Textual Practice: Volume 2 No.3

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 2 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1988

Contents

Articles

Discipline and discipleship JOHN FROW

In the rathouse of history with Thomas Pynchon: rereading V.ROBERT HOLTON

Facecrime: George Orwell and the physiognomy of politics

307 323

IAN HAYWOOD

343

The politics of Finnegans Wake DAVID PIERCE

363

Disarming voices (a nuclear exchange) CARDIFF TEXT ANALYSIS GROUP

375

Obituary

Allon White: A Tribute

389

Letter

Hermeneutic hubris RICHARD LEVIN

393

Reviews Michael Westlake, Imaginary Women ANTONY EASTHOPE

397

Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture NICHOLAS ZURBRUGG

401

Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History DAVID AMIGONI

407

Anthony Wilden, The Rules are No Game and Man and Woman, War and Peace BRIAN COATES

411

Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone STEPHEN GLYNN

419

iv

Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction ELIZABETH WRIGHT

425

R.Colls and P.Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, and M.J.Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 R.A.STRADLING

429

Thomas G.Pavel, The Poetics of Plot and Fictional Worlds DUNCAN SALKELD

435

Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization DANIELA CAVALLARO

443

Index to Volume 2

447

Discipline and discipleship JOHN FROW

I The transfer of knowledges is almost always mediated by institutions and by authorized persons. I set up some metaphors in this paper to try to examine these mediating processes by which knowledges are both reproduced and transformed. In particular, I take psychoanalytic and religious training as metaphors for the transmission of a discipline, and then I briefly extend the figure of discipleship to talk about literary pedagogy and the training of graduate students. Since the work of Foucault we ‘know’ that a discipline is not a body of knowledge alone, but is as well an organization of practices, a mode of institutional control, and a principle of limitation operating on discourse. This limitation, it must be stressed, is not the repression of a spontaneously developing knowledge but is precisely productive of knowledge; energy is an effect of structure, not its opposite. In Foucault’s lexicon there is a small but marked difference between ‘a discipline’ and ‘discipline’ in the sense of ‘disciplinary action’; and an equally small but marked difference between a discipline and a discursive formation. In each case, however, there is the possibility of recasting the unreflected concept of ‘a discipline’ in terms of the more complex concept to which it is opposed. Thus we could say that disciplines not only operate with a specific domain of objects, methods, techniques, and protocols for the recognition of true propositions, but they also act as mechanisms for the generation of new propositions within a particular conceptual and technical framework. These propositions may be either true or false; what defines them as valid propositions is that they are constructed in accordance with the rules for the formation of disciplinary objects and concepts.1 But disciplines function as much to reproduce an existing structure of knowledge as to produce new knowledge. For most disciplines, the complex interrelation between these two functions is bounded by the educational apparatus and established in the process of transmission of knowledge to ‘disciples’ and in their accreditation as legitimate knowing subjects. My first and most general line of argument, then, has to do with the forms of desire-for-knowledge which are mobilized in this process. A second and more specific line of argument running through the article is concerned with understanding how the process of transmission of disciplinary knowledge is bound up with processes of interpretation—that is, both how it authorizes interpretation and judgement, and how interpretative processes are intricated in a relation to disciplinary mastery. Here I suggest (but tangentially) the operation of a form of discipleship which is specific to the

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interpretative disciplines. If interpretative authority differs from other authorized knowledges, however, I do not seek to ground it epistemologically. My interest is in the institutional status of knowledge in its relation to desire. This interest should immediately require me to question the standing of my own enunciation: to question the forms of recognition and of will-to-truth with which it is invested. These are questions, I suppose, about the monologic genres of the academic essay and the public lecture; but the political consequences of these genres cannot simply be read off from their formal structure of enunciation, and there are no formal guarantees of the political correctness of any act of speaking or writing. The prescription of dialogue or group discussion, for example, may still be a coercive gesture; and I shall write later of some of the ways in which silence can be used in a secular or religious transference relation as a form of enunciative control. At the centre of these questions of speaking and authority is the problem of what Lacan calls le sujet suppose savoir. At stake here is the difference between ‘really’ knowing and being invested, under particular conditions, with a temporary and fictional attribute of knowledge. I shall be arguing that the failure to maintain the fictional status of the attribution of knowledge has reinforced the hieratic structure of the institution of psychoanalysis; but implicit in this argument is a presumption that the attribution of a right to know is indeed provisionally and fictitiously possible. II I begin, then, with that discipline which more than any other, and in an exemplary fashion, has both theorized and failed to theorize the social relations of interpretation involved in its practice. The striking thing about psychoanalysis, says Julia Kristeva in Histoires d’amour, is that it uses love as the basis of its cure. On the one hand it measures the confusions, the pain, the symptoms, and the hallucinations revealed by love against the minimal and irreducible reality of sex; and on the other hand it deliberately provokes a state of love between the patient and the analyst, in order not simply to mobilize these confusions and hallucinations, to present them for interpretation, but to work through them, to defuse them and finally to displace them in that ‘analytic pirouette’ by which the love transferred on to the analyst is again shifted in the achievement of an analysis. In this process the analyst is shown to be a lieu-tenant, the holder of the place of the Other, which he or she occupies ‘as a subject who is supposed to know—and to know how to love; as a consequence he becomes in the cure the supreme beloved and the chosen victim’.2 The text in which the transference relation is first opened to theorization is the ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’, or ‘Dora’—a fragment because the analysis was broken off by the patient in a refusal of these particular social relations of interpretation. The text has been intensively read in recent years, particularly by feminist critics, and I don’t want to repeat this history of reading. Let me instead simply outline the formal structure of the series of interpretations around which the case study is organized. In the first place there is a reading of the symptoms produced on Dora’s body. Freud interprets these symptoms in terms of the overdetermined displacement of sexual memories and fantasies, but insists that, rather than imposing his interpretations, he elicits each of them from Dora: ‘She knew about it already but the question of where her knowledge came

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from was a riddle which her memories were unable to solve. She had forgotten the source of all her information on this subject.’3 A second series extends this first set of interpretations into an analysis of the complex screen-relations between Dora’s father and Herr and Frau K., and of Dora’s role as an object of barter between the two men. Again, the analysis is said to be elicited from Dora herself; but Freud then proceeds to undermine it, and precisely because it is ‘a sound and incontestable train of argument’. When such coherence is encountered during treatment, it soon becomes evident that the patient is using thoughts of this kind, which the analysis cannot attack, for the purpose of cloaking others which are anxious to escape from criticism and from consciousness. A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content. All that needs be done is to turn back each particular reproach on to the speaker himself. (p. 35) Freud then proposes Dora’s complicity in her father’s affair with Frau K. and her identification with the older woman. What he doesn’t discuss is the possibility of his own identification with the father, or the position of the father, and the bearing this possibility might have had on his intervention at this point. The third set of interpretations is of those dreams that ‘seemed to call for insertion in the long thread of connections which spun itself out between a symptom of the disease and a pathogenic idea’ (p. 15). Two dreams are analysed in considerable detail, and reduced to a repressed matrix. Freud says of the second dream, for example, that ‘beyond the almost limitless series of displacements which were thus brought to light, it was possible to divine the operation of a single simple factor—Dora’s deep-rooted homosexual love for Frau K.’ (p. 105). The case that Freud builds up in the course of analysing the dreams is of a quasi-legal character, but he stresses that the interpretation is complicated by the role that the offer and the unravelling of the dream play in the relation between patient and analyst. ‘Everything’, he says of an earlier piece of dream interpretation, ‘fits together very satisfactorily upon this view; but owing to the characteristics of “transference” its validity is not susceptible or dennite proof (p. 74). Transference is a radical form of interference in the interpretative process, and, whereas other explanatory techniques can be acquired relatively easily, ‘transference is the one thing the presence of which has to be detected almost without assistance and with only the slightest clues to go upon, while at the same time the risk of making arbitrary inferences has to be avoided’ (p. 116). Nevertheless, it cannot be evaded, since it is a factor in the interpretative process, and since ‘it is only after the transference has been resolved that a patient arrives at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connections which have been constructed during the analysis’ (pp. 116–17). Transferences thus constitute the fourth set of interpretations on which the analyst must work. They are described, in a textual metaphor which runs through the whole case history, as ‘new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician’ (p. 116). The analyst is inserted into a ‘psychical series’4 which runs back to the fantasy structure of the Oedipus complex, and which is triggered off when repressed contents are in danger of being revealed. Here, Freud replaces

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both the father and—to his surprise—Herr K. But he is also inserted into a series of governesses: by being ‘dismissed’ with two weeks’ notice, ‘just like a maidservant or a governess’ (p. 105), he repeats both the K.s’ governess, who was seduced by K. and then sacked, and with whom Dora seems strongly to identify; and Dora’s own governess, who initiated her into sexual knowledge and who loved Dora’s father. Feminist readings of the case history have concentrated on the moment of Dora’s break with Freud; and indeed, in its assignment to the analyst of a blame which he refuses, it crucially reveals the desire of the analyst as a central component of the analysis. It is with the failure to take account of this desire that Freud is taxed by later theorists of the process of counter-transference. Muslin and Gill focus on Freud’s prescription of what would constitute a ‘healthy’ sexual response to an older man’s forced advances as evidence of Freud’s libidinal involvement with Dora through an identification with Herr K.5 Marcus suggests that the counter-transference was largely negative, and that the case functioned ‘as part of the process by which Freud began to move toward a resolution of his relation with Fliess—and perhaps vice-versa as well’.6 And Rose argues that interpretation works in the case as a form of resistance on Freud’s part—resistance ‘to the pressing need to develop a theory of sexuality, whose complexity or difficulty manifests itself time and again’.7 Several instances in the case history of Dora’s exclusion from Freud’s triumphs of interpretation indicate the problematic position of the analyst when interpretation becomes a paranoid display of mastery. In this respect the ‘Fragment’ repeats the tension running through The Interpretation of Dreams between the principle that interpretation involves above all the productive activity of the dreamer, with the analyst playing merely a catalytic role in the talking ‘cure, and a conception of the dream-text as an object given to interpretation ‘even independently of information from the dreamer’, and independently of the social relations set in play in the analytic situation.8 But it is precisely in terms of the social relations involved that Lacan attempts to defend Freud in his various theorizations of the transference. The psychoanalytic experience, Lacan argues, proceeds in a ‘relationship of subject to subject, which means that it preserves a dimension which is irreducible to all psychology considered as the objectification of certain properties of the individual. What happens in an analysis is that the subject is, strictly speaking, constituted through a discourse, to which the mere presence of the psychoanalyst brings, before any intervention, the dimension of dialogue.’ 9 With respect to this principle, the ‘conceptual inadequacy’10 of the notion of counter-transference consists in its reduction of the analytic relationship to an ‘intersubjective introjection’, that is, to a ‘dual relation’11 in which transference and counter-transference, as the psychological implication of two real individuals, balance each other out. But transference and counter-transference are not separate and opposed processes: The transference is a phenomenon in which subject and psycho-analyst are both included. To divide it in terms of transference and counter-transference—however bold, however confident what is said on this theme may be—is never more than a way of avoiding the essence of the matter.12 That is, the position of the analyst is always already involved in the transference, and this position which the person of the analyst occupies is a moment in a ‘psychical series’. Thus, ‘by

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opening up the dialectic of the transference, we must establish the notion of the Other with a capital O as being the locus of the deployment of speech.’13 It is because of Freud’s formal occupation of this function that Lacan can then argue that ‘the keys always fall into Freud’s hands even in those cases which are broken off like this one.’14 The dialectical structure of the situation itself resolves the transference. In her exemplary reading of Lacan’s ‘Intervention sur le transfert’ Suzanne Gearhart suggests that his analysis ‘hinges on a distinction between an actor implicated in the scene and a neutral position not directly implicated in it’, and this ‘distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, between the subject who is caught up in the imaginary relationships described by the scene and the (position of the) analyst, is absolute’.15 Thus, for Lacan, the ‘personal and historical’ blindness Freud displayed in his analysis of Dora nevertheless doesn’t affect the structural possibility of a ‘neutral perspective from which the problems it caused could have been resolved’.16 This neutral position, that of the subject credited with possessing knowledge, is thought by Lacan in unitary and monolithic terms. It is affirmed as an institution rather than problematized as a place riven by desire, and this is because it rests upon a final appeal to the transcendental subject of knowledge; I shall return to this point shortly. For the moment, let me dwell briefly on the metaphor of those ‘keys’ which ‘always fall into Freud’s hands’. These are the fixed hermeneutic ‘key’ which is one aspect of The Interpretation of Dreams, and they presumably correspond to the ‘picklocks’ to which, Freud writes to Fliess, the case of Dora is yielding.17 If the metaphor is in the most banal way phallic, it is because that realism of knowledge which assumes that a stable and pre-given meaning can be released by use of the correct analytic instrument corresponds precisely to a realism of the phallus which equates it with the penis, as well as to what Lacan denounces in Freud himself as a ‘prejudice which falsifies the conception of the Oedipus complex from the start, by making it define as natural, rather than normative, the predominance of the paternal figure’.18 And it corresponds to that sexual realism which accepts the reality of female sexuality as the reality of the lack of the phallus, and which led Freud at a later date to believe that a male analyst could not be a suitable transference object for a homosexual woman patient (as he believed Dora to be).19 The interpretative realism which both invokes and secures the authority of the analytic position is avoided in Kristeva’s account of the relativity of interpretation to the play of fantasies of desire and authority in analysis. The analyst is not fixed in the position of the classical interpreter, who interprets by virtue of stable meanings derived from a solid system or morality or who at least tries to restrict the range of his delirium through a stable theoretical counterweight. This is not to say that analytic theory does not exist but rather that, all things considered, its consistency is rudimentary when compared to the countertransferential operation which is always specific and which sets the interpretive machine in motion differently every time.20 And because ‘the efficacy of interpretation is a function of its transferential truth’, interpretation has a directly political dimension. 21 At another level, however, this politics of interpretation is called into question by the institutional structure of psychoanalysis. Gayatri Spivak, for example, claims that Kristeva ‘fail[s] to question the sociohistorical

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symptomaticity of psychoanalysis as a disciplinary practice’.22 To a certain extent Kristeva is able to answer this charge by distinguishing between two different ways of assuming analytic authority: The analyst provisionally occupies the place of the Great Other insofar as he is the metaphorical object of an idealizing identification. It is by knowing this and doing it that he creates the space for transference. By repressing it, however, the analyst becomes that Führer for whom Freud already showed his abhorrence in Group Psychology.23 But this still conceives of knowledge, in Hegelian terms, as self-presence and a selfrecognition which makes possible the resolution of the transference. If knowledge is thought, however, not through the model of the capacity of a knowing subject to represent its knowledge to itself, but structurally, as the effect of particular disciplinary conditions of possibility, then this dialectic of self-recognition might perhaps lose some of its obviousness. III Let me develop a distinction here between two models of the transmission of knowledge. The first is the productive relation of an analyst to a client, or of a teacher to a student who is not being trained as a teacher. ‘Productivity’ here implies both that the knowledge transmitted may be transformed in its application, and that this transformation will not be built into the structure of the discipline. The second, reproductive, relation of a teacher to a disciple represents at once the strict control of disciplinary boundaries, and the possibility of a transformation of the boundaries which will be institutionalized in the discipline itself. It is to some of the contradictions and limitations of this second model that I want now to address my discussion through a consideration of the role of transference in the psychoanalytic training analysis. The training analysis was instituted in 192:2 to serve three functions: the transmission of technique; the provision of a control over the counter-transference; and the establishment of a lineal descent from Freud. It is thus a central part of that history of discipleship that Roustang recounts in Dire Mastery. This history is one of competition between Freud’s disciples for the position of favourite. Freud himself seems actively to have incited the struggle between Jung and Abraham, and Roustang suggests that he used his relation to Ferenczi as a means of liquidating his transference relation to Fliess, and that this process was then repeated with the other disciples. ‘At work in each case were: attachment to Freud’s person, demand for privileged recognition, jealousy of the others, and conflict about the inheritance.’24 This culminated in the constitution of the International Psychoanalytical Association around the figure of the charismatic leader. The mechanism of transference thus became the central organizational principle for the psychoanalytic institution. Roustang comments: If one compares Freud’s analyses of the Church and the army in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to his project for a psychoanalytic society in On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, one is forced to notice a strange relationship between the

two: loyalty to the founder, allegiance to one leader, adherence to one doctrine, rejection

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of dissidents, and other aspects. All these features defining the new society can be explained in psychoanalytic terms only by an identification with the leader as an object of love, as the ego ideal…if every psychoanalytic society reproduces the Church or the army, if by its very structure it passes on to its members the influences and the ill effects of identification and love, then psychoanalysis itself is certainly threatened or subverted, and its fine edge is blunted.25 In institutional terms, it is crucial that no provision is made for the dissolution of the transference in the process of training. Psychoanalysis is constituted as a discipline and as an institution in relation to an orthodox knowledge embodied in a knowing subject. Lacan says of this relation: As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere… there is transference. What does an organization of psychoanalysts mean when it confers certificates of ability, if not that it indicates to whom one may apply to represent the subject who is supposed to know? Now, it is quite certain, as everyone knows, that no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute knowledge. That is why, in a sense, it can be said that if there is someone to whom one can apply there can be only one such person. This one was Freud, while he was alive. The fact that Freud, on the subject of the unconscious, was legitimately the subject that one could presume to know, sets aside anything that had to do with the analytic relation, when it was initiated, by his patients, with him. He was not only the subject who was supposed to know. He did know, and he gave us this knowledge in terms that may be said to be indestructible, in as much as, since they were first communicated, they support an interrogation which, up to the present day, has never been exhausted. No progress has been made, however small, that has not deviated whenever one of the terms around which Freud ordered the ways that he traced, and the paths of the unconscious, has been neglected. This shows us clearly enough what the function of the subject who is supposed to know is all about. The function, and by the same token, the consequence, the prestige, I would say, of Freud are on the horizon of every position of the analyst. They constitute the drama of the social, communal organization of psychoanalysts. 26 While it is crucial always to allow for duplicity and indirection in Lacan, it does seem that what he here invokes is a transcendental subject of knowledge, and that the invocation works to preserve the place and the reality of truth. In other words, this is a cognitive realism in the sense that it locates knowledge in a fixed place rather than in that structural relation in which the analyst—every analyst—stands in for the Other who is endlessly displaced in the Symbolic. Where Laplanche, for example, thinks of transference in terms of metaphor (Übertragung/metapherein), of fiction, of a misplaced and displaced addressee, 27 Lacan here anchors the language game of interpretation in a finally secure reality—and this despite the whole structuralist and anti-naturalist bent of his work.

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Although in principle there is always a discontinuity between texts and their consequences, it nevertheless seems likely that this reliance upon a trancendental subject has had marked disciplinary effects, with the repetition in the Lacanian community of precisely those structures Lacan had denounced as resembling the religious community of the church. In this reformed society external boundaries are maintained by the central role accorded to excommunication, and internal cohesion is built around the poles of adulation of the Master and the abjection of the disciples. Roustang again: In a group whose only goal is to acknowledge Lacan and to be acknowledged by him, the dissolution of the transference is a theoretical absurdity. After each congress, the participants wonder whom among the speakers Lacan will notice, which papers he will praise or condemn. And if he mentions no-one, whatever allusions he makes will be copiously interpreted. A system based exclusively on recognition by Lacan inexorably leads to the sterility of his disciples. Although Lacan himself complains of this, however, he refuses to acknowledge his responsibility or his need to remain unique.28 The 1979 dissolution of the École Freudienne (which was justified explicitly as a way of breaking the transference of the disciples on to Lacan) was followed almost immediately by the founding of the Cause Freudienne.29 And it is telling that all contributors to the journal Scilicet remained anonymous—with the single exception of Lacan.30 The opposition is that between the namelessness of those who are supposed to know, and who are subsumed in their formal roles, and the naming, indeed the father-naming, of the one who knows. The question at issue here is whether the structured organization of a discipline (and I take it that there can be no cohesive discipline of knowledge in the absence of a formal structure) is possible without a reliance upon the master/disciple couple, in however mediated a form, and in particular without a structural non-resolution of the transference. Roustang is pessimistic, arguing that ‘if the transference can be resolved in regard to the analyst, it must reappear in the very act of producing disciples’.31 My final metaphor for the disciplinary process, to which I now turn, is again concerned directly with this process of discipleship. IV In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel A New Dominion, Lee and Margaret, two English girls of about 20, are living with their swami in an ashram built on cheap land outside Benares. The conditions are primitive, but these discomforts could be and were interpreted as blessings, for what surer test could there be of a disciple’s sincerity than the ability to overcome discomforts? There were many who fell short and one by one they went away, and Swamiji saw them do so with a smiling, loving acquiescence. It only made him draw those that remained closer to himself.32 The focal point of the group’s activities and of its relation to Swamiji is a hutment which has been fitted out as a communal prayer hall. The room is dominated by a picture of Swamiji’s own guru, ‘a very holy man who wore no clothes and sat on a deer skin’ (p. 81). Beneath it,

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seated in a big velvet armchair, Swamiji encourages the devotions of the disciples, inspiring them to chant the names of the gods ever more loudly and more devotedly. Lee and Margaret are at first embarrassed, reserved, unable to sing with the same abandon as the others; but slowly, as the days passed, cunningly, he enticed them out of themselves. To each of them it appeared and became clear beyond doubt with each successive meeting that he was concentrating only on her. At first, Lee thought she must be imagining it—after all, there were all these others, all intent only on him and drawing their inspiration only from him—what was so special about her that he should single her out from among them? To cure herself of her misapprehension, she would lower her eyes away from him but she could never do so for long because he seemed to be drawing her back, beckoning to her, telling her come, look up, look at me. And when she did, sure enough, there he was smiling at her—yes! at her alone!—so that she had to smile back and sing the way he wanted her to and cry out ‘Rama! Gopala! Hari! Krishna!’ with as much abandon as she could manage. And afterwards, when he distributed the bits of rock sugar that served as holy offerings, then too at her turn, as he put it into her mouth, there was this special message for her, this speaking without words that went right through her and reached it seemed to her into regions which no one had hitherto penetrated. (p. 83) In this community the ‘lateral’ relations between the disciples are characterized by competition and jealousy, whereas their ‘Vertical’ relation to the swami is one of immediacy. Lee visits Swamiji and realizes that he had been expecting her; ‘she knew he could see right into her and it both thrilled and frightened her’ (p. 101). This relationship is, of course, one of power, but what is at stake is accepting this, and thereby moving it to a different level. When Lee refuses to make a gesture of submission demanded of her, this refusal itself then becomes the object of an inquisition (just as ‘resistance’ in psychoanalysis is construed as a symptom); and Lee senses that her rebellion is not against Swamiji but ‘against myself, my own feelings’ (p. 123). Swamiji himself is clearsighted about what is involved in this process. He tells her friend Raymond: Lee is now in my hands. She is my responsibility to mould and to make. But before I can mould and make, I have to break. The old Lee must be broken before the new Lee can be formed, and we are now only at the first stage of our task…. I have to help her and guide her every step so that she will know that everything is nothing and also that she herself is nothing. Only then can she belong to me as the disciple must belong to the guru. (pp. 144–6) As time passes, Lee comes to realize that she has failed some test and incurred her guru’s disfavour. Becoming deeply depressed, she begins to withdraw from the group: I drag myself around. I’ve never been like this before. Everything is so strange, so dismal; it’s as if there’s no light in the sun, and those glorious Indian nights, well they too now are dark and drab to me. Even at the hymn-singing we have morning and evening when he always seems to be singling out each of us separately, even then I’m not there for him. Lately I’ve stopped joining in with the others when they sing. I must

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stand there silent; I don’t feel like singing. I’m sure he’s noticed—he always notices when anyone doesn’t sing fervently enough—but now with me he pretends not to. He ignores me completely. I don’t know why. I think about it all the time. (p. 185) When she speaks about this to another disciple, the girl avoids answering directly and tells Lee that ‘what was happening now was only between me and him. And if I could bring myself to understand that his present neglect of me was nothing but an extension of his love and care for me, my suffering would be at an end’ (pp. 185–6). The silence of the guru, that is, works like the tactical silence of the analyst in giving shape to a transference relation. 33 Lee continues to be unable to accept and trust Swamiji’s disregard of her (although she recognizes that this indicates her low stage of spiritual development). When she eventually reproaches him, he abuses her, rapes her, and defiles her, and then turns her out of the ashram. Other disciples are sent to fetch her back; and at the end of the book, despite her deeply ambivalent feelings (based in part on the fact that Margaret, who, in accordance with the guru’s teaching, has refused Western medicine, has become fatally ill and died), she returns to the ashram to take up her position as the favoured disciple. My interest here is in the abstract pattern of the master-disciple relationship. A novel doesn’t of course provide valid anthropological material, but this one does produce a clear general model of the process of doctrinal transmission—one which corresponds closely to other accounts of religious discipleship. This model is that of a practice of initiation and guidance, structured as a rite of passage with clearly defined stages and a definite psychological progression. The central moment is that of the transference on to the guru. He in turn is qualified to take on the responsibility for this transference because of his own successfully resolved training and his command of an esoteric lore and technique. (It is irrelevant that the lore may be totally banal in content; what matters is its charismatic enunciation.) The guru is characterized above all by his insight: Lee feels that she has been singled out by Swamiji; a former Rajneeshi writes in a very similar way that it seemed as though Bhagwan noticed only her in the crowd; 34 and Lacan’s disciples clearly envisage a similar possibility of recognition. But noticing may be extended to non-conscious levels, in a process of mind speaking to mind. Thus Freud recommends that the analyst should ‘turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient’. The precondition for this is that he ‘must be able to communicate more freely with his own unconscious’, and it is precisely the purpose of the training analysis to make this possible. 35 The literature on the sociology of religion and religious psychology seems, for whatever reason, to be strikingly poor in descriptions of the process of doctrinal transmission. Let me follow van Gennep in isolating three stages in the passage through discipleship—first, separation; second, the transition across a threshold; and, third, aggregation. 36 The separation stage involves a passage out of an unsatisfactory community or an immature status; the finding of the single appropriate teacher; and the entry into a community of novitiates. Movement to the second, liminal stage is marked by various forms of dispossession —of one’s name, of clothes, of social status and its insignia. The central process here is the breaking down of the old ego. This may involve a ritual humiliation, as in the rape of Lee, or a ritual ordeal. The point is to enforce submission to the will of the master, and this will include both direct attack and what Goffman calls ‘looping’, in which defensive responses are themselves taken as an object of attack37—hence Lee’s feeling of bad faith when she is unable

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to make a gesture of submission. Finally, the liminal stage may incorporate an actual alienation, a period of wandering in the wilderness, as with Lee’s attempt to escape and Dora’s turning away from Freud. In this process of loss, what is discovered is that the guru had nothing to teach except that he had nothing to teach. The initiate discovers, in other words, that he or she already possessed the knowledge that was to be acquired, and that the task of the spiritual master was to bring about an awareness of this. The form of the process is its content. The last moment of the rite of passage is a rebirth into a new self. In theory this leads to a decisive break with the master, as the initiate in turn becomes a teacher, an enlightened one. In practice it seems that this resolution of the transference on to the master involves essentially a recognition of its fictionality; the guru teaches sitting beneath a portrait of his own guru, and it is through this resolution that the esoteric lore and the techniques associated with it are transmitted intact. V Transference relations of various kinds and various degrees of intensity obviously occur throughout any pedagogic system, although I shall suggest that the charismatic role of the teacher has been given a very particular institutional form in modern, text-oriented literary studies. But the analogy I want to pursue for the moment is with the training of graduate students—that is, with the moment of reproduction of the relations of literary knowledge. The ritual of the PhD has to do at once with the authorization of interpretative credentials and with the transmission—but also the controlled transformation—of a disciplinary structure. In its usual form it is organized as a passage from an undergraduate community to postgraduate loneliness; a breaking down of ego; and the acquisition of a specialized lore through a difficult and intense relation to a supervisor. The ordeal of candidature is a mad process in its assignment of a structural role to insecurity. It challenges the candidate’s sense of worth, provoking a trauma of loss as one of its central knowledge-producing mechanisms, one which is often cruelly prolonged or repeated. And this process is individualized; the absence of any theorization of its institutional dimensions works to isolate the candidate by denying him or her a procedural rationale for the trauma. It is not, of course, an individual process. In the first place, disciplines have external conditions of access, support, and reproducibility, which I have not attempted to discuss here. In the second place, the relation to the supervisor is no more a relation of one to one than it is in psychoanalysis. The supervisor is a representative of institutional and disciplinary authority, and the holder of a place in both diachronic and synchronic relation to the disciplinary authorities (although struggle within the discipline is also at stake in, and an effect of, the training—this is formalized in the French soutenance, where the supervisor acts as an advocate (rapporteur) for the candidate against the critique launched by the assesseur, and where what is at issue is in part the prestige and the strength of the supervisor). He or she thus mediates the candidate’s relation to the absent masters of the discipline, and in principle this mediation can be dispensed with, treated as a point of passage rather than as an embodiment of authority. But the embodiment is important both in terms of providing a focus for the relations of disciplinary authority and in terms of setting up the possibility of response. Embodiment should also be taken quite literally, however. The pedagogic relation

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in general and the candidate-supervisor relation in particular are erotic relations, in the sense that they depend upon the mechanisms of transference love. (This love may, of course, take the form of resentment or hatred.) In the case of a male candidate the relationship will take the form of Oedipal rivalry (in the German university system the supervisor is called the Doktorvater, ‘doctoral father’)—that is, a fantasy relationship involving at once emulation and hostility and culminating in the occupation by the candidate of the place of the displaced father figure: the place that had always been reserved for him. This pattern is complicated in the case of female candidates by the possibility that the erotics of the transference and the counter-transference can be taken literally, and realized in the form of either sexual blackmail or an exploitative physical relationship. Charisma and harassment are the two faces of pedagogic authority. I have assumed that the supervisor is a male, because it is a normatively masculine position. But there are clearly special problems for female supervisors, because they tend to be isolated in predominantly male departments; because they are often required to serve in an overdetermined erotic and maternal role in relation to female students; and because their anomalous occupation of a normatively masculine position subjects them to a continued pressure to prove their worth. This account sounds and in part is critical; but a criticism of a disciplinary structure can only be correctly based if it is aware of the functions this structure performs. A discipline is an organization of relations and techniques for the production and use of knowledge; there can be no knowledge whatsoever that is not enabled by some such structure, however informal, however embedded in everyday life it may be. The question is not, therefore, whether or not there should be disciplines and disciplinary relations, but can only be about their form, their relative flexibility, their productiveness, and so on. In a recent paper on the 1921 Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England Noel King suggests that the development of modern ‘English’—modern literary studies—both depends upon and reinforces a moral pedagogy in which the central charismatic role of the teacher and the character-forming effects of engagement with literary texts are foregrounded. Techniques of classroom teaching using texts as the basis for a continuous interrogation of moral experience are developed—in particular, dramatic declamation and a form of close reading relying upon a power of judgement which is at once literary and moral. The need the Newbolt Report responded to was for a form of teaching and examination…which could place the teacher—student relation at its centre, in a new kind of way, such that the student would be open to infinite noncoercive correction. The moral stature of the teacher had to be established, as the embodiment of certain norms and as the point at which a disciplinary system corrected students in an embodied fashion. The teacher becomes a point of relay for the construction of an autonomous, self-policing ‘pupil-life’. 38 Such self-regulation is the end effect of the mediating role of the teacher in relation to the literary text. The teacher’s enthusiasm will finally make possible an unmediated relationship of the pupil to literature, but ‘the “disappearance” of the teacher as a part of the pedagogical mechanism can occur only to the extent that the pupil has successfully mastered the techne of self.’ 39 To focus on the centrality of the teacher-pupil relationship to this ‘experiential’ pedagogy, says King, ‘is to remind ourselves of that set of emulable norms, the presence of an

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exemplary personage, at once therapeutic and charismatic; to remind ourselves, that is, of a system of pedagogical exchange from which we have yet to escape.’ And he suggests that ‘one of the current tasks of criticism might usefully consist in indicating the extent to which it is now possible for “English” to drop away without that system of pedagogy disappearing.’ 40 This system of pedagogy was developed in the first instance for use within secondary schools and for university undergraduate teaching. Let me recall the distinction I made before between two models of the transmission of knowledge: the first working through the ‘productive’ relation of a master to a non-professional client or student; the second through the ‘reproductive’ relation of a master to a disciple. This distinction corresponds very roughly to that between secondary and undergraduate education, on the one hand, and specialized postgraduate study, on the other. But the point is that the distinction is in no way absolute, since the first relation always in principle contains the possibility of the second (that is, of a reproductive use); and this, in turn, need not be structurally distinct from the first, ‘productive’ relation. Moreover, the correlation between the two models seems to me to be more striking in the case of literary study than for most other disciplines. I want to suggest that this is a result of the interpretative focus of literary study—its simultaneous nurturing of independent moral judgement, and control of the limits of judgement through the mechanisms of embodied correction. The questions of graduate-training and of a charismatic pedagogy are thus questions about the moral and experiential dimension given to judgement in literary studies, and about the processes of authorization of such judgement. This linkage is a part of our New Critical inheritance, and it does not seem to me to have been substantially modified by the structuralist and post-structuralist orthodoxies which have succeeded the New Criticism. But, while a rejection of the relatively intimate teaching relations fostered in this tradition might be salutary as a refusal of charismatic authority, it might well entail no more than a repression of the reality of transference relations and of the mediated transferential structure of interpretation. It might mean no more than a return to the positivist pedagogy of those ‘hard’ sciences, philology and history, which the New Criticism displaced from the centre of the discipline. 41 To ask whether the ordeal of discipleship can be dispensed with involves asking another, more fundamental question: whether there can be a dispassionate acquisition of knowledge. Perhaps there can be no generally valid answer to this question; but I believe that in the case of literary studies the answer must be that there can not. It is for this reason that I have placed the master-disciple relation at the centre of the process of doctrinal transmission. To assert the passional basis of the acquisition of at least certain kinds of knowledge is to say that there can be no unmediated relation to knowledge (no simple ‘love of knowledge’). The master—disciple relation, whether in a focused or a diffuse form, is a mechanism—archaic and clumsy—for investing the process of transmission of knowledge with a productive intensity. It is a politically fraught mechanism; and it remains, directly or indirectly, the horizon of all our disciplinary transactions.

Murdoch University, Western Australia

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NOTES 1 Michel Foucault, ‘The order of discourse’, trans. Ian McLeod, Untying the Text, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 59–61. 2 Julia Kristeva, Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983), p. 19. 3 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragments of an analysis of a case of hysteria (“Dora”)’ (1905 [1901]), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), vol. 7, P. 31. Page numbers to this edition are given in the text in parentheses. 4 Sigmund Freud, ‘The dynamics of transference’ (1912.), Standard Edition, vol. 12, p. 100. 5 M.M.Gill and H.L.Muslin, ‘Transference in the Dora case’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 26, 2 (1978), pp. 323–4. 6 Steven Marcus, ‘Freud and Dora: story, history, case history’, Representations (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 303, n. 22. 7 Jacqueline Rose, ‘“Dora”—fragment of an analysis’, mlf, 2 (1978), p. 9. 8 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1901), Standard Edition, vol. 5, P. 342. 9 Jacques Lacan, ‘Intervention on transference’, in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 62. 10 Jacques Lacan, ‘The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power’, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 226. 11 Ibid., p. 246. 12 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 231. 13 Lacan, Écrits, p. 264. 14 Lacan, ‘Intervention on transference’, p. 67. 15 Suzanne Gearhart, ‘The scene of psychoanalysis: the unanswered questions of Dora’, Diacritics (March 1979), p. 116. 16 Ibid., p.115. 17 14 October 1900: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 427. 18 Lacan, ‘Intervention on transference’, p. 69. 19 Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman’ (1920), Standard Edition, vol. 18, p. 164. 20 Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis and the polis’, trans. Margaret Waller, Critical Inquiry, 9, 1 (1982), p. 84. 21 Ibid., p. 86. 22 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The politics of interpretations’, Critical Inquiry, 9, 1 (1982), p. 270. 23 Kristeva, Histoires d’amour, p. 36. 24 François Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 9. 25 Ibid., p. 17. 26 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis., p. 232. 27 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 138. 28 Roustang, op. cit., p. 28. 29 Cf. Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Catherine Clément, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 30 Roustang, op. cit., p. 31.

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31 Ibid., p. 34. 32 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A New Dominion (1972.; repr. London: Granada, 1983), p. 82. Hereafter page references appear in the text in parentheses. 33 Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 62: ‘The agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not supposed to know.’ 34 Sally Belfrage, Flowers of Emptiness (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 164. 35 Sigmund Freud, ‘Recommendations to physicians practising psychoanalysis’ (1912,), Standard Edition, vol. 12, p. 115. 36 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). 37 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 42. 38 Noel King, ‘“The teacher must exist before the pupil”: the Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England, 1921’, Literature and History, 13, 1 (1987), p. 27. 39 Ibid., p. 30; cf. Ian Hunter, ‘Culture and government: the emergence of literary education’, PhD thesis (Griffith University, 1986). 40 King, op. cit., p. 33. 41 Cf. Steven Mailloux, ‘Rhetorical hermeneutics’, Critical Inquiry, 11, 4 (1985), pp. 632–3.

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In the rathouse of history with Thomas Pynchon: rereading V. ROBERT HOLTON

‘One would have to exorcise the city, the island…. The continents, the world. Or the western part,’ as an afterthought. ‘We are western men.’ (V., p. 451) Hayden White’s argument ‘that the conviction that one can make sense of history stands on the same level of epistemic plausibility as the conviction that it makes no sense whatsoever’ 1 seems to echo a recurring concern in Thomas Pynchon’s work. Stencil in V., Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, and Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow all seek to discern some order or pattern in the world and its history. An inevitable problem then arises to haunt them throughout the novels—is this pattern, order, meaning (if located) a property of the world and of history? Or is it a projection of the ordering perception of the one who is searching for meaning? If the order or meaning perceived is primarily a property of the interpreter’s perception, how, then, is that sublime object of interpretation—historical reality—to be approached? And what are the political implications of this problem? A number of critics have discussed the epistemological problems presented in Pynchon’s work, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the precise setting or context in which Pynchon locates those problems. Yet these are essential components of the work. V. explores the aporias of epistemology at a series of specific and critical junctures in modern Western history, documenting the breakdown of white imperialist hegemony. His concern with science and various abstract bodies of thought is certainly important, but his radical questioning of power, politics, historical events, and philosophy of history ought to be taken seriously. There is an almost Pychonesque irony in the way in which many critics have maintained a blind spot in their readings of Pynchon’s texts, a blind spot that occludes the explicitly social and political dimensions of the work. Plater, for instance, dismisses the overt political history in Pynchon quite lightly in favour of a more abstract grounding of the work: ‘colonialism’, he writes ‘is only one of Pynchon’s several metaphors for the uncertainty relations of reality and illusion. Others work equally well.’ Stark, perhaps, is most adamant: ‘Occasionally he does discuss moral or social issues, but he usually subordinates them to other issues…. As a general rule, however, he focuses on literary, epistemological, and metaphysical problems.’ ‘Pynchon does not often refer to social and political history.’ Elsewhere he speaks of ‘the relatively minor importance of politics’ in V. In general, however, even those critics who, like Schaub, do acknowledge the social and historical dimension of Pynchon’s work devote most of their commentary to his various abstract philosophical and

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scientific concerns.2 In the following article I attempt instead to represent Pynchon as a profoundly political and historical novelist whose conception of the political and historical field has much in common with contemporary cultural and historiographical theory. According to White, prior to the formation of the discipline of history in the nineteenth century, the subject was considered a branch of the more general field of rhetoric, ‘the source and repository of tradition, moral exemplars, and admonitory lessons’. White writes: the historical field itself (that is, the past or the historical process) had to be viewed as a chaos that made no sense at all or one that could be made to bear as many senses as wit and rhetorical talent could impose on it. (CF, pp. 64–5) As history came to constitute a distinct discipline, rules of evidence and a more rigorous sense of factuality came into play, not only regulating the kinds of narratives a historian could produce but also altering the underlying conception of the nature of the historical field itself: ‘For this tradition, whatever “confusion” is displayed by the historical record is only a surface phenomenon’ (CF, p. 71) subject to correction by subsequent historians. White goes on to relate these dichotomous conceptions of history to the concurrent debate on the nature of the sublime and the beautiful. The irreducible confusion and the ultimately unrepresentable nature of the historical field are associated with the idea of the sublime, while the conception of history as possessing order, logic, or sense falls into the aesthetic category of the beautiful. As aesthetics superseded rhetoric and the beautiful gradually displaced the sublime as a category of judgement, the narratives both of history and of fiction were expected to display a more thorough sense of coherence, to make sense in a more complete and sustained way. Any single historical narrative should ideally exhibit both an internal coherence and a fidelity to ‘the facts’, such that it could be seen as one chapter of a narrative that, if extended long enough, could theoretically recount and account for all of history. This view of history is supportable only by the exclusion of the historical sublime: history as an awesome, perhaps incomprehensible, terrifying, multifarious, unrepresentable spectacle. The attempt to represent history in a narrative form, then, gives rise to some difficulties: the problem is not that history cannot be interpreted as much as the fact that it can be, endlessly, it seems, and in contradictory ways. As Ricœur notes, no matter which historiographical methodology is applied, the event is restored at the end of each attempted explanation as a remainder left by each such attempt…as a dissonance between explanatory structures, and finally, as the life and death of the structures themselves. 3 Similarly, Lyotard argues that the sublimity of the pure event subverts any attempt at final or full representation, and furthermore that the sublime is thus precisely what must be repressed in order for representation to occur. 4 The exhaustive narrative is by definition impossible and any history is necessarily a selective one. Selection of the events deemed worthy of narration, of narrative point of view, and of the narrative techniques employed thus fall partly under the compulsion of the need for narrative coherence, a compulsion that prompts White to ask ‘what kind of notion of reality authorizes construction of a narrative

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account of reality in which continuity rather than discontinuity governs the articulation of the discourse’ (CF, p. 10). With a few exceptions, notably in modern literature, narrative strains for the effect of having filled in all the gaps, of having put an image of continuity, coherency, and meaning in place of the fantasies of emptiness, need, and frustrated desire that inhabit our nightmares about the destructive power of time. (CF, p. 11) The continuity of the narrative realist form of historical discourse, its tendency to totalization, has another aspect, one that White borrows from Hegel: an ‘intimate relationship’ seems to exist ‘between law, historicality, and narrativity’, and, he observes, ‘this raises the suspicion that narrative in general…has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority’ (CF, p. 13). It may not be stretching the point too much to infer that problems of narrative continuity have to do with problems of authority in a more general sense as well. History is generally, as the saying goes, written from the vantage-point of the victors; to this may be added Fanon’s observation that objectivity has always been on the side of the colonizer. 5 In a similar vein, White argues: For subordinant, emergent, or resisting social groups,…opposition can be carried forward only on the basis of a conception of the historical record as being not a window through which the past ‘as it really was’ can be apprehended but rather a wall that must be broken through if the ‘terror of history’ is to be directly confronted. (CF, p. 82.) A number of historians, including White, have called attention to Chateaubriand’s heroic conception of the vocation of the historian: In the silence of abjection, when the only sounds to be heard are the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when everything trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to deserve his disfavor, this is when the historian appears, charged with avenging the people. (CF, p. 79) White does not, however, advocate a more rigorous ‘scientific’ approach to the writing of history, nor a return to the Covering Law Model. A breakdown in the idea of objective narrative realism and the recovery of the historical sublime may, he argues, be a ‘necessary precondition for the production of a historiography of the sort that Chateaubriand conceived to be desirable in times of “abjection”’. This postmodern version of the historical sublime differs, however, from its predecessors. Jameson remarks that the sublime is no longer subjective in the older sense that a personality is standing in front of the Alps and knowing the limits of the individual subject and the human ego. On the contrary, it is a kind of non-humanist experience of limits beyond which you get dissolved. 6

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This sense of dissolution that marks the sublime can be taken to refer as well to the dissolution of the continuity and coherence of narrative and its claim to represent reality realistically. The crisis in narrative authority has ranged from a questioning of the various aspects of the art of narration to a wholesale scepticism towards the possibility of narrative representation. Said writes that, for some contemporaries, ‘narrative, which poses an enabling arché and a vindicating telos, is no longer an adequate figure for plotting the human trajectory in society. There is nothing to look forward to: we are stuck within our circle.’ 7 If narrative coherence is threatened, as White’s remarks on the relation of narrativity and legality would seem to imply, then the cohesion and legitimacy of the social system are also being threatened. Along with the weakening of the authority of the narratives through which society understands and authorizes itself comes a concomitant crisis in that society. It is surely no coincidence that much postmodern fiction was produced in a period of social upheaval, a period during which many of the basic beliefs of European and North American society were subjected to radical critique. The dissolution of individual subjectivity resulting from the sublime corresponds on the social plane with a dissolution of certain kinds of social and narrative authority. ‘With the sublime,’ writes Lyotard, ‘we go a long way into heterogeneity’8—a heterogeneity that is rendered impossible by the dominance of monolithic ‘objectivity’ and ‘realism’. This heterogeneous discourse would by definition include the alterity which has been repressed by an imperialist culture and its totalizing narratives. In this sense postmodern historical relativism can be seen as the dissolution or delegitimization of any one cultural group’s claim to sole authority in the construction of historical narrative, an authority that is ultimately political in nature. The problem of separate, perhaps incommensurable, worlds of experience, and of a concurrent separation in the representation of that experience, has long been a central one for Pynchon, and he has often been quite specific about the social and political implications. As a student in the late fifties influenced by the beat movement he began ‘to get a sense of that other world humming along out there’ 9 beyond the privileged world of Cornell. His own early short fiction often turns on themes of class or racial separation, anticipating the social turbulence of the sixties. About that era, Pynchon writes: The success of the ‘new left’…was…limited by the failure of college kids and blue collar workers to get together politically. One reason was the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way of communication between the two groups. (SL, pp. xv–xvi) As its title suggests, one of Pynchon’s few published essays, ‘A journey into the Mind of Watts’, is an attempt to map one such force field and to articulate the subjective experience of the residents of Watts as the possibility of riot simmered once again on the brink of boiling. At ‘the heart of L.A.’s racial sickness is the coexistence of two very different cultures: one white and one black.’ These two cultures, each with its own internal logic and historical trajectory, often confront each other over the barrel of a police revolver, ‘and the history of this place and these times makes it impossible for the cop to come on any different, or for you to hate him any less.’ 10 The eastern boundary of Watts, he writes, looks ‘like the edge of the world’. The idea of mental geography and frontiers continues in another image of the ghetto as a ‘country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles further than most whites seem at present willing

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to travel’, 11 a country whose customs, dress codes, hairdos, and history simply do not mesh with the hegemonic white culture. While insisting on the existence of an invisible force field of race and class separating the inhabitants of Watts from the dominant white culture, Pynchon nevertheless attempts to bridge that gap, to interpret and represent the experience of the other with empathy, intelligence, and decency. Similarly, Said, in his essay on post-colonial intellectuals, writes: I think we should begin by accepting the notion that although there is an irreducible subjective core to human experience, this experience is also historical and secular, it is accessible to certain kinds of analysis, and… it is not exhausted by totalizing theories marked and limited by doctrinal lines or by analytic constructs…. That is we must be able to think through and interpret together discrepant experiences, each with its particular agendas and pace of development, its own formations, its internal coherence and its system of external relationships. 12 Images such as ‘the edge of the world’ and ‘invisible force fields’ posit a universe made up of non-synchronous 13 systems of ‘discrepant experiences’, and Pynchon’s frequent invocation of this difference, whatever its epistemological consequences, is firmly based in social and historical observation. It is by means of this firm grounding in concrete social experience that he avoids the trivialization that can be a consequence of moral or cultural relativism. For example, early in V. he states the problem in miniature. Profane is riding the subway, ‘yoyoing’ back and forth from one end of the line to the other for hours; during the course of the day he sees the atmosphere change radically: The shuttle after morning rush hour is near empty, like a littered beach after tourists have all gone home. In the hours between nine and noon the permanent residents come creeping back up their strand, shy and tentative. Since sunup all manner of affluent have filled the limits of that world with a sense of summer and life; now sleeping bums and old ladies on relief, who have been there all along unnoticed, re-establish a kind of property right, and the coming on of a falling season.14 Although the beach image suggests that the bums and old ladies have actually gone somewhere, Pynchon assures us that they have not. Instead, their power to impose the definition of what Sidney Stencil would call The Situation’ has been eclipsed: the affluent have ‘filled the limits of that world’, that is, defined it according to their own limited experience, then moved on without having been touched or affected in any way, without even having recognized the existence of an alterity whose definition of The Situation’ it has occluded. This little epistemological parable describes an aspect of power relations between the relatively rich and the relatively poor. Elsewhere, Rachel Owlglass, an upper-middle-class young woman who feels restricted by the limits of her world, laments that ‘Daughters are constrained to pace demure and darkeyed like so many Rapunzels within the magic frontiers.’ Since she realizes that she may not be able to escape, she asks Profane to tell her about the world outside: ‘How the road is. Your boy’s road that I’ll never see…. What it’s like west of Ithaca and south of Princeton. Places I won’t know’ (V., pp. 25, 27). Ithaca and Princeton function here as ideological boundaries as

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much as geographical locations, and the epistemological limits arise here through gender as well as class. 15 Those ‘magic frontiers’ recall ‘the limits of the world’ mentioned above and look forward to yet another similar instance: Esther meets a college boy who leads a conventional middle-class life but is attracted to the bohemian lifestyles of a group known as the Whole Sick Crew: He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. (V., p. 58) This split between worlds separates a counter-culture from the mainstream, a phenomenon Pynchon has long been interested in. The ‘invisible force fields’ separating cultural groups find metaphorical expression in V. as well in the profusion of siege imagery—the siege of Malta and Foppl’s siege party are the most detailed, but there are many other passing references. The military siege with its focus on a wall separating opposing groups finds its epistemological correlative in the idea of fundamentally irreconcilable discrepant experience, or perhaps in White’s epistemological ‘walls that must be broken through’. The most extensive exploration of this problem in V., however, revolves around certain aspects of racial difference, examining a series of critical moments in the history of European imperialism when the West quite deliberately and strategically denied the validity and the reality of non-synchronous Third World experience as part of a brutal enforcement of its own priorities. Not only has imperialist Western culture not often cared to ‘think through and interpret…discrepant experiences’ together with other cultural groups; it has in fact attempted to eradicate some of those cultures entirely. Pynchon writes of the ‘racist, sexist, and protofascist’ spirit of the time preceding the publication of the novel in 1963, a time when ‘John Kennedy’s role model James Bond was about to make his name by kicking third-world people around, another extension of the boy’s adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading’ (SL, p. xxi). V. is, in a sense, a parody of those books—by Kipling, Buchan, Haggard, et al.—that contributed to the construction of the ‘manichean’ racial difference that JanMohamed locates at the very heart of that colonialist literary genre. 16 Clear though Pynchon’s political position is here, perhaps the most critically neglected aspect of V. is its political use of epistemological and historiographical problems as a means to break down the wall of objective realism, a wall that has protected the hegemonic culture of Western society. The general epistemological dilemma in V. is given one central formulation by British agent Sidney Stencil, who ‘remembered times when whole embassiesful of personnel had simply run amok and gibbering in the streets when confronted with a Situation which refused to make sense no matter who looked at it, or from what angle.’ As a result he problematizes the very existence of an objective reality. ‘He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment’ (V., p. 189). In order to minimize confusion—a costly danger in the espionage business (which is not merely an epistemological metaphor but also, and perhaps more importantly, a straightforwardly political one)—Stencil Sr has developed an alternative

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to objective appraisal: a form of epistemological teamwork. But this approach too is not without difficulties: Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. (V., p. 189) ‘The sublime’, writes Lyotard in a similar vein, ‘bears witness to the incommensurability between thought and the real world.’ 17 If, as Lyotard argues, the terror and the sublimity of the event lie in part in its unrepresentability, then for Sidney Stencil there is at least safety in numbers. Truth, or knowledge, thus ultimately becomes a problem not of verification (or at least not of verification alone) but of consensus, privileging the homogeneous over the heterogeneous. In fact, one of the lessons of V. concerns the final impossibility of representing the world coherently and fully from any single perspective, an unrepresentability that brings us back as well to White’s historical sublime. Stencil Jr’s quest for V. demonstrates both the futility of the attempt and the inevitable distortions that must result from such an obsessive and totalizing vision. In developing his consensus approach to reality and The Situation, Stencil Sr stresses the need for a ‘degree of rapport’ among those attempting to form the composite picture of it, suggesting that otherwise they would ‘form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous’ (V., p. 189). The word ‘mongrel’ carries here, as usual, a pejorative sense, and in V., with its acute awareness of race and colonialism, it carries a less abstract meaning as well—a racial mixture. Sidney Stencil’s insistence on a ‘degree of rapport’ suggests an ethnocentrism which serves to protect his version of The Situation from epistemological and political dissolution and guarantees the exclusion of the kind of discrepant or non-synchronous experience that Said and Bloch speak of. Like many of his generation (and ours), Stencil Sr acknowledges with regret the passing of an imperialist era which protected the homogeneity of representation and power. As an anti-colonialist movement gathers momentum in Malta with its ‘motley of races’ (V., p. 310), he reflects with resignation that There were no more princes. Henceforth politics would become progressively more democratized, more thrown into the hands of amateurs. The disease would progress. Stencil was nearly past caring’ (V., p. 489). In the world of Stencil Jr, however, that difference—while still central—is far less divisive. Racial purity, a fetishized ideal in the historical sections of V., is at times almost parodied. The members of the Whole Sick Crew and those with whom they associate are, by and large, as Rachel puts it, ‘Deracinated’ (V., p. 382) in both senses of the word: rootless and without sharp racial distinctions in the manner of Stencil Sr’s generation. While they are by no means oblivious to their particular racial backgrounds, with the exception of Mafia Winsome this awareness is not generally used as a principle of exclusion. Profane is Jewish-Irish, Rachel is Jewish, Sphere is black, Fergus Mixolidian is an Irish-American Jew, Profane spends part of the novel living and working with a Puerto Rican family. Esther does get a nose job, turning her ‘Jew nose’ into an Irish retroussé, but she is criticized for it by her friends and even by the doctor who performs the operation (V., p. 103). Most important of all, perhaps, is the identity of Paola Maijstral, who is Maltese. Malta is in the middle of the Mediterranean, the middle of

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the middle of the world, a point where Europe and Africa intersect. It is referred to as ‘a cradle of life’ (V., p. 382) and, echoing Sidney Stencil’s strictures against a ‘mongrel’ reality, the people of Malta are characterized as a ‘motley of races’ (V., p. 310). Malta is the site of a number of key episodes in the novel, and in one of the most powerful scenes the children of this ‘motley of races’, among the ruins of European Second World War bombing, disassemble V., who has come to be identified with a particularly evil form of reified racist colonialism. Ironically, when Stencil Jr tries to represent The Situation of 1898, his narrators constitute precisely the sort of ‘mongrel’ assortment his father would have rejected: P.Aïeul, Arab café waiter; Yusef, another Arab, a kitchen worker; Maxwell Rowley-Bugge, a disgraced expatriate English paedophile; Waldetar, a Portuguese Jew working on the railroads in Egypt; Gebrail, an Arab phaeton driver; Girgis, an acrobat and burglar working with a team of Syrians; and Hanne, barmaid in a German-style beerhall in Egypt. All of these characters try to interpret the behaviour of the same group of diplomat-spies, attempt to construct a version of The Situation. Thus Stencil Jr attempts to come to terms to some degree with the idea of a non-homogeneous interpretation of reality. Nevertheless, Stencil Jr is finally something like White’s traditional historian attempting to find both meaning and narrative coherence in history. His facts, of course, are incomplete, so in an effort to represent certain historical moments of importance to his overall narrative he must go beyond hard facts, blurring further the line separating fiction and history. History according to Herbert Stencil, as his name might suggest, is made to fit a pattern. Yet within the novel it is largely through Stencil’s narratives that we have access to history: Around each seed of a dossier, therefore, had developed a nacreous mass of inference, poetic license, forcible dislocation of personality into a past he didn’t remember and had no right in save the right of imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is recognized by no one. (V., p. 62.) The first historical dossier that Pynchon, via Stencil, presents concerns the Fashoda episode, a critical moment in European imperialism. In any narrative, focalization or point of view determines a great deal; chapter 3 presents a series of fictional events related to the historical crisis, each from a different point of view but always with the guiding vision of Stencil’s combination of ‘imaginative anxiety or historical care’ in the background. The eight separate focalizers in the chapter offer very different perspectives on the events they observe. In more conventional narratives, writes Rimmon-Kenan, the ‘norms’ of the text in accordance with which the events and characters are evaluated ‘are presented through a single dominant perspective, that of the narrator-focalizer’. Pynchon’s use of multiple focalizers undermines any single sense of norms as interpretative guides: the single authoritative external focalizer gives way to a plurality of ideological positions…. Some of these positions may concur in part or in whole, others may be mutually opposed, the interplay among them provoking a non-unitary, ‘polyphonic’ reading of the text.18

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This ‘non-unitary, “polyphonic” reading’ may presumably be extended to encompass a reading of history itself, a reading that could allow space for non-synchronous and disparate experience. In the other ‘Stencilized’ chapters as well, this technique is employed. Whether it is a shifting focalizer (chapter 7), Stencil’s adaptation of someone else’s story (chapter 9), or the rendering of someone else’s diary (chapter 11), ‘the single authoritative external focalizer’ is always undermined. Pynchon’s use of this technique allows him to present a glimpse of the world from various perspectives, an imaginative attempt to cross those ‘magic frontiers’ that separate different universes of discourse. We are reminded, however, of the difficulty of doing so, of escaping from our towers, by the fact that both the focalizers who provide a centre of consciousness and to some degree the events related have been ‘Stencilized’. Yet balancing this narrative instability is the historical detail: the Mahdi, the Fashoda episode, the siege of Malta. These are matters of historical fact, and Pynchon does not seem concerned with challenging that status. According to the history books, the Herero uprising of 1904 did occur and was suppressed by von Trotha in the manner Pynchon relates, and in 1912. the Bondels, led by Abraham Morris, did unsuccessfully rise against the white colonial government.19 It is worth pointing out that, whatever the epistemological traps that lie tangled within Stencil’s obsession with V., the subtext of every historical narrative he produces has to do with imperialist conquest or violence, with a steady current of racism. Even in the chapter ‘V. in love’, the least overtly political of the historical chapters, there occurs a profusion of references to race and imperialism probing the ‘erotic and aesthetic fascination with “the Orient”’ that Huyssen (and, of course, Said) has characterized as a ‘deeply problematic’ element of European culture.20 It is in these themes of race and colonial history that the continuity of V. lies, and it is a continuity that remains undisturbed by the epistemological aporias presented by the novel. However much the possibility of final knowledge is undermined and narrative shown to be unstable, Pynchon seems at times to address the reader directly and without a trace of epistemological distress: [Hanging] had been a popular form of killing during the Great Rebellion of 1904–07, when the Hereros and Hottentots, who usually fought one another, staged a simultaneous but uncoordinated rising against an incompetent German administration. General Lothar von Trotha, having demonstrated to Berlin during his Chinese and East African campaigns a certain expertise at suppressing pigmented populations, was brought in to deal with the Hereros. In August 1904, von Trotha issued his ‘Vernichtungs Befehl’, whereby the German forces were ordered to exterminate systematically every Herero man, woman and child they could find. He was about 80 percent successful. Out of the estimated 80,000 Hereros living in the territory in 1904, an official German census taken seven years later set the Herero population at only 15,130, this being a decrease of 64,870. Similarly the Hottentots were reduced in the same period by about 10,000, the Berg-Damaras by 17,000. Allowing for natural causes during those unnatural years, von Trotha, who stayed for only one of them, is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000 people. This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good. (V., pp. 244–5)

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All this information is a matter of verifiable historical ‘fact’. The only trace of irony in this section occurs in the last sentence, and it does nothing to undermine the certainty of the account; instead it lends power to it. Pynchon combines historical facts, even statistics, with what seems at times an almost allegorical symbolism in order to sharpen his critique. Mondaugen, at one point during the siege party, sets off in search of the power generator so that he can tap some of the electricity for his experiments. The generator he actually finds is of a more symbolic nature than he had intended, however: Foppl’s own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold in the very center and round it the nine planets and their moons, suspended from tracks in the ceiling, actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys, belts, racks, pinions and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a treadmill in the corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by a Bondelschwartz [slave], now unoccupied. (V., p. 239) Ignoring the reference to slavery, one might argue that the epistemological metaphor here concerns the way in which we construct our universe and suggests that our constructions are, like Stencil’s, rather clumsy at times. Mondaugen has, odd though it may seem, danced into the room with a young woman whose declared ‘purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of men’ (V., p. 239). The rhythm of the music they had been dancing to is transformed into a kind of cosmic rhythm as Mondaugen released her, skipped to the treadmill and began a jog-trot that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining in a way that raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling, shuddering, the wooden planets began to rotate and spin. Saturn’s rings to whirl, moons their precessions, our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking up speed; as the girl continued to dance, having chosen Venus for her partner; as Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic, following in the footsteps of a generation of slaves. (V., p. 239) Again, it is possible to read this as a demonstration that love (or at least desire) makes the world go round. And Pynchon, with his fine sense of cliché, no doubt intends this. But the final allusion once again is to slavery, oppression. Without knowing it, Mondaugen has found the generator, albeit not the one he was looking for. So, ‘breathing heavily’, he ‘staggered off the treadmill to carry on his descent and search for the generator’ (V., p. 140). For the reader at least there should be less ambiguity surrounding the power generator and the generations of slaves who have powered this society as Mondaugen reaches bottom in his descent and finds, perhaps, the very slave whose place as generator on the planetary treadmill had been unoccupied. As if the entire day had come into being only to prepare him for this, he discovered a Bondel male, face down and naked, the back and buttocks showing scar tissue from old sjambokings as well as more recent wounds, laid open across the flesh like so many toothless smiles…. Mondaugen approached the man and stooped to listen for breathing

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or a heartbeat, trying not to see the white vertebra that winked at him from one long opening. (V., p. 2.40) The seemingly incongruous images that accompany this scene, of smiles and a wink, underscore with a grim irony the power of metaphorical representation. Thus the wounds represented here as smiles and winks can be read as the inscription of the desire and power of the oppressor on the literal body of the slave—from the point of view of the torturer, a point of view that Mondaugen has passively accepted. Eventually, however, he decides to leave the white enclave: ‘Mondaugen this time withdrew, preferring at last neither to watch nor to listen.’ He then makes a dramatic (again, almost allegorical) crossing of the ravine separating the siege party from the rest of the world—the siege is, in V., political and epistemological as well as military. He drops a plank across a narrow part of the abyss and works ‘his way gingerly across, trying not to look down at the tiny stream two hundred feet below’. The ravine constitutes a significant epistemological gap with overt moral consequences, and Mondaugen is crossing one of the ‘magical frontiers’, going beyond ‘the limits’ of that particular world. He makes his way through the scrubland until he meets a Bondel on a donkey: He let Mondaugen ride behind him. At that point Mondaugen didn’t know where they were going. As the sun climbed he dozed on and off, his cheek against the Bondel’s scarred back…as they trotted along the Bondel began to sing…. The song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn’t understand it. (V., p. 279) Disoriented and in many ways uncomprehending after the literal bridging of a sublime abyss, an ‘invisible force field’, he has arrived at the conditions of possibility of another state of mind, beyond the siege mentality. The scarred back of the Bondel can be considered a kind of text that can be read in different ways in different cultural and historical situations (even as ‘smiles’ and ‘winks’), but the existence of the scars themselves is not in doubt. Although ‘history is not a text’, writes Jameson, ‘it is inaccessible to us except in textual form.’ 21 Here the text of history is inscribed in the scars on the backs of its victims. Writing of the cultural meaning of scars for another colonized group—Latin American Indians—de Certeau asserts that the Indians preserve a painful recognition of four and a half centuries of colonization. Dominated but not vanquished, they keep alive the memory of what the Europeans have ‘forgotten’—a continuous series of uprisings and awakenings which have left hardly a trace in the occupiers’ historiographical literature. This history of resistance marked by cruel repression is marked on the Indian’s body as much as it is recorded in transmitted accounts—or more so. For them, these ‘scars on the body proper—or the fallen “heroes” or “martyrs” who correspond to them in narrative’ constitute ‘the index of a history yet to be made’. 22 There is a clear moral and historical imperative governing Pynchon’s representation of ‘real’ historical events and their apparent pattern. It can be detected perhaps in the way the Bondel’s post-revolutionary song (a failed revolution) echoes in V. through decades and across

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cultures: in Porcepic’s appropriation of African polyrhythms for white European modernist music (V., p. 402) and in Sphere’s black American jazz with its ‘rising rhythms of African nationalism’ (V., p. 60). While a number of patterns do repeat in the historical and the contemporary chapters, it is an overstatement to claim as Hite does that reality in V. is somehow ‘static… which suggests that past and present exist simultaneously or even that they are reversible…in V. past and present reflect each other in receding vistas’. 23 There can be no question, for example, of reversing the genocidal atrocities carried out against the Hereros, and to suggest an equivalence to ‘Mafia Winsome’s intellectual racism’ is clearly as disproportionate as is her equivalence of Foppl’s siege party (with its racist torture, murder, rape, and depravity) and the relatively mild bohemianism of the Whole Sick Crew. 24 This response to the novel is quite common, however, and results from approaching it as an abstract philosophical statement or an epistemological puzzle (albeit a puzzle that may not allow the possibility of a solution) to the exclusion of the concrete social and historical detail. Patteson argues that, for Stencil, ‘V. is in a sense a vast hall of mirrors in which…an indefinite number of variations’ may be discovered, ‘but no way out of his dilemma’. 25 The recurrence of mirror imagery in discussions of V. is symptomatic of a prevalent problem in postmodernism: the possibility that an acceptance of relativity entails a trivializing of interpretation. Bloch argues that in some versions of historical relativism The very process of history is broken up…historical relativism is here turned into something static; it is being caught in cultural monads, that is, culture souls without windows, with no links among each other, yet full of mirrors facing inside. 26 A dangerous tendency of cultural relativism, Fabian adds, is the fact ‘that such mirrors, if placed at propitious angles, also have the miraculous power to make real objects disappear’.27 Bloch and Fabian undoubtedly have an important point: certainly there are aspects of postmodernism and cultural relativism that effectively de-realize history—it has been argued that some of White’s work, for example, lends itself to this possibility. Yet this need not be the case. There is a corollary to this mirror imagery: if placed at certain other propitious angles, mirrors have an equally miraculous power to present objects and perspectives previously unavailable to perception. Pynchon’s postmodern mirrors may indeed conceal many things and present many illusions and deceptions, but they also re-present historical situations and events that had hitherto remained obscured from sight. Under the cover of historical relativism, rather than making events disappear, he is making present what seems to be a remarkable history of Western racism from the atrocities of colonialism to the somewhat more covert racism of America at the time of writing. It is also not entirely accurate to claim, as Hite does, that ‘in V.… nobody seems to learn anything’. Sphere, Rachel, and Maijstral all seem to progress in their understanding of the world. And, while it is true that ‘Benny Profane’s last words in the book are “Offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddam thing”’ (V., p. 51), Profane is not set up as an ideal or universal specimen. Nor is Stencil, whose policy towards knowledge is either obsessive or ‘Approach and avoid’ (V., p. 55), to be considered a universal epistemological model: it hadn’t really ever stopped being the same simple-minded, literal pursuit; V. ambiguously a beast of venery, chased like the hart, hind or hare…. And clownish

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Stencil capering along behind her, bells ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad. For no one’s amusement but his own. (V., pp. 61–2) Surely there is a middle ground between Profane, who claims to understand nothing and to learn nothing, and Stencil, who seeks to comprehend the totality of experience. Much of the book is written in a slapstick tone which encourages at best a limited identification with the characters. As readers we need not choose only between the two; instead, it ought to be possible to learn something ourselves. The point here is neither to hypostatize facts nor to relativize them out of existence. As Said contends, ‘Facts do not speak for themselves but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them.’ And, he continues, in a tone almost reminiscent of Chateaubriand, where are the facts if not embedded in history, and then reconstituted and recovered by human agents stirred by some perceived or desired or hoped-for historical narrative whose aim is to restore justice to the dispossessed. 28 Pynchon’s history is an attempt to remind us about certain aspects of our heritage that, as de Certeau has observed, we might prefer to overlook as we select the materials from which to construct our narrative of the past. And, no matter how much it is argued that the past is our own creation, we create it out of a limited supply of building materials: ‘People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history’s rags and straws…. Doubtless their private versions of history showed up in action’ (V., p. 225). Doubtless everyone’s version of history does show up in action—which is why it is so important to examine the construction of history in order to come to an understanding of the complex relationship between ideology and praxis. In theory there may be an infinite number of designs for the rathouse, but in practice there is a finite (and remarkably consistent) number of headlines to build with, and many rathouses display a certain similarity. The building of a historical rathouse is not simply a matter of jouissance , of the free play of the imagination: such a ‘postmodern style of history’ would, as Foster fears, ‘signal the disintegration of style and the collapse of history’. 29 In Pynchon’s work, however, history is in no danger of collapse. The Herero—Bondel episode is not an isolated one in V. The Mahdi uprising, alluded to in chapter 3, was a nationalist, millenarian movement which had attempted to repel the colonizing British. Historical accounts of the Battle of Omdurman (1898), yet another of V.’s sieges, are chilling. Against a large army of Sudanese, most of whom fought with spears, the British forces used heavy artillery, with the result that on the battlefield more than 10,000 Sudanese died immediately, and uncounted more men, women, and children died of wounds or in the shelling of the city. As a fitting conclusion to this destruction, after the fighting was over, the tomb of the Mahdi, the only building of size in the city, ‘the focal point of the religious and political life of the capital’, and symbol of the culture’s narrative orientation, was destroyed.30 Elsewhere, one of Stencil’s impersonations considers the strange history of Egypt’s Lake Mareotis:

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Beneath the lake were 150 villages, submerged by a man-made Flood in 1801, when the English cut through an isthmus of desert during the siege of Alexandria, to let the Mediterranean in. Waldetar liked to think that the waterfowl soaring thick in the air were ghosts of fellahin. What submarine wonders at the floor of Mareotis! Lost country: houses, hovels, farms, water wheels, all intact. Did the narwhal pull their plows? Devilfish drive their water wheels? (V., p. 79) Here again we are given historical fact without epistemological complication but accompanied by a quiet but powerful, even lyrical, sense of historical pathos. The incident is a kind of historical curiosity as well, since it occurred as part of the British campaign against the French led by Napoleon, and neither nationality remained in Egypt long after the battle. It was in a sense a precursor to the Fashoda crisis, which also pitted the British against the French but without the overt colonialist motive for the British. E.M.Forster discusses the incident in his book on the city of Alexandria, and, as an example of historical relativism and the de-realization of history, it is worth juxtaposing his account with the account Pynchon gives to Waldetar. What is now ‘Lake Mariout [sic] was almost dry,’ Forster writes. ‘It contained a little fresh water, but most of its enormous bed was under cultivation.’ In a strategic move to isolate the French troops in Alexandria the British opened a channel. The salt water rushed in, to the delight of the British soldiers, and in a month thousands of acres had been drowned.’ The move was successful. The French surrendered and both imperialist armies retired: ‘we had accomplished our aim, and had no reason to remain in the country any longer; we left it to our allies the Turks.’ The elision of the inhabitants from this narrative is made all the more strange by use of the metaphor ‘drowned’ to describe the acres instead of the people whose fate does not, in this account, merit notice. Indeed, Forster suggests, they should be grateful for receiving the attention of Europeans; brief though it was, it rescued the area from a kind of native stupor: the sleep of so many centuries had been broken. The eyes of Europe were again directed to the deserted shore. Though Napoleon had failed and the British had retired, a new age had begun for Alexandria. Life flowed back into her, just as the waters, when Hutchinson cut the dyke, flowed back into Lake Mariout. 31 The problem of point of view in history is central here. Deserted by whom? The imperialist forces who returned immediately to Europe? The inhabitants whose lives were submerged beneath the salt water? White argues that although we claim ‘to rank events in terms of their world-historical significance…that significance is less world historical than simply Western European’, representing ‘a perspective that is culture-specific, not universal at all’ (CF., pp. 9–10). Forster unreflectively reiterates the kind of culture-specific historical narrative that White criticizes and Pynchon is self-consciously undermining. As one of V.’s characters points out, We can always so easily give the wrong reasons…can say: the Chinese campaigns, they were for the Queen, and India for some gorgeous notion of Empire. I know. I have said these things to my men, the public, to myself. There are Englishmen dying in South

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Africa today and about to die tomorrow who believe these words as—I dare say you believe in God. (V., p. 169) It is at a point such as this that Pynchon’s technical manipulation of narrative together with his overt subject matter combine to subvert orthodox historical accounts. This reference to South Africa is as timely now as it was in 1963 when V. was published; perhaps more so, as mainstream political and historical opinion on South Africa seems gradually to be catching up with Pynchon’s position of twenty-five years ago—yet another illustration of historical or historiographical relativity. White observes: The more historically self-conscious the writer of any form of historiography, the more the question of the social system and the law which sustains it, the authority of this law and its justification, and threats to this law occupy his attention. (CF, p. 13) Pynchon’s self-consciousness as a historian and otherwise have often been observed, but the problem of social or political authority has not generally been considered central to V. Nevertheless, whether the examples are drawn from European, Egyptian, Sudanese, Namibian, or Maltese history, the rooms in Pynchon’s rathouse exhibit a radical and consistent rereading of European imperialism. Yet Pynchon is no dogmatist: any final interpretation—of history or of his story—remains thwarted. As Schaub argues, ‘he is adamantly opposed …to the creation of any stable, fixed “history”’. 32 Pynchon’s project is not primarily a reconstruction of history from the point of view of its victims, although elements of this are present in the novel. Instead he works to decentre the possibility of an established authoritative objective account of historical events. Mink argues: The cognitive function of narrative form, then, is not just to relate a succession of events but to body forth an ensemble of interrelationships of many different kinds as a single whole. In fictional narrative the coherence of such complex forms affords aesthetic or emotional satisfaction: in historical narrative it additionally claims truth. But this is where the problem arises. Pynchon, of course, is well aware of the problem, and at the possible expense of ‘aesthetic or emotional satisfaction’ has sacrificed to some degree the totality implied in the ‘single whole’. Instead he is faithful to the fact that, as Mink writes, one event ‘may belong to different stories, and its particular significance will vary with its place in these different—often very different—narratives.’33 As Stencil Sr observes, The Situation is an n-dimensional mish-mash (V., p. 460). Pynchon might even agree with Jameson that postmodernism’s resort to the sublime and to relativity should not remain an end in itself; the point is rather To undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism…to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what I have called substitutes for history.’ 34 While V. does not, by itself, articulate the discourse of the other to any great extent, by fragmenting the monolithic Western narrative of objective historical realism it works towards opening the discursive space in which that narrative of alterity, of non-synchronous and discrepant

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experience, may be articulated and possibly even understood. ‘There’s no organized effort about it,’ explains the narrator of V., ‘but there remains a grand joke on all visitors to Baedeker’s world: the permanent residents are actually humans in disguise’ (V., p. 78). Pynchon’s fiction constitutes an attempt to reveal the human behind the disguise, and to remind us that those other ‘permanent residents’, the ‘bums and old ladies on relief, have been with us on the subway all along. In his retrospective introduction to Slow Learner , published twenty years after V., Pynchon writes that ‘It may yet turn out that racial differences are not as basic as questions of money and power, but have served a useful purpose…in keeping us divided and so relatively poor and powerless’ (SL, p. xxi). Yet in V., written while the American civil rights movement gathered momentum, it is racial difference that is explored most fully. Pynchon’s fictional representations of history constitute in many ways an early example of the move towards racial integration and non-coercive understanding that was to become a central tenet of radical politics in the 19608. Early in the novel Paola teaches her friends a song that she had learned from a French paratrooper on ‘leave from the fighting in Algeria’— Algeria, being perhaps the best-publicized anti-colonial war immediately prior to the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam, was no doubt in the news while V. was being written: Demain le noir matin, Je fermerai la porte Au nez des années mortes; J’irai par les chemins. Je mendierai ma vie Sur la terre et sur l’onde, Du vieux au nouveau monde.

(V., pp. 18–19)

Closing the door on the dead years, for this soldier, can only mean closing the door on the historical era of colonialism. Yet most of the many military characters in V. seem to live below the horizon of history, without much awareness of the political and historical pressures behind military action. When the Suez crisis occurs, the sailors in V. talk of many things, but not of history or politics. The lack of awareness on the part of the characters in V. has been commented on by a number of critics, as has the novel’s lack of tangible hope. But there may be, as V.’s Eigenvalue says, folds and crests in the fabric of history such that if we are situated…at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else…[and] it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the ’30’s, the curious fashions of the ’20’s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see. (V., p. 156)

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V. may, then, be read as an attempt to foster, if not clear vision, then at least the necessary conditions in which clearer vision might be possible. To this end, Pynchon presents images of cultural and historical relativism and of the sublime, the latter being present in both aspects discussed by Lyotard. The first—the ultimately unrepresentable nature of the event and the plurality of historical interpretation—has been discussed earlier. ‘The art object’, writes Lyotard, ‘no longer bends itself to models [of the beautiful] but tries to present the fact that there is an unpresentable.’ The other aspect of the sublime is perhaps more peculiarly contemporary: ‘the sublime’, he writes, ‘is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening. …What is terrifying is that the It happens that does not happen, that it stops happening.’35 Lyotard’s idea of nothing further happening entails the end of the narrative, and the end of the social possibility of creating narrative can only coincide with the destruction of that society—as the plight of the Namibian Hereros in 1904 or in 1988 demonstrates, or as Said has argued in reference to the Palestinian question.36 The end of the narrative of history on a global scale is apocalypse, the sublime spectacle of unrepresentable terror. The sublime has not lost its link to terror,’ writes Huyssen. ‘For what could be more sublime and unrepresentable than the nuclear holocaust, the bomb being the signifier of an ultimate sublime.’37 As long as events continue to unfold, however, it is possible to represent them in one way or another as something happening, continuing the narrative as it were. But throughout V. the possibility echoes that the end of the story, the end of history, may be imminent, as ‘the balloon’ appears set to ‘go up’ on a number of occasions and Western society seems about to tear itself apart in war. The novel ends as the troops prepare for yet another neo-colonial showdown—Suez. ‘The Middle East,’ says Stencil Jr, ‘cradle of civilization, may yet be its grave’ (V., p. 387). This ending signals an attempt to connect the historical record and the novel itself to present conditions in the world, to historicize contemporary politics in a radical context. Pynchon observes that, although the First World War takes on the power of an ‘apocalyptic showdown’ in V., Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad enough in ’59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow…. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we have all tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy about it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it. (SL, p. xxix) In a study of the liberational possibilities of cultural relativity, Dirlik writes: Hegemony requires a center, not only in space but also in time. The decentering of the hegemonic group, be it class or nation, deprives history of a center and the hegemonic group of its claims upon history. Culturalism that achieves this end points to a liberating possibility, if only as a possibility. Yet the fragility of this sense of possibility must be noted. Indeed, as Dirlik (and many others) points out, some kinds of postmodern thought have the effect of de-realizing concrete

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historical experience quite thoroughly, compounding rather than helping to ease the post-colonial situation. What is needed, ‘it needs to be stressed, is not an epistemology the goal of which is to discover abstract truths, but an epistemology with an intention, one that seeks to overcome the alienation that is implicit in the notion of truth conceived abstractly.’38 There is no reason to assume that postmodernism, as an ‘ism’, can provide the appropriate concrete historical, philosophical, or political framework to support a radical position. If it is to do so, writes Huyssen, it ‘will have to be a postmodernism of resistance, including resistance to that easy postmodernism of the “anything goes” variety’.39 As a postmodern historiographical novel—a novel about historical representation as well as about historical events—Pynchon’s V. does point in that direction.

McGill University

NOTES 1 H.White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 73. Subsequent page references to this edition (abbreviated CF) will appear in the text in parentheses. 2 W.Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 112; J.Stark, Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information (Athens, Ohio: University Press, 1983), pp. 23–4, 105, 169; T.Schaub, Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1981). 3 P.Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 224. 4 J.-F.Lyotard, ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, Paragraph, 6 (1985). 5 F.Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963) p. 61. 6 A.Stephanson, ‘Regarding postmodernism—a conversation with Fredric Jameson’, Social Text, 17 (Fall 1987), pp. 30–1. 7 E.Said, ‘Intellectuals in the post-colonial world’, Salmagundi, 70–1 (1986), p. 50. 8 J.-F.Lyotard, ‘The sign of history’, in D.Attridge, G.Bennington, and R. Young (eds), Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 175. 9 T.Pynchon, Slow Learner (New York: Bantam, 1985), pp. xvi—xvii. Subsequent page references to this edition (abbreviated SL) will appear in the text in parentheses. 10 T.Pynchon, ‘A journey into the Mind of Watts’, New York Times Magazine, 12. June 1966, p. 35. 11 Ibid., pp. 78, 80. 12. Said, op. cit., pp. 55–6. 13 See E.Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the obligation to its dialectics’, trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique, 11 (Spring 1977). 14 T.Pynchon, V. (New York: Modern Library, 1966), pp. 37–8. Subsequent page references to this edition will appear in the text in parentheses. 15 The image is evidently an important one for Pynchon: his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, employs the same image of a woman trapped in a socio- epistemological tower, and documents her attempts to escape. For an interesting analysis of Lot 49, and one of the few readings of Pynchon to take his social critique seriously, see P.Coates, ‘Unfinished business: Thomas Pynchon and the quest for revolution’, New Left Review, 160 (November—December 1986). 16 A.R.JanMohamed, ‘The economy of Manichean allegory: the function of racial difference in colonialist literature’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (Autumn 1985). 17 Lyotard, ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, p. 7.

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18 S.Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 81. 19 While some critics have questioned the veracity of Pynchon’s historical detail in the light of the evident fertility of his imagination, Cassola argues that ‘Pynchon has taken the trouble to investigate everything to the last detail. His “historical” narrative [about Malta] is based on documentary evidence’: A. Cassola, ‘Pynchon, V., and the Malta connection’, Journal of World Literature, 12, 2 (July 1985), p. 311. 20 A.Huyssen, ‘Mapping the postmodern’, New German Critique, 33 (1984), p. 51; E.Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). 21 F.Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 35. 22 M.de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 227. 23 M.Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 51. 24 Ibid., pp. 64–5. 25 R.F.Patteson, ‘How true a text? Chapter three of V. and “Under the Rose”’, Southern Humanities Review, 18, 4 (1984), p. 25. 26 E.Bloch, in J.Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 44–5. 27 Fabian, op. cit., p. 45. 28 E.Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, London Review of Books, 6, 3 (16 February 1984), pp. 14, 16. 29 H.Foster, ‘(Post)modern polemics’, New German Critique, 33 (1984), p. 73. 30 M.W.Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1898–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 4–5. 31 E.M.Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 93. 32 Schaub, op. cit., p. 110. 33 L.Mink, ‘Narrative form as cognitive instrument’, in R.H.Canary and H. Kosicki (eds), The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Under standing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 144–5. 34 Stephanson, op. cit., p. 42. 35 Lyotard, ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, pp. 10, 12. 36 Said, ‘Permission to narrate’. 37 Huyssen, op. cit., p. 46. 38 A.Dirlik, ‘Culturalism as hegemonic ideology and liberating practice’, Cultural Critique, 6 (Spring 1987), pp. 27, 45. 39 Huyssen, op. cit., p. 52.

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Facecrime: George Orwell and the physiognomy of politics IAN HAYWOOD

‘Rebellion meant a look in the eyes.’ Winston Smith’s description of the mode in which political opposition to the state commences in Nineteen Eighty-Four has bathetic power. The significance of the communication (rebellion) arises from a minute physical gesture (‘a look in the eyes’). That disparity attests to the repressive watchfulness of state surveillance techniques. Big Brother’s ubiquitous, public stare forces a fleeting, furtive challenge. In order to be a rebel, one must be able both to transmit and to receive the necessary information in a unique moment of private exchange, a flash of intelligence. The reading of faces is a political act. Yet Winston’s words do not identify the exact nature of that ‘look’. Despite his experiences with Julia and O’Brien, Winston cannot say what a rebellious face looks like; he cannot categorize the all-important signal transmitted from one pair of eyes to another. Like O’Brien’s ‘equivocal glance’ in the Hate Session, the ‘look in the eyes’ has a tenuous status, hovering on the borders of knowledge and mystery. On this unstable sign rests the instability of Winston’s rebellion. The reliability of physiognomical information is therefore crucial for Winston. But it is also crucial for the state, which studies faces for evidence of unorthodox expressions (facecrime). These are dilemmas inside the novel, to which we shall be returning. But the problem does not end there. The critic outside the text must also participate in the struggle to stabilize the sign. The value of the political vision in the novel rests heavily on the intense physiognomic activity that occurs. Moreover, physiognomy has a privileged place in much of Orwell’s previous writing. Before conducting an in-depth study of Nineteen EightyFour, therefore, it is necessary to investigate the concept of physiognomy and Orwell’s use of it as political discourse. The definition of physiognomy is ‘equivocal’. It refers to the discipline or skill of interpreting faces and expressions as keys to personality. The word also means the countenance itself, the object of interpretation. This duality is often ignored, and the ‘reading’ is collapsed into the ‘text’. A description of a face will strive to seem objective, masking the assumptions that must be made before expressions on the surface of a body can be allowed to correspond to emotions and qualities on the inside. For instance, to say a person has an ‘innocent’ face or a ‘naïve’ expression betrays many cultural presuppositions. Physiognomy as a science assumes that facial signifiers are causally related to the underlying signifieds of personality. The interpretative movement is from surface to core, but never back to the conditions of interpreting. Physiognomy has an ancient pedigree. The first treatise was written by Aristotle. Appropriately, he was one of its first victims. In an incident recalled by Parson Adams in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a physiognomist named Zopyrus declared that Aristotle’s

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countenance revealed him to be a rogue. Public opinion was outraged, but Aristotle confessed he did in fact have many insalubrious propensities, and only his self-control had prevented people realizing this. In Orwellian terms, his facecrime had not been detected. Aristotle’s unmasking exposed a fracture in the procedure at its inception. On the one hand the body is the mirror of the soul: one’s expressions are formed involuntarily according to what type of a person one is. One’s face therefore will show certain ‘tell-tale’ signs. The logical conclusion of such a deterministic creed is cataloguing, classifying, and stereotyping, all of which involve grave moral problems. On the other hand, one can exert at least some control over one’s features, loosening the tie of signifier to signified, and forcing physiognomy to yield only partial knowledge, blocking its dehumanizing potential. Both camps celebrate the special function of the face as the site of the production and exchange of meaning. The disagreement is not about theory (faces can be read) but about the degree of usefulness: a social issue. For art, however, the problem is also an aesthetic one. Realism may aim to avoid stereotyping; the use of conventions and types may be the most readily available vocabulary. Art has been intimately involved in studying and fixing kinds of facial expression.1 One of the most famous exponents is Hogarth, the eighteenth-century satirical engraver and artist. His work contributes to the great age of physiognomy in Europe: the period stretching from Charles Le Brun’s Method for Drawing the Emotions (1696) and Expression of the Passions (1698) through Johann Lavater’s The Art of Understanding People (1772) to Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), by which time physiognomy was firmly established in the craft of the realistic novel. As a practising satirist Hogarth had to wrestle with the need to stereotype, to produce social types, to temper caricature with social realism. His comments in the Analysis of Beauty (1753) show a passion for, but scepticism about, physiognomy. Although there are correspondences between certain expressions and certain (particularly strong) emotions, a reliable translation from exterior to interior is not assured. As much as Hogarth deployed physiognomy in his prints, he needed a much more extensive visual vocabulary to perform his satirical attacks. Hogarth noted, for instance, that a grave expression does not tell the observer whether the cause of the expression is a trivial or important matter.2 Similarly, Henry Fielding wondered how hypocrisy could be shown on someone’s face: action and language also needed to be included (the Zopyrus story is a cautionary note). Nevertheless, there were followers of the more rigorous and hard-line schools of Le Brun and Lavater.3 Graeme Tytler has unearthed many interesting eighteenth-century celebrations of physiognomy. From our Orwellian position, some of these eulogies could be the work of the Thought Police. For instance, Lord Chesterfield offered his son some wordly advice for survival in the political world: Mind, not what people say, but how they say it; and if you have any sagacity, you may discover more truth by your eyes than by your ears. People can say what they will, but they cannot look just as they will; and the looks frequently discover what their words are calculated to conceal. Observe, therefore, people’s looks carefully when they speak not only to you, but to each other. I have often guessed, by people’s faces, what they were saying, though I could not hear one word they said.4

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Here language is a deception, not physical appearance. The impersonal, objective, and determined is more powerful than the personal, subjective, and voluntary (‘People can say what they will, but they cannot look just as they will’). Walter Shandy’s words in Tristram Shandy become even more chilling if they are politicized: There are a thousand unnoticed openings…which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul; and I maintain it…that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room,—or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.5 The ‘penetrating’ movement is explicit. One’s personality is like a kernel in a shell, or the true reality (soul) behind a mask of surface expressions. Such is the way in which language and criticism have been thought to work conventionally: criticism permeates the text’s surface, ‘discovering’ the hidden reality; language, as Orwell himself believed, is a window, a framed pane of referentiality.6 Yet Walter Shandy’s eye can only see a ‘something’, and Chesterfield’s insight is unspecific (‘looks’). According to modern theories of language, it is very difficult for people to ‘say what they will’.7 Serious interest in physiognomy seems to have waned towards the end of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the decline of classic realism in the novel and the advent of photography. Darwin used photographs in his physiognomic studies, to increase their accuracy.8 The technological advance may not have been enough to rescue the discipline, but photography made available on a mass scale images of one’s own and others’ faces.9 Though physiognomy as a formal discipline withered, the reading of faces was ingrained as a cultural practice, and photography with its reputation for unparalleled realism became a major new site of physiognomic activity. Here for the first time were ‘real’ faces frozen in one particular expression and framed: the perfect window of representation, the fixing of meaning. But, as modern theory of photography shows, reading a photograph of any kind is the equivalent to reading any other text, and must involve the debunking of conventional notions of surface and depth. It is precisely that duality that plagues physiognomy. To complete this brief excursion into physiognomic epistemology we must therefore turn to photographic theory.10 Roland Barthes was one of the first theorists to attack the idea that a photograph is a ‘message without a code’—pure denotation with no connotation.11 To put it another way, there is no text without interpretation. To believe there can be is to endorse the nineteenthcentury illusion that a photograph is an unmediated copy of the real world, in which signifier and signified are fused. Yet most subsequent critical approaches still employ referentiality, a movement from the ‘surface’ of the photograph to something behind or beneath it. Even semiotics and structuralism suffer from this essentialism, or what Derrida called the ‘metaphysics of presence’. For Barthes, ‘all images are polysemous’ and made up of a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds which cannot be fixed.12 Victor Burgin has restated this post-structuralist position: Thus, presented with any text whatsoever, visual or verbal, the notion of ‘true signified’ must yield to Derrida’s différence or Peirce’s ‘unlimited semiosis’. The alternative is a metaphysics of interpretation through which an attempt is made to reconstitute the missing ‘presence’ which is felt to be the source of a singular and true content of the empirically given form of the text.13

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It might seem that this is merely a new form of subjectivism, but post-structuralism does not regard reader response as an act of unmediated free will but rather as the putting into play of ideological formations. Interpretation is an event, an interaction which occurs on the previously expendable ‘surface’ of the photograph: a photograph is not to be reduced to ‘pure form’ nor ‘window on the world’, nor is it a gangway to the presence of an author…the photograph is a place of work, a structured and structuring space within which a reader deploys, and is deployed by, what codes he or she is familiar with in order to make sense.14 To make sense is not to discover the truth, the ‘invisible bedrock of reality’.15 Connotation does not dissolve into denotation. To make sense is to realize that an ‘uncertain sign’ need not produce ‘terror’16 but rather might yield an insight into how received notions of truth are constructed. The first striking example of physiognomical insight in Orwell’s work comes at the end of the first chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell is leaving Wigan on a train when he sees a working-class woman trying to unblock a wastepipe in her garden: I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘it isn’t the same for them as it would be for us’, and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drainpipe.17 The incident has the persuasive force of a spontaneously frozen moment of intimacy, a baring of souls which serves as a political statement: the working class are not to be dismissed as ‘ignorant’. The expression on the woman’s face functions metonymically, standing for the ‘desolate, hopeless’, yet conscious suffering of ‘people bred in the slums’. Yet here metonymy is perilously close to stereotyping, one of the grave dangers of physiognomy. The woman has the ‘usual exhausted face’ whose features are determined by collective social experience (‘miscarriages and drudgery’). One of the sources of power in the passage, however, lies in the challenging of such patronizing outsiders’ views which are as ignorant in their middle-class complacency as those they stereotype. Presumably the look on Orwell’s face, could we see it, would not be one of pity. It is Orwell’s role as the looker, the observer, the physiognomer, that is problematical. The woman’s expression does not exist objectively. It is entirely his verbal construction. He does not try to conceal his outsideness. Indeed, the publication of Orwell’s diary of his Wigan experience has shown that he was originally on foot when the incident occurred.18 His reasons for relocating himself on a fictional train are worth contemplating. His position as an

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observer is given added dramatic force. His physical and social distance from the woman are increased, yet the ‘freezing’ of the motion of the train heightens the significance of the meeting of eyes, valorizes Orwell’s observational acuity, and justifies his political conclusion. The embellished version has the aesthetic edge over the original. Orwell places a window between his eyes and the woman’s, but the window dissolves in the act of looking through it, just as both language and the woman’s face provide access to a previously hidden truth, a revelation. Most importantly for Orwell, perhaps, there is an attempt to remove the privilege which has generated the insight. The woman ‘understood as well as [he] did’ the message to be gained. It is a characteristic Orwellian paradox that he tries to use his class position to declass himself. But there is a serious doubt whether the physiognomy of the passage will sustain this dissolution. The only definite information we have is the woman’s ‘round pale face’, almost a tabula rasa, or sheet of paper awaiting inscription, definition, meaning. Yet this never occurs. Her ‘expression’ is vague and not even her own (what is a ‘usual’ look of exhaustion?). Nor are the epithets ‘desolate’ and ‘hopeless’ reified as concrete facial features. Even the word ‘wore’ is possibly counter-productive, since it suggests not ‘worn’ (as in ‘worn down’) but wearing clothes, thus emphasizing the exteriority of what is being observed. Finally, and most damagingly, when Orwell moves to reverse the negativity of stereotyping (which he has also endorsed) there is no corresponding change on the woman’s face, no detail which shows that dignified and humanizing knowledge of her plight. There is only a double negative (‘not the ignorant’) and a further reference to ‘what I saw in her face’. What ‘I’ saw is Orwell’s subjective response, which will not translate into the objective ‘She knew’. The insight gained from the experience has been of Orwell’s artistic and political method. Orwell was only an incipient socialist when he wrote Wigan Pier (1936). The experience which really politicized him was fighting as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He could temporarily exchange the pen for the rifle, participate in class struggle rather than observe it. Our access to his experience, of course, is Homage to Catalonia (1938), a literary reconstruction of events. Remarkably, the story which will unveil the birth of Orwell’s revolutionary political consciousness opens with a highly irrational physiognomic interaction. Orwell remembers seeing an unknown Italian militiaman at the Lenin barracks in Barcelona: He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean— to whom I have taken such an immediate liking.19 The aesthetic appeal of such an opening may well come from the mixture of mystery and sensationalism (‘commit murder’). Unlike the Wigan episode, the uncertainty of Orwell’s subjective reaction is highlighted. The instantaneous if inexplicable camaraderie with a

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stranger is what matters, its inexplicability strengthening its emotional appeal. This unknown warrior is not a sociological subject but a fellow outsider: both of them are foreigners. The artificiality of the camaraderie is stressed. After marvelling at the ‘queer’ way their ‘spirits’ met in seemingly ‘utter intimacy’, Orwell confesses: ‘to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again.’ For the physiognomy to yield results the intimacy must remain illusory, a fabrication. There is no meeting of eyes. There is no awareness on the soldier’s side. He is, after all, illiterate. All the insight and knowledge are Orwell’s, and he constructs the soldier as a symbol of unsystematized memory: ‘With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories.’20 This is the raw material which will be crafted, shaped, and theorized into objectivity during the course of the book. Suitably, it is the rawness of the soldier which is his endearing aspect: his savage, reckless loyalty. He is a type, though he cannot be definitively classified; he may be anarchist or communist, though one wonders what a ‘typical’ anarchist’s face is like. As with the Wigan woman, facial features are absent. There is an elusive ‘something’ in the soldier’s expression which promotes actions, emotions, and attitudes but remains as unidentifiable as Orwell’s reasons for becoming excited. Note that in the last sentence of the extract Orwell reminds us that any instantaneous attraction to a woman is of a different (sexual) order—lest we may misinterpret his admiration for male physical features. Interestingly enough, when Orwell wrote a poem about the same experience, even the gender division is eroded: what peace I knew then In gazing on his battered face Purer than any woman’s!21 So the self-conscious foregrounding of vagueness and uncertainty, of ‘unstable signs’, may seem to avoid the dangers of loading physiognomy with objective political significance. But the absent information is still a problem. Orwell wants us to believe the ‘candour and ferocity’ are actually contained in the face. Without any evidence for this, there is the danger of the militiaman becoming a mere extension of Orwell’s consciousness, despite his ostensible function as ‘the flower of the European working class’.22 Yet to specify actual facial detail might particularize at the expense of typicality. The memory of the face of the unknown soldier is nothing less than the objective correlative of the whole war. When Orwell recalls the face—‘oh, how vividly!’—‘the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right’.23 The face is ‘a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about’.24 These are remarkable statements. Despite the pointers to perspicuity (Vividly’, ‘see clearly’), the man’s face is a blank, a featureless cipher, which calls into question Orwell’s reduction of ‘complex side-issues’ into impressionistic, firsthand experience which will yield instinctive political wisdom. Orwell’s most sublime celebration of the face occurs at the end of the poem which concludes ‘Looking back on the Spanish Civil War’ (1942):

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But the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit. 25 The crystal may be transparent, but it is also a blankness. The ‘thing’ that is the spirit of human resilience, our humanist essence, is inviolable, but also invisible, abstracted beyond politics. A similar polarization between physiognomic knowledge and political experience can be seen at the end of the essay ‘Charles Dickens’ (1939). Again, physiognomy is not a mode of description but a form of argument. Again, the movement is from frank subjectivity through stereotyping to abstraction: When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.26 There is evidence here for the hotly disputed political backsliding Orwell underwent at the onset of the war. Factionalism is cowardly and spiteful, a far cry from the lengthy analysis of the various republican parties in Homage to Catalonia. Yet the political conclusion celebrating noble, humane non-alignment is undermined by the admission that it is not Dickens’s face under scrutiny but an idealization. To locate this face means looking ‘behind the page’, piercing the surface of the text to discover the buried presence which, paradoxically, is entirely of one’s own making. Dickens’s ‘actual face’ available on photographs is for some reason inadequate, although the phantom face is very similar. The similarity is almost an irrelevance, for the only physical details are a beard, ruddiness, and a laugh, hardly enough to signify the elaborate interpretation which follows. Action and emotion are presented as expression: the face is ‘of someone in perpetual struggle—which tells us nothing about the face. While the real face of Dickens remains locked away in its photograph, the textual Dickens can transcend temporal restrictions and be an object-lesson in ‘free intelligence’ for the squabbling sectarianism of 1939. His generous anger cannot be politically colonized, though it is a political statement, an heroic gesture. Orwell has given physiognomy a privileged status to enable him to escape the limitations of rational political discourse and achieve special insight into the human condition rooted in instinctive, unpolluted feeling. Orwell mistrusted theory, but even his commonsense

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empiricism needed to define experience in terms of wider, more impersonal forces. His lack of success in doing this has been the focus of much critical and political comment.27 In physiognomy, perhaps Orwell believed he had found the ‘peace’ of the ‘crystal spirit’, unshatterable, incontestable. The possibility that this humanist notion of ‘free’ human will is itself a construction of an ‘orthodoxy.’ would have been beyond him, or would have been refuted. Orwell’s ‘honest’ responses jostle with his attempt to transform the faces being read into political paradigms. Nowhere is the danger of this approach more apparent than in his physiognomizing of Big Brother’s real-life counterparts Stalin and Hitler. The problem is not in his professed admiration for them, but in the complexion of that admiration. Stalin receives brief treatment in a review written in 1938, where Orwell notes that ‘Stalin, at any rate on the cinematograph, has a likeable face.’28 This is too cursory to be taken very seriously, and in any case Orwell adds: ‘Al Capone was the best of husbands and fathers.’ Still, one might carp at the value of divorcing Stalin’s ‘likeable’ countenance from political context. The physiognomy of Hitler is much more substantial. Orwell wrote a review of Hurst and Blackett’s edition of Mein Kampf in 1940. The review begins dismissively. The book is merely the ‘fixed version of a monomaniac’ who strives to create a ‘horrible brainless empire’.29 Then Orwell changes tack, confessing: ‘I have never been able to dislike Hitler.’ There is something ‘deeply appealing about him’, though Orwell would ‘kill him if I could get within reach of him’. Note the opposition between the personal and the political. Orwell wants us to know where his loyalties lie, but subjective licence flourishes in inverse proportion to physical distance. Orwell can ‘reach’ Hitler through the text (which has not impressed him, nor has it conjured a phantom face behind the page) or more significantly through a photographic portrait. The actual presence of Hitler’s face would produce hatred. The photographic representation produces reverence: The fact is there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photograph and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is there. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The competing discourses are evident. Rational enquiry founders when it tries to penetrate the visage. Hitler’s ‘grievance’ must be accepted but its cause ‘can only be guessed at’. The denotation of his mind remains a mystery, but not the connotation, upon which Orwell waxes into a series of analogies, a marked elaboration on the heroism of Dickens. All this is generated by Hitler’s ‘pathetic, dog-like face’. The excessiveness of the physiognomical yield corresponds to a paucity of definition of the object. The possibility of Orwell’s succumbing like

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Winston Smith to power worship and the cult of the personality is perhaps not as outrageous as the claim that the fabricated knowledge in the physiognomic reading is exactly ‘how Hitler sees himself. He does not see his ‘grievance’ which has motivated his career, but the style of his response, his cultural ‘mythology’, as Barthes would say. Once that claim has been made, Orwell can explain Hitler’s political success in terms of this self-sacrificial appeal. According to Orwell, Hitler has grasped the bizarre psychological fact that people desire ‘struggle, danger and death’ of which he is the epitome, rather than being a hated oppressor. This act of mass empathy and identification is what sustains Hitler’s empire, and it is a conscious act of political manipulation. Whereas before Orwell examined the photograph the Hitler of Mein Kampf was an inert ‘fixed vision’, the physiognomy has liberated him, his political vision, and Orwell’s political insight. The irrationality of Orwell’s method matches perfectly the ‘hidden’ secret of totalitarianism: its appeal to the irrational.30 As one critic has rioted, the reading of Hitler’s face is an anticipation of Big Brother.31 In Nineteen Eighty-Four the need to make sense of physiognomy is of utmost importance for the characters and the critic. According to Goldstein’s manual ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism’, the function of Big Brother is to ‘act as a focusing point for love, fear and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards any organisation’.32 Hence the existence of ‘B.B.’s’ face on huge posters, frontispieces to books, coins. This ‘guise’ (p. 167) attracts people’s strongest feelings, taking control of possibly subversive emotions which might deviate from strict loyalty to the party. Such is the totalitarian logic of totemism, a form of mass hypnosis or ‘false consciousness’. The cathartic cocktail of emotions is powerfully contradictory (love, fear). It is a highly ingenious regime, which can produce antithetical responses from the same image. Goldstein’s heretical writings describe the theoretical rationale behind the enigmatic machinery of conditioning. The effect ‘B.B.’33 has on people can be stated, but its confirmation, its actual performance, can only be witnessed in the ‘plot’ of the novel, the world of Winston’s empirical experience, the world of aesthetic writing (Goldstein’s manual has been criticized as a non-literary intrusion into the naturalism of the rest of the novel) and of dangerously uncertain signs. It is in the ‘real’ world of the novel that B.B.’s ability to ‘focus’ contradictory emotions must prove itself. An initial problem is that Winston is not meant to register a typical response to B.B.Winston’s consciousness, which filters the action of the novel, is seditious precisely because it is aware of the ways in which it is being manipulated. Winston can think on a conceptual, theoretical level, though he cannot achieve the systematic overview of Goldstein’s manual. Winston’s insights are constantly compromised by his experience, which paradoxically may lend those insights greater authority. In order to be able to resist thought control, Winston must be able to understand it, to know what the orthodox response to B.B.’s face ought to be. He must look at the face as a site of political struggle. Without its famous caption, we first see simply a man’s face on a large poster tacked to the wall in Winston’s block of flats: ‘the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features’ (p. 5). As Alexander Dallin has observed, there is Vagueness’ and ‘uncertainty’ in this physiognomy.34 B.B. is ‘about’ 45, and there is little to define ‘ruggedly handsome’, the only specific feature being a moustache (the latter detail has been enough for many readers to find the lurking image of Stalin, Kitchener, etc.). ‘Handsome’ is surely a subjective response, though Winston is probably meant to be registering the consensus view. There is a certain ‘reverence’ here, though nothing as yet

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approaching ‘love’. The problem is in deciding whether Winston is inside or outside that reverence. The next physiognomical detail introduces the possibility of ‘fear’: ‘It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move’ (p. 5). The appeal is to a familiar notion of optical illusion which does not have to be explained further. The important point is that ‘contrived’ alerts us to the fact that this is not an ‘unmediated’ reproduction of a ‘real’ face but a construction, a play of signs. The next sentence introduces the caption ‘BIG BROTHER is WATCHING YOU’, which seems to follow naturally, when in fact an illusory ‘following’ movement of the eyes is being invested with purposive intent: ‘watching’. The caption has given the face identity: a name (more on this later) and a mind—a ‘depth’ behind the image. This naturalizing continues when Winston looks at another poster and ‘the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own’ (p. 6). There is depth on both sides but the power of penetration is B.B.’s. The interaction has the aesthetic appeal of mystery, a considerable elaboration from the mere visual trickery of magnetic movement of the eyes, or the sinister state surveillance of ubiquitous ‘watching’. ‘Deep’ suggests an enigmatic, irrational relationship, which may or may not be typical, and may or may not be reducible to politics. The Hate Session ‘focuses’ these questions dramatically. The description of this public event is appropriately the most intense physiognomical episode in the novel. B.B.’s face exerts its maximum power. Winston’s unorthodoxy must struggle against absorption into collective hysteria. He must appear to respond correctly to the images of Goldstein (the Devil) and B.B. (the Saviour) while realizing they are contrivances. When the face of Goldstein is flashed on to the Hate screen it produces in Winston ‘a painful mixture of emotions’: It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. (p. 13) There is more physical detail here, most of which contributes to a crude racial stereotype. The ‘sheep-like quality’ is Orwell’s equivalent of the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda which presented Jews as rats. Rats, of course, are Winston’s own private phobia. Goldstein is ‘sheeplike’ presumably to suggest his doctrines are just so much bleating (the diabolical equivalent of duckspeak) or that anyone who follows him is mindless. The comparison is an odd one nevertheless, made even odder a few lines later by the added quality ‘self-satisfied’. Anthropomorphic readings of animals’ faces have been another persistent problem of physiognomy. A face may be ‘self-satisfied’ and ‘sheep-like’, but it is difficult to imagine the two being connected. Likewise the essential connotations of Goldstein’s face rely on fragile connectives: ‘yet somehow’, ‘a kind of’. We do not know where the ‘cleverness’ and its opposing ‘despicable’ aspect come from. The former may have something to do with age and the spectacles perched in an old-fashioned and scholarly manner (both O’Brien and Charrington wear spectacles). Winston’s ability to feel reverence for Goldstein’s cleverness may mark Winston’s rebellious consciousness, his own intelligence. His revulsion would therefore be a conditioned, involuntary, state-induced response, though it is a heavy load for Goldstein’s ‘long thin nose’ to bear. Of course there is much other paraphernalia, but it is clearly the projected faces of

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Goldstein and B.B. that are the ‘focus’ of attention. Goldstein’s ‘sheep-like’ quality is given some objective authority when his face is temporarily replaced by an actual sheep’s face. We see here how the ‘plot’ of a novel may clash with its ‘story’. If we regard the latter as the basic raw material of Oceanic experience, there have been many Hate Sessions, and Winston has seen Goldstein’s face associated with a sheep’s many times. His response has been programmed. But as we read the novel the physiognomy is given first, to be confirmed by the gimmickry. In similar fashion Goldstein’s manual, which Winston reads just prior to his arrest, ostensibly confirms many of Winston’s previous insights. When B.B.’s face reappears on the Hate screen to pacify the audience’s hysterical hatred for Goldstein it is ‘full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen’ (p. 16). At least the irrational aspect of B.B.’s most perplexing feature (his calmness) is here foregrounded. The more his image appears in the novel, the more his face is able to connote. That may be appropriate in the dramatic unfolding of the tale, but runs up against the objection that B.B.’s face does not actually change. There is only one image, with the same expression, the same eyes, the same moustache. The illusory ‘mind’ behind the surface cannot change either. Only the reading of the image can change. Yet there is one variable: size. The face is literally ‘big’. Its power is bound up with its larger-than-life scale (‘because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as being a metre wide’ (p. 226)). That meaning of ‘big’ seems to make more sense than ‘big brother’—that is, older brother. According to Goldstein’s manual, the name is a ‘direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty’ (p. 172) to mask the actual transformation of the family into an extension of the Thought Police. But if Winston’s estimate of B.B.’s age is correct (‘about forty-five’) then he is a very old brother indeed to young people, not all that old to someone in their mid-forties, and, absurdly, a younger ‘brother’ to anyone above that age. So it is better to think of ‘big’ in terms of size. Given this logic, it comes as a risible shock to find B.B.’s face miniaturized on the backs of coins. As Winston looks at a 25 cent piece he assures us, ‘Even from the coin the eyes pursued you’ (p. 25). The optical trick was feasible for a metre-wide poster. Here it seems barely possible, and certainly nothing to be afraid of. Big Brother has become diminutive. A little further on in the novel Winston ponders the regulation portrait of B.B. on the frontispiece of a children’s history book: The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. (p. 67) Again there is a disparity between the ‘huge’ impact of the face and its relatively small size. The disparity extends to the extensiveness of Winston’s response and the unparalleled degree of eloquence it consists of. This is the ‘deepest’ response so far, the furthest Winston has been penetrated, the strongest register yet of B.B.’s terrorizing ability. The eyes are ‘hypnotic’: they affect the looker hypnotically. Or rather they typically have this effect. Winston is ‘almost’ hypnotized. His normal perceptions have to remain intact to make the description possible. Hence the fail-safe approximation: ‘It was as though…’. The precise signification of B.B.’s facial details cannot be fixed.

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This indeterminacy, this ‘deferred’ knowledge, actually becomes the physiognomical focus when Winston has a second look at coins at the end of part 1 of the novel: ‘The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?’ (p. 86). There has been no mention of a ‘smile’ before this point. There are some logical absurdities that must be confronted. If the smile is ‘hidden’, there is no reason to suspect its existence. The moustache could equally conceal a grimace, a sneer, etc. There is also a problem with ‘heavy’, whose function must be kept separate from the physical lightness of the coin. But the crucial new information is the absent presence of the smile, as tantalizing as the Mona Lisa. If it can be confirmed, it may connote benevolence, the complement to the ‘calm, protecting’ (though not ‘heavy’) positive virtues of the image. B.B.’s moustache may exist only to produce this desire for and denial of a crucial sign. The moustache is almost a symbol for physiognomy: it is a surface suggesting an immanent meaning beneath it. The final logical flaw is that the moustache can never be penetrated or removed. It will remain in its ambiguous position. Perhaps, however, Winston’s recalcitrance is the real source of the lack of clarity. Once he is ‘cured’, he will see with ideological purity, with untainted vision, and the smile will yield its secret. That is exactly how the novel ends. The veil has been lifted. With a ‘soul white as snow’ Winston looks at a poster (for us it is the final look; for Winston, in many ways, it is the first): He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! (p. 239) The pursuit of the elusive sign is made the ‘focus’ of Winston’s whole life and the terms of his defeat. Yet the ‘kind of smile’ is not specified. If Winston can see its shape and semiotic function, that awareness is ‘hidden’ from language, having escaped the inevitable possibilities of ‘misunderstanding’, into a perfect realm where he can love Big Brother. The function of physiognomy as a ‘focusing’ of powerful emotions has been shown to be problematical. Winston’s lived experience does not readily complement the theoretical statements in Goldstein’s manual. The same tension can be found if we broaden our focus to incorporate the state machinery of which B.B. is the ‘guise’. He cannot really look into a person’s soul, despite Winston’s response. The real snooping and eavesdropping is conducted and directed by those forces ‘behind’ that guise, known collectively as the Thought Police: A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police…the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in his sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized…any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. (p. 168) State scrutiny, personal paranoia, orthodoxy becoming instinct. Exactly how this watch on deviant signs is maintained is not explained by the manual, despite the mobilization of armies of professionals, including Swiftian scientists: ‘The scientist of to-day is…a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice’ (p. 156). The reason why the scientist has turned

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state physiognomer is ironically because thoughts cannot be read but only deduced. That leaves open the possibility that orthodox responses can be faked, and that is precisely the unstable space that Winston occupies. His facial expressions still remain partly under his control. A minute deviant sign is a major political triumph. But this unorthodoxy can never be shown: The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (p. 52) These are Winston’s Goldsteinian insights. The totalitarian logic seems coherent, until we examine it with ‘minuteness’. The intention of the state is to ossify facial expression: there must be only one sign for the ever-narrowing range of signifieds. Connotation must become denotation. But we are not told how Party members are trained in ‘wearing’ the ‘proper’ expression. In the example Winston cites, one must look ‘credulous’, as if this will mean the same configuration on the face of each comrade. It is also difficult to know how one can mentally police an ‘unconscious look’, which by definition is involuntary. Presumably facecrime is there to deter, but that exposes the precariousness of the process. If conformity has to be coerced, it is not the ‘instinct’ the Party requires, and it remains a mere surface, the core untouched. This ambiguity is most strikingly demonstrated during the Hate Sessions. Winston ‘could not help sharing in the general delirium’: ‘Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction’ (p. 17). ‘Dissemble’ and ‘control’ are at odds with ‘instinctive’. The use of the generic ‘your’ indicates that the description applies to the ‘general delirium’, which surely is not meant to be seen (by the state, or us) as mass dissimulation. On the threshold of his journey to Room 101, Winston decides that to be successfully disloyal mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. (pp. 225–6) The irony here is that this paradoxical logic has all the trappings of doublethink, to which Winston is still resistant. Similarly, Winston’s own powers of physiognomy achieve results that the Thought Police would be proud of. One of the obvious ways in which those heinous ‘symptoms of inner struggle’ are spotted is by vigilant Party members scrutinizing each other. In this respect Winston is no different. He reads faces in order to respond with the appropriate expression on his own. Take the over-clever Symes, for example, whose ‘mocking eyes’ ‘seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you’ (p. 42). When Symes praises the genius of B.B., ‘a sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother’ (p. 45). The response is carefully ambiguous. The construction of the sentence does not

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indicate whether Winston is willing the ‘flitting’ movement, or whether it is a weakly involuntary, ‘instinctive’ expression. Symes is perceptive enough to translate whatever happens to Winston’s features (we are not told) into a ‘vapid’ enthusiasm, though Symes is too obsessed with explaining Newspeak to report Winston for facecrime. Ironically it is Symes’s perceptiveness, Winston decides, that means he will be vaporized: ‘He sees too clearly…. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face’ (p. 46). The prophecy is correct. It is worth noting that Winston’s role as surrogate narrator of the novel requires him to provide physiognomical detail about most characters. There is not space here to look at all the instances, though they are uniformly interesting because all have political ramifications.35 The faces of O’Brien and Julia warrant most discussion, and I shall be focusing on them shortly. But attention must first be given to some other fascinating physiognomies. Stereotyping is far from being a bad thing in Oceania, since the intention of the state is to standardize everything, including facial expression. Thus Winston can excoriate the ‘beetlelike type’ ministry workers with their ‘fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes’ (p. 52). The choice of ‘inscrutable’ is interesting. It suggests not only that these clones are mindless automatons, but that whatever is behind the face is impenetrable, impossible to read (the ‘very small eyes’ are points of restricted entry). Rather than orthodoxy’s erasing the last vestiges of connotative slippage between signifier and signified, the latter has been walled off, encased by a mask which can only yield blankness, absence, leaving only a surface. Orthodoxy had precisely that effect on Winston’s wife Katherine: ‘She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it’ (p. 56). The reading of facial detail here is utterly unreliable, a complete red herring. ‘Bold’, ‘aquiline’, and ‘noble’ are the dead reminders of a bygone age where a Platonic correspondence could exist between physical and moral beauty. ‘Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’ The mind is a non-state, a vacuum, no longer occupied by thought. The problem for the state is that it has not yet abolished expression, which constantly promises to refer to the meaning ‘behind it’. Little wonder, then, that Winston’s memory is haunted by faces and vacuums. His description of Katherine is actually encased in a more dramatic memory: the encounter with the prostitute. Winston juxtaposes the debased sexuality of the latter with the debased frigidity of the former. Yet both women have the same attribute of an unreliable exterior. Initially this was the appeal of the prostitute: ‘She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces’ (p. 54). The excitement of make-up is not its ability to enhance but its ability to conceal. Winston is lured to the subversive potential of a ‘mask’, the falsification, the fabrication, of appearance in a regulated world. When the lamplight reveals the horrible truth that the woman is not young but old, the mask begins to crack: The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all. (p. 58) Once the mask cracks there is only a ‘cavernous blackness’, the abyss of the dissolution of meaning, an elusive and treacherous ‘depth’. Winston is disgusted that he ‘went ahead and

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did it just the same’. Perhaps the vacuous area of non-meaning is as enticing as it is terrifying. When Julia puts on make-up for Winston (including the exact same perfume the prostitute used) her beauty is enhanced, though Winston cannot help recalling a ‘cavernous mouth’ (p. 117). Winston’s most galling memory is of his mother and sister. He is consumed by guilt. They disappeared one day when he had run off with his sister’s ration of chocolate. The last thing he saw was his ‘mother’s anxious eyes…fixed on his face’. (p. 133). He has never been able to interpret that expression, to know what she was really thinking. In his dreams that absence is transformed into powerful symbolism: Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place—the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave—but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down .. . they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things. (p. 27) In fact the ‘order of things’ in Oceania does not countenance the irrational ‘knowledge in their faces.’ Self-sacrifice, emotional ties, are ‘subterranean’. They have no possible signifiers in a regime which strives to make all meaning ‘unavoidable’. The only place for ‘cavernous blackness’ is in Room 101, the ultimate torture chamber of Miniluv (‘the place where there is no darkness’, as another dream prophetically informs him), where he will atone for his guilt. The reaching of physiognomy into the realm of the irrational is nowhere more advanced than in the contact Winston makes with Julia and O’Brien. Both relationships commence with highly charged, mysterious glances. In both cases Winston is certain there has been an almost telepathic communication. In both cases he misreads what is ‘written’ on the other’s face. His physiognomical powers are finely tuned enough to mark Julia and O’Brien out as special, but his interpretations are also fatally compromised. We are not told very much about Julia’s face. She is ‘bold-looking’ (p. 11). Winston is not attracted to her. She, like O’Brien, summons him: ‘Once when they passed in the corridor she had given him a quick, sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror’ (p. 12). As Barthes said, the ‘uncertain sign’ is a source of ‘terror’. To understand Winston’s excessive reaction we have to learn more about his profound sexual ambivalences.36 His relationship with Julia has elements of sadism, that with O’Brien elements of masochism. Ambivalence is a ‘black’ area of unfixed signification, an area which threatens the protagonist, the state, and the critic desperate to impose an interpretation. Julia’s ‘glance’ penetrates Winston with more savagery than B.B. ever manages. Winston assumes she is a member of the Thought Police, and in fact she has chosen him precisely because she has spotted his unorthodoxy: ‘It was something in your face. I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them’ (p. 100). Winston’s hunch is not too far off the mark. Whatever that ‘something’ is, it is a reliable sign. It is significant that one of the effects of Winston’s

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torture is to batter his face beyond recognition and effectively give it ‘new shape’ (p. 225), a new set of signifiers for his changed feelings. Winston’s interior, however, is still intractable, leading to a mismatch: The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt. (p. 2.18) The state cannot possibly allow that degree of malfunction of physiognomy. Such a face would be no more than a mask. So there is an insidious logic in the form of torture devised for Winston in Room 101: a ‘mask-like attachment’ (p. 217) which is strapped to his head and from which rats will be released to strip away his face. The horror of the situation causes a ‘black panic’ (p. 230). It is no coincidence this reminds us of the ‘black terror’ of Julia’s first glance. The only way Winston can save himself is to tell the rats to ‘Tear her face off. When the two of them meet in the outside world again, their faces are duly changed. Hers is ‘sallower’, and her hair partly conceals a scar (p. 234). His face is ‘bloated’ and watery, the symptoms of his besotted quiescence. This time her ‘momentary glance’ is ‘full of contempt and dislike’, though Winston’s watery mind cannot be precise about the exact origins of the hostility: it could be the past; it could be merely his face. O’Brien’s face is presented in much more detail than Julia’s: O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, curiously civilised. (p. 12.) We are prepared to tolerate the vagueness of ‘indefinable’ for the intriguing contrast of charm and brutality which is the fascination for Winston. The full implications of O’Brien’s ‘urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique’ are worked out in the torture scenes. At this stage in the novel, O’Brien’s incongruous features connote incongruous politics: ‘Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence.’ Perhaps. We have to rely on that absent ‘something’ again. The only certain unorthodoxy is the oddness of O’Brien’s features, later described as ‘ugly and yet so civilised’ (p. 143) and ‘ugly, and so intelligent’ (p. 202.). O’Brien ought certainly to be a target for the Thought Police. When his and Winston’s eyes meet during the Hate Session, it is ‘intelligence’ in a different sense which occurs: there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he knew!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakeable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. ‘I am with you,’ O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. ‘I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!’ And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face was as inscrutable as everybody else’s. (p. 17)

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With hindsight we know that O’Brien is faking this look—a very remarkable skill which must lead some readers to disregard the ‘flash of intelligence’ as mystery-mongering. The incident is only slightly less credible, however, than the ‘real-life’ precedents studied earlier. The language of the passage is orthodox physiognomy: thoughts flowing in and out through the eyes. Winston’s reading of the ‘equivocal glance’ (p. 18) is given credence by Julia: ‘She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe O’Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes’ (p. 124). Such is the ‘equivocal’ nature of Winston’s inordinate trust in O’Brien that on several occasions O’Brien’s face and B.B.’s seem interchangeable in Winston’s mind. Once Winston is captured, this irrational likening becomes prophetic, for Winston takes on the role of the state. His ‘intelligence’ is at least as problematical as his ‘brutal’ side. The sadistic infliction of pain plays its part in Winston’s torture, of course, as does his own masochistic response. Critics have attributed Winston’s continual respect and admiration for his torturer to homosexuality (this explanation extends to B.B. also), power worship, guilt.37 By these criteria, O’Brien and Winston are on the same side: the diminutive Winston, the ‘prize-fighter’ O’Brien. But Winston’s ‘conversion’ from sinner to believer is the result not only of physical pain but of elaborate intellectual interrogation. O’Brien takes great pains to explain and argue the system, to undermine and destroy Winston’s view of the world. This is where the athleticism and power of O’Brien’s ‘intelligence’ proves itself. It comes as no major surprise to discover he helped to write Goldstein’s manual. O’Brien seems omniscient, as godlike as B.B. That is exactly where his intelligence becomes a problem. If O’Brien is still a part of the system he must use doublethink. He must believe even the more outrageous facets of the creed he espouses. It is much easier for Winston (and us) to see O’Brien as a controller and manipulator if not a producer of state ideology, able to wield it so effectively because he is not its subject like everyone else. This problem is presented in physiognomic terms. While tied down on a table, of course, Winston’s whole universe has centred on O’Brien’s face. When O’Brien’s pseudo-religious ranting rises to its fever pitches, Winston searches for knowledge in the face hovering over him: His face looked enormous because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. (p. 203) His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston; he is not a hypocrite; he believes every word he says…. His mind contained Winston’s mind. But in that case how could it be true that O’Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. (p. 205) You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like…. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself…? (p. 211) This is the final destination of Orwell’s physiognomy of politics: a lunatic intelligence, the inversion of signifying systems; ‘cavernous blackness’ of ‘lunatic intensity’. Whether or not the ‘enormous’ image is aesthetically and intellectually satisfying will continue to be debated. The face remains a surface upon which competing claims will be made. Winston’s reading of what can be seen in O’Brien’s face need not be correct.

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One final point. The last sight we have of Winston is of his shedding ‘two gin-scented tears’. Do these tears signify relief, remorse, self-pity, adulation? As physiognomers ourselves, we must continue to struggle with the productiveness of connotation, and to revel in its possibilities.

Roehampton Institute of Higher Education

NOTES 1 For information about the history of physiognomy, I am indebted to chapter 3 of Aaron Scharf, William Hogarth (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1979), Unit 7 of the Second-Level Arts Course, The Enlightenment’. 2 Ibid., p. 25. 3 Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), passim. 4 Quoted in ibid., pp. 137–8. 5 Quoted in ibid., p. 138. 6 ‘Good prose is like a window pane’: quoted from ‘Why I write’ (1946), in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), vol. 1, p. 7; this work is referred to as CEJL from this point. 7 For a useful summary of many of the modern positions on linguistic theory, see Richard Harland, Superstructuralism (London: Methuen, 1987), chs 7 and 10. 8 Scharf, op. cit., pp. 26–7. 9 An élitist objection to the advent of photography was that it lowered the standards of art. Baudelaire, for instance, reckoned that ‘From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal’: quoted in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 96. 10 I have found Victor Burgin’s work particularly useful in this section of the article. 11 See ‘The photographic message’ (1961) in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1987), pp. 15–31. 12 From ‘The rhetoric of the image’, in ibid., p. 39. 13 Victor Burgin, ‘Photographic practice and art theory’, in Burgin (ed.), op. cit., pp. 54–5. 14 Victor Burgin, ‘Looking at photography’, in ibid., p. 153. 15 Simon Watney, ‘Making strange: the shattered mirror’, in ibid., p. 174. 16 Barthes, op. cit., p. 39. 17 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 16–17. 18 CEJL, 1, pp. 170–213, 177–8. 19 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 7. Abbreviated from now on as HC. 20 HC, p. 8. 21 The poem concludes ‘Looking back on the Spanish Civil War’ (1942). See HC, p. 246. 22 HC, p. 244. 23 HC, p. 243. 24 HC, p. 243. 25 HC, p. 247. 26 CEJL, 1, p. 460. 27 See the contributions to Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), and Raymond Williams, Orwell (London: Fontana, 1984).

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28 Review of Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons, published in New English Weekly, 9 June 1938; CEJL, 1, pp. 333–4, 334. 29 Review of Mein Kampf, published in New English Weekly, 21 March 1940; CEJL, 2 pp. 12–14, 13. 30 Orwell believed Zamyatin’s We was superior to Huxley’s Brave New World because of We’s ‘intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism— human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is created with divine attributes’. See review of We published in Tribune, 4 January 1946; CEJL, 2, pp. 72–5, 75. 31 William Steinhoff, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), p. 186. 32 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 167. Subsequent page references appear in the text in parentheses. I am aware that Goldstein’s book was written partly by O’Brien, but for convenience’s sake I continue to refer to to it as Goldstein’s manual. 33 I use the Party shorthand for Big Brother, so there is no need to continue using quotation marks for B.B. 34 Alexander Dallin, ‘Big Brother is watching you’, in Peter Stansky (ed.), On Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York and San Francisco: W.H.Freeman, 1983), pp. 188–97, 88. 35 The most significant omission from this article is the face of Charrington, which has echoes of both O’Brien and Goldstein, and which undergoes a transformation into a face of a member of the Thought Police at the end of part 2. 36 See Antony Easthope, ‘Fact and fantasy in Nineteen Eighty-Four’, in Norris (ed.), op. cit., pp. 243–63; Paul Robinson, ‘For the love of Big Brother: the sexual politics of Nineteen EightyFour’, in Stansky (ed.), op. cit., pp. 148–58. 37 See the persuasive treatment of the religious implications of Winston’s torture in Patrick Reilly, George Orwell: The Age’s Adversary (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986), ch. 9.

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The politics of Finnegans Wake DAVID PIERCE

There is no more daunting task for criticism than an enquiry into the politics of Finnegans Wake, a text whose epigraph is perhaps best captured in the schoolboy Latin of the interrogators in chapter 15:

Magis megis enerretur mynus hoc intelligow. (478.17–18) Indeed, the more Finnegans Wake is explained, the less at times it is understood—which is a not uncommon pattern of response. Fog, together with cloud and rain, constitutes the natural ambience of this text, and becomes in turn emblematic of the relationship between it and the reader. At the opening of chapter 3 the reader is invited to ‘Chest Cee!’ But the fog is ‘Sdense’ that the reader becomes the object of scorn, out of place, a ‘spoof of visibility in a freakfog’ (48.1–2). Nothing is clear—not even the reader’s desire for clarity, which is being in some way spoofed—though there may be temporary, if misplaced, relief in that it is only a ‘freakfog’. For much of the text, the reader is like ‘Head-in-Clouds’ (18.23), anxiously awaiting the proverbial breaks in the clouds for a view of the earth below. But the fog continues. The first and last chapters of Book 3 begin with a reference to it—‘White fogbow spans’ (403.6); ‘What was thaas? Fog was whaas?’ (555.1)—and it is not until the final chapter that we are confidently, though perhaps ironically, informed by someone that the ‘smog is lofting’ (593.6–7). Not for nothing did Joyce refer to Finnegans Wake as his ‘experiment in interpreting “the dark night of the soul”’. 1 We can go further and, in the light of Roland Barthes’s attack on the distinction between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of writing, 2 add that this experiment is intensified for the reader by Joyce’s familiar coupling of experience and writing, by which means he underscores the fact that writing too is ‘experience’. Fog, dreams, the night—these are useful metaphors for the unknown territory here being charted. Joyce didn’t need Ezra Pound to tell him how difficult (that is, how painful) it was for the reader. He knew exactly what was involved: hence the constant promptings and encouragement to the reader not to give up. ‘Phew!’ (10.24) as we exit from the Willingdone Museyroom. ‘What a warm time we were in there.’ Indeed. Elsewhere we are told: ‘Cry not yet!’ (20.19), or, more simply, ‘Smile!’ (55.2). Later, words are put into our mouths: ‘This is nat language at any sinse of the world’ (83.12). We are even told who constitutes the ideal reader—someone ‘suffering from an ideal insomnia’ (120.13–14). Suffering, yes, but then even this purchase on the text is undermined by the humorous collocation of insomnia with ideal. It is a ‘book of Doublends Jined’ (20.15–16), ‘Work in Progress’, a ‘most moraculous jeeremyhead sindbook for all the peoples’ (229.31–2,), ‘all about crime and libel’ (419.34). But

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‘the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude’ (57.16—17). Indeed, we might not unreasonably conclude that Finnegans Wake is the ‘last word in stolentelling!’ (424.35). Lies, distortion, voices from afar (3.9, 407.14), impenetrable riddles and stories, history as ‘fabled by the daughters of memory’ (Ulysses, p. 20), together underline the difficulty (some might say the folly) of ever being able to determine the politics of Finnegans Wake. Then, too, we are unsure—yet it belongs to an early stage of any such investigation—if we are dealing primarily with parody, pastiche, or burlesque. Is the ‘collideorscape’ (143.28) showing us a universe where, following Nicholas of Cusa, there is a coincidence of opposites, or a world where things are linked arbitrarily? What is being mocked in bringing together disparate material in this way—one or more of the items referred to, or the human desire to make sense of such disparate material? Such questions serve to remind us of a wider modern fascination, which stretches across the sciences and the humanities, with Heisenberg’s ‘indeterminacy principle’, and perhaps it is for this reason that we need to address issues of clarification rather than increase the epistemological doubt never far from the surface of Joyce studies. To prevent adding to the confusion, it may be helpful if we isolate three areas for consideration in an approach to the politics of Finnegans Wake: the political context of Finnegans Wake, its political message, and political readings. The first belongs to a form of historical investigation and placing, to what Robert Weimann calls ‘past significance’;3 the second to the author’s implicit or explicit political message as contained in the text; the third to our own contemporary political interpretation of Finnegans Wake, or to what Weimann terms ‘present meaning’. Of course, these three areas significantly overlap, and Weimann would be the first to insist on the unity of the first and the third, the historical with the evaluative. But in Wake studies we are still some way off integrating the historical with the evaluative, and we need therefore to put down some markers. Too often in critical discussions of the politics of Finnegans Wake the tendency has been to focus on one area with little or no thought given to the other two areas. The best discussions—and I include here the work of John Garvin, Hugh Kenner, W.J.McCormack, and Seamus Deane—have come from investigations into historical context; less satisfactory—and I here instance the work of Phillip Herring, Diarmuid Maguire, and, though excellent in other ways, Dominic Manganiello—have been those which centre on the second area; the third area remains the least explored but, given the advances of recent feminist theory, the most promising.4 Here I concentrate on presenting an overall picture of what I take to be involved in discussing the politics of Finnegans Wake. In the first section I point up certain lines in recent developments, in the second section my intention is to clarify difficulties, while in the third I touch on alternative approaches to this particular topic. POLITICAL CONTEXT The political context of Finnegans Wake embraces a wide field of enquiry, which, for illustrative purposes, can be grouped under a series of headings labelled Irish, Anglo-Irish, European, myth, and history, and with further subheadings referring to pre-modern history, the nineteenth century, the Fall of Parnell, the Easter Rising, the Irish Civil War, and the inter-war years. In this regard we might note the significance of the date when Finnegans Wake was begun, for 1923 marked the end of the Civil War and of the revolutionary period

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ushered in by Easter 1916. Just as Ulysses belongs to a period of expectancy that found its now perennially hopeful expression in the one day in June in 1904, in a parallel way Finnegans Wake gives voice to the disorder and disillusionment that befell Irish politics in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Irish War, when civil war and internecine feuding broke out between the warring brothers Shem and Shaun. Shaun, as John Garvin makes clear, is not unlike the figure of Eamon de Valera, the ‘dogmestic Shaun’ (411.23), who rose from being a ‘mathmaster’ (4.4) to becoming ‘through deafths of durkness greengrown deeper… [the] vote of the Irish, voise from afar’ (407.12–14). This connection between Shaun and de Valera receives further support from Sean O’Faolain’s equally critical biography of the Irish leader published in the same year as Finnegans Wake. One passage might well be about ‘frank’ Shaun: Fundamentally his political integrity was unimpeachable…. If only… De Valera would once or twice say, ‘I am not infallible. I am no hero. I am no saint. I had to contradict myself. It was for Ireland’—the heart would open more readily to him, and one could without detriment either to the symbol or the man create the hero in full admiration.5 De Valera refused to acknowledge Lloyd George’s Anglo-Irish Treaty, which had been negotiated under duress in December 1921 by Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, and the other Irish leaders. Instead, he proposed an amendment known as Document Number Two, which sought a looser association between Ireland and Great Britain. It was a narrow point of principle: effectively, the Irish delegates had been outmanœuvred by the British, who had used the familiar tactic of divide and rule. As someone once quipped, the only difference between the two documents was that one was signed and the other one wasn’t. Throughout Finnegans Wake there are references to Documents Numbers One and Two (see 358.30, 369.24, 386.20, 528.32, 619.19), and in chapter 15 ‘Keven’ (a Shaun figure) finds ‘dogumen number one…an illegible downfumbed by an unelgible’ (482.20–1). What distressed Joyce about de Valera was his moral uprightness, his dogmatic insistence on a formula of words, his narrow view of Ireland, and his willingness to plunge his country into civil war and thereby subject Nora and the children in April 1922. to ‘the premier terror of Errorland’ (62.25) (a phrase that yokes together de Valera as President of Dail Eireann, his parsimonious role in the treaty negotiations, and the ensuing terror which accompanied the breakdown of order). ‘The devil era’ (473.8), which is interpreted, significantly, in the context of the treaty negotiations as ‘a slip of time between a date and a ghostmark’ (473.8–9), had begun. In many ways the primary political context for Finnegans Wake is the Civil War, so much so that Hugh Kenner has suggested that the figure being waked is perhaps a participant in that conflict.6 Certainly, apart from de Valera there are enough references to other figures and events, as well as to fratricide, violence to the person, and decidedly sinister encounters, to support the notion that Finnegans Wake is a Civil War text. The presence of Erskine Childers, whose father Hugh Culling Eardley Childers (1827–96) was nicknamed ‘Here Comes Everybody’, is relevant here. Author of the thriller The Riddle of the Sands (1903), Childers took part in the Howth gun-running in July 1914; he later joined de Valera’s Republican side in the Civil War, and, having been caught with a pistol in his possession (given him by Michael Collins when the two were on the same side), was executed in November 1922 by a Free State firing squad. He is mentioned at 473.9, ‘chilldays embers’,

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and at 596.5, ‘hailed chimers’ ersekind’, where there is a play on his (and HCE’s) Englishness; he is possibly being referred to in the first question in the picture gallery chapter in the phrase ‘made a summer assault on our shores and begiddy got his sands full’ (132.20–1), and perhaps he is there, when the Document is being scrutinized in chapter 5, as ‘the eternal chimerahunter…the sensory crowd in his belly coupled with an eye for the goods trooth bewilderblissed by their night effluvia with guns like drums’ (107.14–17). Drawing attention to this particular context to Finnegans Wake returns us as a matter of course to the less ambiguous period preceding the Troubles and to the ‘Surrection!’ (593.2) of Easter Week 1916, ‘our hour or risings’ (598.13), and to the Proclamation of the Republic: ‘Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world’ (593.3). The beginning of the last chapter of Finnegans Wake is a celebration of a new dawn, part of which takes its cue from 1916. ‘Surrection!’ is both resurrection and insurrection; ‘Eireweeker’ is both Eire, Easter Week, HCE, ear, and weaker; ‘the whole bludyn world’ is reminiscent of the papal address ‘Urbi et Orbi’ given at Easter and therefore linked with the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic from the General Post Office; it also picks up the phrase in chapter 1 used after the ‘erection’ of the wall—‘For whole the world to see’ (6.11–12). Throughout the final chapter there are references to the wider nationalist struggle for Irish independence: Sinn Fein, whose slogan we might notice did service for Joyce’s own ideological perspective, reinterpreted now as ‘oursouls alone’, is mentioned at 614.14 and 623.28–9; Patrick Pearse appears at 620.24; at 614.17 Parnell’s insistence that ‘newmanmaun set a marge to the merge of unnotions’ is dusted down again (compare its earlier formulation at 292.26–7) ; the unofficial nineteenth-century Irish national anthem and rallying call written by Thomas Davis appears as ‘Innition wons agame’ at 614.17–18; while Michael Dwyer, the 1798 rebel, has a walk-on part at 600.18. The celebration of Easter 1916, however, is short-lived, and with the ricorso we are back to the opening chapter again with ‘snake wurrums everyside’ (19.12), ‘sneaks’ (19.13), ‘racketeers and bottloggers’ (19.19), the ante- and post-bellum period, as it were, of ‘bloody wars’ (14.9) and ‘Killallwho’ (15.11). However, we can perhaps hear in the very last words of the chapter the Sinn Fein slogan, not now ‘ourselves alone’ but simply ‘a lone’ (628.15). For, if Finnegans Wake—caught as it is between 1916 and 1923—is concerned in no small measure with the theme of loss, then part of that loss turns on the historical failure of the Irish revolution to bring forth a new Ireland. In identifying the period 1916–23 as one of the strands that constitute the political context for Finnegans Wake, it is as well not to claim too much. For of course there are other strands, some of which are Irish, others of which are not. Some critics, for example, might wish to argue for priority to be assigned to the Roderick O’Conor sketch, which was the earliest passage of Finnegans Wake to be written. At the Treaty of Windsor in 1175 Rory O’Connor, the last High King of Ireland, pledged his allegiance—‘suck up’ (381.30) is how this is described in the text—to Henry II, and thus was initiated the modern phase of Irish history, caught between subservience to and rejection of the Crown. Others, aware that Joyce’s focus is on his native country but now broadened to include all kinds of material much of which is non-Irish, might wish to claim that the primary political context for Finnegans Wake is that of the exile in Europe, keenly alive to politics but guarded about taking sides, especially in a period that tended to see the destiny of man exclusively, as Thomas Mann observed, in political terms.

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Equally, we need to bear in mind that the relationship between text and context in the case of Finnegans Wake is perhaps qualitatively different from that which obtains with other works. The defeat of the left at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938 is a moment that haunts Malcolm Lowry’s ‘thirties’ novel Under the Volcano (1947). It is not only significant for the British consul’s brother Hugh, who was a correspondent for The Globe in Madrid, but it is also associated with the growth of fascism in Mexico—the British consulate in Cuernavaca is on the point of being closed, the Nazi German presence is increasing, and at the end of the novel the consul is murdered by fascist police. The political context for the novel, it can be legitimately argued, is the Spanish Civil War, its repercussions and meanings, which can now be felt worldwide. Among the political themes dealt with in the novel are: the defeat of the left, the image of life as an ‘arena’ where diametrically opposed viewpoints or political systems are in conflict (Mexico is described as being at the centre of the earth, Cuernavaca as the place where the American-style highway peters out, while a bullfight occupies a central episode of the novel), the shadow of world war, the problem of commitment especially for the writer, and the possibility or otherwise of private life in an age of politics. The political context for Under the Volcano, a novel that is often seen in non-political terms, is in fact especially sharp and revolves around quintessentially thirties concerns. Finnegans Wake (which is also in part a thirties text) cannot be tied back so neatly to any one political context. This, though, has nothing to do with its being more ‘universal’ or tackling ‘universal’ themes. Rather, it centres on Joyce’s rewriting of the relationship between text and context and the consequent disarray for the critic in determining what constitutes his or her role in such matters: there is no political unconscious in Finnegans Wake awaiting the supplementary attention of the critic. Hence the political context for Finnegans Wake needs augmenting by two other sorts of investigation, one concerned with Joyce’s intentions and message, the other with a second-order enquiry where the concept of a political context or ideas about the relationship between text and context are themselves subjected to scrutiny under what can be termed political readings. POLITICAL MESSAGE In looking for a clue to Joyce’s politics in Finnegans Wake we might well recall Shaun’s cautionary note in his portrait of Shem in chapter 7: ‘not even then could such an antinomian be true to type’ (172.17–18). Possibly in reaction to his Jesuit education and Catholic upbringing, Joyce hated to be pinned down. As an undergraduate, Stephen Dedalus refuses to sign Tsar Nicholas II’s petition for peace; as an established Irish writer, Joyce refused to join the newly formed Irish Academy of Letters. He even turned down an invitation to a St Patrick’s Day party at which the Irish ambassador was to attend, for fear that his presence might be misconstrued as a tacit endorsement of the Free State.7 In the biography, Richard Ellmann tells us that Joyce ‘refused to commit himself publicly in any way’.8 But in a sense of course he already had, for from the moment of his exile from his native country in 1904, which was a deliberate disengagement from Ireland, there developed a parallel and increasingly public commitment to writing. Unlike many British writers of the thirties, such as Edward Upward, W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood, or George Orwell, Joyce remained unimpressed by the distinction between writing and action. Hence the absence in his work of the exploration of the border, whether as symbol or reality. For him, writing was experience,

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and it remained the most effective instrument for reshaping and changing the world. Hence the significance (in part at least) of the image of the telescope in Finnegans Wake. At the same time, his commitment to writing went hand in hand with a Flaubertian desire as an author to refine himself out of existence and to make the paraphrase of his work formidable and, perhaps with his final work, impossible. These factors need to be kept in mind as we try to discover what it is Joyce intended by Finnegans Wake. In the late eighteenth century Edmund Burke voiced his opposition to Grattan’s Protestant Parliament on the grounds that, if the connection with Westminster were broken, the rights of Irish Catholics—which, he knew, were precariously few under English law—would be further eroded. Joyce’s view—and it is one that he never seems to have radically altered—was that genuine freedom for the Irish people was not to be equated simply with breaking the crosschannel link. Like Stephen, he understood how he was a servant of two masters—England and Rome. Historically, with the establishment of the Free State in 1922, the links with the Crown were broken, but the other tyranny continued and indeed—at least in the field of censorship and social legislation—flourished. ‘Healiopolis’ in the figure of Tim Healy—and we might recall Joyce’s childhood poem ‘Et Tu, Healy’, which contains (presumably) a scathing attack on Healy for his part in the fall of Parnell—was now in charge at the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park. If Joyce was a Republican, then it was of the Parnellite Home Rule variety; that is, he desired to break the connection with England—but not entirely (after all, he was in receipt of a Civil List pension and continued to travel under a British passport). I think it is against this background that we should interpret his remarks in Finnegans Wake about ‘freestouters and publicranks’ (329.31): he is not saying a plague on all your houses, whether Free Stater or Republican, but rather he is showing impatience with the narrowing of the political options available for his country. He was equally irritated with the Border and with the Border issue. In the encounter between the attacker and the adversary, ‘the boarder incident prerepeated itself’ (81.32–3), while in the portrait of Shem in chapter 7 Shaun declares: ‘He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea’ (171.4–6). To muddle through rather than meddle with—here is the characteristic Joycean emphasis, now augmented with the familiar opposition between Europe as opportunity and Ireland as backward and provincial. It isn’t the whole story, of course, for what is Finnegans Wake doing if it isn’t meddling with ‘Irrland’s split little pea’? Indeed, throughout his writings Joyce strikes at the narrow definitions of Irish identity increasingly apparent from the 1880s onwards. Think of the censure of the Celtic Revival in ‘A Mother’, of the celebration of the outsider in Irish culture in Ulysses and its twin attack on Mr Deasy’s Orangeism and the Citizen’s one-eyed nationalism, or of the deliberate choice in Finnegans Wake of a hero who uses a ‘British to my backbone tongue’ (36.31–2) and whose surname is derived from a West Sussex directory. Who now, Joyce seems to be saying, can tell the difference between Mutt and Jute, the indigeneous Irish from the foreign invader? ‘Become a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you’ (16.24–5). Conversely, who now can claim proprietorial or exclusive rights to English, given the writing of Finnegans Wake and given the way in which Joyce—like the Gaelic-speaking King—‘murdered all the English he knew’ (93.2)? It is appropriate to concentrate in the first instance on the Irish and on the Anglo-Irish context of Joyce’s message, but it is not enough. The audience for Finnegans Wake is an

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international one which, as Louis MacNeice put it, may or may not care ‘Who is the king of your castle’.9 Joyce’s message, in other words, exhibits more than an Irish inflection and contains a much wider appeal for a modern audience. Here we might single out two aspects: the theme of peace and the right to individual liberty. As chapter 1 demonstrates, human history in general and European and British history in particular has been a history of warfare, of ‘wills gen wonts’ (4.1). Hear its sounds of guns and wailing: ‘Brekkek Kekkek Kekkek Kekkek! Koax Koax Koax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh!’ (4.2–3). What better place to capture the essence of human history than a museum dedicated to war. In the opening chapter Joyce gives us the Willingdone, that monument to war and to the arrogant use of male sexual power which stands guard not only over the sexual misdeeds of HCE but also as it were over the whole text. In Joyce’s Notebook, VI.B.22 (p. 150), he lists a series of foreign words for peace, for paix—‘Hoping’, ‘Takiya’, ‘Hoa bink’, ‘Thai bink’, ‘Soc’, ‘Kuam samakkhi’, ‘berdamai’, ‘ju jen pen suk’, ‘shanti’, ‘sainte’, ‘sianta’, ‘al-solhe’, ‘soulhe’, ‘soulke’, ‘Khagagouthioun’, ‘dama’. As the first three words of the last chapter remind us, Finnegans Wake is a call for peace: ‘Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!’ (593.1). Samdhi, like shantih, is Sanskrit for peace, and so it is appropriate that, just as the first chapter begins with the fall of human history, the last chapter begins with an expression of hope, a turning of the page of human history, a coda to what has gone before. The Sanctus triplet is here perhaps the least ambiguous of all its appearances in the text—earlier we have had ‘Xanthos! Xanthos! Xanthos!’ (235.9), ‘Shaunti and shaunti and shaunti again!’ (408.33), and ‘Shunt us! Shunt us! Shunt us! (454.33). It also contrasts with the ‘Shantih’ of the last line of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922.), which is in Eliot’s gloss ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’.10 Peace in Joyce is never associated with some higher realm of consciousness, but is invariably located in time and place, and we shouldn’t be surprised if the opening to the last chapter also mimes the Easter Rising, or indeed if hope for the future is shadowed by the hopes for the future in the past. The second aspect concerns Joyce’s constant references to individual liberty. In chapter 3, HCE is called a list of what he assumes are abusive names—‘Firstnighter, Informer, Old Fruit’, and so on. Though hurt, he does not rise to the bait; he is going through a period of religious reform, we are humorously informed, helped by ‘the dominican mission for the sowsealist potty’ and ‘the rowmish devowtion known as the howly rowsary’ (72.23–5). Instead, his response, captured in the lowly comma, in the change of typeface, and in the use of free indirect speech, is muted, defensive, and verbose: ‘but anarchistically respectsful of the liberties of the noninvasive individual, did not respond a solitary wedgeword beyond such sedentarity’ (72.16–18). Again, we cannot expect the antinomian to be true to type (in both meanings of that phrase), but I think we can detect in Finnegans Wake a plea for the rights of the individual to be respected. In this regard we might notice how such rights are seen not so much in terms of democratic or consumer rights but rather as the more basic right to be an agnostic, or not to have a gun pointed in one’s face, or perhaps—bearing in mind the special difficulties of the owner of a public house—not to have people invade one’s private space. Finnegans Wake does not contain the kind of political message that is to be found in, say, Sean O’Casey’s The Star Turns Red (1940) or in the great plays of Bertolt Brecht’s period of exile. Joyce shied away from the role of teacher, and the only lesson the Shem figure teaches is a subversive one, namely the geometry of ALP’s vagina (which is also presumably a sideswipe at the ‘mathmaster’s’ sterile approach to reality). It must be confessed that the

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political message outlined here amounts to very little. After all, there are few who don’t want peace or the right not to be unduly disturbed—especially at night. Compare the insightfulness about war everywhere apparent in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), as in the Sergeant’s opening remark about ‘Peace—that’s just a mess; takes a war to restore order…no order, no war’, or in the Chaplain’s opinion that ‘war satisfies all requirements, peaceable ones included’, or in Brecht’s own view of the play—that war is ‘a continuation of business by other means’, that ‘no sacrifice is too great for the struggle against war’.11 By comparison, the discourse on peace in Finnegans Wake, especially when we recall its date of publication, is too generalized and bland, too lacking in the necessary edge and focus, to ultimately challenge us. This remains one of the central difficulties in centring a discussion of the politics of Finnegans Wake on the text’s political message, for even after the political platform has been identified, which is no easy task given the Flaubertian inheritance, there still remains the problem of the insightfulness or otherwise of what is being said. POLITICAL READINGS In outlining the political context and message of Finnegans Wake, a number of political readings have already been touched on. In this section the focus is on Weimann’s ‘present meaning’. A common objection to Finnegans Wake from the left and others is that reality is complex enough and that in writing Finnegans Wake Joyce has merely compounded it. Given that such a charge can be answered, another one often follows, for as Marx said in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ 12 Put differently, could the time needed to understand Finnegans Wake be better spent changing the world? Is there not a tyranny on Joyce’s part in requiring so much time and attention from the reader? Have all the words written by the professors in interpreting the text contributed to anything significant beyond the Joyce confederacy? Has Finnegans Wake, in Brecht’s words, shortened ‘the age of exploitation’?13 These questions are difficult to answer but are worth raising because they challenge us to develop a more finely tuned political reading of the work—even if in the end we remain consumed by self-doubt, conscious perhaps, like Shem, of not ‘having struck one blow’ (176.29) (for Ireland or freedom). Among the many political readings of Finnegans Wake, two strands in particular can be mentioned here. The first concerns the way in which Joyce has widened a discussion of politics to include material often designated as outside its scope. In this regard his assault on the phallocentricity of language is telling. Nothing in Finnegans Wake has a single meaning; nothing can be tied back to a single source of meaning. This links, of course, on the one hand, with the ‘metaphors’ of fog, the night, and dreams and, on the other, with the confusion and doubt that surround the letter, the names of ‘characters’, or the significance of the title. But there is more to it than this. Phallocentric discourse is marked by the display and exercise of power: it assumes that the human subject controls, precedes, or exists outside language, that the position of the subject in language is unproblematic, and that its task as discourse is mastery over the world through science, rationality, and logic. Finnegans Wake radically questions such assumptions and makes us aware of the decentred subject, the problematic relationship of the human subject to language, and the central importance of excess and of

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what Hélène Cixous calls ‘écriture féminine’ or ‘feminine writing’. In this regard, HCE’s stutter, linked with his sexual guilt and with the cluster of meanings that surrounds the word ‘hesitency’, reminds us of a phallocentric discourse under pressure, and contrasts with the flow of language, with ‘gramma’s grammar’ (268.17), as articulated by ALP and the female voices, and with the accompanying attack on the patriarchal order. According to Derrida, meaning is never truly present in discourse but is ceaselessly deferred (or, we might add in the light of Finnegans Wake, recalled). Against the metaphysics of presence, Derrida posits the free play of the signifier. So it is with Finnegans Wake, a text which is fundamentally caught between the eye and the ear, between writing and speech. Two systems constantly hit off against each other, and at any one time both are co-present, but in such a way as to prevent the possibility of full presence. The form this lack of full presence takes is, like everything else in Finnegans Wake, varied. When some words are read out loud, their meaning becomes restricted, as, for example, with the word ‘boarder’ in the phrase ‘the boarder incident’ (81.32–3); in writing we see both meanings, but when it is spoken hear only one. Sometimes it turns on a syllable, as in the word ‘husbandry’ (38.11), which can be pronounced either as ‘husband dry’ or ‘husbandry’. The eye can take in both meanings, but in reading the word aloud we are of necessity forced to jettison one of the meanings. Sometimes behind the written word we can hear other words, as, for example, with ‘dumbestic’ (dumb, domestic, beast) in the phrase ‘dumbestic husbandry’ (38.11). At other times—and this needs a more extended gloss—we repeatedly notice ‘that patternmind, that paradigmatic ear’ (70.35–6), as Earwicker is called. Language, according to Saussure, is made up of paradigmatic and syntagmatic (or vertical and horizontal) relationships. In Finnegans Wake, many of the syllables, words, phrases, and sentences anticipate or echo each other and come to form a paradigm, a set of vertical relationships that lift them out of the syntagmatic relationships of the particular sentence in which they are embedded. Sometimes when this happens the reader is unable to integrate the two sets of relationship, seeing one, then the other, but never the two together as a unity. Thus ‘deltic dwilights’ (492.9) recalls Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, but it also revives ‘cultic twalette’ (344.12), and so the reader is momentarily caught between an extratextual reference and an intratextual paradigm. At the level of individual words, ‘deltic’ exists within a series of lexical sets which are perhaps related to each other only because of a common word: ‘deltic origin’ (Delphic oracle) (140.9), ‘deltas twoport’ (318.13) (death do us part), ‘triagonal delta’ (297.24) (ALP’s triangular delta). Similarly with ‘dwilights’, ‘cultic’, and ‘twalette’. On the other hand there are paradigms, such as St Augustine’s felix culpa, or refrains such as ‘The wren, the wren, the king of all birds’, or prayers such as the Hail Mary, that include many variations, so many in fact that the paradigm draws the reader away from the surrounding syntagmatic relationships, and it is at this point that we perhaps recognize the force of Derrida’s concept of the free play of the signifier. Finnegans Wake—and this in part accounts for the problematic status of its political message—refuses the distinction between denotation and connotation, being, as Samuel Beckett once proclaimed, ‘not about something; it is that something itself’.14 Furthermore, it mocks our legitimate readerly desires for a paraphrasable content. The aesthetics of high modernism here meets the more recent discussion that takes its bearings from psychoanalysis, semiotics, and linguistics, and is in turn given a radical and social nuance. Thus an aesthetics which had its origins in defeat and alienation—the fate of art after

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1848—takes on a political meaning in the work of critical modernists such as Brecht and Joyce. In Brecht it is closely allied with the struggle against fascism and for socialism; in Joyce it takes its most prominent form in the struggle against the identity of word and world. In the long run both struggles were—and are—necessary, and we should take care not to counterpose the two and assume we are obliged to choose one and dismiss the other. Finnegans Wake—and we need perhaps to invoke a distinction here between a political message and a political meaning—is a subversive text, which not only contributes to a strengthening of a potentially radical theory about language, gender, and the human subject but also continues to extend and test such a theory. For the second approach to a political reading of Finnegans Wake I turn to Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of Rabelais and to his concept of chronotope (chronos + topos): Rabelais’ task is to gather together on a new material base a world that, due to the dissolution of the medieval world view, is disintegrating. The medieval wholeness and roundedness of the world…had been destroyed. There was destroyed as well the medieval conception of history—the Creation of the World, the Fall from Grace, the First Expulsion, Redemption, the Second Exile, the Final Judgment—concepts in which real time is devalued and dissolved in extratemporal categories. In this world view, time is a force that only destroys and annihilates; it creates nothing…. A new chronotope was needed that would permit one to link real life (history) to the real earth. It was necessary to oppose to eschatology a creative and generative time.15 There is much here that is relevant to an understanding of Joyce’s project. Think, for example, of the usefulness of the phrase ‘gather together’ in connection with Finnegans Wake, a text that is the supreme example in literature of the concept of bricolage, where disparate, heterogeneous material is brought together not for any reason inherent in the material but because it can be assigned meaning and used to form part of a new view of the world. Joyce doesn’t reflect the world; he gathers it together. Or think of his ‘generative’ view of time. He deliberately eschews the apocalyptic sensibility and primitivism of many of his modernist contemporaries. Taking a longer view of history—which had been assigned to the Irish by the triumphs of the British—he saw the workings of much larger cycles than were available to those immediately involved in the establishment or protection of empire. This is summed up in an enigmatic phrase that recurs in Finnegans Wake: history is ‘the seim anew’ (215.23), ‘the same renew’ (226.17), ‘Sein annews’ (277.18). It is Joyce’s answer to the pre-Socratic dilemma of permanence and change, of whether or not it is possible to step into the same river twice. Here lies one of the key tensions in his last work, between the known pattern of human history, with all its ‘Killykillkilly’ and ‘wills gen wonts’, and the future destiny of the race and its ability or otherwise to live in peace. The Liffey has much to tell us, not only about the guilty secrets it has seen—‘O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia’ (196.1–3)—but also about bringing human history into a closer alignment with the natural world, about listening to rhythms and sounds which predate the rise of civilization and within which our modern world should be enfolded. The comparison between Rabelais and Joyce is more complex than this, not least because Joyce recognized that the Irish ‘are still fundamentally a medieval people’ and that ‘Ulysses also is medieval’.16 In Finnegans Wake we are told that Shem is ‘weird…and middayevil

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down to his vegetable soul’ (423.27–8). Aquinas and scholasticism were among Joyce’s fathers and stood him ‘in good stead’ when he embarked on his voyage away from medieval Ireland and medieval Dublin towards the modern world of Europe and Paris. The historical irony is that Joyce, whose head was saturated with medieval ideas, whose natural bias was ‘the backward look’, and whose perspective was invariably long-term, came to be regarded in the inter-war years as the leading exponent of the avant-garde. But then Joyce had the advantage over his contemporaries of being more directly exposed to contradictory ways of perceiving the world and therefore of sensing more sharply the plight of being in some way disinherited. In giving up his religion and in exiling himself from Ireland, family, and friends, Joyce lost much of the ideology which bound him to the social structure and which lent him a sense of coherence and purpose. However, from his Catholic upbringing and Jesuit education he retained structures and forms and an interest in taxonomy which not only served him well in the period of The Waste Land and in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War, but which also stood him in good stead when he began to pick up the pieces of a disintegrated world and rediscover anew the ‘strandentwining cable of all flesh’ (Ulysses, p. 32).

College of Ripon and York St John NOTES Quotations from Joyce are taken from the Faber edition of Finnegans Wake, (1939), and from the new Penguin edition of Ulysses (1986). 1 Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 327, to Harriet Weaver, 14 August 1927. 2 Roland Barthes, Image—Music—Text, selected and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1979), pp. 142–8. 3 See the chapter entitled ‘Past significance and present meaning in literary history’ in Robert Weimann, Structure and Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), pp. 18–56. 4 For recent contextual studies, see, inter alia, John Garvin, James Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension (Dublin and London: Gill & Macmillan; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977); William J.McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Seamus Deane, ‘Joyce and Nationalism’, in Colin MacCabe (ed.), James Joyce: New Perspectives (Brighton: Harvester; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 168–83; Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). For Joyce’s political message, see Philip Herring, ‘Joyce’s Politics’, in Fritz Senn (ed.), New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 3–14; Dominic Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Diarmuid Maguire, ‘The Politics of Finnegans Wake’, in Giorgio Melchiori (ed.), Joyce in Rome: The Genesis of Ulysses (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984), pp. 120–8. For the third approach, see, inter alia, Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1978); Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (eds), Women in Joyce (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Bonnie Kime Scott, James Joyce (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). 5 Sean O’Faolain, De Valera (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), p. 173. On pp. 174 and 175 the word ‘frank’ appears twice. In September 1932 at the League of Nations, de Valera, his biographer tells

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us, ‘spoke with so much frank forcefulness about the League’; in the same speech de Valera declared, ‘Let us be frank with ourselves’. Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 290. Characteristically, Kenner is being provocative. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 643 n. Ibid., p. 708. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. E.R.Dodds (London: Faber, 1979), p. 134. The phrase is from section XVI of ‘Autumn Journal’. T.S.Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), p. 86. Actually, modern students of comparative religion are reluctant to see equivalences between religions in the way Eliot does. It can also be noted in passing that samdhi and shantih are to be distinguished and cannot adequately be translated by the one word ‘peace’. Perhaps the use of the two words in Finnegans Wake is another example of Joyce intent on showing his superior knowledge over his rival Eliot. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen Student Editions, 1983), pp. 3–4, 53–4, and xvii. From Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p. 30. From his poem ‘A Bed for the Night’, in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, eds. John Willett and Ralph Mannheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), p. 181. From Beckett’s essay ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce’, in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber, 1961), p. 14. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1983), p. 205. The connection between Bakhtin and Joyce, especially in the context of dialogism, carnivalesque, and the grotesque, has been the subject of recent critical attention; see, for example, the first chapter of Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1–16. Bakhtin’s insights into the workings of literary history could well be applied further in Joyce studies. Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (London: Millington, 1974), pp. 92–4.

Disarming voices (a nuclear exchange) CARDIFF TEXT ANALYSIS GROUP

On 8 December 1987 President Reagan, on behalf of the USA, and General Secretary Gorbachev, on behalf of the USSR, signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington to eliminate medium-range nuclear weapons. On behalf of the rest of the world the media breathed a sigh of relief. But even now a nuclear war is being waged. The mode of this war is textual. It involves a continual exchange of words, where battles are fought, subjects are enlisted, and the grounds of meaning and power are contested. An exchange of bombs would mark only the culmination and the end of such a conflict. But emphasis on the awful reality of nuclear weapons deflects from discussions of how nuclear power, the power to terrify and threaten, is discursive.1 Of course, nuclear issues are not independent of cultural practices but are produced by the power relations indissociable from the values and assumptions which sustain them. Moreover, the binary pattern of superpower confrontation takes the oppositional form that language seems to prescribe: one position defines itself by opposing the other, by fixing difference as opposition, and thus each superpower unifies its subjects in a relation of antithesis which appears as the condition of meaning. The unity of one position—its power and meaning—depends on its polar relationship to the other: position becomes an effect of opposition. But in the nuclear age this embattled relationship is also circumscribed by the threat (or promise) of the absolute effacement of the respective cultures and indeed identities of the USA and USSR. At this point the discursive perimeters which both specify and limit oppositional meanings are breached by the strange and subversive operations of textual difference. As dividing-lines slide, for example between the significations of peace and war, or between words and deeds, the unity of a position cracks and other meanings, alternative possibilities, emerge. Could it be that the ‘fabulously textual’ nature of the nuclear phenomenon is a peculiarly appropriate target for a critical analysis concerned with the production of meanings, the deployment of power and the effects of discourse?2 On 21 January 1985, in his second inaugural address, Ronald Reagan outlined prospects for peace. Peace was also a major issue in Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech on Soviet television on 29 March 1986, when he discussed the Russian moratorium on nuclear testing. (See Figures 1 and 2 below). While these speeches are not necessarily representative, they are significant instances of distinct discursive positions operating upon and exposed to the implications of nuclear war.

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THE MASTER’S VOICE The project of Reagan’s speech is to establish a unified, authoritative subject position for its audience by the invocation of universal human values. The text identifies these values as life, strength, progress, peace, and above all freedom and individuality. It does not differentiate between them; they are used interchangeably, synthesized within the ideological naturalness of humanism. The text also attempts to reconcile contraries: we are ‘to strive with all our strength toward the ultimate individual freedom, consistent with an orderly society’. It asserts an ideal of unconstrained individuals: ‘There are no limits to growth and human progress, when men and women are free to follow their dreams.’ It promises the regeneration of America, the nation and its citizens, physically, economically, and militarily, as Vibrant, robust and alive’, unified in commitment to ‘human freedom’. To perform this process of unification, it invokes the autonomous subject, even as it promises this subject’s realization as the absolute American and human (human-as-American) self. This self is ultimately located beyond cultural, racial, and political boundaries: ‘though our heritage is one of blood lines from every corner of the earth, we are all Americans’. Like God, this self transcends differentiation. From every dollar bill the American eagle similarly proclaims ‘e pluribus unum’: the absolute one unifies the disparate many. Reagan’s speech is also able to transcend temporal difference: while Reagan states, ‘we… are not given to looking backward’, the subsequent paragraph, and indeed the whole text, refers back to historical events. Even the present becomes history, as Reagan projects himself into the future to refer to his own period (the present in which he is speaking) in the past tense: We are creating a nation once again…. these will be years when Americans have restored their confidence and tradition of progress… when America courageously supported the struggle for individual liberty …and turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness into the warm sunlight of human freedom. The absolute self can efface historical difference: it transcends, omnisciently, the continuum which is simultaneously tradition and progress. The effect of this transcendence will be to install peace throughout the world: ‘we utter no prayer more fervently than the ancient prayer for peace on earth…. We strive for peace and security.’ Appropriately, the eagle clasps an olive branch. The humanist self, benevolently defined in a network of values in which ‘peace’ is privileged, promises to eliminate difference. But without difference there is no meaning. Signification is an effect of that system of differences with no positive terms which we call language. Thus the text cannot produce a unified position for the American subject, nor can it define its totalizing, humanizing project except by invoking a necessary, differentiating other. This can only be everything that is nonAmerican, and therefore non-human, a world awaiting the sound of its master’s voice: It is the American sound…. we fill the world with our sound—in unity, affection, and love: one people under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom that He has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and a hopeful world.

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Here, in the final paragraph of Reagan’s speech, the force of textual difference—the invocation of the non-human waiting, hopeful world—is so potent that the speech subverts the unity that it claims to celebrate: far from eliminating difference, the speech, in spite of itself, recreates opposition. In any case, the waiting world was not always so hopeful. At the beginning of the speech George Washington, his hand on the Bible in a similar context, faced the ‘raw, untamed wilderness’. Other versions of history might people this wilderness with the indigenous population of America, reluctant to be tamed. Towards the end of the speech the larger spaces of ‘totalitarian darkness’ eventually bring to light threatening figures, the ‘allies of oppression and war’, and these are to be confronted on (and in) their own militaristic terms: ‘Human freedom is on the march’ and will brook no resistance. The United States, ‘a nation…mighty in its youth and powerful in its purpose’, with its ‘alliances strengthened’, must prepare to fight for and alongside human freedom: for freedom is our best ally, and it is the world’s only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace. Every blow we inflict against poverty will be a blow against its dark allies of oppression and war. Every victory for human freedom will be a victory for world peace. In this sequence of military metaphors, in which blows are struck in the name of peace, it becomes apparent that the effect of the elimination of difference is to collapse the distinction between peace and war on which the meaning of those terms depends. Meanwhile the repressed differentiating other returns as a fully constituted enemy, the dark ally of evil. ‘We live’, the speech declares, ‘in a world that’s lit by lightning.’ And in a series of flashbacks, appropriately fragmentary, like some montage of old movies, the erstwhile star delivers a speech written for him to perform, mythologizing the American past in the present tense. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the men of the Alamo and a nameless settler all prepare for war. A general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely President paces the darkened halls, and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. Into the unknowing air there ascends the American sound, a triumphant song, a palpable hit, which suitably celebrates a succession of conquests. Seen in this context a declaration earlier in the speech takes on a new and more ominous meaning: ‘Let us stand as one today: one people under God determined that our future shall be worthy of our past.’ The American eagle, of course, holds an olive branch in one claw, arrows in the other. In a nuclear age the promised elimination of difference by a nation in possession of more sophisticated missiles could well imply the disappearance of difference in an indifferent radioactive cloud: a final obliteration.

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THE VOICE OF REASON? If a certain cloudiness also envelops Reagan’s rhetoric, that could be part of the project: when threatening figures loom out of the dark, paranoia obscures distinctions. When Mikhail Gorbachev spoke to the Soviet people on television on 29 March 1986 to explain the USSR’s proposals for a nuclear-free world, the mode of address was altogether more straightforward, as the medium required: ‘Good evening, dear comrades! At our meeting tonight I would like to share my views with you.’ Evidently persuasion here is to be more relaxed, a sharing of views rather than an incitement to fervour. The speech begins with narrative. ‘Several days ago the United States carried out yet another nuclear explosion.’ There is nothing mythological on offer in this story, just apparently bare and certainly regrettable fact. ‘It is clear to us all that the timing was not chosen at random.’ The argument consistently reasserts its own clarity (to us all): ‘This much is clear This must be made absolutely clear.’ The subject position for the television audience is constructed as sensible and clear-headed. The spectator is invited to follow the presentation of a rational case supported by evidence, to understand its implications, and to grasp what has to be done. There are, Gorbachev urges, two possibilities: we must either disarm or die. The Soviet people, and people everywhere, must choose. The power of the speech depends on the familiarity of its rhetorical strategies. Ironically, from a European perspective, it is the Communist leader whose plain style, reasoned argument, unassuming manner, and transparent anxiety present themselves as reassuringly normal. This is a mode of address we readily recognize, and it draws on a system of differences we (think we) know. In Reagan’s speech the elimination of difference promised by nuclear possession underwrites the projected unity of an undifferentiated world and an absolute self. In Gorbachev’s address there is no nuclear promise but only a nuclear threat. Nuclear weapons undermine life and possibly result in its final obliteration. Whereas Reagan’s speech attempts to collapse difference into a transcendent present and a transcendent self, the project of Gorbachev’s text is precisely to make a difference, to start from difference and to ward off the death threat occasioned by its elimination, which is to make the difference of life and death. Difference in the form of a sought-for break with the past is the pivot on which the text’s move towards disarmament and peace turns. The speech differentiates the present from the past, both privileging the present (that is, life) as what is at stake in the arms race and at the same time problematizing it as a site of change: Today, in the nuclear and space era, one cannot think in categories of the past. All must ultimately come to realize that everything has radically changed. The question now is not only of the preservation of peace but of the survival of mankind as well. The present, constructed as continuous and stable in Reagan’s speech, is here unfixed, severed from the past, and thrown into a state of flux: it is conceived not in terms of similitude—history-as-present/presence—but as difference, as the place where history is held to account, where ‘responsible decisions must be taken’ if the nuclear ‘deadlock’ of the past is to be broken. Reagan’s text effectively effaces history by its appeal to an eternal present and by the simultaneity or synchrony of its filmic images. Conversely, Gorbachev’s speech recalls

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history, employing it as a narrative, a linear continuum. This diachronic narrative maps out a world whose metaphoric geography is one of steps, stages, and traversal. It is not the ‘waiting world’, the empty space, of Reagan’s text, it is not a world populated by unconstrained individuals, but one that is structured by the differences of politics, culture, race, and, above all, time. In its final stages the speech calls on this divided world—‘the American people and its government’, ‘the governments of the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America’— to break with the past, to recognize that ‘Time is running out’. ‘Mankind’, the speech warns, ‘is standing on a line that requires the utmost responsibility.’ This concluding caution urges the necessary abandonment of the past in order that a new, different road towards disarmament, life, and peace may be travelled. The precipice on which Gorbachev’s speech places humanity represents the dividing line which separates peace from war, reason from insanity, and life from death. The discursive strategies of the text are designed to identify and enlist peace-loving rational subjects against the US administration and its deadly irrationality in continuing to test nuclear devices, despite the USSR’s moratorium: Soviet people, like people of good will in all countries, are indignant at these actions of the United States. They write about this in their letters to the Party’s Central Committee and request that an assessment be made of the resulting situation. They ask how this should all be understood, what conclusions should be drawn, why the United States has taken such a step, and how our country’s leadership intends to act in these conditions.

Figure 1 Ronald Reagan, ‘Second inaugural address’, 21 January 1985, in Keesings Contemporary Archives, ed. Robert Fraser, vol. 31 (London: Longman, 1985), PP. 33, 387–8. There are no words adequate to express my thanks for the great honour you have bestowed onme. I will do my utmost to be deserving of your trust. This is…the 50th time that we the people have celebrated this historic occasion. When the first President, George Washington, placed his hand upon the Bible, he stood less than a single day’s journey by horseback from raw, untamed wilderness. There were 4,000,000 Americans in a Union of 13 states. Today, we are 60 times as many in a Union of 50 states. We have lighted the world with our inventions, gone to the aid of mankind wherever in the world there was a cry for help, journeyed to the moon and safely returned. So much has changed. And yet, we stand together as we did two centuries ago. When I took this oath four years ago I did so in a time of economic stress. Voices were raised saying that we had to look to our past for the greatness and glory. But we, the present-day Americans, are not given to looking backward. In this blessed land, there is always a better tomorrow. Four years ago, I spoke to you of a new beginning and we have accomplished that. But in another sense, our new beginning is a continuation of that beginning created two centuries ago when, for the first time in history, government, the people said, was not our master, it is our servant; its only power, that which we the people allow it to have. That system has never failed us. But, for a time, we failed the system. We asked things of government that government was not equipped to give. We yielded authority to the national government that properly belonged to states or to local governments or to the people

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themselves. We allowed taxes and inflation to rob us of our earnings and savings and watched the great industrial machine that had made us the most productive people on earth, slow down, and the number of unemployed increase. By 1980, we knew it was time to renew our faith; to strive with all our strength toward the ultimate individual freedom, consistent with an orderly society. We believed then and now: There are no limits to growth and human progress, when men and women are free to follow their dreams. And we were right to believe that. Tax rates have been reduced, inflation cut dramatically, and more people are employed than ever before in our history. We are creating a nation once again, vibrant, robust and alive…. We will not rest until every American enjoys the fullness of freedom, dignity, and opportunity as our birthright… and if we meet this challenge, these will be years when Americans have restored their confidence and tradition of progress; when our values of faith, family, work and neighbourhood were restated for a modern age; when our economy was finally freed from government’s grip; when we made sincere efforts at meaningful arms reductions, and by rebuilding our defences, our economy, and developing new technologies, helped preserve peace in a troubled world; when America courageously supported the struggle for individual liberty, self-government, and free enterprise throughout the world, and turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness and into the warm sunlight of human freedom…. Let history say of us, these were golden years—when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best. Our two-party system has served us well over the years, but never better than in those times of great challenge, when we came together not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans united in a common cause…. Let us stand as one today: one people under God determined that our future shall be worthy of our past. As we do, we must not repeat the well-intentioned errors of our past. We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women, by sending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiralling demands of a bloated federal establishment. You elected us in 1980 to e