Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture)

unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture

Esther Rashkin

UNSPEAKABLE SECRETS AND THE

P S YC H OA NA LY S I S O F C U LT U R E

SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture Henry Sussman, editor

UNSPEAKABLE SECRETS AND THE P S YC H OA NA LY S I S O F C U LT U R E

Esther Rashkin

Jacket illustrations: Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait (Isabel Rawsthorne) 1964 and a detail (left panel) of Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964. © 2008 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rashkin, Esther, 1951Unspeakable secrets and the psychoanalysis of culture / Esther Rashkin. p. cm. — (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7533-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures— Psychological aspects. 2. Psychology and literature. 3. European fiction— 19th century—History and criticism. 4. Secrecy in literature. 5. CryptoJews. I. Title. PN1995.R353 2008 741.43'653--dc22 2007041849 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Allan

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Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Vexed Encounters: Psychoanalysis, Cultural Studies, and the Politics of Close Reading Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Conclusion

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Devouring Loss: A Recipe for Mourning in “Babette’s Feast”

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Tortured History: Crypts, Colonialism, and Collaboration in Last Tango in Paris

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Haunted Children, Cultural Catastrophe, and Phantom Transmissions in the “Dirty War” and the Holocaust

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Religious Transvestism and the Stigma of Jewish Identity

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Anticipating the Final Solution: Symbolism and the Occulted Jew in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël

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Imperial Legacies and the Art of Abuse in The Picture of Dorian Gray

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The Ghost of Cultural Studies

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Notes

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Index

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I l l u s t r at i o n s

Figure 1.1. Babette’s Feast (1987): Quail in Sarcophagus Figure 1.2. Quail ready to be consumed Figure 2.1. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Paul taunts Jeanne Figure 2.2. Paul pretends to eat a rat Figure 2.3. Paul speaks to Rosa Figure 2.4. Tango dancers Figure 2.5. Tom reverses gear Figure 2.6. Dolly shot descends on Paul Figure 2.7. Train on the bridge Figure 2.8. Jeanne walks behind Paul Figure 2.9. Jeanne turns to look at Paul Figure 2.10. Jeanne as transference object Figure 2.11. Jeanne as analyst Figure 2.12. Jeanne “explains” the killing Figure 2.13. Paul wears a kepi Figure 2.14. Jeanne takes aim Figure 2.15. Cleansing power of Vigor Figure 2.16. Jeanne and Tom fight Figure 2.17. CRS Figure 2.18. Night and Fog (1955): Jews at the Vél’ d’Hiv’ Figure 2.19. Last Tango in Paris: Rue Jules Verne Figure 2.20. Night and Fog: shot #39 uncensored Figure 2.21. Shot #39 censored ix

35 35 49 49 53 58 61 65 65 66 66 67 67 70 72 73 78 79 79 85 85 87 88

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Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

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n the clinical realm we speak of the importance of process, and of how insight and transformation occur over time as ideas are explored, emotions experienced, and relationships developed. This book emerged from a parallel process that was nurtured and sustained by friends and colleagues who generously shared with me their expertise and critical insights, and who offered invaluable suggestions and unwavering encouragement as the project evolved. I am especially grateful to Vincent Cheng, Thérèse De Raedt, Karen Edwards, Colette Gaudin, Gema Guevara, Vivian Kogan, Lawrence Kritzman, Eric Lager, James Lehning, Michael Levine, Deborah Porter, Todd Reeser, Randy Stewart, and Georges Van Den Abbeele. I also want to express my gratitude to those friends whose enthusiasm and support have been so meaningful to me as this project has matured: Nina Boguslavsky, Elisabeth Catroux, Kary Cotter, Francoise and Jacky Guindon, Christine Norman, Stewart Olsen, Merritt Stites, and Harriet Wolfe. I am also grateful to my students and patients who, over the years, have invited me to explore with them the life of the mind and the world of emotions, and who have helped me to see how inextricably linked these truly are. I want to thank the American Psychoanalytic Association for a yearlong Fellowship that provided not only an intellectually stimulating experience, but also an immensely enjoyable one. I also would like to acknowledge the generous support for my project provided by the University of Utah Research Committee and by the College of Humanities Career Development Committee at the University of Utah. My sincere thanks to Ceres Birkhead and the other librarians and media and technology specialists at the Marriott Library of the University of Utah for their invaluable help. I also want to express my appreciation to Henry xi

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Sussman, James Peltz, Larin McLaughlin, and Marilyn Semerad at the State University of New York Press for their support and sage advice. A slightly different version of chapter 1 appeared in Style, Special Issue on Psychoanalysis: Theory and Practice, 29, 3 (Fall 1995). Chapter 3 is a revised and expanded version of an article first published in Psychoanalytic Review, 86, 3 (June 1999). An earlier draft of chapter 4 appeared in Religion and the Arts, 1, 4 (1997). An initial version of chapter 5 was printed in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 26, 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1998), and a very small portion of chapter 6 was published in Modern Philology, 95, 1 (August 1997); copyright 1997 by The University of Chicago. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to use this material. All illustrations in this volume were taken from the following DVD sources: Babette’s Feast, director Gabriel Axel (A-S Panorama Film International, copyright 1987; MGM Home Entertainment Inc., copyright 2001); Last Tango in Paris, director Bernardo Bertolucci (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., copyright 1972; MGM Home Entertainment Inc., copyright 1998); and Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog], director Alain Resnais (Argos Films, copyright 1956; The Criterion Collection, copyright 2003). The lyrics of En el país de Nomeacuerdo by María Elena Walsh are from Inolvidable (Sony Music Entertainment—Argentina, S. A., copyright 1999).

I N T RO D U C T I O N Vexed Encounters: Psychoanalysis, Cultural Studies, and the Politics of Close Reading

In sum, academic criticism is, paradoxically, prepared to accept . . . the principle of interpretive criticism or, to use a different word (which still causes fear), ideological critique; but it denies that this interpretation and this ideology can function in a realm that is purely internal to the work; in short, what is rejected is immanent analysis: everything is acceptable as long as the work can be put in relation to something besides itself, that is, something besides literature: history . . . , psychology . . . , these elsewheres of the work will gradually be allowed; what will not be allowed is criticism that establishes itself within the work and posits the work’s relation to the world only after having entirely described it from the interior, in its functions or, as we say today, in its structure . . .1 —Roland Barthes, “The Two Criticisms”

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he relationship between psychoanalysis and cultural studies is a vexed one. It need not be. I want to argue in this study that psychoanalysis galvanizes—in a way that no other discipline can—the contact between texts and social, historical, and political contexts. It illuminates

For the reader’s convenience, page references to primary texts in each chapter appear throughout in parentheses following quotations. All ellipses within quotations are my own, unless stated otherwise. I most often use The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), cited throughout as OED, and Le Grand Robert de la langue française, 2nd edition (Paris: Le Robert, 1985), cited as Le Grand Robert, to confirm the common usage and meaning of a word at the time it was used in a text because these reference works provide dates and examples of usage. Other reference works are used for confirmation and are cited where appropriate.

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obscured ideology and exposes cultural connections that would otherwise remain unseen. It does this best when it is anchored in a focused practice of close reading, a practice that cultural studies has marginalized along with psychoanalysis itself. To retrace, psychoanalytically, the concealed lines of transmission between text and context thus also means to recast close textual analysis itself as an engaged political practice with formidable hermeneutic and heuristic powers. This study springs from my investigations of literary and film narratives that conceal within themselves distressing, unspeakable, potentially psychopathogenic secrets. Uncovering these secrets and their vicissitudes, which psychoanalysis is well equipped to do, reveals powerful and too-often overlooked engagements between these works of literature and film and specific cultural and ideological constellations. This project is thus at odds with recent trends in cultural studies. Scholarship’s intensive exploration of all dimensions of cultural production during the last fifteen years has dealt with psychoanalysis in only two ways: either it has ignored it (as a glance at cultural studies journal contents, anthologies, and conference programs reveals); or it has understood psychoanalysis to mean Freudian and Lacanian theory. When cultural studies does deploy Freud and Lacan in the service of ideological critique, they are primarily confined to support status. Freud’s theory of “identification,” for example, may be called upon to bolster a sociopolitical analysis of how race, class, or gender constructs public space. Lacan’s concepts of the “phallus” and “the Other” may serve to reinforce a materialist critique of rap music marketing or gender inequities in public education. While these deployments have value, they barely touch the theoretical wealth that psychoanalysis has to offer the study of cultural practices.2 It has not always been this way.

REREADING MYTHOLOGIES Roland Barthes overtly appealed to psychoanalysis for help in reading certain cultural phenomena in Mythologies, a work that most regard as one of the founding texts of cultural studies. In the essay entitled “Soappowders and Detergents” [“Saponides et Détergents”], first published in 1954 following a world conference on detergents held in Paris that year, Barthes turns his attention to the advertising of cleansing agents. In this, as in the other essays in Mythologies, Barthes elaborates “in detail” a semiologically based demystification of the discursive practices and soci-

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ocultural representations that confuse the historical with the natural.3 To put it another way, he shows how these practices present as immanent and authentic what is symbolically and ideologically constructed in post–World War II French society. It is clear that Mythologies takes as its focus or “essential enemy” the “bourgeois norm.”4 What is striking about the essay on “Soap-powders and Detergents,” on which I want to focus, is its suggestion that psychoanalysis, a term Barthes uses “without reference to any specific school,” take a close look at the advertising campaigns being disseminated by the detergent manufacturers.5 These campaigns, Barthes argues, have been so massive that the laundry products now belong to a region of French daily life which the various types of psychoanalysis would do well to pay some attention to if they wish to keep up to date. One could then usefully contrast the psychoanalysis of purifying fluids (chlorinated, for example) with that of soap-powders . . . or that of detergents. . . . The relations between the illness and the cure, between dirt and a given product, are very different in each case. (36) [font aujourd’hui partie de cette zone de la vie quotidienne des Français, où les psychanalyses, si elles se tenaient à jour, devraient bien porter un peu leur regard. On pourrait alors utilement opposer à la psychanalyse des liquides purificateurs (Javel), celle des poudres saponidées . . . ou détergentes. . . . Les rapports du remède et du mal, du produit et de la saleté sont très différents dans l’un ou l’autre cas.]6 Barthes’s essay positions psychoanalysis as a valuable if not privileged heuristic instrument for deciphering the semantic and semiotic strategies employed in the marketing of soaps. We did not realize, until Barthes, that there were any such strategies. Barthes goes on to amplify his argument in the next paragraph, commenting that, “even in the category of powders, one must in addition oppose against advertisements based on psychology those based on psychoanalysis” (37). (It is worth noting, and I will come back to this, that Barthes distinguishes face creams from soap powders because the former, which he discusses in another Mythology, “have a very different psychoanalytic meaning” [37]). There is more to say about detergents, however: the essay reconfigures the discourse of detergents in terms of illness and cure, malady and

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remedy. It thereby suggests not only that there is a psychopathological dimension to the French cultural practice of cleansing that justifies seeking consultation from psychoanalysis (as opposed to its presumably less sophisticated cousin, psychology) that would be sensitive to the workings of the unconscious. It also implies that the possibility of “cure” exists, and that there is some chance for relief or deliverance from the distress or pain embedded in the antagonisms between dirt and detergent, soil and soap. Barthes’s analysis raises two questions. First, how might we explain this sudden onset of soap advertising in mid-1950s France? Second, what are we to make of his surprising invocation of psychoanalysis in the midst of a semiotically grounded demythifying of the bourgeois ideology that has been woven into the marketing of laundry products? The first question has already been asked, and to some degree answered, by another reader of Barthes, Kristin Ross, in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995). Ross’s thesis—that France’s rapid, postwar modernization was propelled not only by the forces of American technology and consumerism, but also by the decolonization of Algeria—illustrates the insights that strong cultural analysis can provide. It also reveals what cultural studies can miss, and what psychoanalysis can help us see. Ross invokes Barthes to launch her examination of the cult-like status of hygiene in the postwar French domestic sphere. She is impatient with the clichéd narrative of wartime deprivation, which has long served to explain France’s postwar hunger for consumer goods as a natural outgrowth of the literal hunger France suffered during the Occupation. Ross claims that Barthes puts his finger on the real psychic need underlying this consumption at the end of his essay in Mythologies on skin cream, entitled “Depth Advertised” [“Publicité de la profondeur”], which she quotes: “‘Decay is being expelled (from the teeth, the skin, the blood, the breath)’: France is having a great yen for cleanliness.”7 If Barthes correctly identifies France’s deep need to be clean, however, Ross observes that neither he nor his contemporary chroniclers of the quotidian (Lefebvre, Baudrillard) ever explain why this is so, or how this hunger for hygiene is related to postwar modernization or France’s mutating concept of nationhood. This is Ross’s project. Ross acknowledges briefly how metaphors of hygiene are woven through postwar discourses of anti-Pétainist political purges, campaigns for moral purification, and efforts by literary authors (notably of the “New Novel”) to clean up novelistic style. But she wants to focus on

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even more immediate history. That is, she explains France’s virtual obsession with cleanliness, which advertising campaigns and women’s magazines stoke as they target (primarily) women, as an effect of the end of empire and the displacement of colonial administrative and disciplinary practices into the realm of everyday metropolitan domesticity. In soonto-be postcolonial France, cleanliness is the means by which the French will maintain their difference from and superiority over the formerly colonized. France must become a modern nation, which means a technologically advanced and hygienic one, because Algeria is becoming an independent nation. “[S]ome distinction between the two must still prevail. France must, so to speak, clean house; reinventing the home is reinventing the nation” (Ross, 78). Ross’s thesis is a highly suggestive, provocative contribution to current thinking about postwar French history and culture. She illustrates it with an eclectic array of cultural artifacts and social practices ranging from advertisements for kitchen appliances and laundry detergents to film representations of domesticity and autobiographical accounts of French techniques of “clean torture” in Algeria. Some have questioned the accuracy of her history and her use of metaphor and unexpected juxtaposition to argue her case. Others have accused her of going too far in linking what she calls France’s “modernization” and “culture of cleanliness” (Ross, 74) to decolonization and France’s changing concept of national identity.8 I would argue that she does not go far enough. At least not in her reading of France’s obsession with hygiene. Even as she seeks to provide an alternative “experience of the historicity” (Ross, 10) of France’s modernization, which postmodernist theories, steeped in “the dissolution of the event and of diachronic agency, seek to efface” (Ross, 10), she herself stops too soon, abandons her own diachronic counterdiscourse. A close, psychoanalytic reading of Barthes’s essays on detergents and skin cream, to which Ross refers, will help illustrate my point. It will also suggest how psychoanalysis can expose ideology and unconscious political motives and dynamics, embedded within societal practices and discourses, that resist detection by materialist cultural analysis. Ross has not paid close enough attention to the metaphoric dimension of Barthes’s language, which is crucial to his project and to mine. Barthes observes a key semiotic distinction in the marketing of soappowders and detergents that hinges on what these products do to dirt. Ads for chlorinated fluids, he notes, portray them as “liquid fire” (36), which must be carefully dosed or “the object itself would be affected, ‘burnt’” (36).9 Such products alter matter in “violent, . . . chemical” (36)

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ways: “the product ‘kills’ the dirt” (36).10 Powders, by contrast, have very different connotations. They are “separating agents” (36).11 They “liberate the object from its circumstantial imperfection: dirt is ‘forced out’ and no longer killed [since this] puny enemy, stunted and black, . . . takes to its heels from the fine pure linen at the sole threat” (36) of the detergent’s action.12 Barthes adds that advertisements for one very popular brand of detergent turn the consumer into an “accomplice of a liberation rather than the mere beneficiary of a result” (37) by explaining how the product cleans.13 The ads also invoke the semiotics of “foam”—connoting luxury, pleasure, lightness, and spirituality—to “disguise the abrasive function of the detergent” (37) and to reassure consumers that the fabric’s “molecular order” (38) will not be damaged by the harsh cleansing.14 Finally, Barthes suggests ethnographic correlatives for these hygienic behaviors. He sees chlorine and ammonia-based agents, which represent “a kind of absolute fire” (36), as extensions of the “washerwoman’s movements when she beats the clothes” (36).15 Powders, on the other hand, are “selective” (36).16 They have a “policing rather than a war-making function” (36) because they do not kill but “push, drive dirt out through the weave of the object” (36).17 As such, they correspond to “the housewife pressing and rolling the washing against a sloping board” (36).18 Barthes’s unveiling of these advertisements—their rhetorical appeal to the liberating pleasures of housewifery, and the underlying bourgeois ideology that constructs gendered domesticity as natural and necessary—is powerful and convincing. Accurate as his analysis may be, there is an even more complex and surprising narrative concealed within these soap ads and highlighted, albeit inadvertently, by Barthes’s own attempt to demythologize them. It may be that Barthes was as uncomfortable as the reader may now be upon encountering this language in the context of selling soap. This discomfort comes from the strange familiarity of the language, from the disturbing, uncanny feeling that we have seen and heard these metaphors before. We have. Barthes’s annotated taxonomy of cleansing solutions and his anthropomorphizing of their cleaning functions are readable as a reinscription or second-degree writing of the saga of postwar France’s shameful and (at the time) largely unacknowledged participation in the Nazi’s Final Solution. I want to suggest, in other words, that Barthes’s essay on soap-powders and detergents is not just about the hidden ideologies and discursive strategies deployed to sell products that eliminate dirt from French fabrics. It is also about the practice of eliminating Jews from the fabric of French society and the rhetorical whitewash used to cover it up.

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It is Barthes’s language itself that allows me to make this apparently outrageous argument. Just as dirt is “selected, separated, driven, and forced out” by the “policing” actions of soap-powders, so the Jews, portrayed in so much propaganda as a subhuman, “puny enemy, stunted and black,” were selected, separated, and forced out from the “pure linen” of Christian France by Vichy’s collaborationist police and driven to French internment camps like Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande before being eliminated at Auschwitz. Expelled from the “teeth, skin, blood, and breath” of the French body politic to satisfy France’s desire to be an “accomplice . . . rather than [a] mere beneficiary” of the Nazis’ “great yen for cleanliness” and genetic, “molecular order,” the Jews were gassed and then burnt, via the subterfuge of delousing, which “disguised the abrasive” function of “purifying” agents that alter matter in “violent, chemical” ways, “‘kill’ dirt,” and burn “the object itself.” Barthes’s essay on skin cream ads amplifies this embedded narrative. While he codes as “scientism” (“Depth,” 47) advertisers’ emphasis on the “ultra-penetrating” (49; Barthes’s italics), “deep cleansing” (47), “regenerative” (47) qualities of substances like “bactericide agent R 51” (47; Barthes’s italics),19 these references to science, thorough cleaning, and mysteriously coded chemical agents evoke the notorious insecticide Zyklon B, which literally penetrated the “skin, blood, and breath” of its victims in order to (racially) purify and regenerate.20 The advertisements for soaps, detergents, and skin creams, and Barthes’s exposure of the semiotics of warfare, expulsion, and destruction inscribed within these odes to hygiene, can thus be read as telltale signs of the drama of the Holocaust, which permeated the social fiber, practices, and discourse of postwar France. This is where psychoanalysis comes in: the ads can be read as symptoms of the return of the repressed. They are ciphered signifiers of the nation’s struggle—and in large part failure—to come to terms, in the aftermath of the Second World War, with its eager collusion in rounding up and eliminating the Jews. It is not necessary to repeat here the compelling accounts by historians, such as Rousso, Paxton, and Birnbaum, who have described the various ways in which France tried to suppress or deny this moment of its history and transmute the events of anti-Semitic collaboration into a story of unified resistance to Nazi occupation.21 I want only to suggest that the highly charged and cohesive language of the soap and skin cream ads, if read closely through a psychoanalytic lens, emerges as the cryptic narrative of French complicity in the expulsion and extermination of the Jews which, in the mid-1950s, the nation of France had still not made part of its

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public discourse or accepted as part of its history. In lieu of washing its dirty laundry in public, acknowledging its guilt, and integrating within its ego-State the psychosocial and political changes necessary to begin to repair the damage to its national identity and enable it to reconstruct the institutions of Republican democracy, postwar France repressed the trauma of Vichy’s craven pursuit of racial hygiene, only to have its symptoms return, under the aegis of “modernization,” as a craving for soap. The historical record and political context support this reading. While the rhetoric used to sell soaps and skin creams is readable as a narrative about the Holocaust, the signifier “soap” itself comes into the 1950s with its own highly charged backstory. Alain Resnais’s classic film, Night and Fog, tells this story through poetic images and words. The thirty-two-minute film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 after the French board of censors insisted that a reference to Vichy’s participation in the deportations be removed, relies heavily on archival footage of the concentration camps, taken by allied military liberators and the Nazis themselves.22 The footage contains disturbing images of emaciated prisoners, carbonized corpses, gouged walls and ceilings of gas chambers, and the twisted metal and heat-scarred bricks of the crematoria. Toward the end of the film, the camera moves past mounds of eyeglasses, clothing, shoes, and women’s hair, which were collected from the camps’ prisoners. The narration, written by the poet Jean Cayrol (himself a survivor of Mauthausen), simultaneously describes what was done to the bodies of those killed. Everything was saved. Here are the reserves of the Nazis at war, here are their warehouses. . . . Nothing but women’s hair. . . . At 15 pfennigs a kilo, it was used to make cloth. From the bones . . . fertilizer—at least, they tried. From the bodies—words are insufficient. . . . From the bodies, they make soap.23 [Tout est récupéré. Voici les réserves des nazis en guerre, leurs greniers. . . . Rien que des cheveux de femmes. . . . A 15 pfennigs le kilo, on en fait du tissu. Avec les os . . . des engrais—tout au moins on essaie. Avec les corps . . . mais on ne peut plus rien dire . . . avec les corps, on veut fabriquer du savon.] The idea that the flesh of the Jews was rendered into soap has been refuted as rumor by several authorities on the Holocaust, despite various

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survivor accounts asserting its truth.24 Its presence as fact in Resnais’s film (upon which the director, coincidentally, began work shortly after the World Congress on Detergents and the publication of Barthes’s essay on soap) suggests that the notion was nonetheless well ensconced in the French zeitgeist or collective unconscious of the postwar period. In light of the advertising rhetoric for skin cleansers, which supposedly “vivify, revitalize, and regenerate,” and given the sudden ubiquity of soap products in the 1950s, this “fact” invites us to read “soap” differently. Soap, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, is not just a signifier of the return of France’s repressed collusion in the Final Solution. Soap is also a symptom of France’s denial of the murder of its Jews. If the Jews were turned into soap, the unspoken, unconscious narrative goes, and if soap is now everywhere in French society, then the Jews of France were never killed. They were driven out, yes, but they have returned—revitalized and regenerated. Soap, in this admittedly grotesque intrapsychic logic of defense, becomes the vehicle of a fantasy of return, and the symbolic medium of a radical denial of the fate of French Jewry. (This, interestingly, is one of the common forms of contemporary anti-Semitic discourse. While Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of France’s right-wing National Front party, infamously refers to the gas chambers as a mere “detail” of World War II history whose “truth” is still being debated, other virulent Holocaust deniers, like Faurisson and Irving, state categorically that the gas chambers never existed, that millions of Jewish deportees were not methodically exterminated, and that most survived and eventually returned from the camps.)25 The yen for cleanliness in the mid-1950s can thus be related not only to France’s efforts to contain emergent nationalist forces in Algeria and to reinvent itself as a modern nation in order to maintain its sense of superiority over its former colony, as Kristin Ross argues. France’s desire for hygiene, along with the advertising rhetoric that constructs and feeds it, cryptically expresses what postwar France could not put into words, could not share in a communal discourse of national contrition, and thus could neither introject nor mourn: its willing collusion in the eradication of the Jews, and its loss of identity as a republic founded on principles of human and civil rights, and universalism. In the absence of any working through or psychic digestive process that could enable this traumatic loss to be absorbed and integrated within France’s evolving identity as a democratic nation, the trauma remained unassimilated, unburied, and unmemorialized—and a source of ongoing internal disarray or “illness.”

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We remember that Ross also found links between what she called France’s “modernization” and the use of torture against Algerian nationalists. I would argue that France’s use of torture could be reconsidered as a symptom of this illness. Without ignoring the military, political, and psychosocial justifications France invoked to support the practice (or that other countries regularly invoke to support their practice), we can surmise that this sadistic behavior also functioned as an unrecognized reenactment or unconscious return of France’s repressed or unintrojected participation in the torture of the Jews. Vichy’s identification with the Nazi aggressor, which led to barbarous cruelty initiated and pursued by the French themselves, in a sense came into its own during the Algerian conflict. With the Nazis out of the picture, the French became “Nazis” toward their “new (dirty) Jews”: the “dirty” Algerians. The fact that the torture was referred to as “clean” (meaning it left no physical traces) may not just be linked, as Ross contends, to the interwoven forces of decolonization, modernization, and the commodification and marketing of cleanliness. It may have as much, if not more, to do with the idea that “cleaning,” with its associations of disinfection and delousing, repeated or reenacted France’s repressed “disinfection” or self-cleansing of the Jews, of which there was also to be no trace (hence the censoring of Night and Fog). We are left to wonder whether torture against Algerians would have been as prevalent—or practiced at all—if France had come to terms with its World War II history, been able to voice its shame and articulate its sense of loss, and thereby transcend its inability to mourn in order to begin the process of psychic repair and self-restoration. The metacritical question I posed earlier—why Barthes invokes psychoanalysis in the midst of a semiotically grounded project of materialist and ideological critique—can now be addressed. If Barthes hails psychoanalysis without doing a psychoanalytic reading, if he evokes the metaphors of illness and remedy in conjunction with soil and soap but does not analyze what this “illness” might be, how it could be remedied, or what “illness” and “remedy” would mean in such a context, it may be because he somehow “knows” that his methodology is inadequate to expose a crucial dimension of French advertising’s commodifying of hygiene. And if, even as he astutely culls from the ads their overdetermined tropes and unmasks them as agents for a bourgeois ideology of 1950s normative domesticity, he unsuspectingly writes the story of a national trauma of genocidal collaboration and its undiagnosed sequelae, it may be because he wants to see something his own reading lens cannot

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bring into focus. Barthes’s repeated conjurings of a psychoanalysis that he does not practice, in sum, and his musings about the insights this practice could offer about the rhetoric of cleansing, suggest that psychoanalysis in some sense haunts Barthes’s readings of culture. It hovers, ghostlike, as an ethereal but potentially illuminating, even therapeutic presence that he nonetheless cannot grasp. Barthes’s essays on soaps and skin creams are thus not only readable as cryptic tales of France’s unsuccessful struggle to mourn its Jews and transcend its shamefully traumatic turn toward fascism. They stand, in their unanswered invocations of psychoanalytic interpretation, as a kind of memorial or monument to loss—the loss of curiosity about what psychoanalysis might contribute to cultural studies. What makes Barthes’s essays so refreshing in general and so relevant for my project is that, while his frame of reference is clearly semiotic, materialist, and ideological, he acknowledges that psychoanalysis has a role to play in the study of culture, and he appeals openly, even if only rhetorically, for its help. Despite referencing Mythologies as a foundational text, cultural studies, as it has been practiced over the last fifteen years, rarely if ever has.

P S YC H OA NA LY T I C C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S How can we understand the disparity between Barthes’s hailing of psychoanalysis and the invisible or at best marginal position to which psychoanalysis has since been relegated within cultural studies? There are, I think, two main reasons for this disciplinary disconnect. The first is cultural studies’ rather narrow view of what psychoanalytic theory itself has to offer. The second is cultural studies’ aversion toward (if not outright rejection of) the practice of close reading. Let me address the second reason first since, whatever one might think of Barthes’s more general claims about literature, culture, reading, writing, pleasure, love, or psychoanalysis itself, Barthes is, indisputably, a close reader. From his detailed unravelings of semantic strings in the Mythologies, to the semesensitive reflections of A Lover’s Discourse, to the exhaustive—some would say exhausting—word-by-word decoding of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” in S/Z (the subject of my fourth chapter), Barthes reads closely. Thus, while claiming his work as an inspiration and touchstone of their critical enterprise, cultural studies practitioners generally eschew the very practice of reading at the core of Barthes’s own. We have to wonder why.

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This aversion to close reading might be construed as a sign of fatigue from what is, admittedly, a demanding and painstaking mode of analysis. It could have to do with market forces and shrinking publishing budgets that privilege scholarly books’ profitability and thus broader, less intensively focused studies. Or it might be a response to the notion that some of what cultural studies addresses—such as popular culture—does not require, benefit from, or even hold up under close reading. While these hypotheses can be debated and nuanced, they no doubt play some role in the reluctance to read closely. A more intellectually reasoned and yet more subtly disturbing argument for the disfavor in which cultural studies generally holds close textual analysis has been made by Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler in the introduction to their cultural studies anthology.26 Their argument is disturbing because, if we read it closely, we find embedded in it a conservative, even repressive conception of disciplinary history that is itself ahistorical and that handcuffs cultural studies by restricting its capacity for political and ideological critique. As the editors discuss the difficulty of defining the theories and methods upon which cultural studies relies to do its work, they observe that cultural studies could “best be seen as bricolage,” since it has “no distinct methodology . . . to call its own” (Grossberg, 2). They add that, while “no methodology can be privileged, or even temporarily employed with total security and confidence, . . . none can be eliminated out of hand” (Grossberg, 2). Significantly, however, as they justifiably contend that cultural studies must carefully assess any methodology it adopts, the editors single out close reading to make their point. It is problematic for cultural studies simply to adopt, uncritically, any of the formalized disciplinary practices of the academy, for those practices, as much as the distinctions they inscribe, carry with them a heritage of disciplinary investments and exclusions and a history of social effects that cultural studies would often be inclined to repudiate. Thus, for example, although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required. Moreover, textual analysis in literature studies carries a history of convictions that texts are properly understood as wholly self-determined and independent objects as well as a bias about which kinds of texts are worthy of analysis. That burden of associations cannot be ignored. (Grossberg, 2)

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It is true that the practice of close reading is connected with the “formalized disciplinary practices” of, most (in)famously, New Criticism. Formalist schools of interpretation view the text as a self-determined and independent object, and they use textual analysis to articulate and enforce a conservative, discriminatory cultural agenda that classifies certain authors, genres, and genders as more worthy of study than others. It is also true that close reading is strongly associated with deconstruction, which has been accused, in extensive and ongoing debate, of concealing an ahistoricist, apolitical ideology behind radical claims for the indeterminacy of textual boundaries and the undecidability of textual meaning. But it is precisely because these close reading practices, first used in the 1940s and peaking in the 1980s, are part of a history of reading that they cannot, and must not, be assumed to be the only way in which close textual study can be done. Nor should these practices be seen as ineluctable burdens on any other forms or modes of close analysis. It is certainly important to be aware of literary and critical history and of the biases past reading approaches may have borne and enforced. But to diminish or restrict the potential contributions and validity of close textual analysis because of the way it has been—or is accused of having been—practiced in the past is itself both ahistorical, in its denial of diachronic agency and change, and transhistorical, in its universalizing, essentialist assumptions about what close reading will always necessarily entail. Cultural studies seems to have decided that close reading will always be suspect because it has, in the past, been used by some in the service of a biased, non-contextualized, isolationist view of the text as “not-in-the-world.” I want to argue that cultural studies, by explicitly or implicitly maintaining this position, deprives itself of a formidable intellectual and critical tool. It denies itself—and its readers—the unrestricted freedom to seek out and expose ideologies that are concealed within texts and that can only be seen through close reading. Even if certain culturally focused studies are remarkably significant for revealing hidden political, social, or material dimensions of texts, too many others stay too close to those texts’ surface, perhaps “burdened” or restrained by the history of close analysis. As a result, they fail to identify the profound individuality of these cultural products, and they miss their more deeply buried sociohistorical aspects and encrypted ideologies. So Ross effectively locates, in France’s modernization efforts and passion for hygiene, an ideology of a sustained will to power and a need to maintain the colonizer/colonized relationship between France and Algeria. But she does

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not identify, in the French yen for cleansing, the cryptic narratives of the return of France’s repressed anti-Semitism and denial of its genocidal collaboration. In this study I propose a radical politics of sustained close reading that joins cultural studies and psychoanalysis. I elaborate detailed analyses that expose the deeply embedded and unimagined social, cultural, and ideological dimensions of texts that have thus far resisted exposure. This reading process, while tightly focused, is rigorously opposed to the conservative, restrictive practices of formalist schools such as New Criticism. It also goes against the grain of poststructuralist approaches, like deconstruction, which concentrate on showing how texts reflect on or allegorize their own self-subverting modes of producing meanings. Close reading, as I practice it, is above all a psychoanalytic process. It aims to uncover aspects of textual psychic histories, which have been inscribed within literary and film narratives, as a crucial and necessary prerequisite to unveiling and assessing the narratives’ concealed sociocultural, historical, and ideological contexts. This means that, as I take up Barthes’s invitation to think psychoanalytically about culture, I seek to challenge cultural studies’ tendency to marginalize psychoanalysis by providing a broader, less restrictive view of its theoretical offerings and a more fulfilling (and admittedly provocative) demonstration of what it offers as a method and instrument of heuristic inquiry and cultural critique. Simon During, while sketching out the history of cultural studies and its theoretical underpinnings in the introduction to his own anthology of cultural readings, confirms that psychoanalysis, which he identifies as the “politico-psychoanalytic structuralism” of Lacan (often infused with Althusser), has never made much headway in the discipline. He suggests why. It did not concede enough space to the capacity of the individual or community to act on the world on their own terms, to generate their own meanings and effects. It was too theoretical in the sense that it offered truths which took little or no account of local differences; indeed, its claims to be scientifically true lacked support from scientific method. And it did not pay enough heed to the actual techniques and practices by which individuals form themselves and their lives.27 In my view, Lacanian theory makes an important contribution in underscoring the centrality of language to the psychoanalytic enterprise. I

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nonetheless agree that it tends to yield readings that are too often predetermined or predictable because it relies so heavily on the oedipally organized paradigms of the imaginary and the symbolic, or on the inevitable links connecting trauma, fantasy, jouissance, and the real. It also assumes as ontological truth that subjectivity is marked by castration and the irremediable lack at the core of being, and that meaning is always inaccessible and constituted by the infinite slippage of material signifiers over irretrievable signifieds. Readings that use Freudian theory uncritically suffer a similar fate, since many of its core concepts—such as the death instinct, oedipal desire, orality, anality, and castration anxiety— are highly debatable (perhaps even more so within psychoanalysis itself) and can straitjacket a reading, preventing it from identifying what is specific about a text or local about a context. But these criticisms cannot be generalized to all of psychoanalysis. There are psychoanalytic theories and orientations that are acutely concerned with the individual’s capacity to change, with the specific ways in which personal and societal traumas interrupt or block a subject’s development and ability to act in and on the world, with the psychopathologies that emerge from such blockages, and with the means by which such blockages can be transcended. The theories of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and of Sándor Ferenczi who preceded them in the tradition of Hungarian psychoanalysis, are key examples of these. Abraham and Torok’s concepts of introjection, incorporation, crypt, phantom, cryptonymy, and illness of mourning, in particular, and Ferenczi’s work on introjection and his idea of the identification with the aggressor, offer an array of interpretive possibilities to readers of all theoretical persuasions. They are also vital for my study because, as I extend them into the realm of cultural and ideological critique, they allow me to propose a new way of bringing cultural studies and psychoanalysis together that is mutually enhancing, intellectually productive, and politically engaged.28 Abraham, Torok, and Ferenczi were all centrally concerned with how certain events or dramas could be experienced as so psychically disruptive that any attempt to absorb or integrate them within the ego would destabilize it and block if not destroy the subject’s ability to be. Abraham and Torok emphasized that it was not the content per se of an event but the fact that an individual lived it intrapsychically as shameful, humiliating, and thus potentially annihilating that made the event “traumatic” and that compelled the individual, consciously or more often unconsciously, to envelop it in silence and render it “unspeakable.” Moving beyond Ferenczi’s earlier writings on introjection and transference,

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and greatly influenced by their clinical work with World War II and Holocaust survivors tormented by dramas experienced as so shameful that revealing them threatened to destroy their sense of identity and the very possibility of existing, Abraham and Torok elaborated a metapsychology of secrets. In it, they described the kinds of intrapsychic structures that can form to conceal and preserve intact humiliating secrets, and they explained new ways of understanding how language, including behavior readable as language, could be deciphered to reveal a secret’s unspeakable contents, the extra- and especially intrapsychic circumstances of its formation, and the consequences of its formation and perpetuation for the life of an individual. Abraham and Torok’s emphasis was essentially clinical. They did not analyze literature, film, or sociocultural events in any sustained way, nor did they explore the interstices between texts and historical or cultural contexts. Their recognition of the specificity of human trauma, however, their rejection of universal paradigms based on drives, instincts, or preset stages of psychosocial development to explain the psychopathogenic potential of secrets, and their investigations into the modes by which language can both reveal and produce psychic distress, provide a conceptual base from which to shift the psychoanalysis of the unspeakable into the realm of cultural and ideological analysis. One result of my project will be the delineation of a psychoanalytic mode of detecting and interpreting certain historical and sociopolitical aspects of texts that pays heed to how individual subjects generate their own possibilities (and impossibilities) of being, and how these subjects deploy different practices and techniques to act on their world and themselves in their struggle to transcend psychic distress and create new paths for survival.29 My approach involves reading “in detail,” as Barthes might say, in order to uncover the various ways in which unspeakable secrets perturb and propel the fictional sagas of characters in certain works of literature and film. These secrets involve the loss of family and livelihood, emotional and sexual abuse, incest, illegitimacy, and religious identity. My approach, in a word, is anasemic. I read “back up toward” (ana) prior “significations” (semia) embedded in texts in order to identify traumatic, shameful secrets in the fictional life histories of their protagonists. Although these secrets are never explicitly revealed and their effects and sequelae are not readily comprehensible, they can be reconstructed from their ciphered traces inscribed within the text. This anasemic reading process is attentive to the complex networks and intertwinings of various

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linguistic and rhetorical forms, from metaphor and metonymy to more recently discovered figures like cryptonymy. It is not predominantly rhizomic in its organization or emphasis, however, as cultural studies readings often tend to be. It involves, by contrast, an abyssal, regressive process that looks backward through and deeply into the text’s overdetermined language (including visual, filmic language) to locate dramas too distressing or disruptive to be put into words. As a result of their silencing, these dramas’ effects upon the construction and unfolding of the text’s narrative have never been identified, and their latent connections with sociocultural, historical, and/or political contexts have never been recognized or examined. This is, in large part, what I mean by the politics of close reading. I am well aware that the text is a product of culture and is inseparable from the historical and material contexts from which it emerges and in which it continues to exist. I insist, however, on the close reading of specific elements of a text as a necessary, foundational moment of the process of cultural analysis and ideological critique. Whereas cultural studies tends to focus on themes, identities, or sets of artifacts to examine more generally their cultural meaning, materiality, or functioning, I move from text to culture in order to ask what might be related to the text that is not readily visible from its context, or what encrypted links might exist between text and culture that would enable us to understand better the text’s environmental resonances. My approach, in other words, hinges on reading a given text anasemically before any connections can be affirmed or conclusions drawn about the text’s relationship, as a product of culture or a producer of culture, to any social, historical, or political contexts. Only after I have decrypted and reconstructed various traumatic sagas and their sequelae hidden within the text—what I want to call the text’s psychoanalytic historicity—can I make links, which have thus far not been seen, between these embedded sagas or pre-texts and certain ideologies or histories. Only after I have shown that the text conceals specific, local dramas, which can be discerned solely through a flexible yet carefully calibrated psychoanalytic lens, can I expose and examine the networks connecting such dramas to the politicized discourses with which they engage: from religious practices, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and child abuse, to sexuality, censorship, marketing, and mass consumption. My clinical work as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist has been vital to this project. I treat patients, in English and in French, from a variety of economic, religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, who suffer from

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depression, anxiety, and the vast array of effects produced by traumatic events, relationships, and environments. This experience has underscored for me the importance of the detail, of the need to listen closely (and at times interlinguistically) to what people—and fictional characters—say and do not say, and to how they figure speech and embody silence. Moreover, dealing constantly with the material conditions of providing mental health therapy (including the effects of insurance costs and practice guidelines, local and regional attitudes, and geographic distance on its accessibility, duration, and quality) has brought into sharp focus how the material alters the therapeutic, and vice versa. My clinical experience has also highlighted the immense need for patience and empathy as those who suffer—whether in the therapeutic setting or in literary or film narratives—try to express their stories, and the stories of others whose traces they bear, layer by layer, trope by trope, diversion by (unintentionally) obfuscating diversion. It has also enhanced my appreciation of what is involved in the struggle to transcend obstacles that impede the ability to be, obstacles that can replace the revitalizing pleasure of relationship with the psychic pain of disconnection, aloneness, and the sense of nonexistence. In essence, my clinical work has reaffirmed my belief that suffering can often be alleviated, that desiring change is the most radical thing one can do, and that the role of the clinician is to identify what it would take to effect change and to help patients in their efforts to regain a sense of worth and of self. This is directly relevant to the close psychoanalytic readings I practice. Although I cannot “change” a fictional character or “cure” a text, I can try to identify what has led a character to a certain impasse in her or his “life story,” what has happened to allow that character to move beyond the impasse, or what would have had to have happened for such a transcendence. As is true in listening to patients, close psychoanalytic reading means remaining open to all possibilities, without relying on preordained grids that prescribe a certain developmental or behavioral course, and without depending on preconceived notions of what causes psychic distress and how it can generate narratives. As is also the case in being with patients, close psychoanalytic reading means identifying the place(s) and source(s) of suffering in a narrative as it engages with, reflects, or refracts its cultural contexts, and in imagining how the narrative might be changed, or the historical, political, and social discourses located inside or outside it might be altered. In proposing a different way of envisaging the heuristic potential of psychoanalytic theory, I thus call upon that theory to help expose and

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explore heretofore unseen relationships between aesthetic production and material conditions, between the workings of the unconscious and the textual inscription of ideology. Careful not to move too quickly to locate the social, political, or historical, a step that often bypasses the text’s complexity and its contextual networks, I seek to resituate close analysis within an ever-expanding practice of transphenomenal inquiry. Such an inquiry aims to make visible otherwise invisible or unrecognizable psychopathogenic sagas and their intertwinings with cultural and ideological narratives, all of which may seem to lie outside the text’s apparent boundaries or the material conditions of its production. One result of this approach is a different way of envisaging how texts respond to questions of the “local” and “individual agency,” areas that cultural studies claims psychoanalysis has not adequately addressed. In the chapters that follow, I explore these and other engagements between text and culture by combining psychoanalysis with close textual analysis to elaborate a new form of psychoanalytic cultural studies. The theme that unites all my readings is the unspeakable secret: the shameful, conflicted, undigestible drama that so threatens a character’s ability to be that it must be elided from language and either held in an unassimilated, unintrojected state of suspension, or incorporated and encased within an intrapsychic vault designed to insure its integrity and prevent its revelation. I am not suggesting, as trauma theorists such as Caruth and Felman have, that unspeakability is an inherent or immanent aspect of trauma because the event that overwhelms is always an unrepresentable, “unclaimed experience,” or because verbalizing the trauma would mark a loss of the “event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding.”30 I do not agree, in other words, that a traumatic experience is necessarily unspeakable or unsymbolizable. I am proposing instead that there are events or dramas that a subject may experience as literally too shameful for words, and as so potentially destabilizing to the psyche that they must be encased in silence and neither assimilated intrapsychically nor verbalized externally. The conscious or unconscious will to silence in these instances is not driven by a desire to preserve the event’s inherent incomprehensibility or essential horror, but to preserve the (apparent) integrity of the subject and, possibly, of the subject’s family or social group. I am also suggesting that the ability to speak of an experience that has provoked intense psychic distress does not erase the disruptive force that the experience may have had on the subject or deny its power to have caused profound psychic pain. Nor does it mean that the process of working through the trauma is or will

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ever be completed, or that the experience has been or could ever be totally reabsorbed in some final state of “cure.” The ability to verbalize a secret signifies rather that the subject has surmounted an obstacle to being and can now reengage in the (still challenging) process of goingon-being. Such verbalizing also prevents a silenced drama from being transmitted transgenerationally to subjects who have had no direct experience of it (as can be seen in several texts in this study as well as other fictional texts and patient narratives), and who therefore cannot engage actively with it—either to resist or assimilate it—without some mediating agency or form of analytic intervention. The literary and film narratives I analyze in this study illustrate, in increasingly complex ways, the kinds of intrapsychic structures and processes that can be produced and deployed to preserve intact unspeakable secrets. They also reveal the variety of linguistic and rhetorical mechanisms by which texts can conceal and cryptically reveal such secrets, and the unrecognized and progressively intricate ways in which texts with secrets can intersect with aspects of their historical and sociocultural contexts. I was unaware when I chose these texts that they would all turn out to contain unspeakable secrets, or that they bore within them intricately woven and powerfully revealing links to concealed ideologies. I was drawn to study them for the same core reasons that I am drawn to work with patients: they convey a strong although initially ineffable sense of unarticulated suffering, and their characters either express (indirectly) a desire for relief from this suffering or act out scenarios that, while seeming to promise relief, paradoxically and tragically only make that suffering worse.31 I begin with Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast” because the characters’ sagas of conflicted traumatic loss and their responses to it, although silenced and never articulated in the text, are less cryptically inscribed than the sagas concealed in the other literary and film texts I examine, and because the narrative pivots on Babette’s explicit plea for help, even if this plea is not expressly for psychological help. Dinesen’s short story is also a logical first text because its dénouement is the least tragic of the narratives in the study, and because it reveals not only how harboring an unspeakable secret can interfere with the processes of a character’s ability to be, but also how such interference can be surmounted and the possibility of existence may be restored. The points of interconnection between the text and its sociocultural context are also the most readily identifiable of the narratives under study, even if the significations of these interconnections are not immediately apparent.

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I thus begin chapter 1 by asking how we can understand the collective response of filmgoers who, after viewing Gabriel Axel’s cinematic adaptation of Dinesen’s short story, attended expensive dinners that replicated the “feast” prepared by Babette in the short story and portrayed elaborately on screen. Rather than interpreting this group behavior solely as a material response to commercial marketing forces, or as a desire to demonstrate class dominance through conspicuous consumption, I focus first on the language of the story and film to show how Babette’s creation of the feast is the means by which she enacts a desire to transcend psychic obstacles to mourning a loss about which she is unable to speak. I then reread the public’s reaction as the expression of its own unconscious and unspoken collective need to mourn loss. My analysis also elaborates certain theoretical differences that have shaped psychoanalytic history by distinguishing Abraham and Torok’s writings on mourning from those of Freud, by highlighting their Ferenczian-influenced metapsychological distinction between introjection and incorporation, and by exploring some of the implications of concepts such as crypt, antimetaphor, and demetaphorization. In the process, I suggest ways of re-imagining the relationship between religion and psychoanalysis, cure and self-analysis, and artistic creativity and therapeutic action. With chapter 2 on Bernardo Bertolucci’s groundbreaking film, Last Tango in Paris, I shift from an emphasis on the processes of introjection, psychic assimilation, and the possibility of going-on-being to more complex and disruptive forms of psychopathology involving incorporation and the construction of an intrapsychic crypt. Designed to preserve intact an unspeakable secret, the crypt itself interferes—in this case catastrophically—with a character’s ability to be. Through a close reading of the film’s violent language, which is as harsh as the sadistic sex acts we watch, I link the male protagonist’s disturbing saga of sexual conquest, emotional violence, and death to a silence he has unknowingly built around an unspeakably shameful secret. Deciphering this secret’s traces from the narrative reveals how it prevents him from mourning his wife and also propels his need for anonymous sexual trysts. It also allows me to examine the film’s patent references to France’s colonial war with Algeria in the context of unspoken historical secrets and loss to show how its latent, thus far unseen references to France’s earlier collaboration with Nazi Germany offer a tacit critique of the history of French government film censorship. As the sociopolitical and ideological complexity of the film emerges, a new appreciation of the film’s engagement with psychoanalysis and its place in cinematic and cultural history becomes possible.

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Chapter 3, about psychoanalytic haunting in the context of Argentina’s “Dirty War” and the Holocaust, introduces the theory of the phantom and the effects of the transgenerational transmission of unspeakable secrets. I focus first on Luis Puenzo’s 1985 film, The Official Story, to examine the potentially haunting, phantom-producing effects of the catastrophic events of the “Dirty War” on its survivors and Argentine society today. This leads to a comparison of the metapsychological theories of the phantom and “transposition” and to a discussion of the psychopathogenic potential of unspeakable secrets in the context of the Holocaust. By discussing a clinical case from my own practice and rereading another clinician’s vignette involving the child of a Holocaust survivor, I elaborate ways in which the theory of the phantom obliges us to rethink what is meant by the “child in analysis.” There follows a reflection on the transphenomenological relationship between parent and child in cases of phantomatic haunting, and on the political, historical, and psychoanalytic implications of phantom analysis for other instances of social catastrophe. In the next two chapters I explore the connections between unseen and shameful secrets of Jewish identity and specific aspects of European anti-Semitism, including the societal response to Édouard Drumont’s anti-Semitic writings and the Nazis’ plan for the Final Solution. Chapter 4 offers an alternative to readings of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine” (1830), made famous by Roland Barthes’s semiotic analysis in S/Z, which shows how castration forms the (empty) core of the text. By deploying phantomatic analysis to connect Sarrasine’s fatal attraction to a castrato with a haunting secret of Jewish identity, I expose the story’s ciphered intertwinings with the myth of the Wandering Jew, the history of the crypto-Jews, and issues of gender and religious travesty. This opens the way to reevaluating the tale within the context of the post-Napoleonic shift from theological to racist anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century France. Chapter 5 focuses on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s famous symbolist play, Axël (1890), to unveil the cryptonymic formations of language by which a secret of shameful Jewish identity has been transmitted through generations of the characters’ family histories. As I expose the embedded traces of these histories, I also reveal an unnoticed strain of virulent antiSemitism that permeates the play. Psychoanalytic close reading becomes a powerful tool for identifying this encrypted ideology and for reassessing Axël’s role as the exemplar of the literary Symbolist movement. In the end, the play emerges as a disturbing reflection on fin de siècle French society’s growing sense of haunting by the Jews in its midst, and

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as a harbinger of the collective, ultimately genocidal response to that haunting fifty years later. In the final chapter on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I elaborate how Dorian’s sadistic and ultimately self-destructive behavior is driven simultaneously by his own experience of an unspeakable trauma of child abuse and also by a shameful secret, involving illegitimacy, that was kept by someone else and transmitted to him transgenerationally without his awareness. My reading thus takes issue with the almost universally held belief that Dorian’s friend, Lord Henry, corrupts the innocent young man and pushes him into a life of decadence. As the analysis delineates the workings of incorporation, identificatory confusion, phantom transmissions, and interlinguistic encrypting, the novel emerges as a commentary on the nature and origins of art and on the relationship between creativity and violence. Once I have resituated it within the context of Victorian society, I also show how the novel offers a subtle commentary on the British colonial enterprise, on Wilde’s own complex negotiations with Irish nationalism and Anglo-Irish identity, and on the psychological legacies of personal and political abuse. With the conclusion, I return to Barthes’s Mythologies to suggest how other essays in this cornerstone of cultural studies might be reread, through the mode of psychoanalytic close reading I have demonstrated, as a product and critique of post-collaborationist French society and the ideologies of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Ultimately, Barthes’s work makes an implicit argument for resisting the tendency to locate texts within their immediately apparent contexts, and for seeking out what may have been transmitted unconsciously into the discursive formations of literary, film, and other cultural narratives. From Roland Barthes’s hailing of a psychoanalysis that he does not pursue to the most recent examples of cultural critique, psychoanalysis has had a troubled relationship with cultural studies. This book proposes a way of bringing psychoanalysis together with cultural analysis through a practice of close reading. This practice exposes how ideology and politics can be inscribed or encrypted within literary and film texts, and how literature and film can themselves write or inscribe ideology, politics, and history. In the process, ideology itself emerges as a symptom to be read, as a sign of textual or contextual distress that for some reason cannot be articulated. One benefit of locating this distress is the possibility of rethinking the connections among the artifacts, signs, and symptoms of culture and psychoanalysis itself. If, as I have endeavored to show, one of the touchstones of cultural studies—Barthes’s Mythologies—is in effect

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haunted by psychoanalysis, it may be that psychoanalysis, in some form, has always already been present as an uncanny, ghostly incarnation within the larger project of reading culture. It may be, in other words, that psychoanalysis has always in some way also haunted cultural studies. If so, then unveiling and articulating what has been repressed or made unconscious can only help us to read texts, and perhaps transform vexation into pleasure, and reluctance into discovery.

1 Devouring Loss A Recipe for Mourning in “Babette’s Feast”

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested . . . —Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

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hen director Gabriel Axel’s film version of “Babette’s Feast” hit American movie screens in 1988, restaurants in major cities around the country offered the chance to enjoy the sumptuous feast served up in the movie.1 For a hefty price, filmgoers could complete the cinema experience by heading off to a restaurant and savoring the delights of turtle soup, Blinis Demidoff, and Cailles en Sarcophage, accompanied by Veuve Clicquot champagne and Clos de Vougeot burgundy. These wellattended dinners became rich fodder for some social observers, who critiqued them as an example of 1980s yuppie self-indulgence. While film reviewers debated the problems of translating Dinesen’s narrative for the screen and discussed the aesthetic issues of the plight of the artist and the transformative power of art, these pundits considered the diners’ response symptomatic of the me-decade’s materialist culture of conspicuous consumption.2 Once again, they lamented, excessive disposable income was serving the insatiable and emptily narcissistic desires of a thin slice of society. While there is no concrete evidence to suggest that readers of Dinesen’s short story have indulged in similar acts of consumption over the years, the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand. After all, the story was first published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in June 1950 when Dinesen, in need of money and eager to break into the lucrative American magazine market, took the advice of a friend who urged, “Write about food. Americans are obsessed with food.”3 If the story is 25

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indeed “about food,” we may ask precisely what it says about food, and whether what it says invites a different reading of the collective “eaterresponse” of a segment of the moviegoing public. Dinesen scholars, while certainly not ignoring the culinary aspects of the tale, have tended to concentrate their analyses on the question of artistic creation, on the conflict between the aesthetic and the ascetic, and, more recently, on the specificity of the woman as artist and creator. Food has tended to be viewed allegorically in the story as representing, for example, the schism between the ethical, Norwegian, puritanical sect of Protestantism, nurtured on split cod and ale-and-bread soup, and the aesthetic, sensuous inclinations of French Catholicism, nourished by haute cuisine and epitomized by the master chef Babette. The miraculous dinner Babette prepares at the story’s end serves, in this reading, to reconcile the ascetic with the aesthetic, the spiritual with the carnal.4 Another view holds that Babette is an “artist-priest” and benevolent “witch” who heals the dissension in the aging congregation with the “communion feast” or “Last Supper” she prepares, revealing through this Dionysian repast that spiritual fulfillment is obtainable only through acceptance of fleshly values.5 Still another, feminist, approach argues that the Quail in Sarcophagus that Babette cooks represents the “woman’s own body that is offered up, in displaced form, through her Eucharistic culinary corpus.”6 Babette is exhausted at the dinner’s end because she is “emptied out, . . . in effect consumed by her own artistic production.”7 Female artistic creation is considered inseparable from feminine sacrifice, and the production of narrative is understood to imply the author’s “simultaneous self-annihilation and self-creation.”8 There is no denying that Babette’s sumptuous feast and its aftermath offer a reflection on religion and on the opposition between the spiritual and the carnal, while also raising the questions of artistic creation and identity. But these issues do not fully represent the text’s concerns. In the close reading that follows, I want to show that the dinner has above all a psychoanalytic function: it allows for a communion in loss by enabling unspeakable loss to be talked about and the process of its mourning to begin. “Babette’s Feast,” in other words, is a story about overcoming an inability to mourn. It dramatizes the effects of a blockage to mourning and writes the prescription or recipe for transcending that blockage. The preparation and consumption of food serve as the medium of transcendence, as the means by which a shameful loss is swallowed and the process of its digestion begins. The feast also functions as a vehicle for articulating a fundamental connection between artistic creation and

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bereavement, between literary inscription and psychic memorialization, and between the production of narrative as an aesthetic enterprise and the creation of art as a life-saving act.

P S YC H I C I N D I G E S T I O N AND THE UNBURIED DEAD The story’s plot is simple. Martine and Philippa, two beautiful daughters of a Lutheran dean who heads a small ascetic sect in the Norwegian fishing village of Berlevaag in the 1850s, each turn down an attractive suitor— one a young officer, the other a famous French opera singer—in order to remain faithful to their father and his religious ideals. One night, in 1871, with the dean deceased and the unmarried sisters carrying on his religious work in the community, Babette Hersant arrives on their doorstep with a letter of introduction from the French singer, Achille Papin. A fighter in the Paris Commune uprising in which her husband and son were killed, Babette begs for asylum and offers to become the sisters’ housekeeper. They hesitantly agree, and Babette becomes a valued member of the household who, for the next twelve years, cleans, washes, and cooks simple meals for the sisters and the poor and sick of the village. When Babette, whose only tie with France during her years in Norway has been her regular purchase of a lottery ticket, wins ten thousand francs, she insists on cooking the one hundredth birthday dinner the sisters are planning in memory of the dean. At the end of the sumptuous feast, which is attended by the congregation and Martine’s lost love, now a general, Babette reveals the secret she has kept all these years: she was once the renowned chef of a restaurant in Paris, the Café Anglais, and a great artist. Disclosing that she has spent all her winnings on the dinner, she explains that she will not return to France, since the world she knew there is gone anyway, and the story ends with the two sisters moved to tears by the generosity and talent they have just witnessed. It is not readily apparent from this brief summary of “Babette’s Feast” that the first five chapters of the twelve-chapter story recount a series of losses. Moreover, virtually no critical attention has been paid to the fact that each loss is associated with an inability or refusal to speak. When, in the first episode, the young officer, Lorens Loewenhielm, tries to tell Martine of his love, words fail him. Seated beside her and the dean, he feels suddenly unworthy and can “find nothing at all to say.”9 Despite repeated visits to her home and attempts to “communicate his feelings to

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Martine” (6), Lorens, who has always found it easy “to tell a pretty girl that he loved her” (7), finds this time that “the tender words stuck in his throat” (7). Concluding that “fate is hard, and that . . . there are things which are impossible” (7), he returns to his army garrison and is “silent” (7) on the affair, resolving “not . . . to think of it at all . . . , to forget what . . . happened to him . . . [and to] look forward, not back” (7–8). Martine reacts similarly. When her younger sister, Philippa, attempts to turn “the talk to the handsome, silent young man [who] had so suddenly disappeared” (8), Martine “answer[s] her gently, with a still, clear face, and find[s] other things to discuss” (8). The idea of the silenced or suppressed voice is the even more explicit concern of the following episode. When the great Parisian singer Achille Papin hears Philippa sing in church during a visit to Berlevaag, he recognizes her magnificent voice and offers her singing lessons. Overwhelmed by her talent, he tells her of the great future she will have in opera, prospects she keeps secret from her father and sister. One day, as the two finish singing the seduction duet from Don Giovanni, Papin seizes Philippa’s hands, kisses her, and then lets go, for “the moment was too sublime for any further word or movement” (11). Philippa responds by asking her father, without any explanation, to write Monsieur Papin and tell him she no longer wishes lessons. While Papin laments the world’s loss of “its nightingale” (11) and his own loss as an artist whose career would have been renewed, Philippa says nothing about her lost opportunity. The narrator intimates that Philippa was “surprised and frightened” (12) by something the kiss awoke within her, but the incident and its effects are silenced: “Of this visitor from the great world the sisters spoke but little; they lacked the words with which to discuss him” (12). This pattern of loss borne in silence continues in the next two chapters when Babette, “almost mad with grief and fear” (4), arrives on the doorstep of the home of the two sisters in 1871, fifteen years after Philippa’s saga, with a letter of introduction from Achille Papin. Seeking asylum from Paris, where she “lost all she possessed” (13), including a husband and son shot in the Communard uprising in which she herself participated, Babette is taken in by the sisters and adapts readily to their ascetic life. But this “speechless stranger” (17), who lives with the sisters for the next twelve years, “never learn[s] to speak the language of her new country” (16) and “[h]ardly ever . . . refer[s] to her past life” (17). When the sisters gently “condol[e] her upon her losses” (17) in the days after her arrival, she responds stoically, “It is Fate” (17). Sometimes when talking to her they “get no answer” (18) at all, and they realize that

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Babette harbored “memories and longings of which they knew nothing” (18) and of which, for some reason, she would not or could not speak. If Lorens, Martine, Philippa, and Babette stifle all speech about their losses, words are miraculously recovered at the end of Babette’s dinner. Lorens suddenly speaks of his enduring love for Martine, who subtly acknowledges her own feelings. Babette finally reveals that she was a great chef in Paris and describes the life she lived and lost there. And “deep, forgotten chords vibrat[e]” (47) in the heart of Philippa, who recognizes her lost life as an artist by consoling Babette with the same words Achille Papin used to lament his and the opera world’s loss of Philippa’s beautiful voice. Somehow the feast has loosened all these tongues and enabled them to speak of loss and suffering. It has allowed silences to be filled and memories recalled. To understand why this occurs, it is helpful to review briefly some of the theoretical literature concerned with the metapsychology of mourning. In his earliest writings on the difference between mourning and melancholia (1917), Freud described “normal,” nonpathological mourning as a process involving the gradual, painful withdrawal of libidinal attachments from a lost object, which may be a loved person or “some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”10 The work of mourning consists in recalling “each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object” (“Mourning,” 245) and, through reality testing that reveals the object no longer exists, slowly detaching the libido from the object, ultimately freeing it to attach itself to other objects. As defined in “Mourning and Melancholia,” the specificity of melancholia lies in the fact that the libidinal attachment to an object-choice is ambivalent and narcissistic in nature. This attachment means that the libido cannot be readily withdrawn from the object and displaced onto another when the object is lost. Instead, the libido “is withdrawn into the ego [and serves] to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object” (“Mourning,” 249; Freud’s italics). An object-loss is thus transformed into an ego-loss, and the melancholic subject’s typical self-deprecation and self-criticism are understood to apply not to him or her but to the object brought into the ego. As Freud’s views on the process of identification evolved, he concluded (in “The Ego and the Id,” 1923) that the process of setting up a lost object inside the ego is a very “common and . . . typical” one that plays a major role in “determining the form taken by the ego and that . . . makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character’.”11 Mourning, like melancholia, was now

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seen to involve a “setting up of the object inside the ego. . . . It may be that by this introjection . . . , the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects” (“Ego,” 29).12 Partly as a corrective to Freud’s blurring of the distinction between mourning and melancholia, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok endeavored to reinstall their difference and to offer a new way of understanding the related concepts of fixation and fantasy. They did this in their essay “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” (1972), by first reinstating what they considered the lost distinction between introjection and incorporation.13 Recalling that Ferenczi, the originator of the term “introjection,” identified it as a normal process by which libidinally charged objects are gradually included within the ego, which is thereby enlarged and enriched, Abraham and Torok elaborated, explaining that it is also the process by which a necessary alteration in the ego’s topography is effected so that the reality of a loss may be integrated within the psyche.14 They further proposed that the conversion of a loss into language is a critical sign of its introjection and of the psyche’s accommodation of that loss. They held that an early paradigm of this process is found right after birth in the infant’s experience of an “empty mouth” (“Mourning or Melancholia,” 127). The absence of the maternal object (the breast) leads to crying and howling, and these eventually give way to speech addressed to the mother as a partial replacement for absent satisfactions of the mouth. Ultimately, the mother’s presence itself is replaced by words. The absence of objects and the empty mouth are transformed into words; at last, even the experiences related to words are converted into other words. So the wants of the original oral vacancy are remedied by being turned into verbal relationships with the speaking community at large. Introjecting a desire, a grief, a situation means channeling them through language into a communion of empty mouths. This is how the literal ingestion of foods becomes introjection when viewed figuratively. The passage from food to language in the mouth presupposes the successful replacement of the object’s presence with the self’s cognizance of its absence. Since language acts and makes up for absence by representing, by giving figurative shape to presence, it can only be comprehended or shared in a “commu-

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nity of empty mouths.” (“Mourning or Melancholia,” 128; Abraham and Torok’s italics, translation slightly modified)15 This linking of normal mourning with introjection and the conversion of a loss into speech resonates strongly with the pattern I’ve just identified in “Babette’s Feast” where a character’s refusal or inability to speak about loss gives way to an articulation of loss through a form of “communion” with bereaved others. Abraham and Torok’s idea that the literal ingestion of food can function as a figure of the introjective process specific to nonpathological mourning also seems highly pertinent since the transformation of loss into speech in Dinesen’s story occurs following the consumption of a feast. I would indeed propose that we read the repeated absence of language about loss in the narrative as a sign that the process of introjection has been blocked, that normal mourning has for some reason been obstructed for the characters, and that the literal consuming of the dinner somehow facilitates the removal of this obstruction. The text itself confirms the link between introjection and ingestion, between unstated or unmourned loss and the inability to digest food, in the description of Lorens Loewenhielm’s life during the thirty years following his encounter with Martine. He has become a general, married, and led a busy life at court. Reflecting on his accomplishments, however, he is still not happy. Feeling that “[s]omewhere something had been lost” (33), he is troubled by a “deep-seated, invisible thorn” (31) on which he cannot quite put his finger, and, most disturbingly for a man “who valued good food highly in life” (32), he is pained by “indigestion from which he sometimes suffered” (32). It would not be an exaggeration to say that “Babette’s Feast” is fundamentally a story about indigestion— physical and psychic—and about a dinner whose ingestion effectively “cures” the dyspeptic. Before explaining how the dinner performs this cure, we must first determine the etiology of the illness. We must ask what would prevent the losses experienced by these characters from being mourned and their suffering from being put into words. Achille Papin’s letter on Babette’s behalf makes clear that her departure from France was hasty and traumatic. A fugitive fleeing for her life, she was unable to bury her husband and son properly or to say goodbye to friends and places that made up her world in Paris. With no time to absorb her losses before plunging into an ascetic life likely to magnify any preexisting sense of loss, Babette is forced to forestall or suspend mourning in order to survive. There is another reason, however, for

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Babette’s suspension of grieving: her losses conflict with each other. Both her husband and son die for the Commune at the hands of General Galliffet and the aristocracy, the very people who recognize Babette’s great talent and make it possible for her to live and practice her art. The desire to mourn her husband and son thus conflicts with the desire to mourn those who, while responsible for her family’s murder and her own flight for survival, were the sine qua non of her life as a culinary artist in Paris. She reveals this at the story’s end when she is finally able to speak of her past and tell the sisters that she will not be returning to Paris: “What will I do in Paris? They have all gone. I have lost them all, Mesdames. . . . The Duke of Morny, the Duke of Decazes, Prince Narishkine, General Galliffet, Aurélian Scholl, Paul Daru, the Princesse Pauline! All!”. . . “But all those people . . . ,” [Philippa] said, “those princes and great people of Paris whom you named, Babette? You yourself fought against them. You were a Communard! The General you named had your husband and son shot! How can you grieve over them?”. . . “Yes . . . those people . . . were evil and cruel. They let the people of Paris starve; they oppressed and wronged the poor. Thanks be to God, I stood upon a barricade; I loaded the gun for my menfolk! But all the same, Mesdames, I shall not go back to Paris, now that those people of whom I have spoken are no longer there.”. . . “You see, . . . those people belonged to me, they were mine. They had been brought up and trained . . . to understand what a great artist I am. I could make them happy. When I did my very best I could make them perfectly happy.” (45–48) To mourn her husband and son would mean recognizing that the society for which she lived and that gave her life and love as an artist was oppressive and murderous. To mourn the loss of this society and of her position as a culinary genius within it would be to express her love for those who murdered her husband and son and wronged the poor. Caught in an impossible, unspeakable double bind where mourning is tied to shameful love, Babette’s solution during her twelve years in Berlevaag is to mourn no one: to keep secret the drama of her loss, and to exclude from language any expression of her suffering.

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A different conflict inhibiting mourning affects Martine and Philippa. Brought up by their father to “renounc[e] the pleasures of this world” (3), these beautiful young women are effectively put off-limits to men by the dean, who makes clear that to him in his calling his daughters were his right and left hand. Who could want to bereave him of them? And the fair girls had been brought up to an ideal of heavenly love; they were all filled with it and did not let themselves be touched by the flames of this world. (5) To act upon or even acknowledge their desires for Lorens, Achille Papin, and worldly lives outside the sect would mean “bereaving” or betraying their father and abandoning the ascetic values he preached. In order to satisfy their desire to be faithful to him, therefore, they must deny their worldly desires. Denying these desires means also denying that the desires have been frustrated, that a loss has been suffered. The sisters’ love for their father and wish not to bereave him thus conflicts with their need to mourn lost loves and lives. The result is a silencing of the language of desire and loss, and a blocking of their ability to mourn. Finally, Lorens never speaks of his loss of Martine since admitting he was dominated by the dean, whose presence and words left him feeling unworthy of his daughter and “a shy and sorry figure” (33), would mean admitting that “a lieutenant of the hussars had let himself be defeated and frustrated” (7) by an old man. Recognizing his loss would also mean acknowledging that he had let his fear of sharing the “sheer misery” (33) of the sect’s ascetic lifestyle cause him to make the wrong choice in life. His shameful defeat in love thus challenges his identity as a brave and knowing soldier, and he responds by removing from language any admission of his loss. In view of these impediments to mourning and what might be called an involuntary “ascetism of the word,” we can now ask how the dinner served by Babette and consumed by these characters enables them to articulate their losses and begin to grieve. The sisters, let us remember, hold the dinner on the one hundredth anniversary of the dean’s birth because they aim to unite the congregation in recollecting their leader’s life and contributions and in paying “honor to his memory” (27). While not a sad occasion, the meal recalls and commemorates the dead and can be considered a sort of wake or mourning dinner, an idea underscored by

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the wreath the sisters hang around the dean’s portrait and by the candles they light beneath it. Seen in this context, Babette’s emphatic request to prepare a “real French dinner” (22) for the occasion, despite the sisters’ reluctance to let her do so, may be read as a desire to recall and commemorate a life that was French and that is now dead for her. It may be read as a means of mourning what she herself has lost. Enacting such a commemoration would first necessitate properly burying her dead, something Babette could not do before fleeing France. Her preparation of a “real French dinner” can be seen as the means of accomplishing just this. It is a way to “bring to life” in Norway—in the form of French foods, wines, pots and pans, tableware, and the like, all of which she has shipped from France—that which she possessed and lost in France so that it can finally be recognized as dead and suitably entombed. If Babette is pleased to learn that a general who lived for several years in Paris will attend the dinner, it is because he represents for her the aristocracy she trained to appreciate her artistry and because his presence will help complete her re-creation of France in Berlevaag. The burial itself is accomplished through the preparation of the meal and, specifically, through the main dish Babette cooks: Cailles en Sarcophage—Quail in Sarcophagus. While one might argue that it is hardly surprising Babette would choose to serve the dish for which she was famous in Paris, the narrative underscores the acute significance of her choice in the explicit parallels it draws between birds and people. When the sisters learn that Babette has won the French lottery, they are saddened to think she may leave them, but cannot blame Babette for departing, since “birds will return to their nests and human beings to the country of their birth” (21). Later, seated at the dinner table among the somber members of the congregation, the general, in his uniform covered with decorations, looks “like an ornamental bird, a golden pheasant or a peacock, in this sedate party of black crows and jackdaws” (30–31). Since birds are anthropomorphized or assimilated to humans in the text, we must read closely Babette’s decision to prepare Cailles en Sarcophage. Doing so we hear in caille not just the French word for “quail,” but also the term of endearment used to refer to a loved one, as in the expression ma petite caille, translated as “my beloved, my darling, or my dearest.”16 Although this expression never appears in the written story, it is used in the film when Babette, collecting her shipment of goods from France at the seashore, picks up the cage of live quail and murmurs to them affectionately, “Allô mes petites cailles.” Whether actually scripted or an invention of the French actress Stéphane Audran, who plays

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Fig. 1.1. Babette’s Feast (1987): Babette carefully prepares Quail in Sarcophagus

Fig. 1.2. Babette’s Feast (1987): the beloved quail in their sarcophagi ready to be consumed

Babette, the moment makes explicit what is tacitly yet indisputably at play in the short story. The quail Babette brings from France, kills, and then meticulously entombs in their sarcophagi are not just birds, but her loved ones. The quail function as the fleshly embodiment of her husband, her son, the French aristocracy, and her cherished life in France.

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Through their slow, careful preparation as a culinary pièce de résistance, she is able to begin to acknowledge as dead those dear to her and to entomb properly what she lost in France. At the same time, the preparation of the cailles functions as an initial step toward articulating her loss in language. The word’s figurative dimension allows Babette “to speak” for the first time—even if only performatively through the preparation and presentation of the quail—of her dead loved ones. In the same way, her decision to serve Veuve Clicquot with the dinner, while at first glance a seemingly undetermined and logical choice of a famed champagne, can also be heard as a tacit putting into language of her loss and of her identity as a bereaved widow, since the brand name means “the Widow Clicquot.” The film’s depiction of Babette’s careful, one could say respectful, preparation of the dinner, which is only briefly recounted in the written narrative, properly emphasizes the ceremonial, mournful nature of this undertaking. It accurately illustrates the idea that Babette’s artistry in the kitchen is dedicated not only to the preparation of a meal, but also to the preparation of the dead for burial. In cooking the dinner, in other words, Babette performs the triple role of a great chef, a gifted mortician, and a knowing doctor. She prepares the dead bodies of her loved ones or cailles for entombment so that they may be literally consumed (by others) and thereby introjected (by her), making possible a cure for her “psychic indigestion.”17 At the same time, she writes or inscribes the prescription for this cure in the very dish she creates as her remedy. Indeed, the sarcophagi she prepares convey the message that the dead are not just to be buried, but must be consumed for her remedy to work. This message is conveyed by the word sarcophagus, which is Greek for “flesh eating” and is the name of the “stone reputed among the Greeks to have the property of consuming the flesh of dead bodies deposited in it, and consequently used for coffins.”18 Babette’s dish of Cailles en Sarcophage is thus itself a narrative of sorts. It is a text that cryptically tells of the need to bury the dead in such a way that they can be psychically devoured and digested and hence transformed into a tomb or memorial to their own disappearance: into a monument—which is what a sarcophagus, with its embellishing sculptures or inscriptions, is— that marks their absence and that not only permits, but also invites the memorialization or recollection of their presence in and through language. The live turtle Babette has shipped from France and makes into soup, and that looks “like some greenish-black stone” (25), can be read as yet another gastronomic vehicle through which she writes and fills the prescription for her own cure. This animal, which can be said to live in or

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carry with it its own “tomb” or “sarcophagus,” leaves behind, once the body within has been devoured, a kind of monument to its own memory. The turtle soup thus combines with the Cailles en Sarcophage and the Veuve Clicquot champagne to tell the tale of how healthy digestion of a loss is to proceed and of how memory of the loss may be constructed and rendered palatable.19 We can now understand why Babette appears at the end of the dinner “as white and as deadly exhausted as on the night when she first appeared and had fainted on [the sisters’] doorstep” (44). Through her entombment of the dead and her psychic ingestion of them (via the congregation), this culinary magician has performed a temporal shift. She has traveled (mentally) back in time to the moment, twelve years earlier, when she first suffered her loss and was unable to mourn. Having recreated through the feast her former existence and having brought together, buried, and monumentalized her husband, her son, and “her” aristocracy, she is at last able to transcend the blockage to mourning, to convert her suffering into words, and to reveal the secret she has kept about the life she lived and lost in France. Thus, when the sisters learn that Babette has spent all ten thousand francs of her lottery winnings on the dinner and Philippa says softly, “Dear Babette . . . , you ought not to have given away all you had for our sake” (46), Babette responds with a deep glance of “pity, even scorn” (46) and retorts, “For your sake? . . . No. For my own” (46). Babette’s sumptuous recreation of a dinner for twelve at the Café Anglais does not have as its principal goal allowing her to practice her art one last time or to reaffirm her identity as an artist in a gesture of nostalgic self-sacrifice or self-annihilation. This re-creation is the means by which she finally buries “France” and begins her new life in Norway. It is not an act of selflessness, but of self-rescue and selfpreservation. It is an act of survival. The end of the story suggests that Babette will indeed survive and may ultimately thrive. Before the dinner, she had cooked only for the sisters and prepared a soup that had the “power to stimulate and strengthen” (16) the poor and sick of the community, a “medicinal” gesture that can be construed as an initial but inadequate attempt at selfcure. Babette’s feast, on the other hand, enacts a recipe for self-cure that works. The moment she is able to say to the sisters, “I was once cook at the Café Anglais” (44), is the moment she finally separates the past from the present and is, in effect, “reborn in Norway.” Now, finally, she will be able to reconcile herself to the ascetic world in which she has existed for twelve years. Now, at last, she should be able to share wholly in the

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simple pleasures and self-denial of these people, all of which she has borne stoically these past years, but has never made her own. And now, finally, she will probably learn to converse with a community whose language she “never learned to speak” (16), and her “broken Norwegian” (17) may well become fluent. These changes do not mean that Babette will henceforth be immune to feelings of loss, longing, and sadness. On the contrary, she will now mourn normally; she will spend years, perhaps the rest of her life, slowly digesting and making a part of herself the shame and loss she has suffered. While doing so, however, she will be able to live and find pleasure in the present and move forward in life. She no longer will spend her time “lost in the study” (18) of her recipe book and conjuring meals she could only confect in the past. When, at the very end of the story, Philippa puts her arms around Babette and feels “the cook’s body like a marble monument against her own” (48), it is because Babette, through the feast, has become herself a living memorial for the dead. She has become a sarcophagus of sorts, a living tomb who carries within her the trace or inscription of an unspeakable loss she can now recall and mourn at will.

F O O D T H AT S P E A K S , A RT T H AT H E A L S Babette’s feast serves not only to cure her own inability to mourn, but that of General Loewenhielm as well. Recognizing the Cailles en Sarcophage before him as the specialty of the Café Anglais in Paris, he speaks of the woman chef there, the “greatest culinary genius of the age” (38), who could turn a dinner into “a kind of love affair . . . in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety” (38). Given his initial perception of Martine as a “golden-haired angel” (6) and as a “vision of a higher and purer life” (6) who reminds him of a Huldre or “female mountain spirit” (5) of Norway, the general’s conflation of the bodily and the spiritual takes on precise significance. It suggests that we read the dish before him in “spiritual”—psychic or figurative—terms; that we see the Quail in Sarcophagus, which provokes his comments, as the fleshly incarnation—for him—of his lost but never buried or mourned “love affair” with the spiritual, angelic Martine. For the general, literally swallowing the flesh of the quail is equivalent to “swallowing” figuratively and beginning to digest psychically or “spiritually” the loss of his petite caille, of his angelic, “winged” beloved.

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The narrative makes clear that this process of ingestion marks the beginning of mourning and involves the conversion of a loss into language. It is only after consuming the meal that the general, who had decided before arriving at the sisters’ home to “dominate the conversation at dinner” (34), finally speaks “in a manner so new to himself and so strangely moving that after his first sentence he had to make a pause. For . . . it was as if the whole figure of General Loewenhielm . . . were but a mouthpiece for a message which meant to be brought forth” (40; my italics). The quail and its tomb devoured, the general’s entire body is transformed into a mouth, the meal’s flesh is made word, and he admits for the first time that he had once trembled in fear: “Never till now had the General stated that he trembled; he was genuinely surprised and even shocked at hearing his own voice proclaim the fact” (40). A humiliating event he has kept secret for thirty-one years is now put into words. His fear of the dean, which had dissuaded him from pursuing Martine, is voiced, albeit discreetly, for the first time. And as the general speaks about grace, mercy, and amnesty—“grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty” (40)—he in essence grants them to himself and his former adversary. He forgives himself as the young Lorens, who trembled and lost a beloved. He grants amnesty to the dean, who had dominated the dinner conversation long ago and prevented him from expressing his love for Martine. And he implies that what had been lost has now been recovered, through language, as that which can be mourned. In fact, the last sentence of the general’s speech consists of the dean’s own intimidating words: “See! that which we have chosen is given us,” the general proclaims, “and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us.” Then, quoting the dean, he concludes: “For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another” (40–41). With the dean’s words filling his mouth, the general at last swallows the saga of his loss. As he departs the sisters’ home at evening’s end, his once silenced voice now speaks to Martine of love, carnal and spiritual appetite, and the mourning process he is about to begin: “I have been with you every day of my life. You know, do you not, that it has been so?” “Yes,” said Martine, “I know that it has been so.” “And,” he continued, “I shall be with you every day that is left to me. Every evening I shall sit down, if not in the flesh, which means nothing, in spirit, which is all, to dine with you, just

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like tonight. For tonight I have learned, dear sister, that in this world anything is possible.” (42; my italics) Lorens provides here his own recipe for mourning. He will spend the remainder of his days reliving this dinner as the main ingredient of his introjective process. He in essence says to Martine, “I will spend the rest of my life digesting a loss that will slowly become a part of me. I will live my days adjusting and enlarging my spiritual or psychic being, through my memory of ingesting this meal, so as finally to digest and absorb your absence and make your memory an integral and savoured part of my life.” With the general’s last words, Isak Dinesen makes clear that this story about food is a story about mourning. It is a tale that portrays blocked or suspended grieving in terms of silence, secrecy, and physical indigestion, and that prescribes as a cure for these symptoms filling the mouth with food that “speaks,” with nourishment whose literal ingestion figures the conversion of loss or emptiness into speech and the transformation of unutterable pain into the language of bereavement. If the general’s ability to speak the dean’s words marks his transcendence of a blockage to mourning, Philippa’s last utterance signals her initiation of the same process. When Babette reveals her true identity as an artist, she invokes Achille Papin as someone who also sought to perform to his utmost and whom the sisters remember as having openly “grieved” (14) for Philippa’s lost voice in his letter introducing Babette. In that letter Papin consoled himself with the thought that her voice would indeed be heard again in Paradise: “There you will be the great artist that God meant you to be,” he wrote. “Ah! how you will enchant the angels” (14). Upon hearing Babette finally give voice to her losses as a wife, a mother, and a great chef following the dinner, Philippa finds her own silenced voice through the words of Achille Papin: Philippa went up to Babette and put her arms round her. . . . For a while she could not speak. Then she whispered: “Yet this is not the end! I feel, Babette, that this is not the end. In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah!” she added, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ah, how you will enchant the angels!” (48; my italics) By assuming as her own the aggrieved Papin’s words and addressing them to a woman artist who finally acknowledges suffering a loss,

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Philippa assumes for the first time her own identity as a bereaved woman and artist. Through Papin’s words, she gives voice to her own loss of a lover and a singing career and, we may presume, sheds tears not just for Babette but also for herself as well. Babette’s feast and the Quail in Sarcophagus thus function for Philippa as they do for Babette, the general, and Martine. Ingesting the entombed “bird” becomes a figurative means of swallowing the loss of her beloved, her petite caille, Achille Papin. At the same time, it allows her to swallow the loss of her birdlike voice, thought by Papin to be that of a “nightingale” (11), and to fill at last her empty mouth with the language of mourning. By the story’s end, moreover, the entire congregation has joined in this communion of grieving mouths. Since the dean’s death, the congregants had become increasingly afflicted with a dissension “like a poisoning of the blood” and “a deepseated, festering splinter” (19). At the dinner, however, they begin to talk with each other. Although having vowed not to say a word about the food in deference to the sisters’ fears that something frightening like “frogs or snails” (27) might be served, the guests found “somehow this evening tongues had been loosened” (36). Though silent about the meal itself, the brethren seemed for all else to have “received the gift of tongues” (41). The feast thus appears to have “cured” the congregation along with Babette, the general, Martine, and Philippa. It would be a mistake, however, to think the congregants suffer in the same way as the others. The silence that gives way to their gift of tongues is not a symptom of suspended mourning. The congregation’s comical intoxication by the fleshly pleasures of good food and wine and their emergence from stern, discordant asceticism into ebullient and harmonious well-being—a shift readers have generally taken to be the principal aim of the dinner and the “lesson” of the story—needs to be read instead as an accompaniment to the central dramas of mourning of the four main characters. The congregation, in other words, functions in the story as something of a Greek chorus that echoes the main theme of the conversion of suspended mourning into normal grieving, but only in its most basic notes or themes of silence giving way to speech, internal discord yielding to harmony. At the same time, the congregants’ amusing refusal to speak about food and their ability to speak about the loss of a loved one (the dean) serve as a figural counterpoint or chiasmus of the story’s central trope in which the inability to speak about loss is cured by food “that speaks” or is transformed into speech.

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In light of the foregoing, we can now reassess the idea, shared to some degree by most interpreters of the text, that the feast is a Eucharistic banquet or Last Supper in which twelve members participate in a ritual celebration of (Babette’s) sacrifice.20 I want to suggest that, if the banquet has a Eucharistic dimension, it has less to do with selfless sacrifice and the granting of grace than with the psychic process of mourning. That is, the feast is readable as the Last Supper if the latter itself is read as a trope of introjection, as a symbolic meal in which the physical ingestion of bread and wine figures the psychic swallowing and digestion of a lost beloved (Christ). Put another way, if we can interpret Babette’s feast as representing or mirroring the Last Supper, it is above all because the narrative implicitly suggests that we read the Last Supper itself as a proleptic act of mourning, as a “wake before the fact” at which the loss of the soon-to-be-dead is symbolically integrated within the self through the literal ingestion of food. The dean’s and sisters’ comical hesitancy to allow “Papists” (Papin and Babette) into their home and the theme of “Protestant Puritanism versus worldly, carnal Catholicism,” which is gently woven through the story, can hence be read as signs informing the reader that the feast in the text requires a puritan or “Protestant” reading. The “Eucharist” of Babette’s dinner, in sum, is a Protestant one in which the literal ingestion of bread and wine is understood as a symbolic or metaphorical communion with the flesh and blood of the dead. In this form, it is distinct from the Catholic Eucharist in which the bread and wine are believed to become the actual flesh and blood of Christ. Babette’s is a ritual where the mouth is literally filled with food so that a silence about loss can be filled with words and so that an absence can be celebrated in and with language about absence. “Babette’s Feast” can therefore be described as a text that uses a religious context to reflect upon the psychic dimension of the creative act. It links artistic creation with psychic suffering, and it shows how the specific psychopathology of blocked or suspended mourning can be transcended or “cured” through the production of a particular work of art. The tale thus articulates a psychoanalytic aesthetic in which artistic production is readable as a symptomatic response to an unspeakable trauma that poses an obstacle to being, and as a performative attempt at self-cure that aims to overcome such an obstacle. The creation of the feast as a work of art to be ingested, in other words, serves as both a telltale symbol of impeded mourning and as the means by which figuration, as the mode of surmounting that impediment, is reinstalled. The production of

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art makes possible the work of metaphor as both a figure and an instrument of introjection. The idea that the feast “speaks,” through its ingredients, of what has not been said or mourned and thereby mediates and enacts the metaphorization of loss becomes clearer if understood in contrast to the dynamic of incorporation, which subverts or denies metaphorization. Incorporation occurs in response to a narcissistic loss that cannot be articulated in language because the subject shares with the lost object a shameful and therefore unspeakable secret whose revelation threatens to annihilate them both. In order for the subject to safeguard the secret as unspoken, preserve the innocence of the lost object, and protect the precarious stability of the subject’s own self, the subject pretends to have had nothing to lose in the first place. This pretense is sustained by the fantasy of incorporation, which functions by effecting a false introjection or simulated “swallowing” of what has been lost. Instead of the loss being introjected and the ego’s topography rearranged to accommodate the object’s absence, the lost object itself is magically taken into the psyche and preserved alive in an “intrapsychic crypt” (“Mourning or Melancholia,” 130) or vault lodged within the ego but resistant to the ego’s mechanisms of assimilation. The structure of the crypt simultaneously prevents the psyche from integrating the loss (and thereby potentially disintegrating the subject), protects the secret from exposure, and maintains the (fictitious) integrity of the debased object, thereby allowing the subject to deny that a loss ever occurred. In incorporation, the words associated with the loss cannot be used figuratively to express or convert loss into language, as they are in normal mourning, since the tainted secret must not be shared in a communion of other mouths. The rhetoric of mourning, in this instance, could be called a pathological rhetoric because it consists of the subject’s literalizing or demetaphorizing the words associated with the lost object’s shame as a means of undoing or nullifying that shame. A core figure of this rhetoric is what Abraham and Torok call “antimetaphor” (“Mourning or Melancholia,” 131), which in its most dramatic form manifests itself as the “fecalizing” of the lost object: the subject will literally swallow excrement or engage in coprolalia, for example, as a way of saying that the lost object is not filthy or vile, but good, edible, even delectable. The shame associated with the loss is thus denied by one’s destroying the metaphoricity of words, by vitiating their “capacity for figurative representation” (“Mourning or Melancholia,” 132). Examples of this can be

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found in the writings of the Marquis de Sade and in the films of John Waters. I will discuss a complex instance of incorporation and the rhetoric of demetaphorization and the crypt in the next chapter on Last Tango in Paris. As opposed to what I would term the pathological psychoanalytic aesthetic that emerges from this form of psychic disturbance, the effect produced by “Babette’s Feast” comes from what could be called a curative psychoanalytic aesthetic. This produces a sublime, uplifting affect, which announces the transcendence of a psychopathogenic trauma. Babette does not incorporate her loss as an unspeakable secret within an intrapsychic crypt. Rather, she suspends verbalization just as she herself is suspended in a metapsychological double bind between two incompatible alternatives of speech that render her acknowledgment of one part of her loss an implicit denial of the other part. This suspension does not lead her to avoid or void metaphor through a radical literalization of her trauma of loss. It prompts her instead to create a comestible artifact whose very ingestion gives itself to be read as a metaphor of introjection and whose readability as a trope unblocks speech and opens the way to the symbolization of loss. Babette’s culinary art, in short, does not aim to demetaphorize language or flatten out the figural in order to nullify its threat to silence. Her artistic creation functions as the vehicle for a metaphorization of loss that has resisted language. It serves as a medium of figuration that gives voice to the unmourned, unstated grief that has effectively left her mute for twelve years and prevented her from living life as her own. The aesthetic production of the feast can therefore be construed ontologically and metapsychologically as a psychic response to a blockage to being, as a symbolic narrative created as a means of filling in the gap in Babette’s speech that has prevented her self-realization. The feast, to put it another way, is readable anasemically, via a hermeneutic movement back toward earlier significations that lie beyond immediate perception, as the symptom produced as a means of transcending a trauma that has arrested figuration, impeded mourning, and obstructed Babette’s ability to live as a subject in and of loss. As it reflects upon the connection between aesthetic production and psychopathology and upon the curative effects of art, “Babette’s Feast” also demonstrates the possible psychic impact of art on those who receive or “consume” it. It presents a “theory of reception” that explains how a work of art, created in the course of one individual’s struggle to be, may—even if only unconsciously—be “read,” “used,” or “consumed” by others in their own attempts at self-cure and symbolization.

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This consumption, moreover, is not limited to the fictional characters of the narrative; it extends to larger sociocultural contexts as well. While Babette’s feast serves as the medium through which she, the two sisters, and the general all surmount an inability to mourn, it seems also to serve at least some readers—or viewers—in a similar fashion. I want to suggest, in other words, that the “eater-response” of moviegoers discussed at the beginning of this reading cannot be explained solely as a materialist or consumerist response to a clever marketing strategy. It is also symptomatic of at least some viewers’ desires to share or commune in a process of mourning. The fact that many of those attending the pricey replications of Babette’s feast were yuppie baby boomers indicates not only that they had ample income of which to dispose, but that they were also of an age, thirty- or forty-something, at which they had begun to experience if not accumulate traumatic losses in their lives. Their attendance at these dinners may therefore be seen as the unconscious expression of a wish to mourn, to participate in a “wake” or “Last Supper” of sorts through which they might grieve for their own losses. While some diners may well have sought merely the pleasures of good food, others, I would propose, unwittingly yet happily paid dearly for an opportunity to mourn: for a chance to swallow or further digest the loss of their petite caille. For these consumers, watching the film and ingesting the dinner afterward was a therapeutic experience that afforded solace as much as pleasure. The fact that the cost of these dinners, served by fine restaurants in cities around the country, was roughly equivalent to the cost of a psychoanalytic session in those same cities bolsters this conflation of the gastronomic and therapeutic.21 To what extent, I want to ask in conclusion, might the writing of “Babette’s Feast” have been a therapeutic endeavor for Isak Dinesen? Several critics have noted the ironic contrast between the story and Dinesen’s plight in 1950 when, suffering from the advanced syphilis that had attacked her digestive system, she was unable to eat normally and was in fact slowly starving to death. (She died of emaciation in September 1962.)22 While the short story might be viewed as Dinesen’s mordant commentary on her physical condition, the link between text and author can be understood quite differently if seen in terms of the connection the story itself makes between artistic creation and mourning. As Karen Blixen, her pre-authorial self and owner of a coffee plantation in the British colony of Kenya, Dinesen suffered losses not unlike those of Babette. She too had been forced to leave the country and people she loved (when the plantation failed); she too had lost a husband, whose

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incessant philandering resulted ultimately in divorce. She also lost her lover, Denys Finch Hatten, who died in a plane crash. Upon returning to Denmark, Dinesen suffered anguished feelings of loss and grief. When asked in 1934, upon publishing her first story collection titled Seven Gothic Tales, whether it would not have been more natural for her to write her first book about Africa, she replied that it would have been as easy to have turned immediately to that subject as to have written “about a child the day one buried it. One must have things at a distance.”23 If Africa was for Dinesen a “child she had buried” and could only talk or write about from a distance, and if “Babette’s Feast” is all about the creation of a work of art as the therapeutic medium for “talking” about loss, I would suggest that Dinesen, too, like the sisters, the general, and a portion of the restaurant-going viewers of the film, “used” this narrative for her own therapeutic needs. “Babette’s Feast,” in sum, is readable as Dinesen’s tacit rewriting or “second volume” of Out of Africa in which she linguistically inscribes the loss of her own petite caille (Denys Finch Hatten) and her own Café Anglais or coffee plantation in English Kenya. Created as a symptom of her need to grieve, as a vehicle for facilitating the grieving process, and as a subtle commentary on the intricate relationship between writing and bereavement, “Babette’s Feast” can ultimately be read as a text that humorously and poignantly tells the tale of Dinesen’s own recipe for mourning.

2 T o rt u r e d H i s t o ry Crypts, Colonialism, and Collaboration in Last Tango in Paris

. . . my films are constructed according to a stratification so mysterious to me that I could never separate the political from the psychoanalytic. . . . It seems to me that my films are all about finding the way out of this labyrinth, this chaos of politics and psychoanalysis. —Bernardo Bertolucci to Jean Gili in Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews

T

wo strangers meet in a Paris apartment, isolated from the world, where they have anonymous, sadomasochistic sex. He finally tells her he loves her. She shoots him in the groin and kills him. At first glance, there seems to be something post-coital, spent, politically unengaged about Last Tango in Paris. The story has none of the explicit ideological positioning or antifascist fervor of Bertolucci’s earlier, more obviously Marxist-inflected films such as Before the Revolution (1964), The Spider’s Stratagem (1969), or The Conformist (1970). Following its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1972, reviewers generally agreed that Bertolucci had turned inward, away from the political, and they praised the film’s unapologetic depiction of a no-holds-barred, purely sexual relationship. Critics who contended that the film was political cast its politics in sexual terms. Either the film was revolutionary because of its unsentimental, highly erotic depiction of unrestrained human desire.1 Or it was reactionary in its contemptuous, machismoladen view of women as passive sex objects with no identity of their own.2 A third, more mediated view saw the film as a noble but doomed attempt to subvert bourgeois morality and defy societal dominion over 47

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Eros by confronting the repressive institutions of family, church, and state with the unfettered pursuit of raw sexual passion.3 There is no denying that Last Tango in Paris is rife with intense sexuality, sadism, and misogyny, and that it depicts a tormented couple who try to resist internalized bourgeois codes of sexual and moral propriety. I will argue in this chapter, however, that Last Tango is less about sex than about death. Or, rather, that sex functions as a symptom of an inability to psychically bury and mourn the dead. This inability to mourn has a public, political dimension, and not just a private, familial one. It can be linked to what I will show is the film’s cryptic commentary on French colonial history and the loss of Algeria in 1962, and to its even more subtly inscribed reflection on France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany and the French government’s postwar censorship of cinema. Revealing how the film conceals within itself these sociohistorical and political discourses hinges on close psychoanalytic reading, and on construing sex in the film as both a practice and a trope. Not surprisingly, critics attempting to grapple with the film’s sexual dimensions have often called upon psychoanalysis for help, especially Freudian theory. They have perhaps been encouraged by Bertolucci’s own comment that, while “the film is meant to mean different things to different people,” the story could be seen as “an oedipal projection on the part of the girl; after all, she is 19 and Brando 48. And his story could be another oedipal projection—he feels, in a way, that he is as much the son of his wife as he is the father of the girl.”4 Others have used Lacan to show how the female protagonist seeks to possess the phallus by giving herself to the Other, its owner, thereby “fetishizing that which she does not have, what she is not permitted to have: power, language, self.”5 The film’s troubling linkage of power with sex—and raw pleasure with annihilation—has raised further questions. When asked whether he was proposing anonymous sex as the antidote for feelings of impotence, solitude, and death, Bertolucci denied any link between sex and death, insisting that sex was a “new kind of language” for the film’s two characters that meant to convey a “liberation from the subconscious.”6 I agree that sex is readable as a language in Last Tango in Paris. But this language, pace Bertolucci, is in fact intimately linked with death. After his wife of five years commits suicide in their Paris apartment, Paul, a middle-aged American expatriate (played by Marlon Brando), embarks on a fierce sexual affair with Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a French woman he encounters by chance. Not only does he forcibly sodomize her and make her penetrate him anally, but he taunts and demeans her

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Fig. 2.1. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Paul taunts Jeanne with a dead rat

Fig. 2.2 Last Tango in Paris (1972): Paul horrifies Jeanne by pretending to eat the rat

verbally. Indeed, the film’s language is at times as violent and as sadistically aggressive as the sexual perpetrations it depicts. When Jeanne finds a dead, blood-soaked rat in their bed, for example, Paul mocks her by holding the rat in front of her face and insisting they eat it: “A rat. It’s only a rat, more rats in Paris than people, yum, yum, yum. . . . Don’t you want a bite? . . . You sure you won’t have any? . . . What’s the matter, you don’t dig rat? . . . Listen, I gotta get some mayonnaise for this because it really is good with mayonnaise. I’ll save the asshole for you. (chuckling) Rat’s asshole and mayonnaise.”

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Later, Paul verbally abuses Jeanne as he forces her to explore him anally: “I’m gonna get a pig,” he tells her as she penetrates him. “And I’m gonna have the pig fuck you. And I want the pig to vomit in your face. And I want you to swallow the vomit. . . . And I want the pig to die while you’re fucking him. And then you have to go behind and I want you to smell the dying farts of the pig.”7 One of my aims in this chapter is to examine the film’s logorrheic violence, along with its sexual sadism, to bring into focus the connections it establishes between sex and death, loss and impossible mourning, unspeakable secrets and suicide. In doing so, I will avoid Freudian notions of oedipal rivalry and patricidal fantasy, since they rely on precast views of sexual desire that cannot adequately account for the film’s verbal or sexual violence. Lacan’s linking of power and sex with language seems more promising as a theoretical frame. However, relying on ideas such as the unrepresentability of jouissance and trauma or the fetishistic status of the phallus, which can offer only the illusion of self-identity, interferes with reading beneath the film’s manifestly phallic rhetoric to unveil its incorporative fantasies and unspeakable secrets. Such reliance also impedes elaborating the film’s cryptic engagement with the sociocultural and historical contexts of colonialism and collaboration. My analysis begins by examining how sex functions in the film as a manifestation or symptom of an inability to psychically bury and mourn the dead. This is different from “Babette’s Feast” in which unspoken secrets, which caused grieving to be suspended, were ultimately voiced so that the unburied dead could finally be interred and the process of mourning initiated. Last Tango in Paris is about blocked mourning and the formation of an intrapsychic crypt in which both the unburied dead and the unspeakable secrets preventing their interment are housed in perpetuity. Moreover, whereas the preparation of the meal functions in “Babette’s Feast” as a symbolic form of self-therapy that opens the way for Babette, the two sisters, and the General to resume their (intrapsychic) lives and go on being, there is no therapeutic process or goingon-being in Last Tango. Bertolucci’s film does stage a desire for psychoanalysis through a variety of spatial and relational representations of the analytic scene. But this desire is repeatedly frustrated. Mourning— and being—remain impossible. It is this very impossibility, however, that opens the way to linking the film’s saga of individual loss and obstructed mourning with its latent sociocultural and political dimensions. In the last two parts of the chapter I will explore these links to show how the film’s cryptic narrative of intrapsychic incorporation can also be read as a

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reflection of and commentary on France’s inability to mourn the loss of colonial hegemony in Algeria, its failure to come to terms with the loss of its identity, under Vichy, as a liberal democracy devoted to human and civil rights, and its refusal to acknowledge its history of film censorship, which aimed, in part, to deny these very losses.

S E X U A L I N T RU S I O N S , FA N TA S I E S O F I N C O R P O R AT I O N , I L L N E S S O F M O U R N I N G As the film unfolds, Paul’s unbridled verbal assaults (like those cited previously), which he repeatedly inflicts upon Jeanne during their sexual trysts, contrast markedly with the absolute silence he demands regarding their names and pasts. He grunts like an animal when she asks his name, and he cuts her off when she starts to reveal hers and to talk about her life: No! No, I don’t, I don’t wanna know your name. You don’t have a name, and I don’t have a name either. No names here. . . . I don’t wanna know anything about you. I don’t wanna know where you live or where you come from. . . . We’re gonna forget everything that we knew, every—all the people, all that we do, all that we—wherever we live, we’re gonna forget that, everything, everything. Paul’s silence with Jeanne extends to his wife Rosa’s suicide, which occurs just before the film narrative begins. Paul does not mention it until the film’s end, when Jeanne tells him their affair is over: “Listen,” he says. “I’m forty-five. I’m a widower. I’ve got a little hotel that’s kind of a dump. . . . I used to live on my luck—then I got married. My wife killed herself. But you know, what the hell. I’m no prize. . . . I’ve got a prostate like an Idaho potato. But I’m still a good stick man.” Paul matter-offactly reports his wife’s suicide without any expression of pain or grief and while insisting on his sexual prowess. In fact, his entire relationship with Jeanne is marked by a total absence of any language expressing loss, an absence he fills with a relentlessly aggressive discourse about fornication and bodily functions. This substitution of logorrheic violence for affective expressions of grief suggests a psychopathological dimension to Paul’s behavior that transcends explanations grounded in existential desires for sexual freedom, Freudian theories of infantile sexuality or oedipal dynamics, and Lacanian perspectives oriented by the law of the

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father or the real. More precisely, it raises the possibility that the sadistic, carnal trysts Paul shares with a woman whose identity he refuses to know are in some way symptomatic of an inability to speak about and mourn his dead wife, and of the obstacles impeding his mourning process. Before exploring how Paul’s sadism and insistently repellent references to swallowing and excreting might be related to his silence about his wife’s death, I want to expand on some of the epistemological and interpretive implications of Abraham and Torok’s linkage of secrets with mourning, which were partially articulated in the preceding chapter. I noted there that, when integrating a loss within the ego necessitates too distressing or destabilizing an adjustment in the ego’s topography, the conversion of the loss into language is blocked and the introjective process is stalled. A variety of intrapsychic configurations and pathological behaviors of differing degrees of severity can result. Incorporation occurs when the subject harbors a secret concerning the lost object that is too shameful for words. In order to protect the secret from exposure, the lost object and the shameful trauma attached to it undergo a “preservative repression” and are sealed up alive or incorporated in an intrapsychic crypt located within the ego. The structure of the crypt protects the secret from exposure because it isolates it from the dynamic mechanisms by which the repressed typically returns from the unconscious. The crypt also insulates the ego from undergoing the radically destabilizing reorganization that the secret’s articulation would entail, since the crypt’s walls interfere with the ego’s own assimilative mechanisms of introjection. Burying alive the lost object and the secret within the crypt thus enables the subject not only to refuse to mourn the object’s loss, but to deny that any loss has taken place.8 I would reformulate this concept of introjection in the context of Last Tango in Paris in terms of a psychic digestive process in which something is taken into the ego, broken down, and assimilated so that it becomes an indistinguishable part of the self. I would propose, correspondingly, that incorporation is analogous to a case of chronic indigestion that the subject disguises behind a voracious appetite. That is, in order to avoid psychically “swallowing” or integrating a loss by filling the mouth with language that expresses or figures loss, the subject acts out fantasies of incorporation and literally swallows and sometimes expels from the body certain objects in a ploy to erase or negate the void demanding to be filled. This literal ingestion and expulsion involves a process of demetaphorization that subverts the metaphorical or symbolic dimension of language through which loss is normally converted into

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Fig. 2.3. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Paul speaks to Rosa as if she were alive

words, shared with others, and thereby psychically assimilated. Unable to express loss linguistically, the subject enacts oral or anal scenarios (the latter convey “having possessed” through the act of dispossession), which substitute for the “mouth-work” that cannot be performed. These fantasies cryptically articulate the subject’s desire to introject a loss and the impossibility of doing so, while simultaneously denying that a loss has occurred. Understanding these connections among blocked introjection, secrets, crypts, and the inability to mourn allows us to reassess Paul’s words and behaviors toward Jeanne—which involve swallowing, expelling, and repeated penetrations—as possible fantasies of incorporation produced in response to his wife’s suicide. In fact, I want to propose that, metapsychologically speaking, Paul’s wife is not dead for him at all, but is instead buried alive in a crypt, along with an unspeakably shameful secret he associates with her loss. The extraordinary scene, close to the end of the film, in which Paul sits beside his wife’s corpse, laid out in one of their hotel rooms, supports this. Paul speaks to Rosa, as the stage directions in the scenario explicitly state, “as if she were alive”: You look ridiculous in that make-up. Like the caricature of a whore. . . . For five years I was more a guest in this fucking flophouse than a husband, with privileges of course. And then . . . you let me inherit Marcel. The husband’s double whose room was the double of ours. . . . I didn’t even have the guts to ask him . . . if the same numbers that you and I did were the same

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numbers you did with him. . . . You cheap, goddam fucking, godforsaken whore. I hope you rot in hell! You’re worse than the dirtiest street pig that anybody could find anywhere, and you know why? you know why? Because you lied . . . go on, tell me you didn’t lie . . . go on, tell me something, go on, smile, you cunt . . . go on, tell me you pig-fucker. You goddam fucking pig fucking liar. (suddenly sobbing) Rosa, I’m sorry . . . Rosa, oh god, I’m sorry. I don’t know why you did it. I’d do it too if I knew how. I just don’t know. I have to find a way. Not only does Paul talk to Rosa as if she were alive, but he verbally assaults her. His anger appears aimed not so much at Rosa’s having had a lover, whom Paul has known all about, but at the extent to which she turned Marcel into Paul’s double, possibly even engaging in identical sexual practices with him. (When Paul visits Marcel in an earlier scene, we learn that Rosa bought the same bathrobe and bourbon for both men, and that she started to wallpaper Marcel’s apartment to look just like hers and Paul’s.) Paul’s rage thus appears less a response to Rosa’s desire for other, different men in her life than to her desire for more of Paul—more than he apparently could provide. His apology (“Rosa, I’m sorry”) can accordingly be heard to express his guilt for her suicide: had he been a more adequate, satisfying lover and husband, she would not have killed herself. Paul’s guilt is in itself insufficient to explain his inability to mourn Rosa, however. If he has psychically buried her alive, there must be some secret connected with her death, possibly tied to the issue of sexual performance or satisfaction, that is too shameful for words. Paul’s linkage of his sexual competency (“I’m still a good stick man”) with the moment he finally breaks his silence with Jeanne about Rosa’s suicide supports this. It suggests that the secret he buries with his wife, and that prevents him from voicing his grief, involves something he cannot say about his sexual performance. The film’s vivid language about sex, and specifically about orgasm, points to what this “unsayable” might be. When Jeanne proposes that the two try to “come without touching” as they sit naked on the apartment floor, for example, Paul eagerly joins in: “Come without touching? Okay. You concentrating? Did you come yet? . . . I didn’t either yet. You’re not trying hard enough.” Later, wondering aloud if Jeanne thought about sex as a child, Paul asks, “When did you first come? How old were you?” She tells of being overcome by an orgasm while running down the hill to school one day. Then, angry because Paul

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does not seem to be listening to her, she lies down on the bed and masturbates. Watching her silently from a corner of the room, Paul begins to cry. His tears echo the only other time he sobs in the film: while speaking to Rosa’s dead body. This repetition suggests that Paul’s ability to mourn the dead may be blocked by an unspeakable secret involving orgasm and, more specifically, “coming without touching.” This suggestion is supported by Maria Torok’s essay, written prior to her work with Abraham on the crypt, in which she explores just such a connection between orgasm and impossible mourning. In “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse” (1968), Torok draws upon her clinical experience to expand on the observation of Karl Abraham (no relation to Nicolas Abraham) that a significant number of people show an increase in libido following the death of a loved one.9 Torok notes that this is indeed a common, nonpathological reaction that resolves itself, without lasting psychic distress, if the desires toward the deceased have been introjected and the subject no longer needs the loved one for emotional or ego growth. She enlarges upon this, however, to propose that, when a subject loses a love object for whom there are still unresolved, unintrojected desires, the subject can experience an unexpected libidinal eruption—which may manifest itself as a spontaneous orgasm—that represents the subject’s final, desperate attempt to give of her or himself uninhibitedly in order to resurrect the deceased and complete the introjective process. The subject lives this libidinal outpouring as untoward, shameful, and unspeakable, whether it accompanies or follows closely upon the death of a parent or other obviously inappropriate sexual object, or whether it is directed at the death of an appropriate sexual partner—a spouse or lover—with whom the subject has had an unsettled or “neurotic” relationship. The subject responds to this shameful experience—this “coming without touching”—by a preservative repression that transforms the libidinal overflow or orgasm into a secret and buries it alive in a crypt in the ego alongside the deceased. Henceforth, the defunct exists as an “exquisite corpse,” providing the subject with a continual source of both pleasure and pain: pleasure because the deceased, buried but alive, incarnates the subject’s hope of one day introjecting the remaining desires toward the loved one and completing the process of psychic growth; pain because the subject feels guilt for the crime of enjoying an illegitimate sexual moment prompted by the deceased. The subject in effect undergoes a psychic split, suffering intensely but unable to grieve, since the crypt houses the lost object as alive and so conceals from the subject the loss to be mourned.10

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The telltale signs of the illness of mourning, whose formation depends upon the construction of a crypt and the processes of incorporation and preservative repression, resonate uncannily with the tragedy of Last Tango in Paris. The subject suffering impossible grief unknowingly attempts to revive and bring the deceased back from the crypt by repeating the shameful, unspeakable moment that led to the lost object’s entombment in the first place: the moment of libidinal excess or orgasm. The subject, in other words, acts out compulsively, in displaced or camouflaged form, the very moment of being overwhelmed by sexual excitation in the unstated hope that this time the overflowing energy will be enough to revive the deceased, to bring back the lost love so that introjection can proceed. This is precisely what we see in Paul’s anonymous, perversely aggressive sexual encounters with Jeanne. If he suddenly descends upon her in their first meeting in the apartment and climaxes without so much as a word or gesture of foreplay, just as Jeanne happens upon him out of nowhere as he walks across the bridge in the film’s opening sequence, and if he sodomizes her without warning and makes her penetrate him anally while he comes, it is because an orgasmic eruption must have descended upon him without warning when he learned of Rosa’s death. Unable to satisfy his wife while she lived, he must have “come without touching” when he heard of her death, desperately but vainly attempting to satisfy her retroactively and undo her suicide. The shame of this moment of delight, combined with his feelings of sexual inadequacy and culpability for her suicide, rendered the moment unspeakable. Guilty of an unexpected outpouring of love that was too much, too late, Paul encrypted the entire drama, burying Rosa alive with the secret of his crime. His anonymous, depersonalized sexual trysts with Jeanne thus represent repeated stagings of this unspeakable moment involving his wife. They are fantasies of incorporation in which he unwittingly uses Jeanne, whose name and past he refuses to know, as an anonymous stand-in for Rosa and surrogate sex partner with whom he cryptically acts out simulacra of introjection: magical, hallucinatory moments of sexual adequacy that point to the drama of inadequacy and loss he cannot introject. This substitution of Jeanne for Rosa is underscored by the parallels between the abusive linguistic content of the trysts and Paul’s discourse with his dead wife. Paul sits beside Rosa’s corpse, for example, and calls her a “pig-fucker” and a “fucking pig” right after the scene in which Jeanne penetrates him and he climaxes while telling her he wants her to “fuck a

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dying pig, swallow its vomit, and smell its dying farts.” Paul thus experiences with Jeanne a moment of physical, orgasmic excess (figured by the overflowing vomit and farts) associated with the death of a pig—a pig we can now understand as a metaphor for Rosa. A similar substitution occurs in Paul’s perverse comments about the blood-soaked rat Jeanne finds in their bed. In the scene following her discovery, Paul insists on bathing Jeanne, who was caught in the rain, saying that otherwise she will get pneumonia: “And then you know what happens?” he asks. “You die. And then you know what happens when you die? I get to fuck the dead rat!” With the bathtub and the blood-soaked rat echoing the bloodfilled bathtub in which Rosa slits her wrists and throat, and with the idea of a rat resonating with Paul’s verbal assaults on Rosa, whom he calls a “whore, cunt, and fucking liar” for betraying him with Marcel, we recognize that the dead “rat” Paul is talking about “fucking” is Rosa. Paul’s sexual and verbal perpetrations with Jeanne thus emerge as cryptic reenactments of the unspeakable crime of orgasm he committed upon Rosa’s death. At the same time, his words about literally swallowing the vomit and farts of a dying pig and eating a dead rat are readable as demetaphorized fantasies of incorporation: as ciphered symptoms of an insatiable, impossible desire to “swallow” figuratively the death of his wife in order to bury her loss once and for all; and as an antimetaphorical fecalizing and coprophagic fantasy in which a vile, disgusting rat (Rosa) becomes a delectable, “yummy” delicacy (“rat’s asshole with mayonnaise”), thereby nullifying the metaphoricity of words and denying the shameful drama associated with the lost object. Paul’s language and behavior throughout the film emerge in this analysis as one long, sustained tango, as a dance in which the man openly parades his virility as he bends the woman to his will in a pantomime of lovemaking. Jeanne, so suggestible and compliant, is the perfect partner in this dance, steadfastly accompanying him until his very last performance of the drama that tortures him. Indeed, Paul’s outrageous attempts to dance in the midst of the tango competition in the film’s penultimate sequence do not merely parody the mannered machismo displayed by the male dancers on the floor. The dimly lit dance hall and the expressionless faces, tightly bound hairstyles, and rigid movements of the women partners eerily echo the darkened room in which Rosa is laid out, her hair tied firmly in place, her face morbidly vacant. Paul’s parodic sexual display and inappropriate intrusion among the couples miming sexual possession (including exposing his asshole when he moons them all)

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Fig. 2.4. Last Tango in Paris (1972): the vacant faces of the tango dancers

can thus be viewed as yet another repetition of the inappropriate sexual eruption that intruded upon him when Rosa died. At the end of the sequence, when Jeanne, still functioning as Rosa’s surrogate, tells Paul that “it’s finished, . . . we’re never going to see each other again,” and then masturbates him covertly under the table at which they are seated, the link between Rosa’s “finish” or death and hidden, unspeakable libidinal excess is sealed. So too is Paul’s fate. If the tango is about the man’s bending the woman to his will, the film’s last sequence, when Jeanne seems to rebel against Paul’s abuse and his final intrusion into her apartment by shooting him to death, reveals her ultimate—albeit unwitting—capitulation to his will. Paul’s verbal and sexual violence toward Jeanne, in other words, is not just a symptom of his inability to bury his wife. It is the means by which he attempts to rejoin and recover her. “Rosa, I’m sorry,” he says to her corpse as he sits by her side in the hotel room, “I don’t know why you did it. I’d do it too if I knew how. I just don’t know. I have to find a way.” Paul finds a way in his sadistic behavior toward Jeanne, behavior we can now understand as carefully, although unconsciously, choreographed steps that drive her to kill him in what has ultimately to be reread as his act of suicide. Psychically unable to accommodate the loss of his wife, Paul destroys himself in one last attempt to give of himself completely so as to satisfy and thereby revive her exquisite corpse. In a final fantasy of incorporation, he tries to bring Rosa back to life by joining with her in death.

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T H E S C E N E O F A NA LY S I S “Look, when something’s finished it begins again, don’t you see?” Paul explains to Jeanne when she tells him their affair is over. Moments later he pushes his way into her apartment, tells Jeanne he loves her, and says he wants to know her name. She shoots him in the groin with her father’s army pistol as she utters, “Jeanne.” Paul staggers to the balcony whispering, “Our children, our children, our children will remember,” takes the chewing gum from his mouth, sticks it under the railing, and collapses in a fetal position as he groans his last word: “Ma.” An ironic touch that makes this tragic scene slightly more bearable, Paul’s removal of his indigestible gum also mimics his inability to “swallow” or introject Rosa’s death. At the same time, this infantile gesture, his words “our children” and “Ma,” and his fetal form suggest a sudden regression to childhood that invites the viewer to “begin (the story) again”: to reread the film, through the lens of this last sequence, as in some sense a “child’s narrative.” Unsurprisingly, the elements of this final sequence have been read oedipally as indicators of Paul’s incestuous desires for his mother (figured by Jeanne), and as Jeanne’s acting out her desire to kill her father (figured by Paul). The elements assume very different significations, however, if viewed in the context of the illness of mourning and the idea that a latent neurotic conflict, usually involving a parent or parental figure(s), underlies a subject’s susceptibility to experiencing a shameful moment of libidinal excess.11 The etiology of the illness of mourning, in other words, is always anasemic. It is always contingent upon a prior trauma or traumas in which a child’s normal expressions of desire for psychic growth and separation were met with an uncontrolled or disordered response from a parent, whose ability to integrate her or his own desires was itself impaired. The latent neurosis upon which the illness of mourning is constructed is thus not an oedipal one caused by the child’s inability to transcend the parent’s refusal of the child’s desire for union. The neurosis is produced when the parent is unable to transcend an obstacle to her or his own introjective processes. The conflict in the parent is thereby visited upon the child, distorting or obstructing the child’s own introjections and normal passage through stages of parental separation toward ego growth and independence.12 Paul’s words about “children,” his utterance “Ma,” and his fetal position in the film’s last shot, together with his explicit and implicit

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sadosexual references to his mother in the narrative, can be reread as manifestations of such a latent neurotic conflict. When Rosa’s mother arrives to help make funeral preparations, for example, Paul calls her “Mom” and “Mother,” bites her hand when she attempts to comfort him, and turns off all the lights, despite her fear of the dark. Before forcing Jeanne to penetrate him, he links orgasm to the maternal womb, telling Jeanne to “go right up into the ass of death . . . till you find a womb of fear.” And when Paul finally talks to Jeanne about his childhood, he juxtaposes references to his mother in the nude with a barely camouflaged anecdote about spontaneous or uncontrolled ejaculation: My father was a drunk, tough whore-fucker, bar fighter, supermasculine, he was tough. My mother was very—very poetic, and also a drunk, and my memories about when I was a kid were of her being arrested nude. We lived in this small town, farming community. . . . There was a farmer . . . and he smoked a clay pipe, and half the time he wouldn’t put tobacco in it. . . . All day long I’d watch his spit which would run down the pipe stem and hang on the bowl of the pipe. And I used to make bets with myself when it was going to fall off, and I always lost. I never saw it fall off. I’d just look around and it’d be gone, and then the new one would be there. And then we had a beautiful—well, my mother, my mother taught me to love nature. And, uh, I guess that was the most she could do. With the farmer’s erotically charged pipe framed by references to Paul’s mother as both uncontrolled and loving, with Paul’s query, moments later, about Jeanne’s first orgasm, and with his demand that Jeanne repeat aloud, while he sodomizes her, his verbal assaults on the family as a place of “secrets” where “the will is broken by repression” and the “children are tortured until they tell their first lie,” we can surmise that what “tortures” Paul and infantilizes him at the story’s end concerns some kind of “secret,” childhood sexual trauma, involving his mother, that he has concealed or repressed. There is not enough evidence in the film to identify this trauma with certainty. However, the scene in which Paul bathes Jeanne, while talking about the kind of man who worships “in front of the altar of his own prick” and while insisting he can give her “the best fucking that [she’s] gonna get,” hints at its possible dynamics. It suggests that his libidinal eruption at Rosa’s death and his inability to mourn may be rooted in an earlier drama involving his expe-

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rience(s) of an erection or orgasm, perhaps while his mother bathed him. His mother would have responded to this in a conflicted manner, thereby obstructing the normal introjection of his psychosexual desires. This conjecture is supported by the fact that the bathtub, throughout the film, is a signifier of the repetition of untoward events. Not only does Jeanne’s bath scene recall the tub in which Rosa slits her wrists and throat, it also echoes the sequence in which the hotel maid washes the blood from the tub and tells Paul how the police made her reenact Rosa’s last movements, in and around it, as they investigated her death. If Paul’s sadistic relationship with Jeanne has to be read as a screen for his inability to mourn Rosa, his tortured relationship with Rosa emerges as symptomatic of some unspeakable, eroticized trauma involving his mother.13 It could in fact be argued that Bertolucci’s Luna (1979), about an incestuous mother/son relationship, is a narrative complement to Last Tango in Paris, in which the director openly stages and expands upon the unseen childhood sexual saga between Paul and his mother. We need not look outside Last Tango, however, for another film that suggests a repressed or encrypted parental relationship lies embedded in the story. Intercut with Jeanne’s idyll with Paul is her relationship with Tom, a young filmmaker. Hired by French television to make a film called Portrait of a Girl, Tom decides that Jeanne, his fiancée, will be its star. Not only do Tom’s eager but buffoonish attempts at filmmaking serve as comic counterpoint to the disturbing drama between Jeanne and Paul; they also make explicit the idea of uncovering and capturing childhood stories that have been buried or concealed. Tom and his crew accompany

Fig. 2.5. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Tom opens all the doors and reverses gear

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Jeanne to her family house in the suburbs where she grew up. As he films her looking through photographs and notebooks and reminiscing about her dog, schoolmates, and teachers, Tom stops to set up another shot. He opens a series of doors in the house, one behind the other, forming a receding, abyssal structure, and then directs Jeanne (in a dialogue that begins in French and shifts to English when Paul speaks) to think back to the past: Tom:

I’m setting up my shot. There! That’s it. I’ve got it. Reverse gear. . . . That’s it, yes. You understand? Like a car. You put it in reverse. That’s it. Close your eyes, put it in reverse. Close your eyes, that’s it. Come forward, come forward backing up. That’s it, you find your childhood again. Jeanne: Papa. Tom: That’s it, you take off, you find your childhood again. Jeanne: In full dress uniform. Tom: Don’t be afraid. Overcome the obstacles. Jeanne: Papa in Algeria. Tom: That’s it, you are fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, that’s it. Jeanne: . . . (showing Tom a drawing) This is my first love, my cousin Paul, . . . he played the piano magnificently. . . . Tom: Tell me about your father. Jeanne: I thought we were finished. Tom: Five minutes. Jeanne: But I’m in a hurry! I’ve got a business appointment. Tom: Yes, yes, but the colonel! The colonel! SCENE 13 —INTERIOR: APARTMENT; DAY Jeanne: (Still in French) The colonel had green eyes and shiny boots. I loved him like a god, Papa. He was so handsome in his uniform. Paul: (In English) What a steaming pile of horseshit! . . . Jeanne: (In French) I forbid you! . . . He died in ’58 in Algeria. Paul: Or ’68, or ’28, or ’98. Jean: (In French) In ’58! and I forbid you to joke about that! Paul: Listen, why don’t you stop talking about things that don’t matter here? . . . Jeanne: (In English) Why don’t you go back in America?

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I don’t know, bad memories I guess. . . . My father was a drunk, tough, a whore-fucker, bar fighter, super-masculine, he was tough. My mother was very—very poetic, and also a drunk. . . .14

Tom’s efforts to make Jeanne talk about her childhood and father bolster the idea that an unarticulated parental drama (perhaps more than one) lies concealed elsewhere in the narrative. At the same time, his attempts to “regress” Jeanne by counting backwards, and his insistence that she overcome her resistance and refind her childhood, paint him as the caricature of a psychoanalyst who directs or forces the analysand to make associations and, consequently, misses entirely the story he wants to grasp. Tom’s analytic incompetence is ironically underscored by his cinematic ineptitude: each time he and his crew turn the camera to capture comments by Olympia, Jeanne’s elderly nanny, she eludes his lens. Where Tom fails miserably at getting Jeanne to talk about her father, her resistance melts in the immediate cut to the next scene when she eagerly tries to share with Paul what she refused to tell Tom. Paul, however, will hear none of it. Far from a psychoanalytic listener, Paul shuts down Jeanne’s narrative in order to tell his own family story. While Tom tries to be a psychoanalyst and fails, Jeanne makes no attempt to function analytically toward Paul but in some way succeeds; she induces him to talk. Bertolucci’s suturing of Paul’s childhood memories with Jeanne’s resistance to Tom’s attempt to regress her marks a pivotal moment in the film. It suggests that the highly charged, overdetermined relationship between Jeanne and Paul has to be viewed on yet another level as the story of Paul’s unrecognized but insistent desire for analysis. This idea is in fact represented on screen, even before the film proper starts, in the title sequence. The very first image we see is the left panel of Francis Bacon’s painting, Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach (1964), which occupies the left side of a split screen and appears on the cover of this book. A man in white underclothes lies on a red divan in a room with yellow walls and a green floor, his head turned slightly to his left, one arm over his head and one leg bent. As the title and credits roll on the right side of the screen, the painting fades to black, the credits shift sides and continue in its place, and Bacon’s Study for Portrait (Isabel Rawsthorne) (1964), also on the cover, fades in on the right screen. There we see a woman in a white jacket and brownish skirt, seated on a wooden chair, looking off to her left with her arms and legs crossed. The room has

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dark, blackish brown walls and a purple floor, and the silhouette of a rat lies in the foreground. As the credits on the left side end, the first painting reappears in their place and both portraits occupy the screen, side-by-side for several seconds, as the sequence concludes. Bertolucci himself has commented on the significance of these two paintings, recounting how he took Marlon Brando and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, to a Bacon exhibition in Paris just prior to the start of filming. Bertolucci instructed Storaro to carry through the palette of the two portraits in lighting Paul and Jeanne’s apartment, and he encouraged Brando to try to capture the torment expressed in the two paintings.15 Several critics have pursued these connections, noting the resemblance between the reclining form of Lucian Freud and various positions Paul assumes on the floor of the apartment. They have also observed that Isabel Rawsthorne’s white jacket corresponds to the white coat Jeanne wears in the opening sequences, and that the rat in the painting’s foreground announces the rat Jeanne finds in her and Paul’s bed.16 What has gone completely unnoticed is that the two paintings, when shown side-by-side, form the classic image of the psychoanalytic scene, where the analysand reclines on a couch in a figuratively “undressed,” exposed position, unable to see the analyst, who listens, seated out of sight, closed or folded upon herself in impersonal neutrality. The fact that the “analysand” in this diptych is Lucian Freud, the celebrated painter and friend of Bacon who is also Sigmund Freud’s grandson, reinforces this “analytic” reading, so, too, does the fact that Bertolucci himself had begun a classical Freudian analysis three years earlier and was acutely sensitive to the dynamics of analytic process and the configurations of the analytic scene.17 Jeanne and Paul’s relationship can be seen as the unknowing staging or enactment of the psychoanalytic scene represented by these two portraits. Not only does Paul lie on the apartment floor in positions similar to Lucian Freud’s; he also transforms the apartment into a simulacrum of an analyst’s office. With precise gestures, he positions Jeanne in the place of the analyst, seating her in her white coat on a wooden chair, which echo the coat and chair of the “analytic” figure of Isabel Rawsthorne. He demands that they meet regularly in the apartment, refuses to hear any personal self-disclosures from her, and does not want to know “anything that goes on outside,” as one would expect in a classical analysis. I would suggest, in fact, that their sexual trysts, at least from Paul’s perspective, are akin to analytic sessions in which a highly erotic transference has run amok. The apartment in which Paul enacts his illness of mourning with

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Fig. 2.6. Last Tango in Paris (1972): overhead dolly shot descending on Paul

Fig. 2.7. Last Tango in Paris (1972): a train roars overhead on the Bir-Hakeim bridge

his “analyst,” Jeanne, becomes the protected enclave to which he returns, repeatedly, to try (unconsciously) to analyze it. While Jeanne may occupy the place of the analyst vis-à-vis Paul, however, she performs no analysis. The first sequence following the credits defines the “therapeutic” limits of her and Paul’s relationship and, at the same time, establishes a part of the film’s core grammar. With the two Bacon pictures on screen side-by-side, Bertolucci cuts to an overhead dolly shot that descends on Paul from behind. Dressed in a yellow coat that repeats the yellow walls in the portrait of Lucian Freud, Paul

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Fig. 2.8. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Jeanne walks up behind Paul on the bridge

Fig. 2.9. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Jeanne turns back to look at Paul

stands under the metro trestle on the Bir-Hakeim bridge, covering his ears and shouting “fucking God” as a train roars overhead. The swooping, invasive camera movement and the painfully intrusive crescendo of train noise from above are linked from the outset with “fucking.” They are thus identified as visual and aural signifiers of the unwanted orgasmic intrusions, involving Rosa and his mother, that descended or “fell” upon Paul and blocked his ability to mourn. In fact, throughout the film the noisy passage of the metro and frequent descending camera shots serve as a basso continuo, underscoring the looming presence of the intrusive libidinal excess that has traumatized

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Fig. 2.10. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Jeanne as a blank screen or transference object

Fig. 2.11. Last Tango in Paris (1972): receding pillars with Jeanne positioned as the analyst

him. After the train passes, Paul walks along the bridge, bearing an anguished expression, as we see Jeanne for the first time in the distance, walking up behind him, wearing a white coat and dark brown hat (figure 2.8). The camera in front of Paul holds them both in view as she walks past him, turns briefly to look at him (figure 2.9), and then continues on. Paul, lost in his own world, does not see her look at him. Jeanne thus first enters Paul’s anguished space from behind, in the position of the unseen but seeing analyst. When she moves in front of him, still unseen by him, the camera draws back to reveal two parallel rows of steel pillars,

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supporting the train trestle, that recede or “regress” into the distance. With her coat and hat linking her to the white coat and dark brown walls in the Rawsthorne portrait, Jeanne thus moves from the position of the interpreting analyst to that of the analyst as transference object. She moves into Paul’s field of vision, in other words, as the white or blank screen on which he will displace and perform the contents and affects of the traumas torturing him from his recent and distant past (figures 2.10, 2.11). Moments later, when the two meet in the apartment and Paul takes Jeanne sexually, he pins her up against its beige walls and white curtains. It is as if he were hanging her on the wall, like some blank canvas on which to transfer and display the unspoken sagas perturbing him, in the unstated hope of seeing and comprehending them. Transference reactions are of course at the core of the psychoanalytic process. The analyst, in classical terms at least, functions as a blank screen on whom the analysand unconsciously displaces fantasies, affects, defenses, and the like that are derived from relationships to significant others from the past. In a classical analysis, the analyst assumes a transparent, neutral stance toward the analysand in order to facilitate or catalyze the transference. Once unconscious transference elements emerge or are acted out in the session, they can be interpreted and worked through so that their intrusive, inappropriate repetition can be recognized, controlled, and eventually arrested. Metaphorically speaking, we can say that the psychoanalyst engages in a constant back and forth oscillation. Starting from “behind” the analysand in the position of a neutral observer who listens and responds minimally to what is revealed, the analyst moves “in front” of the analysand, who transfers affects and behaviors onto the analyst, and then back again “behind” the analysand to interpret the transference reactions as displacements.18 The choreography of the film’s first sequence mimes this oscillation while indicating the limits of Jeanne’s analytic capacity. Whereas we see her move from the position of an unseen viewer behind Paul to a position in front of him as a screen for his transference reactions, she never moves back behind him—either literally or figuratively—either in the opening sequence or any other time in the film, to the position of interpreter or analyst. When Paul makes Jeanne penetrate him anally, he does of course position her behind him. Indeed, Paul’s sadomasochistic demand—“I want you to put your fingers up my ass”—can be heard as a ciphered demand for analysis, a demand that Jeanne move metaphorically behind him to “explore him internally” and “put her finger” on what lies unseen inside him. Jeanne’s reply, however, is anti-analytical.

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Instead of interpreting his fantasy that a “pig fuck her and die” and that she “go behind . . . and smell the dying farts of the pig,” Jeanne enters into Paul’s fantasy, gratifying rather than elucidating his transference. When Paul taunts her, asking “You gonna do that for me?” she responds: “Yes, and more than that. And worse. And worse than before.” Jeanne seems to sense that there is a “before” that corresponds to Paul’s present behavior, but she is unable to see or interpret it. In fact, Jeanne’s inability to respond to Paul’s demand, despite being positioned physically and metaphorically in the place of the analyst, is consistent with her role as the substitute for Rosa in the narrative. We can reread Paul’s monologue with his dead wife, in other words, as a kind of “analytic moment” in which, after expressing his rage and anger toward her, he breaks down to confess his underlying love. While Rosa cannot possibly respond to Paul’s avowal and emotional catharsis, neither can Jeanne, who, as Rosa’s living incarnation or surrogate, is psychologically deaf if not dead to his tacit desire for understanding.19 The idea that Paul acts out a transference with Jeanne is reinforced by the two actors playing these characters. The narrative itself reminds us that Marlon Brando plays Paul when the hotel maid explains that the police described Paul as “a boxer [who] became an actor, . . . a revolutionary in South America, a journalist in Japan, [and] one day lands in Tahiti” (46).20 This is a list of Brando’s more notable roles in On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Sayonara, and Mutiny on the Bounty, roles that established him as one of the great method actors of his generation.21 The “Method” was invented by Stanislavski and developed by Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, and Stella Adler (Brando’s teacher). It is an intimately psychological style of acting that involves learning techniques for evoking emotional memories of actual experiences that the actor can use to construct a character. Method acting is thus a kind of “conscious” transference, an intentional reactivation and reenactment in the present of affects and behaviors from “scenes” an actor has already lived. As the method actor par excellence, Brando thus functions in Last Tango as a signifier of the analysand enacting a transference. By contrast, Maria Schneider was appearing in her first major film and had no established history or “identity” for the viewer. She was therefore a perfect fit for Jeanne as the anonymous, analytic “blank screen” on whom Paul’s transference could be displayed.22 Ultimately, however, Jeanne rejects the role of blank screen and Paul’s demand for analysis. Not only is she ill-equipped to respond to his need, but she reveals that she herself has something to say. When Paul

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Fig. 2.12. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Jeanne obsessively “explains” the killing

forces his way into her apartment at the end of the film, tells Jeanne he loves her, mockingly dons her father’s military cap, called a kepi, and finally asks her name, she shoots him with her father’s pistol. As Paul lies dead, curled in a fetal position on the balcony, Jeanne stares off camera and tells (in French) what happened in a quasi-dissociative, almost psychotic state: I don’t know who he is. He followed me on the street. He tried to rape me. He’s a madman. I don’t know his name. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know him. He wanted to rape me. I don’t know. I don’t know him. I don’t know who he is. He’s a madman. I don’t know his name. [Je ne sais pas qui sait. Il m’a suivie dans la rue. Il a essayé de me violer. C’est un fou. Je ne sais pas comment il s’appelle. Je ne connais pas son nom. Je ne sais pas qui sait. Il a voulu me violer. Je ne sais pas. Je ne le connais pas. Je ne sais pas qui sait. C’est un fou. Je ne connais pas son nom.] Jeanne seems to anticipate being interrogated by the police about the shooting and to rehearse her exculpating rewrite of the events. But her repetitive, compulsive speech has another function: it is a sign that she has shifted from Paul’s transference object to someone who herself enacts a desire to be heard. Her disaffected, obsessive account to some-

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one out of sight could be the discourse of an analysand on the couch speaking to an unseen analyst. Paul’s comments in the last sequence support this. He rejects Jeanne’s claim that the affair is finished, insisting that “when something’s finished, it begins again.” Then he barges into her apartment and announces with false bravado, “it’s the title shot, baby.” The film’s last frames, Paul implies, mark its beginning. The end of the film loops back to the title shot of Bacon’s analytic diptych, where we can now imagine Jeanne on the analysand’s couch and someone offscreen seated in the analyst’s chair. But what does Jeanne need to narrate and understand? It may be the story of her own inability to mourn and bury a saga involving her father, an army colonel who lived and served in Algeria. In an earlier scene in the Paris apartment she shares with her mother, Jeanne tries on her father’s medal-adorned jacket and kepi. Later, she tells Paul that she loved her father “like a god,” that he was very “handsome in his uniform,” and she becomes angry when Paul mocks his death: “He died in ’58 . . . and I forbid you to joke about that!”23 We have to wonder whether, metapsychologically speaking, Jeanne’s idealized father ever really died or is still “alive” and unburied for her. Killing Paul after he forces his way into her apartment and dons her father’s kepi, in other words, may also be the moment she symbolically “kills” her father— not out of some female version of the Oedipus complex, but because he forced himself upon her. We can reread Jeanne’s final monologue in light of this metaphorical patricide, since she does not name the man she accuses of attempted rape and claims not to know him. Her almost dissociative discourse could thus refer not only to Paul but to her father, and to an unspeakable secret of rape, attempted rape, or sexual molestation by a man she thought she knew, but really did not. Left unburied, unmourned, and unanalyzed, the “death” of this man she idealizes (as perhaps a defense against his cruelty) could underlie her susceptibility to the sadomasochistic relationship she endures with Paul. It could also underlie Jeanne’s incorporation of Paul at the film’s end. That is, if Jeanne refers in her monologue to the man she shot as a stranger, and thus as someone other than Paul, it is possible that Paul, like her father, is not dead for her. Her dissociated gaze and speech raise the possibility, in sum, that she does with Paul what Paul has done with Rosa and his mother. She buries him alive, along with the unspeakable secret of their sadomasochistic idyll, inside a crypt: a crypt that is perhaps already inhabited by her father and the unspeakable secrets of childhood violations.

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In the end, we cannot know Jeanne’s history with her father or the configuration or inhabitants of her intrapsychic world, since Jeanne’s character and family history are not as thoroughly inscribed in the film as Paul’s. Some critics, perhaps resonating unconsciously with this inequality (although not addressing incorporation or pathological mourning), have faulted Bertolucci for making Jeanne too submissive and lacking in agency. They have also pointed to the disparity between the frequent topless and fully nude shots of Maria Schneider and the never-exposed Marlon Brando as evidence of Bertolucci’s sexist tendencies to objectify his female characters and actors.24 These are legitimate issues for debate. I want to propose another angle from which to view Jeanne, however: one that not only amplifies and complicates her function in the film, but also allows us to link the film’s intrapsychic sagas of shameful secrets, loss, and impossible mourning with its unrecognized sociopolitical and historical dimensions. Paul’s last words are key to this endeavor.

A L G E R I A , T O RT U R E , A N D T H E T R AC E S O F C O L O N I A L H I S T O RY As he forces his way into her apartment, dons the colonel’s kepi, and mockingly salutes Jeanne, Paul tells her he loves her and abruptly changes the rules of their relationship: “It’s the title shot, baby,” he says.

Fig. 2.13. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Paul salutes Jeanne while wearing her father’s kepi

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Fig. 2.14. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Jeanne takes aim in her father’s uniform

“We’re goin’ all the way. . . . A little old, but full of memories, eh? Mademoiselle, how do you like your hero? Over easy or sunny-side up? You ran through Africa and Asia and Indonesia. And now I’ve found you. And I love you. I wanna know your name.” Jeanne looks at Paul solemnly, fires her father’s army revolver at his groin, and mutters softly, “Jeanne.” But who speaks her name here? And who pulls the trigger? Paul’s description of his pursuit suggests it is not just Jeanne. She has run “through Africa and Asia and Indonesia”—an itinerary that maps a large part of the geographical history of French colonial expansion. Moreover, Jeanne lives with her mother in a Paris apartment that is “a kingdom of . . . bourgeois comfort.” She has a racist nanny who detests Arabs and lives in the family’s country house in the suburbs. She idealizes her father, a French Army colonel, whose dog could “recognize Arabs by their odor” and who died in Algeria in 1958, the same year de Gaulle was recalled to power to end the growing nationalist uprising. Finally, when Jeanne tries on her father’s kepi and medalfestooned jacket, she aims his army pistol (which he taught her to shoot) at some imaginary assailant, visually and performatively identifying herself with the figure of the colonial aggressor. Seen from this perspective, Jeanne is readable as the embodiment of a certain bourgeois French colonial mentality that sought to thwart the independence movement and keep Algeria French. When Paul jauntily dons the kepi, drolly salutes Jeanne, and reduces the figure of the military hero to a breakfast choice of over easy or sunny-side up eggs, he

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thus not only mocks French colonial authority. He also assumes the role of the Algerian insurgents who resisted French sovereignty. He becomes a figure of the destabilizing other who threatened to turn the rule of colonial empire—and not just eggs—upside down. At the same time, his violent intrusion into Jeanne’s Paris apartment resonates with the violent intrusions by members of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale, the Algerian nationalist underground), who eventually infiltrated the European quarter in Algiers, as well as cities in France, to carry out bombings and assassinations against French government and civilian targets. The FLN’s escalating acts of rebellion brought the full wrath of the French military upon it, and the organization was decimated, albeit temporarily, by the end of the Battle of Algiers in 1958. In this last sequence of the film, then, Paul, the American in Paris, ironically becomes the Algerian in France: he mocks and challenges the power of colonial domination, only to be crushed by the French colonizer figured by a pistol-packing Jeanne. Jeanne’s final, quasi-dissociative monologue reiterates this clash of colonial and anticolonial forces. When she hails the police and invents a story to justify killing the unnamed “madman” who, she claims, inexplicably tried to rape her, she deploys discursive practices similar to those used by the French government to justify its repression of Algerian revolutionaries. For France, Algeria’s quest for nationhood was illegitimate, illogical, even “mad” because Algeria was part of France. After its invasion by French forces in 1830 and annexation as a colony in 1834, Algeria was constitutionally incorporated within the French Republic in 1848 as three overseas departments or DOM (Départements d’Outre-Mer). The French, therefore, did not view the FLN’s resistance to French control as an anticolonial or revolutionary war for independence. They saw it rather as a civil disturbance and illegal secessionist attempt that required, as official discourse insisted, a “pacifying” response involving “policing” actions to “maintain order” and protect people and property against attacks by “outlaws.” As Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France stated in a speech to the National Assembly on November 12, 1954, eleven days after the FLN launched its bid for independence by attacking police, military, and other government installations in various parts of Algeria: “One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation and the integrity of the Republic. The departments of Algeria are part of the Republic; they have been French a long time. . . . Between [the Algerian population] and mainland France there can be no conceivable secession. This must be clear forever and for everyone, in Algeria, on the mainland, and also abroad. Never will France, nor any

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government, nor any Parliament, yield on this fundamental principle.”25 François Mitterrand, then Minister of the Interior, also expressed the ideology of empire underlying France’s attitude and policies toward the insurgency when he proclaimed, in the same parliamentary debate, what would become the rallying cry of the government: “L’Algérie, c’est la France” (“Algeria is France”).26 If we resituate Jeanne’s final monologue within this politico-historical frame, her response to Paul’s irruption into her home becomes a repetition of France’s national response to the revolutionary defiance of its colonial hegemony. When Paul barges into the apartment, in other words, he is not just the Algerian in France: he becomes Algeria itself. At least that is how Jeanne rhetorically describes him to the police, whom she invokes to justify herself and, presumably, to “maintain order.” Just as France perceived Algeria as unjustified, unreasoned, and “mad” in its unprovoked assaults against a benevolent Republic that had no choice but to defend itself and its territorial integrity, so Jeanne portrays Paul as a “madman” who irrationally tries to attack her, and whom she justifiably shoots in an act of self-defense or “policing.” Jeanne’s insistence that she does not know Paul’s name also links her final act to the story of Algeria, since France never officially referred to its combat against the Algerian nationalists as a “war.” The bloody, seven-and-a-half-year struggle—in which many hundreds of thousands of Algerians were tortured and killed, and which led to the collapse of several French governments and the demise of the Fourth Republic itself—was euphemistically referred to by the French government and the highly censored (and selfcensoring) media as “the events,” “operations to maintain order,” a “policing” and “pacifying action,” and “the Algerian drama.” The war was literally a “war without name,” an expression by which it actually came to be referred in the years after the French defeat. Only in June 1999 did the French National Assembly, in a silent vote that ended a rather tepid and superficially homogeneous debate about what was still a largely undigested and unresolved piece of French history, officially confer upon the “events” of Algeria’s struggle for independence the name and legal status of “War.” 27 Jeanne’s almost psychotic insistence that she does not know the name of the madman she kills, however, not only echoes France’s denial of the name and legitimacy of Algeria’s war for nationhood. It also invites us to reread the tormented sexual idyll she shares with Paul, in which there are no names, no pasts, and few memories, as itself an allegory of France’s persistent inability to acknowledge or memorialize its

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brutal repression of Algeria’s struggle for independence ten years after the war’s end, when Last Tango was made. As Paul pushes his way into Jeanne’s apartment, in other words, describes it as “a little old, but full of memories,” mockingly dons the signifier of French empire (the kepi), and asks her name, he does more than change the rules of their sexual relationship. He attempts, in his ironic figuring of the colonized, to restore the language and memory of France’s silenced saga of military defeat, repressed history of torture and rape, and unmemorialized trauma of personal and national loss. He asks, in essence, that Jeanne (as France) say her name so that Paul (as Algeria) can name himself: name himself not as “France” or as Algérie française, as Mitterrand, Mendès France, and colonial discourse dictated, but as an identity and nation separate from the colonizer. Jeanne, in the role of colonizer, cannot allow this. The dishonor of defeat is too unspeakable, the history of torture too shameful, the loss of territorial and moral integrity too unnamable. In her bourgeois apartment in the midst of the metropolis, Jeanne murmurs her name, but only to obliterate its sound—and the possibility of Paul (Algeria) naming himself—with a weapon of colonial oppression. With one shot of her father’s revolver, she mutes naming, effaces identity, kills the possibility of memory, and obstructs mourning. Paul’s last words nonetheless prescribe a remedy for these aphasic and amnesic afflictions: “Our children, our children, our children will remember.” The generations after will restore memory and (re)write the war’s history, his words imply. Those who follow will voice over the obliterating sounds of colonial discourse and refocus the obfuscated images of colonial violence. Then the loss created by the debacle of Algeria can be named, memorialized, and mourned. Then the fantasies of incorporation by which the very existence of that loss has been denied can be re-metaphorized: fantasies like “French Algeria,” the “indissoluble Republic,” “colonizing that is civilizing,” “repression that is pacification,” “torture that is policing,” “war that is not war.” Then, finally, the shameful significations of these protective, delusional imaginings can be restored, and a nation in distress can engage in the symbolizing processes by which psychic introjection is unblocked and obstacles to being are surmounted. Jeanne’s pistol shot, however, does not just ring out with the obliterating voice of the colonizer. It can also be heard as the voice of the colonized who revolts against her oppressor. Jeanne, in sum, occupies both positions in this binary of power. As she submits to Paul’s psychosexual control, possibly acting out an abusive relationship with her father in

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unwitting symbiosis with Paul’s enactment of unspeakable sexual dramas involving his wife and mother, she is also a stand-in for the colonized Algerian as feminized, exoticized, and orientalized. Her frequently nude body can be seen in this light as more than an object of sexual pleasure and control for Paul’s gaze, or as a symptom of Bertolucci’s sexism. It also recalls the veiled Algerian woman who, as Fanon has written, threatened the colonizer because she could see him without being seen. Unveiling this woman, symbolically if not always literally, became the colonizer’s obsession, since it would synecdochally deprive the nationalist cause of its presumed panoptical power and stymie the revolt. Viewed this way, Jeanne’s nudity marks her objectification by the colonizing, masculinist gaze. Shooting Paul in the groin becomes, in turn, an act of rebellion against this spectral, phallic power. (As Jeanne looks through her father’s belongings with her mother in their apartment, she finds in his wallet a photo of a Berber woman, naked from the waist up, who was apparently his mistress. The many shots of Jeanne’s exposed breasts thus repeat the way the colonized Maghrebian female is literally pictured in the film, visually identifying Jeanne’s position with that of the subjugated Algerian woman.) Jeanne’s embodiment of the subjugated, colonized other, however, is even more forcefully conveyed by the episodes of torture she endures with Paul. Torture is not too strong a word here. There are tacit references throughout the film to the French military’s torture of Algerians: a practice that slowly became known to the general public as conscripts wrote home or returned to France from military service, but that was either justified, minimized, or denied by the French government and media. The most obvious reference is the infamous “butter scene” in which Paul forcibly sodomizes Jeanne and makes her utter a diatribe against the family, in which “the children are tortured until they tell their first lie . . . where the will is broken by repression . . . where freedom is assassinated.” The very next scene reinforces the link between this rape and “confession” and the use of torture in Algeria. When Jeanne gets an electric shock trying to plug in a faulty phonograph, she sadistically invites an unwitting Paul to try. As he jumps from the shock and asks coldly, “You enjoy that?,” we are reminded of the notorious gégène or torture by electric current, one of the most popular methods used by the French in Algeria to extract information.28 If the sodomy, confession, and phonograph sequences link Paul and Jeanne’s story to Algeria, there are other, even more subtle references to torture that do so as well. The bathtub scene is one example. As Paul

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Fig. 2.15. Last Tango in Paris (1972): the cleansing power of Vigor

washes Jeanne, who toys with him by insisting she has fallen in love with someone else (who turns out to be Paul), he pushes her head under water twice, swats her with the washrag, and hits her on the head several times with a shoe. Along with Rosa’s suicide in the bathtub and the scene in which the maid lets the water run in the tub as she cleans up the bloody mess (despite Paul insisting she turn off the tap), this mock beating recalls la baignoire (“the bathtub”), another much-used form of “clean torture” in which prisoners were held down in tubs of filthy water until they nearly drowned. Clean torture is evoked again in the Bir-Hakeim metro station when Jeanne and Tom aggressively punch and slap each other against the background of an ad for “Vigor” cleaning liquid, which we first see in an establishing shot (figures 2.15, 2.16). The station’s Arabic name, the picture of a man’s firm hand gripping the cleanser as a woman’s braceleted (or chained?) hand delicately reaches toward it, together with the ad’s militaristic rhetoric proclaiming “The power of an industrial cleaner at the service of your floors,” encode France’s vigorous, violent attempts to clean out the Algerian insurgents and halt the nationalist rebellion. The idea of cleaning out Algerians is also conveyed by the bloodsoaked rat Jeanne finds in the apartment, by the image of the rat in Bacon’s painting of Isabel Rawsthorne, and by four camera shots of the CRS (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité) or French paramilitary riot police. (Two of these shots are inserted in the opening sequence when Paul and Jeanne first cross paths on the Bir-Hakeim bridge. Another two show helmeted and armed CRS in the street in front of the couple’s

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Fig. 2.16. Last Tango in Paris (1972): Jeanne and Tom fight in front of the ad for Vigor

Fig. 2.17. Last Tango in Paris (1972): the CRS stationed below the Bir-Hakeim bridge

apartment, figure 2.17.) Raton (“small rat”) is a racist slur used since the 1930s to refer to Maghrebian Arabs. The term ratonnades, literally “rat roundups,” was first used in the Algerian War and referred to hunting down insurgents.29 It also referred to police roundups of suspected FLN members in France, and to CRS attacks against French Algerians in Paris. Ratonnades was later used to describe CRS assaults on protestors during the student/worker riots of 1968, the immediate and manifest historical context of Last Tango in Paris.30 The bloodied, dead rat Paul

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invites Jeanne to eat and uses to torture her psychologically thus visually and linguistically inserts the tortured Algerian into the film. The inserted shots of the CRS similarly inscribe traces of the anti-Algerian ratonnades beneath the 1968 context of the couple’s story. And the shadowy image of the dead rat in the portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne announces pictorially, from the first images of the opening credits, the shadowy practice of torturing and killing Algerians. Along with the painting’s evocation of the psychoanalytic scene and the ideas of repression, memory, and secret trauma, the dead rats, the shots of the CRS, and the “tortures” Jeanne endures oblige us to resituate the entire film within the context of France’s inability to “eat” or digest psychically the horrors of the ratonnades, and to re-view it as a reflection on the nation’s failure to introject the unspeakable dramas of torture and killing that shaped “the events.” In the end, Jeanne rebels. As Paul forces his way into her apartment, puts on the kepi, and tells her he wants to know her name, the colonized turns on the colonizer. With one pistol shot to the groin, she destroys the site of the reproduction of power, resists the torturer’s dominion, and claims autonomy. Or does she? Even as she defies subjugation, she still seems held within the colonial paradigm of surveillance and control, since she answers—or fantasizes answering—to the police. Decolonized, she appears recolonized, but perhaps then liberated again. After all, Jeanne intends to lie to her imagined interrogators. Is she then a revolutionary who is subdued, an insurgent who finally escapes colonial hegemony, or the colonizer who kills the colonized because he seeks a name and an independent identity? We cannot really say, since Jeanne occupies all three positions at once. As such, she becomes a destabilized and destabilizing figure whose obliterating shot not only silences but speaks, at least in the context of the war without name, of France’s inability to control the narrative of its own history of decolonization.

C O L L A B O R AT I O N , C E N S O R S H I P, A N D T H E R E S T O R AT I O N O F C I N E M AT I C H I S T O RY Jeanne’s shot also speaks of another history that was excised if not completely obliterated: the history of French film about Algeria. As her gunshot silences naming, it also resonates with the sordid story of French government censorship, which sought to mute narratives and obscure images of the war. The last part of this reading explores how Last Tango in Paris retraces and, in some instances, attempts to restore the gaps left

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by these excisions. One case that had particular resonance for Bertolucci was the censoring of Godard’s Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier], made in 1960 and not released until 1963. This event cast a pall on virtually all French filmmakers of the time who had been eager to take on the vexed question of Algeria and the especially taboo subject of torture.31 The film’s banning was all the more troubling since the story, about a French hit man hired by the government to assassinate an Algerian revolutionary, was fairly evenhanded in its political stance, depicting the use of terrorism and torture by both sides in the conflict, Algerian as well as French. Bertolucci, one of the leading figures of the Italian New Wave and a committed Marxist, was greatly influenced by Godard’s politically engaged cinema. His decision to cast Jean-Pierre Léaud as Tom in Last Tango, after Godard had used the actor in seven ideologically charged films, thus had its own political implications.32 Léaud’s clownish imitation of a New Wave director, who shoots (like Godard) unscripted, with available light, synchronous sound, and a handheld camera, and who tries but fails to film the story of a French colonel who served in Algeria, evokes the entire corpus of Godard’s work, but it especially calls to mind the censoring of Le Petit Soldat. This subtle filmic intertext is joined by another New Wave film that openly talked of torture in Algeria: Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour [Muriel or the Time of a Return].33 Given what happened to Le Petit Soldat, Resnais tread carefully and opted to show no images of the brutality in Algeria. Instead, Bernard, a former conscript returned home to France, recounts the story of Muriel’s torture while showing amateur movies of his smiling army buddies posing in the Algerian desert. (The film, made in 1962, was nonetheless suppressed and not released until 1963.)34 The dissonance between Bernard’s sickening narrative and the benign pictures he projects on screen reflects Resnais’s need to censor his own film. At the same time, it functions as a critique of the government’s suppression of filmmaking about the war. This critique is reinforced at the story’s end when Bernard shoots and kills Robert, the soldier who led the torture of Muriel but suffers none of Bernard’s remorse. Doubly charged, the scene represents more than a personal act of reckoning or an allegory of a nation’s awakening sense of regret and guilt. It also speaks of France’s efforts to deny the horrors of torture, erase the memory of its moral slide, and obliterate the traumatizing reminders of a national tragedy. Seen from this angle, Jeanne’s shooting of Paul—her own “torturer” and stand-in for a colonizing father who may have abused her or others in Algeria—functions as a repetition

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of Muriel’s ending and as a preservative gesture that counters the film’s suppression. That is, her shot echoes Bernard’s shooting of Robert and the elimination of a figure of the brutal colonizer. In the same instant, it sutures the quashing or “killing” of Muriel ou le temps d’un retour back into the visual, cinematic history of the war. Jeanne’s shot, in sum, quotes Muriel’s subtitle and becomes itself “the time or moment of a return”: a moment that speaks of the need to recall and restore film memory—even as distorted, tortured, or deformed. Last Tango in Paris also serves as the site for the return of another censored film about Algeria: Gillo Pontecorvo’s remarkable La Battaglia di Algeri / La Bataille d’Algiers [The Battle of Algiers] (1966).35 The film is a realistic re-creation of the FLN’s terrorist attacks in the European quarter of Algiers and the French military’s use of torture to halt the violence and dismantle the rebel organization. Despite showing FLN violence against French civilians, including women and children, and presenting a balanced enough view of the conflict to generate criticism by both the Algerian and French Left as well as the French Right, French censors held back the film for several years, releasing it only in 1970, shortly before Bertolucci began work on Last Tango.36 In the film, French soldiers refer to Algerians as ratons, and we see several disturbing scenes of torture—including use of la gégène and la baignoire—which figured heavily in the film’s censoring and were in fact cut from its American and British versions. Last Tango in Paris, with its own “torture” scenes involving rats, electric shocks, and bathtubs, in effect reinstates the sequences occluded from Pontecorvo’s film and reinscribes the film’s repression within the censored history of Algerian War cinema. Jeanne’s shot to Paul’s groin, if reconsidered within this adulterated history, positions her as a figure of the censor who inflicts the filmic excisions and obliterations Pontecorvo’s film suffered. Paradoxically, however, even as her shot cuts a hole, it also makes whole. Or at least it restores the film’s history of elisions so that it is remembered as having always already been cut and suppressed. Jeanne’s castrating shot, in other words, repeats the trauma of France’s mutilation and repression of The Battle of Algiers, and of Algerian War cinema in general, in order to rewrite and fill in the nation’s film history as always unwhole: as always marked by the erasure of the unseeable and the stifling of the unspeakable.37 There is still one more film I want to connect to Last Tango in Paris. If Bertolucci has created a palimpsest in which the private, psychoanalytic dramas of impossible mourning and incorporated secrets are inscribed within the sociopolitical frame of the worker/student revolu-

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tion and CRS-led ratonnades of 1968, and if this frame overlays the unspeakable events of the Algerian War and its censorship in film, then the trauma of Algeria, in turn, lies atop and conceals a third level of filmic discourse concerning France’s World War II collaboration with Nazi Germany and its cinematographic representations. This third level is suggested throughout Bertolucci’s film by subtle yet insistent references to the seminal film of post-Holocaust France I discussed briefly in my introduction: Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1955).38 This short documentary was intended not only to expose the infamy of Hitler’s Final Solution through largely unseen archival film and photos. It was also meant, as Resnais himself has said, as a tacit warning that the horrors of Nazism might be repeated during the Algerian War where torture and internment were already underway.39 Resnais’s film, like Bertolucci’s, is thus a multilayered reflection on the politics of colonization and the ideologies of empire. I would submit that it is also an unrecognized intertext of Last Tango in Paris, since Bertolucci’s work repeatedly hails, cites, and paraphrases the documentary, as I will now show, in order to talk about the Collaboration, censorship, and France’s continued inability in 1972, when Last Tango premiered, to come to terms with the haunting effects of Vichy. The two films intersect first of all through a shared grammar dominated by images of trains and train tracks and the frequent use of tracking and traveling shots. From the initial sequence of Night and Fog, the camera travels past rows of barbed wire fences, eventually moving along the remnants of train tracks, now overgrown with grass and weeds, that once led into the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It glides past rows of barracks, bunks, and latrines, and along the walls and ceilings of the gas chambers, scarred by hands clawing to escape. It moves past the twisted rails of sleds on which dead bodies were slid into the ovens. And it follows the trains, loaded with thousands of deportees, as they roll out of the stations toward the camps, traverse the countryside, and arrive at their destination, “in the night and the fog,” as the narrator intones. These tracking shots and shots of tracks are all quoted or paraphrased in Last Tango in Paris. The opening sequence starts with a dollied traveling shot that swoops down upon Paul as a metro train crosses the BirHakeim bridge. In content terms, this is the first of many shots of metros crossing the bridge, and of trains and train tracks at the Saint Lazare and Bir-Hakeim stations. Formally speaking, it is the first of many traveling shots that characterize Bertolucci’s and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s fluid style and that shape the look of the entire film. These

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include the travelings that follow the strides, dips, and turns of the tango dancers, that glide through the apartment across walls, windows, and bodies, that race alongside Paul as he chases Jeanne down the ChampsElysées, and that track Tom’s own traveling shot as it advances toward Jeanne while she moves backward, in space and time, toward artifacts and memories of childhood. But these grammatical interstices conceal another, even more nuanced cinematic and sociopolitical connection between Resnais and Bertolucci. The Bir-Hakeim bridge on which Paul and Jeanne first cross paths, where he finds her again at the film’s end, and which opens out toward their apartment on the rue de Passy, together with the BirHakeim-Grenelle metro station where Tom and Jeanne fight under the ad for “Vigor,” form the spatial nexus of the film. This nexus is also Last Tango’s geographical, historical, and political point of convergence with Night and Fog. The Bir-Hakeim-Grenelle metro station, of which Bertolucci is careful to show several identifying signs, is at the intersection of the Boulevard de Grenelle and the rue Nelaton in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. The station, in other words, is directly in front of the former site of the Vél’ d’Hiv’, the popular name for the Vélodrome d’Hiver or “Winter Cycling Stadium,” which stood on the rue Nelaton until 1959 when it was finally torn down. The Vél’ d’Hiv’ is inextricably linked with one of the most notorious moments in France’s collaboration with the Final Solution: la Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv’ or Roundup of Vél’ d’Hiv’. On July 16 and 17, 1942, French police and gendarmes —under orders from Pétain’s government and following an agreement between René Bousquet, chief of police under Vichy, and Karl Oberg, head of the SS and the German police in occupied France—tracked down and rounded up almost 13,000 mostly foreign and stateless Jews residing in Paris, including women and children. They sent 6,000 to the internment camp at Drancy outside Paris and 7,000 (including 4,051 children) to the Vél’ d’Hiv’. The Jews there endured atrocious conditions for a week, suffering in terrible heat with almost no water, food, sanitation, or medical attention. They were finally sent—by train—either to French transit camps such as Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande and from there to death camps, or directly to Auschwitz, the camp where nearly all perished and whose fence posts, overgrown train tracks, moldering gas chambers, and charred crematoria are the visual anchors of Night and Fog.40 From its first traveling shots and images of trains crossing the BirHakeim bridge leaving the rue Nelaton, Last Tango in Paris is thus about roundups: not just ratonnades of Algerians, but rafles of Jews. It is about

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Fig. 2.18. Night and Fog (1955): Jews held at the Vél’ d’Hiv’

Fig. 2.19. Last Tango in Paris (1972): a misleading shot of Rue Jules Verne

traveling and tracking, dislocation and deportation. Bertolucci tacitly says as much in a seemingly innocuous panning shot, after the opening bridge sequence, of a street sign—“Rue Jules Verne”—next to the entrance to Paul and Jeanne’s apartment. The shot is misleading, since

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rue Jules Verne is nowhere near the Bir-Hakeim bridge or the rue de Passy in the 16th arrondissement, where the apartment is located. Rue Jules Verne is further east, in the 11th arrondissement off the rue du Faubourg du Temple, in a once heavily Jewish neighborhood from which many were rounded up in the Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv’. Via a misleading yet reorienting reference to Jules Verne, the travel author par excellence, Bertolucci thus maps the route of the trains of Night and Fog into the spatial, sociocultural, and political discourses of Last Tango in Paris. He invites us to read the geography, images, and cinematographic grammar of his film as signposts of deception and disorientation, and as signifiers of Vichy’s deportation of its Jews “to the East” (as Reinhard Heydrich, concretizing plans for the “final solution of the Jewish question” at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, euphemistically referred to transporting Europe’s Jews to extermination camps), well beyond the 11th arrondissement, to death in Auschwitz.41 But the trains and the traveling and tracking shots in Last Tango are not the only cinematic quotations from Night and Fog. So, too, is the figure of open doors, which we see and hear (in French) repeatedly throughout Bertolucci’s film just as we hear it verbalized in Resnais’s. When Jeanne tries to get a door key to the apartment from the half-mad concierge, when the mover enters without knocking and explains that “la porte était ouverte” [“the door was open”], when the prostitute yells “Réveillez-vous, ouvrez cette porte” [“Wake up! Open this door!”] through the windowed door of Paul’s hotel, when Paul forces open the door to Jeanne’s apartment at the film’s end, when he opens the double doors to the balcony before he crumples to the ground dead, and when Tom opens all the doors in Jeanne’s country house to set up a shot, exclaiming “La porte! La porte! J’ouvre la porte! J’ouvre toutes les portes!” [“The door! The door! I’m opening the door! I’m opening all the doors!”], we hear the mournful words at the end of Night and Fog that describe the macabre moment of the camps’ liberation. As we watch images of emaciated and stunned prisoners pressed against a camp’s barbed wire fences, the narrator explains that they could only stare in silence as the Allies entered through the once locked gates: “Quand les Alliés ouvrent les portes, toutes les portes, les déportés regardent sans comprendre” [“When the Allies opened the doors, all the doors, the deportees looked without understanding”]. It is the final sequence of Last Tango in Paris, however, when Jeanne shoots Paul after he puts on her father’s kepi, that not only corroborates the film’s complex intertextual linkage with Night and Fog, it also reveals

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the extent to which Last Tango functions as a historical commentary and political critique of France’s postwar response to the Collaboration. Night and Fog, like Le Petit Soldat, Muriel, and The Battle of Algiers, was a victim of government censorship. It was scheduled to compete in the short subject category at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. After officials from the West German embassy viewed it in a private screening, innocently arranged by the film’s producer, their government insisted that the French withdraw it because viewers would not be able to distinguish “between the major criminals of the Nazi regime and the Germany of today.”42 The controversy was “resolved” when the film was shown at Cannes “out of competition.” But even before Night and Fog arrived at Cannes, the French government, seeking to deny the extent of Vichy’s complicity in the Holocaust, would not allow it to be distributed unless Resnais cut one shot, #39: a photo found in the Nazi archives of a French gendarme—wearing a kepi—standing in a guard tower at Pithiviers, one of the transit camps in the Loiret region south of Paris to which Jews, including those from the roundups of Vél’ d’Hiv’, were sent before being deported to Auschwitz and other death camps (figure 2.20). Resnais

Fig. 2.20. Night and Fog (1955): uncensored shot #39 of the gendarme at Pithiviers

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Fig. 2.21. Night and Fog (1955): shot #39 censored by Alain Resnais

refused to make the cut, and the standoff held until a compromise was finally reached. Resnais would doctor the shot, obliterating the kepi worn by the gendarme by painting a wooden beam on the photo to cover it (figure 2.21). He refused, however, to alter the narration accompanying the shot, which explicitly refers to “Pithiviers” and “those rounded up at Vél’ d’Hiv’,” because, as he explained later, “it was important to show that France had organized departure sites for the camps.”43 Jeanne’s pistol shot at the end of Last Tango in Paris retells this saga. Mutilating and silencing the man in the kepi repeats the mutilation and censure of the gendarme pictured at Pithiviers. By recalling the obscured kepi, her shot also metaphorically obliterates the beam Resnais painted over it and reinserts the kepi into the photo—and into Night and Fog. Jeanne’s shot is thus a restorative act: it repairs by cutting, replaces by repeating an excision. This excision, in turn, rhetorically names those sent to and deported from Pithiviers. Jeanne’s cutting wound to the groin, in other words, is not just a castrating gesture that links the film’s concealed narratives of sexual abuse with those of colonial and fascist abuse, it also mimics the ritual cut marking Jewish (male) identity. Jeanne’s shot, in

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sum, performs an excision that is also a circumcision. It thereby sutures the biblical mark of the covenant between the Jews and God (which the Nazis used to identify Jews trying to pass as Christians) and Vichy’s antiSemitic ideology back into the picture of the camp at Pithiviers and reiterates their presence as subjects of Night and Fog. Last Tango in Paris becomes, accordingly, an instrument of suture and reinsertion and a site of cinematic memory. It preserves by reshooting and recutting moments of loss. It memorializes by repeating and erasing the obliteration of memory. And it reinscribes in ciphered form at least a part of France’s history of film censorship and its collaboration in the Final Solution.44 Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris is a film about the inability to mourn loss and the incorporation of shameful personal and collective secrets. It is about unspeakable traumas—sexual abuse, torture, genocide—that have been sealed up in individual and national crypts and walled off from exposure. In the France of 1972, when the film was released, the catastrophes of Algeria’s colonization and Vichy’s antiSemitism were still largely unassimilated and unintrojected. Algeria’s struggle for independence would not officially be called a “war” for another twenty-seven years. The events of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ would not officially be recognized and commemorated by the French government for twenty-one more years. These unspeakable traumas were instead preserved intact, in unmarked vaults, buried within the collective psyche of France. There they remained sealed up and protected from exposure by the production and perpetuation of fantasies of incorporation: fantasies that recast Algeria as French, war as pacification, collaboration as resistance, and Vichy France as an Eternal Republic.45 The walls of the crypt, however, do not remain impermeable indefinitely. The Jewish “vermin,” whom Vichy sought to exterminate from France, “returned”—reincarnated as the insurgent ratons of Algeria whom the colonizing French sought to cleanse from the empire. These ratons, in turn, reappeared as the students and workers whom the CRS ultimately crushed in the ratonnades of ’68. Thus, in the end, Paul’s death scene not only sends us back to read the title shot of Bacon’s diptych as a trope of the analytic scene and the intrapsychic death tango Paul dances with Jeanne. It identifies Last Tango in Paris as a film that explores private sagas of incorporation, impossible mourning, and the unconscious desire for analysis in order to speak about a nation’s unspeakable history of shameful secrets, its inability to mourn and memorialize loss, and its own need, if not desire, for analysis.

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3 Haunted Children, Cultural Catastrophe, and P h a n to m T r a n s m i s s i o n s in the “Dirty War” and t h e H o lo c au s t The phantom will be buried, or rather dissipated, by the very words that presided over its coming into being, and by putting into words what was only implied. . . . [Le fantôme sera enterré, ou plutôt dissipé par les mots mêmes qui avaient présidé à son avènement, ainsi que par la mise en mot de ce qui ne fut que sous-entendu. . . .] —Maria Torok, Notes éparses sur le fantôme

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ince Freud’s earliest attempts to construct a metapsychology of traumatic neurosis, psychoanalysis has wrestled with identifying and treating psychopathology produced in response to social catastrophes such as war, genocide, and terrorism. It was not until the late 1960s, however, in response to growing reports from mental health professionals regarding the psychological disorders they were encountering in survivors of the Jewish Holocaust, that a sustained debate began concerning the possible etiology of such disorders and the extent to which preexisting psychopathology was relevant to these patients’ assessment and treatment.1 As analysts’ experience with concentration camp survivors increased, studies identifying patterns of psychic distress involving anxiety, depression, pathologies of mourning, psychosomatic illness, isolative behaviors, and fears of persecution appeared and contributed to what 91

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became known as the “survivor syndrome,” a pseudodiagnostic category that itself came under attack for its reductiveness and tendency to elide the variety and specificity of individual responses to the vast array of Holocaust-related traumas.2 The term also tended to nullify the complex issue of the role played by pre-Holocaust pathology in the evolution of post-Holocaust symptoms, erasing what could be called the “private” in favor of the publicly or socially driven components of mental distress and dysfunction. In the mid-1970s, the issue of the possible sequelae suffered by the children of Holocaust survivors began to emerge, although research on the question was still very limited and there was serious disagreement as to whether such children manifested any distinctive psychopathology in response to their parents’ experiences. Only in the early 1980s were the first major studies produced on the possible transmission of trauma from parents to children and on the form and content of such transmissions and their possible treatment.3 The question that arises repeatedly in the context of this research is whether the symptomology one sees in children of survivors fits preexisting paradigms of psychopathogenesis or instead requires the articulation of new analytic paradigms. This chapter responds to this question by discussing a conceptual possibility whose relevance and implications for the study of psychopathology manifested by certain descendants of survivors of social cataclysms have yet to be adequately explored. I am referring to the metapsychological theory of the “phantom,” a psychic constellation that can be produced in response to specific private, intrafamilial traumas, but that can also manifest itself in response to forms of public trauma associated with societal or group persecution. Still not widely known in the United States among clinical practitioners, the phantom holds considerable theoretical and practical implications for assessing and treating the child psychotherapeutically. In a most fundamental way, the phantom obliges us to rethink precisely what we mean by “the child” in analysis and, by extension, what we mean by “the adult” in treatment. This, in turn, implies a reconception of the performative nature of the analytic dialogue as it endeavors to respond to individual psychopathology emergent from a context of collective social and cultural catastrophe. At the same time, it necessitates a re-visioning of the psychopathogenic potential of historical events, and of the interplay between individual intrapsychic pain and the sociocultural dramas that produce and perpetuate it—or are themselves produced and sustained by it.

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I begin with a brief discussion of the metapsychological and therapeutic implications of the phantom. There follows a discussion of how a phantom may be generated, the possible modes of its appearance, and the obstacles to its identification in the context of the aftermath of two social catastrophes: the “Dirty War” in Argentina and the Holocaust. I will provide a clinical vignette from my own practice as a brief illustration, and then discuss phantomatic formation more extensively in the context of the “Dirty War” through the analysis of a film, and in the context of the Holocaust through case study analysis from which phantom formation can be extrapolated. This will hopefully foster a rethinking of the potential psychic sequelae of these and other social catastrophes, and will generate more clinical literature and academic studies concerned with elaborating and retracing the anasemic evolution of this therapeutically and interpretatively challenging form of psychopathology.

THE VENTRILOQUIZED CHILD As Abraham and Torok developed their metapsychology of secrets during the mid-1970s and elaborated a theoretical framework for the kinds of psychopathology produced when events experienced as too shameful to be verbalized are instead silenced and concealed, they not only reconceptualized psychic configurations such as fixation and fantasy, redefined the distinctions between introjection and incorporation and mourning and melancholia, and described new psychic topographies such as the crypt and illness of mourning discussed in the previous chapters. Drawing on their years of clinical experience, they also discovered a specific topographical structure that had not yet been understood or theorized, which they named the “phantom.” The concept of the phantom emerged as the analysts attempted to explain and treat symptoms in certain patients that did not respond to traditional techniques of analysis based on the Freudian concept of dynamic repression, understood to occur when a subject’s desire comes into conflict with another desire or a prohibition, or when a trauma (such as molestation) interferes with the normal processes of psychic development. Abraham and Torok concluded that it was not so much the paradigmatic incongruity of their patients’ symptoms, but rather the heuristic adequacy of the very concept of dynamic repression that needed to be questioned. They responded with a major expansion and revision of Freud’s theory and proposed that their

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patients’ “anomalous” or resistant symptoms were not caused by the return of what they themselves had repressed, but were related to something that someone else had concealed. They concluded that an individual—usually but not always a parent—can keep secret a disturbing, shameful event or drama and then silently transmit it, through cryptic language and behavior, directly into the unconscious of a child. The language and behavior of the child who has unknowingly received this silent communication or “phantom” may be diagnosed as obsessive, compulsive, phobic, hysterical, eating disordered, manic, depressive, schizophrenic, autistic, or even epileptic because the child’s language and behavior have in fact originated with another person: with the parent or parental figure. The phantom, which usually although not exclusively inhabits families, can, in certain instances, infiltrate and haunt entire family lines as it is passed down silently from parent to child through successive generations. It can also skip generations and be transmitted from a parent to a grandchild without any perceivable symptomatic eruption in the intervening generation.4 The phantom is thus a formation totally outside any strictly phased or developmental view of human behavior, and it therefore marks a radical departure from the general principles of Freudian, Lacanian, and most other psychoanalytic theories. At the same time, it offers a new perspective on the possible etiology of neurosis and even psychosis, since the haunting presence of a phantom is not contingent upon the elements traditionally deemed responsible for these disorders, such as an unresolved Oedipus complex, patricidal fantasies, castration anxiety, or penis envy. The child haunted by a phantom becomes a living tomb or repository in which an unspeakable drama, experienced as traumatic by someone else, lies buried yet alive, exerting its disruptive influence in a potentially infinite number of ways on the existence of the child or on the child grown to adulthood. The silence or gap in the speech of someone else “speaks,” as would a ventriloquist, through the words and acts of the child. To convey the specificity of this particular mode of symptom formation, Abraham and Torok used the term “preservative repression” (refoulement conservateur) to distinguish the work of the phantom from that of the Freudian concept of dynamic or constitutive repression. Preservative repression conveys the idea that the child haunted by the phantom is not the active source of repression, but a recipient or legatee of another’s psychic agency. It also communicates the idea that, along with the transgenerational transmission of an unspeakable secret, the child

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inherits the unstated imperative to preserve intact the integrity of that secret. The child haunted by a phantom, in other words, is unaware that she or he carries another’s secret, and that there is even someone else with a secret. The child is also unaware that she or he functions as a guardian who stands vigil, intrapsychically, to insure the absolute inviolability of the secret and hence the integrity of the parent and the family, who would otherwise be assailed by the secret’s exposure. We can expand upon these ideas in material terms to say that the child haunted by a phantom becomes the unwitting performative agent of a gap in the speech of a parent. The child unknowingly enacts in ciphered form the silenced or encrypted contents of an unspeakable event the parent can never divulge to anyone. Metapsychologically speaking, the child haunted by a phantom is held within a group dynamic with the parent that is constituted by a specific and theoretically identifiable topography that blocks the child from living life as her or his own. The child becomes an unknowing partner in a pathological dual unity: in a metapsychological union with the parent that hinders or blocks totally normal psychic development and inhibits processes of individuation involving repression and introjection that would otherwise allow the child to separate from the parent and become an independent being.5 The idea that the haunted child is held in a pathological dual unity with the parent obliges us to rethink the metapsychological status of the child and, correlatively, of the adult. The analysand haunted by a phantom must always be read as a child bound inextricably and psychopathologically to the parent who concealed the secret. Regardless of the age of the individual “on the couch,” in other words, the patient haunted by a phantom is, for analytic purposes, always the child of a keeper of secrets. The carrier of a phantom in analysis is thus always, metapsychologically speaking, “a child in analysis.” To put it another way, the psychoanalysis of a phantom is always a child analysis. At the same time, however, the psychoanalysis of a phantom is also always an adult analysis—not an analysis of the adult on the couch, but of the adult who concealed the secret. In order to treat a transgenerational haunting, the analyst must, in essence, analyze the individual—the parent (and sometimes the grandparent or great grandparent)—who experienced a trauma as so shameful that it had to be silenced. The “child” on the couch, who may be fifty or sixty years old, becomes the medium of the ancestor’s message: the vehicle through whom the analyst must hear the gap in the discourse of the ancestor and reconstruct the elision in speech that the ancestor knowingly or unknowingly performed.

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The analyst’s job, which is an extremely difficult one, is thus to establish a mediated transference with the ancestor who concealed the secret and who, in many cases, is deceased. In the process, the analyst must reassure the mediating child, who has also inherited with the secret an unspoken imperative to preserve it intact, that the reconstruction of what the ancestor elided from speech, and the reconstituting of the mental topography that led the ancestor to create the secret in the first place, will not threaten the integrity of the ancestor or the family. A brief vignette from my clinical practice is illustrative. The patient, a woman in her early fifties, presented with symptoms consistent with a rather uncommon disorder known as Capgras syndrome. She was convinced that her husband had been replaced—body snatched, if you will—by a famous politician who, she believed, was her husband’s exact double in appearance and behavior. This fixed delusion prevented the patient from having sexual relations with her husband, since to do so would mean betraying him with another man. This was in fact the patient’s chief complaint. She was torn between desiring normal sexual relations with her spouse and not wanting to commit adultery with the politician in the process. The delusion was accompanied by the patient’s paranoid insistence that I never speak about this to her husband, since he “must never know” about the imposter inhabiting him. The patient also refused to take any psychotropic medications, since it was crucial that she “be in control at all times” so that nothing “slipped out at home” about the double possessing her spouse. In the course of treatment, I began to hear cryptic elements in the patient’s initially confused speech and behavior to suggest that her mother, years earlier, had had an extramarital affair. The mother, I reconstructed (but did not share with my patient), must have experienced this drama as so overwhelmingly shameful and unspeakable that she wrapped it in silence, never speaking to anyone about it. She did, however, unknowingly transmit it to her daughter as a phantom. The patient’s delusion of an unrecognized imposter inhabiting her husband cryptically spoke of this saga of an unseen substitution or imposter within the mother’s marriage. The patient’s refusal to have sex with her husband was a repetition of the mother’s not having sex with her husband or, more precisely, not having sex with her husband while she was having it with someone else. At the same time, my patient’s refusal to have sex with the imposter inhabiting her spouse was a cryptic means of “undoing” while also denying and concealing her mother’s adulterous liaison. Finally, the patient’s rejection of medication, while not unusual in those suffering

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psychotic delusions, can be understood as part of her unwittingly inherited “obligation” to keep an alert vigil over the secret and preserve it intact. In this way, the pathological dual unity with the mother could be sustained and the secret’s integrity assured. A major challenge of treatment in such a situation is to establish a therapeutic alliance with the patient through which the clinician can access the mother’s intrapsychic structure. The clinician can then gain some understanding of why the mother had to transform the adultery into an inviolable secret, since it is by no means automatic that such dramas, traumatic as they may be, will always be experienced as profoundly and disruptively shameful and thus need to be concealed in perpetuity. The therapeutic alliance also allows the clinician to ascertain whether the secret was silenced and thereby concealed from others, or also encrypted by the mother—that is, incorporated within her own intrapsychic vault so that she could deny to herself that the trauma ever occurred. (Phantoms can be transmitted both ways: either as secrets wrapped in silence but recognizable by their creators, or as encrypted dramas that are so potentially destabilizing to the subject who lives them that they must be sealed in intrapsychic tombs and secreted from the subject before being passed on to their legatee[s].) Establishing a therapeutic alliance in this case means conveying to the patient (without divulging the secret or allowing her to discover it prematurely, which could have drastic consequences, including suicide) that the mother will not be attacked, that the family will not be disgraced, and that the patient herself will not be shamed or destroyed if she releases her vigilant grip on the secret haunting her. It also means “analyzing” to some extent the patient’s father to understand his role in the drama and the part he may have played, consciously or unconsciously, in keeping the secret. The clinician walks a tightrope in such instances, with little room for error. She tries to create a safe, empathic environment for the patient in the hope that a transference might be established—a daunting challenge in patients with fixed delusions. At the same time, she works to establish a mediated transference, via the patient, with the mother who created the secret so that the patient feels the mother is safely “held,” in Winnicott’s sense of the term, and so that the trauma’s weight can be lifted from the mother and also eventually from the patient herself. The clinician thus performs a child analysis and an adult analysis simultaneously with at least two “patients,” both of whom are committed, at all psychic costs, to obstructing analytic discovery and to making themselves—and thus the occluded secret tormenting them—as inaccessible and impenetrable as

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possible. In the case I’ve sketched out, treatment ended abruptly when the patient moved out of town to live with a family member, leaving the husband bereft, the secret still intact and “safe” from exposure, and the patient still suffering in its grip.

T R A N S G E N E R AT I O NA L T R A N S M I S S I O N AND THE OFFICIAL STORY The phantom thus opens the way to rethinking childhood development as potentially nonstratified, nonlinear, and nonphallocentric. It also invites us to reassess various concepts of family dysfunction and the pathogenesis of illnesses ranging from childhood compulsions and phobias to adult psychotic and dissociative disorders. On the broader, sociocultural level, the phantom permits us to rethink and retheorize certain kinds of political and historical conditions as not just potentially pathogenic, but as possibly phantomogenic. An example of one potentially phantomogenic situation is the event known as the “Dirty War” in Argentina. One could speak about similar situations in Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, Peru, El Salvador, and other Central and South American countries, where military regimes have taken over governments and terrorized populations through the use of clandestine modes of repression in the name of controlling left-wing insurgencies. When the Argentine military junta, referred to as “the Generals,” took power on March 24, 1976, they waged “war” not only against armed leftist guerillas, but also against peaceful dissidents and labor organizers, among whom were so-called ideological delinquents such as liberals, libertarians, lawyers, journalists, socialists, and social workers.6 During the junta’s reign of terror, which ended in 1983, between 20,000 and 30,000 people were “disappeared”—kidnapped, tortured, and killed. They left behind parents and/or children who were kept ignorant of their loved ones’ fate by the government, which denied that such kidnappings and murders were occurring.7 In the last twenty-five years, the Argentine psychotherapeutic community has committed itself to treating the psychic effects of torture suffered by those kidnapped and later released. The community has also aimed to treat the myriad forms of psychological damage inflicted upon the general population from years of sustained government surveillance and repression. In 1986, the psychoanalysts Moises Kijak and Maria Lucila Pelento published results of their investigations into the psychic

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effects of the generals’ policy of mass disappearances.8 A major concern of their work is the psychopathology produced when normal mourning processes, particularly in children and parents of the desaparecidos or “disappeared,” are blocked because the bodies of those assassinated cannot be recovered for burial, or because the government refuses to release information regarding the circumstances of death or whether in fact the missing have actually been killed. Kijak and Pelento discuss the feelings of panic and impotence in these uncertain mourners, and describe the high degree of disintegration produced in the psychic apparatus when survivors’ desires to accept the death of a loved one conflict with the still vital hope that the loved one might reappear alive. They note that, in many instances, a mourner experiences his or her decision to accept finally that a loved one is dead, despite the absence of concrete proof, as itself an act of murder. In this way the junta’s terror continues to reap psychic victims years after its fall. The work on delineating therapies for victims of torture and for alleviating psychopathology induced in others by years of oppression, and the analytic problems of pathological or impossible mourning mapped out by Kijak and Pelento and others, are all extremely legitimate, crucial areas of concern that are highly relevant for a large number of those who endured the military’s reign.9 There is another, smaller group of individuals, however, whose potential for psychic distress has not yet been recognized. Their psychopathology is potentially even more complex and their treatment more daunting than that of the victims previously described because they are possible recipients of phantoms. I refer to the children of the disappeared who were born while their mothers were held captive by the government. In most instances, the mothers were killed immediately after giving birth. Their infants were given by the military, in exchange for money, political favors, or simply out of “collegiality,” to other members of the military, the police, or the political elite pursuing the government’s agenda of repression. In some cases, the children were adopted by the same military officers suspected of killing their parents. Accounts vary, but there may be as many as four hundred such children in these circumstances, a number that includes very young infants who were kidnapped along with their mothers and adopted after their mothers were killed. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group organized to fight government secrecy regarding the plight of these children, has been working to track down and recover these orphaned offspring whom Newsweek magazine, in an article published in February 1993, referred

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to as “the lost generation.”10 It would be more accurate to describe them as “the haunted generation,” since most of these children have been raised by parents who have never revealed the horrible truth of the children’s origins. The therapeutic community has been involved in assessing and treating the psychic stresses experienced by the roughly fifty children from this group who have been identified, located, and either returned by the Argentine courts to biological relatives or allowed to grow up with their adoptive families. For these children, the problem has been deciding whether the ethical need to restore them to their biological families is outweighed by the psychological damage they might sustain if removed from families who raised them and with whom, in some cases, the children themselves wish to remain. There is also growing clinical literature, much of it in Spanish, concerned with the “double trauma” suffered by these so-called restituted children. That is, the original trauma of being separated from birth mothers and raised in a familial environment of secrets is often compounded by the “reconstructive trauma” of recovered children who, upon learning the true identity of their projunta adoptive parents, realize that their lives have been based on lies.11 These issues, problematic and painful as they are, are being decided juridically by the courts and, hopefully, worked through psychologically with the help of a very committed Argentine therapeutic community. For the unidentified children (now adults) whose adoptive parents continue to keep their origins secret, there is no possibility of resolution in sight. More seriously, there exists the potential for phantomatic haunting that has thus far gone unattended. This potential is aggravated not only by the fact that these children’s adoptive parents are likely to be members of the groups who were actively engaged or complicit in the torture and murder of their biological parents. It is also exacerbated by the fact, confirmed by reports from recovered children, that their adoptive parents have inculcated them with a blind respect for the military and other authorities and a hatred for dissidents, intellectuals, and “communists.”12 In view of this, we can begin to appreciate the intensity and complexity of the symptomology likely to emerge in the still unidentified children of the disappeared as they grow into full-fledged adulthood and as the unspeakable secret of their origins, which they may already be carrying, begins to emerge from its burial place and manifest its haunting presence. The seriousness of the psychic disorders that may erupt as signs of this haunting is even more disturbing, given the likelihood that at least some of these children will follow, or have already followed, in the footsteps of their “fathers” to become part of the social, political, or

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military elite exerting influence within or actually governing Argentina. Their potential to affect the sociopolitical and cultural scene, and to produce or perpetrate trauma on others as a result of their own unrecognized victimization by state terror, is thus disproportionate to their relatively small numbers. It is therefore crucial that resources, in addition to those provided by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, be devoted to identifying these children, many of whom by now likely have children of their own, and to revealing their origins as children of parents murdered by the junta. Divulging this secret, although not without its own significant dangers and traumatic potential, would arrest (and possibly prevent) the development of phantoms so that the delicate work of processing and undoing the psychic damage that may have already been generated by the secret’s presence could be undertaken. It is also crucial that the analytic community be aware of the psychic time bombs potentially ticking in these as yet unidentified children, and of the possible transmission of these explosive secrets to their own children and grandchildren and to the societal groups and organizations to which they belong. These bombs may not go off for years or even generations, but their potential for destruction—to their carriers and to society—is formidable. It requires a new kind of metapsychological awareness and therapeutic vigilance among practitioners, who will inevitably encounter such haunted individuals among their patients. I want now to discuss a film that presents what I would call a “case history” of one such unidentified and potentially explosive carrier of a phantom and that reveals post-junta Argentine society’s struggles with this issue: Luis Puenzo’s The Official Story [La Historia Oficial].13 Made in Argentina in 1985, the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film that year. The story takes place in 1983, at the end of the military dictatorship, and focuses on Alicia, an adoptive mother struggling to face the emerging truth of her five-year-old daughter Gaby’s origins: the fact that Gaby’s birth mother and father were kidnapped and killed by the military during the “Dirty War.” The film makes clear that the adoptive father, Roberto, a wealthy businessman who has collaborated with the regime, was also complicit in the murderous circumstances of the adoption. He has never divulged the truth of Gaby’s origins, has led his wife to believe that Gaby’s birth mother willingly gave her up for adoption, and has made Alicia agree never to speak of the evening he brought Gaby home from the hospital or to question the circumstances of the adoption. The film concentrates on how Alicia’s repressed fears about Gaby’s true origins gradually emerge in response to

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her friend Ana’s revelation that she herself was abducted and tortured by the military, and that she knew of infants taken at birth from their imprisoned mothers and sold to adoptive families who asked no questions. A high school history teacher who has lived comfortably with her bourgeois belief in the truth of “documented” facts and government integrity, Alicia slowly but inexorably opens herself to the possibility, which she has denied for five years, that Gaby may be a child of the disappeared. Caught between her desire to know and her fear of learning the truth, she finally faces the horrible facts and, as the film ends, leaves her husband in order to deal with their implications and the excruciating possibility that she may have to return the child she adores to her biological grandmother. Although Gaby is not the central figure in the story and there is not enough revealed about her to delineate an unequivocal assessment, there is sufficient evidence in the film to suggest that the process of phantomatic transmission has already begun. Alicia, for example, confesses to a priest that Gaby has wanted to know about her grandparents and their grandparents, “as far back as God,” adding that Gaby says God is “bionic” because he can see us while we cannot see him. Gaby thus associates her parentage with invisibility and overwhelming power, ideas linked to disappearance and the unknown, unseen forces that can control life and death. These associations are reinforced thematically when Ana tells Gaby about a magical paint that can make people disappear from view. They are further underscored by the lullaby Gaby repeatedly sings and whose words she finally memorizes. The song, “En el país de nomeacuerdo” (“In the Land of I-Don’t-Remember”), is about being “lost” (me pierdo)—we hear the synonym desaparecido—in “the land of I-don’t-remember,” where taking a step in the wrong direction could mean taking one’s last step: “In the land of I-don’t-remember, I take three steps and I’m lost / One step this way, I don’t remember if I took it / One step that way, oh, how it frightens me / . . . One step backward, and I don’t take any more / Because I have already forgotten where I put my other foot.”14 We might initially hear these lyrics as a narrative of the difficult “steps” Alicia has taken toward acknowledging the “frightening” secret of Gaby’s “lost” origins, of her own emergence from the “land of I-don’t-remember,” where she has refused to recall or recognize the truth, and of her steps toward lucidity as she finally confronts Roberto about Gaby’s birth, walks out of the house (and presumably the marriage), and faces the loss of her adoptive child. But there is another way to hear the song, especially given Gaby’s insistent desire to memo-

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rize it, and her pride when she finally sings it to her parents over the phone from her adoptive grandmother’s house in the film’s last sequence. The song is a symptom of Gaby’s haunting by a phantom, by the secret concealed by Roberto and denied by Alicia concerning the “frightening” saga of her real parents. Its lyrics obliquely tell the tale of Gaby’s disappeared mother and father who took a wrong (political) step, after which they literally “took no more,” and were lost in a land from which truth and remembering were banished. The fact that Alicia teaches Gaby the song underscores the transgenerational nature of the transmission, while Gaby’s insistence on learning the words by heart suggests an unconscious desire to commit to memory and guard intact something that others have tried to erase from memory and speech. Moreover, when we first hear Gaby singing, she is taking a bath and proudly announces that she can put her head under water. Alicia tells her not to—she’ll get water in her ears—and then walks into the adjoining bedroom, telling Gaby “to keep singing so I know you haven’t drowned.” These seemingly innocuous comments anticipate Ana’s account of nearly being drowned in a tub of water by her torturers (the baignoire we saw in Last Tango in Paris) and her wrenching admission that, seven years later, she feels she is “still drowning.” It also evokes the plight of many disappeared who not only suffered this form of torture, but were also subsequently drugged and dropped from helicopters to drown in the Río de la Plata. The horrible knowledge of Gaby’s origins, which Alicia represses from awareness, thus seeps out in a way that verbally links singing about being lost with a saga of torture and assassination, and that also reveals how phantomatic secrets can be transmitted without ever being explicitly stated. As we listen to Gaby sing on the phone and soothe herself in a rocking chair in the film’s last scene, we are thus reminded of Alicia’s account of waiting, as a five-year-old child, for her own parents to return home, not knowing that they had been killed in a car accident and believing they had abandoned her. “For years I waited for them,” she confesses to her priest, “sitting there in that rocking chair. I thought daddy and mommy had abandoned me. Not until I grew up and saw their grave did I start to forgive them. I always believed what anyone told me. But now I can’t.” Gaby, too, waits, unknowingly, to learn the true saga of her parents’ fate, even as she herself unwittingly commits it to memory and retells it. While more evidence would be needed to assess the extent to which Gaby is haunted by the secret of her origins, it is clear that the situation depicted in the film is a potentially phantomogenic one. With Alicia’s

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conscious recognition of Gaby’s true family drama and her final decision to expose the secret, Gaby is spared the consequences of prolonged exposure to a psychopathogenic environment. If she is not yet inhabited by a full-blown, fully articulated phantom, she will likely escape the more grave psychic sequelae of haunting. Her apparently symptomatic repetition of the song, however, implies that the transmission has to some extent already occurred, and that an evaluation would reveal the presence of phantom-generated pathology involving, for example, obsessive or compulsive behavior (like singing or chanting) or possibly phobic behaviors related to walking, “taking steps,” or “getting lost.” In real-life circumstances, this child would require treatment that would engage her in a mediated transference between the analyst and her adoptive mother, and between the analyst and her adoptive father, since years of exposure to an environment constructed by an unspeakable secret cannot simply be erased by the revelation of that secret. For this reason, Gaby’s case is emblematic of the situation of the as-yet-unidentified children of the disappeared who have cohabitated and identified with collaborators of the junta, and whose lives articulate as-yet-unheard demands for therapeutic intervention. While overtly focusing on the ethical and psychological dilemma of Gaby’s mother, Puenzo’s film presents a phantomogenic scenario that underscores the existence of these unheard demands of haunted children, and that points to a tragic legacy of the “Dirty War” to which the Argentine psychoanalytic community can respond.

P H A N T O M S O F T H E H O L O C AU S T A very different social cataclysm for which an understanding of the workings of the phantom is crucial involves children of Holocaust survivors. (It should be stated clearly from the outset that not all children of survivors exhibit Holocaust-related symptoms or require treatment of any kind.) The psychoanalytic literature addressing the psychopathology in these children identifies typical symptoms and behaviors, including “impaired object relations, low self-esteem, narcissistic vulnerability, negative identity formation, personality constriction, and considerable affective impairment.”15 In many instances, children of survivors who learn of their parents’ experiences share the parents’ memories of traumatic events or internalize or identify with the parents’ guilt at having survived. A common response to this type of psychic sharing involves the child’s reconstruction of some aspect of the Holocaust in her or his

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own life. Such re-creations may take the form of perceiving “Nazis” in one’s environment, repeatedly identifying others as tormentors or oppressors, or identifying with the aggressor and acting out the sadistic role of Nazi persecutors. Often the child’s unconscious intent in these re-creations is to change the past and convert the parent’s suffering and guilt into a victory over the oppressors.16 Other forms of pathology include the child’s feeling that she or he does not have the right to a happy life, or that the parent sacrificed for the child, who must now fulfill the parent’s dreams and ambitions and accomplish what the Holocaust prevented the parent from accomplishing. The child in such circumstances ultimately lives for the parent.17 As work with survivors’ children progressed through the 1970s and the complexity of their psychopathology became increasingly apparent, Judith Kestenberg proposed that a type of transmitted traumatic neurosis was at work in some of these children, which she called “transposition.” Transposition is a mechanism that goes “beyond identification” in which the survivor’s child transposes her or himself into the parent’s past and plays out the various roles of people in that past, such as the parent(s), other camp prisoners, the persecutors, or the rescuers of the persecuted.18 As Louise Kaplan elaborates, transposition is the “uncanny experience where the past reality of the parent intrudes into the present psychological reality of the child [so that] the dreams, wishes, and nightmares of [the] parent enter [the] child’s mind.”19 The child of a mother who was unable to mourn the loss of her parents in the camp because there were no burial ceremonies, no marked graves, and no time allowed to remember the dead, attempts to reawaken or resuscitate the parent whose emotions are numbed by her unmourned loss. The child may transpose herself into the parent’s past and assume the identity of the survivor’s own parents, incarnating them as alive to satisfy the survivor’s fantasy that they are not dead. Or the child of a mother unable to talk about the horrors of starvation she experienced may exhibit an eating disorder, starving himself as a means of “becoming” a camp prisoner in an attempt to return to and thereby repair his mother’s past, or rescue her from it. In many of these cases, the parents keep secret their traumatic experiences, a fact that suggests a possible connection between transposition and the dynamics of the phantom. While one could argue that the phantom, about which neither Kestenberg nor Kaplan speaks, is a highly specialized form of transposition, the metapsychological differences between the two concepts are significant. First, transposition can involve

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the transmission to the child of the parent’s unrealized needs, desires, and fears, or the parent’s internal conflict between a desire and a prohibition. In the case of a phantom, it is neither unactualized wishes or fears nor ongoing conflicts between desires and interdictions that are transmitted to the child. A child haunted by a phantom inherits from the parent a traumatic situation or drama that has actually occurred and that cannot be undone. Too shameful to be put into words or integrated within the parent’s ego, yet too central to the parent’s experience to be expelled or foreclosed, the drama is silenced and buried alive, along with the shame attached to it, and transmitted cryptically into the child’s unconscious. Second, in cases of transposition in which the parent keeps secret an event that has occurred, the secrecy serves to stimulate the child to uncover the parent’s past and make the parent’s trauma visible and concrete in her or his own life: In all cases, the need to discover, to re-enact, or to live the parents’ past was a major issue in the lives of survivors’ children. This need is different from the usual curiosity of children about their parents. These children feel they have a mission to live in the past and to change it so that their parents’ humiliation, disgrace, and guilt can be converted into victory over the oppressors, and the threat of genocide undone with a restitution of life and worth.20 Sensing the parent’s affect, the child reenacts dramas of shame, fear, or disgrace that evoke and concretize these silenced traumas. By contrast, in phantomatic transmissions the parent transmits to the child not only the unspeakable content of the secret, but also the unstated obligation to keep the secret invisible and unreachable and to prevent anyone from discovering it, including the child. A child haunted by a phantom thus inherits, along with the secret, the additional imperative to suppress any desire to know or understand its origin as a necessary means of maintaining the parent’s and the family’s integrity.21 A case of what the psychoanalyst Arnold Modell calls the “cultural inheritance” of psychopathology and what Kestenberg and Kaplan would likely call “transposition” offers a useful comparison for understanding the distinctive etiology and functioning of the phantom. Modell describes a patient who reported feelings of guilt after a seemingly banal incident.

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In referring to a telephone number, the person at the other end of a phone line said: “I didn’t get the [number] four.” This comment triggered an inexplicable feeling of guilt, which my patient was able to trace to memories of his father’s past that he had assimilated as his own. His father had survived the Holocaust by constructing an underground bunker within the ghetto that he could share with only a limited number of people. Although the father did not express his guilt concerning the life-and-death decisions he implicitly made in excluding others, the patient experienced the father’s unexpressed guilt and internalized it as if it were his own. The phrase “I didn’t get the four” evoked the “memory” of those not rescued and doomed to die. Thus his parent’s history was inseparable from his own; and time past (his parent’s time past) was transposed into the patient’s present time.22 While there is clearly some form of transmission at work in this case, Modell’s patient is not the carrier of a phantom. There is no secret kept by the father, and no secret transmitted to the child. The child becomes an “inheritor,” or I would prefer to say the “agent” or “enactor,” of the father’s unexpressed affect, of the charge—in this instance, guilt—that the father attached to an event about which he was able to speak and of which the child was aware and also able to speak. In the case of a phantom, it is not only the affect attached to a traumatic event that is unexpressed, but the traumatic event itself. The entire trauma is concealed and removed from speech because it is too shameful for words. The child unwittingly inherits a secret she or he does not know and cannot share; she or he becomes the legatee of a lacuna in the speech of the parent that replaces or stands-in for the shameful trauma in a way that makes both the trauma’s content and its affect unintelligible. This does not mean that the child carrying a phantom exhibits no affective symptoms. Rather, it means that whatever affect is transmitted to the child undergoes distortions similar to those enacted upon the secret’s content. In Modell’s cultural inheritance and Kestenberg’s transposition, the affect suppressed by the parent can reemerge in the child in analogous form. The unexpressed shame of the father manifests itself as shame in the son; a parent’s unuttered fear of being identified as too weak to work in the camps will likely emerge as some form of fearfulness in the child. In phantomatic transmissions, the unspoken demand

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to preserve intact the secret and its shameful affect causes significant perturbations in the content as well as the emotions linked to the trauma. The child who inherits a phantom thus cannot become a direct conduit of the parent’s silenced affect. He or she can only experience or act it out in a distorted, incongruent, or camouflaged manner. By modifying Modell’s case, we can see what kind of situation might have caused a phantom to be transmitted to the child. Let us suppose that the father had fallen in love with a woman trapped with him in the ghetto and had kept this love quiet, telling no one about it, not even the woman herself. Let us further suppose that this woman was in love with another man in the ghetto. If, as part of his “life-and-death decisions,” the father decided to exclude his rival from the bunker—effectively killing him— and the father never speaks about what he experienced as a shameful act, a potentially phantomogenic situation would exist in which the father’s unspeakable secret could, years later, be transmitted unknowingly into the unconscious of his child, where it would reside as an intrapsychic bequest capable of significant behavioral and affective disruption. The number and kinds of potentially phantomogenic situations are as incalculable as the traumas of the Holocaust, particularly since so many prisoners in the camps had to commit acts they experienced as shameful in order to survive. To construct another example, we can imagine a situation in which a woman, starving to death in a concentration camp, prostitutes herself with an SS officer in return for a piece of food. She conceals this event, which she experiences as too shameful for words, and never tells anyone about it. After liberation, the woman marries, has a daughter, and keeps the event wrapped in silence, although she may be able to speak about other traumatic events she suffered during the war or in the camp. The child born of this woman is a potential inheritor of her mother’s secret. To extrapolate further, it is quite possible that the symptoms produced in the child by the phantom would assume, at least in part, the form of an eating disorder. Anorexic behavior in this situation could be read linguistically as the cryptic expression of the mother’s shame at having prostituted herself for food: as an encoded mode of saying that “food should not have been eaten; that something indigestible was taken into the mouth that should have been refused.” The difficulty of analyzing phantoms lies in the fact that there is no memory or knowledge of the secreted event in the child that can be awakened. The anorexia of the child here is a symptom that “speaks” obliquely of a trauma experienced and concealed by the mother. It is not

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a manifestation of the return of the child’s repressed, but of the return of a phantom. Nor can this behavior be interpreted simply as a symptomatic echo of the mother’s emaciated state in the camp or of her unsatisfied desires for food. Kestenberg and others have indicated that eating disorders are common in children of survivors who suffered starvation in the camps. Analysis of these children suggests that, through transposition, they act out the parent’s starvation. In my example, the child’s symptoms recapitulate obliquely the various aspects of the trauma as well as the imperative to keep it secret. Thus, the child’s anorexia would have to be read symbolically not only as a cryptic mode of saying that “food should not have been eaten,” but also as a symptom that narrates in ciphered form that “something was taken into the mouth that must never leave the mouth or be uttered; that the mouth must be kept shut about the shame the mother ‘swallowed’ and silenced.”23 Phantoms can be created and transmitted silently through a society in response to many different kinds of social catastrophes. Children and grandchildren of survivors of the World War II Japanese internment camps, of the Cultural Revolution in China, and of the wars in Bosnia and Iraq are among those positioned to have parents who experienced shameful traumas that they concealed as secrets and unknowingly transmitted transgenerationally as phantoms. Children and grandchildren of persecutors are also susceptible to phantomatic haunting. Those in the Argentine military and police, and members of the economic and social elite who worked with the junta, may have shameful secrets they have transmitted to their children as phantoms. Such transmissions can also have occurred in children of German noncombatants, who may have denounced a Jewish neighbor or committed other unutterable acts; or in children of Wehrmacht soldiers, who participated in actions or massacres they experienced as shameful and about which they never spoke; or in children of American soldiers who served in Vietnam or Iraq and engaged in torture or other acts that were, for them, unspeakable. Social catastrophes such as the AIDS epidemic are also potentially phantomogenic, as secrets erected around the true cause of a family member’s death are transmitted silently to successive generations. Phantoms can also manifest themselves collectively in the form of certain social or political movements. While the extreme homophobic behavior of members of some antigay organizations can be ascribed to reaction formation (that is, to the members’ need to defend against their own homosexual desires), it is also possible that such behavior is symptomatic

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of phantomatic secrets concerning the homosexuality of members’ parents or other relatives. Similar connections between members of JeanMarie Le Pen’s homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic National Front party in France and unspeakable familial secrets concerning homosexuality, Jewish identity, and Nazi collaboration could be investigated. As I suggested earlier in the context of my clinical vignette, analysis of such phantom formations, whether on the collective or individual level, is extremely difficult because the analytic process involves a form of transference different from what occurs with patients who have effected a dynamic repression: Thus, the phantom cannot even be recognized by the subject as evident in an “aha” experience and, during analysis, can only give rise to constructions with all their attendant uncertainties. The phantom may nevertheless be deconstructed by analytic construction, though this occurs without the patients’ having the impression that they were in fact the subject of the analysis. It is clear that, in contrast to other types of cases, this work requires a genuine partnership between patient and analyst, the more so since the construction arrived at in this way bears no direct relation to the patient’s own topography but concerns someone else’s. The special difficulty of these analyses lies in the patient’s horror at violating a parent’s or a family’s guarded secret, even though the secret’s text and content are inscribed within the patient’s own unconscious. The horror of transgression, in the strict sense of the term, is compounded by the risk of undermining the fictitious yet necessary integrity of the parental figure in question. . . . The phantom will vanish only when its radically heterogeneous nature with respect to the subject is recognized. . . .24 Analysis, therefore, has to be aimed at helping to rid the haunted subject of something that does not belong to her or him. This means managing the transference in such a way that the voice of the secret-keeping family member, who ventriloquizes or speaks through the voice of the patient, can be heard. Analyzing a phantom is thus something akin to an exorcism. The exorcism, however, must be performed without the patient feeling that the ancestor will be betrayed or dishonored. This implies that the analyst must convey to the “child” on the couch that she or he is the vehicle through whom the analyst will establish a transference with the

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ancestor who concealed the secret. The ancestor in essence becomes the patient to be treated. This process becomes even more challenging when the parental keeper of secrets is dead. In such cases, analyzing the “child” means analyzing the deceased; it means that the analysand becomes the medium through whom the ancestor is “raised from the dead” so that his or her secret can be safely brought out in the open. In cases of phantomatic haunting, the parent and child are thus in a transphenomenological relationship. To read the symptoms manifested in the child in analysis means to carry these symptoms back to a prior narrative beyond perception, to a transphenomenological event or “source” that transcends the child and whose reconstruction by the analyst will allow the child to give voice to the secret concealed by another. This “source” always has its own transphenomenal antecedent or “source” behind which lies, in turn, a theoretically infinite anasemic regression of transphenomena or “originating” traumas. The haunted child in analysis, therefore, always has to be read anasemically as a text “insufficient in itself,” as a narrative that demands to be rejoined with its absent narrative complements or intertexts lying silenced “beyond the child.” Awareness of the psychic configuration and metapsychological functioning of the phantom opens the way to reconsidering the analytic position of the child in the family and in society. It also obliges us to reassess how we can perceive the connections between trauma and social catastrophe to include the very disruptive, highly pathological manifestations of transgenerational haunting. In the chapters that follow, I will elaborate different ways in which individual dramas involving unspeakable secrets and phantom transmissions simultaneously reflect and comment on their sociocultural contexts. Specifically, I will show how the close psychoanalytic reading of phantoms concerned with concealed religious identity, child abuse, incest, and murder can reveal ciphered politico-historical narratives about antiSemitism, colonialism, nationalism, and genocide.

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4 Religious Transvestism and the Stigma of Jewish Identity I am the Wandering Jew of the mind, always standing, always walking, without respite, without pleasures of the heart . . . [Je suis le Juif-Errant de la pensée, toujours debout, toujours marchant, sans repos, sans jouissances de coeur . . .] —Balzac, Letter to Madame Hanska

T

hanks to Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) and the critical discussions this groundbreaking analysis continues to provoke, there is no Balzac short story better known than “Sarrasine” (1830). Barthes’s now familiar thesis, with which the majority of critics generally agree, is that the strategically placed ellipses in Balzac’s story are placeholders for the void or “nothingness of castration”1 at its center, and that Sarrasine’s ignorance of the Roman custom of using castrati to sing soprano roles in opera is “the basis for all the snares by which Sarrasine is surrounded.”2 Thus posited as the zero degree of analysis or textual “truth”3 whose inevitable revelation the narrative functions to defer, castration tends to be treated much like Freud treats “penis envy” in women: as an untranscendable symptom of an inexorable anatomical lack that necessarily grounds interpretation. In the process of deconstructing Barthes’s analysis, Barbara Johnson critiques his naming of castration as the mark of difference inscribed by the text’s ellipses. “Castration,” she contends, “is what the story must, and cannot, say.”4 But whereas Balzac “repeatedly castrates his text of the word castration,” she goes on, Barthes errs when he “fills in the textual gaps with a name [and] erects castration into the meaning of the text, its ultimate signified.”5 Philip Stewart, for his part, criticizes Johnson for 113

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focusing uniquely on castration “to the total neglect of the one factor that is really necessary to explain all that has happened, namely homoeroticism.”6 Stewart maintains that both Barthes and Johnson reduce the text’s polysemia by seeing “all desire” in “Sarrasine” as the “desire of the opposite sex.”7 Recalling D. A. Miller’s earlier “outing” of Barthes and the latter’s failure to address the homoerotic elements of Balzac’s story, Stewart argues that “the occulted concept in Sarrasine is as much homosexuality as castration,”8 and that if we entertain the possibility that “the impulses acting on Sarrasine are largely unconscious, then it is no longer obvious that he is an unambiguous male attracted to someone he believes to be an unambiguous woman.”9 Stewart adds that, while the practice of castration had long ended by 1970 and was no longer a threat, the same was not true of homosexuality, since sodomy with a minor was still a crime in France until 1982.10 Stewart thus surmises that Barthes’s censoring of homosexuality from “Sarrasine” represents a “certain castration of meaning”11 in the text that serves to protect Barthes’s privacy and also “something of the essence of jouissance,”12 whose erotic power Barthes may have sought not to expose or dilute. My purpose in delineating these interpretive perspectives is less to critique or deconstruct them than to suggest another way of making sense of Balzac’s story. The reading I propose asks whether the text’s ellipses, while arguably serving to elide castration and homosexual desire, may also mark the silencing or exclusion from the text of something else that, while not “explaining all that happens” (pace Stewart), nonetheless contributes another dimension to its polysemic wealth. My analysis will reveal that an unspeakable secret concerning a character’s religious identity is concealed in the narrative: Sarrasine’s mother is Jewish. This secret, which by itself explains nothing and is not in any sense the “meaning” of the text, is never explicitly stated in the narrative. Rather it haunts Sarrasine as a phantom. Identifying this phantom, which I will show has been transmitted to him transgenerationally without ever being spoken, hinges on a process of linguistic decrypting and reconstruction that construes certain seemingly incongruous elements of the narrative as ciphered fragments of a drama so shameful they had to be silenced. Close psychoanalytic reading here involves retracing these encrypted fragments anasemically back toward their unspeakable signifying sources, complementary fragments, or co-symbols. It means piecing together from the telltale signs of Sarrasine’s language and behavior an infinitely regressing, always incomplete, and yet potent psychic “pre-

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history” that originates with someone else, but that he unwittingly enacts as his own. One result of this reading approach will be to suggest how psychoanalysis can participate in the exploration and exposure within certain literary works of heretofore unseen narratives of religious identity and prejudice. More specifically, reconstructing from the discursive elements of the text the secret Jewish identity of Sarrasine’s mother, and delineating this drama’s implications for Sarrasine’s life story, will enable me to locate the text’s silenced or repressed discourse about anti-Semitism and elaborate how this “religious unconscious” itself mirrors and comments on the larger sociohistorical and ideological phenomenon with which it coincides: French (Catholic) society’s response to the emancipation of the Jews in post-Revolutionary France.

C RY P T I C C O N F E S S I O N A N D T H E WA N D E R I N G J E W The story begins when an anonymous narrator, speaking to us from a fancy dress ball in the Paris home of the Lanty family, describes a decrepit old man who wanders through the house, whose identity is kept secret by the Lantys, but whom the narrator claims to know. When the narrator’s companion, Mme de Rochefide, asks who this bizarre creature is, the narrator agrees to explain everything. The second half of the story is the narrator’s account of how, as a young man, Ernest-Jean Sarrasine was expelled from Jesuit school, went to Rome to study sculpture, and fell in love with a beautiful singer named Zambinella. Sarrasine pursued her and finally kidnapped her, only to discover that she was a he, and that he was a castrato. Sarrasine was killed by Zambinella’s protector, and Zambinella went on to have a lucrative singing career. This very Zambinella, the narrator explains, is the aged man wandering through the Lanty house and the uncle of Mme de Lanty. He is also, the narrator hints, the source of the Lanty family fortune and hence the reason the family never speaks about the origins of their money or of this strange character. The possibility that something other than castration or homosexuality is concealed in “Sarrasine” is raised at the outset of the story where the idea of a secret is first articulated. Having described the Lanty family’s obsession with keeping “secret”13 both the origins of their fortune

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and Zambinella’s identity, the narrator poses a question that is never answered or even addressed, at least not explicitly, in the text—the question of the Lanty family’s own origins: Nobody knew what country the Lanty family came from. . . . All the members of the family spoke Italian, French, Spanish, English, and German perfectly enough to create the belief that they must have spent a long time among these various peoples. Were they gypsies? . . . The reserve maintained by M. and Mme de Lanty about their origin, their past life, and their relationship with the four corners of the globe [no longer astonished] Paris. (222–24) [Personne ne savait de quel pays venait la famille de Lanty. . . . Tous les membres de cette famille parlaient l’italien, le français, l’espagnol, l’anglais et l’allemand, avec assez de perfection pour faire supposer qu’ils avaient dû longtemps séjourner parmi ces différents peuples. Étaient-ce des bohémiens? . . . La réserve que M. et Mme de Lanty gardaient sur leur origine, sur leur existence passée et sur leurs relations avec les quatre parties du monde [n’étonnaient plus] Paris.]14 This question of origins is underscored by the narrator’s insistence on the matrilineal inheritance of Mme de Lanty’s two children, Marianina and Filippo: “The beauty, the fortune, the wit, the charms of these two children, came solely from their mother. The Count de Lanty was small, ugly, and pock-marked; dark as a Spaniard, dull as a banker” (224).15 The narrator’s combined emphasis on the mysterious Lanty family origins and a maternal legacy calls to mind (and initially appears to contrast with) the other family history he delineates: that of Sarrasine. “Ernest-Jean Sarrasine was the only son of a lawyer in the FrancheComté. . . . The elder Sarrasine, having but one child . . . , hoped to make a magistrate of him, and to live long enough to see . . . the grandson of Matthieu Sarrasine, farmer of saint-Dié, seated beneath the lilies and napping through some trial for the greater glory of the law” (234).16 This genealogical sketch, ostensibly straightforward in nature, becomes problematic when we learn that Sarrasine’s paternity is not limited to the figures of his father and grandfather. Sarrasine, the narrator recounts, was sent at an early age to a Jesuit school and brought up by Jesuit “Fathers” (235) whom he took pleasure in mocking and who ulti-

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mately expelled him, causing him to seek refuge with the sculptor Bouchardon, who treated Sarrasine “like his own son” (235) and educated him with “paternal kindness” (236).17 To complicate matters further, when Sarrasine produced a sculpture revealing his true genius, “all of Besançon rejoiced at having given birth to a great man of the future” (236; my italics).18 If Sarrasine’s paternal lineage is somewhat overextended by surrogate fathers, there is no mention anywhere of his mother, who is replaced in her child-bearing function, even if only figuratively, by the city of Besançon. While one might be tempted to dismiss the omission and replacement of the mother as unimportant or a mere rhetorical convention, the text’s emphasis on omissions and ellipses, on the mysterious Lanty origins, and on the matrilineal transmission from Mme de Lanty to her children raises the suspicion that this elision and the question of the mother in the text are not insignificant. This suspicion is reinforced at the story’s end when Sarrasine, arriving at the ambassador’s palazzo for a concert, asks Prince Chigi why Zambinella is performing dressed as a man. Astonished, the prince responds: “Where do you come from?” (250) [“D’où venez-vous?” (1072)]. The question of Sarrasine’s origins is thus explicitly raised in the context of his blindness to a “woman’s” true identity. This “woman,” moreover, is referred to by the third-person pronoun she [elle] —italicized in the text: “Is it out of consideration for the cardinals, bishops, and abbés present,” Sarrasine asks, “that she is dressed like a man . . . ?” (250), to which the prince responds: “She! Who she?” (250) [“—Elle! Qui elle?” (1072)].19 Joined with the typographically underscored ambiguity of the pronoun elle, the prince’s question makes explicit what the text may be heard implicitly to ask: “Qui elle?” Who is she in the narrative? It raises the possibility that Sarrasine’s blindness to Zambinella’s identity may be a screen or symptom of his blindness to the identity of someone else—a woman whom Zambinella, for reasons as yet unclear, embodies or represents for him. The continuation of Prince Chigi’s response to Sarrasine confirms this: “Has there ever been a woman on the Roman stage? And don’t you know what kind of creatures fill the roles of women in the Papal States?” (250).20 Zambinella is someone who, by definition, fills or assumes female roles, who literally gives voice to the dramas of other women. How then can we determine the woman’s role Zambinella fills or voices for Sarrasine? Initially Sarrasine, who is described as a child who “spent hours . . . dreaming of Homeric heros” (235) and as experiencing a passion for Zambinella so intense that he would leap immense distances

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for her, like the “horses of the gods depicted by Homer” (242), seems to be on his own odyssey whose goal is the “ideal beauty” (237) he perceives in the singer and has long sought to inspire his sculpting.21 But Zambinella not only incarnates female beauty; she also embodies for him the “exquisite proportions of feminine nature” (238).22 She is not just a woman but a “feminine organization” (244), a perfect combination of elements Sarrasine has until now had to piece together from many different women: “seeking in one . . . model the roundness of a perfect leg; in another, the curve of a breast; in another, white shoulders; finally taking some girl’s neck, some woman’s hands, and some child’s smooth knees” (238).23 It is noteworthy that these “smooth knees” belong to a male child: cet enfant (with a masculine demonstrative).24 If Sarrasine sees Zambinella as a “feminine organization” and “ideal model” for reproduction, it seems to be because reproduction here is not purely artistic but human, and because his Odyssean quest is for a maternal figure connected to a male child. Sarrasine confirms this when, overcome by “madness” (238) watching Zambinella perform, he feels the distance between them “cease to exist” (239) and imagines inhabiting her and “breathing in” (239) her voice and the powder “impregnating her hair” (239).25 This passionate union, combined with Sarrasine’s “fecund happiness” (240) 26 when Zambinella sings and his desire for a “feminine organization” ripe for reproduction, looks very much like a passion for fertility: that is, for the woman who bore him. Sarrasine says as much when he is duped by Zambinella’s masquerade and laments, “A woman’s heart was for me a refuge, a homeland. . . . Monster! You who can give life to nothing” (252).27 All along Sarrasine has sought someone able to give life: a woman’s heart as an asylum, home, and life-giving source. The text actually defines the heart in these terms when the narrator, trying to seduce Mme de Rochefide, asks if it is true that she enjoys “hearing stories about those vivid passions to which ravishing Southern women give birth [enfanter] in our hearts?” (233), and when he describes Sarrasine’s reaction to the singer: “he felt a warm source suddenly begin to bubble within the deepest, most intimate part of his being, in what we call the heart, for lack of another word!” (238).28 Hearts, “for lack of another word” (or because “another word” cannot be stated), are a warm, intimate source from which women “give birth.” If Sarrasine has sought in Zambinella a woman’s heart, if he perceives her as the ideal female organization and the perfect “model” (modèle) for artistic reproduction, it is because this modèle (as the word’s synonym makes clear) is the perfect matrice, mold,

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or womb for reproduction.29 Sarrasine’s passionate quest for Zambinella is thus not unlike Odysseus’s. It is a journey homeward toward his origins and the modèle or womb of his mother. We still need to link this maternal quest with Sarrasine’s blindness to Zambinella’s castration. The conflicted nature of his passion provides such a link. On the one hand, he experiences a kind of religious rapture upon hearing Zambinella’s “heavenly” (250), “angelic voice” (249) and seeing her divine beauty.30 On the other hand, his passion is “frightening and infernal” (239), “derives equally from both pleasure and pain” (239), and leaves Sarrasine almost dead: “He had experienced such pleasure, or perhaps he had suffered so keenly, that his life had drained away” (239).31 Passion as a source of suffering and death, combined with Sarrasine’s religious education by the Jesuits, the context of Papal Rome, and the many textual references to the Holy Virgin, the Christ child, and the Crucifixion, all suggest that Sarrasine’s longing for Zambinella involves not only a maternal quest, but also the suffering of a religious passion. As his enraged response to Zambinella’s unveiling cryptically reveals, this is the passion of Christ’s crucifixion: Your feeble hand has destroyed my happiness. What hope can I strip from you for all those you have sullied [flétries]? You have dragged me down [ravalé] to your level. . . . I shall always have the memory of a celestial harpy who thrusts her talons into all my manly feelings, and who will stamp all other women with a seal of imperfection! Monster! (252) [Ta main débile a renversé mon bonheur. Quelle espérance puisje te ravir pour toutes celles que tu as flétries? Tu m’as ravalé jusqu’à toi. . . . J’aurai toujours dans le souvenir une harpie céleste qui viendra enfoncer ses griffes dans tous mes sentiments d’homme, et qui signera toutes les autres femmes d’un cachet d’imperfection! Monstre! (1074)] The revelation of Zambinella’s identity involves a flétrissure, moral debasement, or branding of all women and of Sarrasine himself, who claims to be dragged down (ravalé) to Zambinella’s level. But the references to a harpy’s talons, which stamp all women with a “seal of imperfection,” indicate that this branding is physical and not just moral; that the debasement perpetrated by Zambinella and tainting the sculptor involves a physical mutilation or punishment and puncture wounds

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made by talons or sharp, pointed objects (the verb flétrir can refer to physical as well as moral branding).32 Associated with Zambinella, whose beauty is equal to that “rendered by the chisels of the Greeks” (238) 33 and whose image is repeatedly linked to things Greek, from Pygmalion’s Galatea to Adonis and Endymion, is a cryptic reference to a word in the foreign language Sarrasine (the narrator says) refused to learn in school. “Branding” (flétrir), “talons” (griffes), and “seal of imperfection” (cachet d’imperfection) are all cryptic allusions to the Greek word stigma, meaning “a puncture, prick, wound, or scar left by a pointed instrument,” and whose plural, stigmata, of course, refers to wounds reproducing the wounds of Christ.34 In this moment of revelation, Sarrasine sees Zambinella not just as his mother, but also as the monstrous figure (Monstre!) in whom are joined the ideas of moral condemnation, stigmatizing punishment, and the saga of Christ’s crucifixion. Odd as it may seem, Sarrasine sees Zambinella as the incarnation of the figure of religious anti-Semitism par excellence: the Wandering Jew. The text cryptically anticipates this strange vision from its earliest descriptions of Sarrasine’s tumultuous childhood. He was highly irreverent toward his Jesuit teachers, frequently drawing blasphemous sketches of the Holy Fathers, carving up the chapel’s pews during Mass, and leaving licentious drawings that shocked the youngest Fathers. Most scandalous of all, however, was the singular event that led to his expulsion from the Jesuit school and to his flight from home and his father’s wrath: He was expelled for having, while awaiting his turn at the confessional on Good Friday, sculpted a big stick of wood into the form of Christ. The blasphemy with which this statue was engraved was too blatant not to have merited punishment of the artist. Had he not had the audacity to place this somewhat cynical figure on top of the tabernacle! (235) [Il fut chassé pour avoir, en attendant son tour au confessionnal, un vendredi saint, sculpté une grosse bûche en forme de Christ. L’impiété gravée sur cette statue était trop forte pour ne pas attirer un châtiment à l’artiste. N’avait-il pas eu l’audace de placer sur le haut du tabernacle cette figure passablement cynique! (1058)] Sarrasine’s blasphemous carving of Christ, made on Good Friday while awaiting confession, is itself an unwitting act of confession. With this

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sacrilegious, mocking gesture, for which he is punished by expulsion, Sarrasine symbolically reenacts the saga of the man who, according to legend, cynically mocked Christ on Good Friday: who told the exhausted Savior, when he paused on the man’s doorstep en route to Calvary with his cross, “Why do you linger, move along,” and to whom Christ replied, “I shall move along, but you shall wander until my return.” Sarrasine acts out the mocking gesture perpetrated by the legendary archetype of anti-Jewish sentiment born in the thirteenth century. He performs the saga of the Wandering Jew: of the man flétri, stigmatized, and branded with infamy by Christ, and who was punished (as all Jews deserved to be) by being forced to wander the earth forever— or at least until Judgment Day—without “a refuge [or] a home” (252), unable to rest, unable to die.35 In a moment of religious confession early in his life, Sarrasine cryptically acts out being a Jew. He has no awareness of this ciphered revelation, however, or that this is the same identity he perceives in the monstrous yet longed for mother figure embodied by Zambinella. But it is precisely by decrypting this unrecognized staging of his Jewish identity that we can bring into focus the ethereal phantom haunting him. If Sarrasine plays out being the stigmatized and condemned Wandering Jew, if these defining characteristics also match his perception of Zambinella/his mother (whom he links to moral condemnation, stigmatizing punishment, and Christ’s crucifixion), and if he accuses her of “dragging him down to her level,” it is because the stigmatized Jewish identity to which he unconsciously confesses as a youth is both his and his mother’s. Moreover, since Sarrasine is unaware that the drama he enacts identifies him and his mother as Jewish, and since the text is manifestly concerned from the outset with secret family origins and matrilineal inheritance, the only way Sarrasine could be a Jew and not know it (given that Jewish identity is matrilineal) is if his mother were Jewish and had kept it secret. Sarrasine’s seemingly aberrant youthful behavior and blindly incongruous passion for Zambinella are readable as symptoms of a transgenerational haunting. His “possession” by his love for the singer emerges as the ciphered narrative of his possession by a phantom. This phantom involves an unspeakably shameful secret concerning Jewish identity that was concealed by his mother and cryptically transmitted to him, without ever being stated, as a nescience: an unknown knowledge, wrapped in silence, which he carries lodged within him, but that remains beyond his ken. The text does not provide enough evidence to determine why his mother concealed her Jewishness. We can nonetheless delineate the

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textual implications of the secret’s phantomatic transmission. If, as Barthes states and others agree, Sarrasine’s tale hinges on a “gap in knowledge,” this gap is not the result of his “ignoran[ce] of the code of Papal customs”36 or of the institutionally mandated “social truth” 37 of castration. At issue, in other words, is not a “hole”38 in knowledge or an inadvertent “defect [or] blank in the discourse of others”39 that could be filled in or made consciously accessible to Sarrasine by simple enunciation. Sarrasine’s tale pivots instead on a gap or silence in the speech of a specific other—his mother—that is transmitted to him as an elision or gap in his psyche. The interpretive process necessary to reconstruct this gap is an anasemic one. It involves identifying, within Sarrasine’s language and behavior, encrypted linguistic fragments produced in response to a trauma kept secret by someone else, and it means retracing these fragments back up toward their unspeakable signifying sources or founding silence. Analyzing a phantom text, in other words, entails first recognizing that the unspeakable secret haunting a character can never be explicitly stated, but must be pieced together from its linguistically inscribed traces scattered throughout the narrative. The character’s life saga can then be understood as the ciphered mise en scène or acting out of a drama transmitted as never to be stated or known. To read the ellipses in Balzac’s “Sarrasine” is thus to read not by filling in missing or unstated knowledge or by identifying a lapse in the transmission of cultural codes, but by recognizing that what haunts the sculptor is a secret drama that has been elided from the speech of another and whose very existence as elided is simultaneously transmitted to him and sealed off from his awareness. What drives Sarrasine’s speech and behavior, in sum, is not his ignorance of a piece of knowledge, but the unidentified and disturbing presence within him of knowledge transmitted to him as unknowable.

C A S T R AT I O N , F O RC E D C O N V E R S I O N S , A N D R E L I G I O U S D R AG Proposing that Sarrasine’s mother’s identity as a Jew has been silently transmitted to him as a phantom does not explain why he perceives or “recognizes” this mother in a castrato. It also leaves unclear how the mother’s Jewishness is specifically linked to a drama of expulsion and exile implied by the Wandering Jew saga through which Sarrasine enacts his lineage. Sarrasine’s odd reactions to Zambinella’s performance suggest some answers. The singer instills him with a sense of “depression

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impossible to explain” (238), a frenzied desire to “take possession” (238) of her, and a need to condemn himself: “‘To be loved by her, or die!’ Such was the sentence Sarrasine passed upon himself” (238).40 At the same time, her pliant voice, “agile . . . and . . . supple as a thread shaped by the slightest breath of air,” makes Sarrasine feel his life “drain away” (239) as he sits “on the steps of a church [in] confused meditation” (239).41 The depressing, almost lethal beauty of the singer’s voice resides in the ease with which it changes tone and shape as it assumes forms given it by a prevailing current. The fact that this mutability is also linked to a metaphorical death (life “drains away”) and rebirth (“he fell into one of those frenzies of activity which disclose . . . new principles in our lives” [239]),42 to a legal condemnation or “sentence,” and to a church “meditation” or prayer, implies that Zambinella’s castrated voice speaks to Sarrasine of someone forced or “sentenced” to alter or convert her voice. His ignorance of Zambinella’s identity as a castrato and of the practice of castrati filling the roles of women in the Papal States, in other words, is a symptom of his haunting not just by the secret of his mother’s Jewish identity, but by the drama of her having been forced or condemned by the Catholic Church to sing literally a different tune, to pray in a voice altered to avoid death or exile. Zambinella’s castrated voice, in sum, cryptically conveys to the uncomprehending Sarrasine the story of a religious conversion: of his mother who was forced to convert or “be drained of” one (religious) identity in order to be “reborn” with the “new principles” of another. But Zambinella does not only sing the parts of women. He dresses the parts as well. Sarrasine’s passion is thus for someone whose “conversion” involves appearing in female drag and giving voice to a woman without ever really becoming a woman. Put another way, alongside the encrypted narratives identifying Zambinella as a mother, Jew, and convert, Sarrasine’s blind passion for the singer in gender drag has also to be read as a symptom of his haunting by his Jewish mother’s identity as a performer in “religious drag.” The mother Sarrasine “sees” without consciously recognizing in Zambinella filled the role and visibly adopted the altered voice and identity imposed upon her by the Church, but without ever actually assuming them as her own. This is why, upon hearing Zambinella sing, Sarrasine falls under the spell of a “hallucination” (240), envisions her “in every imaginable position” (240), and sketches her “in every pose . . . unveiled, seated, standing, lying down, chaste or amorous” (239).43 In drawing Zambinella as someone who assumes contrasting poses, Sarrasine unwittingly paints the cryptic portrait of his

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mother as a religious poseur: as someone who posed as a Catholic and pretended to convert but who, despite donning religious drag, remained in fact and in secret a Jew. As he molds her clay image and creates a statue of Zambinella “despite the veils, skirts, corsets and ribbons cloaking her” (240),44 Sarrasine thus unveils (to the reader if not himself) his mother’s true identity as a false convert and fake Catholic: as a crypto-Jew. The “orgy scene” in the story can be reread in this context as the representation of a religious ritual. Sarrasine, the reader is told, is brought to the party by a mysterious duenna who meets him in front of the Hotel di Spagna and leads him through a series of backstreets to a palace. Once inside, he follows a dark “labyrinth of stairways, galleries, and rooms” (242) until he is admitted to “a mysterious apartment” (242) dominated by a large table laden with “sacrosanct bottles” (242).45 When the guests finish supper, they begin an “artist’s orgy” (242) and sing, “under the influence of the Peralta and the Pedro-Ximenes . . . , Calabrian airs, Spanish seguidillas, and Neapolitan canzonettas. . . . Jokes and words of love fl[y] like bullets in a battle through laughter, blasphemies, and invocations to the Holy Virgin or il Bambino” (244–45; Balzac’s italics).46 Given the narrative’s emphasis on Greek deities, sculptures, and language (including the references to “stigma” and “stigmata”), we can hear this secret orgy of wine, women, and song resonate with the meaning of “orgy” in Greek: “secret rites of worship to a deity.”47 The idea of “secret worship” is amplified by the references to Spain (duenna, Hotel di Spagna, Spanish seguidillas, Peralta, PedroXimenes, and Xeres sherry), “sacrosanct bottles,” sacrilegious insults and mocking invocations to the Holy Virgin and Christ (il Bambino), and the fact that this private ritual occurs on Friday evening. When Sarrasine suddenly carries Zambinella off into an adjoining room, the scene being played out becomes clear. Faced with the singer’s drawn dagger and plaintive appeal to his piety (“But today is Friday” [245], Zambinella pleads), Sarrasine, who “was not devout” (245), suddenly “br[eaks] into laughter” (245).48 His mocking of religious devotion on the weekday commemorative of Christ’s crucifixion, when read within the Spanish context involving secret ritual worship in a concealed apartment, points to the drama never explicitly described in the narrative but orienting Sarrasine’s entire life quest. For him, this “artist’s orgy” represents the scene of secret, heretical worship performed for generations in Spain, beginning in the fifteenth century, as persecution of Spanish Jews grew. It is the drama of ritual

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observance practiced by the “false converts,” crypto-Jews, or Marranos, as they came to be called: Jews who lived publicly as Catholics but performed the Jewish Sabbath service on Friday evenings and observed, in secret apartments, caves, cellars, and catacombs throughout Spain, the “sacrilegious,” “blaspheming,” “Christ-mocking” (according to the Inquisition) rituals of their true religion. Sarrasine’s impetuous attempt to possess Zambinella at the orgy thus emerges as another phantomatic symptom and ciphered confession that he recognizes this “woman” as belonging to him, that the drama of sa racine or “his roots or origins” involves having been born of a “Sarrasine” (literally a “female Saracen”): of a Semitic, female “infidel” whom the Church tried to convert, but who prayed and lived in secret as a Jew. (My reading of “Saracen,” “Jew,” and “Infidel” as interchangeable is grounded in the history of the Crusades, during which entire European Jewish populations were wiped out as crusaders took time to crush the “infidel at home among us” on their way to defeating the Saracens in the Holy Land. In 1215, the conflation of Saracens and Jews was made part of Church doctrine by the Fourth Lateran Council, which identified both together as objects of persecution in several canons. Canon 68, for example, decrees that henceforth “Jews and Saracens . . . shall easily be distinguishable from the rest of the populations by the quality of their clothes” to avoid intermarriage or relations with Christians. The fact that Jews and Saracens became interchangeable terms in nineteenth-century France is underscored by the publicity posters for Édouard Drumont’s La France juive [Jewish France], about which I will have more to say in a moment, which depicted the antiSemitic Drumont as a knight setting off to fight the Jews who were portrayed as “the new Saracens, bankers and stockbrokers.”)49 The story’s tragic end and the precise nature of the “revelation” propelling it can now be reconsidered. When Prince Chigi, answering Sarrasine’s query as to why Zambinella is dressed like a man, states that he, Chigi, gave Zambinella his voice and that there has never been a woman on the Roman stage, Sarrasine’s soul is suddenly penetrated by a “horrid truth” (250) [“affreuse vérité” (1072)]: It was as if he had been struck by lightning. He stood motionless, his eyes fixed on the false singer. . . . “It is a woman,” Sarrasine said, believing he was alone. “There is some secret plot beneath all this. Cardinal Cicognara is deceiving the Pope and the whole city of Rome!” (250–51)

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[Il était frappé comme d’un coup de foudre. Il resta immobile, les yeux attachés sur le prétendu chanteur. . . . “C’est une femme, dit Sarrasine en se croyant seul. Il y a là-dessous quelque intrigue secrète. Le cardinal Cicognara trompe le pape et toute la ville de Rome!” (1072–73)] Sarrasine’s response is another cryptic statement of the secret haunting him. The revelation that Zambinella is not a woman and hence did not really adopt the identity to which his voice was forcibly converted represents for Sarrasine the “truth” of his mother’s artificial religious conversion. Seeing Zambinella dressed as a man means “seeing” his mother’s identity as a “false singer,” poseur, or false convert who devised a “secret plot” and acted precisely to “deceive the pope” and dupe the Church into believing she was no longer a Jew. The unveiling of Zambinella’s fictional, travestied gender conversion is thus for Sarrasine a screen through which he unknowingly perceives his mother’s illusory, travestied religious conversion. Castration (as the mark of a forcibly converted voice), combined with gender cross-dressing, thus functions in the text as a vehicle for a deceptive change of habit and an encrypted saga of religious transvestism.

A N T I - S E M I T I S M A N D T H E RO O T S O F A N E L I S I O N It is now time to link this hidden drama with the larger societal context of anti-Semitism by addressing the question Mme de Rochefide asks the narrator as he finishes telling Sarrasine’s tale: “what connection is there between this story and the little old man we saw at the Lantys’?” (253).50 Zambinella, who looks like a “specter” (230–32), “phantom” (231), “ghost that wanders” (231), and a hundred-year-old “walking cadaver” (232) with a “mocking” (230) laugh, obviously calls to mind the figure of the cynical, undying Wandering Jew of folklore.51 Given that Zambinella’s identity is the Lantys’ “well-kept secret” (227)52 and that he embodies for Sarrasine a secret of Jewish identity, it makes sense to ask if Zambinella’s “secret” is that he too is a Jew. We can also ask if the Lanty family, whose origins are the mystery that begins the text and my reading, is also Jewish. This possibility is raised by the Semitic references in the tale, including Marianina’s resemblance to the “sultan’s daughter in . . . the Magic Lamp” (223), speculation that the Lantys got rich robbing “some Casbah” (223), and by the narrator’s comment that the Lantys

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might be “gypsies” (222), since no one knew what country they came from and they all “spoke Italian, French, Spanish, English, and German perfectly enough to create the belief that they must have spent a long time among these various peoples” (223).53 Wandering nomads who speak the language of the country through which they pass (like the multilingual Wandering Jew of legend), the Lantys could indeed be Jewish. Yet we cannot be sure. Unlike Sarrasine’s Jewish genealogy, which can be reconstructed from numerous and internally coherent textual elements, no such lineage or clear Jewish “source” can be identified for Zambinella or any other Lanty family member. The Lantys might be Jews who have wandered gypsy-like through Europe to escape persecution and chosen, once in France, to keep secret their identity. There could also be a concealed Jewish parent in the family history of Monsieur or Madame Lanty (or conceivably both) who, like Sarrasine’s mother, transmitted this identity phantomatically to a child who, as an adult, led the family in a vagabond existence as a means of acting it out. It is equally possible, however, that there is no Jewish blood in Zambinella or any of the Lantys. The family’s peregrinations may be the simple result of following Zambinella in his international singing career, or of one or more of a potentially infinite number of causes ranging from the economic, cultural, and neurotic to the criminal. Far from an obstacle to analysis, however, this inability to decide whether Zambinella or the Lantys are Jewish is crucial to interpreting the frame around Sarrasine’s story and to reading the thus far unnoticed ideological narrative encrypted in the text. The narrator’s apparent intent in telling Sarrasine’s story to Mme de Rochefide, aside from revealing the mystery of Zambinella’s identity and of the Adonis in Vien’s painting, is to seduce this beautiful and forbidding woman. His success is jeopardized early on, however, when his jealousy of Rochefide’s admiration for the Adonis leads him to mock her confusion over the strange figure of Zambinella: “Oh, you fashion me to your own taste,” Rochefide responds angrily. “What tyranny! You don’t want me to be who I am” (233; Balzac’s italics).54 Sarrasine’s story is thus introduced by the question of identity (who is Zambinella? whom does the narrator want Rochefide to be?), and by the correlative question of “conversion” or assimilation: of what it means to conform to another’s desire or notion of identity. In the end, the narrator’s plan fails miserably. Not only is Rochefide not seduced, she concludes that all human feelings inevitably meet with disappointment, and she asserts her determination never to be deceived:

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[D]on’t all human feelings come down to the same thing, to horrible deceptions? . . . I would become a nun tomorrow did I not know that I can remain unmoved as a rock amid the storms of life. If the Christian’s future is also an illusion, at least it is not destroyed until after death. . . . Paris is a very hospitable place. . . . It accepts everything, shameful fortunes and bloodstained fortunes. Crime and infamy can find asylum here . . . ; only virtue has no altars here. Yes, pure souls have their home in heaven! No one will have known me. I am proud of that! (253–54) [[T]ous les sentiments humains ne se dénouent-ils pas ainsi, par d’atroces déceptions? . . . Demain je me ferais dévote si je ne savais pouvoir rester comme un roc inaccessible au milieu des orages de la vie. Si l’avenir du chrétien est encore une illusion, au moins elle ne se détruit qu’après la mort. . . . Paris . . . est une terre bien hospitalière; il accueille tout, et les fortunes honteuses, et les fortunes ensanglantées. Le crime et l’infamie y ont droit d’asile . . . ; la vertu seule y est sans autels. Oui, les âmes pures ont une patrie dans le ciel! Personne ne m’aura connue! J’en suis fière. (1075–76)] Drawing a lesson from Sarrasine’s saga, Rochefide performs a temporal displacement by which she reads this tragedy of deception in the context of contemporary Paris and laments the difficulty of remaining a virtuous Christian amid the rampant evil and deceit surrounding her. This rehistoricizing gesture compels the reader to follow suit, to ask precisely which Paris Rochefide is referring to and what this displacement might represent. A clue emerges from the narrator’s explanation, immediately preceding Rochefide’s complaint, of the connection between Zambinella and Vien’s Adonis: Madame, Cardinal Cicognara took possession of Zambinella’s statue and had it executed in marble; today it is in the Albani Museum. There, in 1791, the Lanty family found it and asked Vien to copy it. The portrait . . . later served for Girodet’s Endymion. . . . (253; Balzac’s italics) [Madame, le cardinal Cicognara se rendit maître de la statue de Zambinella et la fit exécuter en marbre, elle est aujourd’hui dans

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le musée Albani. C’est là qu’en 1791 la famille Lanty la retrouva, et pria Vien de la copier. Le portrait . . . a servi plus tard pour l’Endymion de Girodet. . . . (1075; Balzac’s italics)] The year 1791 is one of only two dates in the text. (The other is 1758, the year Sarrasine goes to Rome and by which the practice of using castrati on stage was well established.) Barthes calls the date one of the tale’s “effects of ‘reality’,” “a dead end that cannot be connected with any other information”55 and that serves only to give the narrative a measure of authenticity. Other critics read 1791 as a reference to the French Revolution, begun two years earlier, with its anticlerical, secularizing politics and ideology.56 One might indeed argue that the date situates Rochefide’s response within a post-Revolutionary nostalgia for France’s lost Christian values. But 1791 has a very specific signification for Jewish history. It is the year in which the Jews of France, after heated and prolonged debate in the Constituent Assembly, were finally emancipated. More precisely, September 27, 1791 marks the emancipation of the approximately thirty thousand Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, the majority of the Jews in France who had been refused emancipation a year earlier when it was accorded to the smaller group of well-assimilated Sephardic Jews in the Bordeaux region.57 With the assembly’s vote, all discriminatory rules concerning Jewish residence, occupation, identifying dress, tax obligations, and the like were abolished. This action established the critical juridical fact that Jews throughout France became legally indistinguishable from Christians. Rochefide’s declaration that “no one will have known her,” uttered in apparent response to the corruption and deceit surrounding her, can be heard as a tacit statement of the national implications of this emancipatory event. Readers have generally construed her response and her intent to remain a faithful Christian or, as she puts it, an “unmovable, faithful rock” (un roc inaccessible)—which is to say a Roche (rock) fide (from fides, faith  faithful)—as simply a rejection of the narrator’s attempt to seduce or “know her” carnally. The problem of identity permeating the text and touching not only Sarrasine, Zambinella, and the Lantys but Rochefide herself—as her “reading” of her name as her identity confirms (a reading that also confirms the legitimacy of reading “Sarrasine”  sa racine, “Saracen”)— indicates we must hear her response in the context of the larger sociocultural issue of Christian identity. If Rochefide proclaims that no one will ever know her, it may be because,

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in a post-emancipatory France where Jews become indistinguishable from Christians, the reference group in contrast to which Christians have historically identified themselves becomes invisible. Rochefide’s assertion of her unknowability, in other words, is a tacit articulation of the new threat to Christian identity. At the same time, it signals an impending shift in the ideology of anti-Semitism. The long history of theological anti-Semitism is written in a Manichean mode that identifies the Jew as the foreigner, infidel, Christkiller, host desecrater, and corrupter of Christian civilization and culture, thanks to whom the Christian recognizes and incarnates the obedient and faithful life taught by Christ. In terms of theological antiSemitism, the Jew has an essentially probative value for the Christian and Christianity. As the Catholic theologian Félicité de Lamennais wrote in 1825, the continued existence of the Jews after the appearance of Christ is a miracle “that manifests until the end of days the inexorable justice and the sanctity of God whom this people dared to deny. . . . [This people] carries in its hands a torch that enlightens the whole world while remaining itself in darkness. . . . All the nations have seen it pass by; all have been seized by horror at the sight of it; it is marked by a sign more terrible than that of Cain. On its forehead an iron hand has written: DEICIDE!”58 This reference to the stigmatized, deicidal Jew whose very existence testifies to God’s mercy brings us back to the legend of the Wandering Jew on which Balzac’s text hinges and which is nothing less than the archetypal narrative of theological anti-Semitism. This nameless everyman or “every Jew” is, according to lore, a witness to the Crucifixion and to the “truth” of Christianity, who spends his life testifying to and disseminating this truth in perpetual repentance for his crime, and who ultimately sees this truth and is converted and saved by Christ. As I have interpreted it, however, Balzac’s “Sarrasine” is the story of Wandering Jews who are unrecognizable and unknowable as such. Both Sarrasine and his mother are invisible, crypto-Jews (the former unwittingly so). Neither functions as a witness to Christianity’s truth or as an identifiable other or guarantor of the Christian’s sense of self. The text, which inscribes its Wandering Jew sagas within it as inaccessible and virtually invisible, thus emerges through its reference to 1791 as a narrative that implicitly recounts and dramatizes the disappearance or invisibility of the identifiable, probative Jew in post-emancipatory France. Written in 1830, the “present” in which Rochefide speaks and

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forty years after the emancipation (hence well into the process of Jewish assimilation), “Sarrasine” can therefore be described as a story about the disappearance of the Jew as a witness, in post-emancipatory France, who can testify to the “truth” of Christian salvation. “Sarrasine,” in sum, is a narrative about the impossibility of henceforth recognizing the Saracen, Infidel, or Jew. It is about the suspension or ellipsis of the signifier of otherness and difference which, in my reading of the text at least, is not castration or the phallus, as has long been argued, but the Jew.59 Balzac has thus written an encrypted history of the psychosocial and political conditions that led to the ideological shift from pre-emancipatory theological anti-Semitism, based on a certain mode of New Testament exegesis rooted in the Gospels and promulgated by the Catholic Church, to post-emancipatory, secular, “modern” anti-Semitism, which emerges in the 1880s as economically and above all racially grounded. Put another way, in “Sarrasine” Balzac rewrites and “modernizes” the saga of the Wandering Jew. He transforms this figure into a spectral, phantomatic identity that haunts Sarrasine and simultaneously functions, by virtue of its invisibility, as a ghostly portent of an inevitable displacement in the discursive practice of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism. Indeed, while there are certainly manifestations of anti-Semitism in France in the decades after 1830, it is not until 1886 and the publication of Édouard Drumont’s La France juive that any sustained articulation of the problem or danger of the “invisible Jew” emerges.60 With this virulent, best-selling polemic, modern anti-Semitism finds its voice in France and, as the historian Léon Poliakov puts it, “the theme of the individual noxiousness of the invisible Jew” develops as an argument for militant anti-Semites.61 “[E]very Jew one sees, every professing Jew,” writes Drumont, is relatively harmless, . . . it is possible to keep an eye on him. The dangerous Jew is the indistinguishable Jew, . . . this is the dangerous animal par excellence and at the same time the uncatchable animal, . . . the most powerful trouble-making element the earth has ever produced. . . .62 [[T]out Juif qu’on voit, tout Juif avéré est relativement peu dangereux, . . . il est possible de le surveiller. Le Juif dangereux, c’est le Juif vague, . . . c’est l’animal nuisible par excellence et en même temps l’animal insaisissable, . . . le plus puissant agent de trouble que jamais la terre ait produit. . . . ]

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As I will elaborate more in the next chapter on Villiers’s Axël, this fear of the invisible Jew will contribute significantly to the late nineteenth-century rise of racist anti-Semitism, with its emphasis on physiological characteristics that allow Christians to recognize Jews who have blended socioculturally, economically, and politically into society. Now I am not arguing that Balzac had any knowledge or premonition that racist anti-Semitism would emerge as the dominant ideology in response to emancipation. I am proposing that, in “Sarrasine,” he writes a reading of the emancipation and inscribes a moment in the history of anti-Semitism that is a moment of disappearance, absence, or ellipsis. The text functions as a ciphered narrative of the emancipation’s transformation of the Jew from seen to unseen, visible to invisible. At the same time, it comments on the affective (if not actual) implications of this transformation for the Christian’s future which, as Mme de Rochefide laments, becomes an “illusion.” Without a clear representation of the recognizable Jew as the Christian’s other, the Christian—and Christianity—are (or appear to be) doomed. Reading Balzac’s writing of this encrypted historical narrative is possible through an anasemic process. Only by first reconstructing the traces of the concealed drama of Jewish identity and false conversion haunting Sarrasine can we perceive and evaluate Balzac’s narrative of the Jew’s disappearance in post-emancipation France and of the threat this disappearance represents for Christianity. Analyzing religious history and ideology thus emerges in this instance as a function of a nonphallocentric psychoanalytic hermeneutic. This hermeneutic, while allowing us to read specific textual elements as traces of an unspeakable secret whose ciphered presence orients the narrative’s unfolding, simultaneously reveals a new way of interpreting the link between literary fictions about trauma and religio-historical discourse. It enables us to see how a silenced drama, which haunts an individual, can become the vehicle for encrypting a religious unconscious that permeates an entire society. The encrypting of such a repressed ideology, and the question of the invisible Jew and its related themes of conversion and concealment, inflect and may even haunt other literary works by Balzac. Of the roughly thirty Jewish characters in the novels and short stories of La Comédie humaine, many either hide their Jewish origins, convert to Christianity, or have ancestors who converted. Balzac identifies all of them, however, as Jews. The banker Nucingen, for example, although described as the “son of some converted Alsatian Jew,” is nonetheless referred to as Jewish in his many appearances in the The Human Com-

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edy. (One notable exception is “Sarrasine,” in which he is described only as “rich” [222; 1044], an interesting silencing of Jewishness that doubles the saga just decrypted about Sarrasine’s silenced identity as the son of a converted Jew.) Une Fille d’Ève’s Nathan Raoul, the son of a Jewish antique dealer and a Catholic mother who “made him a Catholic,” “hides his origins very carefully” but is still “a Jew.”63 Fritz Brunner (Le Cousin Pons), born of a Jewish mother who converted, is nevertheless the “young product of Calvin and Moses.”64 The usurer Gobseck, whose fidelity to his Jewish mother’s religion is uncertain since he may have become a “Catholic, Mohammedan, Brahmin, or Lutheran,” is consistently identified as Jewish.65 And despite Esther’s and Coralie’s conversion to Catholicism, these courtesans of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes are still viewed as Jews.66 Conversion does not erase Jewish identity for Balzac anymore than it does for post-Revolutionary French society. There seems, in other words, to be an implicit need in Balzac to identify the Jew, especially the converted Jew or the child of converts. And this need coincides with France’s fear of its assimilated, invisible Jews whose threat to society grows as they increasingly resemble Christians. “Sarrasine,” along with Balzac’s “Facino Cane” (a tale that makes no mention of Jews but whose main character, as I have shown elsewhere, is haunted by a parent’s concealed Jewish identity), suggest that several of Balzac’s works and the author himself were in some sense haunted by France’s trauma of Jewish assimilation.67 His texts about openly converted Jews and unseen, infiltrating Jews, and his own identification with the figure of the Wandering Jew, as we see in his letter to Madame Hanska quoted in the chapter’s epigraph, imply a need to unconsciously enact or work through an anxiety about the future of the Christian in France. Pursuing this hypothesis would entail investigating whether phantoms of unspeakable Jewish identity and traces of post-emancipation French anti-Semitism might also be decrypted in other Balzac texts.68 Let me conclude, however, by returning to Barthes. As I noted at the beginning of the chapter, Philip Stewart asks why Barthes censors homosexuality from his reading of “Sarrasine” in S/Z and surmises that it may be connected to Barthes’s unspoken desire to protect his private life and the specificity of homoerotic pleasure. I would ask, in parallel fashion, why Barthes omits or censors the Jew from his reading of “Sarrasine,” even as he recognizes the codes of religion, Catholicism, Papal State injunctions, the maternal, and the courtesan (often marked as Jewish in Balzac’s works) woven through the story. This omission is especially

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intriguing since Barthes, in his commentary on lexical unit #545, empties the date it contains of all meaning, despite the fact that the date refers more explicitly than anything else in “Sarrasine” to the history of Jewish emancipation and links that history to Zambinella: There, in 1791, the Lanty family found it [Zambinella’s statue] * REF. Chronology. In fact, the item is a dead end, it cannot be connected with any other information . . . ; it is a pure effect of “reality”: nothing is more “real,” we think, than a date.69 This emptying out of 1791 is even more curious given that Barthes provides a date-filled history of castrati in commenting on lexical unit #557 a few pages later: The historical code to which the narrator refers informs us that the last two famous castrati were Crescentini, who was given the Order of the Iron Crown after Napoleon heard him in Vienna in 1805 and brought him to Paris, and who died in 1846, and Velluti, who sang his final performance in London in 1826 and died in 1861.70 How can we account for this inability to see the historical and sociocultural relevance of 1791 in the context of a story about religious interdictions and the power of the Papacy? It may be that, while “Sarrasine” becomes the medium for an encrypted drama of concealed Jewish identity reflective of early nineteenth-century France’s anxiety about the emancipated, invisible Jew, Barthes’s omission of the Jew from S/Z repeats his repression, in his earlier essays on detergent and skin cream advertisements discussed in my introduction, of France’s twentieth-century anti-Semitism and complicity in deporting its Jews. If Barthes’s project is to unveil the polysemic richness of “Sarrasine,” and if he omits the Jew along with the homosexual from his reading, it is perhaps because the unspeakable drama haunting Sarrasine resonates for him with the still unassimilated trauma of Vichy’s collaboration and its antiJewish laws and discourse—all firmly grounded in the very question of sa racine: the Jew’s roots or bloodlines. This undigested trauma, which not only infiltrates the Mythologies I discussed but might also be present in Barthes’s study of French classical tragedy—Sur Racine,71 could be what prevents him from detecting any trace of the saga of Jewish roots encrypted in “Sarrasine.” This hypothesis is reinforced by several chap-

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ters of S/Z, especially “The Starred text” (13) [“Le texte étoilé”],72 “The Castration Camp” (35), [“Le camp de la castration”],73 and “S/Z” (106), in which Barthes describes the graphic mirroring of “S” and “Z” and the intrinsic violence of the letter “Z,” which “stings like a punishing lash [and] cuts, slashes, or zebras” (106).74 We cannot help hearing in these words echoes of the étoile jaune or yellow star, affixed to the zebrastriped (zebré) uniforms worn by Jews in le camp de concentration (the concentration camp), where they were “punished, lashed, cut, and slashed” for their religious identity. Thus, even as the Jew is elided from Barthes’s reading of “Sarrasine,” we still find in S/Z’s linguistic and graphic elements—beginning with the title itself—runic traces of France’s mirroring collaboration with the “slantwise” (106)75 brutality of the Nazi SS as they excised and elided the Jews from their midst. Barthes’s acutely detailed yet gap-ridden semiotic dissection of “Sarrasine” is thus an unconscious inscription of the double-edged tale of the Jews: of the people whose invisible presence haunted nineteenth-century France, and whose visible absence perturbs if not haunts Barthes and France itself well into the twentieth century.

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5 A n t i c i pat i n g t h e Final Solution Symbolism and the Occulted Jew in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël

Like the people, I call, by the despised name “Jew,” any trafficker in currencies, any unproductive parasite living off the substance and work of others. Jew, usurer, and trafficker are synonymous for me. —Alphonse Toussenel, The Jews, Kings of the Age1 [T]he Jews . . . hate Christ in 1886 as they hated him in the time of Tiberius Augustus; they heap the same insults upon him. Whipping the crucifix on Good Friday, profaning the Host, soiling holy images, such was the great joy of the Jew in the Middle Ages; such is his great joy today. Once, he attacked the bodies of children; today, it is their soul he targets with atheistic teachings. Once he would bleed, now he poisons . . . —Édouard Drumont, La France juive (1886)2

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onsidered the archetype of Symbolist theater and a significant influence on the work of Gide, Yeats, Proust, Maeterlinck, Claudel, and T. S. Eliot, among others, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël (1890) has nonetheless been criticized as a self-indulgent, unreadable foray into the jargon and iconography of hermeticism and as a fundamentally untheatrical drama unsuitable for staging. Those critics who have taken the text seriously have concerned themselves principally with the origins of Villiers’s symbolic imagery, tracing it to his own internal debate with Catholicism and his seduction by the occultist discourses of illuminism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, freemasonry, and Hegelian idealism, all of which were rich sources for Symbolist writers and artists.3 137

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The narrative within the narrative—the account by the steward of Axël’s castle, Herr Zacharias, of how Axël’s father, Ghérard Auërsperg, buried the German State treasure somewhere on the Auërsperg family estate in order to protect it from Napoleon’s invading army—is seen by critics as the fulcrum upon which the text’s philosophical debate hinges. The revelation of this family secret, the fact that Ghérard’s untimely death prevented the treasure from ever being located, and the dishonor this cast upon the Auërsperg family, allow for the staging of the struggle between the corrupting influences of the real world, with its attractions of wealth and physical pleasures, and the ideal, spiritual truths represented to Axël by Master Janus, who teaches him the arcane sciences and mystical pathways to the world beyond. The framing narrative in which Sara de Maupers, Axël’s distant cousin, flees her convent ordination to seek the Auërsperg treasure, falls in love with Axël after discovering it in the Auërsperg family crypt, and renounces the physical pleasures she and Axël could share in order to join him in suicide, is viewed as reinforcing these themes of the ideal and the otherworldly. I do not dispute that these ideas can be found in the text. I intend to show, however, that the intersecting religio-philosophical and occult discourses of the narrative combine to construct a stage upon which a psychoanalytic drama, involving an unspeakable secret quite different from the one explicitly revealed in the text, is played out: the tale of the buried treasure contains encrypted within it the saga of a “buried Jew”; of an unorthodox intruder into the Auërsperg bloodline whose identity was concealed. By exposing this secret I can expose an aspect of Villiers’s text that has gone unnoticed: its fierce anti-Semitism. It will then be possible to elaborate how the play functions as a tacit commentary on and symptom of the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism of fin de siècle French society, and as a cryptic but appalling prescription for remedying France’s “Jewish problem.”

D RU M O N T ’ S I N V I S I B L E J E W Alan Raitt is among the few critics to have discussed the issue of antiSemitism in Villiers’s work. He notes, for example, that the Jewish character of Moses in the short story “The Celestial Adventure” (1887) [“La Céleste aventure”] is portrayed as an avaricious usurer who detests Christ and is concerned only with money.4 He also refers to several negative remarks about Jews in Axël and to anti-Semitic reflections in Villiers’s

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unpublished Sentences occultes; he relates an account of Villiers’s antiSemitism toward Catulle Mendès;5 and he cites a letter from 1889 in which Villiers expresses regret at not publishing with an editor favorable to anti-Semitic comments: “Publishing with you, I would have had elbow room for some anti-Semitic joking.”6 But while Raitt acknowledges that Villiers expressed anti-Jewish opinions toward the end of his life, especially following the publication of Édouard Drumont’s infamous antiSemitic tract, La France juive (1886), he tends to minimize the presence of anti-Semitism within his fiction. Raitt thus alludes to anti-Semitic comments in Axël but does not identify them.7 He recognizes that Moses in “The Celestial Adventure” is presented unsympathetically, but argues that “nonetheless, the portrait is not at all a caricature or even ironic, and offers kinder traits: Moses is ‘charitable,’ he is courageous, he has kept his ancestors’ faith, . . . and he does not persecute the poor.”8 Villiers’s real target, Raitt maintains, is the rich bourgeoisie: “It is the profiteers, and not the Jews, who arouse his indignation in ‘The Celestial Adventure’.”9 Although Villiers was still revising Axël on his death bed, he worked on the text for twenty years (1869–1889), a period that parallels a particularly significant era in French history: the emergence of the Third Republic following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the shift in the polemics of French anti-Semitism. My aim here is to articulate the thus far unseen connections between the play and these sociopolitical events. Far from diminishing the significance of the visible traces of anti-Semitism in the text, my analysis will show that there lurks beneath them a virulent strain of anti-Jewish sentiment that corresponds to an ideology of racist anti-Semitism emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century in France.10 To pursue this thesis, let me begin by extending my discussion in the preceding chapter concerning French Jewish identity and the Revolution. As I noted in discussing “Sarrasine,” the Jews of France were emancipated by the Constituent Assembly in 1791 following heated debate concerning their fitness to be citizens and their allegiance to the nascent Republic. Among the strongest opponents of Jewish enfranchisement were conservative Catholic intellectuals and clergy such as Louis Gabriel de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre. They were latter joined by Félicité de Lamennais who described the Jews as bearing on their foreheads the mark of their deicide.11 The objections of these conservative Catholics, rooted in centuries of theological Judophobia involving accusations of ritual murder, host desecration, and Christkilling, were aimed at doing away with Judaism as a religion. Since the Jews had never recognized Christ as their savior, these polemicists

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argued, they were a degenerate people who could not be regenerated by political emancipation. Only conversion could save them, as de Bonald declared: “That is to say, to speak clearly, that the Jews cannot be, and despite whatever one does never will be, citizens under Christianity, without becoming Christians.”12 The assembly ultimately turned aside this opposition and voted for enfranchisement, abolishing all discriminatory rules that legally differentiated Jews from Christians. Anti-Jewish sentiment subsided with the Restoration as Jews in France became increasingly well assimilated culturally, socially, and economically. Partly in response to this assimilation, Alphonse Toussenel published an attack against “Jewish capitalists” in his 1845 The Jews, Kings of the Age: A History of Financial Feudalism. A disciple of the socialist Fourier, Toussenel denounced Jews as parasitic merchants who subverted the natural, Christian order, had contempt for the rights of workers, and sought to maintain France in a feudal mercantile state ruled by money. Interestingly, Toussenel extended the term “Jew” to include Protestants as well as the English, Dutch, Swiss, and ultimately all foreigners, thereby weakening somewhat the opprobrium attached to it.13 Toussenel’s writings notwithstanding, anti-Semitism in France remained generally subdued until the 1880s when new voices joined the debate. Influenced by virulent anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns in Germany and Austria and pogroms in Russia, incited by the failure of the Catholic Union General Bank (a bankruptcy unfairly blamed on the Rothschilds), and frustrated by the increasing laicization of France, the purveyors of anti-Jewish rhetoric added a new dimension to the existing theologically and economically based anti-Semitism: race. Édouard Drumont’s La France juive (1886), published the same year as the initial complete version of Axël, was the first sustained elaboration in France of racist anti-Semitism and a bestseller whose last edition was printed in 1941. Influenced by Ernest Renan’s linguistically-oriented writings on the superiority of the Indo-European over the Semitic race, Drumont states that the Jew’s blood is corrupt, and that he infects others with the pestilence he carries while remaining himself immune to its effects. As I showed in the context of “Sarrasine,” the particular danger of the Jew for Drumont lies in his invisibility, in the fact that he has infiltrated and poisoned every layer of society and surreptitiously taken control of France’s destiny. For the French to protect themselves from this menace, they must be able to recognize Jews. Drumont accommodates this need in part by presenting a catalogue of racially based physiological characteristics for visually identifying them:

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The principal signs by which we can recognize the Jew remain: that infamous hooked nose, blinking eyes, clenched teeth, protruding ears, square rather than round, almond-shaped fingernails, a torso that is too long, flat feet, round knees, ankles that are turned out in an extraordinary way, the soft, limp hand of the hypocrite and traitor. They often have one arm shorter than the other.14 This disturbing yet potent fin de siècle response to Jewish emancipation and assimilation is historically significant for my reading of Axël. In the process of decrypting from the text the haunting effects of an unspeakable drama of Jewish identity, my analysis brings into relief the interwoven sociocultural and political dimensions of the drama that place it within the context of the racist anti-Semitism that erupted in France with Drumont and flowered, fours years after Villiers’s death, with the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair. More than a symbolist drama that speaks of man’s aspirations toward mastering the arcane sciences and achieving higher states of being, Villiers’s Axël is a play in which the “Jewish question” that assumed center stage in France at the end of the nineteenth century is not only asked but answered—and in a manner that eerily foreshadows the horrifying responses given by the twentieth century.

C RY P T O N Y M S O F J E W I S H I D E N T I T Y From the outset, several elements of the text hint that the “terrible family secret” of the Auërspergs, as it is repeatedly called, may involve a drama other than the one explicitly revealed by Herr Zacharias in scene 6 of part 2. In scene 3 of part 1, the Abbess and Archdeacon of the convent where Sara de Maupers is about to refuse ordination discuss Sara’s strange passion for translating mysterious dialects and “abominable formulas” (15) concealed within hermetic texts and prayers.15 They also speak about deciphering the strange “device running through the letters of the name” (13) in the Maupers family crest, and about the identical crest of the Auërspergs, which is connected with some mysterious “magus” (13) and whose “device . . . is more incomprehensible” (14) than that of the Maupers.16 At the same time, Ghérard’s hiding of the State treasure on his family estate and the circumstances of his murder are repeatedly referred to throughout part 2 as unexplained “enigmas.”

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Axël’s odd behavior is also noteworthy in this context. He refuses to speak about his father’s deed and vows to prevent the treasure’s discovery, which leads him to kill his cousin Kaspar when the latter announces his intention to find it. Thereafter, Axël vacillates, in Hamlet-like fashion, between refusing to seek the treasure and feeling the urge to locate it, finally renouncing its pleasures in favor of death when he at last possesses it. This enigmatic vacillation is compounded by Axël’s confession to Master Janus, his tutor in the occult sciences, that he has been obsessed by a secret he does not know since murdering Kasper: “I killed [Kaspar f]or a secret . . . which I do not know, —which yesterday I had forgotten—and which has obsessed me for an hour, —possessed me with a curiosity from which I thought I was free” (123; Villiers’s ellipsis).17 Axël’s contradictory words and behaviors, together with the text’s emphasis on deciphering mysterious codes, on the linguistic encrypting of names in heraldic devices, and on the need to keep “vigil” (41) over a “sovereign” (41) or transcendent secret, as the title of the first section of part 2 (“Les veilleurs du souverain secret” [562]) announces, all suggest that the secret obsessing or haunting Axël transcends the saga of his father’s deed, and that more is at stake in the text than his “symbolist” struggle between the realms of the physical and the ideal. If, at the end of the play, the “terrible family secret” is found literally interred in the foundations of Axël’s castle in the family crypt alongside Axël’s ancestors, it seems likely that the secret referred to in the text does not concern merely the physical location of the State treasure, but rather an encrypted saga that is sealed up within the foundations of Axël’s “house” or family history. Villiers’s play, it appears, is not just organized by intersecting discourses of the occult, but by an occulted drama buried within it that haunts its characters. Elements throughout the drama support this. Speaking early on about the family mansion, Kaspar notes that “Here, they are three centuries behind,” and he describes Axël as “a young hero of another age . . . with a most elusive character” (57).18 The longtime family servant, Zacharias, appears to be one hundred years old, while Master Janus, to whom Axël transfers his filial respect upon the death of his father and whose knowledge of the occult Axël yearns to acquire, is someone whose eyes “do not seem to belong to a man of this century” (48).19 Finally Miklaus, one of Axël’s retainers, observes the decrepitude of the castle and the faded, indistinct portraits of the family ancestors, exclaiming, “it’s haunted here” (43) [“c’est hanté, ici” (564)]. The identities and characters of both the living and the dead are repeatedly described as

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indistinct or mysterious, the past seems to inhabit the present, and while references in a narrative to ancestral secrets, haunting, and ciphered messages do not necessarily mean that a phantom is at work, one gets the distinct impression that the Auërsperg “house” or family is indeed haunted by a psychic ghost that has somehow infiltrated the line. Other textual evidence reinforces this thesis and the idea that Ghérard’s burial of the German State treasure, about which everyone is able to speak, disguises a truly “terrible” secret about which no one can speak. In his “visionary” (66)20 account of Ghérard’s concealment of the treasure, for instance, Zacharias uses highly charged terms to describe a secret that has been transmitted transgenerationally (albeit consciously) within Axël’s family. When Ghérard suddenly decides not to lead the caravan of treasure-laden wagons to the predetermined fortress known only to him and the two generals accompanying him, Zacharias explains, he heads instead, and without explanation, for his family domain, excited by the childhood memory of “an inviolable receptacle, excavated for centuries, —a site of darkness, with accesses known to him alone, [which] could, at least until the imminent peace, keep—faithfully!—what was entrusted to its deep entrails” (66).21 Leaving the other generals behind, Ghérard leads the detachment of wagons to a spot where he recognizes “his lines of trees,—and . . . some ancient hedge of interlaced branches and high green underbrush” (68).22 Then he notices some moss covered rocks: —He stretched full-length between their crevices, according to the secret transmitted to him one day when he was alone with his father, who had it from his father. And with a special pressure, he made the powerful, rusty levers of olden times creak underground, and here two enormous rocks separated, exposing the centuries-old entrance. (68) [—Il s’est allongé entre leurs joints, dont le secret lui fut un jour transmis, étant seuls, par son père qui le tenait de l’aïeul. Et, d’une pesée spéciale, faisant crier, sous la terre, la rouille des puissants leviers de jadis, voici que deux de ces énormes roches se sont écartées, laissant à découvert l’entrée séculaire. (587)] Explaining how Ghérard concealed the barrels of treasure in this “impenetrable darkness” (69) in just two hours, Zacharias urges Axël’s cousin Kaspar, to whom he recounts this saga, to seek the treasure that

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no longer belongs to anyone, since “the account book, stubs of the receipts delivered with the names of the depositors, has been destroyed, burned!” (70–71).23 The emphasis on the lines of trees and intertwined branches concealing the entrance to the secret depository, the mention of a lost account book or “livre des souches,” echoing lost or unknown roots or stocks of trees (souches can mean “tree stock or stump,” “receipt stub,” “word root,” and “family root, stock, or origin”),24 the fact (we learn later) that this depository is a tunnel system that extends far underground and opens out in the Auërsperg family crypt, and the references to the secret cavern as an “inviolable receptacle” with “deep entrails” of whose secret Ghérard is “hereditary master” (68) [“maître héréditaire” (586)], suggest that what is transmitted transgenerationally through the Auërsperg family is more than the secret location of this cavern entrance. It is something unspeakable and inviolate, having to do with the conception or reproduction (“entrails”) of a souche, root, or stock of the Auërsperg family: a souche whose existence has been concealed or covered over by the proliferation of the family’s branches. Kaspar’s reference to the “paradoxical forests” (81) of the family domain and Axël’s repeated personification of its trees—he calls them “old friends” (102) and “soldiers” (109) who would block the advance of an army and defend the integrity of his house—reinforce the idea that the “terrible family secret” of the Auërspergs has to do with something concealed within the family tree or lineage.25 To unearth this secret, we must return to the framing narrative involving Sara de Maupers, Axël’s distant cousin and the last living descendant of the Maupers line, who escapes from her convent, arrives at Axël’s castle, and unlocks the secret door in the family crypt (behind which lies the State treasure) by pressing a dagger between the eye sockets of the skull affixed to the Auërsperg family crest carved above the door. The Auërsperg and Maupers family crests, both of which are described in detail at the outset of the drama and are identical, hold the key to finding the treasure and, we can surmise, may also reveal Axël’s unspeakable family secret. The two escutcheons contain Latin mottos or devises, to use the text’s term, in which are inscribed the French and German family names. The Maupers name, as the Abbess and Archdeacon discuss in part 1, is easily deciphered in the first letters of the words of the device—“MACTE ANIMO! ULTIMA PERFULGET SOLA” (539) [“Well done! alone the last shines forth” (13)]—while the Auërsperg name is woven throughout its crest’s motto—“ALTIUS RESURGERE SPERO

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GEMMATUS!” (539) [“Covered in gems, I hope to appear again above” (14)]. Both gem-encrusted crests are held by two golden sphinxes on either side. The Archdeacon relates that this feature was changed long ago during a meeting between the Egyptian Sultan’s secret council and the French and German ambassadors, who were the respective heads of the Maupers and Auërsperg families: The Archdeacon, smiling: [T]he heads of these two families, it appears, were at the same time ambassadors, one from France, the other from Germany, at the court of a sultan. . . . —Now, a “magus,” who aided the secret council of the Egyptian prince, was able to persuade the two knights to substitute these mysterious golden sphinxes for the pair of lions which were supporting their common escutcheon. (13–14) [L’Archidiacre, souriant: [L]es chefs de ces deux familles furent, en même temps, paraît-il, ambassadeurs, l’un de France, l’autre d’Allemagne, près d’un soudan. . . . —Or, un “mage,” qui assistait le conseil secret du prince égyptien, sut convaincre les deux chevaliers de substituer ces mystérieux sphinx d’or aux deux lions qui supportaient leur écusson commun. (539)] The family crests are thus the place in the text where the ideas of family lineages, transmissions, enigmas or riddles (the sphinx), secret meetings (“conseil secret”), the deciphering of family names or identities from within foreign languages, the crossbreeding or interweaving of species (the sphinx is half human, half animal), the Occident and the Orient, and the Romance (Maupers), Germanic (Auërsperg), and Semitic (Egypt) all meet. To these intersecting elements we must join one more: the fact that the treasure is uncovered following the oral pronunciation or incantation of the devices on the family crests. When Axël earlier refuses Master Janus’s entreaties to renounce all worldly attractions, he decides to bid adieu to his ancestors in the family tomb before leaving the castle forever. Gazing at the crest sculpted on the wall of the crypt, he implores the golden sphinxes to reveal to him their enigmas and the “secret” (147/651) of the family device, which he then solemnly recites: “ALTIUS RESURGERE SPERO GEMMATUS” (148/652). At this moment Sara enters the crypt. Pressing her dagger between the eyes of the death’s head on the Auërsperg crest, she intones the words of her own family device, at which point the secret wall opens and the buried treasure pours forth.

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Sara has learned the location of the treasure and the mantra for exposing it by deciphering codes in an edition of the Book of Hours bearing the Auërsperg and Maupers crests and sent by Axël’s mother (who learned the treasure’s location from her husband, Ghérard) to the convent where Sara is a novice. She has studied the inscriptions in this Latin prayer book while anticipating her (aborted) taking of the veil, a ceremony performed in Latin in scenes 5 and 6 of part 1. This strong emphasis on liturgical ritual and spoken prayer suggests that what is truly unspeakable in the text may also be located or deciphered within a religious context. It leads us to hypothesize that if the explicit family secret in the text is exposed through the oral recitation of two Latin devises whose significance is revealed in a prayer book decoded within a sacred, religious environment, the occulted family secret buried in the Auërsperg line may also be connected to prayer or religious observance and also somehow reveal itself through oral pronunciation of the devises. (I should add here that the identical nature of the two family escutcheons, Sara’s ability to expose the treasure by reciting the Maupers device before the Auërsperg crest, and the fact that the Book of Hours containing both crests is transmitted from Axël’s mother to Sara, underscore the idea that these two families are intimately linked by a sphinxlike enigma, and that whatever secret infiltrated the souche of the Auërsperg tree was transmitted to the Maupers branch as well. We will see evidence supporting this contention momentarily.) Initial attempts to verify our hypothesis and to hear orally something concealed in the mottos of the two family escutcheons lead to an impasse, until we realize that there are not just two devises in the text but in fact three. The third is contained in Herr Zacharias’s detailed inventory of the treasure Ghérard buried, an inventory some critics have attacked as unnecessary and undramatic: Assets, gold coin of the public reserve, . . . suspended from circulation by the sudden interruption of normal business and negotiation in Germany: 42 million thalers. —Assets coming from the recent issue of the war loan: 76 million thalers; . . . — Sacks of deposits of valuables . . . , cut diamonds, . . . fine pearls, . . . art mountings, pure gold bars and ingots, total estimated value, 78 million thalers. —Consignments in gold specie from private banks . . . , 75 million thalers. —Divers deposits . . . , 26 million thalers, all in gold currency. —Etc., etc. —Total of cash reserves stored . . . : around 350 million thalers: this being . . .

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the unbelievable, immeasurable negotiable assets of more than eleven hundred million French francs, representing the suddenly suspended circulation of more than two-thirds of the gold coin, both foreign and German mintage. (64) [Actif, or monnayé, de l’épargne publique, . . . immobilisés par l’interruption subite des affaires et du négoce normal de l’Allemagne: 42 millions de thalers. —Actif provenant des récentes émissions de l’emprunt de guerre: 76 millions de thalers; . . . — Sacs de dépôts précieux . . . , diamants taillés, . . . perles fines, . . . montures d’art, lingots et saumons d’or pur, d’une estimation totale de 78 millions de thalers. —Envois, en espèces d’or, des banques particulières . . . , 75 millions de thalers. —Dépôts divers . . . , 26 millions de thalers, toujours en or liquide. —Etc., etc. — Total de l’encaisse ainsi amoncelée . . . : environ 350 millions de thalers: soit . . . l’actif invraisemblable, démesuré, de plus de onze cents millions de francs de France, représentant la circulation tout d’un coup suspendue de plus des deux tiers des monnaies d’or, tant d’effigies étrangères qu’allemandes. (583)] The entire passage is about the value of the treasure in “currencies”—another meaning of the French word devises—and specifically in the currency of the German State, in thalers.26 If we pronounce this devise, bearing in mind that a German name is embedded in the Latin devise or motto of the Auërsperg crest and that the State fortune is referred to in the text as a treasure “en espèces sonnantes” (599), meaning “hard cash” (84) or “coin of the realm,” but also, literally, a treasure that “resounds” or “resonates,” we can hear concealed in the French pronunciation of thalers (taleR) the original, German pronunciation of this German word: “tales.” It is in this word that we hear joined—just as they are joined in the family crests with their devices—the elements of a family name or identity, an enigma or riddle involving a hybrid or sphinx-like entity, the idea of religious ritual and spoken prayer, and the meeting of the Occident with the Orient, the European with the Semitic. We hear in this devise or currency the Ashkenazi, Yiddish, or German-Jewish pronunciation of the Hebrew word for the prayer shawl worn by Jewish men when they recite prayers in Jewish observance. We hear in the German currency thalers the Hebrew tallis.27 “The terrible secret” concealed within the Auërsperg family tree and buried in the Auërsperg vault, it seems, concerns a man who wore a tallis:

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a Jew who infiltrated this noble Christian family and whose unspeakable religious identity had to be concealed. There is substantial textual evidence to support this conclusion, a crucial piece of which is Axël’s apparently incongruous response to Master Janus’s arcane oration aimed at convincing him to abandon the pleasures of this world for those of the beyond. As Janus implores Axël to escape his terrestrial chains—“Child of prisoners, rescue yourself from the jail of the world. Escape from Becoming! . . . It is the sanction of Expectation. It is the threshold of the occult world”—Axël, “deeply preoccupied, scarcely listening, as if already unable to believe or understand anymore,” suddenly exclaims: “Oh! these torrential, radiant riches! —this is not just a treasure any longer! No: it is a talisman” (133–34; Villiers’s italics).28 The secret is not about wealth but about a talisman (in French), in German talisman  rhymes with tallis + manne (“man” in German). The secret, we hear, is about a man who wears or wore a tallis.29 This cryptonymic reading of the French thalers to reveal the Yiddish tallis (and of the French talisman to reveal “tallis-man”) should not be entirely surprising, since the text itself underscores the idea that “treasure” and “gold” are deceptive misnomers in the story to be read otherwise. In his account of Ghérard’s adventure, for example, Zacharias states that Ghérard’s troops transported the State fortune disguised as war supplies in barrels bearing the “collective label of cannon, war munitions, and heavy projectiles” (65–66).30 At the end of the drama, when Sara stands surrounded by the immense treasure loosed from within the crypt, she exclaims: “the excessive quantity of this gold transfigures its very name” (152).31 The treasure is identified in a way that conceals and protects what it is, and as something whose true content is in excess of its name. The idea of excess meaning and cloaked or transformed words leads us to reread the complex symbolic network in the text. We now hear in Kaspar’s decision to undertake in secret “the conquest of this fantastic Golden Fleece” (73) not just an analogy between the treasure and the golden coat of the magical ram of Greek mythology.32 We hear the fortune tacitly described as “that which cloaks or covers,” the literal meaning of the Hebrew tallis.33 The ostensible references in the text to the Rosicrucian symbols of the mantle and the veil (le manteau et le voile) can similarly be read as cryptonyms of the tallis that cloaks or veils. And the “mantle of Apollonius” (131), a symbol of heightened self-awareness in which Axël claims to be enveloped, assumes a different meaning in light of Master Janus’s doubting retort: “Upon a sensual body the Mantle frays at the edges, wears thin, gets tattered, letting in gusts from the

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tombs” (131).34 The depiction of Axël’s mantle as fringed or frayed echoes the passages of the Torah in which God tells Moses of the fringed garment to be worn by Jews in prayer: The Lord said also to Moses: Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them to put fringes at the corners of their mantles, and to put on them bands of hyacinthine blue, so that, upon seeing them, they will remember all of the Lord’s commandments. . . . [Le Seigneur dit aussi à Moïse: Parlez aux enfants d’Israël, et dites-leur qu’ils mettent des franges aux coins de leurs manteaux, et qu’ils y joignent des bandes de couleur d’hyacinthe, afin que, les voyant, ils se souviennent de tous les commandements du Seigneur. . . .] (Numbers 15.37–39) You will make fringes with small strings that you will attach to the four corners of the mantle with which you shall cover yourself. [Vous ferez avec de petits cordons des franges que vous mettrez aux quatre coins du manteau dont vous vous couvrez.] (Deuteronomy 22.12) 35 Janus’s disparaging comment implies that Axël is not so much shrouded in a sign of enlightenment as wrapped in a fringed prayer shawl through which he is touched by the air or spirits of the dead. He tacitly describes Axël, in other words, as a man unknowingly clothed as the Jew whose unspeakable entry into the family was long ago entombed.36 If Master Janus mocks Axël’s desire to know “the truth of [his] origin” (129), and if he states that an “occult uterus” (132) is responsible for Axël’s true being, we can now conclude that it is because the “truth” of Axël’s origins resides in the occulted intrusion of a Jew into the Auërsperg line.37 To put it differently, Ghérard’s burial of the German State’s thalers in the Auërsperg crypt, the event from which the entire drama proceeds, has to be read as far more than a wily ruse to fool the invading armies of Napoleon. It is a symptom of Ghérard’s haunting by a phantom: by the terrible secret of the “fetid sperm” (28) (“sperma foetidum” [553]) that infiltrated his noble family, and of the Jewish blood or “tallis–man” who found his way to the core of the Christian

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Auërsperg line and whose shameful Jewish identity was concealed by Ghérard’s ancestors.38 Burying the thalers in tunnels leading to the family crypt is thus Ghérard’s ciphered and unwitting mode of acting out— and thereby cryptically transmitting to his heir, Axël—the unspeakable secret transmitted transgenerationally to him. Axël’s devotion to the study of occult philosophy can in turn be understood, as I want now to show, as a telltale symptom of his reception of this transmission. It is important to recall that the major source of Villiers’s symbolic references to the occult movements of Rosicrucianism, alchemy, freemasonry, and illuminism in Axël was, as Émile Drougard has extensively noted, his reading of Éliphas Lévi’s Dogme et rituel de la haute magie.39 In the introduction to his work, Lévi, a pseudonym for abbé AlphonseCharles Constant (1810–1875), accurately states that the crucial sources for his or anyone’s discussion of esoterism and the occult sciences are the texts of the Hebrew Kabbala: All truly dogmatic religions are issued from the Kabbala and return to it; all that is scientific and grandiose in the religious dreams of visionaries, Jacob Bœhme, Swedenborg, SaintMartin, etc., is borrowed from the Kabbala; all Masonic associations owe their secrets and their symbols to it. The Kabbala alone consecrates the alliance between universal reason and the divine Word; it establishes, by counterbalancing two apparently opposite forces, the eternal equilibrium of beings; it alone reconciles reason with faith, power with freedom, science with mystery; it possesses the keys to the present, the past, and the future!40 [Toutes les religions vraiment dogmatiques sont sorties de la cabale et y retournent; tout ce qu’il y a de scientifique et de grandiose dans les rêves religieux de tous les illuminés, Jacob Bœhme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, etc., est emprunté à la cabale; toutes les associations maçonniques lui doivent leurs secrets et leurs symboles. La cabale consacre seule l’alliance de la raison universelle et du Verbe divin; elle établit, par les contre-poids de deux forces opposées en apparence, la balance éternelle de l’être; elle concilie seule la raison avec la foi, le pouvoir avec la liberté, la science avec le mystère: elle a les clefs du présent, du passé et de l’avenir!]

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The doctrines of the Kabbala, from which emerge the occult discourses Lévi professes, come from a group of Hebrew texts produced between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries in Europe. These texts themselves built upon earlier esoteric writings dating from as early as the second century. Devoted to revealing the mysteries and secrets of Jewish law and tradition, the works of the Kabbala are studied by initiates who agree to protect the sacred truths they contain.41 There is no doubt that Villiers’s reading of Lévi’s work, which contains not only numerous references to the Kabbala but also words, letters, and citations in Hebrew, informed him of the Kabbala’s centrality to the esoteric symbolism he eventually deployed in Axël. It is therefore curious that neither Master Janus, who is charged with transmitting knowledge of the occult to Axël, nor Axël himself ever refers to the Hebrew Kabbala or to the Kabbalists in their lengthy debates. They do mention alchemists and black magicians such as Hermès Trismégiste, Paracelsus, and Raymond Lulle. They also refer to the Pythagorean magician and hermeticist Apollonius de Tyane, as well as to the Rosicrucians. This omission is all the more noteworthy since both men allude to symbols that have Kabbalistic origins, including the ring of Solomon, the pentacle, and the rod. It is also significant because the dénouement of the drama hinges on Sara’s Kabbala-like deciphering of codes inscribed in the Book of Hours, because the transmission of secret knowledge about the treasure parallels the Kabbala’s concern with the transgenerational transmission of secrets, and because there are explicit references to works of the Kabbala in Villiers’s other texts (such as Isis, L’Ève future, and “L’Annonciateur”) in which he cites or pretends to cite their wisdom. Everywhere and yet nowhere, the texts and authors of the Kabbala, which Lévi places at the core of esoteric philosophy, seem to be elided or “occulted” by the dialogue of the occult in Axël. This apparent incongruity nonetheless makes sense if interpreted in light of Ghérard’s behavior. If Ghérard’s burial of the thalers is understood as the cryptic mise en scène of his haunting by an unspeakable “tallis-man’s” infiltration into the Auërsperg family, Axël’s desire to gain knowledge of an occult whose Kabbala-inspired content and textual origins have been occluded can be read as a sign of his haunting by the secret, “Kabbalistic” knowledge of an occulted Jew’s presence in the line. Axël’s studying of arcane sciences whose philosophical underpinnings or “Jewish roots” have been cut out, in other words, can be interpreted as a symptom of the legacy he has unknowingly inherited of an occulted or elided Jew.

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Recognizing Axël’s occult interests as an effect of his family’s phantomatic bequest allows us to read his decision to commit suicide at the end of the play as a response to the unbearable revelation of this inheritance. When Axël at last sees the treasure and hears Sara describe their future lives together, he suddenly asserts that the desire to live is a “sacrilege” (169) and an illness (a “fever we must heal” [170]), and that to give birth to those destined to continue the ennui and horror of their lives would be madness.42 As the treasure pours forth from the Auërsperg crypt, we can reconstruct, Axël in effect “sees” (unknowingly) the thalers  tallis  Jew buried among his ancestors. Defining the line’s perpetuation as a monstrosity to be prevented and life itself as a malady to be cured by death is thus a reaction to the cryptic revelation of his unspeakable Jewish origins. While this response can certainly be construed as evidence of a lurking Judophobia in the text, Sara’s reply to Axël even more forcefully equates Jewish blood with sacrilege and illness. It thereby opens the way to linking Villiers’s drama with the sociohistorical context in which it was written and, more specifically, with the brand of anti-Semitism crystallized in Drumont’s La France juive. As Axël reaches for a dagger to end both their lives, Sara offers instead the poison contained in the family engagement ring she wears— “the ring given to the chatelaines of [her] line in pledge of their wedding nights” (157–58)—and that bears engraved in its antique emerald the Maupers crest shared by the Auërspergs.43 It is difficult not to see in this ring, passed down through successive generations, a reference to the alliance that “poisoned” the Auërsperg/Maupers family. And it is difficult not to conclude that Sara, carrier of this symbol of an envenomed lineage and described as “an obscure soul” (8), is also a carrier of the phantom haunting her and Axël’s family.44 This last living member of the Maupers branch is intrigued by ancient Semitic dialects (15/541); she locates the treasure by deciphering the Kabbala-like formulas in the Book of Hours sent to the convent by Axël’s mother; she tells Axël she felt the invisible presence of his mother’s hand upon her own as she studied the prayer book (158/662); and she is described by Axël himself as “carrying the Orient within” her (171).45 When Axël finds Sara in the family crypt, we can therefore conclude, he in fact encounters the person who has inherited the family secret that not only descended through the Auërsperg line, but that also flowed into the connecting, heraldically identical branch of the Maupers. Upon meeting Sara, in other words, Axël encounters the “secret sharer” of his phantom, the cobeneficiary of the unspeakable legacy, involving the reading of prayer books (  tallis)

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and a tainted alliance of Semitic or Oriental origins, that has infected both branches of the Auërsperg/Maupers family tree.46 Given the context of this shared legacy, we can understand Sara’s offer of poison in the final scene of the play as her own symptomatic mise en scène of the phantom lodged within her. The poison in her ring, which she refers to as “the sap of this mortal ring” (153) [“le suc de cet anneau mortel” (657)], cryptically defines the “sap” (suc) or lifeblood of the family tree as mortally tainted by an alliance among her ancestors. In presenting this suc to Axël as the means to their end, she transforms their suicide into the symbolic acting out of the secret. She literalizes the occulted infiltration of poisonous blood into the family and performs a drama that echoes what Drumont attacks as the silent invasion of French society by the Jew: the “sly and cunning enemy”47 who “poisons”48 “in order to decompose, dissolve . . . France.”49 Sara’s gesture, however, does more than concretize the idea of a noble lineage (or society) contaminated by Jews. It identifies the cure for this poisoning as itself poison. By her gesture, in other words, Sara tacitly prescribes extermination as the final solution to the Auërsperg/Maupers family trauma. At the same time, she makes clear through this act precisely who is to be exterminated. As Axël searches among the riches for a chalice from which to drink the poison, Sara takes up large diamond necklaces lying atop the tombs in the crypt and silently adorns herself with them. Covered in the sparkling gems announced by the Auërsperg device (GEMMATUS), she shines forth as the last in the line proclaimed by the Maupers crest (ULTIMA PERFULGET SOLA) and becomes the cryptic incarnation of the poisonous secret to be remedied. In adorning her neck with the treasure  the thalers  the tallis, she in essence dresses herself as the “tallis-man”; she becomes the visible, living image of the Jew whose infection of the line will be eradicated by her “antidote.” As Axël presses the “fatal cup” (174) to his lips, he and Sara hear in the distance a choir of foresters singing joyously of “the high trees whose death gives [them] bread.”50 Having surrounded himself with woodsmen who live by felling the trees of his domain, Axël, who calls himself “the Old Man of the Forest” (115) and whose German name can now be heard to prefigure his destiny, becomes in the end the forester who fells, with the metaphorical ax (= Axt  Axël) of Sara’s poison, the diseased tree of the Auërsperg/Maupers family.51 If Axël’s and Sara’s suicide is in the end ecstatic, it is because in death they are at last delivered from the weight of the secret haunting them—and from the horror of perpetuating the Jewish blood that seeped into their line.

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V I L L I E R S ’ S “ S O L U T I O N ” A N D T H E S TAG I N G OF FIN DE SIÈCLE ANTI-SEMITISM Reading the literal decrypting of the family treasure as the symbolic exposure of the invisible Jew in Sara’s and Axël’s lineage, and interpreting their suicide as the solution to their “Jewish problem,” allows us to see more clearly how Villiers’s Axël parallels the message and strategies of Drumont’s anti-Semitic project. Drumont’s aim throughout La France juive is to expose the invisible, occulted “Juif vague” who, since the emancipation, has threatened French society by becoming virtually indistinguishable from Catholics.52 By revealing the menace lurking among the French, he hopes to incite his countrymen to liquidate the Jews’ wealth, power, and control of the country. To accomplish this, Drumont turns (like Axël and Sara) to the philosophies of the occult. He performs a double gesture in which he first identifies the ideas of the Kabbala, the Talmud, alchemy, freemasonry, and hermeticism as the heretical sources and inspiration of the Jewish conspiracy aimed at overthrowing Catholic France. In the same breath, however, he sets himself up as a student of these occult sciences and their secret epistemologies. While thus attacking the occult as the fetid origins of the Jewish contamination of France, Drumont uses the tools and knowledge the occult offers in order to expose the concealed Jew. He thereby positions himself as the humble servant of the Republic who, empowered by his knowledge of the arcane, becomes, as Michel Winock writes, “someone who decrypts, from behind official social science, the Jewish Evil.”53 For Drumont, the occult is thus both the source of the Jewish problem and an instrument for solving it. The reading of Axël I have elaborated identifies the occult similarly as the source, location, or discursive space in which the Jew is concealed and as the tool or discursive strategy for exposing him. And just as neither Sara nor Axël stops after having performed the “open sesame” that, however symbolically, exposes the tallis-man buried in their family, Drumont is not content merely to ferret out the unseen contaminant of society. Although he does not mention extermination per se in La France juive, he does speak of eliminating the corrupting influence of France’s parasitic Jews, and he expresses the hope that, by unveiling their cloaked presence, he can motivate French society to rid itself of this pestilence and experience a national rebirth. This will occur, he states, when the Jews’ chains of gold, which keep France under their control, are finally broken. On that day, the French of true blood,

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who have fallen prey to the ruses of the Rothschilds and their ilk, will come to their senses and defend their country against the peril within. They will take back what once belonged to them and return to power the faithful Catholics living in poverty and exile within their own country: When they are finally in the grip of exile and poverty the comrades-in-pleasure of the Rothschilds . . . will understand the value of this Fatherland, which they have done nothing to defend. Only then will they take stock of all that might have been tried to resist, to prevent this society from perishing. . . . All of France will follow the leader who upholds the law and who, instead of striking down the unfortunate French workers, like those of 1871, will strike down the Jews rolling in riches [cousus d’or, literally “sewn or stitched up in gold”] and will tell the poor flocking around this gold mine as it gets away from the undone Semite [décousu = “unstitched, disconnected”]: “If you need some, gather it up!” (my italics) [C’est lorsqu’ils seront aux prises avec l’exil et la pauvreté que les compagnons de plaisir des Rothschild . . . comprendront le prix de cette Patrie qu’ils n’auront rien fait pour défendre. C’est alors seulement qu’ils récapituleront tout ce qu’il était possible de tenter pour résister, pour empêcher cette société de périr. . . . Toute la France suivra le chef qui sera un justicier et qui, au lieu de frapper sur les malheureux ouvriers français, comme les hommes de 1871, frappera sur les Juifs cousus d’or et dira aux pauvres attroupés autour de ce Pactole s’échappant du Sémite décousu: “Si vous avez besoin, ramassez!”]54 This description of gold-adorned Jews undone by those they oppress bears an uncanny resemblance to Sara’s final appearance. While Sara “illustrates” the family devices and shines forth (Perfulget) adorned in gems (Gemmatus!), the chains of jewels clothing her are, at least metaphorically, broken (décousu) and abandoned as she and Axël meet the fate Drumont prescribes for all Jews and leave an existence of power and riches for that of “exile” (175).55 By her last act, in other words, Sara, who shares her name with Abraham’s wife, the “mother” of the Jewish nation, becomes the “visible Jew” of pre-Revolutionary France. Draped in tallis-like garb recalling the Jews’ pre-emancipatory obligation to wear

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identificatory clothing, she incarnates the Jew Drumont seeks to expose and incite others to strike down, overwhelm, and ultimately disconnect (décousu) from French society. Villiers’s Axël is thus a text that presents in cryptic, symbolic language a story that Drumont writes explicitly in La France juive. It stages, in the context of a family drama, the saga of a Jew who infiltrated and poisoned a line, and who was decrypted, exposed, and finally eliminated as a threat through permanent “exile.” Begun sixteen years before the publication of Drumont’s work, the play reflects, through the lens of occultism, a mentality of racist anti-Semitism that emerged gradually in post-emancipation France and that coalesced with Drumont’s polemic and the Dreyfus Affair. It dramatizes French society’s growing sense of haunting by the “invisible Jews” in its midst and, through the final scene of double suicide and exile in death, proposes a solution to the “Jewish problem” to which Drumont only alludes. The drama’s status as a symbolist text has thus to be reevaluated. If symbolism is construed as a movement concerned with individuality, reclusiveness, and projecting arcane inner psychological landscapes onto the external world of objects, Axël is a text that turns the tables. It internalizes an external group or societal mentality and represents, through the deceptive figures of isolation and the occult, the sociopolitical reality of a festering anti-Semitism that emerged to poison fin de siècle France.

6 Imperial Legacies and the Art of Abuse in The Picture of Dorian Gray After all, the most gorgeous pearl is nothing but the splendid coffin of a miserable minute worm. —“A Noted French Authority” The butterfly is the caterpillar in a gaudy cloak; stripped of which, there lies the impostor’s long spindle of a body, pretty much wormshaped as before. —Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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n May 28, 1897, one week after Oscar Wilde completed his sentence of two years’ hard labor for “gross indecency” in violation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the Daily Chronicle of London published his letter to the editor protesting the harsh treatment of children condemned to English prisons.1 Describing the horrible food, fetid air, harsh discipline, and crushing isolation that produced feelings of absolute terror in these children, Wilde claimed that prison authorities were completely ignorant of “the peculiar psychology of a child’s nature,”2 and therefore blind to the damage they were perpetrating upon the children’s psyches. “A child can understand a punishment inflicted by an individual, such as a parent or guardian, and bear it with a certain amount of acquiescence,” Wilde wrote. “What it cannot understand is a punishment inflicted by society.” 157

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It cannot realise what society is. With grown people it is, of course, the reverse. Those of us who are either in prison or have been sent there, can understand, and do understand, what that collective force called society means, and . . . we can force ourselves to accept it. Punishment inflicted on us by an individual, on the other hand, is a thing that no grown person endures, or is expected to endure. . . . To shut up a child in a dimly lit cell, for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of stupidity. If an individual, parent or guardian, did this to a child, he would be severely punished. . . . But our own actual society does worse itself, and to the child to be so treated by a strange abstract force, of whose claims it has no cognisance, is much worse than it would be to receive the same treatment from its father or mother, or some one it knew. The inhuman treatment of a child is always inhuman, by whomsoever it is inflicted. But inhuman treatment by society is to the child the more terrible because there is no appeal. A parent or guardian can be moved, and let out a child from the dark lonely room in which it is confined. But a warder cannot.3 Obviously moved to write by the suffering he himself experienced and witnessed during his own imprisonment, Wilde’s contention that children and adults respond differently to different sources of punishment, and that children accept abuse from parents more readily than from society, demands our attention for several reasons. Published seven years after The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–1891)—a novel explicitly concerned with youth, cruelty, crime, and punishment—Wilde’s letter is not only a heartfelt plea for the humane treatment of child prisoners. As it talks about child abuse and contrasts the effects of cruelty in the private, familial sphere with inhuman treatment perpetrated in the public, institutional realm, the letter also openly engages with the same questions that the novel, albeit in a far more subtle, ciphered way, addresses. My reading of Dorian Gray reveals that a complex saga of child abuse is inscribed cryptically within the narrative. Drawing on the work of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, whose writings have significantly affected analytic thinking about the internal dynamics of abuse in children, I want to argue that Wilde’s text narrates a tale of emotional abuse and dramatizes its ramifications for the narrative life of the main character. At the same time, the reading exposes the novel’s unseen con-

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nections between abuse and aesthetic creation, and between psychic oppression and the production of art as symptom. This is what the first part of the chapter will do. In the second part, I will reveal the presence of a phantom. This phantom involves a secret drama of sexual abuse. It haunts Dorian Gray, underlies his self-destructive behavior, and ultimately kills him. Once we have seen how this unspeakable secret haunts and is cryptonymically inscribed in the text, I then can show that this tale of physical and psychic oppression is, paradoxically, the key to understanding the narrative’s place within its broader historical and political contexts. Specifically, I elaborate how the story engages with Irish nationalism, British empire, and the abusive rapport between colonizer and colonized. Considered within this context, Wilde’s letter of protest, an intriguing foray into child psychology in its own right to which I will return, emerges as an implicit addendum to and psychosocial commentary on The Picture of Dorian Gray. More precisely, its psychoanalytically questionable claim that children are more emotionally vulnerable to abuse by the state than by parents can be read in conjunction with the novel as a symptom of Wilde’s own complex relationship to Irish identity, British imperialism, and his own family history. Recent interpretations of the novel, oriented largely by queer or cultural studies perspectives, have tended to see it in one of two ways: either as a narrative of homosexual desire that transgresses bourgeois class and gender ideologies while charting the development of an eroticized male identity, or as a sociohistorical artifact that embodies and constructs a Victorian public sphere by repositioning practices such as aestheticism and dandyism in terms of the commodification and subversion of bourgeois normativity.4 What has not been thought about enough are the interpretive implications of Dorian Gray’s family history, a history to which Wilde himself draws our attention by adding it to his 1891 revision of the novel’s first published version (1890), from which it is completely absent. There has also been relatively little analysis of the novel’s engagement with the themes of nationalism and colonialism, especially when compared to commentaries on these subjects in Wilde’s more overtly political poems, essays, and theater.5 The few critics who do engage with colonization and empire in The Picture of Dorian Gray do so principally from queer and nonpsychoanalytic cultural studies points of view. The text’s inscription of male-male desire, for example, is read as simultaneously destabilizing the binary of English and Irish (national) bodies. The narrative’s erecting and deconstructing of Celtic typologies

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is seen as a means of subverting master narratives of imperialism and identity. And the many descriptions of non-Western exotica, abstracted from their social and political histories, are viewed as constructing a transcendent European (rather than English or Irish) aesthetic tradition that positions Wilde as a privileged representative of empire.6 Nowhere, however, is there any discussion of how the account of sadistic murder and sequestration marking Dorian Gray’s origins might be linked to a discourse about Irish nationalism or the violence of colonization. This is my project. Through a close psychoanalytic reading of the novel, I will show how Dorian Gray’s trajectory from innocence to malevolence is the effect of a haunting saga of abuse that mimics and allegorizes the abusive dynamics of Irish colonial history. Unspeakable parental cruelty becomes a trope of imperial domination, and The Picture of Dorian Gray emerges as a novel that reflects on Wilde’s contradictory, vacillating positions toward Britain’s imperial legacy and the Anglo-Irish identity bequeathed him by his parents.

A PICTURE OF CHILD ABUSE The idea that The Picture of Dorian Gray treats the issue of child abuse should not be entirely surprising, since the theme of psychological control is present from the outset. The painter, Basil Hallward, tries to protect Dorian Gray, his model and source of inspiration, from Lord Henry’s “very bad influence,” and he begs the latter not to “spoil” his young friend.7 Lord Henry himself ruminates on the “thrill of . . . exercis[ing] . . . influence” (33) and decides to “dominate” (34) Dorian in order to “make that wonderful spirit his own” (34). Lord Henry also reflects on the nature of domination, explaining to Dorian that all influence is immoral, since the one who suffers it will have sins that “are borrowed” (19), a soul that is not his own, and a self that is “an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him” (19). Influence means imposing on someone a persona or image that is not his; it involves a subject’s aggressive, invasive projection of an identity onto an object, as Lord Henry reflects: To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment . . . ; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume:

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there was a real joy in that. . . . [Dorian] could be fashioned into a marvellous type. . . . There was nothing that one could not do with him. (33–34) To the extent that Dorian is affected by a projective, invasive influence, however, it does not appear to originate with Lord Henry, who seems only to have awakened influences already present within Dorian. When Lord Henry urges Dorian to yield to the desires his soul has made “monstrous and unlawful” (20), adding that “You, Mr. Gray, . . . with your . . . rose-white boyhood, . . . have had . . . thoughts that have filled you with terror, . . . dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame” (20), Dorian is bewildered and speechless. He becomes aware that “entirely fresh influences were at work within him” (20): Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. [Lord Henry’s] few words . . . had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before. . . . Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! . . . They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things. . . . Was there anything so real as words? Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. He understood them now. (20–21) What “things” from his boyhood does Dorian suddenly understand? To what childhood “thoughts” of “terror” might such “terrible” words as “shame,” “stain,” “monstrous,” and “unlawful” give “plastic” or tangible form? Recent queer readings of the novel have pointed to these comments as evidence of the characters’ homosexuality and the novel’s engagement with constructs of homoeroticism.8 While these arguments are persuasive, Lord Henry’s conversation with his uncle about Dorian’s origins suggests there is another interpretation. The novel’s first version, published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, mentions nothing about Dorian’s parentage. Nor does it contain the account by Lord Henry’s uncle about Dorian’s grandfather, Lord Kelso, who did not want his daughter, Margaret Devereux, to marry the young man she loved, a “penniless young fellow, a mere nobody, . . . a subaltern in a foot regiment, or something of that kind” (31). Kelso, “a mean dog” (31) known to mistreat underlings, arranges to have his son-in-law killed a few months after the marriage by some “Belgian brute [who] spitted his

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man as if he had been a pigeon” (31). Kelso has the whole “ugly story” (31) hushed up. He brings his daughter home to live with him, she never speaks to him again, and dies within a year, leaving a son. Reflecting on the story as he leaves his uncle, Lord Henry wonders how a beautiful woman’s happiness was cut short by a “hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man” (33). The implication that Dorian was unloved and in some way mistreated by his grandfather is reinforced later when Dorian decides to hide the cruelly altered portrait upstairs in the old schoolroom, a room built by his now dead grandfather “for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance” (95). We learn further that this hatred is reciprocated. When Dorian’s servant refers to Lord Kelso, Dorian, we read, “winced at the mention of his grandfather. He had hateful memories of him” (92). Lord Henry’s allusions to the “monstrous, unlawful, shameful” desires of Dorian’s soul and to his terror-filled thoughts thus appear to resonate with the grandfather’s “hideous, treacherous crime” and with his cruelty toward his grandson. This suggests that the influences awakened in Dorian and the corrupt turn taken by Dorian’s life may somehow be related to his childhood days spent with his grandfather. Dorian’s reaction to his changing portrait supports this. He not only conceals the horrifying picture in the schoolroom where he himself had been kept prisoner, hiding it away “at a distance” (95) just as his grandfather held him at a distance. He also wraps the dreadful painting in a purple satin coverlet that belonged to his grandfather and imagines the picture’s decay in terms of his grandfather’s hideous aging: Beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. . . . The . . . mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. (95) The connection Dorian establishes between the hideous portrait and his hateful grandfather implies that the corrupt existence he leads and sees represented in the painting was in some sense cast over him by his grandfather, just as the grandfather’s purple coverlet is cast over the pic-

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torial image of Dorian’s life. This idea is strengthened by Dorian’s view of man as a creature who bore within himself “strange legacies . . . and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead” (111), and by Dorian’s searching in his family portrait gallery for the “strange poisonous germ [that] crept” (111) through his ancestors’ bodies into his own. These associations suggest that the monstrous influences and cruel desires that Lord Henry awakens in Dorian—influences and desires resulting from an aggressive projection of another’s identity—do not originate with Lord Henry, but with Dorian’s tyrannical grandfather. Dorian’s “poisonous” life is apparently the effect of a “strange and poisonous legacy” bequeathed to him somehow by the hateful Lord Kelso. To understand how such a monstrous legacy can be bestowed or imposed, it is helpful to refer to Sándor Ferenczi’s groundbreaking paper on the psychological effects of child abuse, “Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child” (1933).9 In this work Ferenczi was concerned with the psychopathology produced in children through sexual abuse by an adult. He argued that the power differential between the adult and child in instances of incestuous abuse (which he defined as potentially involving governesses or servants as well as relatives) causes a paralyzing anxiety in the child. Children subjected to this violence “feel physically and morally helpless, their personalities are not sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest, even if only in thought, for the overpowering force and authority of the adult makes them dumb and can rob them of their senses” (Ferenczi, 162). In instances where this anxiety reaches a certain maximum, Ferenczi continued, it compels children to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor. Through the identification, or let us say, introjection of the aggressor, he disappears as part of the external reality, and becomes intra- instead of extra-psychic. . . . (162; Ferenczi’s emphasis) It is important to distinguish what Ferenczi means by “identification with the aggressor” from Anna Freud’s later and better known use of the expression.10 For Anna Freud, identification with the aggressor is a defense mechanism commonly observed in the normal development of the super-ego. It occurs when a subject, faced with an external threat of

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physical aggression or verbal criticism, performs a role reversal and internalizes the aggressor so that the aggressed subject becomes the aggressor and redirects physical or verbal aggression toward an external other or others. For Ferenczi, who uses the term in the very specific context of child sexual abuse, identification with the aggressor does not involve any such role reversal. The sexually aggressed child, whose personality is weak and undeveloped and who relies on the adult for affective and often physical sustenance, seeks to gratify the adult’s desires. What the child identifies with is not the adult, but rather an image of itself created by the adult. For Ferenczi, the child’s identification with the aggressor means that the child assumes or incorporates, intrapsychically, an imago, identity, representation, or picture of him or herself that is constructed for the child by the adult. I should not be understood as arguing that the abuse visited upon Dorian Gray is sexual. There is insufficient textual evidence to sustain such a claim. Ferenczi’s insights are nonetheless extremely useful for understanding pathological behaviors in certain children (later adults) who have been psychologically aggressed, even if not actually sexually molested. Viewed from this perspective, Ferenczi’s theory describes Dorian Gray’s situation quite accurately. With no other existing affective relations in his orphaned, “lonely childhood” (95), Dorian was exclusively dependent for emotional as well as physical survival upon a tyrannical, hateful grandfather. If Lord Kelso imprisoned this isolated boy and persistently treated him as vile and despicable, Dorian, in his inability to resist such aggression and his lack of any mitigating, kindly adult influences, could well have identified with the image of him created by Kelso and incorporated it as his own. In Ferenczi’s terms, Dorian would have subordinated himself to the aggressor’s will and incorporated intrapsychically the hideous identity or portrait that his grandfather constructed for him.11 The text provides evidence to support this analysis. Lord Kelso, we recall, hated Dorian for “his strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons” (95). Kelso arranged his son-in-law’s murder because his daughter Margaret had debased herself by marrying a “penniless . . . nobody” (31) beneath her station. Kelso’s hatred for Dorian, in other words, was for the living offspring of what he deemed a vile marriage, a child whose physical existence was a constant reminder of the daughter’s degradation. For Lord Kelso, Dorian was “just like his mother,” the carnal perpetuation of the defiled Margaret. While some attention has been paid to the significance of Dorian’s name and its link to Hellenic ideals and aesthetics, virtually no notice has

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been taken of the possible significance of his mother’s name. This is a curious omission, given Dorian’s fascination with a romance entitled “A Margarite of America” (106). There are also numerous accounts of pearls in the text (the OED records that “Margarite” and “Margaret” come from the Latin margarita: “pearl”), not the least of which describes Dorian’s appearance at a costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse in a “dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls” (105).12 (I will return shortly to the significance of pearls in the text, about which there is more to say.) But if Margaret’s first name is repeatedly “illustrated” in the narrative, so too—though more obliquely—is her French surname, Devereux. The profusion of French references, quotations, and stanzas of French poems in the text (Wilde was fluent in French), and Lord Henry’s strange comment to Dorian that, in “art, as in politics, les grandpères ont toujours tort [grandfathers are always wrong]” (43–44, Wilde’s italics), invite us to read the mother’s French surname “in translation”—and as perhaps connected to Dorian’s grandfather. Doing so, we hear in “Devereux” the French word véreux, meaning “decayed, vile, rotten, corrupt, shameful, debased, defiled,” or, literally, “worm-eaten.”13 These are the very terms Dorian and others use to describe his desires and behavior throughout the novel. In living his life of criminality and moral turpitude, Dorian in effect acts out the meanings of the word véreux. These are also the terms, moreover, in which Dorian sees the disfigured picture of his cruelty, which he covers with his grandfather’s purple pall so as to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself—something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. (92–93) The picture of Dorian Gray is, in a word, worm-eaten, véreux. If it evokes for Dorian the image of his grandfather, if he covers it with Lord Kelso’s pall and hides it where Kelso imprisoned him, and if he sees in it a representation of his own rotten, debased behavior, we can surmise that what Dorian views in the painting is an image of himself as véreux, an image that comes not from him (or Lord Henry) but from his grandfather. What he “sees” in the picture is an image constructed by Lord Kelso but psychologically cast over him in a way that makes it his own.

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We can in fact reconstruct from Dorian’s perception of his worm-eaten portrait a core element of his grandfather’s abusive treatment. “You, Dorian,” Lord Kelso would have repeatedly conveyed, “are just like your mother; you are her living image. You are not a Kelso but a Devereux; you are the rotten, debased issue of a debased woman.” We can now understand that, if the effects of Dorian’s cruel behavior are visible in the painting and not in him, it is because the corrupt, véreux identity he lives out does not come from himself but was in fact “painted” by someone else. Dorian’s plunge into decadence and criminality represents his acting out of an imago or portrait, created and violently imposed upon him by his oppressive grandfather, which he has incorporated intrapsychically as his own. When Dorian tells Basil that a “portrait has a life of its own” (91), he unwittingly underscores this distinction between the hideous identity represented in the picture and his own, untainted self. This disparity is not a reflection of Dorian’s “evil” soul hidden beneath a benign exterior, or of some Faustian bargain he has made to remain young. The drama played out here is not a moral but a psychoanalytic one. The picture of Dorian Gray is a picture of the psychic effects of psychological child abuse. It is a portrait of his subordination to the will of an aggressor, and of the mental disjunction that results when an oppressor’s representation of a child is internalized and lived out unconsciously by the child, who becomes a blameless, helpless participant in the crime of his own oppression. The widely shared view that Lord Henry is the evil figure in the story who corrupts the innocent Dorian Gray and pushes him into a life of perversity thus has to be rethought. Lord Henry does not influence Dorian or instill in him any despicable proclivities or wishes. With his talk of shameful desires, monstrous behavior, and the ravages of age— “Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets” (24)—Lord Henry instead (unknowingly) awakens the “degenerate” identity projected by the grandfather and dormant within Dorian. Lord Henry, who is himself “amazed at the sudden impression that his words . . . produced” (21), is thus not the cause of Dorian’s tragedy. He is a catalyst for Dorian’s coming into being as véreux, a catalyst whose words are like “music” (21) for Dorian because they resonate with the abusive language and acts through which Lord Kelso painted Dorian’s portrait and made him into the “hideous puppet” or automaton Kelso controlled, even in death. Dorian’s sudden desire not to age or degenerate, which Lord Henry’s speech prompts, can also be explained in terms of this dynamic as a symptom or sign not of Dorian’s narcissism (as has been

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frequently argued), but of his identification with the aggressor. It is an effect of the split installed in Dorian by his incorporation of the imago drawn by his grandfather, and it functions as a ciphered indication that the rotten identity he is about to live out does not originate with him, but comes from the horrible picture of him created by someone else.

A RT A S S Y M P T O M Dorian’s passion for Sibyl Vane and his murder of Basil Hallward assume extra dimensions in view of this analysis. Dorian’s observations that the actress Sibyl had “something of a child about her” (46) and that they were “like children” (46) when they met suggests a parallel between her life and that constructed for Dorian in his childhood (46). Both live by playing roles and acting out words and behavior created by someone else. “Night after night I go to see her play,” Dorian says. “One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. . . . She has been mad. . . . She has been innocent. . . . I have seen her in every age and in every costume” (44). When Lord Henry asks, “When is she Sibyl Vane?” (47), Dorian responds, “Never” (47). But Dorian’s passion is not driven solely by his identification with someone who lives by assuming other personae. His love for Sibyl, who works in a “horrid . . . vulgar . . . wretched hole of a place” (43–44) and comes from a poor family below his own rank (“I am not worthy of him. . . . I feel so much beneath him” [52], she says of Dorian), represents a repetition of Dorian’s mother’s passion for his subaltern father. Dorian’s infatuation with a woman whose “inappropriateness” he himself later acknowledges (“She had been shallow and unworthy” [73]) can be read, in other words, as a symptom of his identification with the imago constructed by his grandfather. It is a means of acting out Lord Kelso’s abusive discourse defining him as unworthy, debased, and as “just like his mother.” Dorian’s cruelty in abandoning Sibyl, an act which leads her to commit suicide, can also be seen along these lines as his continued playing out of this rotten, véreux identity. Dorian’s murder of Basil is likewise readable as a reaction to his abusive childhood. Simply put, Basil Hallward comes to embody for Dorian the man who first “painted” his picture; he becomes Dorian’s grandfather. The possibility of such a meshing or confusion of identities is raised at the story’s beginning when Basil speaks of the nature and source of artistic creation and of the ambiguous distinction between the artist and

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his model, the representer and the represented. He explains to Lord Henry that “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter” (10). He also confesses his reason for not wanting to exhibit his picture of Dorian: “There is too much of myself in the thing” (15). When Basil later repeats this to Dorian, he unwittingly establishes a parallel between himself and the “artist” of Dorian’s psychic portrait, Lord Kelso, who also put “too much of himself”—or of his abusive vision—into the picture he drew of his grandson. This parallel is reinforced by Basil’s desire to control Dorian, which manifests itself despite his claim that domination is being exerted in the other direction: “I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself” (89), he admits to Dorian. This tendency to control is most strongly manifest, however, on Dorian’s thirtysecond birthday, when Basil insists that his friend cease his corrupt behavior of the last twenty years. So that people will stop talking of Dorian “as something vile and degraded” (117), Basil demands that he stop leading others “down into the depths” (118) and that he regain the sense of “honour, of goodness, of purity” (118) he has lost. Basil then orders Dorian to pay heed—“I must speak, and you must listen. You shall listen” (118). He proceeds to list the “hideous things” (117) people have been whispering, accusing Dorian of frequenting “the foulest dens in London” (118), of associating with the most “dreadful people” (118), and of “corrupt[ing] every one” (119) with whom he is intimate. Finally, Basil demands that Dorian give “some answer to these horrible charges”: “Deny them, Dorian, deny them! . . . My God! don’t tell me that you are bad, and corrupt, and shameful” (120). With these berating, accusatory words, Basil replicates the core elements of Lord Kelso’s abusive speech and behavior. This discursive resemblance recurs moments later, with fatal results, when Dorian reveals his portrait to Basil and the painter sees the hideous picture precisely as the grandfather saw Dorian: as foul, rotten, worm-eaten, véreux. “My God! . . . you must be worse than those who talk against you fancy you to be!” He . . . examined [the canvas]. . . . It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful. . . . “Good God, Dorian. . . . What is it that one was taught to say in one’s boyhood?. . . Forgive us our sins. Wash away our iniquities. . . . You have done

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enough evil in your life. My God! don’t you see that accursed thing leering at us?” (122–23) At this precise moment, when Basil evokes Dorian’s boyhood and portrays him as an evil, accursed being, “an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward” (123) comes over Dorian: “The mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything” (123). Picking up a knife, Dorian stabs the man to death. Stabs who? The text’s language is significantly vague. It is not “Basil’s head” that Dorian crushes on the table, but “the man’s head” (123). It is not “Basil” whom Dorian stabs twice more and who sits slumped in the chair, but “the man” (123), “the thing” (123, 135), “the dead thing” (124), “a dead man” (130, 134), and “the silent thing” (134). If Basil Hallward recognizes his signature in the corner of the canvas but nonetheless wonders who painted the “hideous face” (121) (“But who had done it? . . . He had never done that” [120]), it is because another “artist” in fact did it. The figure Dorian stabs to death in the old schoolroom in which he was held prisoner as a child, and whom he loathed and hated more than anything, is the figure who really “painted the picture” of him as monstrous and vile. It is the figure of his grandfather, the man who defined his life and caused him great suffering. “You don’t know what he had made me suffer,” Dorian tells Alan Campbell without naming the corpse that Campbell has been summoned to dispose of: “Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or the marring of it than poor Harry has had. He may not have intended it, the result was the same” (131). As the painter of a hideous portrait who “put too much of himself” (90) into it and who sees Dorian as vile and corrupt, Basil unknowingly assumes for Dorian the identity of his grandfather. At that moment, Dorian, in the grip of a psychotic hallucination in which these two “painters” mesh, strikes back at the loathsome man who tormented him and, inadvertently, kills Basil. Unfortunately, Dorian’s symbolic killing of his grandfather cannot undo the psychic damage wrought by years of abuse. His attempt to “solve” the problem of the grandfather by having Alan Campbell literally dissolve the “dead thing” in the schoolroom is also doomed to fail. This is part of the terrible tragedy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Without any awareness of the presence within him of the incorporated imago Lord Kelso created and that controls his life, Dorian cannot escape his grandfather’s psychic oppression. What makes the novel so powerful is the internal logic or psychoanalytic coherence it

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sustains: the only way for Dorian to rid himself of the grandfather and of his legacy of abuse is by suicide. Deciding that he must destroy the picture, which he regards as the source of his torment, Dorian picks up the knife he used to stab Basil: “As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. . . . He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it” (169). The knife, of course, does not enter the picture but Dorian’s heart. By this act, however, Dorian does in fact “kill the painter’s work” and free himself from the past, because Dorian is the painter’s work. His life of corruption and criminality is the work of art drawn by the “painter” he kills, drawn by his grandfather. The story’s ending thus vividly illustrates what the text has, from the beginning, tacitly proposed as a new way of defining a work of art. Dorian’s suicide obliges us to turn our gaze from the painting to his life in order to see the painter’s work. His death, in other words, alters how we construe artistic creation in the text, since it reveals a work of art to be potentially a lived life whose unfolding concretizes a mental picture or identity created by someone else. More specifically, Dorian’s suicide redefines art to include a life created and lived in response to the psychic violence perpetrated by another—a life generated and lived as a symptom of child abuse. When the text’s final words reveal that the “splendid portrait” (170) of Dorian discovered by the servants is in fact unaltered, we realize that the entire story is based on a sustained hallucination in which Dorian, subordinated to the will of his aggressor, “sees” his painted image as Lord Kelso saw him. Until this moment, Dorian’s portrait has represented the effects produced when an external oppressor is incorporated intrapsychically and becomes the oppressor within, controlling his host’s existence. But just as Dorian’s suicide frees him from this oppressor, so too does it dissolve the split between the child born innocent and uncorrupted (reflected in his youthful, unchanged appearance) and the adult who lives a wretched existence (represented in the painting), between what he could have been if not abused and what his grandfather constructed him to be. As his constructed life ends, in other words, Dorian’s appearance, suddenly “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage” (170), meshes with his incorporated identity. The physical doubles the psychic, and his rotting corpse replaces his vilely lived life as the representation of the violence he has suffered—and as the ultimate work of art in the text. The Gothic convention of mysterious physical transformation thus serves

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Wilde to show one more time how oppression can generate art, and how aesthetic production may hinge on the representation of violence. The convention also supports Wilde’s description of Basil’s response to the picture. If Basil also seems to “see” the painting as altered when Dorian reveals it to him, it is because at that moment he “becomes” the grandfather who sees Dorian as corrupt and worm-eaten. The fact that Basil shares Dorian’s perception, in other words, is Wilde’s way of concretizing the idea that Basil assumes the grandfather’s identity for Dorian.14 The Picture of Dorian Gray is thus a narrative that establishes a radical link between aesthetic creation and violence, between the production of an artistic work and the damage wrought by psychological abuse. On the one hand, it delineates with remarkable acuity the possible symptomology of child abuse. On the other hand, it specifies violence and oppression as potential sources of a work of art, even as it simultaneously expands the definition of a work of art to include an existence lived as a product or symptom of oppression. We can understand Wilde’s comment in his preface to the novel in this context: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim” (3). Through its complex inquiry into the psychic and aesthetic consequences of oppression, The Picture of Dorian Gray reveals the work of art as it redefines it, and it conceals the artist by relocating him within an abusive context of creative production.

L A RVA L S E C R E T S The worm in the tale has another turn. To grasp it, we now need to approach an even more veiled aspect of the story, one that requires still greater focus on its linguistic details. As we know from the previous chapters, phantoms make their presence known by haunted language and cryptic wordplay. If we keep this in mind, the novel’s many references to the horrible “secret” (110) contained in Dorian’s portrait, whose image he believed “would reveal to him his own soul” (84), which “held the secret of his life and told his story” (73), and whose dreadful changes had to be kept from the “prying eyes” (95) of other men, suggest there is something else concealed in the picture, something unseeable and perhaps unspeakable, that concerns the very core of Dorian’s being and the reasons for his existence. Dorian’s own musings about the painting’s alterations make this clear. As he gazes upon the “mask of his shame” (76), he experiences an “almost scientific interest” (76) in the cause of its deterioration:

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Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized?—that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was there some other, more terrible reason? [H]ere was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. . . . If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? . . . But the reason was of no importance. . . . When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood. . . . That was everything. (76, 84) On the one hand, there seems to be something “scientific” and “chemical” underlying the painting’s alterations, something involving a physical reordering of atoms akin to the mutations of living organisms. On the other hand, these alterations appear to represent thoughts and dreams. Products of the mind, spirit, or soul, they “symbolize degradation” and evoke pale, bloodless “masks of shame.” This oscillation between physical and mental explanations for the portrait’s decay recurs a short while later when Dorian covers the image with his grandfather’s antique shroud and hides it in his old schoolroom so that no “eye but his would ever see his shame” (96). His eye fell on a large purple satin coverlet . . . that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself— something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. . . . There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real. . . . Beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean . . . from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh—those curious unpictured sins . . . (92–95)

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The pall hides a “dreadful thing” that is “alive,” a “bestial, sodden, unclean” organism that “stirs in the flesh.” But the pall also masks something “shadowy,” “evil,” and “spiritual.” It covers an ethereal entity that will not die, that carries a “corruption of its own” more frightening than death, and that belongs to the world of “dreams” and “shadow.” The reader has perhaps already guessed it. These are descriptions of larvae: of worms and ghosts, maggots and masks (from the Latin larva: “ghost, specter, or mask,” also referring to an insect in the grub state whose appearance “masks” the adult’s entirely different form).15 Dorian “sees” both these forms of larva in the painting. On the one hand, he perceives the bestial, unclean, writhing maggot that creeps into and soaks itself in the blood and guts of the dead, stirring in the flesh as it eats and defiles it. His “scientific interest,” in other words, is in the immature form of certain species—notably insects—that does not die but “lives on” by metamorphosing into more mature forms of existence. It is thus not enough to say that Dorian’s sins eat at the canvas the way a worm eats at a corpse. The face Dorian perceives painted on the canvas is a worm, the “symbol of degradation,” par excellence, that bores into and feeds voraciously on things once beautiful, perverts the corpse, corrupts and devours the fruit and leaf, and “mars the beauty” of fabric as it “breeds horrors” or offspring that pursue its destructive ways. At the same time, however, Dorian also sees in the painting the frightening larval images of phantoms, specters, and shadows, ghostly figments of the mind that never die but “live on” in the realms of dream and thought. These “pallid,” mask-like apparitions, which have a corruption of their own that transcends death, cast a terrifying pall of dread upon the living—whom they pursue relentlessly, according to Roman legend—as their disembodied presence mutely testifies to the shameful acts of those they haunt. Wilde’s use of Latin in the novel, and his many references to Roman mythology and history, support this lexical deciphering of “larva.” So, too, do Lord Henry’s musings on the meshing of spirit and body, animals and shadows, where we hear another coded narrative about specters and worms: Soul and body, body and soul—how mysterious they were! There was an animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. . . . Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? . . . Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body

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really in the soul . . . ? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. (49–50) But it is Dorian’s frantic need to silence talk of death and to hide his portrait that most clearly identifies “larva” as a polysemic key to his life’s secret. When Basil alludes to the worms that will soon devour Sibyl Vane’s corpse—“Why, man, there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!”—Dorian, who responds with cold detachment to the news of her suicide, suddenly leaps to his feet to silence him: “Stop, Basil! I won’t hear it! . . . You must not tell me about things. What is done is done.” (85). After Dorian has the workmen carry the painting up to his old schoolroom to keep it “secure from prying eyes” (95), he worries that his servant might “worm out of” (96) them what they were doing. And when he first notices the picture changing and hides it behind a screen, he calms himself by reasoning that he is merely prey to a trick played upon his senses: “The horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that makes men mad. The picture had not changed. It was folly to think so” (73). A speck on the brain that makes men mad? It is a “worm,” also known as a “wild worm,” defined as “a whim or ‘maggot’ in the brain; a perverse fancy or desire; a streak of madness or insanity.”16 The portrait’s alterations are caused by mental worms, by the haunting figures of larvae that pervert desire and infect the brain with madness. The shameful secret of Dorian’s life, which must not be spoken or seen, involves literal intrusions into the body, the fear that what has been sealed up will be wormed out, and a “perverse fancy” that haunts like a ghost and leaves one mad. Yes, the picture of Dorian Gray is the vile, rotten (véreux) image that we’ve seen his emotionally abusive grandfather construct for him as a child and that he unknowingly lives out as his own. But it is also something much worse: it is the site where the physical and psychic, material and spiritual meet, and where Dorian “sees” the unviewable and unspeakable secret of his life as the double image of a defiling, destructive worm and of a masked, unidentifiable specter of the dead who breeds horrors. Where might we look to identify this specter and flesh out the larval secret of Dorian’s life? As always, when dealing with a potential phantom we need to focus eyes and ears on the text’s linguistic and rhetorical play. We can start by following Dorian to the picture gallery of his coun-

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try house, where he examines “the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins” (111) in hopes of learning why he fears aging and desires sinful pleasures. Gazing at his exquisitely dressed noble ancestors with their vague histories of adultery, homosexuality, and orgies, he wonders if they have bequeathed him “some strange poisonous germ [that] crept from body to body till it had reached his own . . . , some inheritance of sin and shame” (111–12) that would explain his “actions [and] temperament” (112). These thoughts, combined with Dorian’s interest in the origin of species (pursued through his study of the “materialist doctrines of the Darwinismus movement” [103]) and his desire, when the portrait first changes, “to gather up the scarlet threads of life, and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering” (76), suggest that the secret he seeks is a familial one. More exactly, it involves a “labyrinthine,” maze-like twisting of bloodlines (“scarlet threads of life,” “sanguine labyrinth”), perpetrated by some spinning (“threads”), wormlike ancestor, who “crept” or intruded into the line “to weave a poisonous pattern” of “sin and shame.” The text’s many allusions to hidden and deviant lineages, virtually all of which Wilde added to his 1891 revision of the novel and to which he thus implicitly draws our attention, allow us to reconstruct who might have intruded—and how. After Lord Henry learns from his uncle “the story of Dorian Gray’s parentage” (33)—involving the murder of Dorian’s father and the premature death of his mother—his uncle asks about the American woman engaged to their English friend, Dartmoor. “Who are her people?” he inquires, to which Lord Henry replies, “American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past” (32). Later, we learn that Sibyl Vane’s brother, Jim, distrusts Dorian’s intentions toward her: Dorian “was a gentleman, and he hated him for that, hated him through some curious race-instinct for which he could not account” (55). Jim Vane also harbors long-simmering suspicions about his own origins, and he finally demands that his mother tell him the truth: “Mother, . . . I have a right to know. Were you married to my father?” (59). When she confesses that he is the bastard son of a wellconnected English gentleman who could not marry her, Vane cries out in anger, “My father was a scoundrel then!” (59). The theme of concealed parents, and the juxtaposition of Jim Vane’s unaccountable hatred for Dorian with the secret of his own illegitimate parentage by an English gentleman, invite us to ask if a secret illegitimacy might also be linked to

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the other instance in the text of unexplained hatred for Dorian involving an English gentleman: Lord Kelso’s contempt for the “little grandson whom, for his strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance” (95; my italics). Could the “other reasons” for Kelso’s hatred involve a bastard birth— implicating this English gentleman—that is somehow tied to the larval secret of Dorian’s life, twisted bloodlines and poisoned origins, and the sinful breeding of horrors associated with Dorian’s portrait? Two other references to paternity in the narrative suggest this is the case. At the end of the novel, when Lord Henry asks Dorian what became of his portrait, Dorian explains (in another passage added in 1891) that the “memory of the thing is hateful” to him and that it used to remind him of two lines from Hamlet, which he repeats aloud twice: “Like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart” (163; Wilde’s italics). Reading between the lines, we hear that the painting recalls for Dorian hateful memories of his “loveless” (33) grandfather, truly “A face without a heart,” who cruelly had his son-in-law murdered and heartlessly tyrannized his grandson. But there is still more to read here, since Dorian omits the preceding line in the play in which King Claudius asks, “Laertes, was your father dear to you? Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart?” (Hamlet 4.7, 107–09). Dorian’s omission of the father, while quoting from a play about a ghost who haunts his son, an incestuous union (“Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane” [5.2, 312], says Hamlet, stabbing Claudius), and the killing of Laertes’s father, Polonius, whom Hamlet skewers with his foil just as Dorian’s subaltern father is “spitted . . . as if he had been a pigeon” (31) by Kelso’s henchman, combine with the line evoking Dorian’s hateful grandfather to suggest what is elided from Dorian’s awareness: the heartless, sorrowful story of how he was fathered. Lord Henry, once again unknowingly voicing something that lies unrecognized within Dorian, confirms this when Dorian tells him how he met Sibyl Vane. Dorian explains that he decided to stay for a performance in her dingy little theater because he saw a playbill announcing the evening’s drama, and he invites Lord Henry to guess what play it was. “I should think ‘The Idiot Boy, or Dumb but Innocent.’ Our fathers used to like that sort of piece, I believe. The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grandpères ont toujours tort.” (43–44; Wilde’s italics)

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Talk of fathers suddenly gives way to talk of grandfathers who are always wrong. This slippage from father to grandfather, cloaked in French that earlier revealed the véreux origins of Dorian’s abusively constructed life, can now be translated, if we’re reading phantomatically, to reveal the unspeakable secret whose infectious source and content Dorian seeks in his ancestors’ portraits. It tells us that the identity of the father has indeed been cloaked or elided from the son’s drama, and that the fact that the grandpère slips lexically into the place of the father means that he also did so physically: that he took the father’s place (in bed) and committed a “wrong” or “crime” (tort) of which the “Boy” (Dorian) remained ignorant (“Idiot, Innocent”) and of which neither he nor anyone ever spoke (“Dumb”). The pieces of this labyrinthine picture puzzle begin to take hideous shape. If Dorian sees the shameful “secret of his life” (73) embedded in his portrait, if he has a scientific interest in the origin of species and wonders what “poisonous germ” (111) wormed its way into his bloodlines to corrupt his soul and existence, if parents and pasts in the text are concealed, and if fathers, in particular, are elided and replaced by adulterers who produce bastard sons (Jim Vane), we can conclude that Lord Kelso, the tyrannical grandfather and English gentleman who hated Dorian for mysterious, “other reasons,” is himself embedded in the story of Dorian’s origins. Lord Kelso, the text cryptically reveals, was not just responsible for the heinous crimes of arranging his son-in-law’s murder and tyrannizing the grandson left to his care. He was guilty of literally taking his son-inlaw’s place alongside his daughter, of heartlessly worming his way into her body and soul and incestuously “breeding a horror” whose lineage and life were, in turn, irrevocably defiled. Kelso, in sum, was not just Dorian’s grandfather. He was also his father. The brief account of Dorian’s family story provided by Lord Henry’s uncle confirms this perverse paternity. Kelso was a “mean dog” (31), hated not only by Dorian but by his mother’s grandfather. When the “ugly story” (31) came out about Kelso spinelessly paying someone to insult his son-in-law and kill him in a duel, he was held in contempt and shunned by the members of his club, where he “ate his chop alone” (31) for some time. The Queen herself asked about Kelso’s abject habit of quarreling with cabdrivers over their fares. It became “quite a story” (31), and Henry’s uncle, whom Kelso was visiting at the time, was so “ashamed of him” (31) that he “didn’t dare show [his] face at Court for a month” (31). Kelso, in a word, is a worm. He is the very definition of a “wretched, abject, spineless person who is an object of

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contempt and pity.”17 He not only behaves like a worm, however. He also looks like one. As Dorian watches the “thing upon the canvas” (95) grow old, he anticipates how the “hideousness of age” (95) will take its toll upon the image: The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crows-feet would creep round the fading eyes. . . . The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. (95) The grandfather’s manner may have been “stern” and rigid, but Dorian remembers his body as the flaccid, twisted body of a limp, spineless worm: as a drooping, wrinkled, invertebrate whose darkened veins bulge like sodden, wriggling larvae. Kelso’s very name confirms his verminous identity, as Basil’s comment that a person’s name is “a part of them” (9) and Henry’s claim that “Names are everything” (149) invite us to hear. Kelso rhymes with Kell + sew: (something that) spins or “sews” a “kell” or cocoon. Kelso is a cryptonym of “worm.”18 This is why Dorian must “wrap the dreadful thing” (92) on the canvas, which he comes to loathe as he loathed Kelso, with the “pall for the dead” (92) that belonged to his cruel grandfather. If Dorian sees in the painting the larval images of a worm and masked specter, if Kelso looks and behaves like a worm and is so named, and if the hidden portrait embodies for Dorian the shameful secret of his life, it is because he “sees” in it the “dreadful thing” who planted the “poisonous germ” at the core of his being and wrapped his intrusive act in silence. What Dorian unknowingly perceives and must hide from prying eyes in the schoolroom where his hateful grandfather hid him is the “unpictured sin” (95) of his incestuous conception, and the masked image of the grandfather who replaced his subaltern “father” to infuse Dorian with the “gentlemanly” legacy of a twisted paternity. The text in fact actually says this. When Dorian first notices “a touch of cruelty in the mouth” (72) of the portrait but finds no similar line warping his own lips, he examines the image more closely: “there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was horribly apparent” (73; my italics). Wilde’s canny wordplay is revealing. The

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dreadful thing Dorian sees on the canvas, and that “held the secret of his life, and told his story” (73), is not just “horribly apparent.” It is, horribly, a parent: a grandfather who was also his father. The Picture of Dorian Gray is thus the story of a phantomatic haunting. It is the tale of an unspeakable incest: of a “child born in pain” (33) and a mother who died after “months of voiceless agony” (33). The child, “left to the solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man” (33), who hated him not only “for his strange likeness to his mother” (95) but also, we now know, because he was his own bastard son, was sequestered in a room in the family house, just as Kelso sequestered the secret of his incestuous paternity and Dorian sequesters the picture of his usurping father. This secret paternity was nonetheless transmitted, without ever being stated, from the (grand)father to the (grand)son he raised. It haunts Dorian like the spectral larvae of the Romans: tormenting him with some vague sense of sin and shame, infecting him like a “wild worm” in the brain with mad but revealing passions, and sensitizing him to certain words that cryptonymically convey the drama of his incestuous origins. We actually hear the words of this drama in Dorian’s first meeting with Lord Henry, discussed earlier in the context of his emotional abuse by Kelso. Encouraging Dorian to yield to his impulses, Henry implies that he has resisted monstrous desires that he dares not avow. “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with . . . desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. . . . You, Mr. Gray, . . . have had . . . thoughts [and] dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—” [Henry’s] words . . . had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that [Dorian] felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. . . . Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words? (20–21)

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What is so “terrible,” “clear,” “vivid,” and “cruel” about “mere” words whose music is as sweet and harmonious as “that of viol or of lute” and that give form to formless things? If we listen to the harmonies and “secret chords” of “viol” and “lute” in French—the language of grandpères and mothers (Devereux)—we hear and also clearly see in “viol” (the stringed instrument) the similar sounding French word for “rape” (viol), while “lute” rhymes with lutte, French for “struggle or fight.” The “terrible,” “mere” words here are, in French, the mère words, the terrible words of Dorian’s mother (mère = “mother”) who, we can reconstruct, fought off being raped by her father when she “could not escape” by mere words alone. Echoed in the musical rhymes of these mere words are the details of Kelso’s crime of incest: his violent aggression against a daughter who struggled to resist his desire (as Lord Henry accuses Dorian of resisting his), but who was finally forced to yield (as Henry tells Dorian he must). From this struggle and violation Dorian was conceived and took “plastic form.” Margaret Devereux, who “never spoke” (31) to her father again and presumably never spoke of being raped, took the crime and the secret of Dorian’s “monstrous and unlawful” origins with her to the grave. It is thus not just his incestuous paternity, but the specific drama of his mother’s violent rape that haunts Dorian as a phantom and that can be read in the many cryptonymic descriptions of his passions and thoughts throughout the narrative. When he yearns to understand why “violets . . . woke the memory of dead romances” (104) for him, for example, we hear in both the flower and color “violet” (and in the color’s synonyms—“purple, amethyst, mauve, magenta”—sprinkled generously through the text) interlinguistic cryptonyms of rape: “violet” is a synonym of the French violet, which rhymes with violée meaning “a woman who was raped.” Lord Henry’s comment that “Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life” (28) wryly confirms this decrypting of rape from “violet” and its colorful synonyms. Dorian’s passion for musical “instruments . . . of bestial shape and with hideous voices” (105), and for concerts of stringed instruments where “mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or . . . Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes” (104), also speaks, through interlinguistic cryptonymy, of the monstrous but futile “struggles” (“lutes”  luttes) Margaret Devereux waged against her father’s “bestial, hideous” assault, since “zithers,” “lutes,” and “stringed instruments” are variants of “viol,” with its French homonym meaning “rape.” If Lord Henry finds talking to Dorian “like playing upon an exquisite violin” (33), it is thus

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because “this son of Love and Death” (34), as in the “dorian” mode of chant his name evokes, resonates, like a violin, with the ciphered sounds of the struggle and rape he carries encrypted within him and from which he was born.

H AU N T E D M E TA M O R P H O S I S The worm is not done turning. There are still other, even more startling ways in which the phantom can be decrypted lexically from the text to expose important dimensions of Dorian’s tragic saga and thereby reveal the novel’s engagement with the historical and political dramas of British empire and Irish nationalism. Dorian’s passion for jewels—especially pearls—is one such telltale sign of the haunting secret of his larval origins. While it is commonly believed that pearls are created when a grain of sand enters and irritates the flesh of an oyster, pearls in fact more frequently form when parasitic worms penetrate the oyster (or other mollusk) and become lodged between the shell and the membrane attached to it. The oyster protects itself from the irritating intruder by secreting concentric layers of lustrous nacre around the worm to entomb it. Wilde was no doubt aware of this, since he read several works on precious stones from which he drew his lengthy descriptions of Dorian’s gem collection, and since the formation and cultivation of pearls was a lively subject of scientific and economic debate in late Victorian England.19 The narrative’s concerns with Dorian’s own formation and “cultivation” reflect this, especially since he is described as a beautiful, pearl-like being who seemed “made out of ivory” (9, 167), with a “purity [that was] unspotted” (18, 33) like the “white . . . beauty [of] old Greek marbles” (33–34). Dorian’s lineage is also associated with pearls, not just through his mother Margaret’s name, but also through his ancestor, Lady Elizabeth Devereux, who wears a “pearl stomacher” (112) in her portrait. When Dorian attends a costume ball “in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls” (105) and dons his ecclesiastical cope adorned with “seed-pearls” (108), he thus embodies this identity—inscribed in his own name—as a lustrous or gilded (in French, doré  Dorian) pearl created by the intrusion of a dull, Gray, parasitic worm into the stomach or womb of his mother.20 Margaret Devereux’s own name also tells this tale of the “pearl” (Margaret) “born from” (De) something rotten and “worm-like” (véreux).21 But there is still another, even more telling mode by which “worms” inscribe the haunting secret of Dorian’s origins in the narrative and link

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this personal saga to the text’s politico-historical dimensions: through the trope of butterflies. (Butterfly collecting was very widespread in Britain by the nineteenth century as a scientific and social activity. Many middleclass homes had small collections of the insects on display in curio cabinets; entomological societies and publications flourished; and in 1878 London’s first annual Grand National Entomological Exhibition was attended by seventy thousand people.)22 Toward the end of the novel, in another chapter Wilde added to the 1891 edition, Dorian hosts friends for tea in the botanical conservatory of his estate. Lord Henry, explaining his “plan for rechristening everything” (148) since learning the clumsy, Latinate name for an orchid specimen he admires, laments, “It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. . . . From a label there is no escape!” (149). As the Duke of Narborough describes the “last Brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection” (148), the conversation shifts from classifying and labeling specimens to collecting, killing, and displaying them—especially butterflies. Thus, when the Duchess of Monmouth suggests that Dorian thinks her husband married her “on purely scientific principles as the best specimen he could find of a modern butterfly” (150), Dorian laughs, “Well, I hope he won’t stick pins into you” (150). When the Duchess tells Lord Henry that she sides with the Trojans because they fought for a woman, Henry reminds her that they were defeated. “There are worse things than capture” (151), she responds, to which Henry replies: “A burnt child loves the fire” (152). When she insists that she is not even singed and that her “wings are untouched” (152), he responds that it is because she uses “them for everything, except flight” (152). She suggests that it is because “Men have educated us,” and she challenges him to “Describe us as a sex” (152). “Sphynxes without secrets,” Henry retorts. Finally, wondering why Dorian has not yet returned from the garden with an orchid for her evening dress, she sets off to help him, adding, “I have not yet told him the colour of my frock.” Henry reminds her: “Ah!, you must suit your frock to his flowers” (152). Lord Henry is implicitly identified in this scene as a lepidopterist. He recognizes the Duchess as a winged creature drawn to fire, just as butterflies and moths are drawn to a flame, and he insists that she match her evening dress to the flower, just as butterflies suit their colors to flowers and vegetation to avoid predators. Her species? She is a “sphinx.” Naturally, we first think of the monster of Greek legend whose secret Oedipus divined. But she is a sphinx “without secrets”: which is to say that she is one of the Sphingidae, a large family of beauti-

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fully colored Lepidoptera that (like the Duchess) generally come out in the evening. (Wilde knew about butterflies and moths from his reading of Darwin’s The Descent of Man and On the Origin of Species, whose illustrated volumes were among the books in his private library in 1895. In these works, Darwin discusses at length the characteristics and metamorphosis of beetles, butterflies, moths, and larvae, including several species of sphinx.)23 But the Duchess is far from the only winged beauty of interest to Henry Wotton (whose name recalls Edward Wotton, considered by many a trailblazer in the scientific study of insects, and the coauthor of the first book about insects published in Britain, the Insectorum Theatrum [1634], containing the earliest descriptions of eighteen species of British butterflies).24 Lord Henry also seeks to capture a male specimen for study: the gold and gray species named Dorian Gray. From the beginning, Dorian is in fact cryptically described as a butterfly. Sitting in Basil’s studio, with “the rich odour of roses, and . . . lilac” (7) wafting in from the “honey-sweet . . . blossoms” (7) of the garden where “bees” (7), a “grasshopper [and] dragon-fly” (11), and “two green-and-white butterflies” (24) flit and feed, Lord Henry admires Dorian’s portrait, “clamped to an upright easel” (7) as one might mount a butterfly, and tells Basil that the boy is a “young Adonis” (9), “a Narcissus” (9) and “some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at” (9). Henry is not just referring to two beautiful youths from Greek mythology. Adonis and Narcissus are also species of butterflies, “brainless, beautiful creatures” who offer colorful visual pleasure akin to flowers.25 Dorian uncannily confirms this identity by seeming to feed, like a butterfly, on flower nectar in the garden, “burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine” (22). If Lord Henry, who claims to speak “from the scientific point of view” (19), tells Dorian that the “aim of life is self-development [and to] realize one’s nature perfectly” (19), and if he insists that Dorian is a “wonderful creation” (22) who has “only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully” (23), it is because he sees Dorian as a fully realized imago—the “scientific” term for the “perfect,” “fully” developed butterfly that has metamorphosed from the larval and pupal (also called chrysalis) stages into adulthood.26 Lord Henry’s decision to dominate Dorian Gray, whose name tells the tale of this metamorphosis from the dullish gray worm to the golden chrysalis (from khrusos meaning “gold”)27 and the brilliant (doré) imago, thus reflects not just the much

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analyzed homoerotic aspect of their relationship. It also speaks of a lepidopterist’s desire to capture, possess, and examine a beautiful specimen, as Lord Henry’s musings about Dorian’s love for Sibyl Vane attest: It made [Dorian] a more interesting study. He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. . . . It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain. . . . There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. (48–49) Sulphurous fumes, subtle poisons, and masks of glass speak of butterfly collecting: of the capture and poisoning of specimens, usually in a glass “killing jar” where a chemical gives off lethal fumes, and of their pinning and mounting under glass “masks” or plates that preserve them for study and display. Although never explicitly identified as such in the novel, Lord Henry is a butterfly collector intent on adding Dorian Gray to his collection. Interestingly, the 1945 film of The Picture of Dorian Gray actually makes this explicit, since it opens with a sequence, not in the novel, in which Lord Henry captures, asphyxiates by chemical fumes, and then pins a butterfly from Basil’s garden as he waits to meet Dorian Gray for the first time.28 In this context of butterflies, Lord Henry’s warning that Dorian should enjoy his beauty before it fades and Dorian’s desperate desire not to age take on new meaning, for Henry effectively describes Dorian’s decline as a reverse metamorphosis. Dorian, he says, will become “old and wrinkled and ugly” (22–23), “his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed” (25), because “Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets” (24). Dorian will lose his limbs (wings) and devolve from a beautifully colored butterfly into a colorless, unseeing “puppet” (pupa in Latin) and then an “ugly, wrinkled, graceless, deformed” larva or caterpillar. If Henry’s description causes Dorian a pain that “struck through him like a knife” (25)—as one sticks a pin through a butterfly—it is because he unwittingly voices the unspoken saga of Dorian’s origins. To age for Dorian means to resemble the

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ugly, deformed father at the core of his being and thus to incarnate and visibly expose the unspeakable secret of his birth. If the secret is to remain concealed from others and himself, if the parasitic worm at the center of his pearly being is to remain encrypted, he must remain young. The painting will grow old instead. It will morph, in Dorian’s hallucinatory vision, from the imago of a beautiful butterfly into the less perfect but still golden pupa cloaking the worm (as the gold and purple pall cloaks the portrait), and then devolve further into the hideous larval image that so horrifies Dorian. It is not by chance that the room where Dorian hides the portrait served as his schoolroom (“pupil” comes from the diminutive of pupa) and, before that, as his “play-room” (95) where Kelso kept him “at a distance” (95), and where he was tended and fed (as immature larva feed upon vegetation) by Kelso’s housekeeper named— what else?—Mrs. Leaf.29 It is also not by chance that the mysterious “yellow book” (97) that Lord Henry gives Dorian, that is never named in the narrative but that Wilde acknowledged was inspired by Huysmans’s À Rebours, mesmerizes and “poison[s]” (114) the young man.30 A study in the decadent and dehumanized collection of objects as a way to avoid living life, the novel’s title, usually rendered as Against Nature but more accurately translated as Against the Grain, Backwards, or In Reverse, not only evokes Dorian’s descent into a life of moral decay, it also alludes to the reverse or backward metamorphosis that his aging would represent as it brings him closer to the secret of his corrupt, véreux origins. Seen in this light, Dorian’s desire to remain young is far more than the symptom of a vain narcissism or a new hedonist aesthetic. It is a cryptic expression of the need to guard intact the unspeakable drama of verminous, incestuous rape that created him and that haunts him as a phantom. Dorian, however, is not just a beautiful specimen who is collected and studied by Lord Henry and captured in a painting by Basil. He himself becomes a collector or lepidopterist in his own right. As his behavior and not just his picture grows more cruel and literally wormlike (we watch him “creep upstairs to the locked room” [99], “creep out of the house . . . down to dreadful places” [109], and learn of his “creeping . . . and slinking . . . into the foulest dens” [118]), he immerses himself in collecting objects, all of which evoke worms and butterflies. He is fascinated by the “secrets” (103) of perfumes, extracted from flowers that feed butterflies and plants that feed worms, and by the pearls and brilliant gems he spends days “settling and resettling in their cases” (105), as one sets

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brilliant butterflies in their display boxes. He is also passionate about his “exquisite specimens” (108) of silk embroideries, decorated with “iridescent beetles’ wings” (108) and “five hundred and sixty-one butterflies” (108), and his “beautiful specimens” (108) of ecclesiastical vestments, embroidered with “seed-pearls” (108) and “coloured silks” (109), recalling parasitic intruders and the cocoons or “kells” of silkworms. But besides objects, Dorian also collects people, using them to meet his needs and satisfy his pleasures, and leading them “down into the depths” (118), as Basil says, where they “lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity” (118). Sibyl Vane is his most tragic conquest. Enthralled by this “genius” (42) who plays Juliet one night, Desdemona the next, but who is “never” (47) Sibyl Vane, Dorian compares her to a clay “figurine” (62) whom he will buy from the theater owner to whom she is bound, showcase on a West End stage (47), and place “on a pedestal of gold . . . to see the world worship the woman who is mine” (63). When Sibyl decides to abandon the artifice of acting—where she can only speak “unreal” (70) words and “mimic” (70) emotions that are not hers—in order to be with Dorian, her “Prince of life!” (70) who has revealed to her what real love and living are about, Dorian becomes enraged: You have killed my love. . . . I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. . . . How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. (70) Like a lepidopterist who does not let the beautiful butterfly live in nature but catches, kills, and displays it, Dorian cannot let the delicate and beautiful Sibyl Vane live her own life. Moving from role to role like a butterfly flitting among flowers, she exists for Dorian as an exotic object of pleasure to be captured, possessed, named, and exhibited as his own vain reflection. Lord Henry says as much after Sibyl’s suicide, insisting that “The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shake-

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speare’s plays. . . . Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. . . . But don’t waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are” (82). It is no accident that Sibyl, whose last name evokes the “veins” that nourish and support butterfly wings, kills herself by ingesting “prussic acid” (78), a form of cyanide that was used to asphyxiate butterflies in killing jars.31 Dorian’s cruelty toward the childlike Sibyl is thus not just another instance of his acting out the véreux imago constructed and projected onto him by Lord Kelso. It is also an enactment of his father’s silenced violation and psychic murder of his daughter, Dorian’s mother. Just as Dorian captures and “suffocates” Sibyl through his demand that she exist for him alone, so Kelso captured and (at the very least) emotionally suffocated his child, Margaret Devereux, by preventing her from living a life apart from him. Sibyl, whose name evokes the oracle of Cumae, thus becomes, through her suicide, a reverse or backward figure of prophecy. She does not so much foretell the future as symbolically and unknowingly reenact with Dorian his past: the unspeakable secret of his mother’s tragic possession and psychological strangulation at the hands of her jealous, Othello-like father. Dorian’s murder of Basil can also be reread in the context of butterflies, worms, and reverse metamorphosis. When Dorian pleads for his portrait after Basil tries to destroy it, Basil agrees to give it to him, describing it (and Dorian) as one would a butterfly to be mounted, preserved, and displayed: “Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and sent home” (27). This analogy is subtly repeated later when Dorian reveals the hideously altered picture to Basil, who cries out, “This is the face of a satyr” (122). The image on the canvas is indeed that of a sexual predator, of the wormlike Kelso who raped his daughter. But it is also the face of a de-metamorphosed Dorian, of a satyr butterfly (the common name for species in the Satyridae family) now devolved, in his corrupt behavior at least, to the ugly larval state at his core.32 When Basil locates “his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion” (121) in the lower corner of the canvas, confirming that he is indeed the creator of this horrid image, artistry and paternity suddenly merge for Dorian in a lethal moment of psychotic confusion. Basil, who earlier confessed to putting “too much” (90) of himself into the portrait, becomes in this instant not just the emotionally abusive grandfather who “painted” Dorian as vile and véreux. As his bright red signature of authorship cryptonymically reveals, Basil also becomes Dorian’s incestuous father:

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the insidious worm (“vermilion,” from the Latin vermiculus meaning “little worm”  Kell + sew  Kelso) who violated his own daughter and literally put too much of himself into Dorian’s creation.33 As Basil implores Dorian to pray with him and murmurs phrases from the “Our Father” that unwittingly invoke his haunting drama of perverse paternity, Dorian is suddenly overcome by the “mad passions of a hunted animal” (123) and by how much he “loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything” (123). As his gaze falls upon the knife he used “to cut a piece of cord” (123) days earlier, he seizes it and stabs the painter, digging it “into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man’s head down on the table, and stabbing again and again” (123). The hunted turns on the hunter as Dorian, piercing the vein as if skewering a wriggling, bloodfilled worm (recalling Kelso’s wormy, “blue-veined” hands), tries to cut the psychic cord binding him phantomatically to the verminous entity— “the thing” (123), “the dead thing” (124)—responsible for his creation. Basil, whose name resonates with things “base,” lowly, and wormlike, and who earlier confessed that he “grew jealous of every one to whom” (89) Dorian spoke and wanted him “all to myself” (89), becomes, in this fatal moment, Dorian’s jealous father: the man who could not cut the cord to the daughter he wanted all for himself, who had her spouse hunted down and stabbed, and who is, more than anyone, the artist of the work named “Dorian Gray.” Dorian’s murder of Basil is thus a doubly symbolic homicide. Through it he “kills” not only the abusive grandfather who raised him, but also the incestuous father who conceived him. Dorian’s suicide at the end of the narrative also has to be reread in light of the spectral secret of his origins. As he knifes—or pins—himself through the heart, performing the lepidopterist’s gesture that Lord Henry and Basil both tried on him with words and paint, he also reenacts the trauma lived by his mother, who was “pinned” by Kelso as one pins a specimen for display. In the climactic moment of his death, in sum, Dorian meshes with his hallucinatory, wormlike self-image on the canvas, completes his reverse metamorphosis by joining physically with the larval core of his identity, and silently speaks, through his hideous body language, the unspeakable secret of his véreux origins. Speaks how, exactly? The very last sentences of the narrative, in which his servants discover his corpse in the old schoolroom next to the beautiful portrait, tell us: “Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized

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who it was” (170). Examined the rings? There is only one reference in the entire novel to Dorian’s rings. It comes the morning after he kills Basil, as he dresses with care, “giving . . . attention to . . . his necktie and scarf-pin, and changing his rings more than once” (126). Are we to understand that this climactic moment of recognition hinges on one passing reference to jewelry? No, these are different rings—rings that “change more than once,” that speak of mutation, transformation, and of the withered, wrinkled entity lying on the floor of the schoolroom described as both a “man” and “thing” (“they recognized who it was”). These are the rings of a worm: of the segmented, annelid body of the larval intruder who bore into Dorian’s nacreously beautiful mother and produced a bastard son. With his final metamorphosis and collapse, Dorian’s physical form joins with the loathsome, ringed secret of unspeakable origins he unknowingly perceives on the canvas. In this horrifying yet tragic instant, he dies twice over: not just as the visible incarnation of the véreux identity constructed for him by his grandfather, but also as the child of the parasitic worm who fathered him and whose larval presence has until now lain encrypted beneath his pearllike beauty. In the end, the novel comes full circle as its title can now be heard to foretell cryptonymically the ghostly saga of Dorian Gray’s life: the story of a work of art or “picture”  “image”  “imago”  butterfly that devolves from its golden, gilded (doré) state to reveal the gray, larval drama of its haunting creation.

E N C RY P T E D P O L I T I C S It is time now to see how butterflies and lepidopterists, pearls and intruder worms point us to English-Irish colonial history and to Oscar Wilde’s complex relationship to his Anglo-Irish heritage and his own family’s history of violation and illegitimacy. A brief account of key elements in England’s imperial treatment of Ireland will help frame these histories, whose heretofore unseen inscriptions in the novel are the focus of the last part of my analysis. For centuries, of course, British imperial discourse painted the Irish as childlike, uncivilized, unclean, temperamental, superstitious, and subhuman. In his famous tract Chartism (1839), for example, in which he analyzed the English working class, the breakdown of social order, and the threat of revolution, Thomas Carlyle described the “uncivilised Irishman”34 arriving on English shores as “the sorest evil”35 England must face. Claiming the Irish had descended from

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“manhood to squalid apehood,”36 Carlyle described them as a “degraded, . . . violent, mendacious . . . people circulat[ing] not order but disorder, through every vein of it; —and the cure, if it is to be a cure, must begin at the heart: not in his condition only but in himself must the Patient be all changed.”37 Influenced by Carlyle’s views, Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), also described the Irish immigrant as lazy, uncouth, and uncivilized, with “[d]irty habits, which have become second nature”38 and a “coarseness, which drags him down virtually to the level of a savage.”39 Whereas Carlyle asserted that the savagery flowing through the veins of the Irish could only be cured through a complete change of heart or moral transfusion, however, Engels proposed miscegenation to solve the Irish problem. Interbreeding the childish, wildly tempered Irish with the stable, reasoned English would benefit both races, he claimed, since it would civilize the former, provoke more revolutionary zeal in the latter, and thereby improve the chances for England’s social, political, and economic transformation.40 Discourses constructing the Irish as childlike, untamed, and needing cleansing or selective breeding to civilize their savage blood were already part of British colonial rhetoric and policy long before Wilde’s Victorian era, however. Such discourses were especially pervasive in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as Tudor and Stuart England struggled to subjugate a rebellious Ireland. In A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), for example, the poet Edmund Spenser, who served as Lord Deputy of Ireland and clerk of the Chancery for Faculties, described the Irish as “very stubborne, and untamed,”41 with an ancestry marked by brutish and savage customs and behavior. He argued that only the uncompromising imposition of English law upon Ireland could bring the island under control. Sir John Davies, Attorney General for Ireland, Speaker of the Irish Parliament, and a prime architect of English imperialism, similarly depicted the Irish, in A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued (1612), as “lewd and wicked” and as remarkable for “their promiscuous generation of children; their neglect of lawful matrimony; their uncleanness in apparel, diet, and lodging; and their contempt and scorn of all things necessary to the civil life of man.”42 The only way to civilize the Irish, he maintained, was to bring the whole island under English military and juridical control, make the Irish obedient to the Crown of England, and thus bring an end to the strife between the two peoples.43 Cromwell’s brutal suppression of the bloody Irish uprising of 1641 altered the terms of this debate and contributed to Sir John Temple’s even

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more radical solution to the Irish question. In his inflammatory The Irish Rebellion (1646), Temple held that the sole means of dealing with the Irish—a “depraved and barbarous”44 race totally incapable of self-government or of becoming English—was to impose a system of rule that would completely subjugate the country and totally transform Irish society. Just such a transformation was the aim of the British plantations, an especially aggressive colonial practice that went beyond military occupation, the imposition of English law, and the exploitation of colonized lands. Begun under Elizabeth I and substantially expanded during the seventeenth century, the plantations involved the systematic confiscation of lands owned by Irish Catholics and their granting to Protestant English, Scottish, and Welsh settlers or “planters.” Combined with the extermination of rebellious Irish clans and landowning families (especially during the violent Cromwellian era), laws restricting where Catholic Irish could live and work (leaving many to die from hunger and disease), and policies requiring planters to import British settlers, including women, to farm and manage their lands, the plantations of Ireland functioned as de facto sites of ethnic cleansing. By 1700, this “civilizing” process of infusing Irish soil with the “parental” presence of British settlers and their progeny had led to the sociopolitical and economic dominance of Anglicans within Ireland—known as the “Protestant Ascendancy”—which would last through the end of the Victorian era.45 Oscar Wilde, an Anglo-Irishman whose own Protestant ancestors were part of this empire building, himself succinctly and ironically described this practice of English transplantation and reproduction in his 1889 review of anti–Home Rule historian James Anthony Froude’s novel about the Irish problem, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. England’s first settlers were Norman nobles. They became more Irish than the Irish, and England found herself in this difficulty. To abandon Ireland would be discreditable, to rule it as a province would be contrary to English tradition. She then tried to rule by dividing, and failed. The Pope was too strong for her. At last she made her great political discovery. What Ireland wanted was evidently an entirely new population of the same race and the same religion as her own.46 Published just a year before the first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s review not only condemns England’s racial and religious cleansing and self-reproducing practice of plantation. It also

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anticipates what I want to argue is a very strong critique of empire that Wilde inscribed in his own novel a year later. We find evidence of this critique in the discussion of “America” (35), “slavery” (36), and London’s “East End” (36) during the luncheon at the residence of Lord Henry’s aunt, attended by a member of Parliament and various lords and ladies. This passage, along with similar scenes of repartee among Lord Henry’s cohort of blue-blooded friends and relatives, is generally read as a Wildean indictment of the hypocrisy and self-satisfaction of late Victorian England’s ruling class.47 These references, however, also evoke the colonial plantations in the United States and, by extension, those in Ireland, since the impoverished East End of London was home to many Irish immigrants fleeing famine and poverty in Ireland during the nineteenth century.48 Margaret Devereux’s surname, which has already yielded much to close reading and is first mentioned in the preceding scene, also invokes English/Irish colonial history by recalling Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex, whom Elizabeth I supported in establishing one of the first plantations in Ulster in 1573. Lord Henry Wotton’s own name (and “Names,” we know he said, “are everything” [139]) reinforces this link and the novel’s Irish connection by evoking another Lord Henry Wotton (1568–1639): a secretary to Walter Devereux’s son, Robert Devereux, and chronicler of his courtly life as the second Earl of Essex during Elizabeth’s repression of the Irish rebels.49 But Kelso’s hiring of a “Belgian brute” (31) to kill his daughter’s husband in Spa, Belgium and the silenced drama of Margaret Devereux’s rape and Dorian’s illegitimate birth speak even more forcefully—if cryptically—of Britain’s colonizing of Ireland. These references to Belgium locate the murder and secret rape within a colonial context by invoking the infamous African exploits of King Léopold II of Belgium who, less than five years before Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray and aided by Henry Morton Stanley, the legendary British-born explorer and Léopold’s envoy to the Congo, manipulated the participants at the Congress of Berlin (1884–1885) into ceding him the Free State of Congo as his own private possession. (Léopold’s exploitation of the Congo was extremely brutal and his agents quickly became notorious for their use of mutilation, slavery, murder, and sexual violence.)50 Margaret’s unnamed husband, depicted as a “penniless . . . nobody” (31) and mere “subaltern” (31) who is “spitted . . . as if he had been a pigeon” (31) (or pinned as if a butterfly), also invokes the impoverished, animal-like Irish who were displaced when not killed by planters sent to establish British dominion in Ireland. Finally, Margaret Devereux herself, a woman portrayed as

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impulsively childlike for rejecting suitors of noble rank to marry a subaltern, and who is ensnared and “colonized” by her noble English father, also becomes a figure of the infantile and rebellious Irish who had to be subdued by the “civilizing,” parental rule of empire. The murder of Margaret Devereux’s husband and the encrypted tale of Kelso’s rape and impregnation of his defiant daughter, in other words, are tropes of empire and ciphered references to Britain’s rape and cleansing insemination of Ireland—Britain’s “wild child,” as Davies, Spenser, Temple, Carlyle, Engels, and others described her. At the same time, the cryptic dramas of parasitic intruder worms, pearls, butterflies, and perverse paternity haunting Dorian Gray emerge as coded allegories of the legacy of empire: of the destructive inheritance left to the colonial subject by plantation, imperial self-replication, and the “purifying” transfusion (or intrusion) of Protestant blood into Catholic veins. Like the lepidopterist, whose practice and targets are tacitly inscribed throughout the text and who denies the butterfly a life in nature by catching, killing, and pinning it for the pleasure of possession and exhibition, like Kelso who captures and then robs his daughter of her own life and parasitically violates her for the sadistic satisfactions of domination and self-perpetuation, and like all the other vain “collectors” in the tale (Lord Henry, Basil, Dorian) who seek to ensnare innocent, exotic, “uncivilized” others (Dorian, Sibyl Vane) as mirrors of their power and ascendancy, so Britain netted, conquered, and inseminated the untamed Irish for the rewards of control, exploitation, and expansion. As Wilde’s novel draws subtle parallels between paternal rape and empire-building, between collecting exotic butterflies (in itself a trope of empire) and individuals and conquering peoples and nations, it thus condemns the lie of the civilizing, ennobling mission of British colonialism as a screen for the desire to intrude upon, subjugate, and exploit the other. The novel, in fine, tacitly inscribes while critiquing the history of the Irish plantations, the origins of Anglo-Irish identity, and the rationalizing discourses of empire. What remains puzzling is why this critique is so well concealed—hidden to the “second degree” within an already encrypted family drama of incestuous violation and illegitimacy. Why would Wilde so heavily cloak one of the strongest attacks on empire anywhere in his writings beneath the conventions of gothic romance, a fairly benign mockery of English aristocratic hypocrisy, and, as recent scholarship has underscored, a critique of heteronormativity? An important clue lies in Wilde’s own shifting, often contradictory positions toward Irish nationalism and British empire. This ambivalence

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is all the more intriguing in light of Wilde’s parents’ strong nationalist allegiances. Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde, wrote fervent nationalist poetry and essays under the pen name Speranza. She also published collections of Irish legends, charms, and superstitions, held salons for nationalist-leaning intellectuals, artists, and politicians in Dublin and later London, and enthusiastically supported the Young Ireland movement. Oscar’s father, Sir William Wilde, was an eminent ear and eye surgeon who founded St. Mark’s Hospital in Dublin, wrote major textbooks on aural and ophthalmic diseases, and, as a physician devoted to improving the health of Ireland’s inhabitants, performed the nation’s first complete medical census as Ireland’s Census Commissioner. He also catalogued the antiquities collection of the National Museum of Ireland, published a collection of Irish superstitions, and penned scholarly works about the land and history of Ireland.51 Oscar Wilde was hardly as consistent in his devotion to Irish nationalism. On the one hand, he described himself as a “thorough republican”52 and as “not English [but] Irish which is quite another thing.”53 He claimed that the Irish people had once been the “most aristocratic in Europe,” that poetic rhyme was “entirely of Irish invention,” and that, with the intrusion of the English, “art in Ireland came to an end, . . . for art could not live and flourish under a tyrant.”54 Wilde attributed the notion of Irish inferiority to “the insolence with which the English have always treated us,”55 and he claimed that the Irish were “fighting for the principle of autonomy against empire, for independence against centralization.”56 He supported Charles Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule Party that sought parliamentary independence for Ireland, and he praised Gladstone, who promoted Home Rule while British prime minister, as “the one English statesman who has understood us, who has sympathised with us, whom we claim now as our leader, and who . . . will lead us to the grandest and justest political victory of this age.”57 On the other hand, Wilde did not oppose Britain’s colonial enterprise or seek its end. “I do not wish to see the empire dismembered,” he stated during his visit to the United States in 1882, “but only to see the Irish people free, and Ireland still as a willing and integral part of the British Empire.”58 He opposed violence as a means to independence and decried the assassination of Lord Cavendish by Irish nationalists in Dublin, explaining that “When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her,” only then adding in a verbal footnote, “We forget how much England is to blame. She is reaping the fruit of seven centuries of injustice.”59 In his poem “Libertatis Sacra Fames” (The Sacred Hunger for Freedom), which

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Wilde claimed represented his political views, he favored dictatorship over demagogues who would “betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.”60 And in “Ave Imperatrix” (Hail to the Empress), he hoped that England would emerge as a “young Republic” from the grim task of bringing enlightenment and order to primitive lands and societies where her martyred soldiers have died in the name of empire.61 We could explain this vacillation in postcolonial terms as Wilde’s attempt to construct a hybrid space of Anglo-Irish identity by simultaneously identifying with the empire subordinating him as Irish and with the colonized Irish resisting subjugation. Occupying this floating middle aligns him with the politically and economically dominant bourgeois colonizing minority within Ireland, even as this minority is stigmatized and kept peripheral by the English center. But Wilde’s letter to the editor of the London Daily Chronicle about the abuse of children in prisons, which I quoted at the beginning of the chapter, suggests there may also be a psychoanalytic dimension to his political ambivalence, especially if we reread his vacillations in light of the unspeakable dramas of child abuse just decrypted from The Picture of Dorian Gray. The letter is revealing because, in it, Wilde gets the psychology of abuse exactly backwards. By claiming that the child suffers more from “punishment inflicted by society” than by “a parent or guardian” whose harshness the child can bear with some “acquiescence,” and by asserting that, for the child, being “shut up . . . in a dimly lit cell is much worse than it would be to receive the same treatment from its father or mother,” Wilde mistakenly ascribes the far more destructive power of parental cruelty to the state, effectively denying the psychic ravages of familial child abuse. For the child, what matters above all is the secure attachment to the parent (or caregiver), which assures the child that she or he is loved, that the child deserves to live a full and independent life, and that to do so will not threaten the connection with the parent or impinge on the sense of being loved. For the child (later the adult), there is no emotional connection with society to be lost, no psychic bond with government to be threatened. The bond that is vulnerable to loss—assuming it was there in the first place—is with the parents or caregivers. What traumatizes a child is enduring or “acquiescing” (as Wilde calls it) to parental cruelty. Blaming the prison system, however harsh it may be, or expressing anger at the government, society, judges, or lawyers is, in this context, a defense against attacking the parent(s). It is a displacement that protects the child’s tie to the parent in the face of abuse, and that allows the child, who fears losing the parent’s love (even when it is already lost), to keep

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alive the hope of being loved and the fantasy of being rescued by the parent from society’s harsh treatment. Wilde’s letter maintains this fantasy. It allows him to preserve the fiction of a cruel parent’s enduring love by imagining that the abusive parent can be moved by the child’s suffering whereas the state cannot. “The inhuman treatment of a child is always inhuman,” Wilde continues, “But inhuman treatment by society is to the child the more terrible because there is no appeal. A parent or guardian can be moved, and let out a child from the dark lonely room in which it is confined. But a warder cannot.” Wilde is of course writing this after his brutal experience in prison. But we cannot forget that it is also written after The Picture of Dorian Gray in which an inhuman father does not let his children out from the dark lonely room in which they are confined, who instead sequesters and rapes his daughter and isolates and emotionally abuses his son/grandson. The conflict between Wilde’s personal fantasy about the underlying humanity of abusive parents and his creation of a novel about the catastrophic effects of inhuman paternal child abuse suggests there is something else, related to Wilde’s own family history, that may be concealed in the novel: something that could shed light on this conflict, on Wilde’s vacillations between nationalism and imperialism, and on his need to encrypt his critique of empire. This possibility is supported by Wilde’s desire, expressed in “De Profundis” (1897), to transform his horrible imprisonment into a spiritual experience and someday be able to say that “the two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.”62 Generally viewed as proof of how deeply Oxford affected him (since prison was obviously life-changing), this phrase is striking for the parallel Wilde draws between being sent away by society and being sent away by his father. Written several months before his release from Reading Gaol and his letter about child prisoners, the comment, in other words, can be seen not only as presaging Wilde’s editorial comparison of familial and societal child abuse. It also inserts his father into the equation, inviting us to reread not just the letter in the Daily Chronicle but also The Picture of Dorian Gray in the context of his own family story and paternal relations. When we look back at the novel with this in mind, we see that the many collections of objects, butterflies, and people, the encrypted drama of rape and illegitimacy, and the murder of Basil Hallward itself can in fact all be connected to Oscar Wilde’s father. William Wilde, after all, was not just a collector of census data, Irish superstitions, and Irish history. He also “collected” women and children. Prior to his marriage, he

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fathered three illegitimate offspring by at least two different mistresses.63 During his marriage, he reputedly had other mistresses, among them a former patient, Mary Travers. Wilde was often away from home, occupied by work and affairs. He was also quite occupied by the much younger Travers, whom he welcomed into his home and often invited to join him and the children on excursions. In 1864, when Oscar was ten years old, Travers made the sensational claim that William Wilde had chloroformed and raped her during a visit. When Lady Wilde accused Travers of extortion, Travers sued for libel. The trial became the talk of Dublin and left a permanent stain on the physician’s reputation and the family name.64 Together with William Wilde’s physical and emotional absences, it also apparently left its mark on Oscar, from whom there is no surviving evidence of affection toward his father.65 Years later, he commented on how deeds of the father can affect the son, noting that “Religion tells us that the father has eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth shall be set on edge.”66 Still later, he wrote with telling irony in An Ideal Husband, one of his many works concerned with unknown parentage and confused identities, that “Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.”67 The Wilde family dramas involving ruined reputations, illegitimate offspring, rape, and chloroform (used to suffocate butterflies before pinning them) all link William Wilde to the encrypted sagas of child abuse in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But Oscar’s father is inscribed most incisively in the novel through Dorian’s murder of Basil Hallward. As Basil scolds Dorian for his bad behavior, Dorian is suddenly overwhelmed by hatred, as if the feeling had been “whispered into his ear” (123) by the grinning lips of his portrait. Picking up the instrument he used earlier “to cut a piece of cord” (123), Dorian kills Basil by digging “the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear” (123). This murder is medicinal in more ways than one. As one of the most distinguished otologists of his time, William Wilde gave his name to a variety of surgical techniques and instruments for treating ear disorders, many of which are described in his classic Aural Surgery (1853). Best known among these are “Wilde’s snare” (also called “Wilde’s noose”) for cutting out growths, and “Wilde’s incision”: a surgical cut made alongside the vein behind the ear to expose the mastoid cavity and remove infected cells causing ear pain or hearing loss.68 Cutting cord and knife incisions behind the ear thus whisper to the reader that Basil’s murder is a triply layered scene of patricide, that Dorian’s killing of this symbolic father

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has an autobiographical dimension to it, and that Oscar Wilde may well have experienced his father much as Dorian experiences Kelso and Basil, his unwitting proxy: as a rejecting, unloving man who wanted to “send him away” (not just to Oxford) and remove him emotionally, if not surgically, as if a source of pain or infection; and as someone from whom he felt the need to protect himself, as Dorian does from Basil’s verbal attack, by patricidally carving up his literary embodiment with a wildly symbolic incision of his own. The ambiguously named “dead man” (130, 134) and “dead thing” (124) left sprawled on the table in the old schoolroom is thus not just the hallucinated incarnation of Dorian’s father and grandfather. It is also the figure of the son, Oscar, who felt cut up or cut out by his father, as well as the image of his father, William, whose rejecting aggression the son would finally excise and dissolve—in fiction at least.69 How could Oscar Wilde not vacillate between embracing the nationalist cause espoused by his parents and rejecting it, since he could identify with one parent—his “darling” mother—but disidentified with the other, his father? How could he consistently condemn empire and plantations when his own father was a colonizer of women and a “planter” of bastards? And how could he decry the unmitigated horror of parental child abuse in a letter to the editor when it would mean abandoning once and for all the fantasy of parental love and rescue to which he apparently clung to the end of his life? After all, we find this fantasy not just in the letter to the editor, but also in one of the last works Wilde wrote, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1897, published 1898), where the narrator sympathizes with a killer about to be hanged (bringing to mind “Wilde’s noose”) and speaks of murder by a kiss—a succinct description of incest in which the illusion of tenderness masks a soul-murdering need to dominate or “colonize” a child. This fantasy is also sustained and simultaneously subverted by the poem’s haunting refrain—Each man kills the thing he loves—since the perverse notion that a person can still love someone they kill is itself undercut by dehumanizingly naming the loved one a “thing.” If, as Lord Henry claims, “In art, as in politics, les grandpères ont toujours tort” (44), it is because The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel about grandfathers, fathers, and paternalistic colonizers in which art and politics constantly intertwine, and in which a de-metamorphosing picture speaks cryptically of the haunting effects upon children and nations of rape and plantation, abuse and imperialism. If Oscar Wilde could not voice this explicitly in an unwavering critique of empire, it is likely

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because, like Dorian Gray who pores over his ancestors’ portraits seeking the “poisonous germ” (111) transmitted to him transgenerationally, Oscar Wilde was himself haunted by the legacy of Protestant Ascendancy bequeathed him by his Anglo-Irish ancestors: by the fathers and grandfathers whose complicity in Britain’s snaring and incestuous rape of Ireland shaped his identity and yet tormented him like Roman larvae. After all, Wilde early on described his “bête noire” as “a thorough Irish Protestant”;70 he could not imagine how man could face God’s judgment with his “wretched Protestant prejudices and bigotry clinging still to him”;71 and he flirted with Catholicism his entire life. And so, much later on, he would write—and also subvert—the fantasies that men still love the women they kill, that fathers still love the daughters they kiss and rape, and that empires still nurture the nations they infantilize and destroy. This was how he could speak the unspeakable and attempt to expiate the devouring, worm-like guilt of being the offspring and legatee of an ethnic cleansing. And this was why he needed to encrypt the political within an already cryptic psychoanalytic tale, and transform the haunting sagas of familial and imperial abuse into a story about a man and a painting.

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CONCLUSION The Ghost of Cultural Studies

Words are also dwelling places. [Les mots sont aussi des demeures.] —Jean Cayrol, Oeuvre poétique

I

began this study with an epigraph from Roland Barthes’s “The Two Criticisms” (1963) and would like now to revisit it briefly in conclusion. Barthes’s chief complaint in the essay is that academic critics are only willing to perform ideological criticism “as long as the work can be put in relation to something besides itself”—what he calls its “elsewheres,” such as history and psychology. These critics reject “immanent analysis,” as he terms it, which considers the work in relation to the world “only after having entirely described it from the interior in its functions or . . . structure.”1 Since Barthes, poststructuralism and postmodernism have disabused us of thinking we can ever “entirely describe” anything or neatly distinguish a work’s interior from its exterior. They have also shifted our focus from the text’s “functions” and “structure” to its discourses and practices. But the substance of Barthes’s argument remains relevant to a core thesis of my project: the need to avoid the tendency in cultural studies to move too fast toward ideological critique; to leap frog over thick description and encrypted signs, semes, and symptoms to reach the text’s “elsewheres” of social and political significance. My readings have shown what can emerge when those leaps are suspended, when rapid moves toward the text’s elsewheres are forestalled, and when anasemic analysis, acutely attentive to linguistic detail and informed by psychoanalytic conceptual possibilities such as the crypt, 201

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illness of mourning, phantom, and cryptonymy, takes its time to locate dramas and ideologies embedded within the text’s narrative before tying them into broader historical networks and sociocultural contexts. Thus, in “Babette’s Feast” I moved below the signifying systems linking the ascetic and aesthetic, creativity and suffering, mass marketing and bourgeois consumption, to identify the text’s silences, connect them to unburied losses suffered by the story’s characters and Dinesen herself, and thereby show how the public’s ingestion of simulacra of the “feast” is a means of sharing in the mourning process that the text represents and performs. In Last Tango in Paris, I explained how the protagonists’ sadomasochistic trysts are not just a reflection of the sexual revolution or a rejection of repressive bourgeois traditions enforced by family, church, and state; they are enactments of the inability to mourn encrypted personal loss, and of France’s failure to acknowledge and grieve its history of censorship, colonialism, and collaboration. My third chapter, on Argentina’s fascist construction of an “official” history denying the horrors of the “Dirty War,” revealed how The Official Story is also a psychoanalytic study of the children of the disappeared who live unknowingly within the country’s bourgeois midst, and whose possible haunting may have disruptive effects upon Argentine society and democracy. The chapter also elaborated how phantomatic transmission can help explain psychopathological responses to the Holocaust and other social catastrophes. I developed the implications of phantom analysis in the next chapter’s rereading of “Sarrasine’s” ellipses, long associated with the unspeakable “truths” of castration and homosexuality, to show how they elide a very different “truth” of Jewish identity, and how elaborating this secret unveils the text’s engagement with France’s post-Revolutionary Judophobia and the perceived threat of the newly emancipated and “invisible” Jew. This analysis led to reconsidering Villiers’s archetypal symbolist drama, Axël, as a text whose concern with the occult conceals fin de siècle France’s growing racist anti-Semitism, while eerily prescribing a prophetic genocidal solution to the nation’s “Jewish problem.” Finally, I decrypted the saga of Dorian Gray’s incestuous origins, in what is generally considered one of Wilde’s least political texts, to expose its cryptic inscription of the history of Irish colonization, its associations of parental abuse with imperial power, and its embedding of the familial and societal sources of Wilde’s ambivalence toward his Anglo-Irish origins. To complete this study, let me pursue one last reading and return to Barthes’s Mythologies, which I discussed in my introduction. There I analyzed his two essays on detergents and skin creams as sites of the

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return of France’s repressed history of Nazi collaboration in order to illustrate the limits of cultural studies as it is currently practiced and the political and heuristic potential of engaged close reading informed by psychoanalysis. I want now to suggest that these are not the only two chapters in the Mythologies that speak of France’s inability to come to terms with the loss of its identity as a republic, or to mourn its Nazi alliance and enthusiastic contribution to exterminating its Jews. These themes are also found, in varying degrees and forms, in virtually all of the Mythologies, a fact that underscores not only the political and sociohistorical complexity of Barthes’s work; it also invites us to reassess these essays’ role as a cornerstone of cultural analysis and ideological critique. The essay entitled “Billy Graham at the Vél’ d’Hiv’” [“Billy Graham au Vél’ d’Hiv’”] is a prime example of what I’m suggesting. Barthes’s focus is on the hypnotic, tautological rhetoric of the evangelical spectacle as thousands of French Protestants gathered in a Paris stadium in 1955 to hear Billy Graham preach. Barthes unmasks the Cold War political agenda underlying this religious crusade, concluding that Americans have mistaken France’s long tradition of rationalism and intellectualism for an atheism that inevitably leads to Communism: “‘To awaken’ France from atheism is to awaken her from the Communist fascination. Billy Graham’s campaign has been merely a McCarthyist episode.”2 But while Barthes critiques the seductive, cult-like nature of this religious assembly and exposes the event’s latent political dimensions, he never mentions that the Vél’ d’Hiv’, as I explained in my analysis of Last Tango in Paris, was the infamous site of another politically driven “religious assembly”: La Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv’. During the roundup of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ in July of 1942, Vichy police arrested roughly thirteen thousand Parisian Jews and held seven thousand of them in the cycling stadium, before deporting them to Auschwitz and other death camps where almost all were killed. Eager to prove their bona fides as loyal accomplices of the Nazis, the Vichy authorities performed their task with what could be called religious or McCarthyite zeal, ferreting out the seditious threat in their midst with such enthusiasm that they also rounded up and deported Jewish children, going beyond what the Gestapo itself had requested. Thus, when Barthes describes Billy Graham ending his spectacle by performing a “material segregation” (65) of the assembled, amid publicity in the stadium for the tire glue made of dissolved rubber called “Super Dissolution” (65), and then leading this group into a “secret crypt” (65) for an “ersatz form of Initiation” (65), and when Barthes

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compares these theatrics with those of the magician, Le Grand Robert, who “terminates the ‘treatment’ of his public by a special selection . . . of the chosen” (65) whom he hypnotizes and “puts to sleep” (65), we hear haunting echoes of the “selections” of the Jews—the “Chosen people”— who were led into secret crypts or chambers for a fake, ersatz disinfecting, but were instead put to sleep permanently and dissolved by “special treatment”: the Nazi euphemism for extermination.3 As we listen to Barthes lament the anti-Communist ideology and political witch hunt implicit in Graham’s religious assembly, we thus also hear another lament—for the deported and exterminated Jews first assembled in the Vél’ d’Hiv’ as part of Vichy’s own political witch hunt—which has been cleansed, dissolved, or repressed from Barthes’s discourse but whose linguistic traces nonetheless return to be read. We find similar traces of this unspeakable narrative in “The Tour de France as Epic” [“Le Tour de France comme épopée”], in which Barthes observes that “‘race’”4 is audible in the racers’ names (“Brankart the Frank, . . . Robic the Celt” [79]), that their challenge in the event is “assimilation” (81) of France’s geography, and that “collapse” (84; Barthes’s italics), causing a racer to leave the Tour, is a “debacle [of] ‘Hiroshimatic’” (84) proportions.5 These and other elements reveal that the essay is not just about the famed bicycle race around the Hexagon of metropolitan France. It is also about France’s decision not to assimilate the Jewish race within its territory but rather to force its Jews to leave the Hexagon, via the bicycle racing oval of the Vél’ d’Hiv’, in a national debacle of “Hiroshimatic” or, we might say, “Auschwitzian” proportions. Sports and religion are also visible symptoms of the return of the repressed Vichy saga in “The World of Wrestling” [“Le monde où l’on catch”: the English “catch” translates “wrestling” in French] in which Barthes compares the spectacle of “Pain, Defeat and Justice” (19)6 in “the Ring” (17) to “Religious Worship” (25) and the “Suffering and Humiliation [of] Jesus” (21), since wrestlers “hold [and] immobilize the adversary indefinitely [and] convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer” (20).7 Torture, religious suffering, crucifixion of a Jew (Jesus), and “catching” and holding an adversary call to mind the “ring” of the Vél’ d’Hiv’—where boxing matches and other sports events were also held—and where the Jews who were “caught” by the French in the Rafle were held and immobilized in torturous conditions, before being sent off to further suffering, humiliation, and death. The unspeakable saga of France’s participation in the Final Solution permeates the Mythologies. We find allusions to it in the essay on the

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world travel guide called “The Blue guide” [“Le Guide bleu”]8 in which Barthes describes church sculptures as embodying “La Famille et le Travail” (123), echoing Vichy’s motto, “Famille, Travail, Patrie” (Family, Work, Homeland). We find it in “Steak and Fries” [“Le bifteck et les frites”], in which Barthes describes rare or “bloody” (“saignant” [78])9 steak as a symbol of pure French blood that has to be protected from foreign contamination. And we find it in “Poujade and the Intellectuals” [“Poujade et les intellectuels”] in which Barthes shows how Pierre Poujade’s description of Jewish Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France as “a bottle of Vichy water” (132; Barthes’s italics) links racial difference with physical weakness and “corporeal disgrace” (132).10 And yet, in all these references to religious campaigns, the Vél’ d’Hiv’, catching, selections, special treatment, torture, pure French blood, racial difference, physical inferiority, Jews, and Vichy, Barthes never recognizes that he is reading ciphered inscriptions of France’s collaboration in the Final Solution. He never notices how the ideological critiques he himself writes function as sites of the return of this repressed national history and anti-Semitic discourse. And he never realizes that his invocations throughout the Mythologies of a psychoanalytic mode of reading, which he does not perform, invite us to examine his own readerly and writerly ellipses—not just to reflect on what significations they might suspend, but to move psychoanalysis itself from the periphery to a more prominent position from which its heuristic, epistemological, and political potential for interpreting texts and contexts can be exploited. The figure many consider the grandfather of cultural studies has thus not only contributed significantly to establishing the terms and modes of cultural critique. His Mythologies are powerful, albeit unintentional examples of what cultural studies can miss when unaided by close reading focused on the psychoanalytic historicity of texts and the ways in which their unspeakable dramas conceal other social or political narratives. If, as I suggested in my introduction, Barthes’s essays are haunted by psychoanalysis, which hovers ghostlike in the margins of his work but never materializes to expose ideologies buried in the objects and discourses he examines, then cultural studies itself seems to have inherited this ghost. Even as its practitioners seek to identify implicit or repressed narratives of power or control, cultural studies carries the haunted legacy of Barthes’s silencing of psychoanalysis, along with the need—inherent in phantomatic transmissions—to preserve intact whatever secrets its deployment might reveal. In the process, this vibrant field of research has deprived itself of conceptual possibilities that could expose conflicted,

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shameful, and unspeakable sagas that are not just hidden or repressed in texts, but may also be incorporated, encrypted, or transmitted transgenerationally by them. The new psychoanalytic cultural studies I have proposed and practiced in this book aims in a sense to exorcise this ghost of psychoanalysis: to expose cultural analysis’ inheritance of an ambivalent and still spectral curiosity about the unconscious dimensions of texts and contexts, and to show that ideological critique need not suffer from close psychoanalytic reading. Quite the contrary, it can be enhanced, empowered, renewed, and ultimately redefined by it.

NOTES

I N T RO D U C T I O N V E X E D E N C O U N T E R S : P S YC H OA NA LYS I S , C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S , A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C LO S E R E A D I N G 1. “En somme, ce que la critique universitaire est disposée à admettre . . . c’est paradoxalement le principe d’une critique d’interprétation, ou si l’on préfère (bien que le mot fasse encore peur), d’une critique idéologique; mais ce qu’elle refuse, c’est que cette interprétation et cette idéologie puissent décider de travailler dans un domaine purement intérieur à l’oeuvre; bref, ce qui est récusé, c’est l’analyse immanente: tout est acceptable, pourvu que l’oeuvre puisse être mise en rapport avec autre chose qu’elle-même, c’est-à-dire autre chose que la littérature: l’histoire . . . , la psychologie . . . , ces ailleurs de l’oeuvre seront peu à peu admis; ce qui ne le sera pas, c’est un travail qui s’installe dans l’oeuvre et ne pose son rapport au monde qu’après l’avoir entièrement décrite de l’intérieur, dans ses fonctions, ou, comme on dit aujourd’hui, dans sa structure . . .” “Les Deux critiques,” Modern Language Notes 78, 5 (December 1963): 447–52; reprinted in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 246–51; Barthes’s italics. My translation. 2. Slavoj Žižek, perhaps more than anyone else, has rejuvenated scholarly interest in Lacanian theory and extended its applications for ideological critique and cultural analysis. His work combines neo-Marxist political and economic theory, post-Hegelian philosophy, and the implications of Lacan’s concept of the real (understood as the site of nonrepresentable horror and pleasure) to reflect on trauma, fantasy, jouissance, and economies of excess and surplus in the cultural sphere. In emphasizing the importance of the real over more traditional literary 207

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applications of Lacan’s distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic, Žižek has solidified Lacan’s place, alongside Freud, as one of the two dominant psychoanalytic discourses deployed in the service of cultural critique. Although both Žižek and I are interested in joining psychoanalysis with cultural analysis to unveil concealed ideologies, and although we both draw on core Freudian concepts such as repression, displacement, and transference while agreeing with Lacan’s emphasis on the importance of language for any psychoanalytic hermeneutic, my readings also draw upon psychoanalytic theories that diverge sharply from and also contest Freudian paradigms of psychic development and Lacanian models oriented by the phallus, lack, and the imaginary, symbolic, and real. 3. Roland Barthes, “Preface to the 1970 edition” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 9; Barthes’s italics. 4. Ibid. 5. “Soap-powders and Detergents” in Lavers, p. 37. Page numbers in parentheses following citations from the essay refer to Lavers’s translation, which I have modified. 6. “Saponides et Détergents” in Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), p. 38; Barthes’s italics. Page numbers following French citations are from this edition of the essay, which was originally published in Les Lettres nouvelles 21 (November 1954). 7. Quoted in Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 73, from “Depth Advertised” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 49. Translations from Howard, which I have modified, are henceforth noted as “Depth” and followed by page numbers. Page references to the French are from “Publicité de la profondeur” in Mythologies, first published in Les Lettres nouvelles 27 (May 1955). The French of Ross’s quotation reads: “‘La pourriture s’expulse (des dents, de la peau, du sang, de l’haleine)’: La France ressent une grande fringale de propreté” (85). 8. See, for example, review articles by Richard Kuisel, American Historical Review 101, 3 (June 1996): 859–60; Herrick Chapman, “Modernity and National Identity in Postwar France,” French Historical Studies 22, 2 (Spring 1999): 291–314; Margaret Atack, Modern Language Review 92, 4 (October 1997): 988–91; and Paul Betts, Design Issues 13, 2 (Summer 1997): 83–84.

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9. As readers of French will recognize, the rhetorical figures I am underscoring are all present in the original French: “feu liquide . . . faute de quoi l’objet lui-même est atteint, ‘brûlé’” (38). 10. “violente, . . . chimique”; “le produit ‘tue’ la saleté” (38). 11. “éléments séparateurs” (38). 12. “libérer l’objet de son imperfection circonstancielle: on ‘chasse’ la saleté, on ne la tue plus [car ce] petit ennemi malingre et noir . . . s’enfuit à toutes jambes du beau linge pur, rien qu’à la menace [du détergent]” (38). 13. “complice d’une délivrance et non plus seulement bénéficiaire d’un résultat” (39). 14. “masquer la fonction abrasive du détergent”; “l’ordre moléculaire” (40). 15. “feu total” (38); “le geste de la lavandière battant son linge” (39). 16. “sélectives” (38). 17. “une fonction de police, non de guerre”; “poussent, conduisent la saleté à travers la trame de l’objet” (38). 18. “la ménagère pressant et roulant la lessive le long du lavoir incliné” (39). 19. “scientisme,” “ultra-pénétrante,” “nettoyer en profondeur,” “régénérants,” “l’agent bactéricide R 51” (83–84; Barthes’s italics). 20. Zyklon B, the brand name for a form of hydrogen cyanide, was in fact originally used as a delousing and disinfecting agent. It was composed of hydrocyanic acid combined with bromide and chloride derivatives (as in the chlorinated bleaches that “kill and burn”) and a form of diatomaceous earth as a carrier. See “Zyklon B” by Pitch Bloch, the appendix to “A Paper Eichmann” in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 60–61. Zyklon B killed humans by penetrating the airways and skin and cutting off the cells’ ability to bind with oxygen, thus suffocating its victims internally. The Nazis experimented with different scenarios for delivering the poison into the gas chambers so that it would be more quickly absorbed through the nose, mouth, and skin, a fact eerily echoed by the ads’ claims for skin creams’ “ultra-penetrating” qualities. 21. See, among others, Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, trans. Nathan Bracher

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(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998); Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972); Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and JeanPierre Azéma, Jean-Pierre Rioux, and Henry Rousso, eds., Les Guerres franco-françaises, special issue of Vingtième Siècle, Revue d’histoire 5 (January-March, 1985). 22. I discuss the implications of the French government’s censoring of Night and Fog in the context of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and French film history in Chapter 2. 23. Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog], director Alain Resnais, script Jean Cayrol, cinematography Sacha Vierny, producer Anatole Dauman (Argos-Como-Cocinor, 1955). Translation and ellipses in subtitles from DVD of Nuit et Brouillard (Argos Films, 1956; The Criterion Collection, 2003). 24. See, for example, Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vols. 2–3 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), pp. 737–38, 955n, 966–67, 1118; and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, p. 161. Hilberg acknowledges that the rumor has been a very persistent one. 25. Bruno Frappat, “M. Le Pen et ‘l’effet détail’,” Le Monde (September 16, 1987): 1, 8. The highly overdetermined nature of “soap” as a figure of cleansing, extermination, and denial is underscored by the fact that, at Birkenau, “a towel and a piece of soap” were given to each Jewish prisoner before entering the gas chamber to persuade them that they were actually going to take showers. In John Mendelsohn, ed., The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes, vol. 11: “The Wannsee Protocol and a 1944 Report on Auschwitz by the Office of Strategic Services” (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), p. 252, also in L’Extermination des Juifs en Pologne, vols. 5–10, depositions by eyewitnesses, Third Series: “Les Camps d’extermination” (Geneva: C.J.M., 1944), pp. 59–60, quoted by Pitch Bloch in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, p. 62. In addition to Vidal-Naquet’s work on the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, see also Alain Finkielkraut, L’Avenir d’une négation: Réflexion sur la question du génocide (Paris: Seuil, 1982); and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, second ed. (New York: Plume, 1994).

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26. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992). 27. Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader, second ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 6. 28. Abraham and Torok were Hungarian and immigrated to Paris from Budapest in 1938 and 1947, respectively. Abraham received a degree in philosophy before becoming an analyst, while Torok was awarded a bachelor’s degree in child psychology before training as a psychoanalyst. 29. For a more extensive discussion of Abraham and Torok’s metapsychology, including their theories of the dual unity, phantom, anasemia, cryptonymy, symbol, trauma, catastrophe, and transphenomena, and for an analysis comparing their work with Freud’s and Lacan’s, see chapter 1, “For a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Works of Abraham and Torok,” in my Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 13–48. 30. Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction” in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 154; Caruth’s italics. See also Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). For an excellent review and critical assessment of trauma theory, see Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma Theory: Its Critics and Vicissitudes” in History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 31. It is important to emphasize that the secrets I decrypt are not the “meaning” or “truth” of the texts and that their unveiling does not represent or imply an end to interpretation—any more than uncovering a patient’s repressed trauma of sexual abuse constitutes the “meaning” of the patient’s narrative, the “truth” of the patient’s life, or the end of analysis. The close psychoanalytic reading process I elaborate is concerned with exploring how the complex rhetorical strategies deployed to hide and conserve intact unspeakable secrets are readable in and through the ontological paralysis their creation and preservation produce in those carrying them. It aims not to limit interpretation but to open up ways of linking a character’s (or patient’s) individual struggle to survive, in the face of potentially annihilating trauma, with collective sociocultural

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dramas and ideologically inflected histories. To conceive of this practice as one that fixes meaning or reveals the truth is to misconstrue it and to foreclose the new and fertile possibilities for ideological critique and cultural analysis this approach offers.

1. DEVOURING LOSS: A RECIPE FOR MOURNING IN “BABET TE’S FEAST” 1. Babettes gæstebud [Babette’s Feast], director Gabriel Axel, screenplay Gabriel Axel based on the short story by Isak Dinesen, cinematography Henning Kristiansen, producers Just Betzer and Bo Christensen (A-S Panorama Film International, 1987; MGM Home Entertainment Inc., 2001). While some “feasts” were held in private homes and offered in restaurants as a spontaneous reaction to the film, most of the restaurant dinners were arranged as part of the marketing strategy by the distributor, Orion Classics. The film, a Danish production made in 1987 and winner of that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is generally faithful to the short story, although it transposes the original Norwegian setting to a small village in Denmark, leaves out details about Babette’s activities in the Commune, and transforms Babette’s “broken Norwegian” into very competent Danish. Also, the scenes involving the preparation and serving of the dinner are more detailed in the film than in the short story. 2. See Richard Schickel, “Dining Well Is the Best Revenge,” Time (March 7, 1988): 42; and Stanley Kaufmann, “Changes of Voice and Place,” New Republic (March 21, 1988): 26–27. 3. Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 329. The short story was later included in the collection Anecdotes of Destiny. 4. Robert Langbaum, The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen’s Art (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 248–55. 5. Sara Stambaugh, The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), pp. 79–81. 6. Susan Hardy Aiken, Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 254. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Isak Dinesen, Babette’s Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny

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(New York: Vintage Press, 1988), p. 6. Page numbers following citations refer to this edition. 10. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. 1953–1973, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. 14, p. 243. Henceforth cited as “Mourning.” 11. Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. 1953–1973, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), vol. 19, p. 28. Henceforth cited as “Ego.” 12. The remaining difference for Freud between mourning and melancholia was that, in the latter, the relationship between the subject and the lost object taken into the ego was narcissistic and ambivalent. 13. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” in The Shell and the Kernel, trans. N. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 125–38, the French in L’Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978; Flammarion, 1987), pp. 259–75. Henceforth cited as “Mourning or Melancholia.” I am grateful to the late Maria Torok, with whom I discussed the film of Babette’s Feast over dinner in the winter of 1991, for her insights about mourning and introjection. 14. See Sándor Ferenczi, “On Transference and Introjection” in First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, trans. Ernest Jones (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1952), pp. 35–93. 15. Abraham and Torok distinguish melancholia from nonpathological mourning by the presence of a crypt or intrapsychic vault inside the ego in which the subject incorporates or seals off a loss that cannot be put into words because the subject shares a shameful, unspeakable secret with the lost object. Incorporation (which is not at issue in “Babette’s Feast”) is thus construed as a fantasy that allows the ego to avoid readjusting its internal topography in response to a loss that, if acknowledged, would threaten its integrity. I will discuss incorporation at the end of this chapter in the context of figuration, and also throughout the chapters that follow. 16. Le Grand Robert, caille, n.f., sense 2. The French expression was in use by 1863. Dinesen was fluent in French and often included French words, sentences, or verse in her works. 17. Preparing food for others to eat defined Babette’s life in Paris. It is thus through such preparation for others’ consumption that she buries her past life and begins to digest her loss. 18. OED, sarcophagus, sb., orig. adj., sense 1.

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19. The tale of cannibalism involving the consuming of an African chief’s grandchild, which Martine suddenly remembers following the dinner (46), reinforces the idea that the story is about the digestion (and introjection) of the dead. It is also noteworthy that blinis, which Babette prepares with caviar, are typically served at Russian wakes. 20. In addition to Stambaugh and Aiken, see Mary Elizabeth Podles, “Babette’s Feast: Feasting with Lutherans,” Antioch Review 50 (Summer 1992): 551–65; Margaret H. McFadden, “Gendering the Feast: Women, Spirituality, and Grace in Three Food Films” in Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film, ed. Anne L. Bower (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 117–28; and Frantz Leander Hansen, The Aristocratic Universe of Karen Blixen: Destiny and the Denial of Fate, trans. Gaye Kynoch (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2003), pp. 79–86. 21. L’Hermitage in Los Angeles, for example, served the feast for $75 per person, $105 with wine, while Petrossian in New York City offered the gastronomic experience for $90 per person, $125 with a glass of each of the accompanying wines. See Ruth Reichl, “Feasting à la ‘Babette’,” Los Angeles Times (March 20, 1988): 98; and Florence Fabricant, “In ‘Babette’ a Great Feast for the Palate and the Eye,” New York Times (March 2, 1988), sec. C: 1+. Other cities offering versions of the dinner included Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans. 22. Aiken, pp. 254–55. 23. Thurman, p. 281.

2 . T O RT U R E D H I S T O RY: C RY P T S , C O L O N I A L I S M , A N D C O L L A B O R AT I O N I N L A S T T A N G O I N P A R I S 1. Pauline Kael, “Tango,” The New Yorker 47 (October 28, 1972): 130–38. 2. Judith Christ, “‘Last Tango,’ but Not the Last Word,” New York Magazine (February 5, 1973): 64–65. 3. See Joan Mellen, “Sexual Politics and Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris” in Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1973), pp. 128–46; Yosefa Loshitzky, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995); and Norman Mailer, “A Transit to Narcissus,” New York Review of Books (May 17, 1973): 3–10.

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4. Gideon Bachman, “Every Sexual Relationship Is Condemned,” Film Quarterly 3 (Spring 1973): 5. For other oedipally inflected commentaries see Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Ungar, 1983), pp. 306–10; and T. Jefferson Kline, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. 106–26. Kline also draws on Winnicott for his reading. For a mixture of oedipal and pre-oedipal concerns, see Lynda K. Bundtzen, “Bertolucci’s Erotic Politics and the Auteur Theory: From Last Tango in Paris to The Last Emperor” in Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor: Multiple Takes, ed. Bruce Sklarew, Bonnie Kaufman, et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), pp. 175–99. 5. Robert Phillip Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 230. 6. Bachman, p. 4. 7. Ultimo tango a Parigi [Last Tango in Paris], director Bernardo Bertolucci, screenplay Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli, cinematography Vittorio Storaro, producer Alberto Grimaldi (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., 1972; MGM Home Entertainment Inc., 1998). 8. “The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed—everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt. . . . The crypt also includes the actual or supposed traumas that made introjection impracticable.” Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” in The Shell and the Kernel, trans. N. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 130. The original French in L’Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978; Flammarion, 1987), p. 266. I will discuss the concept of preservative repression in the context of the transgenerational transmission of unspeakable secrets in the chapters that follow. 9. In The Shell and the Kernel, pp. 107–24, first published as “La Maladie du deuil et fantasme du cadavre exquis,” Revue française de psychanalyse 32, 4 (1968): 715–33, and reprinted in L’Écorce et le noyau, pp. 229–51. 10. This view of psychic splitting has enormous implications for rethinking the etiology and treatment of psychopathology that resembles

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schizophrenia or schizoaffective, bipolar, or dissociative disorder, but that may instead, in certain instances, be understood as a manifestation of the illness of mourning. It should also be noted that Torok does not use the term “crypt” in her essay but “tomb.” The term “crypt” and its complex functioning with regard to trauma and mourning were not articulated until her work with Abraham in “Mourning or Melancholia” and “‘The Lost Object—Me’: Notes on Endocryptic Identification” (in The Shell and the Kernel, pp. 139–56, the French in L’Écorce et le noyau, pp. 295–317) and also in their The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. N. Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), first published as Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976). We can nonetheless read Torok’s essay on “Illness of Mourning” as a proleptic account of one kind of psychopathology that results in crypt formation. 11. “For those who might ask whether the illness of mourning is an autonomous formation or merely an episode in a prior neurotic problem, the recurrent dreams about teeth [which accompany the illness and most all its analyses], indicating conflicts of transition, authorize an answer. The illness of mourning is a special case of a wider and more inclusive framework of disturbances that generally characterize periods of transition.” (“Illness of Mourning,” pp. 123–24; my interpolation). 12. The ways in which the effects of traumas experienced by parents can be visited upon or transmitted to their children and succeeding generations as “phantoms” are explored in the chapters that follow. 13. By “trauma” here I do not mean a single, external event, such as witnessing the primordial scene, which Freud defined as always automatically traumatic. Rather, trauma refers to the internal, metapsychological reality that is constructed within and lived out by the subject when the subject’s ability to work through and introject a destabilizing intersubjective drama is obstructed. We cannot of course know what specific erotic drama(s) Paul may have experienced with his mother. However, his tale of the pipe, recounted in Paris to a French woman, is suggestive of one sexual possibility if heard interlinguistically, since faire une pipe or tailler une pipe (literally, “to make or carve a pipe”) is French slang for fellatio. 14. All English translations from the French here and elsewhere are my own. Tom:

Je fais mon plan. Voilà, c’est ça, j’ai trouvé. La marche arrière. . . . Mais oui, tu comprends? Comme une voiture. Tu mets le retour en arrière. Voilà. Ferme les

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yeux, mets le retour en arrière. Ferme les yeux. Voilà. Avance, avance en reculant. Voilà, tu retrouves ton enfance. Jeanne: Papa. Tom: Voilà, tu décolles, tu retrouves ton enfance. Jeanne: En grand uniforme. Tom: N’aie pas peur. Tu franchis des obstacles. Jeanne: Papa en Algérie. Tom: Voilà, tu as quinze ans, quatorze, treize, douze, onze, dix, neuf, voilà. Jeanne: . . . C’est mon premier amour, mon cousin Paul, . . . il jouait du piano comme un dieu. . . . Tom: Dis donc, parle-moi de ton père. Jeanne: Je croyais qu’on avait fini. Tom: Cinq minutes. Jeanne: Mais je suis pressée! J’ai un rendez-vous de travail. Tom: Eh alors, le colonel! le colonel! SCENE 13—INTERIOR: APARTMENT; DAY Jeanne: Le colonel avait les yeux verts et les bottes luisantes. Je l’aimais comme un dieu, Papa. Qu’est-ce qu’il était beau dans son uniforme. Paul: What a steaming pile of horseshit! . . . Jeanne: Je t’interdis! . . . Il est mort en ’58, en Algérie. Paul: Or ’68, or ’28, or ’98. Jean: En ’58! et je t’interdis de plaisanter avec ça! Paul: Listen, why don’t you stop talking about things that don’t matter here? . . . Jeanne: Why don’t you go back in America? Paul: I don’t know, bad memories I guess. . . . 15. Pierre Pitiot and Jean-Claude Mirabella, Sur Bertolucci (Castelnau-le-Lez: Editions Climats, 1991), p. 67. 16. David Thompson, Last Tango in Paris (London: British Film Institute, 1998), pp. 25–28; Kline, p. 115; and Kolker, p. 128. 17. Bertolucci has spoken openly and frequently about his analysis. See, especially, Fabien S. Gerard, T. Jefferson Kline, and Bruce Sklarew, eds., Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000); and Pitiot and Mirabella. 18. Ferenczi speaks of the catalytic function and shifting position of the analyst in the transference: “If we pursued [a] comparison taken from

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chemistry we might conceive of psychoanalysis, so far as the transference is concerned, as a kind of catalysis. The person of the physician has here the effect of a catalytic ferment that temporarily attracts to itself the affects split off by the dissection. In a technically correct psycho-analysis, however, the bond thus formed is only a loose one, the interest of the patient being led back as soon as possible to its original, covered-over sources and brought into permanent connection with them.” See Sándor Ferenczi, “Introjection and Transference” in First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, trans. Ernest Jones (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1952), pp. 39–40; Ferenczi’s italics. Transference is not the same as projection, a term one might logically be tempted to use in a cinematic context. Projection, like transference, can occur both within the analytic dyad and outside it. It is a defense mechanism by which the analysand attributes affects, qualities, thoughts, or behaviors to the analyst (or others) that belong to the analysand, but that are too painful to be recognized as part of him or herself. While projection is a regressive mechanism in ego functioning that may indeed occur as part of the transference, it is generally construed within the classical analytic dyad as a “supplement to the mechanism of displacement,” which is at the core of transference reactions. See Ralph R. Greenson, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1 (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1967), p. 175; Greenson’s italics. These observations about transference adhere most closely to classical Freudian thinking and practice. The management of transference reactions, the so-called neutrality of the analyst, and the question of when and whether or not to interpret the transference have been and continue to be debated and revised by post-Freudian clinicians from a variety of perspectives, including schools oriented by object relations, self psychological, relational, and Lacanian theories. It is impossible to say with certainty why the analytic scene, as I am describing it in Last Tango in Paris, is structured as a classical one, although Bertolucci’s own classical Freudian analytic experience was likely a strong influence. 19. The fact that Rosa lies on the “couch,” in the position of the analysand, while Paul sits beside her in the more “analytic” position underscores the film’s preoccupation with the spatial and dynamically relational positioning of the analyst/analysand dyad. 20. “un boxer . . . , puis il est devenu acteur, . . . révolutionnaire en l’Amérique du Sud, journaliste au Japon, un jour il débarque à Tahiti.” 21. Kinder and Houston first noted the correspondence between Paul’s life and Brando’s film roles, but interpreted it as a reflection on “romantic heroism” rather than in the context of method acting and its

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implications. See Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston, “Bertolucci and the Dance of Danger,” Sight and Sound 42, 4 (Autumn 1973): 190. 22. The process of “affective memory” used by method actors has always been controversial and has not been endorsed by all teachers or practitioners of The Method. It has been criticized by some as a “substitute for the emotionally releasing abreactive processes of psychoanalysis” and thus prone to become a “sort of ‘private therapy.’” It has also been deemed dangerous because of the “near hysterical emotions” the procedure can produce. See David Garfield, A Player’s Place: The Story of the Actor’s Studio (New York: Macmillan, 1980), p. 174. 23. “Je l’aimais comme un dieu, Papa. Qu’est-ce qu’il était beau dans son uniforme. . . . Il est mort en ’58 . . . et je t’interdis de plaisanter avec ça!” 24. Judith Christ, in her New York Magazine review, articulated for many the sense of outrage at the machismo-laden portrayal of women in the film, arguing that this in itself limited the film’s universality. Joan Mellen agrees that Jeanne may be “sexually vibrant and alluring, but she is without depth, real character or the capacity to rise to the role of heroine or rebel. Her entire body, complete with pubic hair, is continuously revealed to us because it is irrelevant to the dynamic of the film” (Mellen, p. 135). Bertolucci responded indirectly to this criticism, explaining that he had filmed a scene that showed Brando’s genitals, but cut it out “to shorten the film” and perhaps also out of a sense of shame: “I had so identified myself with Brando that . . . [t]o show him naked would have been like showing myself naked.” See Charles Michener, “‘Tango’: The Hottest Movie,” Newsweek 9 (February 12, 1973): 56. Bertolucci may have tried to redress this naked inequality in his next film, 1900, when he shot Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu totally nude, with closeups, in bed together with a prostitute. 25. “On ne transige pas lorsqu’il s’agit de défendre la paix intérieure de la nation et l’intégrité de la République. Les départements d’Algérie font partie de la République, ils sont français depuis longtemps. . . . Entre elle [leur population] et la métropole il n’est pas de sécession concevable. Cela doit être clair pour toujours et pour tout le monde, en Algérie, dans la métropole et aussi à l’étranger. Jamais la France, jamais aucun Parlement, jamais aucun gouvernement, ne cédera sur ce principe fondamental.” Le Monde (November 14–15, 1954): 3; my translation. 26. Ibid. 27. After a request for a voice vote was denied, the Senate followed the National Assembly’s action with a unanimous silent vote on October

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5, 1999. Concerning the number of victims of the Algerian War, the subject continues to stir debate. While there is general agreement that close to 25,000 French soldiers died, the number of Algerians killed ranges from the very low estimate of 141,000, given by the French government in March of 1962, to the official Algerian claim of “1.5 million martyrs” killed (a number stated in the Algerian Constitution of 1963 and reiterated by the Boumediene government in 1970). As Benjamin Stora observes, the battle of statistics is a complex ideological one that has contributed to reconstructing a mythic, imagined history of the Algerian War. See “Le Bilan des pertes” and “Conflits de mémoire: des archives et des chiffres” in Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), pp. 180–84, 269–76; and “Guerre d’Algérie: combien de morts?” in L’Algérie des Français, ed. Charles-Robert Ageron (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 275–77. Other important works that treat the complex history of the Algerian War and its aftermath include Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora, La Guerre d’Algérie: 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004); Jean-Pierre Rioux, ed., La Guerre d’Algérie et les Français (Paris: Fayard, 1990); John Talbott, The War Without a Name: France in Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (New York: Penguin, 1977); Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830–2000: A Short History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Charles-Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1839 to the Present, trans. Michael Brett (London: Hurst and Co., 1991); and Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War (London: Clarendon Press, 1994). See also Bertrand Tavernier’s 1992 documentary on the Algerian War, La Guerre sans Nom (GMT Productions, Le Studio Canal + & Little Bear). 28. The secrecy and lies covering the practice of torture were exposed most sensationally by the publication of Henri Alleg’s La Question (Paris: Editions de Minuit) in February 1958. Sixty thousand copies of this detailed account of his own torture were sold before the government decided the book was subversive and seized it. For a detailed account of how word of torture gradually seeped out, see “La divulgation des secrets, l’indifférence des Français” in Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, pp. 46–73. Discussions of torture gained momentum in 1999 after the “events” in Algeria were officially declared a “war,” and a large number of works have been published recently that include very disturbing accounts from a variety of victims and participants in the practice. See especially, Louisette Ighilahriz, Algérienne (Paris: Fayard/Calmann-

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Lévy, 2001); General Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, 1955–57 (New York: Enigma, 2002); and Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’Armée pendant la Guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). See also Pierre VidalNaquet’s earlier La Torture dans la République (Paris: La Découverte, 1983) and the review article by Adam Shatz, “The Torture of Algiers,” The New York Review of Books (November 21, 2002): 53–57. 29. Le Grand Robert gives 1955 for the first usage of ratonnade and cites, in support, a reference to the Algerian War. It also indicates that raton was already in use in 1937. 30. Paul himself evokes the events of 1968 when Jeanne tells him her father died in 1958: “Or ’68, or ’28, or ’98.” For more on the CRS and police involvement in massacres of civilian Algerians and French in Paris during the Algerian conflict, see Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, pp. 92–108. 31. Le Petit Soldat, screenplay Jean-Luc Godard, cinematography Raoul Coutard, producer Georges de Beauregard (SNC, 1960). On the censorship history of Le Petit Soldat, see Jean-Luc Douin, Dictionnaire de la censure au cinéma: Images interdites (Paris: PUF, 1998), pp. 206, 216. For more on the censorship of films concerned with Algeria, see “Le cinéma sous la censure” in Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, pp. 38–42; “Cinema Images of the Algerian Conflict, 1954–1992” in Dine, pp. 215–32; and Douin, passim. 32. Léaud had major roles in Godard’s very ideological La Chinoise (1967), Made in the USA (1966), Masculine-Féminine (1965), and Le Gai Savoir (1968), and very small parts in Pierrot le fou (1965), Alphaville (1965), and Weekend (1967). 33. Screenplay Jean Cayrol, cinematography Sacha Vierny, producer Anatole Dauman (Argos Films/Alpha Productions/Éclair/Films de la Pléaide/Dear Films, 1963). 34. Douin, pp. 199, 206. Resnais’s earlier anticolonial documentary made with Chris Marker, Les Statues meurent aussi [Even Statues Die] (Tadié Cinéma/Présence Africane, 1953), had already been censored and was not released until 1964 (Douin, p. 205). 35. Screenplay Franco Solinas, cinematography Marcello Gatti, producer Yacef Saadi (Igor Film/Casbah Films/Magna Films, 1966). 36. Although refusing to demonize either side, Pontecorvo is clearly allied with the insurgency. When the film was finally released in France, right-wing sympathizers bombed some cinemas where it was shown, threatened others, and, in Lons-le-Saunier, destroyed the movie

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screen and poured sulfuric acid on the film reels. As a result of this violence, the film was withdrawn from distribution for several years. See Douin, p. 50, and Rebecca Pauly, The Transparent Illusion: Image and Ideology in French Text and Film (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 31. 37. Pontecorvo’s films, like those of his fellow Italian Marxist Bertolucci, were highly political. In 1969, he cast Marlon Brando in the lead of Burn!, a film about the unintended consequences of colonialist power and the incitement of indigenous rebellion in the 1840s Caribbean. Brando’s presence in Last Tango just two years later thus, by itself, evokes Pontecorvo’s engaged filmography and The Battle of Algiers. 38. Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog], director Alain Resnais, script Jean Cayrol, cinematography Sacha Vierny, producer Anatole Dauman (Argos-Como-Cocinor, 1955), DVD (Argos Films, 1956; The Criterion Collection, 2003). 39. In a 1986 interview, Resnais explained that certain members of the French communist party wanted him to change the last words of the narration, which suggest that concentration camps still exist elsewhere and that the cries of those imprisoned continue to be ignored, because they felt this implicated the Soviet Union. Resnais clarified: “the Algerian War was starting in France, and there were already zones in the center of France with internment camps . . . where you were not allowed to stop your car as you drove by, . . . so I made the film . . . with this idea that, in a certain way, it was starting again in France. . . . I was thinking of the camps for Algerians that were being constructed in France.” Richard Raskin, Nuit et brouillard: On the Making, Reception and Functions of a Major Documentary Film (Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press, 1987), pp. 51–57; my translation. Louis Daquin, a French filmmaker and communist who was very moved upon seeing Resnais’s film, mediated the controversy and the narration was left unchanged. For more on the Algerian internment camps in France, see Benjamin Stora, “La politique des camps d’internement” in L’Algérie des Français, ed. Charles-Robert Ageron (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991), pp. 295–300; and Stora, Algeria 1830–2000, pp. 52–53. 40. The Vichy government had made mass arrests of Jews previously, but this was the first time that women, children, and the elderly were rounded up to be deported. For more on the Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv’, see Claude Lévy and Paul Tillard, Betrayal at the Vél d’Hiv, trans. Inea Bushnaq (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969); and Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New York: Holmes & Meier,

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1985), vol. 2, pp. 635–40. For essays on the intersections of memory, culture, and French anti-Semitism, see Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish Question” in France (New York: Routledge, 1995). 41. See John Mendelsohn, ed., The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes, vol. 11: “The Wannsee Protocol and a 1944 Report on Auschwitz by the Office of Strategic Services” (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), pp. 18–37. Bertolucci’s intention to name the street “Rue Jules Verne” is clear from the printed scenario of the film, which indicates that the first scene takes place on the Rue Jules Verne, but then describes the sequence we actually see with Paul and Jeanne on the BirHakeim bridge. See Bernardo Bertolucci, Last Tango in Paris, screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli (New York: Delacorte Press/Quicksilver Books, 1972). The screenplay, while generally faithful to the film, nonetheless contains several scenes that were cut from the film and slight differences in dialogue and settings. My contention that Bertolucci was sensitive to the self-referential and rhetorical potential of using traveling and tracking shots to film trains and train tracks, and that he was on some level influenced by the traveling shots of Night and Fog, is supported by his comment in a 1970 interview about the final shot of a train station in The Spider’s Stratagem: “At first the grass is not very thick, but as things go along—and here I can’t help being ironic—there is . . . the railroad in the railroad because it’s with a tracking shot that we shoot the railroad and so the tracking shot is of itself because it shows the rails which disappear under the grass which pervades the whole film from the beginning” (Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews, p. 57). 42. “le spectateur normal n’étant pas en mesure de se rendre compte de la différence entre les chefs criminels du régime nazi et l’Allemagne d’aujourd’hui.” Letter from the West German Embassy to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Christian Pineau, cited in Raskin, p. 35; my translation. Interestingly, West Germany was the first foreign country to purchase the film for national distribution. 43. “c’était quand même important de montrer que la France avait organisé des points de départ pour les camps.” Resnais explained in his 1986 interview that he asked for an official letter from the censorship commission requiring that he cut the gendarme shot so there would be a paper trail of the demand and no one could accuse him of initiating the cut himself. When the commission refused to issue the letter and threatened to suppress the last reel of the film if Resnais did not make the cut,

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the film was in effect put under censure in what Resnais called a “no man’s land.” Only after several weeks of negotiations was the compromise of doctoring the shot reached. By then, the censorship board did not dare to ask that the narration’s reference to “Camp de Pithiviers” also be cut, and they also backed down on an initial demand that Resnais remove several shots of corpses near the film’s end that were deemed too violent. Raskin, pp. 56–57. The theme of cutting and censorship is also suggested in Last Tango when Paul asks Marcel about his part-time job cutting out newspaper articles for an agency, and when Paul tells Jeanne to get a scissors to cut the fingernails on one hand so she can penetrate him. It is perhaps only a coincidence, since Dominique Sanda was Bertolucci’s first choice for the role of Jeanne, but still worth noting the irony that Maria Schneider’s name is German for “tailor,” from the verb schneiden: “to cut.” From the title sequence in which Schneider’s name appears alongside Francis Bacon’s images of the psychoanalytic dyad, the ideas of physical cutting, political censoring, and psychoanalytic repression are thus announced and overdetermined. Another irony involving censorship lies in the fact that Bertolucci was condemned for obscenity, along with Brando and Schneider, when Last Tango premiered in Italy in 1972. In 1978, the Appeals Court of Bologna ordered the destruction of the film negative and all but three copies of the film, which were to be held in the national film library on the condition that no one be allowed to view them. In 1978, Bertolucci resubmitted the film to the censors who, this time, allowed its distribution without any cuts. Douin, p. 56. 44. It is both ironic and troubling that the censored kepi shot has been restored to its original form, with the kepi fully visible and no trace of the obliterating beam, in both the French and U.S. versions of the recently released DVD of Nuit et Brouillard (Argos Films 1956, DVD Argos Films, Arte France Développement, 2003; The Criterion Collection, 2003). The challenge of preserving the history of the film’s censorship struggle and of filmmakers’ responses to it for future generations is clear. This is all the more relevant since Resnais has been criticized by many for failing to make clear that the Jews were the principal targets of the Nazi extermination camps. See, among others, Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Image of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 15–16, and the interviews with Serge Klarsfeld and Claude Lanzmann on the French DVD.

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Last Tango in Paris also evokes another film about the Collaboration with its own history of censorship: Marcel Ophüls’s Le Chagrin et la pitié [The Sorrow and the Pity]. Shot in 1967–1968 and originally intended for broadcast on French television, Ophüls’s relationship with the ORTF (the office controlling all radio and television broadcasting in France) became problematic when his two producers, both working for the ORTF, were forced out of the organization. Ophüls obtained funding from Germany and Switzerland to continue filming, and the finished film was shown in Switzerland, West Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States in 1971. The ORTF, however, refused to acquire the rights to the film, effectively if not officially banning it. The film was shown in a few theaters in Paris in 1971, but was not shown on French television until 1981. The film within Last Tango, Tom’s Portrait of a Girl, is a subtle reminder of this saga since Tom tells Jeanne he is making it “for French television” and since, like Ophüls’s film, which consists mostly of interviews, it focuses on Jeanne remembering and recounting events of the past. For more on the funding and distribution history of The Sorrow and the Pity, see Henry Rousso’s detailed account in The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 100–14. 45. In several notable speeches at the end of World War II, Charles de Gaulle rhetorically rewrote French history by speaking of “Paris liberated by itself” and of “Eternal France.” He also refused to declare the rebirth of the Republic since, despite Pétain’s dissolution of the Third Republic, de Gaulle claimed it had never ceased to exist. On the myths of postwar France’s rewriting of the Collaboration and other examples of Gaullist symbolism aimed at bracketing or sequestering the events of Vichy, see Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, pp. 15–59.

3 . H AU N T E D C H I L D R E N , C U LT U R A L C ATA S T RO PHE, AND PHANTOM TRANSMISSIONS IN THE “ D I RT Y WA R ” A N D T H E H O L O C AU S T 1. See William G. Niederland, “Clinical Observations on the ‘Survivor Syndrome,’” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968): 313–15; Erich Simenauer, “Late Psychic Sequelae of Man-Made Disasters,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968): 306–09; and

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Heinrich Winnick, “Contribution to Symposium on Psychic Traumatization Through Social Catastrophe,” International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 49 (1968): 298–301. 2. See Henry Krystal, ed., Massive Psychic Trauma (New York: International Universities Press, 1968); Henry Krystal and William G. Niederland, eds., Psychic Traumatization: After Effects in Individuals and Communities (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971); and Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1979). 3. See Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy, eds., Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Harvey Barocas and Carol Barocas, “Wounds of the Fathers: The Next Generation of Holocaust Victims,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 6 (1979): 331–40; Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust, trans. Naomi Goldblum (London: Routledge, 1992); and Rafael Moses, ed., Persistent Shadows of the Holocaust: The Meaning to Those Not Directly Affected (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993). 4. The phantom can be transmitted through caretakers such as governesses or nurses who become de facto family members. It can also be transmitted to someone outside the family. In this chapter I am concerned exclusively with intrafamilial phantoms. For an example of an extrafamilial transmission that occurs after a phantom’s passage through numerous generations within a family, see my analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 123–55. Nicolas Abraham first delineated the theory of the phantom in “Notes du séminaire sur l’unité duelle et le fantôme” (1974–1975) and in “Notules sur le fantôme” (1975), both in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978; Flammarion, 1987), and the latter published as “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology” in the second volume of Abraham and Torok’s translated writings, The Shell and the Kernel, trans. N. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). While some work has been done in South America, Germany, and other European countries, the vast majority of clinical case studies of phantom formations and their sequelae have appeared in France. See, especially, Claude Nachin, Les Fantômes de l’âme: A propos des héritages psychiques (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993); Serge Tisseron et al., eds., Le Psychisme à l’épreuve des générations: Clinique du fantôme (Paris: Dunod, 2000); Adèle Covello and G. C. Lairy, “L’épilepsie, agir du corps, maladie généalogique,” Top-

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ique 40 (November 1987): 99–141; Pascal Hachet, Cryptes et fantômes en psychanalyse: Essais autour de l’oeuvre de Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Serge Tisseron, La Honte: psychanalyse d’un lien social (Paris: Dunod, 1992); Lise Kovienski, “Recherche fantôme . . . rapidement” in La Psychanalyse avec Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok, ed. Jean Claude Rouchy (Paris: Eres, 2001), pp. 145–47; and Maria Torok, “Story of Fear: The Symptoms of Phobia—the Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom?” in The Shell and the Kernel, first published as “Histoire de peur, le symptôme phobique: Retour du refoulé ou retour du fantôme,” Études freudiennes 9–10 (1975): 229–38, reprinted in L’Écorce et le noyau, pp. 434–46. 5. For more on the concept of the dual unity and its relationship to phantom formations, see “The Dual Unity” and “The Child Gives Birth—to Itself” in Rashkin, pp. 16–21. It should be clear that, by secrets, I am not referring to gossip shared with some but not others, or family matters kept from children to preserve privacy, or even traumatic events initially kept secret but about which one can ultimately speak, even if only to one or two others. My concern is with secrets so shameful and potentially disintegrating that they are literally unspeakable and cannot ever be revealed to anyone. 6. The quotation marks around “Dirty War” here and throughout signal that the term is a contested one, used originally by the junta, and that the “war” was in reality a state-sponsored campaign of violence and human rights abuses directed at opponents of a repressive regime. 7. For an excellent overview of the “Dirty War,” see Martin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993). See also Donald C. Hodges, Argentina’s “Dirty War”: An Intellectual Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991) and his Argentina, 1943–1987: The National Revolution and Resistance, second ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988). 8. Moises Kijak and Maria Lucila Pelento, “Mourning in Certain Situations of Social Catastrophe,” International Review of PsychoAnalysis 13, 4 (1986): 463–71. For a psychosocial study of the effects of torture and disappearances, see Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, “The Treatment of Children in the ‘Dirty War’: Ideology, State Terrorism and the Abuse of Children in Argentina” in Child Survival, ed. Nancy ScheperHughes (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1987). 9. For other important works on this subject, see especially Nancy Caro Hollander’s Love in a Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in

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Latin America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Hollander’s “Buenos Aires: Latin Mecca of Psychoanalysis,” Social Research 57 (1990): 889–919; M. Brinton Lykes, “‘Children in the Storm’: Psychosocial Trauma in Latin America” in Surviving Beyond Fear: Women, Children and Human Rights in Latin America, ed. Marjorie Agosín (Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1993), pp. 152–61; Jo Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared (Boston: South End Press, 1989); and John Simpson and Jana Bennett, The Disappeared and the Mothers of the Plaza (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). 10. Brook Larmer, “The Lost Generation,” Newsweek (February 8, 1993): 39–40. 11. Hollander, Love in a Time of Hate, p. 182. Hollander also reports that, while there is hope that learning the real story of one’s identity is ultimately necessary and positive and that this provides a “foundation for an identity and life based on the truth” (182), some mental health clinicians are less sure of such positive outcomes and report encountering pathologies in restituted children involving blocked mourning, survivor guilt, or guilt for having “betrayed” their biological parents by loving their adoptive ones (251). On the debate about restoring children to their biological families, see Rita Arditti and M. Brinton Lykes, “The Disappeared Children of Argentina: The Work of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo” in Agosín, pp. 168–75. For a moving account of one restituted child, see Marifran Carlson, “A Tragedy and a Miracle: Leonor Alonso and the Human Cost of State Terrorism in Argentina” in Agosín, pp. 71–85. 12. Larmer, p. 39. 13. La Historia Oficial [The Official Story], director Luis Puenzo, screenplay Puenzo and Aida Bortnik, cinematography Félix Monti, producer Marcello Pineyro (Historias Cinematográfica /Progress Communications, 1985). 14. The song and lyrics are by the Argentine singer-songwriter María Elena Walsh, well known for her songs for children. The English translation is mine. “En el país de nomeacuerdo, doy tres pasitos y me pierdo. / Un pasito para aquí, no recuerdo si lo di. / Un pasito para allá, !Hay que miedo que me da! / . . . Un pasito para atrás, y no doy ninguno mas. / Porque ya, ya me olvidé donde puse el otro pie.” From the CD entitled Inolvidable (Sony Music Entertainment-Argentina, S.A., 1999). 15. Barocas and Barocas, p. 331. 16. Judith Kestenberg, “Survivor-Parents and Their Children” in Generations of the Holocaust, ed. Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy (New York: Basic Books, 1982), pp. 83–102.

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17. See Henry Krystal, “Integration and Self-Healing in Posttraumatic States” in Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays, ed. Steven Luel and Paul Marcus (New York: KTAV Publishing, 1984), pp. 113–33; and Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn, “Reverberations of Genocide: Its Expression in the Conscious and Unconscious of Post-Holocaust Generations” in Luel and Marcus, pp. 151–67. 18. Judith Kestenberg, “Metapsychological Assessment Based on Analysis of a Survivor’s Child” in Bergmann and Jucovy, p. 155. 19. Louise Kaplan, No Voice Is Ever Wholly Lost (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 223–25. 20. Kestenberg, “Survivor-Parents,” p. 101. 21. The psychoanalysts Vamik Volkan, Gabriele Ast, William Greer, Maurice Apprey, and Jean Laplanche have made significant contributions to the literature on transgenerational transmission of trauma. Their focus, however, tends to be on the sequelae of pathological mourning, on impediments to detachment from lost objects or their intrapsychic representations, on the ways in which parents unconsciously or consciously force aspects of their own internalized object relations into the internal self-representations of children, and on the dynamics of repair in which children attempt to remedy wounds or deficits suffered by parents. These perspectives, and others like them concerned with post-memory, complement but also differ from my and Abraham and Torok’s emphasis on the concealment of unspeakable secrets and the metapsychological and symptomatic implications of their unrecognized transmission. As I noted in my introduction, the workings and implications of the phantom, incorporation, and the crypt are also distinct from the contributions to trauma theory by scholars such as Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, for whom trauma is an unclaimable event that can only be experienced belatedly, in the aftermath of its forgetting, as a symptom of history. Key to the work of delineating and treating phantoms is the decrypting of language and behavior that, while generated to resist representability and understanding, is not irrevocably incomprehensible. Furthermore, in instances of the transgenerational transmission of haunting secrets, the traumatic event can be said to be both experienced and not experienced; that is, it is experienced (as opposed to fantasized or imagined) in one generation and not experienced (and hence not susceptible to repression, denial, foreclosure, etc.) by its intrapsychic legatee in another generation. For other works on trauma and its intergenerational transmission, see Vamik Volkan, Gabriele Ast, and William Greer, Jr., The Third Reich in

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the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and Its Consequences (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2002); Maurice Apprey, “Repairing History: Reworking Transgenerational Trauma” in Hating in the First Person Plural: Psychoanalytic Essays on Racism, Homophobia, Misogyny, and Terror, ed. Donald Moss (New York: Other Press, 2003); Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and LaCapra’s History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 22. Arnold Modell, Other Times, Other Realities: Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Treatment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 79; Modell’s brackets and italics. 23. In my example, it would not be unusual to find some form of sexual obsession or dysfunction among the daughter’s symptoms connected to the element of prostitution in the secreted drama. Thus, a predilection if not obsession for performing fellatio, which would serve to conflate sex, swallowing, and eating, might be present. Or, quite oppositely, the patient might be inorgasmic, which would suggest a desexualizing displacement of her desire to never need to be satisfied or nourished. There is also a strong possibility that the patient could exhibit some form of speech impediment that would link the history of verbal silencing and the inherited imperative to preserve the secret intact with her anorexia or inability to swallow. 24. Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom” in The Shell and the Kernel, p. 174.

4. RELIGIOUS TRANSVESTISM AND THE STIGMA OF JEWISH IDENTITY 1. Roland Barthes, S/Z, followed by “Sarrasine,” trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), p. 122; Barthes’s italics. The original French in S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970). I have modified slightly Miller’s translation of Barthes’s essay.

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2. Ibid., pp. 105–06. 3. Ibid., p. 62. 4. Barbara Johnson, “The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac” in The Critical Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 11. 5. Ibid.; Johnson’s italics. 6. Philip Stewart, “What Barthes Couldn’t Say: On the Curious Occultation of Homoeroticism in S/Z,” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24, 1 (March 2001): 9; Stewart’s italics. 7. Ibid., p. 8. 8. Ibid., p. 12. 9. Ibid., p. 6; Stewart’s italics. On Barthes’s failure to discuss homosexuality, see D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 10. Ibid., p. 11. 11. Ibid., p. 13. 12. Ibid., p. 12; Stewart’s italics. 13. Page numbers in parentheses following citations refer to Richard Miller’s translation of “Sarrasine,” addended to his translation of S/Z, op. cit., p. 227, although I have made significant modifications. 14. French quotations from “Sarrasine” are from Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, 12 vols., ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. 6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), pp. 1044–46; introduction and notes, Pierre Citron, pp. 1035–41, 1544–54. References to this text as well as others in the twelvevolume collection henceforth cited as La Comédie humaine followed by volume and page indications. 15. “La beauté, la fortune, l’esprit, les grâces de ces deux enfants venaient uniquement de leur mère. Le comte de Lanty était petit, laid et grêlé; sombre comme un Espagnol, ennuyeux comme un banquier” (1046). 16. “Ernest-Jean Sarrasine était le seul fils d’un procureur de la Franche-Comté. . . . Le vieux maître Sarrasine, n’ayant qu’un enfant, . . . espérait en faire un magistrat, et vivre assez longtemps pour voir . . . le petit-fils de Matthieu Sarrasine, laboureur au pays de Saint-Dié, s’asseoir sur les lys et dormir à l’audience pour la plus grande gloire du Parlement” (1057). 17. “pères” (1058); “comme son enfant” (1058); “une bonté paternelle” (1059). 18. “Besançon tout entier se félicita d’avoir donné le jour à un grand homme futur” (1058; my italics).

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19. “C’est sans doute par égard pour les cardinaux, les évêques et les abbés qui sont ici . . . qu’elle est habillée en homme . . . ?” (1072; Balzac’s italics). 20. “Est-il jamais monté de femme sur les théâtres de Rome? Et ne savez-vous pas par quelles créatures les rôles de femme sont remplis dans les États du pape?” (1072). 21. “restait des heures . . . à se représenter les héros d’Homère” (1057); “chevaux des immortels peints par Homère” (1064); “la beauté idéale” (1060). 22. “ces exquises proportions de la nature féminine” (1060). 23. “organization féminine” (1066), “en demandant à un modèle . . . les rondeurs d’une jambe accomplie; à tel autre, les contours du sein; à celui-là, ses blanches épaules; prenant enfin le cou d’une jeune fille, et les mains de cette femme, et les genoux polis de cet enfant” (1060). 24. The importance of this detail is underscored by the fact, mentioned in Pierre Citron’s notes to the story, that Balzac changed the original feminine demonstrative (cette) to the masculine in a late revision of the text (1550). 25. “un mouvement de folie”; “il n’existait pas de distance entre lui et la Zambinella”; “sentir le vent de cette voix, de respirer la poudre embaumé dont ces cheveux étaient imprégnés” (1061). 26. “bonheur . . . fécond” (1063). 27. “Un coeur de femme était pour moi un asile, une patrie. . . . Monstre! toi qui ne peux donner la vie à rien” (1074). 28. “Au moins est-il vrai que vous aimez à entendre raconter l’histoire de ces passions énergiques enfantées dans nos coeurs par les ravissantes femmes du Midi?” (1056); “il sentit un foyer qui pétilla soudain dans les profondeurs de son être intime, de ce que nous nommons le coeur, faute de mot!” (1061). 29. Le Grand Robert, modèle, n.m., sense 7. 30. “voix céleste” (1072); “voix d’ange” (1071). 31. “terrible et d’infernal” (1061); “tient autant au plaisir qu’à la douleur” (1062); “Il avait eu tant de plaisir, ou peut-être avait-il tant souffert, que sa vie s’était écoulée . . .” (1061). 32. Le Grand Robert, flétrir, v., sense II, 1 and 2. 33. “rendues par le ciseau des Grecs” (1060). 34. OED, stigma, sb., from Latin stigma via Greek, mark made by a pointed instrument, brand, from the root stig in Greek: to prick, puncture; sense 1, 2, and 3 (for the plural). 35. For authoritative studies of the legend of the Wandering Jew, see George Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence, RI:

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Brown University Press, 1965); and Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes, eds., The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 36. S/Z, p. 185. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., pp. 184–85. 40. “une depression morale impossible à expliquer”; “s’emparer de cette femme”; “‘Être aimé d’elle, ou mourir,’ tel fut l’arrêt que Sarrasine porta sur lui-même” (1061). 41. “agile . . . et . . . souple comme un fil auquel le moindre souffle d’air donne une forme” (1061); “s’était écoulée” (1061); “sur les marches d’une église [où] il se perdit dans une méditation confuse” (1062). 42. “il tomba dans un de ces paroxysmes d’activité qui nous révèlent la présence de principes nouveaux dans notre existence” (1062). 43. “hallucination”; “dans toutes les situations imaginables”; “dans toutes les poses . . . sans voile, assise, debout, couchée, ou chaste ou amoureuse” (1062). 44. “malgré les voiles, les jupes, les corsets et les noeuds de rubans qui la lui dérobaient” (1062). 45. “labyrinthe d’escaliers, de galeries et d’appartements”; “mystérieux appartement”; “sacrosaintes bouteilles” (1065). 46. “une orgie d’artistes” (1065); “inspirés par le peralta et le pedro ximenès . . . , des airs de la Calabre, des seguidilles espagnoles, des canzonettes napolitaines. . . . Les plaisanteries et les mots d’amour se croisaient, comme des balles dans une bataille, à travers les rires, des impiétés, les invocations à la sainte vierge ou al Bambino” (1067; Balzac’s emphasis). 47. OED, orgy, sb., sense 1 and 2. 48. “Mais c’est aujourd’hui vendredi”; “Sarrasine, qui n’était pas dévot, se prit à rire” (1068). 49. For Canon 68 and other canons on the Jews, see Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (Philadelphia: Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1933), pp. 308–09. On Drumont, see Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 86. The term Marrano was a pejorative one used in Spain, beginning in the fifteenth century, to refer to the falsely converted or Judaizing Jews. For more on Marranism, see Haim Beinart, Conversos On Trial (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981); Edward Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism (New York: Paulist Press, 1985); and Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos (Philadelphia:

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Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932). Balzac’s short story, “Les Marana,” ostensibly about the legacy of a family of courtesans, might now be reconsidered given that marana is the Portuguese spelling of “marrana” or (female) crypto-Jew. In his introduction to “Les Marana,” Pierre Citron notes this meaning and specifies, given the Italo-Spanish context of the story, that the word referred to “Saracens forced to be baptized by the edicts of Charles II of Anjou, king of Sicily in 1300” (La Comédie humaine, vol. 10, p. 1025). The theme of the converted Jew is woven throughout Balzac’s work via the pivotal character of the Baron Nucingen, a powerful Parisian banker who appears in thirty-one novels and short stories of La Comédie humaine, who is described in the opening pages of La Maison Nucingen [The Firm Nucingen] as “Alsatian and the son of some Jew who converted by ambition” [“Alsacien, fils de quelque juif converti par ambition”], (La Comédie humaine, vol. 6, p. 338), and who is mentioned at the beginning of “Sarrasine” as the guests at the Lanty ball speculate about their fortune: “Do you think they’re as rich as M. de Nucingen or M. de Gondreville?” (222) [“Les croyez-vous aussi riches que le sont M. de Nucingen ou M. de Gondreville?” (1044)]. I will discuss the presence of other Jewish characters in La Comédie humaine at the end of this chapter. 50. “quel rapport existe-t-il entre cette histoire et le petit vieillard que nous avons vu chez les Lanty?” (1075). 51. “un spectre” (1052–55); “cette ombre” (1053); “errer des revenants” (1054); “cadavre ambulant” (1055); “rire . . . goguenard” (1052). 52. “un secret si bien gardé” (1049). 53. “la fille du sultan dans le conte de La Lampe merveilleuse” (1045); “quelque Casauba” (1045); “des bohémiens” (1045); “parlaient l’italien, le français, l’espagnol, l’anglais et l’allemand avec assez de perfection pour faire supposer qu’ils avaient dû longtemps séjourner parmi ces différents peuples” (1044–45). 54. “Oh! Vous me faites à votre goût. Singulière tyrannie! Vous voulez que je ne sois pas moi.” (1056; Balzac’s italics). 55. S/Z, p. 207. 56. For a reading that considers the text in connection with the Revolution and the Terror, see Sandy Petrey, “Castration, Speech Acts, and the Realist Difference: S/Z versus Sarrasine” in Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 57. The Sephardic or “Portuguese” Jews numbered approximately 7,000–8,000 at the time. They had already been well assimilated in Spain

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and Portugal and hence, along with the small community of Jews in Avignon (roughly 2,000), elicited much less resistance in the assembly than the Ashkenazim. They were emancipated on January 28, 1790 (several months after the Protestants). With the implementation of Napoleon’s “Infamous Decree” of 1808, many of the civil rights afforded the Jews were lost, particularly by the Alsatian Jews. This decree was allowed to expire by Louis XVIII in 1818, at which time the French Jews achieved more or less complete and definitive emancipation. A last issue, the civil status of rabbis, was finally resolved in February of 1831 when Jewish clergy were granted the same status of salaried civil servants as Christian clergy. For more on the emancipation of the French Jews, see Jay Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Vanguard Press, 1975); Zosa Szajkowsi, Jews and the Revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 (New York: KTAV Publishing, 1970); Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). 58. “qui manifestera jusqu’aux derniers jours l’inexorable justice et la sainteté du Dieu que ce peuple osa renier. . . . [Ce peuple] porte en ses mains un flambeau qui éclaire le monde entier, et lui-même est dans les ténèbres. . . . Tous les peuples l’ont vu passer; tous ont été saisis d’horreur à son aspect: il étoit marqué d’un signe plus terrible que celui de Caïn: sur son front, une main de fer avoit écrit: DÉICIDE!” Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Minerva G.M.B.H, 1836–1837), pp. 43–44; my translation. 59. Readings of homoeroticism in “Sarrasine” might be expanded in light of this interpretation by examining the literary and sociocultural intersections, in nineteenth-century France, of the figures of the homosexual and the Jew. 60. In the pre-Drumont writings of Barruel, de Maistre, de Bonald, and anti-Semitic socialist disciples of Fourier such as Toussenel, Jews are attacked as agents who subvert the natural, “Christian” order of society and as parasitic merchants and bankers who rule as kings in control of a mercantile feudal economic system. See especially Alphonse Toussenel, Les Juifs rois de l’époque, histoire de la féodalité financière (Paris:

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Librairie de l’École Sociétaire, 1845); and Louis Gabriel Amboise, vicomte de Bonald, “Sur les Juifs, 1806” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 11. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1982), pp.113–37. 61. Poliakov, p. 299. 62. Édouard Drumont, La France juive, essai d’histoire contemporaine, 2 vols. (Paris: Marpon and Flammarion, 1886), vol. 1, pp. 316–17; my translation. 63. “le fils d’un brocanteur juif . . . mais sa mère était catholique, elle en a malheureusement fait un chrétien. . . . Cette origine que Nathan cache avec tant de soin . . .” (Une Fille d’Ève in La Comédie humaine, vol. 2 [1976], p. 332). 64. “jeune produit du calvinisme et du mosaïsme” (Le Cousin Pons in La Comédie humaine, vol. 7, p. 534). 65. “Était-il resté fidèle à la religion de sa mère, et regardait-il les Chrétiens comme sa proie? s’était-il fait catholique, mahométan, brahme ou luthérien?” (Gobseck in La Comédie humaine, vol. 2, p. 967). 66. For more on Jewish characters in Balzac, see Ketty Kupfer, Les Juifs de Balzac (Paris: NM7 Editions, 2001). 67. See chapter 4, “Legacies of Gold in Honoré de Balzac’s Facino Cane,” in my Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 81–92. 68. La Peau de chagrin and La Fille aux yeux d’or are two texts that come to mind as potential subjects of study. 69. S/Z, p. 207; Barthes’s italics. 70. S/Z, p. 214. 71. Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963), translated by Richard Howard as On Racine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964). 72. S/Z, in French, p. 20. 73. Ibid., p. 42. 74. “est cinglant à la façon d’un fouet châtieur [et] il coupe, il barre, il zèbre”; ibid., p. 113. 75. “en écharpe”; ibid.

5 . A N T I C I PAT I N G T H E F I NA L S O L U T I O N : S Y M B O L I S M A N D T H E O C C U LT E D J E W I N V I L L I E R S D E L ’ I S L E - A DA M ’ S A X Ë L 1. “J’appelle, comme le peuple, de ce nom méprisé de juif, tout trafiquant d’espèces, tout parasite improductif, vivant de la substance et

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du travail d’autrui. Juif, usurier, trafiquant, sont pour moi synonymes.” Alphonse Toussenel, Les Juifs, rois de l’époque, histoire de la féodalité financière [The Jews, Kings of the Age: A History of Financial Feudalism], second ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Gabriel de Gonet, 1847), vol. 2, p. 1; my translation. 2. “[L]es Juifs . . . haïssent le Christ en 1886, comme ils le haïssaient du temps de Tibère Auguste, ils le couvrent des mêmes outrages. Fouetter le crucifix le Vendredi-Saint, profaner les hosties, souiller les saintes images, telle est la grande joie du Juif au Moyen Age; telle est sa grande joie aujourd’hui. Jadis, il s’attaquait au corps des enfants; aujourd’hui, c’est à leur âme qu’il en veut avec l’enseignement athée; il saignait jadis, maintenant il empoisonne . . .” Édouard Drumont, La France juive, essai d’histoire contemporaine [Jewish France, essay of contemporary history], 2 vols. (Paris: Marpon and Flammarion, 1886), vol. 2, p. 381; my translation. 3. Philippe-Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) began work on Axël in 1869 and published parts of it in 1872, 1882, and 1884. The first complete edition appeared in La Jeune France in 1885–1886. The title of Edmund Wilson’s classic study of the origins of the Symbolist movement and its influence on Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Stein, Proust, and Valery—Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931)—refers to Villiers’s hero, whom Wilson sees as exemplary of the insulated, ultra-idealistic protagonist of the Symbolist aesthetic. For more on Axël’s influence on the Symbolist movement, see Alan Raitt, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam et le mouvement symboliste (Paris: José Corti, 1986). 4. See Raitt’s prefatory note to “La Céleste aventure” in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols., Alan Raitt and Pierre-Georges Castex, eds., vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 1207. Henceforth cited as Oeuvres complètes. 5. Léon Deffoux recounts that, when Villiers’s friendship with the half-Jewish writer Catulle Mendès soured, he publicly mocked him by miming a rapacious Shylock and chanting his name in imitation of Yiddish pronunciation. Alan Raitt, The Life of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 194. 6. “Chez vous, j’aurais eu—pour quelques plaisanteries antisémitiques, les coudées plus libres. Et je regretterai.” Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 1324. The letter was written to a Monsieur Lavignet on February 4, 1889. 7. The comments are not difficult to identify. Axël’s cousin Kaspar, for example, ironically accuses “the ‘honest’ bourgeois, the ‘honest’

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merchants, the ‘honest’ Jews” (79) [“les ‘honnêtes’ bourgeois, les ‘honnêtes’ marchands, les ‘honnêtes’ juifs” (595)] of accumulating their wealth through theft, usury, and ruses, while Sara explains that she was able to continue her trek to Axël’s castle by selling her “pearl and opal necklace to Jews” (162) [“à des juifs mon collier de perles et d’opales”] (666). Here and throughout, English translations and page references following citations are from Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axel, trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1970). Translations have been slightly modified by me. All French citations and page references to Axël are from Villiers’s Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, containing the definitive version published posthumously in 1890. 8. “[t]outefois, le portrait n’a rien de caricatural ni même d’ironique, et présente des traits plus doux: Mosé est ‘aumônieux,’ il est courageux, il a gardé sa foi ancestrale, . . . et il ne persécute pas les pauvres.” Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 1207; my translation. 9. “Ce sont les profiteurs, et non les juifs, qui excitent son indignation dans ‘La Céleste aventure.’” Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 1208; my translation. 10. There are other explicit traces of anti-Semitism in Villiers’s fiction that have been ignored. In “The Celestial Adventure,” Villiers compares Moses to Ahasverus, the anti-Semitic figure known as the Wandering Jew. In a disturbingly sadistic short story, “Torture by Hope” [“La Torture par l’espérance”] (1887), he describes a rabbi who is psychologically tortured by his inquisitor before being put to death. 11. Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion in Oeuvres complètes, 10 vols. (Paris: Minerva G.M.B.H, 1836–1837), vol. 3, pp. 43–44. 12. “C’est-à-dire, pour parler clairement, que les juifs ne peuvent pas être, et même, quoi qu’on fasse ne seront jamais citoyens sous le christianisme, sans devenir chrétiens.” Louis Gabriel Amboise, vicomte de Bonald, “Sur les Juifs, 1806” in Oeuvres complètes, 16 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1982), vol. 11, p. 130; de Bonald’s italics. 13. Toussenel, pp. 4–8. 14. “Les principaux signes auxquels on peut reconnaître le Juif restent donc: ce fameux nez recourbé, les yeux clignotants, les dents serrées, les oreilles saillantes, les ongles carrés au lieu d’être arrondis en amande, le torse trop long, le pied plat, les genoux ronds, la cheville extraordinairement en dehors, la main moelleuse et fondante de l’hypocrite et du traître. Ils ont assez souvent un bras plus court que l’autre.” (Drumont, vol. 1, p. 34; my translation.) For more on the sociopolitical

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developments leading to La France juive, see Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Vanguard Press, 1975); Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Béatrice Philippe, Les Juifs à Paris à la Belle Epoque (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992); and Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1972). 15. “d’abominables formules” (541). 16. “devise courant sur les lettres du nom”; “mage”; “devise . . . est plus incompréhensible” (539). 17. “j’ai tué [Kaspar p]our un secret . . . que je ne connais pas, — qu’hier j’oubliais, —et qui, depuis une heure, m’obsède, —m’envahit d’un intérêt dont je croyais avoir brisé la servitude” (632; Villiers’s ellipsis). 18. “Ici, l’on est en retard de trois cents ans”; “un jeune héros d’un autre âge . . . d’un caractère . . . des plus indéfinissables” (577). 19. “ne semblent pas être ceux d’un homme de ce siècle” (569). 20. “visionnaire” (585). 21. “un réceptacle inviolable, exfodié depuis des siècles, —un lieu de ténèbres, aux accès connus de lui seul, [qui] pouvait, au moins jusqu’à la paix prochaine, garder—fidèlement!—ce qui serait confié à ses profondes entrailles” (585). 22. “ses lignes d’arbres, —et . . . quelque antique haie de ramée et de hautes verdures . . .” (586). 23. “impénétrables ténèbres” (587); “le livre des souches, contrôle des reçus délivrés aux noms des dépositaires, a été détruit, brûlé!” (589). 24. Le Grand Robert, souche, n.f., sense 1, 2, and 3. 25. “paradoxales forêts” (597); “anciens amis” (616); “combattants” (626). 26. Le Grand Robert, devise, n.f., sense II. 27. The French word thalers is thus an interlinguistic cryptonym from which we can decrypt the Hebrew tallis through the following linguistic operations: thalers (in French)thalers (in German) by synonymytallis (in Yiddish/Hebrew) by homophony. Villiers claimed to know and speak Hebrew, and he transliterated Hebrew words in several works, including the short stories “L’Annonciateur” and “La Céleste aventure,” “Les Danaïdes” episode of Légende et histoire, and an early version of his novel L’Ève future. Since the Jewish population in Paris consisted largely of Ashkenazim at the time of the Third Republic, whatever Hebrew Villiers heard probably followed Ashkenzi/Yiddish pronunciation, which usually transforms the final “t” into “s” (rendering the

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Hebrew tallit as tallis) and “a” to “o.” An example of this latter transformation is found in “La Céleste aventure,” where Villiers transliterates the Hebrew word for holy (kadosch) as the Yiddish kodosch. Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 242. The reference noted earlier to the “veilleurs du souverain secret” (562) and the Abbess’s comment that, in the course of Sara’s esoteric reading, she had undoubtedly “deciphered some . . . strange piece of information—a sovereign . . . (Villiers’s ellipsis) hint! an important secret” (17) [“déchiffré quelque . . . étrange renseignement, —une suggestion . . . (Villiers’s ellipsis) souveraine! un important secret” (543)], can now be heard as confirmation of this interpretation and as a tacit indication that the devise from which the text’s “sovereign secret” is to be deciphered is, like the English “sovereign” in this French/German context, a foreign coin: thalers. Cryptonyms, literally “words that hide,” are key rhetorical figures through which phantoms are transmitted. They are always formed by linguistic transformations that involve at least two steps in which the “archeonym” (the unspeakable word elided from discourse) is embedded. This embedding or encrypting occurs via combinations of mono- or interlinguistic synonymy, homophony, paranomasia, and the like, all of which ensure the archeonym’s “safe” transgenerational passage. The challenge of analyzing cryptonyms lies in reconstructing their sequences of transformation so that traces of the unspeakable can be made audible and inscriptions of the illegible can be read. 28. “Extrais-toi de la geôle du monde, enfant des prisonniers. Évade-toi du Devenir! . . . C’est la sanction de l’Espérable. C’est là le seuil du monde occulte” (641–42); “qui écoute à peine, en une distraction profonde, comme ne pouvant déjà plus croire ni comprendre” (642; Villiers’s italics); “Oh! ces torrentielles richesses radieuses! —ce ne sont même plus des richesses! non: c’est un talisman” (642). 29. The French talisman is another interlinguistic cryptonym concealing the German for “man” and the Yiddish tallis. Villiers, who made several trips to Germany to visit his friend, the composer Richard Wagner, was somewhat familiar with German. For an analysis of another phantom text involving the deciphering of an interlinguistic cryptonym that hinges on reading the French word for “gold” (or) as an interlinguistic homophone of the Hebrew OR () meaning “light,” see the reading of Balzac’s “Facino Cane” in my Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, pp. 81–92.

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30. “étiquette collective d’engins, de munitions de guerre et de lourds projectiles” (584). 31. “l’excessive quantité de cet or en transfigure le nom” (656). 32. “la conquête de cette fantastique Toison d’or” (595). 33. OED, tallith, sb., (with Spanish Jews talit, Ger. Jews tallis) from the Hebrew meaning “to cover, shelter.” The garment or mantle . . . worn by Jews at prayer. 34. “manteau d’Apollonius” (639); “Autour d’un corps sensuel, le Manteau s’effrange, s’élime et se troue, laissant passer le vent des sépulcres” (640). 35. The French is from the Sacy Bible, the Port Royal translation most in use in the nineteenth century. La Bible, trans. Louis-Isaac Lemaître de Sacy (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990). English translations are my own. 36. There is no doubt that Villiers was familiar with the Sacy Bible’s descriptions of the fringed prayer shawl woven with hyacinthine blue threads. In “L’Annonciateur,” he describes the high priest of King Solomon’s temple as “crossing his sacerdotal phylacteries upon the folds of his hyacinthine shawl” [“croisant ses phylactères sacerdotaux sur les plis de son pallah d’hyacinthe” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 751; translation mine]. Villiers thus reveals his knowledge of the Sacy verses and of the ritual use of the tallis and phylacteries. 37. “la vérité de [s]on origine” (638); “occulte utérus” (640). 38. During Sara’s induction ceremony, the Celebrant of the Office of the Dead recites a Latin passage from Saint-Bernard’s Meditations that describes man as an “inferior,” “vile” being, born of “fetid sperm,” who “does not know his origin” [“Et non memor es quae sit origo tua” (553/28)]. This same passage, which first appears in the 1872 version of Axël, was added to the 1883 version of Villiers’s short story, “L’intersigne,” which I have interpreted elsewhere as a phantom text in which the protagonist, Xavier, is haunted by the secret of his origins: the fact that his family priest, abbé Maucombe, is his father. The references to fetid sperm and unknown origins function there, as they do in Axël, to speak tacitly of shameful and unorthodox religious paternity. See “The Interred Sign: Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’intersigne” in Family Secrets, pp. 64–80. 39. In his article, “Villiers de l’Isle-Adam et Éliphas Lévi,” Drougard establishes a very extensive list of Villiers’s borrowings from the occultist and shows how frequently Villiers actually cited or

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paraphrased him in Axël as well as in other texts. See Émile Drougard, “Villiers de l’Isle-Adam et Éliphas Lévi,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 10, 3 (1931): 505–30. 40. Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris: Editions Bussière, 1988), p. 50; my translation. 41. The idea of the transmission of knowledge and tradition is conveyed semantically by the word kabbala itself, which is generally translated to mean “tradition, transmission, and/or reception” of knowledge. 42. “sacrilège”; “fièvre dont il faille nous guérir” (672). 43. “l’anneau donné à [s]es aïeules pour gage des nuits nuptiales” (661). 44. “une âme obscure” (534). 45. “au fond de cet Orient que tu portes en toi-même” (673). 46. The path of the secret’s transmission to Sara is not as fully elaborated in the text as it is for Axël. The idea that her side of the family is also haunted by it, however, is confirmed by the fact that the French ambassador to Egypt from the Maupers branch, and not just the German ambassador from the Auërsperg side, added sphinxes to the family crest. This fact also allows us to deduce that the infiltration of the Jew into the Maupers/Auërsperg family tree must have taken place prior to the ambassadors’ trip to Egypt. 47. “oblique et cauteleux ennemi” in Drumont, vol. 2, p. 565. 48. “empoisonne,” ibid., p. 381. 49. “pour décomposer, pour dissoudre cette France,” ibid., vol. 1, p. 285. 50. “coupe mortelle” (677); “Sus aux grands arbres dont la mort nous donne le pain!” (676). 51. “Le Vieux de la Forêt” (627). The New Schöffler-Weis German & English Dictionary, Axt n.f., axe, Am ax; hatchet (Lincolnwood, IL: NTC, 1990). 52. Drumont, vol. 2, p. 316. Drumont’s argument was propelled in part by Germany’s annexation of Alsace following France’s defeat in 1871. As a result, France lost a large number of its Alsatian Jews, many of whom had retained their traditional customs and garb. This left France with an even larger proportion of well-assimilated, “invisible” Jews who could not be easily recognized. 53. “celui qui, derrière la science sociale officielle, décrypte le Mal juif” in Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 131; my translation.

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54. Drumont, vol. 2, pp. 564–65; my translation. 55. “l’exil” (677).

6 . I M P E R I A L L E G AC I E S A N D T H E A RT O F A B U S E I N T H E PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY 1. “The Case of Warder Martin: Some Cruelties of Prison Life” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, with an introduction by Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1966), pp. 958–64. About one year later, on March 24, 1898, Wilde wrote a second letter to the editor, entitled “Prison Reform,” in which he proposed ways of making prisoners’ lives more humane. Ibid., pp. 965–69. 2. Ibid., p. 959. 3. Ibid., pp. 959–60. My italics. 4. For a sociohistorical account of the text, see Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). For a discussion of the text as a narrative of homosexual desire, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Ed Cohen, “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation,” PMLA 102, 3 (October 1987): 801–13; Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Jeff Nunokawa, “Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” American Imago 49, 3 (Fall 1992): 311–21. Previous psychoanalytic readings of the novel include Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “The Phenomenon of Aging in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray: A Lacanian View” in Memory and Desire, ed. Murray Schwartz and Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and Judith Weissman, “‘The Castrating Gesture’ in Wilde and the Post-structuralists,” The Southern Review 24, 3 (1988): 520–34. 5. See especially Richard Pine’s The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), and Davis Coakley’s Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House, 1994), which have contributed to recent interest in Wilde’s nationalism, his participation in the Celtic revival, and the political dimensions of his writings, especially his drama and poetry.

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6. See, in order, Sedgwick, pp.175–77; Mary C. King, “Typing Dorian Gray: Wilde and the Interpellated Text,” Irish Studies Review 9, 1 (2001): 15–24; and Curtis Marez, “The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde’s Opium Smoke Screen,” ELH 64, 1 (1997): 257–87. 7. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988), pp. 19, 17. Page numbers in parentheses following citations refer to this edition. 8. See especially Nunokawa and Cohen. 9. Sándor Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child” in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Michael Balint, trans. Eric Mosbacher et al. (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1955), pp. 156–67. 10. Anna Freud, “Identification with the Aggressor” in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, trans. Cecil Baines (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), pp. 117–31. 11. Ferenczi concentrates on how the sexual abuser constructs the child as a desirable love object and on how the child, identifying with this construction, acts to “love” the abuser. But this paradigm also holds in instances where the abuser constructs the child as aggressive or even murderous so that the child, in order to be “loved” by the adult, acts out aggression toward others. 12. OED, margarite, sb., sense 1.; Margaret, sb., an application of L. margarita “pearl,” sense 1. 13. Le Grand Robert, véreux, adj., sense 1 and 2; and Robert & Collins Dictionnaire Français-Anglais/Anglais-Français, sense a and b. 14. Basil’s shift of identity is itself foreshadowed in the text when he speaks about Sibyl Vane in the same way that Kelso considered his subaltern son-in-law: “Dorian engaged to be married [to some little actress]! . . . I can’t believe it. . . . But think of Dorian’s birth, and position, and wealth. It would be absurd for him to marry so much beneath him. . . . I don’t want to see Dorian tied to some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his intellect” (60). 15. OED, larva, sb., sense 1 and 2. 16. OED, worm, sb., sense II, 11 and 11b. 17. OED, worm, sb., sense II, 10; Collins English Dictionary, worm, sb., sense 5, second ed. (London: Collins, 1986). 18. OED, kell, sb., sense 3b. Kelso  (by homophony) kell + sew  (by synonymy) “worm.”

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19. Isobel Murray reports that Wilde read about gems in A. H. Church’s Precious Stones (1882), one of the South Kensington Museum Art Handbooks that he consulted for his descriptions of collectibles in the novel, and in William Jones’s History and Mystery of Precious Stones (1880). Wilde was a frequent visitor to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum, known for its collections of jewelry, textiles, and furniture. See the editor’s notes in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 233. With regard to pearl formation, in 1791 the Danish conchologist Johann Hieronymus Chemnitz hypothesized that pearls formed as a “defense mechanism against intruders.” In 1856, F. de Filipi and Friedrich Küchenmeister proposed the “parasite theory” of pearl formation: that “pearls can be induced by the presence of parasites, and often form around them.” In Neil Landman, Paula Mikkelsen, et al., Pearls: A Natural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), p. 155. This theory was confirmed by R. Garner in 1873 in “On the Formation of British Pearls and Their Possible Improvement,” Journal of the Linnean Society 11:426–28, cited in Landman, pp. 211–12. It was also attested to by Max Bauer, who noted evidence of “small fishes, boring sponges, and worms in the nuclei of pearls but in no single case was the nucleus found to consist of a grain of sand.” In Precious Stones, 2 vols., trans. L. J. Spencer (New York: Dover, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 585–89, translated from the original German (1896) in 1904. 20. Le Grand Robert, doré, adj., sense I, 1 and 2. 21. The idea that the pearl has to be read as a person born from the oyster is underscored by Dorian’s reading of French verse from Gautier’s Émaux et camées [Enamels and Cameos] describing Venus emerging from the sea carried on a shell with her “pearly breast streaming” (“Le sein de perles ruisselant” [127]), recalling the origins of beautiful pearls from oysters. Dorian’s reading of French verses, which he repeats “over and over to himself” (127), also evokes worms since vers (French for “verse”) is also French for “worms.” 22. Michael A. Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 25–54. 23. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 386–423, reprinted from first edition (London: John Murray, 1871); and On the

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Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (New York: Heritage Press, 1963). This latter work contains a glossary of terms including “annelids, cocoon, imago, pupa, larva, and chrysalis.” Following Wilde’s arrest and charge with indecency and sodomy, a bankruptcy sale of the books and manuscripts in his private library, along with the entire contents of his London home on Tite Street, including furniture, china, paintings, and the like, was forced by the Marquis of Queensberry (who demanded payment of his court costs) and then joined by Wilde’s other creditors. In Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 459. Lot 63 in the auction catalogue for the sale lists “Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man, 4 vols. illus.” In Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, ed. A. N. L. Munby, 12 vols. (London: Mansell with Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 1971), vol. 1, p. 379. Sphingidae or “sphinx” are technically a family of moths within the Lepidoptera order. They are among the biggest and most colorful of moth families and are sometimes referred to as “evening butterflies.” They are named for the odd appearance of the caterpillar, which holds its head in a manner thought to resemble an Egyptian sphinx. For more on the Sphingidae, see Richard A. Martin, Butterflies and Moths: A Study of the Largest and Most Beautiful of the Insects (New York: Golden Press, 1958), pp. 32–33; and V. J. Stanek, Encyclopédie des Papillons, trans. Barbora Faure (Paris: Gründ, 1977). This reading of “sphinx” invites us to reread Wilde’s lengthy poem “The Sphinx” (published in 1894 although mostly written in the 1880s) in the context of butterflies, moths, and the trope of metamorphosis. 24. Salmon, pp. 95–97. Wotton, who was born at Oxford in 1492 and died in 1555, practiced as a physician in London and is also credited with establishing the modern science of zoology. 25. The Adonis Blue (Lysandra bellargus), first identified by Rottemburg in 1775, is one of the most beautiful of the “British Blues” (Salmon, pp. 365, 386), referred to by Darwin in The Descent of Man as “English Blues” (Darwin, p. 390), while the Narcissus Jewel (Hypochrysops narcissus) was discovered in its native Australia in 1775 by Fabricius, who also identified the Henotesia narcissus in 1798 in Mauritius and Reunion Island. In Bernard D’Abrera, Butterflies of the Australian Region, second ed. (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1971), pp. 336–37; and D’Abrera, Butterflies of the Afrotropical Region (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1980), p. 186. 26. OED, imago, sb., sense I. The final and perfect stage or form of an insect after it has undergone all its metamorphoses; the “perfect insect.”

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27. Collins English Dictionary, chrysalis, sb., from Latin chrysallis, from Greek khrusallis, from khrusos gold. 28. The Picture of Dorian Gray, director Albert Lewin, screenplay Albert Lewin, producer Pandro S. Berman, cinematography Harry Stradling (MGM, 1945). In the novel, Henry’s retort at dinner that the “only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes” underscores this theme of butterflies, since he “played with the idea, . . . tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox” (37). 29. Emphasizing this idea, Dorian does not call her Mrs. Leaf but simply “Leaf” (92). “Pupil” comes from the Latin pupillus and pupilla, diminutives of pupus (boy) and pupa (girl, doll, puppet), respectively. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1973). 30. In a letter of April 15, 1892, Wilde wrote that “The book in Dorian Gray is one of the many books I have never written, but it is partly suggested by Huysmans’s À Rebours, which you will get at any French booksellers. It is a fantastic variation on Huysmans’s over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age.” The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, eds. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000), p. 524. 31. The use of crushed laurel leaves, which give off prussic acid (hydrocyanic acid), was first introduced in 1835 by James Francis Stephens, an English entomologist and author of A Systematic Catalogue of British Insects. This became a very popular killing method, rivaling the use of chloroform. In London in 1859, the lepidopterist W. D. Crotch published a variation of this in The Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, which involved mixing potassium cyanide with tartaric acid to produce prussic acid fumes. Salmon, pp. 63–64, 141–42. On wing venation, see Lionel Higgins, The Butterflies of Britain and Europe (London: Collins, 1983), p. 20. 32. The satyrs are so named because many species live in woods, like the satyrs of Greek mythology. Martin, p. 29. 33. Webster’s, vermilion, sb., ME vermilioun, from OF vermeillon, from vermeil, adj., bright red, vermilion, from LL vermiculus kermes, from L, little worm. 34. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, second ed. (London: James Fraser, 1840), p. 28. 35. Ibid. Wilde was very interested in Carlyle’s work and owned his antique writing table, which was auctioned off with all his other possessions in 1895. Munby, p. 386.

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36. Carlyle, p. 28. 37. Ibid., pp. 26–27. For more on British perceptions of the Irish, see L. P. Curtis Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, CT: University of Bridgeport, 1968), pp. 17–36; Edward G. Lengel, The Irish Through British Eyes: Perceptions of Ireland in the Famine Era (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Richard Ned Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976); and David Hayton, “From Barbarian to Burlesque: English Images of the Irish c. 1660–1750,” Irish Economic Social History 15 (1988): 5–31. 38. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958, 1968), p. 105. 39. Ibid., p. 106. 40. “In the long run this union of the livelier, more mercurial and more fiery temperament of the Irish with the stolid, patient, and sensible character of the English can only be mutually beneficial.” Ibid., p. 139. For more on Carlyle’s and Engels’s constructions of the Irish immigrant from the context of race and capitalism, see Amy E. Martin, “‘Becoming a Race Apart’: Representing Irish Racial Difference and the British Working Class in Victorian Critiques of Capitalism” in Was Ireland A Colony?: Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Terrence McDonough (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), pp. 186–211. 41. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland: From the First Printed Edition (1633), ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 14, 44–75. Written in 1596, the tract was not published until 1633. 42. Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued [And] Brought Under Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign (1612), ed. James P. Myers (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), p. 171. Davies was influenced by Spenser’s tract, which was circulated in manuscript form years before its actual publication. 43. Ibid., p. 224. 44. Sir John Temple, The Irish Rebellion, or An History of the Beginnings and First Progress of the General Rebellion Raised within the Kingdom of Ireland upon the Three and Twentieth Day of October, in the Year 1641; Together with the Barbarous Cruelties and Bloody Mas-

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sacres which Endured Thereupon (London: A. M. and R. R. for Edw. Gellibrand, 1679), p. 8. For a comparative analysis of the writings of Spenser, Davies, and Temple on the question of Irish nationalism and identity, see Kathleen M. Noonan, “‘The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People’: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth-Century Policy and Propaganda,” The Historical Journal 41, 1 (March 1998): 151–77. 45. For more on the plantations and the colonization of Ireland, see Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and also Canny’s Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 46. “Mr. Froude’s Blue Book” in Oscar Wilde: Selected Journalism, ed. Anya Clayworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 38. The review was originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 13, 1889. 47. See Coakley, pp. 200–02. 48. By 1851, about 160,000 Irish-born inhabitants or children born in England of Irish parents were living in London, principally in the East End areas of Holborn and the south side of the Thames east of London Bridge. Francis Sheppard, London: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 291; and Marc Brodie, The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London 1885–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 193–98. 49. Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Logan Pearsall Smith, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907). 50. Sir Martin Ewans, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and Its Aftermath (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002); and Barbara Emerson, Leopold II of the Belgians: King of Colonialism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979). 51. On Wilde’s parents, see Ellmann, pp. 6–11; and Terence De Vere White, The Parents of Oscar Wilde (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967). 52. Ellmann, p. 196. 53. Pall Mall Budget (June 30, 1892); quoted in Pine, p. 12. 54. New York World (June 18, 1882) and St. Paul Globe (June 18, 1882); quoted in Ellmann, p. 196.

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55. V. O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (London: Constable, 1938), p. 79; quoted in Coakley, p. 195. 56. “Oscar Wilde—Arrival of the Great Esthete,” The Atlantic Constitution (July 5, 1882); quoted in Coakley, p. 184. 57. In a letter to W. E. Gladstone, November 2, 1888, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 369. 58. E. H. Mikhail, ed., Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 92–93.; quoted in Coakley, p. 196. 59. “Should Geniuses Meet?,” Court and Society Review IV (May 4, 1887): 413–14; quoted in Ellmann, p. 196. 60. Better the rule of One, whom all obey / Than to let clamorous demagogues betray / Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 715. 61. Ibid., pp. 710–13. 62. Ibid., p. 915. 63. Ellmann, p. 13. 64. Joy Melville, Mother of Oscar: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde (London: John Murray, 1994), pp. 88–106; and Ellmann, pp. 13–15. 65. Gary Schmidgall notes that the one surviving letter to his father, written when Oscar was nineteen, has no salutation and is signed “Oscar O’F. W. Wilde,” while Oscar refers to his father in a letter to his mother from the same period as “Sir William.” The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar (New York: Dutton, 1994), p. 83. 66. In Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand, eds., Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 135. Wilde was paraphrasing Jeremiah 31:29 and Ezekiel 18:2 in response to William Kingdom Clifford’s theories about the psychological as well as physical inheritance of acquired characteristics. See John Sloan, Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 143–44. 67. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 538. 68. See William Wilde, Practical Observations on Aural Surgery and the Nature and Treatment of Diseases of the Ear with Illustrations (Philadelphia: Blanchard & Lea, 1853), pp. 223–47, 393–99; Hanau W. Loeb, “Surgery of the Mastoid Process: Wilde’s Incision,” in Operative Surgery of the Nose, Throat, and Ear for Laryngologists, Rhinologists, Otologists, and Surgeons, 2 vols. (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1919), vol. 2, pp. 309–27; and Charles H. Burnett, The Ear: Its Anatomy, Physiology,

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and Diseases. A Practical Treatise for the Use of Medical Students and Practitioners (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1877), pp. 518–20. 69. A major risk of mastoid surgery via Wilde’s incision was perforation of the mastoid emissary vein or the posterior aural artery, both lying behind the ear alongside the mastoid process, since this could lead to catastrophic blood loss and death. See Aural Surgery, p. 233, and Frederick Whiting, The Modern Mastoid Operation (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co., 1905), pp. 93–97. The “incision” Dorian makes in Basil’s vein behind the ear thus represents a “botched” procedure that not only leads to Basil’s death, but can also be read symbolically as Oscar Wilde’s own psychic murder at the hands of his surgeon father, and as William Wilde’s “death” at the novelistic hands of his son. In a sad irony, it appears that radical mastoid surgery using Wilde’s incision and carried out under chloroform was likely performed on Oscar Wilde in the final weeks of his life to treat a chronic middle ear infection that had become acute and that ultimately led to meningoencephalitis, a brain infection similar to meningitis from which he ultimately died. The photograph of Wilde taken the day after his death as he lay on his deathbed reveals a mourning wreath positioned to camouflage the invasive surgery performed on his right ear. See Ashley Robins and Sean Sellars, “Oscar Wilde’s Terminal Illness: Reappraisal after a Century,” Lancet 356, 9244 (November 25, 2000): 1841–43. 70. “Confession Album” filled out by Wilde in 1877, reprinted in Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), pp. 44–45. 71. Letter to Reginald Harding, circa June 16, 1877, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 54.

CONCLUSION: THE GHOST OF C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 1. “Les Deux critiques,” Modern Language Notes 78, 5 (December 1963): 447–52; reprinted in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 246–51; Barthes’s italics; my translation. 2. “‘Réveiller’ la France de l’athéisme, c’est la réveiller de la fascination communiste. La campagne de Billy Graham n’a été qu’un épisode maccarthyste,” in Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), p. 102. Page numbers following French quotations from this and other

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Mythologies discussed here refer to this edition. The English translation (which I have modified) in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 66. 3. “ségrégation matérielle”; “Super Dissolution”; “crypte . . . secrète”; “l’ersatz formel de l’Initiation” ; “terminait le ‘traitement’ de son public par une sélection particulière, distinguant . . . les élus”; “un ensommeillement” (101). “Les Élus,” like “the Chosen” in English, refers to the Jewish people. Collins & Robert French-English/EnglishFrench Dictionary, Élus, n.m., sense 2c, second ed. (London & Paris: Collins and Le Robert, 1987). 4. The English in Howard, p. 79. The French is “‘race’” (111). 5. “Brankart le Franc, . . . Robic le Celte” (111); “problème d’assimilation” (113); “l’affaissement” (116; Barthes’s italics); “une débâcle [d]’un caractère ‘hiroshimatique’” (116). 6. English citations from Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). The French: “grand spectacle de la Douleur, de la Défaite, et de la Justice” (17). 7. “le Ring” (15); “au Culte” (24); “de la Souffrance et de l’Humiliation [de] Jésus” (19–20); “une prise . . . qui permet d’immobiliser indéfiniment l’adversaire et . . . de transmettre au public cette paresse terrifiante du tortionnaire” (18). 8. The English in Lavers, pp. 74–77. 9. Ibid., p. 62. Lavers leaves “saignant” in French; Barthes’s italics. 10. The English in Howard. “une bouteille de Vichy” (187; Barthes’s italics); “disgrâce corporelle” (187).

Index

Abraham, Karl, 55 Abraham, Nicolas: Works by: “Notes du séminaire sur l’unité duelle et le fantôme,” 226n4; “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” 226n4, 230n24 Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok: and antimetaphor, 21, 43; background of, 211n28; and the crypt, 15, 21, 55, 93, 213n15, 215n8, 215–16n10; and cryptonymy, 15; on introjection and incorporation, 15, 21, 30–31, 93–94, 213n15, 215n8; on mourning, 15, 30–31, 52, 93–94, 213n15, 215n8; and the phantom, 15, 93–94, 110, 226n4; on secrets, 16, 52, 93–94, 215n8, 229n21; theoretical differences with Freud, 21, 30, 93–94, 211n29, 226n4; on transference, 110; on trauma, 15–16, 93, 215n8, 215–16n10. Works by: L’Écorce et le noyau, 213n13, 215–16nn8–10, 226n4; “‘The Lost Object—Me’: Notes on Endocryptic Identification,” 215–16n10; “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” 30–31, 43, 213n13, 215n8, 215–16n10; The Shell and the Kernel, 213n13, 215–16nn8–10, 226–27n4, 230n24;

The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, 215–16n10 Algeria: and The Battle of Algiers, 82, 87, 222n37; decolonization and nationhood of, 4–5, 9–10, 13, 21, 48, 51, 72–83, 89, 219–20nn27–28, 221n30; as feminized, 77; and film censorship, 81–83, 221n31, 222n39; and Last Tango in Paris, 21, 48, 51, 62, 71–84, 89, 219–21nn27–31, 222n39; and Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, 81–82, 87; and Night and Fog, 83–84, 222n39; and Le Petit Soldat, 81, 87, 221n31; and ratons and ratonnades, 79–80, 82–84, 89, 221nn29–30; and torture, 5, 10, 72, 76–83, 89, 220n28 Althusser, Louis, 14 anasemic reading, 16–17, 44, 114, 132, 201, 211n29: and illness of mourning, 59; and the phantom, 93, 111, 122; and transphenomena, 111 antimetaphor, 21, 43, 57 anti-Semitism: and Axël, 22, 138–41, 152, 154–56, 237n6, 238n10, 238–39n14, 242n53; and Last Tango in Paris, 89, 222–23n40; and Mythologies, 7–11, 14, 23, 205; and Night and Fog, 8, 10; and psychoanalytic close reading, 14, 17, 110–11,

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anti-Semitism (continued) 115; and “Sarrasine,” 22, 115, 120, 125–26, 130–35, 233n49, 234–35n57, 235n60; and S/Z, 134–35. See also, Auschwitz; collaboration, France’s; crypto-Jews; Drumont, Édouard; Final Solution, the; genocide; Holocaust, the; Judophobia; Marrano(s); Night and Fog; Pithiviers; Toussenel, Alphonse; Vél’ d’Hiv’; Vichy; Wandering Jew, the Auschwitz, 7, 83–84, 86–87, 203–4, 210n25, 222–23nn40–41 Axël (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam): and antiSemitism, 22, 138–41, 152, 154–56, 237n6, 238n10, 238n14, 242n53; crypt as family tomb in, 138, 142, 144–45, 148–50, 152–53; cryptonyms and cryptonymy in, 22, 141, 148, 239n27, 240n29; and Édouard Drumont, 22, 137–41, 152–56, 237n2, 238n14, 242n47, 242n52, 243n54; and the Final Solution, 22, 137, 153; and la France juive, 137, 139–40, 152, 154, 156, 237n2, 238n14; and genocide, 23, 202; Jewish identity in, 22, 138–39, 141, 147–48, 150, 202; and Judophobia, 139, 152, 202; and Kabbala, 150–52, 154, 242n41; the occult and occulted in, 137–38, 142, 146, 148–54, 156, 202, 241n39; the phantom in, 143, 149, 152–53, 240n29, 241n38; secret(s)in, 22, 138, 141–53, 239n27, 241n38, 242n46; Symbolist movement and symbolism in, 22, 137, 141–42, 148, 150–51, 156, 202, 237n3; Alphonse Toussenel and, 137, 140, 235n60, 236n1; and the Wandering Jew, 238n10. See also anti-Semitism; Drumont, Édouard; ideology; Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Philippe-Auguste Axel, Gabriel, 21, 25, 212n1 “Babette’s Feast” (Dinesen): and antimetaphor, 21, 43; artistic creation and psychic suffering in, 26–27, 42–46; blocked mourning and

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unspeakable loss in, 20–21, 26–33, 37–38, 40–42; burying the dead in, 34–38, 213n17; and the crypt, 21, 43–44, 213n15; and demetaphorization, 21, 43–44; film adaptation of, 21, 25; filmgoers’ response to, 21, 25–26, 45; Freud’s theories of mourning and, 21, 29–30, 213n12; incorporation and, 21, 30, 43–44, 213n13, 213n15; introjection in, 21, 30–31, 36, 40, 42–44, 213nn13–14, 214n19; and the Last Supper, 26, 42, 45; psychic indigestion in, 27, 31, 36; and psychic memorialization, 27, 36–40; secret(s) in, 20, 27–28, 32, 37, 39, 43–44; selfcure in, 36–37, 42, 44, 50; speaking of loss in, 36–46. See also, Blixen, Karen; Dinesen, Isak Bacon, Francis, 63–65, 71, 78, 89, 223–24n43: and Study for Portrait (Isabel Rawsthorne), 63–64, 68, 78, 80; and Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 63–65 Balzac, Honoré de: La Comédie humaine, 132, 231n14, 233–34n49, 236nn63–65; Le Cousin Pons, 133, 236n64; “Facino Cane,” 133, 236n67, 240n29; La Fille aux yeux d’or, 236n68; Une Fille d’Ève, 133, 236n63; and French anti-Semitism, 131–33; Gobseck, 236n65; La Maison Nucingen, 233–34n49; “Les Marana,” 233–34n49; La Peau de chagrin, 236n68; “Sarrasine,” 11, 22, 113–15, 122, 130–35, 139–40, 202, 230n1, 231nn13–14, 233n49, 234n56, 235n59; Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, 133; and the Wandering Jew, 113, 130–31, 133. See also “Sarrasine” Barthes, Roland: Barbara Johnson on, 113–14, 231nn4–5; “Billy Graham at the Vél’ d’Hiv,’” 203–4, 251–52nn2–3; “The Blue guide,” 205, 252n8; D.A. Miller on, 114, 231n9; “Depth Advertised,” 4–7, 208n7; A Lover’s Discourse, 11; Mythologies, 2–4, 11, 23, 134, 202–5, 208n3, 208nn6–7,

Index 251n2; Philip Stewart on, 113–14, 133, 231n6; “Poujade and the Intellectuals,” 205, 252n10; and psychoanalysis, 1–11, 14, 23, 205; on “Sarrasine,” 22, 113–14, 122, 129, 133–35, 230n1; “Soap-Powders and Detergents,” 2–7, 208nn5–6, 209nn9–19; “Steak and Fries,” 205, 252n9; Sur Racine, 134, 236n71; S/Z, 11, 22, 113, 133–35, 230n1, 231n4, 231n6, 231n13, 233n36, 234nn55–56, 236nn69–70, 236n72–75; “Le Tour de France as Epic,” 204, 252nn4–5; “The Two Criticisms,” 1, 201, 207n1, 251n1; “The World of Wrestling,” 204, 252nn6–7 Battle of Algiers, The (Pontecorvo), 82, 87, 222n37 Bertolucci, Bernardo: and Before the Revolution, 47; and The Conformist, 47; and Last Tango in Paris, 21, 47–48, 50, 61, 63–65, 72, 77, 81–86, 89, 210n22, 214–15nn3–7, 217–18nn17–18, 219n24, 222n37, 223n41, 224n43; and Luna, 61; and 1900, 219n24; and The Spider’s Stratagem, 47. See also Last Tango in Paris Blixen, Karen, 45, 214n20. See also Dinesen, Isak Brando, Marlon, 48, 64, 69, 72, 218n21, 219n24, 222n37, 223–24n43. See also Last Tango in Paris Caruth, Cathy, 19, 211n30, 229n21 Cayrol, Jean, 8, 201, 210n23, 221n33, 222n38 censorship, 8, 10, 17, 21, 48, 51, 75, 80–83, 87–89, 202, 210n22, 221n31, 221n34, 223–25nn43–44 close reading: and anasemia, 16–17, 114, 132, 201; the argument for psychoanalytic, 1–4, 7–11, 14–24, 201–6; aversion of cultural studies to, 1–2, 11–14, 201, 205–6; and clinical work, 17–18, 96–98; of the political and sociohistorical, 1–2, 8–11, 14, 17–19, 21–26, 44–48, 50–51, 72–89, 93,

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98–104, 108–11, 113–15, 126–35, 137–41, 153–60, 189–99, 201–6; and psychoanalytic historicity, 17, 205. See also ideological critique; ideology collaboration, France’s: and Barthes’s Mythologies, 7, 10, 14, 23, 203, 205; and Last Tango in Paris, 21, 47–48, 50, 80, 83–89, 202, 224–25nn44–45; and the phantom, 110; and S/Z, 134–35 colonialism, 17, 111: and Barthes’s Mythologies, 4–5, 9–10, 13; and Last Tango in Paris, 21, 47–48, 50–51, 72–83, 88–89, 202, 219–21nn25–31, 221–22nn34–37, 222n39; and The Picture of Dorian Gray, 23, 159–60, 189–95, 202, 244n6, 247–49nn34–50 crypt: and “Babette’s Feast,” 21, 43–44; as family tomb in Axël, 138, 142, 144–45, 148–50, 152–53; in Last Tango in Paris, 21, 47, 50, 52–53, 55–56, 71, 89, 215n8, 215n10; metapsychological concept of, 15, 93, 201, 213n15, 229n21; in Mythologies, 203–4, 252n3 crypto-Jews, 22, 124–25, 130, 233–34n49. See also Marrano(s) cryptonym, cryptonymic. See cryptonymy cryptonymy, 15, 17, 201, 211n29, 215–16n10: in Axël, 22, 141, 148, 239n27, 240n29; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 159, 178–80, 187–89 cultural studies: and anasemic reading, 16–17, 93, 111, 114–15, 132, 201; aversion to close reading by, 1–2, 11–14, 201, 205–6; aversion to psychoanalysis by, 1–4, 11–24, 159–60, 201–6; psychoanalytic, 1–4, 11, 14–15, 19, 23, 205–6; and psychoanalytic historicity, 17, 205. See also close reading; ideological critique; ideology; Mythologies deconstruction, 13–14, 110, 113–14, 159 de Gaulle, Charles, 73, 225n45 demetaphorization, 21, 43–44, 52, 57 Dinesen, Isak: and “Babette’s Feast,” 20, 25–26, 31, 40, 45–46, 202, 212n3,

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Dinesen, Isak (continued) 212nn4–6, 212n9, 213n16; and the film of Babette’s Feast, 21, 25, 212n1; and Kenya, 45–46; and Out of Africa, 46 “Dirty War,” the: and The Official Story, 22, 98, 101–4, 202, 227nn6–8; and phantom transmissions, 22, 91, 93, 98, 104, 202; and secrets, 22, 100–1 Drumont, Édouard, 22, 125, 131, 137–41, 152–56, 233n49, 235n60, 236n62, 237n2, 238n14, 242n47, 242n52, 243n54 dual unity, 95, 97, 211n29, 227n5 “Ego and the Id, The” (Freud), 29–30, 213n11 exquisite corpse, 55, 58, 215n9 fantasies of incorporation, 21, 43, 50–53, 56–58, 76, 89. See also incorporation Felman, Shoshana, 19, 211n30, 229n21 Ferenczi, Sándor, 15, 21, 30, 158, 163–64, 213n14, 217n18, 244n9, 244n11 film censorship. See censorship Final Solution, the, 6, 9, 22, 83–84, 86, 89, 137, 153, 204–5 France juive, La (Drumont), 125, 131, 137, 139–40, 152, 154, 156, 236n62, 237n2, 238n14. See also Drumont, Édouard Freud, Anna, 163, 244n10 Freud, Lucian, 63–65 Freud, Sigmund: classical analysis and transference, 64, 68, 217n18; and cultural studies, 2, 15, 207n2; “The Ego and the Id,” 29–30, 213n11; and Lucian Freud, 64; on mourning and melancholia, 21, 29–31, 213n12; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 29, 213n10; and oedipal dynamics in Last Tango in Paris, 48, 50–51, 59, 71, 215n4; his theories compared to Abraham and Torok’s, 93–94, 211n29, 226n4; on trauma, 91, 216n13 genocide, 10, 23, 89, 91, 106, 111, 202, 229n17

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Godard, Jean-Luc, 81, 214n3, 221nn31–32 haunting. See phantom Holocaust, the: Abraham and Torok influenced by, 16; and Barthes’s Mythologies, 7–9, 209n20, 210n25; clinical perspectives on, 91–92, 104–8, 226nn2–3, 229n17, 229n21; Louise Kaplan on, 105–6, 229n19; Judith Kestenberg on, 105–7, 109, 228n16, 229n18, 229n20; and Last Tango in Paris, 83, 87, 223n41, 224n44; Arnold Modell on, 106–8, 230n22; and the phantom, 22, 91–93, 104–9, 202, 226n4; and secrets, 22, 105–9, 230n23. See also Auschwitz; collaboration, France’s; Final Solution; genocide; Night and Fog; Pithiviers; Vél’ d’Hiv’; Vichy identification with the aggressor, 10, 15, 163–64, 167, 244n10 ideological critique, 1–2, 10, 12, 15–17, 21, 201, 203, 205–6, 207n2, 211n31. See also cultural studies; ideology ideology: of anti-Semitism, 6, 89, 115, 127, 129–35, 139–41, 203–5; bourgeois, 3–4, 6, 10, 159; buried, concealed, embedded, encrypted, or hidden, 5–6, 13–14, 17, 20, 22–23, 127, 131–32, 201–2, 205, 207n2; and the “Dirty War,” 98, 227n8; of empire, 75, 83; and psychoanalysis, 1–3, 5, 11, 14–23, 132, 201–6, 207n2, 211n31 illness of mourning: and anasemic analysis, 59, 201, 216n11; and the crypt, 93, 215n10; and cultural critique, 15; in Last Tango in Paris, 51, 55–56, 59, 64, 216nn10–11 incorporation: and “Babette’s Feast,” 43, 213n13, 213n15; in Last Tango in Paris, 21, 50–52, 71–72, 89, 215n8; metapsychological concept of, 15, 21, 30, 93, 213n13, 213n15, 215n8, 229n21; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 23, 167. See also fantasies of incorporation

Index intrapsychic vault. See crypt introjection: and “Babette’s Feast,” 21, 30–31, 42–44, 213nn13–4, 214n19; in Last Tango in Paris, 21, 52–53, 55–56, 59, 61, 76, 80, 89, 215n8, 217–18n18; metapsychological concept of, 15, 21, 30, 93, 95, 213nn13–4, 215n8, 217–18n18; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 23, 163 Johnson, Barbara, 113–14, 231nn4–5 Judophobia, 139, 152, 202 Kabbala, 150–52, 154, 242n41 Kaplan, Louise, 105–6, 229n19 Kestenberg, Judith, 105–7, 109, 228n16, 229n18, 229n20 Lacan, Jacques: and cultural studies, 2, 14–15, 207n2; his theories applied to Last Tango in Paris, 48, 50–51, 217–18n18; his theories applied to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 243n4; his theories compared to Abraham and Torok’s, 94, 211n29 Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci): Abraham and Torok’s theories and, 52, 55, 215n8, 215n10; and Algeria, 21, 48, 51, 62, 71–84, 89, 219–21nn27–31, 222n39; analytic scene in, 50, 59, 63–71, 80, 89, 217–18nn18–19; antimetaphor in, 57; anti-Semitism and, 89, 222n40; and Francis Bacon, 63–65, 71, 78, 89, 223n43; and The Battle of Algiers, 82, 87, 222n37; and Bernardo Bertolucci, 21, 47–48, 50, 61, 63–65, 72, 77, 81–86, 89, 210n22, 214–5nn3–7, 217nn15–18, 219n24, 222n37, 223n41, 223n43; Marlon Brando in, 48, 64, 69, 72, 218n21, 219n24, 222n37, 223n43; and censorship, 21, 48, 51, 75, 80–83, 87–89, 221n31, 221n34, 223–25nn43–44; colonialism and, 21, 47–48, 50–51, 72–83, 88–89, 221n34, 222n37; crypt in, 21, 47, 50, 52–53, 55–56, 71, 89, 215n8, 215n10; and demetaphoriza-

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tion, 52, 57; exquisite corpse in, 55, 58, 215n9; fantasies of incorporation in, 21, 50–53, 56–58, 76, 89; and the Final Solution, 83–84, 86, 89; and France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, 21, 47–48, 50–51, 80, 83–89, 224–25nn44–45; and Lucian Freud, 63–65; Freudian theory and, 48, 50–51, 59, 215n4, 216n13, 217n18; the Holocaust and, 83, 87, 223n41, 224n44; illness of mourning in, 51, 55–56, 59, 64, 215–16nn10–11; incorporation in, 21, 50–2, 71–72, 82, 89, 215n8; and introjection, 21, 52–53, 55–56, 59, 61, 76, 80, 89, 215n8, 217n18; Lacanian theory and, 48, 50–51, 217n18; and Luna, 61; mourning in, 21, 48, 50–61, 66, 71–72, 76, 82, 89; and Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, 81–82, 87; and Night and Fog, 83–89, 210n22, 222nn38–39, 223n41, 224n44; and Le Petit Soldat, 81, 87, 221n31; and preservative repression, 52, 55–56, 94, 215n8; ratons and ratonnades in, 79–80, 82–84, 89, 221n29; and Isabel Rawsthorne, 63–64, 68, 78, 80; Maria Schneider in, 48, 69, 72, 223n43; secret(s) in, 21, 50, 52–56, 60, 71–72, 80, 82, 89, 220n28; and torture, 60, 72, 75–78, 80–83, 89, 220n28; transference in, 64, 67–70; trauma and, 50, 52, 59–61, 66, 68, 76, 80–83, 89, 216n13; and the Vél’ d’Hiv,’ 84–89, 222n40; and Vichy, 51, 83–89. See also Algeria; illness of mourning; “Method, The”; Night and Fog Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 9, 110, 210n25 Lover’s Discourse, A (Barthes), 11 Luna (Bertolucci), 61 Marrano(s), 125, 233n49. See also crypto-Jews Mendès France, Pierre, 74, 76, 205 “Method, The,” 69, 218–19nn21–22 Miller, D. A., 114, 231n9 Mitterrand, François, 75–76

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Modell, Arnold, 106–8, 230n22 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 29, 213n10 “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” (Abraham and Torok), 30–31, 43, 213n13, 215n8, 215–16n10 Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais), 81–82, 87. See also Last Tango in Paris Mythologies (Barthes), 2–4, 11, 23, 134, 202–5, 208n3, 208nn6–7, 251n2 New Criticism, 13–14 Night and Fog (Resnais), 8, 10, 83–89, 210nn22–23, 222n38, 223n41 Official Story, The (Puenzo): and the “Dirty War,” 22, 98–104, 202; and the phantom, 22, 98, 101–4, 202; secrets in, 22, 101–4 Petit Soldat, Le (Godard), 81, 87, 221n31 phantom: in Axël, 143, 149, 152–53, 240n29, 241n38; clinical examples of, 22, 96–101, 108–9, 226n4, 230n23; and cultural catastrophes, 109–11; and the “Dirty War,” 22, 91, 93, 98–104, 202; dual unity and, 95–97, 211n29, 227n5; and “Facino Cane,” 133, 236n67, 240n29; and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 226n4; and the haunting of cultural studies, 11, 23–24, 201–6; and the Holocaust, 22, 91–93, 104–9, 202; and “L’intersigne,” 241n38; metapsychological theory of, 15, 22, 91–98, 105–11, 201, 205, 211n29, 216n12, 226–27nn4–5, 229n21, 230n24; in The Official Story, 22, 98, 101–4, 202; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 23, 159, 171, 173–74, 177, 179–81, 185–86, 188; and preservative repression, 94; in “Sarrasine,” 22, 114, 121–22, 125, 127, 131, 133, 202; transphenomenological relationship and, 22, 111 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde): and the aesthetic, 159–60, 164, 171, 185; and Anglo-Irish identity, 23, 160,

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189, 191, 193, 195, 199, 202; child abuse in, 23, 157–60, 163–64, 166, 169–71, 179, 195–99, 243n1, 244n9, 244n11; colonial history and empire in, 23, 159–60, 181, 189–99, 202, 244n6, 247–49nn34–50; cryptonyms and cryptonymic formation in, 159, 178–81, 187–89; incorporation in, 23, 164, 166–67, 169–70; and the phantom, 23, 159, 171, 173–74, 177, 179–81, 185–86, 188; and prison letters 157–58, 195–96, 243n1; secret(s) in, 23, 159, 171, 174–82, 185, 187–89, 192; trauma in, 23, 188, 195; and Wilde’s relation to his parents, 194, 196–99. See also, trauma; Wilde, Oscar; Wilde, Jane Francesca; Wilde, William Pithiviers, 7, 84, 87–89, 223–24n43 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 82, 221–22nn36–37: The Battle of Algiers, 82, 87, 222n37; Burn!, 222n37 preservative repression, 52, 55–56, 94, 215n8 psychoanalytic historicity, 17, 205 Puenzo, Luis, 22, 101, 104, 228n13 Raitt, Alain, 138–39, 237nn3–5 Rawsthorne, Isabel, 63–64, 68, 78, 80 Resnais, Alain, 8–9, 81–84, 86–88, 210n23, 221n34, 222nn38–39, 223–24nn43–44 Ross, Kristin, 4–5, 9–10, 13, 208n7 “Sarrasine” (Balzac): and anti-Semitism, 22, 115, 120, 125–26, 130–35, 233n49, 234–35n57, 235n60; Barthes on, 22, 113–14, 122, 129, 133–35, 230n1, 236n69; castration in, 22, 113–15, 119, 122, 126, 135, 202, 234n56; and crypto-Jews, 22, 124–25, 130, 233–34n49; and La France juive, 125, 131, 236n62; homosexuality and, 114–15, 133–34, 202, 231n6, 235n59; and Jewish identity, 22, 113, 115, 121, 126, 132–33, 202; Barbara Johnson on, 113–14, 231nn4–5; and Judopho-

Index bia, 202; and Marrano(s), 125, 233n49; D. A. Miller on, 114, 231n9; the phantom in, 22, 114, 121–22, 125, 127, 131, 133, 202; religious drag in, 122–24; secret(s) in, 22, 114–15, 121–27, 132, 202; Philip Stewart on, 113–14, 133, 231n6; and S/Z, 11, 22, 113, 133–35, 230n1, 231n6, 231n13, 233nn36–39, 234nn55–56; transvestism in, 113, 126; and the Wandering Jew, 22, 113, 115, 120–22, 126–27, 130–31, 133, 232n35 Schneider, Maria, 48, 69, 72, 223–24n43. See also Last Tango in Paris secret(s): in Axël, 22, 138, 141–53, 239n27, 241n38, 242n46; in “Babette’s Feast,” 20, 27–28, 32, 37, 39, 43–44; and the “Dirty War,” 22, 100–1; and the Holocaust, 22, 105–9, 230n23; in Last Tango in Paris, 21, 50, 52–56, 60, 71–72, 80, 82, 89, 220n28; metapsychology of, 16, 52, 93–98, 213n15, 215n8, 229n21; in The Official Story, 22, 101–4; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 23, 159, 171, 174–82, 185, 187–89, 192; in “Sarrasine,” 22, 114–15, 121–27, 132, 202; unspeakable, shameful, traumatic, 2, 16, 19–20, 52, 109–11, 205, 211nn29–31, 213n15, 226n4, 227n5, 229n21, 236n67, 240n29. See also crypt; cryptonymy; illness of mourning; incorporation; phantom; trauma Statues meurent aussi, Les (Resnais), 221n34 Stewart, Philip, 113–14, 133, 231n6 Sur Racine (Barthes), 134, 236n71 S/Z (Barthes), 11, 22, 113, 133–35, 230n1, 231n6, 231n13, 233n36, 234nn55–56, 236nn69–70, 236n72–75 Torok, Maria: “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse,” 55, 215–16nn9–11; Notes éparses sur le fantôme, 91; on pathological mourning, 55; “Story of Fear: The Symptoms of Phobia—the

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Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom?,” 226–27n4 Toussenel, Alphonse, 137, 140, 235n60, 236n1 transference: classical theory of, 64, 68, 207–8n2, 217–18n18; Ferenczi and, 15, 213n14, 217n18; in Last Tango in Paris, 64, 67–70; in The Official Story, 104; and the phantom, 96–97, 110–11 transgenerational haunting. See phantom transgenerational transmissions. See phantom transphenomenological relationship, 22, 111: and transphenomena, 111, 211n29; and transphenomenal inquiry, 19 trauma: Abraham and Torok’s theories of, 15–16, 93, 215n8, 215–16n10; and anasemia, 16–17, 59, 93, 111, 122, 132; and Axël, 153; in “Babette’s Feast,” 20, 31, 42, 44–45; and Barthes’s Mythologies, 8–11, 134–35; Caruth on, 19, 211n30, 229n21; and the “Dirty War,” 98–104, 227n9; Ferenczi and, 15; the Holocaust and, 91–92, 104–9, 225–26nn1–2, 229n17; and Lacan, 15, 50, 207n2, 211n29; and Last Tango in Paris, 50, 52, 59–61, 66, 68, 76, 80–83, 89, 216n13; in The Official Story, 98–104; and phantomatic or transgenerational transmission, 92–101, 105–11, 122, 133, 216n12, 229n21; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 23, 188, 195; and psychoanalytic historicity, 17; and “Sarrasine,” 132–34; unspeakable or secret, 16–17, 19–20, 42, 44, 50, 52, 60–61, 80, 83, 89, 93–97, 100–1, 105–11, 122, 132–34, 153, 188, 211n31, 227n5, 229n21; of Vichy, 8–11 Vél’ d’Hiv,’ 84–89, 203–5, 222n40 Vichy: and Last Tango in Paris, 51, 83–89, 222n40, 224–25n44–45; and Mythologies, 7–8, 10, 203–5, 209n21, 252n10; and S/Z, 134. See also censorship; Night and Fog; Vél’ d’Hiv’

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Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, PhilippeAuguste: “L’Annonciateur,” 151, 239n27; and anti-Semitism, 22, 132, 138–9, 141, 156, 202, 237–38nn4–10; “The Celestial Adventure” [“La Céleste aventure”], 138–39, 237n4, 238nn9–10, 239n27; “Les Danaïdes,” 239n27; L’Ève future, 151, 239n27; influence of Éliphas Lévi on, 150; “L’intersigne,” 241n38; Isis, 151; and Kabbala, 150–51, 241n39; his knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish, 239n27, 240n29; his knowledge of Jewish ritual, 241n36; Oeuvres complètes, 237n4, 237–38nn6–9, 239–40n27, 241n36; and Richard Wagner, 240n29; and the Symbolist movement 137, 237n3; “Torture by Hope,” 238n10. See also Axël; Raitt, Alan Wandering Jew, the, 22, 113, 115, 120–22, 126–27, 130–31, 133, 232n35, 238n10 Wilde, Jane Francesca, 194, 197–98, 249n51, 250n64 Wilde, Oscar: and À Rebours, 185, 247n30; his additions to The Picture

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of Dorian Gray, 159, 175, 182; and aesthetic production, 170–71; “Ave Imperatrix,” 195; “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” 198; “De Profundis,” 196; and ear surgery, 251n69; and empire and Anglo-Irish identity, 23, 159–60, 189, 191–96, 198–99, 202, 243n5, 247n35, 249n46, 249–50nn51–61, 251nn70–71; An Ideal Husband, 197; his knowledge of butterflies and moths, 183, 245–46n23; his knowledge of foreign languages, 165, 173; and letters about prison life, 157–59, 195–96, 243nn1–3; “Libertatis Sacra Fames,” 194; and pearls, 181, 245n19; his relationship with parents, 194, 196–98, 249n51, 250nn62–67, 251n69; “The Sphinx,” 246n23. See also The Picture of Dorian Gray; Wilde, Jane Francesca; Wilde, William Wilde, William, 194, 196–97, 250–51nn68–69 Winnicott, D.W., 97, 215n4 Žižek, Slavoj, 207n2

CULTURAL STUDIES / PSYCHOLOGY

“One of the preeminent theorists of our time, Esther Rashkin has produced an outstanding work that will recast the still vibrant yet often stealth culture of psychoanalysis. Her readings and intuitions, motivated by a distinguished critical and clinical praxis, make irrevocable claims on post-Freudian theories of the crypt, maladie du deuil, incorporation and effects of the phantom, crucially repositioning the agon between close reading and ideological critique. The range and depth of her inquiry present brilliant dossiers on the history of unconscious transmission systems.” — Avital Ronell, New York University, and Jacques Derrida Professor of Media and Philosophy, the European Graduate School

“The psychoanalysis of culture is a formidable undertaking. Many try. Few succeed. Esther Rashkin, in this impressive new contribution, distinguishes herself as one who belongs in that elite group who can apply psychoanalytic thinking to cultural phenomena in a seamless and highly readable manner. Her use of leading Hungarian psychoanalytic thinkers is an auspicious choice that provides her discourse with a fresh perspective. I highly recommend this book to both students and scholars of interdisciplinary psychoanalysis.” — Glen O. Gabbard, MD, Brown Foundation Chair of Psychoanalysis and Professor of Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine

“This is the most exciting work of psychoanalysis I’ve read in the last decade, and a stunningly brilliant argument about the relevance of psychoanalytic interpretation for cultural analysis. It’s a groundbreaking piece of intellectual work that will have a deep impact on the future of literary and cultural analysis.” — Georges Van Den Abbeele, Dean of Humanities, University of California at Santa Cruz

A volume in the SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture Henry Sussman, editor

SUNY P R E S S State University of New York Press

www.sunypress.edu