debates over ‘appropriation of voice’, Cannizzo rightly noted that at least the exhibit did not appropriate the black voice (‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 152). That it also silenced that voice is not discussed, however. Though the director of the museum and, especially, the curator took most of the pressure, it is worth reminding ourselves once again that there was a team involved in creating this (like any other) show: in addition to the curator, there was a graphic designer, an architect, an artist, and an interpretive planner. Since, as we shall see, display involves design as much as conceptual framing, many of the problems could not be directly attributed to the curator alone. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 152. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 153. See Jordanova, p. 32, on how trophies from colonial expansion in museums usually express ‘victory, ownership, control and dominion’ which trigger ‘fantasies and memories’ and elicit admiration. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 157: the intention was to expose ‘a rather brutal historical reality’ and make ‘clear that the imperial advance was not some sort of adventure story but resulted in death and destruction’. Even in book or magazine illustrations, advertising, or illustrated dictionaries, there is always a complicated verbal/visual tension between the decorative and the didactic, between the descriptive and the prescriptive. See Schildkrout, p. 19. Susan Crean, ‘Taking the missionary position’, This Magazine, 24, 6 (February 1991), p. 26. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 156. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 152. Schildkrout, p. 17. For a summary of the range of responses, see Robert Fulford, ‘Into the heart of the matter’, Rotunda (September 1991), p. 24. Among those who held this view, see Simon Chung, ‘Into the heart of ROM’s racism’, Lexicon, 10 October 1990, p. 7. See Errol Nazareth, ‘Royal Ontario Museum showcase showdown’, Now (29 March-4 April 1990), p. 11. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 154, my emphasis. Durrans, p. 145. Heather Robertson, ‘Out of Africa, into the soup’, Canadian Forum, 69, 792 (September 1990), p. 4; Charles Roach, Toronto Star, 5 June 1990. The word is that of one of the demonstrators, as cited in Toronto Star, 13 June 1990, p. A3. Crean, p. 25. Cited in ‘Analyzing racism at ROM’, in The Varsity (June 1990), p. 4. Individual visitors saw other ironies which the evidence of the curator’s comments and the catalogue would suggest were not actually intentional ones. For instance, see Schildkrout, p. 21: ‘In both text and image, the exhibition attempted to use irony in order to present its condemnation of the colonial point of view. In addition to the unfortunate quotations and pseudo-quotations, the exhibition contained section titles that were meant to be read as ironic cues. For example, the ROM assumed (wrongly) that the audience would understand the irony intended in the use of the word “Commerce” as a title for an exhibit case devoted to artifacts of the slave trade.’ Handout distributed at the picket-lines. Christopher Hume, Toronto Star, 15 May 1990. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 155. Homi K.Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse’, October, 28 (1984), pp. 125– 33. Homi K.Bhabha, ‘The Other question’, p. 71.

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91 See Peter Vergo, ‘The reticent object’, in Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, p. 53, on the persistent museological belief that elucidation can only take the form of words. 92 Crean, p. 25. 93 This term was used quite often in the press: see, for example, editorial in the Globe and Mail, 19 October 1990, p. A16; Bronwyn Drainie in the same newspaper, 24 March 1990. Cf. David Cayley, Globe and Mail, 10 August 1990. 95 Schildkrout, p. 21. 96 Oji Adisa and Ras Rao, cited by Isabel Vincent in the Globe and Mail, 14 July 1990, pp. D1—D2. 97 Eva Mackey, ‘The politics of race and representation in Toronto, Canada: Events and discourses around the Royal Ontario Museum’s “Into the Heart of Africa” Exhibit’, M.A. dissertation, University of Sussex, pp. 46–7. 98 This question was raised by Zhao Meichang (1990) in a graduate course paper (Department of English, University of Toronto) entitled ‘ROM’s Into the Heart of Africa: A commentary’. 99 This is the suggestion of Susan Crean, p. 25. 100 Austin-Smith, p. 52. 101 See the letter to the editor by A.W.Frank Banfield, the son of one of those missionaries, in the Toronto Star, 26 May 1990, p. D3; Isabel Vincent, Globe and Mail, 28 July 1990, p. C12, on William Samarin’s defence in Christian Week; cf. Colan Mitchell, letter to editor, Toronto Star, 5 June 1990, p. A16. 102 See Globe and Mail, 20 June 1990. 103 Christopher Hume, Toronto Star, 29 September 1990. 104 Hazel Da Breo, cited in Nazareth, p. 11; see too Doug Robinson, Now (5–11 April 1990). 105 Fulford, p. 19. 106 Rachel M.Brownstein, ‘Jane Austen: Irony and authority’, in Regina Barreca (ed.), Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1988), p. 57. 107 Delia Chiaro, The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 10– 14. She also points out that the concept of what people find funny ‘appears to be surrounded by linguistic, geographical, diachronic, sociocultural and personal boundaries’ (p. 5). 108 Here I am referring to Wayne C.Booth’s theory in his Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) that irony creates ‘amiable communities’ between ironists and audiences. 109 My reference here is to Booth’s famous distinction throughout The Rhetoric of Irony between stable and unstable ironies. 110 Charles Roach, Now (22 March–4 April 1990); Toronto Star, 5 June 1990. 111 Michael Valpy, Globe and Mail, 6 June 1990. 112 Durrans, p. 163. 113 Smith, p. 19. See too Wright, pp. 133–4. 114 Austin-Smith felt only white audiences could have ‘access to the luxury of ironic detachment’ (p. 52). 115 As discussed by Bronwyn Drainie, Globe and Mail, 24 March 1990 and 6 April 1991. Part of the reason for such a response, as Marlene Nourbese Philip pointed out, is that, for Africans, museums have been seen as ‘a significant site of their racial oppression’ (Toronto Star, 14 January 1991, p. A4). 116 The powerful use of irony by black artists such as Robert Colescott and Fred Wilson (working within the museum setting, as well) would suggest that this view is not shared by all, however. 117 Austin-Smith, p. 52. 118 Crean, p. 25. 119 Cited in Fulford, p. 23. 120 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 121 Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 130. 122 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (London: Routledge, 1984). 123 Indeed, in ‘Museum visiting as a cultural phenomenon’, in Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, Nick Merriman suggests that people who are better off in the present than they were in the past and who visit museums ‘because

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133 134 135 136 137 138 139

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of their cultured connotations, as a way of legitimating their higher status with an appropriate leisure activity’ (p. 170) are more likely to have a negative view of the past, ‘seeing it as something we have progressed from, as a way of legitimating their present status’ (p. 170). Interestingly, age and gender are usually considered to be less significant differences. Hooper-Greenhill, p. 215. Eva Mackey described herself as the ‘perfect’ viewer of the exhibit: a student of anthropology, with a grounding in reflexive, postmodern anthropology and feminism, and therefore interested in how ‘meaning about “others” is constructed’, she had also done research on the white colonial presence in Africa and was part of the white, anglophone majority of Canada (p. 7). Unlike the situation in the USA, there was historically a much smaller black slave population in Canada; some Canadian blacks came as loyalists at the time of American independence or as travellers on the Underground Railway. In Toronto today, there are many black communities originating from various Caribbean islands and African nations, most recently Somalia. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 154. Cf. Donna Laframboise, Toronto Star, 22 October 1990. Schildkrout, p. 20: ‘Despite disclaimers that these people were speaking in the context of another epoch, the overall impression given to many visitors was that the ROM endorsed their views.’ James Clifford, ‘On collecting art and culture’, in Ferguson et al., Out There, p. 144. Clifford, p. 144. Toronto writer Margaret Atwood has presented, in both poems (such as ‘Elegy for the Giant Tortoises’ and ‘A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum’) and fiction—most notably in Life Before Man —a view of the project of modernity institutionalized specifically in the ROM. The fictionalizing and constructing power of categorizing, for example, is articulated and critiqued in that novel by a museum palaeontologist who feels the urge to cry out to those who have faith in that institution’s facts and definitions: ‘The Mesozoic isn’t real. It’s only a word for a place you can’t go to any more because it isn’t there. It’s called the Mesozoic because we call it that’ (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979), p. 290, italics hers. Jeanne Cannizzo, catalogue, Into the Heart of Africa (Toronto, 1989), p. 62. Subsequent references will be in parentheses in the text itself. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 213. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 155. Ayanna Black, cited in Crean, p. 27. Cannizzo, catalogue, p. 35. Jim Freedman, ‘Bringing it all back home: A commentary on Into the Heart of Africa’, Museum Quarterly, 18, 1 (1990), p. 40. There were, however, critiques of the postmodern strategies of the show as well. See Schildkrout, p. 19: ‘instead of finding an account of Canadian involvement in the colonization of Africa, the audience got snippets of biographies and general statements that suggested colonial attitudes. The audience is told little about the history and effects of British military exploits in Africa, but is given a powerful hint of exploitation and violence.’ See Crean, p. 24: the organizers were ‘awfully quiet and oblique in their disapproval, never directly condemning or examining its legacy’. See Eva Mackey, p. 61 (via Lyotard), and Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 105–7 especially. See also Clifford, Predicament, p. 12: ‘If authenticity is relational, there can be no essence except as a political, cultural invention, a local tactic.’ Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 151. See John Kuo Wei Tchen, ‘Creating a dialogic museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment’, in Museums and Communities, pp. 285–326. James Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, in Clifford and Marcus (eds), Writing Culture, p. 15. Cannizzo, ‘Exhibiting cultures’, p. 156: ‘period quotations and historical photographs were used to suggest interaction, the process of collection and the presence of individuals behind the objects’.

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146 Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the contact zone’, Profession 91, p. 35. See too bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 150–2 on ‘radical critical thinkers’ describing the ‘other’. 147 See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 102: ‘Communication is…a political interaction, not only in that its dynamics may operate through differences of power between the agents but also in that the interaction may put those differences at stake, threatening or promising (again it must cut both ways) either to confirm and maintain them or to subvert or otherwise change them.’ See too Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 163, on the ‘informatics of domination’. 148 The difficulties with consultation began with the multiple and fragmented African Canadian communities in the city—of West Indian, African, and American/Canadian origins. The museum did have its promotional, publicity and educational material screened for possible problems by paid experts from the black community; it introduced the show five months before its opening at a reception for that community and, subsequent to a negative response at this stage, set up focus groups and made changes to some of the promotional material—though not, I believe, to the show itself. An expert in African anthropology vetted the catalogue. Lectures and other events were set up by a black African historian, Dr Kasozi, in conjunction with the exhibition. Some of these were later cancelled because of lack of attendance (after the demonstrations began). 149 This led to a ‘Task Force on Museums and First Peoples’ whose 1992 report was introduced by a letter from Ovide Mercredi, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations: ‘Out of controversy can come understanding and an opening for constructive dialogue. The Assembly of First Nations is pleased to have been involved in the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples. The many cultures of the peoples of Canada have so much to share with each other. Out of this sharing can only come a renewed pride in their respective cultures.’ 150 For a discussion of the successful ‘Art/artifact’ exhibition, see Steven D. Lavine and Ivan Karp, ‘Introduction: Museums and multiculturalism’, in Exhibiting Cultures, pp. 7–8. In the same volume, the curator of that exhibit describes her intention: see Susan Vogel, ‘Always true to the object’, pp. 191–204. 151 Not every postcolonial exhibit has been well received, of course. The Smithsonian’s 1991 ‘West as America’ showed how some nineteenthcentury artists glorified the European conquest of the Americas, down-playing exploitation, genocide, cultural displacement, and greed, while representing the indigenous peoples as fierce, brutal, and thus worthy of suppression. The museums planning to host the show after the Washington opening backed out in the face of negative response from the American public. This was also the fate of ‘Into the Heart of Africa’: the four American and Canadian museums which had agreed to present the show cancelled after the Toronto protests. 152 Marjorie Halpin, ‘Fragments: Reflections on collecting’, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, Museum Note 31 (1991), p. 2. 153 See Schildkrout, p. 22: ‘Wilson’s agenda was straightforward, cleverly presented, and unambiguous.’ 154 Clifford, ‘On collecting’, p. 164. 155 Cited by Ahmed Elamin, Share, 4 April 1991, p. 1. 156 Michael Baxandall, ‘Exhibiting intention: Some preconditions for the visual display of culturally purposeful objects’, in Exhibiting Cultures, p. 41. 157 Cannizzo, catalogue, p. 92. 158 Adele Freedman, Globe and Mail, 17 November 1989, p. C11. 159 Cannizzo, in an interview with Hazel Da Breo in Fuse 13 (Winter 1989–90), p. 37. See Jane Peirson Jones, ‘The colonial legacy and the community: The Gallery 33 project’, in Museums and Communities, pp. 221–41. Jones is the curator of the Gallery 33 project at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and describes the success of this exhibition space in terms relevant to the ROM controversy: ‘Gallery 33 represents the museum’s ethnography collection and reflects the heritages of local ethnic minority communities. At the same time it is an exhibition about cultural diversity. But the focus on collectors and collecting achieves several additional goals: deconstructing colonialism, recontextualizing twentieth-century migrations, and integrating the histories of white

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Britons and ethnic minorities. In doing so, Gallery 33 moves forward and becomes more than an essay in cultural diversity: it begins to inform and challenge all of Birmingham’s communities’ (p. 240). Cited both in the exhibition and in Cannizzo, catalogue, p. 14. With the notoriously fine vision of hindsight and admittedly not taking into account the difficulties of timing and of institutional constraints, it is (perhaps too) easy to suggest a number of design and framing changes that might have been made to the exhibition even after it opened: reducing the size of certain violent visual images; being more clear and consistent about the function of quotation marks; perhaps choosing to rely less on ironic indirection; reducing the necessity of having to read texts to get meaning; being more aware of the power and semiotic coding of visual images; removing the African ‘boutique’ and its white staff; even inverting the order of the exhibition—introducing the objects in their African context first, then tracing how they came to enter the museum’s collection. Clifford, Predicament, p. 9. This connection is that of Trinh Minh-ha in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 2.

Dead herrings: ‘You must have mistaken the author’ ORTWIN DE GRAEF

I would endeavour to explain to you what I really meant—or what I fancied I meant by the poem, if it were not that I remember Dr. Johnson’s bitter and rather just remarks about the folly of explaining what, if worth explaining, should explain itself. Edgar Allan Poe1 The handwriting of this letter shows that Poe was not himself when he wrote it. Arthur Hobson Quinn2 The odd mixture of gratification and embarrassment attendant upon the confirmation of the already known in the previously unread is a sentiment familiar to most critics. The gratification is often what prevails: the satisfaction at finding one’s critical presuppositions recognized by the text one brings them to is so constitutive a feature of the hermeneutical project that it must seem perverse not to embrace it as legitimate. Yet, if a critic is committed to reading, a sense of embarrassment at having been right all along typically refuses to go away. One strategy to defuse this refusal consists in rephrasing the confirmation as an affirmation, as a truth spoken by the text prior to its being spoken in the reading, now understood as a mere echo. A further strategy then characteristically serves to dispel the disabling sense of belatedness this entails: the text is seen as having always already said what the critic, too, had always already said. Critic and text merge, and since the critic’s self-definition requires that his or her voice be that of the text, this unison is staged as the total disappearance of the interpretation in the face of its object. A notorious instance of this gesture is Heidegger’s remark on his own readings of Hölderlin: Der letzte, aber auch der schwerste Schritt jeder Auslegung besteht darin, mit ihren Erläuterungen vor dem reinen Dastehen des Gedichtes zu verschwinden. Das dann im eigenen Gesetz stehende Gedicht bringt selbst unmittelbar ein Licht in die anderen Gedichte. Daher meinen wir beim wiederholenden Lesen, wir hätten die Gedichte schon immer so verstanden. Es ist gut, wenn wir das meinen.3 Yet, to recognize this repetitively predicted self-erasure as an instance of the story of hermeneutics suggested just now is to instantiate that story yet again, and any committed reading of this passage should allow for a refusal to let its law be that of our story: such is the embarrassment that should not go away.

© Routledge 1994

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Moving between a note and a query, what I would like to offer in the following pages is a variation on this theme by way of an inquiry into Edgar Allan Poe’s fascination with handwriting. MATHEMATICAL FARCE History awaits from autographs its final verdict! Charles Hamilton4 La Graphologie est une science éminemment politique, puisqu’elle n’a pas besoin du sujet même pour le connaître. Voyez donc! quelle force gouvernementale, pouvoir juger des hommes a distance! Alexandre Dumas fils5 In 1836, Poe published two (anonymous) articles called ‘Autography’ in the Southern Literary Messenger. The articles consist of thirty-eight fictitious letters ascribed to existing public figures and accompanied by facsimile signatures. The whole is dramatically framed as the result of a co-operation between Mr Messenger and one Joseph Miller, whose middle initial changes from one moment to the next, running twice through the alphabet from A to Z.6 Miller is cast as the recipient of the fake letters (replies to non-existent queries of his own) and he and Mr Messenger offer brief comments on the manuscripts at hand as indicative of their writers’ character. Even in a minimal synopsis such as this, it is not difficult to hear the profound truth of this graphological7 hoax: Mr Miller of the shifty initial is a figure for the linguistic constitution of the subject as an identity forever deferred in the difference of a repeated primal letter; the intention to trace mental qualities in handwriting signals the constitution of language as its own originary supplement—writing; and the underlying pun which reads character in characters indicates the tautological stammer of the advent of truth. ‘Autography’ establishes Poe as a Lacan-cum-Derrida avant la lettre (with some Heidegger and de Man thrown in for good measure), this truth immediately illuminates his other writings as so many repetitions of itself,8 and the books can be closed. Needless to say that this will not do—not because it is not true (it is), but because it is not enough. For there is more in ‘Autography’ than meets the eye—the question of what it means for the eye to be met, for instance. One index of this question occurs in a letter supposedly written by Francis Lieber, editor of the Encyclopedia Americana, author of an ‘Essay on International Copy-Right’ and professor of political economy. The letter, addressed to Joseph N.O.Miller, Esq., is as follows: Dear Sir,—I have looked with great care over several different editions of Plato, among which I may mention the Bipont edition, 1781–8, 12 vols. oct.; that of Ast, and that of Bekker, reprinted in London, 11 vols. oct. I cannot, however, discover the passage about which you ask me—‘is it not very ridiculous?’ You must have mistaken the author. Please write again. Respectfully yours, Francis Lieber9 In his impressively documented edition of the ‘Autography’, Thomas Ollive Mabbott comments that The phrase attributed to the philosopher [“is it not very ridiculous?”] is one of Poe’s better jokes’ (M, II, p. 90), but he does not explain just how the joke is supposed to work, thereby suggesting, perhaps, that its wit is spent in the introduction of the word ‘ridiculous’ in the venerable Corpus Platonicum—in which case the joke can hardly be called a very good one. Yet, when we actually take up the task abandoned by Lieber,

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matters soon become more amusing, for (as even only a cursory glance at Ast’s Lexicon Platonicum allows us to discover) the rhetoric of the ridiculous (γελοιοζ or —‘nothing makes so fine a show as your Greek’)10 is in fact a standard, but not therefore unproblematical, maieutic manoeuvre in Plato’s dialogues, and this observation opens up a fertile field for intertextual impertinence. A particularly attractive instance occurs in Book VII of The Republic, where Socrates, after having chided Glaucon for his naïvely literal perception of astronomy, goes on to argue for the superiority of a mathematical astronomy, concerned not with the visible ‘variegated bodies in the heavens’ but with the ‘real beings’ which ‘truly are to be comprehended by reason and the dianoëtic power, but not by sight’ (529d).11 Socrates stages this point by means of an analogy with the previously covered discipline of geometry, and it is here that Poe’s joke comes alive: Is not then, said I [Socrates], that variety in the heavens to be made use of as a paradigm for learning those real things, in the same manner as if one should meet with geometrical figures, drawn remarkably well and elaborately by Daedalus, or some other artist or painter? For a man who was skilled in geometry, in seeing these, would truly think the workmanship most excellent, yet would esteem it ridiculous (γελoιoν) to consider these things seriously, as if from thence he were to learn the truth, as to what were in equal, in duplicate, or in any other proportion. (529e) To which Glaucon can only sheepishly reply: ‘Why would it not be ridiculous (γελoιoν)?’ (530a). The conclusion invited by short-circuiting this passage with Miller’s query appears to be clear: if it is ridiculous to try to attain the truth through an investigation of visible traces, graphology is forever doomed to be an exercise for deluded cave-dwellers, fatally removed from the True and the Good. Poe’s allusion—if that is what it is—radically exposes the scientific pretence of the graphologist, who fails to see that what meets the eye is only ever what meets the eye, not the mind, and who thus blinds himself to the cardinal goal of Poe’s pursuits, the principle of proportions.12 From this perspective, then, the ‘Autography’ states not the truth of the linguistic constitution of the subject as writing but rather seeks to stake out, even if only by ironical implication, a realm of true identity which is to the self of deconstruction what the real or the intelligible is to the visible. It will be objected that, apart from being far-fetched, this intertextual frivolity, which would read the ‘Autography’ as a comical but ultimately serious Platonic rejection of graphology, seriously underestimates Poe’s somewhat perverse habit of ridiculing what he revered,13 and here one could indeed invoke the three ‘serious’ texts on autography he published in Graham’s Magazine some five years later, as well as his 1844 confession in the Marginalia that in all he had ‘ever said about manuscript, as affording indication of character’ he was ‘far more than half serious’ (H, XVI, p. 18).14 A closer look at the case of Professor Lieber suggests some further grounds for this objection. Like most of the figures in the 1836 texts, Lieber also figures in the 1841 chapters, which in fact quote large portions of the graphological commentary of the first versions. However, in this last respect Lieber (together with some others) forms a significant exception. Here is Mr Miller’s comment on the Professor’s hand in 1836: The whole air of the writing seems to indicate vivacity and energy of thought—but altogether, the letter puts us at fault—for we have never before known a man of minute erudition (and such is Professor Lieber) who did not write a very different hand from this. We should have imagined a petite and careful chirography.

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(M, II, p. 284) In 1841, Poe explicitly takes charge and levels the apparent anomaly: Professor Lieber’s character is that of the frankest and most unpretending bonhomie, while his erudition is rather massive than minute. We may therefore expect his MS. to differ widely from that of his brother scholar, Professor Anthon; and so in truth it does. His chirography is careless, heavy, black, and forcible, without the slightest attempt at ornament— (H, XV, p. 202) At second sight, the difference between the two readings can be accounted for as a difference in method: Miller starts out from a hypothesis based on observation which is then faulted, while Poe begins with a conclusion which is then rephrased as a hypothesis validated by observation. But the decisive distinction here is clearly less a matter of induction versus deduction than of accurate foreknowledge: Miller’s faulting of graphological doctrine is actually an argument in its defence, as the ‘petite and careful’ hand he ‘should have imagined’ would in fact not have adequately indi cated the mental make-up of Lieber, who, as Poe knew (having reviewed part of his memoirs in 1836, before the first ‘Autography’ paper), had enough ‘vivacity and energy’ to travel to Greece in 1821 with the intention to fight in the war for independence (H, VIII, pp. 162–8) and whose erudition was in fact not ‘minute’ but rather ‘massive’. The conclusion would then indeed have to be that in Miller Poe only ridicules the inaccurate practice of the science, not the science itself. Yet, the intertextual network we have activated suggests another reading here: the only proof we have that Lieber’s erudition is indeed not minute is that he fails to locate the passage in Plato Mr Miller is looking for —a passage which implicitly ridicules the pretence to truth in the very exercise of graphology. The evidence of the truth of graphology is thus circumstantially dependent on an inability to detect an argument against it —the important point being that this formula exactly describes Poe’s own serious graphological practice as well as his theoretical defence of the discipline, both of which are determined by a programmatic and damaging erasure of what does not fit. Here is Poe’s fundamental theoretical statement of the case for graphology: The general proposition is unquestionable—that the mental qualities will have a tendency to impress the MS. The difficulty lies in the comparison of this tendency, as a mathematical force, with the forces of the various disturbing influences of mere circumstance. But—given a man’s purely physical biography, with his MS., and the moral biography may be deduced. (H, XVI, p. 18) What this passage stages is the Platonic dream of the elimination of all circumstance (or becoming) and its subordination to the unchanging truth of Being, of which mathematics, as the science of the always already known ( )15 is the prime representative. What Poe designates as a comparison between the mathematical force of character-transmission and the influence of mere circumstance on the act of writing in fact amounts to a translation of the circumstantial into the mathematical: circumstantial influence is disturbing only when it is not recognized as such—the moment it can be compared with mathematical force it is itself recognized and becomes mathematical. The difference between the primary mathematical force and the secondary (circumstantial) mathematical force is that the former yields positive, the latter only

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negative certainty, but ultimately this latter is no less positive than the former, and it is no coincidence that Poe should raise negative certainty to a point of high graphological principle: The actual practical extent to which these ideas are applicable is not sufficiently understood. For my own part, I by no means shrink from acknowledging that I act, hourly, upon estimates of character derived from chirography. The estimates, however, upon which I depend, are chiefly negative. For example; a man may not always be a man of genius, or a man of taste, or a man of firmness, or a man of any other quality, because he writes this hand or that; but there are MSS. which no man of firmness, or of taste, or of genius, ever did, will, or can write. (H, XVI, pp. 18–19) Quality can be faked but cannot hide itself: the truth of the good will out, mathematically, and the fact that this mathematical emergence is, by definition, susceptible of imitation, is a circumstance graphology is ready to assimilate in a swift sleight-of-hand. Far from being a threat to the rule of graphology, the noncorrespondence between a hand and its author comes to reinforce it as the proverbial, but pre-programmed and therefore unexceptional exception. The law of this reduction of appearance into essence—of this reproduction of appearance as essence—is that, for all his insistence on the principium individuationis16 (or in fact because of this preoccupation), Poe cannot stand what he cannot understand as more of the same. His stated concern for the accurate registration, reproduction and preservation of the visible particular is invariably performed in the name of universal intelligibility. Just like Plato’s model can accommodate any anomaly in the visible as a trivial effect of its distance from the ideal, Poe’s doctrine can break down all noise into stable information, into the truth of real proportion to be read in what meets the eye—reading here being a process of reaping, of emptying out, of forcing all that is into the measure of the mathematical by retracing it with the supreme stylus of the alethic. Both models, marked as they are by a compulsion to find only what repeats the already known (be it by way of intelligible reflection or along the detour of traceable deviation) in order to then say it again, are radically ridiculous—if only for the reason Plato himself gives us in the Euthydemus: ‘Because it is certainly ridiculous ( ) again to adduce that which was formerly proposed, and to say the same thing twice’ (279d).17 SCRIBAL SEX Die Sprache hat einen Leib und der Leib hat eine Sprache. Dennoch— die Welt gründet auf dem was am Leibe nicht Sprache ist (dem Moralischen) und an der Sprache nicht Leib (dem Ausdruckslosen). Dahingegen hat freilich die Graphologie durchaus es mit dem zu tun, was an der Sprache der Handschrift das Leibhafte, am Leibe der Handschrift das Sprechende ist. Walter Benjamin18 But perhaps all this intertextual innuendo for bipeds without feathers19 only illustrates the pertinence of David Halliburton’s reminder that ‘The hunt for concealed ironic messages has a way of leading the critic indefatigably on—much like the hunt for concealed sex.’20 Ironically, however, concealed sex is very much what is also at stake. There is, for instance, the ridiculously appropriate case of Poe’s first letter to Sarah Helen Whitman, written under the assumed name of Edward S.T.Grey, with an effort to disguise his handwriting21 (amusingly not extended to the address on the envelope), and in which, by way of ascertaining whether Mrs Whitman was in Providence so as to be able to plot efficiently his designs on her

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Poe’s eye-shaped drawing of a hand drawing out the truth, intended as the title-page illustration for The Stylus, one of his many unsuccessful editorial ventures. (Reproduced with the publisher’s kind permission from Wolf Mankowitz, The Extraordinary Mr Poe: A Biography of Edgar Allan Poe, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978.)

heart, he requested her autograph, that is: her hand.22 Unfortunately, he never read the truth of her character in its tracings, and we can only guess whether it lived up to the standards of his graphological aesthetics by concealing the author’s gender. For Poe’s estimate of the hand of female authors is directly proportional to their having suppressed the (non-)features of femininity in their chirography: praise is due only to those who differ from ‘most of [their] sex’ in that their MS is not ‘formed…upon a regular school-model, [which] is, of course, not in the slightest degree indicative of character’ (H, XV, p. 207).23 To the extent that they swerve from the original form (or Form), female hands cross gender, and considering the potential consequences of such a fascinating transgression, it is hardly surprising that the urbane editorial Poe should hasten to add at several occasions that a ‘sufficient’ degree of ‘femininity’ (or even, in a curious double cross, ‘effeminacy’ (H, XV, p. 230)) is fortunately preserved.

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That there would thus be something ‘essentially’ feminine or effeminate about the ‘regular school-model’, and that écriture feminine is consequently a matter of circumstance rather than mathematical charactertransmission, is largely in keeping with familiar patterns of gender-discipline. But Poe’s thought on the matter—or body—of writing is not contained by these patterns: rather, as I shall briefly try to show, it forces the logic of gender-patrol to a point of (re)productive crisis. That Poe should none the less remain blind to this crisis is—as the hermeneutical auxiliary suggests—as it should be, even if only for the sake of the auxiliary. In his introduction to the 1841 ‘Chapter on Autography’, Poe proposes to account for the ‘rational’ nature of the interest in autographs: Next to the person of a distinguished man-of-letters, we desire to see his portrait—next to his portrait, his autograph. In the latter, especially, there is something which seems to bring him before us in his true idiosyncrasy—in his character of scribe. (H, XV, p. 178) The critical point here is not just that the true character of a scribe is to sacrifice all character in the cause of copying, but more importantly that, given the characteristically disciplined nature of écriture feminine, such sacrifice should be an eminently female activity. If, therefore, the ‘true idiosyncrasy’ of a ‘distinguished man-of-letters’ is ‘his character of scribe’, it would seem to follow that distinguished men-of-letters are essentially copying (-) women. This inference may seem wilfully perverse and at any rate easily remediable by a minimal enforcement of semantic hygiene, but it does leave traces in Poe’s writing. Already in his ‘serious’ comments on the chirography of Mrs E.F.Ellet, the short-circuit sparks off questions of originality and derivation that go to the heart of the matter: Her hand…is clear, neat, forcible and legible; just such a hand as one would desire for copying MSS. of importance. We have observed that the writers of such epistles as those before us, are often known as translators, but seldom evince high originality or very eminent talent of any kind. (H, XV, p. 207) Such ‘observation’ of the unprepossessing nature of the stereotypically female trans-scribe is clearly reassuring, precisely inasmuch as it veils a threatening contamination of the origin. A few years later, however, in Poe’s enthusiastic 1845 reception of the advent of ‘Anastatic Printing’, the veil is rent and the gender-crisis of graphology stands fully revealed.24 Poe’s praise of Anastatic Printing as a process whose ‘province’ it is ‘to revolutionize the world’ (H, XIV, p. 154) and whose ‘inevitable results enkindle the imagination, and embarrass the understanding’ (p. 155), swiftly moves from a recognition of the new technique’s ‘merely immediate and most obvious’ merits (as a cheap, flexible and rapid means to meet the demands of the market (pp. 156–7)), to more (but ultimately less) substantial advantages. He observes that the conception of traditional printing as a necessary way to ensure legibility is a symptom of historical amnesia and predicts that ‘by degrees it will be remembered that, while MS. was a necessity, men wrote after such fasion that no books printed in modern times have surpassed their MSS. either in accuracy or in beauty’ (p. 157). Once this recollection has firmly taken root, he argues, the world of letters will witness a revolutionary revival of ‘the cultivation of a neat and distinct style of handwriting’—this time, however, not as a matter of necessity, but as an exercise of freedom. Anastatic Printing will effectively abolish ‘the expensive interference of the typesetter’ as well as ‘the often ruinous intervention of the publisher’ and, as a result, full authorial licence will finally be established: ‘[The

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author] may intersperse [his MS.] with his own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, in the certainty of being fairly brought before his readers, with all the freshness of his original conception about him’ (p. 157). But even this emancipatory dynamic, which comes to strengthen the initial ‘merely’ economic argument, does not yet exhaust the virtues of Anastatic Printing. Poe is brought up short by his own thought: And at this point we are arrested by a consideration of infinite moment, although of a seemingly shadowy character. The cultivation of accuracy in MS., thus enforced, will tend with an inevitable impetus to every species of improvement in style—more especially in the points of concision and distinctness—and this again, in a degree even more noticeable, to precision of thought, and luminous arrangement of matter. There is a very peculiar and easily intelligible reciprocal influ ence between the thing written and the manner of writing—but the latter has the predominant influence of the two. The more remote effect on philosophy at large, which will inevitably result from improvement of style and thought in the points of concision, distinctness, and accuracy, need only be suggested to be conceived. (pp. 157–8) If the defence of Anastatic Printing had stopped here, the presupposed intelligibility of the reciprocal but hierarchical relation between ‘the thing written’ and ‘the manner of writing’ could have stood as the unargued but workable regulative ideal for the remote future of ‘philosophy at large’. But Poe, ever loth to leave well enough alone, goes on to wreak havoc on his own vision by trans-sexing the scribe and by reinscribing his argument in the logic of a momentous redistribution of labour: As a consequence of attention being directed to neatness and beauty of MS., the antique profession of the scribe will be revived, affording abundant employment to women—their delicacy of organization fitting them particularly for such tasks. The female amanuensis, indeed, will occupy very nearly the position of the present male type-setter, whose industry will be diverted perforce into other channels. (p. 158) The terms of the syllogism are in place. Major premiss: the ‘cultivation of accuracy in MS.’ generates a substantial improvement in ‘philosophy at large’. Minor premiss: such cultivation is the ordained province of female amanuenses. Ergo: the future of philosophy as writing is female —‘l’écriture serait la femme.’25 By diligently transcribing the master scrawl in their characteristically featureless hand—the hand of the original Form —women spell the crisis of writing in the mode of enhanced intelligibility —a task perhaps for Ms Ellet, Ms Whitman or another starry-eyed Annabel Lee. And certainly for Virginia Poe, who, as Mabbott informs us, ‘cared little for poetry…but knew one of [her husband’s] pieces well enough to write it out (and sign it as if it were her own) in the album of her cousin Mary E.Herring.’26 Given this imminent displacement of authorial invention by female scribal labour, it is entirely consistent that Poe should round off his article by claiming, with admirable inconsistency, that the ultimate effect of Anastatic Printing will be a devaluation of ‘the physique of a book’ in favour of ‘the value of its morale’ (p. 159). The superficial justification of this claim is that Anastatic Printing will put the means of production within the range of each and all (including, presumably, the male typesetters it has made redundant), but the underlying thrust is inevitably one of disincarnation in the face of the all too female writing body. What starts out as a revalorization of the magical presence of the author in the first-hand production of his bodily hand, ends up, after the ruinous intervention of the handmaiden, in a total Aufhebung of the materiality of

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writing into the realm of ‘intrinsic merit’ (p. 159). Appropriately, the last thoughts of the article are reserved for a recognition of the ‘imperative necessity’ of copyright laws to protect this ‘intrinsic merit’: with delicately organized female amanuenses in the ascendancy, the dematerialization of writing, which should by rights have been countered by means of Anastatic Printing, stands in need of legal ratification. The female body of copiers has to be kept at a lawful distance from the astral body of the original author in his true character of, precisely, non-scribe. The manipulation, then, of the female scribe is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the hand best suited for such a topic is that of the disembodied male-of-letters. OCULAR JUDGEMENT …we gaze at this production of his pen as into his own inscrutable eyes, seeking for the mystery of his nature. Nathaniel Hawthorne27 He thought, for a long time, of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live—how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their last. They had looks that remained, as great poets had quoted lines. Henry James28 And there is more of the sexual and the sidereal in this plot. Plato’s investment in astronomy was erotically overdetermined too, at least according to Diogenes Laertius’s quotation of two epigrams ascribed to Plato as lyrical effusions in honour of his fellow-student of the truth of astral bodies, the appropriately named Aster: Star-gazing Aster, would I were the skies, To gaze upon thee with a thousand eyes. Among the living once the Morning Star, Thou shin’st, now dead, like Hesper from afar.29 It may not be Plato the comic, favourite morsel of His Significantly Eyeless Satanic Majesty,30 but it’s sufficiently morbid and cosmic for Poe. Thine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined Then desolately fall, O God! on my funereal mind Like starlight on a pall— 31 ‘Only thine eyes remained./They would not go—they never yet have gone’32—‘And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes’33: Hegel would have approved, as witness his comment on Plato’s distich quoted above: ‘art…has to convert every shape in all points of its visible surface into an eye, which is the seat of the soul and brings the spirit into appearance’ (Ästhetik, I, III, A, 1).34 Whether it is the eyes of Ligeia or the hand of Professor Lieber, the stakes are obsessively the same: what is to be located is the ocular particular where the visible enters the universe of the intelligible, where the amorphous sex of the scribal body shifts into the essential shape of the soul, where the mind sublates the physique of her earthly casket and sends abroad her spirit.

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SPITTING DUCKS [To take] Poe with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self. Henry James35 The point here is not that deconstructionist critics of Poe are peculiarly lax or parasitic in their scholarship but that deconstructionist critics of Poe and their readers share so unexamined and ebullient a relish for more and more deconstructions of Poe that they overlook, or are at least willing to tolerate, redundancy. R.C.de Prospo36 And yet. ‘Ist es gut wenn wir das meinen?’ Perhaps the passage Professor Lieber failed to find is actually this, from Book VI of the Republic: is it not ridiculous (γελοιον) in other things of small account to employ our whole labour, and strive to have them the most accurate and perfect, and not deem the highest and most important affairs worthy of our highest attention, in order to render them the most perfect? (504e)37 The rhetoric of the question already performs its answer in the affirmative, and Adeimantus’s affirmative rejoinder is consequently at once hermeneutically accurate and embarrassingly ridiculous: like literary criticism, it posits its conclusion as more of the same, adduces again ‘that which was formerly proposed’. But no sooner has literary criticism refused to conform to this rule of confirmation by instead turning its eye to a reading of what has not been formerly proposed, than it is ridiculed for its perverse blindness to ‘the highest and most important affairs’— those that are hermeneutically relevant. At least in the eyes of the authority that has always already proposed the proper form of the same and banishes both what it recognizes as the reproduction of that form and what it cannot recognize as such reproduction to the obscurity of evil. For as Socrates also teaches, ‘he is a fool who deems anything ridiculous (γελoιoν) but what is bad, and attempts to rally upon any other idea of the ridiculous but that of the foolish and the vicious, or to be serious in any other pursuit but that of the good’ (Republic, 452d-e).38 As is well known, in Poe such fusion of ridicule and moral outrage significantly finds its most powerful voice in his persecution of plagiarism, the vicious repetition of what was formerly proposed (by Poe). One last dead herring: In reply to an allegation from Henry B.Hirst to the effect that in ‘Ulalume’ Poe had committed ‘plagiarism of idea’ by ‘shadow[ing] out his story’ on the model of Hirst’s own ‘Endymion’, Poe turns the tables and demonstrates how Hirst himself stole a passage involving, unsurprisingly, a dead woman, a ‘slanderous tongue’ and an ‘evil eye’, from Poe’s own ‘Lenore’. But before thus hoisting Hirst by his own petard, Poe juxtaposes the passages from ‘Ulalume’ and ‘Endymion’ and confesses that he regrets not finding any resemblance between them in the first place. Regrets, since ‘to be a good imitator of Henry B. Hirst, is quite enough honour for me.’ Really regrets: ‘for malo cum Platone errare, &c.’ (H, XIII, p. 212).39 Catholic University of Leuven (Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research)

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NOTES A first version of this paper was presented at the Poe Studies Association’s session on ‘Texts and Intertexts’ at the 1991 MLA convention in San Francisco. I am grateful to Liliane Weissberg, the president of that session, for having given me the opportunity to repeat myself here. 1 Letter to Susan Ingram, 10 September 1849. Quoted in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume I: Poems, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 414. Hereafter cited M, I. 2 Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1942), p. 377, n. 55. 3 ‘The last, but also the hardest step in any interpretation is for this interpretation to disappear with its elucidations in the face of the pure standing-there of the poem. The poem then stands in its own law and immediately sheds light on the other poems. Therefore we believe in repeated reading that we had always already understood these poems in this way. It is good when we believe that.’ Martin Heidegger, ‘Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage’, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlin’s Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981), pp. 7–8; p. 8. 4 Charles Hamilton, Collecting Autographs and Manuscripts, Illustrated with more than Eight Hundred Facsimiles and Other Reproductions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), p. 238. 5 ‘Graphology is an eminently political science, since it does not need the subject itself in order to know it. Just consider! what governmental force, to be able to judge men from a distance!’ Epigraph to the introduction in Jean-Hippolyte Michon, Système de graphologie: L’art de connaître les hommes d’après leur écriture, 9th edn (Paris: Ghio, 1888), p. 13. 6 But missing out the J once and the U twice. Ingenious solutions to this riddle have been suggested by Alexander Hammond (‘The hidden Jew in Poe’s “Autography”’, in Poe Newsletter, 2, 3, October 1969, pp. 55–6) and Roger O’Connor (‘Letters, signatures, and “Juws” in Poe’s “Autography” ‘in Poe Newsletter, 3; 1, June 1970, pp. 21–2). 7 I should perhaps point out that Poe does not use the word ‘graphology’. According to the OED, it was probably coined (initially as ‘graphiology’) ‘by some of the advertising practitioners of the art about 1850’. 8 A most obvious instance being the repetition of the mystery of the mutable initial in ‘The Man that was Used Up’ (1839), the opening of which further repeats ‘Ligeia’. On this score, see my ‘The eye of the text: Two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe’, MLN (Modern Language Notes), 104, 5 (December 1989), pp. 1098–1123. 9 Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume II: Tales and Sketches, 1831–1842, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, with the assistance of Eleanor D.Kewer and Maureen C.Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 283–4. Hereafter cited M, II. References to the Virginia Edition—The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 17 vols, ed. James A.Harrison, with textual notes by R.A. Stewart (New York: AMS Press (reprint of 1902 edition), 1965)—will also be given in the main text (H, volume number). 10 Poe, ‘The Psyche Zenobia (How to write a Blackwood article)’, M, II, p. 346. 11 I quote from Thomas Taylor’s 1804 translation in his The Works of Plato (New York: Garland (reprint), 1984), vol. I, p. 374. I have not been able to ascertain which translation (if any) Poe was familiar with (the bibliographical references in Lieber’s letter—which Mabbott moreover suggests to have been copied from an article in the Messenger [M, II, p. 290]—are all to Greek editions with, except in the case of Ast, Latin translation), but Taylor (certainly read by Emerson and Thoreau) is not an unlikely candidate. 12 A classic instance of Poe’s obsessive intent on proportional representation is his repeated (mis)quotation of Bacon’s ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’ (e.g. ‘Ligeia’, M, II, p. 311, and, significantly, ‘Anastatic printing’, H, XIV, p. 153), where one could argue that the strangeness of the proportion is that in it which is not accessible to the eye. The more relevant—and more complicated —reference here would be to The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ and to the parallel discussion of ‘µονσικη' in the Marginalia (M, II, pp. 610–11 and H, XIII, p. 163).

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13 A further objection would be that this reading neglects Poe’s general rejection of what he knew of Plato (excepting his programme for the education of the soul through the discipline of proportion), a rejection evident in his explicit statement that ‘the value of Platonian philosophy’ is ‘exactly nothing at all’ (H, XII, p. 164). However, it would not be very difficult to demonstrate that, if this be indeed its value, this would also mean that at least half of Poe’s own philosophy—and certainly large sections of Eureka, specifically in its royal disdain for ‘demonstration’ and ‘ocular proof’—must be discarded as well. I cannot adequately cover this issue here, but I may draw attention to the interesting analogy between the three modes of reasoning in Eureka (and in ‘Mellonta Tauta’) and the analogy of the Divided Line in The Republic. ‘Induction’ would be the order of illusion (εικασια) ), ‘deduction’ the order of mathematical reasoning (διανοια), and the ‘seemingly intuitive and belief ( leaps’ or the ‘guessing’ the order of intelligence or dialectic ( ). One apparent limit of the analogy would be that for Plato ‘guessing’ (εικασια) is precisely what takes place in the cave—but then again, Poe’s guess is as good as Plato’s νοησιζ. 14 Though in the introduction to the first of the Graham’s Magazine papers, he admits that in the original ‘Autography’-papers his ‘design was never more than semi-serious’ (H, XV, p. 177), and that he was ‘not unfrequently’ guilty of ‘sacrificing truth for the sake of a bon-mot’ (p. 178). The truth of the practice itself, however, is vindicated throughout (‘that a strong analogy does generally and naturally exist between a man’s chirography and character, will be denied by none but the unreflecting’), and in the 1841 series he therefore proposes ‘seriously to illustrate our position that the mental features are indicated (with certain exceptions) by the handwriting’ (p. 178). 15 Cf. Dirk De Schutter, ‘Heideggers filosofie van de transcendentie’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 50, 3 (September 1988), pp. 453–91; p. 476. 16 Cf. Poe, ‘Morella’ (M, II, p. 226). 17 Taylor’s translation, volume V, p. 320. 18 ‘Language has a body and the body has a language. Still—the world is based on that aspect of the body which is not language (the moral aspect) and on that aspect of language which is not body (the expressionless aspect). Graphology, on the other hand, is certainly completely concerned with the bodily aspect of the language of handwriting, and with the speaking face of the body of handwriting.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Anja und Georg Mendelssohn, Der Mensch in der Handschrift’, in Gesammelte Schriften, III: Kritiken und Rezensionen, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 135–9; p. 138. 19 Cf. Poe, ‘Diddling considered as one of the exact sciences’, in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume III: Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, with the assistance of Eleanor D.Kewer and Maureen C.Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 869. 20 David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe, A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 229. 21 Or, more accurately, his handwritings, for he had more than one—see Hamilton, Collecting Autographs, p. 116; and Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe, p. 179. 22 See Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, p. 575; and The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), pp. 276, 528. 23 Of the twelve female authors Poe comments upon, four are praised for their handwriting’s not evincing ‘undue effeminacy’ (M, II, pp. 266, 270, 281; H, XV, p. 230), two are praised for the ‘freedom’ of their MS which is recognized as other than feminine (M, II, pp. 269; H, XV, p. 246), three are characterized as laudably differing from their ‘sex in general’ (H, XV, pp. 197, 203, 245—the second of these being explicitly singled out for her ‘masculine style of thought’), and the remaining three are dismissed for writing too much like ‘most of [their] sex’ (H, XV, pp. 206, 207, 259). 24 ‘Anastatic Printing’ is a process through which ‘any thing written, drawn, or printed, can be made to stereotype itself, with absolute accuracy, in five minutes’ (H, XIV, p. 154). The technique involves spreading acid over a printed or, more importantly, written page, which is then applied to a zinc plate: as the acid is neutralized by the ink, it only corrodes the zinc where the page is blank, and the result is a zinc stereotype plate. 25 Jacques Derrida, Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 44.

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26 Cf. M, I, p. 523. The poem in question—now known as ‘To Frances S. Osgood’—was inscribed by Poe himself to no less than three different ladies: another Herring (Elizabeth Rebecca), Eliza White, and Frances Osgood (see M, I, pp. 233–4). 27 Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘A Book of Autographs’, in Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1982), pp. 959–74; p. 970. 28 Henry James, ‘The Altar of the Dead’, The Complete Tales of Henry James, Volume 9:1892–1898, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1964), pp. 231–71; pp. 236–7. 29 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in two volumes, with an English translation by R.D.Hicks (London: Heinemann, 1925), Book III, sect. 29. 30 In ‘The Bargain Lost’ and the highly similar ‘Bon-Bon’ Poe has the Prince of Darkness list some of the antique souls he enjoyed the most: ‘There was the soul of Cratinus—passable: Aristophanes—racy: Plato—exquisite— not your Plato, but Plato the comic poet: your Plato would have turned the stomach of Cerberus—faugh!’ (M, II, p. 91; p. 110). As for the devil’s vision: ‘In short, Pierre Bon-Bon not only saw plainly that his Majesty had no eyes whatsoever, but could discover no indications of their having existed at any previous period—for the space where the eyes should naturally have been, was, I am constrained to say, simply a dead level of flesh’ (M, II, p. 106). 31 ‘To [Elmira]’, M, I, p. 132. 32 ‘To Helen [Whitman]’, M, I, p. 446. 33 ‘Annabel Lee’, M, p. 479. 34 G.W.F.Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M.Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. I, p. 152. 35 Quoted in J.Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. viii. 36 R.C.de Prospo, ‘Deconstructive Poe(tics)’, Diacritics 18, 3 (Fall 1988), pp. 43–64, passim. 37 Taylor’s translation, vol. I, p. 341. A very similar question occurs in the apocryphal dialogue Demodocos: ‘Is it not ridiculous, to exert oneself for perfectly useless matters?’ (38lb). 38 Taylor’s translation, vol. I, pp. 291–2. 39 The reply was written in 1849 but never published with Poe’s consent— Griswold included it in his 1850 edition (cf. M, I, p. 415).

Paradigms lost: chaos, Milton and Jurassic Park HARRIETT HAWKINS

Chaos Umpire sits, And by decision more imbroils the fray By which he Reigns…[over his] wild Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixt Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1674 Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behaviour: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon…the regular movements of objects. But there is another kind of behaviour, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They’re hard to solve—in fact, they’re usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory. Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, 1991 Portrayed as ‘ancestor of nature’, supreme ruler over Tumult, Confusion and Chance, imperial Chaos entered classic English literature in Milton’s Paradise Lost.1 Three centuries later, ‘chaos theory’ entered modern popular culture through the crash course offered to the mass readership of Michael Crichton’s bestselling thriller, and then through Steven Spielberg who likewise uses it to moralize the mythic fable of Jurassic Park. In overall outline as in incident, Jurassic Park replicates the ‘fractal’ structure (see below) of Paradise Lost which in turn replicates Genesis. For instance: in an introductory chapter entitled ‘Almost Paradise’ an innocent little girl gets bitten when she tries to play with an unusually intelligent and friendly little reptile that can, astonishingly, walk upright on its hind legs. It is a mini-dinosaur, and the scene, so obviously comparable to Eve’s meeting with the friendly, talking snake in Paradise Lost, is the first of our close encounters with the megaserpents re-created to inhabit a man-made Eden.

© Routledge 1994

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As, by now, practically everyone ever likely to read this essay (along with their kids) already knows, on a carefully controlled and isolated island in Central America, the billionaire John Hammond oversees the creation of ‘new life forms’ in ‘a very short time’ and expects them ‘to do his bidding’ because ‘he made them’.2 Of course, as the chaos theorist, Ian Malcolm predicts—and as anyone familiar with Milton’s epic or the Book of Genesis could have foreseen—Hammond’s Eden inevitably fails to behave as planned. In spite of all precautions, dinosaurs not intended to mate or escape do both. Milton’s majestic, menacing Tyrannosaurus rex—Satan, who wilfully revolted against God’s authority— then Adam and Eve, whose rejection of God’s authority was comparatively unpremeditated, as well as the morally blameless (albeit threatening to man) reptiles that escape from Hammond’s theme-park (thus we come full circle from Satan), seem likewise called up from time immemorial to ensure chaos. They thus exemplify the central tenet of chaos theory that allows Ian Malcolm to predict, with absolute conviction, that Hammond’s seemingly impregnable island will inevitably proceed to behave in unpredictable ways (p. 77). But why on earth should this ‘inevitably’ be the pattern in ancient and modern myths as well as in chaos theory? Why should events in a 300-year-old epic poem which was based on the most primal of biblical parables, and a late twentieth-century blockbuster based on state-of-the-art scientific theory, follow an identical pattern? Unless theory and mythic fictions alike are reflecting a comparable reality even as (in chaos theory) ‘fractal geometry’ appears to describe ‘real objects’ and events ‘in the natural world’ that ‘look almost identical at different scales’ (see Jurassic Park, p. 171): ‘For example’, Malcolm said, ‘a big mountain, seen from far away has a certain rugged mountain shape. If you get closer, and examine a small peak of the big mountain, it will have the same mountain shape. In fact, you can go all the way down the scale to a tiny speck of rock, seen under a microscope —it will have the same basic fractal shape as the big mountain…. And this sameness also occurs for events.’3 A cognate ‘sameness’ of shape and event would seem to occur in art exactly as it does in nature. ‘Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favours just a few’4—and so, apparently, does art. As in Milton’s epic, where the Argument of the opening lines (to say nothing of foreknowledge of the Genesis myth) gives us certain knowledge that the earthly paradise is bound to be lost, Ian Malcolm’s confident predictions assure that the suspense involved in Jurassic Park lies not in finding out whether but how things on Hammond’s island will go wrong. That, Malcolm informs us, we cannot know, until they inevitably do. Or, as Doyne Farmer—a real-life member of the ‘Chaos Cabal’—describes the process, the overall system ‘is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next. On a philosophical level, it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism’ (Chaos, p. 251). Arguably the same processes are operative in chaos theory, in fact, and in Milton’s predetermined mythic fiction about free will. Michael Crichton introduces his fictional exponent of chaos theory, Ian Malcolm, as ‘one of the most famous of the new generation of mathematicians’ who were ‘openly interested in “how the real world works”’ (p. 73). In contrast to linear equations describing the regular, and therefore predictable, movements of planets and comets, these mathematicians were concerned with apparently simple and mundane systems (like the movment of a billiard ball) as well as extremely complex systems (like the weather) that are likewise so ‘sensitive to initial conditions’ that they will inevitably operate in unpredictable ways. ‘Chaos theory says two things. First, that complex systems like weather have an underlying order. Second, the reverse of that—simple systems can produce complex behaviour.’ Take the example of pool balls. Although ‘you can know the force and the mass of a ball’ and ‘can calculate the force with which it will strike the

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walls’, you cannot predict the ball’s course for ‘more than a few seconds into the future’ since, ‘almost immediately, very small effects—imperfections in the surface of the ball, tiny indentations in the wood of the table—start to make a difference. And it doesn’t take long before they overpower your careful calculations’ (pp. 76–7). ‘Hammond’s project’, Malcolm adds, ‘is another apparently simple system— animals within a zoo environment—that will eventually show unpredictable behaviour’. ‘You know this because of…’ ‘Theory.’ Malcolm said. ‘But hadn’t you better see the island, to see what he’s actually done?’ ‘No. That is quite unnecessary. The details don’t matter. Theory tells me that the island will quickly proceed to behave in an unpredictable fashion.’ ‘And you’re confident of your theory.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ Malcolm said, ‘Totally confident’. He sat back in the chair. ‘There is a problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen.’ (p. 77) Neither in theory nor in practice can John Hammond—or any geneticist, or any student of dinosaurs, or any computer—possibly predict what small effects might become, or were presently being amplified, as they were when frog DNA, introduced to correct a deficiency, enabled certain cloned dinosaurs to mate independently. Or what human mistakes or misdeeds might mess things up, as when a computer engineer temporarily shut off the electrified fences that controlled the dinosaurs, but didn’t get back to turn them on again in time, and so allowed a wholesale escape. But, as Malcolm insists, whatever effects may be amplified, Hammond’s apparently simple system will eventually show unpredictable behaviour. The pattern of events in Paradise Lost is strikingly similar. Comparably ‘sensitive to initial conditions’ in their comparably controlled environment, Adam and Eve (first introduced to us hand in hand in Eden) soon begin to show divergent, increasingly amplified traits. Created as lord of the animals but lesser than the angels, Adam had experienced loneliness. Subsequently, he cannot bear to face life without Eve. Conversely Eve, who had never lived without Adam, desires autonomy. She suggests they work alone for a time. Because he fears alienating her, Adam gives her permission to go: ‘Go, for thy stay, not free, absents thee more.’ Promising to be back by noon, ‘from her husband’s hand her hand/soft she withdrew’ (IX. 385–6). From thence the loss of Eden. Whether they are looked at structurally or thematically, inevitability (order) and unpredictability (chaos, turbulence) are simultaneously, and systematically, built into Jurassic Park and Paradise Lost alike. Ian Malcolm’s account of the way initially comparable weather systems are so ‘sensitively dependent on initial conditions’ that ‘one will wander off and rapidly become very different from the first’ (p. 76) could serve as a theoretical gloss on Milton’s portrayal of the falls of Eve and Adam. Small effects, ‘tiny differences’ become amplified and lead to huge divergences (‘thunderstorms instead of sunshine’). Compare the way a small divergence, Eve’s suggestion that she and Adam might work apart for a while, is amplified to such an extent that all hell breaks loose in the less than 1,000 lines of verse that come between Milton’s harmonious portrayal of ‘the human pair’ when the ‘sacred light began to dawn in Eden’ on the morning before the fall (IX. 191–201), and his account of the cosmic and psychological turbulence ensuing afterwards: Nor only Tears Rained at their Eyes, but high Winds worse within

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Began to rise, high Passions, Anger, Hate Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook sore Their inward State of Mind, calm Region once, And full of Peace, now toss’t and turbulent. (IX. 1121–6) The reign of Chaos now encompasses the earth. Conversely, however, the order of Milton’s God (like the order of his epic) ultimately encompasses Chaos. In so far as they likewise insist that there is an order ultimately ruling, as well as allowing, disorder, modern chaos theory fits Paradise Lost like a glove. To the question raised in the title of Ian Stewart’s book about the new mathematics of chaos, Does God Play Dice?, the answer offered on the last page is ‘If God played dice, He’d win.’5 Likewise, to the question asked him by another character in Jurassic Park, ‘Is chaos all just random and unpredictable?’ ‘Is that it?’ Ian Malcolm answers ‘No’. ‘We actually find regularities within the complex variety of a [turbulent] system’s behaviour’ (p. 76). As if to exemplify this process, Milton’s Chaos is personified as ‘Umpire’ who ‘by decision more embroils the fray by which he reigns’. Portrayed as a process and a place as well as a state of mind (‘the mind is its own place’) the wild dominion of Chaos, the ‘eternal anarch’, is in turn contained within the larger cosmic order over which God (the eternal Monarch) presides as ultimate umpire, and by decision rules. ‘Et sine fine Chaos & sine fine Deus’ says S.B. in one of the two poems dedicatory to Paradise Lost (second edition, 1674): without end Chaos and without end God.6 In time, the two powers are coextensive. Yet in the games God plays, the odds are with the house. Likewise finding chaos-in-order and order-in-chaos, modern chaos theory is ultimately deconstructive—it even deconstructs its own deconstructions. And so does Paradise Lost, whose author is, simultaneously, of the Devil’s party and on the side of the angels.7 Like the first chapters of Genesis, Paradise Lost and Jurassic Park enact comparable processes through which an externally controlled and newly created environment (cosmos) of order and maximum security gives way to forces of chaos that are in turn contained within the larger order of ‘eternal Providence’—of Art, of Nature—of chaos theory itself. ‘Almost Paradise’, the initial chapter stressing Crichton’s mythic sequences of events, is balanced by the title of a concluding chapter, ‘Almost Paradigm’, that stresses his ordering of incidents according to the principles of chaos theory. And comparably conflated scientific and literary allusions such as ‘paradigms lost’ and ‘chaos is come again’ would provide equally appropriate subtitles for Crichton’s science-fiction and for Milton’s epic, which has sci-fi aspects of its own. In fact, Paradise Lost may be the most historically influential of all science-fiction fantasies. Compare, for instance, Darth Vader in Star Wars to Satan, and compare Milton’s poignantly ambivalent account of the loss of Eden with any number of episodes of Star Trek (e.g. ‘The Apple’) that deal with paradoxically ‘fortunate’ falls. For that matter, the hauntingly memorable ‘realistically unreal’ ‘dawn-of-creation’ effects —the ‘lighting, jungle, foliage’ designed for the primeval island in Merion C.Cooper’s original film version of King Kong (which was a major cinematic precedent for Spielberg’s Jurassic Park) were ‘copied directly’ from Gustave Doré’s engraved illustrations of Milton’s Eden.8 In any event, when looked at in terms of the single most revolutionary tenet of chaos theory itself, which is that it actually reflects reality, Paradise Lost, Jurassic Park, Genesis, and other high and low, ancient and modern portrayals of comparable dissolutions of an initially ordered environment into chaos not only reveal the same ‘fractal’ structure and sequence of events. Their portrayals of unreal events can also be said to reflect the same, simultaneously ordered (Apollonian) and chaotic (Dionysian) reality. This is why chaos theory may prove as liberating, as revolutionary, and as challenging to certain axioms of literary theory as it

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did to cherished scientific assumptions. Witness, for instance, the combination of wonder, exhilaration and sense of conversion evinced by the differing scientists quoted by James Gleick in his historical account of the development of chaos theory. ‘You can’t appreciate the kind of revelation [we experienced] unless you’ve been brainwashed by six or seven years of a typical physics curriculum. You’re taught that there are classical models where everything is determined by initial conditions. And then there are quantum mechanical models where things are determined but you have to contend with a limit on how much initial information you can gather’ (compare Marx’s historical—or ideological—and Freud’s gender-childhood-based determinisms). What was ‘striking to us’ was that ‘if you take regular physical systems which have been analyzed to death in classical physics, but you take one little step away in parameter space, you end up with something to which all of this huge body of analysis does not apply.’ The idea that all these classical deterministic systems could generate randomness’ led to the realization that there was a whole realm of physical experience that did not fit into the current framework: ‘It’s not the same as the old vision at all—it’s much broader.’ ‘It seemed like something out of nothing.’ ‘We at last had a chance to look around at the immediate world —a world so mundane it was wonderful—and understand something!’ (see Chaos, pp. 250–1, my italics). As opposed to many of the most influential literary theorists, the most influential chaos theorists cited above admit, indeed insist, that—whether we like it or not—there is ‘something’ of the utmost importance outside their sacred texts, outside all our texts. So does Milton: What surmounts the reach Of human sense, I shall delineate so, By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms, As may express them best, though what if Earth Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things therein Each to each other like, more than on Earth is thought? (V. 571–6) Through his unrivalled range of intertextual allusions (to Pandora, Proserpina, Venus, Samson, Orpheus, Homer, Virgil, Dante) Milton reveals the manifold myths underlying his epic attempt to encompass them all. In his commendatory poem ‘On Paradise Lost’ Andrew Marvell in turn stressed its ‘sacred truths’ along with its ‘infinite’ scale, its ‘vast Design’ —‘God’s Reconcil’d Decree,/Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,/ Heavn’n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All’ (see Paradise Lost, ed. Hughes, p. 3). And he appropriately evokes another myth, another ‘Mighty Poet’, another prophet: Where couldst thou words of such a compass find? Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind? Just Heav’n thee like Tiresias to requite Rewards with Prophecy thy loss of sight. The point is that in Marvell’s tribute, as in the poem he pays tribute to, poetic fictions are explicitly used to point to truths that lie outside the cited texts. Like enduring mythic fictions, modern chaos theory serves to challenge, and may ultimately doom to extinction, the by now tired old critical truism/fiction that there is no such thing as a universal truth (which, paradoxically, seems the only universal ‘truth’ acknowledged as such in certain critical circles). By contrast, chaos theory makes strong claims about its universality: ‘the laws of complexity hold universally, caring

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not at all for the details of a system’s constituent atoms’. ‘No matter what the medium, the behaviour obeys the same newly discovered laws.’ ‘It was a very happy and shocking discovery that there were structures in nonlinear systems that are always the same if you looked at them the right way.’ (Chaos, pp. 5, 183, 304). This seems cognate to the obvious fact that there are only so many plot-lines in literature and that a similar dynamic (and arguably both realistically and aesthetically pleasing) interaction between (‘classic’ ‘Apollonian’, ‘Augustan’) order and (‘Dionysian, ‘Romantic’, irrational, chaotic) disorder tends to occur in literature and literary history alike from ancient times to the present. By contrast, exclusive and absolute order and chaos fail to resonate ‘with the way nature organizes itself or the way human perception sees the world’. ‘Why is it,’ asks the nonlinear physicist Gert Eilenberger, ‘that the silhouette of a storm-bent leafless tree against an evening sky in winter is perceived as beautiful, but the corresponding silhouette of any multi-purpose university building is not, in spite of all efforts of the architect?’ The answer seems to me…to follow from the new insights into dynamical systems. Our feeling for beauty is inspired by the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder in natural objects—in clouds, trees, mountain ranges, or snow crystals. The shapes of all these are dynamical processes jelled into physical forms, and particular combinations of order and disorder are typical for them. (Chaos, p. 117) Certain character types designed to embody the dynamic interaction between order and chaos (within and without the human psyche) also recur in art.9 Prospero/Caliban, Frankenstein/Monster are comparable controllers/creators and rebellious creations/subordinates. And certain cliché moralisms—e.g. ‘Man may unleash and finally be destroyed by monsters (chaotic forces) he cannot control’ likewise recur in ‘high’ literature and science fictions alike. Looked at mythically, Jurassic Park can not only be seen as cognate to Paradise Lost but to the legends of Faust and Frankenstein, who, like John Hammond, thought they could behave as Gods and were likewise headed for a fall, even as (in the original novel) Hammond is devoured by dinosaurs of his own creation, and thus brought down by the chaos theory that Crichton uses as a metaphor for things as they really are. Conversely, in Spielberg’s film version of Jurassic Park, as in Paradise Lost, the God-father/God-figure survives the rebel lions of his own creations (so we may have Jurassic Park II as well as Paradise Regained). Crichton’s use of chaos theory in Jurassic Park is wonderfully functional. But the theory itself serves as more than an exercise in authorial ingenuity. In comparison to comparatively linear and limited (and therefore conceivably controllable) determinisms, chaos theory is crushingly humbling, yet revelatory and exhilarating in that it so obviously does correspond to ‘something that actually exists in the real world’: ‘Chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rainstorm we cannot predict’ (Chaos, p. 312). The same axiom whereby ‘intelligent animals’ with ‘diverse traits’ (like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) will inevitably behave in unpredictable ways, makes it impossible to base accurate predictions of human behaviour, including how our own creations/children will turn out, on any alternative model: including economic determinism, historical determinism, biological determinism, ideological indoctrination, or what you will.10 We can’t predict what any individual will make of any given quanta of information, or experience: ‘In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but generated—created from connections that were not there before’ (Chaos, pp. 261–2). We are, to some degree at least, intellectually as well as genetically unique individuals with a mixture of diverse traits that allows us to make radically differing connections of our own. Like Milton’s Adam and Eve.

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Perhaps significantly, no amount of gender-conditioning, or cultural conditioning, or ideological indoctrination, or even fear of death, serves to avert Eve’s decision to eat the Fruit. Or Adam’s. Both were assigned their complementary gender roles and indocrinated in them. For ‘contemplation’ and for ‘valor’ he was formed. ‘For softness, shee and sweet attractive Grace’. ‘Hee for God only, shee for God in him’. Programmed for ‘absolute rule’ and ‘true authority’ (IV. 295–301) Adam is repeatedly assured that he occupies the superior, dominant role in the scheme of things: ‘For well I understand in the prime end/Of Nature her th’ inferior’. Likewise, Eve is led to acknowledge that her beauty is inferior to Adam’s wisdom. ‘Thy gentle hand/Seiz’d mine, I yielded, and from that time see/How beauty is excell’d by manly grace/And wisdom, which alone is truly fair’ (IV. 490–1). But gender lines blur and gender roles reverse within 48 hours, when ‘domestic’ Adam yields to Eve’s will, lets her sally forth (like a valorous hero) to meet their mutual adversary, and stays behind (like a wife) to weave a garland to place on the brow of the returning champion (IX. 319, 893). Gender lines blur again when Eve offers to shoulder all the blame for the fall (like a husband who takes responsibility for his wife’s debts). Psychological traits prove likewise unstable when Milton’s selfish Eve unselfishly and heroically offers to face God’s punishment all alone. In the end they leave Eden hand in hand as equals in their humble knowledge of their mutual frailty and mutual need for each other in the chaotic world they must henceforth live in, quite unable to command. After the fall, the first thunderclouds appear and climactic turbulence compounds. ‘Winds rise’ and ‘woods and seas upturn’. ‘Thus began/Outrage from lifeless things’. Then ‘Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowl with Fowl…to graze the Herb all leaving,/Devour’d each other’. Nor stood much in awe Of Man, but fled him, or with cout’nance grim Glar’d on him passing. (X. 705–16) Adios Eden, and welcome to Jurassic Park. As opposed to explanatory theories based on cultural, ideological and sexual differences, chaos theory likewise provides the basis for a (cosmopolitan) human commonality based on a common humility (and mutual dependency) stemming from our universal ignorance concerning what is going to happen next. Or how on earth to control it when it does. It seems in an odd way liberating to admit that we cannot possibly calculate (nor could any computer conceivably calculate) what very small effects, or what combination of complex and simple effects (time, place, persons, pressures, etc.) may or may not have crucial consequences. ‘Meanwhile the hour of Noon drew on, and wak’d/An eager appetite rais’d by the smell/So savory of that Fruit’ (IX. 939–41)—what dire events from trivial causes spring! Influences as banal as the time of day and the mundane fact that she was hungry contributed to Eve’s appetite for that fragrant fruit whose ‘mortal taste/Brought Death into the World, and all our woe’ (I. 2–3). Chaos theory fits Milton’s epic to the very end, when Adam and Eve (like us) confront a chaotic cosmos where divine order (eternal Providence) can only be dimly discerned, like the barely visible shape of a distant mountain. And only understood by analogy, as in modern chaos theory or in Milton’s epic, where it is as if his God mandated the very freedom to disobey that Adam and Eve were warned not to manifest if they chose to inhabit an eternally stable earthly Paradise—or his Heaven of pure order. Ever since the Fall, in art (if not in life) the image of eternal stability invariably seems boring. We want chaos to ensue. Reading a fiction or watching a disaster film, who isn’t ‘of the Devil’s party’? Conversely, the unrelieved portrayal (or experience) of chaos creates the desire for order to assert itself. Thus the appeal of works dealing with chaotic and terrifying phenomena in large measure stems from our desire to see what

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happens when all hell breaks loose, as well as from our certain knowledge that the catastrophes involved are safely contained in the fiction. However dire the events portrayed, there is a clear recognition of overall, preordained order in the fictional genre (the thriller, the epic, or the film). With or without foreknowledge of the plot and however eagerly anticipated or unanticipated the events may be by differing members of the audience, once the film was in the can, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was structurally safe from the disruptive tenets of chaos theory as expounded in Crichton’s novel. Thus Spielberg could accomplish what Crichton’s John Hammond could not—create an island inhabited by dinosaurs who in fact behave exactly according to direction, and make a fortune selling his artificial monsters to a global audience. Even as a poet who was politically defeated, helplessly blind and crippled by arthritis in real life, incorporated God, Satan, Adam, Eve—‘Heav’n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All’—into his own epic design. Never was there such a sublimely egotistical epic or such a self-referential (as well as textually derivative) film spectacular. Both of which, however, refer us directly to the uncontrollable world outside their texts where chaos operates not just in theory but in practice, and where the mundane and trivial, as well as the fearsome and destructive forces we cannot control (for which Milton’s Satan and Crichton’s velociraptors are appropriately mean and magnificent metaphors) are real. Therefore, of course, individual responses to these works may themselves be chaotic. Authors cannot control what effects their works may have. There are arguments that some children may be traumatized by seeing dinosaurs that parent-figures in the film cannot protect the children from (Spielberg said he wouldn’t want his under-eights to watch it). Others may love the dinosaurs. Milton’s readers have in turn taken the sides of Satan, God, Adam, and Eve, basing their arguments, pro and con, on the identical text. It seems to me that chaos theory confirms certain modern critical theories (most notably deconstruction11), even as it resurrects certain prestructuralist critical dinosaurs (such as text-transcending relevance). It also allows for similarities that transcend historical differences as well as differences in genre. Although Paradise Lost is a seventeenth-century ‘classic’ designed for a ‘fit audience, though few’ (Paradise Lost, VII. 31), and Jurassic Park exemplifies late twentieth-century ‘popular’ entertainment designed for a mega-audience, chaos theory allows us to see significant similarities between them. In its theoretical premisses and frames of reference, chaos theory likewise renders obsolete past and present taboos against treating together, as structurally comparable (rather than historically or categorically noncomparable), ancient and modern and popular and canonical works of varying genres that show the same pattern and may, arguably, reflect the same extratextual reality. Or may raise comparably overwhelming questions about what kind of reality lies outside their texts. Such as the ultimate question raised, in turn, by Milton’s cosmos (‘sine fine Chaos, & sine fine Deus’) and by Michael Crichton’s portrayal of chaos theory in action: There was a story about the quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg, on his deathbed, declaring that he will have two questions for God: why relativity, and why turbulence. Heisenberg says, ‘I really think He may have an answer to the first question.’ (Chaos, p. 121) Linacre College, Oxford

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NOTES 1 References to Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y.Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1962), II, pp. 890–911—further references are parenthetically inserted in my text. Milton drew his image of Chaos as the primal flux from which everything was created from Hesiod and Ovid, but expanded on these sources to make Chaos a ruling principle in his epic. Pope, of course, followed Milton from the beginning to the end of The Dunciad (1743):

Lo, thy dread empire, Chaos! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word; Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall, And universal darkness buries all. 2 See Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park (London: Arrow Edition, 1991), p. 305. Subsequent page references are inserted parenthetically in the text. 3 When asked for examples of ‘events’, Malcolm responds: ‘When you study fluctuations in cotton prices, you find that the graph of price fluctuations in the course of a day looks basically like the graph for a week, which looks basically like the graph for a year, or for ten years. And that’s how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there…. At the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.’ This corresponds exactly to the structure of events in another blockbuster film, Groundhog Day (1993). 4 See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (London: Cardinal Books, 1991; first published in Great Britain by Heinemann, 1988), p. 267—hereafter cited as Chaos, with page references inserted in the text. As Michael Crichton acknowledges (see p. 401) Gleick’s history of chaos theory was a major source for Jurassic Park. 5 Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 303. 6 See S.B., M.D., IN PARADISUM AMISSAM SUMMI POETAE JOHANNIS MILTONI, in Paradise Lost, ed. Hughes, p. 3. 7 Blake saw Milton as a revolutionary rebel (like Satan). C.S. Lewis saw him as an establishment-figure traditionalist (like God). But as Christopher Hill argues, these counter-views may stem from the fact that, as a poet, ‘Milton was at his best when he was most divided.’ See Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 473. As Hill’s book demonstrates, his first-hand experience of a failed revolution may have profoundly influenced Milton’s attitudes towards both God and Satan, ‘Eternal Providence’ and Chaos. 8 See Merion C.Cooper, as quoted by Ronald Haver in David O.Selznick’s Hollywood (New York: Bonanza Books, 1980), pp. 84–5: The lighting, the jungle, the foliage we stole direct from Doré. But we had great difficulty getting a sense of depth on the miniature jungle. Between the two of us we devised what we called ‘ariel perspective’, whereby the jungle sets were built on three large tables. On those tables were a series of plate-glass panes on which [were] painted sections of the jungle and skies, all copied directly from Doré’s steel engravings for Paradise Lost.

See also Ian Stewart’s account of recent ‘fractal forgeries’ in sci-fi films (Does God Play Dice, p. 229): ‘To store in a computer the exact data needed to reconstruct the cratered surface of the Moon requires absolutely vast amounts of memory: reasonable enough for a catalogue of lunar geography, but pointless if the purpose is to produce a convincing background for a TV science-fiction drama. The answer is “fractal forgeries” or “computer recursions” which “mimic the desired forms”. ‘Fractal

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forgeries were used in the movie Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, for the landscape of the Genesis planet; and in Return of the Jedi to create the geography of the moons of Endor and the outlines of the Death Star. Richard Voss, who started the whole field of computer fractals continues to be active: a recent triumph of his has been the computer generation of convincing clouds.’ 9 See the dynamic/dramatic interaction between (Apollonian and Dionysian) forces of order and chaos in Greek literature as described in turn by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, E.R.Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). On Cosmos and Chaos in Eastern mythology, see Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History (New York: Harper & Row, 1959) and see also Ian Stewart (Does God Play Dice, p. 22) on the interaction in Hindu mythology between ‘Vishnu the god of maintenance (order), and Shiva the god of destruction (disorder)’. The distinction between the order of Vishnu and the disorder of Shiva is not that between good and evil. It…represents instead two different ways in which divinity makes itself manifest: benevolence and wrath, harmony and discord.’ ‘In the same way mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical beauty.’ 10 See Stewart, Does God Play Dice, p. 40: ‘If Newton could not predict the behaviour of three balls, could Marx predict that of three people?’ The “inexorable laws of physics” on which Marx tried to model his laws of history were never really there.’ No one (no Marxist or Freudian —or economic or theological or astrological paradigm) enabled anyone to predict the collapse of the Soviet Empire or foresee various consequences of that collapse, such as the ethnic wars in Bosnia. By contrast to determinist theories that turn out ‘to be as much practical use as a spider’s web against an avalanche’ (p. 44), ‘not only does the idea of chaotic dynamics work—it works far better than anyone could have hoped’. ‘Chaos does occur in nature. In fact, I find it amazing how much Nature seems to know about the mathematics of chaos. And presumably knew it long before the mathematicians did…. We’d like it to be true —and in defiance of all experience, it is…. There’s a mystery here. But not one that has to be resolved before we can take advantage of the wonderful miracle that it works’ (p. 188). ‘A method devised to study chaos in turbulent flows works equally well on measles epidemics.’ Stewart goes on to argue that ‘to criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity’ (p. 291). It could likewise be argued that an exclusive concentration on literature’s cultural, ideological and historical roots and branches may rob the critic of comparably important tools—analogy, generality—in surveying the multicultural, transhistorical, international, extra-curricular forests of art. 11 The relevance of chaos theory to postmodernism can be taken for granted here, since it has already been demonstrated. See the pioneering studies by N.Katherine Hayles: Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), and Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Prospero’s Books and the visionary page PETER SCHWENGER

‘Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words.’ In its context—Michel Foucault’s ‘Fantasia of the library’1—this sentence appears at first to be only an elaborate way of saying that now (since Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Anthony) a bookish erudition is the source of fantasy. That Foucault’s words are more than a rhetorical flourish, though, becomes clear later in his essay when he analyses the iconography of St Anthony himself. In the painting by Breughel the Younger that impelled Flaubert to write The Temptation, the hermit kneels before an immense volume while all about him is a crowd of grotesques. The relation of the book to the fantasies is ambiguous. Is it a book of Holy Scripture, offering an escape from the forces of diabolic persecution? Or is it a magician’s book, through which St Anthony seeks to control these forces? Or even through which he has summoned them? Or perhaps the kind of book it is matters less than the fact of a book here, the effect of a book: ‘It may be…that these creatures of unnatural issue escaped from the book, from the gaps between the open pages or the blank spaces between the letters.’2 Since every book has these gaps, these blanks that are filled in reading, the visionary experience in question, then, may arise not ‘henceforth’ with the opening of Flaubert’s book but always with the opening of any book. Christopher Collins, in The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye, asserts that ‘every text presents a world in which figures, or fragments of figures, hover upon empty grounds, a bizarre world of floating synechdoches, of undulant Goyaesque phantoms…every poetic text simply by virtue of its medium simulates visionary events.’3 Later I will be discussing the argument that produced this conclusion. First, though, I want to concentrate on a specific artistic practice; for artistry precedes argument, produces argument, is perhaps a form of argument. As Foucault develops his points out of Flaubert’s work, so I wish to develop mine out of a more recent example of the visionary page, one that makes the visionary visible in ways that Breughel could never have conceived: Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books. In the second scene of The Tempest, Prospero tells of Gonzalo’s charity: Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom. (I.ii. 166–8)

© Routledge 1994

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Greenaway’s reading of Shakespeare’s play puts these books in the fore-ground. They may be magic books, but are not necessarily so, and in any case they have something to say about the magic of books in general. Yet the books are not a generic huddle: there are twenty-four of them, each itemized and described in detail. The descriptions/visualizations4 are themselves a variegated argument for the visionary nature of reading. And some of them are distinctly similar to St Anthony’s book. The Book of Mythologies, for instance, is a huge volume, open and slanted backwards like a raked stage. Sitting and crouching on the double spread of pages— with text and illustrations—are various mythological figures…accompanied by nymphs and putti who are endeavouring to turn the next huge page to free the occupants of the next chapter—fauns and hamadryads who are already struggling to get out.5 Or take An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus, full of maps of Hell: ‘When the atlas is opened the maps bubble with pitch. Avalanches of hot, loose gravel and molten sand fall out of the book to scorch the library floor’ (p. 20). The film catalogues each of these books in turn and immerses the viewer in the reader’s visionary experience. The vision of The Tempest itself—the experience of the play—arises out of these books. The Book of Mythologies is the ‘template’ for the spirits that populate the island. Similarly A Book of Architecture and Other Music operates ‘like a magnificent pop-up book’ whose paper models rise to triumphant music, elaborate themselves and freeze into a Mannerist architectural complex that makes an irony of Prospero’s reference to his ‘poor cell’. The books thus create the island and everything that is on it. They also serve as an ars memoriae, each book representing a topos for the story of Prospero’s past as well as the story he now develops. The themes of that story are those of the books: Prospero turns over The Book of Utopias as Gonzalo speaks of the ideal society he would create on the island; the altercation with Caliban over the uses of speech is intercut with The Book of Languages, out of which ‘words and sentences and paragraphs gather like black tadpoles or flocking starlings…accompanied by a great noise of babbling voices’ (p. 96). But the books are not just reminders of or commentary on an already existent story; their powers may be invoked in the writing of new stories. Nowhere in Prospero’s Books is this point made more spectacularly than in the opening scene. Prospero is found naked in his bathhouse, standing in a pool surrounded by colonnades. Greenaway describes him as being ‘like a de la Tour St. Jerome…like a Bellini St. Anthony…stripped and humbled before a book’ (pp. 39–40). For on a table beside him in the pool is The Book of Water, whose pages have been turned before us in the film’s opening shots. Gradually the illustrations have become more animated: at first, the script tells us, only small arrows follow the movement of a diagrammed whirlpool, then at intervals ‘a wave moves, a ripple-motion animates the drawing of an ebbing tide, animated colour sweeps through the black-and-white drawing of a waterfall, a real corpse is buffeted by moving water in an image of the Flood’ (p. 39). Out of this book emerges by degrees the full howling tempest that shipwrecks the travellers from Italy. So Greenaway’s film is not only about the powers liberated by reading a book, but also about the powers that are involved in writing one. Prospero is in his bathhouse, but as well—perhaps actually—he is in his study. And as the storm rises in fury he mouths the first word of the play: Boatswain! Tentative at first, it becomes a conjuration: the Boatswain is called into being along with the Captain who, in the play, calls for him. His response—‘Here Master; what cheer?’—is as much to the Master who is Prospero as to the Master of the ship. (Later Ariel, explicitly conjured into Prospero’s presence, gives a similar reply: ‘All hail great master, grave sir, hail!’) We are given a close-up of the word Boatswain! being written: we hear the

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scratching of the quill, see the ink dry. As Prospero writes the lines of the play he speaks them aloud, ‘speaking the characters so powerfully through the words’, says Greenaway, ‘that they are conjured before us’ (p. 9). The sodden mariners take shape and, in a parallel action, the naked Prospero clothes himself in his cloak, which is also his art. Constantly changing colour, it lets escape from its billowing folds a multitude of mythological creatures, along with animals, birds, plants: ‘the world is in his cloak’ (p. 52). This sense of a tumultuous overspill of power continues as Prospero makes his way to Miranda’s bedroom, passing through a long columned hallway crowded with equivocal, perhaps allegorical nudes, and then passing through a library scarcely less crowded. ‘Fantasies’, says Foucault, ‘are carefully deployed in the hushed library, with its columns of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight enclosure, but within confines that also liberate impossible worlds’ (p. 90). So it is with Prospero’s library. As he passes through it, each section of the library releases appropriate objects and people. These seem to spill into each other to create Breughelesque combinations: ‘ambiguous bacchanalian figures— wearing birettas and mitres —sit astride a giant abacus…two giggling nereids—playing with a sheep—swing on a library stepladder…a long-tailed creature sits drinking in the shadow of a tall desk…’ (p. 52). Such glimpses imply another force of books: their ability to combine, forming new books, as in Prospero’s library, where the original twentyfour books have begotten thousands more. Reaching Miranda’s bedroom, Prospero finds her tossing restlessly, in the throes of the tempest-dream he has created. He speaks her lines in the same way that he has spoken those in the first scene and ends by covering her with his magic cloak. With such control, Prospero’s peevish interruptions of himself to ensure that he is being listened to (‘Dost thou attend me?’) seem even more incomprehensible in this version than in most. Yet an explanation of Miranda’s seeming inattention is at hand in the very images of Greenaway’s film—in the fact that there are images generated by Prospero’s tale. Imagine that Miranda is awake, as she is in Shakespeare’s original. Her body language would then be perfectly in keeping with those times when the spoken word generates an image. Christopher Collins has noted the tendency for people to turn their eyes away from a speaker and unfocus them when being given visually oriented information such as directions: ‘Conjugate lateral eye movement’, the technical term for this maneuver, allows us to create a schematic mental image, or map, without visual interference from our informant or from any other potentially interferent visual object. He for his part understands this optical move of ours as exhibiting proper attention to his words. In another speech-act circumstance our behavior might be interpreted as shy or disrespectful or devious (‘shifty-eyed’).6 Greenaway’s version sidesteps this suggestion of Miranda’s own visionary powers, and instead makes of her a character in her father’s play. The dream she has is not her own: it belongs to the man who watches her having it. This theme of watching is prominent in Shakespeare’s play. From this scene on, Julian Patrick has observed, ‘until almost the end of the play, what happens on stage happens to other audiences than us, as we watch others being watched’.7 Yet despite the disturbing gender implications of Greenaway’s treatment of the Prospero-Miranda scene, we are ultimately dealing less with the proprietal gaze here than with something that challenges the very idea of the proper, the proprietal. We will understand its nature if we conceive of these watchers of watchers, which we ourselves are watching, as if they were multiple frames.

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II ‘Pictures conjured by text’, Greenaway tells us, ‘can be as tantalizingly substantial as objects and facts and events, constantly framed and reframed. This framing and re-framing becomes like the text itself—a motif —reminding the viewer that it is all an illusion constantly fitted into a rectangle…into a picture frame, a film frame’.8 With this foregrounding of the frame certain questions are foregrounded as well, questions as metaphysical as they are artistic. According to Jacques Derrida, the frame is ‘the decisive structure of what is at stake’9 in fundamental questions of intrinsic and extrinsic, what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ the work of art. Derrida makes this claim in the first essay of The Truth in Painting, entitled ‘Parergon’. Parergon is that which is beside the ergon or work; the term is used by Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Parergon, says Kant, is ‘only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the object… Thus it is with the frames of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces’.10 All three of Kant’s examples are prominent in Greenaway’s film. Colonnades are a favourite architectural motif, invariably framing fantastic forces: they surround the bathhouse in deep perspectives; they make up the long corridor, crowded with the island’s spirits, that leads to the library; and they hide within their recesses the visualizations of Prospero’s past as he tells his tale. Draperies are at times used as a framing device: huge rich billows of fabric held back by nude bodies, or entwined with them, in the style of seventeenth-century paintings. And Greenaway’s nudes—not statues but unabashed flesh—are often accessorized by draperies, sashes, hats, allegorical accoutrements. Finally, the frame itself. It can be as simple here as a floating rectangle of imagery superimposed on the images of the screen’s larger rectangle to create a dimensionless line of interface. Or it can be as elaborate as the heavy, ornate frames of the mirrors in which Prospero views his fantasies—these frames themselves framed by the nude bodies that hold up the mirror before him. In all these ways Greenaway gives visual form to the question of the frame. That question is ultimately the question of the supplement. For Derrida no work of art is self-sufficiently present, sufficient to itself. The line between the work’s interior and its exterior is not an incisive dividing line, but one that thickens: Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only (as Kant would have it) from the integral inside, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung, from the space in which statue or column is erected, then, step by step, from the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in which the drive to signature is produced.11 A frame is always within another frame, one that gives meaning to that which is framed, even to the frame itself. This does not mean that we have a series of nested influences which can be neatly labelled. The paradoxes of ergon/parergon reproduce themselves within the thickness of every frame. Derrida speaks of the passepartout, the French term for what in English is called a picture’s ‘mat’—a piece of cardboard, of a certain thickness, between the picture, which is seen through the opening cut in it, and the surrounding picture frame. Typically, Derrida plays on the term’s multiple meanings: the passepartout is a pass-key, but it is a key that opens too much, for it literally ‘goes everywhere’. Its nature, if we think about it at all, disseminates itself in a series of metaphysical paradoxes, rather than containing and holding in. Indeed, we can question whether there really is something to be contained. The frame, broadly defined, is the supplement of a necessary lack in the work—not in the work’s ‘centre’, because that implies an essentializing orientation, but in the play of its meanings, a more appropriately diffuse phrasing. For Derrida, meanings always arise and can only arise out of supplementation.

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In Prospero’s Books the text is supplemented above all by the visual. But this visuality is not the mode of everyday perception, or we would only have a production of The Tempest staged for a movie camera, as has been done before. Greenaway attempts to capture, at least occasionally, the mode of visuality that is peculiar to reading. Initially this visuality is not distinguished from print but embedded in it: we must see print with our physical eye in order for our mind’s eye to open. So, using the computerized capacities of the Graphic Paintbox,12 Greenaway has created books whose print pulses with colour where the text might seem to call for it. From behind the scrim of print images then emerge, often revealing more images behind them in a series of translucent planes: ‘retrospective encasement’, Foucault calls this.13 The latter transformations of the text are by no means the dimmest—not in Foucault, not in Greenaway—though they are the furthest from immediate apprehension. Figure and ground give way to each other or function equivocally. An uneasy framing effect results—uneasy because the implied perspective of a frame series is constantly being overturned. In the same way, the framing act that is reading (or is that act framed by the text?) rapidly moves beyond the priority of material print to a realm of simultaneity where semantic and imagistic elements change places in flickering ambiguous ways. Of course, at any moment a visual force may take on strength and focus. Yet no matter how vivid the image may be, it is always embedded in the multiple, shifting levels of the reading experience. The animation of the text, in that experience, arises only because the text is itself in motion, in a continual state of process. ‘Retrospective encasement’ is in this sense also prospective, generative. Wolfgang Iser makes a similar point in The Act of Reading: ‘Each individual image therefore emerges against the background of a past image, which is thereby given its position in the overall continuity, and is also opened up to meanings not apparent when it was first built up.’14 These meanings which at first are ‘not apparent’ correspond to Derrida’s idea of a necessary ‘lack’ in the work. Iser approaches the same idea when speaking of the inadequate nature of ‘theme’: As the theme is not an end in itself, but a sign for something else, it produces an ‘empty’ reference, and the filling-in of this reference is what constitutes the significance. This is how ideation brings forth an imaginary object, which is a manifestation of that which was not formulated in the text. (p. 147) The lack of the ‘empty’ reference must be supplemented if meaning is to occur. What is said here of the act of reading is true as well of writing. In the same ways that the dim images of reading take on form and definition, yet are embedded in words, flicker between semantic and pictorial—so the writer, Shakespeare or lesser luminary, experiences the elusive life of the work that has not yet come to be, but which gradually takes on strength, is filled in by what was not formulated. We see this process taking place in the film as we watch the writing of The Tempest, even while ‘reading’ it. The frame is the space of creation in writing, no less than in reading. As in any reading experience, the ‘readers’ of Greenaway’s film are both inside and outside of it. Prospero inhabits an equally indeterminate space: spirits take shape at his suggestion, therefore are the externalized actors of his internal impulses. Yet Prospero himself may be viewed (moving the camera back) as yet another airy shape enacting, it has often been suggested, Shakespeare’s own relation to his art. Can we move yet further back? Shakespeare and ‘the great globe itself’ can be seen as similar airy shapes. The frames expand outward only to reveal that they are inward, that all is supplement, parergon without ultimate ergon. We are such stuff as dreams are made of.

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III The collapse of distinctions between ergon and parergon, between interior and exterior, enacts itself in yet another version during reading: the collapse of a rigid subject/object distinction. In considering this aspect of reading, Wolfgang Iser takes his cue from something said by Jean Starobinski: ‘Strictly speaking, what we see arising here is a complex reality, in which the difference between subject and object disappears’ (p. 155). Iser goes on to muse over Georges Poulet’s essay ‘Criticism and the experience of interiority’. For Poulet, the book is an object whose function is to eradicate its own material essence, replacing it with a mode of existence that further calls into question the notion of objectivity: ‘Doubtless what I glimpse through the words are mental forms not divested of an appearance of objectivity. But they do not seem to be of another nature than my mind which thinks them. They are objects, but subjectified objects.’15 Yet what subjectifies these objects is not, it seems, the subjectivity of the reader but that of another whose thoughts we are thinking. This subjectivity not only displaces our own; it can displace even the mentalistic objects that evoke it in our minds: Poulet relates the epiphanic experience of standing amid a number of paintings by Tintoretto and apprehending a subjectivity transcending the depicted objects. Iser rejects this hypostatized subjectivity. Though he agrees that reading removes the subject-object division, and that the reader becomes occupied to a degree by the author’s thoughts, he nevertheless sees these thoughts creating a different kind of division within the reader: There occurs a kind of artificial division as the reader brings into his own foreground something which he is not. This does not mean, though, that his own orientations disappear completely. However much they may recede into the past, they still form the background against which the prevailing thoughts of the author take on thematic significance… Indeed, we can only bring another person’s thoughts into our foreground if they are in some way related to the virtual background of our own orientations (for otherwise they would be incomprehensible).16 The image, that subjectified object, thus comes into being when our background is foregrounded, when our ground becomes the author’s figure, figured forth in airy shapes which are yet our own. The reader’s mental background is a space of infinite potential, crowded with many more conceivable subjectivities than the single version we commonly refer to as our ‘self’. Such a background seems to be the antithesis of the one suggested by Christopher Collins in a chapter of The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye entitled ‘Introspection and the visionary imagination’. Earlier in his book, he has talked of imaging as it occurs in the recall of episodes from one’s own past. These images, like their originals, carry with them the sense of a peripheral field extending beyond the relatively narrow focus of our gaze. But this peripheral field is necessarily absent from any imaging produced by a text written by another: To put it bluntly, when we enter the imaginary space of a text, we don’t know where we are. We orient ourselves only in reference to the few landmarks we are given—nouns situated in a void. These nouns are fashioned into an assumed visuospatial network by prepositions, verbs, and adverbs, but are displayed to us only in the linear, unidirectional sequence of word order. Not having actually perceived this scene ourselves, we have no peripheral field in which to detect and target an object as our next image…. [O]ur peripheral field is as blank as the white space that surrounds each printed character and, as for our next image, that comes when and only when the text determines.17

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Collins insists on the blanks between textual images in this way because he sees a connection between the mode of visualizing produced by texts and that which demonstrably arises out of blanks, the visionary that arises out of visual deficiency. Among such conditions Collins cites: visual deprivation (darkness, closed eyes); homogeneous visual fields, void of features (such as a clear sky); randomized visual fields within whose texture we find faces and figures. But these examples indicate, contrary to Collins’s intention, that in introspection there is never a blank. Rather than supporting the idea of ‘groundless figures’, these examples indicate the tendency of any presumed ground to generate figures—as Foucault suggests that the monstrous crowd around St Anthony has escaped ‘from the gaps between the open pages or the blank spaces between the letters’. In the material world these may be perceived as blanks: in the introspec tive world they are lacks which, felt as such, impel themselves toward fulfilment: ground becomes figure, which in turn becomes ground for yet further figures. The tumultuous background of our own memories, fears and desires generates more versions of these than can be visualized in any single text. They hover just beyond apprehension, waiting to be called into the light, in the same way that (to appropriate a comparison that Collins makes) crowds of underworld spirits hover, in classical epics, around the blood of the sacrifice. The reader who in a sense has temporarily sacrificed a known subjectivity may find other subjective forms just outside of vision, forming a periphery unlike that of the visible world but no less crowded than that world— or the world of Greenaway’s screen. Writing, or reading, is supposed to give a habitation to airy nothing. Yet that ‘nothing’ has a dimensioned strength. A reader’s visualization may blank out the objects of the real world for a time, annihilating all that’s made for a thing of thought. And besides the curious vividness of the visualized creation there is the space it inhabits, vibrating with potential, with dim apprehensions. Like Derrida’s passepartout, that space has a certain thickness. Thus when its shapes vanish into ‘thin air’ they do not do so easily: they ‘heavily vanish’, according to Shakespeare. This description of the effect of Prospero’s coming to himself during the masque he has created is not likely to refer to any actual stage practice. Unlike the ‘quaint device’ by which the banquet provided to the castaways is made to vanish, this vanishing is performed in Shakespeare’s theatre of the mind: to ‘heavily vanish’ denotes a collapsing, a sinking, and above all a strange reluctance to disappear. This difficult disappearance may have something to do with the crowded lushness of the masque itself— the language is notably more ornate, more ‘thick’ here than in the play proper. It may also have to do with the masque’s relation to the complexities of the frame. To begin with, the masque is a parergon, an incidental beauty not necessary to the efficacy of the work as a whole. It is, however, treated as a work in itself, and is framed by multiple watchers: we watch Prospero watching Ferdinand and Miranda watching the masque. At the same time the masque frames the watchers: its ornate figures of speech, its speaking mythological figures, frame the happiness of Ferdinand and Miranda, quite as much as does the curtain drawn later to display the picture of the lovers playing chess—a picture which immediately thereafter leaves its frame when the lovers greet the onlookers. All of these particulars give a sort of local habitation to Derrida’s general statement that the parergon ‘has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy’.18 After detouring through the question of subject-object relations in reading, then, we are returned to the question of frame. We can reframe the question in terms of those relations. In reading The Tempest are we shaped into an alien subjectivity, as Poulet would have it, taking on the forms peculiar to Shakespeare’s art? Or are his airy shapes conjured up by us during the act of reading—every reader a Prospero? Like all such framing questions, these refuse to still themselves, and necessarily change places with each other. The only last word we can find is that spoken by Prospero in his epilogue—which, we must cautiously note, is a parergon. Prospero casts himself now as an airy, indeed an Ariel-like spirit. As Sycorax ‘did confine’ Ariel

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‘into a cloven pine’ (II.i.274, 277), so Prospero ‘must be here confin’d’ by us unless we release him from his bands—the constant plea of Ariel to his Master. We are thus Master to Prospero, Prospero to the play. As in the play’s first scene Prospero conjured up the tempest (and in the film’s first scene conjured up The Tempest), so now we are asked to provide a milder breeze for Prospero: ‘gentle breath of yours my sails must fill’. Yet where will this get him? To Naples (see Naples and die) where ‘every third thought shall be my grave’. We have here a return to mere humanity: stripped and mortal, outside of a book. But as for us, we are not ready to abjure this ordinary magic. For reasons of his own, or Shakespeare’s own, Prospero resolves to drown his book—or ‘books’ in Greenaway’s version. The film allows us actually to witness Prospero hurling his books into the sea, each dying in a fashion spectacularly appropriate to its nature. Finally only two books are left: ‘a thick volume called Thirty-Six Plays’, with Shakespeare’s name on the spine, ‘and—bound identically—but much slimmer—Prospero’s unfinished The Tempest’ When Prospero, after a moment, throws both of them into the sea ‘the books land together on the water and Caliban surfaces—splurting and spouting water from a long underwater swim— he snatches both books and disappears again under the surface.’19 In doing so, Caliban only acts as any reader would, as every reader does. The reader’s part is not, as Prospero would want it, to speed a fiction’s characters above deep water toward a destination on or in earth. Rather it is to drown the book some fathoms deep in the reader’s visionary mind, where the printed page undergoes its rich sea-change. Mount St Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia NOTES I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, which supported this work with a research grant; Kathleen MacConnell, who has been an exemplary research assistant; and Christopher Collins, who provided many helpful comments on the manuscript. 1 M.Foucault, ‘Fantasia of the library’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F.Bouchard, trans. Donald F.Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 90. 2 ibid., p. 94. 3 C.Collins, The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye: Literature and the Psychology of the Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 155. 4 It is appropriate that Prospero’s Books exists in two versions: the published film script and the film, which is somewhat different in its details from the script’s initial conception. Greenaway’s script, which itself generates images in its readers, is preceded by the director’s internal images, and then used to generate the cinematic realization of those images. The Prospero’s Books of my title is thus as much a book (the film script) about the images generated by a book (The Tempest) as it is a film. I move freely between the images of the script and those of the realized film; my concern is with the implications of the images rather than of the medium in which they are found. Strictly speaking, then, this is not an essay about cinema. 5 P.Greenaway, Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s Tempest (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991), p. 57. 6 Collins, The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye, p. 2. 7 J.Patrick, ‘The Tempest as Supplement’, in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 173. 8 Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, p. 12. 9 J.Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McCleod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 61. 10 I.Kant, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), p. 68.

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11 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 61. 12 The Graphic Paintbox is an indication of the technological tools that may soon be available to the creator of computer novels. Using Hypertext, an author can now combine prints with visuals, music, and various moving parts: an example is Sarah Smith’s three-disk epic King of Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Eastgate Systems, 1991). Greenaway’s effects are of course years ahead of Smith’s—but perhaps not that many years. 13 Foucault, ‘Fantasia of the library’, p. 97. 14 W.Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 148. 15 G.Poulet, ‘Criticism and the experience of interiority’, in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. 58. 16 Iser, The Act of Reading, p. 155. 17 Collins, The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye, p. 151. 18 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 61. 19 Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, p. 162.

‘The life with a hole in it’: Philip Larkin and the condition of England NIGEL ALDERMAN

The flurry of words written about Philip Larkin over the past year and a half, energized by the publication of his Selected Letters and Andrew Motion’s biography, have contained very little real analysis of the reasons for what both his attackers and defenders agree was his importance to post-war English literature and culture.1 Indeed, the furore was clearly fuelled by a belief in his continuing centrality, his status, in Tom Paulin’s words, as a ‘national monument’.2 It is this belief, I would suggest, which is perhaps the most interesting aspect about the affair and which this essay will investigate. Why Larkin?3 Why did so many reviewers nostalgically use Larkin or a Larkin poem as means to access a whole historical period, and why were they so saddened and rattled by the revelations of his racism, misogyny, and misanthropy, as if his views said something about them?4 Why did their words convey the over-whelming sense that a home (a home?) they once had was lost, was no longer to be enjoyed, admired, or celebrated, but rather had to be elegized as something irretrievably gone in a way that can only be called suitably Larkinesque? Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft And turn again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase. (p. 119)5 ‘Home is so Sad’ ends with an elegiac gesture of contempt: ‘that vase’, the mass-produced object which attempts to decorate and to give the house status, to make it ‘home’: it is an objet d’art, the very term denoting middle-class pretensions at culture. ‘That vase’ looks back towards that urn gazed at by an earlier striving middle-class poet who made it declare ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’.6 Keats’s urn asserts that a home, a transcendental place of stasis and peace, can be found and be founded by an ode that decorates, is written on, an urn, whereas now any truth to be found certainly has no relevance to beauty and is, furthermore, located around the loss of home, or rather the inevitable failure of trying to found a home in a mass-

© Routledge 1994

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produced house with mass-produced items. Even when it began (those insistent ‘its’: ‘It stays as it was left… it withers so…it started as…how it was’), it was just a ‘joyous shot at how things ought to be’. Their ideals for their future life were doomed because to be targeted they have to be translated into ‘things’, indeed are already things which do not, cannot, belong to them since it is they who have been targeted and whose ideals are products of selling strategies: ‘essential beauty’, as Larkin entitles a poem on advertising, is the images on bill-boards: it is ‘these sharply-pictured groves/of how life should be’ which ‘shine perpetually’ (p. 144). This failure of home has ensured its becoming a museum of sorts, a private museum for the speaker’s lost self, containing the bric-a-brac of a manufactured past: ‘pictures’ and ‘cutlery’, ‘music in the piano stool’ and ‘that vase’. A museum to the speaker/poet who has left: home is no longer the parents’ house, home is no longer the British Museum in which a stolen work of art stands, it is now an English museum in which there stands ‘that vase’ not only situating the relative class positions of the speaker and his parents, but also revealing the paradox of upward mobility. ‘That vase’ heralds the success of the speaker’s class mobility, he can ‘see how it was’, how he was. The success of the home in producing a son who has risen implies its corresponding failure as a home. His gaze is now that of a social superior, who has, as he says of his birthplace, ‘now…got the whole place clearly charted’ (p. 81). This clarity, this ability to map the coordinates of class and its attendant signifiers of cultural capital, is achieved by being a privileged observer, whose superior position within the system should not, however, be mistaken for a vantage point outside the system. Although Larkin consistently sets up the speaker as ruminating outsider, observing an event, object, or emotion, this position is then reinscribed within the motivating experience, refusing any such position of Cartesian dualist security and accepting the irony of bourgeois aesthetic distance. In ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, a poem he wrote while he was working in Belfast, he makes explicit the link between the impossibility of this subject position and national identity: Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home; Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech, Insisting so on difference, made me welcome: Once that was recognized, we were in touch. The stanza first charts the creation of the Cartesian self: initially aware of its difference from the not-self, from ‘home’, the mind (it is not yet an ‘I’) creates meaning, ‘sense’, from such ‘strangeness’ (cogito ergo), and then the ‘rebuff’ of the other who by ‘insisting so on difference’ produces the ‘me’ (sum), matter. The self so produced offers the awareness of other bodies and the possibility of the physical (‘we were in touch’): the solitary idea (‘Lonely’) leads to an individual, bodied self, which in turn leads to the production of other bodies, and engenders the idea of a community: Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable, The herring-hawker’s cry, dwindling, went To prove me separate, not unworkable. It could also be argued that the self produced in the first stanza is a Lockean one, with the original sense impression (‘Lonely’) leading to the bodied individual self. Either way the general point remains the same: Larkin details the production of the individual through an awareness of its separation from others, and only after this individual self is produced can a sense of community be derived. As such it can be seen as a

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classic portrayal of both the archetypal bourgeois self and the theory of society that follows. The success of the ‘separate’ ‘me’ is measured by how workable it is, arguing that the failure of ‘home’, of England, lies in its production of an ‘unworkable’ self: Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments It would be much more serious to refuse. Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. (p. 104) The self so carefully constructed in the first two stanzas vanishes into a national identity: these are not his ‘customs and establishments’ in the sense of belonging to him and him only, they are rather ‘England[’s]’. England and his self are dissolved into a depthless present of ‘existence’, nothing is under them and nothing insures or ensures their continuing survival: both are ‘unworkable’. The reason for this seems to be focused on the word that brings in the idea of history. ‘The smell of dockland’ is ‘archaic’, a thing of the past both for the speaker, and, presumably, since he is from there, for his country, England. If we remember that Larkin is writing this during the five years he lived and worked in Belfast, the motivation of the poem and the complexity of its attempt to construct national and personal identities becomes clearer. For someone like Larkin who called himself ‘one of nature’s Orange-men’, Belfast should be as much home as England;7 that it is ‘so’ ‘differen[t]’, that it is in fact ‘Ireland’ rather than Northern Ireland, is a repudiation of the idea of a United Kingdom which decomposes the kingdom into separate nations; it ceases to be workable as a unifying identity.8 It is decomposing because ‘docklands’ are ‘archaic’, a thing of the past, ‘unworkable’, for ‘England’ and the ‘separate’ self England produces. The pastness of this industrial and imperial moment is emphasized, while being simultaneously naturalized and hidden by its comparison with a ‘stable’, linking it to a preindustrial, predominantly rural economy. In a rhetorical strategy typical of post-war British political discourse of both Left and Right, and one which Larkin consistently uses,9 the industrial past is nostalgically figured in terms of a communal, gemeinschaft pastoral landscape, enabling the reality of the change from a precapitalistic to a capitalistic society to be occluded.10 Paradoxically, however, it is only this inability to remain an imperial power, to impose ‘British’ hegemony upon others, that begins the poem (if it were successful he would not be ‘[l]onely in Ireland’) and produces England’s formulation as a nation. In other words, ‘home is so sad’ because the move from the British museum to an English one means a move from a universal rhetoric, one that can incorporate other nations and national pasts (it was always the British Empire and can be centred and validated by owning the originary Western culture—the Grecian urn), to a rhetoric of difference that signifies the breakdown of the island’s universal term: the post-Imperial necessity of re-theorizing English as a term after the triumphant age of European imperial-nationalism is a function of the country’s relative decline; a decline, moreover, linked to the upsurge of nationalism and national identity elsewhere which forced the decolonization of the Empire. Rather than being able to be a figure of cultural production and reproduction for Larkin, then, England and Englishness become synonymous at the moment of their postulation with their unworkability, their decline into sterility, impotence, with the failure of reproduction. That failure haunts Larkin’s poetry and seems to motivate his most opaque moments, those recurrent moments when his poetry circumvents its imprisoning empirical rhetoric and opens out into a spatial and temporal landscape scarred by literary modernism, which comes to function as a contradictory synecdoche, simultaneously figuring the possibility and impossibility of literary and national success.

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This assertion is clearly in contrast to the image of Larkin that he, his admirers, and his detractors have so sedulously constructed: the plainspeaking, robustly philistine, man of the world, who has no time for the pretentious cant of the literateur and/or academic and who responds to such questions as, ‘but what if a critic construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ with the amusingly offensive, ‘I should think he was talking balls.’11 However, recent work by Barbara Everett and Motion has convincingly shown how influenced Larkin was by the French Symbolists, in particular Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Gautier, and how his poetry, especially that of High Windows, consistently alludes to their writing.12 Moreover both the Selected Letters and Motion’s biography reveal Larkin’s ambition to become a great writer and his corresponding grandiloquent views of it as a vocation.13 In her finest essay, ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’, Everett reads Larkin’s ‘Sympathy In White Major’ and ‘High Windows’ through a series of allusive transformations to their echoing of Gautier and Mallarmé, revealing Larkin’s extensive reading in French Symbolist poetry. In other words, although critics have often mentioned his antipathy, and in later life party-piece hostility, to what he came to call the three Ps (Pound, Picasso, and Parker), his relationship to, and attack on, them is far more complex and problematic than he has been given credit for by his detractors and praisers. For example, he admired and reviewed jazz (the reviews were later collected in book form in All That Jazz) which was not only of central importance to many of the major modernists in all media forms (Picasso, Eliot, Stravinsky, Eisenstein), but was also often portrayed and thematized as the archetypal ‘modern’ music, combining as it seemed to do the primitive and the sophisticated, innovation and tradition, universal form and individual solo. Moreover, his attacks on ‘Modernism’ primarily concentrate on its institutionalization and a perceived concomitant loss of an audience beyond an academic one. As he wrote of post-Parker jazz: Jazz moved, ominously, into the culture belt, the concert halls, university recital rooms and summer schools where the kind of criticism I have outlined has freer play. This was bound to make the reestablishment of any artist-audience nexus more difficult, for universities have long been the accepted stamping ground for the subsidized acceptance of art[.]14 In this context, however, it must be remembered, as Alan Sinfield points out, that modernism’s institutionalization in Britain in the 1950s was closely linked to the cultural dominance of the United States and its ‘reinvention’ of modernism.15 Finally, Larkin often uses terms derived from modernist aesthetics when he wishes to commend a particular musician or writer; his praise of Louis Armstrong, for example, is nearly always couched in language strikingly similar to Eliot’s statements in ‘Tradition and the individual talent’.16 It is surely no accident, as Robert Crawford points out, that in his poem ‘For Sidney Bechet’ Larkin describes the epiphanaic effects of the great jazz player’s soprano saxophone through an allusion to the end of Ulysses: ‘On me your voice falls as they say love should/Like an enormous yes’ (p. 83).17 In short, Larkin’s allusiveness and the wide range of his reading has still not been fully acknowledged; the first poem of his which he considered ‘mature’ shows how allusively attenuated he can be: Going

There is an evening coming in Across the fields, one never seen before; That lights no lamps. Silken it seems at a distance, yet

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When it is drawn up over the knees and breast It brings no comfort. Where has the tree gone, that locked Earth to sky? What is under my hands, That I cannot feel? What loads my hands down? (p. 3) Here Larkin echoes and revises Eliot and Yeats in a poem that lends itself to a Harold Bloomian reading of the anxiety of influence, concerning a writer’s Oedipal conflict with his poetic forefather(s).18 In this light, unable to escape from the power of Eliot’s first three lines of ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ (‘Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon the table’), Larkin spins out, or rather annotates, the metaphor before ending in the exhaustion of questions, signifying his inability to find a space for himself outside the language of his precursor. Furthermore, the failure of Larkin to misread Eliot arises from attempting to do so via another precursor, Yeats: the Yeatsian images of aesthetic pleasure (‘Silken it seemed’) and aesthetic unity (‘the tree…that lock[s]/Earth to sky’) fail, have disappeared, leaving only a questioning subjectivity, which comes into being through a dismal awareness of its own belated status, of its—as the poem was initially titled—‘dying day’. At the same time, however, the depiction of this type of subjectivity, with its removal of Eliot’s urban imagery into a rural setting (‘across the fields’), and the corresponding demythologization and domestication of Yeats’s symbols, shrinks the poem into being very similar to the mood poems of Edward Thomas and the Georgians. The poem is essentially one extended conceit—the ‘evening com[es] in’; it cannot ‘light’ ‘lamps’; it is then figured as some form of blanket, before the personal voice enters asking questions—and is not contained within an empirical frame of specificity. The poem ends by opening out into questions that concern the status of the speaker’s belated subjectivity only. What such a Bloomian reading leaves out, therefore, is the larger historical question of the problematic status of any ‘English’ poetic subjectivity when it is mediated through an American and an Irishman, the two figures whom Larkin regarded then, and continued to regard, as the two most important twentieth-century English language poets.19 In his later poetry, such a metaphoric moment would occur within a socially situated frame and, accordingly, its historical ramifications would be thematized. One way of approaching this investigation, then, is to use David Lodge’s charting of literary history via Roman Jakobson’s notion of metaphor and metonymy.20 Lodge argues that modernist writing is predicated upon the primacy of metaphor, whereas metonymy is central to realist, empirical writing.21 For Lodge, Larkin’s discourse is exemplarily metonymic. However, it seems more accurate to say that in many Larkin poems, among his most famous, there occurs a highly metaphoric moment which disrupts the metonymic frame. All three of his major collections contain a number of such poems: in The Less Deceived, ‘Deceptions’, Spring’, ‘If, My Darling’, and ‘Absences’; in The Whitsun Weddings, ‘Here’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘For Sydney Bechet’, and ‘Afternoons’; in High Windows, ‘High Windows’, ‘Livings’, ‘Money’, and ‘The Card Players’. Virtually all the poems in his first volume, The North Ship are metaphoric in nature, heavily indebted to Yeats’s symbolist lyrics, and the development of Larkin’s style is not, as he argued, a movement from Yeats to Hardy, but rather a surrounding of the Yeatsian moment (the metaphor) within a Hardyesque frame.22 In other words, these moments function as metaphor does in Paul Ricoeur’s theorization, ‘neither to improve communication nor to insure univocity in argumentation, but to shatter and increase our sense of reality by shattering and increasing our language’.23 This shattering in Larkin opens up

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into an overdetermined site of linguistic, social, and historical struggle which raises issues concerning the problematic status of theorizing and defining both an English modernism and national identity.24 Larkin’s poetry, therefore, revolves around two losses, two absences, which can be investigated to come to terms with Larkin’s relationship to, and construction of, nationalism and modernism. This loss of modernism is the desire to find a moment of epiphany; constantly Larkin’s poetry talks of these moments but these moments are never actual, or imagined as achievable in the poetry. Such moments include the loss of England, or rather the loss of the British Empire, which requires England to define itself in its own terms when previously it could define ‘Englishness’ in opposition to something else. In other words, Larkin’s position as a belated national poet, writing after the domination of English literature by Yeats and Eliot, corresponds to England’s problematic status as a belated nation, which has lost its colonies (beginning with Ireland), and which is secondary to the new imperial power, America. Since his first book was published in 1945 and his last major poem was written in 1975, his career spans the end of the Second World War and the referendum on entry into the European Economic Community: the brief era which begins with the loss of Empire and ends with England’s reabsorption into a larger system. Analyses of ‘Englishness’ were a central aspect of the politics of this era: analyses which, as Tom Nairn points out, usually ended in some form of Burkean myth of the organic community.25 Larkin’s ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’ appears to be an exemplary investigation, but its effect and conclusion are rather different: Light spreads darkly downwards from the high Clusters of lights over empty chairs That face each other, coloured differently. Through open doors, the dining-room declares A larger loneliness of knives and glass And silence laid like a carpet. A porter reads An unsold evening paper. Hours pass, And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds, Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room. In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How Isolated, like a fort, it is— The headed paper, made for writing home (If home existed) letters of exile: Now Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages. (p. 163) The hotel is slowly hollowed out through a succession of emptying images until it becomes an ‘isolated…fort’ from which a soldier is writing home. In the best essay so far written on Larkin, Tom Paulin says of this passage: The hotel is like a fort in some nameless colony or like a lighthouse above darkening waves. The poem displaces an English provincial city and makes its author momentarily into an exile. This bold deployment of ostranenye which transforms the Victorian hotel into a place of mystery and danger is essentially colonial rather than European.26

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For Paulin, English poets are either imperialist, unproblematic users of the ‘Queen’s English’, or oppressed, subversive users of dialect, and, since Larkin belongs to the former, the displacement in this poem has to be ‘colonial’, the fort has to be in ‘some nameless colony’. However, the historical movement is far more complex and problematic. The place is, indeed, one of the great Victorian station hotels which were symbols of technological progress, imperial power, and superior comfort; but the setting is the present, 1966. In other words, it is long after the heroic age of the railways, nineteen years since the once mighty railway companies, virtually bankrupt, had welcomed nationalization, and just three years since the Beeching report had heralded the rationalization of the railway system, with a corresponding cancellation of nearly all the unprofitable branch lines. The hotel then is an empty shell of this past. It is empty of guests and of the past comforts supplied to guests: the ‘corridors’ are ‘shoeless’ both because, for economic and social reasons, there is no longer the staff to clean the shoes, and because no one can afford to stay. Consequently, the hotel has changed, its once single function is propped up by another: it has diversified, offering itself as a ‘conference’ centre, as well as a hotel. Yet its function still remains exclusionary, setting apart ‘visitors’ from ‘homes’, and remains unaffordable to large sections of the population. Moreover, the diversification also reveals the diminishment of those figures who heralded the coming of the new consumer culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels, the peripatetic salesmen; in the new informational world they are less and less necessary; only meeting for training and sales conferences, no longer being able to afford to stay, no longer having the brash confidence to flash their money.27 As in ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, there is the same nostalgic regret for the past industrial age of English imperial and mercantile domination. This past hollows out the present, making it a scene of absence and elegy: an unworkable hotel. However, this poem continues the process of emptying out until we reach not a ‘fort in some nameless colony’, not even an abandoned capitalist fortress in the home country, but a fort in the North of England that precedes England as ‘England’. In short, we are returned to the outposts of the Roman Empire, when England was herself a colony. The journey through English history in order to find ‘home’ has led back to the present: at the moment of posited origin, England has become a colony, a subsidiary in a larger global system, as it is in the present. Furthermore, whereas W.H.Auden in similar historical poems can call Rome home since he lays claim to a Western, transnational classical tradition, such a strategy is not available to Larkin:28 his longing for home by definition distances him from it, and home, therefore, (by definition) no longer exists. To be exiled internally, within a (former) home country is to redefine home as a museum whose doors are about to be breached.29 In other words, what he discovers as a consequence of his nostalgia, his home-longing, is that this national identity has no centre, has no fixed point, that ‘home’ does not ‘exis[t]’. He is an ‘exile’ within his own country—he has no home in it, nor can it function as one. And he ends with an image of the sea—so important to England’s power; a power based upon mercantile trade outside England and which helped create not only the belief that England was the centre of the world, but also the formulation of national identity as a discrete, self-sufficient, organic thing. In short, Larkin hollows out the Burkean myth of the organic community: instead of successive, larger circles of home, we find successive circles of exile from home, indeed the absence of home, as the waves cease to be a gateway of exploration and trade, a border and boundary which can be traversed, and become distant, different, an insurmountable boundary that is overwhelming and existence-threatening.30 This constant figuration of the nation’s inability to reproduce itself in its own image becomes analogous, and often coterminous, with the similar situation of the self.31 In the extended conceit of ‘Dry Point’, for example:

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Endlessly, time-honoured irritant, A bubble is restively forming at your tip. Burst it as fast as we can— It will grow again, until we begin dying. Silently it inflates, till we’re enclosed And forced to start the struggle to get out: Bestial, intent, real. The wet spark comes, the bright blown walls collapse, But what sad scapes we cannot turn from then: What ashen hills! what salted shrunken lakes! How leaden the ring looks, Birmingham magic all discredited, And how remote that bare and sunscrubbed room, Intensely far, that padlocked cube of light We neither define nor prove, Where you, we dream, obtain no right of entry. (p. 36) The first stanza begins with a traditional image of desire, of the penis as being separate from, and beyond the control of, the self to whose body it belongs.32 This desire is linked with non-human time: it occurs ‘endlessly’ and, as such, is distinct from the self, from human time. The self, then, comes into being with the awareness of the difference between these two temporalities: the agency moves from the ‘it’ to the ‘we’, because we can ‘burst it’; this destruction, however, brings with it death, the end of the self, since ‘[i]t will grow again, until we begin dying’. The Renaissance-style pun on ‘dying’ reveals the paradoxical nature of this self-production through bodily desire and the reproduction of future ‘selves’ who will replace the dying. The self so produced is permanently under threat: it comes into existence through the awareness of the possibility of nonexistence; desire, in short, both enables the self to be produced, while at the same time overwhelming and disenabling the self. An additional metaphorical level links this with the production of art (‘dry-point’ is a form of etching), not only intimating a connection between writing and self-production, but also a corresponding failure to be self-sufficient since the ‘bubble’—the ink at the tip—is ‘burst’ as soon as it is ‘form[ed]’: the moment at which the writing is released to another, the reader. The second stanza continues the metaphors of self production, sexual reproduction, and artistic production, combining the images of the foetus in the womb with the pre-modern idea of the homunculus in the sperm, and the ‘bright blown walls’ of hand-made glass, or, more broadly, the bubble of any illusion. The images ‘collapse’ again, and, syntactically lead into the third stanza which adds a fourth level of meaning as the supposed climactic moment of birth, orgasm, and finished art object are figured as a failed industrial landscape. The inflationary bubble has burst to open out into ‘ashen hills’ and the failure of England’s ‘discredited’ industrial heartland: the Midlands. Birmingham was the premier and most powerful provincial city of the late nineteenth century, the home of Joseph Chamberlain and the centre of the English jewelry trade: its golden ‘ring[s]’ have now turned to ‘lead’, its alchemical ‘magic’, its ability to turn everything (its ‘scapes’, ‘hills’, and ‘lakes’) into credit, capital, profit, is ‘discredited’: no ‘elsewhere underwrites’ its ‘existence’. The final stanza opens out into an image of totality beyond the self, of pure form, ‘[a] cube of light’, a place beyond both mind and matter; it can ‘neither’ be ‘defin[ed]’ by reason, nor ‘prov[ed]’ empirically; it

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is where ‘you…obtain no right of entry’. It is unclear who the ‘you’ is here (is it the reader, the bubble, desire, woman, self, art, history?) suggesting that the insurmountable and insupportable ‘padlocked’ garrison is a place where no ‘other’ can exist. Larkin’s image of the ‘bare and sunscrubbed room’ clearly points to the bright attics and garrets of the Symbolists; in a sense then, by acknowledging the inability to produce the multipurpose symbol, Larkin is able to produce one. By figuring the Symbolist ideal as ‘remote’, ‘intensely far’, ‘unachievable’, he exiles himself, establishes again his nation’s ‘unworkableness’: it cannot reproduce its own image. Once again the movement from self-production to national production has emptied out into what in ‘Deceptions’ he calls ‘fulfilment’s desolate attic’ (p. 32). Repeatedly in Larkin’s poetry, the self is portrayed as being on the verge of collapse, as its interiority is emptied out as its supports become void of value. In ‘If, My Darling’, he uses the conceit of a lover entering into the mind of the speaker to discover an interiority no longer composed of the value-laden objects of the high bourgeoisie, but rather those objects destroyed by the reality of work, of the labour required to produce and purchase them: If my darling were once to decide Not to stop at my eyes, But to jump, like Alice, with floating skirt into my head She would find no tables and chairs. No mahogany claw-footed sideboards, No undisturbed embers; The Tantalus would not be filled, nor the fender-seat cosy; Nor the shelves stuffed with small-printed books for the sabbath, Nor the butler bibulous, the housemaids lazy: None of these things is available. Instead she would notice a house gone to rot, an interior space, penetrated by money and sex and dirty dreams and work, by a ‘reality’ that has smashed the Grecian urn, the utopian possibilities of the future and past: She would find herself looped with the creep of varying light Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate; Delusions that shrink to the size of a woman’s glove, Then sicken inclusively outwards. She would also remark The unwholesome floor, as it might be the skin of a grave From which ascends an adhesive sense of betrayal, A Grecian statue kicked in the privates, money, A swill-tub of finer feelings. But most of all She’d be stopping her ears against the incessant recital Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms Each one double-yolked with meaning and meaning’s rebuttal For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot, And to hear how the past is past and the future neuter Might knock my darling off her unpriceable pivot. (p. 41)

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With its terza rima form this poem shrinks Dante’s Divine Comedy into a small lyric which refuses the possibility of a meaningful past or future. Here the self cannot create meaning or indeed theorize its own origins from the past—it is irrevocably past—nor can it imagine it being reproduced: ‘the future’ is ‘neuter’. The effect of which is to destroy any form of value outside the system: there is no ‘unpriceable pivot’. Consequently, not only can nothing (neither ‘that vase’ nor the ‘Grecian statue’) function as an autonomous poetic or aesthetic object, but also nothing links these in a determinate causal narrative. (Indeed, only the conceit of a train journey usually enables the production of poems longer than thirty lines, for example: ‘I Remember, I Remember’, ‘Here’, The Whitsun Weddings’, and ‘Dockery and Son’.)33 These two issues—the autonomization of the epiphanaic or lyric moment and the production of narrative— constitute the crucial formal problematics of Larkin’s poetry. Significantly, in his last three books Larkin used the lyric sequence as a means of increasing length only once with ‘Livings’, published in his final volume High Windows, and, as a consequence, the sequence occupies a crucial space in any analysis of Larkin’s work. ‘Livings’ consists of only three poems (revealingly shrunken!), each delineating at dinner a particular social universe which is about to come to an end. In the first section, a commercial traveller visits a provincial hotel in 1929 and encounters a ‘living’ community still intimately connected to the Victorian age, as Larkin leaves out the place names like a narrator in a three-decker novel: I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed. Every third month I book myself in at The—Hotel in—ton for three days. The boots carries my lean old leather case Up to a single, where I hang my hat. One beer, and then ‘the dinner’, at which I read The—shire Times from soup to stewed pears. Births, deaths. For Sale. Police court. Motor Spares. The guests he encounters are the staple characters of that most nostalgic and conservative of forms, the classical English country house detective story: Afterwards, whisky in the Smoke Room: Clough, Margetts, the Captain, Dr. Watterson; Who makes ends meet, who’s taking the knock, Government tariffs, wages, price of stock. Smoke hangs under the light. The pictures on The walls are comic—hunting, trenches, stuff Nobody minds or notices. A sound Of dominoes from the bar. I stand a round. In contrast to ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, rather than being hollowed out, the space becomes filled with the objects of everyday life, and the following description of the landscape outside forms a correspondingly striking exception in the Larkin canon: Later, the square is empty: a big sky

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Drains down the estuary like the bed Of a gold river, and the Customs House Still has its office lit. For the first and only time in Larkin’s poetry, the sky and the sea at the end of the shore neither engulf nor threaten the previously constructed existence. The nation takes in what is outside (‘the big sky/Drains down the estuary like the bed/Of a gold river’), the elsewhere underwrites, and is underwritten by, the here which economically dominates and centres it with the still working, ‘still…lit’, ‘Customs House’.34 However, this production of a viable, workable economy and community, leads into a separate self who measures his distance from it, and who, accordingly, wishes to alter it by changing the family business: I drowse Between ex-Army sheets, wondering why I think it’s worth while coming. Father’s dead: He used to, but the business now is mine. It’s time for change, in nineteen twenty-nine. (p. 186) At this moment of individual decision, agency is lost and the central economy and insured communal existence is shown to be a fake, a bubble about to be burst, as the Wall Street Crash takes place off stage, relegating this historical moment to a museum piece. The second section celebrates the life of a lighthouse keeper and his seemingly symbiotic and religious relationship with the sea and its lifeforms: Seventy feet down The sea explodes upwards, Relapsing, to slaver Off landing-stage steps— Running suds, rejoice! Rocks writhe back to sight. Mussels, limpets, Husband their tenacity In the freezing slither— Creatures, I cherish you! By day, sky builds Grape-dark over the salt Unsown stirring fields. Radio rubs its legs, Telling me of elsewhere: At one level the speaker is now peripheral to the larger social world, but on another he continues to be central since his work enables the world’s trading business to take place safely; an ambivalence encapsulated by the ‘radio’ ‘telling [him] of elsewhere’. As in the previous section, however, the poem turns as the speaker asserts his separation from his ‘living’, urging that everything located in its use value

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should be averted to produce a solipsistic space of celebration, not realizing, of course, that the space of the lighthouse is dependent on its function, on the elsewhere it guides and which ensures its existence: Barometers falling, Ports wind-shuttered, Fleets pent like hounds, Fire in humped inns Kippering sea-pictures— Keep it all off! By night, snow swerves (O loose moth world) Through the stare travelling Leather-black waters. Guarded by brilliance I set plate and spoon, And after, divining cards. Lit shelved liners Grope like mad worlds westward. (pp. 187–8) The light becomes internalized: instead of the brilliance guarding the ships from the rocks, it guards him. Rather than being at the centre of the trading world through its paradoxical existence at the margin, then, the space has become another museum object: an eternal present which prevents connections being made between the past it has been extracted from, and the future it cannot foretell: it exists in a random universe of ‘divining cards’, while elsewhere, in the west, in America, the now incomprehensible historical world continues. The final section follows the same narrative trajectory as it begins with a detailed and convincing delineation of a dinner at an Oxbridge college sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. The conversation flows from the physical to the metaphysical, from the speculative to the matter-of-fact, from the aesthetic to the political, a range which symbolizes an ideal, male world of Renaissance donnish scholarship and ease: Tonight we dine without the Master (Nocturnal vapours do not please); The port goes round so much the faster, Topics are raised with no less ease— Which advowson looks the fairest, What the wood from Snape will fetch Names for pudendum mulieris, Why is Judas like Jack Ketch? The candleflames grow thin then broaden: Our butler Starveling piles the logs And sets behind the screens a jordan (Quicker than going to the bogs).

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The wine heats temper and complexion: Oath-enforced assertions fly On rheumy fevers, resurrection, Regicide and rabbit pie. The section again ends with a depiction of the surrounding landscape which breaks down the previously constructed coherent ‘living’, as, in contrast to the first two stanzas, each line, except the closing two, is a single, separate paratactic unit, precluding the possibility of any necessary or inevitable causal connection or circumscribed, knowable community: The fields around are cold and muddy, The cobbled streets close by are still, A sizar shivers at his study, The kitchen cat has made his kill; The bells discuss the hour’s gradations, Dusty shelves hold prayers and proofs: Above, Chaldean constellations Sparkle over crowded roofs. (p. 188) The final two lines refer back to an earlier, sophisticated intellectual and social formation which is, in the now of the speaker’s time, a museum piece, as the speaker’s own world is to us in our now. Once more, the speaker’s awareness of separation from his social world has led to a moment of lyric vision predicated on the collapse of that social world, and which, in turn, heralds the speaker’s own destruction. This poetic sequence, then, the only one of Larkin’s mature career, sets out the poles of his conceptual universe. The lyric epiphany occurs at the moment when the community from which it appears ceases to exist; to be more precise, it is the apocalyptic collapse of the community which produces the epiphany. Furthermore, this moment of lyric production is inextricably linked with creation of a self which enables it to be spoken; at the same time, however, this self also precludes the workableness of further narrative, since it comes into being through the awareness of the possibility of its non-existence. Thus, the community then carries the valence of reproduction, and the self that of the end of reproduction. By using the heuristic device of a Greimas semantic square, these binary oppositions and the combinations they provoke enable Larkin to be located within the wider sphere of his historical situation:35 Larkin himself obviously synthesizes the left-hand side, thematically, ideologically, and formally: first, his major themes are the failure of the self, its inevitable death, and the availability or unavailability of the lyric moment; second, his conception of England is predicated on its lyrical death, brought to a ghostly after-life by the poet; and, last, the synthesis conforms to the situation of poetry in England today: predominantly lyric, with a corresponding emphasis on a subjectivity which is threatened, if not all but

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eradicated, both by its belatedness (imagine an original lyric) and by the global economic and cultural system it inhabits. The right-hand side synthesis is formally and ideologically performed by the novel: the premier prose narrative form and one that points outside England towards the greater community of Europe. Larkin’s own career and writing supports this assertion since he desperately wanted to be a novelist, but after writing two, Jill and The Girl In Winter,36 found himself unable to write another; from then on novelists periodically appear in his writings as profitable and successful charlatans, able to live in Europe off their writing, in direct contrast to the poem’s speaker. (In terms of Larkin’s biography, the figure who unifies the poles would be Kingsley Amis.)37 These two sides then, provide the two pragmatic poles of English conservative and liberal politics of the post-war period: an acceptance and belief either in England’s inevitable and terminal decline, or in England’s role as a European partner, both of which provide England with a limited and restricted but nevertheless achievable role in the world. The other two sides, however, provide different resolutions to the conceptual problematic in the combinations which Greimas calls the complex and neutral: the former being, in Fredric Jameson’s words, ‘the ideal synthesis’, the latter the ‘union of purely negative or privative terms’.38 These combinations return us to the two figures who dominate twentieth-century English poetry and from whom Larkin sought to free himself, Yeats and Eliot, both of whom offer him alternative versions of literary and national politics. It also returns us to the two nations who have dominated English politics of the post-war period, Ireland and America. Eliot stands for that literary moment when, as Graham Martin succinctly puts it, ‘in the most ambitious feat of cultural imperialism the century seems likely to produce’ Eliot succeeded in taking over an entire literary culture.39 Moreover, The Waste Land makes European, but particularly English, culture, into a museum: a site of annotated and ‘shore[d]’ up ‘ruins’, which, like the home in ‘Home Is So Sad’, cannot produce themselves as a reproducing whole. This position with its synthesis of self, death, and narrative (or history) can be seen, as in ‘Dry-Point’, to conform to the ceaseless modernizing process of the economic system itself, and heralds its historical transition from industrial and national capitalism to corporate and

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multinational. At the same time, it accords with the movement from a system of competing European imperial powers, to a global system dominated by the American economy: an emergent culture in the interwar period which became dominant after the Second World War. Yeats corresponds to the ideal synthesis of a bardic lyric poetry of mythic origin, intimately connected with the community from which it comes and with a viable politics in the form of national liberation.40 Here, then, in the complex and neutral terms we get the utopian, impossible dreams of post-war nationalist English politics: on the one hand an assertion of a national politics of mythic organicism, racial identity, and national liberation at a time when the nation is not a colony and the sense of decline is a function of its ceasing to be an imperial power; and on the other an assertion of an imperial, racial politics founded on a belief in a ‘special relationship’ based upon a perceived cultural commonality with the United States.41 Finally, what this schema also reveals is the absence of any form of radical, utopian internationalism of the Left. The history of the 1945–75 period, in particular the Labour Party’s integral role within the society and England’s role as America’s most loyal ally in the Cold War, corroborates this absence. It is only with the failure of the Labour government of 1974–9, its capitulation to the International Monetary Fund, the election success of Margaret Thatcher, and the acceleration of the arms race, that a coherent, non-Roman-tic, international-looking Left coalesces.42 However, its difficulty in formulating a political narrative and argument, and then inserting such a formulation into the various discursive formations, is manifest as long as issues of English nationality and nationalism continue to dictate and dominate political discourse.43 Larkin’s poetry then, in its negotiation of the facts of high modernism, of Yeats and Eliot, of decolonization and imperial decline, of the European community and American global power, finds a limited space which by asserting the failure of reproduction, by circumscribing the possibility of new narratives, allows it to produce its shrunken objects (those vases!) out of its own belatedness. Such a form of production is strikingly analogous to Nairn’s analysis in The Enchanted Glass of the ceaseless reproduction of Ukanian traditional memorabilia centred on the monarchy, with its corresponding relegation of England to a pastiche museum of self-perpetuating, hollowed images of monarchistic nationalism. However, Larkin’s ruthless analysis ensures that his poetry, rather than celebrating this process of production, highlights its emptiness: his poems become sepulchral and elegiac: I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down From long french windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad In the evening sun. It is intensely sad. (p. 198) Duke University NOTES I would like to thank Guinn Batten, Dan Blanton, and Jed Esty for both their support and their various suggestions and criticisms of the manuscript. 1 The major reviews of the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 1992) were by John Carey, ‘Mail chauvinism’, Sunday Times, 25 October 1992, pp. 6–5; Ian Hamilton, ‘Bugger me blue’, London Review of Books, 22 October 1992, pp. 3–4; and Mick Imlah, ‘Selfishly yours, Philip’, Times Literary Supplement, 23 October 1992, p. 13; and those of Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life

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(London: Faber, 1993) were by Alan Bennett, ‘Alas! Deceived’, London Review of Books, 25 March 1993; pp. 3– 9; Ian Ham ilton, ‘Self’s the man’, Times Literary Supplement, 2 April 1993, pp. 3–4; and Jonathan Raban, ‘The idea of elsewhere’, The New Republic, 19–26 July 1993; pp. 30–6. The central letters in the furore were published in the Times Literary Supplement (6 November 1992, p. 27; 13 November 1992, p. 17; 20 November 1992, p. 19; 27 November 1992, p. 21; and 4 December 1992, p. 15) and in the London Review of Books (22 April 1993, p. 4; 13 May 1993, pp. 4 and 17; and 27 May 1993, p. 4.) There were also important articles by John Bayley (‘Becoming a girl’, London Review of Books, 25 March 1993, p. 10, and ‘Aardvark’, London Review of Books, 22 April 1993, p. 11), Lisa Jardine (‘Saxon violence’, The Guardian, 8 December 1992, pp. 6–7b with a response in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘NB’, 11 December 1992, p. 14), and Martin Amis (‘Don Juan in Hull’, The New Yorker, 12 July 1993, pp. 74–82). Recent books include James Booth, Philip Larkin: Writer (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), Roger Day, Larkin (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), and A.T.Tolley, My Proper Ground: a Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and its Development (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). It is proper here to say that I believe neither the Selected Letters nor the Collected Poems are adequate as scholarly editions. Letter, Times Literary Supplement 6 November 1992, p. 27. It is surely strange that such a position of cultural importance should be held by a lyric poet with so small an œuvre and range—only in England…? Two examples taken from the elegantly written reviews by Alan Bennett and Jonathan Raban respectively: ‘Without ever having known Larkin I feel, as I think many readers will, that I have lost a friend’ (p. 9), and ‘Those grimly beautiful later poems are still solid facts of their period like the three-day week and the falling pound’ (p. 30). All the quotations of Larkin’s poetry are taken from Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1988). Despite its lack of historical analysis and sweeping generalizations as to the nature of class and education in late eighteenth to early nineteenth-century England, Marjorie Levinson’s analysis of Keats’s cultural aspirations in Keats: A Life of Allegory (London: Blackwell, 1988), still remains the best so far. It should be read, however, in conjunction with Marilyn Butler’s review of the book where she points out that the type of Dissenting Academy Keats went to provided an excellent education and had done so since the late seventeenth century. Quoted by Barbara Everett, ‘Art and Larkin’, in Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 1989), p. 131. Ireland periodically functions in Larkin’s poetry to denote the distance of the speaker in the poem from the community he inhabits or the ideals he desires: in ‘Church Going’, for instance, he ‘donates an Irish sixpence’ into the collection; in ‘Toads’ the ability to escape from the work-a-day world is through ‘blarney’; and in ‘Dublinesque’ an Irish funeral is seen as a form of communal ritual which the speaker can see, but not take part in. In ‘Here’, for example, where Hull is described as ‘a terminate and fishy-smelling/Pastoral of ships up streets’. This occlusion is especially noteworthy for the way in which the two societies are impacted together to create a synchronic space, so providing the sense of both timelessness and tradition. As historians such as Eric Hobsbawm in The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Industry and Empire (London: Penguin Books, 1988), Perry Anderson in English Questions (London: Verso, 1991), and Tom Nairn in The Break-up of Britain (London: NLB, 1977) and The Enchanted Glass (London: Radius, 1988) have shown, this ability to create a tradition firmly situated in an industrial, capitalist social structure, but shrouded in the ritual of a feudal past, seems to be, or at least its success seems to be, peculiarly English, and a significant factor in its social stability and conservative politics. John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London: Faber, 1981) p. 118. There are a surprising number of not-very-good monographs on Larkin which repeat this reading and conform to the same format of five chapters consisting of: chapter 1, biography and reputation; chapter 2, brief analysis of novels and The North Ship, detailing the supposed turn from Yeats to Hardy; chapter 3, The Less Deceived; chapter 4, The Whitsun Weddings; chapter 5, High Windows.

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12 ‘Larkin’s Edens’ and ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’, in Poets in Their Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and ‘Art and Larkin’, in Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work, ed. Dale Salwack (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 1989). Philip Larkin (London: Methuen, 1984). The major critique of this view is an unconvincing article by Claude Rawson, ‘Larkin’s desolate attics’, Raritan 11, 2 (Fall 1991), pp. 25–47, which emphasizes a Swiftian analogue. 13 One of the greatest merits of Motion’s superb biography is its emphasis on Larkin’s life as being, in the words of its subtitle, ‘a writer’s life’. 14 Required Writings (London: Faber, 1984), p. 292. 15 Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 182. 16 See ‘What Armstrong did’, Required Writings, pp. 314–17. Larkin’s essay on John Betjeman, ‘It could only happen in England’, Required Writings, pp. 204–18, projects a similar ambivalence as it begins by praising Betjeman for selling so much, and for being a poet ‘for whom the modern poetic revolution has simply not taken place’ and ends with a breath-taking and hubristic reversal, as Larkin makes Betjeman the exemplary Eliotian poet. 17 Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 274. 18 Harold Bloom works out his Oedipal poetics in three major books: The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 19 He gives them the most space in his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). 20 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Arnold, 1977) and ‘Philip Larkin: The metonymic muse’, in Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work, ed. Dale Salwack (Iowa: Iowa University Press 1989), pp. 118–28. 21 Clearly, we are all aware after the work of Paul de Man, especially his readings of Rilke and Proust in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), that both metaphor and metonymy are endlessly dependent upon, and endlessly subversive of, each other. Nevertheless, the structural distinction Lodge makes seems a useful one. 22 The clearest example of Larkin’s version of this narrative is his 1965 ‘Introduction’ to the second edition of The North Ship (London: Faber, 1965). Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin also asserts that Yeats is present throughout Larkin’s career and sees Larkin as successfully synthesizing Hardy and Yeats. Motion uses the rhetoric of organic progression to argue that Larkin has done ‘more than any other living poet to solve the crisis that beset British poetry after the modernists had entered its bloodstream’ (p. 20). However, Motion’s unproblematic version of poetic progress and refusal to consider questions of national identity seem inadequate to deal with the power and complexity of Larkin’s work. In her Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1986), Edna Longley also discusses the continuing influence of Yeats as an ‘Anti-Self’ (p. 113). 23 ‘Creativity in language: word, polysemy, metaphor’, in Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Boston: Beacon, 1978), pp. 132–3. 24 Donald Davie’s latest book, Under Briggflatts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and indeed his whole career can be seen as exemplary in this regard. In the book Davie attempts to chart the influence and continuation of modernist poetics in post-war British poetry only to discover all and none of it is so influenced. Another way of looking at the issue is to try to locate a break in English literature that can be defined as ‘postmodernist’ in relation to ‘modernist’: there is no Samuel Beckett in relation to James Joyce, no nouveau roman in relation to Marcel Proust, no Italo Calvino in relation to Italo Svevo, no John Ashbery in relation to Wallace Stevens, no Thomas Pynchon in relation to William Faulkner, no Gunter Grass in relation to Thomas Mann. This is not simply a question for immanent literary history, but rather leads into the status of modernity and modernization in England, as well as its peculiar historical position as having the most mediated bourgeois revolution and being the first industrialized nation.

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25 In Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain see, in particular, his chapters ‘English nationalism: The case of Enoch Powell’ and The English enigma’. Returning to the Burkean myth was not simply a preserve of the right since its influence can be seen in the works of, for example, both Raymond Williams and E.P.Thompson. 26 ‘She did not change: Philip Larkin’, in Minatour (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 247– 8. 27 Some of the major examples can be found in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the novels of H.G.Wells, Arnold Bennett, and George Gissing, and, of course, the relatively less successful Leopold Bloom who, nevertheless, is still more economically successful than most of the inhabitants of Dublin. 28 See, for example, ‘The Shield of Achilles’, ‘Homage to Clio’ and ‘Horae Canonicae’. His Roman soldier poem, ‘Roman Wall Blues’, is an imagin ative, historical recreation of the feelings of one of the Roman men on guard duty on Hadrian’s Wall. 29 Longley also mentions the importance of ‘home’, or the absence of one, for Larkin. 30 Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Anchor, 1973). 31 Larkin’s biography is clearly relevant here: his father was City Treasurer of Coventry and was the type of powerful, provincial burgher common in Victorian and Edwardian fiction. Although not as important a figure as his father, Larkin himself was an extremely successful professional man: the University of Hull was one of the first newly independent universities in the 1960s and Larkin’s design for its library became the model for all the new universities. He also was instrumental in promoting the securing of British literary manuscripts in British libraries. However, unlike his father, he clearly had no desire to reproduce himself, as his attitude both to women and children—to human reproduction one might say—is well documented. 32 This is a prevalent motif in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and poetry. 33 ‘The Old Fools’, ‘The Building’ and ‘Show Saturday’ are the three most significant exceptions. 34 In addition, Britain was still on the gold standard in 1929. 35 I borrow this use of the Greimas semantic square from Fredric Jameson, in particular his The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 36 Both novels are interesting and well worth reading. Jill (London: Fortune, 1946) is perhaps the first encounter in English literature with a figure who became a staple of post-war English fiction, the ‘grammar school scholar’. And Girl In Winter (London: Faber, 1947) is an extremely successful ‘poetic’ novel in the style of Virginia Woolf and Henry Green. 37 One of his last poems, ‘The Life with a Hole in it’ (p. 202), sets out just such an exemplary opposition:

So the shit in the shuttered chateau Who does his five hundred words Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and birds Is as far off as ever… See also ‘Fiction and the Reading Public’ and ‘A Study of Reading Habits’.

38 39 40 41

Kingsley Amis was a contemporary of Larkin’s at college and one of his closest friends. Jim Dixon of Lucky Jim was based upon Larkin and Larkin has a number of poems which seem to be addressed to an interlocutor very similar to Amis: see especially, ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’ (p. 122). Furthermore, Larkin’s letters show an ambivalence and envy towards Amis’s social, literary, and sexual success. Hamilton discusses this rivalry in his review of the Selected Letters and Motion closely examines the relationship in his biography. The Political Unconscious, p. 168. ‘Introduction’, Eliot In Perspective, ed. Graham Martin (London: Arnold, 1970), p. 22. For these terms, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 121–7, and The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken, 1981), pp. 203–5. Hence, the revelations of Larkin’s racism should come as no surprise.

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42 Obviously, such a formation was observable earlier, in particular in the people centred around the New Left Review of the mid-1960s with their criticism of earlier Left figures such as E.P.Thompson and Raymond Williams. Nevertheless, it is only with the loss of the 1979 election and the London Labour Party’s victory in the Greater London Council elections of the same year that this new formation begins to play a central role in national politics via its attempt to control the Labour Party, and its demonization by the national press, the Labour Right, etc., with Marxism Today as the central journal. 43 These generalizations require further elaboration which would have to begin with Perry Anderson’s magisterial analyses of English history and society in English Questions. A recent example of how disastrous this emphasis on English nationalism can be for the Right as well as the Left is the farcical attempt of John Major and his government to avoid devaluing sterling in 1992: an attempt their earlier nationalist rhetoric forced upon them since they repeatedly emphasized their aim to make sterling the currency of choice above the Deutschmark by showing the ‘steadfast Dunkirk spirit’. The end result of which was the loss of a third of the nation’s currency reserves in four hours, the removal of sterling from the ERM, and a forced devaluation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The quotations in this essay from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin (1988) are cited by kind permission of the publishers, Faber and Faber Ltd.

The Heimlich Manoeuvre TERENCE HAWKES

I IN CUSTODY I will focus on two eruptions. The first occurs in the middle of Matthew Arnold’s essay of 1864, ‘The Function Of Criticism At The Present Time’. Arnold has been addressing the linked questions of the true nature of English literary criticism on the one hand and the true nature of English national culture on the other. If the first is ever to engage fruitfully with the second, literary criticism must become, he says, a depoliticized ‘absolutely and entirely independent’ activity. Only then will it be able to confront and finally defeat what he calls the ‘retarding and vulgarizing’ accounts of current Englishness recently put forward by two home-grown journalist/politicians, Sir Charles Adderley and Mr John Arthur Roebuck. Then, casting round for an example of something concrete to set against the fatuous self-satisfaction of these apologists, with their cant about ‘our unrivalled happiness’ as members of ‘the old Anglo-Saxon race… the best breed in the whole world’, he quite suddenly and out of the blue quotes from a newspaper account of a specific criminal case: A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperley Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.1 The impact of that, even today, is considerable. A nugget of genuine domestic Englishness, the case of Wragg is curiously disturbing at a number of levels. Nomen est omen. The ‘hideous’ name Wragg, Arnold comments, itself challenges the pretensions of ‘our old Anglo-Saxon breed…the best in the whole world’ by showing ‘how much that is harsh and ill-favoured’ there is in that best. A literary criticism which ‘serves the cause of perfection’ by insisting on these contrasts between pretensions and reality in society must begin precisely here, at home. And although Mr Roebuck may not think much of an adversary who ‘replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath Wragg is in custody’, in no other way (says Arnold) will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to moderate themselves.2 He doesn’t consider whether Mr Roebuck (nomen est omen indeed) might have been more effectively challenged by the murmuring of what a local newspaper reports to have been Wragg’s own piteous, yet oddly piercing cry at

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her trial, setting her present state of custody tellingly against its opposite: ‘I should never have done it if I had had a home for him.’3 II HOMEBOY Wragg’s is a voice—and a name—that could easily have issued, a generation later, from the depths of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like the snatches of conversation about pregnancy and marriage, and the drunken demotic pub-talk of that poem, her words somehow manage to speak from the domestic centre of a culture, indeed literally of house and ‘home’, whilst at the same time signalling a fundamental estrangement from it. But the second eruption I have in mind occurs in fact in a critical essay of Eliot’s: one that has something of the same purpose as Arnold’s, signalled by the fact that it has the same title: ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923). In response partly to the vaporizings of the critic John Middleton Murry, Eliot here also takes up the question of literary criticism and the nature of genuine Englishness. Murry has argued that the latter is to be found vested in something which he terms the ‘inner voice’ of the nation: ‘The English writer, the English divine, the English statesman, inherit no rules from their forebears; they inherit only this: a sense that in the last resort they must depend on the inner voice.’4 Eliot’s carefully honed New England sensibility, with its precise commitment to the inheritance of rules from forebears, immediately recoils from this ‘inner voice’ of Old England. Admitting, coldly, that the statement appears ‘to cover certain cases’, he begins a withering attack: The inner voice, in fact, sounds remarkably like an old principle which has been formulated by an elder critic in the now familiar phrase of ‘doing as one likes’. —and then the ice cracks and a most startling and memorable image suddenly erupts: The possessors of the inner voice ride ten in a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice, which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust.5 Moral revelations vouchsafed in the corridor of a train of the Great Western Railway (as it then was) whilst pulling out of Paddington Station are no doubt few and far between. But even if they lack the force of holy writ, their impact can apparently be considerable. Faced with what might be called an excluding plenitude of rowdy Englishness, Eliot’s criticism here starts to draw on rhythmic and metaphorical skills developed in the cause of the modernist aesthetic. What suddenly surfaces here is nothing less than the nucleus of a kind of imagist poem, something that Ezra Pound characterized as ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. Characteristically, like Pound’s own famous ‘In a station of the Metro’: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. it involves modern urban transport systems, with their enclosed spaces and vivid, if ephemeral visual contacts. Ultimately, it offers an image which is both fleeting and concrete, confirming—as Richard Aldington put it —that an imagist poem properly manifests a ‘hardness, as of cut stone’.6 Yet it is also clear and concise, mimicking the episodic glance of the male urban flâneur. It meets, almost precisely, the requirement ofT. E.

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Hulme for a ‘visual, concrete language’ which ‘…always endeavours to arrest you and to make you continuously see a physical thing’ (Speculations).7 And when the undoubtedly arrested Eliot inspected that intensely physical railway compartment, what he saw was an Englishness which, in a suddenly disturbing mode, seemed to have no resting place, no room, no home to offer him. III EASILY FREUDENED The concept of ‘home’ in that expanded sense is of course crucial to Freud’s well-known paper of 1919, Das Unheimliche.8 Its aim is to distinguish a particular class of, or core of feeling within, the general field of ‘the frightening’, which could justify the use of a special name for it. Freud’s immediate target is the apparently stable opposition between the heimlich, the ‘intimate’ or ‘domestic’, and the unheimlich, the strange or ‘uncanny’.9 His central tactic is to unpick and ultimately to dissolve that opposition. Freud’s case is that the ‘uncanny’ is not simply the new and the unfamiliar. Something has to be added to it in order to give it its ‘uncanny’ quality, and that something is, disturbingly, already well known to us: ‘the uncanny (unheimlich) is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.10 More disturbingly, ‘the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix “un” is the token of repression’. Thus the uncanny, says Freud, invariably involves something ‘which ought to have remained hidden, but has come to light’.11 One key to the mystery lies in ‘an examination of linguistic usage’.12 This reveals that the apparent polarities heimlich/unheimlich are not truly opposed. The ‘familiar’ begins to reveal surprising links with the ‘not known’. Indeed, as the different shades of meaning derived from heimlich develop, they start to exhibit qualities identical with their opposites until, on the one hand, the word ‘means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’.13 This migration of meaning finally reveals, as Freud puts it in a classic deconstructive manoeuvre, the interdependence of the terms: Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.’14 It is obviously tempting to try to situate Matthew Arnold’s notion of a heimlich English culture in this context. His essay not only considers Englishness in terms of what Edward Said calls ‘an aggressive sense of nation, home, community and belonging’, of being ‘at home’ or ‘in place’ in a particular sphere.15 He defines it at last and most powerfully by pointing to the boundary beyond which the ‘placeless’ or the ‘homeless’ or the ‘uncanny’ begins. This is exactly where we encounter Wragg. She erupts in Arnold’s text as a horrific, homeless spectre, revealing a suppressed dimension of the culture which a properly directed criticism will force us to confront. Such a criticism’s last, and best function, Arnold seems to be saying, is to tell us what our ‘home’ culture is really like, and it does that by enabling us to see Wragg clearly, as a powerful signifier whose reiteration is enough to puncture the pomposities of Messrs. Adderley and Roebuck. Criticism’s very detachment from the political, practical and polemical enables it, says Arnold, to confront these gentlemen with what their vision occludes: it points to an unheimlich suppressed by, but unavoidably included within, the English heimlich. Once more the focus is on nomenclature: Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world’, has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names— Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than ‘the best race in the world’: by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing!16

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Recognition of Wragg and her plight is not only seen as the central concern and duty of responsible criticism, but, in the course of Arnold’s analysis, it becomes clear that her homelessness, like the plight of the homeless everywhere, serves to define what we mean by ‘home’. Wragg acts as a boundary marker, a gibbet and a dangling body which proclaims the limit of civilization as we know it, the absolute distinctions of an ‘English’ discourse, the end of the real, the natural, the ‘inside’, the ‘superior’, and the domestic, and the beginning of the strange, the unnatural, the ‘outside’, the ‘inferior’ and the uncanny. Wragg, in short, marks the spot where the heimlich is defined by the fact that the unheimlich appears. The spectre continually haunting the notion of ‘criticism’, as described by Arnold and many others since, is that of its apparently essential secondariness: its status as something merely repetitive, something that is always already preceded. Michel Foucault’s disingenuous statement that the hierarchical relationship primary/secondary, text/commentary is permanent, regardless of the nature of the documents which take on these functions, offers a classic formulation. He grants that ‘This differentiation is certainly neither stable, nor constant, nor absolute. There is not, on the one side, the category of fundamental or creative discourses, given for all time, and on the other, the mass of discourses which repeat, gloss, and comment.’17 Nonetheless he claims that the ‘principle of a differentiation will continuously be ‘put back into play’. We can annul one or other of the terms of the relation, but we cannot ‘do away with the relation itself’. Foucault goes on to argue that ‘in what is broadly called commentary’, the hierarchy between primary and secondary texts plays two complementary roles. The ‘dominance of the primary text, its permanence, its status as a discourse which can always be re-actualised’ seems to make for an ‘open possibility of speaking’. On the other hand, the ‘only role’ open to commentary is to repeat: ‘to say at last what was silently articulated “beyond”, in the text’. Caught in a paradox, the commentary must ‘say for the first time what had, nonetheless, already been said, and must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never been said’. It offers a ‘repetition in disguise’, at whose furthest reach there lurks the spectre of ‘mere recitation’. The first casualty of any probing of the notion of an unchallengeable relationship between primary and secondary will of course be that idea of repetition. Repetition presupposes a primary to which it is itself inevitably secondary. However, Freud’s notion of the unheimlich immediately brings that relationship into question. Repetition of the same thing, he argues, is a major source of the uncanny, and it can finally be defined in terms which stress exactly that: it is that class of frightening things ‘in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs’.18 Freud’s larger theory of repetition is of course fully developed in Beyond The Pleasure Principle on which he was working concurrently with his revision of Das Unheimliche. There, as part of a fundamental ‘need to restore an earlier state of things’, repetition achieves a kind of primary initiating status as it comes to be linked to the death drive.19 And certainly when heimlich and unheimlich merge, the Foucauldian ‘secondary’ seems to mingle with and almost to usurp its ‘primary’. Here, at least, the so-called ‘relation itself’ between them starts to seem collusive, rather than ‘given’, and the persistent sense that the one lies at the heart of the other hints at a potential obliteration of the distinction between the two. For Arnold, it is clear that literary criticism is the activity which, drawing the uncanny to the attention of the domestic, or pointing out Wragg to Adderley and Roebuck, demonstrates their interdependence and insists upon it. If this is its function at the present time, then criticism (which may appear to be secondary, merely repetitive) has at least a prima facie case also to be seen as primary. Or rather, the whole primarysecondary relationship begins to seem ungroundable: perhaps there is, in respect of the literature/criticism nexus, no primary, no resting place, no home?

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IV MEIN IRISCH KIND If we were looking for an area of repression, in which unspeakable unheimlich secrets recurrently haunt the heimlich texts of British culture and prove to be their foundation as much as their undoing, the secondary that worryingly questions the standing of their primary, then we would do well to look slightly more closely at Matthew Arnold’s account of the case of Wragg. The Victorian period broadly encouraged the operation of a complex system of social distinction which finally confined most of those determined as the ‘lower’ orders within the limits of what can be seen as a specific, unifying ‘race’. The common characteristics supposedly shared by the labouring classes, Jews, Southern Europeans and non-Europeans subjugated by empire, included moral degeneracy, physical uncleanliness and, in consequence, a systematic tendency towards desecration of the unified holy shrine of domesticity and hygiene. In Britain, any one instance of inferiority could readily be taken as a sign of the others and there are plenty of examples of a kind of ‘network of affinities’20 supporting a programme of racial totalization which constructed foreigners—and the working class in general—as hovel-dwelling, bathroom-subverting, low-browed, dirty, cunning, darkskinned ‘savages’. In Britain, one of the chief objects of this kind of derision was of course the Irish. As early as the midseventeenth century, Irish servants who had been summarily shipped to service in the British West Indies were liable to join forces with black slaves in rebellions against their common masters.21 By the nineteenth century the word ‘Irish’ functioned broadly in English as a term signifying the wild, intemperate, aggressive behaviour and illogical untutored argument deemed characteristic of savagery in general. That many of the poorest sections of Britain’s industrial cities could be nominated ‘Irishtown’ or ‘Irish Court’ without demur is a telling detail in respect of the degrading, grubby context in which Arnold is at pains to locate Wragg: by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And ‘our unrivalled happiness’—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills —how dismal those who have seen them will remember—the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child!… And the final touch—short, bleak, and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-Saxon breed!22 Wragg’s context, involving dirt, labour, poverty, moral irresponsibility and the defilement of domesticity in the form of her illegitimate child and her infanticide, surely presents her in this sense not as Anglo-Saxon, but as something Anglo-Saxons have ‘lopped off’ in an attempt to dispose of it: as Irish, a representative of that ubiquitous, emasculated, and by now thoroughly ‘feminized’ Celtic culture whose apparent nature Arnold, in his writings elsewhere, had done much to characterize.23 We need make nothing of the fact that, not five miles from the dismal Mapperley Hills (how dismal those who have seen them will remember) the map shows a quite separate, ‘lopped off’ town called—exquisitely—Arnold. For Wragg’s anarchic, antipatriarchal, unheimlich eruption in Arnold’s text as the Other repressed by a self-satisfied Anglo-Saxon bourgeois and colonial ideology, invites us by its own force to see her as a version of an immemorial displaced figure. It is one which, despite the demands of and for Home (Ireland’s claims for ‘Home’ Rule climax in 1870, with the founding of the Home Rule movement) seems forever doomed to wander homelessly in the English psyche: Frisch weht der Wind

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Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind Wo weilest du? That these lines, for English speakers, urge a return to Eliot as much as to Wagner is not accidental. The Waste Land’s use of the sailor’s song from Tristan und Isolde is a significant part of the poem’s focus upon wandering, rootlessness and homelessness as a feature of the Western experience in the twentieth century. And when we return to Eliot’s essay ‘The Function of Criticism’, his diatribe against the ‘inner voice’ seems to spring from similar concerns. The central objection to the ‘inner voice’ is that it is exclusive. If its presence defines true Englishness, in a sense that Heimat points to, then its absence must bar the American Eliot from that company, however successful had been his elocutionary exertions over the years in sedulous pursuit of the English ‘outer voice’. Eliot’s overriding critical notion was always of course of an adjustable ‘order’ or tradition of truly great Western writers, in which the advent of newcomers made a regular realignment necessary: the ‘outsider’ is thus accommodated, domesticated, put ‘in place’ and made ‘at home’. Eliot’s conversion to the established church starts after the publication of The Waste Land and perhaps represents, as Edward Said has suggested, a turning away from the difficulties of filiation (natural continuity between generations: something prohibited by his exile and the difficulties of his marriage to Vivien) and towards the alternative involvements available through affiliation, that is the bondings offered by ‘institutions, associations and communities’.24 This would certainly encourage a sense of the weaving of the individual talent into the web of connections afforded by the great Western ‘tradition’, so that an inherited American, Republican, and Protestant commitment might eventually be transformed into the infamous English affiliative trio of Royalism, Classicism, and Anglo-Catholicism. Natural justice suggests that the strenuous pursuit of such strange Gods should be rewarded by a modicum of acceptance. Eliot’s uncomprehending resentment when the ‘inner voice’ of Englishness turns out to be vested elsewhere is correspondingly acute. Its monument is the sudden eruption into the text of ‘The Function of Criticism’—garnished for better effect with a broad range of modernist poetic devices—of that over-full railway carriage, whose denizens can be derided for asserting their insufferably boisterous, fully affiliated Englishness as football supporters on a trip to foreign parts (i.e. Swansea) at the expense of the exclusion from their number of a would-be fellow-traveller. European readers will of course be aware of the phenomenon of foot-ball as the focus of riotous affiliative nationalism in the twentieth century. In this, as in other regards, the United States retains an unviolated innocence (at least until the World Cup arrives there) so that Eliot’s American experience can hardly have prepared him for behaviour of this sort. That perhaps confirms—despite his best efforts at Anglicization—how American he had remained. By their football supporters shall ye know them, and indeed it seems to have been precisely by those means that his discovery is made of an unheimlich spectre of exclusion located at the very heart of the English heimlich (what offers to be more heimlich for a Harvard educated traveller in pursuit of the great Western tradition than a seat in a carriage of the Great Western Railway?) But let me be entirely outrageous. The eruption that confronts Eliot in that carriage is a phenomenon for which we English have a particular and revealing name: hooliganism. The provenance of the word ‘hooligan’ is clear, disturbing, and once more involves nomenclature. It probably derives from an account (published in 1899) of the exploits of a fictitious denizen of Irish Court in East London, ‘Patrick Hooligan’.25 In short, ‘hooligan’ carries the clear connotation ‘Irish’. It offers a classic displacement of

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violent disorderly behaviour on to a despised and supposedly ‘savage’ subculture, with the implication that it is racially characteristic. Throughout the twentieth century, the increasingly broad deployment of the term in Britain has been part of a series of complex ideological manoeuvres by which the British have tried to negotiate an engagement with what they still presume to call the ‘Irish problem’—that is, by writing off the activities of an anti-colonial movement as the typical behaviour of degraded barbarians. That the rise in what is now firmly perceived and routinely denounced as ‘football hooliganism’ in Britain increasingly parallels the rise of violent rejection of British rule in Ireland no doubt warrants further investigation in these terms. Of course from time immemorial there has been a tradition in Britain and throughout Europe of Carnivalesque behaviour which, with its riotous upturning of accepted values and hierarchies, its commitment to ‘rough music’ and the crude extra-legal settling of scores, has appeared to override civil authority and has sometimes fostered serious political challenge to it. And more recently in Britain there has been a tradition of rowdy, law-breaking behaviour which—if practised by, say, undergraduates at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge—could be safely written off as ‘high spirits’, or part of the tradition of the undergraduate ‘Rag’. But this kind of boisterousness has increasingly—once it is seen to attract lesser breeds without the law—invited the moralizing tendencies of magistrates and sociologists as a prelude to its denunciation as the work of ‘football hooligans’. The brief but memorable eruption of football hooliganism into Eliot’s ‘The Function of Criticism’ is a matter of some moment; not least because it resonates with the eruption in Matthew Arnold’s The Function of Criticism’ of a similar, violently disorderly force. Linked to Eliot’s not only by a potential Irish dimension, but by a name—Wragg—in which, as Arnold (quintessentially an Oxford Man) would know, the spectre of youthful disruptive behaviour also lurks—this side of Ionia, Attica and the Ilissus at least—it stands as a factor with which British culture—and its literary criticism—has had to come to terms. V FIRST AID FOR THE CHOKING VICTIM However, at what Foucault calls the ‘preconceptual’ level, Arnold’s essay and Eliot’s perhaps share much more extensive common ground. Together they tell us a good deal about the ideological freight carried by literary criticism at the moment of its installation as a key component of Anglo-American culture. Both promote and reinforce a fundamental division between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’, between ‘home’ and ‘away’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, in which the complexities surrounding the heimlich are actively at work. For Arnold, ‘foreignness’ involves the ‘free play of ideas’ which can only influence for the good an English insularity committed to the merely practical. For Eliot, the ‘foreign’ offers an ordered, hierarchical stability to shore against what he sees as the disorder likely to flow from the chaotic and potentially revolutionary ‘inner voice’ on which John Middleton Murry and later D.H.Lawrence seem to insist. Of course, that is only the crudest sketch of the terrain in question, but in general terms it seems to confirm that the subject position offered by both examples of this discourse—and I am taking Arnold’s and Eliot’s essays as crucially definitive locations and formulations of a discourse that will for a generation supply the common coin of academic literary criticism in the English-speaking world—systematically presents the critic in terms of a sophisticated ‘foreignness’ projected as part of the cool appraising stance of the outsider. Coleridge’s notion of a praetorian cadre of teachers operating within society as a select ‘clerisy’, or Arnold’s idea of the recruitment of an elite fifth column of trained academic ‘aliens’, comes disturbingly to mind. The Arnold-influenced Newbolt Report (1921), direct precursor in Britain of professionalized academic literary criticism, speaks chillingly of University teachers of English as Missionaries.

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Of course, Arnold professes sympathy for Wragg, whilst Eliot maintains a frigid scorn for the possessors of the ‘inner voice’. But both accept —as colonizing ‘outsiders’ who claim to be able to see what the savage aboriginal ‘insiders’ cannot—the necessity of recognizing the paradoxical Englishness of each eruption. Eliot’s essay is important because it sanctions the transfer of aspects of its own eruption to Arnold’s and estab lishes a resonance—albeit deeply submerged—with the case of Wragg. Freud’s point is confirmed in both: the unheimlich represents a repressed dimension of the heimlich. Meanwhile, the links of football hooliganism with an older tradition of Carnival, and even the ‘psychological onomatopoeia’ of Wragg’s name (of which Arnold as we have seen makes a great deal) begin to hint at a sanctioned loosening of moral strictures. And that disturbing prospect starts, darkly, and surprisingly, to suggest the Mapperley Hills and Paddington Station as unlikely locations of a long-hidden and unified unheimlich that literary criticism, at its academic inception in Britain, feels it has somehow to engage with. In short, I am suggesting that the essays of Arnold and Eliot cohere around the eruptions of this Wragg— Hooligan nexus. Its vague roots lie, I would also suggest, in a forgotten—or repressed—dimension of British culture. In proposing its consideration as a single unit, I do so with only residual misgivings about the reduction and false clarity this imposes on its shadowy complexity. It is hardly counter-intuitive, after all, to suggest that the unheimlich lying within the heimlich in the modern English psyche has something to do with Ireland. And this is no more than to say that Ireland can always be perceived by an inherent prejudice as the Anarchy to a Culture whose presuppositions are and always have been English. What confronts both Arnold and Eliot, as they consider the function of literary criticism in its postindustrial setting, is thus the stirring of a pre-industrial ghost: a wholly disconcerting prospect in which that which is ‘away’ in football terms, startlingly erupts into that which is ‘home’. As Missionaries, their project is nothing less than the imposition of a law and order on this savage chaos. Their central aim is to ‘map’ it, to establish the contours of ‘home’, by imposing an apellation which we have perhaps for too long endorsed: English. As part of the process, both offer to speak on behalf of a complex and hitherto covert, but none the less authentic Englishness, an ‘inside’ which apparently reluctantly agrees to emerge in order to take on the policing role of ‘outside’. But by the stratagem of backing thus humbly into the limelight, ‘authentic’ Englishness—Wragg, the absurd claims of the ‘inner voice’—manages in my view to obscure something far more radical, far more deeply ‘inside’ and implicated with itself. In calling up this deep-seated internal challenge to the ‘law and order’ of English literary criticism and nominating it, however rawly, as ‘Irish’, I suppose I am finally trying to outline a principle which out-Arnolds Arnold and out-Eliots Eliot: one which challenges fundamental ‘English’ presuppositions in the most fundamental way; which ultimately refuses their very logic, their very ordering of the world, their very notion of causality, of the plausible in scholarship, the very oppositions on which this depends—and which refuses in the end the distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’, and between those modes of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ on which—as in Arnold and Eliot—it apparently insists. The voice which has most relentlessly made this challenge over the years is inevitably an Irish one. It is of course that of Oscar Wilde. It speaks most cogently in the essay which presents his astonishing reply to Arnold and, as it were in advance, to Eliot: ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891). In effect, what this essay awards to criticism is a primary not a secondary role: Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name…criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does…. Anybody can write a three volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature…criticism is itself an art…. It is to criticism that the future belongs…. There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.26

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The work of a true—albeit dandified—Hooligan, this polemic effortlessly reverses the apparently immutable hierarchy identified by Foucault, just as Wilde’s whole life from the level of a paradoxical literary style to that of committed sexual role, seems to have been geared to the reversal at all levels and in all respects of the English sense of how things are and should be. ‘Considered as an instrument of thought,’ he writes, ‘the English mind is coarse and undeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.’27 For reversals on that scale, of course, he paid the price that Hooligans pay. The principle at stake may nevertheless be allowed finally to challenge the notion of ‘mere’ repetition which lies at the heart of traditional ideas of literary criticism, certainly in its professionalized form in the Academy. I hope to have suggested that a different notion of repetition might finally engage us. It is one whose aim is the generation of the new in terms of the only kind of newness we can recognize because its source is the old. I am speaking of a criticism anxious, not merely to raise the spectre of the unheimlich, but also intent, not on nullifying it, but on somehow including and promoting the unheimlich within the material it examines —indeed of openly scrutinizing those elements that its initial impulse is to try to occlude or swallow. When such a criticism then takes the criticism of the past as its raw material—puts Arnold’s and Eliot’s criticism, that is, on the syllabus, with a standing equal to that of their so-called ‘creative’ writing, it will be releasing repetition from its servitude to precedence, and presenting it as a vital source of the new. What we can retain from Foucault is surely the notion that, as part of the project of modernity, the essence of a truly modern criticism will not involve the reinforcement of so-called transcendental standards or structures, or any of the other lineaments of a tired, not to say oppressive scholarly tradition. It will rather call for a kind of principled and self-inventing betrayal of that tradition whose investigation of criticism’s own presuppositions will wilfully promote the, by traditional standards, bogus connections and parallels of the sort that I have been shamelessly deploying: their aim an expansion of the possibilities of our use of criticism as a material intervention into history rather than the prosecution of what we misguidedly think of as scholarly ‘facts’ or ‘truth’. Such a project absolves Criticism from any commitment to the tetchy pursuit of true judgement or, worse, the soul-gelding aridity of quellenforschung. Instead it turns into a creative genre in its own right; one whose fundamental mode is a sort of pre-emptive repetition: a matter (I begin, I dare say, to sound ‘Irish’) of getting the repetition in first, its central feature the active identifying, confronting and using of the unheimlich, the pressing home of Freud’s deconstructive proposal that the unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of the heimlich, until those positions are virtually reversed. Until, that is, the heimlich appears almost as a sub-species of the unheimlich, and we begin to face the possibility that ‘home’ is only the tamed and taming doll’s house we construct as a poor bulwark against the apparitions that permanently haunt us. That the various rooms of one’s home may be comfortably lined with books, plays and poems perhaps just intensifies an unease which lies at the heart of that vision of domesticity. And perhaps it serves finally to confront us with a prospect which is genuinely frightening because truly known of old and, though long repressed, long familiar: the appalling possibility that home is where the art is: that, in terms of the unheimlich critical vision, what we think of as home and what we think of as art are in some way shockingly coterminous in their role as mere vehicles for the most paltry of human comforts. It is a view whose implications have undergone a crucial probing in those numerous voices which have spoken and continue to speak of the homelessness, expropriation, expatriation and exile that are central features of life in our century. The range is vast, and perhaps the case of Wragg, for whom custody clearly stands in a deeply ironic opposition to the ‘home’ which would have prevented her crime, lies at one end of it. At the other, a hundred years, two world wars, revolutions and holocausts on, lies the work of Theodor

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Adorno. His judgement that ‘Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable’ concludes, at its uttermost bitter reach, that Today…it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home'.28 In respect of art, the sort of homeless, ‘hooligan’ criticism that I am advocating must eventually subscribe to a morality of that sort. And if it is finally able to plumb the deepest entrails of a culture, beyond the level at which any way of life feels itself to be ‘at home’, bringing to the surface—or, better, bringing the surface down to—whatever inhibits that culture’s genuine nourishment, then it may aptly, and in the name of a more beneficial notion of eruption, be finally linked to a strategy whose simple design, I have lately observed, seems, astonishingly, to be outlined on the walls of every American restaurant. For there, in that most portentous of modern locations, an exotic rubric suddenly and darkly speaks of ‘First Aid For The Choking Victim’. Central to the welfare of any Choking Victim (and surely most of us will from time to time have felt included in that company) is the principle that there is a sort of eruption which can be good for you, and that in its most benign form—that of regurgitation—lies the basis of a new beginning. In the circumstances— and to mention nomenclature for the last time—it strikes me as only slightly uncanny that the name given to this most radical of critical gambits happens to be ‘The Heimlich Manoeuvre’. University of Wales College of Cardiff NOTES 1 Matthew Arnold, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R.H.Super, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. III, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 273. 2 ibid., p. 274. 3 ibid., p. 479. 4 See T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber, 1951), p. 27. 5 ibid., p. 27. 6 I am here and in what follows drawing extensively on Andrew Thacker’s provocative argument in his ‘Imagist Travels in Modernist Space’, Textual Practice, 7, 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 224–46. 7 See Thacker, art. cit., pp. 239–40. 8 Usually translated as ‘The Uncanny’. See Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII, Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), pp. 217–56. 9 I am aware that the modern German word heimlich does not necessarily carry the sense that the Austrian Freud seems to ascribe to it. His detailed philological analysis covers several pages and is none the less remarkably thorough. Its aim, of course, is less to specify individual meanings than to focus on the spurious ‘opposition’ of heimlich and unheimlich. 10 Freud, op. cit., p. 220. 11 ibid., pp. 241–5. 12 ibid., p. 220. 13 ibid., pp. 224–5. 14 ibid., p. 226. This classic deconstructive analysis perhaps lingered to haunt the German language in the twenty years following Freud’s paper. At its furthest reach, heimlich has links not only with Heimat, the ‘homeland’, but even perhaps—via geheim—with the secret forces of terror raised to exclude the Heimat’s enemies. This generates a kind of oxymoron whose grim climax occurred when Freud joked of the Geheime Staatspolizei, after they had ransacked his heimlich Vienna home, that he could ‘heartily recommend the Gestapo to anybody’. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 642. 15 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984), p. 12.

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16 Arnold, op. cit., p. 273. Christopher Ricks has commented on Eliot’s no less intense interest in such matters. Certainly, Eliot’s inv entions for the correspondence columns of The Egoist include names that would have confirmed Arnold’s despair: ‘Charles James Grimble (The Vicarage, Leays)’ and ‘Helen B.Trundlett (Batton, Kent)’, to say nothing of ‘Muriel A.Schwarz (60, Alexandra Gardens, Hampstead NW)’. Note also Eliot’s constant invention of names in the spirit of nomen est omen: Professor Channing-Cheetah, Nancy Ellicott, and supremely, J.Alfred Prufrock. Of course Eliot also had his trouvailles to match Arnold’s Wragg and Roebuck, such as Sir Alfred Mond. See Christopher Ricks, T.S.Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber, 1988), pp. 1–24 and 242–3. 17 Michel Foucault, The order of discourse’ in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 52–64. See also Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), pp. 78–81. 18 Freud, op. cit., p. 234. 19 Das Unheimliche itself presents a valuable complication of the matter for the actual writing of it is so saturated with the issues of repetition that they begin to call into question the very principles on which parts of the argument seem to rest. The War itself had of course decisively undermined linear notions of sequence and consequence. It is, Freud says, as a result of the ‘times in which we live’, that he presents his paper ‘without any claim to priority’ (op. cit., p. 220). In a letter to Ferenczi in May 1919 he indicates directly that he has dug an old paper out of a drawer and is rewriting it (p. 218), whereupon the editors of the Standard Edition admit that ‘Nothing is known as to when it was originally written or how much it was changed.’ They even contribute the straight-faced comment that ‘The passages dealing with the “compulsion to repeat” must in any case have formed part of the revision’ (p. 218). In short, Freud’s revisionary return to the paper means that a crumbling of the primarysecondary relationship characterizes the very composition of the argument before surfacing as one of its most disturbing features. 20 I take the phrase from Luke Gibbons’s invaluable, ‘Race against time: Racial discourse and Irish history’, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, 1991, p. 98. 21 See Christopher Hill, People and Ideas in 17th Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 169–70. 22 Arnold, op. cit., pp. 273–4. 23 See Luke Gibbons, op. cit. There was a notable rise in cases of recorded infanticide in Britain in the 1860s, together with a tendency to regard the crime as an ‘Irish’ solution to the problem of poverty—a point of view informed perhaps by recollections of Swift’s A Modest Proposal. See R.Sauer, ‘Deadly motherhood: Infanticide and abortion in 19th century Britain’, Population Studies, vol. 32 (1978) pp. 81–93. I am indebted to Dr Jo McDonagh of the University of Exeter for this and a great deal more information on the topic. 24 See Edward Said, op. cit., pp. 8 and 17. 25 See Clarence Rook, The Hooligan Nights (1899) (Oxford University Press, 1979), especially pp. 14–20. 26 See Richard Ellmann (ed.), The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (London: W.H.Allen, 1970), pp. 355–403, passim. 27 ibid., p. 403. 28 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 1951, trans. E.F.N.Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1951), pp. 38–9. Edward Said has recently drawn attention to these passages in his BBC Reith Lectures (1993).

Reviews

• Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 151 pp., £27.95 (hardback), £8.95 (paperback) DIETER FREUNDLIEB

Debates concerning methodological issues in literary interpretation may not be at the forefront of current thinking in literary studies, but if this is so it is by no means because the issues have been satisfactorily resolved. They clearly have not. None the less, there seems to be a majority view, whether it is based on assumptions built into various forms of neopragmatist reader-response criticism, deconstructionist criticism, or a criticism influenced by philosophical hermeneutics, that literary texts are open to innumerable different interpretations and that anything like a reasonably strict methodology for interpretation as envisaged, for example, by E.D.Hirsch in his Validity in Interpretation in the late sixties, is perhaps neither possible nor desirable. Ever since Roland Barthes’s dictum in his essay ‘The death of the author’ that to insist on a univocal reading is to invoke the authoritarian figures of God and the Law, literary critics and critical theorists have been reluctant to suggest that the emancipation from the constraints of reading advocated by Barthes might not have been the kind of revolutionary act Barthes deluded himself into thinking it was. The euphoria of interpretative liberation embodied in Barthes’s 1970s radicality prevented (and still prevents) many from recognizing the silliness of some of Barthes’s pronouncements. But the times are changing, and it is certainly to be welcomed that someone of the stature and international standing of Umberto Eco, both as a theorist and a creative writer, has made a significant contribution to the reopening of the question of methodological standards and criteria of literary interpretation in his three Tanner Lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1990 in front of a very large audience. The three lectures, in a slightly revised form, have now been published by Cambridge University Press, together with one essay each by Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose as contributing seminarists. Also included in the volume is a substantive and very useful introductory piece by the editor Stefan Collini and a relatively short reply to the seminarists’ essays by Eco. Unfortunately, the volume does not contain an edited transcript of the day-long discussion, chaired by Frank Kermode, that took place between Eco and the three contributors to this volume as well as various distinguished members of the audience. This is all the more deplorable since the essay by Richard Rorty is primarily addressed to a previously published essay by Eco1 rather than his Tanner lectures, and Christine Brooke-Rose’s contribution, entitled ‘Palimpsest history’, while very interesting in itself, does not engage in any debate with Eco at all. The cover blurb of the paperback edition which says that ‘[t]hree of the world’s leading figures in philosophy, literary theory, and criticism take up the challenge of entering into debate with Eco on the question of interpretation’ and the first ‘unauthored’ page of the book on which the reader is told that ‘the philosopher Richard Rorty, the literary theorist Jonathan Culler, and the critic and novelist Christine Brooke-Rose

© Routledge 1994

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challenge Eco’s argument and elaborate their own distinctive positions’ is therefore somewhat misleading. In fact, as far as Brooke-Rose’s essay is concerned, the claim that is made here is simply a case of false advertising. Both Collini in his introduction and Eco in his reply have great difficulty in saying anything much about Brooke-Rose’s essay because her contribution to the book does not have any direct bearing on the key issues raised by Eco. Rather than blaming Brooke-Rose, the reviewer suspects that the source of this problem lies with the organizers of the lectures. As Rorty mentions in a footnote, Eco’s lectures were not available to the seminarists in advance (though this does not seem to have applied to Culler). Instead, the contributors were advised to consult Eco’s previously published essay which addresses several of the problems investigated in the Tanner lectures. Jonathan Culler’s paper, however, addresses both Eco’s Tanner lectures and Rorty’s response to Eco, and is therefore particularly important. In any event, in spite of the somewhat unfortunate circumstances surrounding the edition of the lectures and papers collected in this volume, there is enough substance in those contributions which do engage with each other to make this a very interesting debate that deserves a close scrutiny by anyone working in the interpretative disciplines. The main aim of Eco’s three lectures is to show that while literary texts can indeed be interpreted in a number of different ways, the texts as such set certain limits to what is an acceptable interpretation. Already in his contribution to the Sesquicentennial International Congress on Charles Sanders Peirce at Harvard in 1989, Eco had argued that Peirce’s notion of unlimited semiosis should not be interpreted as licensing a deconstructionist undecidability of meaning.2 As far as criteria for interpretative acceptability are concerned, Eco wants to avoid the Scylla of authorial intention (intentio auctoris), which he considers largely inaccessible and irrelevant, and the Charybdis of the intention of the reader (intentio lectoris) as sole determinants of textual meaning. He claims to have found a more workable criterion in what he calls intentio operis, i.e. the intention of the work, a notion he promises to elaborate in his second and third lecture. In his first lecture Eco approaches the issue of interpretation and overinterpretation from a historical point of view, arguing that the more radical postmodern theories of reading look decidedly ‘pre-antique’ if looked at in the light of Hermeticist (e.g. Cabbalistic) and Gnostic traditions of interpretation. Alongside the Western traditions of rationalism there have always been a-rational forms of thought, and sometimes it is difficult to tell the two traditions apart. Eco argues, for example, that ‘Hermetic knowledge influences Francis Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, and modern quantitative science is born, inter alia, in a dialogue with the qualitative knowledge of Hermetism’ (p. 34). Within these a-rational, or even irrational, traditions the principle of identity is abandoned in favour of a coincidentia oppositorum. As a result, textual meaning becomes infinite (p. 32). Relationships of sympathy and similarity are assumed to exist between microcosm and macrocosm and, as Eco puts it: Once the mechanism of analogy has been set in motion there is no guarantee that it will stop. The image, the concept, the truth that is discovered beneath the veil of similarity, will in its turn be seen as a sign of another analogical deferral. Every time one thinks to have discovered a similarity, it will point to another similarity, in an endless progress. In a universe dominated by the logic of similarity (and cosmic sympathy) the interpreter has the right and the duty to suspect that what one believed to be the meaning of a sign is in fact the sign for a further meaning. (p. 47) Since everything is similar to every other thing in some respect, a Hermetic semiosis of suspicion has no determinate criteria for interpretation.

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In his second lecture Eco looks at another case of ‘overinterpretation’ by a group of nineteenth-century writers he calls ‘Followers of the Veil’, writers such as Gabriel Rosetti who almost obsessively tried to find some secret message in the works of Dante. Finally, he comments on a reading of Wordsworth’s muchinterpreted Lucy poem ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ by Geoffrey Hartman, a case of overinterpretation that seems to be situated somewhere on the borderline between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. Eco insists that while there are always several possible interpretations of literary texts, the existence of clear cases of incorrect or unacceptable interpretations constitutes some kind of Popperian falsification of the general theory that textual meanings are necessarily indeterminate or undecidable. But Eco has considerable trouble establishing how exactly texts manage to constrain their interpretations. One way of doing this is his attempt to show that apart from an intentio auctoris and an intentio lectoris, there is what he calls an intentio operis. He claims that traditionally the debate over interpretation focused either on what the author of a text intended to say (intentio auctoris) or on what the text could be construed as saying independently of the author’s intentions. Once the second opinion is accepted, the question can then arise whether the text’s meaning results from an internal coherence and an independently existing system of signification underlying the text or from the reader’s system of signification and his or her wishes and desires as they are applied to the text (intentio lectoris). Eco argues that the intentions of the empirical author are, in most cases, ‘radically useless’ (p. 66), but he does not wish to leave a text entirely at the mercy of the reader either, for this can lead to the kind of deconstructionist overinterpretation he rejects. However, when it comes to explaining how an intentio operis can serve as a criterion for what is to count as acceptable interpretations Eco has very little to offer in the way of detailed argument. He interprets intentio operis as the ‘semiotic strategies’ of the text, thus trying to disengage the text from both the author and the reader, but his only explicit criteria for the validity of an interpretation are stylistic conventions and the coherence of a text. Apart from the fact that using terms such as ‘strategy’ and ‘the text’s intention’ makes little sense unless we postulate an agent who pursues such a strategy or forms an intention—and this would have to be, again, either the author or the reader—Eco is forced to admit the ultimate circularity in his establishment of interpretative criteria when he says: ‘the text is an object that the interpretation builds up in the course of the circular effort of validating itself on the basis of what it makes up as its result’ (p. 64). Eco is, of course, aware that one of the problems of a methodology of interpretation is the fact that ‘interpretation’ is an extremely vague term and includes many things that go way beyond a mere attribution of meanings. He therefore wants to narrow down the meaning of ‘interpretation’ by distinguishing between the use of a text and its interpretation, a distinction similar to Hirsch’s earlier one between interpretation and significance. He then claims that if we want to interpret a text we have to take into account the cultural and linguistic background of its author. Now while it is obvious that no discussion of interpretative methodology will get very far unless ‘interpretation’ is given a fairly narrow definition, it is not so clear why Eco insists on the necessity to take the cultural and linguistic background into consideration. In other words, his injunction only makes sense given certain assumptions about the cognitive aims, and possibly the ethics, of interpretation, but these assumptions are not spelt out in Eco’s lectures. He argues, quite rightly, that texts are understood on the basis of both a set of codes and encyclopedic knowledge, but the methodological rule according to which we should apply the codes and the encyclopedic knowledge that informed the production of a text rather than any sense-making strategies that yield interesting results (as some critics would no doubt argue) only follows if our aim is historically reliable knowledge about texts as historical documents and if we are guided by certain ethical principles of communication that tell us that we should take authors and their communicative acts seriously. Eco’s premature dismissal of the empirical author and his or her

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intentions seems incompatible with his methodological rule that we should interpret texts in terms of the set of codes and the world-knowledge available to the author. What is needed is a different account of how the communicative intentions of a writer are to be treated methodologically and how they relate to readings that either deliberately or accidentally go beyond them. There will always be ways of making sense of a text that go beyond the codes and the specific bodies of knowledge an author was aware of when he or she produced a text. But such readings could be accounted for in terms of unintended consequences of the communicative act of producing a text. Authors simply cannot, and often do not want to, control the reception of their texts. This way one would not have to reject the intentions of the empirical author altogether as Eco suggests. The main problem, however, seems to lie in the fact that Eco does not distinguish between prior intentions (which cannot normally be reconstructed from the text alone and are methodologically largely irrelevant) and intentions in action in the way John Searle has suggested.3 What Eco calls ‘the text’s intentions’ could then be conceived of more adequately as the real author’s intentions in action manifesting themselves in the text. This would still leave room for unconscious intentions, if one believes in such entities, and it would not exclude the realization, on the part of the reader, of unintended semantic consequences resulting from the reader’s mobilization of codes and bodies of knowledge that yield coherent but non-author-intended sense. It is not surprising that Richard Rorty, in his contribution entitled ‘The pragmatist’s progress’ raises a whole range of objections against Eco’s attempt to constrain interpretative freedom. Contrary to the position he attributed to Eco on the basis of his reading of Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum, Rorty realizes that Eco still believes that texts have properties (even if most of them turn out to be relational ones) about which a literary critic can be right or wrong. Eco, in Rorty’s words, is still a ‘code-cracker’. Also, Rorty denies that there is any significant difference between semiotic objects and non-semiotic ones and he claims, as he has done in other contexts, that nothing there is has any intrinsic nature. He therefore seizes upon Eco’s admission (which Eco need not have made had he analysed and made explicit his own ontological and epistemological assumptions more carefully) that the object of interpretation is made rather than found, a view he entirely agrees with, given his extreme nominalism. This allows him to reject Eco’s criterion of text-internal coherence, arguing that ‘a text just has whatever coherence it happened to acquire during the last roll of the hermeneutic wheel’ (p. 97). Texts, he maintains, are like clay on a potter’s wheel, a position more or less identical with that of Stanley Fish. They take whatever shape the potter decides to give them. Curiously, Rorty’s anti-realism, which leads him to say that we make objects by talking about them and that we can never check sentences against something non-linguistic, always stops short of an antirealist account of causality. As in Popper’s conception of basic statements in the logic of science, objects, according to Rorty, can cause us to change a statement about them. What he denies, however, is that our pre-linguistic observations of objects can be a reason for changing our beliefs. Again, as in the case of Popper, for whom the non-logical relations between observations and sentences are methodologically irrelevant psychology, Rorty argues that you ‘can only check a sentence against other sentences, sentences to which it is connected by various labyrinthine inferential relationships’ (p. 100). There are at least two problems here: One is that Rorty’s realism with regard to causality does not make sense since, given his nominalism, there is no reason to exempt causes. Rorty does not say why causes (or textual ‘stimuli’ in the case of interpretation) are not entities we make up by talking about them and hence as changeable as any other part of our current vocabulary. To deny that anything has a nature and at the same time assume the existence of causal impacts on our mind is simply incompatible. The second problem is that if all we have to rely on in our acceptance of statements are ‘labyrinthine’ inferential relationships to other statements, there are no good reasons for believing in the validity of any, since there will always be equally coherent but incompatible or contradictory sets of statements. And in any case, since the validity of

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sentences seems to rely entirely on the validity of other sentences, no set of coherent sentences can be valid as a whole. Rorty also rejects Eco’s distinction between interpretation and use because in Rorty’s view virtually everything we ever do and should do with things (including people) is to use them for certain purposes. However, he tries to minimize the ethical dubiousness of this maxim by arguing that we should replace Eco’s distinction with the one between ‘knowing what you want to get out of a person or thing or text in advance and hoping that the person or thing or text will help you want something different—that he or she or it will help you to change your purposes, and thus change your life’ (p. 106). But this is hardly an improvement. It is still a strictly utilitarian view, and there is no discussion why changing one’s life as a result of a reading process is intrinsically good. One of Eco’s distinctions that Rorty also rejects in this context concerns the difference between an analysis of how a text achieves its semiotic effects, i.e. an analysis of the mechanisms that are involved in the reader’s understanding of the text’s meanings, and the interpretation of a text that proceeds on the basis of the reader’s intuitive knowledge of codes and a culturally organized encyclopedic knowledge. Unfortunately, Eco himself blurs this important distinction when he says: ‘To interpret a text means to explain why these words can do various things (and not others) through the way they are interpreted’ (p. 24). Eco uses similarly misleading terminology in his earlier essay ‘Intentio lectoris: The state of the art’ when he says that ‘critical’ or ‘semiotic’ interpretation ‘is a metalinguistic activity—a semiotic approach— which aims at describing and explaining the formal reasons for which a given text produces a given response’.4 But this is inadequate. The explanation of why or how texts mean is precisely not what we normally mean by ‘interpretation’. What Eco is talking about here, rather, is what Jonathan Culler had in mind when he argued in the midseventies that instead of endlessly producing new interpretations, literary studies should be concerned with an explanatory analysis of literary competence, i.e. the mechanisms internalized by experienced readers that allow them to make sense of literary texts in accordance with the specific ways of conveying meanings that operate in these texts. Interpretation, in the sense of attributing various meanings to texts as sets of signifiers, is precisely not a metalinguistic activity but a linguistic one, though it must be admitted that interpretations often contain attempts to explain why the text means what the interpreter thinks it means. These explanations, however, are usually not anchored in a systematic semiotic theory though they are logically distinct from the intuitive attribution of meanings to the text. The latter activity, i.e. the intuitive attribution of meaning, and the competence that makes it possible, are (or certainly can be) objects of an explanatory analysis as Culler suggested in his Structuralist Poetics (1975).5 Nonetheless, in spite of the misleading terminology employed by Eco, his distinction is reasonably clear, and both Rorty and Culler discuss issues arising from the distinction in their respective contributions. Not surprisingly, Rorty claims that there is, in fact, no important distinction to be made here and that finding out how texts work is uninteresting anyway. He does not seem to be in any way perturbed by the fact that it follows from his statements that the whole of linguistics, as precisely an explanatory science of how language works, whether in texts or in smaller units, is thereby also declared uninteresting.6 Instead, he suggests that literary texts are only interesting if they make us ‘love’ or ‘hate’ them and thus affect our own self-creation and self-fashioning. What he wants is not methodical but ‘inspired’ readings. Rorty seems to be aware, in spite of his belief in the notion of talking things into existence rather than talking about existing things, that these readings, including his own readings, involve the ‘imposition’ of ‘grids’ on texts (p. 91). But he does not let himself be worried by this for too long, for in the final stage of the pragmatist’s progress the pragmatist realizes that all descriptions ‘are evaluated according to their efficacy as instruments for purposes, rather than by their fidelity to the object described’ (p. 92) —which makes one wonder what

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difference there is between this attitude of the enlightened pragmatist and that of the Nazis who no doubt found their description of Jews and other ethnic groups as Untermenschen very useful for their purposes. But then we all seem to be in the same boat anyway, for as Rorty assures us: ‘all anybody ever does with anything is use it’ (p. 93). Occasionally, Rorty has trouble living up to the standards of the thoroughly enlightened pragmatist who no longer has any need for the outmoded dualisms of Western philosophy such as reality and appear ance. Thus he tells us that interpreters of literary texts sometimes get so excited about their interpretations that they suffer from ‘the illusion’ that they now see ‘what a text is really about’ (p. 105). It does not seem to bother him that by characterizing some beliefs as illusions he is reintroducing the distinction between appearance and reality at the metalevel of his own discourse, perhaps because it suits his purposes—but then we know by now that this is all that counts anyway. According to the Rortyan pragmatist, we should not succumb to ‘the old occultist urge… to make an invidious distinction between getting it right and making it useful’ (p. 108). But the problem remains, even within Rorty’s own scheme of things, how we can know whether something is in fact useful —or whether it is more useful than other things. It would be of little help if we tried to solve this question by reducing it again to a matter of usefulness. Rorty’s desire to use literary texts solely for purposes of self-creation and to evaluate them in those terms clearly resembles at least certain kinds of traditional ‘humanist’ literary criticism—and Rorty is well aware of this. But whereas in the case of traditional criticism, literature was seen as ethically relevant in a more universal sense, even if in practice such alleged universal relevance was often ideologically distorted, in Rorty’s case the relevance of literature for the conduct and shaping of one’s life is seen as purely selfcentred and restricted to the private sphere. Rorty sees no reason to justify this self-centredness. Instead, he argues that his approach differs from traditional ‘humanist’ criticism because, unlike humanist criticism, his is not essentialist in the sense that it does not assume the existence of any permanent things embedded in human nature. But in a way this puts Rorty in a far less justifiable position than the traditional humanist scholar, given the fact that literature is not just read privately but still taught in most universities to large numbers of students. In other words, to put it bluntly, who cares what novels Rorty likes and how they help him shape his own life, unless there is something about the life-shaping quality of literature in general that is worth enquiring into. Eco, in his final response to the seminarists, does not address these issues in detail. He only discusses them in the context of the general distinction between the use and the interpretation of texts and the more specific context of the distinction between the explanation of how texts mean and our intuitive interpretation of them. Eco’s response to Rorty is more sympathetic than it need be, arguing, on the one hand, that if we were only to live pleasurably, we could well decide that ‘Beauty is Fun, Fun Beauty, that is all Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know’ (p. 146); on the other hand, he points out that finding out how texts work and how they produce their multiple meanings is also pleasurable and in no way a hindrance to enjoying the reading of a text. In his defence, against Rorty, of interpretative constraints and the criteria for either acceptable interpretations or acceptable explanations, Eco is again supporting what appears to be a rather weak position, a position that fails to spell out the crucial issues underlying an epistem ology of semiotics. He gives more ground to Rorty than he should because he accepts Peirce’s idea that ultimately everything is a sign and all knowledge an interpretation of signs. This is perhaps why, in the end, he appeals to the cultural consensus of the community of scholars as the final criterion for any hypothesis or interpretation. However, it is doubtful that such a consensus ever exists, particularly in literary studies. And if it does, it is always likely to give way to what is at best another only temporary consensus. This means that Eco’s criterion is not workable. A better methodology would have to be established on the basis of the reasons that are likely to

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lead to a consensus. The pure fact that a consensus about something has been achieved says nothing about the validity of the views endorsed in such a consensus. At the very least, a consensus theory of truth or acceptability must specify, as Habermas has tried7 (though with questionable success), the conditions under which a consensus is to be taken as valid. No such attempt is made by Eco. A methodology that could guide interpretation cannot be developed without a more detailed investigation into the ontology of texts and the epistemology of semantics. The outcome of such an investigation might well be that purely interpretative statements, in so far as they rely on encyclopedic knowledge rather than shared linguistic rules, have, logically speaking, the status of recommendations rather than empirically true or false statements.8 Jonathan Culler’s contribution to Interpretation and Overinterpretation has the advantage of addressing both Eco’s Tanner lectures and Rorty’s response. He begins by criticizing Eco’s notion of overinterpretation because in his view some of the cases discussed by Eco are in fact underinterpretations rather than overinterpretations. However, this is partly a terminological quibble. What Eco calls overinterpretations is, at least in some of the cases he looks at, an overinterpretation of specific parts of a text and thereby, at the same time, an underinterpretation, from Culler’s point of view, of other important parts of a text. Culler wishes to encourage overinterpretation because he believes it is intellectually challenging, but he is obviously not thinking of the kind of overinterpretation just mentioned since for him this is really a case of underinterpretation. Overinterpretation is redefined by Culler as ‘overstanding’ in Wayne Booth’s sense,9 and it includes both an explanatory analysis of how a text means and how its meanings function in a wider psychological and social context. Surely, Eco would support the general drift of Culler’s comments. In his ‘Reply’, which is almost exclusively directed at Rorty, he does not respond to Culler’s point, but there is no reason why Eco should restrict the scope of literary studies to questions of textual meanings as such. In any case, Culler quickly turns to Rorty whom he criticizes much more severely than Eco. In accordance with his earlier views (developed in his Structuralist Poetics) Culler insists against Rorty that literary studies should be exactly about how literary texts mean and how they function, rather than simply concerned with the enjoyment of such texts. Thus he claims that ‘the idea of literary study as a discipline is precisely the attempt to develop a systematic understanding of the semiotic mechanisms of literature, the various strategies of its forms’ (p. 117). Apparently, even after his conversion to deconstructionism, Culler thinks that something like a systematic study of how sign systems operate is both possible and desirable. Culler takes his critique of Rorty a considerable step further, however, when he accuses him (and other prominent neo-pragmatists such as Stanley Fish) of abandoning the kind of rigorous argumentation that brought them to eminence the moment they have achieved such eminence in their profession. In this way they ‘seek systematically to destroy the structure through which they attained their positions and which would enable others to challenge them in their turn’ (p. 118). Similarly, Culler argues that ‘by denying any public structure of argument in which the young or marginalized could challenge the views of those who currently occupy positions of authority in literary studies [of the type Rorty favours] helps make those positions unassailable and in effect confirms a structure in place by denying that there is a structure’ (p. 119). Rorty could, of course, reply that what those who wish to challenge him have to do is introduce a ‘new vocabulary’ and somehow persuade others that the new vocabulary is ‘more useful’. Nonetheless, Culler has a point. It is much harder to convince those who are in power that the vocabulary they are using is no longer useful than it is to show, by methodologically informed argument, that their beliefs are wrong. Culler has also identified a crucial ethical problem in Rorty’s position. If the truth or falsity of arguments is reduced to usefulness defined in terms of the purposes of those who put them forward, and if the arguments have nothing to do with the nature of things because there are no such natures, then those in power become indeed unassailable. If descriptions, explanations, and interpretations are useful rather than true, and if what is useful is useful relative to the individual user, then anything that challenges the dominant view will not be

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‘useful’ for those in positions of authority, and hence dismissed. To what extent Rorty is aware of the ethical (and political) consequences of his position and whether he is willing to modify it remains to be seen. Overall, Interpretation and Overinterpretation raises important issues in semiotics and literary studies. But it does not develop these issues in sufficient technical detail to be able to offer decisive arguments for or against methodological rules in interpretation, whether ‘interpretation’ is understood as the more intuitive process of attributing meanings to texts or as the explanatory analysis of how those meaning-effects come about. One is left with the impression (at least this reviewer is) that Eco gets it right when he rejects various kinds of overinterpretation. But his arguments need to be supported by a more convincing analysis of both the empirical and the philosophical questions underlying our understanding of texts than he has provided in his lectures. Griffith University

NOTES 1 ‘Intentio lectoris: The state of the art’, originally published in Differentia, 2 (1988), pp. 147–68. Also published in Giovanna Borradori (ed.), Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 27–43, and in Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 44–63. 2 A modified version of this paper was later published in Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, under the title ‘Unlimited semiosis and drift: Pragmaticism vs. “Pragmatism”’. 3 John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 4 Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, p. 36. 5 For a more detailed discussion of Culler’s project of a structuralist poetics as an explanatory study of literary competence, see my ‘From structuralism to post-structuralism: Was the structuralist project beyond redemption?’, Poetics, 18, 1989, pp. 271–98. 6 Rorty has held this view for many years. I remember very well Rorty’s very similar response to a paper I presented at the Humanities Research Centre in Canberra in 1984 concerned with the question of ‘how texts work’. 7 See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Wahrheitstheorien’, in H.Fahrenbach (ed.), Wirklichkeit und Reflexion. Festschrift für W.Schulz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1973). 8 I have investigated some of these questions in several earlier publications. See, for example, ‘Identification, interpretation, and explanation. Some problems in the philosophy of literary studies’, Poetics, 9, 1980, pp. 423– 40; ‘Understanding Poe’s tales. A schema-theoretic view’, Poetics, 11, 1982, pp. 25–44; ‘Can meanings be objects of knowledge?’, Poetics, 12, 1983, pp. 259–75; and ‘Explaining interpretation. The case of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw’, Poetics Today, 5, 1984, pp. 79–95. 9 Wayne Booth, Literary Understanding: The Power and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

• Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London, New York: Verso, 1992), 358 pp., $29.95 (hardback) TIM BRENNAN

Aijaz Ahmad has missed an opportunity, I think. His book is in one sense powerfully new. He re-examines the rise of literary theory with the vivid historical grounding of the debates surrounding post-war independence as well as the decisive contributions of international communism itself. By the book’s end, it is difficult to contest that communism was deeply and productively linked to what is normally called decolonization, and that its record has been ignored or grotesquely distorted by current cultural theory. The book’s ambitions are so broad, however, and it divides its forces so lavishly across its various battle fronts, that Ahmad puts his entire enterprise in jeopardy. Above all, he can not bring himself to grant the double-edged nature of theory—its creativity and its powerful discomfort with specific forms of power, not only its evanescence and pretence. As for the middle sections of the book dedicated to critically demolishing aspects of the work of Fredric Jameson, Salman Rushdie, and Edward Said—he chooses odd, and in the end impossible, figures for showing what is most dubious in colonial studies. They are, one might say, almost exactly the wrong ones. In these sections he leaps from critical sharpness to overstatement, and in some passages slides from assaults on intellectual motive to arguments that seem (even if they are not) merely personal— particularly in his treatment of Said, whose portrait here is a caricature. But to Ahmad’s immense credit, he makes it impossible for critics to overlook people in places like Shanghai, Kampala, Madras or Jakarta who were not fighting the West as a civilizational and imperial other, but simply the ‘rich’—or what most of them would have called the ‘bourgeoisie’. It is difficult in the present climate to remember how many farmers, teachers, and writers were massacred for supporting land reform or corporate nationalizations, or for belonging to groups like the MPLA, the Tupamaros, or Mau Mau, or (even more likely) for speaking on behalf of views that the authorities could not help seeing as ‘red’, whether one was affiliated to a party or not. The destiny of liberation registered in this scenario is now, by a silence to which theory contributes, given over to oblivion. One speaks now of the people of the East having voted with their feet, forgetting the millions who chose the ways of the East but who were simply eliminated. And this is a crucial point: the drift of theory as it meets with ‘Colonial Discourse’ has had the effect of repressing a discussion of precisely this history—not by accident, Ahmad avers, but out of interest, or rather, the disinterest of an intellectual caste in an ongoing imperial drama of knowledge-production in the metropolitan university. One very welcome move in this text, then, is its account of the fate of the socialist idea itself, ‘the sheer intractability of the extremely unfavourable material conditions under which socialism’s battles had to be fought, both internally and externally’ as well as socialism’s own failure to ‘construct an egalitarian social space where problems could be openly faced and alternative[s]…found’. Much of Ahmad’s rancour comes from the burying of these memories, which clearly have to be buried for the highly coded rejections of

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‘totalizing narratives’ (viz. Marxism) to work. If this is recalled, Ahmad’s effort in one respect at least is justifiable, for he is confronting those who now, at the end of history, sign off on what they helped destroy. It is not the case, I think, as some have argued (in reviews in Public Culture and Social Text) that the author is interested only in political economy, that his real gripe is with any criticism that emphasizes superstructure, or that he fails to appreciate the alternative and contestatory culture colonial theory itself is busy making. These counter-claims seem to me anticipated by Ahmad himself, and in some cases to reveal the very self-importance and idealist posturing that is the subject of Ahmad’s lengthy book. In effect, these sorts of retorts help prove his general case. Moreover, much of the sternness of tone is calculated. Readers, for example, may miss the fact that one of his intentions here is to revive an intellectual tradition of socialist polemic represented by (among others) The Holy Family with its blasts against Bruno Bauer’s ‘critical criticism’ or by Walter Benjamin’s often forgotten essay on surrealism, where the German critic, attacking a left intellectualism not unlike that targeted by Ahmad, is snide and dismissive. The protocols of debate Ahmad cherishes will probably not register with his readers. On the other hand, though his bluntness echoes the eloquent rudeness of Marx himself, Ahmad can also be careless, and this is a very bad thing to mix with a polemic. Beginning with the chapters on the history of theory, and proceeding to the case studies, in the later chapters he ponders ‘Three Worlds Theory’, Marx’s scholarship on India and the concept of ‘Indian Literature’—the highlights of the book. In spite of a good deal of rough riding over positions that are much more subtle and interesting than he makes them, Ahmad’s points on the Marxist legacy are welcome, if only because they check the large number of recent studies that distort that legacy with a remarkably tendentious ease. Marxism, he explains, cannot simply be treated as a ‘modes of production narrative’ and then placed alongside deconstruction and reader-response theory in a comparative assessment of critical schools. It was, and partially is, a term imbricated in a century and a half of mass mobilizations on a global scale, the ideology of acting governments, the inspiration of generations of popular literatures and philosophical coinages, vying until recently for a majority of the world’s sympathies. Ahmad is at his best expressing his contempt for the absurd position that places ‘Marxism’ on the same scale with relatively recent contributions to the history of ideas—largely French critiques of Western metaphysics, binarism, the immanence of spoken languages, and historical agency. On the other hand, he often fails to distinguish between deeply conservative apologists and brilliantly idiosyncratic thinkers grappling with the unique problems of their own prospects and station. From the outset Ahmad manages to be both judicious and condescending in ways that at first invigorate, but finally worry, the reader. This tough demeanour accentuates the errors wherever they occur, offering sceptics at times an alibi for dismissing the book tout court. For he does, in fact, collapse mutually incompatible views. A major, although not fatal, confusion of this sort occurs in his surveys of theoretical trends in the US academy. For example, the ‘identity politics’ that emerged from poststructuralism (to which he gives the evocative and basically accurate name, ‘cultural nationalism’) do not in the end belong with a criticism in the habit of wielding the term ‘Third World’— a category Ahmad spends a good deal of time contesting. He writes as though he thinks the two distinct strains come from a single origin. Ahmad misses the point that the majority wing of ‘Colonial Discourse Analysis’—precisely because of their cultural nationalism—has been vigilant against any such dubiously global construct as a ‘third world literature’. The term itself in these circles would likely be an unpleasant reminder of ‘nostalgic’ moments like the Second Declaration of Havana. More logically, Ahmad might have focused on a rather different problem within this tendency of thought: its discrete, fragmented treatment of systematic geopolitical control. He does not see these distinctions, apparently, because both positions are equally noxious to him.

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True, this shortcoming does not prevent him from being right about theory’s practical demerits in general outline, but it does expose his weaknesses before an audience he is in the act of criticizing—an audience steeped in theory, familiar with its intricate shadings, and yet accused of slipshod scholarship on matters of history. It is a great tactical blunder. On the other side of the error, he misses the point that those who typically speak of a ‘third world literature’ are exactly the ones most influenced by Marxism, and are critics who have anticipated some of his observations in this book, although more weakly and tentatively to be sure. Although using the term ‘third world’ too freely, perhaps, and without enough attention to the high-handed elitist manoeuvrings of Bandung—some have invoked it against the term, ‘postcolonial’ in order to remind American readers that colonialism still existed, and that trade debts and Rio summits still provided fuel for something like an international popular front, a ‘world opinion’ that refused to let the imperial order appear natural. With his potential allies lumped in with poststructuralism, one might ask: is there really no one in the academy making the points he is making? Has the Marxist legacy of the 1930s and 1940s really left no offspring, or been smothered by the prevailing reaction of the general culture? He implies as much. What is more, by keeping the book rhetorically addressed to his original Indian academic audience, he suggests that American political life is so corrupt or infantalized that the points he makes cannot ever be fully grasped in the United States. True, his rhetorical point in such framing is as calculated as his tone. He is saying that theory need not originate in Paris, London, New York, or California. He deliberately construes the book as a debate and an exposure that the metropolis can only overhear; the metropolitan critic, peevish and stymied on the sidelines, is now the subject of another voice and agenda, and this on its own terms, is a very clever and welcome manoeuvre. Unfortunately, since he only recently left his post at an American university to take up residence as a fellow at the Nehru Library and Museum in Delhi, he comes off looking as though he were casting himself as the one survivor of American gloom, working without support or friendship or any hints of a common culture of opposition except in India and the Middle East (as he intimates in the book itself with his extended anecdotes about Raymond Williams’s lonely dissidence in Britain in the 1950s). This account mis-states the level of awareness and solidarity that exists for his broad positions in the United States. Above all, these flaws prompt complaints out of disappointment. One is always aware of how much better the book would be without them. Interspersed throughout the first five chapters, at times in extended and quotable passages, can be found that effective gesture that captures the book’s strategy: an explaining away of, rather than an intellectual engagement with, poststructuralism, combined with a defence (at times only implicit) of a methodology of departure rather than continuity. By staying outside poststructuralism’s terms of reference in the early chapters, Ahmad successfully summons an army of vignettes and allusions that, through the filter of his own personal witness, leaves the practice of academic theory looking very naked and mandarin. The technique may enrage, but its ability to shake up the constellation of currently acceptable ideas is clear. Thus, he debunks the now-famous account of the ‘left’ university by reminding us that the 1960s ex-radicals who entered the academy were precisely the ones who did not opt for work in trade unions or political parties, a positioning that more or less sealed their idealism and escapism of outlook. As for the ‘postcolonial intellectual’, Ahmad offers a caustic scenario. In one such passage, he alludes to his more general thesis about the necessity of avoiding uniquely metropolitan terms of reference while at the same time refusing to succumb to the temptations of identity politics: [The] liberal university is usually, for the non-white student, a place of desolation, even panic… [M] any get lost in the funhouse of disagreeable habitations and impossible returns. Out of these miseries

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arises a small academic elite which knows it will not return, joins the faculty of this or that metropolitan university, frequents the circuits of conferences and the university presses, and develops, often with the greatest degree of personal innocence and missionary zeal, quite considerable stakes in overvalorizing what has already been designated as ‘Third World Literature’—and when fashions change, reconciles this category even with poststructuralism. (p. 84) Like this passage, much else he writes is resonant for future work. Why, he asks, have so few traced the effects of the Algerian war on Derrida, or the political conservatism built into French theory following the let-down of post-1968 Paris? In what sense can it be said that the Maoist principle of rural encirclement influenced the American student movement, leading it through images of Vietnamese peasants to embrace, at a later date, racial difference as resistance? If the ‘third world’ as a slogan of imputed rebellion against US and European power is brandished today as a weapon, what in fact were its origins in the Cold War atmosphere of the Bandung Conference under the leadership of Nehru who, even at the Conference, had foremost on his mind the outmanoeuvring of the Communist Party at home? But even in moments of strength, there are unpredictable weaknesses —slippages that to me are the result of excess. For instance, while a major positive note in the book is its recovery of suppressed histories, Ahmad does not always get his history exactly right. He argues, for example, that ‘within Hispanic America, the Chilean slaughter brought to a virtual close the revolutionary dynamic unleashed by the Cuban revolution’ (p. 19). Since the point of this observation merges with another—that anti-colonial nationalism had spent itself as an historical force by ‘about the mid-1970s’ (p. 35)—he is building a case that the scene for the reception of a narrowly textual politics in a US milieu was prepared by the demoralization that came with the collapse of colonial resistance. The claims are very important to his thesis, but I cannot see how they can be true. In Latin America, it was not only the Sandinista victory in 1979 (which he mentions, although it occurred six years after the Pinochet coup) but its subsequent shock waves of anti-colonial euphoria on a continental scale for more than a decade, prompting left nationalist movements in Peru, El Salvador, Colombia and elsewhere, and (more to the point) giving a radical impetus to intellectuals and youth in the metropolitan centres. Indeed, one might argue that it was the presence, not the absence, of third world revolutionary stirrings that prompted multiculturalism, however damaged its execution in the era of Reagan/Thatcher’s empire resurgent. As to the more general proposition of decline following the Vietnamese accords in 1975, how does this fit with the rise of the New People’s Army of the Philippines, the right-wing clerical antiimperialism of the Iranian revolution, the victory of the New Jewel movement in Granada, and the decisive battle in Angola between the Cuban and South African armies which led directly to the Namibian accords— all of them post—1975, and all of them (again) with resonant activist effects in the metropolis, particularly in the form of the American anti-apartheid movement as well as Jesse Jackson’s foreign policy statements in the 1984 presidential elections? Arguably, these troubled chronologies are the book’s major weak point. But if not them, then it is the broadside against Said, where Ahmad lowers the whole level of his argument in a terse ‘expose’ that is, first of all, unnecessary and misdirected, but also gratuitous. More than anything, though, it is quite inaccurate. In a number of early footnotes as well as in the lengthiest chapter of the book (placed significantly in its very centre), Ahmad accuses Said of having actually created ‘colonial discourse’, a proposition that significantly eases Ahmad’s task of demolition by congealing a varied and confusing assortment of positions into one (admittedly central) writer’s work. It is, however, false.

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Said, we hear, has forged ‘an academic kind of nationalist radicalism’ (p. 173) that by the power of his reputation has produced a virtual legion of clones. To Ahmad, Said is little more than a careerist who in Orientalism reduces imperial conflict to a matter of culturalist fantasy. Because he is ‘eclectic’—and the great sub-theme of Ahmad’s book has to do with the evils of ‘eclecticism’—Said devises a sort of hodgepodge, a highly personal criticism that yokes together the traditional passions of humanism with the epistemological convictions of poststructuralism. The result, says Ahmad, is an incalculable boost to a textual politics and to the ‘third world’ as a resistance-of-convenience—one that does not look too closely at class in the anti-colonial movements, and (inevitably) at class as a factor in academic privilege. In assessing this remarkable claim, one could begin with the smaller, obvious mistakes: Ahmad’s flat misreading of Said on Julien Benda, for example, where he misses Said’s point completely, turning it into its opposite (in fact Said did not endorse but rather inverted Benda by claiming that intellectual ‘treason’ was tantamount to non-involvement in issues of pressing public policy); or the fact that, although critical of Marx’s comments on India, Said has repeatedly praised the Marxist intellectual legacy in print, defending (unpopularly) the late Lukács, Emile Habiby, Amilcar Cabral and others. More importantly, though, if Ahmad is going to define poststructuralism as a position that sees ‘historical agency itself as a “myth of origins”, nations and states…as irretrievably coercive, classes as simply discursive constructs, and political parties themselves as fundamentally contaminated with collectivist illusions of a stable subject position’ (p. 36), what can be going through his mind to link these ideas with Edward Said, the author of an extensive body of writing since 1982 that has bewailed the complicity of academic theorizing with the public cultures of Reaganism; that has always, unambiguously, even vehemently, defended ‘historical agency’; and that has explicitly undone the late evasions of Foucault and the gullibilities of Derridean language theory? Apart from an occasional admiring quotation from Burke, Nietzsche, or, yes, Foucault, there is precious little to substantiate Said’s poststructuralism, and volumes to contest it. Said, moreover, has been a conspicuous recent opponent of what Ahmad calls ‘cultural nationalism’ and has plainly made the distinction Ahmad labours to repeat: that highly educated professionals from the poorer countries living in ‘exile’ cannot be simply spliced on to the millions of voiceless refugees and labourers of the global diaspora. Although one might expect Said not to take this position, he has, openly, repeatedly, and with a sense of principle never granted him by Ahmad. Similarly, to launch an assault on Said’s ‘eclecticism’ is like accusing Vico of being too secular: that is the whole point. Anyone who knows Said’s career can see that his eclectic method is quite conscious; he systematically defends it as method in over fifteen years of writing as an antidote to the infuriating ‘systems’ of theory. Ahmad never betrays much of an awareness of this defence; he writes always as if merely proving eclecticism would clinch the argument— one of many indications that, in this area of his study (unlike others), he is not at home with his subject. Similarly, although Ahmad footnotes James Clifford’s famous review of Orientalism, he seems to have missed the huge irony in the fact that Clifford—a pronounced Foucauldian—has precisely the same critique of Said’s ‘electicism’ as Ahmad does, even though it is Ahmad’s aim to demonstrate that Said is a Foucauldian. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that Ahmad was talking about absolutely nothing. Although the very momentum of his critique bowls his sense over, so to speak, producing here an overstatement, there is a much more restricted sort of reservation that lies behind his animosity. He repeatedly takes Said’s calculated demonstrations of nonsectarian catholicity as proof of dubious and divided commitments, thereby obscuring what one would think is Ahmad’s real position: that a pacification of all constituencies in the end only creates a culture of intellectual accommodation when taken up by lesser hands. I have indicated elsewhere that I do not agree with this criticism of Said, but it makes more sense than the one he offers. These sorts of weaknesses may keep the book from getting the hearing it should. For much of what he lays at Said’s door, although it does not belong there, does belong at the door of Said’s epigones. There has

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been among the readers of Orientalism a turning to ‘coloniality’ as a substitute for discussing imperialism as such. Incapable of Said’s provisos, or ignorant of his practice, many have taken from Orientalism simply permission to subsume all conflict under the categories of discursive violence, looking at the language (or ‘discourse’) of conquest but not its brutal realities. It is this ‘second tier’ that Ahmad needed to examine. But that kind of critique would not have received the same notoriety, so instead he reads back from the truly flawed to accuse the prominent of creating the problem. It will not hold. With the recent appearance of Culture and Imperialism, Ahmad’s portrait is bound in some respects to look weaker than it already does, for although Said in that extraordinarily generous book continues to depict imperial conflict ‘civilizationally’, he also attacks the posturing of a disengaged art more explicitly than ever before, and with many more references to what Ahmad elsewhere calls the ‘history of materialities’—in this case, the imperial system of land acquisition and the global guest-worker system. Readers, at any rate, should feel torn by this study. When in the later chapters, he thinks through the viability of the concept, ‘Indian literature’ for example, or discusses canon-formation at the beginning of the Rushdie chapter, we are in the presence of something rich and, in the best sense of the word, functional. And yet even here, sitting alongside these passages, is a sceptical dismissal of literary theory’s obsessive interrogation of national identity, or its (actually rather rare) solidarities with the civilizational others of imperialism. I have always found this dismissal of the national unnecessary in the terms he poses it. To dwell on national belonging, or to express a decisive sympathy with national liberation (even in its nonsocialist forms) is to grasp the points made by Lenin in 1916, who never treated these particularisms or these classless fetishizings of ethnicity as Ahmad does: that is, as rude intrusions of ‘bourgeois’ politics into socialist opportunities. Indeed, one notices in Ahmad’s passionate chapters on India, or in the very framing of the book as a whole, which addresses his Indian colleagues in Delhi, that same attention to the national that he finds so suspect when expressed as a literary slogan. The book has an admirable range and a freshness of anger. But a case with these faults of fact and, more importantly, of theory, will not serve as he intended them to. In Ahmad’s hands it might have. It should have. State University of New York

• David Shepherd, Beyond Metafiction: Self-Con-sciousness in Soviet Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), xii +260 pp., £30.00 (hard-w back)

• Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xx+291 pp., £11.95 (paperback)

• Ian Reid, Narrative Exchanges (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), vi+265 pp., £35.00 (hardback)

• Philip J.M.Sturgess, Narrativity: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), x+322 pp., £35.00 (hardback) NEIL CORNWELL

In his Foreword to Ross Chambers’s 1984 study of narrative, Story and Situation, Wlad Godzich wrote: If tropological operations and discursive forces order the sequence of events in stories, and do not do so in any predictable manner but only may do so, then we can never know from a narrative what the actual sequence of events in a given instance may have been, or what caused what. Such a narrative may give us pleasure or hold our interest, but it is useless from the point of view of cognition; it offers no reliable knowledge about that which it purports to relate.1 This is a problem that Tolstoy grappled with 130 years ago in both the philosophical and the narrativehistorical sections of War and Peace. We have in the meantime become that much more accustomed to regarding history as narrative, as well as looking for the tropological operations in the presentation of the stories that comprise historiography; all the more so since the work of Hayden White and his poststructuralist epigones. Now, as we wade ever deeper into the new world disorder of the nervous (and naughty?) nineties, we have had to contend with what Francis Fukuyama has termed ‘the end of history’ and Michael Ignatieff is wont to gloss, in the wake too of Lyotard, as ‘the end of the grand narratives’. What makes the narrow narratives of the nineties less ‘grand’, or ‘great’, than those of, shall we say, 1945–89 (to encompass the Cold War), or 1939–45, or (to cover the totality of the Soviet experience) 1917– 91? Lack of knowledge of what is purportedly being related may well seem to apply to the former Yugoslavia (remove Tito’s mildly authoritarian socialist system and witness the barbarity in Bosnia!), but the narratives of religious and/or ethnic hatred are nothing new (remember Ireland!). The open-endedness of history, as that of certain self-conscious types of fiction, leads we know not where (it is scarcely worth mentioning the continued crises of the Middle East, or Africa, or that of the Indian subcontinent). At the same time, the role of the storyteller has become more dangerous than Walter Benjamin envisaged, while story itself is faced by one conspiracy after another.2 Now is surely as good a time as any for a fresh look at narrative theory. David Shepherd, as a Russianist, returns to the Soviet—indeed the out-and-out Stalinist—experience of the 1920s and 30s. His study is narrower in scope than its title promises, dealing with just four writers. The key novels of two of these, Leonov and Kaverin (The Thief and Artist Unknown respectively), have been translated into English but it will severely test most library holdings to find them. The other two figures, the hitherto presumed orthodox Soviet authoress Marietta Shaginian and the metafictional dissident Konstantin Vaginov, are unknown to an English readership. Outside Russianist circles, therefore, Shepherd’s book must depend on its appeal as a case study and on its theoretical interest. Metafiction, a term present in literary criticism since about 1970 and perhaps best known through Patricia Waugh’s volume in the ‘New Accents’ series,3 provides the principal focus, though Shepherd is also a keen Bakhtinian.4 Much postmodernist writing includes metafictional elements; older examples are to be found

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in the fiction of Sterne, Diderot and Cervantes. The term obviously has potential within Russian literature and it has indeed begun to be employed, from the West at least, in recent years. The present volume is nevertheless a pioneering study in Russian literature and in the critical theory of Russian literary studies. Its purpose is to survey the somewhat self-conscious responses of the four selected authors to the prevailing pressures of Soviet literary politics. In the terms used by Ross Chambers (in his 1991 study), three of these authors write in an ‘oppositional’ mode; only Vaginov (if even he) verges on ‘resistance’. Non-Russianists might feel the lack of a full account of the phenomena of socialist realism and cultural revolution, and we might all have gained from more information on the antecedents in Russian literature of the metafictional cast of writing. However, Leonov’s The Thief is examined in connection with its featuring of a novel within a novel and for its appropriation from the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage of Dostoevsky. Shaginian makes a surprise appearance, represented by her novel Kik (1929), in which four accounts of the same event, penned in contrasting literary styles, illustrate or parody what is and what is not acceptable among actual, called for, or passé modes of writing. Her own pseudodocumentary form of construction and such issues as the value of the left-art inspired ‘literature of fact’, as against traditional bourgeois ‘literature of the imagination’, are highlighted. The tubercular dissident Vaginov, who is attracting increased attention on the coat-tails of interest in the OBERIU movement (the principal members of which were Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky), enters the fray through his novel The Works and Days of Svistonov (again of 1929), in which the process of writing is seen to depend, not so much on the inspiration of genius and political development, as on collages culled from ‘obscure books and offbeat reality’ (p. 118), thus effectively challenging the authority of the author. The fourth figure, Kaverin, is even more deserving of reassessment (or indeed of full assessment). Discussed here are The Troublemaker and Artist Unknown, notable for their characterizations of known prototypes (Shklovsky and Khlebnikov), their mixing of art forms, their intertextual dependence on classic European novels and the pervasive impact of Kaverin’s own prototypical and metafictional obsession: ‘Baron Brambeus’ (pseudonym of a minor nineteenth-century writer and publisher). The remaining chapters are again more theoretical: looking at rereading and rewriting (of The Thief, which surprisingly manages to exude a greater level of metafiction in its 1959 version); and the rewriting of literary history, now under way in the post-Soviet period. This study justly claims to be an early and moderate step in that direction, and is quite rightly as critical of Western scholarship as it is of the ‘dismally materialistic theory’ (p. 160) employed for decades by Soviet criticism. The structural complexity of the works examined is shown to be more problematic than had been appreciated by commentators of either stripe, while the standard career model employed in the West for many such writers, that of a ‘smooth continuum from daring dissidence to cosy conformity’ (p. 190) is patently deeply flawed. Ross Chambers is a French scholar, as well as a theorist and a comparativist. His 1984 study, Story and Situation, concentrates on narrative situation, or ‘point’, in storytelling, which he views as a ‘seductive’ process between teller and listener, in an attempted exploration of the power of fiction. This leads to an interesting dissection of an essential range of short fictional texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth century: old favourites like ‘The Purloined Letter’ and ‘Sarrasine’ are given a further twist; Nerval’s ‘Sylvie’ is prominently featured and excellent readings are provided of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ and The Dead’. In his 1991 study, Room for Maneuver, Chambers is less canonical. While this may be a welcome move in some respects, enabling him to discuss Australian and French Canadian texts, as well as Nerval again and Latin American novels, it does also, for the more general reader in search of stimulating readings of exemplary texts, represent a possible retreat towards obscurity. This places greater weight than does Story and Situation on the theoretical innovations negotiated by the book, which are indeed of value, if at times a trifle protracted and repetitious. Following on from the relatively voyeuristic approach to narrative

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seduction in the earlier study, Chambers here switches the emphasis from narrative to reading. He treats the relation of ‘narrative function’ to ‘textual function’ as a clinamen or ‘swerve’ (in Harold Bloom’s terms) brought about by reading (the discourse of control is mediated by the very fact that it is inevitably read): ‘Reading works, in other words, within the room for maneuver produced by the difference that reading produces’ (p. 237). Reading allows therefore for oppositionality, through a process of irony, conversion, desire and (hopefully and eventually) change. This book is also a study, in literary terms at least, of the mechanics of ‘oppositional’ activity (the great white hope for non-violent change in a postmodernist world of disorder and fragmentation?), as opposed to the praxis of (a foredoomed or futile?) resistance. In more ‘liberal’ societies, oppositionality is arguably actively encouraged; this is less the case in more totalitarian variants, where tolerance and humour are in short supply. A classic literary illustration of this, furnished here, is Kundera’s The Joke, in which tepid oppositionality is wilfully misconstrued as resistance (the thought police anywhere, of course, refuse to differentiate; Rushdie is a more recent victim). A further strand to this study, in which perhaps Chambers comes really into his own, is the treatment of story under oppression in the circumstances of ‘dictation’: the double meaning is evoked as narrative meets the repression of dictators in The President (Asturias) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig). The latter novel enables Chambers to reinsinuate his earlier theme of seduction by narrative in a case in which change ensues: at least internal and attitudinal, if not external or political. Ian Reid, who now writes from the dizzy heights of the Deputy Vice-Chancellorship of a Western Australian university, is probably best known hitherto for his contributions to genre studies, and in particular for his ‘Critical Idiom’ volume, The Short Story (1977). Dissatisfied with ‘orthodox narrative poetics’, seen as the Formalist-structuralist domination of narrative theory emphasizing chains of events, Reid wishes to introduce, drawn from anthropology, linguistics and education, concepts of exchange theory, in order to display ‘the pragmatics of storytelling as a relationship between communicants’ (p. 3). Rather than wrestle with the traditional relationship between content and form, Reid wishes to engage with ‘substitution’ (a type of narrative sleight of hand) and ‘dispossession’ (power-play, or the usurpation of narrative). The latter concept brings him at times close to Chambers, on whose earlier work he frequently draws. At a time when, to quote Reid’s own paraphrase of Lyotard, ‘larger ethical imperatives are taken over by the state and the multinational corporation, and knowledge becomes a market-driven service industry’ (p. 167), this study might almost be seen as an attempt to drive market forces into the very innards of literary theory. However, that would be something of a misrepresentation. The basic idea of the relationship between narrator and narratee as ‘transaction’ has a certain general validity, while texts can always be found to illustrate a point. At the same time, is not a concentration on the narrator-narratee relationship basically and largely a reassertion of the well-worn concept of ‘point of view’? Similarly, perhaps, Reid’s endeavour to secure the death of the ‘implied author’ as a useful notion does not grapple with a definition of that entity as author of a single (but entire) text. For that matter, certain exponents and areas of ‘orthodox’ narratology5 seem to be ignored: Stanzel, whose system is more self-contained than most, is not mentioned; neither is the later Chatman’s somewhat Chomskian concept of ‘text-types’.6 There are, though, some useful theoretical nuggets in this study. In particular, the discussion of framing devices in Chapter 2 draws attention, in addition to intertextuality, to ‘intratextual’, ‘extratextual’ and ‘circumtextual’ framing. These, especially the latter, can assume prime importance in certain circumstances, such as metafiction (a category here accorded little attention), for instance in the fictional productions of Alasdair Gray (which, again, are not cited here). Indeed, those who comb books on narratology primarily for exploitable readings of canonical (or could-be canonical) texts may well be disappointed by this study.

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Apart from Wordsworth’s The Prelude (read against The Tempest), Flaubert’s Three Tales and the odd short story by Katherine Mansfield, Boccaccio and Daudet, chosen illustrative texts here range from Achebe and Duras (whom at least we should have read), through DeLillo and an obscure linked trio of Australian stories, to a collage by Jaimy Gordon and anecdotal evidence of a text presented to the author by a 5-yearold boy (!): this last is included, seemingly, to typify the natural generation of a text of ‘simple home-versusaway structure’ (p. 204). Philip J.M.Sturgess, on the other hand, remains perfectly satisfied with orthodox narrative poetics as such, placing his emphasis fairly and squarely on a narrative theory which very much emphasizes chains of events. In fact, he wishes to identify and affirm a ‘logic of narrativity’ which will serve to legitimize ‘narrativity as a syntagmatic process’ (p. 34), it would seem, in all its fictional manifestations. This purpose is effected by the deployment of six ‘principles’ (p. 56) which appear to amount to a catch-all for any (?) known text, determining at any given time ‘that these words be expressed at this moment in the text, and no others’ (p. 45); ‘the course of representation in a work can never be arbitrary’, claims Sturgess (p. 100). The principles adduced include both microtextual and macrotextual elements, the a priori and the a posteriori. Most models proposed by structural theory hitherto have been perceived as unsatisfactory on the grounds that very few, if any, actual texts seem to fit them. Sturgess’s theory, on the other hand, seems to be so allinclusive that we find ourselves severely challenged to name a text that would not fit it. Contradictions, as identified by deconstructionists and Marxists, are not real contradictions, Sturgess affirms, as the arguments put forward in this regard lack ‘semantic legitimacy’ (p. 98). What about metafictional discontinuities? There is no problem here either, as ‘there are no discontinuous narratives, only narratives with different types of continuity’ (p. 246): we merely have to be ready to switch from one level to another. Every narrative, then, has its own logic, as well as (or due to?) being subject to the general logic of narrativity; so there can be no losers (what about ‘bad’, or incompetent, authors, one is inclined mischievously to wonder— or can there be no such thing?). Sturgess builds up his argument laboriously and painstakingly, with many a qualification or concession along the way. He tells us what he is going to do, does it, and then tells us what he has done, with no lack either of interim summary or recapitulation (whatever happened to the concept of the creatively cutting copy editor?). He uses Formalist and structuralist-type predecessors from Propp to Genette, taking in Prince, Chatman, Todorov and others, plus Barthes and Bremond. Three times though, we are told that a volume called La Narrativité (Paris, 1980, edited by D.Tiffeneau) is ‘the only work published so far which concentrates on the concept’ here under consideration. Sturgess clearly knows Stanzel, who perhaps in some ways is his closest competitor (indeed he reviewed the paperback edition of A Theory of Narrative in Textual Practice in Spring 1988, pp. 130–2); however, curiously enough, he makes only two brief references to him. This is two references more than we find to the innovations of Chambers or to Wallace Martin, to Lyotard or Deleuze; Eco too is conspicuously absent. Instead, Sturgess’s approach is underpinned by Aristotle and by the philosophy of J.L.Mackie. The ‘correctness’ or otherwise of Sturgess’s logic could only be determined by means of a philosophical argumentation as complex as his own. The question is, does it matter? If he is correct, what more will there be to say? But, on the other hand, will it really get us anywhere? This question should be answerable by taking a look at his Part Two, ‘The Practice of Narrativity’. Here he examines five heterogeneous narrative texts (and here canonical pop-pickers might hope for richer pickings): Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, Joyce’s Ulysses, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, followed, as a concluding exercise, by Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. The analyses produced are workmanlike, but do not reveal anything very startling. The best of them is a more than competent guided tour through the ‘Odyssean adven- tures of narrativity’ (p. 231) which comprise Ulysses. The findings on Conrad and

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Koestler seem to offer little that is new. In the case of O’Brien, the narrative quirks are basically seen to be there because they are there. In the case of Edgeworth, all-inclusivity even embraces George Watson’s introduction to the Oxford editions (and this without Reid’s pretext of circumtextual framing), while dealing uneasily with the narrative method employed, which would have been termed by the Formalists skaz (storytelling delivered in a dialect or substandard speech form, at variance with the author’s normal register of language). Sturgess’s proffered system of ‘syntagmatic logic’ endeavours to ‘open the possibility to answering for every moment of the narrative’s existence’ (p. 288). It perhaps now seems appropriate enough that one of the texts he analyses should be Darkness at Noon, one of the two non-Russian novels which most effectively epitomize the long night of Stalinism (the other being Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev7—itself a challengingly structured narrative). Apropos of this phenomenon, Sturgess, playing on the well-known dictum of Stephen Dedalus, claims that ‘the nightmare of reason is intelligible at the level of narrativity’ (p. 286) while, wisely if depressingly, reminding us that nevertheless ‘at the level of history perhaps little can be done to illuminate it’. This would seem to encapsulate a none too hopeful message, equally, for sufferers from and analysts of the nightmares of the nineties. University of Bristol NOTES 1 Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Foreword by Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xiv. 2 I allude of course to the personal predicament of Salman Rushdie; the threat to story is imaginatively conveyed in his Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta Books/Penguin Books, 1990). There is no need here to spell out the real world analogues. On ‘The Storyteller’, see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Collins/ Fontana Books, 1973). 3 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984). Use is also made of Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (London and New York: Methuen, 1984) and other studies. 4 See Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (eds), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). 5 Throughout this article I take ‘narrativity’, in the sense used by Sturgess (p. 7) and others, to mean the ‘capacity for being a narrative’; ‘narratology’ I take to be the study of narrative theory. 6 ‘Text-types are deep-level functions actualizable by a variety of surface forms’: Seymour Chatman, ‘The representation of text-types’, Textual Practice, 2, 1 (Spring 1988), p. 24. 7 This novel has recently been reprinted, for the first time since 1968: Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, trans. Willard R.Trask (London: Journeyman Press, 1992).

• Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania (Lincoln, Neb. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 175 pp., $25.00 (hardback) LAWRENCE DRISCOLL

In his essay on ‘Surrealism’ Walter Benjamin states that ‘The reader, the thinking one, the waiting one, the flâneur are as much types of illumination as are the opium-eater, the dreamer, the drunken one.’1 Since this initial exploration, the issues surrounding the rhetoric of drugs can be found scattered throughout the margins of contemporary theory. Virilio’s discussions of speed, narcosis and technology; Jameson’s theorization of postmodern ‘intoxication’, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of becoming-other and their discussions of William Burroughs, psychedelia and alcohol in The Logic of Sense, Derrida’s reading of the pharmakon and Foucault’s discussion of opium and LSD in ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’ are all indicators of a structuring presence within European and American theory concerning the question of ‘drugs’. In The Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has added to this debate by suggesting that ‘[t]he “decadence” of drug addiction, in…late nineteenth century texts, intersects with two kinds of bodily definition [and that] the integrity of…national borders, the reifications of national will and vitality, were readily organized around these narratives of introjection.’2 Ronell’s text seeks to enter into this theoretical milieu by setting out to expose our total investment, and implication in, the rhetoric of drugs. If Ronell’s previous work, The Telephone Book, set out to establish the relationship between technology, thought and addiction, then in Crack Wars she has expanded her philosophical enquiry by addressing what is intoxicated in literature and what literature ‘becomes’ when it is intoxicated. Crack Wars spirals out of a question posed by Nietzsche in The Gay Science in which he asks ‘[w]ho will ever relate the whole history of narcotica?—It is almost the history of “culture”, of our so-called high culture’ (p. 3). Ronell feels that as yet, we cannot address Nietzsche’s question with any degree of accuracy because the history of narcotica is an open history whose approach routes are still blocked [and that in any case] it is too soon to say with certainty that one has fully understood how to conduct the study of addiction and, in particular, how it may bear upon drugs. To understand in such a way would be to stop reading, to close the book. (p. 50) As Ronell is careful to point out, ‘[t]he intersecting cut between freedom, drugs and the addicted condition (what we are symptomatologizing as “Being-on-drugs”) deserves an interminable analysis whose heavily barred doors can be no more than cracked open by a solitary research’ (p. 59). Ronell establishes that Crack Wars thus ‘settles with this Nietzschean “almost”—the place where narcotics articulates a quiver between history and ontology’ (p. 3). Many of Ronell’s suggestions run parallel to an article written by Derrida which appeared in Autrement in 1986, entitled ‘Rhétorique de la Drogue’ in which he argues that the work of any writer of fictions will be accepted into the institution only in so far as the text is seen to articulate a direct link to reality and thereby

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produce meaning within a signifying economy. The rhetoric of drugs comes in for close examination at this point for, as Bataille points out, the experience of the intoxicated writer is an ‘experience without truth’ (p. 103). In ‘Rhétorique de la Drogue’ Derrida outlines this position as follows: L’écriture n’est pas seulement une drogue, c’est un jeu…et un mauvais jeu s’il n’est plus réglé par le souci de la vérité philosophique. [Writing is not only a drug, it is a game…and a bad game if it is not regulated by a concern for philosophical truth].3 Ronell thus coins the term ‘hallucinogenres’ to define such discourses which stubbornly refuse, or have no interest, in articulating a concern for truth. It is these hallucinogenres that she claims are under attack in the war against drugs. The ‘war’ represents an attack upon all manifestations of ‘artifice’, what Ronell terms ‘a secret war against artificial, pathogenetic and foreign invasions’ (p. 114): ‘This is why every serious war on drugs comes from a community that is at some level of consciousness also hostile to the genuine writer’ (p. 106). Although such comments are worth exploring, some of her statements leave the reader unsure of what conclusions can be gleaned from the critique. For example: who is actually speaking when we talk of ‘a community’, what psychic process is at work when she says that the war on drugs comes from ‘some level of consciousness’, who is being included/excluded by the term ‘the genuine writer’, and finally, how could a war on drugs not be ‘serious’? The terrain is fraught with difficulty as Ronell has pointed out, but she is careful to keep the hazy borders of the subject as focused as possible. In spite of her claim that drugs are ‘non-theorizable’ she has provided us with an example of how we can begin to outline an archaeology of knowledge regarding the rhetoric of drugs. Ronell asks us to consider what could be at stake if ‘“drugs” named a special mode of addiction…or the structure that is philosophically and metaphysically at the basis of our culture?’ (p. 13). Her starting-point for an examination of this issue is Heidegger’s Being and Time which she deconstructs around the issue of addiction: ‘[i]n order to designate with exactitude the way Dasein’s Being reveals itself, that is, as care, Heidegger must ascertain that parasitical phenomena such as urge and addiction are at once named and crowded out’ (p. 40), concluding that he ‘cannot allow the family of wishing and willing, addiction and urge, to bust the primordial structural totality which care guarantees…. Heidegger [thus] blocks efforts to trace care back to special acts or drives which include addiction’ (p. 40). Ronell reveals to us the ways in which urge and addiction are actually the dangerous supplement to Dasein’s Being. Dasein is thus dependent upon, and not separate from, addiction. Her solution locates itself as follows: One might hazard that Dasein needs to face its intoxication—fascination and vertigo—soberly, that is with the tensed fist of anxiety. That’s why Dasein is split over where to go: it is drawn toward the experience of fascination and passivity even as it is drawn (or draws itself) toward the experience of death. (p. 44) Chapter 2, ‘Towards a narcoanalysis’, outlines Ronell’s theoretical boundaries and contains an explanation of why she has chosen to spend the rest of the text on a ‘reading’ of Madame Bovary. As she points out, [t]his work does not accord with literary criticism in the traditional sense…[rather] it tries to understand an object that splits existence into incommensurable articulations. This object resists the revelation of its truth to the point of retaining the status of absolute otherness. Nonetheless, it has given rise to laws and moral pronouncements.

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(p. 49) Ronell begins with Madame Bovary because it articulates the moment when God removes himself from the ontological scene, thus giving birth to structures of addiction. As Derrida points out in ‘Rhétorique de la Drogue’: ‘quand le ciel transcendant vient a se dépeupler…une sorte rhétorique que fatale supplée cette vacance, et c’est le fétichisme toxicomaniaque.’ [When the transcendent sky becomes empty, a fatal rhetoric of drug addiction emerges to fill this gap.]4 Ronell presents this situation in the context of Madame Bovary in her own inimitable style: God’s fundamental breakdown, His out-of-serviceness and withdrawal from the scene, meant that [Emma] had to replace the emptiness with a symbolic authority…. That’s when the panic set in, the emergencies that invaded the entire scene. Nothing else mattered; she needed her dose, and she started responding like an addict to the alarm signals proliferating around her…. She would have to mime another plenitude. (p. 175) Thus without ‘the paternal metaphor holding things together, one was at a loss, one became the artisan of one’s own body’ (p. 75). Emma thus plays out her various addictions as a compensation for loss: ‘she was the body on which these urges started showing, almost naturally, prior to the time the technological prosthesis became available on the streets and drugs had become an effect of institution, convention, law’ (p. 77). Ronell focuses on Madame Bovary because it is the ‘structure of addiction, and even of drug addiction in particular [that] Flaubert discovers and exposes’ (p. 103). The novel is important in understanding our cultural implication in the narratives of addiction in that ‘Few other works of fiction have brought out evidence of the pharmacodependency with which literature has always been secretly associated—as sedative, as cure, as escape conduit or euphorizing substance, as mimetic poisoning’ (p. 11). Ronell is concerned to explore the parallels that exist between the two fields of literature and drugs: ‘[t]he horizon of drugs is the same as that of literature: they share the same line, depending on similar technologies and sometimes suffering analogous crackdowns before the law. They shoot up fictions, disjuncting a whole regime of consciousness’ (p. 78). Ronell’s project has crucial ramifications for a gendered analysis of addiction in that she reveals how the potentially destabilizing power of literature/ addiction is a site of ‘Unaddressed or unchanneled pleasure…[it] belongs to the registers of a “feminine” writing in the sense that it is neither phallically aimed nor referentially anchored’ (p. 107). Ronell, like Ernst Junger, sees drugs as forming part of an allotechnology in that they ‘open up the gulf of extra-erotic, extra-epistemic desire’ (p. 33). Yet the project begins to slide a little, as Ronell warned us at the start, as the addict, at one point, is seen to be outside the community, ‘dispensing with the formalities of signing… refusing to bond with community’ (p. 107), whilst earlier in the text we are told that the addict ‘[d]etached from the strictly determined referent…can also hanker after a mystified communion of community’ (p. 42). The questions surrounding the relationship between ‘drugs’ and ‘community’ remain to be clarified. While the issues of toxicity and the constant threat of invasion by foreign bodies resonate vibrantly with the subtext concerning America’s puritan struggle against artifice, the close proximity of racial issues and drugs are only briefly rehearsed in Ronell’s text. In spite of the suggestive title, the text does not expand its findings into an analysis of the use of crack amongst American ghetto populations and the possible parallels that could be made between the war on drugs and postmodern forms of (urban) imperialism. Ronell’s text opens up a series of questions concerned with the technical/toxic vs. the organic/pure body, and she follows Derrida by articulating the inadequacy of these terms. Debates that take place surrounding

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the rhetoric of drugs often argue for the power of drugs to return the individual to a more ‘natural’ state, yet as Derrida has pointed out it is this natural ‘pure’ body which is often held up as an example of what the ‘toxic’ body of the addict should return to.5 Ronell analyses the ways in which literature is censored and subject to repression, not when it is obscene, but when it becomes ‘toxic’. She cites the examples of Naked Lunch and Ulysses, both of which were categorized as having an ‘emetic function’ rather than being a form of pornographic inducement (p. 55). Madame Bovary, Ulysses and Naked Lunch are thus similar in that they function as a toxic presence in the culture, articulating discourses from within the simulacrum of the pharmakon. Such toxic texts are censored because they openly present themselves as speaking from a realm of non-being. ‘Literature is most exposed when it stops representing, that is, when it ceases veiling itself with the excess that we commonly call meaning (p. 57). Literature will pass the censors and escape the category of ‘poison’ (in the name of which Flaubert’s novel was condemned) depending upon the success to which it ‘dresses up the wound of its non-being when it goes out into the world [because literature] has to be seen wearing something external to itself, it cannot simply circulate its non-being’ (p. 57). Ronell goes on to explore the relationship of addiction and toxicity to the politics of gastronomy, raising questions regarding Emma Bovary’s relationship to eating and consumption, vomiting and restraint, all of which operate within a ‘libidinally invested economy’: Drugs make us ask what it means to consume anything, anything at all…. Where does the experience of eating begin? What of the remains? Are drugs in some way linked to the management of remains? How has the body been drawn into the disposal systems of our technological age? (p. 63) Chapter 5, ‘Scoring literature’ contains the main analysis of Madame Bovary. Punctuated by the refrain of ‘[w]hat do we hold against the drug addict?’ this chapter explores Emma’s addiction to literature, as well as her ‘anorectic stubbornness’ (p. 121) which comes forward when she prefers to read rather than eat. Moreover, the binary of natural/artificial is examined in relation to Emma’s adultery in so far as scenes of ‘drunkenness and adulterous trespass are constantly put in communication’ (p. 99). This, Ronell argues, is due to the role of adultery, whose etymology signifies ‘mind altering’ (to adulterate) and thereby operates as a toxic counter to her ‘natural’ marriage. Ronell goes on to illustrate the ways in which not only are her adulterous encounters described ‘as experiences of intoxication’ (p. 104) but that her husband too operates as a drug: ‘[h]e seemed to her contemptible, weak and insignificant. How could she get rid of him?… She felt numb, as though she had been overcome by opium fumes’ (p. 104). Ronell comments that ‘[n]ot only does this passage argue for the refinement of difference—this opiate acts differently from other insinuations of her substance/husband abuse—it also shows the opium base to be at the bottom of life’ (p. 104). This remark, and several like it, often leave the reader somewhat puzzled by Ronell’s generalizations that have a tendency to slide in and out of the historically specific. For example, the commentary surrounding the above analysis resolves itself in the following way: Like the Western world, there is no place or moment in the life of Madame Bovary that could be designated as genuinely clean or drugfree, because being exposed to existence, and placing one’s body in the grips of a temporality that pains, produces a rapport to being that is addictive, artificial and beside itself. (pp. 104–5)

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The rhetoric of drugs does seem to ‘evade conceptual arrest’ as Ronell points out, but the result is that one is often forced back into making the rhetoric of drugs/toxicity into a transcendent category rather than trying to open up how toxicity is employed differently depending upon the politics of subjectivity that embrace a certain period. Can we really talk about Heidegger, Flaubert, Joyce and Burroughs as belonging to the same rhetoric of drugs? Will texts authored by women articulate an identical relationship to the rhetoric of drugs as do Flaubert, Joyce and Burroughs? If, as Derrida argues, the addict’s story is the search for the perfect body or the lost body, then is there not a gendered memory of the body? The chapter goes on to explore the position of the doctor and the pharmacist in Madame Bovary and Ronell concludes that ‘the critical question that Flaubert poses through the novel concerns the possibility of a culture divested of hallucinogens’ (p. 96). The final section of the work foregrounds the intense diversity and possibilities of this treacherous terrain when, inside a thanatorium (built by Ernst Junger), Freud, Judge Schreber, Irma, Heidegger, Marguerite Duras, Emma Bovary, Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Henri Michaux and Nietzsche get together to discuss a wide range of topics including abortion, AIDS, alcohol, and hypnosis (which Schreber and Irma like to call ‘the language drug’). Ernst Junger convinces Heidegger to drop acid, while Henri Michaux discusses ‘psychomimetic substances and the miraculated subject’ with Freud (p. 162). In ‘Rhétorique de la Drogue’ Derrida argues that the question of drugs is really a question regarding limits; the limits of the body, the limits of the imagination, the limits of endurance, the limits of textuality and the limits of society, and Ronell’s text goes a long way to reveal how extensive these limits are within Western culture. As with any addictive substance the reader is left wanting more from Ronell’s text than may as yet be possible. Regarding the analyses of the zones of experience designated as intoxicated/sober Ronell feels that ‘It is too soon to tell, and one doesn’t want to fall into the pits of defending Being-as-drugs (of the ecstatic or calming sort). Still, it is absolutely necessary to hazard a preliminary hypothesis and to take risks’ (p. 105). The value of Ronell’s work therefore lies in its incredible suggestiveness. The topics that she touches upon, from menstruation and gastronomy to Philip K.Dick and virtual reality, will certainly generate a proliferation of further avenues by which cultural critics can begin to open up the crucial history of addiction and its relationship to textuality. Ronell has outlined the beginnings of a vital project that can assist us in understanding the intricate nexus that connects toxicity, technology, ‘drugs’, and literature as well as excavating the channels through which all of these are feeding on the rhetoric of drugs. University of Southern California NOTES 1 Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 189. See also ‘Hashish in Marseille’, pp. 137ff. 2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 173. 3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Rhétorique de la Drogue’, Autrement, 106, (1989), p. 201. 4 ibid., p. 205. 5 ibid., p. 199ff.

• David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (London: André Deutsch, 1991), 318 pp., £9.99 (paperback) K.M.NEWTON

‘It is only fair to assume’, writes David Lehman about de Man’s short article, ‘The Jews and contemporary literature’, published in Le Soir in March of 1941, ‘that de Man wrote as he did in complete ignorance of the Nazis’ genocidal aim’ (p. 181). This sentence appears to demonstrate how unprejudiced and impartial David Lehman is in this study of de Man and deconstruction. Of course Lehman could hardly assert that de Man did know or might have known about the Nazis’ plan of genocide since, as Lehman himself tells us, the ‘Final Solution’ was only adopted as Nazi policy at the beginning of 1942. To say then that ‘It is only fair to assume’ that de Man was ignorant of this plan is strange. How could he have known about a policy of genocide that the Nazis hadn’t yet decided upon? The phrase ‘only fair to assume’ suggests a measure of doubt as we have to assume de Man was ignorant. The implication is that we can’t know for certain that he was. The rhetorical effect of the phrase ‘only fair to assume’ is to create doubt in the reader’s mind about de Man’s ignorance yet at the same time suggest that the writer is bending over backwards to be fair to de Man. The reader is, however, being encouraged to wonder if Lehman is being too trusting, especially as he has prefaced his assumption of de Man’s ignorance with a graphic account of Le Soir’s blatant anti-semitic attitudes. The sentence following Lehman’s assumption of de Man’s ignorance, inevitably beginning with ‘But’, allows the reader’s latent doubt to develop further. Lehman goes on for several paragraphs to give details of Nazi persecution of the Jews at the time de Man was writing for Le Soir; also, he informs us, there were rumours of death camps in August of 1941, the month that the Nazis began transporting Belgian Jews to Auschwitz. A context is therefore created for Lehman’s assumption of de Man’s ignorance of Nazi genocide which deprives it of any force. The effect is that the reader is disinclined to accept that assumption. Why should we give someone so deeply associated with fascism and anti-semitism the benefit of any doubt since his complicity with genocide is clear? One is used to this manipulative technique in certain sections of the press, particularly in stories concerning relationships between or involving members of the royal family or of politicians engaged in liaisons with actresses or models: language is moulded to create a reality that has power over the reader even though there may be no facts or supporting evidence to give it any substance. David Lehman is primarily a journalist, though he also has an academic background. He discloses that he broke the story of de Man’s past in Newsweek, an article that provoked outrage on the part of certain deconstructionists, mainly because it juxtaposed a photograph of de Man with one of Nazis on the march. This led to what Lehman calls ‘the virtual declaration of war on journalism’ (p. 216) by deconstructionists. This book continues that war and takes the fight to the deconstructionist camp. If one of Lehman’s aims is to restore the reputation and credibility of journalism in the face of academic condemnation of it then he has signally failed, for the book uses every journalistic trick in an effort at character assassination. The book claims that de Man was not only an enthusiastic collaborator at the time of writing for Le Soir but also talks of his ‘embrace of fascism’ (p. 229), accuses him of anti-semitism and of ‘Virulent racism’ (p. 215) and of supporting

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Jewish deportation from Europe—indeed Lehman draws a parallel between de Man’s article on the Jews and contemporary literature and Hitler’s Mein Kampf (p. 238)—and in addition he asserts that de Man was a bigamist who callously rejected his wife and children, a swindler, an intellectual fraud who used deconstruction merely for self-serving reasons. Yet there is little or no convincing evidence to support these contentions, even though one finds some of them being increasingly repeated as if they were indisputable fact.1 Lehman’s case against de Man is a house of cards in which rhetoric takes the place of evidence and logical argument, an ironic state of affairs since Lehman’s general aim in the book is to attack deconstruction for elevating rhetoric over history, the subject, reason. Yet Lehman shows that journalism need not be used for such contemptible ends. The first section of this book is about deconstruction in general, and though Lehman is strongly opposed to deconstruction he presents a well-written and clear account of it that is better than many academic introductions to the subject. Lehman has taken the trouble to grapple with deconstructionist writings and shows great journalistic skill in summarizing them. His criticisms, though fairly familiar to anyone who has read critics like M.H.Abrams on deconstruction, are serious and worthy of consideration. But when he moves to the subject of de Man the book takes on quite a different character: the aim is to destroy de Man’s reputation and to brand his deconstructionist defenders as guilty of the worst kind of bad faith. The first section of the book, by presenting its case judiciously, has the effect of softening the reader up so that he or she will feel inclined to accept that the author’s treatment of de Man displays a similar fair-mindedness. Deconstruction proves useful to Lehman as a double-edged sword by which to attack de Man. Lehman is particularly scathing about the excesses of defenders of de Man such as Shoshana Felman who uses deconstructionist critical strategies to try to exculpate him, comparing him in his wartime experience to Captain Ahab and Ishmael in Moby Dick. Lehman sees this as an instance of how deconstruction replaces ‘reasoning’ by ‘metaphors’ (p. 204) and condemns this practice, but he then goes on to use it for his own ends by constructing a series of metaphors of his own, comparing de Man with a Nazi war criminal in Welles’s film The Stranger, with Marlow in Heart of Darkness, and with Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s novel. Whereas Felman’s metaphors are dismissed as far-fetched and ridiculous, Lehman’s are allowed to stand. Lehman continually places de Man in no-win situations. Someone who knew de Man during the war and who claims that he had not a political mind and saw writing for Le Soir as a career opportunity, is treated sceptically by Lehman, but when that same person also claims that de Man was a swindler and a liar in his business dealings at this period such testimony is not called into question. In a letter about his wartime activities, written after his appointment to a post at Harvard, de Man had called Hendrik de Man his father, when in fact he was his uncle. Though on the surface it would appear not to be in de Man’s interest to create such a strong link between himself and such a controversial figure, Lehman sees this merely as a subtle way for de Man to gain sympathy for his involvement in collaboration by suggesting that he was subject to family pressure. In fact Hendrik de Man was like a father to de Man, who had been been brought up by him for several years, but having condemned de Man first of all as a subtle liar for claiming Hendrik as his father, Lehman then uses this father-son relationship to suggest that de Man was indeed the ‘chosen son’ of a notorious collaborator. That de Man was unfortunate to be brought up by a major political figure who had committed himself to a policy of non-resistance to the Nazis, and was thus exposed to such a dangerous influence at a formative period of his life is given no consideration by Lehman. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of Lehman’s vision of de Man as fully-formed fascist and anti-semite. Before discussing whether there is any justification for calling de Man a fascist and racist, one should consider the new accusations that have been given wider publicity by this book. Little can be said about the claim that de Man was a swindler since Lehman only supplies the unsubstantiated assertion that de Man ‘had earned himself a local reputation for dishonesty’ (p. 187) as a result of a business failure in publishing.

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The really shocking revelation, however, is that de Man was a bigamist. Lehman does attempt to back up this claim. He tells us that de Man lived in a kind of ménage à trois with a married couple and eventually became the lover of the woman and had three sons by her. Using a phrase much loved by journalists of the tabloid press Lehman calls de Man her ‘common-law husband’ (p. 188), a term that has no legal standing whatsoever. Lehman’s contention that de Man became a bigamist when he married in America is based on the assumption that de Man had in the interim married his lover. But as Lehman has to admit, though only in an aside—‘assuming that the two were legally married’ (p. 190) (Lehman’s italics)—that is mere assumption; he supplies no evidence to prove that such a marriage had taken place. Thus the accusation that de Man was a bigamist is totally unsubstantiated. It is surely quite scandalous for Lehman to accuse de Man of bigamy without such proof. It is another indication of his unprincipled determination to blacken de Man’s name. Lehman also claims that de Man quite callously abandoned his first family and he supports this by quoting from an interview, by telephone we learn from the notes at the back of the book, with one of de Man’s sons. Yet it is clear that de Man must have retained some kind of contact with his first family since his son had met de Man and been introduced to de Man’s daughter. It may be that de Man’s behaviour to his first family was morally culpable but before passing that kind of judgement one would require much more information on the subject. The first family, apart from de Man, settled in South America. Did de Man’s first ‘wife’ marry again? What was her view of his marriage? Do she and de Man’s other sons back up the view of the son Lehman spoke to? What position do de Man’s American wife and daughter take on the matter? To condemn de Man in the absence of answers to such questions is precipitate to say the least. And in any case de Man’s personal relationships have no relevance as to whether or not he was a collaborator, fascist, or racist. Plenty of fascists were respectable married men and plenty of men of dubious moral character in their personal lives were opposed to fascism. Lehman is again using the tactics of the tabloid press in his quest to destroy de Man’s reputation. Lehman’s case for de Man’s ‘embrace of fascism’—clearly the most serious accusation in the book— rests on three main contentions: (1) that his decision to write for a collaborationist newspaper such as Le Soir indicates that he believed in its pro-Nazi policies; (2) that the content of the articles he wrote reveals an intellectual commitment to fascism, particularly to its racial programme; (3) that his silence about his past and failure to make any public statement were signs of guilt and indicate a complete lack of moral integrity. I shall consider these three claims in turn. One of the weakest aspects of Lehman’s book is that it makes little or no attempt to understand de Man’s actions in their historical context. Lehman adopts a ‘wise after the event’ attitude that assumes that it was as clear in December 1940 when de Man joined Le Soir that the Nazi regime was as great a tyranny as we know it to have been today and that Germany would be defeated in the war. De Man must have been influenced by his uncle’s view that, given Germany’s military triumph and domination of Europe, Belgium had no alternative but to adapt itself to this situation. Lehman sees fascist sympathies underlying de Man’s assertion in an article of 1941 that Germany ‘finds itself…called upon to exercise hegemony in Europe’ (p. 163), but at the present time when Europe finds a united Germany again undeniably dominant, de Man’s assumption that Germany will inevitably be the hegemonic European power requires no commitment to fascism for its justification. Yet if de Man had been a fascist or Nazi sympathiser at the beginning of the war it seems odd that he should have fled when Belgium was invaded by the Germans and only returned when he failed to gain entry to Spain. For Lehman ‘One can only speculate about why de Man and his pregnant mistress left Belgium’ (p. 189), but needless to say Lehman doesn’t speculate in de Man’s favour. Rather he contrasts de Man’s return to Belgium to exploit, as Lehman sees it, his connections in order to profit from the ‘New Order’ with the sad fate of Walter Benjamin who committed suicide after being turned

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back at the same border. A spurious contrast is created between the tragic Benjamin who would rather die than return to Nazism and the opportunistic de Man who chose to adapt and survive. The possibility that the link between de Man and Benjamin may have been a socialist opposition to fascism and Nazism is eliminated even from consideration. Any explanation as to why de Man chose to become a free-lance literary critic for Le Soir can only of course be speculation, but Lehman’s view that he did so because he chose to embrace fascism is less plausible, it seems to me, than the possibility that, with a family to support and when the war must have seemed as good as over, he decided that there was no alternative but to adapt himself to an inevitably German-dominated Europe. In retrospect, of course, this was a bad judgement, but it should not be simply identified with a decision to collaborate motivated by a sympathy with Nazi objectives. Lehman’s contention that de Man was ideologically in agreement with the Nazi sympathies of Le Soir has to confront the awkward fact that de Man chose to stop writing for the paper in 1942. De Man’s own explanations as to why he did so was that ‘nazi thought-control…no longer allow[ed] freedom of statement’ (p. 199). Lehman of course will have none of this, yet if de Man had embraced fascism at this period why did he quit? Fear of assassination by the resistance is Lehman’s explanation, and he informs us that a colleague of de Man’s on the newspaper had been killed. This sounds plausible until we learn that this assassination took place after de Man had quit: according to Lehman de Man had stopped writing for the newspaper by November 1942 and this fellow-journalist was assassinated in January 1943. What remarkable foresight on de Man’s part, for Lehman tells us that this journalist ‘could just as easily have been Paul de Man’ (p. 179). The implausibility of this speculation suggests that nothing will be allowed to undermine in the slightest way Lehman’s case against de Man. What is striking about this book is that it soon becomes clear that the claim that de Man was a fascist and anti-semite during his period writing for Le Soir rests almost entirely on one two-page article on the Jews and contemporary literature. Lehman attempts to show that other articles de Man wrote have a hidden fascist agenda in that they review respectfully books written by known fascists and collaborators. Yet if de Man was a supporter of fascism why did he not say so more directly like other writers for Le Soir? In such a newspaper writers certainly didn’t need to conceal fascist sympathies. If anything had to be concealed it would be a lack of commitment to fascism. The fact that Lehman has to extract an underlying fascist message from these articles when there would have been no constraint on de Man’s expressing such messages directly and unequivocally if he wanted to, undermines the credibility of Lehman’s claim that de Man’s articles as a whole reveal him to be a fascist. Only one article, ‘The Jews and contemporary literature’, expresses any views that can be directly linked with fascism. This is why that article is so crucial. No interpretative ingenuity of the type that Lehman directs at other articles needs to be exercised in order to demonstrate these fascist connections. Even some of de Man’s strongest supporters have deplored the article: for Jacques Derrida it is the ‘most unbearable’2 of the articles; J. Hillis Miller has called it ‘inexcusable’3; and Lehman quotes the following comment by Barbara Johnson: ‘How can one avoid feeling rage and disgust at a person who could write such a thing’ (p. 233). Though other aspects of Lehman’s treatment of de Man may be condemned, he seems to be on solid ground in his judgement of this article since even de Man’s closest colleagues find it shocking. Certainly reading this article—which Lehman translates and includes as an appendix to this book (pp. 269–71) —at the present time one can readily agree that it serves the interests of fascism. Published in a special edition of Le Soir which brought together a number of articles on the subject of the Jews, almost all of which were quite blatantly committed to Nazi ideology, and at a time when the Nazis were on the verge of adopting their ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question, it can’t, and shouldn’t, be dissociated from this fascist context. Since meaning is determined by context it inevitably takes on a fascist meaning for anyone aware of that context. Yet to go on

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to conclude from this, as Lehman does, that de Man in a personal sense was therefore a fascist and antisemite because his article in its context of publication served the interests of fascism and anti-semitism, is unjustifiable. Lehman’s conclusion would be defensible only if de Man deliberately placed his article in that context and identified himself with it. There is no evidence that he did so. De Man also has no responsibility for the fact that knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’ is intrinsic to the context in which the article is read now. If one wants to use de Man’s article as a means of understanding what views he held at the time of writing it, we have to try to bracket out contexts that are not appropriate. If we do so I believe the article will not support the view that it reveals de Man as a fascist and a racist. It is clear from de Man’s writings of this period that he held organicist views. As defenders of him have pointed out he accepted the ‘aesthetic ideology’ that he attacks in his later writings. It’s more than probable that his later views were influenced by his wartime experience; it would be surprising if they weren’t, but his organicist views shouldn’t be identified with fascism. Though Lehman calls him a Belgian nationalist he is more accurately described as a believer in a European cultural identity, with each nation having its own organically developing literary and cultural tradition. If one equates organicist views with fascism then not only was de Man a fascist but numerous major figures in Western culture such as Herder, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, F.R.Leavis must also be seen as fascists. ‘The Jews and contemporary literature’ is a typical organicist essay. The subject of the article is the claim made by ‘vulgar anti-semitism’ that modern Western literature is Jewish in its basis. De Man uses the words ‘degenerate’, ‘decadent’, and ‘polluted’ in discussing this view but these are clearly attributed to this vulgar anti-semitic conception of contemporary Western literature which de Man is calling into question. He sees Jewish culture as ‘foreign’ but that does not in organicist terms imply inferiority, only difference and unassimilability. De Man’s argument is coherent and defensible from an organicist point of view: European literature is viewed as an organic development with its own laws and it is too powerful, argues de Man, to have been taken over in the twentieth century by Jews. On the contrary, he asserts, what is surprising is that Jews have had so little influence on contemporary literature. Clearly de Man doesn’t believe that there have been no significant modern Jewish writers since he lists Kafka as a major modern innovator. For Lehman this is something to be explained away in order to protect his view of de Man as anti-semite. He attempts to do so by supporting Stanley Corngold’s view that de Man had merely copied a list of important modern writers cited in a book by Aldous Huxley. It is thus merely ‘a rote sequence of names’ (p. 236). Yet Huxley had included Proust and the fact that de Man excludes Proust (though in other articles of this period he treats Proust as a major figure) suggests, according to Lehman, that anti-semitism is implied by this list. Only those who have blind faith that de Man was a fascist and racist will be persuaded by this argument. Was de Man at this period so lacking in knowledge of modern literature that he would need to copy a list of major modern writers from Huxley? Also, if he wanted to deny Jews any role whatever in modern Western literature by excluding Proust—who in any case is not usually thought of as being a Jewish writer since he was only half-Jewish and brought up as a Catholic—why should he have retained Kafka, a writer whose Jewishness can’t be ignored or denied? One of the most difficult things to accept, however, about de Man’s article is his claim that Jews have had only a minor influence on modern Western literature. From the perspective of the end of the twentieth century this is a ridiculous contention and one that only an anti-semite would attempt to justify. But from the perspective of 1941 there’s some justification for de Man’s view. Of the major writers of the early part of the century few were Jewish. Is de Man not right to say that most Jewish writers of the early part of this century were of the second rank and that the great majority of major figures were non-Jewish? Is stating that antisemitic or racist? Of course such statements can be used for racist purposes, and no doubt that was why Le Soir accepted de Man’s article, but de Man’s purpose is to support his organicist view of the integrity of

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the Western literary tradition. According to Lehman’s account de Man dismisses Jewish writers as ‘mediocrities’, but the Jewish writers de Man mentions by name, such as André Maurois and Julien Benda, are not condemned as worthless. For de Man they are of the ‘second rank… not among the most important figures, and especially not among those who have had some directive influence on literary genres’. Is de Man not right about the writers he mentions? This does not mean that the work of these writers is of no value or that there are not numerous non-Jewish writers who are also of the second rank. Derrida, however, has criticized de Man’s article for representing Jews in stereotypical terms and one has to agree that he does so when he writes of Jews’ ‘cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them’, but the aim is not to denigrate Jews by such stereotyping but to suggest that these qualities are a positive advantage for contemporary novelists since they ‘would seem to be the very precious qualities for the work of lucid analysis that the novel requires’. But de Man the organicist believes literary tradition is the stronger force and that this has nevertheless prevented Jews from having a major influence on modern literature. However, easily the most condemned part of this article is the second last sentence, which follows de Man’s contention that the vital nature of Western culture has been shown by literature’s resistance to a pervasive Jewish influence: ‘What’s more, one can thus see that a solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences.’ It is easy to understand the outrage this sentence has caused. The use of the words ‘solution’ and ‘problem’ inevitably conjures up the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish ‘problem’. But if one’s interest is in understanding de Man’s thinking at this period such associations must be seen as accidental as he wrote this article before these words had taken on their murderous associations. Lehman also states several times that de Man advocates the ‘deportation’ of Jews from Europe even if he doesn’t express direct support for genocide: ‘In March 1941…de Man pondered the merits of deportation as a possible “solution to the Jewish problem”’ (p. 181). Even Barbara Johnson, whom Lehman quotes, claims that de Man ‘found the idea of deportation reasonable’ (p. 234) in this article. Yet there is no mention of deportation by de Man or suggestion that force will be used to drive Jews out of Europe. At the time de Man was writing, the Nazis had not used force to drive Jews out of Europe in order to create a Jewish colony. But if de Man is not indirectly alluding to some Nazi-organized forcible expulsion what else could he mean? Lehman’s theory, which Derrida also thinks possible, is that de Man ‘may have had in mind the so-called Madagascar plan that several Nazi officials, Himmler and Heydrich among them, had briefly considered in 1940 pending the outcome of the Battle of Britain’ (p. 181). Presumably the Nazis hadn’t made this plan public. It seems unlikely that de Man would have known in 1941 of a plan that had been discussed only among the Nazi hierarchy. Even Lehman has to admit that de Man only ‘may have had’ this in mind though he then goes on to treat this weak hypothesis as if it were fact. An alternative hypothesis which seems to me to be far more plausible is that de Man is alluding to Zionism and its belief that Jews should reject Europe and commit themselves to re-establishing nationhood in Palestine. Official Nazi policy had been to promote Jewish emigration, particularly to Palestine, and Hitler himself had expressed support for this policy. Writing in 1941 when a rabidly anti-Jewish German regime had triumphed militarily and seemed set to dominate Europe, de Man may have thought that Jews would have come to the conclusion that there was no alternative to emigration and Zionism. Even this most controversial of articles, therefore, seems to me to be easily defendable against the view that it reveals de Man to be a fascist and racist. Though Lehman claims that de Man criticizes vulgar antisemitism only to advocate the alternative of a ‘Genteel anti-Semitism’ (p. 215) by taking the view that Jews have no claim to be the ‘creators’ of contemporary literature and that they have not ‘exercised a

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preponderant influence over its evolution’, this last statement of de Man’s implies that they have nevertheless had some influence, even if only a minor one, and this suggests that the inclusion of Kafka as a major modern writer was not some kind of accident, as Lehman seems to believe. However, it’s also clear that de Man doesn’t go out of his way to say anything positive about the Jewish contribution to literature and that this article contains obvious overstatements, notably the last sentence which says that the creation of a Jewish colony would only deprive the literary life of the West of ‘some personalities of mediocre worth’, though even here it could be argued that de Man is not making a universal judgement on all Jewish writers over time, which would contradict his inclusion of Kafka as a major modern figure, but alluding to the literary situation in 1941. It would be odd, however, to expect an article on the role of Jews in contemporary culture in a pro-Nazi newspaper like Le Soir to say anything explicitly positive about the Jewish contribution to Western culture, since such a newspaper would clearly not tolerate any sentiments that were favourable to Jews. Certain compromises obviously had to be made when one chose to write for Le Soir and de Man can be criticized for making them. However, de Man’s situation is not unusual and not different in kind from that which confronts left-wing writers who choose to write for a right-wing press and must inevitably make compromises in order to do so. I also see no reason to disbelieve his claim that he stopped writing for Le Soir because he finally could not balance his own freedom of expression with the the need to operate within the constraints created by the newspaper’s pro-Nazi policy. If the most that de Man can be accused of is that for two years he adapted himself in a passive way to Nazi rule in Belgium by writing as a literary critic for a pro-Nazi newspaper, and that there is no convincing evidence to suggest that he was an active collaborator or a fascist or a racist, why did he keep silent about it if he had nothing to hide? Of course, despite Lehman’s repeated reference to his ‘silence’, he did not keep entirely silent as he defended himself in his Harvard letter. Lehman claims that this letter does nothing to disprove the view that he was silent as it wasn’t a public statement but a letter not intended to be publicized beyond the institution. De Man’s silence can be defended on the grounds that it would have been absurd for him to have made a public statement at that stage; after all he was a virtual nonentity at the time, and even later when he became a well-known critic, personal statements of a public kind would have been quite alien to the kind of critical discourse he specialized in. But it would be ridiculous to deny that it was in de Man’s interests to keep silent about his Belgian writings. Though, as I’ve suggested, he had no reason to feel that he was guilty of being a collaborator or a Nazi sympathizer and that in a sense he had nothing to confess, despite Lehman’s assertions, it’s obvious that these articles would have been a considerable embarrassment to him and it’s therefore hardly surprising that he did not acknowledge them publicly or even privately to his friends. These early writings clearly take quite a different view of literature from the anti-organicist position he adopted in his later work. But, more important, if the essay on the Jews and contemporary literature had come to light at the beginning of his academic career in America in a post-Holocaust context it would almost certainly have prevented him from getting a university job, and if he had acknowledged it later when he had become established it would have created a scandal. De Man must surely have realized that. Though he may have shown moral cowardice in not facing up to his past irrespective of the consequences, perhaps we should be grateful that he didn’t choose to put his Le Soir articles on his curriculum vitae when applying for academic posts as this would almost certainly have prevented him obtaining an academic base and thus deprived us of such texts as Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading, which would of course have been a considerable loss for contemporary criticism. Finally, does the de Man affair compromise deconstruction? Lehman, of course, is not alone in thinking that it does. He suggests continuities between de Man’s ‘embrace of fascism’ and the fascist connections of other writers who have been associated with deconstruction, such as Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot.

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Obviously, if Lehman’s interpretation of de Man has no justification, these connections have no validity. Lehman also fails to mention the point that the two major influences on de Man’s later writing were Jews: Derrida and Benjamin. A notable silence in Lehman’s text is any reference to Derrida’s Jewish background, and he tries to dismiss the Benjamin connection by claiming that it was another sign of de Man’s moral cowardice that he made no allusion in his writing on Benjamin to the fact that they were linked in seeking to flee from the Nazis by the same route, with Benjamin’s death being in stark contrast to de Man’s survival through collaboration. This is clearly a smokescreen designed to divert one from the fact that a Jewish writer was a major influence on de Man’s later thinking. Such a fact is inconvenient for Lehman’s desperate claim that there’s some intrinsic relation between fascism and deconstruction. Though I’ve argued that Lehman’s thesis on de Man has no credibility, the book at least has the merit of providing data on the de Man affair that allows one to come to quite different conclusions from his. However, clearly a great deal of information on de Man’s Belgian background and early personal life has still to emerge and this may have a significant influence on future interpretations of his thinking and character at this period. What one can say for sure is that Lehman’s book is a hatchet job that completely fails to back up convincingly the contention that de Man was ideologically committed to fascism and racism in his Le Soir writings. University of Dundee NOTES 1 For example, Patrick Parrinder writes in Authors and Authority (Basing-stoke and London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 308: ‘De Man had been a Flemish nationalist and then a pro-Nazi…’ 2 See Jacques Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 201. 3 See J.Hillis Miller, Theory Now and Then (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991), p. 362.

• Paula Marantz Cohen, The Daughter’s Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-century Domestic Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 240 pp., £27.95 (hardback)

• Naomi Segal, The Adulteress’s Child: Authorship and Desire in the Nineteenth-century Novel (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992), 264 pp., £39.50 (hardback) KATE FLINT

The nineteenth-century bourgeois novel and psychoanalytic theory exist in a symbiotic relationship with one another. The familial tensions which the fictions articulate, negotiate and plot are the site for the development of Freud’s own hypotheses; the terms in which he set up his case histories, his notation of dialogue, his sense of drama and of the transformative power of language in turn being meditated by established narrative forms. Seductive in their similarity to Freud’s scenarios, the personal dynamics contained in these novels have repeatedly been scrutinized by means of a range of psychoanalytically based approaches. These approaches increasingly seek to move away, however, from the orthodoxly Freudian. Paula Marantz Cohen, in The Daughter’s Dilemma, and Naomi Segal, in The Adulteress’s Child, offer two very differently grounded strategies, although both are concerned with the ideology and structures of the family. Hypothesizing that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we may trace a close ideological relationship between forms of fiction and the formation of the family, Cohen bases her analysis upon ‘family systems theory’. In therapy, such a theory focuses, and seeks to transform, the interactive patterns present in a family rather than concentrating solely on the individual. It is founded on a paradox: that closed systems (such as the bourgeois family and, by extension, the Victorian novel) are inherently pathogenic, yet it seeks to heal the pathologies of such systems. Just as a therapist will frequently choose to put forward exaggerated versions of family relationships in order to expose the destructive nature of certain patterns of interaction to those undergoing therapy, so Cohen chooses five problematic novels. She argues that the ‘capacity of certain works of literature to push the boundaries of convention to the edge of deviance and lay bare their culture’s ideological limitations and potentialities is perhaps the basis for a functional theory of literary value’. The question of literary value proves rather a red herring, since what Cohen is most concerned to do is to expose the family dynamics of Clarissa, Mansfield Park, Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, and The Awkward Age. In particular, she highlights the role of the mediating daughter, especially as this daughter is contained within a closed family system—a role mythologized, for her, by the death of Clarissa. Thus Mansfield Park, which, unlike Austen’s other novels, does not present the heroine’s individuality as a counter or antidote to her family, employs Fanny Price as a ‘regulator’. Austen blends her in to the fabric of a family in order to stabilize it, thus allowing the closed form of this novel to stand as a parallel to the increasing conventionalization, and institutionalization, of the nuclear family. This reading suffers from the fact that Cohen does not give enough weight to the threat posed by the Crawfords, nor to the fact that Austen firmly sides with the social patterns of the landed gentry rather than looking at the simultaneously present, shifting values of urban society. More conducive to getting one to rethink a familiar text is her interpretation of Wuthering Heights, both for the stress it places on the elder Catherine’s relationship with her father, and for her understanding of Nelly’s function as ‘random noise’, equivalent to the therapist’s

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introduction of undirected behaviour into a relationship system to effect structural change. Nelly’s interventions thus allow for the rehabilitation of the degenerated system which the novel depicts in its first half: moreover, she represents an alternative treatment of the female role, one in which mediating abilities are not invested in a body which, pace Lévi-Strauss (invoked by both Cohen and Segal), is itself an object of sexual exchange. Rather, with Nelly, access to information is the crucial item in a ritual of exchange. With Mr Tulliver’s death in The Mill on the Floss, a stable triad (father/daughter/son) becomes an unstable dyad (sister/brother). Since Maggie cannot reproduce the form of her original relationship with her father with Tom, this leads to a pattern of conflict developing between them which both results in complete alienation and also links them until death. Here, Cohen also introduces a biographical reading, seeing Eliot’s —or rather ‘Marian’s’—own personal and professional achievements as the result of elaborate substitutions within a configuration of her relationships with her actual family. If, according to Cohen, The Mill on the Floss represents the nuclear family as it increasingly came under strain (in which context, of course, we might have looked harder at the fact of the novel’s historical setting), then James looks forward to the twentieth century even more presciently, increasingly understanding that conventional family relationships present constraints to self-actualization. He anticipates the moment when, as Barthes puts it, ‘I is nothing other than the instance saying I’; when experience is organized in terms of interpretive discourse, rather than in relation to a presumed ‘real’, material world full of variegated human relations. The variety of human relationships which are subtly explored in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature—even within the terms of conventional family structures—are lost sight of behind Cohen’s adoption of the language of family systems theory. The texts which she chooses suit the terms of her own rather closed argument well, providing a neat —too neat—paradigm of shifting family relations, as presented in the passage of the bourgeois novel from eighteenth-century consolidation to the challenges posed by the modernist concentration on the intense, often alienated expression of individual consciousness. So encompassing is this theory, however, that even the most self-cocooned of modernist protagonists cannot escape its terms: Murray Bowen, one of its most influential proponents, has argued that emotional cut-off from one’s family is as much a reflection of emotional dependence as is never leaving home. Perhaps such a double bind would have served Cohen if she had chosen other texts, but one wonders how useful Cecilia, say, or even Daniel Deronda would have been to her enterprise. She fails to inspire confidence in her knowledge of other novels. Is Helen Burns, in Jane Eyre, really an anorectic? She eats Miss Temple’s seedcake readily enough. And what does she mean by saying that Little Dorritt [sic] is ‘incorporated into a surrogate family containing her future husband’? Surely it is Clennam, eventually, who is incorporated into the ‘family’ of the Marshalsea? ‘What if’ other texts had been chosen is a question one finds oneself asking in relation to Naomi Segal’s The Adulteress’s Child, too. This study is more wide-ranging than Cohen’s—her examples range from Le Rouge et le noir to L’Education sentimentale to The Scarlet Letter, from Anna Karenina to Effi Briest. These two continents of adulteresses demonstrate a recurrent parallel patterning: either they have (prior to the affair, or as a result of it) a son, in which case they are caught within a patrilinear pattern in which this male child provides a surrogate for the male protagonist (although this son is frequently presented as ill, a means by which the male author can show his uncertainty towards an unfaithful woman). Or the adulteresses have a daughter, who, seen from a masculine perspective in which matrilinear bonding suggests a closeness unavailable to him, can be nothing other than an irritant and a distraction. These patterns and variations are demonstrated through a number of close, thoughtful readings. Unlike Cohen, Segal avoids paring away the emotional, historical, and social resonances of her texts to make them read like an exemplary set of a therapist’s case histories. She is a far more subtle and discriminating critic. But the price of her own alertness to multiplicity and complexity is a frequent blurring of clarity in her own

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writing, which makes this book at once suggestive in its interpretations and frustrating through its frequently gnomic utterances. The biggest, deliberate omission on Segal’s part is fiction written by women, for her concern is with the limiting stereotypes produced by men’s imaginations. Her subjects are the subjects of male desire: woman’s desire does not, in their texts, come in to the picture, any more than the fact that motherhood may not always be the focal point of their existence. Segal’s argument would certainly have been complicated had she introduced, say, the Princess in Daniel Deronda’s famous disclaimer of maternal urgings: ‘Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel—or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.’ This omission would be less disconcerting if it were not for Segal’s conclusion, in which she shifts from the patriarchal structures of the nineteenth century to examine women’s attitudes towards childbearing today. Like Cohen, she turns away from Freud, this time to consider not the family as a whole, but the importance of the child’s phantasized loss of the primal mother and accession to autonomy as an adult individual: a phantasy which, if related to the changing social roles of women, and recognized and explored to the full, may well change the phantasies of the future, and hence the dynamics of human relationships. Both Segal and Cohen (‘in writing this book, I could detach myself from the cramped position of a mediator within a closed family system and engage in more wide-ranging mediation’) acknowledge their personal investment in their subject matter. Both are concerned to consider psychoanalytic assumptions not just as they were formed by the nineteenth century, but as re-articulated in relation to contemporary social patterns. The distance between Segal’s conclusion and the rest of her study, however, demonstrates a greater acknowledgement on her part than on Cohen’s of the difficulties involved in applying today’s terminology retrospectively. This is particularly true when critics restrict themselves, as here, to questions of representation. Although both ostensibly write of plots, neither considers in any detail the potential of the place of the reader’s desire within the structuring and suspense of the text—the field illuminated by Peter Brooks, above all. And, fascinated by acts of closure, neither pauses to consider, say, Nancy Miller’s hypothesis that it is in evading closure for as long as possible that the nineteenth-century heroine comes closest to challenging Freudian (and social) assumptions about women’s wants. Plots are little more, for these critics, than something which can be turned into a diagrammatic mapping of oscillating relationships. Whilst both The Daughter’s Dilemma and The Adulteress’s Child offer many localized insights, their overall approaches diminish, rather than expand, the potential of the specific texts they discuss. They are at their most effective in the theoretical questions they pose for today: in particular, the difficulty of perceiving or theorizing the mother as subject. Psychoanalytic criticism which draws its terms and assumptions from particular social formations, however, must negotiate its relationship with the structures of the past— however temptingly similar to those of today they may appear to be—with the greatest of care. At best, perhaps, it can function as a suggestive, rather than as a diagnostic, tool. Oxford University

• Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (eds), Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 214 pp., £35.00 (hardback) WARREN BUCKLAND

In the introduction to this collection of essays, written for the most part by academics who come from (or live and work in) former British colonies, Helen Tiffin remarks that ‘This is the first book to seek to characterise post-modernist and post-colonial discourses in relation to each other, and to chart their interesting and diverging trajectories’ (p. vii). Postmodern discourse and postcolonialism emerged from the same historical moment —the decentring of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. But whereas the first term refers to the post-industrialism of the West under late capitalism and to its mode of representation, the latter refers to writing (both literacy and critical) from former colonies of Europe. More specifically, as Stephen Slemon points out in the opening essay (p. 2), postmodernism has been defined both as an historical period of Western capitalism (Jameson) and as a catalogue of textual devices—parody, allegory, the free play of signifiers, etc. (Hassan, Michael Newman, Hutcheon). But Slemon goes beyond the traditional definition of postcolonialism as a post-independence historical period in once-colonized nations and instead defines it as ‘a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture’ (p. 3), which has the advantage of identifying postcolonial discourse within colonial and neo-colonial periods of a nation’s history. According to this anthology, the overlapping areas of discussion that have dominated the postcolonial/ postmodern interface in literary studies over the last decade include: (1) the determination of the intersections and divergences between the two discourses; (2) the establishment of the links between modernism and colonialism; (3) the examination of the role of (Western) postmodern critics in their definition and assimilation of postcolonial texts; and (4), the analysis of the tendency in postcolonial literary practice to follow a dual agenda—a parodic one, which it shares with postmodernist literature; but beyond this, a referential agenda, one which recuperates social traditions necessary to the establishment of a postcolonial self-identity. In relation to (1) Ian Adam argues that the postcolonial and the post-modern ‘converge in appearing as prominent literary practices in post-colonial cultures, equally committed to a subversion of authoritative and monocultural forms of genre, history and discourse. They merge in such overlapping formal practices as discontinuity, polyphony, and derealization’ (p. 79). And Linda Hutcheon points out in her contribution to the anthology that postcolonial and postmodern literature share the formal technique of ‘magic realism’ (p. 169). But for Adam the two discourses diverge: ‘in historical reach’—i.e. the postcolonial is apparent within colonialism, whereas there is a sharp break between modernism and postmodernism: ‘in their sites of production’—postcolonialism emerges from social and political self-assertion, whereas postmodernism expresses scepticism concerning such self-identity; and finally, they diverge ‘in theoretical base’ (p. 79), for whereas postmodernism is based on textual play and the simulacrum (which Adam traces back to Sausssure’s anti-referential linguistics), postcolonialism recuperates an ontology (the referent) within this textual play (a tendency it shares with C.S.Peirce’s semiotics).

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In relation to (2), establishing the links between modernism and colonialism, Slemon notes that colonialists partly achieved social containment and control through the establishment of the colonialist educational apparatus, which circulated the canonical European literary text. He also examines why the two critical discourses postmodernism and postcolonialism have not merged, as they have in literary discourse. In (3), postcolonial critics realize that it is not the text itself, but its reading, which defines the text’s status. This attention to the reading is useful in evaluating how Western critics have responded to postcolonial literature. As Slemon points out, they frequently read postcolonial literature only in terms of antireferential, postmodern parody: ‘Western post-modernist readings can so overvalue the anti-referential or deconstructive energetics of post-colonial texts that they efface the important recuperative work that is also going on within them’, for within postcolonial literature ‘a positive (post-colonial) referentiality operates alongside a counter discursive parodic energy’ (p. 7). Western critics therefore assimilate postcolonial (nonWestern) literature to a particular historical period of the West’s history (postmodernism), which implicates these critics in the process of neo-colonialism. (4) Analysis of the dual (postmodern/referential) agenda in postcolonial literature is by far the dominant area of discussion in this anthology, and overlaps with the previous domains of discussion. The response of postcolonial writers to their past does not, of course, form a unified, homogeneous body of literature, but consists of a multiplicity of differential textual strategies. However, due to the widespread circulation of the canonical European literary text in the colonial educational apparatus, the response of many postcolonial writers has been to develop a parodic or reiterative practice of literature that ‘quotes’ these canonical texts ‘in ways that expose their residual colonialist politics and that refigure their narratives to a new ideological vector’ (Slemon, p. 4). The most notable examples are the various rewritings of The Tempest and J.M. Cotezee’s rewriting of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Roxana (Foe, 1987). These famous reiterative texts are not discussed in this anthology,1 but Slemon analyses Neville Farki’s rewriting of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories (pp. 6–7), Robert Wilson examines Angela Carter’s feminist rewriting of traditional European folk-tales (pp. 109–23), and Hena Maes-Jelinek analyses Wilson Harris’s novels (pp. 47–64). In particular, Maes-Jelinek discusses Harris’s transformation of allegorical and epic modes of writing into contemporary fictional modes: ‘Harris has revised and altered the leading thread and issues of The Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faustus [sic] and major aspects of Ulysses’ quest in his latest trilogy, Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal and The Four Banks of the River of Space’ (p. 56). These canonical texts enter Harris’s novels in the form of the ‘guide’: ‘One thinks, for example,…of characters acting…as spiritual guides through the labyrinth of memory, like Masters in Carnival, Faust in The Infinite Rehearsal, and the characters, “live absences”, who help Anselm translate “epic fate into inimitable freedom” in Four Banks (xiii, 9)’ (p. 56). But this rewriting is not carried out ‘in playfulness or, at the other extreme, out of despair in a world become meaningless but, on the contrary, to make possible the quest for value and meaning’ (p. 51). Other contributors to the anthology discuss postcolonial literary texts which, while not reiterative, operate within the dual (postmodern/referential) agenda—that is, go beyond playfulness and despair in search for value and meaning. Adam considers the Canadian Earle Birney’s classic narrative poem ‘David’ and Australian Peter Carey’s short story ‘Do You Love Me?’ For Adam, Birney’s poem demonstrates complete confidence in language’s referentiality by depicting Canada as a real place with its own identity, but this confidence is shadowed by the poem’s narrative, which (as Tiffin states in the introduction) ‘allegorically undermines that foundation’ (p. xiii). In Carey, by contrast, Adam notes a self-referential play on language underpinned by a recuperative reconstruction of referentiality and meaning. Simon Gikandi points out that the dual agenda is also strong in the work of Caribbean women writers (Merle Hodge, Zee Edgell, and Michele Cliff), who attempt to recover and legitimize the experience of modern Caribbean women through

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realist narrative strategies, which are none the less undermined through the fragmentation of space and time (pp. 13–22). One reason for the presence of this dual agenda may be the indigenized base of postcolonial literature (and art in general). The postcolonial writer ‘becomes increasingly conscious of and chooses to work within modalities particular to his or her culture which have very little in the way of European counterparts’, with the result that s/he produces a ‘discourse of utter difference’ (Adam, p. 80). Another reason is developed by Annamaria Carusi, (pp. 95–108). She notes that the combination of postmodernism and referentiality at once overcomes the pure parody games of the former and the naïve positivism of the latter. In so doing, it overcomes the political impotence (or neo-conservatism) in postmodernism’s endless play of discursive self-referentiality and the realists’ aim to recover a precolonial, national origin or essence (which is none other than an appeal to the old European ideology of nationalism). Throughout the anthology the reader is constantly confronted with definitions of postcolonial literature as ‘counter’ or ‘oppositional’ discourse. But for me these are inappropriate terms, for they suggest that postcolonial literature is a purely negative discourse—that is, one unable to transgress colonialism. This returns us to the well-known problem of a purely negative discourse implicitly defining itself in relation to the dominant discourse (becoming its imaginary, mirror image)—placing itself in a position of negative identification with the dominant discourse. And as Anthony Wilden has argued, ‘dissent must transcend the status of negative identification. In short, all dissent must be of a higher logical type than that with which it is in conflict.’ This can only be achieved when all imaginary relations to the dominant discourse are ‘transcended in the real and material relationships of wo/mankind by the mediation of the Symbolic in its symbiotic relation with the Real’.2 Whereas postmodern practices, caught in the imaginary, free play of signifiers, have abandoned the Real (the referent), postcolonial literature has remained faithful to the referent and to the material and political situation of its peoples. We can compare the relation between colonialism and postcolonialism to the analogous relation between dominant (patriarchal-narrative) cinema and feminist avant-garde practices. In recent years the latter have not simply constituted an ‘oppositional’ cinematic practice (with the aim of destroying visual pleasure in dominant cinema), for under these conditions it would be wholly dependent for its existence on dominant cinema. As Teresa de Lauretis has pointed out, feminist cinema has refused to be placed in this position of negative identification with dominant cinema: The most exciting work in cinema and in feminism today is not anti-narrative or anti-Oedipal; quite the opposite. It is narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance, for it seeks to stress the duplicity of that scenario and the specific contradiction of the female subject in it, the contradiction by which historical women must work with and against the Oedipus.3 This ‘dual’ agenda (working with and against Oedipal narrative structures) also overcomes the reductionist attempt to articulate a specific female pleasure in film, in which this pleasure is defined in terms of a female biological ‘essence’. The predominantly short essays (averaging 12–15 pages) that make up Past the Last Post attempt to identify the specific agenda of a critical practice comprising of postcolonial and postmodern discourses. The book’s subtitle is misleading, for it aims to achieve this through specific, politically based practical analyses, rather than in terms of a general, meta-theoretical debate. This immediately distances the book from postmodernism as it is currently conceived and instead begins to discuss ‘real’ issues such as land claims, the survival of marginalized social groups, and the establishment of a native voice and subjectivity (while attempting to avoid the trap of nationalism).

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The exceptions to this emphasis on textual analysis are the contributions by Simon During (pp. 23–45) and John Frow (pp. 139–52). Both raise general issues that go beyond the framework of textual analysis: During criticizes, amongst other things, James Clifford’s concept of the ‘post-cultural’, and Frow considers the specific political and economic conditions underpinning postmodern cultural production, and also discusses its global implications. Past the Last Post successfully demonstrates how the intersection of postcolonial discourse and postmodernism has exposed the latter’s apoliticism and has challenged its neo-colonial reading of postcolonial literature. Diana Brydon expresses these points in the final essay when she writes: ‘If post-modernism is at least partly about “how the world dreams itself to be ‘American’” (Stuart Hall…), then post-colonialism is about waking from that dream, and learning to dream otherwise’ (p. 192). This is so long as the dreamer does not forget the reality outside the dream. University of East Anglia NOTES 1 Canadian and Caribbean rewritings of The Tempest are analysed by Diana Brydon in ‘Re-writing The Tempest’, World Literature Written in English, 23, 1 (1984), pp. 75–88. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discusses Coetzee’s novel Foe in ‘Theory in the margin: Cotezee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana, in Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 154–80. 2 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd edn (London: Tavistock, 1980), p. lvii; p. lvi. 3 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), p. 157.

• Jacqueline de Weever, Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women’s Fiction (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 194 pp., £35.00 (hardback) CHIDI OKONKWO

The subject of this book is ‘the mythography of black women writers’. Taking seventeen novels by seven black-American women, Jacqueline de Weever explores the patterns informing their reworking of Western, Afri can, African-American and American-Indian mythological archetypes into new mythologies articulating America’s multicultural reality. De Weever challenges the pet theses of Eurocentric patriarchal scholarship which privileges the Western world’s Attic-Hebraic-Christian heritage, and demonstrates her theses through rigorous analyses of intertextuality and interplay of, to adapt T.S.Eliot, ‘traditions and individual talents’. She thus fruitfully discusses literary influences, a sore point between Western and Third World scholars, without the kind of simplistic racial stereotypes which mar Charles Larson’s The Novel in the Third World. As Jonathan Culler observes in The Pursuit of Signs, intertextuality goes beyond sources and influences to investigate a work’s ‘participation in the discursive space of a culture’, its relationship with ‘the various languages or signifying practices of a culture’ as well as to ‘those texts which articulate for it the possibilities of that culture.’ Chapter 1, ‘Mythmaking: intertextuality, inversion, and metaphor’, analyses the deployment of these mythmaking strategies for social commentary through harnessing the resources of such prior texts as the Barbados slave revolts of 1675 and 1692 in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Race, the Timeless People, or West African folk-tales as in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, and Ntozake Shange’s more general use of metaphor in Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the portrayal of psychic fracture: the former through ‘Metaphors of transformation’ derived from the animal, insect and vegetable worlds, and the latter through ‘Metaphors of alienation’ depicting the impact of Western cultural imperialism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Sula, Alice Walker’s short stories, Toni Cade Bambaras’s The Salt Eaters, and Gayle Jones’s Eva’s Man. Finally, Chapter 4, ‘Mothers: devouring and nurturing’, examines revisions of the Mother archetype (‘the familiar stereotypes of the Mammy, the Jezebel, and the Conjurewoman’) favoured by male writers. Given de Weever’s location in the Western scholarship tradition, a few slips are inevitable. First is the treatment of the archetype of the underworld journey, with its concomitant of dismemberment and reintegration. Reformulating this archetype as that of ‘the musician who creates harmony from disharmony, who is the dismembered god and the singing head’, de Weever restricts it to the Orpheus myth and concludes that it has no African or American-Indian equivalents (p. 4). Yet Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World uncovers it in Ogun’s rite of passage within Yoruba creation myth. Next, de Weever unwisely borrows her African concept of time from Keith A.Sandiford’s, which uncomfortably recalls J.S.Mbiti’s insupportable generalizations in African Religions and Philosophy. Fortunately, the argument derives its cogency from the treatment of time in the texts studied rather than the cited ‘authorities’. More serious are de Weever’s tendency towards metaphysical interpretations where historical-political interpretations demand primacy, and her uncritical repetitions of the universalist rhetorics which mask

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Western feminists’ complicity in the exploitative power relationships which oppress Third World women (p. 139). She thus reads a positive ‘transformation and rebirth’ theme in a character’s insensitive claim that ‘his vegetables get their iron and calcium from the bones of Indians’ buried in the land he now farms (p. 73). One detects here the influences of Shakespeare’s transformation theme in The Tempest, or its inspired reworking in T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land. Nevertheless, neither metaphor nor myth can positively valorize the extermination of millions of American Indians by Spaniards and other colonizers of the Americas. The ahistorical approach also argues that even in ‘matriarchal’ households ‘the mother is still at the mercy of the patriarchal welfare department, which makes rules about her sex life’ (p. 134), and ‘power relations between mother and child are often simply a reflection of power relations in patriarchal society’. Black-American underclass society is thus transformed into a micro-level duplicate of the larger Western-dominated society, the emasculated black male being confounded with Euro-American power structures. This contrasts sharply with Susan Willis’s more penetrating analysis in ‘Eruptions of funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison’.1 Finally, the book’s title betrays the tendency among ‘Minority Discourse’ exponents—certain scholars from non-European minority populations and immigrants in Western countries—to follow Europe’s assimilationist traditions of erecting local realities into universal absolutes. Despite its title, the book is exclusively concerned with black American women. De Weever’s achievement is to demonstrate, through theory and insightful textual analyses, not the truths or aesthetics of universal black womanhood, but that contemporary American society’s multiculturalism encourages peculiarly American texts, and ‘the experiences related in those texts speak vividly to the fragmented ontology of the New World personality’. University of Wales College of Cardiff NOTE 1 Henry Louis Gates, Jr (ed.), Black Literature and Literary Theory London and New York: Routledge, 1990).

• Richard Ambrosini, Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 253 pp., £35.00 (hardback)

• Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 218 pp., £30.00 (hardback)

• Mark Wollaeger, Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 262 pp., £32.50 (hardback) REYNOLD HUMPHRIES

Despite differences in approach and subject matter the three volumes under discussion have something in common: a desire to re-centre both writing in Conrad and writing on Conrad so as to make of his work the locus classicus of certain themes, concepts and philosophical concerns. There may be inconsistencies, ambiguities, tensions and so forth to be thoughtfully teased from the text, but the overall thrust in Conrad, for the authors of these books, is towards meaning, particularly meaning that can be circumscribed with a reasonable amount of confidence, despite the Angst so prevalent in Conrad. And Angst being very contagious, critics can succumb to it too, hence the drive to defuse it by insisting on safe themes. It is therefore preferable to present Conrad as someone riddled with doubt—or worse—but aware of this dimension of himself and his work and capable of confronting it than to have to admit that Conrad’s fiction is dealing with matters that question that very ‘centredness’. Or, to take an example from the author’s work; rather accept the unpleasant truth about imperialism and selfish ambition in late nineteenth-century Europe, faced, we are assured, by Kurtz—‘the horror! the horror!’—than to have to admit that we may not know what ‘the horror’ is at all. Ambrosini’s central thesis is that Conrad’s statements on art in general and his own in particular have not been given the attention they deserve because of the importance traditionally granted to those of James, Joyce and Woolf. He argues that Conrad’s privileged tropes—work, idealism, fidelity, effect and pessimism —are not just set out in his critical writing but defined, refined and followed through in his fiction. Wollaeger is anxious to show the role and limits of scepticism in Conrad’s ‘worldview’ and resorts to Descartes, Hume and Schopenhauer in an attempt to redefine the thematics of isolation and betrayal and the relation of author to character and narrator. Erdinast-Vulcan places Conrad the writer within a modernist tradition influenced by Nietzsche, and argues that the work of Bakhtin and MacIntyre can help to grasp Conrad’s aesthetic concerns. If she is far more alert to tensions and ‘faultlines’ within Conrad, the overall approach of each critic tends to be thematic. In the case of all these books the authors strive to set up Conrad as a highly conscious artist plagued by doubts and anxieties. Several books devoted solely or partly to Conrad appear every year, not to mention the numerous articles in specialized journals (and not just those devoted to Conrad studies). It is therefore with some surprise that one finds Ambrosini evoking ‘the recent marked decline in the number of scholarly words devoted to him’ (p. 3). I would challenge this remark, not as an observation of a fact, but because it masks—as unconsciously as the discourse of these books masks, often on the mode of negation, certain key aspects of Conrad’s writing and language—a particular tendency in Conrad criticism which has consisted in foregrounding Conrad’s long and painful struggle with the very act of composition and the concomitant problems of (re)presentation and the systematic presence of this problematics in his fiction. This vital critical trend goes back to Said’s 1974 article on narrative and is perhaps best summed up by the title of Jeremy Hawthorn’s first book on the author, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness. A

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(strictly non-exhaustive) list would have to include contributions by Jameson, White, Darras, Bonney, Conroy, Fogel, Lothe, Pecora, Dobrinsky, Brooks, Staten, Paccaud (and your modest reviewer). Although various contributions falling within a ‘poststructuralist’ approach tend to fetishize the so-called ‘free play of the signifier’ (an understandable, but misguided and inaccurate attempt to combat the fetishization of moral concerns), what they have in common is an appeal to hermeneutic systems that either deconstruct an entire category of cherished beliefs (psychoanalysis and the subject) or else foreground certain tasteless aspects of life today and not only in Conrad’s day (Marxism’s insistence on History, imperialism and reified social relations). The three books in question set their faces firmly against such hermeneutic systems which have produced a body of theoretical work which, from the point of view of quality and impact, dominates Conrad studies in a way that is clearly disquieting for more traditional scholarly approaches, for whom language is either simply ‘style’ or else an optional extra. In their attempt to marginalize such decentring discourses the three authors tend to find themselves faced with the return of the repressed: what they wish to elide is referred to on the mode of denial, an eloquent testimony to its opposite. On two occasions in his discussion of Lord Jim Ambrosini draws attention to crucial elements of the novel in order to deny their presence or validity. Thus he says of the jump from the Patna and the question of whether the ship had run into something: ‘The issue is not the (non-) existence of something beyond facts. Rather, the issue is how to test the value of one’s convictions in action’ (p. 121). Two remarks seem in order here. First, Lord Jim insists that simple facts are, precisely, useless in trying to determine why Jim and the others abandoned ship: the problem is elsewhere. Second, there is a discursive strategy threading its way throughout the novel to the effect that there are certain things that it is impossible to express through words, and that words can produce meaning in excess of what is normally expected. This question of what can(not) be symbolized is the dimension of the Real that Jim’s incoherent attempts to come to grips with run up against like some immovable mass. Thus it is through Jim’s frustration and helplessness when faced with the inadequacies/excesses of language that Lord Jim strives to communicate this dilemma, a fact which, in a moment of unconscious parody, Ambrosini ‘recognises’ when he says of Marlow: ‘It is not a web of words which he is trying to unravel, but the elusive mystery of a flesh and blood human being’ (p. 128). Despite being present(ed) to us only through words, Jim is, in these terms, clearly easier to handle, more palpable, than the regrettable polysemy of language. The expression ‘a flesh and blood human being’ raises the question of the self-centred ego and, by extension, its systematic deconstruction within much of Conrad. Both Erdinast-Vulcan and Wollaeger approach this dangerous territory by way of references to the supernatural in Conrad or, rather, by way of vocabulary meant to belong to that world. Discussing Razumov’s relations to his ‘double’, Haldin, Erdinast-Vulcan reminds the reader of a remark made by Razumov: ‘I glided like a phantom’ (p. 131). It is regrettable that she should make no link between this remark and Marlow’s observation in Heart of Darkness that he and his boat and crew ‘glided past like phantoms’ to express his uncanny feeling of unreality in relation to the jungle. She might also have pointed out that the word ‘phantom’ is used to describe Nostromo; at the end of the novel he also compares himself to the lost gringos who, we are told, are ‘spectral and alive’. Wollaeger raises the question of ghosts and of ‘haunting the world’ in a discussion of ‘the author’s obsessive investment in guilt’ and the tensions that are bound to arise between faith and scepticism, with ‘hauntedness’ evoking ‘Conrad’s skeptical suspension between conflicting attitudes toward transcendence’ (pp. 36–7, 39). Wollaeger’s concern is metaphysical and religious, but he also refers to ‘the apparent power of absent causes’ (p. 36) and the absurd yet troubling fear that the self is wholly authored by forces external to it’ (p. 42). He is in fact admitting to the determining forces of History and the unconscious which can certainly be described as ‘absent causes’ inasmuch as they are symbolized through acts and words so displaced as to be

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unrecognizable for what they are. The very vocabulary of ‘phantoms’ is, of course, no accident in Conrad where it insists so massively that, in the best tradition of psychic resistance, it is overlooked by most critics.1 For we are dealing, in the very letter of the text (and Conrad’s fiction is full of letters), with that ‘phantom objectivity’ evoked by Lukács in his discussion of reification, where objects, by becoming ‘human’, communicate to reified subjects the uncanny feeling of being robbed of their very substance and of moving through the world as if devoid of genuine contact with it and other humans. This vocabulary in Conrad must therefore be grasped as the unconscious textual manifestation of the fragmented self under capitalism. By juxtaposing the uncanny and the unnatural as if they were synonyms, Erdinast-Vulcan represses the role of History within the text (p. 131). The drive to put this fragmented self back together again is urgently present in all books, but from a standpoint that is metaphysical, indeed religious and in no way determined by or from a political standpoint. Yet Conrad was surely a profoundly political writer: his work shows a consistent awareness of History, however displaced and disavowed the real issues may be. Indeed, given the nature of ideology, it is difficult to see what other form the issues could take, particularly in a conservative writer. It is a dimension of his writing that is crucially, sadly lacking in these three books whose discourse on Conrad ultimately partakes of the same unconscious design as that which Jameson pinpointed in Conrad himself, namely ‘to arrest the living raw material of life, and by wrenching it from the historical situation in which alone its change is meaningful, to preserve it, beyond time, in the imaginary’.2 Université de Lille III NOTES 1 Readers will be acquainted with the pertinent remarks made on this subject by Chris Baldick in his In Frankenstein’s Shadow (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). See also my articles ‘Is there life before capitalism? Fetishism and reification in Nostromo’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y, Université de Pau, October 1992, and ‘Language and “adjectical insistence” in Heart of Darkness’, Conradiana (forthcoming). 2 The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 238.

• Geert Lernout, The French Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), vi+291 pp., $29.95 (hardback)

• Derek Attridge (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xv +305 pp., $39.50 (hardback) $12.95) (paperback)

• Vincent J.Cheng and Timothy Martin (eds), Joyce in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xvii+292 pp., £37.50 (hardback) ROSEMARIE A.BATTAGLIA

In a meticulously researched study of the ‘New Joyce’ created by Joycean interest in France, Geert Lernout shows Joyce as a rich text for postmodernist inquiry, of which Terry Eagleton describes Finnegans Wake as the touchstone. Postmodernism is described by Lernout as diachronic, and poststructuralism critiques or attacks its logical positivistic, metaphysical ground. Its precursors are the German philosophers Hegel and Heidegger, and it is influenced by Freud’s work in France and German-French political relations. It is negative about and oppositional to ‘doctrine’, and Lernout discovers a paradigm for poststructuralist criticism in the work of Cixous, Derrida, and Sollers. It is Lernout’s contention that Joyce, the most complex of modern authors, attracts writers of theories of literature, prophets of a new era for humanity, and theorists such as Eco, Iser, and Scholes as well as the Gnostic approaches of Boldereff and Loehrich. Since the 1920s and 30s, the Irish and British have been less thrilled by Joyce than Americans. Joyce criticism in the English-speaking world varied enormously. The centre of Joyce criticism in Joyce’s lifetime was the avant-garde in France, but later this centre shifted to the US, where it remains. American Joyce criticism escaped New Criticism because of the abundance of nonacademic readers, the availability of drafts and manuscripts, and an authoritative biography. According to Lernout, Joyce has attracted theoreticians, prophets of a new era, the avant-garde, and eccentrics. After Joyce’s death, he attracted little interest in France until 1968. From 1920 to 1940 Joyce lived in Paris, where Valery Larbaud, a respected French critic, was his first important supporter. The French published Ulysses in 1929, and Louis Gillet was another important supporter. Lernout points out the differences between Joyce and the surrealists and the fact that university criticism did not avoid Joyce, although there was little room for Joyce in French literature in the 1920s and 1930s. Before and after the Second World War, Joyce was seen as the inventor of the interior monologue, although it took until 1931, when Edouard Dujardin, the author of Les Lauriers sont coupées, set the record straight in a book on the history of the interior monologue. Nouveau Roman writers claimed Joyce as a predecessor, and after 1968, the boom in Joyce studies, translators were making almost all of Joyce’s work available in French and his works were widely distributed, including three general introductions in French. The 1968 doctoral dissertation of Cixous, L’exil de James Joyce ou l’art de remplacement, begins a new interest in Joyce. Her thesis is that Joyce’s work is a copy of his life, that his life repeats his work. Cixous places herself as a prestructuralist, and Lernout criticizes Cixous’s ‘Thoth et l’écriture’ as a ‘hasty confrontation of Jacques Derrida and James Atherton’ (p. 43). Lernout takes Cixous to task for carelessness in translations from Finnegans Wake in Prénoms de personne. There are inaccurate quoting and misleading translations, and Cixous is more concerned with her own critical position than with the texts’ arguments. Nevertheless, I feel that not enough attention is given to the new genre of Joyce criticism begun by Cixous. Lernout does credit her interest in Joyce as an influence on her feminist writing, and he does credit her as one of the foremost feminist thinkers in France, along with Irigaray and Kristeva.

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Lernout writes of the great influence of Joyce on Derrida and the great concern of Derrida with Joyce’s texts. Incidentally, Derrida is not seen by Lernout as a reliable witness on Joyce. Joyce is important in Derrida’s thinking in the 1970s. The style and presentation of Glas owes a great deal to Finnegans Wake, although it is not mentioned, neither is Joyce. La Carte postale de Socrate a Freud et au delà would have been impossible without Joyce, who is present in the text itself. At the 1984 International James Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt, Derrida delivered a paper on Joyce in French lasting two hours. Derrida’s relation with Joyce is complex; with the exception of Mallarmé, there is no other creative writer to whom Derrida has returned so often. Derrida’s interest is in the privileging of the written word over the spoken (Finnegans Wake cannot be read aloud), the deconstructive process at work in Joyce’s text, and its generalized undecidability. We must, says Lernout, distinguish between the general theory and hermeneutic of Derrida. The practice of reading texts and the underlying theory of interpretation form an integral part of Derrida’s project. Lernout compares the place Hölderlin holds for Heidegger with that of Joyce for Derrida; however, Hölderlin is a witness for Heidegger and Lernout will not argue that Joyce occupies the same position for Derrida. Lacan’s interest in Joyce is similar to that of Derrida in that it tells us more about the interpreter than about Joyce or Joyce’s works. In June 1975, Lacan read the inaugural lecture at the Fifth International James Joyce Symposium in Paris. Lacan tells his readers to read Joyce in Encore: Séminaire XX (1975); and Séminaire XXIII (1975–76): Le sinthome, following the Paris Symposium, has not been published in a regular series edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, but a number of texts appeared in Ornicar? It’s interesting to note that whenever Lacan writes about Joyce, he puns as Joyce puns. Like Lacan, Joyce is a heretic, the heir of his father, un pauvre hère-étique (un pauvre here=a poor devil), and a hero. Because ‘perversion’ is nothing but a pèreversion, a version towards the father (version vers le père), the sinthome is the father. Joyce is full of the father, whom in Ulysses he must support by his art along with family, country, and race. Unconnected remarks about Joyce will characterize all the seminars in this series. Jean-Michel Rabaté is named as the most productive poststructuralist Joycean of the university critics. Lernout’s method of fault-finding occurs again in the section on Rabaté as in the section on Cixous and Aubert, as he takes us through Rabaté’s essays on Joyce. Rabaté’s poststructuralist Joycean criticism shows an evolution away from Lacan toward Derrida and Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot and he has joined the genetic research group in Paris led by Claude Jacquet. The group of Derridean critics working on Joyce is small. Joyce studies in France are still being published in traditional prestructuralist modes of criticism, and most traditional academics publish in journals devoted to Irish literature. Chapter 4, ‘Joyce and Tel Quel’, is the most intriguing chapter of the book; the renown Joyce has had with Tel Quel since its inception until its dissolution and the formation of its successor, L’Infini, attests to the abiding interest Joyce holds for Philippe Sollers and other Tel Quel Joyceans. Lernout describes the history of Tel Quel as the history of the French intellectual avant-garde. Joyce’s work first appears in Tel Quel two years after its beginning, with the publication of Umberto Eco’s ‘Le Moyen-âge de James Joyce’ in issues 11 and 12, continues through Stephen Heath’s ‘Ambiviolences’, the first telquelian, deconstructed reading of Joyce, appearing in 1972, and in the first text by Phillipe Sollers that was fully devoted to Joyce, ‘Argument’, an introduction to the translation of parts of Book IV of the Wake. Lernout states that at this point Joyce will play a part in the ‘sexual and political revolution’ of Tel Quel. At the Paris Symposium in 1975, Sollers’ paper damned representatives of the academic establishment, capitalist and imperialist Americans, and supporters of an anti-Freudian ego-psychology. Sollers describes Finnegans Wake as a political act in which Joyce opposes a ‘transnationalism’ to the nationalism of pre-war fascism. Sollers describes Joyce as taking the part of Freud against Jung, and according to Lernout he does not add much to

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the ideas articulated in Heath’s ‘Ambiviolences’ except to reinforce their ‘political and psychoanalytic consequences’. Stephen Heath’s essays on Joyce in Tel Quel form the basis of all following discussions of Joyce in Tel Quel. The Maoist Marxist-Leninist phase of Tel Quel eventually gave way to the aura of the nouveaux philosophes, a dedicated appropriation of the work of Heidegger, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Serres, and ‘the Nietzscheans’. In the meantime, Sollers underwent a ‘conversion’ from a prior anti-metaphysical, anti-religious position to an explicitly Catholic one, siding with the mystics, Gnostics, and saints in an anticlericism which does not support the church as an institution or as a community of believers. Another radical break by Sollers occurred in 1983, when Sollers leaves Seuil, abolishes Tel Quel, founds at Denoel a new journal, L’Infini, and publishes a 570-page novel, Femmes. L’Infini will continue where Tel Quel left off. In an interview with Frans De Haes, Sollers compares his novel Paradis to Finnegans Wake, and theoretical Joycean work is continued by Jean-Louis Houdebine, who has been greatly influenced by Sollers. Julia Kristeva remains close to the thinking of Sollers, her husband, but has written little on Joyce, referring to him, however, as an authority all through her work. Lernout concludes his fascinating chapter on Joyce and Tel Quel with the statement that avant-garde literature has played a central role in Tel Quel’s many phases. Writing like Joyce’s remains central in this privileging of the aesthetic, of literary discourse, of a difficult, fragmentary writing, in which ‘Tel Quel joins with Lacan, Derrida, and, behind them, with Heidegger’ (p. 168). After identifying Robert Scholes as the first American ‘structuralist’ critic of Joyce, Lernout opens Chapter 5, ‘The new Joyce in England and America’, with a discussion of Stephen Heath, the first British Joycean to turn to France and to publish in Tel Quel. Lernout places Heath in the very active New Left in Britain, and the same is true of Colin MacCabe, who followed Heath’s example. Lernout questions MacCabe’s assertion that ‘art can only participate in a revolutionary politics’, and indicates the contrast between MacCabe’s opinion that Joyce’s texts are ineffective politically and Lernout’s feeling that Sollers seems almost ‘to suggest that copies of Finnegans Wake dropped over Nazi Germany would have effectively finished the National Socialist Party’ (p. 173). Lernout further writes that it is ironic that ‘the political Joyce interpretation finally appeared in printed form in England two years after it had been abandoned by the French’ (p. 175). MacCabe’s book shares the ‘explicit antiAmericanism’ of British and Irish critics, and a series of lectures resulted from MacCabe’s presence at Cambridge, published in 1982 as James Joyce: New Perspectives. Lernout describes British poststructuralism as based on an Althusserian position that kept in close contact with politics. MacCabe’s recent silence may result from the fact that it is much more difficult in the United Kingdom to change politics and keep your aesthetics intact than in France. Lernout points out that apparently MacCabe has joined the Social Democratic Party, being reconciled with the reformist socialism to which he objected so strongly in his James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. The Fifth International James Joyce Symposium in Paris in June 1975 was the scene of a confrontation between French and American Joyceans. However, poststructuralism was not completely eluded by American Joyceans. David Hayman has had a continuing interest in French intellectual life, but the first self-proclaimed poststructuralist American Joycean was Margot Norris, who wrote three essays in 1974, later incorporated in her The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake, 1976. Her approach is based on Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Freud, and Heidegger. Suzette Henke shares the same background in phenomenology as Hillis Miller and de Man, and her Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook grew from her studies with Paul Ricoeur. The essays in Women in Joyce, edited by Henke and Elaine Unkeless, show the influence of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and in the introduction the editors state that all the essays reveal perspectives differing from that of traditional formalist criticism.

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From Frankfurt in 1984 onwards, postructuralism becomes the dominant approach in Joyce criticism. One American Lacanian Joycean is Sheldon Brivic, and the only American critic who has adopted the Tel Quel Joyce is Beryl Schlossman, who wrote her dissertation under Julia Kristeva, published as Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language. In Britain, most postructuralist Joyceans have turned to Derrida, for example Maud Ellman and Derek Attridge. However, Lernout describes the most recent influential approach in American Joyce studies as the feminist reading. Things changed radically at Frankfurt from the few references to French theory in Women in Joyce and traditional ‘gynocritical’ papers read by Karen Lawrence and Suzette Henke at the Dublin Symposium to Christine van Boheemen’s reading of ‘Penelope’ as a confirmation of the ‘otherness’ of Ulysses. Her essay is part of a longer discussion in The Novel as Family Romance, 1987. The challenge to American feminism was taken up by Bonnie Kime Scott, whose first book on Joyce and feminism is very much in the American feminist tradition, and the discovery of the French continental approach is very much a part of her second book. Jennifer Levine deals with the more Derridean problematic of originality and repetition, and Shari Benstock seems to have been ahead of most Joyce critics in her Derridean readings of Finnegans Wake. In the proceedings of the Philadelphia conference, the tendency toward the new feminist approach is pronounced. Lernout states that what surprises him in the shift of paradigms in Joyce studies is not only the lack of opposition from traditional critics but the absence of serious discussion between traditionalists and those of the challenging paradigm; what remains ironic is that by the time the North American critics adopted poststructuralism adopted from France, the majority of French critics had moved on to something else. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce is aptly entitled a ‘Companion’ for it meets the needs of beginning as well as advanced students and readers of Joyce and presents articles of both traditional and postmodernist criticism. In the first article by Attridge himself, ‘Reading Joyce’, he introduces us to the ways we can read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, explicating a passage by means of which a group of ideal readers of the Wake, each bringing his own perceptions and knowledge to the text, shows multiple themes and situations within one paragraph. Before the interpretation of the Wake passage, Attridge takes us through one story in Dubliners, ‘Eveline’, in which the sparseness of language is shown to be equivalent to the mental states of Eveline, which anticipates the style of Portrait and of Ulysses, showing at the same time an inconclusiveness or ambiguity which teases the reader about Joyce’s intentions. Is Frank really taking her to his home in ‘Buenos Ayres’? Whether or not Frank is telling the truth to Eveline, her refusal to accompany him in the end, preferring to remain in the Dublin world she knows rather than take the risk of adventure, suggests the character of Maria in the story ‘Clay’, and the repetition of The Bohemian Girl motif in both stories suggests another ironic likeness. Neither Eveline nor Maria could fulfil the role of The Bohemian Girl, although it is evident that there are parts of their personalities which would like to. Joyce’s ironic intentions as a novelist link all his works, which act as supplements to each other, one work completing the meanings begun or intended in a prior work, as, for example, Ulysses completes the meanings begun in Portrait. Eveline is like Gerty MacDowell in Ulysses and the mariner whose words must be taken with caution appears again in ‘Eumaeus’. Attridge’s deft analysis of the Wake passage shows us Joyce at his most transgressive as a fiction writer, and the reader is to suspend his normal expectations concerning plot, character, and narrative voice in reading the book. Attridge’s reading of the passage suggests the inexhaustible dimensions of meaning the reader will find in reading the Wake and its infinite suggestibility from the level of the single word or syllable to the whole. The next two articles describe the influences of Irish and Continental writers upon Joyce. Seamus Deane, in ‘Joyce the Irishman’, explains how, although Joyce renounced Catholic Ireland, he was formed by it, and his quest for artistic freedom was shaped by the examples of earlier Irish writers who had failed to attain the

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independence he sought. Klaus Reichert describes Dante and Giordano Bruno as great European influences upon Joyce, both of whom were connected with Joyce himself by exile, and Reichert finds a striking resemblance between Freud, who dealt a death blow to bourgeois morality, and Joyce. However, another European, Henrik Ibsen, was the greatest influence on Joyce, according to Reichert. Ibsen’s uncompromising attack on everything sanctioned by Western civilization attracted Joyce, as well as his exile. Joyce, Reichert points out, is like Ibsen, and what he attributed to Ibsen he assumed for himself. Gerhart Hauptmann, a successor to Ibsen, also had a great influence on Joyce. Nietzsche is presumed by Reichert to have had an effect on Joyce, particularly the equation of god and artist. Richard Wagner, who carried the spirit of revolution into art, impressed Joyce, and the leitmotif from Wagner’s opera operates in Ulysses. Except for Hauptmann, all were exiles fixated upon their countries and all were revolutionaries who broke with tradition and changed the course of history in their fields. Other Europeans who influenced Joyce were Bjornsterne Bjornsen, Jean Peter Jacobsen, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Lermontov, and Arthur Symons. Jean-Michel Rabaté gives a history of Joyce’s stay in Paris, where, after the publication of Ulysses, Joyce had extremely rapid recognition, and Rabaté states that Finnegans Wake could not have been produced in any other milieu, reiterating the European influence upon Joyce mentioned above. Jean-Paul Riquelme describes the influence of Walter Pater on A Portrait. Stephen’s alternating allegiance to the visionary and the material, which gives rise to styles of fantasy and realism by means of a double perspective, is one of Joyce’s major stylistic achievements. We experience both scepticism and the deeply felt impact of the thoughts and events in Stephen’s changing sensibility, and Joyce renders the deep ambivalence of Stephen’s mental life. The influence of Yeats’s stories can be seen in Stephen Hero, and in A Portrait Joyce created the style of memory through which recollection is framed or collected. Joyce alienates and juxtaposes extremes, transforming the heights of experience at the end of each chapter in A Portrait in turn by realistic, undermining detail. Jennifer Levine gives a reading of Ulysses, as a ‘complex unity whose intricacy matches that of a vital organism’, with ‘synchronic and spatial mapping based on repetitions’ (p. 141). She studies Ulysses as poem, novel, and text, stressing intertextuality. The ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode is seen as a deconstructive text, to ‘unravel those illusions of originality, authority, and authorship, and to jostle those planes of identity upon which “Literature” traditionally rests’ (p. 158). Margot Norris, in her excellent chapter on Finnegans Wake, suggests that no other literary work is in greater need of external guides than the Wake. In the Wake, form and content merge, and it is ‘about’ not being certain what it is about. Cosmic indeterminacies in Finnegans Wake question everything in the text. Norris suggests that something like characters and narrative emerge in this novel, but that it is difficult to learn how we know about them. To be understood at all, the text relies on endless repetitions of its coded messages. The identities of the characters are difficult to maintain because of their many associative identities and functions. The story of the family in the Wake does not unfold in a linear plot; instead there are family ‘plots’ or displaced vignettes that are often versions of one another, all versions of the same family conflicts. Joyce intended the Wake to be the ‘dream’ of his earlier texts, a supplement, as it were, that completes the meaning of the earlier texts, as though the earlier texts contained hidden truths, secret feelings and desires, and unconscious knowledge that the language ‘contains’ possible interpretations which the text does not articulate. Norris writes that there are two tendencies in Wake criticism, one that seeks or imposes coherence and order on the text, and the other that sees the impossibility of this. In the last decade, Finnegans Wake became assimilated to postmodern literature and the theoretical interpretations it generated. Scholars of the Wake either stress the random, ad hoc nature of Joyce’s note-taking or the rational and architectural construction.

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Norris concludes that the creative art that shaped Finnegans Wake was highly heterogeneous. Norris concludes that the greater familiarity with Finnegans Wake of postmodern readers will yield a greater and more comfortable relationship with a text which departs so drastically from literary convention. Freudian psychoanalytic premisses have enabled us better to confront an anarchic, unflattering, and alienating portrayal of our dreaming selves given in the perspective of modern art. Vicki Mahaffey studies Joyce’s shorter works, which show that his technique, even in longer texts, is an imagist one, adapted from poetry to narrative and massively elaborated in the process. The shorter texts provide the simplest statement of themes, treated polyphonically in the longer compositions: themes of loss, betrayal, and the interplay of psychological and social experience. The shorter works are derived from identifiable sources and became sources themselves for later work. Joyce reinterprets them and uses them. Mahaffey points to a problem in our reading of Joyce’s shorter works in the contexts of the larger ones, i.e. the disjunction between what the shorter works lack (humour, complexity, and self-consciousness) and what they share (seriatim structure, concern with betrayal, hunger for experience, appropriation of other writers’ voices). Like Joyce’s later works, the shorter works depend upon a large written tradition yet strain against the tradition they exceed. Hans Walter Gabler, in his chapter ‘Joyce’s text in progress’, finds that Joyce’s notes for Exiles deconstruct a biographical pre-text. His notes are ‘germs’ from which the autonomous text originates. One of the earliest and the most persistent of Joyce’s strategies is retextualization of the pre-text from the œuvre. Giacomo Joyce contains resurfacings in prose miniatures of ‘narrative epiphanies’ from an earlier period. In A Portrait he uses epiphany texts as pre-texts from within his own œuvre. The pretext A Portrait exploits is Stephen Hero. The writerly path from Stephen Hero to A Portrait is paved in Dubliners. Dubliners has been read as an array of intertextual references as well as auto-referentiality. A Portrait first fully succeeds as a unified rewriting of intertwining pre-texts. In a mode of rewriting within Joyce’s own œuvre as well as on the level of concerns about structure that predate the actual writing, the beginnings of Ulysses first manifest themselves. The vestiges of A Portrait are carried over into Ulysses. Stephen is redefined as a ‘foundered Icarus’ and the Hamlet chapter revolves on a restatement of Stephen’s aesthetic theories. Gabler presents Joyce’s plans for the construction of A Portrait and Ulysses. In drafts for Ulysses, Gabler states that there is always the suggestion of a descent from a pre-existing text. To all appearances, his compositions were conceived and verbalized in the mind and committed to memory before being written out as drafts. These become the carrier documents of transmission. Joyce was highly conscious of structure in creating Ulysses. ‘Circe’ was generated from earlier parts of Ulysses, a rewriting, as ‘Penelope’ is a final rewriting. Finnegans Wake has a rich document legacy that has received little critical exploration. To do justice to Joyce’s artistry in Work in Progress, Joyce scholarship may yet require a new critical outlook. Karen Lawrence’s article on Joyce and feminism begins with a discussion of feminist accusations against Joyce’s supposed misogyny; Lawrence points out that female accusation staged in Joyce’s fiction and present in his dreams addresses the charges of feminist readers like Gilbert and Gubar, who claim that women in Joyce are ‘sentenced’ to a purely material existence. Lawrence claims that this particular feminist reading ignores the way in which Joyce’s texts partly deconstruct the symbolic, encoded forms of their own representations and expose the workings of male desire. Joyce’s fictions and dream accounts implicitly acknowledge that the male writer’s representation of woman is never ‘objective’, but rather involves a combination of hubris, assault, fascination, even envy. When men write to and about the ‘Other’, emotions are never expressed simply or directly, and feelings about the ‘Other’ are highly ambivalent, changeable, and disguised from oneself. Lawrence argues that a catalogue of misogynistic images or female stereotypes in Joyce’s works fails to account for his undermining of the grounds of representation. We should not ignore his radical scepticism of the possibility of ‘lassoing’ essences, including that of the ‘vaulting

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feminine libido’. The deconstruction of presences poses a relationship between the metaphor of woman and a writing practice that disrupts patriarchal signature and conventions. Joyce’s texts unmask male anxieties of women’s power. Lawrence names Joyce a precursor of deconstruction in unmasking binary oppositions such as presence/absence, male/female. Lawrence also writes that Joyce’s critique of the ideological surface of patriarchal culture in general and his greater selfconsciousness about the mechanisms of the cultural construction of the female, seem often to coexist with the longing for a natural home in the maternal body. Although Joyce’s work from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake moves toward a radical questioning of the notion of origin, it retains the signs of longing for just such an origin or home, a longing Stephen expresses when he calls mother love ‘the only true thing in life.’ Joyce encodes, in even the most postmodern of works, Finnegans Wake and the latter parts of Ulysses, the desire for that place of birth, or origin, while simultaneously showing the impossibility of even getting beyond culture and language to a natural ‘home’. In the final chapter, ‘Joyce, modernism, and post-modernism’, Christopher Butler describes Joyce as a modernist writer who confronts the loss of traditional faith and prefers a realistic involvement with life rather than an idealistic one. Joyce’s sceptical relativism has its roots in nineteenth-century thought, particularly in Nietzsche. The tradition of thought descending from Arnold through Wilde and others was equally significant in legitimizing the feeling of distance and alienation from a social and intellectual context. In Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger there is a description of the alienation of the artist from those around him, and the young Daedalus of Stephen Hero has similar traits. Daedalus describes his sense of the modern to his friend Cranly as an anti-traditional seeing of things as they really are. Joyce managed the complete recreative and parodic mastery of previous traditions before his commitment to the experimental modernism of the opening of A Portrait. Strangely enough, Joyce is faithful to tradition; the ghosts which accompany Stephen on his walk to the University are Hauptmann, Newman, Guido Cavalcanti, Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Aristotle, Aquinas. The ideas he presents in his books are not those of the modernist avant-garde. It is through his style that modernism is implied. In the opening and closing pages of A Portrait his modernist experimentalism is totally unpredictable in terms of these influences. Joyce thus enters the experimental mainstream of modernism by an extraordinary display of technique, and not by any anterior commitment to some avant-gardist doctrine. By the time of the publication of the earlier episodes of Ulysses, he could claim that he had bequeathed to his successors new resources which were not merely matters of style. He had managed a distinctive reinvention of Symbolism in his use of the ‘epiphany’ in A Portrait and in its aesthetic theory, and he revived and extended ‘stream of consciousness’, previously found in Edouard Dujardin. By 1922, he had produced an encyclopedic epic. He vastly expanded the experimental repertoire available to the novelist and paradoxically influenced the general movement of the 1920s back towards a conservative neo-classicism. Joyce’s innovations had influenced Eliot and Pound, and Ulysses had a direct influence on Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Alfred Doblin, Hermann Broch, Vladimir Nabokov, and others. Joyce did not participate directly in the modernist movement going on around him, Butler claims. Although Joyce knew about other types of modernist experimental activity, he was not going to be drawn by them. In his library, we find only Gide, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Lawrence, Lewis, Heinrich Mann, Woolf, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Freud amongst those of his books which could be thought to have been of much interest to the avant-garde of his time. Joyce was, however, more aware of what was going on around him than this would suggest. It will be up to future critics to make parallels with contemporary art more convincing than those in the current literature. It is the ideology of avant-garde movements which Joyce found irrelevant to his purposes; he quickly appropriated modernist techniques, however, keeping himself clear of the manifestos. Joyce’s work thus has to be placed within the modernist tradition by critical comparison rather

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than through the study of its direct influence. His synthesis of past and present, rather than an ironic or satirical juxtaposition, as in Eliot, of the classical and the modern, seems to Butler to be one of Joyce’s most distinctive achievements. There were critical objections to Joyce’s work; he was judged as ‘completely anarchic’ and ‘in rebellion against the social morality of civilization’. He ‘deliberately ignores moral codes and conventions’. The reader, Butler counters, is expected to rationalize Joyce’s use of language by reference to the great change in assumptions concerning our mental life which was proclaimed by the modernists. This is the essentially post-Freudian assumption that there is an intelligible rationale for the association of apparently disjunct ideas. This was much attacked at the time, by, for example, Max Eastman, as a mere ‘cult of intelligibility’. There was considerable agreement with Edmund Wilson’s claim that Ulysses was the ‘most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human conscious ness’ (p. 272). Critics described Ulysses as a Freudian book. Butler writes that clearly Joyce would have known that he had provided excellent examples for psychoanalytic interpretation. But Butler contends that it is a separate question to decide on the nature of any Freudian influence on him. Joyce’s moral attitude toward psychoanalysis seems to have been very hostile, at least in the period of Ulysses. It seems to me that it could be argued that Joyce was producing in his fictions the same claims as Freud in his writings on the unconscious; was Joyce contemptuous of psychoanalysis in his occasional remarks because of a deep rivalry with Freud, a rivalry based on Freud both as a father-figure and a great discoverer? Do his appropriations of psychoanalytic techniques in his fictions yet his open criticisms of psychoanalysis reveal an ambivalence that is founded on Joyce’s own ambivalence toward John Joyce and Stephen Dedalus’s toward Simon Dedalus? Joyce described psychoanalysis as ‘blackmail’, although Finnegans Wake is clearly indebted to psychoanalysis, to which it frequently alludes. Butler desribes the role of the narrator in Joyce’s works as disruptive of tradition and characteristic of other modernist fiction. The Wake has been seen as an attempt at a revolution in society through the word, as an act of liberation (Sollers, Kristeva). This kind of apologia marks a point of transition from modern to postmodern writing, which is centrally concerned with the artificiality of modes of discourse, with intertextuality, and with that attack on mimesis which transforms real ‘matter-of-fact’ into a ‘matter of fict’ or ‘the matter of ficfect’. Brian McHale has described Anna Livia’s personification as the River Liffey as postmodernist fiction. Finnegans Wake was neglected in its own time, but it has had an influence later on a new tradition, on writers like Federman, Sukeick, Sorrentino, and Barthelme. For them as for Joyce, ‘the text produces a derisive hesitation of sense, the final revelation of meaning being always for “later”’, as Stephen Heath puts it. Heath concludes that the Wake produces a ‘radical contestation of the knowledge of his language constructed by the subject’ (p. 278). Margot Norris’s book on the Wake, which Butler describes as one of the best interpretations of this work to date, sees the book in relation to post-Saussurean structuralism, to Lévi-Strauss, to Lacan, and to Derrida. The Wake has served as a major inspiration to postmodernists, not only to writers and theorists but also to musicians, who have been concerned to invent alternative languages and who have wished to turn away from the consensual forms of discourse in the society which surrounds it. It has been equally influential on poststructuralist literary theory and philosophy since the 1960s. Butler concludes that Joyce wanted to be interpreted; in this he follows early modernism, which wanted to attract an audience which was willing to decode the relationships between stylistic medium and message. His works, from Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake, mark steps in the evolution of literature from the Symbolist epoch to the postmodern. Joyce in Context presents a selection of papers presented at the 1989 James Joyce Conference in Philadelphia, where 141 Joyceans presented the academic programme. The programme was large and diverse, allowing room for avant-garde as well as for traditional Joyceans. Joyce in Context is divided into four sections, ‘The Modernist Context’, ‘The Context of the Other: Joyce on the Margins’, ‘Contexts for

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Joyce’, and ‘Re-reading Joyce: Joyce in His Own Context’. The keynote address of Dennis Donaghue opens the first section of the book as well as it opened the conference. In his paper, Donaghue refers to Jameson’s argument against Ulysses and his favouring of Wyndham Lewis as surpisingly contradictory to Jameson’s Marxist claims. Jameson feels that modernist writers like Joyce and Eliot show an ‘inwardness’ which is at direct odds with Marxist ideology, and this to me raises the question of the subject in a text. Nevertheless, Donaghue points out that Jameson’s praise of Wyndham Lewis seems to be puzzling. Lewis is praised by Jameson for Fascist qualities, two of which are the separation of subject from object and the notion of characters as mere functions of their situations. Donaghue writes contra Jameson’s disparagement of the ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Ithaca’ episodes of Ulysses as the most boring of the book, and Bersani’s claim against Ulysses that it is based upon a ‘conservative ideology of the self’ and that it is a mere relocation of ‘cultural inheritance’, rather than a subversion of it. ‘Eumaus, says Donaghue, is one style among eighteen and shows that its individuality comes from ‘an assemblage of possibilities embedded in a language’ (p. 38). Johanna Garvey’s article on Woolf and Joyce sees Jacob’s Room as a dramatic re/vision of Ulysses. She presents evidence that Woolf’s work shows not only the influence of Ulysses but Woolf’s argument with it as she develops her own narrative strategies. Woolf had three preoccupations concerning Joyce’s work: the presence of the male ego, a lack of recognition for women’s writing, and indecency. She sought, according to Garvey, to compensate for or work against these preoccupations in writing Jacob’s Room. The close relationship between Ford Maddox Ford and Joyce is the basis for Vincent P.Cheng’s paper. Cheng claims that this relationship has been largely ignored in scholarship. Ford encouraged Joyce and published ‘mamalujo’, the first publication of part of Finnegans Wake, in The Transatlantic Review in 1924, which he edited. Cheng describes how close the relationship between the two men was and how each of them influenced the other’s works. Brian W.Shaffer, in ‘Joyce and Freud: Discontent and its civilization’, draws upon Freud’s theories of civilization and narcissism in The Future of An Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents to show how Joyce’s depictions of character in Dubliners and in Ulysses form a critique of modern civilization which resembles Freud’s. Shaffer shows how Gerty MacDowell in the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses shows a narcissistic selfcentredness by means of which her illusions about love parallel Freud’s concept of a narcissistic diffusion of aggressive feelings within civilization and a culturally encouraged narcissism. Both Gerty and Chandler in ‘A Little Cloud’ are trapped by paralysis, and Shaffer considers the delusions of both of them as a way to overcome the cultural suffocation of their desires. They are, in short, unable to act but merely to wish. Joyce is shown by Shaffer to offer as deft an analysis of cultural narcissism as Freud. Colleen Lamos gives a feminist consideration of Molly’s ‘signature’ as given in her monologue as a supplement in the Derridean sense, ‘one which calls into question the authority and integrity of that “first [Bloom’s] signature”’ (p. 91). She further writes that Ulysses demonstrates that difference is reproduced with the regimes of gender and that the male/female opposition is internally divided. Molly’s language is seen as a flow of feminine language like ALP’s in the Wake. Joyce’s attempt to ‘write women’s desire’ sides with the father and appears to renounce the paternal symbolic order through an alliance with the mother. But Lamos contends that ‘that alliance is simply the reappropriation of an imaginary construction’ (p. 97). Joyce, in forging Molly’s discourse, includes her as a sign of the transcendence of sexual difference in Ulysses. Theresa O’Connor presents the argument that the Celtic myths that supplied central images for Yeats’s works provided the framework for the amalgam of tales known in twelfth-century France as the Grail myth. In Ulysses, amor matris is posed against regeneration through sacrificial male blood, as given in the Grail myth, and the oscillation between these two concepts in Ulysses deconstructs or decodes the nationalist

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myth, enabling us to see the Grail as the sacrificial blood of a male victim and saviour and the regenerative blood of the mother. The French historian Michelet becomes a resonating ‘voice’ or intertext in Ulysses, according to Bonnie Kime Scott, and Michelet’s texts, which Joyce most likely had read, viewed women as part of nature and gave them a part in history. In Ulysses, Michelet becomes a figure who prepares us for Joyce’s portrayal of Molly as Gea-Tellus or as a part of nature. Suzette Henke describes Joyce as a creator of misogynistic male characters, not as necessarily misogynistic himself, defending Joyce against the castigations of feminist critics such as Carolyn Heilbrun, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar. Henke questions whether Joyce transcended dualistic female categories and the accompanying images they engender to move toward an understanding of the problems of sexual politics and female desire. For the misogynistic Stephen, amor matris was the ‘only true thing in life’, as, Henke concludes, it was for Joyce. Joyce’s masculine signature is inscribed on the ‘sexual/textual body of woman represented as mother, muse, ghost, vampire, lover, and symbolic saint’ (p. 139). Henke concludes that Joyce’s sexual obsession was pre-Oedipal; although he defiled the virginal figure in his fiction in a whorelike manner, amor matris remained for him the ‘only true thing in life’. In Part III, ‘Contexts for Joyce’, Roy Gottfried contends that Joyce’s satiric aim in Dubliners was to make his stories a parodic embodiment of a ‘paralysis’ of style, the parody of a prevalent literary style which that society had indifferently read, the writing of the Literary Revival and Irish letters. This style was like the style of the daily press and Joyce called that style ‘mean’. When Joyce claims he wrote in a style of ‘scrupulous meanness’, he mimics in reconstruction expected features of the Irish Revival, ‘within the context of what the public thinks of as literary style in the language it had “seen” in the press’ (p. 161). Therefore, the style of Dubliners is a comic caricature of the style prevalent in Joyce’s time. Garry M.Leonard studies the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses in ‘Joyce and Lacan’, where Deasy’s linear, teleological view of history serves his own misogynism and paranoia. Lacan states that the fictional unity of subjectivity makes the representation of ‘reality’ in language seem real, but the ‘Real’ persists beyond the subject’s knowledge. How a nation depends on ‘History’ for a belief in its destiny is similar to the way a subject depends on a reconstructed memory of an individual past. The goal of ‘history’ is a more righteous nationalism, and the goal of ‘His [ ]tory’ is a more secure egotism. Stephen wishes to narrate ‘His [ ]tory’ as opposed to Deasy’s nationalistic history. We cannot directly apprehend the ‘Real’, according to Lacan, so we interpret it by telling stories that ‘intersect with the story of our “selves”’ (p. 176). A close reading of ‘Ithaca’ by Constance Tagopoulos reveals thematic parallels with The Odyssey of Homer embedded in Joyce’s text by stylistic and rhetorical devices which show intertextuality. Joyce chose The Odyssey because it is a domestic epic, according to Tagopoulos. ‘Ithaca’ in Joyce’s text focuses on the homecoming, re-stating Vico’s argument of the historical recurrence of basic situations and experiences. The Homeric model of return, disguise, and recognition is applied to Joyce’s ‘Ithaca’. Dan Schiff, in ‘James Joyce and cartoons’, looks at evidence concerning Joyce’s experience with cartoons, examines cartoon characters in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and assesses why Joyce referred to specific cartoons in his last two novels. Part IV, ‘Re-reading Joyce: Joyce in His Own Context’, presents traditional Joycean criticism by Ian Crump, Fritz Senn, Bernard Benstock, and Di Jin. Of interest in this section is Ian Crump’s paper on narrative style in Portrait as a merging of character and narrator, of first and third persons, a style that allows us to experience Stephen as both actor and writer. This intermingling shows a change in the style of Portrait, differentiating it clearly from Stephen Hero. In order to understand the relation of the aesthetic theory to Portrait, Crump says we must examine the evolution of the theory. Concerning the distancing of the artist from his handiwork, Crump writes that Joyce was prevented by his ‘ineradicable egoism’ in his

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initial attempts to represent his past selves. Crump indicates that there is a confusion of consciousness between Stephen and Joyce in Stephen Hero, which led Joyce too confuse his narrative authority with Stephen’s. The last three papers in the book, those of Fritz Senn, Bernard Benstock, and Di Jin, open up further exploration in Joyce studies. Senn presents the issue of the Joycean catalogue in the early works and invites scholars to enter the lists and help classify the Joycean catalogues, and Bernard Benstock, again on cataloguing the catalogues, places Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in the epic tradition because of Joyce’s use of various kinds of lists. Di Jin is writing a translation of Ulysses into Chinese and explains the extreme difficulty of so doing. Jin examined various translation of Ulysses for principles of translation, and he believes that a literary translator should always work for the ‘closest approximation in total effect’ (p. 283). Morehead State University

• Brian Rigby, Popular Culture in Modern France: A Study of Cultural Discourse (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 244pp., £35.00 (hardback), £10.99 (paperback) IAN BUCHANAN

Popular Culture in Modern France by Brian Rigby is misnamed. That is to say, the title does not do justice to either the breadth or importance of this study; nor does the second part of the title: A Study of Cultural Discourse. It too is inadequate. Something like ‘An Archaeology of Contemporary French Thought on Popular Culture’ would have been more fitting, for that is what it really is. Rigby puts the concept ‘popular culture’ under the microscope and analyses the various stances French theorists have taken with regard to this subject. Confined to the latter half of this century, Rigby’s study takes us from the late 1930s to the present day and details with precision the complex process of evolution ‘la culture populaire’ has undergone. The question, What is popular culture? is a vexed one, and not one for which an answer readily exists. What Rigby demonstrates is that the meaning of this concept will very often depend upon the motives of its user. Whether it invokes ‘the people’, or just ‘people’ depends entirely on the user of ‘popular culture’ as a concept believing in either of these terms. Certain theoreticians refuse the idea ‘the people’ because it implies a political unity they do not believe exists. Therefore, for their own purposes, popular culture refers to people, humans in the plural without any inference of collectivity. Conversely, for others, popular culture is the culture of ‘the people’, meaning—virtually speaking—the proletariat or working class and is opposed to a concept of high or dominant culture and is, in practice, quite categorical. For still others, popular culture is connotative of peasant culture (‘a people’ in other words); referring to nearly extinct, folkloric practices carried out by a minority population of subsistence farmers. Here again, the implication is that the peasants are the ‘true’ people, they are closer to their roots than everyone else and are therefore less corrupted by modern society. Obviously, the inflexion the individual theorist chooses is revealing in itself: ‘people’, ‘the people’ or ‘a people’, as concepts all entail an agenda. The extreme case is represented by Baudrillard. In an account of the Georges Pompidou Centre, Baudrillard described it as a ‘monument of cultural dissuasion’ (p. 187). Baudrillard, in this account, refuses the notion of people altogether because it would be too purposive, and instead employs the term ‘masses’. ‘[Baudrillard] did not think of the masses as made up of individual agents…. Rather, he saw them as primitive, mindless units moving around in a mechanical fashion’ (p. 188). The end-point of the postmodern condition of alienation is, of course, the reduction of people to units. Bourdieu’s sociological platform which is supposedly free of bias is interrogated at length by Rigby, revealing a predisposition for ‘high’ culture and demonstrating that for Bourdieu democratization means ‘raising’ the standards of the barbarous working class. Bourdieu, Rigby argues, ‘may in reality, have done as much as Kant to perpetuate the idea that popular culture is a grossly inferior and degraded form of culture’ (p. 106). This charge stems from Bourdieu’s insistence that no form of culture, or style, escapes the influence of background; that working-class culture is in effect a culture of necessity not choice. On this point Rigby concedes that Bourdieu’s project may have its merits. By describing working-class culture as a

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culture of deprivation Bourdieu paves the way more forcefully for reform measures than do socialist critics who valorize the wholesomeness of working-class culture. Rigby does not allow the theory to stand aside from the theorist, so far as he is concerned the two go hand in hand. ‘Although Bourdieu likes to keep his ideological positions well under control in his sociological work, it seems clear that his treatment of cultural matters has been significantly determined by his own attitudes’ (p. 100). Rigby operates in dangerous territory here: how does he know exactly what Bourdieu’s attitudes are? The intentional fallacy is a chasm into which the unwary can fall. But by the same token, by not confronting the attitudes of the actual theorists themselves, ambiguity is allowed to reign supreme and the hidden agendas are never brought into the open. As such theorists are not held accountable for their theories. For example, are we supposed to take Bourdieu’s description of working-class culture as barbarous literally or figuratively? Rigby seeks his answer from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Questioning the theorist, not the theory, as a methodology is used powerfully by Rigby. Roland Barthes’ stance with regard to culture, Rigby argues, is deeply coloured by his homosexuality—‘Barthes’ unashamed contempt for…“ordinary” lives was in reality an essential element in his critique’ (p. 179). Justification for this claim is found, first of all in Mythologies, in which Barthes castigates a young couple for marrying and choosing to believe the petit-bourgeois dream, but more strongly in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes in which Barthes writes: ‘The potential for enjoyment that follows from a perversion (in this instance, that of the two H’s: homosexuality and hashish) is always underestimated’ (p. 179). ‘For Barthes “pluralism” was not therefore…a democratic concept that acknowledged otherness…. It was, rather, a deeply individualistic notion that allowed for infinite possibilities of “dispersion” and “multiplication”’ (p. 180). Ultimately Barthes’ position is rather similar to that of Bourdieu—though willing to treat popular cultural forms as art and apply exactly the same kinds of methodologies to it, Barthes does not relinquish prior notions of ‘distinction’. Reserving the right to judge good against bad, high against low, vulgar or sophisticated, is essentially the difference between Barthes, Bourdieu, Baudrillard and the theorists of ‘the everyday’, namely, de Certeau, Mayol and Giard. On one side, there is a need to find a way to transcend the ordinary and everyday, to escape its barbarousness. On the other side of this informal equation is the everyday as a kind of transcendence. Effectively summarizing their project (the three worked together frequently) Giard wrote that there was a ‘need to return to insignificance in order to break out of the feeling of being hemmed in by an ideology and by an intelligentsia’ (p. 27). This entailed a refusal to despise so-called mass culture. In so doing these theorists ran counter to Henri Lefebvre, a noted theorist of the everyday who also called for a move away from the marvellous to the ordinary. Lefebvre despised mass culture not because of its vulgarity or crassness or any other value-based assessment, but rather because he saw any culture that was commodity-centric as being alienating (p. 34). De Certeau, on the other hand, regarded commodities as raw materials which people used productively to fashion their own plenitude (p. 21). Thus rendering the very notion of mass culture redundant. De Certeau’s commitment to pluralism is reflected in the numerous works he devoted to the subject; he argued that the everyday was filled with creative possibility and that it was not just the festive, ‘la fête’, as theorists after Bakhtin insisted (most notably, Lefebvre, who wanted to end the distinction between the everyday and the festive (pp. 34–5)) that had subversive potential. Unlike Bourdieu, for example, de Certeau did not regard the everyday as necessarily repressive. ‘Capitalist society may repress, but it does not, in fact, destroy the creativity of the people’ (p. 34). Wishing to escape the connotations of such overdetermined terms ‘the people’ or ‘popular’, de Certeau et al. instead took to referring to people as either users or practitioners and situated them within ordinary or everyday culture. By emphasizing the productivity of the users of a particular culture these theorists were able to reformulate contemporary thinking about culture, and rather than argue for a need to find a way of

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rising above the ordinary they demonstrated how extraordinary the ordinary was. Perhaps most importantly, they demonstrated that whilst the modern might be alienating, modern people were coping. Mayol provides a good example of this kind of thinking: the user of the city…always succeeds in creating for himself [sic] places to which he can withdraw; he always manages to devise itineraries for his use or pleasure, which are the marks he himself has contrived to mark on the urban landscape. (p. 23) The implicitly positive attitude taken by these theorists of the everyday has recently begun to find favour, particularly among those disgruntled with the pessimism of postmodernism. However most Marxist theorists find de Certeau’s thinking to be too positive, that is to say, blind to the very real repression encountered by the dominated classes. As Rigby makes clear, ‘popular culture’ is by no means a contestfree term, its definition depending to a great degree on a prior understanding of ‘people’. ‘The willingness or unwillingness of writers to use the term “le peuple” is a central issue in all the texts with which I am dealing’ (p. 41). By concentrating attention on this one issue Rigby facilitates a rapid appraisal of a broad range of theories and theorists, thereby opening avenues for future research. Someone not inclined to see the everyday as a site of plenitude will know to steer clear of de Certeau, Mayol and Giard for example. But might instead want to follow the path outlined by a number of other thinkers not mentioned so far, such as Charpentreau and Kaes who wrote, in 1962, that ‘If everyday life is mass culture, then…people must not experience it passively but must learn how to respond actively to the given environment’ (p. 43). There has long been a need for this kind of study: French theory is prominent in many other areas of critical thinking in the humanities but is yet, I believe, to truly make its mark in cultural studies. So far this field has been dominated, to a great extent, by the so-called Birmingham school. The cross-section provided by Rigby indicates that there are many valuable works written in French that Anglophones can no longer ignore. Murdoch University

• Molly Andrews, Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 229 pp., £30.00 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback) WILLY MALEY

The oldest hath borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (King Lear, V.iii.324–5) One version of the recent history of textual practice is that we have moved from life to work, and from work to text. This is regarded as a kind of intellectual ageing process, one in which we have left behind both biography—as a product of bourgeois individualism—and the humanist notion of a text as a life’s work. We should be wary though of the idea of progress implicit in this theoretical shift. A certain ‘chronologocentrism’ or academic ‘ageism’ may be at work. For a start, from a deconstructive standpoint, there is nothing outside the generalized text, and certainly not life or labour. The unpopularity of biography in modern literary theory is an understandable reaction to the Romantic cult of the individual author, and an inevitable consequence of the naturalization of the classical subject, which has become so transparent, so much a part of the ineluctable modality of life, that it is difficult to detect, let alone deconstruct. But the textual cruces of ‘biographism’ cannot be wished away by an act of critical will. Nor can class difference and the need for social change be lightly dismissed. First Margaret Thatcher insisted that there was no such thing as society, then John Major claimed we have a classless one. The socalled ‘collapse of communism’ has contributed to the growing unfashionability of explicit political activism and the literature of commitment. Class has been virtually abandoned both as a means of analysis and as a lever for change. This double reaction against individual biography and social theory has led to an impasse in academic writing. Marxism, and, by extension, Marxist literary criticism, appears something of an embarrassment at the moment, while nobody is in any particular hurry to get back to the titillating trivia of authors’ lives. Criticism has become increasingly asocial and anti-biographical. Yet biography, like nationalism, is a complex text that demands to be read. Similarly class, interacting with race, gender, and age, remains central in structuring the working lives of readers and writers. It too is a complex, differentiated, heterogeneous and variegated text. In Lifetimes of Commitment, Molly Andrews looks at the sustained commitment of ‘fifteen people who, for at least half a century, have dedicated themselves to working for social change’. In doing so, she undoes the opposition between youthful radicalism and ageing conservatism. The men and women whose lives she looks at and listens to have grown into, not out of socialism. Theirs have been lifetimes of sustained political commitment, inspiring and instructive. Andrews defines ‘commitment’ in terms of a lasting adherence to the politics of social change. She maps out four features of commitment—intention, duration, action, and priority. Her fifteen interviewees have led committed lives for over half a century, participating in a variety of political struggles, from fighting Franco to actively opposing apartheid.

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Andrews is cognisant of the pitfalls of oral history, and a scholarly disquisition ‘On the subject of subjectivity’ anticipates objections from a range of critical perspectives. Despite the apparent subjectivity of her material, and an unabashed predilection for psychologizing, she is relentlessly anti-essentialist and rigorously materialist in her analyses. But are the voices of her respondents to be taken as a mark of authenticity and unmediated experience? Can the subaltern speak? Is information that comes straight from the horse’s mouth more valuable than interpretation? Andrews opts for a critical engagement with her subjects and her subject matter. Elderly political activists reflecting on the events of the 1930s that galvanized and motivated a generation of left-wing intellectuals— the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, the Hunger Marches, the Spanish Civil War—could have generated nostalgia, romanticism, sentimentalism. It is a credit to Andrews’ interviewing technique and methodology that precious little of the mawkishness one might expect to be engendered by such harking back to the heyday of the ‘British Left’ manifests itself. Instead we get an heterogeneous array of histories which rely on insight rather than hindsight, with Andrews acting as a skilful facilitator for some sharp recollections. For me the most engaging and inventive part of Lifetimes of Commitment is the second chapter, headed ‘The potential of social identity theory’, which offers a useful corrective to that sterile academic sectarianism which regards ‘Race’, ‘Gender’, and ‘Class’ as self-contained, mutually exclusive totems. Andrews prefers to think in terms of ‘multiple group membership’. She warns against the privileging of one form of difference over another: Oppression, by its very nature, relies on hierarchy. By prioritizing one aspect of difference over another, are we not creating fertile grounds for oppression to reproduce itself? One is reminded here of the well worn strategy: Divide and Conquer. Let us move away, then, from this dangerous essentialist construction of identity. (p. 41) This is refreshing compared with the naïve and simplistic distinctions drawn up by those critics who do not let their advocacy of interdisciplinarianism or their affection for intertextuality prevent them from partitioning difference. It is especially pertinent for those who use fetishized concepts of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’ as sticks with which to beat the—in their eyes—outmoded category of ‘Class’ into submission. One can see difference as part of the problem or part of the solution. But if it is to be not only accepted and tolerated, but celebrated, then it should be appreciated in its multiplicity as well as its singularity. There is one point on which Andrews has the Achilles Heel of many social scientists and literary critics who, when discussing Marx or Marxism, feel themselves to be under no obligation to resort to primary texts. Secondary sources suffice. (I am well aware of the conceptual difficulties that lie behind the separation of primary and secondary sources, and indeed I am always alert to the problematics of sources as such, but it seems to me to be an ethical responsibility to read the ‘original’ before taking a representation, and particularly a refutation, at face value). Andrews alludes to the ‘classical socialist position on women’s oppression’ as ‘a product of class oppression’, and adds: The first well-known, coherent and influential statement of this position was in Friedrich Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. (p. 36)

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Andrews goes on to cite a feminist critique of Engels to this affect. But the derivation of this ‘classical socialist position’ is bogus. What Engels writes in the text referred to is that the social division of labour grows out of the sexual division of labour, i.e. contra Andrews et al., sexual difference precedes class difference in Engels’ book. Andrews has researched her subject thoroughly, and as well as setting out in detail the debate on age in western capitalist societies, she supplies an historical framework of events within which one can read the individual histories of her respondents. Yet in supplementing anecdotes and memories with hard facts, Andrews does not simplistically posit ‘History’ as an absolute given. The historical chapter that forms a bridge between the theoretical and analytical halves of the book is entitled ‘A nation in turmoil: Britain between the wars’. This is an excellent piece of historical exposition, erudite and perceptive, but its frame of reference is somewhat narrower than is suggested by the title. As an American working in Cambridge, England—Lifetimes of Commitment began life as a doctoral thesis in the Department of Social and Political Science there—Andrews may be forgiven for mistaking Little England for Great Britain. Coming from a different continent, it is as easy to substitute British for English as it once was to substitute Soviet for Russian. Many English critics manage the same incontinence without the excuse of cultural distance. There is of course no British nation, only a British state, containing— in every sense of the word—four nations, and many more nationalities. Much of the anxiety and awkwardness of the ‘British Left’, not to mention its innate conservatism with respect to the state, has its roots in its own oxymoronic appellation. There is a fundamental contradiction inherent in the idea of a ‘British’ road to socialism. Marx recognized the Union as the saviour of the British state and the cause of the becomingbourgeois of the English working class. My own feeling is that the problem with the CPGB was not the CP but the GB, in the same way that the problem with the CPSU was not the CP but the SU. Between communism and unionism lies the fraught terrain of the national question, the question that no amount of obituaries for the ‘nation-state’ will dispel. The age of nationalism, far from being over, has only just begun. The class struggle waits in the wings, its resolution postponed. This is not merely another hazardous hierarchization. Nationalism is before class not in the sense of prioritization. It does not precede class, it confronts it. In these days when the ideology of the aesthetic comes before historical experience, beauty before age, anything that lends itself to a critique of the current modish preoccupation with novelty has to be applauded. New Historicism, the New Left, the New Right, New Realism, the New World Order, Late Capitalism, PostMarxism, Post-Structuralism, Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism—we need something to counteract the Johnnycome-latelies of contemporary critical theory. Andrews’ comprehensive investigation of the ageing process as it affects political activism, drawing on a series of individual case studies while never losing sight of their social context, is a model of a mature form of textual practice that is mindful of history and devoid of that easy cynicism with respect to political commitment that is a sign of the folly of youth rather than the wisdom of age. Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London

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Notes for contributors

Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English, to Professor Terence Hawkes at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XB. 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. By submitting a manuscript the author agrees that he or she is giving the publisher the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the paper, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microfilm or any other reproduction of a similar nature. Authors will not be required to assign the copyright. 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: J.Hartley and J.Fiske, ‘Myth-representation: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), pp. 12–33. C.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 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 Ten offprints will be supplied free of charge.