Crossing Boundaries: Thinking Through Literature

Crossing Boundaries Thinking through Literature

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Crossing Boundaries Thinking through Literature

Edited by

Julie Scanlon and

Amy Waste

with contributions by Terry Eagleton and Sally Shuttleworth

Sheffield Academic Press www.SheffieldAcademicPress.com

Copyright © 2001 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19 Kingfield Road Sheffield SI 19AS England www. SheffieldAcademicPress. com Typeset by Sheffield Academic Press and Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd Glasgow British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-84127-232-9

Contents Acknowledgments List of Contributors Crossing Boundaries—Delegates

7 9 11

Introduction Julie Scanlon and Amy Waste

13

'So Childish and So Dreadfully Un-Childlike': Cultural Constructions of Idiocy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Sally Shuttleworth

17

'Aberrant Passions and Unaccountable Antipathies': Nervous Women, Nineteenth-Century Neurology and Literary Text Jane Wood

45

X-Club not X-Files: Walter Pater, Spiritualism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism Gowan Dawson

56

Scientific Prophecies and Modern-Day Seers: Prognostication in the Industrial Fiction of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell Louise Henson

72

Popular Cosmology as Mythic Narrative: A Site for Interdisciplinary Exchange Elizabeth Leane

84

Translation as Gay Deception Ulrika Orloff

98

The Mark of Desire: Rewriting the Romance and Lesbian-Feminist Textual Strategies Fleur Diamond

112

Constructing the Female Self in Migrant Postcolonial Fiction Maria-Sabina Draga-Alexandru

121

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES

Locating the 'Nigga' in 'The Wood-Pile': Robert Frost, the Academy and Pedagogy in the Context of a South African Tertiary Education

Brendon Nicholls

130

Enervation in Language as Innovation in Literature: The Function of Cliche in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy Elizabeth Barry

141

Reading Between the Lines: Materiality in the Age of Hypertext Colin B. Gardner

150

Music to Desire By: Crossing the Berlin Wall with Wim Wenders Annette Davison

161

'Fictional Capital': Economics and Narrative in the Novels of Jay Mclnerney Julian Crockford

169

Bourdieu versus Deconstruction: The Social (Con)Text of Irony and Reality Johannes Angermuller

178

Performance Theory, Practice and the Intrusion of the Real Helen Freshwater

189

Writing on Air Heather Leach

200

Aesthetics and Politics Terry Eagleton

210

Index of Authors

218

Acknowledgments

Julie and Amy would like to thank all the delegates who attended the conference and helped to make it a success as well as those involved in its organization and smooth running in any capacity. Special thanks go to our plenary speakers, Terry Eagleton, Elaine Showalter and Sally Shuttleworth, for taking a chance on a marginal event. Extra special thanks go to Philip Davies for essential and continued support for both the conference and the production of this volume. Thank you, also, to all at Sheffield Academic Press who have worked on the volume. For sponsorship, thanks to the Department of English Literature and the Graduate School, University of Sheffield.

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List of Contributors Johannes Angermuller, Institut fur Soziologie, Otto-von-GuerickeUniversitat Magdeburg, Germany. Elizabeth Barry, Department of English Literature, University of Wales, Bangor. Julian Crockford, Department of English Literature, University of Sheffield. Annette Davison, Department of Music, University of Leeds. Gowan Dawson, Department of English Literature, University of Sheffield. Fleur Diamond, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. Maria-Sabina Draga-Alexandru, Department of English, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, Romania. Terry Eagleton, University of Manchester. Helen Freshwater, Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh. Colin B. Gardner, Department of English Literature and the Bakhtin Centre, Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield. Louise Henson, Department of English Literature, University of Sheffield. Heather Leach, Department of Contemporary Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University. Elizabeth Leane, School of English and European Languages and Literatures, University of Tasmania, Australia.

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES

B r a n d o n Nicholls, Department of Literature, University of Essex. Ulrika Orlofif, Department of Comparative Literature, University College London. Sally Shuttleworth, Department of English Literature, University of Sheffield. Jane Wood, School of English, University of Leeds.

Crossing Boundaries—Delegates Niran Abbas Sam Alberti Johannes AngermMer Alex Arnison Ruth Arnold Caroline Bainbridge Melanie Ball Katya Bargna Elizabeth Barry Simon Beecroft Colin Buckle Katherina Bunzmann Bryan Burns Matthew Campbell Jamie Clarke Stephen Conway Julian Crockford Philip Davies Annette Davison Gowan Dawson Fleur Diamond Maria-Sabina Draga-Alexandru Dan Dubowitz Terry Eagleton Rachel Falconer Ahmad Fayazbaksh Martin Flanagan Helen Freshwater Maria Cristina Fumagalli Sarah Gamble Colin Gardner Jancy George John Haffenden Jacquie Hanham Stuart Harris Michael Hattaway Alexandra Hendriok

Louise Henson Bryony Hoskins BuffHuntley Sophia Kanaouti Joe Kember Jo Knowles Orthodoxia Kyriacou Heather Leach Elizabeth Leane Caroline Lucas Robert McKay Kym Martindale Patricia Martins Mr Martins Ashley Morgan Ian Munday Paul Murphy Brendon Nicholls Maria Noriega-Sanchez Jo Norris Ulrika Orloff Jan Oxley Andrew Palmer Chris Percival Ingo Porada Luca Prono David Reid Angelique Richardson H. Riding Cristina Rivera Fuentes Neil Roberts Pedro Rodriguez Jonathan Roper Anira Rowanchild Julie Scanlon Erica Sheen Elaine Showalter

12 Sally Shuttleworth Suzanne Speidel Andrew Spencer Alice Strager Stephen Strager Angela Taylor Jonathan Taylor Zsuzsanna Varga Fabio Vericat Sue Vice

CROSSING BOUNDARIES Katie J. Ward Amy Waste Phyllis Weliver Deborah West Jane Wood Stephen Woodhams Carina Yervasi Tricia Zakreski George Zarifis

Julie Scanlon and Amy Waste Introduction

Crossing Boundaries began as a conference held at the University of Sheffield in April 1998 and this volume represents the tangible legacy of some of its aims: to overcome the perceived peripherality of research students and their work and to rejuvenate the communal ethos of postgraduate scholarship by emphasizing its central importance to the future of academia. It would be very nice indeed to state that the conference grew from our ebullient satisfaction with postgraduate study in general and our own experiences in particular; alas, we cannot. Our desire to achieve a boost in morale emerged through an awareness of the peculiar monotony of postgraduate life—not simply and necessarily the result of toiling away in daily isolation, but the insistent repetitiveness of certain conversational topics amongst postgraduates. We were struck by the fact that most casual postgraduate exchanges inevitably involved familiar litanies of frustration, complaints and unanswered questions, all of which seemed grounded in one essential condition: uncertainty. Sandwiched between the reasonably comfortable primary roles of the producer, or lecturer, and of the mass-produced undergraduate, the postgraduate research student seems to function as an ethereal oil which assists the academic machinery to roll silently, smoothly and profitably forward. In addition, for those research students who, like us, are also part-time tutors and lecturers, abstract amorphousness often crystallizes into definite embarrassments and difficulties. While in seminar rooms and lecture halls we are expected to teach with the same competence and authority as full-time lecturers, once outside their walls we are required to resume instantaneously the relative impotence of the student, and permitted scarcely more access to departmental facilities or resources than those we teach. The ironic consequence of this bizarre imbalance is that while postgraduates are routinely entrusted with every university's most precious resource—the minds of its undergraduates— other, lesser privileges are jealously guarded from them, liberties

deemed simply too full of the heady potential for wanton abuse to be appropriate: the keys to the departmental photocopying room, for

instance.

As soon as the conference planning got underway, what became immediately apparent was that the fluctuating postgraduate role we had

14

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

experienced—and our interest in addressing it—was shared by others not simply in our own department or faculty or university or country. Research students from other continents responded with the same eagerness as fellow Sheffield postgraduates to our proposal: for three days, participants would present their work in an atmosphere designed specifically to accommodate their particular fluidities of role, of status, of discipline. In the end, more than ninety disparate postgraduate researchers from six different countries converged to define themselves as a group of scholars and hopefully came away, as did we, fortified by a new perception of themselves as a group bound paradoxically by dissimilarity, by each individual's ability to stand alone without support, defining and redefining their role as often as is necessary to adapt and succeed. While those occupying roles of greater stability in the academic world take strength from other sources—stolidity, volume, homogeneity—we as contemporary postgraduates draw ours, it seems, from flexibility, diversity and change. Such diversity is represented by this volume's contributors, some of whom, since the conference, have traversed a particular boundary to become key-bearers, others who have doubtless not had to concern themselves with keys for quite some time and others who remain, for the moment, in the postgraduate hallways. As to the articles themselves, the volume's title speaks to the contradictions inherent in imposing order on its contents. The articles are eclectic by nature and might be read in dialogue with one another in any order at the reader's discretion. Nevertheless, the order in which they appear does offer a certain organic cohesion. The first four contributions share a focus on the interrelationship between literature and science in the nineteenth century, a topic well represented at the conference itself. This selection begins with Sally Shuttleworth considering the 'idiot' figure as constructed in the nineteenth century, opening with the complex status accorded it in articles by Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens. Moving on to explore the fictional representation of idiots in the work of George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, Shuttleworth argues that the 'emerging notions of educability' of the middle of the century were replaced by a 'fierce evolutionary determinism' at its close and that constructions of the idiot at the threshold of adulthood afforded it its position at the boundaries of society. Whereas Shuttleworth focuses on the idiot figure, Jane Wood explores the representation of nervous female characters in Daniel Deronda and Jude the Obscure, examining how scientific and literary discourses are represented in the boundaries between the mind and the external world, with the nerves functioning as a conduit between the two.

INTRODUCTION

15

Gowan Dawson takes up the dialogue between science and literature in his relocation of the aesthete, Walter Pater, as a scientific naturalist. Finally, Louise Henson completes the opening focus on nineteenthcentury science and literature in her article concerning scientific determinism and prophecy in novels by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. Henson suggests that these authors employ the figure of the prophet to synthesize older, diminishing orders with emerging ones. Exchanges between science and narrative are contextualized with contemporary popular cosmology in Elizabeth Leane's examination of Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg. Leane suggests that these authors employ the rhetoric of creationism, while they simultaneously fight the concept, and shows how they prove Lyotard's proposal that scientists couch their theories for the public through narrative while ranking science above it. Discourse hierarchies are also the focus of Ulrika Orloff's challenge to the persistent metaphor of dualism, with particular reference to the 'feminization of translation'. Employing Bakhtin's concept of 'gay deception', Orloff argues for a reappraisal of the translated work to dislocate it from its identity as negative 'other' to the original work. Rewriting conventions is the subject of Fleur Diamond's reading of Jeanette Winterson's The Passion; Diamond highlights the novel's textual strategies of multiple narrative choices, chance and gambling motifs as ways of reinscribing the predictability of formula heterosexual romance narratives to produce a lesbian-identified text. The context of both feminist and postcolonial constructions of the 'other' is explored by Maria-Sabina Draga-Alexandru with reference to the transitional role of the female in migrant postcolonial fiction, particularly contemporary Indian fiction in English. Draga-Alexandru's concentration on the movement of peoples is reversed in Brendon Nicholls's examination of the geographical relocation of literature to other contexts and cultures. Nicholls's close analysis of Robert Frost's poem 'The Wood-Pile' substantiates his argument for a pedagogy which accommodates contemporary Black South African experience. Elizabeth Barry's article shares with that of Nicholls a close attention to the role of language. Barry focuses on Samuel Beckett's use of cliche to demonstrate how the writer makes old language new. In the context of hypertext fiction, Colin Gardner is also concerned with different ways of reading and thinking about literature, relationships between old and new, in relation to materiality and narrative. Annette Davison leads us to consider a different medium: music in film. Through an analysis of music in Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, she explores both the Romantic notions regarding the Utopian function of music and those of Adorno, thereby opening up a broader debate

16

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

between politics and aesthetics upon which the remainder of the articles in this volume touch. Julian Crockford identifies the semiotic function of money as characterized in Jay Mclnerney's novel, Brightness Falls. Crockford argues that the novel sets up a dichotomy between money's intrinsic value, related to Marx's value of labour, and its reflex value which is epitomized by postmodern economics, but that it fails ultimately to complete its critique of self-referentiality. Issues of semiotics, deconstruction and the real are taken up by Johannes Angermiiller in his discussion of Bourdieu's concept of text and reality, which incorporates an analysis of Bourdieu reading Flaubert. Angermiiller's discussion of the real is furthered in Helen Freshwater's consideration of contemporary theatre and the blurring of boundaries between the real and performance, theory and practice. The problematic relationship between theory and practice, and academic investiture in the maintenance of boundaries between creative and academic writing, is the topic of Heather Leach's contribution, which itself exists at the boundaries between these two styles. The volume ends with Terry Eagleton's discussion of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He argues that, while modernism set up an image of what might be achieved, a 'political aesthetics' is yet to arrive.

Sally Shuttleworth 'So Childish and So Dreadfully Un-Childlike': Cultural Constructions of Idiocy in the MidNineteenth Century

In his 1852 article on a Christmas dance at St Luke's Asylum, 'A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree', Dickens welcomed all the improvements in treatment of the insane brought in by the new, humanitarian methods of 'moral management', but nonetheless registered his disturbance at such attempts to imitate or 'ape' normality. He is troubled by the disjunction between the sweet expectancy children would show at the arrival of a Christmas tree and the listless stare' exhibited by these adults: And when the sorrowful procession was closed by 'Tommy', the favourite of the house, the harmless old man, with a giggle and a chuckle and a nod for everyone, I think I would have rather that Tommy had charged at the tree like a Bull, than that Tommy had been, at once so childish and so dreadfully un-childlike.1

Earlier forms of categorization of idiots as sub-human, or animals, were perhaps easier to cope with than this disturbing dislocation of childhood. The idiot in mid-nineteenth-century culture was a figure of ontological indeterminacy, not only crossing boundaries, but troubling and disturbing them: at once animal and human, child and adult; an adult who is always childish, and a child who is never a child. Dickens s article was followed in 1853 by another, succinctly entitled 'Idiots', which was in turn followed in 1854 by Harriet Martineau's response 'Idiots Again'.2 These articles bear witness to the popular fascination with this topic at a time when, for the first time ever, institutions were being founded specifically to house and treat idiots.3 The 1. Charles Dickens, 'A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree', Household Words 4 (Jan. 17, 1852), pp. 385-89 (388). 2. Charles Dickens and W.H. Wills, 'Idiots', Household Words 7 (June 14, 1853), pp. 313-17; Harriet Martineau, 'Idiots Again', Household Words 9 (April 15, 1854), pp. 197-200. 3. This term is clearly one we would never employ today; indeed its very unpalatability brings to the fore some of the worries and concerns that lay behind Victorian usage. Since the subject of this paper is the way in which the Victorians

18

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

1850s were a turning point in attitudes to idiocy as the reforming zeal of moral management bore practical fruit in the construction of special asylums, raising at the same time many questions about the relationship between idiocy, insanity and normality. Exploration of the categories of the abnormal functioned to interrogate and define the normal, as commentators sought to determine what it meant to be human: how far did language separate out the human from the 'brute', and where did that place humans without language? Is adulthood a state of mind, or a sum of years to be lived? In the post-Darwinian climate of the ensuing decades, answers to these questions became increasingly rigid and pessimistic, as moral management gave way to the hereditary determinism of degenerationist theories. For Dickens and Martineau, writing in the midst of these transitions, the figure of the idiot exerted a troubling fascination. Their work is riven with internal contradictions as they seek to negotiate their own relations to this liminal figure. Constructions of idiocy, I will suggest, were central to nineteenthcentury attempts to define the boundaries of social normality. The Victorian age inherited two different traditions and sets of attitudes towards idiocy. Under the first, the idiot was seen as a kind of 'holy fool', possessed, as the alternative term 'innocent' suggests, of a form of simple wisdom unavailable to more corrupt, worldly folk.4 The second, harsher tradition saw idiots as a lower form of life, only one step above animals, and as such deserving little better treatment. Before the nineteenth century there was little specialized medical writing on idiocy, possibly, as Jonathan Andrews has suggested, because it was deemed to be an incurable state and hence not within the domain of medicine. 5 From the late seventeenth century on, however, there developed a keen philosophical interest in the topic, following the work of Locke. 'Children, Ideots, Savages', Locke declared in his Essay Concerning g Human Understanding g (1689) reveal no understanding of general maxims, or

constructed for themselves the category of the 'idiot' I have decided to employ this terminology throughout, rather than switch between nineteenth- and twentiethcentury terms. 4. See Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935); and Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester, 1984). This tradition also informs Foucault's depiction of the 'Ship of Fools', in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, although he does not distinguish in this work between idiots and the insane (trans. Richard Howard; London: Tavistock, 1967). 5. Jonathan Andrews, 'Begging the Question of Idiocy: The Definition and SocioCultural Meaning of Idiocy in Early Modern Britain', Parts I and II, History of Psychiatry 9 (1998), pp. 65-95, 179-200 (181).

Shuttleworth SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE' 19 universal Principles of Knowledge. These beings, who are clumped together as figures existing outside the norms of rational, civilized adulthood, demonstrate through their very emptiness the fallacy of theories of innate impressions or ideas.6 The idiot now emerges as 'someone worth writing about—an observable approximation of human origins, a "blank page" or tabula rasa'.7 The figure of the 'wild child' emerges at centre-stage in eighteenthcentury philosophical discourse as a test case for studying the emergence of the human race, and the role of language in the development of humanity.8 Great excitement was generated by the discovery of the wild child of Lithuania in 1694, and of Peter of Hannover in 1724. Although it was quickly discovered that Peter was an idiot child who had run away from his stepmother, this did nothing to dampen philosophical speculation. For Defoe, Peter's failure to learn language signalled his lack of a human soul: 'Words are to us, the Medium of Thought... we cannot conceive of Things, but by their Names.. .we cannot love or hate, but in acting upon those Passions in the very Form of Words, and we have no other way for it.'9 Paradoxically, the very philosophical energy expended on the wild child or idiot tended to confirm their lower status in the scale of life. Certainly it did little to improve their conditions since their importance as experimental subjects seemed to overrule humanitarian concerns.10 Nonetheless, the concern with educability, and the Revolutionary preoccupation with liberty, equality, and fraternity' which led Pinel to strike off the chains on the inmates in the Bicetre lunatic asylum also led gradually to improvements in the provision for idiots. One of the first attempts in England to distinguish forms of idiocy, and to develop a system of education, was that of the radical political reformer, John Thelwall, who had turned to working with children with speech defects. In Imperfect Developements of the Faculties, Mental and Moral (1810) Thelwall distinguished 'incurable idiotism' from a condition in which the child's mind is 'contracted in its sphere of 6. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Peter H. Nidditch; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1689]), Bk 1, ch. 2, p. 64. 7. Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 57. 8. See Julia Douthwaite, 'Homoferus: Between Monster and Model', EighteenthCentury Life NS 21.2 (1997), pp. 176-202, and Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, chs. 1-2. 9. Daniel Defoe, Mere Nature Delineated (London: T. Warner, 1726), quoted in Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 63. 10. See Douthwaite, 'Homoferus', pp. 180-85.

20

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

activity by physical privation', producing a picture of 'supposed deficiency of general faculty'.11 These children, he claimed, if treated individually, could be educated. Up until this point, idiocy had been treated as a general, incurable condition, usually originating at birth. The legal definition outlined by Blackstone, 'one who hath had no understanding from his nativity, and therefore is by law presumed never likely to attain any' still held in the nineteenth century.12 In practice, however, it was felt to be difficult to uphold the distinction of congenital origin, and idiotism was frequently treated as a condition that could be acquired, thus undermining the perceived boundaries between states of insanity and idiotism.13 In political terms the distinction was crucial since, as the title of Frances Power Cobbe's witty article, 'Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors' makes clear, only the idiot was placed in a legal limbo. Like women and children, the idiot was granted few civil rights, and no political ones. Property was placed in the hands of the Crown, and the right to vote was removed.14 The idiot would remain perpetually within a society, but not of it; a highly visible outsider who troubled its demarcations of normality. Tests of idiocy, however, were highly subjective. Thus the barrister Charles Palmer Phillips suggests in 1858: 'there are many ways in which idiotcy is manifested, as by neglect of the ordinary decencies of life, frequently by foolish laughter, by general vacancy of aspect, and by other modes which are better understood when seen than by verbal description'.15 The appeal here is to a shared sense of visual normality which stands outside the domain of language. Phillips is drawing on the tradition of physiognomical thought reinvigorated and codified by Lavater at the end of the eighteenth century. Lavater's careful drawings of the gradations of human existence, from his sequence tracing the 'gradual transition from the head of a frog to the Apollo' (Figure 1) through to his 11. John Thelwall, Imperfect Developements of the Faculties, Mental and Moral (London, 1810), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 656-57. 12. See Daniel Hack Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882), pp. 286-87. See also Charles Palmer Phillips, The Law Concerning Lunatics, Idiots, and Persons of Unsound Mind (London: Butterworths, 1858), pp. 1-5. 13. See Tuke, Chapters, p. 300. 14. Tuke notes that juries were reluctant to find 'idiocy' for this very reason, usually offering the verdict of lnon compos mentis' which reserved the property for the lunatic on his recovery {Chapters, p. 289). Frances Power Cobbe, 'Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors', Fraser's Magazine (1868), pp. 777-94. 15. Phillips, The Law, p. 5.

Shuttleworth

SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE'

21

meticulous depictions of the phases of idiocy and imbecility (Figure 2), set the framework for subsequent asylum work in the nineteenth century where drawings, and later photographs, were used to define, and differentiate, the features of idiocy and insanity.l6 This work led in turn, through phrenology, to the later science of craniology which sought, through skull measurements, to give scientific authority to earlier loose definitions of 'savages' and 'idiots'.17 The first half of the nineteenth century was an era of optimism, however, with regard to the treatment of idiocy. On the continent, schooling for idiots was established at the hospital for the insane at Bicetre in 1828, while in 1839 Dr Guggenbiihl created an asylum for so-called cretins in Switzerland. His success in educating them was such that he toured Europe helping to establish similar establishments for idiots. His example was copied in England in 1846 by some ladies in Bath, and then in 1847, the Reverend Andrew Reed and Dr John Conolly, the champion of moral management, succeeded in establishing by subscription Park House in Highgate, and then Essex Hall in Colchester. In 1855 the first purposely constructed 'Asylum for Idiots' opened at Earlswood in Surrey.18 16. J.E.D. Esquirol, Pinel's successor, published an atlas of plates to accompany his Des Maladies Mentale (Paris, 1838). In England, Alexander Morison, who was heavily influenced by Esquirol, published The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (London: Longman, 2nd edn, 1840 [1838]). The practice of photographing the insane was first introduced by Crichton Browne at the West Riding Asylum, Wakefield, and formed the basis for some of Charles Darwin's material in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872). See Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: John Wiley, 1982). 17. See, for example, Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 53-57; and J.B. Davis and John Thurnam, Crania Britannica: Delineations and Descriptions of the Skulls of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the British Isles (2 vols.; London, 1865 [1856-65]). 18. For accounts of these developments see Tuke, Chapters, ch. 8, Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years, pp. 656, 967, and David Wright, 'Family Strategies and the Institutional Confinement of "Idiot" Children in Victorian England', fournal of Social History 23.2 (1998), pp. 190-208. Before this time it would seem that idiots were largely cared for at home, in workhouses, or in general asylums. Wright notes that of the initial inmates at Earlswood, fewer than 10 per cent appeared to have been previously cared for outside the home (p. 197). Since the distinctions between insanity and idiocy were not clear, and other options were limited, many idiots were inevitably housed in general asylums, although, as Andrews notes, Bethlem had a policy of refusing idiots since they were deemed incurable. Workhouses, conversely, sought to exclude lunatics, but favoured idiots who were seen as more tractable and better workers (Andrews, 'Begging the Question of Idiocy', pp. 75-80). A recent study

22

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

Parallel to these developments, in Massachusetts the Governor had commissioned an inquiry into the causes of idiocy, and the report in 1848 by Samuel Gridley Howe had offered the results of the first empirical study of idiocy, using the first forms of intelligence testing. Dickens had already encountered Howe on his trip to the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind in Boston, and reported in very glowing terms in American Notes (1842) on his work there with the deaf, mute and blind child, Laura Bridgman. 19 Howe's work on idiocy met with similar acclaim in England.

'Idiots' Dickens's article 'Idiots', of 1853, was written in praise of Reed and Conolly's Park House. As in his earlier article on St Luke's, he is at pains to stress the wonderful improvements in the patients wrought by a system of moral management. The inmates sat down to dinner 'with a self-restraint and decorum perfectly wonderful'.20 All is order and selfcontrol. From the initial gathering of inmates, when all was 'distraction, disorder and noise of the most unnatural character' (p. 316), a society of useful individuals has been constructed, all with their own individual skills. The humanitarian goal of Dickens's article is clear. Yet, internally, there are interesting levels of confusion which undermine this clarity of purpose. The article opens with a summary of popular notions of an idiot, which seems to do its best to evoke revulsion. Dickens includes his own childhood memories of a shambling man 'who was never a child'. The discomfort elicited by this category inversion, where childlike behaviour is located in a figure who is denied, retrospectively, the privilege of ever having inhabited the realm of childhood innocence, is accompanied by an intense feeling of physical violation. Not only does of Devon County Asylum, founded in 1845, reveals that 55 out of 94 child inmates in the early years were classed as idiots from birth or infancy, thus suggesting that the policy of excluding idiots from general asylums was not followed at all institutions. The authors also note that one child was classed as idiotic, although her insanity was reported to be of only 10 months' duration. See Joseph Melling, Richard Adair and Bill Forsythe, ' "A Proper Lunatic for Two Years": Pauper Lunatic Children in Victorian and Edwardian England. Child Admissions to the Devon County Asylum, 1845-1914', Journal of Social History 31 (1997), pp. 371-405 (377). 19. Charles Dickens, American Notes (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d. [1842]), ch. 3- For an account of Dickens's borrowings from Howe's own report on Bridgman, see Elizabeth G. Gitter, 'Charles Dickens and Samuel Gridley Howe', Dickens Quarterly 8 (1991), pp. 162-67. 20. Dickens and Wills, 'Idiots', p. 317.

Figure 1. 'The gradual transition from the head of a frog to the Apollo' (John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy [trans. Thomas Holcroft; London: William Tegg, 9th edn, 1855]. Plates LXXVIII-LXXIX, pp. 496-97).

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES

Figure 2. 'Fools in Profile' (Lavater, Essays in Physiognomy, Plate II, p. 35).

this figure emit 'discordant sounds' which seem to emanate not from his mouth but from his forehead, he also possesses 'a tongue too large for his mouth, and a dreadful pair of hands that wanted to ramble over everything—our own face included' (p. 313). The eager sensual curiosity of an infant evokes fear and disturbance when located in an adult. Dickens's own memories obviously feed into his following observation that our main idea of an idiot is of 'a miserable monster, whom nobody may put to death, but whom everyone must wish dead, and be distressed to see alive' (p. 313). Despite the preceding build-up of negative images this conclusion comes as a shock. Nothing has prepared us for the violence of this desire to obliterate the figure of the idiot from our lives, a desire that is attributed to all readers, but seems to flow rather from Dickens's own intense childhood emotions. The statement sets up resonances that the reforming zeal of the article can never quite overcome. From this point on the tone of the article changes as Dickens offers a brief outline of recent theories of idiocy and enlightened attempts to develop educational programmes. The distinction between insanity and

Shuttleworth 'SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE' 25 idiocy, he suggests, is that 'in the insane certain faculties which once existed have become obliterated or impaired; and that, in idiots, they either never existed or exist imperfectly' (p. 313). His own accounts of idiocy do not follow this distinction, however; in some of his tales, men are struck by shock into idiocy, and are also capable of suddenly recovering. A businessman, for example, is struck into idiocy by losses in trade, but recovers, almost without warning, five years later. Idiocy is, in a sense, gentrified, removed from the category of inborn lack. The manoeuvre is rather like that in the novel, where the working-class hero is allowed to rise up the social scale, only to be found, in the end, to have originated from upper-class stock after all. Dickens follows in his account contemporary medical ideas, derived from phrenology, which argued that the brain is not a unity, but a collection of different organs: some faculties can thus flourish while others fail to function. Idiocy, therefore, ceases to be an absolute state. Dickens's examples of idiocy, and those of Martineau, strongly resemble case studies offered in Oliver Sacks's texts, as we are asked to marvel at the 'calculating boys' who can perform wondrous sums in their heads.21 Others can tell the time better than a watch, or can master specialized skills and become, like Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend (1864), excellent carpenters. The threat of the potential blankness of idiocy is here disarmed by the representational strategy of turning the inmates of the asylum into a set of individualized prodigies. Dickens turns in conclusion to the question of origins; his retreat from his initial definition of inborn lack is striking. Little is known, he suggests, 'beyond the facts that idiocy is sometimes developed during the progess of dentition, and that it would seem to be greatly associated with mental suffering, fright, or anxiety, or with a latent want of power, in the mother' (p. 317). Dickens's commitment to the educationary ideals of moral management, and to the possibilities of development and improvement, leads him to locate the onset of idiocy post-birth, and its primary origins in trauma.22 The focus on dentition is significant for it 21. See, for example, Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1985). 22. It is not entirely clear from this passage whether Dickens is wishing to refer solely to the impact of a mother's strong emotions on the foetus, or also to the possibility of shock precipitating idiocy in a child or adult. The ambiguity is in line, however, with contemporary discussions which encompassed both forms, as did Dickens himself, in his writing. 'Idiots' offers several examples of mature individuals precipitated into idiocy by shock, while Barnaby Rudge (1840-41) accounts for the idiocy of its protagonist by reference to the severe emotional trauma suffered by his mother while carrying him.

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES

marks the shift from the pre-verbal to the verbal stage of infancy. Infants are deemed not to have been born deficient, but to have lost their powers in the physiological struggle to cross that symbolic threshold. Dentition, for the Victorians, was not merely a wearisome time of infant crying and distress, to be soothed by teething rings, but was treated in the medical textbooks as an event that could threaten life and sanity. 23 Outbreaks of hysteria and insanity in puberty, that other transitional period, were also compared directly to the effects of dentition. Puberty, indeed, was often defined as second dentition, a time when the hidden weaknesses bequeathed by the mother often manifested themselves in the child. 24 The final factor in play in Dickens's etiology, 'a latent want of power in the mother', moves beyond individual trauma to questions of heredity. Since hereditary determinism runs counter to the redemptive message of Dickens's article he does not develop this aspect. Instead, he directs a scathing attack on 'your ladyship', an imagined female reader, who finds his pictures of idiots 'odious' and 'disturbing'. Dickens's own emotional disturbance registered at the opening of the article is now displaced onto this figure who is herself held responsible for the plight of idiots; her sense of 'refinement' has caused them to be locked away. As in the image of pregnancy trauma, women are indeed responsible for idiocy, but in this formulation they are also morally responsible. Dickens directs the force of his reforming zeal against this imaginary target, sweeping aside his more complex emotions, and assuaging his own guilt in the process. For the (non-imaginary) reader, however, the force of that revulsion and death-wish conjured into being at the beginning of the article is summoned to mind, undercutting the triumphalist certainties of Dickens's conclusion.

23- Alfred Fennings, Every Mother's Book or The Child's Best Doctor (West Cowes, c. 1856), warns that the child of a mother who drinks spirits is liable to fall victim to 'teething'. Thomas Ballard, A New and Rational Explanation of the Diseases Peculiar to Infants and Mothers (London: John Churchill, I860), departs from medical orthodoxy by suggesting that many of the childhood diseases assumed to stem from teething were actually caused by 'fruitless sucking' which could lead to convulsions and hydrocephalus (p. 24). 24. See, for example, Alfred Vogel, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Children (trans, and ed. H. Raphael; London: H.K. Lewis, 1886), p. 332. J. Langdon Down (who gave his name to Down's syndrome) notes cases of children losing their speech at their second dentition, and notes that the influence of the neurotic mother on the embryo often shows at second dentition or puberty (On Some of the Mental Affections of Childhood and Youth [London: J. and A. Churchill, 1887], pp. 17-18, 23).

Shuttleworth

SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE'

27

'Idiots Again' Harriet Martineau's article is an interesting companion piece to Dickens's, covering much of the same ground in its descriptions of the developments in treatment, and tales of mathematical prodigies, but it adopts a very different line, placing overwhelming emphasis on the functions of heredity. Martineau bursts into attack on those who suggest idiots are gifts from God. Such reasoning, she argues, is blasphemy, 'in imputing to Providence the sufferings which we bring upon ourselves, precisely by disobedience to the great natural laws which it is the best piety to obey' (p. 197). These 'great natural laws' are those which prohibit marriages of blood relations. In support of her claims Martineau adduces two key sets of evidence: the state of the English aristocracy, and Howe's report on idiocy in Massachusetts. Both reveal the appalling consequences of inbreeding. In England, members of our oldest baronages are placed in lunatic asylums, while in Massachusetts inbreeding has produced mass idiocy. In seventeen interbred families there were ninety-five children: of these, one was a dwarf, one was deaf, twelve were scrofulous and 'FORTY-FOUR were IDIOTS' (p. 197). Martineau was clearly writing before the major degenerationist theories of the end of the nineteenth century, but the groundwork is being laid here. Idiocy and defects are created by human folly—the wilful refusal to follow the dictates of natural law. Despite the severity of her strictures, Martineau offers a more intimate portait than Dickens: the distance of an institutional setting is exchanged for the vivid realization of domestic life. She describes in moving and indeed quite loving detail the difficulties, and rewards, for the entire family of having an idiot in the home. She depicts, also, the mounting anxieties of a mother, as her beloved baby, of whom she had such high hopes, does not respond to her caresses: His mother longs to feel the clasp of his arms round her neck; but her fondlings receive no return. His arm hangs lax over her shoulder. She longs for a look from him, and lays him back on her lap, hoping that they may look into each other's eyes; but he looks at nobody. All his life long nobody will ever meet his eyes; and neither in that way nor any other way will his mind expressly meet that of anybody else (pp. 197-98).

Martineau takes seriously the derivation of the term 'idiot' from the Greek word for 'private': her idiot lives in an asocial, self-enclosed world. She concludes with an attack on earlier notions of idiocy. We should neither worship nor cast out our idiots, but should try to reduce their

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES

number by 'discountenancing, as a crime, the marriage of blood-relations' (p. 200) and then apply science, skill and love to their treatment. Martineau's account is finely balanced between the humanitarian reforming zeal of the moral managers of the first half of the century, and the increasingly pessimistic vision of degeneration in the second half. Its tone towards the end also draws on Romantic writing as we are offered an account of the tale, utilized by Robert Southey in his poem 'Idiot', of the idiot youth who tried to warm, and then feed, the corpse of his mother.25 Sentimentality is even more firmly in play in Martineau's account of the idiot child who lost his mother at two and spent his life in talking to the birds and turning the mangle, but who reverts on his deathbed to mental clarity as he exclaims, 'Oh! my mother! how beautiful!' before he sinks down—dead (p. 200). The tale is in some sense an answer to the grieving anxieties of the mother who can gain no response from her child: a deathbed conversion reveals faculties and affections lying dormant under an outward layer of idiocy. The tradition Martineau is writing in here can be traced to Wordsworth's poem, 'The Idiot Boy', which seemed to lead to a whole genre of sympathetic tales of idiot children.26 The poem, unfeelingly described by Byron as the tale of 'The idiot mother of an "idiot boy" ',27 revealed Wordsworth's adhesion to new Enlightenment concerns for all forms of humanity. The poem's refrain, 'Him whom she loves, her idiot boy', offers us an idiot not as an object of scorn, but of love. Indeed, the repetition establishes that his value lies not in his individual identity as Johnny, but rather in his status as an example of the category 'idiot boy'. The poem experiments playfully with the parallels of idiot and child— the whole drama of Johnny setting off on his journey exactly mirrors that of sending a young child on a mission which might be beyond its powers. The 'burr, burr' emerging from Johnny's lips then takes him further down the age scale into infancy. Our protective instincts are 25. Southey's poem was first published in the Morning Post on 30 June 1798. 26. See, for example, 'The Idiot Girl', Chambers's Edinburgh Journal 11 (Jan.June 1849), pp. 230-32. The story offers a sentimental account of a devoted idiot girl who finds her lost friend when all other attempts have failed. Wordsworth's poem initially created levels of hostility as dealing with subject matter that evoked 'disgust'. In responding to John Wilson's criticisms of the poem, Wordsworth attributed this loathing and disgust' to a 'want of comprehensiveness of think [ing] and feeling' that was not to be found in the lower classes who were not able to board their idiots out, and in consequence treated them with greater sympathy. See John O. Hyden, 'William Wordsworth's Letter to John Wilson (1802): A Corrected Version', Wordsworth Circle 18 (1987), pp. 37-38. 27. Lord Byron, English Bards and Scottish Reviewers: A Satire (1809), p. 248 (OED).

Shuttleworth SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE' 29 thoroughly awoken, but then, almost at the poem's end, we discover his mother is aged almost three score. Since this poem was written before in vitro fertilization of grandmothers, it is safe to assume that Johnny is probably at least twenty, and possibly more—not a boy at all, and certainly not an infant. We are forced to undergo a disorientating category reversal. The concluding lines reinforce this disorientation as the boy who could only burr is catapulted into language. Enjoined to 'tell true' where he has been, Johnny replies: The cocks did crow to-whoo to-whoo, And the sun did shine so cold.

His inverted perceptions embody his own status as a form of category reversal—a grown man who is a child, and a babbling baby who speaks. As in Martineau's projection of the private world of the idiot, there is no answering response to the love of his anxious mother. He absorbs affection but does not return it. Indeed, there is no self to respond: his speech carries no sense of personal agency. The conclusion sets sentiment at bay, refusing the consolatory illusion, to which Martineau was partially to turn, of a submerged, but responsive, humanity. Wordsworth's poem made the idiot into an acceptable subject for literary representation; his work echoes through Victorian attempts to come to terms with this living conundrum, to express in humane terms a figure who seemed to trouble the boundaries of the human. George Eliot's little-known story 'Brother Jacob' (which was initially entitled 'The Idiot Brother') offers one example of this troubled engagement. Although the tale was written in I860, it took until 1864 for Eliot to find a publisher. Since then the story has been treated, if at all, with extreme critical embarrassment. George Eliot was a great admirer of William Wordsworth, and one can find here all the familiar Wordsworthian ingredients: a boy who forsakes his loving family (including his idiot brother) and country home to better himself and goes to the bad. But the tone of the tale could not be further removed from that of 'Michael', or the elegiac nostalgia of parts of Adam Bede. The dominant mode is that of heavy irony, and it is quite clear that the narrator dislikes all the characters involved, including the idiot brother, Jacob. Jacob, indeed, is not an interesting idiot; he is constructed neither as an object of sympathy, nor as a study of the mind's wayward processes. He is, rather, a huge, pitchfork-waving, dumpling- and sweet-eating simpleton. The story can be simply told. David Faux (the epitome, as his name suggests, of falseness) wants to be a confectioner, and decides to steal his mother's guineas and run away to America in order to make his

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES

fortune. His idiot brother, Jacob, of alarming size and ever-present pitchfork, unfortunately finds him burying the stolen guineas. David plays upon his simplicity and love of sweets, suggesting that the guineas, if buried, will actually turn into yellow lozenges. When David returns the next day to dig up the guineas and make good his escape, Jacob is of course already there, and he is forced to take him with him, only finally shaking him off by making him dead drunk. He returns a few years later under another name, to another town, opens a confectioner's shop and seduces local matrons from the paths of culinary virtue. He is just about to contract an advantageous engagement to a young lady of the town when in rushes Jacob, yelling 'b'other Zavy', and demanding 'Mother's Zinnies' from the lozenge jar. He proceeds to ensconce himself in the shop, devouring all in sight. The moral is pointedly delivered at the end: Here ends the story of Mr David Faux, confectioner, and his brother Jacob. And we see in it, I think, an admirable instance of the unexpected forms in which the great Nemesis hides herself. 28

The story is clearly modelled, like all of Eliot's fiction, on the belief that all actions have inexorable consequences. Jacob is a comic version of Raffles, exposing deeds the perpetrator had hoped were long dead and buried. Burial will not turn guineas into lozenges, nor vice into virtue. The tale offers none of the complexity of Middlemarch, however, where Bulstrode's mind, like the view from the window of a lighted room, holds past and present in simultaneous tension.29 Nor does it follow the psychological earnestness of Adam Bede where Arthur Donnithorne has to learn that 'Our deeds carry their terrible consequences... consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.'30 In stark contrast to Eliot's other fiction, 'Brother Jacob' scarcely seems to take itself seriously. If looked at, however, as a companion piece to her other strange tale of that time, 'The Lifted Veil', it acquires a deeper significance. In 'The Lifted Veil', George Eliot gives to her main character the novelist's desired powers to see into the future, and to extend empathy so as to unveil the minds of others. Both gifts, however, turn into curses. Latimer's vision of the future becomes nothing more than an endless repetition of his own death; and the minds of others are revealed to be 28. George Eliot, Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (cabinet edn; Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1878-80), p. 408. 29. George Eliot, Middlemarch (cabinet edn; Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1878-80), III, ch. 61, p. 126. 30. George Eliot, Adam Bede (cabinet edn; Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1878-80), I, ch. 16, p. 258.

Shuttleworth 'SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE' 31 petty, puerile and spiteful. The tale is, as Eliot aptly noted, a 'jeu de melancholie' which revises all the moral values of her other work.31 'Brother Jacob' offers a similar reversal of Eliot's Wordsworthian values. Where 'The Lifted Veil' collapses future and present, 'Brother Jacob' collapses past and present, and undercuts the moral value of memory. For Jacob the intervening years are as if they had never happened— Brother Davy, guineas and lozenges are locked in his mind in an unbreakable link. Memory does not beautify the present by linking it through affection to the past. Jacob's memory operates to obliterate time and perspective, and his affection is shown to be based purely on physical greed. There is no escape for David; Jacob would always keep returning to his shop, 'like a wasp to the honey-pot' (p. 406). Cunning is contrasted with innocence, and both are found to be equally repulsive. The story acts almost as a grotesque parody of George Eliot's other fiction. There is none of the fascination with otherness, with alternative states of mind, to be found in 'The Idiot Boy'. Jacob is constructed as a stock figure of comedy, whose limited animal intelligence highlights the equally limited selfish nature of his brother. A further negative representation of idiocy at this period is to be found in Charlotte Bronte's Villette of 1853, in the figure of the cretin Lucy Snowe is forced to care for during the long vacation. In 1850 Charlotte Bronte had been sent by her friend, the eminent physician John Forbes, a copy of his book, A Physician's Holiday, which detailed his visit to Dr Guggenbiihl's asylum for cretins. Forbes enthusiastically reinforced contemporary views on the educability of cretins; Bronte, by contrast, offers a very different vision. Her cretin had an 'aimless malevolence' and could not be left for a minute. She 'would sit for hours together moping and mowing and distorting her features with indescribable grimaces, it was more like being prisoned with some strange tameless animal than associating with a human being'. Lucy is also forced to render 'personal attentions' to the cretin which make her sick.32 The narrative functions of the cretin are various. Firstly, she reinforces Lucy's sense of superiority in suffering: Lucy 'thrills' to the notion that she is one of the select number chosen for great suffering, while the cretin, with no higher sensibilities, is happy in the lethargy which defines her life. Secondly, in contradiction to her former role, the cretin becomes a focus for aspects of Lucy's own self-hatred. This 'deformed'

31. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, III (ed. Gordon S. Haight; 9 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-78), p. 118. 32. Charlotte Bronte, Villette (ed. Tony Tanner; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 229.

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figure, whose 'mind, like her body, was warped' becomes a negative self-projection for Lucy, whose slight frame and seething mind are warped by passionate jealousy of the amatory successes of the more amply endowed Ginevra Fanshawe. There is also the suggestion that failure in love brings a negative form of motherhood, imaged in Lucy caring for the cretin physically, as one would a baby. Is the cretin the only form of child that Lucy is ever likely to have? Finally, the cretin, in all her animality, is shown to be more fortunate than Lucy, for at least she has someone to care for her: an aunt arrives to take her away for the summer. Only then does Lucy collapse. Bronte's cretin has no place in the discourse of moral management, nor does Bronte have any interest in her as a figure in her own right. She functions, rather, as a focus for Lucy's self-contradictory attempts to define herself. As in Eliot's tale, there is no attempt to expose the misconceptions contained in social images of idiocy; rather, these stock images are employed, and indeed heightened, in order to expose and explore the limitations of supposed normality. David Faux's moral level is revealed as no higher than an idiot's, while Lucy Snowe's inner anguish and self-hatred find external expression in the mentally and morally deformed figure of the cretin. Bronte's and Eliot's rather negative representations need to be set alongside Dickens's fiction, where a very different picture of idiocy emerges. As Natalie McKnight has shown, there are numerous figures who could qualify as possible idiots in Dickens; indeed with idiocy displayed in such an array of different forms, it becomes very difficult to determine the boundaries of supposed normality.33 In Barnaby Rudge (1841) Dickens created an idiot as his main protagonist. His difficulties with the representation of Barnaby, however, perhaps explain the long gestation of the novel. Barnaby is clearly in the 'holy fool' tradition of idiot, with wisdom at times that goes beyond that of his peers,34 but the overall projection is ambiguous, and contradictory. Dickens paints a moving picture of Barnaby's mother anxiously waiting 'for the dawn of mind that never came' until she is forced to acknowledge the tokens, 'not of dulness but of something infinitely worse, so ghastly and unchildlike in its cunning'.35 As in his later projection in 'A Curious Dance', Dickens stresses the unchildlike nature of this child, who is also 'old and elfin-like in face'. The reference to ghastly cunning also draws on the 33- Natalie McKnight, Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners in Dickens (New York: St Martin's Press, 1993). 34. McKnight, Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners, pp. 81-94. 35. Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912), ch. 25, p. 242.

Shuttleworth 'SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE' 33 stereotype of idiots being closer to lower, animal nature and cunning, although this suggestion is not pursued in the novel, and is out of keeping with the general tenor of Barnaby's depiction. Barnaby's mother preserves her hopes for his development until his manhood when 'his childhood was complete andlasting' (ch. 25, p. 243). The form of that lasting childhood seems to shift, however: Barnaby has a mind in which 'words passed from his memory, like breath from a polished mirror' (ch, 53, p. 503) but he also seems capable of deep and lasting memories and affections. He is usually not projected in animal terms, although it is significant that his own inadequate powers of speech are set against those of his highly articulate raven, who is deemed, at the end of the novel, to have outlasted his master, and to 'have gone on talking to the present time'. Barnaby is also twinned with a darker form of selfhood in the figure of Hugh, the young man employed at The Maypole who, according to Mr Willet, had never had his faculties drawn out: 'that chap that can't read nor write, and has never had much to do with anything but animals, and has never lived in any way but like the animals he has lived among, is an animal' (ch. 11, p. 122). Although we as readers are not expected to concur with Mr Willet's judgment, it is nonetheless the case that Hugh is represented throughout in semi-animalistic terms, as a kind of evolutionary throwback. In their deformities, both he and Barnaby carry the legacy of their fathers' sins. Barnaby's mother watches in his development 'the slow and gradual breaking out of that one horror, in which, before his birth, his darkened intellect began' (ch. 25, p. 243). His father later sees reflected in his 'wild eyes' 'terrible images of that guilty night; with his unearthly aspect, and his half-formed mind, he seemed to the murderer a creature who had sprung into existence from his victim's blood' (ch. 69, p. 650). Barnaby and Hugh are both tainted innocents, walking witnesses to their fathers' transgressions. It is never clear how that 'one horror' emerges in Barnaby, but certainly by the end of the novel he is tamed and purified, 'lifted up to God', while the more threatening, animal aspects of his wildness are symbolically destroyed with the execution of Hugh.36 Barnaby is succeeded by a whole series of potential idiots who are defined by their uncertain position on the child/adult scale, and their inadequate grasp of language. As with Barnaby, their innocence is turned into a positive moral attribute. Sloppy, for example, in Our Mutual Friend, 36. 'He, a poor idiot, caged in his narrow cell, was as much lifted up to God, while gazing on the mild light, as the freest and most favoured man in all the spacious city' (Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, ch. 73, p. 691).

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with his bellowing laugh, and ungainly body and obsession with the mangle (a detail which seems to be drawn directly from Harriet Martineau's article),37 is made into a highly moral idiot—not one who lives in a solipsistic universe, but one who has strong attachments. His skills are developed and he is rewarded at the end with potential marriage to Jenny Wren, replacing her 'poor child', her hapless father, with a more educable and biddable child/man. Dickens's sense of the fitting symmetry of this coupling is unsettling, however, in its suggestion that the sharp-witted but physically deformed Jenny would be aptly paired with a man with the physical form of an adult but the mind of a child. Despite the novel's highly positive representation of Sloppy himself, and the care he receives from others, a worrying form of category disturbance is still operative: the Boffins decide to replace their lost baby, Johnny, with the fully grown Sloppy, whose very name deprives him of the dignity ascribed to his infant predecessor, and suggests the ways in which he sprawls outside recognizable categories. In his decision to reject the Boffins' offer of perpetual dinners, he overcomes his child-like or animal preoccupation with the world of the senses, but his moral victory is humorously downplayed, reducing him once more to animal level. He gives vent to his feelings in a 'dismal howl' which, while 'it was creditable to his tenderness of heart', suggested that 'he might on occasion give offence to the neighbours'. The footman looks in because 'he thought it was Cats' (p. 397). Another of Dickens's potential idiots is Jo, the crossing sweeper in Bleak House, who is rejected as a witness at the inquest on Nemo because he 'Can't exactly say'.38 With his repeated refrain 'I don't know nothink', he is the seeming embodiment of that original definition of the idiot—one who is ignorant, or, in that telling mispronunciation, one who does no thinking.39 The novel is obsessed with language and communication, or rather miscommunication—from Krook's painstaking attempts to read, through to that final, unexplained and seemingly gratuitous detail that Caddy's baby is born a deaf mute. With the reassertion of order in the creation of a new Bleak House, this fleeting reference strikes a troubling note. To understand its significance we need to turn once more to the discussions of the role of language in the idiocy debates, and to the treatment of deaf mutes within this context. 37. Martineau, 'Idiots Again', p. 200. 38. Bleak House was being serialized in Household Words when Dickens contributed his article on idiocy. It ran from March 1852 to September 1853, and had reached chapters 50-53 when Dickens published 'Idiots'. 39- Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d.), ch. 11, p. 179; ch. 16, p. 259.

Shuttleworth 'SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE' 35 Prior to nineteenth-century attempts to explore the possibilities of education for deaf mutes, they were routinely classed and housed with idiots and lunatics, their lack of communicatory skills seeming to place them outside the boundaries of social normality. This close association is signalled in Household Words where Harriet Martineau's first response to Dickens's 'Idiots' was actually her article 'Deaf Mutes' of March 1854, which she penned three weeks before 'Idiots Again'. 'Deaf Mutes' starts on a very positive note, with Martineau arguing for the creation of special educational literature and facilities for the infirm, large numbers of whom were currently ignored by the educational system. She praises schools for deaf mutes and all they are achieving, but then extends her argument to suggest that deaf mutes could never be happy at home since they would lack 'companionship of mind': Inferior as the minds of deaf mutes must inevitably be, they are peculiar; and they can never be in full sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of better endowed people. 40

The argument for special treatment is based, it emerges, on a firm conviction of inferiority and alterity. Martineau acknowledges that there are cases of deaf mutes who can apparently lead a normal life within the community, but this is due, she suggests, to their strong 'imitative faculties': 'there is no mind underneath in such a case. There is no thought.' Since the moral part of their nature is never reached, Martineau argues, deaf mutes tend to be passionate, arrogant and selfish.41 Their capacity for rationality is also called into question: Without agreeing with Aristotle, that the deaf and dumb are and must be altogether brutish, or with Condillac, that they have no memory or reasoning power, we have no doubt whatever, that the impossibility of ever giving them the ordinary access to abstractions renders them necessarily and always the lowest class of rational beings (p. 136).

Martineau resolutely rejects any evidence of the educability of deaf mutes. Although they might write down 'pretty similes' and sentiments, 'in their case there is the sign without the thing signified, and the sentimental phrase without the radical feeling under it' (p. 136). For Martineau, language is central to humanity—without the powers of abstraction it permits, the human soul remains unlocked. She has nothing but contempt for romantic views which suggest that deaf mutes, cut off from vulgar associations, are endowed with an infinite 40. Harriet Martineau, 'Deaf Mutes', Household pp. 134-38 (135). 41. Martineau, 'Deaf Mutes', pp. 135-36.

Words 9 (March 25, 1854),

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soul working in retreat from the world. Deaf mutes, she insists, are arrogant and violent, as are also the partially deaf: these latter brood over 'unaimable' thoughts, are self-conscious and suspicious, and badly need to be taught self-control. The portrait is all the more startling when we realize that Martineau herself was partially deaf from childhood, and so we are being offered in these lines a negative self-portrait, which carries almost a sense of self-loathing. 'Deaf Mutes' was written long after Dickens's celebrated American Notes of 1842, where he describes the famous case of Laura Bridgman who was blind, deaf and mute and yet was taught by Samuel Howe to acquire language. Dickens's account is almost rapturous, drawing on Howe's own account of Laura's acquisition of language, and her transition into the acknowledged ranks of full humanity: 'and at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog, or parrot: it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits'.42 Martineau refuses to accept the possibility of this transition: she acknowledges the use of 'finger language' but still believes it is insufficient to capture the subtleties and abstractions of thought that define true humanity. In her account, even the partially deaf seem to be only partial human beings. They have the advantages of language, but the sufferer 'can learn by it only what is expressly communicated to himself', and hence misses out on class learning or general conversation, and is driven by such a solitary life into 'painful and unaimable thoughts', moroseness, and a 'suspicious temper that will inevitably poison his life' if great care is not taken (pp. 137-38). Martineau's article, with its insistence on the centrality of language to any definition of humanity, pinpoints many of the issues involved in contemporary debates on idiocy. Caddy's baby has to be ranked, like Jo the crossing sweeper, outside the boundaries of normal linguistic competence. Dickens deliberately places Jo on the lowest rung of the linguistic ladder: his speech is limited, and he can neither read nor write. The narrator reflects on what it must be like to be 'stone blind and dumb' to every scrap of written language: It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle, go by me, and to know that in ignorance I belong to them, and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend! (ch. 16, p. 260)

The anger in this passage seems to be directed at those so-called 'superior beings' who would dare to place Jo on a par with animals. The 42. Dickens, American Notes, p. 47.

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37

development of Dickens's disquisition unsettles this interpretation, however. With the awakening of the 'great tee-totum' to its daily whirl, reading and writing recommences and 'Jo, and the other lower animals, get on in the unintelligible mess as they can'. Jo is then identified with the blinded, goaded oxen driven, but never guided, to market who, 'plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone walls; and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!' Animality is here transformed from a state of linguistic ignorance to a violent force which threatens both itself and others. The ox might be innocent, goaded to its actions, but nonetheless it will injure those who stand in its path. With that mocking, final line, 'very, very like' it is still possible to read this comparison as ironic. The subsequent passage, however, emphatically endorses Jo's link to the animal world. Jo and a drover's dog both hear a band: He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise, as to wakened association, aspiration or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute! Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark—but not their bite (ch. 16, pp. 260-63).

The warning here mirrors many others in Dickens's work, and is therefore clearly serious.43 Social anger and sympathy for Jo modulate into fear. In a novel where linguistic accomplishment seems frequently to lead to perversion (as seen, for example in the case of Harold Skimpole), it might be thought a blessing to be born or placed outside the sphere of language. Dickens, however, seems here to endorse Martineau's view that humans, without full access to language, will fall to the level of animals, or indeed, Dickens suggests, below it. The dog, at least, has been trained to use his senses in a useful way; Jo and other street urchins remain at the mercy of theirs. Music, that first form of language according to contemporary evolutionary debates, evokes from man and beast merely a sensual response.44 The conceptual ordering of emotion required to summon aspiration or regret is beyond them both. Like 43. See, for example, Charles Dickens, 'The Haunted Man', in Michael Slater (ed.), The Christmas Books, II (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971 [1848]), pp. 245-353 (327). 44. For a discussion of these debates see Delia da Sousa Correa, ' "The Music Vibrating in Her Still": Music and Memory in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda', Nineteenth-Century Contexts Special Issue: Memory, 1789-1914, 12 (2000), pp. 541-63.

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Brother Jacob, Jo and the dog live in a world where past and present are one, where temporal and conceptual distinctions hold no place.

Degeneration The spectre of degeneration, which was to dominate psychological discourse in the last decades of the century, is clearly signalled in Dickens's discussion of Jo. According to Henry Maudsley, prime psychological spokesperson in England for these views, idiocy, like criminality and lunacy, is a 'manufactured article'.45 Such manufacture occurs through environmental influences and heredity. Maudsley, like Martineau, draws on Howe's report on idiocy in Massachusetts to underscore the dangers of inbreeding which can lead to 'imperfect mental and physical development, deaf-mutism, and actual imbecility or idiocy'. He also employs the work of the French psychiatrist, Morel, to chart a chain of degeneration through four generations, starting with drunkenness in the first and leading to 'sterile idiocy' in the fourth. Idiocy, he notes is 'the natural term of mental degeneracy when it goes on unchecked through generations'.46 Maudsley fully subscribes to Darwinian views of animal descent: idiocy is a form of arrested development, where the brain has failed to evolve beyond that of an ape. Maudsley refuses to be seduced by romantic accounts of wild children: Peter the wild boy and the 'savage of Aveyron' were merely idiots who exhibited a capacity for wild animal life. In his discussion of arrested development Maudsley draws on the notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that is, that each individual in the process of development passes through all the animal stages of the evolutionary development of our species. Different forms of idiocy, he suggests, equate with arrested development at different stages of animal life. For evidence, Maudsley refers us to the inmates of a typical asylum, every one of which has its own cow: In most large asylums there is one, or more than one, example of a demented person who truly ruminates: bolting his food rapidly, he retires afterwards to a corner, where at his leisure he quietly brings it up again into the mouth and masticates it as the cow does.

45. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind, quoted in Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 18301890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 327. 46. Taylor and Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied Selves, pp. 327-28. 47. Taylor and Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied Selves, p. 329.

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39

In the last decades of the century, idiocy was returned once more to the state of animal or sub-human. The reforming zeal of moral management which had sought to rescue and educate such beings was overwhelmed by the evolutionary pessimism of post-Darwinian psychiatry. Running alongside this vision of idiocy as a reversion to the animal, there was also, however, another vision of idiocy as a manufactured article: manufactured this time by the pressures of an over-civilized world. Under this formulation, idiots become the victims of a modern capitalist, bureaucratic culture, which is always pressing to obtain more and more out of its subjects.48 James Crichton Browne, in 'Education and the Nervous System' (1883), harks back to Dickens's Dombey and Son of 1848, to the wonderful depiction of Dr Blimber's educational establishment, in order to reinforce his arguments that over-pressurized education can lead to subsequent idiocy: In fact, Dr Blimber's establishment was a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus constantly at work. All the boys blew before their time. Mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round... Moreover, one young gentleman with a swollen nose and an excessively large head...who had gone through everything, suddenly left off blowing one day, and remained in the establishment a mere stock. And people did say that the Doctor had rather overdone it with young Toots, who, when he began to have whiskers, left off having brains. 49

Toots, in Maudsley's terminology, is a manufactured idiot. According to Benjamin Ward Richardson, such over-stimulation of the child's mind could lead to a hardening and fixing of the brain: 'It remains throughout life a large child's brain, very wonderful for power in a child, but very weak in a man or woman.'50 Mr Toots, whose very name, like that of Sloppy, ensures his permanent lack of dignity, remains in the state of a five-year-old child, behaving amiably, but in a manner quite discordant with his adult frame. Dickens, however, rescues Mr Toots, as he does Sloppy, allowing him to marry a woman of sense, the redoubtable Susan Nipper, so that he begins, by the end of the novel, to be able to string sentences together. 48. According to Thomas Stretch Dowse, 'Brain exhaustion from over-study and so-called cramming the brain, is, perhaps, one of the greatest social evils of modern times, and is simply a blot upon advancing civilization.' On Brain and Nerve Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (London: Balliere, Tindall and Cox, 1892), p. 42. 49- James Crichton Browne, 'Education and the Nervous System', in Malcolm Morris (ed.), The Book of Health (London: Cassell, 1883), p. 351. 50. Benjamin Ward Richardson, Diseases of Modern Life (London: Macmillan, 1876), p. 420.

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Behind all these fears of brain forcing lay the belief that the body and mind had only a finite amount of energy to dispose of: energy focused in one direction would deprive body and mind in other vital areas. This was the theory that underpinned the vehement opposition in the late century to women entering further education.51 According to T.S. Clouston, it would soon become necessary to have another rape of the Sabines, to a land where educational theories were unknown, if the race was going to continue. Women who are over-educated damage not only themselves, but also future generations: If these young women do marry, they seldom have more than one or two children, and only puny creatures at that, whom they cannot nurse, and who either die in youth or grow up to be feeble-minded folks. Their mothers had not only used up for another purpose their own reproductive energy, but also most of that which they should have transmitted to their children."52

Where idiocy in the earlier period had often been traced to a fright the mother had experienced during pregnancy, it has now become directly the mother's fault, a result of her deliberate actions. For a woman to pursue education is the height of selfishness; her own gratification is purchased at the expense of the idiocy of her children. At the beginning of the century, Thomas Trotter had warned that if the middle classes continued to pursue their lives of indulgent luxury, then Britain would become 'a nation of slaves and idiots'.53 By the century's close such warnings had been developed into a powerful discourse of degeneracy, where idiocy was invoked as a threat to control social behaviour, whether male drinking patterns, or female indulgence in the forbidden fruit of education. The nineteenth century witnessed sweeping changes in cultural constructions of idiocy, with emerging notions of educability supplanted at the close by a fierce evolutionary determinism. Where Wordsworth used his 'idiot boy' to show the depths of affection within the working 51. Herbert Spencer was one of the first physiologists to warn of the dangers of female education in over-taxing the female economy, in Education, Intellectual, Moral and Physical (London: Williams and Norgate, 1861). Henry Maudsley joined the debate in 1874 with his notorious article, 'Sex in Mind and in Education', Fortnightly Review 15 (April 1874), pp. 466-83. See Taylor and Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied Selves, pp. 373-88. 52. T.S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1883), pp. 528-29. 53. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament (London: Longman, 3rd edn, 1812), p. x.

Shuttleworth 'SO CHILDISH AND SO DREADFULLY UN-CHILDLIKE' 41 classes, late-nineteenth-century theorists employed the figure of the idiot to chart the fine gradations between lower forms of human life and animal states. The mid-century literary texts examined here show a range of responses. George Eliot, despite her Wordsworthian sympathies, shows no interest in her idiot as a character in his own right, while Charlotte Bronte's cretin is an image of deformed animalism, who becomes a vehicle for Lucy Snowe's own self-hatred and despair. Dickens and Martineau offer a far more complicated mix of images and responses. Both strongly support recent moves to house and educate idiots in dedicated institutions, yet the threat of animalism seems never far away in their projections. Even language is no longer an adequate guide to human status. Martineau lashes out in anger at deaf mutes who are full of arrogance and refuse to accept their own inferiority. Their art, of which they are so proud, is not really art at all, for 'all the really artistic qualities of mind are wanting in them' (p. 137). Similarly their use of language is deceptive, for they offer the 'sign without the thing signified' (p. 136); Martineau denies them the capacity for deep feeling which should be the necessary accompaniment of true human language. They emerge in her projections as mere imitation persons; like their own sign language, they are substitutes for the real thing. Martineau is noticeably harsher towards deaf mutes, and the partially deaf, who approximate to her own condition, than towards idiots themselves, who draw a vein of sentimentality in her writing. It is as if the second article, 'Idiots Again', is written as a form of emotional compensation for the anger unleashed in 'Deaf Mutes'. Dickens's own divided responses to the question of idiocy can be traced within the confines of a single article, where the onslaught on the imaginary female reader at the close of 'Idiots' acts as a displacement of the violent emotional disturbance registered in the personal memories which provide the article's opening frame. Despite the introduction of new, more enlightened views of educability, the figure of the idiot remained irredeemably 'other', disturbing the boundaries of the animal and human, and the supposed divisions between childhood and adulthood. The idiot, in Dickens's writing, inhabits neither sphere: as an adult he is a child, and as a child he is always old-looking. The emerging sanctification of the realm of childhood in the Victorian era created a zealous policing of its borders. An idiot could never be allowed to inhabit this realm unambigously. As a child, Dickens's idiot is therefore a proto-adult, while as an adult he becomes 'childish and so dreadfully un-childlike'. Like Martineau's deaf mute, he lacks authenticity. Idiocy is projected both as a pure state, where there is no space for the artifices employed by social beings, and also as a sham. The idiot mimics that which he is not. He operates in

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nineteenth-century discourse as the ultimate liminal figure, troubling the boundaries which denned social normality.

Bibliography Andrews, Jonathan, 'Begging the Question of Idiocy: The Definition and Socio-Cultural Meaning of Idiocy in Early Modern Britain', Parts I and II, History of Psychiatry 9 (1998), pp. 65-95, 179-200. Anon, 'The Idiot Girl', Chambers's Edinburgh Journal 11 Qan.-June 1849), pp. 230-32. Ballard, Thomas, A New and Rational Explanation of the Diseases Peculiar to Infants and Mothers (London: John Churchill, I860). Bewell, Alan, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Billington, Sandra, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester, 1984). Bronte, Charlotte, Villette (ed. Tony Tanner; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979 [1853]). Browne, James Crichton, 'Education and the Nervous System', in Malcolm Morris (ed.), The Book of Health (London: Cassell, 1883). Clouston, T.S., Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1883). Cobbe, Frances Power, 'Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors', Eraser's Magazine (1868), pp. 777-94. Darwin, Charles, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872). Davis, J.B., and John Thurnam, Crania Britannica: Delineations and Descriptions of the Skulls of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the British Isles (2 vols.; London, 1865 [1856-65]). Dickens, Charles, American Notes (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d. [1842]). —Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d. [1841]). —Bleak House (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d. [1852-53]). —'A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree', Household Words 4 Can. 17, 1852), pp. 385-89. —'The Haunted Man', in Michael Slater (ed.), The Christmas Books, II (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971 [1848]), pp. 245-353. Dickens, Charles, and W.H. Wills, 'Idiots', Household Words 7 (June 14, 1853), pp. 313-17. Douthwaite, Julia, 'Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model', Eighteenth-Century Life NS 21.2 (1997), pp. 176-202. Down, J. Langdon, On Some of the Mental Affections of Childhood and Youth (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1887). Dowse, Thomas Stretch, On Brain and Nerve Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (London: Balliere, Tindall and Cox, 1892). Eliot, George, Adam Bede (cabinet edn; Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1878-80). —The George Eliot Letters (ed. Gordon S. Haight; 9 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-78). —Middlemarch (cabinet edn; Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1878-80).

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—Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (cabinet edn; Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1878-80). Esquirol, J.E.D., Des Maladies Mentale (Paris, 1838). Fennings, Alfred, Every Mother's Book or The Child's Best Doctor (West Cowes, c. 1856). Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (trans. Richard Howard; London: Tavistock, 1967). Gilman, Sander, Seeing the Insane (New York: John Wiley, 1982). Gitter, Elizabeth G., 'Charles Dickens and Samuel Gridley Howe', Dickens Quarterly 8 (1991), pp. 162-67. Hunter, Richard, and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535-1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Hyden, John O., 'William Wordsworth's Letter to John Wilson (1802): A Corrected Version', Wordsworth Circle 18 (1987), pp. 37-38. Lavater, John Caspar, Essays on Physiognomy (trans. Thomas Holcroft; London: William Tegg, 9th edn, 1855). Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Peter H. Nidditch; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1689]). Martineau, Harriet, 'Deaf Mutes,' Household Words 9 (March 25, 1854), pp. 134-38. —'Idiots Again', Household Words 9 (April 15, 1854), pp. 197-200. Maudsley, Henry, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (London: Macmillan, 1870). —'Sex in Mind and in Education', Fortnightly Review 15 (April 1874), pp. 466-83. McKnight, Natalie, Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners in Dickens (New York: St Martin's Press, 1993). Melling, Joseph, Richard Adair and Bill Forsythe, ' "A Proper Lunatic for Two Years": Pauper Lunatic Children in Victorian and Edwardian England. Child Admissions to the Devon County Asylum, 1845-1914', Journal of Social History 31 (1997), pp. 371-405. Morison, Alexander, The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (London: Longman, 2nd edn, 1840 [1838]). Morris, Malcolm (ed.), The Book of Health (London: Cassell, 1883). Phillips, Charles Palmer, The Law Concerning Lunatics, Idiots, and Persons of Unsound Mind (London: Butterworths, 1858). Richardson, Benjamin Ward, Diseases of Modern Life (London: Macmillan, 1876). Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (London: Duckworth, 1985). Sousa Correa, Delia da, ' "The Music Vibrating in Her Still": Music and Memory in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss andDaniel Deronda', Nineteenth-Century Contexts Special Issue: Memory, 1789-1914, 12 (2000), pp. 541-63. Southey, Robert, 'Idiot', Morning Post (30 June 1798). Spencer, Herbert, Education, Intellectual, Moral and Physical (London: Williams and Northgate, 1861). Taylor, Jenny Bourne and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830-1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Trotter, Thomas, A View of the Nervous Temperament (London: Longman, 3rd edn, 1812).

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Tuke, Daniel Hack, Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882). Vogel, Alfred, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Children (trans, and ed. H. Raphael; London: H.K. Lewis, 1886). Welsford, Enid, The Fool: His Social and literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935). Wright, David, 'Family Strategies and the Institutional Confinement of "Idiot" Children in Victorian England', Journal of Social History 23.2 (1998), pp. 190-208.

Jane Wood 'Aberrant Passions and Unaccountable Antipathies': Nervous Women, Nineteenth-Century Neurology and Literary Text

Reviewing a number of books on neurology for the North British Review in 1854, David Brewster describes the nerves as 'organs of sensation' forming a kind of membrane whose highest purpose is to convey 'to the brain the impressions which they receive from external objects'. We understand, he writes, that these 'membranes of sensation' are the 'mystic boundary between the two worlds of matter and mind. They receive the impressions of external nature, and convey them to the mind, and by a similar process they take back and give an external existence to those ideas which the mind desires to be reproduced for intellectual and social purposes.'1 Developments in neurological medicine during the second half of the nineteenth century had an impact upon the wider culture of Victorian thought. At the simplest level, nervousness was a dominant category in the disease narratives of Victorian novels. More discursively, however, the idea of a physical mechanism which would explain psychological states was a compelling one in a period which began to see science, and not philosophy, as the means of understanding the nature of the relationship between body and mind. In the spaces between mental and bodily states, the network of the nerves seemed to offer a representational site which would ultimately reveal the key to the mysterious workings of the sensorial life. For writers of both medical and literary texts, the concept of an internal landscape, boundary, or mediating interspace where impulses from the external world passed into consciousness and, in a reverse process, emerged once again in the form of perception and behaviour, opened a whole new area of enquiry. This paper will explore the ways in which these ideas, formulated in medical and related scientific texts, directly informed the representations of nervous women in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. In focusing on Gwendolen Harleth and Sue 1. David Brewster, 'Mental Physiology', North British Review 22 (1854), pp. 179-224 (191).

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Bridehead, I am interested in the comparisons and differences between women set apart by their nervous organization from the world they inhabit. Gwendolen's susceptibility to nervous disorder is a constant feature of a life in which the facts and events of the outside world are at odds with her perception of them. Sue's breakdown takes the form of a nervous atrophy of the kind which contemporary physicians would have directly related to the conditions of the time but which is complicated in the novel by contradictions in its causal criteria. In what follows, I see the crossing of boundaries as functioning on two levels: firstly, on the local level of the nerves as the mechanism of exchange between the objects of the material world and the individual's healthy or diseased impressions of those objects; and, secondly, on the level of discourse, with ideas being exchanged between disciplines. This is not to imply a one-way process whereby novelists simply incorporate medical themes and models into their imaginative fiction, but rather to see science and literature in the broader cultural context in which both are actively engaged in the ideological debates that new knowledge initiates. George Eliot's portrayal of Gwendolen's peculiar 'sensitiveness' to the events of the physical world is shaped by the physiological explanations of behaviour and response that were prominent in the 1870s but, at the same time, it highlights the insufficiencies of purely biological explanations of mental life.2 For scientists, there were difficulties in defining mental experience solely in terms of neural activity, especially with concepts such as 'mind' and 'will'. In the absence of a scientific nomenclature many, including the neurologist and, in Janet Oppenheim's words, 'arch-somaticist' Henry Maudsley, found themselves turning to the figurative language of literature. 3 Even Maudsley's disapproval of what he regards as vague and meaningless abstractions does not insure him against using language more prevalent in sensation fiction. His declaration that 'everything which is displayed outwardly is contained secretly in the innermost', though offered as a straightforward statement of neurological fact, works rather to mystify than explain. 4 The enigmatic processes governing the mind's consciousness of sense experience form the basis of Eliot's construction of Gwendolen's disorder. It is within what Athena Vrettos has called 'the uncharted spaces between physical 2. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (ed. Barbara Hardy; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967 [1876]), p. 95. All subsequent references are to this edition. 3. Janet Oppenheim, 'Shattered Nerves': Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 41. 4. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Enquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 24.

Wood ABERRANT PASSIONS AND UNACCOUNTABLE ANTIPATHIES' 47 reality and psychological interpretations of that reality' that the dysfunction originates. 5 Incongruity and conflict between inside and outside, between psychological autonomy and hereditary determinism, between moral self-management and haunting dreads, and between egoism and social duty, are the endlessly generating enigmas of the novel and the exacerbating criteria of nervous disease. Indeed, the representation of Gwendolen's nervous organization by means of a third-person, interrogative and implicitly interpretative narration suggests a complex, and perhaps ultimately imperceptible system which is not reducible to scientific laws, though it is tempting to imagine that the question posed in the opening sentence of the novel—'[W]hat was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance?' (p. 35)—is one which Maudsley might have felt himself qualified to answer. When Eliot's partner, George HenryLewes, describes neural activity within the body as 'the silent growth of tendencies', his memorable phrase encapsulates both the scientist's vision of the internal processes of transformation which operate beyond the control of the will and the less scientifically assured sense of 'vague and yet mastering' (p. 321) workings of impulse which charge the psychological narratives of Eliot's fiction.6 For the physiologist, the sense of powerlessness in the submission to overmastering organic forces that the term 'tendency' imparts had a fascinating if sinister plausibility, particularly in the light of contemporary theories of hereditary determinism. For the novelist, the notion of the 'silent growth of tendencies' is crucial to the portrayal of an individual whose psychological well-being is increasingly eroded by ungovernable impulses from an indeterminate source, but whose nervous disease is always potentially rather than fully realized. One of the symptoms of Gwendolen's neurosis is her liability to distort the objects, ideas and events of the world outside the self into a false perception of the relationship of those objective facts to the self—a compulsion consistent with a clinical condition known as 'morbid egoism'. A model which distinguished between 'object-consciousness' as the denning feature of health and 'subject-consciousness' as that of morbidity was widely accepted among the medical community. 7

5. Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 61. 6. G.H. Lewes, Problems of life and Mind, Third Series (4 vols.; London: Triibner, 1879), II, p. 24, emphasis in original. 7. The terms 'object-consciousness' and 'subject-consciousness' were coined by William Bevan Lewis in A Textbook of Mental Diseases (London: Charles Griffin, 1889), but related sets of associations and contrasts such as 'introversion/extra-

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Gwendolen's sickness is generated in the self-referential spaces of subject-consciousness, a form of morbid introspection where received sensations are all awry, wrongly processed and interpreted. It is just such a breakdown in the mind's capacity for distinguishing between the real and the imaginary, the significant and the inconsequential, that is indicated in Gwendolen when it is observed that 'all this yeasty mingling of dimly understood facts with vague but deep impressions, and with images half real, half fantastic' (p. 402) vied within her consciousness for priority. The 'mighty drama' (p. 160) of the outside world and her own morbid vision merge into a phantasmagoric interplay of images culminating in the belief that her wish for Grandcourt's death has given the impulse to her sick nerves to make thought spring into action. The mechanism once described by Lewes as the 'motors of the inner life' echoes through her statement: 'I only know that I saw my wish outside me' (p. 76l). 8 Eliot's interrogation of the boundary between external events and inward impression strikes at the very core of neurological enquiry. Gwendolen's malady is marked by crises of alienation and detachment from the continuities and contingencies which fix a sense of self in a knowable world. Further, it is conceived by Eliot not simply as an acute affliction or a kind of monomania, but as the manifestation of some underlying constitutional disorder. Advocates of evolutionary medicine had found a way of including the isolated aberrance, the 'brief madness', into the continuum of inherited neurosis. Viewed in this new context, the acute stretched into the chronic and a whole range of otherwise unaccountable behaviours became amenable to hereditary diagnosis. Medical warnings of a latent tendency in nervous patients to attacks of violent seizure or cataleptic trance are illuminating when attempting to account for Gwendolen's symptoms. From the strangling of her sister's canary-bird to the paralysed immobility which inadvertently enhances her performance of Shakespeare's Hermione; from her fits of hysterical screaming to her shrinking recoil from the mere thought of Grandcourt's touch, the images which figure in Gwendolen's neurosis bear striking resemblance to the signs of latent disease detailed in medical texts as doctors became increasingly habituated to a discourse of nervous degeneration. 'In truth,' states Maudsley, 'nervous disease is a veritable Proteus, disappearing in one form to reappear in another, and it may be,

version', 'egoism/altruism', were repeatedly invoked (before Lewis) to construct a model of health and disease. 8. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, II, p. 97.

W o o d 'ABERRANT PASSIONS AND UNACCOUNTABLE ANTIPATHIES' 49

capriciously skipping one generation to fasten upon the next.' 9 Eliot's allusion to Gwendolen's 'trace of demon ancestry' (p. 99) seems to alert us to this possibility. 'Demon ancestry' is also a significant diagnostic factor in Sue Bridehead's nervousness since, like Jude, she descends from the defective Fawley stock. By the 1890s, the spectre of hereditary diathesis loomed ever larger over women's lives as claims of inferior brain capacity and greater susceptibility to nervous disease came together to define those lives in terms of limited constitutional resources. Socio-medical literature, which had long proclaimed a connection between the nervous disorders of women and unfulfilled sexual lives, seized upon the principle of evolutionary necessity to lay the blame for women's neurotic illnesses upon their unwillingness to conform to the obligations of marriage and motherhood. Both Gwendolen and Sue, we are told, experience 'antipathies' to close physical contact with their husbands. Gwendolen embodies the ambiguity of sexual self-advertisement, being at once the central object of an admiring gaze and 'subject to physical antipathies' (p. 157). The repugnance of proximity is the dread of unwanted intrusion into the private space of the self, a dread that repeatedly manifests itself as the physical pain of strangling and suffocation familiar as 'globus hystericus', or the choking sensation of hysteria.10 For both women, the sense of an inner private self that is at odds with an internalized expectation of external normality is figured as aberrant passion. Sue Bridehead openly admits that her outward 'calm wedded life' is a lie, for inwardly she is 'not really Mrs Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies'.11 In the twenty years or so that separated these two literary heroines, anxieties about the supposed gradual exhaustion of evolutionary energy had heightened. Amid the tensions raised by the findings of biologists and physicists in respect of nervous and global degeneration, medical and sociological interpretations of diminishing resources merely served to consolidate the contradictions which already bedevilled discourse on female sexuality and nervous disease. Scores of treatises, whose authors subscribed to the view that mental and physical potential was gender9. Maudsley, Body and Mind, p. 68. 10. For example, Grandcourt's presence is deemed akin to the stranglehold of 'a crab or boa-constrictor which goes on pinching or crushing' (p. 477) and Gwendolen is constantly in terror of quarrels lest they end with his 'throttling fingers on her neck' (p. 626). 11. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (ed. C.H. Sisson; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978 [1895]), p. 266. All subsequent references are to this edition.

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determined, confirmed and validated sexual difference by means of narratives which asseverate the morbid consequences of living beyond one's biological means. But the aetiology of nervous degeneration identified both hereditary weakness and over-refinement as contributory factors. Similarly, Hardy's representation of Sue Bridehead's ailing health contains a contradiction in diagnosing both a reversion to a primitive state corresponding to a lower point in the evolutionary scale and a nervous sensitivity that had become over-refined. The idea that mental difference in men and women was rooted in biological necessity had become established science. Herbert Spencer and Henry Maudsley were only two among a number of advocates of the evolutionary principle that women's energies were not intellectual but must be conserved for 'the special functions in life for which they are destined'. 12 Alienists and neurologists conducted experiments which resulted in findings that seemed to confirm the inherent differences they already believed. Thus when James Crichton Browne carried out brain autopsies at Wakefield Asylum he concluded that the lighter weight of the female brain not only confirmed women's inferior mental capacity, but also a popular superstition that, along with lunatics and primitive tribes, women were biologically determined to 'stop at a lower point in mental evolution'. 13 It is interesting to note that, in his diary for 1893, Thomas Hardy refers to a conversation he had with Crichton Browne on this very subject. 14 In their eagerness to ratify mental difference, medical writers produced some glaring inconsistencies. The eminent evolutionary physiologist George Romanes attempted to settle the dispute by re-interpreting the term 'mental' according to the separate faculties which comprise it. Romanes perhaps unwittingly exposes the dangers of drawing general truths from a single biological model and comes close to contradiction in an article which simultaneously proclaims that women's cerebral organization was arrested at a lower point in evolutionary development, and that their nerves had evolved to an over-refined delicacy and sensitivity. In the evolutionary race, he contended, woman is already too far behind to catch up. '[E]ven supposing the mind of man to remain stationary [...] it must take many centuries for heredity to produce the

12. Henry Maudsley, 'Sex in Mind and in Education', Fortnightly Review NS 15 (1874), pp. 466-83 (482). 13. James Crichton Browne, 'Education and the Nervous System', in Malcolm Morris (ed.), The Book of Health (London: Cassell, 1884), pp. 269-380 (342). 14. See Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 259.

Wood

ABERRANT PASSIONS AND UNACCOUNTABLE ANTIPATHIES' 51

missing five ounces of the female brain.'15 In explanation of woman's alleged vulnerability to nervous disease, however, he writes, 'The whole organisation of woman is formed on a plan of greater delicacy, and her mental structure is correspondingly more refined: it is further removed from the struggling instincts of the lower animals, and thus more nearly approaches our conception of the spiritual.'16 The contradiction between reversion and refinement becomes assimilated and endlessly repeated in many of the ideas which surfaced during the last years of the century. It was centrally implicated in the disease of neurasthenia, the nervous ailment which became causally and symbolically linked to the era. I am suggesting, too, that it underpins Hardy's portrayal of Sue Bridehead's nervous collapse. Hardy does not endorse the notion of gender-determined constitutional weakness but, in making Jude turn desperately to received wisdoms about women's nature for explanation of Sue's behaviour, the force of these ideas is constantly working in the text in opposition to the narrative of intellectual progress. Where George Eliot conceptualized the network of nerves as a mediating interspace between the outside world and subjective perception, Hardy, I am arguing, saw it as a system which had degenerated to the point where the human mind was effectively disconnected from the material world it inhabited. The 'human race', he contended, 'is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment'.17 He puts the very same thought into the mind of the intelligently imaginative Sue, who is haunted by the idea that 'at the framing of the terrestrial conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity' (p. 417). Hardy's much-quoted phrase, the 'deadly war waged between flesh and spirit', points ominously to what he saw as an unprecedented clash of interests between the higher cerebral functions unique to humankind and the fleshly instincts which belonged to Darwin's 'past and lower state of civilisation'.18 Although the reconciliation of opposing forces is problematic for both protagonists, it is Sue's reluctance to accept the narrow prescriptions of woman's social and sexual duty, and her 15. George J. Romanes, 'Mental Differences Between Men and Women', Nineteenth Century 21 (1887), pp. 654-72 (666). 16. Romanes, 'Mental Differences', p. 660. 17. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 218. 18. Preface to the First Edition of Jude the Obscure; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 2nd edn, 1883 [1871]), p. 564.

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corresponding desire for new freedoms, which are perceived by others as her 'unnatural' traits. The question as to whether Sue's ideas and behaviour showed signs of an extraordinary refinement of the senses or an aberrant psychology is somewhat hastily resolved by linking the two together so that her intelligence is presented as inseparable from 'the perverseness that was part of her' (p. 186). A recognition of mental difference which at first delights, but then exasperates Jude, is in line with contemporary scientific attempts to explain female impressionability, intuition and feeling as rooted in the law of nature. Of course Hardy excludes Sue from such an essentialist category but, in so doing, he binds her to a pathology of nervous disintegration allied to the strain of being different. As was the case with Gwendolen Harleth, Sue's difference from other women is repeatedly stressed. Like Gwendolen, she is eager to have herself considered an exceptional woman with an original turn of mind. Originality, however, stood dangerously at variance with the more acceptable feminine qualities of responsiveness and compliance. The link, moreover, between originality of mind and nervous instability had a long history. Maudsley had brought much of his earlier work on diseased consciousness into the era of degeneration panic when he designated a pathological category for the mind that dared to be different and to 'rebel against the established rule'.19 The force of originality needed to make a stand against the custom and routine of one's allotted medium is a property of the unstable brain, he averred. Hardy noted that this type was most frequently found in individuals with 'a distinct neurotic strain [...] in their families'.20 Such an unhappy conjunction is the 'transcendent irony of fate', since it binds the pioneering spirit to a finite and diminishing supply of nervous energy. Having discharged itself in striving for some 'high moral ideal' or new and radical conditions, that energy is soon exhausted.21 Maudsley's vicious circle of inevitable disintegration is grist

to the mill of Hardy's representation of a heroine whose peculiar notions are the mark of her originality, but at the same time signal her unfitness, 19. Henry Maudsley, Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (London: Kegan Paul and Trench, 1886), p. 208. Hardy made notes from this book as he collected material for Jude. See Patricia Gallivan, 'Science and Art injude the Obscure', in Anne Smith (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Vision Press, 1979), pp. 126-44 (129). 20. Lennart A. Bjork (ed.), The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, I (2 vols.; London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 198. 21. Maudsley, Natural Causes, p. 209. The phrase 'a high moral ideal' appears in Hardy's transcription, though not in Maudsley's text. See Bjork (ed.), The Literary Notebooks, I, p. 198.

Wood 'ABERRANT PASSIONS AND UNACCOUNTABLE ANTIPATHIES' 53 because of her defective ancestry, to survive the vicissitudes that her own disruptive energies have stirred into action. Sue's nervous breakdown takes the form of a reversal to prescribed norms of womanhood—to the old duties and conventions which her healthier mind had so anathematized. It is a paradox of her condition that her reversion to a quivering, self-sacrificing wife is at once a symptom of her disease and a sign of reintegration into a stable sexual hierarchy. Unhinged by the catastrophic deaths of the children, Sue moves back, in the words of Patricia Gallivan quoting from Maudsley, 'into guilt and fear and orthodoxy, suffers a "reversion to the old belief of savages"'.22 Her alarm—'I am getting as superstitious as a savage!' (p. 417)—is confirmation of her own retreat from the forefront of 'thinking and educated humanity', but it is also an acknowledgment of the inescapable burden of a tainted inheritance. With resources already depleted by an adverse genealogy, Sue's mental energy begins to fail. The point where health turns to disease is marked metaphorically as a turning from light to darkness, from enlightenment to a primitive past. Nervous disease dims her once shining intellect and, just like Gwendolen, she loses the ability to distinguish between hierarchies of phenomena and mistakenly believes that her own aberrant agency has precipitated events. The punishing regime which Sue adopts seeks an ethereality which is at once a defiance of a cultural ideal of nurturing womanhood and an extreme interpretation of the role of the domestic angel. However, despite Mrs Edlin's observation that Sue now seemed more like 'a sperrit' (p. 474) than a woman, she does not achieve incorporeality. Instead, the loss of flesh exposes an organism that is little more than 'a mere cluster of nerves', a simple life form functioning solely by reflex and from which 'all initiatory power' (p. 436) has atrophied in the unremitting exhaustion of meeting the obligations to which she is physically and intellectually averse. It is Jude's stubborn persistence in the principle of essential mental difference which returns us to the matter of the inconsistencies in explanations of women's nervous organization. When he acknowledges Sue as his 'guardian-angel' who keeps him from reverting to the condition of 'the pig that was washed turning back to his wallowing in the mire!' (p. 429), we are reminded of George Romanes's assertion that woman's mental structures are 'more refined: [...] further removed from the struggling instincts of the lower animals'. Remarkably, then, Hardy's representation of Sue's breakdown embraces the contradiction that has been noted in the arguments advanced by Romanes and 22. Gallivan, 'Science and Art in Jude the Obscure', p. 133.

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others. Reduced to the primitive reflexes of a simple life form and at the same time refined to the point of unviability within the environment, Sue's nervous pathology spans the evolutionary scale. Both of the novels I have been discussing make use of contemporary scientific knowledge on the role of the nerves to engage in debates about the relationship of body and mind and of the self to the external world. If Gwendolen Harleth's morbid egoism collapses the boundaries between material reality and subjective perception, Sue Bridehead's nervous exhaustion is symptomatic, rather, of a widening gap in which the nervous mechanism has become impossibly overstretched. With the dawn of a new century, psychiatric medicine began to define depression and nervous breakdown in terms far removed from mystic membranes or drained resources. Nonetheless, even as the disciplines of medical science became more specialized, explanations of 'aberrant passions and unaccountable antipathies' entered the public domain already mediated through the cultural sensibilities, ideas and practices which similarly shaped the literary imagination.

Bibliography Bjork, Lennart A., The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (2 vols; London: Macmillan, 1985). Brewster, David, 'Mental Physiology', North British Review 22 (1854), pp. 179-224. Browne, James Crichton, 'Education and the Nervous System', in Malcolm Morris (ed.), The Book of Health (London: Cassell, 1884), pp. 269-380. Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 2ndedn, 1883 [1871]). Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda (ed. Barbara Hardy; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967 [1876]). Gallivan, Patricia, 'Science and Art injude the Obscure', in Anne Smith (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Vision Press, 1979), pp. 126-44. Hardy, Florence Emily, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962). Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure (ed. C.H. Sisson; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978 [1895]). Lewes, G.H., Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series (4 vols.; London: Triibner, 1879). Lewis, William Bevan, A Textbook of Mental Diseases (London: Charles Griffin, 1889). Maudsley, Henry, Body and Mind: An Enquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence (London: Macmillan, 1870). —Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (London: Kegan Paul and Trench, 1886). — The Physiology of Mind, rev. edn of The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (London: Macmillan, 1876).

W o o d ABERRANT PASSIONS AND UNACCOUNTABLE ANTIPATHIES' 55 —'Sex in Mind and in Education', Fortnightly Review NS 15 (1874), pp. 466-83Morris, Malcolm (ed.), The Book of Health (London: Cassell, 1884). Oppenheim, Janet, 'Shattered Nerves': Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Romanes, George J., 'Mental Differences Between Men and Women', Nineteenth Century 21 (1887), pp. 654-72. Smith, Anne (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Vision Press, 1979). Vrettos, Athena, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Gowan Dawson X-Club not X-Files: Walter Pater, Spiritualism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism*

When told of the death of the aesthetic critic Walter Pater in the summer of 1894, Oscar Wilde famously quipped 'Was he ever alive?'1 The image of Pater presented by this barbed witticism, which portrays him as a retiring and overly delicate litterateur constantly withdrawing from any engagement with the outside world, was subsequently propagated in the condescending version of Pater articulated in the early twentieth century. The palpable distaste for his work expressed by Modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot marginalized Pater's importance for several generations of literary critics. More recently, however, criticism informed by cultural studies has shown that the discourse of aestheticism is implicated in a diverse range of nineteenth-century cultural formations.2 In this paper I will endeavour to establish a new framework for Pater's writing, one which has hitherto been largely overlooked, by contextualizing it within the complex and tacitly ideological disputes prompted by Victorian science. Nineteenth-century science, however, consistently defies univocal characterizations. Rather than a unified body of knowledge, the sciences in Victorian Britain were in fact a set of discrete disciplines divided internally by theoretical disputes and ideological tensions. Furthermore, as recent work in the history of science has shown, the retroactive construction of firm boundaries between established orthodox and marginal heterodox forms of Victorian science begins to break down once they are considered within their original historical context, where the understanding of the natural world was often much more fluid and open to contestation than has previously been recognized.3 This paper, * I would like to thank Sally Shuttleworth, Laurel Brake and Richard Noakes for their comments on previous versions of this paper. 1. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), p. 50. 2. See Laurel Brake, Walter Pater (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), pp. 1-7. 3. See Alison Winter, 'The Construction of Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in the Early Victorian Life Sciences', in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 24-50, and Richard J. Noakes,

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which seeks to integrate literary studies with the new historiography of recent contextualist scholarship in the history of science, will consider the conspicuously hostile response in Pater's writing to the scientific pretensions of spiritualism not as a 'correct' and proto-modern reaction to a set of patently 'absurd' phenomena, but rather as evidence of Pater's adherence to the polemical agenda advanced by a small clique of heterogeneous scientists proselytizing on behalf of Darwin's theory of evolution, as well as a more general naturalistic world-view underwritten by the postulates of the uniformity of nature and the conservation of energy. This world-view, which Frank Miller Turner designates 'scientific naturalism' and whose advocates organized themselves into supportive networks such as the X-Club, held that the universe is the product of an unyielding necessity, forged by rigid physical laws that can never be infringed.4 Pater, as I have argued at greater length elsewhere, upholds this particular naturalistic uniformitarian view of the universe throughout his writing.5

'Topics verging very decidedly upon the Ghost element' Spiritualism had begun in North America in 1848 and subsequently crossed the Atlantic four years later. Visiting American mediums instigated a veritable frenzy of interest in table-rapping, seances, clairvoyance, and many other manifestations of a putative spirit world. Despite the scepticism expressed by some early participants such as Michael Faraday (in fact, even he was interested enough to attend seances and devise an experimental test of table-turning), spiritualism continued to enthral men and women of all social classes for the rest of the century and even beyond. Its steadfast affirmation that the spirit survives physical death afforded solace to many in the noxious towns and cities of nineteenth-century England, and defiantly repudiated the rejection of the continuance of personal identity in an eternal hereafter which was ' "Cranks and Visionaries": Science, Spiritualism and Transgression in Victorian Britain' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998). 4. Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 8-37. On the X-Club see R.M. MacLeod, 'The X-Club: A Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 24 (1969), pp. 305-22, and Ruth Barton, ' "An Influential Set of Chaps": The X-Club and Royal Society Politics 1864-65', British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1990), pp. 53-81. 5. See Gowan Dawson, 'Walter Pater, Aestheticism and Victorian Science' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 1998).

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implicit in much contemporary science. As well as contesting the leading currents of modern secular thought, spiritualism also proffered a surrogate or even a rival belief system to established religious faiths. While this rival creed was frequently aligned with reformist politics such as the democratic activism of socialist artisans, and was used by nascent feminists to subvert the traditional expectations of femininity,6 it was at the same time also espoused by intellectuals at Cambridge and Conservative politicians who contended that psychical phenomena made clear the moral purpose of both the universe and the existing social order. 7 In this period spiritualist beliefs were enormously widespread, attracting adherents from groups as far apart as the provincial working classes and the metropolitan elite. 8 In the 1860s and 1870s some prominent scientific practitioners, most notably William Crookes and Alfred Russel Wallace, became convinced of the validity of assertions made by spiritualists that occult phenomena operated in accordance with previously undiscovered natural forces. Spiritualist phenomena, they avowed, could be verified empirically under the strictest experimental conditions. The principal exponents of scientific naturalism, however, remained either superciliously disdainful or belligerently antagonistic. Thomas Henry Huxley, for example, 6. See Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebians 1850-1910 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), and Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989). 7. Brian Wynne remarks that 'the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was formed in 1882 by Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, Frederick Myers, and William Barrett the physicist (all fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge) to investigate the phenomena of spiritualism and related matters. It championed "the unseen world" explicitly as a weapon against the limitations of the materialist cosmology, and used an elaborate scientific approach to establish the scientific reality of events and agencies beyond the ken of that cosmology and its adherents. But it also sought "scientifically" to control, from its own upper-class social base, all excursions into the unseen world beyond current boundaries of ordered experience, so as to discredit the "morally degenerate" interpretations being derived from such excursions'. See 'Physics and Psychics: Science, Symbolic Action, and Social Control in Late Victorian England', in Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (eds.), Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (London: Sage, 1979), pp. 167-86 (176-77). In fact, Barrett was never at Trinity College, Cambridge, but was rather a fellow of the much more orthodox Royal College of Science, Dublin. 8. Janet Oppenheim contends that spiritualism 'was...far more representative of contemporary religious attitudes than the agnosticism embraced by the comparatively few intellectuals who have dominated the historical record of.. .the Victorian crisis of faith'. See The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 18501914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 2.

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averred haughtily that even 'supposing the phenomena to be genuine— they do not interest me...having better things to do',9 while John Tyndall berated 'the intellectual whoredom of "spiritualism" '.10 Spiritualism, as Turner argues, made evident certain lacunae in the naturalist cosmography, most significantly its a priori exclusion of the evidence of subjective empirical experiences which had practical consequences in the lives of certain individuals.11 Any evidence that might attest to the reality of spiritual phenomena therefore had either to be disregarded or renounced entirely in order to uphold the fundamental propositions of scientific naturalism.12 As George W. Stocking has shown, the unpublished diaries of the evolutionary anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor reveal the divergence between his private and published views on spiritualism, as well as the deliberate suppression of his perplexed uncertainty in favour of an unequivocal disbelief.13 Significantly, much of Pater's later writing likewise disavows categorically and indiscriminately the validity of a belief system which many other literary writers such as Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning considered worthy of at least careful examination. Although scholars have only rarely recognized this important but implicit aspect of Pater's work, it makes it clear that he adhered to the specific doctrines of scientific naturalism even in his later writing when it is generally assumed that he moved carefully towards a position of inconspicuous piety, modifying or even negating the more scientific tenor of his earlier writing. Writing in the pro-spiritualist journal the Quarterly Journal of Science (edited by Crookes) in July 1877, Wallace, who had co-developed the natural selection theory of evolution with Charles Darwin and was now one of the principal scientific adherents of spiritualist beliefs, remonstrates that the mainstream periodical press maintains 'what has been termed [a] "conspiracy of silence"' with regard to the subject. While 9. Quoted in Alfred Russel Wallace, 'A Defence of Modern Spiritualism' (Part II), Fortnightly Review NS 15 (June 1874), pp. 785-807 (801-802). 10. John Tyndall, ' "Materialism" and its Enemies', Fortnightly Review NS 18 (November 1875), pp. 579-99 (599). Interestingly, Tyndall, like his mentor Faraday, was willing to attend seances. 11. See Turner, Between Science and Religion, p. 23. 12. Turner writes: 'With a few notable exceptions...men of science...dismissed hypnotism, mesmerism, telepathy, and spiritualism... The scientific reductionism of...naturalistic writers, satisfied with life in the New Nature and with their own systems of evolutionary ethics...made them ill-disposed to consider the possibility that mind might exist separately from its physical organism.' See Between Science and Religion, p. 54. 13. See George W. Stocking, Jr, 'Animism in Theory and Practice: E.B. Tylor's Unpublished "Notes on 'Spiritualism' " ', Man 6 (March 1971), pp. 88-104.

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many thousands of ordinary people have witnessed occult phenomena for themselves at both public and private seances and other mediumistic performances, in newspapers and periodicals these 'new truths' are having to 'make their way against the opposing forces of prepossession and indifference'. Is it, Wallace inquires, 'in the interests of human progress and in accordance with right principles' that 'the press decline or refuse to make it known'? 14 Much of the discussion of spiritualism in mainstream periodicals, however, took place in coded and tacit forms which Wallace seems not to recognize. For instance, the popular genre of the ghost story invariably involves the spirits of the dead returning to earth and could be used either to endorse or to contest spiritualist beliefs. Similarly, while Pater's writing in this period does not engage overtly with spiritualism, it nevertheless participates implicitly in the fervent contemporary debate over the reality of a spiritual realm that interacts unceasingly with the phenomenal world. Indeed, Pater seems to have been concerned with the occult even before the beginning of his literary career. S.R. Brooke recalls in his diary that at a meeting of the 'Old Mortality' society in Oxford in March 1863 which Pater is known to have attended, 'A debate was...started upon the instincts of animals which rapidly turned to Mesmerism and the use of Mediums[,] topics verging very decidedly upon the Ghost element.' 15 While Pater's contribution to this particular debate was not recorded, his later writings disavow categorically the possibility of any supernatural agencies operating in the material world.

'Stranger far than any fancied odylic gravelights!' This aversion towards the widespread conviction that the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living is particularly evident in Pater's writing in the period after the publication of his novel Marius the Epicurean in 1885. For example, in his biographical sketch of the seventeenth-century physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne, which appeared in the May 1886 number of Macmillan's Magazine, Pater foregrounds the close parallels between Browne's arcane and primitive superstition and the ostensibly advanced beliefs now promulgated by spiritualists in late-Victorian England. The evolutionary anthropologist Tylor had similarly contended that the beliefs now held by modern

14. Alfred Russel Wallace, 'Notices of Books', Quarterly Journal of Science NS 7 (July 1877), pp. 391-416 (415). 15. Quoted in Gerald C. Monsman, 'Old Mortality at Oxford', Studies in Philology 61 (1970), pp. 359-89 (387).

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spiritualists made clear the continuity between aspects of primitive culture and apparently advanced civilization. A 'wild North American Indian looking at a spirit-seance in London', he notes in Primitive Culture, 'would be perfectly at home in the proceedings'.16 Akin to Tylor, Pater asserts that Browne, like a nineteenth-century believer in spiritualism, 'represents, in an age the intellectual powers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, the mind to which the supernatural view of things is still credible'.17 The use of the term 'agnosticism', a specifically contemporary philosophical designation coined by Huxley only fifteen years earlier,18 in this description of the prevalent intellectual condition of the seventeenth century, intimates that Browne's primitive credulity with regard to the supernatural closely resembles the irrational conjectures still advanced in the late nineteenth century. Advocates of such intellectually untenable beliefs can always be discerned throughout society, and, as Pater acknowledges, Browne's wilful eschewal of the understanding of the natural world and man's position within it adumbrated by rationalist science has for them a perpetual attraction. He declares: 'The non-mechanical theory of nature has had its adherents since; to the non-mechanical theory of man—that he is in contact with a moral order on a different plane from the mechanical order—thousands, of the most various types and degrees of intellectual power, always adhere' (p. 18). The prevalence of these unscientific opinions, however, does not negate their potential for justifying iniquitous activities such as the persecution of those perceived to possess diabolical powers. Like Tylor, Pater implicitly associates the irrationality of modern spiritualist conjectures with what was now considered to be the barbarous and primitive belief in witchcraft. According to Tylor, 'Witchcraft and Spiritualism have existed for thousands of years in a closeness of union.'19 Similarly, Browne, Pater observes, is 'a believer in the supernatural character of pagan oracles, and a cruel judge of supposed witches' (p. 14). Furthermore, his 'timid, personally-grounded faith might indulge no scepticism...on the reality of witchcraft' (p. 9). There is no necessary distinction, Pater implies, between the modern 16. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, I (2 vols.; London: John Murray, 1871), p. 141. 17. Walter Pater, 'Sir Thomas Browne', Macmillan's Magazine 54 (May 1886), pp. 5-18 (18, my italics). Subsequent page references are given within the body of the text. 18. See Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 10-13. 19. Tylor, Primitive Culture, I, p. 128.

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belief in spiritualist phenomena and the now unpalatable credence which was previously given to the activities of supposed witches. 20 In his essay 'Sir Thomas Browne' Pater insinuates that, as Tylor had contended in Primitive Culture, the contemporary vogue for seances and other forms of spiritualism is merely a residue of barbarous savage beliefs which have survived into the ostensibly more advanced civilization of late-nineteenth-century England. Although he lived in 'an age in which that philosophy made a great stride which ends with Hume' (p. 17), Browne, Pater asserts, 'was himself. ..a lively example of...the fourth species of error noted by Bacon, the Idola Species, that whole tribe of illusions, which are "bred amongst the weeds and tares of one's own brain"' (p. 14). Significantly, in an article 'On the Fallacies of Testimony in Relation to the Supernatural', which appeared in the January 1876 number of the C Contemporary Review, the eminent physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter discusses the four sources of error which Bacon mapped out in the Novum Organum with regard to contemporary spiritualist beliefs. He writes: 'Bacon's classification of "idols" is based on the sources of our prepossessions; and.. .the study of them is very profitable.. .we are liable to

be affected by our prepossessions at every stage of our mental activity... But mental prepossessions do much more than this; they produce sensations having no objective reality.' 21 Pater's reference to Bacon once more implicitly aligns Browne's naive belief in phenomena which cannot be verified by observable empirical facts with the protracted dispute over modern spiritualism which was fought out in the pages of both popular and more intellectually orientated Victorian periodicals. At the same time, however, Pater also discerns a 'vein of rationalism' (p. 9) in Browne's sombre meditations on mortality and the natural world which actually endows his arcane and primitive superstition with a greater validity than the entirely irrational spiritualist doctrines which were still attracting many new adherents in late-Victorian England. While '[h]e

20. Significantly, the anti-spiritualist physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter also makes this same point with regard to Browne. He writes: 'if you accept the testimony of.. .witnesses to the aerial flights of Mr. Home and Mrs. Guppy, you can have no reason whatever for refusing to.. .accept the solemnly attested proofs recorded in the proceedings of our Law Courts within the last two hundred years, of the aerial transport of witches to attend their demonical festivities; the belief in Witchcraft being then accepted not only by the ignorant vulgar, but by some of the wisest men of the time, such as...Sir Thomas Browne.' See 'Mesmerism, Odylism, Table-Turning and Spiritualism', Fraser's Magazine NS 15 (February 1877), pp. 135-57 (136). 21. William Benjamin Carpenter, 'On the Fallacies of Testimony in Relation to the Supernatural', Contemporary Review 27 (January 1876), pp. 279-95 (283).

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seems to have no true sense of natural law, as Bacon understood it', Browne is nevertheless 'at much pains to expose' the speciousness of the 'older sort of magic, or alchemy' (p. 13). His Discourse of Vulgar Errors, moreover, is 'a serious refutation of fairy tales...an instrument for the clarifying of the intellect' (p. 13). It is only 'a surmise', but Pater avers confidently that Browne 'seems as seriously concerned as Bacon to dissipate the crude impressions of a false "common sense", of false science, and a fictitious authority' (p. 13). His tendency to indulge in supernatural explanations notwithstanding, Browne's seventeenth-century understanding of the natural world is in fact far more satisfactory than the wholly unfounded conception of it proffered by nineteenthcentury believers in spiritualism. In his biographical sketch, Pater depicts Browne as an honest investigator' and 'industrious local naturalist' energetically scrutinizing 'the fantastic minute life' which inhabits the marshy fens that surround his home in Norwich (p. 10). His 'ordinary duties [as] a physician', as well as this 'experimental research at home, and indefatigable observation in the open air', constantly direct his thoughts towards the transience of human life and the inevitable putrefaction of the physical body after death (p. 8). At times these melancholy preoccupations make his career seem 'too like a life-long following of one's own funeral' (p. 8). Living in an age in which 'the cold-blooded method of observation and experiment was creeping but slowly over the domain of science' (p. 14), however, Browne's pseudo-scientific experimental work imbues him with a confidence in the 'vague possibilities' (p. 14) of the survival of human personality even after death. He discerns a promise of the eventual resurrection of the dead in 'a sort of physical beauty in the coming of death' (p. 15). Although Pater insists that 'The really stirring poetry of science is not in vague and facile divinations.. .but in its larger ascertained truths—the order of infinite space, the slow method and vast results of infinite time' (p. 14), Browne's vague sense of mystical hope is nevertheless eminently more satisfactory than the superficial optimism afforded by the eschatology of contemporary spiritualism. When Browne, Pater writes, looked 'over all those ugly anatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics, there was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, one day to re-assert itself— stranger far than any fancied odylic graveligbtsf (p. 8, my italics). Browne's conception of the persistence of a spiritual energy in the decaying remains of the human form is no more bizarre than the nineteenth-century hypothesis that a radiant natural force emanates from the graves of recently buried corpses, and, as the tenor of Pater's prose implies, it in fact affords a greater imaginative stimulus. Furthermore, as

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Pater insists in the above passage, the actual existence of these so-called odylic gravelights is only 'fancied'; it is an illusory and chimerical conjecture that has never been empirically verified. Odylic force, the existence of which was first proclaimed by the German chemist and metallurgist Baron Karl von Reichenbach in the early 1840s and was subsequently introduced to England later in the same decade by William Gregory and John Ashburner, was alleged to resemble aspects of electricity, magnetism and heat. This hitherto undiscovered natural force was professed to be emitted continually by every material substance in the universe. Reichenbach's research had begun with the examination of people who were abnormally sensitive to the luminous phenomena of magnets; these 'sensitives', he claimed, could also discern the luminosity of the newly recognized odylic force radiating from non-magnetic objects. Like Franz Anton Mesmer's superfine magnetic fluid, with which it was frequently equated, the concept of odylic force was often used to undergird the phantasmagoric manifestations which spiritualists claimed to witness. In particular, Reichenbach's discoveries seemed to afford an entirely rational explanation for the appearance of ghosts and other spectral forms. In his Letters on Od and Magnetism Reichenbach maintains that many 'sensitives' could discern an odylic radiance emanating from the graves of recently interred corpses. On a nocturnal visit to 'the huge burial-grounds of Vienna', he recalls, a young female 'sensitive' 'saw a number of the burial mounds beset by moving lights... A luminous atmosphere, [she] said, seemed to hang over the newly made graves'. 22 In the light of this testimony, Reichenbach concludes, 'I am quite in earnest...ghosts are really seen; you have the evidence of sufficient witnesses on the point.' 23 In the 1850s Reichenbach's discoveries concerning odylic gravelights seemed to affirm that the apparently supernatural stories, dating back to time immemorial, which describe the return of ghostly spirits to the place of their burial were in fact scientifically true. At the same time, moreover, Reichenbach's affirmation that currents of odylic force flowed ceaselessly through the interstices between one person and another, as well as between animate and inanimate objects, provided the nascent spiritualist movement with what seemed to be an empirically verifiable explanation for psychical phenomena such as thought transference and the spontaneous movement exhibited by various pieces of furniture. 22. Baron Karl von Reichenbach, Letters on Od and Magnetism, (trans. F.D. O'Byrne; repr.; London: Hutchinson & Co., 1926 [1852]), pp. 48-49. 23. Reichenbach, Letters, p. 47.

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After mid-century, however, many prominent scientists became increasingly apprehensive with regard to the validity of Reichenbach's theories. In 1862, for example, a group comprising some of the most eminent professors of physics in Berlin wrote an open letter to a leading German newspaper which repudiated Reichenbach's much vaunted assertion that his experiments in their presence had conclusively proven the objective existence of the odylic force. When Pater's essay 'Sir Thomas Browne' was published nearly two decades later, Reichenbach's experiments on the luminosity of odylic force were still prompting considerable controversy. In an article on 'Spiritualism and its Recent Converts', published in the October 1871 number of the Quarterly Review, William Carpenter concluded that 'a large part of Von Reichenbach's experiences show him to have been victimised by the intentional deceptions of cunning pretenders'.24 In a later piece, furthermore, he similarly contends that the supposed perception of an odylic radiance emanating from material substances is in fact merely a subjective illusion, engendered by the state of 'expectant attention' which Reichenbach induced in the minds of his 'sensitives'. The 'hypothesis of Odylic force [has] proved to be completely baseless', Carpenter insists, 'the phenomena which were supposed to indicate its existence being traceable to the Physiological conditions of the Human organisms, through whose instrumentality they were manifested'.25 The perception of an odylic luminosity could be accounted for simply by either deliberate imposture or the complex internal workings of the human mind. This animadversion notwithstanding, Reichenbach's conjectures nevertheless still continued to attract enthusiastic adherents even in the late nineteenth century. Wallace, writing in response to Carpenter, affirms the scientific validity of Reichenbach's experimental evidence for the existence of odylic force. He declares that in order to confirm the evidence of the 'sensitives' first experimented on, [Reichenbach] invited a large number of his friends and other persons in Vienna to come to his dark room, and the result was that about sixty persons of various ages and conditions saw and described exactly the same phenomena. Among these were a number of literary, official, and scientific men and their families, persons of a status fully equal to that of Dr. Carpenter and the Fellows of the Royal Society.2

24. William Benjamin Carpenter, 'Spiritualism and its Recent Converts', Quarterly Review 131 (October 1871), pp. 301-53 (335). 25. Carpenter, 'Mesmerism', p. 154. 26. Wallace, 'Notices', p. 395.

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In 1882, furthermore, the intellectual luminaries of Trinity College, Cambridge, who had recently founded the Society for Psychical Research, established a committee of investigators to undertake the examination and 'critical revision' of Reichenbach's original research on odylic force. 27 Although Pater's apparently incidental allusion to the long forgotten hypothesis of odylic force has rarely been noted by scholars, 28 it needs to be viewed as a direct intervention in this important contemporary dispute regarding the scientific legitimacy of different forms of testimony. Pater's confident assertion that the odylic luminosity which Reichenbach's 'sensitives' alleged to be emitted by recently interred corpses was actually only 'fancied seems to align him with Carpenter's steadfast insistence that 'the extravagant pretensions of Mesmerism and Odylism have been disproved by scientific investigation'. 29 In his sceptical estimate of occult phenomena such as the odylic force, Pater refuses to acknowledge the validity of any subjective testimony which might vitiate his unitary understanding of the natural world as an unbreakable causal sequence.

'The expectancy of cadaverous "churchyard things"' This concern with subjective testimony in relation to the supernatural is also evident in Pater's second novel Gaston de Latour, set during the wars of religion in sixteenth-century France, which was abandoned unfinished in August 1889- In this fragmentary novel, Pater's consideration of what might initially seem occult or miraculous occurrences invariably ends up repudiating any hint of supernaturalism. For instance, at the beginning of 'Peach-Blossom and Wine', the fourth chapter, which first appeared in the September 1888 number of Macmillan's, Pater narrates a 'strange encounter' 30 between the 'Triumvirate' of Gaston's closest boyhood friends and three spectral doppelgangers. He writes: Soft sounds came out of the distance, but footsteps on the hard road they had not heard, when three others fronted them face to face—Jasmin, Amadee, and Camille—their very selves, visible in the light of the lantern

27. See Oppenheim, The Other World, p. 219. 28. In fact, the only reference to the odylic force I have found is a brief entry in Samuel Wright, An Informative Index to the Writings of Walter H. Pater (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1987), p. 297. 29. Carpenter, 'Mesmerism', p. 137. ' 30. Walter Pater, 'Gaston de Latour' (Part IV), Macmillan's s Magazine 58 (September 1888), pp. 393-400 (394). Further page references are given within the body of the text.

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carried by Camille...a light like their own flashed up counter-wise, but with blood, all three of them, fresh upon the bosom or in the mouth. It was well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even devils, as wise men know, taking flight at its white glitter through the air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with mimic counter motion, upon nothing—upon the empty darkness before them (p. 394).

Despite the unadorned simplicity of his narration, this is the most directly supernatural event in Pater's entire fictional oeuvre?1 At the same time, however, the seemingly inexplicable 'story' which the three friends 'returned, not a little disconcerted, to tell' (p. 393) is in fact susceptible to various entirely naturalistic explanations which, significantly, are interposed earlier in Pater's narrative. The narrative structure of Pater's historical novel dramatizes the scientific scrutiny of subjective testimony regarding occurrences that at first seem explicable only as manifestations of supernatural powers. Throughout Gaston, Pater implicitly accords with Carpenter's maxim that it is 'the duty of the Scientific man to exhaust every possible mode of accounting for new and strange phenomena, before attributing it to any previously unknown agency'.32 Immediately prior to the passage cited above, the narrative contains numerous details which, to a sufficiently sceptical reader, will afford a plausibly naturalistic explanation for the tale of their ghostly encounter which Gaston's three friends relate. Firstly, Pater states simply, 'The fact that armed persons were still abroad, thieves or assassins, lurking under many disguises, might explain what happened on the last evening of their time together' (p. 393). The spectral apparitions which Jasmin, Amadee and Camille appear to witness might in reality be merely three soldiers separated from one of the many itinerant armies which ceaselessly traversed the countryside of La Beauce in what Pater has earlier called 'an age of wild people, of insane impulse, of homicidal mania'.33 While apologists for spiritualism such as Wallace insisted on 'accepting the uniform and consistent testimony of our senses',34 Pater, in his serialized historical novel, makes it clear that 31. William F. Shuter has recently noted that in Pater's writing, 'Extraordinary events occur—the defeat of Napoleon in "Emerald Uthwart", the St. Bartholomew's Eve Massacre in Gaston de Latour, the flood in "Sebastian van Storck", and the earthquake in Marius—but the more extraordinary the event, the more summarily it is narrated.' See Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 17. 32. William Benjamin Carpenter, 'Mesmerism, Odylism, Table-Turning and Spiritualism' (Part II), Fraser's Magazine NS 15 (March 1877), pp. 382-405 (388). 33- Walter Pater, 'Gaston de Latour' (Part III), Macmillan's Magazine 58 (August 1888), pp. 258-66 (265). 34. Alfred Russel Wallace, 'Psychological Curiosities of Scepticism: A Reply to Dr.

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any testimony provided solely by the senses is always vulnerable to the possibility of simple misapprehensions and errors of perception. A few lines later, moreover, Pater also remarks that the 'Triumvirate' of friends 'strolled out...after the wine' (p. 393, my italics). This easily overlooked detail in fact aligns Pater's fiction set in sixteenth-century France with the investigations of nineteenth-century anthropologists who affirmed that alcoholic intoxication provides a rational explanation for what in primitive religious ceremonies were assumed to be supernatural or mystical visions. According to Tylor, 'Among the lower races, and high above their level, morbid ecstasy brought on by meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or disease, is a state common and held in honour.'35 In Peru, he goes on, 'the priests...used to throw themselves into an ecstatic condition by a narcotic drink called "tonca"... The Mexican priests also appear to have used an ointment or drink made with seeds of "oloiuhqui", which produced deliriums and visions.'36 As with the primitive Peruvian and Mexican priests discussed by Tylor, the distorted perception induced by drinking wine perhaps affords an entirely subjective explanation of the mystical vision witnessed by Gaston's three friends, and therefore necessarily vitiates their testimony regarding it. Most significantly, Pater also observes of the 'Triumvirate' of friends, 'What surmises they had of vague danger, took effect, in that age of wizardry, as a quaintly practical superstition, the expectancy of cadaverous "churchyard things", and the like, intruding themselves where they should not be' (p. 393, my italics). It is precisely because they expect to witness certain 'nameless terrors' (p. 393) that the three spectral doppelgangers subsequently appear. Interestingly, in his review of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray in the November 1891 number of the Bookman, Pater refers to 'that very old theme, old because based on some inherent experience or fancy of the human brain, of a double life: of Doppelganger'.37 The sentence from Gaston cited above, moreover, provides clear evidence for my contention that Pater's writing actively participates in the important contemporary dispute regarding the scientific legitimacy of different forms of testimony in relation to the supernatural. In his discussion of the three friends' occult imaginings Pater alludes directly to Carpenter's psychological principle of 'expectant attention'. Writing in the February 1877 number of Fraser's, Carpenter asserts that Carpenter', Fraser's Magazine NS 16 (December 1877), pp. 694-706 (694). 35. Tylor, Primitive Culture, I, p. 277. 36. Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, pp. 377-78. 37. Walter Pater, 'A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde', Bookman 1 (November 1891), pp. 59-60 (p. 60, my italics).

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the state of 'expectant attention' is capable of giving rise either to sensations or to involuntary movements according to the nature of the expectancy... When a number ofpersons...sit for a couple of hours (especially if in the dark) with the expectation of some extraordinary occurrence, such as [seeing] the... visible luminous shapes, of their departed friends; it is perfectly conformable to scientific probability that they should pass more or less completely into a state which is neither waking nor sleeping, but between the two, in which they see, hear, or feel by touch, anything they have been led to expect will present itself.

As Pater intimates, the ostensibly inexplicable vision witnessed by Jasmin, Amadee and Camille can be accounted for simply by the theories of nineteenth-century physiological psychology. Their shared expectation that 'the midnight heaven...was by no means a restful companion', as well as the darkness of the 'bloomy night' (p. 393), makes it evident that their apparently supernatural encounter is in fact an entirely subjective illusion induced by the particular circumstances mapped out by Carpenter in his series of periodical articles, which castigate the subjective testimony that is frequently proffered as conclusive evidence for the reality of spiritualist phenomena. While Carpenter's anti-spiritualist pieces in Fraser's, the Contemporary, the Quarterly and the Athenceum were often belligerently antagonistic,39 in Gaston Pater eschews any such direct statements, but nevertheless subtly provides the reader who is endowed with 'an enlightened "common sense" ' 40 with the objective details necessary to enact a deconstruction of the semblance of supernaturalism in Pater's own narrative. The implacable antagonism towards spiritualism and other manifestations of the supernatural which both Pater's fictional and non-fictional writing exhibit, affords clear evidence for my contention that Pater adhered closely to the specific doctrines of scientific naturalism even in his ostensibly less scientific later writing. As I have noted earlier, in order to uphold the particular cosmography (and the ideological agenda that it entailed) mapped out by the proponents of scientific naturalism, any evidence that might attest to the reality of an external spiritual realm had either to be disregarded or renounced entirely. While other literary writers of his generation, including John Addington Symonds and

38. Carpenter, 'Mesmerism', p. 151 (my italics). 39. Wallace comments 'we must for a time submit to the scorn and ridicule which usually fall to the lot of unpopular minorities, but we look forward with confidence to the advent of a higher class of critics than our present antagonist, critics who will not condescend to a style of controversy so devoid of good taste and impartiality as that adopted by Dr. Carpenter'. See 'Psychological Curiosities', p. 694. 40. Carpenter, 'Mesmerism' (Part II), p. 385.

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Andrew Lang, were profoundly touched by spiritualism, 41 Pater maintained an intemperate and humourless antipathy towards all forms of supernatural power, the vehemence of which is matched only by that of scientific naturalists such as Tyndall and Carpenter (a Unitarian on the margins of the scientific naturalists' circle). Even towards the end of his life, I want to suggest, Pater's sceptical estimation of the occult is definitely X-Club and not X-Files.

Bibliography Barnes, Barry, and Steven Shapin(eds.), Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (London: Sage, 1979). Barrow, Logie, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebians 1850-1910 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Barton, Ruth, ' "An Influential Set of Chaps": The X-Club and Royal Society Politics 1864-65', British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1990), pp. 53-81. Brake, Laurel, Walter Pater (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994). Carpenter, William Benjamin, 'Mesmerism, Odylism, Table-Turning and Spiritualism', Fraser's Magazine NS 15 (February 1877), pp. 135-57. —'Mesmerism, Odylism, Table-Turning and Spiritualism' (Part II), Fraser's Magazine 15 (March 1877), pp. 382-405. —'On the Fallacies of Testimony in Relation to the Supernatural', Contemporary Review 27 Qanuary 1876), pp. 279-95. —'Spiritualism and its Recent Converts', Quarterly Review 131 (October 1871), pp. 301-53Dawson, Gowan, 'Walter Pater, Aestheticism and Victorian Science' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 1998). Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987). Lightman, Bernard, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Lightman, Bernard (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). MacLeod, R.M., 'The X-Club: A Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 24 (1969), pp. 305-22. Monsman, Gerald C , 'Old Mortality at Oxford', Studies in Philology 61 (1970), pp. 359-89Noakes, Richard J., ' "Cranks and Visionaries": Science, Spiritualism and Transgression in Victorian Britain' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998). Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989). Pater, Walter, 'Gaston de Latour' (Part III), Macmillan's Magazine 58 (August 1888), pp. 258-66.

41. See Oppenheim, The Other World, p. 39.

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—'Gaston de Latour' (Part IV), Macmillan's Magazine 58 (September 1888), pp. 393400. —'A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde', Bookman 1 (November 1891), pp. 59-60. —'Sir Thomas Browne', Macmillan's Magazine 54 (May 1886), pp. 5-18. Reichenbach, Baron Karl von, Letters on Od and Magnetism (trans. F.D. O'Byrne; repr.; London: Hutchinson & Co., 1926 [1852]). Shuter, William F., Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Stocking, George W., Jr, 'Animism in Theory and Practice: E.B. Tylor's Unpublished "Notes on 'Spiritualism'"', Man 6 (March 1971), pp. 88-104. Turner, Frank Miller, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). Tylor, Edward Burnett, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (2 vols.; London: John Murray, 1871). Tyndall, John, ' "Materialism" and its Enemies', Fortnightly Review NS 18 (November 1875), pp. 579-99. Wallace, Alfred Russel, 'A Defence of Modern Spiritualism' (Part II), Fortnightly Review NS 15 Gune 1874), pp. 785-807. —'Notices of Books', Quarterly Journal of Science NS 7 (July 1877), pp. 391-416. —'Psychological Curiosities of Scepticism: A Reply to Dr. Carpenter', Fraser's Magazine NS 16 (December 1877), pp. 694-706. Winter, Alison, 'The Construction of Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in the Early Victorian Life Sciences', in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 24-50. Wright, Samuel, An Informative Index to the Writings of Walter H. Pater (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1987). Wynne, Brian, 'Physics and Psychics: Science, Symbolic Action, and Social Control in Late Victorian England', in Barnes and Shapin (eds.), Natural Order, pp. 167-86.

Louise Henson Scientific Prophecies and Modern-Day Seers: Prognostication in the Industrial Fiction of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell

Since the seventeenth century the historically durable conception of prognosis as a supernatural activity has been under the gradual erosion of the secularizing forces of science. During periods of economic and social uncertainty in the first half of the nineteenth century, both the authority and the assumptions of the popular traditions of astrology and radical millenarianism were challenged by the preponderance of secular millennial predictions in the form of optimistic social, political, economic and technological forecasting. These predictions emphasized the developmental forces of history and, as a consequence, rejected the notion of a return to a past golden age, arguing instead for the superiority of the present over the past and of the future over the present.1 Indeed, science as a discipline provided the technological expertise to improve material existence. Moreover, it now assumed supreme prophetic authority. In classical mechanics and probability theory, science had two mathematical models for describing future conditions, thus realizing one of the most enduring of folk traditions. Applied in technological and social policy science, these models reinscribed scientifically the impulse to predict, and, by extension, to forecast with a view to manipulating both natural and social forces. In common with many of their contemporaries, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell captured the seemingly magical nature of scientific and technological advance. Their industrial fiction subtly integrates traditional folk and scientifically based prophetic discourses, reflecting a complex negotiation of cultural continuity. Scientific authority is held to underpin true prevision and thus the qualities associated with the traditional figures of the prophet and the visionary are reflected in the inventor, the economist and the statistician, men who, through the interpretative power of science, seek to divine the complex web of evolving 1. Harold Perkin, 'The History of Social Forecasting', in idem., The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1981), pp. 196-211 (198).

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economic, social and technological relations. The secularization of the supernatural, at least until the 1850s, occurred as science gradually eroded magical belief by exposing its fallacious aspects and appropriating those subsequently deemed rational and naturalistic.2 While religion still maintained its own sphere of influence, magic and science had, in the words of Stephen Sharot, a crucial similarity, which made them competitors, and a crucial difference, which resulted in science replacing magic.3 In terms of prophecy and prediction, scientific prognostication differed little from magical folk practices in its underlying rationale and commonly bore similar supernatural associations. The partial secularization theory echoes the work of the early nineteenth-century German mythographers who speculated on the relationship between ancient magical systems and the physical doctrines that they seemed to embody. In his History of Magic, translated by William Howitt in 1854 and known to both Dickens and Gaskell,4 Joseph Ennemoser suggested that ancient magic was a kind of natural philosophy, which underwent a fundamental corruption with the coming of Christianity. Tracing the evolution of the concept of the supernatural, he argued that for the ancients nature was an outward manifestation of supernatural causality, and that it was later Christian doctrines that split the supernatural from the natural and the physical and set it apart in an extra-worldly sphere, whereby supernatural beings assumed greater power and importance. Nineteenth-century science subsequently began to place the supernatural back in the realm of the physical, but with a difference: the supernatural was redefined as an extended vision of the natural. For Ennemoser the 'natural progress of prophecy' indicated that its origin throughout history was to 'be found in human nature itself and in its inborn attributes'.5 The ancients' obsession with physical signs and the personified significance they placed upon impressive phenomena was symptomatic of the human propensity to conceptualize a future and 2. Although figures such as Comte, G.H. Lewes and Harriet Martineau challenged the relevancy of theology in philosophical matters, they were more extreme and unrepresentative of the 1840s and 1850s. 3. Steven Sharot, 'Magic, Religion, Science and Secularisation', in J. Neusner, E.S. Frerichs and P.V. McCracken Flesher (eds.), Religion, Science and Magic: In Concert and in Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 261-83 (262). 4. Joseph Ennemoser, The History of Magic (trans. W. Howitt; 2 vols.; London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854) which traced the magical antecedents of animal magnetism, was found in the Gad's Hill Library. It was taken out of the Portico Library by William Gaskell. One can only speculate upon Elizabeth Gaskell's knowledge of the contents of this work, but given her lifelong interest in magic, which was shared by the Howitts, the book must have been at least a topic of conversation. 5. Ennemoser, The History of Magic, I, p. x.

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to seek its terms and conditions. Yet the proleptic readings of the ancient cyclic chronotope expressed a subjective and emotional harmony with nature rather than an understanding of causality. Science reconceptualized prediction as an understanding of the regularities and the constants in a given environment, and articulated this principle through authoritative demonstrations of natural law. 'Prevision is the characteristic and the test of knowledge', claimed George Henry Lewes, underlining the emerging epistemological supremacy of science. 6 Indeed, Newton's reformulation of the ancient animistic world into a mechanistic universe had refigured prophecy as a quantitative description of motion. Mathematics no longer merely represented, but actively demonstrated the system of the world, introducing regular patterns into a hitherto unpredictable universe. Newton and Halley's mathematical prognostications subsequently eroded the ominous status of comets and the natural philosophers emerged as the 'authorized prophets', since a knowledge of the state of a physical system in terms of its positions and velocities at a given time meant that one could, in principle, know its state at any other time. 7 Nevertheless, this colonization of the epistemological space occupied by magic with a rational scientific alternative had a discernible occult resonance. The seemingly preposterous claims of astrology were held up in shame against the true predictive power of classical mechanics in Household Words, which represented astronomers as the modern 'Magicians'. These new prophets, whose symbols are the Arabic numerals, and whose arcana are mathematical computations, daily foretell events...with unerring certainty. They prediscover the future of the stars down to their minutest evolution and eccentricity.

Newton's descriptive formula for the new mechanics gave them a mathematical measure, but the causal forces themselves remained obscure. This conception of cosmology as a general physics with a space for metaphysics was implicit in Laplace's predetermined universe:9 6. George Henry Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy (London: John W. Parker, 2nd edn, 1857), p. 660. 7. J.H. Lambert referred to professional astronomers as the 'authorized prophets' in 1760; see Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 145. 8. Frederick Knight Hunt, 'The Planet Watchers of Greenwich', Household Words 1 (25 May 1850), pp. 200-204 (204). 9. In an article for the Encyclopedie Jean d'Alembert denned cosmology in these terms; see Pierre Kerszberg, 'Cosmology: Newton to Einstein', in R.C. Olby et al. (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 639-50 (642).

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Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. In the industrial novel the inventor shares something of this mystical intelligence. The application of mechanics and the laws of motion provided the model upon which technology functioned, and working within this paradigm, the inventor has a visionary power that puts him in touch with mathematically structured truths. This notion is common to both Dickens and Gaskell and for them it is a positive force in machine culture. Their inventors are channels of prophetic knowledge, yet they remain merely humble readers and translators of the mathematical codes of God, as Dickens says of Daniel Doyce: He had the power...of explaining what he himself perceived, and meant with the direct force and distinctness with which it struck his own mind. There was something almost ludicrous in the complete irreconcilability of a vague conventional notion that he must be a visionary man, with the precise, sagacious travelling of his eye and thumb over the plans... His dismissal of himself from his description, was hardly less remarkable. He never said, I discovered this adaptation or invented this combination; but showed the whole thing as if the Divine artificer had made it, and he had happened to find it...so calmly convinced he was that it was established on irrefragable laws.11 Likewise, in Cousin Phillis the narrator's father, a mechanic with an 'inventive genius', has a visionary calling that forces him to formulate his plans: '[H]e worked out his ideas, because, as he said, until he could put them into shape they plagued him night and day.'12 These images of the inventor draw upon the epistemological purity associated with Newtonian science in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Technological expansion, artificially replicating natural laws, had an irresistible inevitability and the potential of mechanics and steam power was the subject of prophetic speculations from Godwin and Erasmus Darwin to

10. Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (trans. F.W. Truscott and F.L. Emory; New York: Dover Publications, 6th edn, 1951 [1814]), p. 4. 11. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (ed. J. Holloway; London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1857]), p. 570. 12. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales (ed. A Easson; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 [1865]), p. 259.

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the entrepreneurs represented in industrial fiction. Operating in harmony with nature, mathematics, physics and engineering were promoted as uncontroversial knowledge. Gaskell describes how Newton's Principia was read at the loom and 'mathematical problems' were 'received with interest, and studied with absorbing attention by many a broad-spoken, common-looking, factory hand'. 13 The historical reality of the enthusiasm for classical mechanics among the hand-loom weavers, the paradigm producing the technological sophistication that would eventually supplant them, indicates the complexity of popular response to machine culture. 14 The working-class autodidact, Job Legh, tempers his complaint that power-looms 'make a man's life like a lottery' with admiration for their scientific foundations, and rationalizes the impact of the machine in terms of a divine plan, such that 'power-looms, and railways, and all such like inventions are gifts of God' and part of 'His plan to end suffering to bring about a higher good'. 15 The recognition implicit in such responses, that science not merely anticipated, but in some ways determined, the future, is reflected in the entrepreneur's interest in technology. In North and South, John Thornton represents the early masters of the cotton industry as the interpreters of the omens of change: Seventy years ago what was it? And now what is it not? Raw, crude materials came together; men of the same level, as regarded education and station, took suddenly the different positions of masters and men, owing to the mother-wit, as regarded the opportunities and probabilities, which distinguished some, and made them far-seeing as to what great future lay concealed in that rude model of Sir Richard Arkwright's.

Nevertheless, the entrepreneur's interest in invention is never neutral and barely masks an underlying profit incentive. Thornton's picture of Arkwright's 1769 spinning frame as the prophetic sign which informs the economic clairvoyancy of the entrepreneur grafts ideologies of classical political economy onto the certainties associated with the machine. This capacity for 'far-seeing' in those who became masters was reinforced as the increasingly complex and interdependent structure of the economy brought a new sense of temporality to the trade cycle and thus the necessity of forecasting pending developments. The economic order 13. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (ed. S. Gill; London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1848]), p. 75. 14. E.P. Thompson also notes working-class interest in Newton's calculus in The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 322. 15. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 457. 16. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (ed. A Easson; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 [1855]), p. 83.

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of the classical economists was held to reflect immutable physical laws. The price mechanism functioned as an 'invisible hand' which, like the gravitational constant, maintained order and harmony in trade relationships. The task of the capitalist was to negotiate this complex economic web and to shift capital to the high-profit industries which would equal the natural price and generate a uniform rate of profits.17 Thornton's use of a meteorological metaphor—'We see the storm approaching and draw in our sails'—to represent his economic prediction that wage levels should be reduced underlines the self-image of the free-market economist as part traditional wise man and part man of science. He prophesied ostensibly for the welfare of the group, yet it was the individual's drive for profit, rather than group subsistence, that emerged as the central and maintaining principle of the economic science of Adam Smith. In spite of the legitimization of economic law as science, Gaskell's masters struggle to maintain their authority and justify their doctrine of common interests. The prognostications of the entrepreneur operated upon a probabilistic basis far removed from the anticipated cause and effect of the old world order, and while machine culture kept the mechanistic worldview and the closed-regular chronotope in currency, the uncertainties of the rapidly expanding market economy perpetuated a space for 'blind chance'. Chance had been associated with superstition and ignorance during the Age of Reason,18 but attained a new scientific respectability following Laplace's formulation of probability as a second scientific predictive tool which demonstrated that regular patterns could be found even in chance occurrences.19 Nevertheless, that the status of chance remained ambiguous during this transition period is indicated by the use of the gambling metaphor, repeatedly applied to developments in economic and social life by Gaskell and Dickens as a vehicle of critique. The metaphor reflects contemporary perceptions of an analogous relationship between modern market economics and the recently professionalized gambling institutions. This relationship was reinforced by the mania for speculation and the expansion of the insurance industry, both of which exploited the potential and the misfortunes of chance. The chronotope in the nineteenth century thus had both closed-regular and chance-probabilistic aspects, and opposing world-views were informed by alternative visions of the natural order. The social vision of 17. Bill Gerrard, 'Classical Economics and the Keynesian Revolution', in Olby et al. (eds.), Companion, pp. 479-93 (480; 482). 18. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 1. 19. Laplace, Theorie analytique desprobabilites (Paris: Ve. Courcier, 1812).

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Adam Bell, in which 'knowledge of the past gives the truest basis for conjecture as to the future', looks back to the security implied by the closed-regular chronotope, in which time is figured as a repetition of order, and operates on a traditional double-determining principle that there is a place for everything, and everything must be in its place.20 However, John Thornton demands a prophetic spirit in tune with the greater variables and potentialities of urbanism and the market economy: 'It is fine when the study of the past leads to a prophecy of the future, but to men groping in new circumstances, it would be finer if the words of experience could direct us how to act in what concerns us most intimately and immediately.'21 In the face of these shifting perceptions of the natural order and the institutionalization of social, political and economic forecasting as science, which undermined the legitimacy of popular prophecy, Gaskell explored the psychology of dislocation among the working class as the unfathomable trade cycle gradually replaced the self-sufficiency and predictability of their cyclically patterned traditions. In Mary Barton, the long-term prognostications of the masters signify little to a workforce which had associated work and its rewards with natural time, and lacked a conceptual framework with which to rationalize the vagaries of the trade cycle and thus prophesy an order out of what was perceived as chaos: In times of sorrowful or fierce endurance, we are often soothed by the mere repetition of old proverbs which tell of the experience of our forefathers; but now, 'it's a long lane that has no turning,' 'the weariest day draws to an end,'...seemed vain sayings, so long and so weary was the pressure of the terrible times.

The assimilation of local groups into the larger system of classical economics resulted in the gradual breakdown of folk beliefs derivative of an older economic system and precipitated a period of confusion, a precursory stage in the groups' attunement to new circumstances. The emergence of probability as a predictive discourse can be seen as symptomatic of a developing numerical and quantitative conception of nature, a vision which included social forces in its calculations.23 Probability in its objective aspect, statistical analysis and frequency distribution, 20. Claude Levi-Strauss, 'Cultural Discontinuity and Economic and Social Development', in idem, Structural Anthropology, II (2 vols.; London: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 312-22 (322). 21. Gaskell, North and South, p. 334. 22. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 157. 23. Hacking, Taming, p. 61.

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refigured 'blind chance' as an abstract fundamental constant. In the 'mystic revelations of statistics',24 contemporaries witnessed what Herman Merivale termed 'accident, or destiny' subjected to 'general rules of calculation'.25 This compelling statistical fatalism had a huge fascination for the reading public, partly because it drew upon the superstitious traditions that had always surrounded prediction. Statistics offered prognostications for future crime, divorce and suicide rates, and thus Adolphe Quetelet could confidently claim, 'We know in advance how many individuals will dirty their hands with the blood of others, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners, nearly as well as one can enumerate in advance the births and deaths that must take place.'26 Such supernatural intimations were reinforced by the sinister erosion of individual autonomy and of a direct accountable causality suggested by statistical fatalism: Take ten—one hundred—or one thousand men, whose choice is made under similar circumstances; and the greater the number of individuals compared, the more does the slightest pressure of external influence—the mere balance of motives—seem to amount to an irresistible force, effacing all varieties of human choice or caprice. The results of an individual will seem to disappear...before the mean results of innumerable wills...under the weight of the vast machinery of moral causes; and differences of temper and disposition sink into mere modifications of general laws, subject to calculation equally with those laws themselves.27 The mysterious abstract fundamental constant posited no constant cause, only constant effects, and was at once a predictable regularity in group terms but unpredictable with reference to the individual. By translating heterogeneous circumstances into homogeneous behaviour patterns, the revelations of frequency distribution became an apt target for satire as they appeared to preclude free will. In Hard Times, through the figure of Tom Gradgrind, who attempts to abjure responsibility for the bank robbery, Dickens exposes the gap between abstract representation and the obscure question of causality:

24. This phrase was used by John Robertson in 'Exclusion of Opinions', a review of vol. I, pt 1 of Transactions of the Statistical Society of London and Westminster Review 31 (April 1838), quoted in Mary Poovey, 'Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Discourse of Statistics in the 1830s', Critical Inquiry 19 (Winter 1993), pp. 256-76 (271). 25. Herman Merivale, 'Moral and Intellectual Statistics of France', Edinburgh Review 69 (April 1839), pp. 49-74. 26. Hacking, Taming, p. 105. 27. Merivale, 'Moral and Intellectual Statistics', pp. 50-51.

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Dickens, in contrast to Gradgrind, is less concerned with the general laws revealed by statistics than with the specific circumstances which produced them. Indeed, in the story of Tom and Louisa Gradgrind, Dickens's position represents a growing understanding of the connection between environment and social trends. While the probability calculus was constant, the conditions for its calculation were variable and thus the most useful function of statistical analysis for many reformers—something usually overlooked—was that of forecasting with a view to changing the circumstances or the conditions that produced such calculations. Dickens lampoons the satisfaction Gradgrind finds in statistical and other sociological data for its own sake while disregarding its value as a basis for reform. Gaskell also indicated the dangers of ignoring statistical fatalism in Mary Barton and cites the use of statistics to support an urgent need for factory legislation. John Barton's discovery of hospital 'numbers' which relate the incidence of accidents at work to the strain of long working hours echoes Ashley's address to the Commons in 1844.29 It represented just one of the seemingly legitimate grievances of the menacing working-class crowd. In the light of mathematical justification for such destabilizing forces, reform for both Dickens and Gaskell becomes a crucial means of propitiating fate. In the spirit of Victorian social forecasting, Dickens was particularly alert to the inevitabilities of the market economy and its probabilistic ethos. The self-interested expectation of the entrepreneur and the financier recalled early conceptions of probability which dealt with games of chance and in which the expectations of the players was the key issue. The gambling metaphor underlines contemporary concerns about the disjunction between economic competency and moral integrity and the opportunities afforded by the market. Dickens's treatment of the mania for speculation places the vagaries of chance in direct opposition to common-sense ideas of cause and effect, and of natural growth and development. Indeed, the negative connotations of the discredited notion of spontaneous generation seem to underpin Dickens's analysis of the overnight emergence of the nouveaux riches?0 Merdle's 28. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (ed. D. Craig; London: Penguin Books, 1969 [1854]), p. 300. Quoted in Hacking, Taming, p. 118. 29. As parliamentary leader of the movement for shortening the working day, Lord Ashley told the Commons that most accidents at work occurred in the last two hours when people became reckless through fatigue. 30. Spontaneous generation was discussed by Edmund Oilier in 'A Scientific

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speculative success is the result of a 'happy stroke of calculation and combination'. He had 'sprung up from nothing, by no natural growth or process that anyone could account for'. In Our Mutual Friend, the very existence of speculators such as Lammle and Veneering undermines any sense of legitimate social endeavour: Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have shares. Have shares enough to be on Boards of Direction... oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares... Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares.31

In Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, speculation is represented both as a disease and as a mechanical fault in the system. Dickens draws a parallel between moral constancy and the constants of natural law: speculation, like gambling, carries a perpetual losing proposition and thus the system will consistently correct those aberrations within it. Dickens exploits the supernatural intimations equated with the fundamental constant in his proleptic 'Books of the Insolvent Fates', which suggest both the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the metaphorical 'book of nature'. These books tell of the preordained fall of those social and economic gamblers who, overestimating their chances, transgress natural law. An alternative perspective which offers alternative conditions for moral conduct is offered in the figure of Daniel Doyce, the inventor who refuses to speculate. Doyce rationalizes Arthur Clennam's disastrous losses in the Merdle speculation in mechanical (closed-regular) terms: There was an error in your calculations. I know what that is. It effects the whole machine, and failure is the consequence. You will profit by the failure, and will avoid it another time. I have done a similar thing myself in construction.32

Doyce's own moral standards reflect the inventor's vision of the universe, with its metaphysical intimations of a predetermined and fixed moral order, which legitimate scientific endeavour upholds. The dialectic nature of Gaskell's industrial fiction sanctions neither the transcendental 'facts' predicted by the political economists, nor the

Figment', Household Words 10 (23 December 1854), pp. 453-56. 31. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (ed. S. Gill; London: Penguin Books, 1988 [1865]), p. 160. 32. Dickens, Little Dorrit, p. 892.

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'wild', 'visionary' activity of John Barton. The tentative portrait of reconciliation between master and men in Mary Barton identifies an instinctive prophetic spirit both as a thread of continuity in human culture and as a manifestation of the common humanity of antagonistic classes: There are stages in the contemplation and endurance of great sorrow, which endow men with the same earnestness and clearness of thought that in some of old took the form of Prophecy...there comes a time... when they are lifted out of the contemplation of their individual cases into a searching inquiry into the nature of their calamity, and the remedy (if remedy there be) which may prevent its recurrence to others as well as to themselves.33 Thus, both authors suggest that successful prophets appear in times of crisis to rationalize the period of chaos that follows the breakdown of old forms, and to posit a new order, a synthesis of the familiar and the emergent. Following Carlyle, Dickens and Gaskell themselves voice, prophetically, the social concerns that would gather pace in the Victorian era. Moreover, they indicate that while the new prophecy will be shaped by the epistemological norms of the time, it will continue the aspirations of the old. Victorian secular prophecy, detached from the causal systems of magic, nevertheless acknowledged the practical basis of divination and its origin in a fundamental human instinct, that of safeguarding the future.

Bibliography Curry, Patrick, Prophecy and Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). Dickens, Charles, Hard Times (ed. D. Craig; London: Penguin Books, 1969 [1854]). —Little Dorrit(cd.J. Holloway; London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1857]). —Our Mutual Friend (ed. S. Gill; London: Penguin Books, 1988 [1865]). Ennemoser, Joseph, The History of Magic (trans. W. Howitt; 2 vols.; London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854). Gaskell, Elizabeth, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales (ed. A Easson; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 [1865]). —Mary Barton (ed. S Gill; London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1848]). —North and South (ed. A Easson; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 [1855]). Gerrard, Bill, 'Classical Economics and the Keynesian Revolution', in Olby et al. (eds.), Companion, pp. 479-93. Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Hunt, Frederick Knight, 'The Planet Watchers of Greenwich', Household Words 1 (25 May 1850), pp. 200-204. Kerszberg, Pierre, 'Cosmology: Newton to Einstein', in Olby et al. (eds.), Companion, pp. 639-50. 33. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 459.

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Levi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology, II (2 vols.; London: Penguin Books, 1976). Lewes, George Henry, Biographical History of Philosophy (London: John W. Parker, 2nd edn, 1857). Merivale, Herman, 'Moral and Intellectual Statistics of France', Edinburgh Review 69 (April 1839), pp. 49-74. Neusner, J., E.S. Frerichs and P.V. McCracken Flesher (eds.), Religion, Science and Magic: In Concert and in Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Olby, R.C., G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie and M.J.S. Hodge (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990). Oilier, Edmund, 'A Scientific Figment', Household Words 10 (23 December 1854), pp. 453-56. Perkin, Harold, The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1981). Poovey, Mary, 'Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Discourse of Statistics in the 1830s', Critical Inquiry 19 (Winter 1993), pp. 256-76. Sharot, Steven, 'Magic, Religion, Science and Secularisation', in Neusner, Frerichs and McCracken Flesher (eds.), Religion, Science and Magic, pp. 261-83. Simon, Pierre, Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (trans. F.W. Truscott and F.L. Emory; New York: Dover Publications, 6th edn, 1951 [1814]). —Theorie analytique desprobability (Paris: Ve. Courcier, 1812). Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 1980).

Elizabeth Leane

Popular Cosmology as Mythic Narrative: A Site for Interdisciplinary Exchange

Despite the recent burgeoning of literary analyses of scientific discourse, science popularization remains a relatively neglected genre.1 This is particularly surprising given the increasing visibility of these texts in the last quarter of a century and their potential for influencing the public's understanding of the nature and value of science. Physics popularizations in particular have held a high profile throughout the twentieth century and, within physics, cosmology and astronomy have been the subject of far more popularizations than any other single area.2 In this paper I want to comment on the discourse of two popularizations of cosmology in the context of current debate about the nature of scientific and mythic knowledge. My chosen texts are Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, and Steven Weinberg's The First Three Minutes, published in 1977. Both books were bestsellers and are considered benchmarks of the genre. Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, claims that when scientists are called upon to describe their discoveries to the public, 'they play by the rules of the narrative game', and that '[t]he state spends large amounts of money to enable science to pass itself off as an epic'.3 At the same time Lyotard argues that scientists dismiss narrative knowledge as 1. Critics who have remarked upon this neglect include T.M. Lessl, 'Science and the Sacred Cosmos: The Ideological Rhetoric of Carl Sagan', Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985), pp. 175-87 (175); R. Cooter and S. Pumfrey, 'Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture', History of Science 32 (1994), pp. 237-67 (237); J. Fahnestock, 'Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts', in M.W. McRae (ed.), The Literature of Science: Perspectives on Popular Science Writing (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 17-36 (18-19); J. Durant, review of The Faber Book of Science, ed. John Carey, Times Literary Supplement (24 Nov. 1995), p. 5; R. Smith, Popular Physics and Astronomy: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), pp. 1-2. 2. Smith, Popular Physics, pp. 1, 179. 3. J. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi; Theory and History of Literature, 10; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989 [1979]), pp. 27-28.

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untestable, and consider it 'savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward'.4 According to Lyotard, then, scientists couch their public rhetoric in the narrative mode in order to create a certain image of their discipline, but simultaneously eschew it as an inferior form of knowledge representation. I aim to show that Hawking and Weinberg enact this process in their popularizations. This positioning of scientific knowledge above narrative knowledge which Lyotard identifies is highly relevant to current interdisciplinary exchanges, in particular the so-called 'Science Wars' which have raged in the last few years between science studies scholars and their opponents. One of the central shared assumptions of the multidisciplinary group of scholars who practise science studies is the social constructivist view that science is a culturally embedded discourse like any other; it is not epistemologicatty privileged but merely culturally privileged,5 and one of their aims is to understand the ways in which this privileging operates. This view challenges the traditional boundaries between science and myth. As literary critic Damien Broderick observes, [O]n this account, science is finally the kind of story which industrial and post-industrial sophisticates tell about the universe and the creatures which inhabit it, including its story-tellers. Its laws are those not of a special 'scientific method', sought for so long by anxious philosophers, but 6 of narrative and myth.

One area of scientific research to which this claim is particularly relevant is cosmology, for the territory on which it stakes its knowledge-claims overlaps that of myth. Although myth is a notoriously slippery concept, according to folklorist Lauri Honko one denning feature is 'the fact that, in general, myths contain information about decisive, creative events in the beginning of time'; thus, '[i]t is no coincidence that cosmogonic descriptions occupy a central position in many mythological accounts'. 'Cosmogonic' is used here in a broad sense to include 'all those stories that recount how the world began, how our era started, how the goals that we strive to attain are determined and our most sacred values codified'.7 Obviously, areas of science such as evolution and particularly cosmology deal with cosmogonic description in the most literal sense, 4. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 27. 5. G. Levine, 'What is Science Studies For and Who Cares?', in A. Ross (ed.), Science Wars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 123-38 (126). 6. D. Broderick, The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), p. 84. 7. L. Honko, 'The Problem of Defining Myth', in A. Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 41-52 (50-51); original italics.

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and this has been a source of much historical debate between religion and science; however, it is the claim that science also fulfils these further functions—defining society's goals and codifying its sacred values—which is currently at issue. Among those quick to defend the unique epistemological status of science have been scientist popularizers such as Weinberg, Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins, all of whom have explicitly addressed the relationship between science and myth in their popularizations.8 Dawkins, in River out of Eden, for example, writes scathingly of 'a fashionable salon philosophy called cultural relativism which holds, in its extreme form, that science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth: science is just the mythology favored by our modern Western tribe'. Dawkins dismisses this claim by pointing to science's material effectiveness: 'Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and 111 show you a hypocrite'. Although Dawkins considers such extreme relativism 'alarmingly common', what he presents is more a straw target which can be conveniently dismissed than an accurate summary of the complex and various views held by those working within science studies.9 Even Bruno Latour, who is often presented as the epitome of the constructivist school which Dawkins is attacking, acknowledges 'the enormous consequences of science', and notes, in much the same terms as Dawkins, that '[o]ne cannot equate.. .the story telling of origin myths somewhere in the South African bush and the Big Bang theory'.10 In addition to these constructivist challenges, scientific cosmology is also currently under attack from within the scientific community. Consider the following assertion: '[T]he Big Bang is a myth, a wonderful myth maybe, which deserves a place of honor in the columbarium which already contains the Indian myth of a cyclic Universe, the Chinese cosmic egg, the Biblical myth of creation in six days, the Ptolemaic cosmological myth, and many others'. 11 The source of this claim is Hannes Alfven, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970. Alfven is no radical relativist. On the contrary, he is a fierce advocate of empiricism, and his claim is specific to Big Bang cosmology. In a paper entitled 8. See S. Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (London: Vintage, 1993 [1977]), pp. 149-50; L. Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber, 1992), p. 119. 9. R. Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1996), pp. 35-36. 10. Quoted in Broderick, Architecture of Babel, p. 85. 11. Quoted in E. Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened: A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe (London: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 228.

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'Cosmology—Myth or Science?', originally published in the Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy in 1984, Alfven argues that 'the triumph of science' has paradoxically given rise to 'a "scientific creationism" inside academia itself'. Alfven claims that in the face of mounting evidence against the Big Bang theory, cosmologists have not abandoned this theory; instead, he contends, '[a]n increasing number of ad hoc assumptions are made, which in a way correspond to the Ptolemaic introduction of more and more epicycles and eccentrics'.12 Thus Alfven is essentially arguing that Big Bang cosmologists are not enacting Popperian falsification but rather supporting Quine's claim that '[a]ny statement can be held true, come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system'.13 In Alfven's view, the source of Big Bang cosmologists' willingness to ignore observational evidence is their veneration of what he terms "mathematical myth'. This myth, which has its source in the philosophy of Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that '[i]t is possible to explore the structure and evolutionary history of the universe by pure theoretical thinking without very much contact with observations'.14 Alfven is not alone in his claim; philosophers of science Paul Feyerabend and Mary Hesse have made similar observations,15 as have a number of science popularizers.16 Weinberg himself in his recent popularization Dreams of a Final Theory explicitly aims to 'counteract' what he considers a widespread 'over-empiricist' 12. H. Alfven, 'Cosmology—Myth or Science?', Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy 5 (1984), pp. 79-98; reprinted in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science 20 (1992), pp. 590-600 (594, 596); original italics. (References are to the latter edition.) 13. Quine, Willard Van Orman, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, rev. edn, 1980 [1953]), p. 43. 14. Alfven, 'Cosmology', pp. 593, 599; original italics. 15. P. Feyerabend, 'Has the Scientific View of the World a Special Status Compared with Other Views?', in J. Hilgevoord (ed.), Physics and Our View of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 135-48 (138-39); M. Hesse, 'Cosmology as Myth', Concilium 166 (1983), pp. 49-54. 16. See J. Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Reading, MA: Helix-Addison-Wesley, 1996), chs. 1, 3 and 4; J. Boslough, Masters of Time: How Wormholes, Snakewood and Assaults on the Big Bang have brought Mystery back to the Cosmos (London: Phoenix, 1993), pp. 54-56; R. Morris, The Edges of Science: Crossing the Boundary from Physics to Metaphysics (London: Fourth Estate, 1990), p. 221; Lerner, Big Bang, chs. 1-4, 8-10; and R.L. Oldershaw, 'What's Wrong with the New Physics?', New Scientist (22-29 Dec. 1990), pp. 56-59. See Oldershaw, 'The New Physics—Physical or Mathematical Science?', American Journal of Physics 56 (1988), pp. 1075-81, for a similar criticism of Big Bang cosmology and fundamental physics in a less popular format.

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view of science, emphasizing 'the remarkable power of the physicist's sense of beauty acting in conjunction with and sometimes even in opposition to the weight of experimental evidence'. 17 While it is difficult for a non-scientist such as myself to evaluate these claims, they are nevertheless worth adding to the more general relativist claims already noted when considering the popular discourse of Hawking and Weinberg. 18 Alfven asserts that '[Big Bang believers] fight against popular creationism, but at the same time they fight fanatically for their own creationism'. 19 My claim is milder, and does not challenge the validity of Big Bang cosmology: I argue that physics popularizers such as Hawking and Weinberg fight against popular creationism, but fight for scientific cosmology by turning to the rhetoric of creationism. The opening paragraphs of The First Three Minutes and A Brief History of Time are strikingly similar: both outline a traditional myth before dismissing it in favour of the scientific world-view. While, in both cases, the central problem identified in the myth—infinite regress—is recognized as a problem also facing science, science is nonetheless presented as a superior knowledge system which makes myth redundant. Weinberg begins by describing a Norse myth, of which I will quote the latter half: [F]rom the liquid drops there grew a giant, Ymer. What did Ymer eat? It seems there was also a cow, Audhumla. And what did she eat? Well, there was also some salt. And so on. I must not offend religious sensibilities, even Viking religious sensibilities, but I think it is fair to say that this is not a very satisfying picture of the origin of the universe. Even leaving aside all objections to hearsay evidence, the story raises as many problems as it answers, and each answer requires a new complication in the initial conditions. 20

17. Weinberg, Dreams, pp. 101, 103. 18. Paul Davies (About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution [London: Viking Penguin, 1995], p. 152), while noting the 'accumulating difficulties' with the Big Bang model that prompted Lerner to write his book in late 1991, observes that just a few months later 'the COBE [Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite] ripples were discovered, and suddenly the big-bang theory was firmly back on track'. Alfven's, Morris's and Oldershaw's criticisms also predate the COBE ripples. However, as Weinberg's and Hawking's books were published well before this evidence appeared, it does not affect my argument here. Boslough (Masters of Time, p. 47) notes that despite the COBE discovery 'problems and inconsistencies continued to confront the big bang model'. 19. Alfven, 'Cosmology', p. 596; original italics. 20. S. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (London: Fontana-Collins, 1983 [1977]), p. 13; original italics. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.

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Lyotard has argued convincingly that it is 'impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different'.21 Yet in this passage Weinberg judges the Edda solely on scientific criteria. He deliberately misreads the mythic account, treating it as a purely physical, rational description of the origin of the universe, referring facetiously to 'hearsay evidence' and 'initial conditions'. This reading seems designed to encourage amused contempt on the part of the reader. The cavalier tone of his apology—'I mustn't offend religious sensibilities, even Viking religious sensibilities'—does nothing to counteract that effect.22 Towards the end of this chapter, Weinberg emphasizes the empirical basis of Big Bang cosmology: 'It is a tribute to the essential objectivity of modern astrophysics that this consensus [the 'standard model' of the Big Bang] has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preferences or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data' (pp. 17-18). Given that traditionally this is the way in which all scientific research is supposed to proceed, it seems slightly

odd that Weinberg needs to emphasize the experimental basis of Big Bang cosmology in this way. A Brief History also begins by opposing modern science to a traditional myth, in this case a variant of the Atlas myth. Hawking describes a public lecture on astronomy in which an exchange takes place between 'a well-known scientist' and 'a little old lady'. When the scientist has concluded his description of the orbits of the planets and stars, the woman puts forward her own theory: ' "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!" '23 21. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 37. 22. Weinberg's initial dismissal of mythic knowledge is qualified somewhat by later remarks: he admits that his sketch of the standard model of the Big Bang shares with the Edda 'an embarrassing vagueness about the very beginning' (p. 17); elsewhere he compares and contrasts the cyclic model of the universe with Norse myth without rhetorically disparaging the latter (p. 147), and the Edda is the final entry in his 'Suggestions for Further Reading', where it is described as 'another view of the beginning and end of the universe' (p. 180). In view of his opening paragraphs, however, it is difficult not to read this last remark as ironic and patronizing, and the other two references are buried in the text and do not have the positional impact necessary to counter the distinction established in these paragraphs. 23- S.W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1989), p. 1. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.

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While Hawking's following discussion is not as dismissive of myth as Weinberg's, their opening paragraphs share the same basic function—to allow the reader a chuckle at the expense of mythic thought and thereby to establish the rationality of myth's implicit alternative, science. The humour content of Hawking's anecdote arises more from the inappropriate context in which the 'infinite tower of tortoises' is suggested than from the myth itself (p. 1). Given that the majority of Hawking's readers are young males, 24 it is perhaps no coincidence that the mouthpiece of the pre-scientific world-view is the cliched 'little old lady', an easy figure of fun for this readership. Like Weinberg, Hawking is at pains to emphasize the sound scientific basis of cosmological research. Early in A Brief History he declares, 'As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation' (p. 10). In his concluding chapter he repeats this point, this time contrasting the 'tower of tortoises' myth with superstring theory and deeming the former an unsuccessful theory: [T]he tortoise theory fails to be a good scientific theory because it predicts that people should be able to fall off the edge of the world. This has not been found to agree with experience, unless that turns out to be the explanation for the people who are supposed to have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle! (p. 171)

As well as flippantly connecting an ancient creation myth with a modern superstition in order to dismiss the former, Hawking implies that myths are failed scientific theories because their predictions are falsified; however, as I discussed previously, cosmology is the one area of science to which the application of Popperian criteria is most problematic. Alfven and many others contend that Big Bang cosmologists are one group of scientists who do not accept falsifying evidence but merely add 'an increasing number of ad hoc assumptions' to their theory. Conversely, it can be argued that Alfven's alternative cosmological research programme, based on plasma physics, has produced correct predictions which have had little effect on the scientific community. Historian of science and former physicist Stephen Brush has used Alfven's research as a test case to see whether scientists actually follow the policy of judging theories on the strength of their predictions. Brush concludes that while '[b]y Popperian criteria [Alfven's] theories should have acquired

24. This is the opinion expressed to me by Ravi Mirchandani, an editorial director at Penguin Books, in a telephone interview (26 Feb. 1996).

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credit by their successful predictions', this has not occurred, and he suggests that 'prediction as a means of evaluating scientific theories has been exaggerated'.25 The salient feature of Hawking's and Weinberg's representations of myth and science is their desire to judge them by the same criteria, and hence their willingness to ignore the encoded structures of mythic thought, structures which refer to aspects of human society apart from knowledge of the physical world. They are adhering to a nineteenthcentury conception of myth as solely proto-scientific knowledge, a conception which twentieth-century thinkers have rejected as overly narrow and simplistic.26 For example, Stephen Toulmin in The Return to Cosmology states that 'it is not enough to regard the old stories only as half-baked science'.27 He later expands on his argument with reference to the Atlas myth: [S]urely Atlas was the product not merely of ignorance. There were a vast number of things besides the mechanism of the solar system of which the Ancients were ignorant; but very few of them gave rise to myths. Only where this ignorance was of importance, where it seemed to mean insecurity, was a myth born... The stability of the Earth becomes a symbol for so much else/28

It is this symbolic dimension of myth which Hawking's and Weinberg's opening paragraphs are designed to ignore. Of course, it is not Hawking's or Weinberg's role to embark on an elaboration of the function of myth. My point is that in neither case is there any suggestion that these two forms of knowledge representation should be seen as complementary, as embodying different kinds of information which are both useful to humanity. Why this need, for both physicists, to establish a hierarchical distinction between science and myth? A possible reason becomes clear on further examination of both texts. At first glance, Weinberg's narrative reflects the linear chronological development of the universe: his text begins with a creation myth and concludes with an apocalypse. In his penultimate paragraph, he notes 25. S.G. Brush, 'Alfven's Programme in Solar System Physics', IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science 20 (1992), pp. 577-89 (584-85). 26. Twentieth-century myth theorists have tended to emphasize the multiple functions of myth, of which explanation of natural phenomena is merely one; Honko, for example, lists eleven other possible functions, including myth as 'projection of the subconscious1,, 'charter of behaviour' and 'legitimation of social institutions' ('Defining Myth', p. 47; original italics). 27. S. Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 2328. Toulmin, Return to Cosmology, p. 69.

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humanity's urge to believe, in his words, 'that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning' (p. 148). He implicitly rejects this reasoning, presenting a profoundly pessimistic view of the universe as overwhelmingly vast and inhospitable, and ending the paragraph with his much quoted observation that '[t]he more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless' (pp. 148-49). Yet, although this is often presented as the concluding sentence of The First Three Minutes, Weinberg does not end his text with such nihilistic portents; rather, in his final paragraph, he succumbs to the teleological urge he has just rejected and turns to science as a fleeting but nonetheless worthwhile source of purpose: But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy (p. 149).

Paradoxically, Weinberg employs the categories of narrative knowledge in order to denigrate them in favour of scientific knowledge. He explicitly rejects the open, farcical narrative as belonging to pre-scientific humanity with its narrative knowledge—to people who 'comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants'. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, provides purpose, a telos; it transforms the open narrative of farce into the closed narrative of tragedy. Weinberg's final paragraph provides closure both in the sense of resolving the epistemological issues raised in the opening paragraphs and in the sense of closing the narrative— his narrative and the narrative of human existence—to alternative interpretations. A similar equation of scientific advance with both human and cosmic purpose is established quite early in A Brief History. Near the end of his first chapter, Hawking asks how we can know that science will come to the correct ultimate conclusions—the correct 'complete unified theory' (p. 12). In answer, he argues that 'the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions' (p. 13). Thus, in Hawking's view, science is evolutionarily destined to succeed. He concludes the chapter with a vision similar to Weinberg's:

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[E]ver since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in (p. 13).

This quest for knowledge, Hawking makes clear in his penultimate paragraph, is an exclusively scientific one; he explicitly dismisses the alternative search for knowledge proposed by Wittgenstein, ' "the analysis of language"' (p. 175). More specifically, in Hawking's evolutionary model of scientific progress, humanity's 'continuing quest' is equated with the search for a 'Theory of Everything' (TOE) which will unify the four fundamental forces of nature. The discovery of such a theory, Hawking proclaims in his controversial conclusion, would be 'the ultimate triumph of human reason', and would allow us to 'know the mind of God' (p. 175). Hawking's reasoning thus centres around the belief in a transcendental signified, a logos; the 'mind of God' remark merely identifies the philosophical and theological senses of logos. The search for this logos—'[a] starting point, to which all explanations may be traced', as Weinberg terms it in his Dreams of a Final Theory^—is intimately connected with the search for an origin of time and space—the Big Bang—and together they provide the telos of human existence. Significantly, such a yearning for an origin is seen by some myth scholars, Mircea Eliade in particular, as an identifying feature of cosmogonic myth. Eliade points to the importance in traditional cosmogonic myth of 'primordial totality1, and also 'the necessity of creation, that is, of the breaking up of the primeval unity'. 30 Similarly, the unification of the fundamental forces of nature is believed to have occurred only in the immensely high temperatures which characterized the early stages of the Big Bang, and is followed by the breaking up of the forces, the 'primeval unity'. The language of cosmologists and fundamental physicists emphasizes the beauty and symmetry of the universe at the time of its origin, and the search for a TOE can be read as a nostalgic attempt to recreate this harmony; to quote Leon Lederman, 'You might find the primordial universe boring, but to a particle physicist, those were the days! Such simplicity, such beauty...' 31

29. Weinberg, Dreams, p. 3. 30. M. Eliade, 'Cosmogonic Myth and "Sacred History" ', in Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative, pp. 137-51 (145); original italics. 31. L. Lederman, with D. Teresi, The God Particle (London: Bantam, 1993), p. 3.

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The mythologizing of the TOE as science's and humanity's sole quest has been increasingly subject to criticism; philosopher Mary Midgley, journalist Brian Appleyard, and speech theorist Thomas Lessl have all pointed to the prevalence of a teleologically based scientism in the language of popularizers such as Hawking, Carl Sagan, Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson, John Barrow and Frank Tipler. 32 Lessl argues that Sagan constructs an 'evolutionary myth' in which '[c]osmic evolution, beginning with the "Big Bang," begets chemical evolution, which begets biological evolution, which begets human evolution, which begets scientific evolution'. In the same way that 'Biblical and tribal religions' trace their genealogies back to a sacred time, so in evolutionary myth '[s]cience is the crowning feature of evolution and is endowed with natural authority as the descendent [sic] of the cosmos'. 33 Scientific cosmology, then, as popularized by Hawking, Weinberg and others, fulfils not just the literal but also the symbolic functions of myth —it recounts, in Honko's phrase, 'how the goals that we strive to attain are determined and our most sacred values codified'. Hayden White argues that narrativity imposes upon real events 'a coherence that permits us to see "the end" in every beginning'. 34 The narratives of The First Three Minutes and A Brief History of Time impose a narrativity upon the universe, so that its beginning—the Big Bang—permits through evolutionary progress its final goal—complete knowledge of itself through science, a Theory of Everything; Weinberg and Hawking tell tales, not of giants and gods, but of the cosmic lineage of the scientific project. Barthes argues that 'the very principle of myth' is that 'it trans-

32. See M. Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), chs. 1, 2, 14, 15 and 17; and B. Appleyard, Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man (London: Pan, 1993 [1992]), p. 2. Science popularizers such as Margaret Wertheim (Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars [London: Fourth Estate, 1997], ch. 9) and John Taylor (When the Clock Struck Zero: Science's Ultimate Limits [London: Picador, 1993], chs. 1, 4 and 11) have also recently criticized the all-embracing claims of TOE physicists. 33. Lessl, 'Sacred Cosmos', pp. 177-78. See Toulmin, Return to Cosmology, pp. 53-71 (particularly pp. 61-62), for an analysis of a related version of this evolutionary myth. The anthropic cosmological principle, which in Midgley's words is 'the notion that the physical universe can in some ways be explained by assuming that it must be such to contain people' (Science as Salvation, p. 27), is clearly relevant to this teleological reasoning; see Science as Salvation, pp. 195-211, for an analysis of popularizations of this subject. 34. H. White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 1-23 (23).

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forms history into nature'.35 We can see the closed teleological narratives of Big Bang cosmology and the search for a TOE as science's attempt to mythologize its own origins and maintain its power—to justify its goals and hence its requirements. As Lyotard suggests, it is in scientists' interest to represent their project as an epic. Big science requires grand narratives, and as Alfven observes, 'To try to write a grand cosmological drama leads necessarily to myth'.36 It seems to me that Hawking's and Weinberg's insistence on a rigid distinction between myth and science is a case of protesting too much, for they themselves employ a mythic representation of science. Literary critic Robert Markley has observed that 'the efforts expended to defend the territories claimed by "science" and the "humanities" often seem an ironic measure of the instability of the distinction between them'.37 Big Bang cosmology is currently one of the focal points of this instability. Toulmin argues that myth is a means to deal with human insecurity; perhaps the fact that Hawking and Weinberg both construct a mythologized vision of science designed to reinforce the distinction between science and other forms of knowledge representation merely reveals their own insecurity about this distinction.

Bibliography Alfven, H., 'Cosmology—Myth or Science?', Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy 5 (1984), pp. 79-98. Reprinted in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science 20 (1992), pp. 590-600. Appleyard, B., Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man (London: Pan, 1993). Barthes, R., Mythologies (trans. Annette Lavers; London: Paladin, 1973 [1957]). Boslough, J., Masters of Time: How Wormholes, Snakewood and Assaults on the Big Bang have brought Mystery back to the Cosmos (London: Phoenix, 1993). Broderick, D., The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994). Brush, S.G., 'Alfven's Programme in Solar System Physics', IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science 20 (1992), pp. 577-89. Cooter, R., and S. Pumfrey, 'Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture', History of Science 32 (1994), pp. 237-67. Davies, P., About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution (London: Viking Penguin, 1995). 35. p. 140. 36. 37. Review

R. Barthes, Mythologies (trans. Annette Lavers; London: Paladin, 1973 [1957]), Quoted in Lerner, Big Bang, p. 214. R. Markley, 'What Now? An Introduction to Interphysics', New 18.1 (1991), pp. 5-8 (6).

Orleans

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Dawkins, R., River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1996). Durant, J., review of The Faber Book of Science, ed. J. Carey, Times Literary Supplement(24 Nov. 1995), p. 5. Eliade, M., 'Cosmogonic Myth and "Sacred History"', in A. Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 137-51. Fahnestock, J., 'Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts', in M.W. McRae (ed.), The Literature of Science: Perspectives on Popular Science Writing (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 17-36. Feyerabend, P., 'Has the Scientific View of the World a Special Status Compared with Other Views?', in J. Hilgevoord (ed.), Physics and Our View of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 135-48. Hawking, S.W., A Brief History of Time: Prom the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1989). Hesse, M., 'Cosmology as Myth', Concilium 166 (1983), pp. 49-54. Honko, L., 'The Problem of Defining Myth', in A. Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 41-52. Horgan, J., The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Reading, MA: Helix-Addison-Wesley, 1996). Lederman, L, with D. Teresi, The God Particle (London: Bantam, 1993). Lessl, T.M., 'Science and the Sacred Cosmos: The Ideological Rhetoric of Carl Sagan', Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985), pp. 175-87. Lerner, E., The Big Bang Never Happened: A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe (London: Simon and Schuster, 1992). Levine, G., 'What is Science Studies For and Who Cares?', in A. Ross (ed.), Science Wars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 123-38. Lyotard, J., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi; Theory and History of Literature, 10; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989 [1979]). Markley, R., 'What Now? An Introduction to Interphysics', New Orleans Review 18.1 (1991), pp. 5-8. Midgley, M., Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992). Morris, R., The Edges of Science: Crossing the Boundary from Physics to Metaphysics (London: Fourth Estate, 1990). Oldershaw, R.L., 'The New Physics—Physical or Mathematical Science?', American Journal of Physics 56 (1988), pp. 1075-81. —'What's Wrong with the New Physics?', New Scientist (22-29 Dec. 1990), pp. 5659. Quine, W.V.O., From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, rev. edn, 1980 [1953])Smith, R., Popular Physics and Astronomy: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996). Taylor, J., When the Clock Struck Zero: Science's Ultimate Limits (London: Picador, 1993). Toulmin, S., The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

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Weinberg, S., Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (London: Vintage, 1993 [1977]). —The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (London: Fontana-Collins, 1983 [1977]). Wertheim, M., Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars (London: Fourth Estate, 1997). White, H., 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 123. Wolpert, L., The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber, 1992).

Ulrika Orloff

Translation as Gay Deception

My research project, 'Challenging the Feminization of Translation: Sex, Lies and the (Reproduction of Words' consists of an evaluation of the dominant discourse of translation; I investigate how and why translations have been regarded as secondary, defective and lacking vis-a-vis 'original' works of literature. The overall purpose of my thesis is to increase critical awareness regarding the still prevailing belief in dualism as the inevitable way of making sense of our existence by looking at the connection between the metaphorical language used for describing the 'innate deficiency' of translations and the stereotypical language frequently used to describe women in relation to men. Terms such as 'subordinate', 'reproductive', 'secondary', 'obedient' and 'faithful' easily present themselves when a metaphorical link between translations and women is considered.1 This gives rise to the question: what are the implications of these similarities for the prevalent view of Literature (with a capital L)? Furthermore, could second-wave feminism, with its emphasis on women's right to difference rather than equality (in the sense of sameness), have anticipated the birth and development of translation studies as an independent—though still questioned—discipline? To view translation as something other than that which is not an original and to consider it as a textual occurrence in its own right is a fairly new phenomenon. Notably, it is only during the last twenty years or so that the 'independence' of translation has been discussed.2

1. Naturally, I am not the first to notice such a metaphorical connection. In a feminist context Lori Chamberlain's essay 'Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13.3 (1988), pp. 57-74, is a well-known and frequently cited text on that topic. See also her contribution 'Gender Metaphorics in Translation', in Mona Baker (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 93-96. 2. Sherry Simon explains how translation studies have been part of 'the cultural turn' from the 1980s onwards; rather than questioning whether a translation is 'correct' or not (which is the traditional, prescriptive manner of looking at translations) 'the emphasis is [now] placed on a descriptive approach: "what do translations do, how do they circulate in the world and elicit response?" '. See Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 7.

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My special interest lies in the current challenge to normative ideas regarding sexuality and the survival of humankind. It is no longer 'obvious' that heterosexual activity leading to human reproduction is the only manner in which humanity as such can be preserved. The implicit consequences of this change within the field of literary theory can be seen in the attempts made by theorists and philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to question and disrupt the hierarchical structure which puts a premium on the 'original' textual product (and its producer—the Author) in order to preserve Literature. The increasing attention paid to translations and the liberation movement' of these 'secondary' texts is especially poignant when literary translation is considered. Clearly, the division between 'original' and 'translation' is most charged within that particular field of study which is why, primarily, I will discuss attitudes towards translations of literary texts. In my thesis I also study feminist translators' views on their work and on the (often feminist) originals that they translate. Moreover, I explain how a feminist approach to translation can be just as authoritarian, exclusive and prescriptive as the patriarchal, traditional, 'canonized', hierarchical literary structure it attempts to undermine. The aim of my project as a whole is not merely to conclude that the dominant discourse of translation is feminized (and dependent upon the negating metaphor of dualism)^ and 'sexually' marked, but also to describe why and how the notion of what translation is and does (in relation to the 'original') appears to be more mobile than ever. Scientific development (such as NRTs, new reproductive technologies) and the subsequent changes in attitudes towards human procreation play an important, if not always explicit, part here. The challenging aspect of my work is that I shall attempt to displace the 'male equals original, female equals translation' schema and show how translation works as a joyful and elusive ('gay') confirmation of its own ideology-based existence. This idea will be partly developed by exploring the literary concept of 'gay deception', used by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). The present essay will focus on explaining some of Bakhtin's most important points regarding literature and language in order to present and describe the category of gay deception in its original context. 3- The term is taken from Helen Haste's book The Sexual Metaphor (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Haste—a Reader in Psychology—suggests that 'we map the polarity of masculine versus feminine on to other polarities. The polarity of masculine and feminine is an extremely powerful idea' (p. 3). In Haste's view dualistic thinking permeates Western culture and in the most fundamental of these polarities— the man/woman constellation—the woman is the negative pole.

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Subsequently, however, I shall use the concept in connection with Judith Butler's views on homosexual and transsexual discourse. The core of the essay is an implicit awareness of how the ideas of both of these theorists can be related to my analysis of the discourse of translation, a relationship which is only occasionally explicitly described in the text. Every discourse has its own selfish and biased proprietor; there are no words with meanings shared by all, no words 'belonging to no one. This view on the meanings of words is presented by Bakhtin in his long essay 'Discourse in the Novel' and it serves well as a starting point for a discussion regarding the discourse of translation. I shall in the following describe such notions as dialogism, heteroglossia and, most importantly, gay deception. In 'Discourse in the Novel' Bakhtin discusses the 'novelness' of the novel. Contrary to what one might think, 'Novelness is the study of any cultural activity that has treated language as dialogic.'5 Words in literary texts (and in other utterances) are always dialogic not only in that they can be related to a certain situation at a certain time but also because they are coming from and heading towards different situations and times. This contextual relationship functions both between and within words, which makes the interaction simultaneous as well as ambivalent: 'The word, by nature always resonant with a multitude of conflicting voices seeks an answer from other words "embodied" in other voices. The word is living, dialogic discourse.' 6 Since Bakhtin does not study literature or any other utterances from a 'unitary' linguistic point of view, an intermingling of voices does not appear chaotic to him. On the contrary, it is the view that language can be studied as an abstract, law-abiding unity—held by such an important and influential linguist as Ferdinand de Saussure—that Bakhtin finds truly problematic. 7 The literary text is not an object consisting of words 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259-422 (401). 5. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 68, my emphasis; see also p. 72. 6. Pam Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 252. Michael Holquist explains that 'The Russian word slovo covers much more territory than its English equivalent, signifying both an individual word and a method of using words [cf. the Greek logos] that presumes a type of authority'. See Holquist, 'Glossary', in idem, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 427. 7. Especially Saussure's 'division of language into langue (the system) and parole (the individual speech act)' since it 'leads to a fundamental misconception of the utterance'. See Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a

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which relate to 'a unitary, impersonal language code',8 for 'there are no words..."belonging to no one"'. Yet, significantly, there are in any language or culture, in any utterance, centripetal as well as centrifugal forces. The centripetal force is 'verbal-ideological', centralizing, authoritative and normative, whereas the centrifugal is a decentring, 'decrowning', changing and openly heteroglot force.9 Heteroglossia involves an unlimited number of intermingling 'socio-ideological' languages: 'languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth'.10 Dialogism—a centrifugal force—is situated within heteroglossia and so is monologism, which is a centripetal force in every discourse. According to Bakhtin, these forces always compete within the utterance. Yet, is it not a contradiction to say that a literary text (an utterance amongst others) is always dialogic and at the same time to maintain that there is such a thing as monologism? No, because in the name of the Author, the Father, the Law and God it is possible to claim autonomy and single-voiced truth. Here I briefly want to argue that the Romantic view of the author as an imaginative and 'inspired' individual, as well as a mediator and tool in the hands of a divine power, has elevated fiction, from the point of view of the original, into a meaningful and truth-expressing entity. Instead of affirming the inherent fictiveness or untruthfulness of fiction (a positive lie) this attitude encourages a 'glorifying' view of literature and its authors and it enforces a hermeneutical search for the inherent meaning in a literary text. Needless to say, the translator is not viewed as working in the hands of divine power and she or he is not to be trusted. The translation is a threat to the original's eternal life as unique since it Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 125. To Saussure the study of (abstract) langue is more important than the study of (concrete) parole since langue sets the rules and forms the basis of every parole. In Bakhtin's view to focus a study of language on langue is to attribute importance to 'finalized' codes rather than 'unfinalized' contexts. Codes are meaningless in that they are abstract; they are ' "pure potential" to mean' and, therefore, quite uninteresting (Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 126). For a brief description of the difference between Saussure's and Bakhtin's linguistic theories see Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 11-13. 8. Holquist, Dialogism, p. 68. 9. See Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', pp. 271-72 and Holquist, 'Glossary', in idem, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 425. 10. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', p. 272. Holquist explains, 'All utterances are heteroglot in that they are shaped by forces whose particularity and variety are practically beyond systematization. The idea of heteroglossia comes as close as possible to conceptualizing a locus where the great centripetal and centrifugal forces that shape discourse can meaningfully come together' (Dialogism, p. 70).

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reveals the 'lie'. It contaminates the pureness of the original and this is why re-translations are in constant demand—to wash some of the imaginary dirt off. Especially from the nineteenth century onwards the tendency in Western literary tradition has been to view a translation as something secondary and temporary. The connection between the concept of translation and unoriginal repeatability/reproduction has since then functioned as a necessary explanation of and justification for limiting the artistic and, not least, financial value of a translation. Somewhat paradoxically, therefore, the role of the translation as a disposable copy or a 'throw-away article' helps to sustain the illusion of a fixed survival of truth and meaningfulness. As noted, the centripetal forces in language try to enforce homogeneity and stable hierarchical structures (for instance canonization within literary genres). The centrifugal forces, in turn, 'challenge fixed definitions'. 11 Moreover, this stratification of the meaning in language 'destroys unity, but...this is not a negative or negating process. It is cheerful war, the Tower of Babel as maypole'. 12 Even if this simile is somewhat phallo(go)centric it is also disarming and playful, in other words, gay. To explain further the function of dialogism I shall present a short description of Bakhtin's notion of 'self' and 'other'. According to Bakhtin, consciousness is only possible through otherness. To perceive a selfness (centre) there must be otherness (not centre) which is 'a relation of simultaneity' and of separateness. 13 This is an interrelationship that has nothing to do with a striving for oneness (or containment). Instead, it confirms and affirms interdependent difference: Dialogism argues that all meaning is relative in the sense that it comes about only as a result of the relation between two bodies occupying simultaneous but different space, where bodies may be thought of as ranging from the immediacy of our physical bodies, to political bodies and 14 to bodies of ideas in general (ideologies).

The most important factors, for my discussion, in Bakhtin's perception of the self/ other structure are that it is non-binary and that it is affirmative. 11. Holquist, 'Glossary', in idem, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 433. 12. Holquist, 'Glossary', in idem, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 433; see also p. 425. 13- Holquist, Dialogism, , pp. 19-20; see p. 89 for a good remark on voices. See Holquist, 'Glossary', in idem, The Dialogic Imagination for a description of alien/ other (p. 423). 14. Holquist, Dialogism,, pp. 20-21.

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To continue, dialogue is always at least triadic: it consists of 'an utterance, a reply, and a relation between the two'. 15 The relationship is on the one hand very much situated in the present time and place but it is 'relative' in the sense that it is constantly confronted by new (and old) relationships. 'Time will tell' is a useful expression since it alludes to the chronological (and therefore historical) aspect of interpretation and meaning. Meaning, in short, is time-bound (as well as context-bound). Another way of determining the relational aspect of dialogue is to introduce Bakhtin's notion of the 'superaddressee'. This 'third party' is not a literal person, nor is it an inner or outer voice engaged in dialogue, but rather an ideal and Utopian listener who is acquainted with every context and who understands everything—quietly and completely. According to Bakhtin the self/speaker/ author supposes and hopes that her or his utterance will be understood by the other/listener/addressee but is also aware, more or less consciously, that she or he cannot be completely understood by this second party (which, presumably, would include an inner addressee of, for instance, the 'self' as a child, i.e. that other which is the self I used to be).16 The superaddressee is often connected to 'various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth)'.17 In other words, it is a manner of naming and concretizing the hopeful implication of complete understanding and response, if not here and now then in another time and place. It is vital to separate this kind of ideological based labelling of the superaddressee from the superaddressee's actual function as 'a metalinguistic fact constitutive of all utterances'.18 The superaddressee is an affirmation of an infinite number of understandings 15. Holquist, Dialogism, p. 38. Put differently, the (at least) three components of dialogue are self, other, and their interaction. 16. Bakhtin emphasizes that this division of the dialogue into three should not be taken in a 'literal, arithmetical sense' since the number of parties involved in dialogical discourse is unbounded. See 'The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis', in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (trans. Vern W. McGee; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 103-31 (126). 17. Bakhtin, 'The Problem of the Text', p. 126. Cf. Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 135-36 and Holquist, Dialogism, pp. 38-39. 18. Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 136. On the same page they stress the ubiquity of the superaddressee in every utterance: 'Cultures, subcultures, and individuals may change their image of the ideally responsive listener, or they may have no concrete and generally shared image, but their utterances still presume this "third party." God may be dead, but in some form the superaddressee is always with us.'

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because it confirms, within the dialogue, that a word's meaning is context-bound and constantly shifting: 'Being heard as such is already a dialogic relation. The word wants to be heard, understood, responded to, and again to respond to the response, and so forth ad inflnitum. It enters into a dialogue that does not have a semantic end.' 19 As noted, an important aspect of dialogue is that it is affirmative. In the self/other constellation the self affirms the other and vice versa. The world is not a place consisting of unfulfilled individuals who need to be whole and unified within themselves. This is an illusionary monologism. There is no self without an other. Therefore, the self is dialogical in itself but it is not self-sufficient. Dialogism is about sharing meanings, not because of the speakers' 'generosity' with words but because this is the affirmative nature of language: The word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the 'soul' of the speaker and does not belong only to him. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one). The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio). It is performed outside the author, and it cannot be introjected into the author. 2 0 There are other parts of Bakhtin's ideas on dialogism which are relevant to my study of the discourse of translation, but these will at least serve as a background for a development of the concept of gay deception. As noted, the meaning in language is flexible and it is dialogic. The speaker addresses a listener in an utterance and a small proportion of potential meaning is presented. There is no possibility for either speaker or addressee to have any full control over the meaning of what is being said and understood. In a monological, authoritative discourse one aim is to pretend that there are no gaps, only negative lacks ready to be covered. 19. Bakhtin, 'The Problem of the Text', p. 127. Dialogism is not a consequence of language, it is language. Meaningful language is an activity, an utterance. Bakhtin's description of the word as entering into a dialogue should be understood in the sense that words, as Morson and Emerson note, do have some 'purely linguistic elements' but that these elements 'lack addressivity' (Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 131). Language does not begin with a sequence of words (a 'sentence'), rather, it becomes through dialogue (an 'utterance'). According to Morson and Emerson, 'Bakhtin endeavors to describe language so that dialogue is not a subsequent act of combination but is itself the starting point' (Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 50). Language is a never-ending and neverbeginning story. 20. Bakhtin, 'The Problem of the Text', pp. 121-22, my emphasis.

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It is now time to 'restore' the introductory quotation by Bakhtin to its context. It appears in the latter part of 'Discourse in the Novel', a text which 'has as its skeleton yet another model for a history of discourse that eventuates in the supreme self-consciousness (consciousness of the other) marked by the heteroglossia of the modern novel'.21 In his search for what constitutes the novelness of the novel, Bakhtin defines two 'stylistic lines' in the history of that genre, two lines which are both conscious of heteroglossia (and double-voiced discourse)—the first reluctantly so and the second in a joyfully affirmative manner. The first line includes, for instance, the high Baroque novel and chivalric romance, whereas the second is presented in stories like Gargantua and Pantagruel and Don Quixote, narratives such as parodic epics, satirical novellas and picaresque novels.22 The second line is the more interesting since novelness is much more apparent there and even though a 'fusion' of the two constitutes the novel as form, from the nineteenth century onwards, this second line dominates that union.23 It is in the low genres' of the second stylistic line that any belief in the fixed, neutral meaning of language is most successfully challenged. Indeed, as Bakhtin notes, in these genres there is 'a profound distrust of human discourse as such'. 24 Such a sceptical attitude towards one inherent meaning in language is in accord with the suggestion that '[e]very discourse has its own selfish and biased proprietor'. It is against the authoritative denial of context-bound and mobile meaning, especially by those in power (priests, kings, scholars), whose language is denned as 'the lie of pathos', that the category of gay deception is developed. Actually, Bakhtin explains that the lie of pathos is present in the language use of all recognized groups of society and that a gay deception is capable of disarming any claim to 'straightforward discourse'.25 Of course, the effect is often most noticeable when the 'gay and intelligent deception, a lie justified because it is directed precisely to liars',26 is targeted at those who are most (superficially and temporarily) influential and powerful. Thus, gay deception does not involve the substitution of a truth for a lie. The language of the agent of

21. Holquist, 'Introduction', in idem, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. xv-xxxiii (xxxiii). 22. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', p. 414. See also the description of the two stylistic lines given by Morson and Emerson in Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 345-46. 23- Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 345. 24. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', p. 401. 25. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', p. 401. 26. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', p. 401.

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gay deception, the 'merry rogue', is not more true than the discourse exposed to her or his mockery. It is worth pointing out that Bakhtin discusses other types of 'jokester', the fool and the clown (both of them acting via stupidity and incomprehension, actual or pretended) and does not, in his descriptions, show any particular partiality towards one of them. He finds the three categories equally important to the development of the novel. They have a similar capacity of ' "making strange" any pretensions to lofty reality a discourse of pathos might have'.27 It should further be stressed that in Bakhtin's view all three types are mere agents of a literary occurrence which will be more refined 'in the great novels of the Second Line'.28 The present discussion, however, will not leave the useful concept of gay deception behind—since the argument here is in fact going to be that translation is a form of gay deception and the translator, therefore, a gay rogue.29 But why choose gay deception and not incomprehension, which is the means of expression for the fool and the clown and, as Bakhtin claims, equally successful in undermining authoritative, standardizing discourse? One reason is that it seems more fruitful to use a concept which implies intelligence and consciousness in its relationship to language rather than accidental or scheming 'stupidity'. Also, the sexual allusions that the English word 'gay' brings about will prove useful in the (pro-)creation/originality discussion that will be presented in my thesis. Heterosexuality—which is so often rendered as 'original'/ 'productive' atnd, therefore, necessary and 'natural'—is losing its warrant of sexual correctness. At the same time our notion of homosexuality will change since it will no longer prove valid to position homosexuality as the kind of sexuality which does not produce. 'Gay' is a loaded and multilateral term full of linguistic, sexual and relational implications: it is a free-floating signifier, [it] generates epistemological unease and poses the problems of whether, why and how discourse is gendered and/or sexualized. As a result of its vast semantic content and potential, gay is not only a skeleton key which opens many doors (and not only those of

27. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', p. 402. In brief, Bakhtin gives the following description of these different categories: 'the rogue's gay deception parodies high languages, the clown's malicious distortion of them [sic], his turning them inside out and finally the fool's naive incomprehension of them' ('Discourse in the Novel', p. 405). 28. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', p. 40929- In Comedy: An Introduction to Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema, T.G.A. Nelson depicts the rogue as having 'a restless creativity, a delight in plots and stratagems, a way with words' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 93-

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closets), it is also a cipher for the creativity of undecidability, a testimony 30 to the endless fluidity of language. Gay is also funny—a joke, a parody—a giggling subversive.31 The rogue has been described as a deliverer of centrifugal (decentralizing) forces into a stagnated discourse dominated by centripetal (centralizing and hierarchic) forces.32 This could mean that through gay deception an authoritative, monologic (single-voiced) and seemingly selfsufficient discourse is interrupted and 'distorted' by a dialogic (doublevoiced), discursive underdog that subverts what was regarded as serious into a joke. The disruption of this 'unity' is 'cheerful war': '[d]ialogic discourse overturns the world of the fathers [the originals] not through violence, but through laughter'.33 Still, there is more to it than that— there is the complex issue of re-evaluating untruthfulness. Through gay

30. Michael Worton, 'You Know What I Mean? The Operability of Codes in Gay Men's Fiction', Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 17.1 (March 1994), pp. 49-59(51). 31. As previously noted, Bakhtin's term 'gay deception' by no means explicitly refers to sexuality or gender issues. It is also important to stress that Bakhtin himself does not discuss homosexuality in his writings. However, Bakhtin has recently been used by some literary critics in connection with queer theory. Vice, in Introducing Bakhtin, mentions for instance Ed Cohen and David Bergman (p. 14 n. 3). Denise Heikinen is another example of a theorist using Bakhtinian ideas in relation to homosexuality. Interestingly, she makes a connection between 'monologic ideas about gender relations' and the disruptive discourse of jokers. See 'Is Bakhtin a Feminist or Just Another Dead White Male? A Celebration of Feminist Possibilities in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman', in Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow (eds.), A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 114-27 (118). She notes how one of the two main characters (who are sharing a prison cell), the effeminate homosexual Molina, 'reminds us of the roles of both Foucault's madman and Bakhtin's fool or clown, whose laughter enables literature to "put its questions to life" ' (p. 119). I have, thus far, only come across one text in which the category of gay deception is mentioned and explicitly used in connection with issues of gender and textual production. In 'The Sphinx Goes Wild(e): Ada Leverson, Oscar Wilde, and the Gender Equipollence of Parody' (in Gail Finney [ed.], Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy [Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994], pp. 119-36), Corinna Sundararajan Rohse unravels the mystery of the serious Author by presenting the literary relationship between two 'parodists', Oscar Wilde and Ada Leverson. In her view, these two authors shared a positive disrespect for originality in literary writings and their 'parodic exchanges [could be described as] a gay deception that achieves identity apart from the sequence and subordination enforcing straight values' (p. 133). 32. Holquist, 'Glossary', in idem, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 425. 33. Lisa Gasbarrone, ' "The Locus for the Other": Cixous, Bakhtin, and Women's Writing', in Hohne and Wussow (eds.), A Dialogue of Voices, pp. 1-19 (5).

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deception, Bakhtin says, 'Falsehood is illuminated by ironic consciousness and in the mouth of the happy rogue parodies itself.'34 This means that whatever normative claims (lies') the so-called authority makes, they are counterfeited by being pronounced again in a parodic manner, implying that gay deception is both uncovering and recovering the lie. Gay deception, and thus translation, is not developed in a vacuum; it has arrived from somewhere and is on its way to somewhere. The very language it mocks forms the basis of its own expressions. To pave further the way for establishing a link between gay deception and translation some examples taken from a text by Judith Butler on the discourse of homosexuality will prove useful. In 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination', Butler discusses the problems connected with classifying and specifying lesbian (and gay) sexuality.35 She suggests that to be able to affirm that lesbian sexuality does exist in its own right it is not enough to ascribe to it certain criteria that have to be fulfilled by anyone claiming to be lesbian (for as, she says, 'who will decide this question, and in the name of whom?'36). According to Butler, it would also be completely misleading to conclude that anything which is not heterosexual is lesbian (or gay) or, indeed, that there is no sexuality but heterosexuality.37 Instead, she suggests that, lesbian sexuality is a process that reinscribes the power domains that it resists, that it is constituted in part from the very heterosexual matrix that it seeks to displace, and that its specificity is to be established, not outside or beyond that reinscription or reiteration, but in the very modality and effects of that reinscription. In other words, the negative constructions of lesbianism as a fake or a bad copy can be occupied and reworked to call into question the claims of heterosexual priority.3

Connected to my discussion on gay deception and its play with authoritarian discourse, these arguments confirm how, by using the 'same' language but in a different context, the apparent stability of authority (sexual, linguistic, literary) is ruptured. And just as gay deception 34. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', p. 402. 35. In Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (eds.), Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 162-65. This is an abridged version of the essay originally printed in D. Fuss (ed.), Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13-31. 36. Judith Butler, 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination', in Jackson and Scott, Feminism and Sexuality, p. 164. 37. Butler, 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination', p. 164. Butler seems consciously to avoid the term 'homosexuality'—no doubt since it connotes bipolarity and an either/or structure of sexuality. 38. Butler, 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination', p. 164.

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uncovers and recovers the 'lie of pathos', a lesbian could be said both to reiterate and to oppose the 'norms' of heterosexuality.39 As Michael Holquist notes, from a Bakhtinian viewpoint there is no 'general language'.40 Similarly, Butler dismisses the existence of an ordinary and general sexuality. Therefore, she stresses, gay people cannot be said to be 'determined' by heterosexuality only because these 'norms reappear within gay identities'.41 Butler does not suggest—and this, I believe, is vital—that lesbian or gay sexuality is in any way more true or free than heterosexuality. As noted, she describes how certain aspects usually connected to heterosexuality can be appropriated and repeated in a gay context. Actually, repetition is the very key to proclaimed uniqueness: The parodic replication and resignification of heterosexual constructs within non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called original, but it shows that heterosexuality only constitutes itself as the original through a convincing act of repetition. The more that 'act' is expropriated, the more the heterosexual claim to originality is exposed as illusory. 42

Following this argument the 'act of repetition' can both establish and dissolve (or defer) normative structures. I will finish this paper by pointing out one very persistent act of repetition within the heterosexual structure: the insistence that it is only through the 'original' sexual act—between a man and a woman—that human 'procreation' is possible. Consequently, the very notion of human survival (repetition of the production of homo sapiens, as it were) has been firmly grounded on heterosexuality. Today, new reproductive technologies such as artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and surrogate mothers have slowly started to undermine the illusion of fixed survival through a heterosexual man/woman constellation. There is now tangible proof that heterosexual activity in the form of intercourse can no longer claim sexual sovereignty and legitimacy in the name of procreation and human survival. Thus, the heterosexual myth—nourished

39- An example of this apparent contradiction would be, as Butler also mentions, drag ('Imitation and Insubordination', pp. 164-65). 40. Holquist, 'Introduction', in idem, The Dialogic Imagination, p. xxi. Cf. Thomas Docherty's discussion regarding Bakhtin's notion of 'tactful' language, 'Authority, History and the Question of Postmodernism', in Maurice Biorotti and Nicola Miller (eds.), What Is an Author? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 53-71 (55-56). 41. Butler, 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination', p. 165. 42. Butler, 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination', p. 165.

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also in homosexual and transsexual discourse—involving (the figures of) an active, virile, aggressive and penetrating male and a passive, fertile, submissive and receptive female is effectively undermined. 43 The implications that this will have for our notion of sexuality and, consequently, any constellation of production vs reproduction (non-production), active vs passive, are numerous—for instance within the field of literature. Now more than ever has it proved necessary constantly to question and challenge the metaphor of dualism.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovic, 'Discourse in the Novel', in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259-422. —'The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis', in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (trans. Vern W. McGee; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 103-31. Butler, Judith, 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination', in D. Fuss (ed.), Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13-31. Abridged in Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (eds.), Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 162-65. Chamberlain, Lori, 'Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 133 (1988), pp. 454-72. Repr. in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 57-74. —'Gender Metaphorics in Translation', in Mona Baker (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 93-96. Docherty, Thomas, 'Authority, History and the Question of Postmodernism', in Maurice Biriotti and Nicola Miller (eds.), What Is an Author? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 53-71. Gasbarrone, Lisa, ' "The Locus for the Other": Cixous, Bakhtin, and Women's Writing', in Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow (eds.), A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 1-19. Haste, Helen, The Sexual Metaphor (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Heikinen, Denise, 'Is Bakhtin a Feminist or Just Another Dead White Male? A Celebration of Feminist Possibilities in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman', in Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow (eds.), A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 114-27. 43. Cf. ch. 3, 'Effeminacy and Reproduction in Different Cultures' (esp. pp. 74-79) in Alan Sinfield, Gay and After (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998), where the author discusses and confronts the dominant ideology of sexuality in the West during the past two thousand years, according to which heterosexual ('reproductive') sex has been placed in a simplistic oppositional relationship with homosexual ('recreational') sex.

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Holquist, Michael, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London: Routledge, 1990). —'Introduction', in idem (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. xvxxxiii. Morris, Pam (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov (London: Edward Arnold, 1994). Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Nelson, T.G.A., Comedy: An Introduction to Comedy in literature, Drama, and Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Simon, Sherry, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996). Sinfield, Alan, Gay and After (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998). Sundararajan Rhose, Corinna, 'The Sphinx Goes Wild(e): Ada Leverson, Oscar Wilde and the Gender Equipollence of Parody', in Gail Finney (ed.), Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994), pp. 119-36. Vice, Sue, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Worton, Michael, 'You Know What I Mean? The Operability of Codes in Gay Men's Fiction', Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 17.1 (March 1994), pp. 49-59.

Fleur Diamond

The Mark of Desire: Rewriting the Romance and Lesbian-Feminist Textual Strategies

This paper examines the workings of the conventional romance plot in relation to and through the lens of a novel by Jeanette Winterson. Specifically, Winterson's novel The Passion is read as a lesbian rewriting of the heterosexual romance plot.x The Passion simultaneously rehearses the generic features of the romance narrative and deconstructs its workings in order to inscribe a text of desire that writes 'otherwise'. The alterations Winterson makes to the usual romance plot articulate that lesbian desire effectively through an elliptical and open-ended story rather than by a linear plot that ends in marriage. This is not a paper on the nature or psychology of lesbian sexuality; nor will I be discussing the formula romance. Rather, romance will be read as a key discourse of desire and sexual difference in our culture; the manner in which desire is produced and codified in heterosexual romance is the site of contention and rewriting in Winterson's novel. The displacement of the traditional happy ending is the major revision Winterson's rewriting of the romance plot inscribes. Through the narration of Villanelle, The Passion's female protagonist, a disruptive sexual/textual practice inhabits the conventional love plot. Villanelle's concertedly fluid and multiple identity is amplified by the open-ended conclusion of her tale; in place of the convention of a univocal narration that ends in marriage or a similar image of legal coupledom, Villanelle's tale is pleated or folded in its structure, offering up an image of several stories playing out at once. This image of a folded plot is sustained thematically in Winterson's work. In a later text, Sexing the Cherry, the narrative is compared to a journey: Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle [...] For the Greeks, the hidden life demanded invisible ink. They wrote an ordinary letter and in between the lines set out another letter, written in milk. The document looked innocent enough

1. Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988 [London: Bloomsbury, 1987]). Subsequent references are to the Penguin edition.

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until one who knew better sprinkled coal-dust over it. What the letter had been no longer mattered; what mattered was the life flaring up undetected.. .till now.

Winterson takes the romance narrative and splays its workings, revealing the 'secret life' of other narratives written between the lines. The usual narrative trajectory of romance conceals the other journeys taken by lesbian desire. In The Passion, Winterson deploys the metaphor of the journey or text written in between the lines of the conventional narrative. Villanelle's journey through her passion for another woman encourages her to read the romance for its hidden folds and possibilities. By arriving at divergent, multiple endings, Villanelle's romance situates lesbian desire at the border or crossing point between the scene of representation and the yet to be re-presented, much like the secret letter written in the spaces of a more visible text. In this way, Winterson constructs lesbian rewritings of the romance plot as a means of writing beyond the narrow confines of conventional discourse. However, while Villanelle's folded, inconclusive plot does signify the slippery relationship between language and desire, her story ultimately refuses a love relationship as the only means of resisting the tyranny of the 'happy ending'. Romance stories make explicit the intricate interlocking relationship between the social organization of desire and narrative convention. By 'romance narratives' I am referring to texts that generally feature a female protagonist and a male suitor. The romance story chronicles the meeting of the pair, and an initial attraction and courting period; the middle part of the story produces suspense for the reader by blocking the path to a union of the protagonists; the desire of the reader is deferred and heightened by ensuing misunderstandings and obstacles to the consummation of the desire between the main characters. The ending of a formula romance is usually signalled by the male character's declaration of love, followed by a 'seal with a kiss' and a marriage scene, or, for the more contemporary plot, sexual intercourse and the promise of marriage.3 While lesbian appropriations of the crime genre are well 2. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1990 [London: Bloomsbury, 1989]), pp. 9-10. Page references are to the Vintage edition. 3. The Passion is one of several contemporary texts that rehearse the heterosexual romance plot while inscribing lesbian desire and love stories. Winterson's subsequent novel Written on the Body (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992) is also commonly read as a lesbian rewriting of the romance plot, despite the ungendered status of the narrator. Mary Fallon's epic poetic text Working Hot (Melbourne: Sybylla, 1989) quotes opera, vernacular phrases and mass-market romance in a searing re-vision of commonly held beliefs about woman-to-woman desire and gendered identity; Marilyn

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documented, the lesbian rewriting of romance might take us more by surprise. In her book Feminist Fiction, Anne Cranny-Francis claims that of all the genres she studies, romance offers the least opportunity for a critical revision or transformation, as it 'encodes the most coherent inflection of the discourses of gender, class and race constitutive of the [patriarchal] social order'. 4 The Passion, however, splits open the tyranny of the romance plot by writing a divergent ending, inscribing a sexual/textual politics of multiple threads, ambiguity, and a refusal of the power of dominant romantic discourse to determine conclusively the cultural imagery of desire. Each narrator of the novel organizes the themes of his or her story around key phrases. The signature phrases are repeated and exchanged between the main characters, in particular Henri and Villanelle. 5 In Villanelle's role as cross-dresser, gambler and thief, the thematic impact of the novel's refrain condenses in her revisionary romance plot. Villanelle's signature phrases are, 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me'; 'You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play', and 'Somewhere between fear and sex passion is'. Weaving together the metafictional mantra, the work in the casino, and the story of Villanelle's desire, the novel articulates a sensitivity to the power of stories to create and structure our sense of reality, and the open-endedness of desire. Villanelle rejects the closure of the traditional romance plot in favour of manipulating the narratives of desire: she transforms the stories she does not trust. In The Passion, Winterson realigns the shape of the romantic trajectory, emphasizing instead the fluidity of desire, and the necessary fluidity of textuality that this inscribes. Thus a representation of desire as such is refused; instead, Villanelle uses images of a fluid geography, asserting that, 'The cities of the interior do not lie on any map' (p. 114). The interior may be any desire or passion, but more specifically lesbian desire does not appear on the narrative maps widely available. A tension

Hacker's long sonnet sequence Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986) appropriates both canonical verse formats and romance in writing about a lesbian relationship; while Dorothy Porter's verse crime novel The Monkey's Mask (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1994) features a subplot revolving around a lesbian femme fatale. 4. Anne Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 192. 5. 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me' is uttered by Henri on pp. 5, 13, 160, by the priest Patrick on p. 40, and by Villanelle on p. 69; 'You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play' is spoken by Henri on pp. 40, 133 and by Villanelle on pp. 66, 73; 'Somewhere between fear and sex passion is' is attributed to Villanelle only, pp. 55, 62, 68, 76.

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therefore arises in the novel between the lesbian quest to represent woman-to-woman desire, and the acknowledgment that any representation of desire goes some way to falsifying its operations. What is at stake is the narratability of Villanelle's lesbian desire. Villanelle addresses the reader, 'Could a woman love a woman for more than one night?' (p. 69). This is a question with ramifications that extend beyond the logistics of conducting an adulterous affair. Villanelle voices the anxiety that her desire will not be written into the pages of her life story, but, rather, will evaporate into the air. Lesbian desire is compared to the traditional heterosexual romantic narrative trajectory, not with an eye to arguing with moralistic or 'family values' objections to same-sex desire, but with a critical gaze directed at the productive and limiting power of discourses of desire.6 Villanelle self-consciously inhabits the universalizing discourses of heterosexual romance. She tells the story of her affair to Henri, and while she constructs it as a love plot she admits that it is not assembled from the elements needed to make a conventional romantic story: It was a woman I loved and you admit that is not the usual thing. I knew her for only five months. We had nine nights together and I never saw her again. You admit that is not the usual thing (p. 94).

Lesbian desire is represented as a non-correlative to the 'usual thing' served up in romance stories. Love is understood in The Passion to exist and circulate through its signs. As noted by Lynne Pearce in her essay 'Written on Tablets of Stone?': 'the discourse of romantic love is a narrative discourse.. .for ourselves, as for the characters in romantic fiction, the experience of "being in love" depends entirely upon the stories we find ourselves able to tell'.7 Villanelle's desire for the Queen of Spades catapults her into the need to explain and narrate the passion she undergoes. As she falls through the 'trapdoor' (p. 68) of desire, the language of love learned in the homeland of romance is suddenly inadequate: [Y]ou are now in a place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange [...] for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who are fluent find life is a foreign language (p. 68). 6. See Judith Roof, Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) for an analysis of how narrative is presumed to be heterosexual in character, and that same-sex desire is seen as marginal or irrelevant to the needs of narrative. 7. Lynne Pearce, 'Written on Tablets of Stone? Jeanette Winterson, Roland Barthes, and the Discourse of Romantic Love', in Suzanne Raitt (ed.), Volcanoes and Pearl Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies (Binghampton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1995), pp. 147-68 (154-55).

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Fluency in the conventions of desire does not prepare one for desire, regardless of sexuality. Lesbian desire, however, is especially foreign to the discourse of love established by romance. Villanelle's re-vision of the romance plot must combine the familiar discursive patterns she has inherited as a story-teller with the imperative to transcribe what the received texts have rendered a 'foreign language'. This produces a hybrid textual strategy that employs the fittings of the conventional romance plot in conjunction with experimental writing practices. The tactics of rupture that mark the structure of The Passion, and the imagery of an 'interior', 'foreign' text-map, echo the imagery used by Virginia Woolf to describe women's experimental fiction in A Room of One's Own.8.8 In her discussion of a fictional female author Mary Carmichael, and her equally fictitious novel Life's Adventure,e, Woolf argues that the bonds between women demand a different textual practice to the expectations of sense and meaning that have developed in patriarchal society. Her description of Mary Carmichael's syntax foregrounds the possibly disorienting and upsetting effects of a break with traditional signifying practices: 'Carmichael is playing a trick on us. For I feel as one feels on a switchback railway when the car, instead of sinking, as one has been lead to expect, swerves up again. Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence' (p. 106). The 'breaking of the sequence' applies not only to syntax on the level of each sentence but also to the overall sweep of narrative expectations. Woolf reads Life's Adventure e expecting the plot to revolve around 'the relationship there may be between Chloe and Roger' (p. 104). However, she finds instead that the relationship that forms the gravitational centre of the novel is between two women: 'the very next words I read were these—"Chloe liked Olivia..." Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things happen. Sometimes women do like women' (p. 106). This passage, commonly interpreted to allude to a lesbian relationship, makes a link between the writing of desire between women and a textual practice that 'breaks the sequence' of conventional narrative, in particular the heterosexual love plot. 9 8. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own [1929] and Three Guineas [1938] (ed. Morag Schiach; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). All page references are to this edition. 9. Noting that heterosexual love is 'the only possible interpreter' of female experience within the patriarchal texts she surveys, Woolf proposes that a text that chronicles what happens when 'Chloe likes Olivia' would be composed of 'half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves' (A Room of One's Own, p. 109).

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Winterson 'breaks the sequence' of the romance plot by inscribing the open-ended and variable process of gambling as an allegory for the writing of desire. The world of gambling is summed up in a signature phrase adopted by Villanelle: 'You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.' Games of chance, Villanelle's speciality in her job at the casino, are worked into The Passion as a synecdoche for the endless and always deferred game of desire. This writing of desire refuses the false closures used by romance to signify the conclusion of the plot. In a similar vein, the stability of gender identity is flouted by Villanelle's work costume: 'I went to work in the Casino, raking dice and spreading cards and lifting wallets where I could[...]I dressed as a boy because that's what the visitors liked to see. It was part of the game, trying to decide which sex was hidden behind tight breeches and extravagant face paste' (p. 54). Pearce argues that Villanelle's story of her affair with the Queen of Spades starts at the usual moment of a 'first sighting' of the beloved.10 However, by its taking place in the casino while Villanelle is dressed as a boy, the first sighting is framed by the open-ended playfulness of Villanelle's games of chance and cross-dressing. The subsequent scenes diverge from the ritualized significance attributed to stabilized sexual difference and a tidy conclusion found in the romance formula. Instead, it is sexual ambiguity that is eroticized. Alongside the playful ambiguity of sexual identity, Winterson inscribes an ambiguity of plot resolution. The Queen of Spades is characterized as a 'wild card' (p. 94) who matches Villanelle's playful swapping of genders with her flirtation with games of chance. There are some of the usual set pieces of romance in Villanelle's story—the obstacle is a husband and social propriety and there is even a balcony scene. Villanelle's revision of romance emphasizes the instability of desire, and, therefore, the necessary break made from the formats of romance to articulate desire differently. This does imply that the writing of all desire is subject to the vicissitudes of its Moreover, the specific language Woolf deems necessary for the writing of desire between women also 'breaks the sequence' on the level of the sentence, even the word: 'note, not with a pencil in a notebook, but in the shortest of shorthand, in words that are hardly syllabled yet...' (A Room of One's Own, p. 110). The story that may be drawn from the phrase 'Chloe likes Olivia' must make the substance of a narrative, but the inscription of that narrative must represent, albeit fleetingly, the 'half lights and profound shadows' that are absent from the common stock of narratives in patriarchal culture. What Woolf s theory of 'breaking the sequence' suggests is that, among other disruptions to the usual course of narrative, the drive towards an unambiguous conclusion may be derailed by this 'woman's sentence' she describes. 10. Pearce, 'Written on Tablets', p. 154.

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excesses; but in Winterson's novel, it is the revelation of her gender that pitches Villanelle into a risk that her story will come to an abrupt end: Every game threatens a wild card. The unpredictable, the out of control. Even with a steady hand and a crystal ball we couldn't rule the world the way we wanted it. There are storms at sea and there are storms inland. Only the convent windows look serenely on both. 'I'm a woman,' I said, lifting up my shirt and risking the catarrh. She smiled. 'I know.' I didn't go home. I stayed (p. 71).

Villanelle's assertion that the 'storms' of desire are not to be avoided. When coupled with her imagery borrowed from gambling, is a refusal of the hegemonic discourses of desire. In contrast to the formula romance, which articulates a view of desire as at base standardized and predictable, Villanelle focuses on the 'out of control' aspects of her passion. The wild card is a symbol of the ability to switch allegiance and identity—in card games the wild card is the one that can stand in for any suit needed. In this way, the image of the wild card signifies an identity that is always in process, that is not anchored to a single suit. During the 'balcony scene', Villanelle throws down her own wild card to reveal the 'suit' of her gender. It is at this point that the middle part of the narrative is also marked as a 'wild card', as it is at this point the story may go either way—the Queen of Spades may truly think Villanelle is a boy. The pressure on Villanelle's romance is to go down the regular route with the only difference being the same-sex relationship. The power of narrative over the story-teller is also disrupted at this crucial point when we are told that the Queen of Spades is married. The end of traditional romance has already been played out for the Queen of Spades elsewhere. This sets up the precedent for Villanelle's break from narrative tradition. Her ongoing but unconsummated desire for the Queen of Spades inscribes the traditional happy ending as just one possible outcome of her 'wild card' story. The Passion uses the narrative middle and lesbian desire as sites where the conventions of narrative structure begin to dissolve and are exposed to a transformative rewriting. Pearce reads Winterson's deployment of the romance narrative in a manner that echoes Woolf's formulation of a female writing that 'breaks the sequence'. Pearce argues that 'Winterson's chief assault on the "tyranny" of romantic love ideology is via her denial of an apparently inevitable chronology (and causality) of events: we may not be able to escape the stories, but we can learn to write them differently'.11 Although Villanelle engages us in a romance that initially echoes the 11. Pearce, "Written on Tablets', p. 149-

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cues and set pieces of formulaic discourses of love, the romance between Villanelle and the Queen of Spades takes up the middle section of the novel as a whole, but it does not figure as a deciding factor in the concluding pages. The traditional happy ending that both Henri and the Queen of Spades represent is subordinated to an ambiguously happy ending of a different order. Unable to offer a convincing conclusion that both delivers conventional reader satisfaction and disrupts the romantic narrative, the final pages of Villanelle's story continue to defer closure, opting instead for a self-reflexive insistence on the allegory of gambling: 'Now that I have been given a reprieve such as only the stories offer? Will I gamble [my heart] again? Yes' (p. 151). Villanelle's romance ends when she retrieves her heart from the Queen of Spades's wardrobe. While literalizing the notion that love is about having one's heart taken by another, the stock-in-trade concept of the beloved being one's 'destiny' is reworked and made the vehicle for a rearrangement of narrative progression: When I met her I felt she was my destiny and that feeling has not altered, even though it remains invisible. Though I have taken myself to the wastes of the world and loved again, I cannot say that I ever truly left her. Sometimes, drinking coffee with friends or walking alone by the too salt sea, I have caught myself in that other life, touched it, seen it to be as real as my own. And if she had lived alone in that elegant house when I first met her? Perhaps I would never have sensed other lives of mine, having no need of them (p. 144).

By proposing a text that has in its folds an 'other life', Villanelle's narration finally resists being incorporated into either Henri's conventional love for her, or the Queen of Spades's desire to recapture her heart. Instead, Villanelle uses the image of multiple narratives, all playing out at once, parallel shadows to the life she lives, to inscribe a discourse of desire that writes in between the either/or of heterosexual and homosexual, romance or its absence. In the image of the wrinkles and folds that traverse the palms of Villanelle's hands, Winterson inscribes the shape of her revised romance: I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here, in this elegant house to eat dinner night after night from an oval table (p. 144).

Villanelle's 'other life' writes itself into a conventional conclusion, perhaps, while the narration Winterson leaves us with is emphatically resistant to closure. We are given an image of a pleated narrative structure in which the folds of various possible outcomes touch each other. This

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passage can be read as an echo of Woolf s image of the 'shadows [and] serpentine caves'; lesbian desire precipitates a negotiation with romance as the dominant discourse with which we codify desire. In her effort to narrate lesbian desire, Villanelle eventually refuses any ending that draws to a definitive closure; instead, we are offered a narrative structure that has split into multiple threads.

Bibliography Cranny-Francis, Anne, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). Fallon, Mary, Working Hot (Melbourne: Sybylla, 1989). Hacker, Marilyn, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986). Pearce, Lynne, 'Written on Tablets of Stone? Jeanette Winterson, Roland Bartb.es, and the Discourse of Romantic Love', in Suzanne Raitt (ed.), Volcanoes and Pearl Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies (Binghampton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1995), pp. 147-68. Porter, Dorothy, The Monkey's Mask (South Melbourne: Hyland House, 1994). Roof, Judith, Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Winterson, Jeanette, The Passion (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988 [London: Bloomsbury, 1987]). —Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1990 [London: Bloomsbury, 1989]). —Written on the Body (London: Vintage, 1993 [London: Jonathan Cape, 1992]). Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own [1929] and Three Guineas [1938] (ed. Morag Schiach; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Maria-Sabina Draga-Alexandru

Constructing the Female Self in Migrant Postcolonial Fiction

This paper starts from the assumption of the legitimacy of studying female and postcolonial identity construction narratives as analogous stories of marginality and emancipation, since they share important genetic, historical and structural similarities. My focus is on female postcolonial identities as they appear in a number of migrant postmodern novels in English, since the novel is the cultural form that best accomplishes the task of narrating, of building up possible alternatives to history (and, as such, to cultural identity construction), to the received, pre-established metanarratives of what we can call—in both Eastern and Western terms—the (patriarchal) canon. The reason that the word 'patriarchal' needs to be bracketed relates to the observation that it has become common practice to equate the two notions, patriarchy and the canon. Based on observations of cross-cultural constructions of the model of authority, in most cases, in patriarchal forms, subversion of the pattern usually comes as an expression of a repressed 'Other': the postcolonial discourse as opposing the discourse of the Empire, whose power depends on the Other's oppression. In gendered terms, this corresponds to the feminine counterpart that is usually associated with the private sphere, meant to be left in the background, as a guarantee of the official male power. Consequently, the female dimension of culture symbolically generates, irrespective of the language in which the discourse is formulated, strategies of subversion and, ultimately, a straightforward challenging of the canonic centre. The two parallel discourses—that of the canon and that of canon-subversion, in both their political and their gendered hypostases—can be approached in terms of Julia Kristeva's theory of the two dimensions of language, the symbolic and the semiotic. Translated into postcolonial terms, this can be seen as going hand in hand with Homi Bhabha's theories of the postcolonial discourse as a mimicking form of the colonial (colonialist) one, by virtue of the ambivalent form of the latter. Julia Kristeva talks about the symbolic as the language of the law (perceived as repressive, because inflexible), that is, the language of the system, of patriarchal tradition, the cultural canon, a monosemantic discourse, the discourse of prose. To this, she opposes the semiotic,

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which is occasioned by the maternal body (signifying the feminine as opposed to the patriarchal), but also represents canon-subversion, polysemy, poetry.l The semiotic as an underlying dimension of language is where the abjected Other finds a voice to express itself, to emerge within the Law; it is actually the only way to familiarize abjection, to give it official formulation as a disguised version of the canon itself. It is, as Kristevaputs it, the only language in which canon subversion is possible, since 'any society may be stabilised only if it excludes poetic language'.2 The semiotic would thus produce that kind of Derridean text which, at the same time, says 'what it does not say'—that is, the primary meaning is underlain by a secondary one, which is different, sometimes even contradictory. Invested with the privilege of polysemy, semiotic language thus becomes capable of constructing alternative identities, and it is in such terms that the postcolonial discourse makes itself heard from within the discourse of the Empire, just as the feminist discourse makes itself heard from within the discourse of patriarchy. Postcolonial mimicry of the imperialist discourse—'an ironic compromise', 'the desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite'—thus evolves into semiotic discourse, which stands for a further stage in the process of discursive liberation from the colonial rule: before asserting his difference plainly, the Other is compelled to mimic the Same.3 In a similar way, female writing, shaped by way of masquerade, adopts the appearance of patriarchal discourse in order to fill it up with a content that is different, aiming in fact at subverting the latter. Indeed, as Judith Butler shows, if in patriarchy woman is compelled to masquerade as the signifier of the Other's desire, which seems to reduce all gender ontology to a play of appearances, on the other hand masquerade suggests that 'there is a "being" or ontological specification of femininity prior to the masquerade, a feminine desire or demand that is masked and capable of disclosure, that, indeed, might promise an eventual disruption and displacement of the phallogocentric signifying economy'.4 To what extent this exists or not, is to be negotiated within a dynamics similar to that of migrancy, with identities shaped on the borders. 1. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez; New York: Columbia University Press, 1980 [1969]), p. 132. 2. Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 31. 3. Homi Bhabha, 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of the Colonial Discourse', October 28 (Spring 1984), pp. 125-33 (126). 4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 47.

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This may be one explanation for the fact that the discourse of the emancipating postcolonial self quite often goes hand in hand with some story of female identity formation, and the area which seems to rely most on versions of strong female characters is that of migrant postcolonial fiction. This is connected to the fact that migration (most of the time perceived as exile) formulates the question of otherness in terms which are not only political, but also geographical, having to do with a displacement ultimately perceived as psychological: the uprooted self that leaves its motherland for an otherland that is initially not loved, but hated, will finally transfer some of its longing for the lost origin onto the new territory, which has originated this longing. Indeed, as Irina Grigorescu Pana points out, 'the elsewhere is adversarial to the motherland and, at the same time, its alibi, for it voices the nostalgia for a home reimagined as an erotic object of desire, remembered only as lost'.5 This erotic relationship with the otherland has to do, on the one hand, with a recognition of the difference within ourselves that the Other responds to and, ultimately, satisfies—'The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners'.6 But, on the other hand, it has to do with the essentially erotic staging of colonization, since love is 'an acknowledged and effective strategy of mastering otherness'.7 Thus, the postcolonial subject—symbolically represented in a double system of significations, as male, in terms of the patriarchal background of his native land, but also as the female, subverting Other in relation to the Empire that formerly colonized the country—will stage the story of migration by mimicking the older erotic scenario used by the colonizer in relation to the colonized land. Migration from the former colonies to the centre, or from the centre to the now emancipated postcolonial territory—two instances of what we may call an inverted colonization process—is a phenomenon which seems to be gathering worldwide momentum nowadays. It is however most visible within the former British Empire, with a rich range of reflections in the fictional construction of the migrant self. I am going to focus on migrant Indian fiction in English, for two reasons: firstly, because it has been extremely successful in drawing the attention of the Western reading audience, owing, for one thing, to the literary value of novels by

5. Irina Grigorescu Pana, The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature (Berne: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 10. 6. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (trans. Leon S. Roudiez; New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1988]), p. 1. 7. Pana, The Tomis Complex, p. 18.

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writers such as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Anita Desai and Arundhati Roy; secondly, because contemporary Indian fiction makes a point of reinterpreting a very rich epic tradition (first of all represented by the archetypal story, the Mahabharatd) in order to use it in narratives of today's postmodern postcolonial identity construction. One more thing should be added here (since it is on female identity construction that this paper focuses): in India, women have a very important role as preservers of tradition within the family and, as such, as story-tellers, while at the same time their position with respect to patriarchy is extremely low. It is relevant here to cite Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night, where the women who narrate (the grandmother, the mother and Mayamma, the husband's old family retainer) relate the present to the mythical past, the various ages of the individual and, ultimately, bridge gaps between cultural spaces.8 This is by virtue of their domestication of the Mahabharata, which is made relevant for the heroine's own identity, restoring some kind of coherence not only at the level of her Indian readjustment, but ultimately in terms of the reconstruction of the contemporary female self. This is of course part of a more general Eastern representation of the woman as a story-teller in order to survive, the Scheherazade figure, appropriated by postcolonial fiction in its attempt to restore the coherence of the displaced self.9 Migration as geographical exile, adding up to the political exile of the 'Orientalized' Other, reinforces the need for taking the narrator function upon oneself. Thus, the construction of the female self in the postcolonial novels of migration becomes significant for the exile's identity construction in general, and in this sense it is very often the case that female characters occupy a central position in the novel (the influence of the author's gender being relevant only to a certain extent). Female emancipation here goes hand in hand with the reassertion of an age-old patriarchal assumption: that the woman is there to offer support and, since she is seen as belonging to the private sphere rather than the public one, it is up to her to rebuild the protective environment of home in the foreign land. Indeed, as Pana points out (basing her observations on Australian literature, but actually referring to a broader perception of the idea of exile), this centrality of female characters is only natural if we take into 8. Githa Hariharan, The Thousand Faces of Night (London: The Women's Press, 1992). 9. The role is not solely limited to females. See, for example, Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), where the main character must make up stories because otherwise he knows he will die.

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account 'the affinities and intersection between the exilic situation of the woman—an exile from power, according to Kristeva—and, mutatis mutandis, the "feminine" state of exiles'.10 Moreover, the condition of woman as mother (an association that functions in all patriarchal systems) makes it possible for the female migrant to adapt better to the otherland, projecting the homely features of the motherland onto it, by means of a kind of affective transference of her own motherly qualities onto what is going to be her home from now on. Metaphorically, this can be translated in terms of the erotic scenario of Peter Brook's intercultural interpretation of the archetypal Indian epic, the Mahabharata,11 in which Draupadi—not only the main female character, but also a character who plays a crucial role in the whole development of the plot—is there to ensure the cohesion among the five brothers by having them all as husbands, acting as an alter-ego of their mother, Kunti, and thus restoring the original unity with the maternal body. References to the Mahabharata are quite frequent in contemporary Indian novels in English, as if the need was felt for a narrative frame for identity construction to take place in. Thus, in both Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night (in the grandmother's stories) and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (the Kathakali show in Chapter 12), the ancient epic is used as an element of contrast, as a temporary, imaginary break in the normal economy of gender power relations, at the end of which role-play is again replaced by the normal everyday order: 'The Kathakali men took off their make-up and went home to beat their wives. Even Kunti, the soft one with breasts.'12 In this way, we can conceive of exile not only as spatial, but also as temporal, historical, the present-day world appearing as an otherland as opposed to the primeval land of myth, representations of female characters (as goddess versus subaltern) being only one of the instances in which this happens. The two dimensions, as a matter of fact, usually go together in narratives of exile. The home-creating virtues shared by female characters in postcolonial novels, meant as they are to stand for stability, for making the new country inhabitable, can be interpreted with reference to Elspeth Probyn's theories of locale as a discursive and, at the same time, nondiscursive arrangement that holds a gendered event, the home being the

10. Pana, The Tomis Complex, p. 52. 11. Peter Brook's theatrical staging of the Mahabarata was premiered in French at the 1985 Avignon Festival in France, then toured the world in 1987-88 and was finally turned into a film (in English) in 198912. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 236.

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most obvious example. 13 On the psychoanalytical model of closed versus open spaces as female versus male, home—also a symbol of the female womb, therefore, of motherhood—is the place where female power can best be exerted, but also the space which the woman can create par excellence. This includes wider representations of home as motherland, women playing a crucial role in redefining the idea of the nation, as they 'carry internalised the lesson of the exchangeability of home, the basis of identity'. 14 Transforming the foreign land of exile into a home that will from now on be readable in familiar terms, the female migrant shows that she is invested with an adaptability that enables her both to preserve the specific features of her own cultural background and to assimilate those of the country she now lives in. Thus, in many migration narratives we can discern two stages in the departure of female characters from the initial model of the cultures they come from, depending also on the extent to which they have emancipated themselves from the patriarchal system. The first stage is that of a further colonization of the female subject, in the sense that migrant communities tend to confine the woman within the private sphere, associated with the family's traditional background: the woman as wife, mother and strong keeper of tradition, as Princess Jeeta is in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, keeping to her sari, Indian noble status and wifely commitment—though the latter is a semblance—even though she has to work in a shop. 15 The second stage is that of the fully emancipated, Westernized young woman, who may even have been born in the West, but belongs to a migrant community, such as Jamila, in the same novel—who actually experiences identity crisis from a perspective that is both Eastern (migrant) and Western. Indeed, she is fully aware of her constant struggle to preserve her identity untouched, to resist 'colonization' both in gendered terms and in terms of Indian values persisting on British ground. A third possibility—which is actually a combination of the two in terms of female identity construction, as it happens in Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night—is that of the emancipated, Westernized woman who returns to her country of origin, in this case India, and is supposed to fill in a slot traditionally reserved for her. In Hariharan's novel, such a readjustment can only take place in terms of a total anni13- Elspeth Probyn, 'Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local', in Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernismism (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 176-89. 14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 252. 15. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1990).

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hilation of all the experiences the heroine has been going through in the United States, which is possible only through painful strategies of mimicking the role she is required to play. Her—more or less successful—masquerading strategies are quite similar to those of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, who make use of their masquerading skills as actors in order to play the immigrant's role.16 Thus, while doing her best to be a dutiful wife to a husband she doesn't love, Devi can't become a mother, because motherhood has to be authentic; it is incompatible with the falseness of mere role-play. Equally, in childhood, while listening to her grandmother's stories from the Mahabharata and trying to identify with Princess Damayanti, she could not identify because of her never-ending 'why' questions that fragmented the myth into pieces, making it signify the broken mirror of postmodern identity rather than continuity and reassurance. When Devi becomes a wife herself, this fragmentation, taken over from the story, is transferred onto the level of real life, splitting her American-educated self from her Indian one. The question of authenticity as opposed to role-play in identity construction is a crucial one and it might be one reason for the Indian fiction's resorting to myth. Since we are approaching this phenomenon in conditions of migration, it immediately follows that the rewriting of myth at the point of encounter between Eastern and Western traditions will combine elements from the two cultural backgrounds, the result being a reading of the myth of the Same through the Other's eyes. The example most at hand is intercultural theatrical performance, such as Peter Brook's Mahabharata, which, starting from the idea that The oriental perception of history, whose origin is seen in myth, passes through the man of today', stages the ancient Indian epic with an international cast, making it relevant for today's world, irrespective of national and ethnic determinants.17 In the same way, the fiction of migration—whether from the margin to the centre or from the centre to the margin—redefines myth from a twofold perspective, on the border, and it is out of this process of negotiation and exchange that identity is redefined. In such situations, in male-written narratives, the female characters are metaphors of stability or catalysts of change (whether they are main characters or secondary ones, narrators or centres of consciousness), sometimes invested with some kind of devilish function, as usually happens in Salman Rushdie's 16. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1989). 17. Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration, 1946-1987 (London: Methuen, 1988), p. 160.

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novels. It is in such terms that we perceive Mary Pereira in Midnight's Children, the obscure female who symbolically changes the course of history by shifting the baby tags at midnight, or Ayesha, the prophet's wife, who in the Koran led an army of men to insurgency, a chaste woman and a whore at the same time, invested with the power to write the text of the Koran in an inverted way, as the Satanic verses. 18 It is especially in the latter case that the semiotic female discourse is used as a disguise for the author's own voice, which makes use of the female character—tendentiously constructed as a hidden monster—to carry a message that is at the same time directed at the Western canon and at Islamic fundamentalism. Narratives—especially those by female voices—of the issue of female adaptability to exile, via the same rereading of the mythical past on the East/West border, try to escape such stereotypical thinking, making a point of the fact that decolonization of identity must go beyond the enactment of the roles assigned to the postcolonial migrant according to the same rules of the Empire (or of patriarchy, in gendered terms). This is the more complex as adaptability is never to be imagined as a clearcut option for the otherland and rejection of one's own country, but as a continuous process of negotiation between the two in the same way in which Elspeth Probyn's notion of locale as a gender-determined inhabitable space can never stop being negotiated. Under such circumstances, authenticity and role-play can hardly be differentiated in the identity construction process. Judith Butler's theory that gender masquerade is inherently related to some kind of 'being or ontological specification of femininity prior to the masquerade', or following from it, as a constructed aim in the absence of which the negotiation itself could not take place, thus results in a reduplication of the female self along the lines of identity versus role-play. Or, rather, a dynamic new identity as role-play.19 Thus, the Mahabharata in Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night has the same function for the Western-educated Devi, who is trying to return to India culturally, as well as geographically, as the European Odyssey has for Matteo and Sophie in Anita Desai's Journey to Ithaca. Indeed, just as in the former novel the contrasting environment of Western culture is necessary in order for Devi to discover the relevance of the epic she grew up with for herself (thus internalizing the Mahabharata, appropriating the story of the nation as ultimately a 18. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981); The Satanic Verses. 19. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 47.

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version of her own life story), in the latter novel the encounter with the mysteries of India proves to be, at least for Sophie, a journey back to her own cultural origins. In this novel it is indeed quite significant that Matteo, who goes through the initiation process, is not the one who makes sense out of it. The Other's epics are thus appropriated, going hand in hand with the need for myth, felt as a source of coherence for contemporary stories of identity formation. As part of the same kind of negotiation of identity between motherland and otherland, present-day characters—especially female ones, placed as they are in a twofold subaltern position in terms of political and gendered power relations—find a way out of crisis by masquerading as archetypal figures. In this never-ending process of transition, exile is sometimes staged as some kind of counter-colonization, a deconstruction of the centre by the former margin, which asserts its cultural authority not only by reinventing its own tradition, but also by showing its intercultural relevance for the contemporary self.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi, 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of the Colonial Discourse', October 28 (Spring 1984), pp. 125-33. Brook, Peter, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration, 1946-1987 (London: Methuen, 1988). Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). Chandra, Vikram, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). Desai, Anita, Journey to Ithaca (London: Heinemann, 1995). Hariharan, Githa, The Thousand Faces of Night (London: The Women's Press, 1992). Kristeva, Julia, Desire in language: A Semiotic Approach to literature and Art (ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez; New York: Columbia University Press, 1980 [1969]). —Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (trans. Leon S. Roudiez; New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980]). —Strangers to Ourselves (trans. Leon S. Roudiez; New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1988]). Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1990). Pana, Irina Grigorescu, The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature (Berne: Peter Lang, 1996). Probyn, Elspeth, 'Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local', in Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernismsm (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 176-89. Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997). Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). —The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1989). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993).

Brendon Nicholls Locating the 'Nigga' in 'The Wood-Pile': Robert Frost, the Academy and Pedagogy in the Context of a South African Tertiary Education*

'There are things you can't convey except in similitudes,' Frost said. 'That's the way we get from one thing to another—from one place in thought to another; by similitudes, of course.' Another name for similitude was parable. By way of example, he referred to 'Mending Wall,' 'The Wood-Pile' and 'The Grindstone.'... Frost's deceptively simple parable, moving from a particular incident to a general idea, operates on three planes, first as a personal incident, second as a moral analogue, and third as an intellectual paradox. Crossing Boundaries. Locating the 'Nigga' in 'The Wood-Pile'. If these must be my titles, then they shall also direct my heading. I want to attempt a crossing of sorts by producing a fugitive reading that advances on thin ice. Since this crossing is transgressive and risks a number of necessary pitfalls, it will be a treacherous one. Further, since advancing my reading actively contributes to the perils it risks, it may involve a treachery of its own. All told, then, the crossing will amount to a species of double-crossing.2 This paper has been framed to address a series of disparate parameters that present nothing so stable as a boundary. First and foremost, I aim to * Robert Frost, 'The Wood-Pile', in Edward Connery Lathem (ed.), The Poetry of Robert Frost. Copyright ©1967 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Copyright 1930, 1939, ©1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Excerpts from the poem are reprinted here by permission of Henry Holt and Co., LLC, and The Random House Group Ltd. 1. R. Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), pp. 258-60. 2. I am aware that a term like 'Nigga' risks contributing to the misconstrual of my project as the reinstitution of a covert form of hate-speech. I hope it will become clear why my subject-matter leads me in this direction. However, I have retained scare-quotes throughout this paper in order to register my discomfiture at using this terminology. It might also be objected that my paper reduces some very large issues into an exceptionally localized account. Not all South African students view themselves as 'Niggas' and not all South African academics are bigots. My focus here is purposively micrological, aiming to transform a set of contradictions into the conditions of possibility. The paper is guided by a need to challenge the old, no matter how minimally it remains, and to celebrate the new, no matter how minimally it emerges.

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highlight some of the localized incongruences that have emerged in the literary academy since the advent of an ostensibly liberated South Africa. Secondly, I want to examine the question of literary relevance as it pertains to a rapidly changing student constituency in South African universities. Finally, I want to interrogate one of the subterfuges to which tenured academics continue to resort in order to shore up an institutionalized privilege, to the detriment of an equitable dispensation for historically disadvantaged students. Each of these objectives will be broached through a reading, which is also quite possibly a necessary misreading, of Robert Frost's poem, 'The Wood-Pile'.3 In September 1996,1 taught this poem to an undergraduate literature class in a South African university. Since the small-group teaching was lecture led, my reading of the poem was hardly original. The particular module to which the poem was assigned was 'Modernism', and the course lectures examined the mediatory role of language in the construction of our life-worlds. 'The Wood-Pile' is particularly suited to this purpose. Its very principle is one of internal division. The first word of the poem locates the persona in a landscape that is both exterior and inhospitable: he is '[o]ut walking in the frozen swamp one grey day'. Further, the construction of the persona shares an affinity with the unhomeliness of the landscape in which he finds himself, if indeed one may speak of the persona's voice as a unified entity: I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.' The persona's self-representation and direct speech at this textual juncture signal more than mere indecision. Rather, it is indecision itself that has the effect of pluralizing his subject-position. In my reading, the first person pronoun we' consolidates the crisis confronting the persona. It provisionally unifies a divided perspective. If the lines that introduce 'The Wood-Pile' imbue the persona's experience of identity with a measure of duplicity, then the anonymous topography of the poem is equally vertiginous: The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went through. The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.

3. Reprinted in R. Frost, Complete Poems of Robert Frost (London: Jonathan Cape, 1961), pp. 123-24.

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The problem posed to the speaker at this point is not merely the difficulty of designating a place or a name in a landscape which is undifferentiated and which therefore has no characterizing indices. It is also the difficulty of locating oneself ui this environment, of designating a site of enunciation from which to speak. The T is not only a personal pronoun substituting for a subjectivity. It is also an object shifting along an axis of instability that is predicated on an excessively stable field of vision: the view is 'too much alike [...] to say for certain [that the T is in a given place] or somewhere else'. It is precisely the difficulty of imputing speech to a recalcitrant landscape that is staged in the following lines: A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself.

The structures of identification underpinning these lines are not conducive to a final interpretation. There are at least three possible readings. Firstly, the obvious personification of the bird renders its actions intelligible. They are motivated by a transparent and misguided instinct for self-preservation. Hence, the bird says no word to tell the persona who the bird was who was so foolish as to think what the bird thought. However, a second possibility is that the 'he' in the third line of the passage above is used in an antiquated sense to denote an abstract person. Thus, the bird says no word to tell the persona who that person was who was so foolish as to think what that person thought. Here the bird's silence would ironize the persona's projection of intentionality onto it. Finally, since the 'he' in the fourth line of the quotation is italicized, and therefore denotes a qualitative difference from the previous 'he', we might also assume that the bird says no word to tell the persona who that person was who was so foolish as to think what the bird thought. We have no way of knowing definitively whether the mode of linguistic exchange here is a reciprocal dialogue or the persona's unilaterally effected projection onto the Real. Accordingly, the 'one who takes everything said as personal to himself would apply equally to the affrighted bird, to the paranoid4 persona, or to an abstract third party who forms the basis of the simile. Since the resonances in 'The WoodPile' are multiple and are not easily signposted, the reader is also destined 4. On this point, see R. Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 141.

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to repeat the paranoia produced in the persona. This reader must choose between becoming bogged down in minute detail or being swamped by significances. The poem anticipates this situation and approaches it playfully. The persona remarks about the bird, One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Cany him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him goodnight. He went behind it to make his last stand.

Quite clearly, 'one flight out sideways' is not possible in the absence of any signs by which to orientate oneself. It is also obvious that if the bird makes his last stand' behind the pile of wood, then the persona has not really allowed the bird's little fear [to] carry him off the way I might have gone'. The persona has indeed gone that way. Even the discovery of human artifice does not provide a stable demarcation by which the persona might lay claim to an alien landscape,5 for despite its precise measurements, the wood-pile has no 'runner tracks in this year's snow [looping] near it' and it is 'somewhat sunken' into the swamp. It is a sign without an identifiable origin or destination. In Richard Poirier's words, the wood-pile is 'a forgotten remnant of earlier efforts to make a "home" by people who, when they did it, were also away from home'.6 What interests me particularly is the persona's final speculation: [...] I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labour of his axe, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

There is a subtle contrast in these lines between the 'human, practical purpose of a wood-pile and the obscure purpose of "the slow smokeless burning of decay" '7 The wood-pile is 'assigned the purpose of warming a frozen swamp. In other words, although the wood-pile is literally unused and deserted, it is in a larger vision performing a task.'8 It is 5. This sentence is indebted to Poirier's terminology in Work of Knowing, p. 142. 6. Poirier, Work of Knowing, p. 142. 7. R. Squires, The Major Themes of Robert Frost (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), p. 73. 8. Squires, Major Themes, p. 39.

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significant that this practicality is posited as an end in itself, even though pathos is the mode within which it consists. Given that 'The Wood-Pile' is also the title of Frost's poem and that it broaches the disorientating effects of blank space on signification, the poem discloses the decaying attendant upon itself as utterance. It is a verbal edifice that defers the moment of its disappearance by remarking upon this moment. What might it mean to teach 'The Wood-Pile' in South Africa? In what sense is it possible to make this poem speak to an environment for which it could never have been envisaged? Such an enterprise would be equivalent to translating dead wood into living tissue. I shall begin by addressing the living tissue in South African universities, their student constituency. I shall return a little later to the dead wood in the academy. A number of contradictions emerged during my class on Frost's poem. They were brought home to me when a black student approached me after class and asked if we could go over 'The Wood-Pile' once more during consultation hours. I asked him if there was something specific that he wished to discuss. 'I didn't understand the poem,' he said; 'it went right over my head.' In retrospect, there is a slight disjunction between teaching about slippages inherent in the necessity of using a language that can never fully convey the objects for which it substitutes, and attempting to study these slippages in a language that is not entirely one's own. Like many of his peers, this student was a second-language English-speaker. His immediate aspiration was to understand the language of the poem—an aspiration which ran contrary to the import of the poem itself. 'The Wood-Pile' deliberately thwarts an easy exposition of its mechanics. This is precisely the point at which Frost's place on the literature syllabus begins to mark the place of a divisive institutional violence. Were one to seek out the formative moments of this violence, it would be necessary to begin with the opportunities and possibilities available to black students under the Apartheid educational system. The Department of Education and Training, as it was then called, was designed to produce a normative inferiority in black students' high schools. The scope of the syllabus was deliberately limited, school facilities were deliberately under-funded, teachers were deliberately underqualified. This terse description of an educational system does not even begin to account for the more widespread social inequalities that have beset the majority of South African learners. Against this socio-economic background, the place of literary studies in an emergent, more equitable post-Apartheid society must be measured against tangible objectives. Put simply, the study of literature has less to do with saying interesting and eloquent things about obscure

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texts than it has to do with providing a rapid class-mobility for historically disenfranchised subjects. The corpus of canonical texts, as it is presently conceived, falls a great deal short of this responsibility. Regrettably, perhaps, the place of 'The Wood-Pile' within this canon must be found wanting in terms of the constituency that it is destined not to serve. Is there a way of reading the poem so that it might address the specificities of a South African tertiary education with a forceful immediacy, even if this means producing a reading that does not meet with some of the conventional expectations of the academy? Can Frost's text address those who do not see themselves represented in it, in such a way as to affirm? I want to suggest that, in some limited and highly provisional ways, it can. One starting point for teaching the elusive intricacies of 'The WoodPile' would be to locate South African students in a signposted landscape that turns out not to be quite so familiar as it at first appears. Since the context of this paper places it at the destination of the crossing, I shall describe a marginally different landscape on this occasion. If you consulted a map of South Africa you would notice something both familiar and distorted. The names of some towns, cities and suburbs would be perfectly recognizable—East London, Cambridge, Dundee, Newcastle, Ramsgate, Aberdeen, Brixton, Colchester—but there would be something unrecognizable about their locations. In fact, East London does not have a Tube service, Cambridge is not widely known for producing brilliant academics and the cattle in Aberdeen are to all intents and purposes sane. You would not be looking at a disfigured map of England and Scotland, but a rather inappropriately named South African copy. A study into the comforts of inappropriate naming would lead us on a historical detour under the rubrics of colonization, border wars, settlement, industrialization, et cetera, and what passes as literature in South African universities today would not be entirely free of this history. The idiom of Frost's poem has a local equivalence that may be exploited for purely pragmatic pedagogical ends. One might scrupulously relate the speech imputed to the bird in 'The Wood-Pile' to the characteristics imputed to an unhomely landscape after 1820, or demonstrate how the identity claims made in each are always subject to the fluctuations of an irreconcilable difference. Alternatively, one might argue that a language and a literature never adequately map onto one place—indeed, locations so named are the end-results of productive opposition. The certainties of a natural language, as the episode involving the small bird in 'The WoodPile' indicates, turn out to be little more than elaborate flights of fancy.9 9. It could be argued that it is precisely the bird's ability toflythrough (that is, t

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I am fairly sure that Robert Frost, writing North of Boston in New Hampshire, 10 could not have anticipated this idiosyncratic template for teaching 'The Wood-Pile'. Nevertheless, 'the poet "who never saw New England as clearly as when he was in Old England" ' n and who told his own students that '[t]here ought to be in everything you write some sign that you come from almost anywhere' 12 would have appreciated the gesture at some level. 13 To claim that 'The Wood-Pile' is capable of speaking to an immediately South African context would have the advantage of side-stepping the hardened contemporary ideological positions on literary relevance. Stated cursorily, there is a pervasive sense in some quarters that African literatures are just not literary enough, or else that Anglo-American literatures are just not African enough. Provided one accepts that any text speaks from and to more than one place, literary relevance is up for grabs. This would also hold true for subjectivities. Recently, in his social column for a Cape Town newspaper, Bafana Khumalo remarked upon his surprise at hearing a black adolescent in a minibus taxi refer to his friend as 'Nigga'. Khumalo's argument was that it was something of an irony to emerge from forty years of institutionalized racism, only to reinforce erstwhile stereotypes. I am personally inclined to see less of an transcend) the landscape that creates the speaker's (disavowed) desire to steal a feather. Here too, imputed speech (or naming) substitutes for an act of violent appropriation. 10. This datum is disputed. E.S. Sergeant reports, ' "The Wood-Pile" [...was] largely written, he told me, before he went to England' (Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963], p. 119). However, J.L. Potter notes that Sergeant's biography is 'marred by sentimental rhetoric, unreliability in details and dates, and questionable documentation' (Robert Frost Handbook [London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980], p. 179). Conventional wisdom on North of Boston holds that the collection was written in England (see L. Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years 1874-1915 [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966], p. 428), although W. Martin maintains with some credibility that at least two of the dialogue poems were written before 1912 ('Frost's Thanatography', in R. Machin and C. Norris [eds.], Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 397). Thompson's account places the number at three (Early Years, p. 428). I have unscrupulously retained any inaccuracies in my description for scrupulously rhetorical purposes. 11. Sergeant, Trial by Existence, p. 116. 12. Poirier, Work of Knowing, p. ix. 13. Thompson records this anecdote: 'When [Frost] suggested to his English friends his determination to call the volume North of Boston, they resisted on the ground that it would result in too much confusion; British readers would associate the title with Boston in Lincolnshire' (Early Years, p. 434). The inverse territorial impulses of Frost's acquaintances may be instructive.

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irony in this incident than an opportunistic reinscription. At least since 1994, certain sectors amongst the South African youth have turned towards American gangsta rap for a lifestyle that may be emulated in their own everyday reality. Not only does hip-hop provide a populist critique of racism and a cultural rallying point for the 'blank generation', but performers such as Snoop Doggy Dog, Tupac Shakur, Dr Dre, Coolio and the Notorious B.I.G. offer the model for a tough-talking, streetsmart, gunslinging, triumphalist machismo that glamorizes and transcends some of the more quotidian aspects of township life.14 Curiously enough, the racist epithet 'nigger' never enjoyed widespread currency during the Apartheid era. One might then discern in the act of donning the trappings of the 'Nigga' a crossing equivalent to the one that I have attempted to effect with Frost's poem.15 Expressed otherwise, the South African homeboy is never entirely at home with his own ontology. His identity is interstitial inasmuch as it is provisional upon at least two irreconcilable elsewheres. I have no idea whether or not my student saw himself in these terms, but a little bird tells me that he fitted the bill. A contradiction emerges. Why is it that some aspects of a culture that may be broadly designated 'American' appeal where others do not? My intuition is that the answer lies in the institutional prerogatives of 'The Wood-Pile' rather than in the assertion that Frost is merely unfunky. This brings me to the title of my paper. The colloquial phrase 'a nigger in the woodpile' denotes a 'suspicious circumstance' or 'something that spoils a good thing'. It dates from 1861 l6 and derives from the attempt to explain away the disappearance of firewood by attributing it to a denigrated human agency. My title reinscribes this idiom in order to draw attention to the ways in which 'The Wood-Pile', a pleasurable read in itself, has been spoiled by its implication in efforts to frustrate the studies of some South African students. The English language would be one available metonym for the property that the literary academy so 14. A great deal more investigative work needs to be done in this field. N. Dolby's pioneering work suggests that racialized popular musical genres presently form the basis for negotiating and contesting adolescent identifications with ideological legacies ('Imagining and Living the Nation: Reading South Africa in a Global Context', in L. Nas and H. Wittenberg (eds.), Proceedings of the Conference of the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa, I [3 vols.; Cape Town: University of the Western Cape, 1996], pp. 74-78). 15. ' "The Wood-Pile" is about being impoverished, being on the dump.. .with no clues by which to locate yourself in space' (Poirier, Work of Knowing, p. 140). 16. See Sir W.A. Craigie and J.R. Hulbert (eds.), A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, III (4 vols.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 1602.

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jealously guards. The gesture of locating the 'Nigga' in 'The Wood-Pile' therefore amounts to an attempt to contest fields of power and representation that are ultimately exclusionary in their outcomes. 17 Were one to examine the antecedents to 'The Wood-Pile' in the corpus of American letters, it is almost possible to broach it as a trope that ushers in a counter-history of equanimity and emancipation in relation to slavery, albeit in highly ambivalent ways. Thoreau writes, [In] most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks of the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them. Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.

In a similar spirit of equanimity, Thoreau records helping a slave 'to forward to the northstar'.19 Walt Whitman, the 'good grey poet' writing at about the same time, reconciles these two moments in 'Song of Myself: The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak, And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him, And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet, 17. Literary studies in South Africa could be demonstrated to be permeated by an anxiety over property. Black students who pass an English Literature course are more readily considered to be employable subjects. Talking the talk, it seems, provides the structure of recognition that qualifies one to walk the walk. My argument is not so much that the literary academy needs to recognize a version of ebonies (black American slang), tempting though this is, given my subject-matter, but that Queen's English is not necessarily the corollary to competent literary criticism. Despite the excellent efforts of staff on Foundation English and English for Academic Purposes programmes to represent second-language speakers as competent speakers of 'englishes', the term 'second-language student' has all too often become a convenient and politically correct shorthand for 'black student' in certain quarters. Thus when 'English usage' is deployed as a measure of competence, one can detect a subtle form of racism at work: efforts to level the playing-fields become translated into ways of shifting the goalposts. 18. H.D. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (London: Penguin Books, 1983 [1854]), p. 298. 19. Thoreau, Walden, p. 198. Frost's admiration for Thoreau is fairly well known. In a letter to Walter Prichard Eaton (July 15, 1915), he wrote: 'Far be it from me.. .to regret that all the poetry isn't in verse. I'm sure I'm glad of all the unversified poetry of Walden—and not merely the nature-descriptive, but narrative as in the beautiful passage about the French-Canadian woodchopper. That last alone with some things in Turgenieff must have had a good deal to do with the making of me' (quoted in R. Ruland [ed.], Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968], p. 8). Frost's poem, The Axe-Helve', probably owes something to Walden.

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And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north, 20 I had him sit next to me at table [...] my firelock leaned in the corner.

By the time we arrive at Mark Twain, writing thirty years later, the wood-pile has decayed considerably, producing a phosphorescent light, and the emancipatory overtone has become far more tentative. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer set about the cumbersome business of freeing Jim from captivity: [...] Tom said we got to have some light to see how to dig by, and a lantern makes too much and might get us into trouble; what we must have was a lot of them rotten chunks that's called fox-fire and just makes a soft kind of glow when you lay them in a dark place. We fetched an armful and hid it in the weeds [...]

Obviously, Frost's poem registers very few of these resonances, although Frost himself is named by this history.22 Hence, my attempt to construct a counter-history cannot be entirely corroborated.23 It is something closer to the pyrotechnics of punk. How might 'The Wood-Pile' translate into an affirmative pedagogy in contemporary South Africa? I shall only suggest one possibility. Earlier in this paper, when I mentioned the dead wood in the South African academy, I was referring not to redundant human potentialities, but to complacency; a fossilizing of affect. In 1995, at an examiners' meeting in a South African literature department at which marks were being recorded from scripts, a tenured staff member exclaimed upon hearing the name of a particular student: 'Oh, I hope he doesn't pass! He's a darned illiterate!' This remark is offensive because it violently imputes an unintelligible silence to another's words, and to this extent, it signals a monumental arrogance and a prejudicial lack of empathy. One might respond with a frosty conceit of one's own. One might suggest that the measure of a student's competence need not be determined by the degree to which his or her expression meets with one's expectations. This is the qualitative difference between a mutually interruptive dia20. W. Whitman, 'Song of Myself' (1855), in Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 20, section 9. 21. M. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1884]), p. 310. 22. Robert Lee Frost was named after the defeated Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. 23. That is to say, it is not hard wood (see the OED etymology).

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logue and a unilaterally effected projection onto the Real. Instead of constructing a model of deficits, one might acknowledge the decay of all words as a productivity in itself24 and urge literary critics to be literate enough to read their own handscripts. History has suppressed values that now need to be affirmed, and they are not merely skin-deep. We might seek out an arrogant antagonist where he darns away at the fraying mantle of a classical education and persistently locate this 'nigger'/ 'Nigga' in 'The Wood-Pile', in the hope that he will eventually cotton on.

Bibliography Cook, R., Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974). Craigie, Sir W.A., and J.R. Hulbert (eds.), A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, III (4 vols.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). Dolby, N., 'Imagining and Living the Nation: Reading South Africa in a Global Context', in L. Nas and H. Wittenberg (eds.), Proceedings of the Conference of the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa, I (3 vols.; Cape Town: University of the Western Cape, 1996), pp. 74-78. Frost, R., Complete Poems of Robert Frost (London: Jonathan Cape, 1961). Martin, W., 'Frost's Thanatography', in R. Machin and C. Norris (eds.), Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 395-405. Poirier, R., Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Potter, J.L., Robert Frost Handbook (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980). Ruland, R. (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968). Sergeant, E.S., Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). Squires, R., The Major Themes of Robert Frost (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963). Thompson, L, Robert Frost: The Early Years 1874-1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). Thoreau, H.D., Walden and Civil Disobedience (London: Penguin Books, 1983 [1854]). Twain, M., The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1884]). Whitman, W., 'Song of Myself' (1855), in Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1996). 24. The poem, in Frost's view, is for its maker always a double reading (of past experience, and of other texts) and hence always a double repetition. The poet is a thanatographer, perpetually rediscovering a dead self and finding that it provided for a future—the 'now' of its verbal memorial (Martin, 'Frost's Thanatography', p. 400).

Elizabeth Barry

Enervation in Language as Innovation in Literature: The Function of Cliche in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy

It is a common theme in criticism of Samuel Beckett that he sought to develop an artistic practice of which the occasion and materials were denuded and put into question. His use of cliche is a central feature of this endeavour, but one that has received very little critical attention. I want to show in this paper how Beckett exploited old language—enervated language—to create new semantic relationships and affective resonances. I also want to explore how these new manoeuvres with old language convey the role of speech in our conception of what constitutes identity. My texts are Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, first published between 1950 and 1953. Each novel is a first-person narrative with increasingly decrepit narrators: the first two are bed-ridden and the last incarnation is withered to a voice which invents its own bodies and comments with gruesome detachment on the behaviour of the organs it does ascribe itself. Each narrator is compelled to write (or finally speak) by anonymous powers-that-be, and their monologues concentrate on their imminent end; in Molloy's case this destination is his mother's room, for Malone, the peace of the tomb, for the bodiless Unnamable the purity of silence. These narrators describe degenerative experience and an erosion of their own identity; it is fitting that cliche—degenerative metaphor come to sound anonymous—should be the cast of their stories. Cliche is a product of the typographic society, where knowledge can be stored and retrieved easily in written form. Its etymology takes us back to the printing press and the technology which allowed the reproduction of a unit of language countless times. In this new society there was no longer a need for the recapitulation of old wisdom. The Romantics insisted instead on the priority of originality and spontaneous expression as a response to the technologies of printing: art was required to produce something new, or at the very least something sincere. Cliche is the other side of the Romantic coin.

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Walter Benjamin described how the 'aura' of the work of art withers in the age of mechanical reproduction. 1 Cliche is likewise language that has lost its aura of spontaneity and its link with a human origin. The dead weight of mass production and the dissemination of language echoes even in cliche's spoken form. Malone, the narrator of Malone Dies in Beckett's trilogy, articulates the deadened nature of his text. He 'will be tepid, die tepid, without enthusiasm', his tales 'almost lifeless'.2 Later on in the text he comments laconically, 'My voice has gone dead; the rest will follow' (p. 271). The Unnamable similarly counsels himself: 'Overcome, that goes without saying, the fatal leaning towards expressiveness' (p. 394). The loss of aura in the stylistic effect of the cliche comes about when the concrete images of its metaphor or trope are no longer felt with their original immediacy due to the innumerable repetitions of the phrase in question. Metaphor can become grammatical (the 'mouth of the river', and 'fork in the road' being the canonical examples); this is dead metaphor and is read as neutral. The metaphors of cliche are only sleeping, in Donald Davie's terminology, however, and this strange halflife means that they are felt to be worn out and lingering beyond their useful life (or having lost the power to move, in a more literary context). 3 In linguistic terms, cliche is described as a unit of discourse in which the valency of certain words brings them together in what Ezra Pound called 'magnetized groups', associations which have a life of their own. 4 A cliche is not a grammatical collocation, fixed and neutral, but a lexical one, so its components are not bound together by the laws of language but as a result of a more contingent historical development. It is a curious type of language, then: not purely grammatical, so that we notice it and can assign to it a value judgment, but neither is it spontaneous. George Orwell, in his famous essay on cliche, 'Politics and the English Language' (1947), described using cliche as 'gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone

1. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in idem, Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn; New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 219-53 (223). 2. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1994), p. 180. Further references to this edition of the trilogy will be given in the text. 3- Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 134. 4. See A.E. Darbyshire, A Grammar of Style (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972), p. 158.

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else'.5 Thus the element of style with a grammatical life of its own in practice comes to act in a fixed and predictable manner, as a kind of verbal automatism. Both cliche's worn-out figures and its anonymous character are symptoms of the frequent repetition of the discourse in question, a feature of a culture of mass production. The time-scale for changes in the reception of certain types of language is foreshortened by the artificial circumstances that print culture imposes on the spoken language, and hence these tropes seem 'over'-used, tired or worn out. Both these aspects of cliche appeal to Beckett. Its metaphor has become fixed not in the final way that a grammaticalization does, but in a half-dead form, worn out rather than completely erased. As such this language, like Beckett's narrators, communicates the nearness of its own extinction while continuing to display a characteristic tenacity. Beckett brings cliche back to life, playing with its form, or making it eerily literal, but he cannot—and does not wish to—erase its problematic effect; we still hear the old version behind the new. Beckett also appreciates its anonymity, its status as language that has been 'thrown out into the public arena'.6 This quality undermines the metaphysics of presence upon which the literary text rests—the impression that we can and do have contact with the individual who is 'speaking' through the text to us. The discourse consists in language that has lost its origin and relinquished the ownership of any individual. These two aspects of cliche converge in Beckett's trilogy. Its automatic prefabricated quality means that the intentionality of the text is diminished. There is no knowable self behind these monologues; they express ignorance and impotence rather than thoughts and feelings. Their language also inhibits the thinking of the idea of self in the abstract. Beckett's reawakened images condense the material and, specifically, corporeal figures inherent in the expression of the most fundamental ideas: our existence as intentional rational beings is subjugated to the prison of our material life. This is exemplified by one instance of Beckett's use of cliche in The Unnamable. The narrator describes himself as 'dying under my own steam', a phrase which comes horribly alive in its spare context so that willed motion becomes stagnant decay. The effect is compounded by a grotesquerie a few lines later when he comments of his relation with the unknown 'they' to whom he attributes his existence, 'if I have a warm place it is not in their hearts' (p. 333). 5. George Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language' (1947), in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (London: Penguin 1994), pp. 348-60 (354). 6. Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen, Les Discours du cliche (Paris: Soc. d'Ed d'Enseignement Superieur, 1982), p. 16.

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The automatic quality of language, irredeemably public and thus alien to Beckett's narrators, and the unintelligibility of its material nature are conveyed simultaneously in another image in this work. The narrator describes his discourse as a 'set of words' that have been rammed down his 'gullet' (p. 327). He goes on, 'I'll fix their gibberish for them. I never understood a word of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in a vomit. My inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting are more than they reckoned with' (p. 327). We recall T.S. Eliot's famous warning in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919) against treating the past, one's cultural memory, as a 'lump, an indiscriminate bolus',7 which can be a wodge of food, or a (bitter) pill. In a typographic post-Romantic society, value is attached less to being able to retain and regurgitate the elements of a collective memory than to the production of 'new' and 'sincere' expressions of individual experience, thoughts and emotions. The narrators of Beckett's texts undermine the latter endeavour, deprived of stimulus and of the capacity to process it. They cannot create; their best shot at authenticity is the negative activity of stubbornly forgetting the learning that is forced down them. Their aim is silence, self-erasure. The dilemma in this pursuit is that these narrators can only describe the process of forgetting in terms which themselves constitute a cultural memory, the habits of the language. Reasoning itself is habitual: people 'build hypotheses that collapse on top of one another, it's human, a lobster couldn't do it' (p. 375), as the Unnamable says. Beckett's strategy is thus to make manifest the 'lumpy' material quality of language, for it to embody matter that does not admit the possibility of a controlling mind and its preconceptions. The experience of the narrators is only sensory experience which they cannot organize or conceptualize; Beckett must rid their language of its rational habits too, returning it to Hobbes's 'decayed sense'. The Unnamable's experience does not extend to recognizable feelings: What makes me weep so? [...] There is nothing saddening here Perhaps it is liquefied brain. Past happiness in any case is clean gone from my memory, assuming it was ever there (p. 295).

The conjunction of liquefied' and the idiom 'clean gone' makes the latter seem as chillingly clinical as the former. The idiom gains a macabre energy. Without the appropriate cultural associations, this habit of language acquires a material life of its own as well as a grammatical identity. Memory is made concrete. 7. T.S. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919), in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected Essays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), pp. 37-44 (39).

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In Molloy, the messenger Gaber's instructions had similarly gone 'clean out' of Moran's head, the idiom itself suggesting that they had never been fully absorbed. Moran comments of Gaber in his turn: 'I have often wondered whether these messengers were not compelled to undergo a surgical operation to induce in them such a degree of amnesia' (p. 107). Gaber's 'rare' individuality and 'singularity' are negative qualities: they consist in his being 'dead' to the meaning of the instructions he gives, and in his ability to forget (p. 107). He is paradoxically particular in so far as his self is erased. Beckett destabilizes the concept of identity itself in this way. The relentlessly material nature of the Beckettian mind makes the existence of the self subject to contingent factors, without an essence. We are all reduced—in the end—to unintelligent and unintelligible matter. We might say that Gaber's heart isn't in the messages he gives. Beckett uses ostensibly 'disembodied' language—language in which the concrete image has been erased—to explore the idea of an eviscerated being that can never invest its language with any sense of self, whose heart is never 'in it'. What happens when the illusion of presence breaks down, when no one invests the T of the discourse? Beckett stages the situation in The Unnamable: But it's not I, it's not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time as if that mattered, but there it is, that takes the heart out of you, your heart isn't in it any more, your heart that was (p. 403).

The repetition of these Ts reduces them to nonsense, 'empties them'. Language can never be appropriated by the self; it is irremediably public, inauthentic. For Beckett's narrators, as for Beckett himself, cliche only makes evident this fundamental feature of language; in Nietzsche's words, 'Language, it seems, has been invented only for the average, for the middling and the communicable. Language vulgarises the speaker.'8 The trilogy has the appearance of monologue, but it cannot find the self from which language can issue. This makes a nonsense of the Romantic idea of 'heartfelt' expression, as Beckett's figures suggest. A comment on the unrealistic demands inherent in this conception of literature occurs earlier in The Unnamable: If they had told me what to say, in order to meet with their approval, I'd be bound to say it sooner or later. But, God forbid, that would have been too easy, my heart wouldn't be in it, I have to puke my heart out too, spew it up along with the rest of the vomit (p. 338). 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, 'From a Moral Theory for the Deaf and Dumb, and Other Philosophers' (1888), cited in J.P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 196.

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How can you put your heart into the mass of foreign matter that passes your lips? These cliches are exemplary in this respect, vivid and emotive coinages that have become anonymous and 'empty'. A certain circularity emerges here, with self predicated on language, language on self. This is the crux of Beckett's investigation in the trilogy. He described this work as 'the long battle of the soliloquy' 9 but there is no pure point of origin for its narrators' own language. Roland Barthes describes the illusion of one's presence behind the text as consisting ultimately in 'all the codes that constitute me, so that in the end my subjectivity takes on the generality of stereotypes'. 10 Saying T is a fiction. Beckett uses cliches both to describe and to demonstrate this failure of intentionality. Here is the Unnamable: 'But enough of this cursed first person, it really is too red a herring, I'll get out of my depth if I'm not careful' (p. 345). n As the same text comments later on: 'The subject doesn't matter, there is none' (p. 363). Beckett celebrates the capacity of language to erase its own origin, removing the subject position to be 'inherently' impersonal. His narrators distance themselves from their language in this way: '[I]t's a question of going on, it goes on, hypotheses are like everything else, they help you on, as if there were need of help, that's right, impersonal' (p. 408). It is inevitable that Beckett should be preoccupied with the ultimate experience of the erasure of the self, the final falling-silent—that of death. In a monologue, indeed, falling silent and death are to all intents and purposes identical. How can language deal with the idea of oblivion, the erasure of consciousness itself? Molloy tries it this way: So I husband my strength for the spurt. For to be unable to spurt, when the hour strikes, no, you might as well give up [...] So I wait, jogging along, for the bell to say, Molloy, one last effort, it's the end. That's how I reason, with images little suited to the situation (p. 81).

This attempt at insouciance contains disturbing linguistic energies that conflate death and love Qe petit morf)—a juxtaposition that Beckett made in his story 'Love and Lethe'. In their effort to get away from it, Molloy's euphemisms for death come back full circle, approaching the most unpalatable biological aspects of death. Even language distracting

9. See Stephen Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 49. 10. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 17. 11. The idea of one's 'depths' is another physical metaphor which Beckett explores. In Molloy, for instance, he writes, 'I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them. That's why I mention it' (p. 20).

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from its subject is pulled inexorably back towards the material nature of its origin. In fact, the idea of mortality lurks behind much of our language, as Christopher Ricks in Beckett's Dying Words showed Beckett to be demonstrating.12 Beckett exploits the commonness of the word 'dead' in colloquial English speech to create a network of associations around the idea. It becomes the absent key word, or what Michael Riffaterre calls an invariant. Riffaterre, a French stylistician, has written on cliche in literature. He questions the idea of a 'starting point' or origin of a text, suggesting that a literary text is often a series of lexical transformations of a certain idea or even of a fragment of language. These transformations often consist of associations contained in cliches or phrasal units.13 The monologue of the Unnamable consists in just such a neurotic regurgitation of one idea, except in his case the idea is a negative one— that of not existing. Yet this repetition of a 'nothing' produces byproducts, periphrastic recapitulations of the idea. These are the material residua of our inability to reason in a pure fashion. Beckett wrote of his prose pieces, Six Residua, that they were 'residual [...] even when that does not appear of which each is all that remains'. 14 In speaking of death, as of silence, we are limited to—and compelled into—'speaking of nothing as though it were something', as the hero of Beckett's Watt puts it. Death is, as I have said, a fruitful source of such residua in our language, testifying to our need for euphemism in facing it. Molloy defers describing his mother's room (although he is already there in the 'narrative present', we are to believe) until an uncertain future date, implicitly after his death: 'I shall have occasion to do so later, perhaps. When I seek refuge there, beat to the world, all shame drunk' (p. 19). These phrases have the density of poetry, which has been described as 'semantic engineering'.15 The word 'dead' is absent, but haunts the text. 'Beat to the world' conflates the two common expressions 'dead beat' and 12. Christopher Ricks, Beckett's Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 107-15. 13- See Michael Riffaterre, 'L'Explication des faits litteraires', in idem, La Production du texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979), pp. 7-27 (14, 19). 14. Beckett in a letter to Brian Finney, cited in Brian Fitch, Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 134. 15. Pierre Maranda, 'The Dialectic of Metaphor: An Anthropological Essay on Hermeneutics', in Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 67-82 (69).

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'dead to the world'; 'drunk', otherwise puzzling, can also be prefixed with 'dead'. The reader can discern an invariant—death—through substitution, according to the grammar of those stereotypic formulas. Text can be produced out of the absent—unsayable—idea, or at least the structures that we build above it to protect ourselves from its dizzying contemplation. The flip side, for Beckett, is that we will never get close to understanding it. Traditionally the colloquial language in a text is intended to invest it with values of lived experience, common wisdom (a Leavisite idea about literature). Beckett makes this principle function ironically in his work: his narrators have lives that are bound up with pain and weakness or which are 'tepid', and these qualities are felt in their language. The texts give the reader an impression of the emptiness of much of the language we use. But the fact that we can hear our own use of language echoed in these works is what makes them compelling. We are engaged in a perverted narcissism, a horrible fascination with the simultaneous meaninglessness and 'dull inviolability' of the words we use and the account of human life that they give us. We discover the surprising tenacity of enervated language. This inviolability means for Beckett that we will never get past the habits of language and thought that cliche embodies: to create will only ever be to repeat with a difference. Germaine Bree conveys both this hopelessness and the compelling nature of Beckett's task when she describes it as being 'to close in on the language of everyday discourse, to track it down and find—and never find—a voice which is one's own'.16

Bibliography Amossy, Ruth, and Elisheva Rosen, Les Discours du cliche (Paris: Soc. d'Edition d'Enseignement Superieur, 1982). Barthes, Roland, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970). Beckett, Samuel, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1994). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn; New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 219-53. Bree, Germaine, 'The Strange World of Beckett's "grand articules" ' (trans. Margaret Guiton), in Melvin Friedman (ed.), Samuel Beckett Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 73-87.

Connor, Stephen, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil BlackweU, 1988). Darbyshire, A.E.,^4 Grammar of Style (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972). 16. Germaine Bree, 'The Strange World of Beckett's "grand articules" ' (trans. Margaret Guiton), in Melvin Friedman (ed.), Samuel Beckett Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 73-87 (80).

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Davie, Donald, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976). Eliot, T.S., 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919), in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected Essays ofT.S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), pp. 37-44. Fitch, Brian, Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). Friedman, Melvin (ed.), Samuel Beckett Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Maranda, Pierre, 'The Dialectic of Metaphor: An Anthropological Essay on Hermeneutics', in Suleiman and Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text, pp. 67-82. Orwell, George, 'Politics and the English Language' (1947), in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (London: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 348-60. Ricks, Christopher, Beckett's Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Riffaterre, Michael, la Production du texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979). Stern, J.P., A Study of Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Suleiman, Susan, and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Colin B. Gardner

Reading Between the Lines: Materiality in the Age of Hypertext

Let me begin by saying that it is not my intention in this paper to present immutable scenarios, or questions for which I have pre-defined answers. For the most part, the discussion I am presenting is the result of an exploration of a terrain which seems, at times, very certain or welltrodden, at times less comprehensive. For reasons that may be obvious to those who have ever been subjected to proclamations about the blessing or evils of computer technology, I feel compelled to preface my discussion with the declaration that I do not claim to be prophet of technodoom or techno-evangelist. Nor must we consider these to be opposite extremes of an imaginary scale—they are both extreme positions and to that extent I consider them to occupy the same niche. In this paper, therefore, I adopt a tone of cautious, moderate appraisal. First of all, I wish to draw attention to a distinction that is often made between electronic text and hypertext. The former is a general term used to describe both narrative and non-narrative text, in the form of digital data, that can be displayed on a computer screen. Hypertext is most often conceived as a specific type of electronic text in which blocks of text are connected to each other using electronic links. Although some writers consider printed texts with loose narrative structures also to be hypertexts, such forms are more accurately regarded as fragmented forms—thereby preserving 'hypertext' as an unambiguous reference to a specific kind of electronic text. Although hypertext has features that are recognizable in printed forms such as reference books, scholarly works and adventure books, medium-dependent factors—such

* The above paper was written as a discussion document at an early stage of enquiry into the subject of my research: hypertext fiction. Many of the points are given a fuller and more systematic treatment in my PhD thesis entitled 'Versions of Interactivity: A Combined Empirical and Theoretical Approach to Hypertext Fiction Criticism', where materiality is examined from a phenomenological perspective and visuality is analysed as a narrative concept. The implications of the shifting boundaries of Web-based literary forms is explored in my article 'Hyperflction in Cyberspace: The Unimaginable Archive', Space and Culture—The Journal 10 (forthcoming).

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as the ability to programme the text to respond dynamically to the reader—nevertheless make the distinction a useful one. Hypertext has traditionally been described as non- or multi-linear, in view of the fact that a reader can combine blocks in various ways. However, non-narrative printed forms also encourage the reader to combine blocks of text in different ways using such things as the index, table of contents and footnotes or endnotes, and so 'non-linearity' is not such a good measure of hypertextuality.* Non-linear textuality is not being studied as an isolated form, but as the basis for a wider critique of textual forms and literary practices. Jane Yellowlees Douglas, for example, argues that the transition from print culture to what she calls an 'alien' environment with different organizational structures can act to defamiliarize interpretational habits that have built up around the printed word.2 These habits are the ways we think about, write and read texts and the ideological, theoretical and cultural assumptions that inform our view of what a text is and ought to be. On the other hand, there are those that would argue that there is nothing new about hypertext. Such writers tend to treat computer-mediated hypertext as either a passing phase in the ongoing evolution of literary experimentation or, rather more cynically, as technology-driven, and so not serious literature. There are, I think, elements of truth in both propositions, although the implications and conclusions are rather too drastic. In the course of this discussion, I hope it will emerge that such simplistic positions do not address the complex and challenging issues inherent in this literary form. I shall take as a point of entry into this discussion the materialities of texts, since many researchers are using this concept, in various ways, to guide a more fundamental analysis of textuality. In other words, many would argue that in order to move forwards, one must move backwards—to basics. Thus an investigation of materialities that aims to make explicit the various implicit aspects of textuality can provide useful bridges across all textual forms. However, since the term 'materiality' is problematic, there being no authoritative definition of it as a literary concept, I shall outline what I have identified as four principal positions: substrate, language, visualization and communication.

1. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Espen J. Aarseth, 'Nonlinearity and Literary Theory', in George P. Landow (ed.), Hyper/ Text/Theory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 51-86. 2. J. Yellowlees Douglas, 'Print Pathways and Interactive Labyrinths: How Hypertext Narratives Affect the Act of Reading' (unpublished PhD thesis, New York University, 1992).

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Firstly, Jan-Dirk Miiller in 'The Body of the Book' considers stone, papyrus and paper to be among the materialities of text. 3 Materiality in this sense stands for physical 'medium', or what Thompson in Media and Modernity refers to as 'technical medium'. 4 The use of 'medium' may lead to some confusion since some critics use the term to refer to the particular form of communication, such as language, sound or image. What I propose, therefore, is to subsume Miiller's materialities under the heading of 'substrate'—a similarly problematic term, since it implies a solid bed upon which matter is fixed or inscribed. Electronic text is not 'inscribed' on the screen in the sense that the phosphor, which emits light when struck by the rapidly firing electrons, decays very rapidly and has to be continually energized. Yet the display is acting on data stored in its memory, and it is there that the inscription could be said to exist. Substrate is thus the physical property of the storage and display, rather than the conceptual notion of language. It would then seem quite natural to ask what, in this material sense, is the digital equivalent of the book? I can give no straight answer. The floppy disk is not an equivalent in the sense that it is impossible for a human to read one without a computer. On the other hand, it is equally hard to imagine scanning the text of a book that has no pages. The disk, however, like an audio or video cassette, contains machine-readable information rather than text. Although it acts as a substrate for the encoded text, its array of magnetic particles distributed across a metallic surface means that the disk is not a reading site. The book, by contrast, is both a substrate for the text and a reading site. The virtual nature of digital textuality means that it can hardly be said to be inscribed on anything. As I have already observed, the substrate of the printed text is the book, usually some form of paper which also guarantees a degree of permanence, whereas the electronic text appears as transitory characters on a screen, such that if it can indeed be said to be inscribed, it is only temporarily so. This apparent detachment of the text from its material substrate had already been undertaken theoretically by critics who promoted intertextual perspectives. Roland Barthes, for example, as long ago as 1966 felt compelled by the shifting and converging boundaries between disciplines to distinguish the concept of 'work' from that of 'text'. In his essay 'From Work to Text', physical and conceptual limits are explored: 'the work can be held in the hand, the 3. Jan-Dirk Miiller, 'The Body of the Book: The Media Transition from Manuscript to Print', in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialities of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 32-44. 4. John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 18.

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text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse'.5 Taking 'work' and 'book' to be coterminous, the observation gives rise to an interesting question since, on the one hand, the cover of the book constitutes a physical boundary for the textual content within it. Yet, according to Barthes, the text is able to extend beyond the work, transcending the physical boundaries imposed by the mechanics of the book, because it is not an 'object', but a 'methodological field'. At what point, or indeed in what sense, therefore, does the physicality of the text (the lexical form, the inscription, the substrate) legitimate the semantic and signifying features of the text? Such a question leads to the second category of materialities which covers the formal aspects and stylistic effects of language. In 'The Language of Poetry', for instance, Derek Attridge considers the signifying effects of poetic rhythm and metre: In considering the semantic functions of poetic form, then, we are enquiring into the various ways in which the perceived substance of language may itself contribute to meaning, independently of the signifying procedures of the words for which it provides a physical vehicle.

The use of triple metre in a poem about the Trinity is thus cited as a metrical example of one such semantic function. To tie the two ends of the argument, classification of these formal linguistic elements could also be extended to include grammatical and narrative structures, as well as generic categorizations, to the extent that the 'physical vehicle' is no longer capable of being seen as independent of but, rather, as identical to its 'signifying procedures'. Although ideas of form and content, signifier and signified, medium and message seem worthy of revival in the light of digital textuality, such a project lies beyond the scope of this paper. Therefore, the second kinds of materialities are simply denned as the application of various linguistic, narrative and stylistic techniques to textual matter. Linguistic and stylistic material elements in hypertext may be found in what some critics and hypertext authors refer to as 'granularity'.7 Simply put, granularity is the ratio of words to window spaces (nodes) so that, for example, a large number of nodes with a small number of words distributed across them would be said to exhibit 'high granularity'. 5. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (trans. Stephen Heath; London: Fontana, 1977), p. 157. 6. Derek Attridge, 'The Language of Poetry: Materiality and Meaning', Essays in Criticism 31 (1981), pp. 228-45 (229). 7. Jay David Bolter et al, Getting Started with Storyspace for Windows (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996).

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Reading a text with varying degrees of granularity may constitute a rhythm not usual in printed books, whose production is governed by commercial considerations, such that excessive granularity would be both expensive to produce and perceived as bad value. The costs associated with electronic text pages are, for the moment at least, negligible. The nearest equivalent to page costs in electronic text is probably Web space, where subscribers are allocated space on a server for a fee. For the moment, however, the cost of space is unlikely to be a factor affecting design considerations under most conditions. Thirdly, extending these formalisms by definition from the verbal to the visual, typography and layout would also be classed as materialities of the text. This would come under the heading 'visualization'. Gerald Janecek in The Look of Russian Literature gives an account of a systematic use of typographical variation to create and augment poetic effects.8 The use of typographical experimentation has been limited by the fact that writers are restricted by publishers. However, as Richard Lanham observes in 'The Electronic Word', digital textuality puts typographic and design control in the hands of both producers and consumers of the text, in place of the printing and publishing industries which have traditionally controlled this aspect of creativity.9 The result of this traditional control is that fount, spacing, margination and pagination styles have become embedded aspects of texts, and thus crucial to our reading practices and expectations. We expect large expensive books, for example, to have ample margins and fine-quality paper, whereas potboilers are acceptable on low-quality paper even with very narrow margins. Our expectations are such that an incompatibility between the quality of the substrate and that of the writing might impinge on our sensibilities to the extent that we might feel cheated. Many printed texts no longer in copyright have been digitized as part of large library projects such as Project Gutenberg; the Text Encoding Initiative was set up to provide guidelines for the encoding of such material. 10 Many institutions use the World Wide Web to upload articles and essays relevant to their courses; individuals with personal interests 8. Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). For an older but comprehensive account of the Concrete Poetry movements, see Mary Ellen Solt (ed.), Concrete Poetry: A World View (London: Indiana University Press, 1970) which includes manifestos and statements by leading exponents. 9. Richard Lanham, 'The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution', New Literary History 20.2 (1989), pp. 265-90. 10. Text Encoding Initiative, http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/ (30/04/98). Project Gutenberg, http://www.promo.net/pg/history.html (26/04/98).

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also use the Web, although there is great variation in design quality in terms of typographic and visual layout. To judge by the appearance of many electronic documents, the principles of typographic layout and design that have evolved within institutions, and which have shaped our experience and expectations of texts, are a complete mystery to many self-publishers. In part, this is probably a result of the sheer recalcitrance of the software design causes us to respond to the presentation of text on the basis of certain predispositions. For example, I have two URLs for Vannevar Bush's essay 'As We May Think'. The first leads to a text displayed in the Times New Roman fount, a standard word-processing fount; the second leads to a version in Courier, a fount originally designed to improve the clarity of letters impressed through a typewriter ribbon. The Times fount creates one kind of expectation based on familiarity, whereas the Courier, redolent of typewritten documents, has

a different effect. My own response is to regard the Courier text as a closer representation of the original, since Bush's article would have been written on a typewriter.11 These considerations lead us to the final broad category 'materialities of communication', which is derived from a contemporary theoretical movement away from interpretations and identifications of meaning towards, instead, a consideration of virtually all aspects of meaning production, including the function of the body and forms of technology. 'Materialities of communication' covers the previous categories by bringing together a diversity of ideas and phenomena under the heading of 'dynamic contexts of performance' and 'meaning effects'. For example, referring to Dickens's reading tours, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer in 'Dimensions of Literature' lists the 'high pulse rates' and 'fainting spells' recorded by chroniclers as significant examples of materialities pertaining to the reading of these texts.12 A more recent example would be the human component of fantasy games, that is, the reactions of the player/reader/writer which are considered crucial to the textual form of narratives that are produced. Questioning the ability of narrative theory to explain the interactive situation in Thomas Pinsky's Mindwheel, P. Michael Campbell in 'Interactive Fiction and Narrative Theory' uses the 'quest' motif to argue that his interaction with fictional characters creates, rather than rehearses, individual narratives.13 11. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/jflashbks/computer/bushf.htm (08/02/ 2000). 12. K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, 'Dimensions of Literature: A Speculative Approach' in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialities of Communication, pp. 45-69 (51). 13. P. Michael Campbell, 'Interactive Fiction and Narrative Theory: Towards an Anti-Theory', New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 10 (1987), pp. 76-84.

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Coming back to the question of linearity, Espen Aarseth argues in 'Nonlinearity and Literary Theory' that our long exposure to print culture has predisposed us to theorize texts in certain ways.14 For example, he notes that early commentators in the field of computermediated textuality devoted attention too narrowly, fixing on the distinction between print and digital mediums, rather than on particular features of each system. According to Aarseth, a more meaningful distinction would be between linear and non-linear textualities. Since it can be shown that print texts can be perfectly non-linear, and that digital texts can be more linear than print ones, the argument for reconceptualizing the textual framework along different metaphysical lines seems convincing. However, Aarseth's position raises the question of the ways in which the text can be said to be dependent upon its own materiality. The book, for example, is a fixed document in which the quality of the paper, typographical layout, styling, cover and even thickness have for a long time been a combination of commercial and aesthetic concerns. Although literary forms may appear gradually to mutate, revealing new forms and styles, the literary object has always been a receptacle for a set of prescribed and inscribed practices which contribute to, and are derived from, a sociocultural value system. It is thus possible that hypertext is in an intermediate stage of development in which the new form has been prescribed, but not yet inscribed. In view of what Aarseth and others have argued, it would be too simplistic to posit 'digital' or 'electronic' or 'computer' textualities against the print version just outlined. When considering the boundaries that exist between information environments, or the globalizing nature of the internet, there is considerable difference between stand-alone machines and interconnected webs of documents. These terms have been shown to be wholly inadequate for saying anything useful about textualities since in the digital environment, materialities appear somewhat different. The boundaries of the text are seemingly 'immaterial', coalescing into what critics call a 'seamless information environment'. Boundaries exist but are fluid since they allow the superimposition of different pictures, sounds or other texts to the extent that the concept of autonomy may completely disappear. This level of contextualization and re-contextualization (a kind of 'supertext', which is superimposed, as opposed to hypertext, which characteristically obliterates that which came before) appears to exceed that which is possible through the annotations one is likely to find in any well-used library book or by having multiple books open on a desk. Physicality recedes into the 14. Aarseth, 'Nonlinearity and Literary Theory', pp. 51-86.

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'immaterial' in the sense that the physical boundary between the information coding and the recipient is negotiated electronically at a site which is virtual. Many critics writing within the field have hailed digital textuality as the next revolution after Gutenberg ushered in the era of moveable type and have emphasized the great advantages to be gained in thinking about, writing and theorizing hypertexts. However, hypertext fiction (I am not talking about digital textuality in general, which is becoming the standard format for reference works, museum guides and other kinds of technical documentation) appears to be on the periphery of the literary world in terms of its output, accessibility and readability. Why bother, then, to take it seriously? There appear to be many writers only too happy to outline the million and one reasons why not. Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil attacks the dehumanizing effects of remote connections made possible by the internet.15 Whether Stoll really believes that direct human physical contact will diminish to the point of extinction with the advent of global communications, or whether he is simply subscribing to a discourse that David Nye in Narratives and Spaces terms 'narrative technology as a means of social control', is uncertain.16 Sven Birkerts's intelligent and thought-provoking The Gutenberg Elegies may seem emotional, rather than purely rational. It is simply, however, a personal account.17 One wonders to what extent the uncomfortable concept of the technologically determined being, as evinced in Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, has engendered such unambivalent attitudes?18 In his book that traces the historic attitudes of the United States towards technology, David Nye argues against this kind of deterministic attitude, maintaining that the public have traditionally welcomed new technologies and sought ways to incorporate them into their lives. If it is possible to talk of an 'age of hypertext' it is one that has arrived in Europe relatively recently, whereas the literature shows that hypertext research, in particular its educational and cognitive aspects, has been part of the intellectual topography of the United States for well over two decades.

15. Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (London: Pan Books, 1996). 16. David Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), p. 17917. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). 18. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

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Problems do exist for theory and practice, not least the fact that nonlinear textualities militate against the authorized version. As Douglas and Campbell, among many others, have demonstrated, theoretical models predicated on the assumptions of print media rarely work for interactive texts. Barthes's analysis of narrative structure in Image-Music-Text, xt , for example, in which he describes two narrative functions, the function and the index, , is problematic. The difficulty in applying this model is that not all elements within a hypertext narrative are recoverable by the reader—elements that exist for some readers do not exist for others. The print text, in contrast, which is relatively stable, supplies the same context in every reading. Barthes's observation that every element of the text is significant implies a mechanism that appears to require a totalizing view of the text, and is thus an important assumption that theoretically underpins the analytic, top-down approach derived from stable, noninteractive texts. Resistance to the establishment of a wider context that would open up print culture and its assumptions to the kind of material analysis it has consistently managed to evade is declining with the advent of new technologies. Contemporary theoretical perspectives are foregrounding many of the assumptions that we still hold and, with the insistence on the oblique, raising awareness of many of the material aspects of textualities—'textualities' meant here in its widest possible sense of constructions, both consciously and unconsciously perceived. In Western literate culture, for example, conversations, thoughts and social interactions are rarely considered to be texts. One of the things the interactive text does is to bring to the fore our privileging of the stable written text over the fluid dynamic texts that are constantly going on around us. The transitory nature of the electronic document and the pseudo-dialogic nature of the interactive text remind us of oral situations. Alternatives sit alongside old certainties, which leads ineluctably to the self-reflective position where we have to ask such questions as 'why do we do things this way?', 'why have we always done things this way?' and 'why do we continue to do things in this way?' How, then, might we explain the relatively slow uptake of hyperfiction and interactive cybertexts, and the popularity of what many regard as its closest cousin, the video game? Vannevar Bush saw his conceptual computer—the MEMEX—as a powerful tool for the recording and analysis of scientific data. Early machines were relatively large and cumbersome, and often required several highly skilled operators with an expert knowledge of machine code. Technological advances allowed smaller computers and eventually the personal computers we know today. Early computers intended for the home user were extremely

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limited in their power and storage capacity. Now, greater power and speed, coupled with an interface that allows a user who knows not a single word of code to perform functions and tasks, has contributed to the growth of the personal computer in many areas. Interest in the medium from literary and cultural critics and artists is increasing—but not rapidly. Although some recent projects have come to mainstream attention, such as Geoff Ryman's printed version of the web-based hyperfiction 253,19 and John Updike's collaborative cybertext Murder Makes the Magazine?0 0 the computer is still not perceived to be a common site for the dissemination of 'serious literature'. Hypertext theorists have noted hostile reactions to reading from computer screens, although current screen resolutions and standards mean more comfortable viewing. George Landow has observed that these kinds of statement are not objections to the concept of interactivity, or to any other kind of digital communication, but are reactions to the technology of the day.21 Technology is certainly changing fast, but can the dynamic contexts of performance and meaning effects created within these technological situations be discounted? Is the difficulty of online reading a materiality of communication—something that can be set apart from the message? In conclusion, I have given in this short space an outline of what I think are the main kinds of materialities that, deeply embedded within our assumptions, may form the basis for a revised consideration of textuality in different forms. I have also pointed to some of the difficulties encountered when trying to describe aspects of textualities in the digital environment using concepts derived from print-oriented culture. It would seem doubtful, irrespective of whether mainstream literary culture moves wholesale into the digital environment, that the factors of textual production previously set down can survive intact, given the existence of alternative environments. The question can be simply put: if material conditions have changed, must narratives predicated upon those materialities change also? Hypertext, by introducing a non-linear dynamic into textual relationships, may be a sufficient catalyst to take a closer look at the materialities of our communications, to read 'between' the lines. 19. Geoff Ryman, 253: The Print Remix (London: Flamingo, 1988); http://www. ryman-novel.com/info/about.htm (26/04/98). 20. John Updike, Murder Makes the Magazine, http://www. amazon.com/ exec/obidos/subst/features/g/greatest-tale/greatest-tale-home.html/(consulted 26/04/ 98; no longer available). 21. George P. Landow, 'What's a Critic to Do? Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext', in idem (ed.), Hyper/Text/Theory, p. 4.

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Bibliography Aarseth, Espen J., 'Nonlinearity and Literary Theory', in Landow (ed.), Hyper/Text/ Theory, pp. 51-86. Attridge, Derek, 'The Language of Poetry: Materiality and Meaning', Essays in Criticism 31 (1981), pp. 228-45. Barthes, Roland, Image-Music-Text (trans. Stephen Heath; London: Fontana, 1977). Birkerts, Sven, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). Bolter, Jay David et al, Getting Started with Storyspace for Windows (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996). Bush, Vannevar, 'As We May Think', Atlantic Monthly (July 1945), pp. 101-108. Campbell, P. Michael, 'Interactive Fiction and Narrative Theory: Towards an AntiTheory', New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 10 (1987), pp. 76-84. Douglas, J. Yellowlees, 'Print Pathways and Interactive Labyrinths: How Hypertext Narratives Affect the Act of Reading' (unpublished PhD thesis, New York University, 1992). Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialities of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Janecek, Gerald, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Landow, George P. (ed.), Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Lanham, Richard, 'The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution', New Literary History 20.2 (1989), pp. 265-90. McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). Muller, Jan-Dirk, 'The Body of the Book: The Media Transition from Manuscript to Print', in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialities of C Communication, pp. 32-44. Nye, David, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig, 'Dimensions of Literature: A Speculative Approach', in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialities of Communication, pp. 45-69. Project Gutenberg, available HTTP, FTP: http://www.promo.net/pg/history.html (26/04/98). Ryman, Geoff, 253: The Print Remix (London: Flamingo, 1998). Available http:// www.ryman-novel.com/info/about.htm (26/04/98). Solt, Mary Ellen (ed.), Concrete Poetry: A World View (London: Indiana University Press, 1970). Stoll, Clifford, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (London: Pan, 1996). Text Encoding Initiative, http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/ (30/04/98). Thompson, John B., The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Updike, John, Murder Makes the Magazine, consulted http://www.amazon.com/ exec/obidos/subst/features/g/greatest-tale/greatest-tale-home.html/ (26/04/98; no longer available).

Annette Davison Music to Desire By: Crossing the Berlin Wall with Wim Wenders

The various kinds of music used in the soundtrack to Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel tiber Berlin, 1987) are, I argue, used to represent the ontological difference between the film's two realms— the angelic and the mortal. Furthermore, referring to the Romantic notion of music's Utopian function, I suggest that each kind of music has a Utopian function for the different angels and mortals. Wings of Desire's narrative is concerned with two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, who observe people living and working in Berlin in the mid1980s. We follow the angels as they float all over the city—in and out of apartments, vehicles, a film set. Neither the Berlin Wall nor the human body are experienced as boundaries by the angels: they walk through the Wall and have unlimited access to their charges' thoughts. In this sense they have a kind of omniscience. However, sensuality proves to be a very real barrier to them. Damiel has grown tired of being able only to watch and catalogue the sensuous experiences and feelings of mortals; he longs to experience them for himself. He becomes drawn to Marion, a lonely trapeze artist working in a circus who longs to find an identity and to be loved. Wenders portrays neither the angelic nor the mortal realm as idyllic, choosing, rather, to depict both ambivalently. On the one hand, despite the angels' ability to oversee and overhear everything, they are unable to affect the lives of the Berliners whom they watch over; they are omniscient yet simultaneously impotent. On the other hand, despite the possibilities that a place in space, time and causality offer to the film's humans, the mortal world can be a lonely place. But the mortal realm is also the focus of angel Damiel's Utopian dream, a dream that offers an impossible, irrecoverable, lost plenitude of existence in the here and now. Subsequently, however, we see this Utopian dream become a reality—about three quarters of the way through the film Damiel falls to earth and becomes mortal. For the lost and lonely Marion, the role of trapeze artist in the circus offers the Utopian promise of identity and rootedness that she lacks (and which may be read as being the Utopian desire of all humanity). However, Marion's Utopia slips from her grasp at

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the moment that she finally attains it: the circus closes before the end of the season. In Wings of Desire, apparently impossible Utopian futures are attained while other seemingly achievable ones are consigned to history and memory. Wenders uses both black-and-white and colour film: the angelic realm—when we see depicted what the angels see—is signified by the use of black-and-white film, the mortal realm by colour. When we see in black and white it can be assumed that the sounds heard are those audible by—often only by—the angels. When we see in colour, we lose this privileged access to inner voices. In some sense, then, the visual pleasure of seeing in colour prohibits our gaining privileged, interior knowledge of Berliners, and of the existence of angels. Broadly speaking, the soundtrack to Wings of Desire comprises three different kinds of music: Western art music,1 rock music and circus music.2 As a result of the images in conjunction with which these different kinds of music are heard, the art music becomes associated with the angels, rock music with the mortal realm, and, not surprisingly, circus music with the circus (also part of the mortal realm). The art music is the only kind of music presented non-diegetically during the film; all of the rock and the circus music is seen to be performed, or played back, diegetically (i.e. within the film's fiction) on radios, records, or as live performance. Just as the angels are unseen by the Berliners, so non-diegetic music has no apparent source within the fictional world of the film. Indeed, as the final element added to the film, complex, non-diegetic music has the temporal freedom to access the film's narrative structure, and is able to draw upon that knowledge to warn the spectator-auditor, or, equally, to deceive. In Wings of Desire, this omniscience of non-diegetic musical voices is associated both with the angels' privileged access to knowledge, and also with their impotence, which results from their inability to be present 'here' and 'now'. The angels exist in the temps mort of eternity, and are thus unable to

1. I am using the term 'art music' not in order to valorize this kind of music, but simply to point to the canon of the Western classical tradition of music and its concomitant association with music as notated (though this has become an increasingly problematic assumption to make since the latter half of the twentieth century), as an opposition to the categories of rock and circus music presented in the film, whose performance traditions are founded on oral, rather than notated, transmission. 2. Also, at one point the circus performers sing a folk song which, because it is performed diegetically and also shares harmonic characteristics with the circus music (as will be discussed below), I have considered as belonging to the same category as circus music

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intervene in, or affect, the mortal world. Rather than being omniscient (or omni-present), Wenders's angels are in fact omni-absent. The different kinds of music function as representations of the ontological status of the subjects in the two realms: the non-diegetic art music represents the angelic, the diegetic rock and circus music the mortal. But, in addition, I shall argue that each of these categories (and a further subdivision of the art music category) also represents a Utopian function both for particular characters in the film and for the film's audience. The notion that music contains a promise of something better first gained prominence with the Romantic aesthetic, a view which holds that music has a Utopian impulse as a result of its ability to signify differently, non-representationally, to reveal something that cannot otherwise be expressed.3 Modernists like Theodor Adorno agree with this Romantic idea that music has a Utopian function, but qualify it with the assertion that such Utopian promise can only ever be expressed or recognized negatively: to affirm the possibility of a better future would be to succumb to the identity-thinking characteristic of commodity culture, resulting in the perpetuation of dominant ideologies, which amounts to false consciousness. Such Utopias involve the promise of an idealized but unattainable future that serves only to maintain the status quo: false Utopias.4 For Adorno, Utopian ideals are not statable directly, are ineffable. This is why music's nature as 'non-conceptual cognition' makes it the art that has the potential to approach most fully his programme of non-identity thinking. For Adorno, music's social function lies precisely in its functionlessness. The more autonomous music becomes, the more it is able to provide a critique of the social world, but the less it is able to impact directly upon or relate to it, and it is thus, in one sense at least, powerless. Paradoxically, then, it is only as a result of withdrawing from society and existing separately from it that music can reveal the truth about it. So, while certain kinds of apparently autonomous music can assist us in our realization of the dystopian nature of late capitalist society, and activate nostalgia for a lost totality, they cannot restore that (Utopian) plenitude. A positive view of the future can only be projected in terms of a negative view of the present. 3. See, for example, A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (trans. E.FJ. Payne; 2 vols.; New York: Dover Publications, 1966). 4. See, for example, T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (trans. C. Lenhardt; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); idem, Philosophy of Modern Music (trans. A.G. Mitchell and W.V. Blomster; London: Sheed & Ward, 1987); T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. J. Cumming; New York: Verso/NLB, 1979).

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For Marion, dreaming of the circus, circus music has a Utopian function. When her Utopian dream is quashed, she turns to rock music for cathartic consolation: for example, we see her dance to it at the Esplanade. Damiel watches, unmoved by this music that he is unable to feel, but moved by its effect on Marion. Through dancing she is able, temporarily at least, to create a space or identity for herself in which to exist. For Damiel, the angel dissatisfied with his lot, rock music has the Utopian promise of the sensual mortal world. The art music written for the film has a more ambiguous nature than the rock and circus music, in terms of signification. Stylistically speaking, most of the art music is modal; in particular, its harmony is suggestive of the minor modes (a small proportion is quasi-atonal—I shall return to this later). 5 Modal harmony behaves as a fairly strong signifier to a particular historical period—that is, the period before which tonal functional harmony developed: pre-seventeenth century. 6 I would argue that this aspect of the art music—its modal harmony—depicts the angels' Utopia of a time long past in which they were able to intervene in the mortal world, nostalgia for a time when they were able to help humankind. However, the orchestration and performance style of much of this music behaves as a stylistic marker to a much later historical period: the Romantic era—which is also the period of music associated most closely with classical Hollywood film music. I would argue that this historical signification has a Utopian function for the film's audience. Caryl Flinn 5. Some of this music is not in fact modal in the strict sense but presents altered minor diatonic harmony. However, this harmonic language shares a number of features with modal harmony, of particular relevance here—its avoidance of tone relations that 'pull' sensuously toward other, more stable tones (through pitch alteration). I shall return to this later. 6. This is an over-simplification. The modes dominated European music from c. AD 400 to AD 1500, and continued to have a strong influence on composition for about another hundred years. With the development of harmonized music the modal system began to collapse. Two of the modes added by Glareanus in 1547—the Ionian and the Aeolian—subsequently became the major and minor scales of diatonic harmony. Gradually, dissonance and chromaticism were admitted into compositions and played a central role in denning the tonal direction of a piece. With the evolution of major-minor tonalities, 'all the harmonies of a composition are organised in relation to a triad on the key note or tonic supported primarily by triads on its dominant and subdominant, with other chords secondary to these, and with temporary modulations to other keys admitted without sacrificing the supremacy of the principal key' (D J. Grout and C.V. Palisca, A History of Western Music [London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1988], p. 354). This system of harmony, based on triads having a function defined in relation to the tonic, is tonal functionality. It should be noted, however, that the cadential forms present in earlier modal music can be regarded as precursors of tonal functionality.

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argues that classical Hollywood film-making bought into the Romantic conception of autonomous art music, and made reference to it in terms of musical style, for several reasons. These included the notion of composer as genius individual, which diverted attention from the otherwise technologically and mechanically generated nature of film as product, and the use of music's ability to signify differently—and thus, to add a sense of wholeness to the evocation of times past depicted in cinema, a nostalgic quality calling forth an otherwise lost plenitude.7 Further to these two somewhat contradictory historical significations of the film's art music, there is a third, which is related to the listener's experience of temporality as created by this music. The tonal functional harmony of the rock and circus music (associated with the mortal world, and performed diegetically) constructs a sense of forward propulsion and linear temporality. The art music, however (associated with the angelic realm, and performed non-diegetically), creates a sense of static temporality rather than a sense of forward propulsion. With functional harmony (in both major and minor keys) an inherent necessity emerges from the tonal language: a particular progression of chords implies a particular continuation; for instance, a dissonant chord must eventually be resolved to a consonance. Our familiarity with the way that this kind of harmonic language works—expectation, deferral, resolution—generates a kind of forward propulsion that is absent in music that is not tonal. Furthermore, in addition to being tonal in harmony, the circus music also has a chromatic aspect; chromaticism has often been associated with sensuality and seduction, at least since Bizet's Carmen. Modal harmony—as exemplified here by the film's art music, composed by Jurgen Knieper—tends to create a less dynamic experience of temporality than that which is built from tonal functional harmony. The static quality of Knieper's music is emphasized by the particular way in which he uses this harmonic language. I would argue that the impression of stasis created by this music represents the predicament that the angels actually find themselves in. It represents an authentic Utopian function in the Adornian sense—that is, it reveals the dystopian nature of the angelic reality.8 On the one hand, the angels long for a lost time in which they were able to intervene in mortal life (which I would suggest is represented by the historical context of modal harmony as musical 7. C. Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 108. See Flinn's study for a more in-depth exposition of the relationship between Hollywood, Romanticism and Utopia. 8. See also E. Bloch, Essays on the Philosophy of Music (trans. P. Palmer; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) on the concept of false and authentic Utopias.

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material—making reference to a time long past). On the other hand, the static quality of the temporality created by this music represents their actual state (as impotent); that is, the dystopian nature of their world. I mentioned above that the non-diegetic music cues fall into two stylistic categories: modal, and a quasi-atonal style reminiscent of some music of the Second Viennese School (that is, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern), though this style appears in only two cues. In fact, both of these styles of composition dissolve the linear temporality of functional harmony, but do so by opposite means. On the one hand, the quasi-atonal style denies the sensuous 'pull' of dissonance by the sheer abundance of dissonance—there are so many dissonant notes that the necessity of their resolution is nullified. On the other hand, the modal harmony denies this tonal directedness by altering scale steps of functional harmony, thus avoiding intervallic relationships that 'pull' sensuously toward more stable tones. It emphasizes instead stable intervals like perfect fifths. Finally, when Damiel begins to materialize in the mortal realm—at which point he is filmed in colour and begins to leave footprints—we hear a single major chord played by strings, repeated with the addition of a harp. I would argue that we can read this major chord as representing Damiel's transition into the mortal world: in this film, the world of functional harmony. So, during the course of the film—in which Damiel gradually takes on a more central role—rock music replaces art music as representative of Damiel's Utopian dream. This supersession—of one conception of musical Utopia by another—reflects Wenders's own feelings about music: Western art music is, for him, forever tainted by its appropriation by the Nazis.9 In his youth, rock music—a genre that was young enough to avoid Nazi exploitation—offered him the possibility of self-expression and identity formation. When Damiel falls to earth and is unable to find Marion because the circus has moved on, it is rock music that is responsible, ultimately, for uniting them, here in the shape of a flyposter for a gig by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. But further analysis of the film's music and narrative reveals that Wenders creates a complex interplay between Damiel's Utopian dream and his angelic nature. As I mentioned earlier, we watch Damiel watch Marion turn to rock music 9. R.P- Kolker and P. Beicker, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p- 12. See also W. Wenders, Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema (trans. S. Whiteside in assoc. with M. Hofmann; London: Faber & Faber, 1989); idem, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations (trans. M. Hofmann; London: Faber & Faber, 1991); idem, The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations (trans. M. Hofmann; London: Faber & Faber, 1997).

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for catharsis. On another occasion, we see Damiel's own confusion over his motivation—his desire to touch, and thereby reassure Marion, also driven by his desire to provide the love that she longs for. We sense a different, more intrusive element to his 'supervision'. This happens when we see and hear Marion listen to a record of Nick Cave's 'The Carny' in her caravan.10 The combination of Damiel's choreographed movements and the camera's framing of him encourages us to question our perception of his character. We see Damiel in mid-close-up begin walking towards Marion in time with the (diegetic) music. His head and shoulders fill the shot as he moves in toward her. In this way Wenders implies, through the mise-en-scene, that Marion is unable to escape from Damiel. No other such synchronized movements of angels to music (diegetic or otherwise) occur during the film. Furthermore, the fact that this music has a 'real world' rather than an 'ethereal world' source tends to conceal the more sinister truth of this moment, implying that the music's relation to the image is coincidental, rather than specific and intended, as the relationship of non-diegetic music to the image usually is.11 The angels' supervision of mortals appears to be benevolent when uncomplicated by desire. Here we see Damiel appear to abuse his angelic privileges, which conflicts with our perception of his compassionate, sexless, angelic nature; he is a 'peeping Tom' rather than a compassionate guardian. That Wenders chooses to associate his impotent angels with the tradition of autonomous art music is perhaps not surprising. As I mentioned earlier, for Adorno, music can only reveal the truth about society by withdrawing from it, by creating its own self-governed, or autonomous, world. In this way, I would argue that the angels' predicament embodies the same dialectical double edge of the Modernist agenda that is exhibited by authentic avant-garde music. In their separation from society the angels are able to contemplate it in its entirety, but are unable to impact upon it. It is possible to consider this as an allegory of Wenders's somewhat ambivalent relationship with Hollywood. In particular, the angels could be read as standing for Wenders as non-Hollywood film director: although he has an omniscient viewpoint, in the sense that he has much more control over the production and distribution of his films by working outside Hollywood, he is unable really to interject, to make a difference on a grand scale. In order to achieve that, 10. On the album Your Funeral My Trial (Mute Records CDSTUMM, 34) by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. 11. See, for example, C. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

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Wenders would have to 'descend', as Damiel does—that is, accept a position within Hollywood—and thus lose his privileges, as Damiel does, and indeed as Wenders did when he made Hammett for Coppola. 12

Bibliography Adorno, T., Aesthetic Theory (trans. C. Lenhardt; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). —Philosophy of Modern Music (trans. A.G. Mitchell and W.V. Blomster; London: Sheed & Ward). Adorno, T., and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. J. Cumming; New York: Verso/NLB, 1979). Bloch, E., Essays on the Philosophy of Music (trans. P. Palmer; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Flinn, C , Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Gorbman, C , Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Grout, D.J., and C.V. Palisca, A History of Western Music (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1988). Kolker, R.P., and P. Beicker, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Representation (trans. E.FJ. Payne; 2 vols.; New York: Dover Publications, 1966). Wenders, W., The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations (trans. M. Hofmann; London: Faber & Faber, 1997). —Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema (trans. S. Whiteside, in assoc. with M. Hofmann; London: Faber & Faber, 1989). — The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations (trans. M. Hofmann; London: Faber & Faber, 1991).

12. Dir. Wenders, 1982. For a full explanation of Hammett's production history, see Wenders, The Logic of Images.

beleaguered

Julian Crockford 'Fictional Capital': Economics and Narrative in the Novels of Jay Mclnerney

'The guys who understand business are going to write the new literature. Wally Stevens said money is a kind of poetry, but he didn't follow his own advice' [...] The new writing will be about technology, the global economy, the electronic ebb and flow of wealth [...] 'Don't be seduced by all that crap about garrets and art.' l

So saying, a Jay Mclnerney character articulates one of the novelist's main thematic concerns—the close relationship between fiction and finance. While Mclnerney populates his novels with minor characters who are stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, and other workers in the financial field, his main protagonists always tend to be publishers, editors or authors, all of whom admit to a fascination with the economic world. In addition, and betraying that tendency of the young, contemporary American novelist to demonstrate his or her literary education, Mclnerney's novels also incorporate the kind of self-conscious allusion to contemporary literary theory that can't help but suggest a college fund well spent. What separates him from the other brat pack writers, however, is his use of this critical self-consciousness as a platform from which to explore wider economic issues.2 This paper will concentrate upon his 1992 novel, Brightness Falls, in which a double plot concerns both the attempted hostile takeover of a publishing house by one of its employees, Russell Calloway, and the subsequent break-up of his marriage. Although the novel vacillates between these two financial and domestic narratives, the economic plot dominates for much of the text. While Mclnerney's novel stays unproblematically within the boundaries inscribed by classic realism, its examination of the state of contemporary 1. Jay Mclnerney, Bright Lights, Big City (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 19 p. 65. 2. The term 'brat pack' is used here to refer specifically to the generation of young novelists, writing predominantly in and about the 1980s, who achieved a high degree of mainstream media attention. The group also includes writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz and Michael Chabon. The work of this generation of authors, who are renamed 'The Blank Generation', is described in Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney (eds.), Shopping in Space (London: Serpent's Tail, 1992).

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literature does enable its author to describe and discuss the postmodern and poststructuralist theorization of the realist genre. Where this text is particularly effective, however, is in its linking of financial and fictional narratives. When the theoretical connections between the economic and literary processes are considered, both are revealed as structures of signification and it is this connection that enables Mclnerney to explore the economic culture of the period. A brief discussion of the theorization of money will demonstrate that the kind of financial institutions that predominated during the 1980s were predicated upon an understanding of economics as an essentially semiotic process, one in which money functioned as a sign. The period was characterized by an emphasis upon what David Harvey, via Marx, refers to as ' "fictional capital"...some kind of money bet on production that does not yet exist'. 3 This definition encompasses the stock market, and leverage and credit institutions, in which money was invested in order to create a profit from itself, thereby severing it from its link to specific acts of production. Descriptions of these financial structures entailed a specific understanding of economics, one which differed from classic materialist accounts. For Marx, for example, money has always appeared in the context of an exchange structure. Tracing society's historical emergence from a barter economy, characterized by the direct exchange of one commodity for another, Marx describes how this increasingly common process of exchange forced the invention of money. To facilitate more efficient exchange, one commodity in particular needed to emerge as a standard, as a universal equivalent against which all the others could be measured. This object or substance, otherwise known as money, still possessed the standard commodity elements, use, exchange and general values, but with one important distinction. Its exchange value became split along the grounds of its two main functions, as it became both a means of payment and a store of value. The money commodity can be described, therefore, as having both reflex and intrinsic value. Reflex value appears in money's use as a token of exchange, when it appears in a differential system between the commodities for which it is exchanged. It becomes essentially worth only what it will buy. In contrast, its intrinsic value is manifest only in its materiality, the worth of the raw material which constitutes it. In both cases, however, the question remains—what is the specific quality that actually constitutes the foundation, or source, of value? It is precisely the difficulty of answering this question that allows money's function to be 3. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity 1990), pp. 107-108.

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

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considered as a semiotic problem. The question of value is transformed into a problem of reference. To what exactly does the economic sign refer? This question was complicated further by the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1973, when the guaranteed convertibility between the dollar and a specified amount of gold was dissolved. Money was effectively dematerialized when it was detached from a specific commodity. Consequently it becomes impossible to consider value as an intrinsic quality of the material of money, for it is no longer tied to any specific raw material. Therefore, money can be conceived of only in terms of its reflex value. When money becomes a mere token for value in exchange it exists as pure sign. This fiscal sign operates in exactly the same way as the linguistic sign, which, in the words of Jonathan Culler, is a 'purely relational entit[y], [a] product of a system of differences'.4 According to this logic, the very possibility of defining an actual or material ground for value disappears in a relational network. So, this understanding of money describes what is effectively a self-contained system of difference, eternally deferring questions of extrinsic value, and thus, the referent of the economic sign. Detached from any reference to a specific amount of real material gold, the economic sign effectively enters hyperreality. In Simulations, Baudrillard describes how the sign becomes the euphoric replacement for, and masks the lack of, the object of which it was supposed to be a representation. For Baudrillard, hyperreality is a closed, infinitely self-replicating system, which effaces its own boundaries, 'cause and effect, the beginning and the end'. He goes on to suggest that 'in this manner all closed systems protect themselves at the same time from the referential'.55 In 'Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction', Baudrillard explicitly implicates money in this process: 'What is fascinating about money [...] is its systematic nature, the potential enclosed in the material for total commutability of all values, thanks to their definitive abstraction. It is this abstraction, the total artificiality of the sign that one "adores" in money. What is

fetishized is the closed perfection of a system, not the "golden calf," or the treasure.'66 The money and stock markets as fictional capital, are predicated upon exactly this kind of hyperreality. The process of buying stocks low and selling them high is dependent upon a free floating value 4. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 40. 5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semitoext(e), 1983), p. 148. 6. Jean Baudrillard, 'Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction', in idem, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (trans. C. Levin; St Louis: Telos Press, 1981), pp. 88-101 (93).

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that can be detached from the limitations of real world production. This process clearly has an affinity with the postmodern loss of faith in anything beyond the textual structure. That many postmodern writers are fascinated by the financial world might be explained by this tendency to function in the same way in which they understand that language does. An interest in literary semiotic structures is easily extrapolated when an already familiar logic is spotted replicating itself in the conduits of the global economy, breeding in the electronic ebb and flow of wealth. Crucially, Marx's understanding of the functioning of money exhibits none of this ambivalence towards referentiality. Sidestepping any problematization of the economic sign, Marx's 'value theory' locates the ultimate source of value, quite simply, in acts of labour. Money may still be understood as a sign, but it becomes a sign with a very specific referent. In Capital, Marx suggests that 'Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form [...of] that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour time.' 7 It is this labour time that can be understood as the economic sign's missing referent. However, Marx does admit that once the economic sign enters the exchange mechanism, this referentiality is actively concealed by the sudden promotion of its reflex value, becoming displaced when the sign enters differential play. Money achieves an apparent autonomy in exchange, which obscures the source of its value, a process Marx describes as commodity fetishism. As David Harvey puts it, in The Limits to Capital, The exchange of commodities for money is real enough, yet it conceals our social relationships with others behind a mere thing—the money form itself. The act of exchange tells us nothing about the conditions of labour of the producers, for example, and keeps us in a state of ignorance concerning our social relations as these are mediated by the market system [...] The existence of money—the form of value—conceals the social meaning of value itself.8

By refusing to recognize the possibility of unproblematic reference, and by concentrating only on the sign within its exchange structure, poststructuralist theory is complicit with this process of commodity fetishism. The conservative logic of money's refusal to acknowledge its own origin in labour is repeated in the critics' neglect of the broader historical foundations of value. 7. Karl Marx, Capital, I (3 vols.; New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 73. Quoted in David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), p. 16. 8. Harvey, The Limits to Capital, p. 17.

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Mclnerney's novels are important because they self-consciously locate themselves within this debate about the semiotic functioning of money. Brightness Falls foregrounds these issues by exploring the connections between economic signs and structures, and literary and linguistic ones. Mclnerney uses his narrative as a critical wedge to separate out semiotic and labour-based economic theories, in order that they might be compared and contrasted. This he achieves by acknowledging a corresponding tension between postmodern and classical realist fictional strategies. This is most obvious in the confrontation between two of Russell Calloway's authors, Victor Propp and Jeff Pierce. Propp is a Pynchonesque postmodernist, whose reputation is based on published fragments of his endlessly deferred second novel. Pierce represents an antithesis to this position, for he is a sensitive, empiricist realist, whose first book is described as 'a collection of stories about an eccentric New England clan that, not so remarkably, closely resembled his own'. 9 The contrast between their respective personal and literary ideologies allows Mclnerney to reflect upon, and then critique, a semiotic understanding of economic structures. Not surprisingly, it is Propp who articulates the poststructuralist position. He exists in a postmodern sphere, and is described as having 'entered an almost purely theoretical realm', with his reputation growing each time he fails to publish his long-awaited second novel (p. 73). He continually manages to negotiate six-figure advances on the back of this book, which his death reveals as barely started, let alone existent in any substantial form. Instead, what exists is a kind of palimpsest, 'multiple copies of the pages [already] published in magazines and journals, annotated over and over again in differentcolored inks, most of the pages so dense with longhand scrawl as to be entirely illegible' (p. 408). It is only its own process of inscription, which is extrapolated to the point of meaninglessness, all sign and no sense, that constitutes Propp's book. In this, Propp's writing displays many of the characteristics of the economic sign in exchange, which, caught in a self-contained, self-generating system, also makes sense only in so far as it is inscribed within that system, and is meaningless outside of it. This correspondence between fiction and finance is strengthened by Propp's ability to make a living from this non-existent book. He generates wealth from a sign, the promised second novel, with no actual referent, effectively transforming it into a correlative of the economic sign. That Propp is indeed intended as a representative for postmodern economics is confirmed by his unproblematic engagement with the 9. Jay Mclnerney, Brightness Falls (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 10. Subsequent page references will be to this edition.

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stock market, which clearly takes precedence over his literary career. He claims to 'understand the stock market better than my broker' (p. 78), a fact which is corroborated when he boosts his own market value, simply by postulating a (probably fictional) bid from a rival publisher. An exploration of Propp's personal ideology further exposes the political implications of his postmodern perspective, and by analogy the semiotic approach to economics. Propp's politics are embodied in his theorization of the 'free lunch', a concept that he understands as integral to American culture and ideology: [WJasn't that really what it meant to be an American, to believe above all in the free lunch [...] firmly fixed in the national psyche was the bedrock belief in something for nothing, the idea that five would get you ten. The free lunch [...] was the gratuitous vein of gold, the oil gusher, the grabbed land, the stock market killing, the windfall profit, the movie sale. Europeans believed in the zero sum game, that one man's feast was his neighbor's fast. But here the whole continent had been free, almost, for the taking (p. 70).

Clearly, Propp's ideology neatly sidesteps any questions of reference, in this case the source of his wealth. Any consideration of the origin of the free lunch is displaced as surely as the question of value in a semiotic understanding of money. When he articulates his own relation to postmodern literary language, Propp manages to tie together all these themes, the American Dream, language and money. He suggests that Americans took everything at face value—words, signs, rhetoric, faces—as if reality itself were so much legal tender [...] Even the phrase 'face value' suggested [...] a labyrinth of interpretation, of masks and falsity and deceit, divergences of appearance and reality, rancorous divorces between signiner and signified, the apparent solidity of the words collapsing underfoot, feathering out and deliquescing into Derridean twilight, surfaces giving way suddenly [...]' (p. 71).

Propp's work, and his ideology, then, perfectly encompass the poststructuralist logic of the economic sign, prizing appearance over substance, surface over depth, and effect over cause. In Brightness Falls, this kind of theorization assumes an ethical dimension. Propp, and hence the postmodern economics he represents, are figured as morally dubious. Propp is portrayed as solipsistic and self-serving and when he dies he leaves nothing, save a vacuum that should have been filled by his second novel. Postmodern literary practice and economics are thus rendered equally empty. Jeff Pierce's authorial ideology resists Propp's deconstructive tendencies. He appeals to a ground beyond Propp's metalinguistic speculation. Rather than being trapped in a system of language, Jeff wants to get

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beyond it to the field of true experience: 'It all seems so inauthentic, and I don't just mean the bad stuff. The artifice of sitting down, the way language implicates you in the lie right off. "April is the crudest month." Yeah? Bullshit. How about February? But once you start, you're inside the thing; the rhetoric has you' (p. 108). Instead, Jeff attempts to ground his writing in actual experience which leads him to drugs and casual sex: 'I'm the guy [...] who can't help believing that getting the hooker [...] will lead me to an ecstatic merger with the raw stuff of the universe' (pp. 407-408). Although his empiricist-realist aesthetic is doomed to failure, Mclnerney uses the figure of Jeff, and what he stands for, as a means of cracking Propp's triumphalist postmodernism, and by implication the Baudrillardian hyperreality of poststructuralist economics. Jeff's realist writing is characterized by a set of commitments to those concepts that postmodernism and poststrueturalism attempt to undermine. Jeff articulates the possibility of transparent reference, the reintroduction of experience as the meaning of realist writing, and the re-establishment of the autonomous human being who exists above and beyond his or her inscription in discourse. These ideas are clearly incompatible with the poststructuralist understanding of money, as they stress what lies beyond inscription, by gesturing to an existent referent. Through Jeff, Brightness Falls is able to question Propp's semiotic economism. In theory, this presents Mclnerney with an opportunity to examine the repressed source of Propp's free lunch, and gives him a chance to state the case for the zero sum game, to suggest that, actually, 'one man's feast was his neighbor's fast' and so to expose money's foundation in labour. However, what actually happens in Brightness Falls is that, having reached this point of potential critique, Mclnerney simply switches genres, abandoning the financial narrative in favour of the domestic one that details the break-up of the Calloways' marriage. The financial plot finishes, inconclusively, with the October 1987 stock market crash. The collapse was caused by investors panicked about the increasing disparity between the face value of their investments and their perceived ability to redeem them for their declared value. This sudden loss of confidence led to a downward spiral, which wiped trillions of dollars from the market. With the whole edifice of postmodern economics in disarray—its self-contained structure ruptured, and its own logic no longer capable of sustaining itself—the question of economic value was once again forced into focus. This crisis of economic signification revealed an absence as obvious as Propp's never completed novel, the lack of a stable value referent. It is at this point that Marx's theory of labour could be inserted in order to fill this gap, and, in fact, embedded within the narrative of Brightness Falls are

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accounts of this labour process. The most important of these incidents occurs in a discussion between Russell Calloway and his father, who used to work in the automobile industry. When Russell tells him of the impending take-over deal, his father opposes it with an allusion to material production: 'At least General Motors makes something [...] there's something wrong with the economy when it rewards the speculators and lawyers and bankers without producing anything' (p. 193). His father remembers how he'd attempted to teach Russell the relationship between labour and money, even as a child: 'It wasn't because I was mean that I made you kids earn all your spending money [...] I wanted you to be able to take care of yourself (p. 193). With the collapse of his deal, Russell is forced to concede his father's point when all his assets, including thousands of dollars of credit, are wiped out. This discussion represents the novel's structural convergence, as domestic and financial discourses come into direct contact. However, rather than using this discussion of labour relations as a means to critique poststructuralist economics, the text instead reinscribes the social relationships between family and friends as its point of closure, prematurely ending the economic discussion. Curiously, this might be seen as a repetition of that logic of money which Marx describes as commodity fetishism. This part of the narrative assumes a reflex value in the context of the novel, rather than an intrinsic one. The closure of the novel is based on the filial context (reflex value) of the conversation, father to son, rather than its (intrinsic) content—the importance of labour relations. Its meaning is constituted by its position in a structure (a system of nested narratives), rather than what it actually signifies (acknowledging the repression of labour). In this sense, the novel becomes a self-contained structure analogous to the economic exchange system, which, akin to Baudrillard's system of hyperreality, protects itself from the referential by effacing its own boundaries, 'cause and effect, the beginning and the end'. Thus, when a materialist reference threatens to rupture the text's hermetic system, it is neatly negated by exchanging it for a more controllable narrative strand. Mclnerney switches abruptly, in both focus and sympathy, from Russell's financial narrative to his wife, Corrine's, domestic one, as the couple are reconciled once more: When they talked about what had gone wrong during the past year, Russell and Corrine were always telling two different stories. In his history of their world, the battle for control of a publishing company and the stock market crash of 1987 would feature predominantly, stirringly; in hers these were footnotes in tiny print (p. 412).

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Instead Corrine realizes 'how connected and interdependent each of them was at all times, their well-being intimately bound up with the fate of those around them' (p. 412). It is this network of affection and family bloodlines, rather than labour relations, which constitutes the novel's conclusion as the question of economic value is displaced by an emphasis on emotional value. The final page describes Russell realizing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous towards the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation (p. 416).

The financial losses resulting from the stock market crash are displaced in the narrative by this recognition, and prioritizing, of emotional loss. The loss to the novel is that it thus fails to complete its potential critique of the postmodern economics of the 1980s. Mclnerney sets it up, but is unable to complete it due to the limitations of the liberal ideology which constitutes the mode of domestic realism that he chooses to close his text.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean, 'Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction', in idem, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (trans. C. Levin; St Louis: Telos Press, 1981), pp. 88-100. —Simulations (New York: Semitoext(e), 1983). Culler, Jonathan, The Pursuit of Signs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). —The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). Marx, Karl, Capital, I (3 vols.; New York: International Publishers, 1967). Mclnerney, Jay, Bright Lights, Big City (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1988). —Brightness Falls (London: Penguin Books, 1993). Young, Elizabeth, and Graham Caveney (eds.), Shopping in Space (London: Serpent's Tail, 1992).

Johannes Angermuller Bourdieu versus Deconstruction: The Social (Con) Text of Irony and Reality

'Power', 'class' and 'history' have become key words for the interpretation of literature. After two decades of deconstructive criticism the social has invaded the text. However, those who are the principal experts on how to deal with texts, i.e. literary critics, are not necessarily the principal experts on sociopolitical contexts. Pierre Bourdieu recently gave new impulses by focusing on the social conditions of literary production. In the following I shall discuss the question of why deconstructionist criticism has turned towards the social and what Bourdieu may contribute to the problem of text and reality.

Why deconstruction was such a liberating experience... The history of Derrida's reception in the United States is a textbook example of how a theory fulfils the needs of an intellectual community at a time when an old paradigm is suddenly perceived as a dead end. In the 1970s, his reflections on the nature of the sign sounded the death knell for the New Critical paradigm and triggered a revolution, especially in departments of English, French and Comparative Literature. This intellectual reversal was based on a fairly simple idea: that meaning derives exclusively from the relations and differences between the signifiers, and not from signineds, positive terms, or transcendental truths. Meaning comes from within the system, produced by internal relations and differences, not by some given 'essence'. In Jameson's words: 'The originality of Structuralism lies in its insistence on the signifier.'1 The text turns 'flat'. Derrida pits the referential aspect of the sign against the differential production of its meaning, with the idea of difference winning uncontestedly. Both ideas—the privileged nature of the signified over the signifier and the arbitrary character of the signifier's meaning—clearly 1. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 111.

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existed in Saussure's structuralist linguistics. Derrida clarifies this apparent contradiction in Saussure by showing that the logocentrist layer of Saussure's theory (the privilege of the signified) is 'in contradiction to Saussure's scientific project'2 and should be done away with. Since the meaning of a signiner is but the product of the difference from what it is not, the signified cannot claim any transcendental self-contained truth. The privilege of the signified over the signifier turns out to be artificial; truth, reality, authorship, in short: all philosophy is first and foremost written. Many American critics of the 1970s found this an appealing idea since they no longer had to indulge in 'the adulation of the author'.3 Barthes's earlier programmatic statement of the 'death of the author' expressed their increasing doubts about the privileged role of the Cartesian subject. The critique of concepts such as 'author', 'intent' and 'consciousness' was accompanied by a rigorous reconceptualization of the referentialtranscendental reality the text had (supposedly) referred to. Thus the end of the humanist project dovetailed with the crisis of realism.4 The text becomes a battlefield where the referents ('reality') and the rhetorical means of their 'expression' ('tropes', 'style', 'writing') are in a constant struggle. Derrida's rigorous treatment of classical philosophical texts highlights this 'tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it [the text] manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless con-

strained to mean'? For some American critics, Derrida's formula became the rationale to stop short of what happens beyond the pages of the books. 'Free play' deconstruction was hardly occupied with thorough analyses of the history and the social context of the literary text. Geoffrey Hartman, for instance, pleaded for entering 'wholeheartedly... into the dance of meaning'.6 Yet to others 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte' came to mean something else. Marxist critics, in particular, have taken up deconstruction as 'an ultimately political practice' because it sets out 'to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of political structures and social institutions

2. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1974]), p. 52. 3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Translator's Preface', in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 [1967]), p. lxxiv. 4. Cf. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970). 5. Christopher Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987), p. 19. 6. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 92.

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maintains its force'.7 For this reason, a certain number of Marxists, feminists and other politically minded theorists have eagerly taken up deconstruction as a fundamental ideology critique. In all these cases, the structuralist language model is taken to break down the strict distinction between the inside ('books') and the outside ('reality'). In this sense, 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte' does not deny the existence of a reality beyond a book but, rather, postulates that reality, too, is (structured like) a sign: 'The system of the sign has no outside.'8 The 'outside' becomes an 'inside', thus explicitly going beyond the small world of an academic library at Yale or Columbia and, later, beyond disciplinary boundaries. What unified 'free play' and post-Marxist deconstruction was a model according to which the signiner is no longer dependent on the signified. For post-Marxists as well as for 'free play' deconstructionists, the 'outside' is no longer a substantive self-contained exteriority. They are engaged 'in something other than traditional humanistic interpretation'.9 In both cases, the totality is seen as a system of signifiers with no positive terms: '[T]he priority of the language model is maintained.'10 Deconstruction helped liberate one type of author—literary critics— from another type of author—the 'speaking subject' literary critics were writing about (poets and writers). In fact, deconstruction has turned out to be a smart move to justify the claim that the writing of literary critics is no less real or relevant than the texts to be 'interpreted'. The 'real' meaning is no less a matter of the critics' books than it is of the authors' books or even of 'reality' itself.11 Positing the almighty critic has had the significant side effect that she or he managed to escape a society increasingly dominated by neoconservative, fundamentalist or even reactionary tendencies. In the 1980s, American critics in the deconstructionist mould were no longer bound by the constraints imposed by other 'speaking subjects', by any universal truths, or, in short, by the world beyond their intellectual community. Deconstructionists began to defend 'the critic's freedom to adopt a charged and "answerable" style of his own in order to counter the weight of received opinion'.12 7. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 128. 8. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 234. 9. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 20. 10. Jameson, Prison-House, p. 112. 11. Cf. especially Jacques Derrida, Glas. Que reste-t-il du savoir absoluP (2 vols.; Paris: Denoel/Gonthier, 1974). 12. Norris, Deconstruction, p. 16.

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This increasing distance from the values of 'common sense' correlated with deconstruction's institutionalization and gaining of autonomy within the academic field. Since deconstruction, especially in the de Manian version, claimed to be a highly rigorous, technical and reproducible operation, it needed teaching and discipleship. So not only does deconstruction guarantee the intellectual autonomy of the critic from right-wing 'family values', gradually it has become an expression of a field with its own logic and syllabus: 'any determination of the political function of the [deconstructionist] literary critic, either from the left or from the right, is incompatible with the institutional autonomy of criticism'.13 Controlling the texts to be deconstructed rather than being controlled by these texts, the new Derridean critic suddenly realized that the canon was dominated by a 'metaphysics of presence' and that even the canon itself might be an ideology crying out for deconstruction. Thus, towards the late 1980s, the astonished critic founds himself or herself in a whole society waiting to be deconstructed. It was no longer a problem of a couple of great books. As Guillory remarks, 'the thematization of the political always falls short of satisfying political demand just by being confined to the literary syllabus'.14 Western tradition and society needed to be addressed in their own right.

.. .and why it finally went downhill Asserting the self-contained character of the text had a funny consequence: by rejecting the privilege of the transcendental signified, the autonomy claimed by the Derridean vanguard critics—both on the postMarxist and 'on the wild side' deconstructionists—led them to recognize that the very world, and yes, society, was metaphysical to its roots. From 'there is nothing outside the text' to 'where's the political?'15 As early as the mid-1980s Derrida recognized the implications of a 'something' beyond the classical philosophers he had been busy deconstructing. As in the case of de Man, Derrida is aware of deconstruction's institutional ramifications: the necessity of deconstruction.. .did not primarily concern philosophical contents, themes or theses, philosophemes, poems, theologemes, ideologemes, but, above all and inseparably, signifying frames, institutional 13. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 247. 14. Guillory, Cultural Capital, p. 237. 15. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996).

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The autonomous position of the intellectual must be maintained in order to preserve his or her freedom from the encroachments of state, markets and other external forces. Derrida's reflections on the relation of intellectual and institution are accompanied by a shift towards overtly political topics. This 'political turn' of deconstruction takes place in Derrida's discussions of repressed others (e.g. the immigrant), violence, the question of human rights and so forth. From the early 1990s on, Derrida's books are considerably preoccupied with these problems17 but it seems unlikely that the impact will be similar to that of Of Grammatology. The turn towards the political has finally marked the beginning crisis of deconstruction. A basic tenet of deconstruction was that despite Nietzsche's, Heidegger's and perhaps even Derrida's powerful efforts to go beyond metaphysics 'the destruction of metaphysics remains within metaphysics'.18 In the long run, sticking to the text means remaining within the gloomy hopeless state called metaphysics without ever going beyond. But at a time when critics become more and more engaged in social and political problems, saying 'it's the text!' indeed may appear a little defensive. Accordingly, critics have recognized an 'apparent detachment of much theory from overtly political questions'.19 The text becomes too restraining a category, a 'prison house of language' Oameson) that, ultimately, can only be undone by social practice: finally the social 'something' cries out for more thorough treatment. Since the early 1990s, many literary critics who started out as 'new New Criticism' deconstructionists have become feminist, post-Marxist, or New Historicist critics working on the problems of social change, inequality and repression. The ironic consequence of 'deconstruction as industry' was that the political implications of deconstruction led to its own deconstruction. To an increasing number of critics, a paradigm once again looks like a dead end: after the 'linguistic turn' (Rorty) the 'political turn'.

16. Jacques Derrida, Du Droit a laphilosophie (Paris: Galilee, 1990), p. 452. All translations from the French original are mine. 17. For instance, Jacques Derrida, Force de Lot. Le 'fondement mystique de Vautorite' (Paris: Galilee, 1994) and idem, Le Droit a la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique (Paris: Verdier, 1997). 18. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 48. 19. Guillory, Cultural Capital, p. 176.

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The theory of Pierre Bourdieu has lately been received as one of the most promising approaches for dealing with the social origins of symbolic power. 20 A reading of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale will serve to introduce his general approach.

Flaubert's ironical realism In Les Regies de I'art,21 Bourdieu takes Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale22 as an example to analyse the social context and history of late nineteenth-century French literary production. L'Education sentimentale, like Madame Bovary, caused a great deal of controversy, even hostility, among Flaubert's contemporaries. The plot is centered around Frederic, a young boheme prosperous enough to live off his fortune in Paris in the time before and after the revolution of 1848. The most characteristic feature of the novel's figures is their mediocrity; the distinctive feature of the plot is its slowness. Frederic never ceases to court one or two mistresses and, because of his idleness, experiences a gradual decline of his material situation. He is torn between the artistic and the bourgeois world and succeeds in neither of them. The tension that he epitomizes between the artistic-intellectual boheme and the grand monde remains unresolved. What is striking is Flaubert's minute and sophisticated description of this long non-event. He gives an extremely accurate representation of the time and its figures, who were taken from 'real life'. The description of seemingly minor details, such as the way of speaking, background events of daily and social life, the fashions and customs of the time, was preceded by an accumulation of notes and papers, interviews and thorough research. In terms of his obsession with reality, Flaubert is a full-blown realist. The formal aspect of the Flaubertian novel, its style, is perhaps what it is most famous for and the result of an unusual amount of energy on Flaubert's part. The Flaubertian style is strikingly clear and precise, economically producing the desired effects. The concise and skilful articulation of his observations, carefully placed between the actually spoken words of the figures, gives a rich and lively touch to the text. Through these interventions, Flaubert skilfully evokes powerful overtones, which permit the impression of 'actually being there'. This 'effect

20. Cf. Guillory, Cultural Capital. 21. Pierre Bourdieu, Les Regies de I'art. Genese et structure du champ litteraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992). 22. Gustave Flaubert, L'Education sentimentale (Paris: Garnier, 1965 [1869]).

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of the real' (Barthes) passes through these brief remarks; they seem to move the text close to the world presented. Yet, although presenting reality as faithfully as possible, the author is never totally absent. This demi-presence can be seen in Flaubert's frequent use of the style indirect libre. The distinction between spoken truth and written commentary breaks down; the author invades the words of his figures. The spoken words begin to oscillate between voice and writing. A distance opens up between the words and the actual situation where they were uttered. The effect of this technique is irony. Irony pervades Flaubert's text everywhere. It is this strange distancing opening up between the spoken words and the author's remarks, between reality and style, that creates irony. Since Flaubert is neither positively nor negatively attached to the universe, he depicts his attitude as always being that of a critical observer who describes every detail he perceives without ever emotionally committing himself to this world. Flaubert's irony results from his unresolved position in a social universe determined by conflicts over symbolic and economic capital.

Bourdieu's analysis of the social conditions of literary production Bourdieu's point is that the reasons for Flaubert's style and the success it met with are not to be sought in the personal brilliance of the author but, instead, in the conditions of intellectual production at that time. Bourdieu gives historical explanations of the battles and relations dominating and making possible the field of art and literature. This field is structured according to the composition and volume of capital the actors in the field dispose of. There is always a (real or potential) conflict between the unequal participants of the game. In late-nineteenthcentury France, for instance, there were, on the one hand, those who, by their institutional position (for instance in the Academie franchise or the French state), by their prestige, and/or by their commercial success were the most powerful and accomplished in producing and reproducing the rules of the literary 'game'. On the other hand, there was an increasing reservoir of mostly obscure and young aspiring writers who, because of their lack of one or several forms of capital, never succeeded in attaining the recognition and success they were striving for. Due to improved educational opportunities for large parts of the population, an increasing number of young intellectuals came to Paris trying to make their living as writers or artists. In this increasingly competitive situation high institutional positions, broad popularity or sweeping commercial successes were no longer sufficient to guarantee the writer's recognition

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by other players of the 'game'. At some point in the 1860s and 1870s the redefinition of the intellectual's role brought about the restricted mode of cultural production, where commercial success was low but the profit of cultural capital high. This structural change in the field of literary production went hand in hand with the necessity of the artist's total devotion to a pure, detached art for art's sake. No longer did the writers consider themselves as the carriers of a moral message. Instead, they soon denned writing as L'artpour I'arf, that is, as independent of any moral meaning or social commitment (cf. Baudelaire). Flaubert's ironical realism is one of the first crucial expressions of this restricted mode of production. A consequence of his social background, Flaubert's position was highly privileged in terms of both economic and cultural capital. This 'double bind' of his real social position is the reason for the apparent indifference expressed in his novels. The irony of his style is the sublime expression of his position in between the economic and the intellectual. His objectively independent position enabled him to observe the social milieu he lived in with distance and aloofness, an attitude that helped initiate a revolution in the field of literary production of his time.

Flaubert's effect of the real versus Bourdieu's reality Bourdieu is both fascinated by and dismissive of Flaubert's ironical realism. The crucial concept with which he analyses Flaubert is the underlying structures and dispositions guiding our interpretation: our habitus. According to Bourdieu, for an author to be understood by a reader it is necessary that both believe that the 'game' played in the field—be it in the ordinary world, in literature or in science—is worth it, has to be taken seriously by the actors. To support this argument, Bourdieu cites the example of Durkheim's logical conformism',23 the basic agreement between the actors on the fundamental schemes of perception, without which there would be no meaning. It is the fundamental belief of the participants in the 'games of society' in the reality of the game, 'a fundamental illusio, a belief in the reality of the world' 24 which is the origin of all meaning. Without such a fundamental socialization, the 'incorporation of shared structures' and the basic condition for the production of meaning would be missing. Flaubert has an excellent command of the underlying incorporated structures of the shared common sense. He skilfully plays with the 23. Bourdieu, Regies, p. 452. 24. Bourdieu, Regies, p. 456.

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reader's anticipations, which gives his fiction its realistic touch. Reader and writer are united by a 'consensus on the sense of the world'. 25 This 'common sense', an incorporated structure like the habitus, is what generates certain expectations within the reader which are consciously created by Flaubert. When he uses familiar stereotypes, for instance, the reader imagines himself or herself to be on familiar territory, but this assumption is soon overturned. It is this sobering effect which creates Flaubert's irony. This half-serious play is what makes his fiction 'more real than what is immediately given to the senses'. 26 And it is this fundamental sobriety, irony and detachment from the ordinary games of social life which made Flaubert's work scandalous for his contemporaries and appealing for Bourdieu. Yet, in the case of Flaubert, Bourdieu never speaks of reality but always of le reel (the real), or the effect of the real. The real is the reality of the fictional that has recourse to concrete histories and singular events. Since the functioning of the 'effect of the real' depends on the meaning-generating structure of shared schemes of perception, the fictional representation of reality is ultimately limited by the common sense: 'This suggestive, allusive, elliptical form is what makes...the literary text deliver the structure, but by covering and stealing it from sight.' 27 Thus Bourdieu makes a very clear distinction between fiction and a scientific representation of reality. To analyse the Reality of the sociologist, it is necessary to be scientific, to present things objectively, and not to have recourse to the singular event and a real that is just the effect of latent structures of the common sense. Literature, by contrast, is always caught in the 'games' that only work because they are taken seriously by the actors. For a statement to be scientific, reality has to be represented by representative samples that 'exemplify very concretely, like the piece of a tissue, the whole part'. 28 Reality has to be measured, quantified and objectified. Ultimately, only the sociologist is able to perform this task and 'pronounce the things as they are, without euphemisms, without demanding to be taken seriously'.29 Bourdieu wants to render 'the things as they are' and 'without demanding to be taken seriously' since a scientific representation of Reality does not need to have recourse to the 'games of society', to a fundamental belief, or to the common sense. But if meaning is 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Bourdieu, Regies, p. 457. Bourdieu, Regies, p. 457. Bourdieu, Regies, p. 458. Bourdieu, Regies, p. 458. Bourdieu, Regies, p. 458.

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constituted by the shared expectations of the 'players', how would Bourdieu be able to give an account of Reality that would not need to have recourse to a fundamental 'belief? How would the author—no matter whether scientific or literary—sidestep the shared structures of common perception and immediately grasp Reality as such?

Meaningless reality? It may be true that Bourdieu cannot claim a personal rendez-vous with Reality but at least he is confidently waiting for a date to be fixed. A reading 'taking seriously' his actual writing reveals that Reality elegantly does without 'demanding to be taken seriously' by the 'participants of the game'. Consequently, the high priest of Reality—the sociologist— must never allow the holy Truth to enter the play of the written. Ironically, this orthodoxy has been called into question by a Jesuit, Michel de Certeau, who considers Bourdieu's theory—in stark contrast to his actual empirical research—'mystical', 'aggressive' and a 'fetish' because of its 'totalizing' tendency.30 The contradiction between subtle analysis and 'theory' seems equally at work in the discussion of Flaubert. Bourdieu's theory claims that Reality, unlike 'the effect of the real', comes without the trace of the written: 'things as they are'. It seems that Culler's remark on the problems of philosophy holds equally true for Bourdieu's theory: 'Philosophers write, but they do not think that philosophy ought to be writing.'31 This paradox is the unacknowledged irony of Bourdieu's admirable analysis of late-nineteenth-century French literature. What Bourdieu's theory manifestly means to say is countered by what he is nevertheless forced to say: that there are no referential contents without textual form. Reality cannot but be represented through writing: a reality (at least with a small 'r') that is always written.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970). Beardsworth, Richard, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996). Bourdieu, Pierre, Les Regies de I'art. Genese et structure du champ litteraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992). Certeau, Michel de, L'Invention du quotidien. I Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

30. Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien. I Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 94, 96. 31. Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 89.

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Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). Derrida, Jacques, DuDroit a laphilosophie (Paris: Galilee, 1990). —Le Droit a la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique (Paris: Verdier, 1997). —Force de Lot Le 'fondement mystique de I'autorite'' (Paris: Galilee, 1994). —Glas. Que reste-t-il du savoir absolu? (2 vols.; Paris: Denoel/Gonthier, 1974). —Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 [1967]). —Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). —Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1974]). Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Blackwell, 1983)Flaubert, Gustave, L'Education sentimentale (Paris: Gamier, 1965 [1869]). Guillory, John, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Jameson, Fredric, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1982). —Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987).

Helen Freshwater Performance Theory, Practice and the Intrusion of the Real

The relationship between theatrical theory and practice is being reconfigured by the encroachment of the 'real', with consequences for the form of both fields, as well as the form of performance itself. Any consideration of this area of disciplinary reconstruction will inevitably involve an attempt to define the 'real', while the performances under consideration often fall outwith the remit of academic assessment, and, in breaking the containing physical boundary of the performer's skin, challenge traditional stage conventions and notions of 'good taste'. Performance theory is nothing new. Theatre practice has always been shadowed by an echolalia of comment and criticism, where the immediacy of enactment is haunted by its very own ineluctable Other. Aristotle's Poetics and Plato's Republic contain moments of textual prescription, and works such as Artaud's The Theatre and its Double demonstrate the way in which theory can fuel performance as well as shadow it.1 Artaud's inability to put his theoretical construct, 'the impossible theatre', into practice, generated innumerable future attempts. Furthermore, the close relationship between the academy and many performers provides a space for the entry of the 'non-real' of theory into concrete practice. The work of Orlan, a French performance artist, is the perfect example of this tendency. She is a professor at the College of Art in Dijon, and her choreographed explorations of the field of radical cosmetic surgery often include quotations from philosophers and psychoanalysts (including Lacan and Artaud) which she reads aloud while undergoing surgery: art, life and the commentary upon it all in one. This is symptomatic of the way in which performance theory has recently begun to widen its scope. It no longer limits its enquiries to the straightforwardly performative, but stretches its interests to include the 1. Aristotle, The Poetics (ed. and trans. S. Halliwell; Cambridge, MA, 1995); Plato, Republic (trans. R. Waterfield; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (London: Calder Publications, 1993).

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realm of everyday life. Here, the boundaries have not only been traversed but also transformed, as discrete disciplinary identities undergo a process of dissolution, and the difference between theatre and life becomes increasingly difficult to define. Numerous theorists have drawn upon the adage 'all the world's a stage', in an exploration of the performative aspects of their disciplines. For example, Erving Goffman's monograph of 1956, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, is a sociological examination of 'role theory'.2 This illuminates the way in which we construct ourselves for the benefit of others, and the diverse roles placed upon the individual, such as parent, child, employee and consumer, which are conditioned by the officially credited values of society. This recognition of the performative dimension of the quotidian has proved fruitful for those who wish to interpret the sign systems of the newly labelled performative realm— which includes sports events, gay rights demonstrations, and environmental activism. Theory and praxis mirror each other as theoretical developments are reflected in the phenomenon of performance art, which demonstrates the increasing interdependency of the real and the theatrical, as they cross-fertilize to create a hybrid performance genre. This is indicated by the relocation of theatre to sites as diverse as the street, the factory, the school and the prison, not to mention the healthy development of siteand community-specific work. Recognition of the theatre's dialectical relation to the quotidian has been accompanied by a marked intrusion of performance into the real. The real, framed as performance, is often contained within the small screen. The proliferation of innumerable talk shows seems to have produced an epidemic of exhibitionism, as people compete to claim their fifteen minutes of fame. Daytime television is awash with personal confessions, revelations, accusations and denunciations. Furthermore, the confessional narrative has also taken firm hold of the publishing world, as the author's account of their dysfunctional family, disturbed childhood, addiction or eating disorder guarantees a boost to sales. However, our taste for the real is not limited to the sick, the sensational or the spectacular. The public's appetite for documentaries on the mundane business of hotels, prisons and airlines appears insatiable. These programmes often rely upon a tacit agreement between the viewed and those viewing, as the subjects of the gaze attempt to present themselves as ignorant of its presence. The popular consumption of 2. E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956).

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'private' scenes suggests that the private is primarily a public concern, marking a radical collision of the public and private realms, and blurring the boundary between the two. Such work interrogates habits of deception and secrecy in viewing and the presumed passivity and ignorance of the exposed object that fuels the voyeuristic traditions of naturalism. Furthermore, recognition of the narrative and theatrical tropes which inhabit the docu-drama reveals its purported authenticity as a fallacy, albeit a carefully constructed one. It is immediately apparent that the narrative demands of revelation and denouement provide the structure for the editorial arrangement of incoherent footage, however much the camera operators and director attempt to elide their existence. The real is clearly orchestrated to conform to a pre-determined performative paradigm. Nonetheless, the premium on live experience remains. However, the prolific supply responding to this demand also demonstrates the extent to which the 'aura' which previously surrounded lived experience has been erased.3 Freed from biographical content, lived experience is now released for consumption by viewers in their own particular cinematic situation. The displacement of personal detail surrounding the film clip or soundbite means that the representation of the experiences of the 'real' become functionally equivalent to any other depiction. Origin, uniqueness and authenticity are no longer relevant. Some would say that the mass media appears to be suffering from an overdose of theatricality. Raymond Williams describes the realignment of drama as habitual experience as a particularly modern condition, observing that we consume more drama in a week, in many cases, than most human beings previously would have seen in a lifetime.4 This condition is described by Feuerbach, who provides Guy Debord with the introductory citation to Society of the Spectacle: For the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence...illusion only is the sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.5

3. This notion of 'aura' is drawn from Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 211-44. 4. R. Williams, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), p. 12. 5. L. Feuerbach, preface to The Essence of Christianity (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), cited by G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), epigraph to first chapter: 'I: Separation Perfected' [no page numbers].

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This proclamation is echoed in the work of Baudrillard, who describes this tendency as the third stage of signification. This world is one where the signifier floats free from the signified, to circulate unimpeded by relation to its referent. This amounts to a religion of appearance, with the simulacra as sacred, while signs are divested of value, desiccated in exchange. This realm of the hyperreal represents an almost obscene supersaturation of imagery, plagued by the cybernetic inertia of nonintentional parody. Its existence removes the need for a public response to, and interrogation of, imagery, as we become increasingly inured to the real. Faced with this fate, performance clings to the authenticity provided by live, unmediated experience, moving away from the beguiling falsities of naturalism. Artaud is the high priest of this theatrical tendency, as he demanded that theatre stop representing everyday life. He maintained that his theatre is not the double of real life because it corresponds exactly to it, but because it is life to the extent to which it is unrepresentable. Artaud's manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty displays his perception of the altered role of the audience, and the extremity of his vision. He states that he wished to create: a theatre of blood a theatre which with each performance will have done something bodily to the one who performs as well as to the one who comes to see others perform, but actually the actors are not performing, they are doing. The theatre is in reality the genesis of creation.

Artaud's work is illuminated by Julia Kristeva's theoretical construct, the 'True-Real', or le vreel? This formulation represents a truth which would be the Real in the Lacanian sense of the term, where there are no images or semblances, and each element is neither real, nor symbolic, nor imaginary, but true. Thus the truth of the signifier, namely its separability and otherness, can be seen to be exerted oh the flesh itself, in a move defined by 'concretization'. It becomes apparent that Artaud's speaking subject in search of the 'True-Real' no longer distinguishes 6. A. Artaud, Oeuvres Completes, XIII (26 vols.; Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 14647, cited in H. Finter, 'Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre', The Drama Review 41.4 (Winter 1997), pp. 15-40 (16). 7. Kristeva's concept of le vreel is detailed in T. Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 214-17. Her essay lLe vreel' first appeared in J. Kristeva and J. Ribette (eds.), Folle Verite: verite et vraisemblance du texte psychotique (Paris: Seuil, 1979), pp. 11-35.

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between the sign and its referent in the usual Saussurian way, but takes the signifier for the real, leaving no space for the signified. Artaud's theories have left a long legacy of attempts to reach this 'True-Real'. Body art, developed in America during the late 1960s, placed cruelty on the stage in fulfilment of the promises of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Pieces included Chris Burden's Shoot, which involved the artist being shot in the arm, and Trans-fixed, a performance where the artist's palms were nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen.8 The experience of pain was designed to remove the body from the abstraction of representation, effectively rejecting the pretence of theatre and its attempts to evoke another 'absent' reality through mimesis. These experiments were based upon a desire to present pure 'presence', as the real asserts itself in opposition to the pretence of theatre. The destruction or slippage of the carefully constructed theatrical edifice is at the heart of many attempts to reach the real through theatre. Part of the audience fascination with live performance is the allure of accident, the potential for mistakes. We are hypnotized by the element of risk, desperately waiting for some irruption of the real. Furthermore, in the age of simulacra, the concept of being touched is reduced to the physical touch, while only the provocation of danger and corporeal pain seems capable of giving meaning or sense to existence. Theatre appears to be suffering a lack of faith in its traditional tools, rejecting the ludic convention and the reassurance that the performers are 'only playing', by adapting the techniques of the circus and extreme sports. The introduction of live creatures onto the stage illustrates this tendency. Recent performances have included live tarantulas, poisonous snakes and an entire colony of rats.9 The actor sharing the stage with these animals works in the face of danger, and in consequence, the performance is perceived as involving genuine risk. This theatre does not aim to highlight the presence of the living, but draws attention to the dangerous attraction of the antidote to the real. The appeal of release into closure through death is not confined to the play of signification, as the parade of death's harbingers and the exhibition of the blood of the performer appears to be the only way that human vulnerability and mortality can penetrate consciousness.

8. These performances are documented in C. Burden, Chris Burden: A Twenty Year Survey (Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988). 9. These appeared respectively in Jan Fabre's Elle etait et ette est, meme (1993), Jan Lauwer's Antonius and Cleopatra (1992) and Marina Abramovic and Charles Atlas's Delusional (1994), cited in H. Finter, 'Antonin Artand and the Impossible Theatre', The Drama Review, pp. 15-40 (19).

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The work of the French artist, Orlan, displays many of these symptoms as she transgresses traditional boundaries of art, in performing realtime, real-place actions. Her ten-year project, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, involves live broadcasts of radically interventionist cosmetic surgery upon her face. 10 Orlan maintains an unusual level of control over the procedures of surgery, remaining conscious throughout, to choreograph each moment. The operating theatre becomes a stage, an arena of costume and conversation, but there is a price to pay for this radical re-acquisition of control. Orlan's insistence upon full consciousness represents considerable risk. The application of local, rather than general anaesthetic, involves a spinal injection known as an epidural block which risks paralysing the patient if it does not hit its mark exactly. With each consecutive surgical intervention and injection, the danger increases. Orlan risks deformation, paralysis, even death through her refiguration of her body as art work. The unquestionable authenticity of this work is very disturbing. We have difficulty viewing images of pain, and Orlan herself admits that she sometimes finds the imagery she produces hard to look at in retrospect. Her work foregrounds extremity, marginality and danger, drawing attention to the fine line between aesthetic action and pathological behaviour. Reactions to it often confuse the personality of the artist with the objectives of the work, and accusations—of madness and selfmutilation—fly.11 She undoubtedly presses us to reconsider the boundaries between normality and madness, as well as art and non-art. Orlan also utilizes the construction of the ob-scene theatrical realm, showing us what is traditionally hidden from view. The ancient conventions surrounding the dramatic portrayal of bloodshed allow us to participate in the game of theatricality, imagining horror at another's behest, accepting our complicity in the conjuring—as long as the actor does not really bleed. This complex seeing and yet not seeing but nevertheless knowing, as in 'I see!', is central to theatricality, but Orlan breaks the terms of the contract. This brings into question our faith in Orlan's presentation. Why do we believe what we see when we are all familiar with the techniques of

10. This work is documented in Orlan, This is My Body, This is My Software (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996). 11. The French periodical, the Revue Scientiftque et Culturelle de Sante Mentale, dedicated an entire issue to Orlan (23-24 [1991]), concluding that her work contained a legitimizing component of aesthetic intention, and was not merely illustrated pyschopathology.

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image manipulation? Yet belief is performed, in the gallery. The response of some spectators, who faint, effectively stages conviction, or at least the desire to believe and the need to act accordingly. Orlan's marketing of her work, and its participation in the media playground, is undoubtedly dependent upon its perceived 'reality'. The status of the real which Orlan is trading upon also demands interrogation. Not everyone will recognize the reality of her work, or its ability to address the real that they inhabit. It is certainly true that these extreme experiments move far from intelligibility in their attempts to capture and express the real but, from Artaud onwards, opposition to the techniques of naturalism has gone hand in hand with a rejection of the more mundane elements of everyday life.12 A critique of this legacy is provided by Rick Rylance, as he launches an uncompromising attack on the intellectual elitism of many theatre practitioners whose work has ceased to speak to, or for, the world of ordinary experience. He suggests that the avant-garde is characterized by a neglect of the values of communication, agency and common experience, in favour of a celebration of theories of the text, acceptance of determined subjectivity, and the mysticism of radical incomprehension. He claims that dramatists are increasingly withdrawing not just from the mainstream political process.. .but also from the patterns of activity, and the discourses and languages, of everyday life. For it has been a major feature of this legacy.. .that everyday life is a mere expression of the ideological forces which shape it, and that people caught (like prisoners) within it are mere victims of ideological entrapment. 13

Rylance's observations call into question what kind of real is being presented by these performance artists. Is extremity the only means of access to the real? The real for most of us comes packaged in the business of the banal, the mundane, the everyday. Perhaps the detail, the layering of seemingly insignificant information to create a referential index, presented in the gritty 'realism' rejected by Artaud, is the only method of recuperating everyday experience. Alan Read notes in his work, Theatre and Everyday Life:

12. For instance, many training techniques for performers (including those espoused by Lecoq, Grotowski and Barba) are based upon the initial elimination of all ingrained actions and habits of movement, as they try to erase the marks and signs of the everyday. 13. R. Rylance, 'Forms of Dissent in Contemporary Drama and Contemporary Theory', in A. Page (ed.), Death of the Playwright (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 115-41 (131).

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES The premise is that everyday life must be pushed aside for theatre to occur. The opposite is true. Everyday life must be known, and intimately, for good theatre to happen. l4

This impasse has been brought about by decades of deconstruction. The unproblematized real has made a successful escape, and continues to avoid recapture following the liberating effects of poststructuralist thought. What is left is a dialectic, contained within the opposing positions of Jacques Lacan and Walter Benjamin. For Lacan, the Real is always relative to the subject and can only be apprehended as missing, or lack. Therefore, the appreciation of any sense of the Real is always an encounter missed, deferred, occluded, as the Real effectively falls by the wayside as impossible. However, Benjamin's perception, as suggested by his reading in Theses on the Philosophy of History, is that the real falls by the wayside, but does not disappear, and is not impossible, but rather accumulates as wreckage.15 These positions illuminate the attempts to represent the real described throughout this paper. The current appetite for the real, evidenced by our obsessive interest in the news and the soap operas of celebrity, is an unavoidable by-product of the subject of the Lacanian Real, which can never fully apprehend the real it constructs through fantasy. Loss and lack fuel desire, maintained, rather than cancelled, by impossibility. In this way, insatiable desire becomes the only dependable reality. Commodities come to represent the real that cannot yet be, or trade on the nostalgia for a real that once was and might be again—if only the product is purchased. This helps to explain the exploitation of the signs of lack of privilege by the fashion and advertising worlds, as witnessed by the prevalence of emaciated models and imagery evoking unrest, poverty and lack. Perhaps the imaging of despair, violence and loss appeases contemporary anxiety about reality effects, as we attempt to control the signs of the wreckage created by capitalism's 'progress'. Appropriating such images may serve to reassure the consumer. Even the most troubling reality can be considered masquerade, hype, sham. Such tragedy is not 'really real'. Capitalism's co-optive power suggests the limitations of the recognition of real life's performativity. Where performativity is simply celebrated for its own sake, it loses its critical, reflective edge and political drive: a simple recognition of the performative status of gender or 14. A. Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 17. 15. W. Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations, pp. 245-55.

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identity does not alter its construction.16 The theory of the performative nature of everyday life is haunted by questions of agency, as the uncritical celebration of the performative masquerade of gender and identity fails to acknowledge the entrapment inherent in a slavish repetition of a reiterative structure.17 Furthermore, an appreciation of the power of capitalism to commodify critique must accompany interpretation of extreme performance. Art's saleable status and its undeniable participation in the processes of exchange must not be ignored. Almost all the live performances discussed in this paper have been watched by a paying audience. How are we to come to terms with the existence of this economy of agony and our desire to attend events which are characterized by the suffering of the artist? Theorists have attempted to tackle the issue of capitalism's co-optive tendency by searching for areas of potential subversion, and tracing fault lines along the walls of hegemony. Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life advises the use of contingent 'tactics' to combat the 'strategies' of authority.18 Similarly, Judith Butler leaves room in her theory of the performative nature of gender for the gradual alteration and adaptation of reiterated performance, thus suggesting modes which allow performance to become action. Perhaps a similar movement is necessary in the realm of performance itself. However, for the moment, the real continues to be primarily associated with those who choose to express it through the extremes of physicality, rather than the less glamorous everyday. This reflection of the real in contemporary theatre studies demonstrates the potential pitfalls of disciplinary reconstruction. Each instance of boundary crossing involves a redefinition of the terms of each previously separate element. During the process of cross-disciplinary merging we must remain attentive to those elements in danger of displacement, and attempt to grasp the potential of this expansion, rather than reproducing the modality of a tradition of exclusion.

16. See J. Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990). 17. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, pp. 22-23: 'performance is, in a sense, "socialised", moulded and modified to fit into the understanding and expectations of the society in which it is presented... Thus, when the individual presents himself before others, his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially credited values of the society.' 18. See M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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Bibliography Aristotle, The Poetics (ed. and trans. S. Halliwell; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Artaud, A., The Theatre and its Double (London: Calder Publications, 1993 [1938]). —Oeuvres Completes, XIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Baldwin, L, 'Blending In: The Immaterial Art of Bobby Baker's Culinary Events', The Drama Review 40.4 (Winter 1996), pp. 37-51. Baudrillard, J., Simulacra and Simulations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Benjamin, W., Illuminations (ed. H. Arendt; London: Fontana, 1992). Beniston, K., 'Being There: Performance as Mise-en-Scene, Abscene, Obscene and Other Scene', PMLA 107.3 (May 1982), pp. 434-49. Bennett, S., Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1997). Burden, C, Chris Burden: A Twenty Year Survey (Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988). Burns, E., Theatricality (London: Longman, 1972). Butler, J., Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993). —Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). —Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). Carlson, M., Performance: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996). Carr, C, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993). Certeau, M. de, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Copeland, R., 'The Presence of Mediation', The Drama Review 34.4 (Winter 1990), pp. 28-44. Debord, G., The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983). Denzin, N., Images of Post-Modern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema (London: Sage, 1991). Derrida, J., Writing and Difference (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Diamond, E., 'Mimesis, Mimicry and the True-Real', Modern Drama 32.1 (1989), pp. 58-72. —'Realism and Hysteria: Notes Towards a Feminist Mimesis', Discourse 13.1 (Winter 1990-91), pp. 59-92. Eagleton, T., The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996). Feuerbach, L., The Essence of Christianity (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989). Finter, H., 'Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre', The Drama Review 41.4 (Winter 1997), pp. 15-40. Fuchs, E., 'Presence and the Revenge of Writing', Performing Arts Journal 9.2-3 (1985), pp. 163-72. George, D.E.R., 'Performance Epistemology', Performance Research 1.1 (Spring 1996), pp. 16-25. Goffman, E., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956).

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Kristeva, J., and J. Ribette (eds.), Folle Verite: verite et vraisemblance du texte psychotique (Paris: Seuil, 1979). Lacan, J., Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). McGrath, J.E., 'Trusting in Rubber: Performing Boundaries During the AIDS Experience', The Drama Review 39.2 (Summer 1995), pp. 21-37. Moi, T. (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Orlan, This is My Body, This is My Software (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996). Plato, Republic (trans. R. Waterfield; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Read, A., Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). Rose, B., 'Is it Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act', Art in America 81.2 (February 1993), pp. 76-81. Rylance, R., 'Forms of Dissent in Contemporary Drama and Contemporary Theory', in A. Page (ed.), Death of the Playwright (Bzsingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 11541. Schnecher, R., and W. Appel (eds.), By Means of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Schneider, R., The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997). Wiles, D., The South Bank Show: Body Art (LWT for ITV, 5 April 1998). Williams, R., Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983).

Heather Leach Writing on Air

For a long long time, goes the story, creative writing was something that happened out there, in the field, the outback, the world's jungles. Critics and theorists (on the inside, at the centre) gathered in and examined textual objects, artefacts perhaps, using them to deduce, define and name the cultures that made them. Authors were witches, dreamers, madmen, women and natives; theorists/critics were priests, doctors, experts and anthropologists. Susan Hiller tells the story of Maurice Leenhardt, the anthropologist, who in the 1930s is asked by the host people he is studying, the New Caledonians, where the wisdom of white people comes from. Leenhardt answers with a rationalist explanation: observation, free from superstition. Then he remarks that perhaps the people think that wisdom came to him in a dream, as it did to their forefathers, through a stone, a magic object. Hiller comments that 'this story addresses a polarity between what we might call "the word" and "the dream", between theory and practice'.1 Now, at this moment, we the creative writing 'natives' are here in growing numbers amongst the anthropologists. Some of us, claiming writing as our only home, could ask the same question the New Caledonians asked: where are the foundations, the origins of the divisions and categories that separate one story from another, the lines in the epistemological sand? The Aztecs described thunder as a battle between two brothers over a woman they both desired, lightning their thin, white children. The meteorologist names the storm Electric, the child of ionized water clouds that rise and fall, pulled upwards by the hot sun and downwards by the huge tug of the earth. Both stories have their pleasures and uses. We are natives together. No escape. No surrender... I aim to be sharp, focused and to the point. However, writing is not a darts match, comrades. Poets know this, but prose is dozier. We judge the nature of the message from the cut of the messenger's coat. However I write, part of the story will already have been told. There is no easy way to say this. 1. B. Einzig (ed.), Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 112.

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The differences, borders, edges, between creative and theoretical writing are substantially undefined, unexplored and untheorized, but are everywhere patrolled and policed with a blind yet meticulous care. There seems already to be a line, that separates them, the creatives, from us, the theoretical—and them the theoretical from us the creatives. We speak as if we know what the difference is, as if we have always known. Jeremy Hooker in his article 'Developing Creativity' speaks of the 'divided mind that some of us find ourselves in'.2 I, too, find myself doubled and split, using 'we' to include myself with both creative and theoretical writers, and also, like Hooker, sometimes dreaming of a singleness of writing practice. To lurch vertiginously between the two seems unnecessarily, at times painfully, awkward and alienating. Ellen Freyer Stark, in '[Reforming the Critical Space', writes, 'I couldn't tell when I was writing criticism and when I was being a poet'. 3 These local voices are rare and welcome, but surely some of the theoretical bigwigs have been banging on in a similar vein for a long time... something has definitely been cooking, hasn't it? So where's the pudding? What is this creative/theoretical boundary, that seems to have been defined, described and set in place long ago? What kind of writing was it that inscribed the line in the sand; a writing neither creative nor theoretical, speaking like Solomon, impartial? The borders, the boundaries of writing (countries, continents), are at least as temporary and disputable as the walls and lines which divide and surround nations. We the theorists—squarely rigorous, truth-finders general; we the artists, settling ourselves comfortably into the dark round self-presence of our inner natures, at home by the creative fires, toasting our toes in the glow of all those burning heart-words: aesthetic; spiritual; imaginative. At best these names and addresses are local expressions of desire and need; useful but playful masks; at worst—not masks but fixed identities, nationalisms, wargames. Whatever our religion, rationalist, theistic or playful, the prophecy is the same: for the time being at least, we are all together in this novel, in this mirror house of language. There is nowhere else to go, no outside texts. We can name the oceans, but only gods can divide the sea. Derrida argues that writing has been suppressed in the service of knowledge: 2. J. Hooker, 'Developing Creativity', Writing and Education 11 (Spring 1997), pp. 6-8 (6). 3. E. Freyer Stark, '[Re]forming the Critical Space', Critical Quarterly 34.3 (Autumn 1992), pp. 55-66 (55).

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CROSSING BOUNDARIES [W]riting would always be derivative, accidental, particular, exterior [... There has been] the historico-metaphysical reduction of writing to the 4 rank of an instrument enslaved.

What is strange, twenty years after Of Grammatology, is how little effect these ideas have had on our writing practices. Although not so strange, perhaps, when we consider how the barriers between 'creative' and 'research/theoretical' writing are shored up and defended. Ellen Freyer Stark goes on to comment: 'I believe I have been systematically educated against such a relationship.' As a graduate student, in the theory class, she says she was expected to 'forget Lizzie' (her fictional character) and in the creative class to 'forget Foucault'.5 At present, in the academy, the borders are nervous but still intact, continuously reinstated through the disciplinarity of schools, subjects and discursive identities. And 'we', writers of fiction, poetry, performance works, drama, who cannot help seeing writing all the time (this is our business after all), are slow to grasp the significance of what we are looking at (not through), the value of the riches we hold in our hands. We whine a little about the theorist who patronizes us, who envies but shackles our strengths, who grows fat on the fruits of our labour, yet still we speak a slave language. Writers, researchers and scholars have information, knowledge and meaning to dig up, classify, rearrange, use. The human project, forwards and backwards, let's not imagine we can do without it. How could I be here, with this word-processor, this desk, this health, wealth and privilege without it? Yet, always on the move, there is something we miss: the texture of the world itself. Not just the pattern, but the weave of language, the thread and the spaces between. Barthes speaks of a tissue of quotations, writing running this way and that as in a stocking.6 Henry James describes the writer as embroiderer, working, on the canvas [I]n terror [...] the vast expanse of that surface [...] the boundless number of its distant perforations [...] the very nature of the holes so to invite, to solicit, to persuade, to practice positively a thousand lures and deceits [...] 7 to lead on and on.

4. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 29. 5. Freyer Stark, '[Rejforming the Critical Space', p. 56. 6. R. Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in idem, Image-Music-Text (ed. S. Heath; London: Flamingo, 1984), pp. 142-48 (146). 7. H. James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (London: Charles Scribner's Sons Ltd, 1962), p. 6.

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What this textual materiality indicates is something.. .difficult to articulate—like that moment when you look through a window and suddenly see the grain of the glass: .. .what is there seems at first like an outside, as if we might be looking through a slit in a door, a tiny gap, all that can be glimpsed is a minute part of what is inside, a flash of colour, an eyelash, a few atoms of matter, the eye, folding back and into itself, curved space. Derrida writes of the monstrous that we cannot yet know or imagine, and this monstrous place is here on this blatant page, to be glimpsed in a writing practice that has no proper name, no wedding ring... This is writing in a force ten gale. Vertical typhoons battle with horizontal hurricanes. Alice drowns in a sea of signifiers and sensible readers swim for shore. Leaning into the wind, this chicken licken keeps trying to at least cross the road, to hold onto some semblance of English pragmatism—give the readers clear signposts, don't allow yourself to be distracted by side arguments, irrelevant wordplay, metaphor, metonymy, image, simile—follow a straight path, an argument, a thesis. How to go on, Horatio. How to do it at all, in this embroidered sea, that is the question. For god's sake woman, make yourself clear. I was brought up in a place where plain speech was highly valued. Common-sense talk, the spade's name. None of your ecriture here, says Auntie Edith, that girl needs a good mouthwash. But Auntie, these divisions—plain and fancy; common and uncommon—might be the spade that digs us all deeper in. Behind this two-faced language, there is another: slippery yet deadly, a groundless ground. Surely, before we stake out defensive positions, the question is: what do we mean by theoretical and creative writing, what is the difference and how can you tell? Not, which is better/which is sweeter/more real/ more knowledgeable/cleverer/more beautiful, but where is the boundary that divides them, and why is it so important to patrol its borders, each side mocking and patronizing the other, arrows over the parapet poisoned with faint praise? Why maintain such a line, such assertions of territoriality? These are not easy questions. What kind of writing can judge writing, can give it name, place, status? And what kind of writing is this... my own practice, this instance writing. Electric fire, cold right side, burned left, someone is mending the broken fence, hammering. Half starved birds hop up and down in the bare tree branches. This writing too, no innocent, cannot help attempting to climb beyond itself, to helicoptor off the page, into some language heaven. Avoiding one edge I trip over another. Yet I must begin somewhere. What writes, writes itself... We need to map the terrain, to read the landscape of this edgy place.

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First: crude contrasting metaphors: creative writing is: round; wiggly; fuzzy; soft;8 theoretical writing is: angular; straight; clear; hard. Immediately embarrassing in their bald statedness, but recognizable if only as the ridiculous ideas of other people. There are alternative descriptions: theoretical writing the ugly, obscure, inaccessible; dominating; creative writing the beautiful, the imaginative, dream-driven; victimised; theoretical searches for/constructs knowledge; creative writing searches for/constructs form

Creative writers are round, curly (girly?). We, the creatives, are arty: in touch with the unconscious, the dark side, the gaps between: inspiration, imagination, self-expression, nature, etcetera etcetera. We all know this plot. These labels and their subtler synonyms clutter the discourses, the literature of writing, structure most of our underlying assumptions. The difficulty is not so much that we can't agree (we are human after all), or that there might be some better way of configuring, of denning the differences, but that we attempt without hesitation to say what writing is and is not, as if we spoke from some space outside the text, beyond writing itself. York. November 1997. The National Association of Writers in Education Conference, academic wing, discussing the Research Assessment Exercise. Some university teachers/writers had been told that their novels, poems, stories did not count, and that they therefore could not be included in the next round. A petition had been organized and sent to all the Higher Education English departments. Many people had signed, indignant at the implied slight: of course creative writing should be included, how could there be any doubt? Clearly, more is at stake than hurt feelings: if creative writing isn't fundable as research, then where will the money come from for future jobs, for time to write? Enter a letter, from Professor Martin Dodsworth, chair of the English panel, dated 27 September 1997 and reproduced in Writing in Education 13, p. 5. It seems that the assumption of exclusion was mistaken.9 The letter attempts to put right any misperceptions and to set out the

8. See Keywords by Raymond Williams for further rich explorations of the word 'creative' (London: Fontana, 1976). 9. Although, as a number of members pointed out, some individual HE institutions had actually excluded creative writing, whether through ignorance or calculated prejudice is not clear.

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panel's remit, and criteria for the inclusion of creative writing as a category of research. Some extracts: Research...is understood as original investigation undertaken to gain knowledge and understanding...[and] includes, among other things, the invention and generation of ideas, images, performances and artefacts... where these lead to substantially improved insights.10

The tone of the letter then becomes a little nervous, defensive, perhaps: Artefacts applies as much to poems, novels and plays as it does to pots and paintings...the English panel, had no option therefore but to consider the creative writing...on an equal footing with more conventional scholarship... the only worry...concerned the amount that was likely to be submitted... Luckily...we had an established writer on the panel...so we did not lack informed advice.J ]

What can be made of this? 1. Artefacts: here are the anthropologists again. These writings, unlike the more 'conventional scholarship' and despite their textuality, are more like pots and paintings than essays, articles, theses. The epithet 'creative' in this context seems to suggest that they have become more (and perhaps therefore also less) than texts. 2. Had no option but to consider on an equal footing: the tone is correct but grudging and not reassuring. 3. The risk of large amounts: why should the panel fear being swamped by creative writing? This anxiety is again odd but suggestive. Perhaps the curliness, the round, wiggliness of creative texts also signifies over-abundance, profligacy, incontinence? 4. An established writer; informed advice: again the terminology is interesting by its omission: Robert Crawford is not described here as a creative writer, yet it is his specifically designated role as creative that gives him his value. And if Robert Crawford is simply a writer, then what are all the other English panel members? Of course, the RAE is a necessary grid placed over the academic endeavour, a practical exercise, human, institutional, and therefore inevitably imperfect. The panel has its honourable purposes and intentions, and somebody has to do it, or at least something has to be done to share out scarce resources. The aim of this critique is not towards some impossible institutional purity, but to argue that the language of Professor Dodsworth's letter, despite its linear non-fictional intentions, displays

10. Martin Dodsworth (letter), Writing in Education 13 (1997), p. 5. 11. Dodsworth, p. 5.

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a creative and instructive fuzziness. This is not because Professor Dodsworth is any more unclear than the rest of us, but because his writing, like mine, like all writing, will not be still, cannot be completely contained and defined within some rationalizing system. The deconstruction of other people's letters is rude, particularly when the writer is so notable, but the rare opportunity to discuss what is so rarely discussed—the very sea we all swim in: writing itself—is too good to miss. What I want to suggest is that the English panel, and Professor Dodsworth, do not know, cannot find, the 'true' difference between creative and other kinds of writing, and that this gap, this discomfiting lack displays itself in the nervous interstices of the letter's language. Evidence is real, goes the story, fiction is wobbly. Professor Dodsworth's letter and similar writings arrogate a meta-language that claims to rise beyond itself, to step outside its own textuality. We must, in the absence of anything better, acknowledge the power of such texts, but we are not obliged to believe in them. The need to fit 'creative' writing into the disciplinary RAE structure may appear superficially to be a simple matter of readjustment and accommodation, but my argument is that it is potentially much more than this. Perhaps what the letter's anxiety displays is the very real fear that the admission into the citadel of a writing that proclaims itself openly 'creative' may bring into question the straight credentials of the writing that is usually called 'research'. Cartoon characters run over the edges of cliffs, vroom. They race across air, screech to a halt, look down, arrrggh, then ever-so-carefully one step, two step, tippy tippy toes. But it's no good. Finally, here it comes, the fall, straight down into the sea, the canyon, the flattening, yet never fatal, ground. University libraries continue to fill up and overflow with scholarly journals, books, theses, essays—referenced, footnoted, peerreviewed. On the distaff side: novels, plays, poetry, innocent of annotation, smirk and get away with it. Universities are producing enormous amounts of writing, some of it about language, about authorship and textuality, but this is mainly still writing that is forgetful of itself that is unable (afraid?) to notice, or to speak of its own materiality. This is how we are taught from the beginning, this is how we teach others. In Postmodernism and Education, Richard Edwards and Robin Usher argue that not only does writing become invisible, but that '[i]n the main, a particular kind of text, the academic text, is required'12 and that the almost universal textual 12. R. Usher and R. Edwards, Postmodernism ledge, 1994), p. 150.

and Education (London: Rout-

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strategy is that of narrative realism, a kind of writing that can conceal its own being as writing.13 A great deal is gained by this concealment. If the textual strategies of philosophers, biologists, critical theorists were to be constantly under scrutiny, then the assumed 'greater' project—the productions of knowledge—might be delayed, even undermined and research writers might find themselves at one with the poets and novelists, subject to the slippery slopes of language, skaters on metaphor rather than masters of truth. Yet narrative realist texts, stories that make up reality, do seem to be essential, if babies are to get bathed, dinners cooked, professors paid and junior academics published in peer-reviewed journals. The point is not to abolish or deny the uses of all such texts, but (for at least some of us) to recognize and trace the boundaries of their textuality, to map the kinds of reality, the realms of truth they produce. Peter Abbs, in his introduction to The Symbolic Order, comments that structuralism and poststructuralism, 'while making various contributions to the understanding of art, have...tended to negate the aesthetic and imaginative dimension...[and] too often became engaged in a wilful obfuscation of meaning to the point of intellectual nihilism'.14 Of course, one man's wilful obfuscation is another's honest confusion and incarnate mystery, but, having sat through many wilfully obfuscated structuralist and poststructuralist lectures, in unimaginative and artless lecture halls, I have to agree. But, surely, it is not only the theorists who have neglected the aesthetic and imaginative, but also the 'creative' writers who have abandoned the theorists, and who have (wilfully?) missed at least some of the point. Perhaps part of the obfuscation that Abbs writes of comes about because 'we' insist on shoring up the wall, leaving the cultural and political and theoretical writer on the 'other' side. If 'they' the theorists can no longer be white men, 'we' the creatives can no longer be natives. Is it surprising that, given the RAE and uncertainty of tenure,15 even those critics and theorists who acknowledge and welcome this current crisis of sense and meaning, still write as if all the guarantees were in place, running out onto clear air?

13. Usher and Edwards, Postmodernism and Education, p. 151. 14. P. Abbs (ed.), The Symbolic Order (London: Falmer Press, 1989), p. xvii. 15. An autobiographical anxiety inserts itself here.

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Is it surprising that there is so much wilful obfuscation—let me put it another way—so much inaccessible and dry theory and criticism, when these new critics and theorists, trained in the 'truth/knowledge/narrative realism' school, find themselves up writing creek without a poetic paddle? This implies the need, not for an escape from theory, but for a reconciliation. Surely 'we' the creatives can no longer lay sole claim to myth, poetry, dream, imagination, mystery, stories and lies, leaving those others with nothing but 'science', 'rationality', 'ideology' and the fictions of 'truth' to write with. How to finish, so many loose ends, questions not even asked, let alone answered: 1. If, after the end of both philosophy and art, we are left with writing that has no proper name, no fixed abode, then what kind of realms of truth and meaning might such writing create? 2. Can we make more room—space for borderzone writings: writing that crosses boundaries—writing that is not on one side against theory/

criticism, but between and within. Here is a quotation from a geological website: Tectonic plates consist of an outer layer of the Earth, the lithosphere, which is cool enough to behave as a more or less rigid shell. Occasionally the hot asthenosphere of the Earth finds a weak place in the lithosphere to rise buoyantly as a plume, or hotspot.. .the oceanic ridges are the.. .spreading centres, creating new oceanic crust [http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/ pub/louie/class/100/plate-tectonics.html].

Tectonic plates, such a useful metaphor, grist here to my rhetorical mill: those rigid disciplinary continents, which, despite their surface stability, float on a sea of magma. And then the drama, the denouement: my hot sister volcano, rising, buoyant as a plume, thrusts those stiff continental lips apart, makes violently new. Of course, the image is quaky: the new creation cools into crust, as hard as before; the plates are driven even further apart: borders, although displaced, remain in place Without these floating skull shells, Earth's burning brains could spill out, no life, no metaphors, end of story. And hotspots hurt. This seismological trope, reined in to illustrate my thesis, slips free to serve all masters. Border writers can claim no country. What I am trying to say here is difficult to say. I am in danger of slipping into wilful obfuscation. The place of borders, the space between the tectonic plates, where plumes rise buoyantly is a place where new things get made—a fertile, yet dangerously volcanic place. Yet it is also no place at all, no kingdom, only language in movement: language so molten that all inscriptions melt, and on which nothing can be finally

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inscribed. In academia, to be without a kingdom is to risk sinking without trace or tenure. This is a risky business.

Bibliography Abbs, P. (ed), The Symbolic Order (London: Falmer Press, 1989). Barthes, Roland, Image-Music-Text (ed. S. Heath; London: Flamingo, 1984). Derrida, J., Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). —Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978). Dodsworth, M., Statement to National Association of Writers in Education, 27 September 1997, in Writing in Education 13 (Autumn 1997), p. 5. Einzig, B. (ed.), Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hitler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Freyer Stark, E., '[Reforming the Critical Space', Critical Quarterly 34.3 (Autumn 1992), pp. 55-66. Hooker, J., 'Developing Creativity', Writing in Education 11 (Spring 1997), pp. 6-8. James, H., The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (London: Charles Scribner's Sons Ltd, 1962). Usher, R., and R. Edwards, Postmodernism and Education (London: Routledge, 1994). Williams, R., Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976).

Terry Eagleton Aesthetics and Politics

The phrase 'political aesthetics' would seem as much an oxymoron, as blatantly self-contradictory, as 'military intelligence' or 'Mormon intellectual'. How can aesthetics be political, when it was actually constituted as the very opposite of all that? And that this is the case is surely obvious from all the dust and heat which has been raised recently over this rather modest, unassuming, academicist little enterprise known as literary theory. Why do people get so steamed up about a project which, let's face it, is of interest to only a few hundred thousand politically not very important people, eminently dispensable that we regrettably are for all our Lacanian-imaginary illusions that the world would crumble to nothing if we weren't around to have it centre on us? Why has there been so much blood on the senior common room floors over this matter, some of it looking alarmingly like mine? Why does this strange, hybrid non-subject called literary theory even from time to time hit the pages of the posher newspapers, so that oil executives are treated to a brief, bewildering exposition of Saussure and Derrida over their fried eggs? It can't, surely, be to do with literature, or reception theory, or any of those other arcane pursuits. Nobody, let's face it, cares a great deal, in the great scheme of things, and certainly not in the White House, about whether your approach to the minor poetry of Sir Walter Raleigh is hermeneutical or poststructuralist, Marxist or post-colonial. (Speaking of the latter, some people seem to labour under the consoling illusion that the relations between the north and south of the globe are importantly to do with something called 'culture'. They may have to do with trade or drugs or oil or armaments or air bases, but questions of value, meaning, language, identity, hybridity, come a dismally long way down on the list. One can sympathize with literary people liking to feel themselves globally relevant, but there's a thin line between relevance and megalomania.) Nobody gets especially steamed up about the politicization of sociology or economics or the discourse of human rights. One expects these sorts of things to be political. But every society also carves out a sort of quasi-sacred space for itself, over and above these pragmatic affairs, in which it seems possible for one blessed moment to be free of

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all that turgidly prosaic stuff and brood instead on the very meaning of the human. The names of this space are historically various: you might call it myth, or religion, or a certain brand of idealist philosophy, or culture, or aesthetics, or the Humanities, or—metonymically—Literature. These latter candidates for the job are of course of very recent historical provenance. The whole task was performed far better by religion, which hooks up the very sensuous texture of one's experience to the most fundamental questions about what it means to be alive and why there is anything at all rather than just nothing; and if the idea of culture has one supremely important source in the nineteenth century, one could do much worse than name it as the final failure of religion as an ideological force. (Though when I am speaking in the USA, I must always recall what a very godly society it still is—how US politicians can still make solemn appeals to the Almighty which make us jaded Europeans wince with embarrassment and shuffle our feet.) Anyway, whatever the transient names of this space, its ideological function was, and remains, entirely necessary: to furnish us with that protected enclave, that range of accessible imagery and archetypes, which we could point to when somebody asked us—not least at times of political crisis and upheaval—what really, in the end, do you live by? A society which needs to drag out its fundamental values and expose them to the light of day is already, you might say, in a certain crisis, since these values work far better by being tacitly assumed, by intertwining themselves so subtly with the roots of our identity that even to scrutinize them would be like trying to leap on our own shadows or haul ourselves up by our bootstraps. But this privileged or protected space remains essential even in the jaundicedly rationalist, technologizing, remorselessly secular and disenchanted world of advanced capitalism (I don't say 'late', since we have no idea how late it is), and it is always handy to have these values available in readily packaged and as it were portable form. And the name of this phenomenon is Literature—though it could always have been something else, and indeed used to be before the quite recent invention of something called the Humanities. One can begin to understand, then, about all that dust and heat and blood. Because if the whole point of this area is to be constituted as the very antithesis of the material or historical, and if the materialists and historicists then begin to get their grubby paws even on that, then there is really nowhere else for liberals or conservatives to retreat to, in a world drained of significance where the aesthetic provides one of the last, lonely, fragile outposts of value as such. And of course I thoroughly understand the panic and anxiety to which this gives rise—some of my best friends are liberals and conservatives, and of course no document

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has more unstinting praise for the capitalist middle class than the Communist Manifesto. These liberal and conservative critics understand, absolutely rightly, that the construction of this demarcated area was historically speaking a most generous-spirited, even Utopian gesture: an attempt, forlorn but nonetheless noble, to redeem those human values and energies for which a brutally utilitarian capitalism has absolutely no time at all, by syphoning them off somewhere else, where they could be nurtured and tended, vigorously flourish, but—here was the price— flourish in splendid isolation from the other social practices of which they were supposed to provide a living critique. The moment when art becomes critical in its very form and being is also the moment when it is struck politically impotent, a contradiction inscribed in the very body of the modernist work of art. But this impotence could always be turned into triumph, victory snatched from the very jaws of defeat, virtue plucked out of dire necessity. Because if the aesthetic was now apparently entirely pointless, without function or rationale, curved back upon itself in glorious, anguished autonomy, conjuring its own substance miraculously out of its unfathomable depths with its back turned aloofly to the workaday world, then it was here, in its very inner structure, that it could be read as most profoundly political and Utopian. For what it then figured was a frail image of how men and women themselves might be, in a society which had finally given the slip to exchange value, the sway of utility, the sovereignty of instrumental reason. Now works of art looked like nothing quite so much as us, or at least us as we might be under transformed political conditions, and looked like this precisely because the political was the last thing they had any truck with. They looked this way because of something that could be shown but not said. Where art was, there humanity shall be. So it is that the political ethics of Karl Marx are of a full-bloodedly aestheticist kind. What pains Marx so deeply is the thought that human powers and capacities, as he calls them, should ever be importantly subdued to an instrumentalist logic—that they should need any rationale, metaphysical or utilitarian, other than their own self-delighting development, in which, like the newly defined work of art, they furnish their own immanent grounds and ends. The only good reason for being a Marxist is that you can stop being one as soon as possible and just lie around all day in various interesting states of jouissance—what at Marx rather more prosaically referred to as the abolition of toil. There is absolutely no reason for him why we should live like works of art, any more than there's any metaphysical foundation to a song or a smile; it just belongs to what he would call our species being. Marxism is ultimately all about the aestheticization of human existence, the release of

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the sensuous particularity of use value from the metaphysical prisonhouse of exchange value and bourgeois abstraction. But of course for Marx this is very far from some sort of callow, laid-back, hedonist, postmodern celebration of pleasure or plurality or the body (that latest fetish of cultural theory), since as a thoroughly traditionalist, indeed Aristotelian moralist, he understands that such a condition could be made available to men and women generally only by the most rigorously instrumental forms of thought and action, and by the willing sacrifice of such self-realization on the part of some for the sake of others. Marx has his Kantian side too, quite properly, and by no means regards the dutiful, deontological, necessary repression of pleasure as a mere hangover from the grand narratives of the boring old men. Even so, his political ethics are much closer to Oscar Wilde's than they are to John Stuart Mill's. It is just that he understood that in order to generate that surplus or sheer gratuitous abundance which is the very mark of our species being, we first need a material surplus too, which the bourgeoisie have been kind and altruistic enough to hand down to us, along with a precious tradition of liberal humanism. Any socialism which lacked these material and spiritual conditions—which tried, for example, to build itself from the ground up in conditions of extreme scarcity, without a usable capitalist and liberal heritage—would inevitably find itself having to generate wealth by the coercive power of an authoritarian state, and so, tragically and criminally, would destroy the very political structures of socialism in the attempt to construct its material base. This is the phenomenon we know as Stalinism, which only Marxists have really been able to explain. And of course all of this is of great relevance in the world of revolution and incipient insurrection we witness around us today: the overthrow of apartheid, of the neoStalinist regimes of the east, the mass popular rebellions of South Korea, the persistent struggles against colonialism, the militancy of the French working class and the like. Perhaps none of this has yet reached the pessimistic postmodern ears of those in the Ivy League universities who have been too busy reading Baudrillard to bother reading the newspapers. In none of this, of course, is culture in the least central. The first move of a materialist cultural theorist must be suitably self-humbling: to recognize how relatively unimportant we are. But not to be central is not necessarily to be nothing. What characterizes the three forms of political struggle which have dominated the global agenda over the past few decades—revolutionary nationalism, feminism, and ethnic conflict—is exactly, and most unusually, that 'culture', in the anthropological rather than aesthetic sense of the word, has become the very medium in which

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political contentions are being fought out. Indeed this is one vital reason for the crisis of the notion of culture in our day—that it has imperceptibly shifted over from being part of the solution to being part of the problem. What began as an essentially transcendent reality, a kind of higher or deeper ground on which mere sublunary quarrels could be imaginarily resolved, has become the very language in which those quarrels articulate themselves. Even so, we mustn't exaggerate here in that fashionable reductionism known today as culturalism. The conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland has something to do with culture, but not fundamentally. Culturally speaking, Northern Catholics and Protestants understand each other only too well. And even if culture has for the moment become part of the material problem rather than the idealist solution, we should surely nonetheless continue to hope for the political and material conditions in which we will be able for the most part to live by culture alone, which is to say, anthropologically speaking, to be free. (For Marx, only gratuitous production, free of the goad of necessity, can finally be the index of our liberty.) Then indeed we shall be free of all this tiresome, utterly essential concern with class and gender and ethnicity and neo-colonialism and talk about something more interesting for a change, such as the curious way in which Prince Charles's ears protrude from his head, or why it is that Railtrack announcements are garbled at all the most vital points. The conflict between socialists and postmodernists can thus be seen as one between two different senses of the aestheticization of politics. If socialism is—I hesitate even to pronounce this demonized term—teleological, it is among other reasons because it believes that the material conditions for what I might call an anthropological aestheticization of politics have yet to be constructed, and that one thing which forestalls that project is the aestheticization of politics in another way: in the specularization of the political, for example, or in that aestheticization of the economic which we call commodity fetishism. Or—in the theoretical sphere—in that monstrous form of dogmatism known as intuitionism, in which I make incontrovertible appeals to something called my immediate political experience in much the same way that old-style aesthetics makes an appeal to taste. Or indeed that neo-pragmatist assault on the cognitive for which truth is whatever is agreeable or convenient to the mind, or to our given discourses, which is yet another form of aestheticization. However philosophically plausible some of these cases may be, none of them has the faintest chance of succeeding in a social order which, while dismantling the metaphysical or foundational in its most routine material behaviour, nevertheless still can't get on ideologically without it. Which is why all those US politicians still talk of the

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Almighty's special regard for the nation at the very moment they have their fingers in the till. Advanced capitalist orders, that's to say, cannot afford to take the Nietzschean way out of the structural contradiction in which they have landed themselves—I mean the irresolvable contradiction of the fact that they stand in need ideologically of a metaphysical foundation which their own rationalizing, secularizing activity continually undermines. Nietzsche had a sort of solution to this—not in so many words, to be sure—which ran as follows: if the spiritual superstructure keeps entering into embarrassing contradiction with your material basis, then just throw away the superstructure. Forget about high-sounding metaphysical rationales. Nobody believes that stuff any more: God is dead, the superstructure has crumbled to dust, and the hypocrisy by which you still strive to square this impossible circle is itself ideologically disabling. So take, instead, the aestheticizing way out: renounce absolutes and just allow your values to be generated up, transiently, perspectivally, by that infinite textual spawning of conflictive energies which is the very stuff of the cosmos, and to which we give the name of will-to-power. Now in one sense this is a highly alluring escape-hatch for a middle class in a metaphysical mess. For of course the sorts of values you conjure directly out of your practical life-activity are always going to be considerably more plausible, ideologically speaking, than those you parachute in from some metaphysical outer space, where the hiatus between what you do and what you say you do—the performative contradiction between them—will itself necessitate reaching for yet another kind of discourse to bridge this incongruous gap. No ideological value which isn't in some sense, however obliquely, anchored in men's and women's lived experience stands any chance at all of surviving for very long, rather as socialism must be among other things an unabashed appeal to people's selfinterest. Nietzsche's (implicit) recommendation is aestheticizing because it asks us, audaciously, to found our being merely in ourselves. The Ubermensch is he who has become autotelic, self-legislating, selfgrounding, just like the aesthetic artefact. But if you do conjure up your values directly from what you do, the danger is that you will end up, in this sort of society at least, with all the worst kinds of values: aggression, domination, competition, and so on. If Nietzsche's recommended escape-route is finally too hair-raising for the bourgeoisie to tread, it is because it overlooks the fact that values must not just be expressive of what we do, but must also help to legitimate it. Value here must have an active role, as of signifier to signified, in relation to our social behaviour, not just the passive reflection of that behaviour of an iconic sign. It must rationalize, totalize, displace, dissemble, sublimate, naturalize and the

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like; but this then opens up a necessary hiatus between what we do and what we say we do, into which the thin end of critique can always be inserted. Various forms of neo-Nietzschean pragmatism, then, are fair enough for academic types, but hardly adequate if you are trying to run a country rather than just a philosophy department. For people have an annoying habit of inquiring after the foundations of their world, and grow restless with aestheticizing answers like 'it just stands on itself'. Theorists are really those adults who have never properly grown up, who continue like a child not yet 'naturalized' to find our most commonplace activities puzzling and estranging, and persist in raising the most embarrassingly large questions about them. Theory is difficult not just because it uses phrases like 'hermeneutical phenomenology', but because of its sheer childlike naivety: 'Where does capitalism come from, mummy?', it pipes up, and generally receives for its pains a late-Wittgensteinian sort of reply: 'This is just what we do, dear.' Theory is thus among other things a kind of Brechtian alienation effect, and only tends to happen when for some reason or other our habitual practices begin to break down, come apart at the seams, hit some logjam beyond which they are incapable of proceeding. When theory breaks out on a virulent, positively epidemic scale, as it has over the last few decades in the West, you can be sure that something has gone awry. The conservative's mistake is to think that what has gone awry is the emergence of theory itself, rather than the situation of which this appearance is symptomatic. Theory in this sense is just a social practice being thrust into a new kind of self-consciousness, and there is thus always something unpleasantly navel-gazing or narcissistic about it, as anyone who has had the misfortune to encounter some leading literary theorists will no doubt be aware. Theory comes about, historically speaking, when it is both possible and necessary for it to do so—either when we need to find a new set of rationales for what we have been doing anyway, or when we need to change the agenda. A long time ago, people used just to drop things occasionally, without giving it much thought. Then along came physicists to instruct them in the gravitational laws by which objects fell to earth, philosophers to query whether there really were any discrete objects to be dropped in the first place, sociologists to speculate that all this dropping was the result of intensifying urban pressures, psychologists to admonish us that it was really all symbolic of trying to drop our parents, poets who wrote of dropping as symbolic of death, and critics who saw it as a sign of the poet's castration complex. Now, suddenly, dropping could never be the same again: we could never get back to the happy garden where we just

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zapped round all day dropping things in fine careless rapture without a worry in the world. Theory had now set in; we still dropped things, of course, but now tentatively, self-consciously, with an exquisite sense of the arbitrary, unfounded nature of the action. Consider all this as an allegory of modernism. Modernism is the moment when words come to be about words, paint about paint, stone about stone—when, under the pressures of a commodifying society in which the very experience that art might take as its subject-matter is felt to be degraded, commodified, sinisterly complicit with power, the work of art begins to bend back upon itself and take its own forms as theme. The structure of this gesture then resembles the structure of theory, as the work of art must now, to be authentic, fold within itself some sort of awareness of the shameful fact that in a non-foundational universe it might just as well never have been. And of course around the time that the art-work is growing in this way 'theoretical', theory for its part is waxing more aesthetic, in that distinguished lineage of anti-philosophers from Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Adorno, Wittgenstein and Derrida who are opposed to philosophy in a philosophically fascinating way—for whom, since what has now become problematic isn't just this or that philosophical topic but the whole nature and status of the discourse itself, a new style of writing it might provide a formal resolution to certain substantive difficulties. Seen as a proleptic gesture, prefiguring some future condition in which we all—and not just philosophers—might think otherwise, this is a rich, fertile strategy; seen—as it must also be, I think—as a rather desperate displacement of, or compensation for, a political aesthetics which is yet to arrive in practice, it runs the risk of idolatry, believing as idolators do that you can have the future in your pocket even now. Indispensable though it is, it thus stands under the judgment of the Judaeo-Christian prohibition on graven images (since the only image of God is humanity), or under the judgment of E.M. Forster's Passage to India: not here, not now, not yet.

Index of Authors Aarseth, EJ. 151, 156 Abbs, P. 207 Adair, R. 22 Adorno, T. 163 AlfVen, H. 87,88,95 Amossy, R. 143 Andrews, J. 18, 21 Appleyard, B. 94 Aristotle 189 Artaud, A. 189, 192 Attridge, D. 153 Bakhtin, M. 99-109 Ballard, T. 26 Barrow, L. 58 Barthes, R. 95, 146, 152, 153, 158, 179, 202 Barton, R. 57 Baudrillard, J. 171 Beardsworth, R. 181 Beckett, S. 141-47 Beicker, P. 166 Benjamin, W. 142,191,196 Bewell, A. 19 Bhabha, H. 122 Billington, S. 18 Birkerts, S. 157 Bjork, L.A. 52 Bloch, E. 165 Bolter, J.D. 153 Boslough, J. 87, 88 Bourdieu, P. 183-87 Brake, L. 56 Bree, G. 148 Brewster, D. 45 Broderick, D. 85, 86 Bronte, C. 31, 32, 41 Brook, P. 127 Browne, J.C. 39, 50 Browning, E.B. 59 Brush, S.G. 91 Burden, C. 193 Bush, V. 155, 158 Butler, J. 108, 109, 122, 128, 197 Byron, Lord 28

Campbell, P.M. 155, 158 Carpenter, W.B. 62, 65-69 Caveney, G. 169 Certeau, M. de 187, 197 Chamberlain, L. 99 Chandra, V. 124 Clouston, T.S. 40 Cobbe, F. Power 20 Conner, S. 146 Cook, R. 131 Cooter, R. 84 Craigie, Sir W.A. 137 Cranny-Francis, A. 114 Culler, J. 171, 180, 187 Curry, P. 74 D'Alembert, J. 74 Darbyshire, A.E. 142 Darwin, C. 21, 51 Davie, D. 142 Davies, P. 88 Davis, J.B. 21 Dawkins, R. 86 Dawson, G. 57 Debord, G. 191 Defoe, D. 19 Derrida, J. 178-82, 201-203 Desai, A. 128 Dickens, C. 17, 18, 22, 24-27, 32-37, 39, 41, 75, 79-81 Dodsworth, M. 204-206 Dolby, N. 137 Douglas, J. Yellowlees 151,158 Douthwaite, J. 19 Down, J. Langdon 26 Dowse, T. Stretch 39 DurantJ. 84 Eagleton, T. 180 Edwards, R. 206, 207 Einzig, B. 200 Eliade, M. 93 Eliot, G. 29-32, 41, 45, 46, 51 Eliot, T.S. 56, 144 Ellmann, R. 56 Emerson, C. 100, 101, 103, 105

INDEX OF AUTHORS Ennomoser, J. 73 Esquirol, J.E.D. 21 Fahnestock, J. 84 Fallon, M. 113 Fennings, A. 26 Feuerbach, L. 191 Feyerabend, P. 87 Finter, H. 192, 193 Fitch, B. 147 Flaubert, G. 183, 184, 186 Flinn, C. 164, 165 Forster, E.M. 214 Forsythe, B. 22 Freyer Stark, E. 201, 202 Frost, R. 130-40, 160 Gallivan, P. 52, 53 Gasbarrone, L. 107 Gaskell, E. 75, 76, 78, 82 Gerrard, B. 77 Gitter, E.G. 22 Goffman, E. 190, 197 Gorbman, C. 167 Grout, D.J. 164 GuilloryJ. 181-83 Hacker, M. 114 Hacking, I. 77-80 Hardy, F.E. 50, 51 Hardy, T. 45, 49, 52 Hariharan, G. 124, 126, 128 Harvey, D. 170, 172 Haste, H. 99 Hawking, S. 84,85,89-95 Heikinen, D. 107 Hesse, M. 87 Holquist, M. 100-103, 105, 107, 109 Honko, L. 85, 91 Hooker, J. 201 HorganJ. 87 Howe, S. Gridley 22 HulbertJ.R. 137 Hunt, F. Knight 74 Hunter, R. 21 HydenJ.O. 28 James, H. 202 Jameson, F. 178, 180 Janecek, G. 154 Kerszberg, P. 74

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Kolker, R.P. 166 KristevaJ. 121-23, 192 Kureishi, H. 126 Lambert, J.H. 74 Landlow, G.P. 159 Lanham, R. 154 Lavater, J. Casper 23, 24 Lederman, L. 93 Lerner, E. 86,87,95 Lessl, T.M. 84, 94 Levi-Strauss, C. 78 Levine, G. 85 Lewes, G.H. 47, 48, 74 Lewis, W.B. 47 Lightman, B. 61 Locke, J. 19 Lyotard, J. 84, 85, 88, 89, 95 McKnight, N. 32 MacLeod, R.M. 57 Macalpine, I. 21 Maranda, P. 147 Marivale, H. 79 Markley, R. 95 Martin, W. 136, 140 Martineau, H. 17, 18, 27-29, 34-37, 41 Marx, K. 170, 172, 212-14 Maudsley, H. 21, 38, 40, 46, 49, 50, 52 MclnerneyJ. 169,173-77 McLuhan, M. 157 Melling, J. 22 Midgley, M. 94 Moi, T. 192 Monsman, G.C. 60 Morison, A. 21 Morris, P. 100 Morris, R. 87 Morson, G.S. 100, 101, 103, 105 Miiller,J.-D. 152 Nelson, T.G.A. 106 Noakes, R.J. 56 Norris, C. 179, 180 Nye, D. 157 Oldershaw, R.L. 87 Oilier, E. 80 Oppenheim, J. 46, 58, 66, 70 Orlan 194, 195 Orwell, G. 142, 143 Owen, A. 58

220

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

Palisca, C.V. 164 Pana, I. Grigorescu 123, 125 Pater, W. 60-70 Pearce, L. 115, 117, 118 Perkin, H. 72 Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig 155 Phillips, C. Palmer 20 Pinsky, T. 155 Plato 189 Poirier, R. 132, 133, 136, 137 Poovey, M. 79 Porter, D. 114 Potter, J.L. 136 Probyn, E. 126 Puig, M. 107 Pumfrey, S. 84 Quine, W. van Orman 87 Read, A. 195,196 Reichenbach, Baron K. von 64-66 RibetteJ. 192 Richardson, B. Ward 39 Ricks, C. 147 Riffaterre, M. 147 Romanes, GJ. 51 RoofJ. 115 Rosen, E. 143 Roy, A. 125 Rushdie, S. 127, 128 Rylance, R. 195 Ryman, G. 159 Sacks, O. 25 Schopenhauer, A. 163 Sergeant, E.S. 136 Sharot, S. 73 Shuter, W.F. 67 Shuttleworth, S. 38, 40 Simon, P., Marquis de Laplace 75, 77 Simon, S. 99 Sinfield,A. 110 Smith, R. 84 Solt, M.E. 154 Sousa Correa, D. da 37 Southey, R. 28 Spencer, H. 40 Spivak, G. Chakravorty 126, 179 Squires, R. 133 Stern, J.P. 145

Stocking, G.W. 59 Stoll, C. 157 Sundararajan Rohse, C. 107 Taylor, J. 94 Taylor, J. Bourne 38, 40 Tennyson, A. 59 ThewellJ. 19,20 Thompson, E.P. 76 Thompson, J.B. 152 Thompson, L. 136 Thoreau, H.D. 138 ThurnamJ. 21 Toulmin, S. 91, 94, 95 Trotter, T. 40 Tuke, D. Hack 20, 21 Turner, F. Miller 57, 59 Twain, M. 139 Tylor, E. Burnett 61, 68 TyndallJ. 59 Updike, J. 159 Usher, R. 206, 207 Vice, S. 101, 107 Vogel, A. 26 Vrettos, A. 47 Wallace, A. Russel 59, 60, 65, 67, 69 Weinberg, S. 84,86,88-95 Welsford, E. 18 Wenders, W. 161,162,166-68 Wertheim, M. 94 White, H. 94 Whitman, W. 138, 139 Wilde, O. 56 Williams, R. 191, 204 Wills, W.H. 17, 22 Winter, A. 56 WintersonJ. 112-19 Wolpert, L. 86 Woolf,V. 116, 117, 120 Wordsworth 28, 29 Worton, M. 107 Wright, D. 21 Wright, S. 66 Wynne, B. 58 Young, E. 169