Textual Practice, Volume 6, Number 1 (Textual Practice Journal)

Editor Terence Hawkes University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE Reviews editor Christopher Norris University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: as above American associate editor Jean Howard Columbia University Postal address: Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York N.Y. 10027, USA Editorial board Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Angela Carter Terry Eagleton Linacre College, Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Mary Jacobus Cornell University, USA Francis Mulhern Middlesex Polytechnic Editorial Assistant Tamsin Spargo

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University of Wales College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Christopher Norris at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. Advertisements. Enquiries to David Policy, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. ISSN 0950–236X © Routledge 1992 ISBN 0-203-99038-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-08111-4 (Print Edition)

Notes for contributors Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English, to Professor Terence Hawkes at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. It will be assumed that authors will keep a copy. Submission of a paper to Textual Practice will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript the author agrees that he or she is giving the publisher the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the paper, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microfilm or any other reproduction of a similar nature. Authors will not be required to assign the copyright. The manuscript Submissions should be typed in double spacing on one side only of the paper, preferably of A4 size, with a 4cm margin on the left-hand side. Articles should normally be of between 7000 and 8000 words in length. Tables should not be inserted in the pages of the manuscript but should be on separate sheets. The desired position in the text for each table should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. Photographs Photographs should be in high-contrast black-and-white glossy prints. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained by authors before submission, and any acknowledgements should be included in the captions. References These should be numbered consecutively in the text, thus: ‘According to a recent theory,4…’, and collected at the end of the paper in the following styles, for journals and books respectively: J.Hartley and J.Fiske, ‘Myth-representation: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), pp. 12–33. C.Norris, The Reconstructive Turn (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). Proofs Page proofs will be sent for correction to the first-named author, unless otherwise requested. The difficulty and expense involved in making amendments at the page proof stage make it essential for authors to prepare their typescripts carefully: any alterations to the original text are strongly discouraged. Our aim is rapid publication: this will be helped if authors provide good copy, following the above instructions, and return their page proofs as quickly as possible.

Offprints Ten offprints will be supplied free of charge.

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 6 NUMBER 1 SPRING 1992

Contents Articles What’s love got to do with it? Reading the liberal humanist romance in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra LINDA CHARNES What’s so funny about ladies’ tailors? A survey of some male (homo)sexual types in the Renaissance SIMON SHEPHERD Re-routing Kristeva: from pessimism to parody PAM MORRIS Biology and history: some psychoanalytic aspects of the writing of Luce Irigaray CHARLES SHEPHERDSON Derrida, Heidegger and Van Gogh’s ‘Old Shoes’ MICHAEL PAYNE Feminine voices inscribing Sarraute’s Childhood and Kingston’s The Woman Warrior CRISTINA BACCHILEGA

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27 41 76 88

Letter Laura Riding MARK JACOBS

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Reviews Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism PETER BROOKER Antony Easthope, Poetry and Phantasy BRIAN COATES Thomas Docherty, After Theory BRIAN McKENNA David Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together GARY DAY

108 114 120 124

Elizabeth Fallaize, The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir MARGARET ATACK John M.Ellis, Against Deconstruction GRAHAM GOOD Peter Sloterdijk, A Critique of Cynical Reason SARAH CHATWIN Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction ANTONY EASTHOPE News from Nowhere. Raymond Williams: The Third Generation ROBERT MIKLITSCH Wilfrid Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion R.A.STRADLING David Ward, Chronicles of Darkness MYRTLE HOOPER

129 133 136 149 153 160 163

ANNOUNCEMENT We are pleased to report that JEAN HOWARD, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York NY 10027, has taken up the position of American Associate Editor of Textual Practice. T.H.

LINDA CHARNES

What’s love got to do with it? Reading the liberal humanist romance in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned. (Antony and Cleopatra)1 What’s love got to do, got to do with it? (Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to Do With It?)

I Before addressing what love has to do and to do with it in Shakespeare’s play, I want to consider what makes a question such as Tina Turner’s intelligible in the first place. As a speech act, this song is a critical ‘intervention’: a disruptive response to a narrative that precedes and exceeds it. Exactly what the question challenges is unimportant—for its rhetorical effectiveness depends not on the particular discourse it targets but, rather, on our recognition of the strategic use of the word ‘love’ with regard to it. In other words, what matters is not the matter, but the form imposed on it ‘in the name of love’. That we understand instantly what the question does betrays our awareness of the use of the concept of love as an authoritative and sacralizing epistemology. Political rulers act ‘out of love’ for their subjects; patriots ‘out of love’ for their countries; fathers ‘out of love’ for their families; mothers ‘out of love’ for their children; spouses and lovers ‘out of love’ for each other. Perhaps it goes without saying that political leaders have loved subjects, patriots countries, parents children, husbands wives, etc. But what doesn’t go without saying are all the other narratives that seek, and find, refuge under such cover. The love story has been one of the most pervasive and effective—yet least deconstructed—of all ideological apparatuses: one of the most effective smokescreens available in the politics of cultural production. One need only think of the historical popularity of crime stories purveyed as love stories: from the Trojan War—that paradigmatic ‘linkage’ of love and genocide—to Bonnie and Clyde; from the subcultural Sid and Nancy to the hyperreal Ron and Nancy—we see the extent to which the concept of love is used as a ‘humanizing’ factor, a way of appropriating figures whom we have no other defensible reason to want to identify with.2 The popularity (and respectability— Julia Roberts was nominated for an Oscar) of the film Pretty Woman—a ‘Cinderella’ story about a prostitute and a ruthless businessman who uses her to try to manoeuvre a hostile corporate takeover—is only the most recent example.3 In these narratives, love is regarded as ‘content’ rather than as something that influences our reception of other elements. I propose that we look at love as a genre, or in Bourdieu’s terms, a restructuring structure within other structuring structures: one whose coercive influence is

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camouflaged by its very obviousness. What we take as the love story aspect of other stories is exactly what enables us to take these other stories, period. The coercive function of love stories has been analysed by Tania Modleski, Janice Radway, Rosalind Coward, and others, who discuss the myths, functions, uses and profits of ‘love’ as it’s been marketed in ‘women’s novels’, or popular romance fiction.4 These important studies map the connections between the fantasies such texts encode and aspects of women’s real social experience. In high-canonical critical circles however, such texts have been (and continue to be) held in contempt for, among other things, their lack of ‘realism’ and their blatantly fantastic representations of certain kinds of erotic and affective relations. It is easy to believe that the phenomenon of subjection, resistance and displacement into ‘love’ operates largely, if not entirely, in romance literature written for, and/or by women. Much less obvious (but for that reason all the more invidious) are the ways in which a similar symptomology infiltrates the male-authored texts of the ‘high’ English canon; and, I would claim, has helped to consolidate Shakespeare’s plays in the history of liberal humanist criticism. There is little evidence that Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra was popular in his own day and much evidence that it was not. There were few critical statements about the play for several centuries after its first production in 1606–7; and as Michael Steppat points out, though Chaucer about 1385 in his Legend of Good Women had spoken of Cleopatra’s ‘passioun’ and her ‘trouth in love’…most Elizabethan discussions focused on what were seen as her moral and political crimes. The Elizabethan writer Richard Reynoldes asserted that a ‘harlotte’ like Cleopatra, who had committed ‘horrible murthers’, [was] [in]capable of dying for love. In general, there doesn’t seem to have been much critical interest in Shakespeare’s version at all until, as Steppat says, ‘the early nineteenth century, when the Romantics showed an interest in Antony as a play to be read in the study’.5 It is not an accident that the play caught the interest of ‘the Romantics’. For writers like Coleridge, Hazlitt and Shelley, who no matter what their professed social and political concerns, contributed more to the notion of ‘great individuals’ than to anything else, have proleptically read that celebration into Shakespeare’s play, finding their own cause in the play’s effects. The very aspects of the play that Shakespeare’s audience would have found most indecorous (Antony and Cleopatra’s apparent indulgence of ‘self’ over public duty, desire over public honour and reputation) are deemed liberatory. And it is not an accident that the intellectual legacy of Romanticism, liberal humanism, has also celebrated this play for its valorizing of Great-Individuals-in-Love.6 The increasing historical popularity of the play has been inseparable from a critical revisionism that has transformed it from what it was in Shakespeare’s time—a notorious story about politics on every level—to what it is now: a ‘legendary’ love story. And this transformation owes more to the ability of critics to misrecognize what love’s got to do with it than with what love actually does in the play. This has been most true of the liberal humanist scholarship on the play, a way of reading that I would argue is always implicitly coded male (regardless of the anatomical sex of its practitioner) because it is a

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view—only possible from a position of total cultural entitlement—in which gender and class differences are ‘transcended’ in great literature’s embrace of a ‘universal’ human nature. There are, of course, many interpretative differences among liberal humanist critics; and it would be wrong to speak of them as a homogeneous group. However, there does seem to be a shared impulse regarding the concept of love. While much liberal humanist criticism of Shakespeare’s play has been subtle and responsive to the social and the political discourses in the text, it tends to assume, in one way or another, explicitly or implicitly, that in the last instance, love (shared by autonomous human agents) is made of different stuff. Even certain critics who would not consider themselves liberal humanists commit the liberal humanist fallacy when it comes to love. What Flaubert said about himself vis-à-vis Emma Bovary is largely true of the way many critics have read Shakespeare’s text: critics who have been either unwilling, or unable, to look at the cultural ‘work’ being done by what they perceive, or construct, as the ‘love story’.7 In its compulsive drive to maintain love in a category all its own, a deus ex machina of affective experience, liberal humanist criticism of Shakespeare’s play enacts the same interpretative symptomology Janice Radway has called ‘reading the romance’. But it is a kind of masculine romance manqué, in which certain socio-sexual anxieties, regarded as trivial in the ‘feminine’ genre of ‘ladies’ romance’, are girded with (and ultimately hypostatized by) the status, dignity and decorum of canonical drama. This isn’t to say that Shakespeare has written a Harlequin romance or even anticipated it.8 It is, rather, to talk about the way the play has been appropriated and understood; and in particular, the way it has been criticially rewritten as a tale of epic, paradigmatic and transcendent love. My concern is not to ‘rescue’ the play, or to dismiss such criticism, but rather to look at what is productive about it—what it does—in a larger arena of cultural politics. In what follows, I want to put Tina Turner’s question to the service of two other questions: how is reading Shakespeare’s play like reading a Harlequin romance? And what does this resemblance have to tell us about a certain symptomology of reading that is pervasive in western culture?

II I am aware that questioning the love of Antony and Cleopatra is in certain circles tantamount to slaughtering one of Shakespeare criticism’s most sacred cows; but I for one have never found the play’s rhetoric of love convincing. However, unlike those who reject their love as being morally offensive or untenable, critics who believe such an attachment between the two figures couldn’t be ‘real love’ (usually supported with claims that he is misogynistic and she is manipulative), I don’t have an alternative vision of what else love might mean in this play. The liberal humanist frequently sees it as Shakespeare’s meditation on the pleasures of ‘mature love’; a ripened version of the passion we see in Romeo and Juliet; the ‘triumph’ of Antony and Cleopatra’s love over their mutual suspicions and political obstacles, etc. Regarded as transcendent in the end, the love of Antony and Cleopatra is reckoned ‘above’ the politics in which the play’s other power relations are mired.

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Behind this, I believe, is an effort to retrieve or maintain a definition of love that will stand safely apart from politics; in fact, one in which love is defined precisely as Other than the political. But rather than regard the love of Antony and Cleopatra in such ‘bracketed’ terms, I want to consider it precisely in terms of all the play’s other power relations, and specifically, its investigation of all representational strategies. Lest I seem too dismissive of the liberal humanist critic’s (LHC) ability to read, I will acknowledge that his celebration of extraordinary-individuals-in-love is not solely a projection; for the play itself deploys such rhetoric. But it does so only to demonstrate that ‘transcendent love’ is a discursive strategy—long recognized as such in courtly love poetry—with very public social and political aims. For as cultural historians (Elias, Underdown, Zemon Davis, Stone), social theorists (Althusser, Foucault, Goux, Bourdieu, Certeau), feminist psychoanalytic critics (Rose, Adelman, Sprengnether) and materialist literary critics (Belsey, Dollimore, Stallybrass) have shown us, the forms of affective relations are inseparable from the specific material, political and social conditions which they constitute and which constitute them. And in early modern England, Love with a capital L (like Art with a capital A) would not have been thinkable apart from these conditions.9 It is (both for the protagonists and for most critics) the ‘love story’ element that renders this historical narrative ‘mythic’. As Hayden White has pointed out about interpretations of history, their comprehensibility tends to depend on their ‘figuration as a story of a particular kind’. Drawing analogies between fictional and historical narratives, White claims that there are at least two levels of interpretation of every historical work: one in which the historian constitutes a story out of a chronicle of events and another in which, by a more fundamental narrative technique, he progressively identifies the kind of story he is telling—comedy, tragedy, romance, epic, or satire, as the case might be. It would be on the second level of interpretation that the mythic consciousness would operate most clearly.10 Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra tropes on each genre White lists above. But unlike Shakespeare’s history plays or the other tragedies, its ‘comprehensibility’, finally, seems always to boil down to this more ‘fundamental narrative’—the love story—a narrative that frequently disguises itself (qua narrative) or is taken as ‘natural’ as opposed to the contrivances of other generic forms. In a recent essay significantly entitled ‘The personal Shakespeare: three clues’, William Kerrigan claims that it is the ‘worth’ of Antony and Cleopatra’s love, and their fidelity to it, that ‘inspires’ their legend. Arguing that ‘as [Shakespeare] allied his dramatic art with the mythological greatness of his lovers, [he] struck against the designs of history’ (p. 189), Kerrigan’s reading exemplifies precisely the kind of excision I have mentioned above, one in which ‘love’ is universalized, naturalized, and more importantly, essentialized in its separation from the discourses that construct other kinds of cultural experience.11 But the ‘love story’ in this play produces what White calls our ‘mythic consciousness’ because it is a narrative that pretends to stand apart from and above other narratives; and it is the lovers themselves who alternately purchase, or jettison, the pretence. The legendeffect Kerrigan attributes to the love story ‘against the designs of history’ I want to

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attribute to the love story within the designs of history. To situate a love story within a play that examines the implications of different forms of representation is to posit love ‘itself’ as a crucial strategem of ideological production. The central issue, then, must be regarded not as what the love story is apart from the play’s other ‘designs’ but, rather, what it does in relation to them. In this play, the politics of desire that motivate imperialist ambition are perfectly congruent with those that operate ‘privately’ in the realm of love; and whatever Antony and Cleopatra feel for each other is comprised of the same materials that constitute the rest of their world. ‘Naturally’ Antony loves Cleopatra—she is exotic, mysterious, capricious, charismatic, charming, earthy—the characterological equivalent of the imagined terrain of Egypt, with which she is always synecdochized. ‘Naturally’ Cleopatra loves Antony—he is magnanimous (in the Aristotelian sense), expansive, aggressive, powerful, manly, famous ‘in the world’s report’, like the imperial Roman terrain he both extends and is an extension of. ‘Naturally’ they are drawn to each other, they are both so much larger than life. But to think of their love in these terms is to consent to Antony and Cleopatra’s self-representations without paying adequate attention to Shakespeare’s representations. It is to fall into what Bourdieu calls ‘the interactionist fallacy’, or, to assign to them ‘personally’ the qualities that are in fact the metonymic extensions of their paradigmatic source: the ‘internalized’ functions of their respective habitus.12 In a play that is simultaneously about legendary Roman expansionism and legendary lovers, it is not surprising that the play records (and produces) a confusion (and fusion) of persons with places. For the shared ideologies that construct Egyptian-ness and Roman-ness reproduce in subjects (as aspects of ‘self’) the structures that structure, and therefore make sense of, their worlds. In this view, there can be no separation between the designs of history and the designs of persons. Whatever love text these figures weave is repeatedly ruptured by political exigency. This is especially true of Antony, who can only justify himself in his own eyes by mystifying ‘this wrangling queen, whom every thing becomes’ (I.i.49). But even the erotic rhetoric Antony uses is abandoned in those moments when he fears political betrayal, as he demonstrates in III.xiii, when he calls Cleopatra a ‘morsel, cold upon/ Dead Caesar’s trencher’ (116), a ‘boggler’, a ‘fragment’. That Antony can lapse so quickly into the debasing terms his fellow Romans use against Cleopatra (note Enobarbus’s reference to her in II.vii.123 as an ‘Egyptian dish’) reveals the extent to which his own construction of her as love object cannot be kept uncontaminated by that of his countrymen—such terms are ever-present in his mind, ready to be mobilized under the appropriate political conditions. Antony’s rhetoric of transcendence is apotropaic—a way of warding off an intolerable awareness of Rome’s view of him as ‘a strumpet’s fool’ (I.i.13) who has ‘offended reputation’ (III.xi.48). In a play in which the political is set up as the ‘Real’, Love becomes Antony’s representation of his own ‘imaginary relationship to his real conditions of existence’,13 a way of shoring up an identity grown blemished ‘in the world’s report’ (II.iii.5). Unable to objectify the objectifications of himself produced in Rome, Antony feels ‘unqualitied with very shame’ (III.xi.44). Unable to escape his own constitution as a Roman (in the history of Augustus Caesar as Shakespeare’s own sources wrote it), his heightened rhetoric of love for Cleopatra is, in Bourdieu’s terms, his ‘attempt to reappropriate an alienated being-for-others’ (Distinction, p. 207), to counter

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the ‘penetrative shame’ that I would claim underlies every aspect of his character in this play. Using ‘love’ to produce ‘distinction’, Antony and Cleopatra themselves posit a transcendent rhetorical realm in which they can underwrite endangered reputations with the symbolic capital that transcendent love always lays claim to. This is not to say that this is not love. But it can and must be regarded as inextricable from socio-political purpose. I have argued elsewhere that Troilus and Cressida (another legendary ‘love story’) posits desire as a form of social production, inseparable in form and operation from the rest of the play’s machinery of legend. A pervasive programme of public desire (Helen and the War) underwrites what I have called myths of private desire.14 Something similar happens in Antony and Cleopatra, in so far as the rhetoric of love is different from how it is practised. Put more simply, Antony and Cleopatra talk about their love in ways that contradict what they actually do with it. In I.i.14–18 we hear what amounts to a theory about love: Cleo. If it be love indeed, tell me how much. Ant. There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d. Cleo. I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d. Ant. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth. This language gestures toward a love that cannot be ‘reckon’d’, that exceeds the supposed baseness of thinking in quantitative terms. But for these two figures, thinking in any terms other than those of an acqusitive expansionism seems to be impossible, as even their ‘alternative’ terms of measurement rely on colonialist images of new territories: finding out a new heaven, a new earth. The ‘expansiveness’ critics attribute to Antony’s love for Cleopatra (in a term that, like misrecognition, refracts the truth of what it misspeaks) can be understood as a part of the play’s lexicon of imperialism. This expansiveness is in fact expansionist. Here is not a love that cannot be reckon’d but, rather, a love that requires even more territory, more, even, than that Octavius covets. Antony’s claim of unwillingness to perform ‘exact bookkeeping’15 is itself a kind of social performance, one that generates symbolic capital by observing in the realm of love what Castiglione describes as a ‘certain sprezzatura’, a way of treating artfully acquired and socially useful skills (in this instance, a style of loving) as if they were intrinsic or ‘natural’.16 This love story then, far from providing a refuge from Rome’s imperial project, a ‘distinction’ from the world of Octavius Caesar, conceives imaginative space for itself in language that partakes of similar narratives, in similar terms. What has frequently been taken as the ‘alternative’ world of Egypt and Cleopatra turns out to be not so different after all. While on one level the play beckons us with the allure of ‘difference’ and its hold over Antony, on another level it demonstrates again and again that while Egypt and Rome may be the sites of different representational strategies, the stakes of their conflict are finally the same. And these are, the ability to lay claim to authoritative space in which the acquired can be appropriated (in senses both personal and political) as property. The connections, then, between the ‘epic’ narrative of empire and the ‘timeless, mythic’ narrative of love are imbricated, as Octavius’s political defeat of Antony is figured in language similar to Cleopatra’s sexual ‘conquest’ of Antony: both are

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represented as strategic and in military terms. In IV.xiv, just before Mardian tells him, falsely, of Cleopatra’s death, Antony informs Eros,

I made these wars for Egypt, and the queen, Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine: Which whilst it was mine, had annex’d unto’t A million moe, now lost…. (15–18) Antony, here convinced that Cleopatra has betrayed him to ‘pack cards’ with Caesar, explicitly reveals the connections between his love and his soldiership, passion and militarism, the conquest of one heart and the annexation of ‘a million moe’. Antony and Cleopatra’s mutual having of hearts gives them the ground and impetus for their own imperial project: theirs is literally a consuming passion in so far as the power it produces is the power to consume new territory. When Antony believes Cleopatra no longer loves him, what he says is ‘She has robb’d me of my sword.’ Falsely informed of her death by Mardian a few lines later, Antony makes it very clear that without Cleopatra, all that is left to do is ‘unarm, the long day’s task is done’ (35). If Antony is ‘No more a soldier’ (42) it is because he is now no more a lover. Unlike Troilus, who renounces his role as lover in order to play the soldier, Antony cannot be the one without being the other. To say this is not to abrogate the sense of love and loss Antony experiences at this moment. But it is to talk about that love as a constituent element of the power relations that inform every aspect of this play. Although the play encourages us to misrecognize Antony’s love for Cleopatra as an alternative to the identity and project he bears for Rome, we see that in his role as Cleopatra’s Antony, he is put to similar use. Except that now, in and from Egypt, he is misplaced in a representational habitus alien to his ‘original’ constitution as ‘Antony’, a constitution which requires the submission of self to the demands of legendary posterity. We can see this imperative at work in Antony’s death scene, where he reverts to type, his dying words most concerned with how he will be narratively re-membered. Ever obsessed with ‘report’, Antony narrates his own memorial, calling himself ‘the greatest prince o’the world’, ‘a Roman valiantly vanquished’ (IV.xv). After bungling his fall on his sword, this rhetoric exemplifies the split between what these figures do and what they say about what they’re doing, a disjunction reinforced by Cleopatra, who is less concerned with the time Antony has left than with remaining in a secure position on her monument. Denying Antony’s request that she descend to kiss him in his last moments, Cleopatra answers,

I dare not, dear, Dear my lord, pardon: I dare not, Lest I be taken: not the imperious show Of the full-fortun’d Caesar ever shall Be brooch’d with me, if knife, drugs, serpents have

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Edge, sting, or operation. I am safe: Your wife Octavia, with her modest eyes, And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour Demuring upon me: but come, come, Antony— Help me, my women,—we must draw thee up: Assist, good friends. (22–30) Ever obsessed with how she is staged, Cleopatra is more anxious about not being a ‘brooch’ in Caesar’s imperious show than in granting her dying lover’s last request. Her foremost thoughts at this moment are on how to keep Caesar and Octavia from ‘acquiring honour’ from her capture; and her references to suicide are prompted here, at least syntactically, not by Antony’s impending death but by the prospect of being made Caesar’s spectacle. For both Antony and Cleopatra, love—even at this most critical of moments—cannot transcend the particular textual material it operates in. For many critics, the play affectively ‘ends’ here in IV.xv, with the death of Antony and Cleopatra’s poetic eulogy to him. Her mythic language about her lover enables the LHC to contrive the emotional ‘sense of an ending’ that the play at once invites and refuses. Cleopatra says she will commit suicide, will die ‘after the high Roman fashion’, will seek ‘the briefest end’ (87–90). The problem, however, is that she doesn’t, and still has the entire fifth act of the play to get through. We watch her efforts to secure resources, to position herself with regard to Octavius, to manoeuvre her way out of her predicament, all to no avail. Does she at last commit suicide because she cannot imagine life without Antony, or because she cannot imagine the humiliation of watching ‘some squeaking Cleopatra boy [her] greatness/I’the posture of a whore’ (V.ii.218–19)? Somehow one suspects that not even her hairdresser knows for sure. Of course, none of this is meant to indict Cleopatra for not loving ‘truly’ or well enough. Quite the reverse. The play posits two versions of love: love as poetic construct or usable material for fiction, and love as realpolitik; love that is ‘to die for’, and love that is to die for if nothing else can be worked out. Which leads us to speculate on why there has been such an abiding effort by liberal humanist critics to recuperate the story for transcendent love. In this play it is Antony who kills himself for love when he believes, wrongly, that Cleopatra is dead. And we should remember that it is Cleopatra herself who has had him falsely informed. As an effort to test his love? To make him regret his accusations against her? I suggest that Cleopatra does this because it never occurs to her that Antony might respond to this news by actually killing himself. So there is a problem here. And I believe it’s around how to recuperate Antony’s epic masculinity—his ‘worth’ and dignity as a legendary warrior-lover—when in this play he occupies a subject position almost always culturally reserved for women, and in relation to a Cleopatra who occupies a position almost always reserved for men. Here a few words about the rigid formula of the Harlequin romance would be helpful. In Loving with a Vengeance, Tania Modleski explains that

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It is useful to see in each Harlequin two basic enigmas: the first, which is more or less explicitly stated (and often constantly repeated), has to do with the puzzling behavior of the hero: why does he constantly mock the heroine? Why is he so often angry at her? The second enigma, usually but not always implicit, concerns how the hero will come to see that the heroine is different from all other women, that she is not, in other words, a ‘scheming little adventuress’. (p. 39; my italics) In the Harlequin romance, the male lover is mocking and cynical directly in proportion to the feelings of love and attraction he represses for the heroine, who, unlike the reader, is unaware of the hero’s ‘true’ feelings. In Shakespeare’s play it is Cleopatra who presents an unreadable, impenetrable surface, the sphynx-like opacity that produces Antony’s fascination and resentment. It is Cleopatra who mocks Antony repeatedly for his allegiances and attachments to Fulvia, Caesar and Rome. And it is Antony who is left to waffle and wonder, Antony who feels the simultaneous humiliation and infatuation that in the Harlequin romance is the designated preserve of the heroine. It is Antony who feels exposed and feminized, ‘his corrigible neck, his face subdued/To penetrative shame’ (IV.xiv.75). In this play it is Antony who is in thrall to love, Antony who leaves battle to follow Cleopatra back to Egypt, Antony who basically quits his job (working for Rome) and abandons everything for his obsession with this love object whom he cannot properly read. All this breach of gender decorum does not a comfortable liberal humanist make. The tension, then, which the LHC must resolve is that between Antony’s love for Cleopatra, who is ‘different from all other women’ because of her extraordinary power, and his inability (shared by the critic) to eliminate lingering fears that she is, finally, a ‘scheming little adventuress’. Of course, if by ‘scheming little adventuress’ one means a woman for whom eroticism involves a conscious desire for power and property, then we must regard Cleopatra as just such as adventuress; but one whose ‘adventurism’, then, is like Antony’s, like Caesar’s, in short, like that of most of the male lovers in Shakespeare’s plays. Cleopatra is, erotically as well as theatrically, one of the boys. For Antony, this is precisely what makes her exciting. For the LHC, however, this thraldom can only be tolerated if the ‘proper’ gender arrangement is finally restored. What makes Antony and Cleopatra recuperable as a legendary ‘love story’ (in a way that Troilus and Cressida is not) is the fact that Cleopatra does finally ‘do the right female thing’ and commit suicide. And with this final act, she seems to inscribe herself into the time-worn tradition of women who kill themselves ‘for love’, providing the critic with the glue needed to cement his reading of this play. Like the ways in which Harlequin romances are read, the LHC’s reading is neither simplistic nor inconsequential. The Harlequin offers the female reader a way imaginatively to revise her real history, to make it come out ‘right’, to provide a new epistemology for a form of cultural experience that has been humiliating and intolerable. In these texts, the cruelty, stand-offishness, cynicism and contempt of the male lover is proven in the end to be ‘about’ his love for the heroine. His behaviour, therefore, has not been a sign of his disregard and disrespect for her or about her social insignificance. On the contrary. The fantasy assures her centrality. In these narratives, the heroine’s

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humiliation becomes the very sign of her power; and the real female social experience of oppression and marginality is given a new history. This is the ‘pay-off’ that the Harlequin story-line promises: that in the end ‘love’ will proleptically revise and make emotional sense of all preceding experience, no matter how violent or disjunctive. What drives the reader to new Harlequins, in the repetition compulsion Modleski describes, is the fact that she keeps returning to a real world which belies the textual fantasy. In the LHC’s reconstruction of love in Antony and Cleopatra, we see a similar symptomology. Only in this version, whatever was undignified (unerect) about Antony is firmed back up as the story takes its place in the reified canonical ranks of legend. Unwilling fully to confront (or, one imagines, to identify with) this unstable representation of a seriously compromised masculine subject-in-love, the liberal humanist seeks transcendence. Faced with Cleopatra’s ability, to paraphrase Cordelia, to love and be politic, the liberal humanist separates the two categories; for fear that the alternative must be an Antony who has been enthralled by a ‘scheming little adventuress’. In a move that proves the repetition compulsion is alive and well in canon formation, Cleopatra’s suicide is read in the tradition of the ‘legend of good women’, and Antony becomes a recuperable epic lover. It may seem that I have set the liberal humanist up as something of a straw man in this discussion. We all know that such criticism has had to cede (or at least share) its position of academic centrality to more politicized and theorized kinds of approaches.17 But the liberal humanist way of reading has been very successfully exportable, as Alan Bloom and William Bennett (to name only the most notorious proponents) have demonstrated. Outside academic circles, liberal humanism reigns, among educated middle-class liberals and conservatives alike, as the voice of centrist interpretative reason, setting the ideological agenda for ‘enlightened’ individuals. In American culture liberal humanism— in virtually every sphere of ideological production—is far more pervasive than poststructuralism. What is at stake in all this is how both the consumers and producers of cultural texts re-member histories, their own and those of others. We have seen with appalling clarity just how subject we still are to the uses of transcendent narratives (‘Just wars’, prosecuted in the name of Freedom, Liberty, Democracy, Faith, the New World Order) when those in power live in terror of ‘the wimp factor’. As Foucault has taught us, we must be very careful about how we talk about cause and effect with regard to power relations; and I certainly do not mean to link liberal humanism, or the defenders of the high canon, directly with the obscene events that have gutted the Persian gulf. Surely there are many liberal humanists (and high-canonists) who were horrified by the alacrity and relish with which we pursued Operation Desert Storm. What profoundly disturbs me, however, is that try as I might, I cannot completely dissever what gets prosecuted in literary and cultural production in the name of Love from what gets prosecuted in the New World Theatre in the name of Freedom and Democracy.18 The degree of misrecognition needed to subsidize our investment in any notion of transcendent anything is matched only by the degree of violence that erupts when our real conditions of existence intrude on the fantasy. In the rarified ranks of Shakespeare scholarship, that most ‘legitimate’ canonical field, we can see that the specious separation of love and politics that I’ve been discussing is not unlike that of high and low culture. Anyone who has seen the Taylor/Burton film

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version of the Antony and Cleopatra story will recall how easily it lent itself to a mass cultural treatment. And in the recent film L.A.Story not only does Steve Martin’s character (a liberal humanist with an advanced degree in literature) quote Shakespeare, but there is a parody of the graveyard scene in Hamlet (with Rick Moranis of Honey I Shrunk the Kids fame) playing the gravedigger. Martin knows that he is in love with his romantic object (the British Victoria Tennant) when she recognizes the allusion and recites the proper lines from the play. Unlike the California-Girl shop clerk he is having casual sex with, this is someone he can take to meet Mother: this girl knows her Shakespeare. All this at the same time that Glenn Close and Mel Gibson are playing the ‘real thing’ in Zeffirelli’s version of Hamlet (suitably revised to hail US movie-goers as Oedipalized Individuals rather than as social and political subjects).19 To what do we owe this upsurge in Shakespeare’s mass-cultural visiblity? I wish to suggest that it is due to Shakespeare’s position as iconic guarantor of liberal humanism, at a time when as a society we desperately need to find ways to justify our moral authority as we throw our weight around. Like so many other products in American consumer culture, Shakespeare is used to reinforce our sense of ‘distinction’: like the best cars, the best furnishings, or the best wine—Shakespeare: the best that’s been thought, said, and felt.20 Shakespeare and Antony have both been res-erected by the liberal humanist fallacy; and in this consolidation of cultural masculinism I believe we can read the same symptomology that produces all desire for legends. For a legend is the interpretative overkill designed to ensure the final stability of the Text—the concrete that bricks signifier to signified and arrests any slippage between effects and what are taken to be their acceptable causes. Legends are things that ‘stand the test of time’. This cliché is true, but not in the way intended by those who still utter it. For transcendence is not about getting it up, but rather, about keeping it up—freezing history in an essentializing of being that denies epistemological (and therefore historical) uncertainty and its threat of authoritat-ive impotence. In the reification of meaning, that textual hardening that is always the aim of legend, Transcendent Love can be regarded as a monumental erection of the critical Phallus against any text that subversively insists on asking, what’s love got to do, got to do with it? Indiana University, Bloomington

NOTES Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Indiana University English Department Colloquium in February 1991; at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in March 1991; and at the 1991 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Vancouver, BC. I am grateful to my colleagues Mary Favret and Cary Wolfe for their valuable criticisms and suggestions. 1 All references are to the Arden edition, ed. M.R.Ridley (London and New York: Methuen, 1965). 2 I refer here to the 1967 Warner Brothers film Bonnie and Clyde; and to the 1986 Zenith Production of Sid and Nancy, the story of ‘Sid Vicious’ and his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen, whom he murdered in a drug-induced rage. As for Ron and Nancy, their narrative

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is still undergoing revisions, the latest offering being Kitty Kelley’s ‘unauthorized’ biography of Nancy Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). 3 Roberts did not win ‘Best Actress’. But Whoopi Goldberg won ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for her role in Ghost—another hugely successful American film in which love is literally transcendent. 4 The title of this essay is meant to recall Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). See also Tanya Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London and New York: Methuen, 1984); Rosalind Coward, Female Desires: How They are Sought, Bought, and Packaged (New York: Grove Press, 1985); and Ann Barr Snitow, ‘Mass market romance: pornography for women is different’, in A.Snitow, C.Stansell and S. Thompson, Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 245–63. 5 The Critical Reception of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra from 1607 to 1905 (Amsterdam: Verlag B.R.Grüner, 1980), pp. 1–2. 6 One must take into account Dryden’s 1678 version, All For Love, in which political issues recede under the foregrounding of a more domesticated vision of the problems of love, jealousy and fidelity. But despite its title, Dryden’s treatment of love doesn’t have the strongly individualist romance ethos that I would claim isn’t fully developed or ideologically operative until the late eighteenth century. 7 Anyone who is at all familiar with Shakespeare criticism will recall how pervasive this way of reading the play has been and continues to be. My concern here is not to prove that this critical tendency exists by singling out particular critics and their readings of Shakespeare, but rather to analyse how a certain attitude toward and construction of love (and Shakespeare) within liberal humanist criticism is congruent with (and even authorizes) the use of other more overtly dangerous narratives of transcendence in mass culture and politics. 8 Tania Modleski discusses the world-wide success of Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd, and their chain of low budget, formulaic romance novels. According to the publishers,

Harlequins are well-plotted, strong romances with a happy ending. They are told from the heroine’s point of view and in the third person. There may be elements of mystery or adventure but these must be subordinate to the romance. The books are contemporary and settings can be anywhere in the world as long as they are authentic. (Loving, pp., 35–6)

Harlequin Romance is the generic name of the publisher’s series; but because of its sales success it has also come to be a descriptive term for any kind of novel that corresponds to this particular formula. As Ann Snitow points out in ‘Mass market romance’, Harlequin is 50 percent owned by the conglomerate controlling the Toronto Star. If you add to the Harlequin sales figures (variously reported from between 60 million to 109 million for 1978) the figures for similar novels by Barbara Cartland and those contemporary romances published by Popular Library, Fawcett, Ballatine, Avon, Pinnacle, Dell, Jove, Bantam, Pocket Books, and Warner, it is clear

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that hundreds of thousands of women are reading books of the Harlequin type. (p. 262, note 1) 9 This is a partial list of works that inform this claim: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. I: The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon, 1978); The Civilizing Process, vol 2: Power and Civility (Pantheon, 1982); The Court Society (Pantheon, 1983); David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper Colophon, 1979); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971); Jean Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986); Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973); ‘“Anger’s my meat”: feeding, dependency, and aggression in Coriolanus’, in Murray Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (eds), Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 129–49; Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and ‘The boy actor and femininity in Antony and Cleopatra’, in N.Holland, S.Homan and B.Paris (eds), Shakespeare’s Personality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Carol Cook, ‘The fatal Cleopatra’, in M.Sprengnether and S.N.Garner (eds), Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender (forthcoming from Cornell University Press); Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London and New York: Methuen, 1988); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986). 10 Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 59. 11 This essay appears in Shakespeare’s Personality. 12 Cf. Distinction, esp. pp. 169–74. 13 This phrase comes from Althusser’s famous definition of ideology in ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy. 14 Cf. L.Charnes, ‘“So unsecret to ourselves”: notorious identity and the material subject in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40, 4 (Winter 1989), pp. 413– 40. 15 Aristotle defines this unwillingness as characteristic of the ‘magnificent man’, in Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1962), p. 90. 16 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles Singleton (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), p. 43. 17 Although for some liberal humanist critics, not without a fight. I am thinking here of Richard Levin, quixotic defender of Shakespeare and the values of humanist scholarship. See ‘Bashing the bourgeois subject’, Textual Practice, 3, 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 76–86 (and Catherine Belsey’s reply, pp. 87–90); and ‘The poetics and politics of bardicide’, PMLA, 105, 3 (May 1990), pp. 491–504. 18 Even taking into account Saddam Hussein’s brutal treatment of the Kurds in 1988, one can only wonder how much of the ferocity of this latest crushing of rebellion is due to the

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humiliation Saddam and his army experienced at the hands of the US and allied forces. After devastating Saddam’s forces, we could not resist revelling in our military, technological and moral superiority. Wielding his usual Janus-faced rhetoric in response to the Kurdish refugee disaster, President Bush at once asserts that the New World Order is ‘a responsibility imposed by our successes’, and ‘reaffirms’ the US ‘policy’ (such as it is after Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, El Salvador) of ‘non-interference’ in the civil affairs of a nation-state. In a rhetorical move that has much in common with the strategies of liberal humanism, Bush first defines the tenets of the New World Order in universalist terms: ‘Peaceful settlements of disputes, solidarity against aggression, reduced and controlled arsenals, and just treatment of all peoples’, before asserting that ‘the new world order [is] based on American ideals’ (New York Times, 14 April 1991; my italics). 19 In both of these films the icon (and iconicity) of British high culture is adjusted to American popular culture and the cult of the individual. L.A.Story takes the Hamlet motif (well-read young man, too attached to mother and alienated by the rottenness of the state of Los Angeles) and transforms it into the ultimate Steve Martin comic fantasy: the Lonely Guy/Jerk finds love and hipness in L.A. And Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, in terms of casting as well as cinematography, becomes an intimate story of unbalanced individuals: a Fatal Attraction leads to a Mad Max, who in turn becomes a Lethal Weapon. In both cases, we can see in the realm of popular ‘entertainment’ the same relationship adumbrated between Bush’s New World Order and particularly American ideals. 20 For an interesting discussion of the relationship between Shakespeare and American culture, see also Michael Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare: Literature, Institution, Ideology in the United States (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990).

SIMON SHEPHERD

What’s so funny about ladies’ tailors? A survey of some male (homo)sexual types in the Renaissance Ladies’ hairdressers, interior decorators, men in red ties, suede-shoe wearers, scoutmasters, aesthetes, men with long hair, dancing-masters, fops, ladies’ tailors. For many people in Britain in the 1960s and 1950s the first words on this list would imply men of a specific sexual orientation: homosexuals. The clarity of that implication fades as the list develops. The signifying link between social type and sexual behaviour is broken within the process of historical change. This break is assisted by our method of conceptualizing homosexual identity. The popularly received and reproduced theory (or version of it) claims that the homosexual as a separate classifiable category—an identity—only came into being when the language of late nineteenth-century science and law conceived such a classification: the virgin birth of the homosexual. Thus whereas one may speak intelligibly of the homosexual as the specific sexual type associated with the profession of interior decorator, a similar association for ladies’ tailors cannot be made since homosexuals could not be said to exist in the Renaissance as a positive definable category. The theory, even in such grossly simplistic form, positions sexuality in relation to the realities of social and ideological (re)production and thus is more useful, more real, than historical works that perpetuate a notion of homosexuality as a historically transcendent category, as for example in A.L.Rowse’s ludicrous Homosexuals in History. The usefulness must, however, be tested in the work of analysing societies which pre-date the late nineteenth century. The only book-length study in English of the English Renaissance is Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Bray employs the insights of Foucault, and of the more Foucauldian bits of Jeffrey Weeks, to argue an extremely interesting case.1 There are, however, some gaps in the argument which affect our view of the Renaissance. In turn—and this is where it really matters—since the writing of history is itself a form of ideological production, any omissions or imbalances will have an effect on the way in which gay men may think of themselves now. The theory of the virgin birth of the homosexual, like most theories of virgin birth, leaves something to be desired. The question asked in the title of this paper would presumably not have needed asking in the Renaissance or Restoration. Jokes always exert pressure on the historian: meaning is encoded not only to produce recognition but to make that recognition pleasurable, to articulate desires and power relations. Interpreters have to work to understand the particular force of those codes. In my attempt to answer my own question I have hypothesized such a thing as Renaissance homosexual types which may be said to perform a function within dominant ideology analogous to, but not the same as, the 1960s

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interior decorator (for example). Although this argument clearly carries within it the assumption that one may speak of ‘homosexual’ types, it does not secretly try to reaffirm homosexuality as transcendent category. Most writers about sexuality in the Renaissance assume not only the existence of homosexual acts, but cultural forms of allusion to those acts and their desires. Orgel can say that commentators on Elizabethan theatre assume that the ‘essential form of erotic excitement in men is homosexual’; Alan Bray’s latest work assumes the category of ‘a sodomite’ and gestures at a transhistorical problem around ‘intimacy between men’.2 My argument suggests, simply, that dominant ideologies, perhaps at all historical conjunctures, need their distinct types of sexual deviance. Tailors in general were comic figures in Renaissance culture. In common proverb lore they were gossips and cheats, but the proverb of most interest here says that ‘three (or nine) tailors make up a man’. This proverb may be related to contemporary attacks on extravagance of clothing fashions at a time when sumptuary laws made formal the links between personal attire and social rank. Attacks on extravagant fashion thus speak for the class anger of the poor at conspicuous consumption and for the conservative worry about shifts in the social hierarchy. The social climber was supposed to claim a high social place not through birth or even merit but through looking the part, dressing as one of the wealthy. Hence, tailors make the man in that they make the man known, give him status.

Boy, set your master’s ruff and brush his gown Lest some spruce tailor, sitting on his stall, Say, there goes a sloven, careless of all. (Guilpin 1598, Satire VI.118–20) The tailors themselves are also charged with flouting the rules of rank marked by attire. When Thomas Elyot is discussing class-specific oaths he expects that ‘some tailor or barber, as well in his oaths as in the excess of his apparel, will counterfeit and be like a gentleman’.3 In contemporary ideology: the tailors assisted in and benefited from the illegitimate activities involved in social climbing (and the expanding market for consumer luxuries); they ministered to ‘excess’. That word is to be important. By contrast with shoemakers, the so-called ‘gentle craft’, tailors were generically not virtuous. Of particular notoriety were those tailors who encouraged and supplied the most needless and redundant of extravagances (as it was depicted in patriarchal culture), that of ladies’ adornments. The sexual jokes about tailors portray them both as heterosexually lecherous and (mainly) effeminate. These two attributes must be seen as connected rather than antithetical. In order to show how this is so it is necessary at this point to leave ladies’ tailors temporarily and look at effeminacy. This concept is central to Renaissance discussions around sexuality. The term itself was not simply pejorative (e.g. a man said to be ‘Temperate, effeminate, and worthy love’ in Marston’s The Insatiate Countess, I.1.58), but a pejorative use came (significantly) to be dominant. In the early Renaissance a man’s sexual passion for a woman could be said not so much to demonstrate his healthy masculinity as to effeminate him (Theseus’s rampant lust for women is called in North’s

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Plutarch his ‘womannishenes’).4 In general manhood was associated with reason and control, both internal and external. Loss of rational control of self, the ‘inner man’, led potentially to loss of social control, and hence loss of male power status. The valorization of heterosexual partnership changed with the increase in economic power of the petty mercantile producers and the consequent currency of the ideologies generally bracketed together as puritanism. The wife was newly valued as workmate and spiritual partner. Hence love and devotion to the female partner came to be situated legitimately in the public sphere (indeed performed a role in reproducing it), and that legitimacy was vouched for in economic terms by the demonstrable profitability in the sales of (maleauthored) domestic conduct books. Sexual desire that neither expressed nor was in turn restrained by this productive partnership, that was non-monogamous and non-marital, was marked as subversive in that it alone led to a man’s effeminacy. At the period when many domestic conduct books were increasingly extolling the virtues of what has come to be recognized (loosely) as so-called ‘puritan marriage’, the stock satiric portrait of the effeminate man was crystallized in the ‘fop’: Luscus ‘hath his Ganymede,/His perfum’d she-goat, smooth kembd and high fed’ (Marston, Scourge of Villainy, 3.39–40; see also Donne’s ‘plump muddy whore, or prostitute boy’, Satire 1.40). The whore on one hand and the boy on the other together mark the illegitimacy of his passion: he has no single partner, neither partner can be secured in a permanent relationship, both partners are unproductive in that one doesn’t want to, and the other can’t, produce a child. The fop is not labelled as a sodomite through the positive selection of a male sex object, but his sodomitical desires are to be expected since he will not discipline his sexual behaviour into married monogamy. Thus sodomy is negatively defined in that it is one of a group of sexual behaviours which have in common their not being productive marriage (‘sodomitical act’ may refer to any sexual activity which is not procreative within marriage). This is not to say that sodomy was invisible or indeed undifferentiated among sexual behaviours. The language of contemporary satire had developed efficient means of reference precisely to sodomy in fops. To exemplify the operation and effect of this, let us concentrate on Guilpin’s Skialetheia (1598): the description of a ‘fine man’ is one who ‘can caper, dance and sing,/Play with his mistress’ fingers’, ‘Who is at every play, and every night/Sups with his ingles’ (p. 49) (ingle=catamite). The point is not that the sex objects are undifferentiated but that they are several and diverse. The fop is prepared to adopt the very specific behaviour patterns associated with each sex object. He is unmanly in that he has no constancy, no autonomous identity (as constructed in emergent bourgeois ideology) but a range of behaviours. The selection of sex object as such does not take a primary place in fixing sexual identity: Pollio is reputed to be a ‘fine fellow’ ‘Both for thy ingle’s face, and goodly show/Of thine apparel and thy napery’ (p. 46). To reduce the desired person to the status of clothing and adornment is again to sin within bourgeois ideology of the individual, as well as to display a conspicuous consumption which offends the ideals of feudal social and market relations. Pollio has a ‘wanton face’, ‘curled hair’ and ‘fat buttock’: an ideology of the personal insists that the body that sins through the artifice of cosmetics must sin also by nature. The body is shaped by the illicit sexual desire. Thus Guilpin’s ‘fine man’ or fop is given identity through a contrast with proper manliness, but in the construction of that identity a positive role is played by the selection of boy sex object. His presence marks the fop’s unwillingness to focus only on

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woman and his treatment of sex as ornament; both of these are then bodily displayed in the fop. The most consistent sign of deviance is not so much physique or desire as apparel. This foregrounds the relations of effeminacy and economics. The 1620 pamphlet describing the ‘Womanish Man’, Haec Vir, has no mention of his sex objects or sexual activity. His effeminacy is constituted by his dress and behaviour, and as such he is placed in antithesis to his opposite number the ‘Man-Woman’, who has a companion pamphlet, Hic Mulier. The effeminate man upsets the natural hierarchy of man and woman, and in doing so represents a modern decadence which is contrasted with ancient heroic manliness. Attire here, as with sumptuary laws, designates rank, and rank then delimits identity: ‘we will here change our attires, as we have changed our minds, and with our attires, our names’ (sig. C3v). The consistent feature of the pictures of fops is not so much the sex object as the extravagant clothes; and the sex object may indeed be thought of as part of the other ornaments. Although some satire may, ideologically, prioritize desire above dress, in general the clothing precedes or replaces any mention of sex object. The consistent feature is a commitment to extravagance. The accompaniment by two sex objects is, in one respect, simply a marker of excess. The effeminate man does not know the restraint necessary in the productive monogamous marriage. A similar argument may be made about the portrayal of ladies’ tailors, to whom I now return. Their heterosexual lechery may be linked with their effeminacy and gossip as a group of symptoms of undisciplined manhood, which respects neither the proprieties of personal reputation nor the untouchability of another man’s wife. Dekker’s play Westward Hoe (1604) opens with a scene between a tailor, a female bawd and (later) a merchant’s wife. It encapsulates a satiric argument: the tailor along with (and sometimes instead of) the bawd plays upon the woman’s self-indulgent appetites in order to sell her fine dresses. In doing this he encourages her to subvert her husband’s financial prudence and grooms her to enter a world of ‘high society’ that is outside her husband’s control. The improper sexual practice signifies the improper business practice. The ladies’ tailor uniquely made his living out of the conspicuous consumption which was ideologically demonized by the petty producers who increasingly found themselves in tension with a decadent aristocracy supported by wealthy merchants. The supposed effeminacy of ladies’ tailors has its roots, I’d suggest, in their perceived economic status. The tailor encourages a desire for excess in apparel, and like the wealthy lady and the fop he aspires to wear such clothes. Just as the ‘womanish man’ is placed in antithesis to the ‘man-woman’ so a scene in The Roaring Girl (Middleton, 1611) juxtaposes the virago Moll Cutpurse with her tailor. The jokes about ladies’ tailors transform the economic practice into a set of personal characteristics. The joke about hetero lechery derives from the tailor’s chance of getting close to a woman’s body, but it’s a joke less popular than the ones about effeminacy and gossip, which place the tailor lowest on the sexual and social rung of manhood: ‘I have turned myself into a tailor, a man, a gentleman, a nobleman, a worthy man.’5 Brewer’s Dictionary suggests tailors were unmanly because their work required a slender physique. This does not explain why tailors should be singled out from among those who did cramped work. It accepts the period’s own ideological investment in physique, which is most concisely marked in the shift in meaning of the proverb that ‘nine tailors make a man’: this came to mean that it

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would take nine tailors physically to equal a man: ‘Compos’d of many ingredient valours,/Just like the manhood of nine tailors.’6 In that he supposedly encourages the indulgent appetites of women the tailor acts as tempter to the most vulnerable part of the monogamous marriage. Patriarchal ideology spoke of woman as more subject to passion than man, the heart as opposed to the head. When the tailor’s temptation succeeds he undermines the husband’s properly male control. In this sense the tailor is opposed to the interests and function of manhood. Through the anti-tailor jokes this ‘opposition’ to manhood is presented as the tailor’s biological incapacity to be a man: ‘Now the tailor (scarce a man himself) must make him a man again’.7 This inference is also produced by the biologizing of the tailor’s supposed inclination to gossip. The gossip is at one level an incitement to compete in the wearing of fine apparel, and hence it serves an economic function. But it comes also to relate to the private sexual lives of others. The tailor as bawd takes his sexual pleasure in bringing other people together—since he’s not a real man himself. The ladies’ tailor is then a sexual type which designates a man who shares the world of women’s tastes (extravagant, redundant ornament); who is not a man in terms of male public power (nor in the sexual capacity that images this); who is vicariously interested in the sexual activities of others. The sexual type is defined without reference to the selection of sex object. Nevertheless it is important to note the tendency to transform the representation of ‘failings’ which were primarily economic or social into peculiarities of the biological person. At this point, I should clarify the reasons for my focus solely on cultural artefacts. Alan Bray is correctly cautious about their value as a ‘convincing source for social history’.8 He claims that satiric portraits are likely to be ‘the product of purely literary or political influences’, and hence when modern scholars read satire they don’t read about London but about the vices of Rome at one remove. It is certainly possible to suggest that the more esoteric satirists are engaged in a literary game in an illiterate society. But there is a continuity of personnel between satire and an artform of mass appeal and mass consumption, namely drama. There was also a (limited) continuity of personnel between the artists and the state administrators, and state attention to fiction in the form of censorship, book burnings and imprisonment. Most Renaissance artworks were explorations both of dominant and of emergent ideologies; and plays explored in front of a mass audience. Artworks, as a special form of production, in Marx’s phrase, question and reproduce the ideologies of gender as well as politics. Satire may be said to police sexual categories and variations. My analysis is not conceiving of writing as a mirror of society, but it is interested in the repeated creation of certain fictions. I want to ask why it was worth cracking the same joke again and again, who was being laughed at, and why. And the laughter is of course the laughter of an often popular audience: this is very different from the somewhat elite ‘evidence’ of aristocratic letters and legal documents. Satiric portraits are certainly ‘the product of… political influences’: show me writing that isn’t. Jokes and character types are artworks, but also social history. To ignore them is to write only half that history. By looking at artworks one can see a shift in the meaning of effeminacy: although it could be applied to passion for either sex it came to be loaded with a specific implication of sodomy. Some of the shifting (which is not so much chronological as doctrinal/ideological) is evidenced in bible translation: the 1562 Geneva bible has ‘There

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were also sodomites in the land’ (1 Kings xiv.24) for Vulgate’s ‘effeminati’; the 1609 Douai bible renders this ‘effeminates’, while the 1611 Authorized Version selects ‘sodomites’. In contemporary satire that picture of the fop’s partners, the female whore and boy, was frequently replaced by a composite, the boy as whore: ‘what Ganymede is that doth grace/The gallant’s heels, one who for two days’ space/Is closely hired’ (Marston, Certain Satires, 3, p. 78). Most satirists, especially ones associated with the Inns of Court, constructed a self-defined masculinist position from which to write (and by ‘masculinist’ here I mean a focus on the power of the penis in genitally-centred sexual activity, an assumption of the natural superiority of male over female). This position is an ideological mediation of the situation of that social grouping which mainly entered the Inns of Court. Its presence in the satire necessarily stresses masculine potency, which is most easily signified by (hetero)sexual conquest (this is why the satire so eagerly makes a signifying system out of sex objects). In these terms the unmanly fop’s selection of sexual objects has to be marked not simply as that which is non-marital but as that which is inappropriately gendered. Thus the dress and behaviour of the fop come to be somewhat more specifically delimited in their signification of sexual desire. We move now to a more clearly sodomitical type, the royal favourite. The social climber par excellence, he operates by dressing himself to attract the monarch or by encouraging the monarch’s more illicit passions. Marlowe’s Gaveston says he will put on erotic shows for Edward II (c. 1594).9 As with the tailor, part of the illegality of the favourite’s conduct derives from his breach of the rules of appropriate competition, in that he has none of the inherited wealth or power which alone should entitle him to be at court. Furthermore, his encouragement of personal appetites effeminates his client or monarch. The favourite is more explicitly homosexual than the tailor or fop in that he is prepared, as a step in the achieving of social and political ambition, deliberately to engage in homosexual acts. He makes himself known to be available as a male sex object, for when he fulfils that sexual role he simultaneously acquires the power he wants. This aspect of the favourite’s behaviour is as it were clinched in a repeated stage gest: the hug of monarch and favourite. (My use of the word ‘gest’ points to Brecht’s dramaturgy, but a similar use of significant gesture, and indeed a similar word, may be found in Renaissance dramaturgy.) Marlowe’s Edward II hugs Spencer to defy his barons. In Dekker’s If This be Not a Good Play, written some years later (c. 1612), a devil, Rufman, is sent to corrupt the court. Unlike the two devils who disguise as a friar and a merchant, the courtier devil works through sensuality on his victim, the ruler. When asked ‘what thou wilt have/But to stay here’, he replies ‘Lo, this is all I crave’ and hugs his monarch (p. 151). The physical behaviour is specific to the sexual type. The gest of the hug exhibits an improper mingling of personal and public, a sign of illicit passions indulged. By contrast, the kiss bestowed by a male courtier on a female monarch is bound by a set of rules which formalize relationships. In the England of Elizabeth I the language in which a male lover did ‘service’ to his female monarch functioned as a mode of articulating power relations. Hetero love language was exploited by the monarch herself, whose self-presentation as virgin-mother (as well as virago) set the terms of royal propaganda.10 An Elizabethan dramatist who wished to explore the contradictions of personal rule used a male monarch and male favourites. For the power sought by the favourite is always possible to achieve within the conditions of personal rule as stressed by the ideology of absolutist monarchy. The favourite is an embodiment

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of the danger within the sort of monarchical system which was so necessary to a decaying feudalism. Seen in this way the favourite is something more than the usual homosexual antics which characterized corrupt courts’ behaviour (see Spenser’s or Donne’s satire; but there were also complaints about sodomy in the Norman court). He is a test of the monarch’s ability to resist, and hence of his worthiness to be monarch. Portrayal of the favourite thus keeps in tension two analyses: the favourite as conspirator designedly corrupting an otherwise worthy monarch; and the favourite who only exists as part of a series of corrupt indulgences from which the worthy monarch would refrain. Edward II keeps the two analyses in balance. A pair of plays can show the differing ideological constructions of the favourite: Thomas of Woodstock (1592) stresses homosexuality more than does Shakespeare’s characteristically more moderate Richard II, but it is primarily interested in the economic abuses of a wasteful monarch. In A Knack to Know a Knave (1594) Philarchus is accused by his father of disobedience to and contempt for his paternity, and justice is sought from the monarch. The king pities his sometime bed-fellow, but has to learn to pass a just sentence. In doing so, he shows royal respect for the father and recognition that private emotions must be private. The proper family is valorized in this confrontation between father and monarch. Within this ideology, the favourite is seen to commit his primary crime against kinship and ‘nature’. His sodomy amounts to disobedience to the father, ruler in the private sphere, rather than monarch, ruler in the public sphere. For the opponents of James’s rule, his encouragement of favourites could become an issue where Elizabeth’s did not—because of the sodomy. Within this particular scandal James’s royal expenditure could be neatly categorized as corruptly wasteful; the scandal drew its force from the value system of emergent bourgeois ideology (although a number of James’s opponents would have been happy to have received royal money themselves). Furthermore, the so-called influence on James of the supposedly sodomitical Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, also acquired significant proportions within the nationalist overtones of oppositional ideology (see his portrayal as the Black Knight in Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624), which also uses the gest of the hug). Sodomy was regularly seen as a foreign condition. Thus during James’s reign, and at a time when power was felt (ideologically) to be increasingly exercised by merchants and traders, the language of opposition to James constructed sodomy as a threat to the nation. In Edward II Marlowe has the enemies of the king make a distinction between the nationally damaging indulgence of a favourite and the ideal of male friendship as exemplified in certain classical rulers. Renaissance England apparently knew of such ‘friendship’ from traditional classical texts; the interest in such a tradition derives, according to Alan Bray, from its capacity to offer a respectable (if elitist) counterbalance to the Christian taboo on sodomy. But I think that is not the whole story. Friendship was not always unproblematically respectable. For example Marlowe assumes audience recognition of the concept, and then ironizes it, in the scene referred to. In his essay on ‘Friendship’ Montaigne is explicitly critical of the inequalities in ancient Greek homosexual relationships.11 The puppet-show in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) makes comedy, and sodomitical innuendo, out of a well-known classic story of friendship. A major problem in analysing this area is the vagueness of the word ‘friend’. Montaigne, his translator, and so many others, use the word both of sexual and nonsexual partners. And, of course, in endless modern commentaries, the sexual meaning has

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been effaced (or defaced). Subversive play with the ideal, the classical and the sexy can be exemplified in the work of at least one writer. When he published his second volume of poems, Richard Barnfield defended himself in his preface against those who interpreted his first volume, The Affectionate Shepherd, ‘otherwise then…I meant’; it was ‘nothing else, but an imitation of Virgil, in the second Eclogue of Alexis’.12 The classical reference is invoked in order to present the poems as imitation rather than expression of desire, as arty rather than sexy (in fact, they’re both). Yet although the second volume is called Cynthia, and Barnfield alludes to The Faerie Queene, it also comprises some sonnets ‘written’ by Daphnis to Ganymede. These sonnets use the classical apparatus of pastoral and myth, along with specific imitations of contemporary poets and heterosexual love language in general, to describe a male sex object. In addition the poems employ frequent double meanings (one of the favourites is on ‘stones’—testicles; which does wonderful things to the image of ‘men of stone’). For example, speaking of Ganymede’s ‘coral lips’:

One night I dreamed (alas ’twas but a dream) That I did feel the sweetness of the same, Wherewith inspired, I young again became, And from my heart a spring of blood did stream (Sonnet 6, p. 56) This reference to a wet dream is fairly innocent compared to some of the word-play in The Affectionate Shepherd. Barnfield’s text invokes a taboo and produces sexual pleasure. In particular that pleasure is produced through double meanings, which offer a private excitement which it is possible to deny publicly. Such a technique not only resexualizes ‘ideal’ friendship but it makes it naughty as well. This interpretation runs counter to that of Alan Bray, who juxtaposes Barnfield’s private, unpublished, and heterosexually oriented commonplace book with his published poems in order to argue that Barnfield was simply engaged in a deceitful literary game. The assumption of a hierarchy of authenticity here is in general risky, particularly so in the Renaissance when the dividing line between private work and work for publication related to class and politics rather than emotion (it’s also a pretty dodgy assumption in the modern period: look at the status of Orton’s diary). At a time when the state takes an interest in ‘private’ papers and letters, the closer a text gets to the appearance of ‘authenticity’ the more its language has to be policed. The argument is not perhaps that Barnfield ‘is’ homosexual, but that he articulates a produced relationship between taboo and pleasure. Barnfield’s work is useful in that it can show some of the far-from-naïve appropriation of classical tradition. But one needs to move beyond the carefully circumscribed pastoral world in order to delineate the features of the more widespread ‘type’ of friendship. Montaigne says, polemically, that he values his particular friend above wife, family and nation. Male-male bonding is frequently defined against the woman (and sometimes the state). Barnfield’s Ganymede sonnets are followed by an Ode in which Daphnis also meets Eliza; I have noted elsewhere how the Spenser-Harvey correspondence speaks of the male-female triangle.13 On the stage, the type is shaped in the relationship of Don

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Pedro to Claudio, and both to Hero, in Much Ado About Nothing. Pedro stands alone at the end of the play, much as do the two other ‘friends’—Antonios in Merchant and in Twelfth Night. He is told, twice, to ‘get a wife’. This final tableau is ambivalent. Pedro’s sexism, like Claudio’s, is attacked. Yet both men are placed in, and their view of sexual relations derived from, a chivalric order that is seen to be old-fashioned and irrelevant. The lonely Pedro, who does not join the new order of marriages, is placeless and melancholy. A play close to Much Ado is Coriolanus, in which Aufidius welcomes Coriolanus with more joy than he felt on his wedding-night and where Coriolanus, in league with this ‘friend’, turns against the city that produced him. The male-bonding is a threat to the state, and murderous to Coriolanus. This play foregrounds militarism in personal relations (even the central relationship between Coriolanus and his mother is seen to be ‘deformed’ by her emphasis on the qualities of soldiering). The idea of comrades-in-arms has always overlapped with the idea of male-bonding since the classical ‘army of lovers’, but in the Renaissance I think it’s possible to see a specific male type shadowed in the ‘old warrior’, the ‘feudal retainer’, the ‘braggart’. All are associated with what is oldfashioned or ineffectual. They differ from Coriolanus and Aufidius in that they either appear alone or are bonded on unequal terms; master and retainer, like king and favourite, bond across rank. The satiric type of the braggart makes extravagant claims to manly prowess, but is known to be ‘effeminate’ in that he cannot go through with the sex acts he boasts. Marston writes of the braggart as a fop. Harder to focus is the tough old ‘retainer’, but I think the type is exemplified in a comedy which is greatly concerned with masculinity, The Two Angry Women of Abington.14 Among the masculine variants appears the character of Coomes, a braggart who sees himself, the master’s man, as superior to the master’s son, and is uniquely submitted by a boy to a series of sodomitical puns. Another version of this is Antonio in Twelfth Night who shows love as well as loyalty towards Sebastian. The ‘old warrior’ and the ‘friend’ have roots in the same social developments. Both have connotations of a residual order, which are signified in their fictional embodiment— Coomes mocked by a boy, Antonio and Don Pedro left isolated. While the emergent order in Renaissance England was that of smaller gentry and petty producers, the residual order was that of aristocratic warlords and private armies. These still had some power, though it was urgently reshaping within the structure of absolutist monarchy. The old order depended upon, and reproduced, personal relations of loyalty to a feudal overlord. In the figures of paederastic retainer or treacherous male-bonding these personal relations are signified as being non-productive, as against the domestic work-unit and spiritual partnership of husband, wife and family. The usefulness of this mediation provided by emergent individualist ideology can be seen when it is remembered that in fact workers were less alienated from their labour in feudal than in capitalist relations of production. Although masculine, these types may be said to be effeminate in that their masculinity is a form of excess, incapable of or substituting for the ‘real’ (‘the only real’) sex act. Proper men do it with women. Male friendship is opposed, in ideology, to the woman in that ‘friends’ talk together in the language that men should only use to women. (This point may be related to the ‘gossip’ of tailors (or modern hairdressers), whose working conditions involve talking to women, and thus undercut the definition of male work as separate from women’s affairs (as it is presented in Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday).

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Gossip is improper because it blurs the structure of difference, which defines gender.) The setting of male friendship against women attempts to make a public world of men (business/government) distinct from a private world of women (emotions/passions). Thus patriarchal order strengthens itself not only by attacking ‘effeminacy’ but by constructing an opposition between male homosexuality and women. My survey has never defined homosexual identity as a self-expression by the homosexual. Instead it has asserted the existence of a discernible collection of jokes, gestures, codes of dress and behaviour, narrative sequences, which together reproduce a set of expectations about the sexuality of some specified social types. If any of this assertion is correct, some general points follow. Before I list those points I should say that I am aware that some of them may be contentious in terms of gay historiography (particularly received versions of the Renaissance); that they dance around the notorious but not dead debate about essentialism and constructionism that has characterized historical analysis of homosexuality (and which is perhaps more fruitfully shelved in favour of an old but good model of determination and agency); and that I’m rather given to grand narratives, which is a heresy in terms of modern British historiography and new historicism. Full development of these concluding points would lead to another essay, not necessarily written by me. I get the sense that in gay historiography there are already an unhealthy number of orthodoxies for a subject so young, that debate is closed down while reputations open up. I think it’s politically important (to me) that this essay does not manufacture authoritative closure, and that its closing points stand as provisional, inviting rejoinder. That said, here they are: 1 Homosexuality in the Renaissance is not simply a set of activities which most people prefer not to name, but, by contrast, activities that are given an identity in so far as they are located in people most likely to do those acts, the sexual actors. There may not be a notion of the homosexual but there is the ladies’ tailor, the fop, the friend. These types vanish from the picture if definition depends on positive selection of sex objects. What is also lost is all discussion of, and battle over, systems of gendering. 2 Alongside satirical attacks and legal proscriptions, analysis must make space for pleasure: some men presumably behaved in certain ways before the satirists created versions of them. (I take it they were not invented by writers de novo: satire must work on recognition of target.) While it’s a commonplace that theatres were attacked as centres of sodomy, modern commentators might look again at dramatists and performers who thought it worthwhile making jokes that took pleasure in the boy as sexually ambiguous man (see the Induction to Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, 1599) and as sex object (e.g. the ‘back gate’ jokes in Chapman’s May Day, 1611). In a commercial company, you don’t make jokes that an audience will not appreciate. 3 Emphasis should be placed on those apologists for male-male sex who can still be identified. Marlowe is everybody’s favourite; Spenser places male-male bonding higher than heterosexual;15 and in 1603 appeared in English Montaigne’s great defence of homosexual friendship. To say with Alan Bray that ‘In general homosexual behaviour went largely unrecognised or ignored, both by those immediately involved and by the communities in which they lived’, and that many did not or could not identify what they were doing, is, I think, to consign homosexuality yet again to ignorance and silence.

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4 Finally, some notions about sodomy may be traced back to the ideology of the individual associated with an emergent bourgeois order. Within this ideology economic or social ‘deviations’ are projected as personal deviations. The personal loyalty expected of a feudal retainer is seen to be (comically) excessive. This is not offered as a critique of feudal relations from the point of view of capitalist order but instead as a confusion of desire in the individual, a muddle over public and private. Richard Barnfield’s puns agree that sodomy should occupy a realm of meaning in excess of the public apparent meaning. The tailor who panders to economic excesses is ‘by nature’ effeminate and saucy, like an early version of camp as a produced subversion within capitalism. Emergent bourgeois ideology constructed sodomy as the excess of masculinity. University of Nottingham

NOTES 1 A.Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: GMP Publishers, 1982); B.R.Burg’s study of Caribbean pirates, Sodomy and the Perception of Evil (New York: New York University Press, 1983), is out of the period. For theoretical models, see J.Weeks, ‘Discourse, desire and sexual deviance’, in The Making of the Modern Homosexual, ed. K.Plummer (London: Hutchinson, 1981) and Sex, Politics and Society (Harlow: Longman, 1981). 2 S.Orgel, ‘Nobody’s perfect: or why did the English stage take boys for women?’ in Displacing Homophobia, ed. R.L.Butters et al. (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1989); A.Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), pp. 1–19. 3 In F.Whigham, Ambition and Privilege (Berkeley: California University Press, 1984), p. 91; see also Guazzo on p. 160. 4 Plutarch, Lives, trans. T.North (1579) (Stratford-upon-Avon: Blackwell, 1928), p. 130; see Orgel, op. cit., p. 14, for other examples. 5 G.Chapman, The Memorable Masque (1613) in Jacobean and Caroline Masques 2 (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1987), line 317. 6 E.C.Brewer, A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell, n.d.); S.Butler, Hudibras (London, 1663), 1.2.21–2. 7 T.Adams, 1614, cited in M.P.Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1950). 8 Bray, op. cit. (1982), pp. 34–5. 9 For my views on Marlowe and sodomy, please see S.Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986). 10 See L.A.Montrose, ‘“Shaping fantasies”: figurations of gender and power in Elizabethan culture’, Representations, 1 (1983), pp. 61–94. 11 M.Montaigne, Essaies, trans. J.Florio (1603) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904). 12 R.Barnfield, Poems (1594–8), ed. E.Arber (Birmingham, 1882), p. 44. 13 S.Shepherd, Spenser (New York: Harvester Press, 1990). 14 H.Porter, Two Angry Women of Abington (1599) (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1987). 15 Shepherd, op. cit. (1990).

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WORKS CITED Chapman, G., May Day (1611), in Plays: Comedies, 1 (New York: Russell, 1961). Dekker, T., If This be Not a Good Play (1612), The Shoemakers’ Holiday (1600), Westward Hoe (1604), in Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Donne, J., Poems, ed. A.J.Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). Guilpin, E., Skialetheia (1598) (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1974). Hic Mulier/Haec Vir (London, 1620). A Knack to Know a Knave (London, 1594). Marlowe, C., Edward II (1594), in Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969). Marston, J., Antonio and Mellida (1599), The Insatiate Countess (1613), in Plays (London, 1887). Marston, J., Poems, ed. A.Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961). Middleton, T., The Roaring Girl (1611), A Game at Chess (1624), MicroCynicon, in Works (London, 1885). Shakespeare, W., Coriolanus, 2 Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, Twelfth Night, in Plays (London: Collins, 1951). Spenser, E., The Faerie Queene, IV.10 (London, 1596). Thomas of Woodstock (1592) (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1977).

PAM MORRIS

Re-routing Kristeva: from pessimism to parody Theory has lost some of the glamour of success. All the radical intellectual iconoclasm of the last two decades seems finally to have come down to an unproductive choice of Althusserian and Lacanian hegemonic essentialism, or the endless play of indeterminacies celebrated by deconstructionists, or the irresistible and omnipresent power of discourse theory. For Marxists and feminists with an imperative to change the world as well as interpret it, this crisis of theory coincides with a crisis of praxis. Marxism has been proclaimed dead, post-feminism, apparently, has arrived. Meanwhile, in lived experience, the structural inequalities of class, gender and race grip lives as harshly as ever. If a theory of political change is to be revitalized a means needs to be found of reconnecting subjects and discourse to the material specificity of the historical moment. As Alan Sinfield has argued, ‘observing textual contradictions, fissures and split subjects does not go far enough’; to be effective as a materialist cultural practice, textual readings must be attentive to ‘the contests to which they have contributed and may contribute…through and beyond any particular text.’1 Two recent feminist books have made the impasse of theory and practice their starting-point, and both locate the problem in the ahistorical, totalizing tendency of much current theory. In her introductory essay to Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Teresa Brennan diagnoses a ‘stagnant’ and ‘deadlocked’ thinking resulting from the unproductive entanglement of political and psychoanalytical issues within feminism.2 The loci of this entanglement are seen by Brennan and other contributors as the totalizing Lacanian concept of the symbolic order and the related debate over essentialism. Brennan argues that these have become obstacles to productive thinking about the relation between psychical reality and the social. What is needed, she urges, is to ‘conceive of a symbolic that is not patriarchal’.3 In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler writes of ‘trouble within contemporary feminism’ which ‘might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism’ or at least cause ‘ever more bitter fragmentation among the ranks’.4 Butler too locates the problem in the issues of essentialism, and a universal and unified concept of patriarchal culture. It seems symptomatic of a loss of interest (or hope?) among feminists in Julia Kristeva’s work that it is allotted only one essay in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Despite powerful advocacy by Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Toril Moi, and Jacqueline Rose, the political and material import of Kristeva’s work is still frequently misrepresented.5 Undoubtedly some of the misconception is due to the nature of Kristeva’s writing itself, and particularly to the increasing concern in her later work with the darker influences of the death instincts upon individual psychic well-being. The purpose of this paper is to undo the more general misunderstandings and to argue for a return to the radical insights of the earlier work as providing the basis for a political

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theory of language and subjects which is open to the processes of history and change. It will be useful to start with Judith Butler’s critique of Kristeva since this pinpoints, in a particularly lucid and rigorous form, the two most widespread and fundamental of those misconceptions. Butler’s reading aims to reveal the inadequacy, as she sees it, of Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic as the means of subverting the determining Lacanian symbolic order. Lacan’s paternal law, writes Butler, ‘structures all linguistic signification’, becoming the ‘universal organizing principle of culture itself’ (p. 79). Subjects constituted within this law (and all are) are constrained within a unitary identity, their language structured by the law, in turn structuring the world ‘by suppressing multiple meanings…and instating univocal and discrete meanings in their place’ (p. 79). Against this totalizing patriarchal law Kristeva promotes the subversive challenge of the semiotic, expressing the original prediscursive libidinal multiplicity which characterizes the primary relation of the child to the maternal body. For Butler, this apparently precultural nature of the semiotic constitutes the fundamental weakness of Kristeva’s argument. Because Kristeva accepts the Lacanian assumption that culture is identical to the symbolic order and that entry into that order is the founding condition of social identity and even of sanity, the repressive symbolic must always remain hegemonic, Butler claims. Any sustained presence of the libidinal energy of the semiotic within individual life leads to psychosis, according to Kristeva, and within the social formation to the breakdown of cultural life itself. Thus the semiotic anarchism ‘emerges from beneath the surface of culture only inevitably to return there…. By relegating the source of subversion to a site outside culture itself, Kristeva appears to foreclose the possibility of subversion as an effective or realizable cultural practice’ (p. 88). The second focus of Butler’s critique is upon Kristeva’s concept of the maternal which, even more than the prediscursive semiotic, has been a source of misgiving to many feminists. According to Butler, Kristeva inscribes the maternal body with ‘a set of meanings that are prior to culture itself…[Kristeva’s] naturalistic descriptions of the maternal body effectively reify motherhood’ and situate maternal heterogeneity within ‘a biological archaism which operates according to a natural and “prepaternal” causality’ (pp. 80, 90). This mythicizing of the mother as originating source of transgressive pleasure and creativity places the concept of the maternal beyond the particularity and variability of culture and history. Inevitably this raises the question of whether Kristeva’s naturalistic discourse of motherhood is not an effect of the symbolic law it is supposed to challenge; whether it does not produce that idealized image of feminine generativity required for the perpetuation of heterosexual reproduction. ‘The female body that is freed from the shackles of the paternal law,’ concludes Butler, ‘may well prove to be yet another incarnation of that law, posing as subversive but operating in the service of that law’s self-amplification and proliferation’ (p. 93). However, this cogent deconstruction of what Butler takes to be Kristevan theory reproduces the common tendency to identify her work uncritically with that of Lacan and to perceive the relation between the semiotic and the symbolic in terms of stark binary opposition quite absent from Kristeva’s own formulation. This misapprehension by Butler is somewhat surprising given that the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem of gender’ she wants to propose depends upon the Kristevan notion of ‘abjection’ as the constitutive process of psychic separation and identity. Butler argues that this wholly constructed

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nature of self over a void should be recognized and emphasized by means of performative and stylized parodic acts which would destabilize gender identity through ‘subversive laughter [at] pastiche-effect…in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effects’ (p. 146). In this way, she claims, cultural configurations of sex and gender could be proliferated until they overwhelm and confound the present binarism of sexual identity, revealing it for the hegemonic fiction that it is. Butler does not seem to recognize that this performative solution (attractive though it is) is vulnerable to the same deconstructive logic that she brings against the Kristevan concept of motherhood. Unless we can conceive of a non-totaliziing symbolic such stylized acts would also operate within a universal patriarchal law; their apparent subversion equally an effect of that law, the licenced transgression which underwrites its necessity and continuance. In this paper I shall attempt to argue that the ‘solutions’ of parody and laughter are central to Kristevan theory, and that her ideas still offer the best direction for an optimistic Marxist-feminist practice and theory, knotting together a causality of language, subject and history. I do not wish to repeat the excellent expositions of Kristeva’s work already offered, but to suggest that the prevailing popular misconceptions of it as dependent upon notions of the instinctual and presocial can best be overcome and its political import brought into clearer focus by a return to her earliest writing. In particular, it needs to be re-emphasized that the first influence upon Kristeva was not Lacan and psychoanalysis, but Bakhtin with his insistence upon the subject in history. Situating the foundation of Kristeva’s theory in Bakhtin’s work helps to clarify her ideas and underlines the consistently political nature of her perception of language: in Brennan’s terms, her interlinking of psychical with social reality. In an essay on Bakhtin written in 1966, ‘Word, dialogue, and novel’, Kristeva recognizes and outlines the four inter-related concepts which were to remain absolutely central to her thinking. Undoubtedly the most important concept Kristeva takes from Bakhtin is the notion of language as dialogic, or intertextual as she renames it. As opposed to a formalist sense of language as an autonomous self-referring system, Bakhtin insists upon a dynamic model of discourse which focuses upon words as multiply overdetermined—saturated with conflicting intent. ‘Only the mythical Adam,’ Bakhtin writes, ‘who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation’.6 In contrast to this mythic ‘innocence’ of a formalist or structuralist view of language, the word within any living utterance ‘enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements, and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group’, a reactive process which inevitably ‘leave[s] a trace in all its semantic layers’ (p. 276). However, even this interaction of the word within a complex semantic field does not exhaust Bakhtin’s sense of dialogism: The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has

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not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. (p. 280) It is for this reason that Kristeva sees Bakhtin as foreshadowing Emile Beneviste’s sense of discourse as necessarily intersubjective or dialogic: Language is possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as ‘I’ in his discourse. Because of this, ‘I’ posits another person, the one who, being as he is completely exterior to ‘me’, becomes my echo to whom I say ‘you’ and who says ‘you’ to me.7 Kristeva’s acceptance of the Bakhtinian sense of language as conflictual, material, and in process—oriented towards an addressee and a future—indicates how far she is from any unquestioned espousal of a Lacanian concept of the symbolic as a static totalizing order.8 On the contrary, as we shall see, Kristeva’s subsequent development of psychoanalytic theory functions to provide a more rigorous understanding of Bakhtin’s dialectical model of language. All utterances, she claims, in the essay on Bakhtin, are the locus simultaneously of speaking subject and internalized addressee (in effect internalized culture) who is ‘answered’ as well as ‘spoken’ to in each utterance. ‘The writer’s interlocutor, then, is the writer himself, but as a reader of another text. The one who writes is the same as the one who reads.’9 To this Bakhtinian sense of language as always double Kristeva contributes a third dimension: because the speaking subject is also always split between the conscious and the unconscious, all discourse is inscribed with desire. From thence onwards Kristeva’s concern with language, and especially her reading of texts, always brings into play this triple ‘intersection of textual surfaces’ (Desire in Language, p. 65). Her reading practice re-articulates not just the dialogic interaction of the conscious with the unconscious of the speaking subject, but also the subject’s intertextual reading/writing of internalized culture.10 The second and probably best-known of Kristevan concepts, the ‘revolution’ or conflict of two opposing ‘dispositions’ within language, stems from this first concept of dialogism or intertextuality. In ‘Word, dialogue, and novel’, Kristeva sets out Bakhtin’s sense of the continuous struggle between monological and polyphonic discourse, not yet using the oppositional terms ‘semiotic’ and ‘symbolic’ she later deploys: ‘The dialogue inherent in all discourse is smothered by a prohibition, a censorship, such that this discourse refuses to turn back upon itself, to enter into dialogue with itself’ (Desire in Language, p. 77). Significantly, her emphasis here is upon ‘dialogue’ as the inherent, ‘given’ state of language, with prohibition of that dialogism imposed upon it, rather than a perception of language as inherently univocal and repressive until or unless subjected to destabilization. Bakhtin’s concept of monological or unitary language appears to be somewhat similar to the Lacanian symbolic order. Unitary language, Bakhtin writes, ‘is a system of linguistic norms… forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought’ (pp. 270–1). However, unlike Lacan’s apparently totalizing view of the symbolic, Bakhtin goes on to insist that at any given historical moment unitary language has to operate in the midst of heteroglossia. ‘Every utterance participates in the “unitary language” (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social

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and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces)’ (p. 272). Language, Bakhtin claims, must always be analysed as a ‘contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of [these] two embattled tendencies’ (p. 272). This continuous struggle of opposing dispositions leads to the third key concept of Kristevan theory: the dialectical process of ‘negation as affirmation’, sometimes called ‘destructive genesis’. Dialogism shatters the totalizing vision of univocal discourse, as one ideological perspective is relativized against a contending viewpoint. In this death of ‘Truth’ a new ‘ambivalent’ truth is constituted. Kristeva writes, ‘writing reads another writing, reads itself and constructs itself through a process of destructive genesis’ (Desire in Language, p. 77). Kristeva follows Bakhtin in seeing laughter and especially parody as founding examples of this ‘negation as affirmation’. Bakhtin emphasizes parody as ‘one of the most ancient and widespread forms for representing the direct word of another’. ‘It is our conviction’, he writes, ‘that there never was a… single type of direct discourse…that did not have its own parodying and travestying double’ (p. 53). Parody is never merely imitation, never just the ‘echo’ of Beneviste; in parody two languages meet in an antagonistic fusion, relativizing the claims of each other’s ‘truth’ and hence producing a new ‘thesis’ which in turn can become the object of parody. Bakhtin associates the tradition of parody with that of carnival and the carnivalesque figures of rogue, clown and fool. The parodic discourse of these figures suggests the public and performative nature of social identity. Bakhtin claims: ‘they are life’s maskers; their being coincides with their role, and outside this role they simply do not exist’ (p. 159). Kristeva picks up and elaborates this idea in her discussion of the carnivalesque. ‘A carnival participant’, she writes, ‘is both actor and spectator, he loses his sense of individuality, passes through a point zero of carnivalesque activity and splits into a subject of the spectacle and an object of the game…man and mask’ (Desire in Language, p. 78). This perception of carnival as the scene of the splitting of the subject into spectactor and spectacle, maker and mask and as the place ‘where prohibitions…and their transgression coexist’ (Desire in Language, p. 79), leads to the fourth central structuring concept of Kristevan thought: the concept of a ‘traversable boundary’ or ‘threshhold’ site between order and its subversion, inside and outside, body and culture, mother and child, semiotic and symbolic. Carnival, Kristeva claims, brings to light the structures ‘underlying the unconscious: sexuality and death’ in its dyadic forms of ‘high and low, birth and agony, food and excrement, praise and curses, laughter and tears’ (Desire in Language, pp. 78–9). The concept of a ‘threshhold’ site has become the most important concern in Kristeva’s recent work, rather overshadowing the earlier emphasis upon dialogic conflict. It receives a variety of terminology throughout Kristeva’s writing and is most fully explored as ‘abjection’ in Powers of Horror. Essentially, however, the concept remains close to Bakhtin’s account of the grotesque Rabelasian carnivalesque body articulated as a boundary site bringing together food and defecation, gluttonous Gargantuan ingestion and obscene expulsions, birth, sex and death, pain and laughter. On the site of the carnivalesque body, Bakhtin writes, ‘death is presented in close relationship with the birth of new life and—simultaneously—with laughter’ (p. 198).11 These four concepts—dialogism (intertextuality), a ‘revolutionary’ conflict between prohibitive and transgressive dispositions within language, the dialectical process of negation, and a ‘threshold’ site—structure all of Kristeva’s subsequent writing. Her use

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of psychoanalytic theory provides a more rigorously argued causality for the insights offered in Bakhtin’s rather impressionistic account of language. A careful tracing of the trajectory of Kristeva’s work from this early basis makes it clear that she never rejects Bakhtin’s dialectical model of language for a totalizing symbolic order, nor, as is so often claimed, does she oppose the symbolic with a precultural archaism. For her, all speaking subjects and their discourse, the semiotic disposition as well as the symbolic, are always already implicated in history. ‘The speaking subject’, she writes, ‘can never be dealt with at the level of drive, or through a child at zero degree of symbolism’ (Desire in Language, p. 276). The child enters the world as the site of polymorphous instinctual drives but these are always already implicated with the social; even in the womb the child hears and responds to the mother’s voice. Kristeva writes in Revolution in Poetic Language, We emphasize the regulated aspect of the chora: its vocal and gestural organization is subject to what we shall call an objective ordering… dictated by natural or socio-historical constraints…. We may therefore posit that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraints in a mediated form which organizes the chora.12 The source of this ordering mediation is the maternal body, experienced by the child as a symbiotic continuum of its own bodily topography. This rhythmic continuum (the chora) of heart-beat, pulse, ingestion and expulsion, light and dark, chill and warmth is crossed and recrossed by fluxes of libidinal energy—undirected polymorphous drives. This motility is ordered (‘articulated’) by means of the primary processes of condensation and displacement which effect discontinuities, temporary stases, repetitions and returns within the flux, organizing it eventually into discrete connections, facilitations and associations. ‘Voice, hearing and sight’, Kristeva writes, ‘are the archaic dispositions where the earliest forms of discreteness emerge. The breast given and withdrawn…. At that point, breast, light and sound become a there: a place, a spot, a marker’ (Desire in Language, p. 283). The replete maternal enclosure, locus of polymorphous erotogenicity, is the material foundation of the omnipoent pre-Oedipal mother of the child’s imaginary stage before separation and symbolization. It is, however, essential to remember that this pre-Oedipal mother only ever exists in the imaginary. It is, Kristeva writes, ‘an unnameable domain…the secret and unreachable horizon of our loves and desires, it assumes for the imagination, the consistency of an archaic mother’13 (my italics). The actual mother, however, is always fully implicated in social and familial structures. The breast is given and withdrawn according to the constraints and practices of the temporal and cultural world in which she is situated. Even her bodily rhythms and vocal tonality are regulated by its temporality and value systems. Thus from the first moment the mediated regulation of the semiotic is social, and this ordering is the necessary precondition for language acquisition, not an ‘alien’, instinctual, opposing force as Butler and others have claimed. When Kristeva writes of a pre-Oedipal archaic mother it is always the fantasy constructed within the imaginary she is referring to. As Jacqueline Rose has pointed out,14 the fact that sometimes her writing seems to endow this mythic figure with its own volitional energy only testifies the more eloquently to the powerful hold it retains upon

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the structures of our adult fantasies. Indeed, Kristeva confesses as much in admitting that her analysands intuit her own ‘uneasiness’, in dealing with ‘a subjugating mother, precociously and encroachingly loving…but always underhandedly fascinating’.15 It is not so surprising, therefore, that she has come to protect herself from the underhand fascination of her ‘own precociously lost love’ by positing an imaginary pre-Oedipal ‘father of individual pre-history’ (Tales of Love, p. 11). For feminists this can seem like a final betrayal; a retreat to the Father as protector against the devouring Mother, who is referred to, in Black Sun, in terms of full Hollywood gothic as ‘the Thing’! In fact, although Kristeva’s melodramatic terminology undoubtedly encourages this exasperated response, the ‘father of individual pre-history’ does occupy a positive position within her theory of language, to which I shall return. Kristeva theorizes the transitional constitution from socially mediated chora into a signifying subject around the central notions of a ‘thetic threshhold’ and ‘negation as affirmation’, drawing upon Freud’s influential essay on ‘Negation’ and Melanie Klein’s concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects.16 Whilst the child is still held within the preOedipal maternal continuum, its experience is organized around the primary impulses of introjection and expulsion. Sensations and objects which contribute to pleasure and satisfaction of needs, like the ‘good breast’, are incorporated as part of the self. Freud sees this impulse of introjection as the working of the life instincts, and the impulse will develop into the mental process of affirmation. Conversely, all that causes undue excitation or distress (the ‘bad breast’) is rejected and expelled beyond the symbiotic boundary. Expulsion is the working of the death instincts and will form the basis of the mental process of negation. For Kristeva the key aspect of negation is its creative capacity to generate process and dispel stasis. Thus the child’s primary impulse of rejection (negation) has a positive effect in that it forms the basis for recognizing objects as separate and external to the self. It is this which provides the possibility of differentiation between subjectivity and objectivity upon which self-identity depends. Thus the ‘thetic threshhold’ is simply the boundary site between inside and outside, self and other: the psychic space whereon the subject constitutes itself through the act of positing objects. Expulsion or negation creates the speaking subject: a subject who substitutes signs for objects. Kristeva writes, This negativity—this expenditure—posits an object as separate from the body proper, and, at the very moment of separation, fixes it in place as absent, as a sign. In this way rejection establishes the object as real and, at the same time, as signifiable (which is to say, already taken on as an object within the signifying system and as subordinate to the subject who posits it through the sign). (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 123) Language, in other words, arises from the child’s desire to subordinate or master an alltoo-powerful reality. Elsewhere Kristeva writes, ‘I have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother,’ is what the speaking subject seems to be saying. ‘But no, I have

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found her again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose her I have not lost her (that is the negation) I can recover her in language.’ (Black Sun, p. 45) Freud’s account of his grandson’s ‘fort/da’ game also provides a graphic illustration of the way the sign (representation) extends the child’s attempted mastery or subordination of that which was originally expelled outside the self as threatening.17 By repetitively throwing away and pulling back a cotton reel (an imaginary representation of his absent mother) accompanying this action with the words ‘fort’ and ‘da’, the child discovered a means of gaining a semblance of mastery over a loss he could not actually control. The fort/da game also demonstrates that it is a misleading simplification to understand the impulses of introjection and expulsion, or the death and life instincts which propel them, as quite separate and distinct. They interact in a continuous dialectical process. The child with the cotton reel expresses simultaneously desire for the mother and aggression towards her in throwing her away: an intense interaction of life and death instincts, of love and hate. Words and other forms of representation which substitute for the expelled or lost object are constituted of this ambivalence. Kristeva’s conception of the semiotic is simply this interaction of the life and death instincts, always already mediated by the social into forms of affirmation and negation, and propelled by the latter to produce the sign. She states, ‘In our view, expenditure or rejection are better terms for the movement of material contradiction that generates the semiotic function’ (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 119). This impulse of rejection is associated with desire to subordinate the object; for an aggressive mastery, by means of the sign, of what has refused control or presence as object. This ‘disposition’ for mastery is the indispensable precondition for the constitution of the speaking subject. Undoubtedly, it is also the ‘disposition’ which motivates the centripetal, unifying tendency which Bakhtin assigns to unitary discourse. In other words, the totalizing impulse of the symbolic is essentially an aspect of the functioning of the semiotic—the functioning of negation. However, it is but one ‘disposition’ or tendency within the signifying system, not the system itself as a capitalized ‘Law’ and ‘Order’ which then needs to be subverted by an extralinguistic, presocial force. Indeed, if the symbolic disposition were really a totalizing Law, imposing wholly unitary and discrete meanings, then metalanguage would be neither logically necessary nor possible. In actuality the creative and destabilizing ‘disposition’ of signifying practice is produced by the same semiotic impulse of negation which constitutes the opposing tendency for univocal mastery. The death instincts generate new forms and laughter—negation as creativity. Words come into being for the speaking subject as always already dialogic and ambivalent. The sign which substitutes for the absent breast is overdetermined with conflicting intent, it is an intertextual site of desire and hate, of the impulse to affirm and to negate. It is this ambivalent dialectic which provides the opening for linguistic creativity and ultimately for the production of new social forms. The sign confers mastery of the absent object upon the speaking subject as a capacity to reproduce as representation that which has been lost. However, this representation is not necessarily identical repetition—an echo—it can be varied to answer the impulse of the presently predominating drive—life or death. Freud writes in ‘Negation’, The reproduction of a

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perception as a presentation is not always a faithful one; it may be modified by omissions, or changed by the merging of various elements.’18 Kristeva restates this idea: ‘Rejection therefore constitutes the return of expulsion …within the domain of the constituted subject: rejection reconstitutes real objects, “creates” new ones, reinvents the real, and re-symbolizes it’ (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 155). It is the ‘compulsion to repeat’ (characteristic of the death drive), but to repeat with the difference of an underlying, socially charged ambivalence, which constitutes all forms of creative or innovative thought. This ambivalence, displaced into signs, accounts for the creative double articulation of language (desire/subject of enunciation; signifier/signified), but it does not explain the triple dialogism involving an addressee/ internalized culture which unites signification fully to history and allows us to conceive of a symbolic which is not patriarchal in any determining sense. Paradoxically, this is the function of the ‘father of individual prehistory’, otherwise called by Kristeva the ‘Third Party’ (Tales of Love, p. 34). How does the child move from its first auto-eroticism in which its body is a fragmentation of zones, each a site of separate erotic gratification, to narcissism which entails an image of a unified body and embryonic ego? There is no leverage within the closure of mother/child dyad to bring about the ‘new psychical action’ of narcissism. It is on this basis that Kristeva argues for the logical necessity of an Other, a Third Party. The claims of this Other upon the maternal body are ‘an indication that the mother is not complete but that she wants…Who? …it is out of [the child’s] “not I”…that an Ego painfully attempts to come into being’, until then ‘the child and the mother do not yet constitute two’ (Tales of Love, pp. 41, 40). Although Kristeva uses the designations ‘father of individual prehistory’ or ‘pre-Oedipal father’, she concedes that these are wholly imaginary conceptions: that ‘he is simply …a potential presence’, and moreover ‘possess[es] the characteristics of both parents’ (Tales of Love, pp. 43, 202). It seems reasonable therefore to see this Third Party as the child’s imaginary way of registering the imposition of social reality upon the mother, which necessitates her withdrawal of attention, her absences and her changes of libidinal rhythms: in effect her orientation towards the world beyond the mother/child dyad, directing the child in that worldly direction also. This cuts out the space of a ‘potential presence’—an Other— before the imposition of the reality principle in the form of the Oedipal father’s prohibition of the maternal body. This Third Party constitutes the space which ‘allows for the existence of a potentially symbolic Other’, Kristeva claims; for an ‘external addressee’ who imposes upon the child the necessity to communicate as well as speak. (For those who ‘do not yet constitute two’ the need for communication does not exist.) In that external necessity the child finds its words authenticated. Otherwise, according to Kristeva, ‘Within the empty enclosure of his narcissism, …[words] (drives and representations) could not find an other (an addressee) who alone might have given a signification to their weighty meaning’ (Tales of Love, p. 49). Thus utterances come to be characterized by a dialogic interaction of desire with necessity, of the subjective with the social, between ‘I say what matters to me’ versus ‘I say for you, for us, so that we can understand one another.’19 This double positionality of the speaking subject, Kristeva claims, as ‘that of his own identity [and]…that of objective expression for the other…has the advantage of clarifying certain of Bakhtin’s positions with reference to dialogism’.20

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With the resolution of the Oedipal conflict, the Third Party, comprising characteristics of both mother and father, is subsumed within the super-ego: internalized culture. Freud describes the super-ego thus: a child’s super-ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents’ super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation.21 However the super-ego comprises not only idealizations of both imaginary parents which the child has introjected—its ego-ideal, but also their arbitrary power which it has sought first to reject and then control by representation. It is this ambivalence which creates the possibility of destabilizing the ‘time-resisting’ authority of social forms. The triple dialogism which constitutes us as speaking subjects of an overdetermined language offers us the potential to be the makers of our own history. In our speech the destructivecreative capacities of the death instincts (negation as affirmation) find an opening into social meaning, shaking and remaking its values. It is against this centrifugal tendency that all authoritarian, totalizing codes have to contend. If ambivalence and dialogism are creative ‘dispositions’ inherent in the very constitution of language, undermining the opposing prohibitive ‘disposition’, then so, too, are laughter and parody. ‘There is one inevitable moment in the movement that recognizes symbolic prohibition and makes it dialectical: laughter’ (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 222). Elsewhere Kristeva writes, ‘Laughter is what lifts inhibitions breaking through prohibition (symbolized by the Creator) to introduce the aggressive, violent, liberating drive’ (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 224). Laughter is a constant theme throughout Kristeva’s writing which has received too little attention in commentaries on her work; it is the bright lining of her black sun of melancholy. Kristeva notes that the infant’s first ‘smile’ or ‘laughter’ appears to be provoked at moments of tension relief, for example, at the point of oral repletion or of anal expulsion. Such moments—ambivalent thresholds where one instinct dies into its opposite—appear to produce involuntary ‘laughter’ (Desire in Language, p. 283). Likewise, rejection, the impulse to expel disturbing influences, creates the ambivalent threshhold between inside and outside, love and hate, upon which knowing laughter is born. Its energy therefore, like that of speech, derives from the death instincts. The ‘fort/da’ response demonstrates the way loss is transformed into a pleasurable game. This form of aggressive playfulness is present in most childhood games of repetition and imitation. The child who scolds or beats a toy is identifying with (introjecting) parental power. However, the scolding voice is not merely an echo; it constructs a parody of power, projecting a mocking image of the authoritative word. The little girl who imitates her mother’s cough expresses simultaneously an impulse of loving identification and an aggressive desire to diminish maternal power. Language is born of the need to dominate what is originally threatening and beyond control. In the infant’s history her/his original loss is experienced as tragedy, but we learn to replay it as farce. From our first words we are all of us ironists. ‘Laughter always indicates an act of aggression against the Creator,’ Kristeva writes (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 223). The black humour with which, throughout history, women and

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men have faced down the worst of war, death and punishment testifies to the strength of this archaic impulse to defeat power by laughter. Introjection, the impulse to identify with that which provides satisfaction of need, signified at the Oedipal stage as gender identity with the parent of the same sex, is always destabilized by ambivalence. We mock power even as we imitate its voice. The double positionality of the subject entails that we are always spectators of our own carnivalesque performances; always in some place aware of ourselves as parodists of our own desired identifications. It is for this reason that Kristeva quotes Baudelaire’s description of laughter as an indication ‘of a permanent dualism in the human being—that is, the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time’ (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 223). Laughter and parody thus always involve pain; they always involve the perception of our own impotence. In recognizing our representation of power or authority as parodic and thereby mastering its threat of annihilation, we must of necessity recognize our own failure to make ourselves in its image. The ‘fake’ or ‘narcissistic seeming’, writes Kristeva, arises ‘because one rarely succeeds in identifying fully with [an] ideal’ and this fakeness ‘challenges the universe of established values [and] pokes fun at them’ (Tales of Love, pp. 126–7). In this unmasking of power by our laughter, we unmake ourselves. But it is this negation which puts us ‘in process’, opening out the possibility of continuously reinventing those performative parodies of identity that Judith Butler advocates as means of subverting repressive constructions of gender. For Kristeva, the artistic representation of being as performance is Mozart’s Don Juan, ‘an artist with no authenticity other than his ability to change, to live without internality, to put on masks just for fun’ (Tales of Love, p. 199). As such, the figure of Don Juan represents our ‘power to triumph while playing’ (ibid., p. 204). Laughter, then, is another of Kristeva’s threshhold sites, making possible the process of destructive genesis. Such sites always involve risk for the subject who seeks to operate across their ambivalence. They always open into the death instincts; it is for this reason that laughter is frequently painful as well as pleasurable, always shadowed by the fear of annihilation. Nevertheless, such laughter is truly ambivalent, rather than simply destructive. At around three months, the undirected laughter stimulated by drive discharges finds a stable point of reference. The mother’s face becomes ‘the privileged receiver of laughter’ (Desire in Language, p. 283). This affirmative laughter finds its echo in the jubilant recognition with which the infant greets its image in the mirror. From thence onwards laughter or smiles affirm our identity for the other. So laughter simultaneously destroys our unified identity, puts us into process, and gives us back to ourselves from the place of the other. The question inevitably arises as to whether Kristeva sees women as having the same access as men to the resources of laughter and parody. Her writing on this is contradictory. The playful ‘triumph’ of Don Juan is described as ‘phallic power’; ‘slaves and women are made otherwise’, she writes (Tales of Love, p. 200). However, in About Chinese Women, she declares that the founding of western civilization upon the cleavage of the two sexes localizes ‘the polymorphic, orgasmic body, desiring and laughing, in the other sex’—that is in women (Kristeva Reader, p. 141). This seems a surer insight. If laughter derives from the need to mock power and authority so as not to be overwhelmed by it, then it seems reasonable to suppose that those within the social formation who remain marginalized and disempowered after infancy will continue to utilize the defiant

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laughter of irony and parody. In the triple dialogism of their discourse, hegemonic ‘Truth’ will always be demystified by fusion with its parodic echo. Thus Kristeva writes of women’s ‘ironic common sense’ which opposes hegemonic claims for ‘divine’ or ‘universal’ knowledge, and she cites the biblical example of Sarah ‘pregnant at 90, [who] laughs at this divine news’ (Kristeva Reader, p. 140). The age-old insistence that ‘women have no sense of humour’ is, of course, the negation which affirms men’s fear of this subversive force. Similarly, those furthest from power can most easily recognize their own ‘faking’ performances of its image; women and slaves have the potential, perhaps, to be the most plural of life’s maskers, as indeed Kristeva seems to suggest in ‘Women’s time’ (Kristeva Reader, pp. 209–10). Kristeva writes of the ‘tremendous psychic, intellectual, and affective effort’ a woman must make to overcome her pre-Oedipal identification with the imaginary archaic mother in order to take her place within the social order (Black Sun, p. 30). Could we not speculate that women achieve this ‘triumph’ through the ambivalent power of laughter? Post-Oedipal gender identification with their mothers offers women the opportunity to recognize their shortfall from the mythic ideal. This double positionality of self/projected self reveals the performative nature of ‘feminine’ gender identity. However, this comic perception is genuinely ambivalent: it ironizes the ‘Truth’ of a unitary or idealized sense of ‘Woman’ or ‘Mother’, but it does not disavow it altogether. This ‘ironic common sense’ prevents women from taking themselves seriously as myth, but preserves a perception of maternal love as a utopian, cherished glimpse of an ideal of communality. As Kristeva argues in ‘Women’s Time’, it is the sacrificial and diminishing nature of so many women’s encounter with the social order that reactivates an escapist desire for the idealized fantasy of an all-powerful mythic mother as the basis of a counter-society ‘imagined as harmonious, without prohibitions, free and all-fulfilling’ (Kristeva Reader, p. 202). For men, after the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, ambivalent laughter in relation to the feminine is difficult to achieve. Identification with the pre-Oedipal mother has been securely repressed so that the feminine has become wholly other and unknowable. Hence laughter can only function as a negative and aggressive impulse to diminish an ancient power, located in women and always feared. Does Kristeva’s theory of language as a parodic, triply dialogic signifying practice offer it as an inevitably revolutionary force, as she has seemed sometimes to claim? Obviously not; laughter, it is quite evident, does not serve only libertarian ends. Any force or object which is feared or resented, perhaps especially in the imagination, can become the focus of non-ambivalent, wholly destructive mockery. However, Kristeva’s perception of language does provide heartening reassurance that structures of power and authority—whether of class or patriarchy—are not wholly determining forces upon our lives and social identities; that the symbolic order is not a totalizing law imposing upon us an inescapable closure of possibility. Signifying practice is a dialogic alternation of ‘dispositions’ within language; dispositions for both mastery and renewal—as indeed we have always known in our practice if not in our theory. In terms of practice, her theory also suggests a challenging model of reading; a rearticulation of texts as triply dialogic, a polemical interaction within the word of writing subject, desire, and history as internalized addressee, with univocal meaning always denied by the force of ambivalence. In addition, when reading texts by women we should

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perhaps be particularly attuned to hidden laughter, the parodic echo, an ironic irreverence. This view of language also suggests the possibility of constructing a genuinely progressive political writing. In the play of an ‘ironic common sense’ those twin dangers to any political discourse—the totalizing desire for a utopian return to an imaginary maternal enclosure or the totalizing authority of complete mastery—are revealed and debunked. This is not to invoke a postmodernist overthrow of all social value. We laugh at ourselves in the name of equality and in laughing with others we recognize and confirm a collective solidarity. University of Dundee

NOTES 1 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘Culture and textuality: debating cultural materialism’, Textual Practice, 4, 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 93, 99. 2 Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 1. 3 ibid., p. 3. 4 Gender Troubles: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. ix, 15. Further references will be cited in the text. 5 Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 122–52; Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London and New York: Methuen, 1985); Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London and New York: Verso, 1986), pp. 141–64. 6 The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 279. Further references will be cited in the text. 7 Emile Beneviste, Problems of General Linguistics (1966) (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1977), p. 225. 8 Lacan also sees the signifying subject as constituted intersubjectively ‘in the response of the other’, and Lacan’s own stylistic eccentricity seems to embrace a ‘semiotic’ multivalency. Nevertheless, his insistent nomenclature of ‘Law’ and ‘Order’ inevitably constructs the symbolic ‘Law of the Father’ as an inescapable universal system, seemingly structuring even the unconscious. Kristeva, on the contrary, has declared that ‘the unconscious is not structured like a language’ (Black Sun, p. 204). If Lacan tends to overwhelm us with the repressive power of the symbolic, Kristeva, perhaps, is inclined to overstate the irresistible influence of the death instincts. 9 Desire in Language, ed. Leon S.Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S.Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 86–7. 10 For example, this ‘triple dialogism’ informs her reading of Céline in Powers of Horror, of ‘Stabat Mater’ in Tales of Love, and the work of Holbein in Black Sun. 11 Bakhtin’s most detailed discussion of carnival and the regenerative Rabelesian body are in Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). 12 Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller with an introduction by Leon S.Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 26–7. Further references will be cited in the text. 13 Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S.Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 145. Further references will be cited in the text. 14 Sexuality in the Field of Vision, pp. 157–64.

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15 Tales of Love, translated by Leon S.Roudiez (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1987), p. 11. Further references will be cited in the text. 16 ‘Negation’ in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 438. 17 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in On Metapsychology, pp. 283–7. 18 ‘Negation’, p. 440. 19 The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 316. Further references will be cited in the text. 20 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 195. Further references will be cited in the text. 21 J.Laplanche and J.B.Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1988), p. 437.

CHARLES SHEPHERDSON

Biology and history: some psychoanalytic aspects of the writing of Luce Irigaray I DEVENIR-FEMME In Partage des femmes, Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni tells of a client, Anne-Marie, who becomes pregnant after she has been in analysis for some time.1 It is a biologically normal pregnancy, but this does not altogether deprive it of significance. It would be a mistake, therefore, to pretend that the question of sexuality can come to a close at this point. This will not keep Anne-Marie from taking refuge from the question by appealing to her supposed proof—as though woman and mother were one and the same. When the pregnancy is confirmed, Anne-Marie goes not to her husband but directly to her analyst and declares that her analysis can come to an end: she now has nothing more to say. Five years earlier, when she was eighteen, Anne-Marie began to suffer from anorexia and amenorrhea, and for two years, her periods stopped altogether—exactly as her mother’s had when she was the same age (pp. 61–2). Her analyst, Lemoine-Luccioni, is reminded of another client whom she calls Blanche, a young woman who was also anorexic and amenorrheic, just as her mother had been at the same age. There is a history here that does not belong to the order of genetics. (i) Biology and history We must be attentive to this history, and the theoretical difficulty it presents. On the one hand we have an organic symptom, but it does not reduce to the order of biology. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders sagely observes, without further comment, that ‘the disturbance [anorexia, which is usually accompanied by amenorrhea] cannot be accounted for by a known physical disorder.’2 On the other hand, in addition to this organic but not simply physiological symptom, we have a history of some kind, linking mother and daughter, but it does not reduce to the order of cultural determination, as though it were a matter of what is so quickly called ‘the social construction of femininity’. For as Lemoine-Luccioni suggests, what is at stake is the handing down of a phenomenon from generation to generation, something, in other words, that happens not at the general level of culture, but rather in a more specific relation between mother and daughter.3 Again, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual observes, without troubling itself further, this disturbance ‘is more common among sisters and mothers of individuals with the disorder than in the general population’. This remark might suggest to the medical community that the cause will one day be found to be genetic. One hears this sort of hope expressed today about alcoholism as well, by a community of research that does not take the history that confronts us here as seriously as it might do. I will suggest that what binds the generations here is not in fact a genetic endowment, nor a matter of what

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we call the ‘social construction of the subject’, but rather an inheritance of the signifier, transmitted at the level of the flesh. It is therefore a question of the relation between the symbol and the organism—a question by means of which psychoanalytic feminism is trying to rethink the categories of biology and history. We are dealing, in short, with what one might call a transmission of the question, a history of the question: the question repeats, and the subject is produced as a particular answer to this question—an answer which, being always more or less inadequate, is frequently also a symptom. Such a history is still virtually unthinkable for us, but it gives us a central and neglected trajectory of Irigaray’s work. An inheritance between generations of women, which functions at the level of the body, without answering to physiology; a history, then, which at the same time is not susceptible to the usual, broad cultural analysis—such phenomena lead Irigaray to bring into question the accepted tools of biological and cultural analysis. This is precisely the theoretical contribution of psychoanalysis: when it is a question of sexuality, feminism cannot have recourse to the usual arguments about cultural and political determination, any more than it can rely on biology to explain the question of sex.4 It is ironic that both of these arguments have been attributed to Irigaray—the one, which pretends she is celebrating female anatomy and is therefore ahistorical, insufficiently political, and guilty of essentialism, and the other, which imagines that she reduces everything to language, as if the question of sexual difference were a matter of nothing more than discourse and representation, nothing more, in short, than a matter of what is hastily called the symbolic order.5 For Irigaray, neither of these positions even begins to encounter the question of sexuality; to read her in terms of these two options is therefore to close out the very basis of her writing. We know that Irigaray has written on the mother—daughter relation.6 But she has not done so in order to celebrate a community of women, as is sometimes said.7 She is not as optimistic here as one might wish.8 Perhaps what is handed down in this relation is precisely the question of sexual difference—‘Am I a man or a woman?’ (ii) ‘The fable of the blood’ Anne-Marie explains to her analyst that some time after the beginning of her symptoms, her father died of a cerebral hemorrhage (her mother’s father had died in a similar way); at the time of his death, her physician gave her advice, evidently hoping that she would be able to resume her life: ‘One year after my father’s death,’ Anne-Marie explains, ‘I put on lipstick, as a physician had advised, and my periods came back’ (p. 62). What is this relation between the symbol and the organism?9 Shortly after this moment, which we might all too quickly call her ‘return to womanhood’, she was engaged to be married, and now, carrying the news of her pregnancy, Anne-Marie will declare to her analyst that she has nothing more to say: she has a job (she is a psychologist and she takes care of children), and now that she is pregnant she does not wish for her analysis to continue. Her analyst refuses to comply with this demand. She notices that her client’s discourse has suddenly changed. Instead of being a pleasure, the prospect of analysis now brings with it a high degree of anxiety: ‘I am not even analyzable,’ Anne-Marie says. Besides, ‘I have stopped dreaming…. And what am I doing here anyway: I’m pregnant’ (p. 63). Faced with a client who stops eating, who stops bleeding, who stops dreaming, and who

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brings her pregnancy forward in order to stop analysis in this particular way, LemoineLuccioni can only regard these details as a chain, a symptomatic repetition. The pregnancy, she believes, is being used as a resistance: ‘conceiving the child’ is intended to put a stop to the question that has governed the entire analysis, namely: ‘If I do not have periods’ (p. 65), if I do not eat, if I do not become a mother, am I nevertheless a woman? Let me pause for a moment at this question to cite the interview with Irigaray entitled ‘Questions’: It is the first question, and all the others lead right back to it. It is this one: ‘Are you a woman?’ A typical question. A man’s question? I don’t think that a woman—unless she has been assimilated to masculine, and more specifically phallic, models—would ask me that question…. In other words, in response to the person who asked the question, I can only refer it back to him and say: ‘it’s your question’…. If I had answered: ‘My dear sir, how can you have such suspicions? It is perfectly clear that I am a woman,’ I should have fallen back into the discourse of a certain ‘truth’ and its power. And if I were claiming that what I am trying to articulate, in speech or writing, starts from the certainty that I am a woman, then I should be caught up once again within ‘phallocratic’ discourse. I might well attempt to overturn it, but I should remain included within it. (p. 121/120–1) (iii) Desire I cannot take time to follow this case presentation in the detail it deserves; let me simply mention a few points. The first concerns the register of Anne-Marie’s desire. Although she claims to have stopped dreaming, this is not the truth; as the analysis continues, it turns out that she ‘has a clearly homosexual dream’. Anne-Marie says she is astonished at this dream, she does not understand it, and she has never had the slightest idea of being a lesbian (pp. 63–7). This is the first detail, then: her pregnancy appears to be offered as proof that she is not a lesbian. This is why Anne-Marie wishes to claim this pregnancy as the last word, the end of analysis. Such is the register of her desire, which will not be spoken.10 (iv) ‘Mother’ and ‘The woman’ The second point concerns a series of remarks Anne-Marie makes about her mother, and the meaning of the term ‘woman’—a term, according to Lemoine-Luccioni, around which all her client’s symptoms have been constructed. In spite of her recent marriage, the pregnancy makes Anne-Marie no longer a wife, the partner, in other words, of her new husband. ‘The pregnancy makes her a kind of universal woman, a woman for everyone’ (p. 64).11 Her analyst recalls another client who says, ‘I do not want to get

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married just to get married. I want to be a married mother for my mother’ (p. 67). In addition, Anne-Marie says there is something criminal about woman: ‘Woman is guilty.’12 ‘Anne-Marie’, her analyst says, ‘is balanced between not being a woman and dying in blood because woman is guilty of theft and murder.’ Her mother, whose husband was a widower when she met him, figures strongly at this point. According to AnneMarie, her mother ‘stole her father from a dead woman’ (p. 64). Anne-Marie, of course, is herself the product of this theft. A final detail: A little before Anne-Marie’s pregnancy, her mother brought her ‘a child’: in a delusional episode, this mother believed herself to be pregnant…. Anne-Marie was very shaken by this event…. ‘It is I who am pregnant, not my mother,’ she says. (p. 65) (v) The body, the signifier, totality We can elaborate here the meaning of ‘La femme’. In conceiving of the body as a relationship between the signifier and the organism, psycho-analysis points out that the organization of the body—which is not given at birth but which has rather to be constructed—is accomplished by virtue of a certain relation to the symbol. We cannot enter here into the important difference between the symbol and the image, but we can note that if the image plays a part in the construction of the body—and certainly it has a decisive role in anorexia—it is another thing to speak of the symbol, which, in so far as it gives rise to the constitution of objects, will play an organizing role in giving limits to the body, in allowing the subject to distinguish, in other words, between what is inside and what is outside. This is what gives the concept of erotogenic zones—those orifices by means of which the body establishes its exchange with exteriority—their decisive relation, not simply to the image, but to the symbol. It will be evident, I think, that in distinguishing between the symbol and the image I am suggesting the necessity of drawing a sharp line where there is normally some confusion. We hear people speak of ‘imagining’ a possible femininity, and ‘symbolizing’ femininity, as though these were roughly the same; we hear the concept of ‘the symbolic’ used as though it were something one could also do, in the sense that one is said to ‘symbolize’ things, or to ‘symbolize’ women in a fashion that will give a place to more than the mother, as Whitford suggests Irigaray wishes to do. This usual meaning of the word is not inappropriate, but it must be remembered that, within the psychoanalytic field, there is a distinction between the symbol and the image, a distinction Freud broached with his discussion of ‘word-presentations’ and ‘thing-presentations’—a distinction which concerns different modes of ‘presentation’ (visual and verbal), different modes of ‘re-presentation’ (memory), and a difference in register between a hypothetical level of ‘perception’ and the order of ‘consciousness’ as it is linguistically organized. Hence one cannot say that the generation of ‘images’ of women would automatically be a means of adding to and altering the ‘symbolic’ (an argument which also misconstrues the symbolic as a rough equivalent for ‘the socio-historical context’). As Irigaray herself says, the most positive and apparently affirmative images of women one can find ‘are capable of nurturing repeatedly and at length all the masquerades of femininity that are

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expected of her’ (p. 26/27). This is precisely why Irigaray finds it necessary to be unusually wary of the strategy of simply offering ‘positive images’, a wariness that separates her work from that of some other feminists.13 It also suggests that her conception of what it would take to ‘change history’ must be complicated accordingly. And clearly this conception will be shaped in part by the psychoanalytic understanding of how the subject’s relation to the past is altered, in such a way that the future may be something other than a repetition of that past. I cannot pursue this problem of the symbol and the image within the scope of this paper, and the importance of this distinction for the concept of history, but I can suggest two things. First, Lemoine-Luccioni is being careful with this distinction when, in effect, she refuses the image in favour of speech: thus, even if the structure of this speech is a question (man or woman?) difficult to bear, and not simply an affirmation (which one finds in some non-psychoanalytic forms of therapy), and even if this question is quite literally a grammatical structure that does not solidify—in the way the image sought by Anne-Marie offers solidity and takes the form of a totality—such a question is nevertheless to be preferred, Lemoine-Luccioni suggests, to the ‘quick fix’ that AnneMarie has attempted. Second, Irigaray frequently says—we have seen it in the quotation cited already—that her project is not to represent ‘woman’, but to ‘articulate, in speech or in writing’, something that starts precisely from her not beginning with the certainty that she is a woman.14 For the moment, let us only note this role of the symbol in the constitution of the body’s organization, that sense of its own limits that is necessary for what one might call the body’s containment within its skin. If this limitation of the body, through the mediation of the symbol, is not achieved in some manner, one can say that the ‘body’, strictly speaking, is not present for the living being.15 Let me cite Monique David-Ménard: The paradoxical relation between the hysteric and her body has become clearer: in a sense, the hysteric lacks a body…. [F]or a hysteric (male or female), certain zones of the erotogenic body—those whose symbolization refers to the first constitution of an object-relation [emphasis mine]—are in fact condemned to non-existence. But another aspect of the paradox comes to light here: if the hysteric lacks a body, it is because he or she passionately rejects the lack.16 We see here not only the figure of ‘La femme’, the idea of a totality which in fact does not exist (‘woman’, as Lacan puts it, is ‘pas toute’; or, in another formulation, ‘La femme n’existe pas’; or, in yet another, this sex is ‘not one’); we also see the relation between ‘La femme’ and the figure of the mother.17 David-Ménard continues: one sees here not only the failure of symbolization that makes the relation to the object, and hence the limitation of the body itself, unstable, but also a desperate declaration that there is nothing but body and that whatever lacks body must be disallowed. There is obliteration of the subject [emphasis mine] by a body that could be figured as a whole and adored as Dora adores the Madonna or Frau K…. The hysteric suffers in that she considers the body the only reality, she is unable to know the order of

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language. When the resources of the symbolic order take into account the void that inhabits a body, they do not suppress it; they give it limits. [See note 23] In this way, Dora comes to be dominated by the question ‘What is Woman?’—a question which seems to her to have only one overwhelming and one might as well say ontotheological answer, in the Madonna. In short, because she was unable to symbolize the ‘void that inhabits the body’, David-Ménard suggests, ‘Dora becomes passionate about the form of an adorable body, and her own body has no configuration, no limit.’ (vi) ‘Man or woman?’ Fourth point. Let us pause for a moment with this question, ‘man or woman?’ In the passage I cited, Irigaray is quick to point out that this is not her question, but one that is constantly posed to her, one that has a tendency to repeat itself: ‘all the other questions lead right back to it’. In response, she hands the question back. ‘It’s your question,’ she replies, which is precisely what Lemoine-Luccioni does, in a gesture we will shortly be tempted to call not only analytic but also ethical. To answer the question in this form, to say, ‘My dear sir, it’s perfectly clear that I am a woman,’ and thus ‘to start from the certainty that I am a woman,’ she says, would be to remain within a certain discourse and its truth. We are accustomed to saying that the neutral subject of philosophy (the ‘cogito’) is a metaphysical construction which obliterates the difference between men and women. Are we equally prepared to consider that sexual difference—‘man or woman’—and with it the name of woman, belongs to metaphysics? The simple assertion of sexual difference is not endorsed by these writers, nor is the solution of ‘androgyny’; what is stressed is a certain relation to the question, in the face of a forced choice, a ‘having-to-choose’ one or the other—a choice to which there is no alternative except the ‘no exit’, taken, for example, by Anne-Marie.18 Are we prepared, in other words, to think the question—not simply the proposition, ‘the subject is not neuter’, but rather that woman as such is ‘this sex which is not one’? Irigaray is sometimes said to assert sexual difference, but what is not remembered is that this refers not simply to the difference between the sexes, but to difference within them—a point that is made by Lemoine-Luccioni as well.19 It is a matter of universality: as I have tried to suggest above, the woman who takes the position of representing ‘all women’, who is, in other words ‘La Femme’, cannot be a woman.20 This is why Lacan says that The woman’—in taking the position of the universal—is one of the ‘names of the Father’.21 Let us not forget that this question—‘Am I a man or a woman?’—is precisely the question that structures hysteria. The hysteric lives an existence that is nothing other than the question: ‘What is a woman?’ In the United States, where psychoanalysis has a very different orientation than it has in France, it is said that hysteria is to be found almost exclusively among women. This is a somewhat strange idea, when we recall that Freud diagnosed himself as a hysteric. We find in the United States, however, no clear clinical means of distinguishing between male hysteria (where it is a question of identification, ‘man or woman?’) and homosexuality (where it is a matter of ‘object-choice’). We do not want to know very much about either one, and we find it convenient to lump things together, so as to disregard both. Consequently, ‘only women are hysterics’. It is perhaps

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worth noting here a superb example of the consequences of such judgements for our systems of classification. There is an amusing but purportedly scientific remark by John C.Nemiah suggesting a certain ‘theoretical’ distinction that would allow a minimal inclusion of the phenomenon of male hysteria—a clinical judgement that would amuse Lacanians in that it evidently places the male hysteric in a certain relation to ‘the law’: ‘Although predominately a disorder of women, it [hysteria] may be found in men [here we have the technical definition] when the symptoms follow an accidental injury that is the subject of litigation.’ This would be the medical judgement: ‘women’ are hysterical, whereas ‘men’ play football and get hurt, and that’s that; but if you put men into a law suit they ‘act like girls’.22 Here too, a certain metaphysics of the ‘one’ is firmly in place. This is not unrelated to our faith in the cult of the father. (vii) The other woman: the ‘one’ and the ‘other’ This brings us to the final point, which concerns her relation to the other, the other woman, her analyst. From her very first interviews, Anne-Marie declared that she wanted to become an analyst.23 This was her first demand, and her analyst refused. For LemoineLuccioni, the demand to assume this image, to become like her analyst, originates in the ego of her client, an ego that has been structured in accordance with an image that is maintained at the expense of Anne-Marie’s desire. Irigaray writes of the hysteric: ‘She has left only two options—mutism and mimicry, and both of these at once’ (p. 134/137).24 The demand to be an analyst is therefore linked to the other refusals of desire to which Anne-Marie has been subjected by the imaginary order to which her ego has been dedicated. The ego’s demand to become an analyst is therefore referred by Lemoine-Luccioni to the amenorrhea that preceded it, and the pregnancy that followed. Anne-Marie, who has stopped bleeding and who has been anorexic like her mother, now demands to be a woman like her analyst, and when her analyst says, in effect, ‘I cannot ordain you as a woman in my image’, Anne-Marie will try to bring the analysis to an end with her pregnancy.25 In short, she plays out her history between a ‘no’ and a ‘yes’: having unconsciously refused to be a ‘woman’, in so far as it appears to mean only ‘motherhood’ (Lemoine-Luccioni calls her symptoms ‘a “no” addressed to the mother’ (p. 62)), Anne-Marie now demands to be identifiable as a ‘woman’, in so far as it will put an end to her question. These identifications, the ‘no’ and the ‘yes’, have determined her in her work, her marriage, her symptoms, her analysis, and most of her life; but at the level of desire, which is signified upon the flesh, in the form of symptoms which she cannot articulate, but which she suffers, Anne-Marie is silently asking, without even knowing it, whether there is a place for her outside the imaginary positions she has been trying to assume at such great cost.26 That is the final point: for Lemoine-Luccioni, the properly analytic, and perhaps also the ethical response, is to recognize that this pregnancy must not be allowed to close the case, but should open again, in the dimension of speech, this question that Anne-Marie has been living in her flesh and silently repeating throughout her history (‘like a good hysteric’, Lemoine-Luccioni says), namely, whether she is a man or a woman. The kernel of the story, for her analyst, is that she is quite capable of being a little girl (anorexic and amenorrheic) or a mother (pregnant, or a child psychologist, or an analyst), but that between these two positions, neither of which is truly hers, ‘there is no place for the

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woman’ and her desire (p. 70). Irigaray, too, is guided by this relation to the other, which we see in the refusal, on the part of the analyst, to sanction the image of woman (‘La femme’) which Anne-Marie would like to assume—an image she finds in her analyst, and which would certainly be a gratifying and even seductive role for the analyst to play, as the mother figure strong enough to rescue the lost daughter and serve as her benevolent role model. The analyst’s refusal of her client’s demand, therefore, is at the same time the refusal to gratify her own ego, in favour of the desire of the other woman, an other desire for which there has never been any place. Let me pause again to cite the opening words of Irigaray’s essay, ‘When our lips speak together’: If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history…. If we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for centuries, as we have been taught to speak, we’ll miss each other, fail ourselves. (p. 205/205) From the example given by Lemoine-Luccioni above, I underscore two points: first, a link between the body and history (personal history, family history, social history); and second, an effort by the analyst to give to the woman, Anne-Marie, a future which will be different from that history, another femininity, the possibility of a future that is linked, in this case, to the analyst’s relentless and I would say ethical insistence upon difference, her refusal, in other words, to put in the place of her client’s sexuality the image of Woman that her client would like to assume as her own. Let us now turn from this example to a more general statement of the relation between biology and sexuality.

II SEXUALITY AND THE VITAL ORDER In its impetus, source, object and aim, human sexuality is unmoored from its grounding in the vital order.27 To speak of the body in its sexuality is not to speak of an organism that is determined by anatomy and the functions of reproduction. Consider these four terms briefly. Clinical work on the impetus or force reveals that no ‘mechanical’ account of energy, no ‘physics’ of libido, will account for the difference between instinct and the sexual drive. Freud’s discovery of the complications and ‘denatured’ character of sexuality in the human—from ‘abnormal’ to everyday instances, and including experiences of childhood which, from the standpoint of ‘reproductive maturity’, would be merely premature, whereas they are structuring in the psychic specificity of the child— this is a first indication of the reason for Freud’s differentiation between Trieb and Instinkt. This should clarify a point taken up in the title of Irigaray’s essay ‘The “mechanics” of fluids’, in which the word ‘mechanics’ appears in quotation marks (pp. 105–16/106–18). Is this a biological energetics of femininity? A reductio a soma that would produce on behalf of women just one more form of the maternal, pre-linguistic, anatomy-is-destiny argument, while leaving out of bounds all politics, all history, all questions of speech and the symbolic order? Is this what Irigaray, the psychoanalyst and philosopher, would have recourse to as a ‘political solution’? This is the conclusion to

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which many of her readers have been drawn, precisely because her discussion of the body is completely isolated from its psychoanalytic context, taken to be purely physiological, and thereby separated altogether both from symbolic and linguistic questions, and also from questions of historical determination.28 Her essay on the ‘mechanics’ of fluids, far from being a precipitous celebration of female anatomy, is dedicated for the most part to a question concerning the history of scientific discourse. The same issue is present in the title of another essay, ‘When our lips speak together (se parlent)’ (pp. 205–17/205–18). Here again, as the very title points out, anatomy is addressed in its primordial relation to speech, and not at all as an isolated, physiological, pre-linguistic domain that would have no connection with history and the symbolic. This does not keep her readers from reducing her account to biomechanics.29 However much Freud might initially have expected to provide a mechanics for the ‘energy’ of libido, then, it immediately became clear that the biological principles of selfpreservation, feeding, heat conservation and homeostasis—in short, the whole system of energy-regulation—may very well account for the activity of the animal (discharge of tension, satisfaction of needs), but it cannot describe the peculiar investments of psychic energy in the human animal.30 The principle of pleasure, which is initially linked to this model of ‘life’ and ‘energy’, in fact meets its limit in the peculiarly human ‘death drive’, which characterizes, not instinct, but sexuality in its relation to the signifier, a sexuality which goes ‘beyond the pleasure’ of the organism. This is why psychoanalysis distinguishes between the instinct and the drive, by demonstrating that the investments of energy in the drive are always bound up with representation. This is why Freud always saw sexuality as bound to questions of memory; this is what it means to speak of sexuality in connection with mechanisms, not just of energy, but of psychic inscription. Finally, this is why Irigaray must take up simultaneously the question of our cultural memory (for instance, the history of philosophy) with the question of the feminine: one cannot simply leave behind or forget a patriarchal past, in favour of some projected alternative, because one is one’s past, as one seeks a future. Thus, when it is a question of historical change, ‘We do not escape so easily,’ Irigaray writes, We do not escape, in particular, by thinking we can dispense with a rigorous interpretation of phallogocratism. There is no simple manageable leap outside it, nor any possible way to situate oneself there, simply by the fact of being a woman. (p. 157/162; original italics) As in analysis, then, it is a matter of re-engaging the past; and without this reengagement, the past only repeats, and the future does not come: In order that woman might reach the place where she takes pleasure as a woman, a long detour by way of the analysis of various systems of oppression brought to bear upon her is assuredly necessary. And pretending to fall back upon the single solution of pleasure risks making her miss what her enjoyment requires—the retracing of an entire social practice. (p. 30/31)

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As for the second term, the relation to the object, investigation of the perversions, especially fetishism, showed that the ‘object-relation’ is not fixed by nature and the reproductive function, but is highly variable. As always with Freud, the ‘exceptional’ case turns out to be guiding for the interpretation of the ‘normal’ case: Are we thus suggesting, since deviance is necessarily defined in relation to a norm, that Freud himself would rally to the notion of a sexual instinct [a biological norm]? Such is not the case…. The movement we sketched above, a movement of exposition which is simultaneously the movement of a system of thought and, in the last analysis, the movement of the thing itself, is that the exception—i.e. perversion—ends up by taking the rule along with it…that exception ends up by undermining and destroying the very notion of a biological norm.31 The effort of the analyst is therefore hardly to normalize this variability, channelling it back into the canal of biology; such normalization is not the goal of analysis, but on the contrary, one of the sources of neurosis that psychoanalysis confronts, as the example of Anne-Marie is intended to suggest. With respect to its aim, the satisfaction of pleasure, the sexual drive can be satisfied in the most diverse and indirect ways, through eating (the pleasure of which is not exhausted by satisfaction of the need for nourishment), speaking (the pleasure of which is not exhausted by imparting a message), looking (the pleasure of which is not exhausted by seeing), and so on.32 This is why we eat, long after we have had our fill, and why the anorexic can find that the oral drive comes fundamentally into conflict with the biological need for food.33 This is why we continue to look long after we have seen, with the fascination or captivation that characterizes our relation to works of art, to which we return long after we ‘know’ what they ‘look like’, as well as our relation to other forms of ‘the beautiful’—nature, the other person, and so on. There is a pleasure that goes beyond the information-gathering of the organism that behaves in response to stimuli. This is the detachment of sexuality from its grounding in nature, sexuality’s peculiar excess.34 In addition, as soon as the human subject enters into the world of others and has an image to uphold, pleasure will be henceforth referred, not to the satisfaction of needs (which is a matter of material necessity, and not yet what is called a ‘relation to the object’), but rather to the satisfaction of a desire for recognition, attention, love, or even power, intellectual distinction, moral superiority—all of which shifts the order of things into a complex relation with words, since the thing, as Hegel points out, cannot give recognition or love, condescension or disdain. In short, the question of the aim of the drive (pleasure), far from being based upon bodily instincts, carries human sexuality beyond the functions of reproduction and self-preservation, and into the order of representation, intersubjectivity and speech.35 And finally, with regard to the source of the drive, which Freud at times took to be the somatic basis, the organ or part of the body that originates the drive, this concept too is always submitted to the order of representation: this is the meaning of the concept of erotogenic zones in the human animal.36 As Monique David-Ménard writes in her book on the body and language in psychoanalysis:

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In these attempts to define the body that is at stake in hysteria, the reference to language makes it clear that the physiological body is not what is involved, even though the symptoms in question are not to be identified exclusively with discourse either. Instead, what is played out in the body takes the place of a discourse that cannot be uttered. Now this is the decisive turning-point; and when Freud speaks of thinking in terms of energy, when he speaks of pleasure in terms of energetistic [sic] or motor discharge, his formulations can no longer be accused of organicism. Elsewhere she adds: If we are to arrive at an adequate conceptualization of what is ‘offered to view’ in hysteria, we have to follow Freud…and free ourselves from what Gaston Bachelard called the substantialist obstacle, a realist approach to the body that grants ontological priority to physiological constructs.37 Analysis of the sexual drive, as distinguished from instinct, thus reveals the denaturalization of human desire. More precisely—since one cannot properly speak of an ‘originally natural’ sexuality that would (later) be distorted by external and therefore merely accidental deformation by the particular conventions of a given culture—the analysis of the sexual drive should lead us to speak of its original emergence as unnatural, as intrinsically constituted through an organization that is beyond the ‘law’ governing the organism alone. This is the ‘imperative’ of culture, the ‘symbolic law’ that is not to be mistaken for an ‘instituted law’, along the lines of a ‘contractual agreement’ produced in history by already given subjects. Rather, the symbol is constitutive for the human subject: without its relation to the symbol (a relation in which the subject is not master), the subject would not enter into history, and sexuality would be governed by the necessities of nature—it would not be susceptible to history. One must therefore distinguish between the particular historical forms that a given culture may institute for sexuality (this is its history), and that inevitability of symbolic inscription that is constitutive of the human animal. In the absence of an adequate recognition of this symbolic inscription as constitutive, one will always be tempted, even in the name of ‘liberating’ it, to return sexuality to its purportedly ‘natural’ (and indeed ahistorical) foundation—which is what some readers have mistaken Irigaray for claiming to do, in her discussion of ‘the feminine’. This conflation of the symbolic, as organizing—in every culture and for every human society—human sexuality, on the one hand, and, on the other, the institutions of patriarchy that arise in time, for a given culture, is what has allowed Elizabeth Grosz to deal so harshly, and I think mistakenly, with Kristeva’s work. With the collapse of the symbolic into the concept of a particular form of social organization, one will also immediately find a collapse of the ‘function’ of the Mother and the Father, two positions which will be filled in, given a particular meaning in one way or another, for every infant born of two sexes, and, on the other hand, the meaning of the ‘woman’ and the ‘man’. In my account of Lemoine-Luccioni, I have been following the crucial distinction between the maternal and the feminine, a distinction that has been lost for this particular subject (there being only the place of the mother); but it would be possible also to distinguish

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between the paternal function and the meaning of masculinity. This is something Kristeva has in fact been exploring, but Grosz’s reading tends, in my view, to identify the function of the third term, which is structural, with the position of the ‘man’. There is no question that this identification is almost inevitable in our culture, and may even be called one of our pathologies, but this does not mean that Kristeva herself should be seen as asserting it, when her work is one of the more eloquent and careful efforts at exploring alternatives to this quick collapse of the ‘man’ into the ‘paternal function’—a collapse no less worrying than the equation of ‘woman’ with ‘motherhood’.38 One begins to see here what the link is between the symbolic and the category of history, and the deficiency of the claim that the ‘symbolic’ is ‘ahistorical’: in fact, it cannot be a question of ‘returning to history’ against the notion of the symbolic, since it is the inevitability of the symbolic that makes history not only possible, but inescapable, for the human animal.39 This is something that Kristeva has understood very clearly, and her assertion of the necessity of the symbolic can be construed as a ‘capitulation to patriarchy’ only if one does not distinguish, as Kristeva does, between the inevitability of prohibition and taboo that seems to attend the animal that speaks, and the particular content that is given to this inevitability of historical inscription, in one or another society. The fact of the symbolic is therefore not to be identified with any particular institutional arrangement, so much as it is a concept used to resist naturalistic discussions of sexuality, to insist upon the susceptibility of human sexuality to history, and to underscore the fact that the inscription of the body in accordance with the law of the symbol is not one that the human subject can master. The concept of the symbolic, then, stresses the essentially historical nature of sexuality while at the same time refusing to support the traditional thesis that the autonomous, conscious subject can be placed at the origin of this history, as its cause or moving force. This should be compatible with those theories which recognize what we might call the machinery of language, the autonomous character of the technology that structures our bodies, alters our vision, our motion through space, our ways of perceiving and gathering information, the spaces we inhabit, the entire language and heraldry of our existence, in accordance with structures that are in no way the products of autonomous subjects, since each subject is as much an ‘effect’ of this machinery, the logic of which is not in our hands. This is why Irigaray takes so seriously women’s relation to speech and writing (the ‘symbol’)—an issue which might be thought to be secondary to material and economic change, or to the task of revising particular institutions (this is what we normally understand as working for ‘historical change’), but which is in fact the condition for the possibility of women having a history in the first place: The ‘liberation’ of women requires a transformation of the economic, and thus necessarily passes through a transformation of culture, and its operative agency: language. Without this interpretation of the general grammar of culture, the feminine will never have a place in history. (p. 151/155) With regard to the question of history, then, in so far as it concerns the drive, the ‘development’ of sexuality is not at all reducible to the ‘psychological’ phenomenon of ‘adapation’, popular among some theorists of child development, according to whom the

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originally autonomous person ‘learns’ (consciously) to control his or her ‘natural’ inclinations, and comes to accept the ‘cultural rules’ of the game of civilization. Such a view starts with an already given subject that subsequently encounters the social order, whereas the psychoanalytic conception of the subject is very different, holding as it does that the subject is not originally given in an autonomous form, but begins in the symbolic. This is one reason why one cannot properly reduce the symbolic to historical conditions exterior to the individual, then; and it suggests why Irigaray insists upon that process of going back over the old ground, which is integral to the ‘possibility’ of the future. Thus, what Freud lays down as the peculiar and primordial organization of the human animal, in accordance with the unnatural law of the signifier, provides the basis of what Irigaray will discuss as the symbolic order, the order in which human sexuality is arranged through a con-figuration of desire and representation that places the subject beyond the system of instinctual need. Consequently, when Irigaray speaks of ‘the body of woman’ and ‘feminine sexuality’, she is always engaged with a highly variable, nonbiological, multivalent, culturally organized and historically specific phenomenon.40 This is not at all to say that there is no biological dimension to the human being, or that sexual difference is to be conceived without any reference to the biological difference between the sexes, as though it were purely a product of linguistic convention and socio-historical determination. It is precisely this historicist notion that the concept of the symbolic puts in question, as a notion that does not take history seriously enough, in so far as it tends to maintain a faith in the ideally uninscribed or ‘free’ subject, as the agent of historical change. A purely ‘culturalist’ position, then, would be as reductive and unconvincing as the idea that cultural practices have no effect upon the ‘natural’ meaning of sexual difference.41 Neither of these positions is taken by Irigaray, though both have been misleadingly attributed to her. It is not a question, therefore, of eliminating the biological in the conceptualization of the body, but of recognizing the peculiar organization of sexuality in the human being, its inscription and translation and distortion within the dimension of desire—a dimension which is not at all confined to the personal domain of psychology, but is thoroughly political, historically situated, and contingent. This contingency, however, does not at all mean that it is subject to change at will, since the subject is historically determined, and subject in its very desire to the order it desires to change. Once again, it is a matter of rethinking history itself, and the way in which the future can be ‘unwritten’, freed from the script that has already been put down.42 This question of history will be our next concern. From this analysis I underscore two points: first, Irigaray’s focus on sexuality cannot be understood as a reduction to the vital order of biology; second, because sexuality is always inscribed within an order of representation, the biological organism can never serve as an origin, a means of returning to a primordial or prehistoric source, on which the meaning of femininity might be constructed: sexuality is always already marked by history.43 It is clear that Irigaray’s discussion of the body (and the feminine imaginary) is one that takes history seriously; and we can say, moreover, that to take history seriously is to recognize the difficulty of leaving it—either for a prehistoric origin (in the natural body, in the pre-Oedipal, or in a conception of matriarchal societies that would have preceded our history), or for a more attentive description of the present, a phenomenological attentiveness to the immediacy of so-called real experience, as though this could yield up a region unaffected by history, or, finally, for a future that one

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produces by willing it into existence. When it is a question of desire and of our historical determination, history is not so easily dispensed with, because the will that wills, that makes its demands, is produced by the history it wishes to contest, just as Anne-Marie’s demand for a future as a mother or an analyst or a woman proves to be a repetition of the past, burdened by the very history she seeks to avoid. Her demand for a future, a future that would go beyond the symptom, that would free her of anorexia and give her a new life, turns out to be a repetition of the past. That is precisely why she stands in need of the other woman. As the example of Anne-Marie is meant to suggest in a preliminary way, then, Irigaray’s work confronts us with a question regarding the future, a future which does not appear simply because it is willed. As Margaret Whitford writes: ‘[S]ome writers on Irigary have’ seen her work as ‘a precipitate celebration of the female imaginary, which bypasses the problem of its existence (whether it exists and what kind of existence it might have).’ There is a ‘sense in which the female imaginary’, she suggests, ‘does not yet exist…. This would be a non-essentialist thesis; the female imaginary would be, not something lurking in the depths of women’s unconscious, but a possible restructuring.’44 The term body, properly understood, is not reducible to a biological phenomenon, because it belongs within the field of sexuality. Obviously, this does not mean that the references to physiology are ‘only metaphors’, with no relation to the flesh: it means that this physiology is subject to sexuality, in the sense of being differently structured, differently organized, than what would otherwise be its counterpart in nature. The body, therefore, this organic and sexualized field, is an imaginary body. Only the imaginary body can be subjected to the kinds of symptoms we find in Anne-Marie, symptoms which are physical and real, and which at the same time cannot be reduced to the ‘organic disorders’ treated by the medical community. This point is also stressed in my opening claim that what is at stake in the case discussed by Lemoine-Luccioni is a question of how to think together (a) a body that does not reduce to the organism, and (b) a history the specificity of which does not reduce to the general order of social conditions. This is the question of the relation between the signifier and the flesh.

III THE PROBLEM OF TEMPORALITY Once this concept of the imaginary body is understood as a physiological reality that is not to be reduced to the apolitical dimension of biology, then it becomes evident why Irigaray not only can, but must speak of the body and the symbolic order at one and the same time. With the introduction of the symbolic, we pass more decisively into history— a connection that is, however, attended by additional complications, above all, complications of time that are central to Irigaray’s work but almost universally neglected by her readers. The basic issue is to understand the juncture between the imaginary and the symbolic, and this will also be to raise the question of the relation between the body and history. This is one problem. Again, Margaret Whitford has suggested that this is an area of Irigaray’s work that is in need of elaboration: the readers who mistakenly see in her work an essentialism, psychic or biological, cannot rightly neglect—or pretend that Irigaray neglects—‘the symbolic, linguistic dimension in which sexual identity may be constructed’. This is certainly correct, and the relation between the body and history is

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clear enough; but an additional difficulty, for many of her readers, is to recognize that this sense of ‘symbolic’ organization is not to be equated with the usual notion of external cultural conditions. This is a second and somewhat different problem, for it introduces the task of rethinking history itself. The basic difficulty here is to recognize that the symbolic is not a set of conditions external to the subject, and that, as a result, the subject who labours to change the world is already its product. The notion of a ‘change in the symbolic’, understood as ‘outside’ the subject, must therefore be supplemented by a ‘change in the subject’ as well. How is this change to occur? And perhaps more pointedly, ‘who’ is it that ‘makes’ this change? This is where the theme of the relation to the other, so central to the analytic relation, and so closely linked to the question of ethics and difference, becomes important. Let us follow this issue through some specific passages. From the psychoanalytic point of view, the symbolic is also a problem within the subject.45 This is to say that Irigaray, as an analyst, is particularly attentive to the fact that the social conditions in which the subject is formed are precisely formative for the subject, so that one of the tasks Irigaray sees as crucial for feminism is recognizing that women, who must engage in the effort to obtain equal rights (her example), at the same time cannot suppose that this struggle will give them access to the identity they may have, or wish for, as women: Women must of course continue to struggle for equal wages and social rights…. But that is not enough: women ‘equal’ to men would be ‘like them’, therefore not women. Once more, the difference between the sexes would be canceled out, misunderstood, concealed…. That explains certain difficulties encountered by the liberation movements. If women allow themselves to be caught in the trap of power, the game of authority, if they let themselves be contaminated by the ‘paranoic’ operations of masculine politics, they have nothing more to say or do as women. (pp. 160–1/165–6) Thus, it is not only clear that she is fully engaged with questions of history; it is also apparent that as an analyst she is particularly wary of claiming to perform a critique of the ‘symbolic’ understood as exterior social conditions, since there is the additional problem of determining ‘who is speaking’ during this critique. Women must struggle for equality then, on behalf of historical change, but there is also the question of where and who ‘woman’ is in this struggle, and indeed whether ‘woman’ even appears on this stage, since the particular female subject is not as such necessarily also in possession of what it means to be ‘a woman’ (‘a woman’, since there is not one ‘Woman’) given her historical determination. As Irigaray puts it in This Sex, the feminine keeps secret. Without knowing it. And if woman is asked to sustain or reanimate man’s desire, the request neglects to spell out what it implies as to the value of her own desire. A desire of which she is not aware, moreover, at least not explicitly. (p. 26/27; my italics)

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And even if she were aware, Irigaray adds, the desire she might claim would still be ‘capable of nourishing at length all the masquerades of “feminity” that are expected of her’ (p. 26/27). The same point is made in ‘Questions’. There may be a sense in which ‘woman’ remains uninscribed, excessive, somehow outside everything that has been made of her on the stage of history; but this does not automatically mean that actual women have access to it: ‘doubtless she needs to reenact it in order to remember what that staging has probably metabolized so thoroughly that she has forgotten it: her own sex’ (p. 148/152; my italics). This task of ‘reenacting in order to remember’ is the (rather analytic) problem of ‘speaking as a woman’. One might argue that the question of woman—where or who woman is—coincides quite precisely with this question of ‘excess’, in the sense that the question of woman’s ‘freedom’ from the culture in which she finds herself is this question: what, of her, if there is anything that escapes patriarchy, presents itself, yet without presenting itself as what has been made of her? One could follow, in other words, the question of the feminine in Irigaray, by taking up the more or less phenomenological question of presence and its relation to what exceeds presence. The theme runs throughout: in spite of her ‘exchange value’, woman is also ‘supplementary’ (un en-plus) to her position as she is circulated in the market (p. 175/179); Irigaray will ‘move back through the masculine imaginary’, showing how woman appears ‘implicated in it and at the same time exceeding its limits’ (p. 157/163–3); and therefore it will be a matter of ‘analyzing not simply the double movement of appropriation and disappropriation in relation to the masculine subject, but also what remains silent’ (p. 156/161); woman has ‘fulfilled the role of matter’, and she thereby ‘functions as the resource…but also as waste’ (this is linked to the ‘divinity’ of woman) (p. 147/151); women’s ‘gestures are often paralysed, or part of the masquerade,’ she writes, ‘except for what resists or subsists “beyond”’ (p. 132/134). Finally: ‘And there you have it, gentlemen, that is why your daughters are dumb’…. And interpreting them where they exhibit only muteness means subjecting them to a language that exiles them at an ever increasing distance from what perhaps they would have said to you, and were already whispering to you…l’affemme. Zone de silence. (p. 111/112–13) The symbolic, then, cannot be understood as an exterior social order that an already available subject named ‘woman’ might seek to reform. The sense of history must be complicated accordingly: far from neglecting history, Irigaray is providing a critique of our familiar conception of history, and the problem of change itself. The remarks made by Lemoine-Luccioni suggest that Anne-Marie’s very desire to resolve the question of ‘woman’ for herself only produces a repetition of the problem with which she began. In a similar way, metaphysics repeats in the very forms most designed to eradicate it. The logic of such repetition (‘That explains certain difficulties encountered by the liberation movements’) cannot go unconfronted. This is why the task for the analyst is to put her client in a position from which she can begin to speak differently. The conjunction of psychoanalysis and politics begins here.

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Irigaray therefore does not claim to speak on behalf of the ‘essence’ of woman. She writes: ‘I could not, I cannot install myself just like that, serenely and directly, in that other syntactic functioning—and I do not see how any woman could’ (p. 133/135). Any number of instances make this clear: the exploitation of women, she writes, is so much a part of our culture that even the critique of this culture has no way of beginning except from within, and with critical tools that are themselves formed by the cultural order they would contest. ‘Exploitation’, she writes (in ‘Women on the market’), ‘is so integral a part of our socio-historical horizon that there is no way to interpret it except from within this horizon’ (pp. 167–8/171). Elsewhere, with regard to the history of philosophy, which she reads critically, to be sure, but which at the same time she in no way simply claims to abandon, or to provide an ‘alternative’ to, Irigaray insists: ‘There is no simple manageable way to leap to the outside of phallogocentrism, nor any possible way to situate oneself there, that would result from the simple fact of being a woman’ (p. 157/ 162; her italics). (i) A question of method Obviously, this attentiveness to historical determination will have consequences for her own method, in so far as it is psychoanalytic (see her sceptical remarks on the preOedipal and its supposed analogy with the prehistoric, as a way of identifying ‘woman’ prior to her social determination—a gesture toward pre-history that is attributed to Irigaray but profoundly foreign to her (pp. 46–8, 122–3/48–9, 123–5)). Far from claiming to articulate the truth of ‘woman as such’, independent of her historical situatedness, by using what one might take to be the privileged method of psychoanalysis, she suggests that one begin with the difficulties of psychoanalysis in its effort to find the truth of woman. This hardly means repudiating psychoanalysis, in favour of another ‘truer’ method, untainted by history—one that would capture woman ‘in herself’, apart from what has been made of her in the course of time. Precisely because of history, she refuses to ‘leap’ outside of metaphysics to the truth of woman, and instead is led to take up psychoanalysis all over again. Will psychoanalysis, then, yield up the ‘truth’ of woman? Can I sketch the content of what that other unconscious, woman’s, might be? No, of course not, since that presupposes disconnecting the feminine from the present-day economy of the unconscious. (p. 123/124). At this point she is asked whether, if psychoanalysis has no privileged access, another less tainted region might serve better, as a more authentic or uncontaminated point of access, namely, ‘the relation of women to the mother and the relation of women among themselves’. She is asked whether this arena of ‘women among themselves’ might provide access to ‘woman’: Would that produce a sketch of the ‘content’ of the ‘feminine’ unconscious? No. It is only a question about the interpretation of the way the unconscious works. (p. 124/25)

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The link between the problem of history, the problem of her own specific historical determination, and her use of psychoanalysis, should thus emerge clearly as one of her central concerns. She neither abandons all the techniques of patriarchy, because of their affiliations with a cultural order she questions (to do this would be to ‘leap outside’, to neglect her own historical situatedness, as she is sometimes wrongly accused of doing), nor does she simply ‘take up the tools’ of analysis in order to reveal the hidden truth of woman (to do so would be to claim an access to ‘woman’ that is not possible, given her own symbolic determination, and it would be to take over the psychoanalytic method as unproblematic): ‘To do that,’ she writes, to present woman, to claim access through psychoanalysis to ‘woman’, would be to anticipate a certain historical process, and to slow down its interpretation and its evolution, by prescribing, as of now, themes and contents for the feminine unconscious. (p. 123/124) The relation of method to history could not be clearer: ‘The tool is not a feminine attribute. But woman may re-utilize its marks on her, in her’ (p. 147/150). Not only is her work profoundly engaged in history, but that engagement itself reflects upon the methods she uses, so that far from simply appealing to psychoanalysis or abandoning it for some ‘elsewhere’, she takes its difficulty with the question of woman as calling for a revision of psychoanalysis—a revision she finds necessary in part as an analyst, as one who has learned to listen for what history has left in shadow: So long as psychoanalysis does not interpret its own entrapment within …a certain type of discourse (to simplify, let us say that of metaphysics)…it cannot raise the question of female sexuality. (p. 124/125) Elsewhere she makes unequivocal her relation to the methods she employs: isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always led us away, led us astray…from woman’s path? In order to re-open woman’s path, it was therefore necessary to note the way in which the method was never as simple as it purports to be. (p. 146/150) If, given her historical determination, there can be no immediate and unproblematic access to the feminine, what, then, is the significance of the phrase ‘speaking as a woman’? In her work, she cannot claim access to the essence of woman, in part because of her own historical determination, and in part, because woman is not understood as a category with one form, but is internally differentiated, ‘not one’. Consequently: Speaking (as) woman is not speaking of woman. It is not a matter of producing a discourse of which woman would be the object, or the

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subject. That said, speaking (as) woman, one may attempt to provide a place for the ‘other’ as feminine. (p. 133/135; my italics) While the historical dimension of her work cannot be neglected, then (and it has been), it is nevertheless important to recognize that Irigaray does not simply speak of the symbolic as the order of cultural history that determines the subject from without—again, the usual argument that Copjec calls ‘the argument from construction’, an argument that takes the politics of feminism to be, along the lines of a rough analogy to Marxism, an effort to change the historical order. This view of the symbolic, taken (non-psychoanalytically) as a register of social conditions, too quickly leaves behind the problem of the relation between the imaginary and the symbolic. We know that Lacan, to the infuriation of many of his readers, insisted that the symbolic, strictly speaking, is not the equivalent of ‘the historical order’, despite its being popularly understood in this way. This view of the historical order as a set of determinations that have been produced by humans in the course of time, conditions that determine the subject but that also promise a certain liberation, since after all they have been produced by human beings and are therefore subject to revision, however much they may determine us—this anthropocentric view of history as something that structures us, but that we in turn have produced and can therefore restructure (Man as the maker of all things)—is precisely the foundation of a powerful tradition of nineteenth-century historicism, grounded in the thesis that ‘Man makes himself’, a humanism that is deeply plagued, as Hegel was, by the fact of historical determination, but that promises, on the very basis of this determination, to provide the human being with a way out, a way of putting himself (and the masculine is intended), as a conscious subject, at the centre of that history that would otherwise override him. This is the strategy of ‘modernity’ that has been so brilliantly and exhaustively described by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les choses. And Irigaray is fully aware that one cannot provide a genuine interrogation of the subject of metaphysics without relinquishing, indeed giving an analysis of, and one might even say mourning, this humanistic understanding of history and historical change.46 As I suggested in the opening section in a concrete way, psychoanalytic feminism not only questions the idea that the ‘body’ is biological; it also and simultaneously questions the idea that ‘history’ can be put in the hands of the conscious subject, since it links Anne-Marie in her very historical determination to an unconscious subject who does not know what she wants (a position of ‘ignorance’ that is not simply negative, as Irigaray suggests in her refusal to ‘start with the certainty that I am a woman’). This does not mean that someone else could speak for her (and Lemoine-Luccioni refuses this role, when it is offered to her). But it means that the question of finding her voice is made into a central problem, rather than being taken for granted as the starting-point for historical change. The discontinuity between desire and knowledge—in particular the supposed ‘subject of knowing’—and between the trajectory of the subject of conscious actions and, in contrast to this, the history that repeats in spite of those actions, cannot easily be overcome. This is the reason why psychoanalysis, in its very structure and functioning, radically depends upon the other—not the ‘freedom’ of the analysand to produce a new future, nor the ‘knowledge’ of the analyst to provide a future on behalf of the client, but

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the radical experience of alterity that makes psychoanalysis into a relation we can call, not scientific, not methodological, but ethical. I am suggesting that there is in Irigaray’s work a connection being developed between ethics and the concept of history, which is nothing other than the formation that develops between subjects, the ‘community’, in which sameness and difference are articulated.47 The problem is therefore how to understand historical change as the ‘time’ of a community that is not the linear, narrated time that has been developed in the nineteenthcentury forms of humanism. This is the context for approaching her discussion of the past, present and future, and the possibility of a time in which sexual difference would appear differently. With this focus on the relation between the imaginary and the symbolic, then, it becomes clear that, as Whitford says, ‘biological essentialism (in the form in which it is usually attributed to Irigaray) is a deterministic and often simplistic thesis which makes change impossible to explain.’ I think it should be possible to add at this point that the usual notion of ‘symbolic determination’ (in the form in which it is often found in cultural theory) would also make change impossible to explain. The question, then, is truly one that involves a rethinking of time, of how history happens: it cannot be adequately ascribed to ‘developmental’ theories that would argue along the lines of nature, but neither can it be convincingly understood as an unfolding produced by the willing subject of humanism. What Irigaray shows in her rethinking of history, in short, is that the critique of the subject goes hand in hand with the argument against anatomy.48 Neither of these two points of orientation for sexual difference—neither the argument from biology nor the argument from construction—can give an adequate account of history and historical change, because neither of them has an adequate conception of subjectivity in its relation to the symbol. We should now be in a position to elaborate the question of time more accurately. (ii) The evidence of the present (Who are we really?) Can one say that historical change will be possible by focusing more carefully on the present, on what is available in the here-and-now of immediate experience, as a site of evidence for the femininity that has been passed over? This is a tempting line of thought, and Irigaray will certainly not rule it out altogether. But she does register some reservations. For to say that the feminine can be retrieved in the immediacy of experience is not to take history seriously enough. What presents itself here, in this or that example, which you may wish to see as an instance of the neglected feminine, Irigaray says, in effect, is not as free of history as you might think, for it turns out to be yet one more image produced by the symbolic order. The most ‘nurturing’, ‘positive’, ‘empowering’ and ‘supportive’ images one can find (but none of these epithets comes close to Irigaray’s vocabulary, or if they appear, it is under a burden of suspicion and wariness, for decisive reasons, as we shall see) will all, according to Irigaray, prove to be captivating ‘ruses’, ‘capable of nurturing at length all the masquerades of “femininity” that are expected of her’ (see note 13). It is clear that, for Irigaray, whose doctoral training is in philosophy and linguistics, the question of what woman is, where woman is, how and whether woman presents herself, cannot be adequately addressed by the appeal to empirical evidence, which will only provide products that belong at least in part to patriarchy. The

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feminism that is engaged in a critique of science has a point of contact here, with respect to ‘evidence’, in that the discourse of science is not automatically accepted by either as transcending its socially specific situation. I would also suggest that the reason her vocabulary excludes a whole series of words that are common fare in the AngloAmerican traditions of feminism, which are largely not psychoanalytic—or, when psychoanalytic, dominated by varieties of ‘therapeutic’ models that work towards ‘empowering’ the ego—is that these words all serve a conception of group dynamics and identification that too often effectively excludes difference and otherness, and demands ‘bonding’ and ‘mutual support’ in their place. Thus, the refusal we saw at the outset, by Lemoine-Luccioni, to play the role of the autonomous and powerful woman who might serve as the benevolent model for her client, is repeated by Irigaray in relation to her readers who might wish for her to speak on behalf of women, or to demonstrate and lay claim to a repressed femininity to which others might then equally lay claim. I would also add that the impatience, and often the rage, expressed in the reception of writings by Irigaray, and Kristeva as well, could very easily be shown to be aggression directed not so much at the supposed theoretical shortcomings of these writers, as at the refusal of these writers to play the role of Woman that is demanded of them. Irigaray does not claim to produce positive images of women on the basis of immediate evidence of the present, then; but neither would the idea of a femininity outside patriarchy be of interest to her. One of the principal reasons for ‘certain difficulties encountered by the liberation movements’, she suggests, and the main reason she has not identified with any group, is that such groups too often purport ‘to determine the “truth” of the feminine, to legislate as to what it means to “be a woman”’ (p. 161/166). What is worse is that these efforts, in Irigaray’s judgement, amount to precisely a slowing down of history—an impediment at precisely the point where one believes change is being produced. Accordingly, speaking of Speculum, she reminds us that it ‘is obviously not a book about woman; and still less a “studied gynocentrism”’: Such naïve judgments overlook the fact that from a feminine locus nothing can be articulated without a questioning of the symbolic itself. (p. 157/162). It ought to be clear, therefore, that her work on the feminine imaginary is to be understood not as a claim to occupy ‘the feminine’—if such a project were even desirable—but as ‘a possible restructuring’, in Whitford’s phrase, ‘suspending and exploring’, as Meaghan Morris puts it.49 Her refusal to ‘install [herself] just like that’ in a femininity that would present itself as such, as the (essence of the) feminine, is the clearest possible evidence that Irigaray’s interrogation of sexual difference goes hand in hand with her critique of the metaphysics of presence. The matter of taking history seriously, then, and recognizing that what one designates (or even imagines: fantasy is clearly no less prey to symbolic determination) as the feminine is likely to be already bound to the structures one wishes to contest. The history of metaphysics does not come to an end upon demand; in fact, the demand for its end belongs to metaphysics as one of its basic features. Evidence of the feminine in the present, then, is not altogether ruled out by Irigaray, but it is met with considerable wariness.

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When it comes to ‘affirming the feminine’, therefore, Irigaray takes history very seriously indeed, to the extent that even the most immediate, empirical, private, intimate or bodily experience gives only the most problematic access to a femininity that might show itself through the sedimentations of history. As Irigaray puts it: if ‘multiplicity’ is now put forth in the name of woman, ‘must this multiplicity of feminine desire and language be understood as shards, scattered remnants of a violated sexuality?’ Let me focus very closely on this question. Multiplicity, she suggests, may perhaps be put forth as a definition of ‘the feminine’— assuming (contrary to fact) that a definition is being sought; but if this multiplicity is put forth in the name of woman, are we to understand this as her essence or rather as an effect of her historical position? Are we to understand that ‘the feminine’, when we look closely at the evidence of the present, shows itself as essentially multiple, or are we to understand that multiplicity is what has been made of her (‘shards, scattered remnants’)—multiplicity, marginality, waste or excess, which can now be celebrated as somehow capable of contesting patriarchy? This is the question Irigaray is asking. We can no longer pretend that the evidence of the present will free us of history, just as we can no longer pretend that a reference to physiology will free us of symbolic determination. (iii) The question of origins Let us proceed slowly here: this remark is put forth as a question, as if to say that perhaps there is no access to a femininity that would be pure, free of all historical determination. Perhaps even ‘femininity as excess’ is only what has been made of woman, ‘scattered remnants’ rather than her ‘nature’. Perhaps it is therefore not a matter of returning to a pure but repressed origin (the pre-Oedipal or the Semiotic), either, since it is not a question of a ‘prehistory’ that one might aim to recover or liberate. Certainly this would be in keeping with the psychoanalytic understanding of repression, namely, that the repressed is not something which exists and then is subsequently covered over in such a way that one might then return to it and liberate it. (This may once have served for the notion of ‘oppression’, but even this notion would oblige most writers currently to acknowledge that the oppressed cannot be simply liberated to their rightful ‘earlier’ condition, since the experience of oppression is constitutive for them.) More basically still, the linear narratives we construct around the notion of repression take no account of the temporal complications by which the human psyche is constructed in a series of repetitions and retroactive constructions that disturb the familiar concept of time. This is what is at stake in the claim that the purportedly ‘original’ bond with the mother, the nurturing unity that one might like to place at the origin, as a ‘stage’ that is subsequently lost, is rather, from the psychoanalytic point of view, a ‘state’ that comes into being for the child only on the condition of being lost. The ‘mother’ of primary narcissism, which can represent for the subject a utopia that once was, did not exist as such at the time, but came into being as an ‘object that has already been lost’. It can certainly function, like the Garden of Eden, in orienting the desire of the subject (or a culture), but the strictly mythological status of this purportedly ‘real object’ must be confronted. This is one of the issues at stake in Irigaray’s conception of history. The ‘absent object’ in its relation to the maternal function is described very attentively by Michele Montrelay (see note 23). Without going into this problem, we should be able to see that the repressed does not

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exist and then ‘suffer’ repression, but is rather produced in the movement that separates it from itself: it does not predate that movement, but is constituted by it. So we must say, with Irigaray, not that there is something original called ‘woman’s pleasure’ which is then repressed, but rather that woman’s pleasure is repressed. This is what she means when, after speaking of woman as multiplicity, Irigaray asks, ‘Must this multiplicity of feminine desire and feminine language be understood as shards, scattered remnants of a violated sexuality?’ In this case, feminine sexuality in its ‘scattered’ and historical existence would not be simply a ‘fragmentation’ to be overcome, a ‘fallen’ state to be redeemed. ‘Multiplicity’ would not be the prehistoric essence of the feminine, or even a definition put forth by Irigaray as an answer to the question of the feminine as such, but would rather be what the feminine has become historically, in its factical existence. Women cannot take refuge, she is suggesting, in the romanticism of origins that would seek an unrepressed zone of prehistoric femininity. This point is made rather directly by Jacqueline Rose, who writes (in regard to Kristeva) that ‘archaic images of the mother, for all their status as fantasy, are not without their effects…if we follow this through, we find ourselves having to relinquish an idealized vision of the lost maternal continent.’50 The problems of time that underlie these considerations have been all too little recognized by her readers. (iv) Imagining (and not imagining) the future Irigaray’s question at this point is therefore ‘must this multiplicity of feminine desire and language be understood as shards, scattered remnants of violated sexuality?’ The cultural order in which she lives, Irigaray adds, ‘certainly puts woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily…as waste, or excess’ (p. 29/30). I stress that this is stated in the form of a question: Isn’t this what multiplicity means? Irigaray responds to this question by saying ‘The question has no simple answer’ (p. 29/30). Certainly, on the one hand, if we look at every available piece of evidence, we do not find a true ‘femininity’ that would reveal itself beneath the repression, but rather femininity as repressed, and this, as Irigaray says, ‘puts woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily’. There is no simple answer, however, for on the other hand, one might ask what the feminine might actually be if it could be articulated apart from its existence as repressed, what, in other words, might remain of woman, apart from what she has become.51 The conditional verbs she often uses are important here, indicating, as the grammarians put it, ‘a condition contrary to fact’.52 Thus, after writing that the feminine is nothing other than what it has become, that the feminine is its history through and through, she adds, on the other hand, in the future conditional: ‘But if the feminine imaginary were able to deploy itself, if it could bring itself into play otherwise than as scraps …would it represent itself, even so, in the form of one universe?’ (p. 29/30) Would it present us with the original nature that has been lost, the ‘Mother’ that has been abandoned, or the truth of the feminine as such? Irigaray’s answer is ‘No’. If the feminine were able to deploy itself otherwise than as scraps, any representation of itself as ‘the feminine’ would amount to one more reinscription within patriarchy; it would amount, in Irigaray’s words, to ‘a privileging of the maternal over the feminine. Of a phallic maternal at that’ (p. 29/30; my italics). I stress all this in detail in order to suggest just how vigilant and wary she is—about the quest for origins, the privileging of the maternal,

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the identification of the feminine with maternity, and indeed about even the possibility or desirability of claiming to speak on behalf of the feminine, not only because she is taking history seriously (in spite of many critical misreadings), and not only because she is refusing to essentialize and universalize woman (in spite of many critical misreadings), but also because of the extreme difficulty of access to any theoretical position, any methodology, that would be free of historical sedimentation. This is a problem of method, which I have addressed in this section in its relation to the question of historical determination. Once the severe difficulty of working, from within history, toward a critique of history, is appreciated, it is no longer possible to believe that Irigaray’s work represents a ‘return to the female body’, or an ‘expression of the feminine imaginary’, or a ‘dangerous essentialism’, or ‘a matter of purely linguistic indulgence’ that has ‘no political relevance’. If the sequence I have outlined from biology to the concept of the body as sexual, to the meaning of the imaginary as bound up with representation, and then finally to the dimension of history, is convincing, then it should be clear that Irigaray’s purported elaboration of the feminine imaginary neither claims to identify, nor even wishes eventually to identify, an essential femininity, much less one that would be rooted in a pre-social physiology.53 I would like to stress that the sequence I have outlined is not an historical or genetic one, as though the biological were to be understood as an origin upon which human sexuality would be subsequently elaborated, this sexuality in turn being eventually repressed, and deferred or sublimated through representation, and thus, as a consequence, entering into history. The sequence is not temporal in this way, but is rather a series of strata which are always in play for Irigaray whenever she speaks of ‘the feminine’ in order to interrogate its determinations, its specificity, its possibilities. From this standpoint it perhaps becomes clearer that the charges of essentialism and ahistoricism, if they are ever of use, would, from Irigaray’s position, describe the work of those who believe they know (quite directly, and on the basis of real experience or historical ‘evidence’) what women are, and who only wish to claim for this figure— woman—the same rights and privileges that other humans have, and that have been denied her. There is no prejudice whatsoever against the struggle for equality, the discourse of rights, and strategies of empowerment. There is only a question as to who it is that seeks these rights, and whether the rights themselves are, so to speak, the right rights. Especially in the area of legal studies, feminist theory has repeatedly confronted the disturbing fact that even if equal rights are accorded, they place women inside a network of determinations that do not accomplish what are at least arguably desirable ends. The ‘subject’ who acquires rights is also given the sometimes dubious status of a neutral, or rather purportedly neutral but in fact masculine, position, so that, for example, the argument for pregnancy leave appears weak because it cannot be ‘distributed equally’, without regard for gender. In short, the cause of equality is in no way repudiated, but is simply seen by Irigaray as being in some respects insufficient; and thus her work is brought to bear upon a questioning of the subject, and the philosophical tradition that has established it—not in order, as is sometimes said, to ‘deconstruct’ subjectivity (as though that meant simply dispersing subjectivity in a random fashion, which is not at all the function of deconstruction), but rather in order to interrogate precisely what the social and historical meanings and dangers of ‘subjectivity’ are, rather than taking for granted its innocence and desirability.54

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What I am suggesting, then, is that the kinds of reservations expressed by some readers are due to a drastic misconception, according to which the biological body, or the so-called feminine imaginary, are abstracted from this set of historical and discursive problems, and then substantialized as autonomous entities (‘the body’ or ‘the imaginary’), with no sense of the cognitive models in which these terms are produced, discursive and historically precise models which Irigaray is analysing. It is this premature isolation and substantializing of her terms which produces a situation in which Irigaray’s readers almost absurdly characterize her as endorsing precisely the kinds of notions Irigaray herself regards as symptomatic and in need of criticism. In short, the words she offers in order to analyse something like the feminine imaginary are problematic words, words she scrutinizes as they emerge, words which, however much they might disclose, are always prey to the discursive order in which they arise—an order that is always likely to belong to patriarchy. She has no other words: that is her theoretical problem, and her very real, historical, experiential determination. It is the affliction about which, and out of which, she writes, writing words that she must continually be reluctant to endorse as her own, not finding herself in them, and yet not having any other resources. This is the question of who woman is—a question that her work is about, and that her writing enacts in the very movement of her thought. Commonwealth Centre, University of Virginia

NOTES 1 Partage des femmes (Paris: Seuil, 1976). See the article by Lemoine-Luccioni excerpted as ‘The fable of the blood’ in Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. and trans. Stuart Schneiderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). References will be to this translation and will appear in the text. 2 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edn (Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), p. 67 (emphasis mine). They also note that the disorder is found 95 per cent of the time in females, and that it carries a mortality rate of 15–21 per cent, adding that ‘many of the adolescents have delayed psychosexual development, and adults have a markedly decreased interest in sex.’ 3 In the interview ‘Questions’, Irigaray writes: ‘When I speak of the relation to the mother, I mean that in our patriarchal culture the daughter is absolutely unable to control her relation to her mother. Nor can the woman control her relation to maternity, unless she reduces herself to that role alone.’ Luce Irigaray, Ce sex qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977). This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). References will henceforth appear in the text, French pagination first, English second, here, p. 140/ 143. Translations are occasionally modified. 4 This is a point that has been made both by Joan Copjec, in ‘Cutting up’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Theresa Brennan (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 227–46, and by Jacqueline Rose, in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986); see ‘Feminism and the psychic’, esp. pp. 7–9, and ‘Femininity and its discontents’, esp. pp. 83–93. 5 I have tried to show elsewhere why the analogy between the term ‘symbolic order’ and the idea of ‘socio-historical conditions’ is seriously flawed from the psychoanalytic point of view (which is not to say its use in other ways is illegitimate, but only that the distinction between the psychoanalytic understanding of the symbol and that of cultural studies must be acknowledged), in ‘On Fate: psychoanalysis and the desire to know,’ in Dialectic and Narrative, ed. Tom Flynn and Dalia Judowitz (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992).

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6 See This Sex, pp. 45–9, 135–8/45–9, 136–40, not to mention Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (Montréal: La Pleine Lune, 1981). 7 Eleanor Kuykendall, for example, writes: The ethical imperative that Irigaray would draw…is to cease to pursue the psychic separation between mother and daughter required by patriarchy’, and to ‘consider the possibility of a matriarchal ethic to replace the patriarchal imperative to separate mother and daughter’. ‘Toward an ethic of nurturance: Luce Irigaray on mothering and power’, in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), p. 269. I would argue virtually the opposite: in our culture, the more pressing need is to make possible a place for the ‘woman’ that does not reduce to that of the ‘mother’. 8 As Margaret Whitford—whom I would like to thank here for a number of helpful remarks on a draft of this paper, and for her generous encouragement—has written, ‘there is no suggestion that communities of women…will automatically be idyllic.’ In fact, she says, ‘women suffer from an inability to individuate themselves, from [what Irigaray, in L’Ethique de la difference sexual (Paris: Minuit, 1984), calls] “confusion of identity between them”…. The problem is well known from Nancy Chodorow’s work, but Chodorow and Irigaray are quite different…. Irigaray accepts the clinical view that women have difficulty in separating from their mothers. However, she presents this psychoanalytic data as a symptom in the symbolic order. She argues that the clinical picture also applies to metaphysics; in metaphysics too, women are not individuated: there is only the place of the mother’ (pp. 110–12; italics mine). See ‘Rereading Irigaray’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, pp. 106–26. For some brief remarks on Chodorow and Lacan, see Toril Moi, ‘Patriarchal thought and the drive for knowledge’, in the same volume, pp. 189–205. 9 We recall Freud’s remark, in ‘Some observations towards a comparative study of organic and hysterical paralysis’ (1888), that the hysterical symptom itself does not follow the lines of anatomy, but rather those of ordinary language: what is paralysed, he notes, is ‘the arm as far up as the shoulder’, or the common idea (one might say image) of the parts of the body. Does the symptom in its non-organic determination, then, correspond to the image of the body, or to the language? 10 This is not to say ‘Anne-Marie is a lesbian’, just like that (it is not what she says, either). Rather, there is a question there, which is also refused: child (not yet ‘woman’) or mother (but not ‘woman’) or even man (that is: not ‘woman’, see note 24)—this is the series of responses among which Anne-Marie vacillates. In other words, one must not reduce her question to a choice, for this is precisely what she has attempted to do by marrying—a solution which does not close the case. The point is, then, that hysteria and homosexuality are not one and the same (see ‘Man or woman?’ below). This is why it is correct to insist that a woman can love another woman as a woman, but also why it is incorrect to say that psychoanalysis treats homosexuality as if one partner were always in effect ‘masculine’, and the other ‘feminine’. 11 One might place here the remarks by women, either pregnant or with infants, to the effect that ‘Everyone has a right (or claims the right) to talk to you when you’re pregnant.’ The child makes her ‘the mother’—as though with this ‘symbiosis’, the woman is for a time not a particular person, a woman, any longer. This period disappears of course as soon as the ‘child’ is old enough to appear as a ‘person’. 12 The singular is used advisedly: it is a matter of the meaning given to La femme. 13 See Elizabeth Gross, ‘Philosophy, subjectivity, and the body: Kristeva and Irigaray’, in Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, ed. Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), pp. 125–43. Irigaray ‘wishes’, Gross writes, ‘to create discourses and representations of women and femininity that may positively inscribe the female body as an autonomous concrete materiality…. Irigaray’s aim is to destabilize the presumed norm… to speak about a positive model or series of representations of femininity’, and her work therefore has ‘a political goal absent in Kristeva, the creation of

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autonomous images, models and representations of women and femininity’ (pp. 138 and 143). 14 See section III, on the notion of the ‘future’. Of course one might try to find an apparent ‘privilege’ of the verbal over the image, here, which could then be shifted so as to imply a ‘privilege’ of the symbolic over the imaginary (it is in fact never a question of such a hierarchy, since both elements are constitutive of the subject’s very being), and one might then take such a view to imply, through another shift, a privilege of the father over the mother (it being assumed that the symbol and the image can be gendered in this way). This is Jane Gallop’s concern in ‘Keys to Dora’, In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 200–20. But it should be clear that the relation between the image and the symbol is not (a) a relation in which it is a matter of choosing one over the other, since they are equiprimordial—both necessary, yet not identical to each other, nor (b) a relation which can be narrated according to a linear history in which the image would be superseded by the symbol. This view has also been used not only to misconstrue Irigaray as positing an autonomous and ‘prehistoric’ femininity that might be recaptured; it has also been used, I think mistakenly, to interpret Kristeva’s account of the relation between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. 15 I have written elsewhere (see note 5) on the word ‘limit’, which marks the difference between the totality of the body given with the image, and the unity of the body given with the register of lack. This word plays a decisive but unacknowledged role in Lacan’s text, The Rome Discourse’, particularly in the second section, ‘Symbol and language as structure and limit of the field’, and in the third section, where the link between ‘limit’ and ‘death’ is clearly marked. Jacqueline Rose has given some brief but precise remarks on this distinction in ‘The imaginary’, in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, where she discusses unity in connection with repetition and the topology of the torus. This topic is also addressed by Michele Montrelay (see note 23). 16 Monique David-Ménard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 130–1. 17 Marie-Hélène Brousse has suggested, on this basis, the possibility of a relation between motherhood and the structure of perversion—an argument which would be worth pursuing here, and which she presented at the Kent State conference on Psychoanalysis and Literature in 1989 and 1990, and at the Ecole Freudienne in Paris, in 1990. 18 Other instances of this ‘no exit’ are possible: in her presentation of a case of transexualism at the Saint-Anne hospital in Paris, in 1990, Dr Gorog stressed that her (anatomically male) client was not to be regarded as a man who wished to become a woman, but was rather a woman who was born into a man’s body that she wished to be rid of. This is, at least as a starting-point, a question of identification rather than of (biological) ‘truth’. One central concern, for the analyst, was to keep the question open—neither to convince the subject that s/he should not want an operation (the attempt at ‘normalization’), nor simply to agree to the operation, since the details of the case (the subject as a child had been sexually abused by an uncle and male school teachers, and had a complex relationship with his grandmother, who held black masses, and who is connected with his belief that he is the reincarnation of Veronica Putnam, a Dutch witch) suggested that such an operation would not in fact resolve the client’s problem, which appeared to be less a ‘hysteric’s’ problem of identification than a problem of psychosis. For such a subject, the possibility of the question is a crucial point of orientation, more important than a secure but entirely meaningless choice. 19 As Rosi Braidotti points out, the importance of the term ‘difference’, in current discussions, has to do not simply with the critique of neuter subjectivity and the assertion of a difference between men and women; it also has to do with insisting upon differences between women. ‘The politics of ontological difference’, in Between Feminism and Psycho-analysis, pp. 89– 105.

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20 Willy Apollon, Daniele Bergeron and Lucy Cantin, on the basis of their work with psychotics in Quebec, have suggested that Marilyn Monroe’s history was essentially that of a psychotic who protected herself against a psychotic break by a precarious identification with ‘The Woman’, an identification which was lost when her career began to unravel. Their work was presented at the Kent State conference on Psychoanalysis and Literature in 1989 and 1990. 21 See Catherine Milliot, Horsexe (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1983), ch. 4. This is what Lacan, from a different starting-point, proposes in Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), with the account of the feminine relation to the law, in which ‘universality’ has a different function than for masculinity. See ‘A love letter’, in Feminine Sexuality, ed. J.Mitchell and J.Rose (New York: Norton, 1982). 22 See ‘Psychoneurotic disorders’ in The Harvard Guide to Modern Psychiatry, ed. Armand M.Nicoli, Jr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 328. 23 Here again we see Anne-Marie’s relation to an ego ideal that coincides with the relation to the mother, and structures the history we are addressing, her passage, in other words, from being a child to being a woman (an analyst, a mother). Now this relation to the mother is replayed in the relation to the child, confirming our remarks on the problem of generations of women. One can see this with Anne-Marie, whose own pregnancy has the effect of replacing a relation she sought with her analyst: you must make me a ‘woman’, Anne-Marie in effect demands, and when she is refused, ‘What I do not give her,’ Lemoine-Luccioni explains, ‘she takes from me with force’ by her ‘proof’ of womanhood. There is a beautiful and rather disturbing account of the moment of giving birth, by Michèle Montrelay in L’Ombre et le nom (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), pp. 119–46, in which the body’s delivery of the child is shown in its connection with our theme of generations of women. In this passage, it is not a question of biological birth, but of the obscure process by which the woman becomes a ‘symbolic’ (rather than an imaginary) mother, thereby allowing her child to be born. The passage, then, not only shows how the ‘moment of becoming the mother’ is both a relation to the child and a replaying of the new mother’s relation to her own mother; it also marks the transition from ‘real’ mother (at the level of physiological fact) to ‘symbolic mother’, and it is this particular aspect which entails a distinction between the image and the symbol, that is to say, which entails a relation to lack. I cite an excerpt of a passage that is worthy of more attention:

The child coming into the world as the descendant of a lineage can do nothing other than describe the senses that are impressed upon him by a structure he knows nothing about. How does he make his first move into the order that manipulates him, an order that is Other and omnipotent? How does he learn the rules of the game? Does he grasp them like a parcel of knowledge? On the contrary, everything begins when an index of these rules, through repetition, is detached and posed as an object that can only signify itself. An example, borrowed from Freud: the cry, he says, inscribes a trait and brings a being to life [this is the mark, the trace, the residue or remainder that will subsequently, nachtraglich, take the form of a past that was never present]. Freud detaches the infant’s pleasure or pain from the organic night to take them outside: toward the ear and thus toward the other who hears. What we see there is a manifestation of the Bejahung [the primary affirmation], where the life drawn from the shadows is concretized into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects. However much the child is dependent on the sensation he experiences, this object is no longer confused with the

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stupidity of the body. It has henceforth become Other: not an object of reality, but a hallucinated object, which as such places a being.

One sees here the first constitution of an index, not an object of need such as the breast is sometimes taken to be, but a mark, constituted through repetition, and therefore strictly speaking not an empirical thing, but a first signifier, described by Freud in the child’s play of the fort/da game. This, in Montrelay’s words, is the moment that detaches the infant’s pleasure from the organic night, and takes it towards the other, in a movement that will forever mix the substance of the flesh with the substantial shadows of hallucination and fantasy. Montrelay continues: ‘This hallucinated matter, never again equal to living matter, is the breast: not the real breast, but the breast as part object, never possessed—woven of clouds of representation lacking limits, suspended out of time.’ The question is, how can this index, this mute signifier, detached from the organic night, this relation to an absence with which the subject begins to identify (since the subject comes out of the shadow, into being, by virtue of this relation to the lack that the mother permits, in Montrelay’s phrase), but in a fashion that is as yet without limit, ‘woven of clouds of representation’—how can this be referred to another signifier, taken up in articulation? How can this unspeakable displacement from the ‘organic night’, this primordial anxiety of the speaking being, be given limits, through articulation? This is the question of the ‘relation to the mother’. Montrelay continues: To permit the hallucinated breast to exist for the child is to open for him a place other than the one that concerns the satisfaction of need. His desire begins to take form, inseparable from an unspoken suffering. How can he support this suffering, which he can say nothing about? The love of a child is doubled with an anxiety that is much more difficult to sustain, in that it repeats another anxiety, obscure, ungraspable, lived by the mother with her mother during the first months of life. A woman is also impotent to say something at the moment of giving birth. The loss of the breast reproduces the loss of the placenta.

We see here, then, a repetition involving the way in which the mother lived the birth of her child and her own birth, which is replayed during that of her offspring, but not in the

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same way. It is as a speaking being that she experiences real loss this time. When she loses herself as the substance of jouissance that exceeds, in containing them, the edges of the body and its objects, seized by the infinity of the Other, who is ‘not whole’—at this moment a woman becomes a symbolic mother. We know the story by Hofmansthal entitled ‘The Woman without a Shadow’, and the truth that it postulates: the woman who does not have a shadow because her mother does not give her one cannot have children. In the Shadow where a woman gets lost, there is also her own mother, ‘absent’ and real. At the moment of giving birth, the real mother is encountered. That is where we are, from mother to daughter, transported and lost in the Shadow. From mother to daughter, because one does not live the birth of a boy and girl in the same way. [emphasis mine]

I close this long quotation. See ‘The story of Louise’, in Returning to Freud, pp. 75–93. 24 As Lacan puts it ‘In this labor [of analysis] which [she] undertakes to reconstruct for another, [she] rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made [her] construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from [her] by another.’ Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 42. 25 This point—her relation to the other—should be developed in connection with the idea of love, in particular transference-love (a topic crucial to Kristeva’s recent work). At this juncture, the analysand prefers a relation of love and identification, both in regard to the person of her analyst, to a relation of desire, since the latter would threaten the imaginary structure of her ego—a structure which is beginning to decompose, which is the reason for the sudden anxiety she shows at the prospect of a continuation of the analysis. As there is not time to develop this here, let me only cite Freud’s 1914 paper, ‘On narcissism: an introduction’ (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. 14, p. 91). Freud speaks here of

choosing a sexual ideal after the narcissistic type which possesses the excellences to which [she] cannot attain. This is the cure by love, which [she] generally prefers to cure-by-analysis…[she] usually brings expectations of this sort with [her] to the treatment and directs them toward the person of the physician…partially freed from [her] repressions…[she] withdraws from further treatment in order to choose a love-object, leaving [her] cure to be continued by a life with someone [she] loves. We might be satisfied with this result, if it did not bring with it all the dangers of a crippling dependence upon [her] helper in need.

See also Octave Mannoni, Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 134–8, et passim. 26 There are a number of complications that I have had to omit here, one of which is that, in her relation to men, Anne-Marie has also been able to adopt what she herself speaks of as the

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role of the man—another position that keeps to one side the question of her desire. ‘[S]he becomes virile’ (p. 66), Lemoine-Luccioni writes; ‘when she is not maternal, Anne-Marie becomes a man’ (p. 70). 27 See especially Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Standard Edition, vol. 7) and The instincts and their vicissitudes’ (Standard Edition, vol. 14). See also Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psycho-analysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), esp. chs 1 and 2. 28 Janet Sayers has written that for Irigaray, ‘Femininity is essentially constituted by female biology’; Kate McKluskie has written that Irigaray puts forth an ‘anatomical determinism’, and ‘is able to deny the need for language’, thereby returning us to ‘the ghetto of inarticulate female intuition’. It should no longer be possible to speak, as Lisa Jardine has recently done, of Irigaray’s ‘reintroduction of feminine biology’, or to call it, as she does, ‘a kind of essentialist strategy’, which she then reproaches as a ‘catastrophe’ that ‘reinforces all that has been oppressively said about women as body’. This reading, which does not even understand in the most basic way what the word ‘body’ means, is simply irresponsible, a non-reading, in which Irigaray is nowhere to be found. Janet Sayers, Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Perspectives (London: Tavistock, 1982). Kate McLuskie, ‘Women’s language and literature: a problem in Women’s Studies’, Feminist Review, 14 (Summer 1983). Lisa Jardine, ‘The politics of impenetrability’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis. 29 I cannot help noting here the superbly symptomatic response of a colleague of mine who, upon reading this particular essay for the first time, was so incredulous as to what was being disclosed about ‘femininity’ and its non-phallic form of auto-eroticism—the purpose of the essay seeming to lie quite unproblematically in the straightforward anatomical proposition, ‘Woman “touches herself” constantly’ (again, the quotation marks go unread (This Sex, p. 24)—and so oblivious to the role of representation in Irigaray’s thinking, that he responded by exclaiming, ‘Why, this is quite incredible, and being a man I could not tell if this continual self-stimulation was true, so I had to ask my wife!’ My suggestion was that, no, what he had to do was not run from the text to the empirical verification that seemed to be his object of desire, but instead read Irigaray’s writing and try to understand what she was saying to him. After all, she is referring not as much to his wife’s genital experience, as to the cultural situation in which he, an academic, still receives Irigaray’s words by referring them to his wife in this way—so that Irigaray must respond (to those who continue reading her text), ‘One would have to listen with another ear’ (p. 29). Otherwise his efforts to take up the question of feminine sexuality will go on appealing to a pre-linguistic, empirical anatomy which gives his wife nothing to say except, ‘Yes, and the vertigo of this auto-erotic anatomy no doubt accounts for why I am so irrational, darling.’ It is incredible that one could still read the first words of the title—‘When our lips’—and stop for an empirical check upon one’s wife before reaching the last words—‘When our lips speak.’ And what about the word ‘lips’, which are made—by whom, here, what listener, what ears?—to take up an anatomical destiny without further ado? What Irigaray would perhaps teach us to see in this domesticopolitical vignette is that the approach to the question of femininity here remains mired in a non-psychoanalytic conception of sexuality that impedes all access to Irigaray’s questions, while at the same time demonstrating in the form of a social comedy the real power of representation that Irigaray is trying to speak to—though without always getting a hearing. 30 Although there is a relation between the self-regulation of the organism and the satisfaction of pleasure, one must be careful here not to collapse the idea of pleasure entirely into the idea of biological life functions: Freud makes a distinction between the interests of selfpreservation and sexual libido very early, in order to indicate that pleasure is linked to a whole series of psychoanalytic problems that set it against the animal maintenance of life— problems including auto-affective pleasure, narcissism, and a number of economic problems in the relation between the ego (as ‘love-object’) and the external world. Pleasure is

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therefore understood as continuous with biological needs only by those who refuse the Freudian position which sees a conflict between these two ideas. It should not be difficult to see, however, that the human ‘organism’ has some capacity to seek pleasure at a cost to its organic self-maintainance—as the advertisement suggests which depicts a man pointing a handgun toward his brain by way of the opening in his nostril, a depiction labelled ‘cocaine’. To see pleasure as continuous with the biological understanding is not a psychoanalytic position, then; but it is the position taken by ego-psychology, for which the ego is seen as the balancing point by which the subject maintains a ‘state of equilibrium’ between external reality and internal impulses—and in this view the ego is taken as an ‘adaptational’ function of the subject. This is not at all, however, the position of Irigaray and Kristeva, for whom there is a distinction between sexuality and the satisfaction of organic needs. For these feminists, the domain of sexuality and the problem of pleasure must not be modelled on the needs of the organism, but must be seen as in conflict with it, and indeed as revealing a number of complex problems in the ‘unnatural’ formation of identity. 31 See Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 23 (original italics). See also Foucault’s remarks on the function of the ‘norm’ in The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), ch. 10. 32 On speaking, see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, pp. 83–5; on the distinction between seeing and looking, cf., for example, Lacan’s remarks in his discussion of the gaze, in Seminar XI (1964), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), and Stuart Schneiderman, ‘Art according to Lacan’, in Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 2, 1 (Spring 1988); and on eating, Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts, pp. 165–6. 33 Susan Bordo has collected some interesting material on anorexia from the journals of students, but the use that she makes of the traditional opposition between the spirit and the flesh, as a conflictual pair that makes sense of the anorexic’s relation to her body—a relation of attempted mastery or transcendence, on her account—differs from the psychoanalytic argument which does not see the ‘flesh’ as equivalent to ‘matter’—precisely because the body is constituted in a much closer relation to the signifier, and because the ‘spirit’ or psyche is nothing but embodied, as the clinical material suggests. This is not to say that the traditional dichotomy is psychologically irrelevant to the anorexic. ‘Anorexia Nervosa: psychopathology as the crystallization of culture’, in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), pp. 87–117. 34 See Parveen Adams, ‘Versions of the body’ in m/f, nos. 11–12 (1986), pp. 27–34. 35 See the discussion of the concept of energy in Jacques Lacan’s Seminar II, 1954–55, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forester (New York: Norton, 1987), ch. 5, esp. pp. 61–2. 36 See Freud, ‘Papers on metapsychology’, Standard Edition, vol. 14, p. 148. The concept of erotogenic zones concerns the organization, not originally given, of the body, both in its surface (the skin, and mucous membranes) and internally (organs, phantasized or organic); it is generally also a concept that addresses the exchange between the internal and external, and is therefore constitutive of the subject’s distinguishing between itself and the outer world—this is one register of the stress placed on the oral and anal drives as dealing with ‘exchange’ and object-relations. Laplanche and Pontalis write: ‘Although the existence and predominance of definite bodily zones in human sexuality remains a fundamental datum in psychoanalytic experience, any account of this fact in merely anatomical and physiological terms is inadequate. What has to be given consideration too is that these zones, at the beginning of psychosexual development, constitute the favored paths of exchange with the surroundings, while at the same time soliciting the most attention, care—and consequently

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stimulation—from the mother.’ The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. D.Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 155. 37 Hysteria From Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, pp. 3, 22. 38 See Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), ch. 3; Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990), chs 3 and 6; and note 13. 39 The philosophical stakes should be clear: any discussion which sets Platonism against historicism thereby takes over uncritically the very categories of metaphysics (in particular the ‘temporal’ and ‘eternal’) that orient our current discussion as to whether gender is ‘cultural’ or ‘biological’, a discussion the shortcomings of which Irigaray is working to overcome. For a discussion of this problem in another context, see Rodolph Gasche’s remarks on historicism in ‘Of aesthetic and historical determination’, in Post-structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge and Geoff Bennington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 139–61. 40 See J.-A.Miller, ‘How psychoanalysis cures according to Lacan’, Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 1, 2 (Fall 1987), pp. 4–30, esp. 19–22. I would also note that my use of the word ‘feminine’, here and throughout the essay, is not meant to be restricted to the cultural aspects of ‘femininity’, aspects to which the word normally refers in English. The English language has the word ‘feminine’ for the so-called ‘constructions’ of gender, and the word ‘female’ for the natural and biological aspects of sex. The French has only one word, ‘féminité’, which makes it unclear whether nature or culture is the reference. I want to preserve this ambiguity, and accordingly I use the word ‘feminine’ as an equivalent for the French word. 41 Joan Copjec, in ‘Cutting up’, objects to what she calls ‘the argument for construction’ for similar reasons:

Consider, for example, certain analyses of the hystericization of women’s bodies, of the ‘invention of hysteria’. According to these, an investigation of turn-of-the-century medical practices…will tell us not how hysteria was studied, but, more accurately, how it was constructed as a historical entity…. In these examples, the social system of representation is conceived as lawful, regulatory, and on this account the cause of the subject [who wants] what social laws want it to want. The construction of the subject, then, depends on the subject’s taking social representations as images of its own ideal being, on the subject’s deriving a ‘narcissistic pleasure’ from these representations.

Copjec claims that this argument cannot give an adequate account of desire, that is to say, of the discrepancy between (a) the subject who is constructed in accordance with the ideals of the symbolic order, and (b) discontent, symptoms, pain and lack. Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, pp. 228–9. This objection points out that in order to explain how the subject can at the same time suffer the consequences of accepting these ideals, the ‘constructionist’ has recourse only to a vague notion of a violated ‘human nature’ which is entirely unsatisfactory. The suggestion is that in current discussions of gender there is generally an impasse in the binary system which simply

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opposes the social to the natural, and Copjec argues that this impasse is more adequately overcome by the triad of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real that is found in Lacan. 42 See John Forrester, ‘…a perfect likeness of the past’, in The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Derrida, Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 90–6. 43 The same difficulty regarding the ‘prehistoric’ presents itself in Kristeva’s conception of the Semiotic and the Symbolic: it is tempting to pretend that these two domains can be put into a temporal sequence that we can then narrate as a history of repression, as though the Semiotic were a ‘prehistoric femininity’ that is subsequently obliterated by a Symbolic dimension which would be temporally later; but in so doing, we would obliterate altogether one of the central tasks that Kristeva is exploring with this distinction, namely, the task of conceptualizing the non-linear temporality that belongs both to poststructuralist accounts of the ‘end’ of metaphysics and historical change, and to the psychoanalytic conception of personal history, psychic time, and human ‘development’—a conception which offers us a whole series of temporal problems ranging from its view of memory, group identifications, the relation to ancestry, and nachtraglichkeit, to the thesis that the unconscious does not know the time of history. The Semiotic and Symbolic cannot be ordered sequentially, then, but must be seen as mutually constitutive and equiprimordial. The problem here, then, is to understand, not how the (original) Semiotic is replaced by the (later) Symbolic, according to a narrative time (a reading that will always be nostalgic), but rather how the conjunction of these two gives rise to the possibility of time. One of the misfortunes suffered by some feminist writers is that their philosophical concerns are sometimes neglected, in favour of what is taken to be their more ‘immediately relevant’ claims—while it should be clear from their texts that these writers claim, as immediately relevant and pressing, the need for a rethinking of the basic concepts of the western tradition which has been formative for women. One would have to explore this temporal question in connection with Kristeva’s essay ‘Women’s time’, to begin to address this adequately, but for our purposes here it is enough to insist that the body, in Irigaray’s work, cannot serve as a prehistoric origin any more than the Semiotic can in Kristeva, because the body is always already involved in a historically determinate order of representation. See Tina Chanter, ‘Female temporality and the future of feminism’, in Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 63–79. 44 ‘Rereading Irigaray’, p. 117; p. 120 (emphasis mine). 45 I in no way mean to suggest that Irigaray is only psychoanalytic in her point of view, or that she has no questions about her relationship to some aspects of psychoanalytic theory—for it is perfectly clear that one of her central concerns is to reread the traditional psychoanalytic literature with the wariest of eyes, as she does other texts. I only mean to highlight here some features of her work—since she is a trained and practicing analyst, and since the reception of her work has hitherto tended to focus on other aspects of her work. 46 One can perhaps appreciate at this point why Foucault, in The Order of Things, for all his severe reservations about psychoanalysis, nevertheless situates it, not with Marxism and phenomenology, as the most tortured and comprehensive forms of the modern philosophy of ‘Man’, but far rather as a ‘counter-science’ which repudiates the figure of ‘Man’ as a metaphysics, without particularly knowing where it is going, as this figure erodes. 47 See Iris Marion Young, ‘The ideal of community and the politics of difference’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J.Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 300–23. 48 ‘Rereading Irigaray’, p. 108. 49 ‘The pirate’s fiancée: feminists and philosophers, or maybe tonight it’ll happen’, in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. 50 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Julia Kristeva: Take two’, in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, p. 159.

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51 The ‘remainder’, taken first and one might think ‘negatively’ as waste, has also been important to Irigaray’s work on what of woman is ‘excess’, that is to say, what is not inscribed, what does not enter entirely into symbolization, what escapes the system that has been given for its articulation. Derrida has discussed this notion of ‘remainder’ in relation to Hegel’s thought, and Irigaray has developed the idea in regard to the Hegelian notion of ‘speculation’ which is clearly meant to include Lacan’s work; an adequate account would have to address the fact that le reste, the remainder, which is not inscribed, is precisely linked by Lacan to the real. 52 Meaghan Morris has noted this, against Monique Plaza: ‘Irigaray’s text itself infuriatingly resists definition as feminine; for her the feminine is conditional and future tense, an interrogative mood…the feminine is suspended and explored.’ See ‘The pirate’s fiancée’. 53 One might elaborate here Kristeva’s interest in the pre-Oedipal relation to the mother (and the ‘father of individual pre-history’), showing that this ‘period’ is for similar reasons not simply a period in time which subsequently is repressed, as many genetic accounts of child development suggest, but is rather a moment which perpetually returns, as do the anal drives, for example. This is why, for both those who argue for the ‘end of metaphysics’ and those who work in psychoanalytic theory, the question of how history happens cannot be detached from the problem of repetition, which is precisely what characterizes the drives and metaphysics. 54 Arleen Dallery indicates the stress French feminism tends to place upon the task that would remain after (or of course while) equal rights and recognition are—more or less, tentatively—secured: ‘Not only has woman’s voice or experience been excluded from the subject matter of western knowledge, but even when the discourse is “about” women, or women are the speaking subjects, it still speaks according to phallocratic codes.’ See ‘The politics of writing (the) body: Ecriture Féminine’, in Gender/Body/Knowledge, ed. Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 53.

MICHAEL PAYNE

Derrida, Heidegger, and Van Gogh’s ‘Old Shoes’ Derrida’s debt to Heidegger is immense. In Positions he says, ‘What I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger’s questions’; and in a later interview, published in the same volume, ‘Heidegger’s text is extremely important to me; …it constitutes a novel, irreversible advance all of whose critical resources we are far from having exploited’. Indeed, Derrida claims that all of the essays he published up to 1971 constitute ‘a departure from Heideggerian problematic’; they display a kind of ‘fanaticism’ in their calling into question ‘the thought of presence’ in Heidegger.1 Heidegger’s concepts of origin, fall, propriety, proper meaning, proximity to the self, body, consciousness, language—especially etymologism in philosophy and rhetoric— Derrida puts into question. Yet he is careful to distance himself from those who have reduced Heidegger to German ideology between the wars or to antisemitism. During the last fifteen years, Heidegger’s importance for Derrida has in no way subsided. Unlike Derrida’s readings of Plato, Rousseau, Poe, Mallarmé, Freud, Saussure, Genet, Artaud, Lévi-Strauss, however, his readings of Heidegger have been more thematic than textual, focusing more on single words or concepts than on their full textual embodiment.2 The notable exception to this procedure is the long final section of The Truth in Painting, entitled ‘Restitutions of the truth in pointing’. Here Derrida offers a meticulous reading of Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art and his most sustained meditation on a Heideggerian text. ‘Restitutions’ is one of Derrida’s most complex texts. It takes the form of a polylogue for an indeterminable—‘n+1’—number of voices. Although Derrida’s headnote identifies the voices as female, one is explicitly revealed to be the author of Margins of Philosophy.3 Quotations or allusions to Glas and The Post Card, the closest textual relatives to ‘Restitutions’, also disrupt the dramatic frame. One speaker has a fixation on the question, ‘What is a pair?’, insisting, ‘I came here [as a woman] to ask this question’ (p. 325). Yet another voice speaks, often eloquently, at great length and by doing so invites the others’ sceptical questions. At least one of the speakers arrives later than the others and, thus, works at an ironic disadvantage (p. 291). Two-thirds of the way through the dialogue one of the voices speaks directly about the form of the text in the selfreflexive manner of a character out of Shakespeare or Beckett who has known all along that she or he is a dramatic fiction; but by revealing that he knows that she is a fiction, he steps out of the frame that can no longer contain him/her. This voice says, It remains that the figure of this interlaced correspondence (for a long time we have no longer known who is talking in it and if there is talk) does not come under any established rhetoric, because it is not simply a discourse, of course, but also because even if transported, by rhetoric, outside of

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discursive rhetoric, tropes and figures would not work here. This interlacing correspondence, for example the interminable overflowing of the whole by the part which explodes the frame or makes us jump over it…is not produced inside a framing or framed element, like the figures of rhetoric in language or discourse, like the figures of ‘pictorial’ ‘rhetoric’ in the system of painting. (p. 344) Much later in the dialogue this textual self-reflection gives way to dramatic despair: ‘We no longer know’, says one of the voices, ‘whose turn it is to speak and how far we’ve got’ (p. 358). The form of this text, then enacts a number of Derridean grammatological themes: texts are always multi-voiced; they constitute structures that already include the deconstructive resources for their own critiques; what is inside the text and what is outside it—as well as what is in the margin and what at the centre—refuse to remain in their proper places; each text is a link in a chain of texts that refuses to yield its first or original link; texts seem uncannily aware that they are being read and take evasive action accordingly. Even more importantly than the reiteration of these grammatological themes, the dialogue form dramatizes the conceptual metaphor of interlacing that recurs throughout this reading of Heidegger. True to its dramatic genre, ‘Restitutions’ both presents and disrupts a narrative, which is here interlaced by and with the voices. At one point (p. 371) the narrative is assigned the figure of a square with the corners presumably named Van Gogh, Heidegger, Kurt Goldstein and Meyer Schapiro. The story might then be laced together this way: From 1881, the year Van Gogh decided to become an artist, through 1888, two years before his death, he completed eight paintings of shoes. In his letters to his brother, Van Gogh distinguishes two phases in his career. From 1881 to 1885 his work concentrated on peasant life. ‘My intention was’, he writes, ‘that it should make people think of a way of life different from that of our refined society.’ Thus ‘The Potato Eaters’, for example, tries, as he puts it, ‘to instil…the idea that the people it depicts at their meal have dug the earth with the hands they are dipping into the dish’. In 1886 Van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris. Of the pictures painted in this second period, epitomized, perhaps, by ‘Night Café’, he writes, ‘Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what was before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcefully.’4 The paintings of the first period, this interpretation suggests, emphasize otherness—the minute physical details of peasant life—while the paintings of the second period are forceful expressions of Van Gogh himself. The eight paintings of shoes are not confined to either period. Although Derrida mentions none of these details, which form a parergon of sorts (an outside that refuses to remain neatly outside the text), he does allude to Van Gogh’s letters and to his ‘peasant ideology’ (pp. 273, 368).

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Vincent Van Gogh, ‘Oude Schoenen (Old Shoes)’ (F 255). (By permission of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.) In 1935–6 Heidegger delivered a series of lectures that were soon published as The Origin of the Work of Art. In his text Heidegger refers to ‘a well-known painting by Van Gogh’ as a pictorial example of ‘a common sort of equipment—a pair of peasant shoes’. He says they are the shoes of a peasant woman. It is ‘only in the picture’, Heidegger insists, that certain things about the shoes are noticeable: From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the farspreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On

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the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.5 This passage becomes the focal point of Derrida’s dialogue. Two years before Heidegger delivered his lecture course, the Jewish psychologist Kurt Goldstein fled from Nazi Germany by way, significantly, of Amsterdam. Goldstein later took up a position at Columbia University and did extensive work on the psychopathology of war victims. Goldstein drew the attention of the art historian Meyer Schapiro, a colleague of his on the Columbia faculty, to The Origin of the Work of Art. Soon after Goldstein’s death Schapiro wrote a brief paper entitled The still life as personal object: a note on Heidegger and Van Gogh’, which he contributed to a volume published in Goldstein’s memory in 1968.6 In preparation for writing his paper, Schapiro wrote to Heidegger asking him to identify which of the eight paintings of shoes by Van Gogh he had referred to in his text. In a personal letter to Schapiro, Heidegger identified the painting in question as no. 255, usually given the title ‘Old Shoes’. In his paper, Schapiro claims that Heidegger is in error when he assigns the shoes to a peasant woman. The shoes are Van Gogh’s, Schapiro claims. In 1977 at Columbia Derrida ‘acted out or narrated’ (p. 272) part of the text of ‘Restitutions’ with Schapiro taking part in the debate that followed. Schapiro’s original paper was subsequently translated into French and published with Derrida’s polylogue in the journal Macula. One way of thinking of the shoes, in terms of this narrative, is to see them moving from one point to another on the square: from Van Gogh to Heidegger to Schapiro (by way of Goldstein) and then back to Van Gogh. Another way of thinking about them is to see them taken from Heidegger by Schapiro to be given as a memorial offering to his friend Goldstein. In Derrida’s dialogue, however, the lines of argument run between Derrida and Heidegger and Schapiro; and restitution is no longer as much a matter of restoring the shoes to their rightful owner as it is a matter of truth in painting and in the texts of Schapiro and Heidegger. The text of ‘Restitutions’ exploits the tension between the forward narrative drive— the ‘ghost story’ (p. 257), as it is called—and the dramatic or dialogic interplay among the speaking voices, which both disrupt the narrative drive and constitute the only source of the story. The questions asked by the voices generate both the narrative and its interruptions; these include but are not limited to the following problems: Whose are the shoes? What are they made of? (p. 257). Why always say of a painting that it renders, that it restitutes? (p. 258). Are the shoes a pair? What is a pair? (p. 259). What is one doing when one attributes a painting…? (p. 266). Could it be that, like a glove turned inside out, the

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shoe sometimes has the convex ‘form’ of the foot (penis), and sometimes the concave form enveloping the foot (vagina)? (p. 267)…. Who is going to believe that this episode [between Schapiro and Heidegger] is merely a theoretical or philosophical dispute for the interpretation of a work or The Work of art? (p. 272)…. Which picture exactly [was Heidegger] referring to? (p. 276)…. How do we explain [Heidegger’s] naïve, impulsive, precritical attribution of the shoes in a painting to such a determined ‘subject’, …the peasant woman…? (pp. 286–7). Is it a matter of rendering justice to Heidegger, of restituting what is his due, his truth…? (p. 301). Is Schapiro right? (p. 308). What is reference in painting? (p. 322). Are we reading? Are we looking? (p. 326). [Is the point] to make ghosts come back? Or on the contrary to stop them from coming back? (p. 339). In the interest of considering at least some of these questions, let us now unlace Derrida’s dialogue, trying to forget for a moment that the entire text is mediated by an indeterminate number of female voices, in an attempt to listen to Schapiro and Heidegger on these questions. ‘Schapiro’ and ‘Heidegger’ are here not only names for dramatic speakers presented to the reader of Derrida’s text by the female voices. They are also writers not framed by the text any more than the text frames itself. Indeed, ‘Restitutions’ so aggressively insists on its own intertextual dependencies that on two occasions (pp. 294, 345) Derrida prints three rows of dots in place of key quotations in three languages from Schapiro and Heidegger. Reading ‘Restitutions’ returns the reader to the Schapiro and Heidegger texts as much as to the Van Gogh painting. What is outside and what inside—where the truth of the text or painting lies—is as much a textual problem as a topic discussed ‘in’ the text. Pointing (pointure) becomes Derrida’s principal metaphor in the dialogue for this piercing of the text or canvas with an invisible lace that stitches it ‘onto its internal and external worlds’ (p. 304). First, then, in this unlacing of the text, we hear from Schapiro: Heidegger’s interpretation of the painting by Van Gogh, Schapiro argues, illustrates ‘the nature of art as a disclosure of truth’. Heidegger turns to the picture when he is distinguishing between three modes of being: ‘useful artifacts’, ‘natural things’, and ‘works of art’. Without recourse to any philosophical theory, he proceeds to describe ‘a familiar sort of equipment—a pair of peasant shoes’; and he chooses ‘a well-known painting by Van Gogh’ in the interest of facilitating ‘the visual realization’ of the shoes. He further argues that to grasp the ‘equipmental being of equipment’, one must know ‘how shoes actually serve’. They serve the peasant woman who stands and walks in them without her thinking about them or looking at them. For her, their being is their use. For the one who looks at Van Gogh’s painting, however, the equipmental being of the shoes is undiscoverable. By looking at the picture of the ‘empty’ shoes, however, the life of the peasant woman, her labour, the earth with which she toils, her anxieties and joys, her world can be seen to rise ‘to its resting-in-itself’.7 Heidegger knew Van Gogh painted such shoes many times, but he does not specify the picture he has in mind, apparently thinking they all present ‘the same truth’. In response to Schapiro’s question, Heidegger identifies the picture as no. 255, which he saw in Amsterdam in March 1930. Nevertheless, Schapiro suggests, he may have conflated no. 255 with no. 250 in which the sole of a shoe is exposed, since he refers to the sole in his

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account. ‘But from neither of these pictures, nor from any of the others’, Schapiro insists, ‘could one properly say that a painting of shoes by Van Gogh expresses the being or essence of a peasant woman’s shoes and her relation to nature and work.’8 These are the shoes not of a peasant woman but of the artist, he concludes, ‘a man of the town and city’. In misattributing the shoes, Heidegger has ‘deceived himself’. The sets of associations with peasants ‘are not sustained by the picture itself but are grounded rather in his own social outlook with its heavy pathos of the primordial and earthy’. Heidegger’s ‘error’ is not only the result of projection, ‘which replaces a close and true attention to the work of art’; it also lies in his concept of ‘the metaphysical power of art’, which ‘remains here a theoretical idea’. The position of the shoes, ‘isolated on the floor…facing us’ gives them the appearance of ‘veridical portraits of aging shoes’. Van Gogh’s ‘feeling for these shoes’ is close to Knut Hamsun’s description of his own shoes in his novel Hunger, and the identification of them as the artist’s own shoes is supported by Gauguin’s reminiscences of Van Gogh. Nevertheless, it is not clear which of the paintings of shoes Gauguin had seen. ‘It does not matter…. Gauguin’s story confirms the essential fact that for Van Gogh the shoes were a piece of his own life.’9 Now Heidegger: What we notice about the shoes we notice in the picture.10 It would be the ‘worst self-deception’ to suggest that the description offered is ‘a subjective action’ (p. 35) or a projection ‘into the painting’ (p. 36). Van Gogh’s painting discloses what the pair of peasant shoes ‘is in truth’ (p. 36). ‘If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work’ (p. 36). A work of art ‘sets up a world’ that is never itself an object but rather ‘the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject’ (p. 44). The material of a work of art (stone, paint, metal, wood, words) does not disappear but rather comes into the open when a work is made (p. 46). The earth comes forth in the work of art, the earth upon which ‘historical man grounds his dwelling in the world’ (p. 46). ‘The establishing of truth in the work’ is to bring forth a unique being that was not previously present and will never be again (p. 62). ‘Truth establishes itself as a strife within a being that is to be brought forth only in such a way that the conflict opens up in this being…’ (p. 63). Derrida’s dialogue in its dramatic form and in its strategy of pointing to Heidegger’s text by piercing through Schapiro’s becomes heavily invested in this conception of truth as a strife that opens up. For Schapiro truth in art is correspondence between visual image and written text—thus the attempt to make the Gauguin reminiscences relevant; this view he develops in his monograph, Words and Pictures.11 Heidegger, however, insists that the opening up is into metaphysics, into the essence of being. Derrida, on the other hand, argues that it is an exploitation of the self-critical resources within one structure of thought that opens that structure up from the inside to what is beyond it. I take it that this is the critical point of departure: Heidegger into metaphysics by way of strife, Derrida out of metaphysics by way of the self-critical resources of metaphysical texts. The argument at this point returns to Derrida’s earlier critique of Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics in Grammatology. That Heideggerian text, like The Origin of the Work of Art, comes from Freiburg in 1935; there, too, reference is made, however briefly, to ‘a painting by Van Gogh’ and to ‘a pair of rough peasant shoes’.12 As Derrida here reads him, Heidegger asks the what of the what and the why of the why by pursuing the question, ‘Why are there essents [seiendes] rather than nothing?’ (p. 1). This question,

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Heidegger argues, is the broadest, deepest, and most fundamental of questions. It is the essential question that lies at the heart of metaphysics and, in turn, of philosophy. It is the essentialist question. It can be seen in the original meaning of the Greek word physis and in the fate of that meaning when physis is translated into the Latin natura. Physis, Heidegger argues, denotes ‘self-blossoming emergence…opening up, unfolding, inwardjutting-beyond-itself [in-sich-aus-sich-hinausstehen]’ (p. 14) or what might be called longing or desire. In this context Heidegger invokes the blossoming of the rose, the rising of the sun, the rolling of the sea, and ‘the coming forth of man and animal from the womb’ (p. 14). The word itself is of great importance to him because ‘words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are’ (p. 13). Furthermore, he argues, it is not from the experience of natural phenomena that the Greeks learned about physis, but rather from their ‘fundamental poetic and intellectual experience of being’ (p. 14). The modern reduction of physis to the phenomena of physics is a pitiful narrowing of the original concept, in Heidegger’s view. To ask the fundamental question of philosophy—‘Why are there essents rather than nothing?’—is to ask at once the fundamental ‘What is…?’ question—‘was ist das ist?’—and the allencompassing, self-reflexive ‘Why…’ question: Why is what is what is? Finally, both in the fate of the Greek word physis and in what Heidegger puts language through to ask what he wants to ask, the question of language—how, why, and what do words mean?— arises as well. Although Derrida does not say so explicitly, or so crudely, he implies that Heidegger’s interpretation of Greek words and Greek thought uproots individual words from their textual ground. When Heidegger does examine specific texts in detail—the two fragments of Heraclitus (pp. 127ff), the first chorus of Antigone (pp. 146ff), the maxim of Parmenides (pp. 166ff)—the translations he offers are highly inventive. Yet in examining these texts, Heidegger warns his reader, ‘We must attempt to hear only what is said’ (p. 146). Although Derrida does not directly call attention to this seemingly innocuous sentence, it nevertheless reveals two features of Heidegger’s practice that Derrida will scrutinize in some detail. First, Heidegger refers to texts as though they are spoken rather than written; second, he substitutes his voice for the text’s even before the text is ‘heard’. The logocentric fiction of truth’s presence in the word requires the obscuring of these processes of mediation. Even as he examines the importance of poetic intelligence, thus foregrounding his own distinctively metaphorical language, Heidegger distracts attention from the mediating function of metaphor, which maintains its underground role in his writing. Derrida describes that function as ‘a sign signifying a signifier itself signifying an eternal verity, eternally thought and spoken in the proximity of a present logos’ (p. 15). Differing, deferring, distancing are the ways of metaphor; when the presence of truth is claimed for the word, metaphor is denied, forced back underground, repressed. ‘Restitutions’ has its own network of metaphors. Four of these—pointure, lace, trap, and ghost—are elaborately developed in the course of the dialogue and shape much of its thought. Pointure has the advantage for Derrida of being a term from printing and shoemaking: a ‘small iron blade with a point, used to fix the page to be printed on to the tympan’, ‘the hole which it makes in the paper’, and a ‘term from shoemaking’ referring to the ‘number of stitches in a shoe or glove’ (p. 256). In the title of the dialogue pointing (pointure) replaces the word painting in the phrase ‘truth in painting’, which allows

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simultaneously the sense that the painting in question is an exercise in the art of pointure and that its truth is not simply framed by the picture—truth, then, not simply contained in painting—rather it pricks, punctures, penetrates the canvas when the picture is bombarded with interpretative questions. Here is a critical difference between Cézanne and Van Gogh, both of whom Derrida quotes on his title page. Cézanne writes, ‘I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you’ (p. 256). He promises pictocentric truth, truth present in painting, though he is still compelled to speak it. The consequence of this view—that the truth of painting cannot be rendered in paint but only in words— Heidegger thought through and affirmed: ‘art is in essence poetry’, he writes in The Origin of the Work of Art (p. 73). Despite their disagreement on the attribution of the shoes, Schapiro and Heidegger agree on the relation of language to painting, except that Heidegger argues that the visual arts are on the way to language as they break ‘open an open place in whose openness everything is other than usual’ (p. 72). Schapiro, on the other hand, thinks of painting as emerging from language; the word is the origin of the picture. The art critic, in his view, performs an act of restitution when he restores the truth of the shoes by matching them, for example, to the text of Gauguin’s reminiscences. Van Gogh, on the other hand, writes, ‘But truth is so dear to me, and so is the seeking to make true [Derrida’s italics], that indeed I believe… I would still rather be a cobbler than a musician with colors’ (p. 256). Despite Heidegger’s privileged place for poetry, it is Van Gogh who maintains the metaphor; ‘a cobbler…with colors’ sustains and develops the ambiguity of pointure. Now to betray that metaphor for a moment, let us say what we can about the image of truth it offers us in the dialogue. Truth is not formalistically contained by the painting any more than the signified can be found within the signifier. In his catalogue for the exhibition he mounted at the Louvre in the autumn of 1990 on the theme of blindness, Derrida further develops this Saussurean parallel: ‘There is an abyss of heterogeneity between the thing drawn and the drawing line, even between a thing represented and its representation, the model and the image.’13 Language in its search for truth punctures the painting, not as one might take a knife to a canvas but as one might lace a shoe. Writing about art has the effect of lacing one canvas to another. This pictural intertextuality points not only to the interrelations among paintings but also to the relationships of painting to the world and to language. Derrida’s insistence here on the metaphor—the link between two distinct things in such a way as to bring into the open a point of otherwise hidden similarity—restitutes the distinctness of the individual paintings, as well as the distinctiveness of painting, language, painter and critic. Derrida would have us see the frame of the picture, like the margins of the printed page, as that which ‘cuts out but also sews back together …by an invisible lace which pierces the canvas’, just as the pointure pierces the paper, passes into it in order to sew it back into its milieu, into its ‘internal and external worlds’ (p. 304). The metaphor of the lace is already active in the shoemaking aspect of pointure, but the painting in question provides considerable specificity and a pictorial ground for this metaphor. The lace of one shoe curls in the lower right corner of the picture as though to encircle the name of the artist. But there is no name. The absence of ‘Vincent’ from its usual place, a place here seemingly marked by the O of the lace, is convenient for Derrida’s calling into question Schapiro’s assertion that still life is a ‘personal object’ and Heidegger’s logocentrism of truth’s presence in the word to which painting aspires.

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Already, however, I have said more than the voices do about the circle of lace and have fallen into its trap. The voices say, ‘the loop is open’, it is ‘as though…it stood in place of the signature’ (p. 277; my italics). The temptation to fill in the strange loop is to succumb to another meaning of the French word for lace (le lacet), which is ‘trap’ or ‘snare’. The loop of lace is a metonymy for the empty shoes, a trap that Van Gogh tempts us to fill in. Pointure, lace and trap are also related to ghosts. A voice calls the dialogue a ghost story (p. 258); the shoes are ‘hallucinogenic; (p. 273); for Schapiro they seem to face the viewer and are a kind of spectral portrait of the artist; for Heidegger, too, they are a portrait, and as he looks into their ‘dark opening’ he sees staring at him the toilsome life of the peasant woman. The shoes do not quite seem to touch the ground or the floor; there is an underneath beneath their underneath. As Heidegger’s visual example of ‘thing’ and ‘work’, they are metaphysically haunted by ‘the fundamental Greek experience of the Being of beings in general’ (p. 287). In his conflation of the several paintings of shoes, Heidegger allows the paintings themselves to take on a ghostly quality, as though they were visible yet transparent. Then there is the matter of the disembodied voices in the dialogue who invite the reader to doubt that what is at stake between Schapiro and Heidegger is simply the interpretation of the pictures. ‘There are other, more urgent things at stake’ (p. 329), one voice says. Then this: But an army of ghosts are demanding their shoes. Ghosts up in arms, an immense tide of deportees searching for their names. If you want to go to this theatre, here’s the road of affect: the bottomless memory of a dispossession, an expropriation, a despoilment. And there are tons of shoes piled up there, pairs mixed up and lost. (pp. 330–1) These words recall the unbearable photographs of the Holocaust with the nightmarish visual metonymy of piles of personal property recalling the millions who died. On 6 February 1943, Himmler received an inventory that lists ‘22,000 pairs of children’s shoes’ collected from Birkenau. An eyewitness at Dachau recalls, ‘We were shaken to the depths of our soul when the first transports of children’s shoes arrived from Auschwitz.’14 Photographic essays of life in the Warsaw ghetto have also stressed the ragged shoes of Jews, deported, dispossessed, expropriated, disspoiled, and nameless.15 The voices suggest the painting is haunted by such ghosts of a later time. At the risk of falling into the trap formed by the loop of the lace, we can nevertheless not ignore how Heidegger’s Nazi involvement is a part of the textual network that includes Derrida’s text. Heidegger’s references to the Van Gogh painting of shoes explicitly links The Origins of the Work of Art with An Introduction to Metaphysics. The notorious description in that volume of ‘the inner truth and greatness’ of National Socialism (p. 199), which immediately precedes Heidegger’s conclusion, completes his theme of greatness in the ‘works and destinies of nations’ (p. 11). And before the strangely isolated reference to ‘a painting by Van Gogh’, Heidegger asks whether a state is situated ‘by virtue of the fact that the state police arrest a suspect’ (p. 35). Although Schapiro makes no overt reference to Heidegger’s Nazi activities, despite the circumstances that made him aware of Heidegger’s essay and the occasion of his writing in memory of Kurt Goldstein, one voice in Derrida’s dialogue says, ‘You’re trying to

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justify him at any price’ (p. 320). This meets the reader’s suspicion that Heidegger is indeed being restituted in the face of Schapiro’s critique, however meticulously Schapiro’s precritical naïveté has been exposed. What is apparently another voice uncannily anticipates the first part of Victor Farias’s argument in Heidegger et le nazisme (1987) that links Heidegger’s own peasant ideology with his later party membership. That voice says, It does not suffice to analyze the motivations of all sorts (metaphysical, ‘ideological,’ political, idiophantasmatic, all knotted together) which drove him in 1935, almost half a century after their production and entry onto the market, to annex these shoes, on the pretext of repatriating them back to their authentic rural landscape, back to their native place. (p. 338) The argument here is against Schapiro, but now, more than a decade after the publication of ‘Restitutions’, it has wider implications, which are manifest in two recent impassioned and sustained attacks on deconstruction, Heidegger and Derrida. John Ellis, who does not deal with Heidegger at all in his book, Against Deconstruction, nevertheless sets out ‘to analyze deconstruction itself’ and from this effort concludes that deconstruction is not just a collection of arguments in different areas of theory or even a group of related doctrines; it is possible to abstract from all of this a particular strategy, a kind of deconstructive logic of inquiry.16 Indeed, he proceeds with the unusual task of rendering the essence of deconstruction’s suspicion of essentialism. Deconstruction’s strategy manifests ‘the most important handicaps and liabilities especially of American criticism’ (p. 153), he argues; it perpetuates the unthinking attitudes of critics and resists genuine change in critical practice; it is incoherent, ineffective, riddled with errors, and illogical (p. 154–5); it fosters ‘unrestrained pluralism’ of interpretation (p. 156); it is ‘inherently antitheoretical’ in its ‘accommodation with the prevalent laissez-faire of critical practice’ (p. 158); its apparent novelty has shattered the ‘communal process’ of earlier literary theory; it has provided no check on ‘the indigestible, chaotic flow of critical writing’ (p. 159). As these citations suggest, Ellis’s text develops an elaborate network of personifications that creates a bloated monster, Deconstruction, which has needs, desires, strategies; it commits errors, violates logic, retards change; it undermines standards and commits irresponsible acts. If this thing existed, who wouldn’t want to join with Ellis’s ironic forces to oppose it. I cannot find a place where Ellis steps back to reflect on his metaphorical creation. Instead, when different practitioners of deconstruction disagree with each other, he sees evidence of deconstruction’s logical disarray; when they agree, he finds in their thinking nothing but the mongering of slogans. Ellis creates an essentialist fiction and labels it ‘deconstruction’ without once examining in detail a text by Derrida or anyone else he calls a ‘deconstructionist’. Derrida warned in Part 1 of Grammatology that deconstruction, because of its oppositional posture, risks having its project named for it;17 Ellis has attempted to do just that. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, in Heidegger and Modernity, have created an even larger collective monster and named it ‘French intellectuals’. Their primary concern is with the continued importance of Heidegger in France, even after the appearance of Victor

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Farias’s book Heidegger and Nazism. Ferry and Renaut claim that this collective creature, ‘French intellectuals’, disseminates an ‘orthodox Heideggerian interpretation of Heidegger’s Nazism’ under such names as Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Elisabeth de Fontenay, whose writing has put modernism and humanism under critical pressure. Ferry and Renaut, like Ellis, do not refer to The Truth in Painting nor do they undertake to examine any of Derrida’s texts in detail. They are quick to argue—very plausibly—that the specificity, plurality and textuality of modernism needs careful reassessment. They do not consider the possibility that French theory is also a plurality. This, however, leads them into the inconsistent argument that there is an unorthodox French interpretation of Heidegger’s Nazism, which they call the ‘Derridean interpretation’.18 This interpretation includes such texts as Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question and Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger, Art and Politics, which consider texts by Heidegger critical of Nazism. The ‘Derridean interpretation’ does not, however, include works by Derrida himself that critically examine Heidegger’s accommodation of Nazism. Here, then, the effort is to create a category to which Derrida’s name is attached but which includes texts he did not write and excludes many he did.19 Ferry and Renaut want to claim that Derrida’s only work critical of Heidegger appeared after Farias’s book was published in 1987. To maintain this claim they must ignore the critique of An Introduction to Metaphysics in Grammatology (1965) and the related examination of The Origins of the Work of Art in ‘Restitutions’ (1977–8). It does not suffice, as the dialogue warns, to analyse the metaphysical, ideological, political, ideophantasmatic motivations—‘all knotted together’—of French intellectuals, deconstructionists, Derrida, or Heidegger without giving careful consideration to what they have written and how they have written it. I began by writing that Derrida owes Heidegger an immense debt. He has not set out to repay it by avoiding Heidegger’s writings of the thirties but rather by giving that work his most sustained critical attention. In doing so, he has not been an apologist for Heidegger’s Nazism; instead, especially in ‘Restitutions’, he has relentlessly exceeded Heidegger’s example in giving careful attention to the textuality of philosophy, here applying deconstructive critical procedures, as in so much of his earlier writing, to Heidegger’s own texts. Even when he has available to him Schapiro’s note, which manifests a generous, personal motive and a political or textual unconscious to which he would, doubtless, otherwise have been more than sympathetic, Derrida refuses to allow the issue of truth to be sacrificed. ‘The task of a deconstruction of the history of ontology’, as Heidegger calls it,20 continues to be Derrida’s principal project, none the less when it exposes the terrible fallibility of one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Bucknell University

NOTES 1 J.Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press, 1987 (French edn, 1971)), pp. 9, 54–5. 2 See, for example, the six papers on Heidegger in Psyche: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987) and De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987). 3 J.Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 (French edn, 1978)), p. 264. Further citations from this text are noted in round brackets.

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4 Quoted in Harold Osborne (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 486–7. 5 M.Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 32–4. 6 The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, ed. Marianne L.Simmel (New York: Springer, 1968). 7 Schapiro, in The Reach of Mind, pp. 203–4. 8 ibid., p. 205. 9 ibid., pp. 205–8. 10 Heidegger, p. 34. Further citations from this text are noted in round brackets. 11 M.Schapiro, Words and Pictures (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). 12 M.Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 (1935)), p. 35. Further citations from this text are noted in round brackets. 13 ‘The blindness of beginning’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Guardian (2 November 1990), p. 25. 14 M.Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (Glasgow: Collins, 1987), pp. 539–41. 15 See, for example, Ulrich Keller, The Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs (Magnolia, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1941). 16 J.Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 3, 137. Further citations from this text are noted in round brackets. 17 J.Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 (1965)), p. 4. 18 L.Ferry and A.Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Philip Franklin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 (1988)), p. 43. 19 See esp. pp. 119–20. 20 M.Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962 (1927)), p. 86.

CRISTINA BACCHILEGA

Feminine voices inscribing Sarraute’s Childhood and Kingston’s The Woman Warrior ‘She doesn’t revolve around a sun that is more star than the stars.’ (Hélène Cixous)

Nathalie Sarraute’s autobiographical Enfance (1983; translated as Childhood in 1984) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) could not have emerged from more distant cultural experiences and traditions within Franco-American contexts. An acclaimed French novelist and representative of the influential nouveau roman avant-garde, Sarraute writes about her childhood when she is in her eighties and does so with the staged insouciance of a successful intellectual working within a well-established tradition. In contrast, The Woman Warrior, Kingston’s first book, marks a necessary step both in the process of defining a marginalized and silenced Chinese American identity, and in the attempt to legitimate a recognizable Asian American tradition of writing. Yet these two texts intersect in the conflictual approach to language and writing that the young protagonists, Natasha and Maxine, share, as well as the ‘gendered’ narrative strategies Sarraute and Kingston choose to voice their experiences. How to address this commonality— Sarraute’s and Kingston’s excesses and transgressions in the areas of theme, narrative strategy, and voice? Here I propose to read Childhood and The Woman Warrior as examples of ‘feminine writing’ in Hélène Cixous’s use of the term, seeking to multiply the power of that excess and, at the same time, to ground it by ‘testing’ Cixous’s utopian theory. The power of the textual and testing excesses would, then, be both poetic and political: the historically and culturally inscribed voices which frame Childhood and The Woman Warrior can warn us of the potential dangers of Cixous’s song even as they perform it themselves. I have turned to Cixous for this project on the basis of strategically political considerations. She is the most openly utopian of the French feminists and, as a ‘poetic thinker’, the least bound to the rules of ‘theory’ and ‘critical discourse’. Her brave turn to the future allows for a political use of psychoanalysis that does not necessarily become a re-turn to woman as lack; it also enables her to practise some possibilities of ‘feminine’ desire, in her visionary ‘writing as a woman, towards women’.1 Also, her voice is rarely heard in recent American feminist debates, perhaps because few of her writings have been translated and she is being evaluated only as a theorist, not a playwright, a poet, a writer.2 And ‘feminine writing’ as she portrays it seems for the most part to have been

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confined to Cixous’s own selection; this creates a circular logic which partly defeats the potential of reading as an ‘act of listening’.3 In their autobiographical fictions, both Sarraute and Kingston implicitly ask ‘What is my place if I am a woman?’—Cixous’s stated question in La Jeune Née (1975; translated as The Newly Born Woman in 1986). All three writers seek answers in and from their childhoods, which—Cixous argues—‘men have so much trouble making women forget, and which they condemn to the in-pace’, to the peace of the tomb.4 This process of ‘forgetting’ she describes as mourning: ‘When you’ve lost something and the loss is a dangerous one, you refuse to admit that something of your self might be lost in the lost object. So you “mourn”, you make haste to recover the investment made in the lost object.’5 Cixous’s definition involves the process of incorporating the loss, claiming it as lost property, burying inside what lies outside, replacing the other through internalization. Thus, for Cixous, mourning is part of a masculine libidinal and political economy, one that thrives on the work of death since it demands lethal battling between the terms of the binary oppositions it builds on. This economy demands the ‘burial’ of both woman and child, for Man/Woman and Man/Child are comparably hierarchical binary oppositions, which, as the (gentle)manly ‘Women and Children first’ suggests, are easily reduced to Man/Woman and Child. In contrast, Cixous’s poetic discourse seeks to transform the common-place association of woman with death and mourning into a life-giving image of active acceptance. What makes woman capable of not forgetting her childhood, of not condemning it to the ‘oblivion of burial’? Her refusal to mourn, Cixous proclaims: ‘woman…does not mourn, does not resign herself to loss. She basically takes up the challenge of loss in order to go on living: she lives it, gives it life, is capable of unsparing loss.’6 The couple Woman—Child, she submits, is different: its economy does not demand the symbolic death of the child, of the other within us. Childhood then is where ‘woman’ must begin: There is a ground, it is her ground—childhood flesh, shining blood—or background, depth. A white depth, a core, forgettable, forgotten, and this ground, covered by an infinite number of strata, layers, sheets of paper— is her sun (sol…soleil).7 This feminine economy of giving—what Cixous defiantly calls ‘Other-Love’—can be seen at work in ‘feminine writing’ which overflows and re-turns to the mother, to the body, to milk, and to voice, not as a nostalgic return to origin, but as a journey ‘to the unknown, to invent’. In Cixous’s words, It is in writing, from woman and toward woman, and in accepting the challenge of the discourse controlled by the phallus, that woman will affirm woman somewhere other than in silence, the place reserved for her in and through the Symbolic.8 It is in their lost, but unforgotten, unburied childhoods of struggle that Sarraute and Kingston ‘begin’. The dialogue which marks the halting start of Sarraute’s Childhood

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articulates the difficulty, the uncertainty, the risk involved in writing from—and not simply about—that sol, soleil, ground and sun of childhood. I quote: Have you really not forgotten what it was like there? how everything there fluctuates, alters, escapes…you grope your way along, forever searching, straining…towards what? what is it? it’s like nothing else …no one talks about it…it evades you, you grasp it as best you can, you push it…where? no matter where, so long as it eventually finds some fertile ground where it can develop, where it can perhaps manage to live…. My goodness, just thinking about it…. —Yes, it makes you grandiloquent. I would even say, presumptuous. I wonder whether it isn’t still the same fear…. Remember the way it returns when anything inchoate crops up…. What remains with us from former endeavors always seems to have the advantage over what is still trembling somewhere in limbo….9 Sarraute re-turns to her childhood precisely because it has not ‘become fixed once and for all’: ‘it’s still vacillating, no written word, no word of any sort has yet touched it, …it is still faintly quivering…’, one of the narrating voices affirms (p. 3). Refusing to ‘plaster over the gap’ (p. 16), Sarraute, woman-child, tells her story in defiance of the voice of the Law. ‘No, you’re not to do that’ (p. 3): in response to these words, which are meant to crush the child-woman, an oppressed, swelling voice dares: ‘Yes, I am going to do it’ (p. 4). Natasha, the child, slashes the back of a settee with scissors to challenge the governess her father has chosen for her. Nathalie Sarraute, the woman-child, ‘begins’ by slashing the tissue enveloping her and our fictions of childhood and identity; she then proceeds to look with us ‘at what comes out of it… something flabby, greyish, is escaping from the slit’ (p. 6). Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘vacillating’ memoirs also advance by making her unburied childhood public; that is, by transgression. The text opens on a violation:’ “You must not tell anyone”, my mother said, “what I am about to tell you”’ (The Woman Warrior, p. 3). In the five narratives which make up The Woman Warrior, Kingston gives voice to several ‘ghosts’ and tells—that is, re-invents—stories she heard or experienced during her girlhood. At the core of each narrative is the ‘ghost’ of a different woman. First, the adulterous and suicidal aunt, the one the family punished with oblivion, haunts Maxine; then it’s the mythical warrior Fa Mu Lan, who took her father’s place at war to save her village. The unreconciled ghost of a woman who suffered and died in silence is followed by that of a strong woman who is not pacified by hoping she will be avenged in some hypothetical future. This oppositional pair finds itself repeated several times in the text so as to mirror, on a progressively smaller scale, Maxine’s inner conflicts, her own ‘split’ voice and identity: another aunt, the weak Moon Orchid, appears in dramatic contrast to Brave Orchid, Maxine’s mother; a quiet Chinese schoolmate, a cry-baby with a ‘China doll hair cut’ (pp. 201–2), the silent (and ultimately more fortunate) reincarnation of No Name Woman turns into Maxine’s own much-hated alter ego. Kingston’s violation of silence is the tentative but sustained exploration of a question for which she does not have a simple answer, one that would allow her to identify herself as an adult individual and make her childhood into something ‘fixed’:

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Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand how things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? (p. 6) This exploration only leads to more questions: ‘I continue to sort out what’s just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living’ (p. 239), Kingston states at the end of her memoirs. But what is she sorting? And why? ‘My mother has given me pictures to dream—nightmare babies that recur.’ (p. 101); in those nightmares, despite Kingston’s care, the ‘dream baby’ dies. To make it live, Kingston must violently break open the ‘impossible stories’ with which our parents ‘stuff our heads like suitcases which they jam-pack with home-made underwear’ (p. 102). Those stories, pushed back into dreams, speak the rule of silence, tell ‘not to tell’. Coming out of the slit Kingston makes in the silence which has continued to kill No Name Woman and her child is a multitude of greyish, bloated ghosts—women and children—who continue to people her womanhood and childhood and whom Kingston refuses to keep killing, to keep ‘deliberately forgetting’ (p. 18). Cixous chants: ‘The relationship to childhood (the child she was, she is, she acts and makes and starts anew, and unties at the place where, as a same she even others herself), is no more cut off than is the relationship to the “mother”, as it consists of delights and violences.’10 Sarraute’s and Kingston’s autobiographical fictions rediscover and reevaluate, on both thematic and discursive levels, the primacy of the mother/daughter relationship in the writers’ identity formation. Let me offer a brief sketch, first, of Natasha’s and Maxine’s narrated detachment from the mother and, then, of their re-turn to her through ‘feminine’ writing. Almost half-way into her book, Sarraute narrates her journey from Russia (the land more clearly associated with her mother) to France, where she will live with her father. She is 8 years old and absolutely distressed: I amuse myself by chanting the same two words in time with the sound of the wheels…always the same two words which came, no doubt, from the sunlit plains I could see from the window…the French word soleil and the same word in Russian, solntze, in which the ‘l’ is hardly pronounced, sometimes I say sol-ntze, pulling back and pushing out my lips, with the tip of my curled up tongue pressing against my front teeth, and sometimes, so-leil, stretching my lips, my tongue barely touching my teeth. And then again, sol-ntze. And then again, so-leil. A minddestroying game which I can’t stop. It stops of its own accord, and the tears flow. (pp. 94–5) Soleil/solntze: this battle of words re-enacts the childhood struggle between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, a struggle through which the letter ‘l’ or elle, she, the little girl, child and future woman, will have to fight to be heard, rather than simply exchanged.11

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The entire text of Sarraute’s Childhood amplifies this scene of conflict. It tells the story of Natasha’s journey from the world of an all-powerful, unpredictable, delightful yet violently unforgiving mother to the world of the father, where the child is encouraged to become a model pupil who enjoys dictation and recitation and looks forward to paternal approval. When her journey comes to its predictable end, Natasha appears willing to accept the loss of her mother. She has found refuge in writing, especially writing under direction: I am nothing other than what I have written…. I am completely protected from whims and caprices, from obscure, disturbing movements, suddenly provoked…is it by me? or is it by what they perceive behind me and which I mask? And also, nothing reaches me here of that love, ‘our love’, as Mama calls it in her letters…which gives rise to something in me that hurts…. No trace of that here. Here, I am in security. (pp. 148–9) Natasha has become what one of the narrating voices calls a ‘reasonable little monster’ (p. 143). In The Woman Warrior, young Maxine goes through a disturbingly similar process during her own Chinese-American girlhood in California. She too finds certain words ‘troublesome’: I could not undertand ‘I’. The Chinese ‘I’ has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American ‘I’, assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; ‘I’ is a capital and ‘you’ is lower-case. I stared at the middle line and waited so long for its black center to resolve into tight strokes and dots that I forgot to pronounce it. (p. 193) The struggle in which the little girl finds her ‘I’ silenced seems to be more strictly cultural here, but we discover that in both ethnic contexts she is doubly erased, ‘buried’ in silence because of gender. There is a Chinese word for the female I—which is ‘slave’. Break the women with their own tongues!’ (p. 56): Kingston’s perceptive comment, which is in no contradiction with the Chinese customs of female infanticide and slavery she hears about, finds further confirmation in the insults her third grand-uncle shouts at the table, pointing at the little girls, ‘“Eat, maggots”, he said, “Look at the maggots chew”’ (p. 223). Her identity is equally shaky in the American context. Maxine finds herself forced to ‘invent’ an ‘American-feminine speaking personality’ (‘And all the time I was having to turn myself American-feminine, or no dates’, p. 56), only to be further silenced: ‘Normal Chinese women’s voices are strong and bossy. We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine. Apparently we whispered even more softly than the Americans’ (p. 200). In both worlds, the feminine ‘I’ speaks ‘in an inaudible voice’ (p. 13).

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To move away from this dark place of silence, young Maxine rejects both the Chinese tradition and her own female body. I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. ‘Bad girl’, my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy? ‘What do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?’ ‘A lumberjack in Oregon.’ (p. 56) This rebellion inevitably culminates in a violent detachment from the mother, the ‘champion talker’ of the Chinese tradition in Maxine’s mind, the one whose food, customs, beliefs, stories and maxims (including ‘There’s no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls’, p. 54) she seeks to move away from by getting straight A’s. Through school—even if obviously not simply through school—where the ‘Teacher Ghosts’ teach her to ‘take stories’ and ‘turn them into essays’ (p. 235), Maxine comes to blame her mother for her own difference: ‘It’s your fault I talk weird’ (p. 234). The rejection of her mother-culture takes the shape of ‘concrete’, of ‘plastic, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots’ (p. 237). She also valorizes lists, essays, and logic—other forms of writing under dictation— over her mother’s paradoxical, oral exorcisms. The story of Natasha’s and Maxine’s childhoods then reiterates the psychoanalytically well-known rejection of the mother, her loss to the ‘country’ of the Symbolic. In this country (be it France or White US) language, writing, education are identified as belonging to the father; they are no ‘“free” gift’12: to deserve these gifts the little girls must reject the mother and ‘imitate’ the words of the father, write ‘under dictation’. In both cases, however, Sarraute’s and Kingston’s writing—the telling of this childhood story—questions the ensuing bond of the child with the father and reaffirms the bond with the mother, the desire to write not from that lost motherland, but deliberately from the frontier between the two countries and écritures.13 Nathalie Sarraute’s evocation of her childhood is organized around the child’s gradual acceptance of her mother’s absence but also, as Bruno Vercier remarks, around the writer’s desire to reach for the mother’s love through writing, through ‘feminine’ writing, I’d specify. In choosing to write her unvoiced, living childhood, the writer in Childhood refuses to conform ‘to the most valued, most highly thought-of models’, whether they are ‘happy childhood memories’ (p. 23) or crystallized, well-packaged fictions of unhappy childhoods such as David Copperfield, No Relations, The Prince and the Pauper and ‘Cinderella’, Natasha’s own childhood readings. Her writing, then, is not safe, it is not under the dominant mode of dictation: in the world of the Symbolic, where ‘she doesn’t count’, the woman-child proclaims ‘I’m resisting… I’m holding out on this bit of territory on which I have hoisted [my mother’s] colours, on which I’ve put up her flag’ (p. 9); she does so, even if her resistance marks her as ‘an insufferable child, a crazy child, a fanatical child’ (p. 7). This resistance does not place Natasha or Sarraute outside of dictation itself—in that the girl obeys the mother’s command and, as Vercier notes, Sarraute’s privileging of liquid metaphors perhaps honours the mother’s flag, her

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seemingly unreasonable request that her daughter chew her food ‘until it has become as liquid as soup’ (p. 8)—but it does question the dictates of the Symbolic.14 Similarly, Kingston’s privileging of ‘talk-story’ within her writing indicates that she is her mother’s interlocutor and vice versa. The calculated confusion of genres in The Woman Warrior may, for instance, affect its readersin ways which replicate Maxine’s complaints about her mother’s stories: And I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won’t tell me a story and then say, ‘This is a true story’, or ‘This is just a story.’ I can’t tell the difference…. I can’t tell what’s real and what you make up. (p. 235) Kingston’s breaking the silence about No Name Woman as well as her weaving together of ghost-stories and talk-story mark her re-turn on the page to her mother, the previously rejected exorcist/shaman and story-teller. The final section of ‘A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe’ is a gift to her mother and to the reader underscoring Kingston’s acceptance as a writer of her mother’s talk-story gifts to her. Neither gift tries to recover ‘expenses’; it pours out ‘going everywhere to the other’.15 The story’s beginning is the mother’s, the ending the daughter’s. It tells first of Kingston’s grandmother in China who proved that the ‘family was immune to harm as long as it went to plays’ (p. 241) and, then, of Ts’en Yen, a poet born in AD 175 and captured by a chieftain during a raid by the Southern Hsiung-nu. Ts’en Yen could sing in Chinese in such a way that even the ‘barbarians’ felt her sadness, her anger; and her children (who could not speak Chinese) ‘did not laugh, but eventually sang along’ (p. 243). Like this ancient poet’s song, Kingston’s talk-story text figures the wish to ‘translate well’ from one culture to another, from mother to daughter, from woman to woman.16 And it is for the reader to accept this gift by producing more, different, yet translatable songs. Writing in mother’s milk, rather than father’s ink, is not the only discursive mark of what Cixous calls ‘Other-Love’. In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous affirms: Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me—the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live—that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?—a feminine one, a masculine one, some?— several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. This peopling gives neither rest nor security, always disturbs the relationship to ‘reality’, produces an uncertainty that gets in the way of the subject’s socialization.17 Here Cixous celebrates the link between feminine subjectivity—‘the experience of notme within me’, the splitting apart ‘without regret’—and ‘feminine writing’, a praxis which flows from ‘open memory’.18 Sarraute and Kingston accept the challenge of this ‘peopling’, this permeability and the regard for the other, by approaching writing as a speaking out and into contradictions, questions and answers, desires and fears, where no one adult voice is in control. On the level of discourse, then, they further question

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‘masculine’ writing by privileging plural, changing, living voices—a praxis which loosens up psychosocial constructs of gender and aesthetic constructs of genre in ways that ask us as readers to reposition ‘ourselves’ in respect not only of Childhood and The Woman Warrior, but also to the ‘text’ of ‘our’ ‘childhoods’ and to the activity of writing. Sarraute’s Childhood ‘begins’ with a dash, a marker of voice. This voice speaks and its first pronoun is ‘you’: —Then you are really going to do that? ‘Evoke your childhood memories’… How these words embarrass you, you don’t like them. But you have to admit that they are the only appropriate words. You want to ‘evoke your memories’…there’s no getting away from it, that’s what it is. —Yes, I can’t help it, it tempts me, I don’t know why…. (p. 1) Before I, as reader, can even ask ‘who’s speaking?’ I am obliquely addressed and questioned, brought into the text by that ‘you’. Am I committing myself to evoking my childhood memories? No, I was expecting to read some. Some other ‘I’ answers the question (for me?), admitting to the temptation that ‘evoking’ one’s childhood memories holds for it (me?) and confessing its helplessness. ‘You’ and ‘I’, typically safely separate, oppositional markers of personal identity, float in and out of fiction, in and out of each other. And it is no small matter that in the French, the evoking ‘I’, the one that refuses to forget, is feminine, while the ‘you’ is not gendered throughout the text. Sarraute’s voice then is not one voice, but voices in dialogue: who is going to evoke her/your/ my childhood memories? From the very start of her reminiscence, she does not speak from a point of arrival, but listens instead to the other(s) within and without ‘herself’. ‘You’ and ‘I’ in this autobiographical fiction defy the conventions of traditional memoirs and autobiographies by not interpreting ‘childhood’ through a single finalized/finalizing voice. No one adult is speaking and the silences in between voices, as well as the visual gaps on the page in between utterances and scenes, do not allow us (‘you’s’ and ‘I’s’ in dialogue rather than ‘we’ as unified body politic) to be seduced by the fiction of a well-shaped and meaningful statement. The ‘you’ and the ‘I’ in this fiction scrutinize each other’s motives with suspicion and question each other: why succumb to the desire of evoking one’s childhood? In the process, the superego-like ‘you’ becomes the ‘I’ and this ‘I’, apparently reluctant to begin the evocation, is said by the ‘you’, the other ‘I’, to have, precisely by its admonitions and warnings, ‘conjured…up’ that ghost. The tie between ‘you’ and ‘I’ tightens up, yet these voices remain different—not separate—and continue to speak in the text of Childhood. Analogously, even though, as we draw closer to the conclusion of The Woman Warrior, its strictly autobiographical features become more direct, the constitution of the narrated and narrating ‘I’ as unified subject remains problematic.19 Kingston’s writing measures the distance separating ‘her’ from her various role models (her mother, aunts, alter ego, mythical woman warriors and poets) only to discover that her childhood cannot be severed from those ghosts’ struggles and that her narrative of girlhood is simply one among many interpretations of stories belonging to a collective and familial memory. More importantly, in the last section of The Woman Warrior, as my comments have already indicated, Kingston’s presentation of that memory as a multi-voiced dialogue

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undergoes an interpretative transformation in the process of telling: no longer the product of constraints, it becomes a deliberate strategy, a gift to those who used to be the drowned-in-silence ghosts of her childhood. In their contradictory re-turn to the mother, their privileging of voice, and their refusal to constitute unitary subjects, Childhood and The Woman Warrior can thus be read as powerful renditions of ‘feminine writing’, practising a transgressive textual economy of giving. However, to do so exclusively would be to ignore—kill, bury—the localized, historically and culturally constituted, peculiarities of Sarraute’s and Kingston’s strategies as writers and experiences as women. Gayatri Spivak and Alice Jardine have, to different effects, directed feminists’ attention to the general problem of poststructuralist discourses which valorize ‘woman’ and ignore ‘women’. In Sexual/Textual Politics Toril Moi alerts us to the existence of this same dangerous split in Cixous’s discourse: [The] absence of any specific analysis of the material factors preventing women from writing…constitutes a major weakness of Cixous’s utopia…. Stirring and seductive though such a vision is, it can say nothing of the actual inequities, deprivations and violations that women, as social beings rather than as mythological archetypes, must constantly suffer.20 To fall completely under the spell of Cixous’s song, many of us fear, would eventually mean being trapped in the Imaginary, before or beyond all political struggles—not just the violations that different women have experienced, but also the victories they/we have achieved. It would mean ignoring the Phallic Mother simply to idolize the Good Mother. It could mean ‘burying’ the difference between this woman and that woman, this child and that child. The mother, the writing, the multi-voiced ‘I’ to which Sarraute and Kingston re-turn in their challenge to the ‘masculine’ are not the same mother, the same writing, the same multi-voiced ‘I’. (Not to say that the ‘masculine’ is the same, but that is not my focus here.) First, Natasha’s childish—not childlike—mother is a writer herself, an intellectual of sorts, a socially privileged woman, whose motherhood seems to ‘cramp her style’. Maxine’s mother is a story-teller and an ex-doctor: her loud Chinese voice in an American laundry warns her daughter of how easy it is for women to lose the privileges endowed by education and class. Brave Orchid also pours stories and words over her daughter to nurture her; in doing so she risks smothering Maxine, but ultimately bestows the gift of ‘talking story’ upon her. Conversely, in Childhood, even though she is a writer for children, Natasha’s Mama reads to her reluctantly and, when directing spare but cutting sententiae at her, she seems unaware of their power: ‘If you touch one of those poles, you’ll die’ (p. 19); ‘You only have one mama in the whole world’ (p. 91); ‘A child who loves its mother thinks that no one is more beautiful than she’ (p. 84). So in both cases, language, with its uses and abuses, beauty and power, is central to the motherdaughter relationship, but its function is quite different. With small gestures and, more paradoxically, her own absence, self-absorbed and beautiful Mama charms Natasha into hoisting her colours; Brave Orchid’s overbearing presence casts a spell on Maxine, but a spell which requires disenchantment—the daugh-ter’s rebellion—as a condition for its magic to work. While Natasha’s mother leaves her with the word ‘wrath’ and almost

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crushes her under its beauty in both Russian and French (Childhood, p. 228)21 Brave Orchid finally releases Maxine:’ “Of course, you must go, Little Dog.” A weight lifted from me…. She has not called me that endearment for years—a name to fool the gods’ (The Woman Warrior, p. 127). Natasha must de-mythologize her own mother in order to re-turn to ‘the mother’ in the shape of her stepmother and, especially, her stepmother’s nurturing mother; Maxine must mythologize her own mother in order to hear her marginalized voice and appreciate its generous gifts. While the re-turn to the mother is more apparently thematized in The Woman Warrior, Sarraute’s Childhood is a more deliberate narrative enactment of it. Precisely because the two mothers are so different, the valorization of ‘the mother’ is achieved to a higher degree through representation in one text and discursive problematization in the other. While this observation may seem to replicate Alice Jardine’s hypothesis about the difference between the configurations of woman in modern American vs. French fictions by men, I want to stress that in these two women’s texts I find the difference to be quantitative, rather than qualitative. Second, Sarraute comes to writing as Woman-Child at the end of a long, successful career. Her avant-garde writing has undoubtedly constituted a challenge to traditional writing all along, but never before explicitly from a ‘personal’ and ‘feminine’ position: Sarraute was never quite a feminist and refuses to think of herself as a ‘woman writer’. Reviewers who looked suspiciously at this autobiographical text felt reassured when they realized that in it Sarraute had not abandoned her epistemological strategy, tropisms. Summarizing her argument in response to those who read Childhood as ‘a complete departure from her previous work’, Gretchen T.Besser writes: ‘While taking a step in a new direction and tiptoeing into the field of autobiography, Nathalie Sarraute has not ceased concentrating on tropismes, which constitute her unique stamp on contemporary French literature.’22 On the one hand, the very features of her writing which have made and still make her writing ‘subversive’ paradoxically contribute to the ‘authority’ of her text of childhood; on the other hand, Childhood marks the climax of that subversion in its discursive problematization of gender. In contrast, Kingston’s ‘feminine writing’ is a mark of defiance, the beginning of her struggle as a writer, a new kind of writer in the US. She does not identify herself as feminist either, but her writing immediately recognizes gender conflicts within cultures as paradigmatic dramatizations of other hierarchical forms of oppression. Being a woman inescapably shapes Kingston’s other questions: ‘How does a Chinese American of my generation …receive [Chinese] stories? How have we heard? What do we make of them? What are the new stories that are relevant to America today?’23 In other words, while Sarraute eventually comes to recognize herself as Woman-Child through writing, Kingston can come to the scene of writing only having first recognized herself as Woman-Child. Nathalie Sarraute writes that during the gatherings of her father’s friends in Paris ‘no one made the slightest distinction between men and women, either from the intellectual or moral point of view’ (p. 178). In the process of writing Childhood this ‘absence of any sort of feeling of inequality’ strikes her (pp. 177–8): thus, she implicitly acknowledges it as a privilege, another ‘masculine’ fiction which enveloped her and gave her power within it as long as she was unaware of its fictionality. While living and then re-creating her girlhood, Maxine Hong Kingston hears the explicit condemnation of her sex (‘No girls!’) in the words as well as the silence of her male

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relatives. She could not ignore it even if she tried to and finds herself debilitated by this pervasive fiction, until she tears it apart. Third, the multi-voiced ‘I’ in the two texts positions itself differently with respect to the family which engendered it and the narrative it is engendering. Sarraute’s fragmented identity mirrors the fragmentation of her family, affirming the child’s movement away from her two families, both socially privileged, but clearly inadequate. By the end of her narrative, Natasha is physically separated from her mother who has stormed out of her life more than once (see pp. 227–31). She feels uncomfortable with her father who, when expressing his affection to her, calls her ‘my daughter, my little girl, my child’, possessive words that feel to her ‘like the rather painful affirmation of a special bond that unites [them]…like the assurance of his constant support, and also a little like a challenge’ (p. 240). And she is further estranged from her stepmother Vera who responds to her implicit plea for love (‘Tell me, do you hate me?’ (p. 241)) with another one of her ‘normal people, moral people’ clichés, ‘How can anyone hate a child?’ (p. 242). While Sarraute’s writing partly reinterprets this emotional split from her family, it selfconsciously never works to patch over it. Rather, the mention of her strong attraction to Ponson du Terrail’s Rocambole in spite of her father’s disdain (‘It’s rubbish, he isn’t a writer’, p. 235) indicates an intellectual detachment and critique as well. Compared to Rocambole’s excessive world of adventure, the daily failures of the nuclear family appear ‘so narrow, petty’, the people Natasha lives with become ‘small, reasonable, prudent’ (p. 237). Rocambole might not be a lasting influence on Sarraute’s imagination; however, it is also evident that the well-educated but stifling family environment did little to nurture her provocative and disturbing writing, even as it encouraged her intellectual development. Conversely, as Gayle K.Sato argues effectively, Kingston attributes selfhood and artistic creation to the family that formerly signified repression: ‘As an act of both criticism and celebration, the writing of Woman Warrior required a departure from home in order to discover the ways in which one need not depart.’24 This contrast is not simply the product of individual psychological and intellectual journeys; it is also inescapably linked with the different histories of the family as institution in Sarraute’s and Kingston’s social communities, a topic too broad for me to discuss at length. Finally, Sarraute’s narrating voices take the readers of Childhood on a journey which ends abruptly and anti-climatically when Natasha goes on to the lycée. The ‘new life’ that awaits her (p. 244), her end, is writing, but Sarraute does not find it necessary to narrate the culmination of her initiation process nor to affirm her identity as a writer. Her poetics of tropisms clearly rejects the linearity of a bildungsroman or kunstlerroman and her name is in any case amply recognized by the French literary establishment. Unlike this somewhat jaded mother of many legitimate though unlawful texts, Kingston proudly bestows a proper name upon her created/‘paper’ self—Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior (in an act which characterizes the nominative nature of mythic consciousness).25 Once again, however, we should resist placing Kingston’s artistic itinerary in the formal paradigm of the western bildungsroman for she presents herself and the other members of her ‘female family’ in a ‘filial gesture’ which firmly places her writing, as Sato argues, in the Chinese-American tradition.26 Having found it troubling that Jacques Derrida’s atypical question, ‘Of what “woman” are you speaking?’27 remains always deferred in Cixous’s utopian theory of ‘feminine writing’, I find it reassuring and promising that the exploration of precisely this question

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is an integral part of asking ‘What is my place if I am a woman?’ in Sarraute’s and Kingston’s writing practices. Since these writers have gained much strength from situating their stories and texts in specific socio-historical ways, choosing to ignore that Sarraute’s Childhood will be more of a gift to certain women, and Kingston’s to others, can only weaken the dialogue among ‘feminine’ voices. As an Italian living in the US, whose Anglo-Indian mother lives in Italy and whose students in Hawaii are prevalently Asian American, I have been made aware of these power(ful) differentials. Yet I recognize that forgetting Cixous’s sorties will also result in a loss for feminism since she provides ‘ways out’ of patriarchal interpretative thinking, she opens our ears and minds to a different music, and does ask ‘What is there in common between our being womenfighting and women-writing?’28 While I do not wish to ‘defend’ Cixous—who needs no champions—nor to act in the name of piety or pluralism, I hope to have exemplified a politically productive reading strategy, which consciously rejects lethal binary thinking and yet addresses specific forms of knowledge and oppression. Mine too, then, is a paradoxical filial gesture as I simultaneously rewrite Cixous and listen to her, illegitimately claim these texts to the ‘feminine’ and then turn to illustrate their differences within feminine writing, chant and argue, play out mothers and daughters in the plural without seeking to silence or drown either of them. The paradox— this running the risk of contradiction—is one of Cixous’s gifts, and I find it empowering when it allows me to listen more attentively to those many ‘women’, marked by culture, ethnicity, and class, who live around and within us. University of Hawaii at Manoa

NOTES An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Comparative Literature Conference at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu (January 1988); I also reformulate some ideas appearing in my shorter piece, ‘The Woman Warrior di Maxine Hong Kingston: trasgressione e creazione dell’io narrante’, Quaderni di retorica e poetica, 2, 1 (1986) pp. 227–33. I want to thank the University of Hawaii Feminist Theory Group for its liveliness, support, and challenge. I would like to thank Gayle K.Sato for reading an earlier version of this article. 1 Hélène Cixous, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), p. 245. 2 For a recent ‘positive’ assessment of Cixous’s work, see Morag Shiach, ‘“Their ‘symbolic’ exists, it holds power—we, the sowers of disorder, now it only too well”’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 153–67. Shiach articulates ‘the connections between the different discourses, “feminist”, “historical”, “literary”, and “psychoanalytic”, which are mobilized in Cixous’s texts’, p. 166. 3 See Susan Sellers (ed.), Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988). 4 Cixous, ‘Sorties: out and out: attacks/ways out/forays’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 69.

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5 Cixous, ‘Castration or decapitation?’, trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7, 1 (Autumn 1981), p. 54. 6 ibid. 7 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, p. 88. 8 ibid., p. 93. 9 Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood: An Autobiography, trans. Barbara Wright (New York: George Braziller, 1984), p. 2. I did consult the French text (Editions Gallimard, 1983), but am quoting from the English. All further references to this work appear in the text as do references to Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Random House, 1977). 10 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, p. 93. 11 The letter ‘l’ is masculine in French, but since the pun with ‘elle’ is so pervasive I don’t believe that undermines my reading of the letter as the struggling girl who is being shuffled from language to language, from parent to parent or, more in general, as ‘woman’ within the economy of ‘masculine’ discourses. It is also possible to think of that letter as the mother from whom Nathalie is being separated. 12 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, p. 87. 13 It is not within the reach of this essay to analyse Cixous’s metaphor of the mother, which has been criticized by feminists: see Donna C.Stanton, ‘Difference on trial: a critique of the maternal metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva’, in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K.Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 157–82; and Claire Kahane, ‘Questioning the maternal voice’, Genders, 1, 3 (Fall 1988), pp. 82–91. While I share Kahane’s understanding of Kristeva’s semiotic and her desire ‘to claim that there is a potential usefulness to feminism in the public articulation of a dream’ (p. 83), I would not confine Cixous’s representation of the maternal voice simply to nostalgia. The future plays a radically important part in Cixous’s ‘idealization’ of the mother and her writing practice in general. Subject to interpretation, the process I describe in The Woman Warrior can be equally understood in the framework of Cixous’s or Kristeva’s metaphor. 14 See Bruno Vercier, ‘(Nouveau) roman et autobiographie: Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute’, French Literature Series, 12 (1985), pp. 162–70. 15 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, p. 87. 16 ‘In this book, as much a celebration of Brave Orchid as it is an autobiography of Maxine Hong Kingston, the autobiographer both separates from and rejoins her mother, her family’s and community’s chief representative’, states Margaret Miller, ‘Threads of identity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior’, Biography, 6, 1 (Winter 1983), p. 28. While there is disagreement over the reasons and dynamics of Kingston’s ambivalence toward her mother, much of the criticism seems to concur on this point. In ‘From silence to song: the triumph of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior’, Frontiers, 9, 2 (1987), p. 80, Linda Morante writes: ‘It is a story told both in spite of and because of the mother who silenced her and yet taught her to sing. A reproach and a tribute. See also Deborah Homsher, ‘The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston: a bridging of autobiography and fiction’, Iowa Review, 10, 4 (Fall 1979), pp. 93–7; Stephanie A.Demetrakopoulos, The meta-physics of matrilinearism in women’s autobiography: studies of Mead’s Blackberry Winter, Hellman’s Pentimento, Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Kingston’s The Woman Warrior’, in Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C.Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 180–205; Veronica Wang, ‘Reality and fantasy: the Chinese-American woman’s quest for identity’, MELUS, 12, 3 (Fall 1985), pp. 23–31; Suzanne Juhasz, ‘Maxine Hong Kingston: narrative technique & female identity’, in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, ed. Catherine Rain-water and William J.Scheick (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), pp. 173–89. For a more antagonistic view of the mother-daughter relationship, see in particular Elaine Kim’s argument in ‘Visions and fierce dreams: a commentary of the works of Maxine Hong

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Kingston’, Amerasia, 8, 2 (1981): ‘In The Woman Warrior, two powerful women, the mother and the daughter contend over who will talk-story in the end. The daughter prevails because it is she who can transplant the mother’s talk-story in the American environment’, p. 155. 17 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, pp. 85–6. 18 ibid., p. 90. 19 The analysis of Kingston’s narrative strategies has largely taken place within the question of genre. See Patricia Lin Blinde, ‘The icicle in the desert: perspective and form in the works of two Chinese-American writers’, MELUS, 6, 3 (1979), pp. 51–71; Bobby Fong, ‘Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical strategy in The Woman Warrior’, Biography, 12, 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 117–26; and Sidonie Smith, ‘Self, subject, and resistance: marginalities and twentieth-century autobiographical practice’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 9, 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 11–24. It would seem that autobiography is one of the choice genres to practise the problematizing of gender as well as class, ethnicity and identity. 20 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), p. 123. 21 Natasha’s mother repeats ‘courroux’ and ‘gniev’ to her (p. 240). 22 Gretchen B.Besser, ‘Sarraute on childhood—her own’, French Literature Series, 12 (1985), pp. 154–61. For an excellent and rare interview which situates the conception and writing of Childhood within Sarraute’s philosophy of language, see Carmen Licari,’ “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a, qu’est-ce qui c’est passé? Mais rien”: entretiens avec Nathalie Sarraute’, Francofonia: Studi e ricerche sulla letteratura di lingua francese, 5 (Autumn 1985), pp. 3–16. Françoise van Roey-Roux discusses the text’s originality within the genre of autobiography as a result of Sarraute’s ongoing engagement with a kind of writing that features conversations as well as ‘sub-conversations’ (‘Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute ou de la fiction à l’autobiographie’, Etudes Littéraires, 17, 2 (Autumn 1984), pp. 273–82). Her comments on voice are also perceptive. More recent analyses of Childhood are: Germaine Brée, ‘Autogynography’, The Southern Review, 22, 2 (Spring 1986), pp. 223–30; Yvette Went-Daoust, ‘Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute ou le pouvoir de la parole’, Les Lettres Romaines, 41, 4 (November 1987), pp. 337–50; Louis Sass, ‘Introspection, schizophrenia, and the fragmentation of self’, Representations, 19 (Summer 1987), pp. 1–34. For some of Sarraute’s comments on her own ‘venue à l’écriture’ see ‘Nathalie Sarraute’, in Three Decades of the French New Novel, ed. Lois Oppenheim (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 119–31. 23 Sue Chin, ‘An interview with Maxine Hong Kingston: “Everyone has a story to tell”’, The International Examiner, 18 May 1983, p. 4. Kingston also points out: ‘For the record, most of my mail is from Chinese American women, who tell me how similar their childhoods were to the one in the book, or they say their lives are not like that at all, but they understand the feelings; then they tell me some stories about themselves’ (in ‘Cultural misreadings’, Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities, ed. Guy Amirthanayagam (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 63). See also the interview ‘Maxine Hong Kingston’, in Women Writers of the West Coast Speaking of Their Lives and Careers, ed. Marilyn Yalom (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983), pp. 11–19. Suzi Wong’s review of The Woman Warrior in Amerasia, 4, 1 (1977) begins: ‘Like Maxine Hong Kingston, I am the daughter of a Chinese laundryman in America. This fact insists on thrusting itself upon my reading of her book…. In fact, I feel as if a sister had written the book…sister in the tenderest sense of having shared certain shame, secrets, and scars’, p. 165. It is almost impossible to think of a reader of Sarraute’s responding in an equivalent fashion, even though she has built for herself a ‘community of readers’. The discussion of gender and ethnicity in The Woman Warrior is ongoing: see Elaine H.Kim, ‘Visions and fierce dreams’, especially p. 147, and ‘Defining Asian American realities through literature’, Cultural Critique, 6 (Spring 1987), pp. 87–111; Linda Hunt, ‘“I could not figure out what was my village”: gender vs. ethnicity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior’, MELUS, 12, 3 (Fall 1985), pp. 5–12;

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King-Kok Cheung, ‘“Don’t tell”: imposed silences in The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior’, PMLA, 103, 2 (March 1988), pp. 162–74. More recently the debate within the Asian-American literary community has been heavily informed by gendered writing practices as exemplified, whether they endorse this interpretation or not, by Kingston and Frank Chin. See Elaine Kim ‘“Such opposite creatures”: men and women in Asian American literature’, Michigan Quarterly (Winter 1990), pp. 68–93 and King-Kok Cheung, ‘The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific: must a Chinese American critic choose between feminism and heroism?’, in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 234–51. 24 Gayle K.Sato, ‘Ghosts as Chinese American constructs in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior’, in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, ed. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar (University of Tennessee Press, 1991. 25 See Jurij Lotman and Boris A.Uspenskij, Tipologia della cultura (Milan: Bompiani, 1975). 26 Sato’s essay first subverts the terms in which ethnicity in The Woman Warrior is commonly framed, by specifying where Kingston is writing from: ‘Kingston’s nationality is not undetermined. She wants to clarify “Asian”, but this process begins from the fixed fact of American nationality’; then, it elaborates the text’s Asian American features. Teresa de Lauretis writes about the recognition of female ‘mentors’ or ‘role models’ in a recent article, ‘The essence of the triangle or, Taking the risk of essentialism seriously: feminist theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain’, differences, 1, 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–37. In spite of obvious disparities, both the female ‘entrustment’ presented by de Lauretis and the ‘filial gesture’ discussed by Sato reinterpret, in the context of a freer, more generous economy, what Cixous sees as the ‘masculine’ notion of ‘paying a debt’. 27 Jacques Derrida, ‘voice ii…’, ‘Voices edited by Verena Andermatt Conley’, boundary 2, 12, 2 (Winter 1984), p. 89. Derrida is responding to Conley’s remarks here which are derivative of Cixous’s without, of course, being hers. Derrida’s comments are worth quoting more at length since he seems to have learned something from feminist theory and to have, as a result, some contribution to make to the current debate on essentialism:

What group of women is in question? Where? When? To what extent? …we are as little assured of this economy that you call ‘feminine’ in what is called ‘woman’ as that which you call a ‘masculine’ economy in what is meant to be called ‘man’. The names of ‘woman’ and of ‘man’ which, in everyday language, retain authority between quotation marks, continue to designate all that ‘anatomical destiny’ governs in its name. This recourse to anatomy still dominates ‘modern discourse’ which is riddled to death, I mean, by psychoanalysis…. More and less anatomy! That is what we need today. Less: …yes, the body is a ‘ciphered body’. More: the disciplines of knowledge, which nevertheless remain stammering as to this ciphered body, are no longer what they were at the moment when these axiomatics of psychoanalysis were established…. Even if it is not a question of ‘building’ on them a discourse about sexual difference, without displacement and reinterpretation, what obscurantism there would be in ignoring current or future mutations.

For different feminist perspectives which discuss the ‘woman’/‘women’ gap and slippage from a socio-historical angle and

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confront the questions of anatomy, see: Rosi Braidotti, ‘The politics of ontological difference’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, pp. 89–105, and Donna Haraway, ‘A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80 (1985), pp. 65–107. 28 Cixous, ‘Poetry is/and (the) political’, Bread and Roses, 2 (1980), p. 17.

Letter LAURA RIDING K.K.Ruthven’s essay centring on Laura Riding (‘How to avoid being canonized’, Textual Practice, 5, 2 (Summer 1991) seems, on the face of it, a well-researched piece of work, raiding widely, in its scholarly arguments, numerous and disparate strongholds of critical opinion, from the ultra-respectable if embattled Matthew Arnold, and the French avant garde, to the latest well-entrenched feminist critics. It is a shame, then, that when he comes to Laura (Riding) Jackson, he shoots himself in the foot. The subject Mr Ruthven tackles of the processes of the canonization (or not) of certain writers, poets, and the possible connivance of the authors themselves in getting elected into the lay-sainthood, comes unstuck when he puts her forward as possible saintly candidate (or not), to be elected by the present generation or a later one, when he questions the degree to which she might be advancing her own claim to sainthood. He sees this as her, to him, devious method of at once suppressing her poems in her refusing her permission to various anthologists to reprint them (a decision, by the way, she made as early as 1928 in her and Robert Graves’s A Pamphlet Against Anthologies), while allegedly simultaneously maintaining intense interest in her work by publicly berating critics who, faced with her work itself, continue, according to her, to get it wrong, even when ostensibly praising it. To illustrate his view, Mr Ruthven cites a, to him, commendable review of her Selected Poems: In Five Sets by Judith Thurman which he quotes as acclaiming Riding ‘as the author of “some of the finest feminist poems” known to her [Judith Thurman, that is]’. He then proceeds to accuse Mrs Jackson of being churlishly ‘belligerent’ for taking ‘Ms’ (Miss? Mrs?) Thurman to task in wrongly interpreting the poems she alights on, and for also refusing the accolade of being elected as a ‘feminist’. According to Mr Ruthven, following Judith Thurman in this, Mrs Jackson is a proven feminist on the basis of two particular poems of hers, ‘Divestment of Beauty’ and ‘Auspice of Jewels’, the first of which, according to Mr Ruthven, ‘urges women to “Forswear the imbecile/ Theology of loveliness”’, while the second ‘deplores the way women have “connived” at wearing jewellery to attract men, producing as a result “forgeries of [them]selves” under the phallocratic gaze.’ He then points out to his readers Laura (Riding) Jackson’s hypocrisy because, he notes, according to ‘memorists like Tom Roberts [sic]’, she was once a ‘spectacular bejeweller of herself’, and all her objections to her critics, Judith Thurman among them, is just ‘high-falutin talk’. As it happens, he, with Judith Thurman in tow, is so wrong about the two poems in question that he entirely reverses their respective

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meanings (as he is also wrong on a poem he quotes early in his essay, ‘The Quids’). The two poems emphatically do not reproach women for the wearing of jewels, but, actually, consider jewellery, and any other accoutrements that might make a woman feminine, as the natural and fitting complement to woman’s being a woman. ‘Divestment of Beauty’, in the first instance, is addressed to men, not to women, as the fourth verse makes clear. If only men were able to see women for what they are, instead of for just their outer beauty (but for that as well), then

It were the sign, man, To pluck the loathsome eye, Forswear the imbecile Theology of loveliness… And grow to later youth, Felling the patriarchal leer… While she and she, she, she, disclose The recondite familiar to your candour. Roughly, what the poet is saying in this beautifully complex poem is that if women were to lay aside their outer beauty (the natural ‘homage of the eye’ of men), then men might find woman a ‘loathsome spectacle’ but at least they would grow to ‘later youth’ and thus accept the uniqueness of women. Mr Ruthven is so confused in his reading of the poem that he puts the blame at the feet of woman, whereas the poem is, actually, a complaint against man! In the second poem, Mr Ruthven likewise reverses the meaning in his failure to give the third verse its full meaning, particularly in the lines:

And the silent given glitter locks us In a not false unplainness… He would have the core of meaning of the poem as deploring ‘the way women have connived at wearing jewellery to attract men’. These two lines, however, in all their serene simplicity, clearly enough state that such jewels and other adornments (the ‘given glitter’) that beautify the outer form of women are, in fact, fitting tribute to their actual selves, ‘a not false unplainness’. He again overlooks the entire meaning of the poem’s first verse, which shows the poem to be addressed to men in the first place, rather than to women:

They have connived at those jewelled fascinations

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That to our hands and arms and ears And heads and necks and feet And all the winding stalk Extended the mute spell of the face. ‘They’ are men, as ‘our’ is quite clearly women. And one has to say, what an occasion has been lost by Mr Ruthven and many another commentator not to dwell on the movingly beautiful imagery of these mere five lines in a total of some sixty lines! What waste! I hope it will not be thought that I am merely carping here. I am offering not just a different, relativist variation in the reading of the two poems, but a precisely opposite reading to Mr Ruthven’s. By my lights, he destroys the poems, their meanings, and in doing so gives himself licence for any number of caustic asides at Mrs Jackson’s expense, as, upbraiding her, sarcastically, for being some kind of covert feminist, despite her denial; as, for her hypocrisy in being herself fond of jewels, and so forth. I have been able to underline and bring to the surface just these two gross errors of his arising from his complete misunderstanding of just two poems, in the midst of a welter of remarks he makes about Laura (Riding) Jackson as a person, Laura (Riding) Jackson as a poet, remarks that bound from a sifting of various biographical data of a distasteful kind to the latest in feminist critique that either includes or does not include reference to her, and all of it based on what?—on exactly the kind of misreading of her poems, of her work in general, that Mr Ruthven offers in the guise of criticism? For, clearly, in the background of biographical and critical detail he has recourse to, nothing—not even the ‘liberalhumanist’ approach of Joyce Wexler, ‘extremely sympathetic to Riding’, plus, of course, her ‘indispensable bibliography’—no, not one interpretation has assisted him in understanding two poems. This surely, brings into question the validity of all the books, essays, reviews that he calls upon to strengthen his argument, none of which has helped him in understanding these particular poems (and, in my reading of these same books, essays, reviews, in any other of the poems, either). Something is seriously amiss. Then what will Mr Ruthven think should Mrs Jackson point out to him his errors? That she is ungrateful? Will he be miffed if she finds him ‘stupid’ or of ‘the Mean school of Riding criticism’? Or that he should have ‘consulted’ her? (Why not, by the way, consult with an author for comment purpose on what purports to be a serious piece of work on her, and that might take some months to prepare?) If he, Judith Thurman and others can get it so wrong in straight-forward interpretations, then it is pertinent to question what else they have got wrong. He draws, after all, upon Joyce Wexler, Hugh Ford, Albert Burns, Martin Seymour-Smith, R.P.Graves, Paul Auster, Stephen Spender, etc., etc., yet still renders just two poems into their opposite meanings, making a complete nonsense of them and of the thrust of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s work in general so far as his readers are concerned. It is, to put it at no more than this, dismal that scholars and critics should thus far have failed to give a decent account of Laura Riding’s poems, or Laura (Riding) Jacksons’s work as a whole. But it is much worse than just dismal to see comments which range from the ungraceful to the ugly interposed in the critical-scholastic apparatus of such modish subjects as literary canonization, canonizing, ‘canonicity’, which describe, for

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instance, her book The Telling as ‘less than compelling’, or, in unpleasant schoolboy humour, her Selected Poems as ‘distractingly Wimbledonian’. These and other asides weigh so heavily against his pretended fairness at the essay’s close as not merely to cancel it out but to consign it to that ‘Contemporary Concept Dump’ he makes play with that Laura (Riding) Jackson so fruitfully suggested for ideas that fizzle away to an idle nothingness. For, in the end, had he understood the slightest thing about Laura (Riding) Jackson he would have known that the whole idea of ‘canonization’, ‘canonicity’, while endemic in the male-structured world at large, is wholly inimical to what she has been writing about for no less than the last seventy years. He might like to check such books of hers as Contemporaries And Snobs or Anarchsism Is Not Enough of the 1920s, or an essay of hers in her magazine Epilogue in the 1930s entitled ‘The theme of fame’, and much else that he might find. Of all the authors he might have lighted on for illustrating his thesis, she is not merely the least likely candidate, but, in the terms of Mr Ruthven’s argument, she is no candidate at all. Yours faithfully, Mark Jacobs (Note: Laura Riding died in Wabasso, Florida, on 2 September 1991—Ed.) I am indebted to Mark Jacobs for displaying so ingenuously the discursive symptoms of Lauraphilia dementia—a condition produced by years of ventriloquial subservience to the late Laura Riding, and the reproduction of her opinions on her writings as the correct ones. But in so far as he fails to engage with the theoretical issues raised in my essay, I can merely thank him for giving analysts of textual practices some idea of the kind of damage done to Riding’s reputation by her minders. K.K.Ruthven

Reviews PETER BROOKER

• Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, edited and introduced by Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 208 pp., £8.95 It’s the end of history! A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of consumerism! Postmodernism has hit the streets and capitalist democracy rules OK or not OK! Whatever the qualms about this postmodern scenario, no one can doubt after the earthquake that has run from November 1989 along the fault line of East and West Germany that a decisive break in the post-war period has occurred and that Europe is entering an entirely new set of political, economic and cultural relations. In this latest ‘postmodern’ heave, perestroika has destabilized and rejoined identities overnight, borders high and low have been literally crossed, and what passed as the grandest political narrative of post-war Europe has stalled and fallen. At the time of writing in late 1989, many are already convinced that this is the end of ‘socialism/communism’ (what’s the difference?), swayed by media talk of German reunification. The real, and one hopes, lasting claim meanwhile is that East Germany and other countries in the eastern bloc are breaking into a post-Stalinist era, to discover there less the end than the beginning of history. The promise of this moment lies therefore in ideas and programmes for socialist pluralism; in new, experimental, forms beyond ‘no longer existing socialism’ which, who knows, might help unlock the grip of ‘already existing capitalism’ upon postmodern culture in the west. Who knows? Raymond Williams, a veteran crosser of borders, who pulled down walls and hierarchies, keyword by keyword as he went, would have made good sense of events in Europe. Indeed in an essay like ‘Towards many socialisms’ published in Resources of Hope (1989) he had already done so. This perspective, opening on to a new future, came towards the end of Williams’s reassessment of an entire political and cultural lexicon; from the early work on industry, democracy, class, art and culture, through the crucial double challenge to the traditional concepts of literary and cultural study and the static vocabulary of classic Marxism, to the green and European perspective of his last essays. It was a pioneering and deeply instructive, indeed epic, achievement. The book of keywords was not complete, however, nor closed. Williams had not fully realized the

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importance of gender, as he admitted;1 nor, until the mid-1980s, had he turned directly to modernism. As for post-modernism, on present evidence, this was a word he could hardly bring himself to utter. Also—for possibly related reasons—American literature and culture made virtually no appearance in Williams’s work. Significantly, in these essays, the orthodoxies and marginal or apparent freedoms of American intellectual and political life, which comprise some of the subtleties of postmodernity, are introduced, as is the theme of race, via Edward Said, from an edited discussion with Williams. This item appears as an ‘Appendix’ after eleven other chapters. The core of these are from 1985–6 with outriders reaching back to the ‘Afterword to Modern Tragedy’ (1979) to the latest ‘Theatre as a political forum’ (1988). Six chapters, including those most directly on modernism and the avant-garde, have been previously published in different volumes. There is a short, distantly relevant chapter, previously a pamphlet, on Arts Council policy, the chapter ‘Culture and technology’ from Towards 2000, and an essay apiece on cultural studies and cultural theory. The first of this pair, together with two other essays ‘When was modernism? and ‘Cinema and socialism’, are newly published here. This is the volume more or less as Williams was planning it, assembled now, as Pinkney explains, so as to follow ‘the underlying logic of a developing argument’. One missing chapter, ‘Against the new conformists’ (a grievous loss, as Pinkney says), remains as a general subtitle to signal Williams’s mounting polemic. Who the new conformists are we never learn, exactly, at least not from Williams, since his prose winds as ever through the ‘usual famous qualifying and complicating’2 across broad tracts where there is, as he might say, specific and necessarily complex work to be done; setting markers but naming no names. The reader is bound all the same to try to read this missing chapter into existence. Pinkney suggests we look for its ‘literary side’ to the early ‘Afterword to Modern Tragedy’, an editorial addition to Williams’s plan. ‘Literary’ is a surprising description for Williams’s sombre collocation here of tragic forms and social tragedy, but his perception of a ‘structure of feeling’ forming since the late 1960s—a mood marked in the midst of a dying order and a new official hardness and authoritarianism by danger and conflict, shock and loss, amounting as he puts it to ‘a widespread loss of the future’ (p. 96)—does effectively launch the book’s main cultural theme, lifting it away from the more direct treatments of modernism and the avant-garde in the opening five chapters. These first chapters quickly establish modernism’s constructed and exclusive identity. Williams (implicitly) confirms Peter Bürger’s distinction between modernist autonomy and the avant-garde ambition to reintegrate art and social praxis, and very usefully explores the kind of co-ordinates for modernism tabled by Perry Anderson: the metropolis, new technology, exile and immigration, and political radicalism.3 As Pinkney underlines in his Introduction, however, it is an important argument and strategy in the book to survey and assess modernism from a position beyond its own self-definition. These first chapters already open this distance before Williams sets himself not only outside but against modernism’s boundaries, influence and deformations. In the ‘Afterword to Modern Tragedy’ he broods on the contemporary historical tragedy of noncommunication and its intensified acceptance in naturalized dramatic forms (he cites Chekhov and Beckett) which sever connections and kill all hope. Later he assails the general cultural pessimism and technological determinism which sees new technologies, whether of the press, radio or TV, as producing unstoppable pap, and so retreats in

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horrified passivity to a non-existent realm of unsullied quality, or declines into a bottomless world of no standards, or adopts the cheerless contemporary radicalism of negative play. In the earlier essay, at the low point of 1979, one feels Williams’s grip on history tighten as all else shudders and drifts. Here in ‘Culture and technology’ from Towards 2000, he strikes two-handedly, a wrathful bard, at modernism’s degraded progeny: ‘the most reductive versions of human existence in the whole of cultural history’ (p. 130), and at its agents and inheritors who would deny the alternative future that the book reclaims. The shocks and dislocations of modernism have become the normalized universally circulated experience of a dominant ‘popular’ culture: ‘fragmentation, loss of identity, loss of the very grounds of communication…natural competitive violence; the insignificance of history; the fictionality of all actions; the arbitrariness of language’ (ibid.) have become the routine small change of a cultural establishment in league with paranational commodity exchange. A once-liberating modernism has become our jailor. What Williams describes has become a familiar kind of ‘postmodernism’. Where others have seen pastiche and parody, Williams sees a deadening homogenization emanating from the centres of power, but against it and insistently, in a newly invigorated humanism, a popular resilience and the vitality of popular cultural activity (the words ‘human’, ‘vital’, ‘living’, ‘impulses’, ‘energies’, ‘active’, ‘irrepressible’ flood the pages of this essay). With this come proposals, long associated with Williams, for democratic cultural forms and institutions, and for a renewal of the original cultural studies project, engaged once more with the interests and pressures of people’s lives, regardless of formal disciplines. He is thus led to a practical utopianism, to ‘the known alternative principle of the common provision of all necessary common services’ (p. 128), and to the vision of ‘a new socialism, in numerous and complex societies’, for here are ‘the authentically modern movements’ (p. 139). It seems churlish to complain of this. However, if Williams’s polemic is to stand at the door of the future, there are many subscribers who won’t get a look in. Williams would be the first to require specific and flexible attention, ‘analysis rather than summary’ of the kind of ‘multi-valent and both dynamic and uncertain process’ (p. 91) which makes up the contemporary as any cultural formation. Recent radical theory and criticism, however, seem not to deserve it: thus, where he might enlist he expels, and where he should discriminate he denounces. At the centre of his attack is the ‘language paradigm’, specifically the structuralist model which Williams sees as interrupting the authentic project in cultural studies and as circuiting the USA and France to resettle here as poststructuralism, in an unholy alliance with an accommodating ‘self-consciously modernist Marxism’ (p. 171). This whole undifferentiated enterprise from the 1960s to the late 1970s (or earlier and later—its boundaries are vague) represented a catastrophic return to formalism, ‘many wasted years’ (ibid.) in which ‘theory’ served only to deepen the hopeless negativities of the postmodern condition. If by postmodernism we mean Jean Baudrillard, this entails the perception of a progressive detachment of the ‘signifier’ from the ‘signified’; from the realist moment, we might say, when image reflects reality, to the critical, ‘relative autonomy’ of modernism which masks or perverts that reality, to the final postmodern eclipse of the ‘signified’ by the ‘signifier’. So we are brought to the never ending end of things, the dead moment of achieved utopia. And thus Baudrillard in a gesture of resignation which

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cancels the self, and the real, and truth and history, comes to endorse the banal sublimities of a hyperreal culture of unanchored images. Arguing specifically against this new conformism—though he concedes the reality of hyperreality in present-day political culture especially—Christopher Norris has marked out an alternative theoretical route, not from Saussure, but in the post-Fregean tradition of analytic philosophy, as well as in Habermas’s ‘transcendental pragmatics’ which would reclaim reference, rationality, critique, and the grounds for political concern and action.4 Williams’s alternative is the road from Vitebsk, a resumption of the initiative begun in the critique of formalism by Voloshinov, Bakhtin and Medvedev. Here in theory and analysis (introduced notably by Williams a dozen years ago in Marxism and Literature) is a view of language as a dynamic, dialogic, social form, the record and agency of ideological difference and struggle. It is this model then that Williams (and Edward Said) would mobilize against the tyrannous fatalism of current orthodoxies. One remembers however that the title of Williams’s intended chapter is written ‘Against the new conformists’. For Williams there are old as well as new conformists. One is asked therefore not only to root for Bakhtin against Baudrillard (say), but to find structuralism, poststructuralism, ‘modernist Marxism’ all equally guilty, in the same sentence. This tendency is seen to have uniformly denied reference and material reality, and thus, crucially for Williams, to have been anti-representational and anti-realist. Hence his charge in the opening chapter ‘When was modernism?’ that modernism has excluded ‘the great realists’ (in its hegemonic form, ‘modernism’ excluded and marginalized a number of other ‘modernisms’ too—American, black, feminist, non-English and fascist, but Williams does not comment on this). Hence too his argument and the evidence from Strindberg with which he opens two chapters for a ‘modernist naturalism’. By the last chapter, ‘The uses of cultural theory’, where he makes the fullest case for Bakhtin and Co. and the enemy is squashed together in the firing line, we know pretty well who these older conformists are. We could name names (Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Althusser and assorted epigones) and could go on to name books, magazines, essays, as Williams does not. To do so, though, would, to say the least, modulate his polemic. Or ought to. As it stands a generation of ‘British post-structuralists’ stand accused of a false transfer of Saussurean categories (which they anyway misunderstood) to literary and cultural production, and of invoking an avant-garde ideology of autonomy as authority for a formalist, anti-popular and anti-radical criticism. One only has to begin to follow through, say, Catherine Belsey’s work or to consider the ‘cultural materialism’ of Dollimore and Sinfield or ‘new historicism’ ‘to say nothing’ of deconstructionist and post-Marxist feminisms, to see that these are not all ‘the same’ and that the charge of formalism is generally wildly off-beam, however sterile and unconnected some poststructuralist work has been. Just to suggest the complications: Catherine Belsey’s critique of ‘classic realism’ (indebted to Althusser, Lacan and Screen) would seem to brand her Critical Practice (1980) as a major begetter of new conformism. In a later essay, ‘Literature, history, politics’ (1983), Belsey recognizes that her classification of kinds of texts here ‘may have been excessively formalistic’, and proposes, via Foucault, a ‘post-structuralist history…not of an irrecoverable experience, but of meanings, of the signified in its plurality’.5 The remaking, the ‘fictioning’, of literature will, she concludes, render up ‘our true history in the interests of a politics of change’.6 In the essay ‘Towards cultural

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history’ (1989) she says that ‘the transformation of English into cultural history would be unthinkable without the example of Raymond Williams’ (true, but others, including Belsey, have contributed to this process), and defines the project of cultural history as ‘a history of meanings, and struggles for meaning…. Its focus is on change, cultural difference and the relativity of truth. And its purpose is to change the subject, involving ourselves as practitioners in the political and pedagogic process of making history.’7 If this is ‘conformist’ then Williams was an Englishman. Commenting elsewhere on ‘British post-structuralism’ Tony Pinkney says rightly that Williams did no more than adumbrate a full-scale analysis of this and other features in the post-sixties cultural formation.8 Yet he chastises it, misleadingly I think, in much the same terms as Williams, and then, in the present ‘Introduction’, commanding and subtle though it is, simplifies the matter even further. Barthes, Althusser, and after them British radical critics (Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, Belsey, Easthope, Eagleton—Pinkney does name names) were all excited, he says, indeed spellbound by what he calls the ‘Brechtian voodoo’ which granted modernism a ‘grisly afterlife’ (p. 23). Pinkney is right to suggest a specific historical and political context for Brecht, ‘within alienation analysing alienation’, and to question any direct transfer of his methods to Britain. But the series of points he scores against Brecht, derived in the main from Williams’s Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (that Brecht’s ‘complex seeing’ was not embodied in his work, that his drama was ‘“not oriented to growth”’, that it retained the Expressionist polarity of ‘“isolated individual versus total system”’, that he was ‘“hardly interested at all in intermediate relationships”’, that his work conveniently enthroned ‘“the critical spectator”’ and that Verfremdung ‘derived from the Russian Formalist “defamiliarisation”’, pp. 20, 21) could all be challenged. Indeed several of them are reversed in the present volume by Williams himself. In the essay ‘Theatre as a political forum’ he sees a shift after Brecht’s early plays towards a ‘positive and eventually collective response’, from ‘the idea of a consciously participating, critical audience’ to the presentation in exile of ‘profoundly divided, even self-dissolving figures’; the introduction of ‘the utopian elements of the fairytale’, and ‘the utopian realisation of a rare and happy justice, [when] the collective impulse survives and communicates’ (pp. 89–91). Leaving Althusser and the others to one side, it is evidently a mistake on this kind of reading to conflate Brecht or his influence, uniformly or at all, with ‘formalist radicalism’ or a ‘new idealism’ or ‘dead-end modernisms’. To say that Williams changed his mind only confirms that the movements in criticism and culture in this ‘Brecht epoch’ cannot be blocked, tagged, and ditched the way they are here. Williams stubbornly describes these features in Brecht as comprising a ‘modernist Naturalism’. The second term takes the positive stress throughout, but there is a concession and a juxtaposition in this usage, akin perhaps to the subtextual montage Pinkney discovers in which Dada forms the ‘counterplay to Bolshevism’; a ‘warm current’ taking the chill off scientific socialism. He extrapolates this intriguingly as ‘a New Left “third space” between reform and revolution that remains to be invented in full’ (p. 26). Williams had been moving this kind of ‘complex thinking’ forward in relation to contemporary cultural production in the discussion ‘Brecht and beyond’ in Politics and Letters. There he extends the case for naturalism to the rich tradition of television drama which has reclaimed a working-class history (Days of Hope and When the Boat Comes In

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are his examples). Beyond this ‘indicative’ and retrospective realism, Williams discovers in Brecht a second ‘subjunctive’ mode in which a scene can be replayed to produce a different outcome (the example he gives from television is The Big Flame). In the 1980s, as this first tradition thinned, there have been a handful of further examples in this second mode (The Singing Detective, The Edge of Darkness, 1999, and especially in A Very British Coup). One could think of further examples of ‘near future’ fiction and drama outside of television, which move beyond critical negation towards a positively transforming estrangement, and Williams links this project, necessarily, with an appropriation of the major means of contemporary cultural production and persuasion. The form of the subjunctive mode is ‘if we did this, what would happen next?’9 It precisely describes the mood of ‘Vortex Europe’ and says what is still required in experiment and exploration to dismantle the conformism of subjectivities and systems— and so invent a ‘third space’. On the Berlin wall was written ‘DADA and MAMA for DEMOCRACY!’: a message that socialist culture may have more resources in a more pluralist tradition than even Raymond Williams knew. Thames Polytechnic

NOTES 1 Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 319. 2 ibid., p. 320. 3 See Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and revolution’, New Left Review, 144 (March-April 1984), pp. 96–113. 4 Christopher Norris, ‘Lost in the funhouse: Baudrillard and the politics of postmodernism’, Textual Practice, 3, 3 (Winter 1989), pp. 360–87. 5 In David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory, A Reader (London and New York: Longman, 1988), pp. 407, 405. 6 ibid., p. 410. 7 Textual Practice, 3, 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 161, 168. 8 See Pinkney’s review of Antony Easthope’s British Post-Structuralism Since 1968, THES, 30 September 1988. 9 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London and New York: Verso, 1979), p. 219.

BRIAN COATES

• Antony Easthope, Poetry and Phantasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 227 pp., £27.50 The theorizing of literary discourse arises from a recognition that it is a discourse positioned by historical, ideological and economic circumstance. Treating text as ‘literature’ inscribes institutional membership upon it, shapes and classifies potential responses, signals the presence of canonical authority. The ideological nature of canonical requirements led the Russian Formalists to research the specificities of literary structure: Jakobson’s phonological and syntactical analyses and Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie clarify the sense in isolating a particular body of texts for analysis, a sense that through its scientific claims aspires to transcend the ideological. This notation of the material structure of literature left a key problem unsolved that poststructuralist method is still working over. The material that ‘makes’ literature is itself made—linguistic forms, local troping traditions, subjectivity, the relation of subject and object, rhythmic organization—all stem from a patterning of cultural practices that are developed within particular social formations. The literary work gathers and arranges a collection of such items in accord with contemporary administrative, pedagogic, aesthetic and technical concerns. Genre, intertextual placement, audience function, institutional structure and communication mode are ranged among these concerns. Text is always interpreted. From this starting-point, Antony Easthope in Poetry and Phantasy argues that ‘the main option is between the institutional power of the conventional mode of interpretation and the challenge of more radical criticism’ (p. 7). Poetry and Phantasy reads the text of western poetry through a study of the social phantasies that propel the insertion of subjectivity into aesthetic discourse. The basis of social phantasy as interpretative device is that ‘the literary text always produces ideological and phantasy meanings in a simultaneity’ (p. 43). The project initiated in Poetry as Discourse, an exploration of the materiality of the signifier, is here extended to the level of meaning. Easthope’s aim is to bring psychoanalytic method to bear on an historically and ideologically understood literary canon. Phantasy in poetry is, on this reading, coded with socializing agencies. The formal nature of the art object is the result of a labour that transforms psychic experience into shaped form. An analogy for this labour is the ‘dreamwork’ that patterns latent content into manifest content. Here the argument is qualified by a distinction between the dream which has a dreamer and the poem as a social product of which analysis must stop at the text (‘text’, that is, as both index and vehicle of ideological currents). This distinction, dream/poem, is loosely formed, for Easthope is intent to blur any extension of it to ‘personal/social’. His point is that the textuality of art foregrounds the public meanings of our psychic life. The narration of a

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dream and the writing of a poem are cognate activities: the signifying systems of narrative and poetics exert pressure on the material to shed itself of personal idiosyncrasy and to augment itself by recourse to the formal properties of the signifier. The project of linking a psychoanalytic criticism with a historical materialism works through the problem of relating ‘timeless’ psychic characteristics to historical moment. Freud’s speculation that the super-ego carries ideological memory-traces that position history within the unconscious leads to a discussion that incorporates brief accounts of the views of Williams, Bakhtin, Althusser, Macherey, Lyotard and Jameson before settling upon Hirst and Woolley’s Social Relations and Human Attributes as a model for the linkage of ideology and psychoanalysis. Easthope’s incisive account of the current debate in poststructuralist work takes Althusser’s conception of a decentred history as a useful mechanism allowing ideology to be separated from the unconscious while always in relation. The structure of the social formation is made up of relatively autonomous units; interaction is a critical feature of Althusser’s thesis but its occurrence is uneven. Literature, as aesthetic production, also works in its own time and thus ‘the issue of the relation between ideology and the unconscious must be re-considered in terms specific to literature’ (p. 33). The decentring manoeuvre is neatly turned on its head in the final section of the book’s theoretical introduction when Easthope brings Stephen Heath’s account of psychoanalysis and ideology into the discussion. Subjects exist in the social formation but their identity is also contextualized in a specific material history. To speak of an individual is to refer to an identity that is both psychic and social. And it is the simultaneity of these identities (which shadow and track one another) that sets psychoanalysis firmly within historical materialism. Since social process ‘does not exhaust the subject’ (Heath, quoted on p. 41), an Althusserian autonomy of structure characterizes the deployment of psychoanalytic theory. Heath uses the Saussurian analogy of a sheet of paper to point up these linkages and Easthope, building on this framework, opens up the signifier to the play of the two related yet autonomous systems of ideology and phantasy. He concludes: No general mode or form of correspondence between ideology and phantasy is being asserted here—only that specific correspondence is ensured and in fact produced by the way a given order of signifiers in a text opens simultaneously onto ideological meanings on the one side and phantasy meanings on the other. (p. 45) The account of European poetry which makes up the body of the book fulfils this twofold programme through a study of the ‘development of a poetic tradition promoting and enabling the social phantasy of what may be termed male scopophiliac narcissism’ (p. 60). Modernism, in its Poundian version, is seen to challenge this tradition by rooting the subject in history and presenting a discourse that interrogates the meanings of that history. From the early Renaissance up to the twentieth century, the institution of poetry posits a speaking subject who articulates the power of the gaze. He rehearses the Lacanian mirror-phase in an ideological context which contains a coercive sexual imperialism

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hitched to a strategy of bourgeois self-interest. Easthope’s case is that the courtly love tradition sets in motion an inwardness that results in narcissistic phantasy. Donne’s ‘Elegy 19’ provides a model illustration of the point. Setting it against its source in Ovid’s Amores allows the scopophiliac phantasy of Renaissance poetic practice to be highlighted: the sexual object is desexualized through allusion and conceit; the speaker aims for visual mastery of the woman; the object of desire is always ahead; a restless, constantly displaced energy motivates the discourse; his search is for ‘a transcendent object, one whose perfect atemporal image may return him to an equally perfect reflection of himself’ (p. 58). An important feature of the discussion concerns the secularization of spiritual forms that accompanied the rise of a bourgeois class ideology. The discourse of love opens up the discontinuities of the feudalism-capitalism shift by articulating relationships based on hierarchical conceptions (woman as displaced divinity) that are subverted in the texts by a privatized sensibility which urges this switch of allegiances, accepts the need for adultery with all its consequences for established social order, and stands on earned merit rather than birthright as a marker of integrity. This suggestive reading of the emotional flux of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry presents, in effect, a deconstruction of the high modernist canon of European poetry instituted by T.S.Eliot. Spiritual aspirations are diffused and sublimated by the relentless drive of the emergent mercantile economy; the ‘new consciousness’ of metaphysical poetry possesses a matching unconscious that is externalized in the figuration of active male subject, speaker, viewer dominating passive female object. Easthope, using Foucault’s History of Sexuality, points to the oddly indirect sexuality of Donne’s poem, its voyeuristic delight in the unclothing of the woman, its narcissistic display of object as a function of subject. In this text, seventeenth-century poetry possesses not ‘a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience’ (Eliot) but one in continual flight from experience, possessing a battery of discourses able to divert and suppress the alarming physicality of other people. Tracing social phantasy through Milton and the Augustan poets, Easthope emphasizes the privileging of the signified over the signifier, the attempt to produce unmediated, transparent meanings and the constant reinforcement of patriarchy in the narrative web and poetic technique of the age. The authorizing presences in seventeenth-century poetics—Milton’s God, Dryden’s Charles II—are distinguished through the varying modes in which they attempt to suppress the feminine. Augustan practice cloaks its patriarchy as ‘objectivity’, the ‘minutely detailed transparency of the discourse from itself’ (p. 112) as witnessed in The Rape of the Lock. Poetry, recognizing and resisting sexual difference, reiterates the Oedipal triangle—‘the father comes to be wished for as a dead father’ (p. 112). Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes and Gray’s Elegy articulate the melancholy of this death and the pressure of desire that lies at its source. Romanticism is tackled by lining up the alienation effect of machine production with the splitting of subject from external world that occurs as the ego is formed. The compensatory lure of romantic ideology stems from its utopian project of reinstituting a sense of totality even as it recognizes the impossibility of its task. Thus primary narcissism and the nostalgia for a pre-industrial subjectivity combine in phantasy to produce a poetic that strives to ‘wish away the signifier’, the mark of sexual and linguistic difference. Romantic poetic technique, privileging symbol over allegory and

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discours over histoire conceals the lack that energizes language, ego development and productive social engagement. The analysis of ‘To a Skylark’ presented here unpacks the Romantic model of the organic poem by drawing attention to the gap between speaker and skylark. The journey to narcissistic unity with the ego ideal fails and it is the proffered access to this failure that denies the reality of the poem as representation, as artefact, an object creating reader as subject. Social estrangement is disguised as a crisis of consciousness; the ideological plot is played out in an internal psychic phantasy which marginalizes the historical separation of worker and product by effacing the gap between reader and poem. Two further chapters of the book explore the role of social phantasy in Victorian and modernist poetry. The defence mechanisms of rationalization, secondary revision and disavowal are used to explore the tension in Victorian texts between human meaning and a world that is the creature of evolution. Ideas of a transcendent ego and a powerful father figure are both threatened. As Easthope puts it: An ideology denying that the world is designed by God the Father becomes imbricated in a social phantasy with wishes and fears well summed up in the idea that—in every sense—the paternal ego is ‘no longer master in its own house’. (p. 166) Easthope suggests that the feminine, rendered invisible by the Augustan poets, colonized in both Renaissance and Romantic poetry, appears in Victorian literature through the anxiety generated by the undermining of the father. The unstable ego, finding no alleviation of its condition in its objects, retreats into a troubled phantasy whose forms are pathological, ‘melancholy, paranoia, delusional jealousy’ (p. 106). The Waste Land is the subject of a detailed analysis which frames the poem within a concept of negative theology. A transcendent absence, figured in the references to ‘nothing’, blindness, the death wish, a generalized horror feminae and a self-directed aggressiveness unify the text around phantasies of insufficiency, incoherence and impotence. Easthope brings Eliot’s essay, ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ into the discussion in order to distinguish ‘emotions’ from ‘feelings’. This essay, so proximate to ‘Gerontion’ and The Waste Land, might well have been looked at further in relation to the poems. ‘Tradition’, that authoritative father-figure for Eliot, stands as a colossus in the essay; like Chronos, it is sustained by swallowing its children. The personae of ‘Gerontion’ and The Waste Land release the repressed material of the essay: Gerontion is immobilized by self-disgust; fragments of a ravaged Europe of which he is both victim and embodiment make him a demonic parody of ‘the mind of Europe’. The Waste Land, oscillating between the mimetic and the textual in Easthope’s discussion, is also a testimony to Eliot’s second main theoretical interest—the ‘difficulty’ of poetry. Easthope finds that ‘the transcendental ego denied by the signifier is partly re-introduced by the signified’ (p. 182), a point which takes on a more substantial character if we allow Eliot’s prose into the argument as indicative of a disturbance in the relation of the historical to the signifier. The non-sequential narrative and multiplicity of source material of the poetry strikes at the closed logic of the essay. To put it another way, the ‘story’ of the poem reveals the ‘form’ of the essay.

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Easthope reads Pound as a poet whose work takes greater cognizance of the historical moment. The Cantos are a postmodern text, foregrounding the signifier, spreading the speaking voice across the enunciation and denying a transcendental meaning, positive or negative in both signifier and signified. The inward quality of sexuality and the transcendent ego of the speaking voice characteristic of the poetic tradition surveyed in the text are absent in Pound’s Cantos which favour a ‘diffuse corporeality, tactile and synaesthetic’ (p. 188). The scope of this Eliot/Pound opposition is widened by a short and somewhat cavalier excursus into postmodernist theories of the subject. Jameson and Lyotard, with their respective accounts of late capitalism and the end of narrative as the source of postmodernism, are criticized for considering postmodernism as a unified cultural manifestation. Easthope’s preference is for the Althusserian decentred structure whereby different cultural forms can be seen as autonomous. This proves a cunning manoeuvre to reinstate the privileging of Pound over Eliot in what now appears as the autonomous form of poetry. Postmodernism need not worry about ‘the disappearance of the individual subject’ (Jameson) for the Pisan Cantos present ‘an I which claims no transcendence’ (p. 192), a subject able to reappropriate body from the entanglement of ideology. Pound’s strong interest in the ideogram and Eastern signifying systems provided a stimulus to his subversive, cryptogrammatic method (this area is the subject of a useful discussion in Easthope’s Poetry as Discourse, London: Methuen, 1983, pp. 38–43) which would tie in with the suggestion here that the psychoanalytic model of interpretation is shown up as a western historical construct through its inapplicability to his work. The use of Pound’s Cantos as symptomatic of a postmodernist break with the patriarchal fixity of poetic subjectivity in the western tradition opens the way to an examination of psychoanalysis itself. Built around the passage to centred subjectivity that is part of a social formation peculiar to capitalism, psychoanalysis is an ideologically constructed discourse. Easthope turns this potentially limiting condition to advantage by pointing up the ability of psychoanalysis to ‘inhabit’ the structuration of the individual and the shift to an inward conception of sexuality and truth. Working from within, it is able to deconstruct in a way that is denied the orthodox critique which assumes a mastery that is uncontaminated by historical process. The position is advanced through an observing of the fold that wraps psychoanalysis as text (‘literature’) with psychoanalysis as metalanguage (‘criticism’). The space this opens up is confirmed by a listing of the kinds of category problem that face psycho-analysis and which therefore aid its use as a tool which ‘inhabits’ the subject: psychoanalytic criticism is not taken seriously in Britain; the rigour and system of its scientific method evoke a questioning scepticism about its findings; psychoanalytic method and language is modified by the pull of the text; in Freud’s account, phantasy is an historically determined practice that indicates ‘the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind’. ‘Poetry as phantasy’ is thus an adjunct of the history of the subject moving from satisfaction into phantasy. Easthope concludes with an account of the moral implications of the argument. Canonical texts privilege the isolated masculine voice. The self-sufficient, unified individual of liberal humanism embodies a politics shaped around narcissistic phantasies that seek to marginalize the feminine. Confessional discourse reinforces the truth claims of masculine desire in a sign system which works to universalize a monosexual vision.

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Conventional literary criticism is in league to protect this vision through its account of ‘the emergence of the individual’ in western culture. This is an intelligent, closely-written treatise highlighting the uses of psychoanalysis in a materialist analysis of the poetic tradition. Following Juliet Mitchell and Elizabeth Wright, Easthope rehabilitates Freud in his discussion of Lacan and the repression of feminine desire. His exploration of the features of psychoanalysis is, in its positive phase, a significant tool of literary and philosophic analysis. In its deconstructive phase, it is a near neighbour of the ‘rhizome’ that escapes the established signifying system built around subject/object relations. University of Limerick

BRIAN McKENNA

• Thomas Docherty, After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 248 pp., £35.00 Thomas Docherty’s contribution to the Occidental intelligentsia’s stock-pile of books about the construct ‘postmodernism’ is one which construes this fin-de-siècle phenomenon à la Lyotard, consonant as it is with the latter’s definition of the postmodern as ‘that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself’.1 Docherty takes over and puts to stimulating work this notion that there is a tendency in modernist art which celebrates the incapacity of the subject to totalize reality and can be designated as properly ‘postmodern’. This proclivity, contends Docherty, has been inherent in all the historical ‘modernisms’ so far, evident especially in their compulsion to experiment ‘in the interests of finding and formulating the rules which will govern subsequent (“modern”) art’ (p. 17). He goes on to suggest that, specific to our own cultural moment is ‘a postmodernism which is not the condition of our modernism, but is rather coming into its own in our rejection of the modernist project’ (p. 4). By the latter he seems to mean not so much early twentieth-century modernism as the very project of modernity itself, inaugurated by the Franco-Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and championed most compellingly today by Jürgen Habermas. The postmodern themes which organize After Theory are seduction, transgression, aurality, and flight: and these are supplemented by signifiers such as deterritorialization, immaterialization, eventuality, and (Docherty’s neologism, this), aliation. The endproduct is a flawed gem of high cultural criticism which eschews the more usual signified of ‘postmodernism’, commodified popular culture. While others extol the kitsch and pastiche of Madonna and Miami Vice, Docherty, clad in his Lyotard, dances and weaves his way through the temporal and spatial labyrinth of high art, his TV and video unplugged. Docherty’s basic critical strategy is to use his figures and tropes to reread a range of modernist and avant-garde cultural practices as productive of postmodernist dissonance. Illustrative of his hermeneutic is a word-playing analysis of Wallace Stevens’s poem, ‘The Poems of Our Climate’, which is concerned less with the production of a ‘true’ knowledge of the text than with establishing a self-validating narrative between the elements which ‘ghost’ it. Such interpretation, he maintains, actively involves the reader in the kind of ‘historical production of meaning’ (p. 42) further exemplified by his audacious re-hearing of Eliot’s The Waste Land. This locus classicus of the modernist sensibility is said to evince postmodernity in its textually encoded ‘response to it[s] own reading’ and in its suggestion of the womanly ‘Jug, jug’ of the discordant song of the nightingale (p. 168).

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Docherty makes a similar move when he frames the deterritorialized flights of Diaghilev and Nijinsky as quintessentially postmodern (Marxism Today’s infamous designation of the former as ‘Fordism in Dance’ notwithstanding!). Indeed he argues that the ‘dancer’s leap’ as such ‘is the locus of exactly the postmodern tension between localization and deracination’ (p. 18) and that, in the ‘seduction of the dance itself’ (p. 20) is inscribed a postmodern impetus towards the Other and self-difference (‘aliation’). After Theory also effects an assimilation to its discourse on postmodernity of 1960s avant-garde sculpture and pictorial art. For example, Richard Long’s 1967 picture A Line Made by Walking is adduced as postmodern because of its foregrounding of its own status as an event, its deterritorializing evanescence, and its immaterialization of the walking artist who ‘ghosts’ it. Art-work of this nature has obvious affinities with the negative avant-garde of the early twentieth century, which tried ‘to avoid…absorption by not producing an object. No artefacts: just gestures, happenings, manifestations, disruptions’.2 And indeed, Docher-ty’s desire is to highlight the postmodernity of the entire avant-garde, absorbing ‘Berlin Dada, French Surrealism and Russian Constructivism’ (p. 61) into his own post-Marxist language-game. Yet, it would surely be more appropriate to articulate the avant-garde (and its defeat) with historical Bolshevism (and its defeat by Fascism and Stalinism)? Docherty also construes photography—when read postmodernistically—as an immaterializing and deterritorializing cultural practice (in an interesting argument which turns on the spectral photography of Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron). He exhorts us to: learn to view the photographic not as a strict record or documentary evidence purporting to provide truth in the guise of enlightenment about specific material histories in certain stable terrains. Rather, it becomes important that we recognize the photographic as an obscuring mode of representation. (pp. 93–4) Now, as a corrective to any naïve conception of the photograph as an object which unproblematically bears forth its message, this is useful. But is it really politically helpful to render opaque photographs of Auschwitz or Tiananmen Square? Moreover, it is surely rather fanciful to suggest that the power of the United States ‘depends upon a particular photological version of realist interpretation’ (p. 93), and that if only we refused the Rambo movies any ‘kind of truthful representation, however ideological’ (p. 94), then Latin America could slough off US hegemony? A similarly idealist ‘immaterialization’ of bourgeois power is signified by Docherty’s assertion that the process of active listening to avant-garde music generates a compositional mode of hearing which constitutes an ‘emancipation from commodity capitalism and an entry into new social relations’ (p. 200). As with so much of the discourse around ‘postmodernism’, After Theory enunciates a politics whose nature is ascribable to the fall-out from the failure of les événements de mai ’68. As is well known, faced with the reimposition of bourgeois order in France, some on the European Left ‘went micropolitical’, discerning on the margins of the broad canvas of the defeated revolutionary movement proleptic elements of their own concerns.

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Docherty conceptualizes les événements as a sixties ‘happening’, replete with an anachronistic ‘eventuality’ which transgressed the ‘merely political’ (p. 9). His astonishing asseveration is that: Had the imagination achieved power, had Cohn-Bendit, Krivine, Sauvageot—and, indeed, Lyotard—assumed some kind of directed control, the events would have become merely Modern. When de Gaulle in France reassumed precisely such programmatic control, the events were drained of their postmodern energy, and did, in fact, become merely Modern. (ibid.) This equivalencing of the brutal restoration of capitalist normality and the hypothesis of a successful socialist revolution is not one which would have recommended itself to those people on the Nantes Central Strike Committee who ran the city from 26 to 31 May 1968, nor to those occupying workers at the Atlantic Shipyards at St Nazaire who refused to submit a list of specific demands because they wanted a root-and-branch elimination of capitalism.3 Despite his chariness of apodictic truth, Docherty is crystal clear about the ‘real’ of Marxism—‘a primary locus of reaction’ is his verdict (p. 206). Rather a strange evaluation of an ideology which advocates the global extirpation of capitalism and the democratic planning of the world’s economy by the freely associated producers, one would have thought. By its acceptance of that conflation of Marxism and Stalinism so beloved of bourgeois and bureaucrat alike, After Theory constitutes itself as part of the problem of our epoch. It is fair enough to say that the misidentification of ‘socialism’ with the Soviet Union and its duplicates has retarded working-class self-emancipation for decades; but radicals now surely have the opportunity, in the wake of the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe, to render more easily realizable the emancipatory potential of ‘Marxism’ re-born. In line with his trashing of Marxism is Docherty’s endorsement of Jean Baudrillard’s notion that ubiquitous in postmodern capitalist society is a principle of ‘operational negativity’ which sanctifies the ‘hyperreal’ as real by invoking an imaginary term: thus the normalcy of America is ‘proved’ by Disneyland, the usual propriety of the US Presidency by the Watergate scandal, ‘theatre by anti-theatre, art by anti-art, psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, capitalism by revolution’ (p. 117). This dystopian image of a society traversed not by the struggles of human agents, but by binary oppositions which automatically cancel each other out, is extended to Marxian dialectics which are said by Docherty to operate ‘on a simulated scandal of hearing the antithesis to every thesis’—a statement which overlooks Marxism’s concern with movement through contradiction, its perennial quest for a third term. This latter is that to which Michel Pêcheux gives the name ‘disidentification’, beyond both conformist identification and merely negative nonidentification.4 Docherty, following Baudrillard, demonstrates no sense of working on and against what prevails to produce a disidentificatory cultural politics. Thus the ‘scandal’ of working-class revolt is, for him, always-already ‘operational within the system of capital itself’, which ‘simply uses such scandal to innoculate itself against further attack’ (p. 208). Of course, flesh-and-blood capitalists’ rulers never ‘simply’ do

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anything in an economy to which crisis is endemic. Moreover, working-class people can learn lessons too—mindless bacteria they are not. Also integral to After Theory is Lyotard’s perception of the injustice entailed by the encroachment of one language-game upon another. In this respect, Docherty is quite right to say that ‘it is unjust to reduce the language-game of feminism to that of marxism’ (p. 214). But what Marxist in the field of cultural criticism today would want to do that? What ought to be possible, of course, is the articulation of Marxism with a class-aware feminism whereby the former would defer, as appropriate, to the latter. The rhetoric of After Theory strives to demonize such a project, characterizing Enlightenment rationality in general as ‘imperialist and racist’, and speaking of Marxism’s drive to ‘colonize’ feminism. This linguistic violence does not, however, dispel the illogicality of the postulate that speaking Marxism necessarily entails silencing feminism, or that one cannot speak both. There is, however, it seems to me, something of value in Docherty’s insight that much of what passes for Marxism is analogous to a lazy form of ‘mathematical logic’, in which ‘the system does the thinking’ (pp. 206–7). Moreover, since Marxists are often culpable of failing to historicize their own texts, of failing to be sufficiently self-reflexive, Docherty’s critique of Marxism as ‘not historical enough’ (p. 240) is not without pertinence. Furthermore, unlike Baudrillard and tutti quanti, Docherty earns respect for the seriousness with which he endeavours ‘to delineate and explicate a more positively radical position for the intellectual working within the institution of cultural practices in the academy’ (p. 1). This position, ‘at the interface of ideologies…refusing the domination by any governing theory, by any position which makes a fundamental claim upon truth, totality, or reality’ (p. 219), looks like a productive one in terms of specific critical studies. One ‘governing theory’ we could well do without, though, is that globalizing theoretical ‘universal equivalent’ which has (depressingly) put discourse about ‘art-in-general’ back into the seminar room, and which goes by the tedious name, ‘postmodernism’. Wadham College, Oxford

NOTES 1 Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 81. 2 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 372. 3 Martin Thomas, ‘May ‘68’, Workers’ Liberty, 10 (May 1988), pp. 20–1. 4 For a cogent introduction to Pécheux’s terms, see Diane Macdonnell, Theories of Discourse: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), esp. pp. 39–40 and pp. 128–30.

GARY DAY

• David E.Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 278 pp., £9.95 This is an outrageous book and Musselwhite knows it. He admits to being ‘aghast’ (p. 14) at his own arguments and well he might be. He even has the cheek to limit the nineteenthcentury novel to five authors—George Eliot not among them—without explaining the basis for his selection. But this is part of a strategy of deliberate provocation designed to shock, joke and argue the reader into a new awareness of the Victorian novel and, by and large, it succeeds. Musselwhite’s methods sometimes stretch credulity to its breaking point, but for all that this is a book which never fails to generate interest and excitement, making it something of a novelty among critical works. The influence of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly Anti-Oedipus, is evident throughout the book and, for the reader who is not familiar with their work, it might be useful to start with Musselwhite’s account of some of their main ideas which he describes in the first of two appendices, the second being a critique of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari’s playfulness is apparent in Musselwhite’s tongue-in-cheek style and, in their view that everything is a machine connected to another machine, all of which are related to continual flows that criss-cross one another, Musselwhite finds some theoretical justification for his tendency to ‘discover’ all sorts of connections between disparate phenomena. However, it is Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the Oedipus complex in capitalist society which most shapes Musselwhite’s argument. Basically they say that the Oedipal family structure concentrates desire in the family rather than in society and this serves the interests of capitalism which would otherwise be overwhelmed by desire’s anarchic heterogeneity. In short, with Oedipus desire loses its social character and becomes individualized. Musselwhite traces this process in the nineteenth-century novel which, as it develops, shows less interest in the public and social and more in the private and familial. For Musselwhite, the Victorian novel is a massive act of repression. It labels, classifies, genders and grammaticizes all the energy and possibility unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, principally by imprisoning it in the family so that what could be a political threat is reduced to a familial one. By showing what the novel has repressed Musselwhite hopes to make available to us thoughts, behaviours and sexualities which are at present not just denied but are ideologically unthinkable. Musselwhite’s adoption of Deleuze and Guattari’s position is not without its problems. To begin with there is the question of terminology. Musselwhite makes free use of words like ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ and of phrases such as ‘rhizomic structures’ and ‘tree structures’ and ‘the body without organs’. These are specific terms which derive their

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meaning from the political and psychoanalytic project of Anti-Oedipus and are consequently ill-adapted to discriminating between different literary styles. Nor are they particularly suited to registering the minute reverberations of irony. It may be no accident, therefore, that Musselwhite is unable to locate the irony of Bleak House. Nor, in his discussion of Wuthering Heights, is he able to see that parts of it, such as Heathcliff’s bashing his head against a tree, are actually quite funny in their melodramatic excess and are not meant to be taken as genuine insights into ‘the horror at the heart of…human relationships’ (p. 94). Another problem with Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary is that it appears ahistorical and this inhibits Musselwhite’s historical investigation. In Anti-Oedipus the same terms are used to explain different periods which thereby lose their specificity. More importantly, however, the recurrence of certain terms such as ‘desiring machines’ and the ‘nomadic subject’ is in danger of giving the work a schematic character and, by using such terms, Musselwhite lays himself open to the same charge. In his discussion of The Old Curiosity Shop, for example, he cites the hereditary club foot of the Garlands and the Marchioness’s being sent to school under the name of Sophronia Sphynx as proof of bourgeois culture constructing the Oedipus complex before Freud discovered it. But Musselwhite can only make this claim by ignoring how these details relate to the rest of the novel. This highlights one of the weaknesses of his approach. He is so concerned with marginalia, with what a text does not say, that he is in danger of overlooking what it does say. In his discussion of Vanity Fair, for instance, Musselwhite hardly mentions the main body of the novel. To do this, he says, would mean debating whether Becky is guilty or not—though I don’t see why he thinks this is the only way to discuss the novel. Such a discussion, he continues, would be free of political and historical considerations in so far as it remained within the values which the novel itself establishes, whereas Musselwhite is primarily interested in what those values may exclude. This is a valid view but it overlooks the fact that every work of art must exclude something, otherwise it would simply not exist. Moreover aesthetic considerations play a part in deciding what can or cannot be included in a novel. It is not enough to say that the aesthetic is politically determined since that ignores the fact it has its own degree of autonomy. Musselwhite, however, seems oblivious of this point. For him, what literature excludes is politically motivated, not by the individual author but by the way of thinking which the state has implanted in him or her. And if this sounds like paranoia, it is. Mansfield Park was ‘designed’ (p. 42) to be an ideological institution and there are countless other references to a conspiracy theory. This position shows a lack of proportion which is most evident in Musselwhite’s characterization of political repression as, among other things, ‘potholes…queues [and] unpunctual trains’ (p. 237)—and who was it that made the latter run on time? Really, this would be laughable if it weren’t so insulting to those who are imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs. A second feature of Musselwhite’s method is to ‘let the texts do the work for you’ (p. 10). He has tried, he says, ‘to read closely and listen to what the texts themselves had to say’ (ibid.). This is a somewhat disingenuous argument. It implies that the reader encounters a text innocently, with no expectations of what it is or how to read it. In fact, as Musselwhite well knows, a reader approaches a work armed with codes and conventions without which he or she would not be able to engage in the reading process

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at all. These codes and conventions are the history of our reading experience, providing us with interpretative schemes by which we make sense of a text. Musselwhite’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari is an example of one such scheme and it means that he is attuned only to those areas of a text which correspond to it. Two further points should show how untenable Musselwhite’s position is. First, it is hard to see how he lets the text do the work for him when he frequently goes outside it to letters and journals. Second, the reader is not given a chance to let the text do the work for him or her; Musselwhite does it instead, as, when discussing Frankenstein, he comments ‘we shouldn’t let ourselves be deceived by that…reference to the division of property’ (p. 57). If there are flaws in Musselwhite’s position there is also irony. The attack on Fredric Jameson is typical of Musselwhite’s stance against the academic establishment which he chastises for being ‘numbingly conformist’ (p. 1). Musselwhite, by contrast, is a rebel and it is hard to resist seeing in this a typical Oedipal scenario; the son opposing the paternal authority of the literary establishment. Musselwhite’s pose seems to demonstrate the inevitability of Oedipus the moment he attacks it. Musselwhite’s willingness to strike out in new directions may lead to muddles and inconsistencies but this is more than compensated for by his new readings of familiar works. His argument about Mansfield Park is that it represents Jane Austen’s desire to turn herself into a professional writer. But he also looks at those two notoriously problematical areas of the novel, namely the Lovers’ Vows incident and the Portsmouth episode. Musselwhite suggests that the novel appropriates the philosophy of Lovers’ Vows to forge an identity for the emerging middle class at the same time as it repudiates that philosophy for more radical ends. The crucial factor here seems to be the revolutionary character of Lovers’ Vows, but a tale of the aristocracy morally righting itself and love triumphant hardly seems to threaten the foundations of the state. Moreover Frederic’s attempt to rob the man who turns out to be his father suggests that Lovers’ Vows contains the Oedipal trap from which it is supposed to offer liberation. Musselwhite is more convincing on the Portsmouth episode, which he claims shows a different consciousness from the rest of the novel, and he ingeniously shows what strategies the text deploys to contain the revolutionary threat it presents. Musselwhite’s main point about Frankenstein is that the monster is all that society refuses to name, it is a reminder ‘that other societies are possible, other knowledges, other histories, other sexualities’ (p. 59) and for this reason it has to be repressed. The interesting thing about this essay is that what the Monster represents for Musselwhite, the Pole represents for Walton, an explorer and one of the narrators, as it too is a place of possibility. Musselwhite criticizes Walton’s search for the Pole as a ‘myth’ of a ‘perfect…undifferentiated…centre…compared with which all that comes after is a fall’ (p. 48). Yet the same charge could be levelled against Musselwhite whose search for repressed texts resembles Walton’s search for the Pole: both Pole and texts are equated with undifferentiation in so far as they offer an escape from one fixed identity into numerous others which can all be inhabited simultaneously. Moreover his claim that repressed texts and their possibilities were once available suggests strongly that our present condition is a fallen one. Musselwhite’s attempt to trace the determinations of texts is an attempt to recover what has been lost—which immediately suggests an Oedipal longing. Of course

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Musselwhite would deny this, arguing that what he has in mind is a condition approximate to that of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic subject which moves across the natural, social and historical body in a continuous process of becoming. However, it is hard to see how this process could be effectively distinguished from that pre-Oedipal oceanic unity which Lacan calls the Imaginary. Even if we were to accept that the nomadic subject bore no relevance to Oedipus, there is still the problem of imagining what sort of world the nomadic subject could inhabit: it seems like a sixties utopia, with everyone being natural and spontaneous and doing their own thing—which seems somewhat naïve and facile. Is Musselwhite being nostalgic for the hippy era and thereby failing to see the conditions of production of Anti-Oedipus, which make it a contingent work, despite the absolutist values he seems to confer upon it? What, I wonder, are its repressed texts? Apart from perhaps touching on a paradox at the heart of Musselwhite’s project, the essay on Frankenstein also contains one of the best examples of Musselwhite’s overearnestness—the analysis of the Monster’s creation as an act of masturbation. OK, so we can just about accept that Mary Shelley had intimate knowledge of all the debilitating effects of male self-abuse, but Musselwhite should surely be nominated for a place in pseud’s corner when he solemnly adds that masturbation is a symptom of a wider crisis since it is ‘the introduction of difference into the very essence of the delusion of selfsufficiency’ (p. 64). Indeed, this analysis is typical of the way Musselwhite finds great matters in small things. Another example occurs in the essay on Wuthering Heights, where he modulates the names Nelly and Ellen to arrive at Nelson, which he then cites as proof for his claim that Emily eventually succeeded in occupying the position of the Lacanian father. It would be interesting to situate this elicitation of significance from tiny details within the wider context of the crisis of meaning in our culture. Leaving that aside, however, Musselwhite’s main point in this article is that the real conditions of the production of Wuthering Heights are to be found in the school exercises Emily Brontë wrote during her ten-month stay in Brussels under the supervision of M.Constantin Héger. I only wish I could share Musselwhite’s faith in the existence of real conditions of production. To me it appears like a search for origins, part Marxist but more metaphysical. Don’t conditions of production also have conditions of production? The chapter on Vanity Fair is, like the others, brilliant but flawed. Musselwhite’s basic argument is that the novel traces a breakdown in representation, and withdraws ‘from the social to the psychological’ (p. 110). The retreat from history can be seen, Musselwhite claims, most emblematically in the Agamemnon episode which signifies a reduction of ‘a powerful analysis of history and politics to the status of a…farce’ (p. 121). In a breathtaking move Musselwhite then links this to Marx’s observation in his Eighteenth Brumaire that history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, before going on to show how representation is reinscribed in the family by a society that no longer knows itself. The problem here, apart from a too easy equation of British and French politics, lies in Musselwhite’s view of Agamemnon. It is not a powerful analysis of history and politics but part of a trilogy dealing more with myth than fact, treating as it does of offences against the gods, vengeance and divine justice. Musselwhite also sees the play as an example of realism, which is hard to reconcile with the chorus, masks,

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poetry and other conventions of Greek tragedy. Musselwhite makes his arguments depend on small details so it’s unfortunate if he doesn’t get them right. His history is questionable too. In the chapter on Mansfield Park he has the landed gentry collapsing in the first decade of the century, but in the one on Vanity Fair the same event happens in 1852. In that same chapter Musselwhite also asserts that the years between 1846 and 1852 saw the institution of a professional Civil Service, which in fact did not occur until the legislation of 1870, the recommendations of the committee of 1853 being largely ignored. Again Musselwhite’s claim that representation was reinscribed in the family which then becomes an agent of social control is too simplistic. The family was seen as an agent of social control back in the sixteenth century. Musselwhite is perfectly right to trace a preoccupation with inwardness in the Victorian novel but this was part of a larger process that cannot just be reduced to Oedipus. The last essay, on Dickens, is the longest and is the only one in the collection which attempts to cover a writer’s development. Musselwhite’s case is that ‘“Boz”…was a better writer than “Dickens”’ (p. 14) because the former celebrated surfaces and the heterogeneity of things which the latter abandoned as he constituted himself as a professional novelist and became more preoccupied with psychological states. It is a commonplace of Dickens criticism to say that the early works lack the control of the later ones. Musselwhite merely restates this argument and adds a value judgement. Musselwhite also argues that Dickens’s grasp of political and economic problems diminishes as his career develops. This is simply not the case. Oliver Twist may condemn the Poor Law but it remains a tremendously naïve novel to the extent that none of Oliver’s experiences affect him in the slightest—he remains good despite being surrounded by criminals. Musselwhite’s point that there is a growing concern with the family in Dickens’s work is again highly suspect. Nicholas Nickleby, for example, shows as much interest in the family, perhaps more, as any of the later works. What Musselwhite overlooks in the early novels is their Oedipal structure which gives them a coherence embarrassing to his case. Oliver Twist opens with the loss of the mother and ends with her recovery in the form of Rose, a mother substitute. It’s also something of a mystery why Musselwhite should ignore Barnaby Rudge in his account of the early novels, especially as that was the one which Dickens wished to write first. Finally, Musselwhite’s dismissal of the Autobiographical Fragment on the grounds that its secrecy was as much flaunted as repressed misses the point; it’s precisely that which needs explaining. Musselwhite is aware of the drawbacks of his book but his aim was to set some hares running, and he has. He is idiosyncratic and can be eccentric but this does not detract from what remains a wide-ranging and fascinating book that is likely not only to revive interest in the nineteenth-century novel but also remain one of the best studies on it for some time to come. Middlesex Polytechnic, Graduate Centre

MARGARET ATACK

• Elizabeth Fallaize, The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), viii+200 pp., £9.99 (paperback) ‘For Beauvoir’, writes Elizabeth Fallaize as she concludes her discussion of All Men Are Mortal, ‘history was not going anywhere’. Metanarratives have been discredited by others since that novel’s appearance in 1946, and the teleological view of history is rejected by common accord. Which does not mean that it is not still on the move. It is to the credit of this absorbing study of Simone de Beauvoir’s novels that its analyses are not undermined by the political and biographical events which have occurred since its first publication in 1988. If anything has catapulted Sartre and Beauvoir into History, and incidentally proved their contention that historicity entails changing frames of reference, it is the revolutions in Eastern Europe, and the bringing down of the Berlin wall. So much of their political lives was shaped within and by the context of the Cold War; they are no longer here to reinterpret and reorientate the meaning of their endeavours in the light of the present changes, nor can implicit or embryonic responses be extrapolated from their works. Beauvoir’s views on politics and history will be judged, necessarily, by criteria she could not have foreseen, although she does not seem to have shared Sartre’s sense of oppression and trauma at the prospect. In terms of more personal revaluations, the publication of her letters to Sartre in 1989, and particularly the revelation, for most readers at least, of her bisexuality, will have its impact on criticism of her work. Fallaize’s study indirectly re-poses questions around the weight and relevance to be accorded to authorship, first in her discussions of Beauvoir’s intentions to use realism to political ends, and second in the interplay between narrative theory and biography. Perhaps it is inescapable with an author who has written such important autobiographies, and whose life was in so many respects in the public domain, that structural readings are still combined with biography. There is no sense of reluctance or unease on Fallaize’s part here, nor should there be. But in literary criticism which is placing its explanatory principles elsewhere, the rejection of the model which ultimately traced its authority back to the conscious or unconscious intention of the author leaves the question of what value to place on an author’s aims and intentions unresolved. Pragmatically (and even theoretically), however, the question of agency can be put on one side in favour of the recognition of biography’s status as discourse and thus an inevitable part of the process of reading and rereading. For example, whether one viewed Beauvoir’s account of her life with Sartre sympathetically or not, the conclusion that it placed a special value on the heterosexual couple was widely drawn, and necessarily influenced the readings of heterosexual couples in her fiction. The knowledge of her bisexuality must change that.

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Fallaize quotes her comment to Alice Schwartzer in 1976, that if she were rewriting her memoirs she would ‘like to tell women how I have lived my sexuality, because this is not an individual but a political issue. At the time I didn’t do it because I hadn’t understood the size and importance of the issue.’ Such a comment now has a completely different resonance and import. Elizabeth Fallaize has written a comprehensive and rewarding study of Beauvoir’s work, the first to be devoted to her novels. Beauvoir emerges as a novelist of stature, whose work achieved wide critical and popular acclaim. More interestingly, the practice of fiction, analysing technique and structure in relation to her political and ideological goals, was an abiding obsession. Fallaize focuses on the relationship between meaning and narrative strategies, enabling her to establish thematic and structural patterns; her feminist perspective combines this with questions of sexual politics, of gender and representation, and of women’s words and voices in narrative and in traditions of writing. The analysis is never less than compelling throughout. Fallaize plots the trajectory of Beauvoir’s life as passing through a series of radicalizations towards her active espousal of feminist politics in the 1970s. The Resistance, the Cold War, issues of class, and decolonization, are the staging posts in this political journey; the majority of the novels too tie together both personal and political dramas. Across the works, the role and power of the individual emerges as a leitmotiv, be it in history, in politics or in literary practice, a theme consistent with the existentialist emphasis on philosophical freedom. While contemporary suspicion of determinism or reductionism may mean that Beauvoir’s stress on the individual in relation to history or politics is sympathetically received, the same may not be true of her interrogation of the individual in relation to wider, universalist categories, such as humanity, or even gender. She Came To Stay (1943) is presented as a novel which oscillates between the philosophical, with Beauvoir exploring the interpersonal dimensions of consciousness and conflict, and the psychological, through a psycho-sexual drama constructed around two narrative trios. Anxiety over the roles open to women as they face conflicting models of femininity is considered to be a major theme; Beauvoir may come to feminism late, but questions of gender identity are central to all her fiction. Fallaize mobilizes a structural approach, using in particular Genette’s categories of focus and voice, to give what is effectively a psycho-sexual reading of narrative structure, in that the patterns identified are consistently related to gender and sexual politics, both structurally and thematically. This comes very strongly to the fore in discussion of the subsequent novels, which, unlike She Came To Stay, integrate political and historical dimensions, and which are characterized by a ‘structure of preference’, as Fallaize dubs the consistent pattern of commitment, abandonment and re-commitment, a structure which serves to reinforce the truth-value of the stance thus reaffirmed. It is a pattern in relationships (that of Jean and Hélène in The Blood of Others for example) as well as in political choices. Frequently the two shadow each other. This can have the effect of producing one-dimensional fiction, as Blanchot’s famous charge against that novel underlines. What Fallaize shows is that combining this kind of reading with attention to gender, sexuality, language and power reveals novels which are in fact extremely complex in the ways they problematize meaning. The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir offers a triple-layered discussion of meaning and structure, since it is at one and the same time an analysis of Beauvoir’s fiction using that

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approach, a discussion of Beauvoir’s deliberate use of technique for political ends, and a discussion of characters who themselves are embarked upon quests for meaning, or at least investigating what meaningful action is open to the individual within and against History, or Politics, or Gender. In the light of her later novels, All Men Are Mortal and The Mandarins can almost be read as settling accounts, the first with History, the second with Politics. All Men Are Mortal has an immortal central character whose failure to perceive any coherent sense to the centuries he lives through significantly sweeps aside the particular belief in progress of the Enlightenment years. Although other characters express optimistic attitudes towards the possibility of affecting the course of events in a meaningful way which transcends the local event, the weight of this novel falls on the side of scepticism. Similarly, the ineffectual character and the lack of power of the intellectual within politics is a major theme of The Mandarins with its ironically distancing title to underline the message. It is perhaps worth recalling at this point that the individual in all this is never a free-wheeling self-contained agent. Being is necessarily being-in-situation for Beauvoir. Questions of agency and action in relation to the political and historical dimensions of situations do not alter that structure. The same can be said of gender. In an illuminating phrase, Fallaize sums up the central lesson of The Second Sex: ‘“woman”, in the sense of the social construction of femininity, is a situation’ (p. 13). The dramas of female characters may come to dominate in the later short stories, yet many of Beauvoir’s characters can be said to be grappling with that at once most personal and most social dimension of being. It is undeniable that Beauvoir is an obsessional author; any charge that her fiction is too cerebral and one-dimensional simply misses the point. Her novels revolve around death, violence and murder. Even more striking is the overriding use of metaphors of criminality. Among countless examples, one can cite the notion in The Second Sex that women are part victims, part accomplices in the constructions of womanhood, or novels which rely on murder, on the emotions of guilt and the crime of ‘being another’, on a detective-fiction structure placing characters in the dock. Fallaize draws out others, such as the writing on the female body, which ranges from anxiety to crisis to obscenity. In another variant on structure and meaning, Beauvoir’s intentions appear to be betrayed by the very structures and metaphors she uses. She created many strong, interesting female characters, yet Fallaize questions whether they can be said to be positive heroines, seeing them as either destroyed, or existing in the narratives of male characters and therefore dominated, or mad. In the most intriguing shift across structures, Fallaize traces the relations of female characters to focus and voice, concluding that whenever they narrate their own stories, their words are caught in madness. The argument here is that Beauvoir’s fiction is mobilizing not unfamiliar scenarios, where male characters, who dominate as narrators in the earlier fiction, produce a view of masculinity, aligned with rationality and language, whereas female characters who accede to the narrative ‘I’ can only do so in a discourse of madness, within a narrative context in which femininity, sexuality, body and madness cohere. The opposition between men’s words and women’s words is replicated in the situation of Beauvoir herself, placing herself within a masculine tradition. The arguments are very persuasive, especially in the typology of female characters; none the less there is a range of questions which can be posed about this. Some are of the conventional literary critical kind. Are there not characters in the corpus, such as Marcel

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in The Blood of Others, who display many of the characteristics attributed to the mad women? Could the shift towards different psychologies in the later texts equally be adduced by the different vision of psychology encapsulated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, or alternatively by an author with greater confidence seeking to move away from the voluntarism of the roman à thèse? More interesting are the questions raised about women, language and narrative. Is there anything authentically masculine about words of male characters in a novel? What is their relationship to the author who is ‘writing as a woman’? It is as though there were an authentic power struggle between male and female characters, and continuity between Beauvoir and language, writing as a woman, and some elements of the novels she wrote. Even if one were to introduce a more psychological vocabulary of projections and identifications, it still seems to me that there is some slippage in the parallels being established, in that Beauvoir is effectively posited as being in a more direct relationship to some aspects of these narratives than others. This is also true of the possible explanation offered for the long gap between The Mandarins and Les Belles Images, that the autobiographical volumes produced during those years had at last allowed Beauvoir to say ‘I’, and to start writing fiction ‘as a woman’. I am not convinced that the ‘I’ of an autobiography is any less mediated than the ‘I’ of a central male character in an earlier novel. If it were, I suspect there would be no escape for any of us from the determinism of situation, and I would like to believe Beauvoir was right in being on the side of freedom. Sunderland Polytechnic

GRAHAM GOOD

• John M.Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 152 pp., £21.95 John Ellis is a Germanist who has published books on Kleist, Schiller, and the German Novelle, as well as an earlier theoretical study, The Theory of Literary Criticism (1974). The title of the latter work evokes Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949), and is organized in the same way, around a series of central issues, though Ellis treats fewer topics at greater length. Both, incidentally, are worth comparing to the recently published collective volume Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (University of Chicago Press, 1990). All three attempt to lay out the basic issues of literary theory and to summarize recent debate on them. There the resemblance ends, for the Critical Terms volume represents a compendium of all that Ellis dislikes about contemporary ‘theory’, which he does not believe is theory at all. The Preface to Against Deconstruction alludes to the coming into dominance of deconstruction ‘during the last fifteen years’, exactly the period since his own theoretical book. We can sense in the new work some of Ellis’s frustration with what he calls the ‘degeneration’ of discussion on many of the issues he and others had already clarified. What does Ellis have ‘against deconstruction’? Here is a selection of things. It is founded on a misunderstanding by Derrida of Saussure’s theory of language, for example, the simple error that ‘the arbitrariness of the sign makes meaning arbitrary in the sense of indeterminate’ (p. 49). It persistently and inaccurately attributes epistemological naïveté to its opponents. It wilfully obscures its language, thus concealing what would otherwise be obvious mistakes or banal truisms. It ignores large bodies of work directly relevant to the issues it discusses. Its rhetoric is marked by exaggeration, provocation, and overstatement. Its predilection for attacking common sense as bourgeois stupidity goes back in French culture to Baudelaire and Flaubert, and its false pretence of being an academic enfant terrible goes back to Barthes’s and Foucault’s assault on the university establishment of the 1960s. Deconstruction’s posture of ‘subversiveness’ is totally inappropriate in the American context, where the monolithic conservatism attributed to ‘traditional’ approaches to literature has never existed. Deconstruction shows contempt for its opponents rather than trying to learn from them or conduct a rational debate with them. Its aggressive and intimidating style is meant to silence opposition, and to conceal the absurdity or banality of its propositions. If all of this is true, how could deconstruction have succeeded to the extent it has? Ellis atrributes this to the emotional satisfactions deconstruction offers: the feeling of being excitingly shocking, or superiority to the bourgeois herd, and of intellectual sophistication. Even so, Ellis is puzzled about why there has been no effective challenge to deconstruction’s manifest absurdities by now. At this point deconstruction begins to

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sound like Ingsoc, an ideology whose power is based on ‘collective solipsism’ (O’Brien’s term in 1984) and on the blatant denial of common sense and rational argument. Here too, Ellis’s predicament as the sole dissenter begins to resemble that of Winston Smith. Is he the only person, he wonders, to have noticed the absurdity of what the authorities are saying? Or are there others whose dissent is surreptitious and unwritten, since they lack the confidence for a public challenge? Ellis writes: ‘there is far more grumbling about deconstruction in the corridors of academic institutions than ever finds its way into print’ (p. ix). To be sure, Ellis concedes, there are a few foolhardy challengers like M.H. Abrams, but they fall into the trap set by deconstruction and are beguiled into assertions of naïve realism and common sense of exactly the kind it thrives on. They are as easily disposed of as Winston Smith and his desperate ‘Truisms are true’ slogan. Ellis more resembles the persona of Orwell himself as the independent individual taking on the ideologists and propagandists, and he uses many of Orwell’s favourite strategies and rhetorical devices. One is translating pretentious-sounding phrases into plain English or vice versa, as Orwell does in ‘Politics and the English language’ and elsewhere. In a similar vein, Ellis accuses deconstruction of repeating ‘magic’ formulae and set phrases as a substitute for the less dramatic but more difficult and rewarding task of seeking precise formulations. Its slogans, like ‘the metaphysics of presence’, ‘the death of the author’, or ‘all interpretation is misinterpretation’, turn out on examination to be either absurd or banal, like the Ingsoc slogans in 1984. Another Orwellian tactic used by Ellis is to produce a set of numbered quotations and work through them one by one in a mocking search for something meaningful, as he does in his quest for a definition of the term ‘logocentrism’. Behind the high-sounding obscurantism of deconstruction’s language, Ellis finds a few simple manoeuvres which create the semblance of profound thinking. The chief of these is to focus attention on the most naïve formulation of the view being attacked, and then simply reverse it, which creates the dramatic effect desired. For example, words do not refer to things in the real world but only signify other words; authors do not create the meaning of their texts by composing them, but instead readers, by reading them; texts do not have a particular meaning that can be investigated but are limitless in their meaning because of the free play of signs; a careful reading does not give knowledge of a text, because all readings are misreadings; whatever the obvious meaning of a literary text is taken to be, one must stand it on its head. (p. 139) Deconstructive sophistication is thus for Ellis simply a reversed naïveté: ‘Primitive ideas reversed produce more primitive ideas’ (p. 140). The sophistication is an illusion created by contrast to the first, naïve position. Yet on occasion Ellis seems to use the same trick himself: ‘on the contrary’ and ‘quite the reverse’ are recurrent phrases in his book. Against Deconstruction itself often reverses deconstruction’s claims: deconstruction is not radical, but conservative; it is not theoretical, but a defence against theory; it is not sophisticated, but under the pretentious language, embarrassingly naïve; it has not improved the quality of literary criticism, but helped it to decline. At one point he writes

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that ‘these judgments [that a non-discriminating attitude to interpretations is more sophisticated than a discriminating one] obviously need reversing’ (p. 135). At times Ellis seems to be attributing to deconstruction everything he says deconstruction attributes to naïve traditionalism, while appropriating for his own position deconstruction’s claims to be innovative, sophisticated, radical, etc. At least twice he makes fun of deconstruction’s catch-phrase ‘demystifying privileged ideas’, but it is actually quite a good description of his own purpose here. Overall, I found Ellis’s demystification of deconstruction highly persuasive. He is certainly not a naïve traditionalist, and is well versed in linguistics and philosophy. His writing is clear and precise, and he provides helpful summaries along the way. He has nothing good to say about deconstruction at all, so it’s not exactly a balanced assessment; yet his presentation of deconstructive thought does not seem to me to caricature it, but rather to pick out its crucial flaws with commendable skill. The energy of the writing is inevitably negative in a polemical work of this kind, and at times there is an edge of exasperation, of an authority figure making an effort to remain precise and calm in the face of provocation. There is also a trace of hostility towards French culture, perhaps understandable in a Germanist who has seen Anglo-American ‘theory’ refuse to import German ideas except via France. I also think he exaggerates the Lansonian orthodoxy of French criticism before Barthes. It’s worth noting, too, that Ellis does not take on Derrida’s work as a whole, or even any one text in detail: his crucial chapter on Derrida’s misreading of Saussure generally refers to the first fifty pages of Of Grammatology and to the interviews in Positions. Otherwise the main targets are the Anglo-American expositors of deconstruction: Hawkes, Norris, Lentricchia, Johnson, and of course Culler. Ellis has a lot of fun at Culler’s expense, suggesting that the reason why High Deconstructionists are so suspicious of his expositions is that their relative clarity comes dangerously close to exposing deconstruction’s basic fallacies. It will be interesting to see what kind of response the deconstructive camp can manage to this devastating attack.1 University of British Columbia

NOTES 1 For a start, see Christopher Norris, ‘Limited think: how not to read Derrida’, Diacritics, 20, 1 (1990), pp. 17–36.

SARAH CHATWIN

• Peter Sloterdijk, A Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London: Verso, 1988), 598 pp., £19.95 (paperback) In 1983, a critical storm blew up in Germany, occasioned by the publication of a provocative text. Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason drew both praise and dissent for its attempt to kick-start a stalling enlightenment. In 1988, the book’s publication in Britain and the US provoked little more than a yawn from The Academy. Yet Sloterdijk’s ambitions are huge, and his charge against contemporary critical individuals quite damning. ‘We are enlightened, we are apathetic’ he says, and if we are to escape our apparent fate of ‘not caring’ our way to the apocalypse then we must analyse and root out the cause of our current malaise. Such a project involves an excavation of the phenomenon of cynicism. In undertaking this task, Sloterdijk leads Critical Theory into its third generation, a journey which takes him by way of Nietzsche, skirting existentialism and turning left past Heidegger. This review is an X-ray of the text’s philosophical skeleton, and an evalution of Sloterdijk’s cheeky strategy.

I The Critique of Cynical Reason concludes by asking to be read as an introduction to another enterprise, the critique of subjective reason. Sloterdijk offers an analysis of cynicism as that which is primarily constitutive of contemporary consciousness, qua subjective consciousness. Yet once we can identify and evaluate cynicism, we may be in a position to embark on a critique of that subjective reason. Such critique would be motivated by recollections of the philosophies of antiquity, when there was held to be a unity between knowledge of the world and knowledge of the self. The book begins with similar, apparently nostalgic meditations: In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding. We are enlightened, we are apathetic. No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be. It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified. (p. xxvi) The way which we have chosen to ‘live with it’ is by means of cynicism. But what kind of a life is this? The question of the continued toleration of intolerable circumstances

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underpins Sloterdijk’s enterprise. His analysis leads him to conclude that life has become unlivable, that the armed and armoured self of modernity has to take the risk of selfdestruction, theoretically speaking, if s/he is to avoid the risk of self-destruction, practically speaking. Concomitant with this is the (re)discovery of a kind of knowledge we can love, if we do not prove to be ‘culturally too old to repeat such experiences’ (p. xxxviii). Paraphrasing Adorno and echoing Marx, Critique of Cynical Reason opens with the observation that: ‘For a century now philosophy has been lying on its deathbed, but it cannot die because it has not fulfilled its task’ (p. xxvi). So perhaps we should read Sloterdijk’s thick book (written ‘at a time when even thinner books are considered impudent’) as a large-scale introduction to a philosophical project which will lead to the completion of the ‘task’ of philosophy. What will become of philosophy once it has completed its task? We cannot say. Sloterdijk writes of adopting a ‘quasi-neoclassical movement of thought’ (p. 540) in his conclusion. Classical thought could attain an Odysseus-style home-coming, he maintains, culminating in a moment of recognition. But: For the modern subject, a ‘vagabond in existence’, there is no longer any return home to the ‘identical’. What appeared to us as our ‘own’ and as ‘origin’, as soon as we ‘turn around’, has always altered and been lost. (p. 538) So Sloterdijk acknowledges the impossibility of the modern subject ever making a genuine home-coming. (The ‘hero’ of the book, Diogenes, was himself in exile, but declared himself to be a ‘citizen of the world’.) Yet at the same time he wishes to hold out hope for such an event: The dream I pursue is to see the dying tree of philosophy bloom once again, in a blossoming without disillusionment…shimmering in the colours of the beginning, as in the Greek dawn, when theoria was beginning and when, inconceivably and suddenly, like everything clear, understanding found its language. (p. xxxvii) We may not return home, but we may rejuvenate philosophy, and the key to such rejuvenation, Sloterdijk believes, lies with the transformation (‘liquefaction’) of the modern subject. Hence the end point of the book, ‘Under way toward a critique of subjective reason’. Sloterdijk’s hope must be that his projects of critique will lead him ultimately to the kind of knowledge that it would be appropriate to love. The title of the book gestures towards its smaller ambitions. In the Preface, Sloterdijk tells us that the occasion for the writing of this text was the 200th anniversary of the publication of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The anniversary had prompted him to wonder: ‘How would we look to the penetratingly human eye of the philosopher?’ (p. xxx). The answer, for Sloterdijk, is that we would look shameful. He does not want to face the author of On Perpetual Peace with the tattered fragments to which we have reduced the enlightenment project. For Sloterdijk retains a kind of faith in enlightenment, albeit in a highly qualified, utopian version of the project. Andreas Huyssen, in the

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Introduction, points to an illuminating parallel. He quotes Foucault’s essay ‘The subject and power’, where Foucault reads Kant in relation to Descartes. Foucault writes: When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heisst Aufklärung?, he meant, What’s going on right now? What’s happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other words: What are we? as Aufklärer, as part of the Enlightenment? Compare this with the Cartesian question: Who am I? I, as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? But Kant asks something else: What are we? in a very precise moment of history. Kant’s question appears as an analysis both of us and our present. Huyssen then comments: ‘I think we may read Sloterdijk with maximum benefit if we read him in the same way as Foucault read Kant’s programmatic essay. What is at stake in Critique of Cynical Reason is not a universal history of cynicism (as such the book would be seriously flawed), but rather a more limited investigation of the role of cynicism and its antagonist kynicism for contemporary critical individuals’ (p. xi). That means, for us. And Sloterdijk regards ‘us’ to be those who share his qualified relation to enlightenment. At one point he asks: ‘Who today is still an enlightener? The question is almost too direct to be decent’ (p. 88). But, never afraid of being considered indecent, he poses and answers the question. One may spot enlighteners by their disillusionment: I do not really believe in the end of enlightenment just because the spectacle has come to an end. When so many disappointed enlighteners whine today, they are just spitting out all their rage and sadness, which would hinder them from continuing to propogate enlightenment, into the spittoon of the public sphere. Only courageous people feel when they are discouraged; only enlighteners notice when it is getting dark; only moralists become demoralised. In a word: We are still here. (p. 89) Sloterdijk’s text is immersed in historical, political and cultural specificities, pertinent to contemporary critical individuals. We are supposed to recognize ourselves here, and to read the text as an analysis of our situation. True to its role as critique, the text proceeds immanently, from within cynical reason, yet ultimately that critique is oriented towards an idea of liberation. In order to identify what it means for Sloterdijk so to orient his text, we need to look closely at his analyses of cynicism, of kynicism and of the relation between the two. Before doing so, however, we must first establish something more about the nature of Sloterdijk’s relation to enlightenment and critique.

II Today, when our relation to knowledge can no longer be characterized by eros, and when we approach the objects of our knowledge as polemicists not lovers, we find ourselves surrounded on all sides by a post-coital twilight in which, like lovers parting at dawn, we simply contemplate the frailty of that which has passed between us. Knowledge now is

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complicit with power, knowledge is power. Such is Sloterdijk’s analysis of the state of contemporary thought. Central to his making this analysis is his evaluation of the fate of the enlightenment project, an investigation of which should help to clarify the nature of Sloterdijk’s own engagement with both critique and irrationalist impulses. We want to see how, here and there, in the critique itself, the germs of new dogmatisms are formed. Enlightenment does not penetrate into social consciousness as an unproblematic bringer of light. Where it has an effect, a twilight arises, a deep ambivalence. We will characterise this ambivalence as the atmosphere in which, in the middle of a snarl of factual self-preservation with moral self-denial, cynicism crystallises. (p. 22) Enlightenment brings not light but twilight. So what happened? Why are we left with only ‘dissatisfied enlightenment’? In his second chapter, ‘Enlightenment as dialogue: critique of ideology as continuation of the miscarried dialogue through other means’ (a title which reveals Sloterdijk’s characteristic use of the snappy précis), Sloterdijk reverses recent chronology in order to situate himself with respect to Critical Theory, and in so doing offers something of a response to that question. He treats Habermas’s ideal speech situation as paradigmatic of the aims of enlightenment, and portrays Adorno and Horkheimer’s version of ideology critique as a gesture which followed from the impotence of the ideal of dialogue to be effective in reality. His use of Habermas’s ideal speech situation as a way of reading back into the ideals of enlightenment enables him to capture the essence of those ideals in a potent way, but as a philosophical move it does not amount to an adequate engagement with Habermas. Habermas’s turn to dialogic ideals stemmed from disaffection with the superior critical standpoint which the ideology critic seems committed to adopt, so any attempt to read those dialogic ideals as being prior to ideology critique overlooks the very point which the affirmation of dialogue is supposed to make. However, Sloterdijk’s aim here is not to evaluate Habermas but to praise him. He does not mention Habermas by name but clearly considers the Habermasian project to be of utmost importance, for he writes: ‘To preserve the healing fiction of free dialogue is one of the last tasks of philosophy’ (p. 14). So in the dying moments of philosophy, Habermas’s gesture is a necessary one, and as such is one which Sloterdijk, himself a disillusioned enlightener, would wish to sustain. Sloterdijk is concerned with the means of power available to enlightenment (which he acknowledges to be ‘already incorrect’, as enlightenment is supposed to be about voluntary consensus, not power). His thesis is that the ‘epistemological idyll’ of free, uncoerced dialogue which is supposed to lead to both partners emerging as ‘winners in knowledge and solidarity’, is undermined by the operations of power, where ‘it would be more appropriate to talk of a war of consciousness than a dialogue of peace’ (p. 13). Preserving this ‘healing fiction’ maintains a rather hopeless hope for reconciliation, and acknowledging its status as fiction shows the massive extent of the disruption brought about by power, by reality.

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Because they do not want to talk with us, we have to talk about them…. Ideology critique is the continuation of the miscarried dialogue through other means. (p. 15) The ineffectiveness of enlightenment as dialogue brings about the move to ideology critique, which Sloterdijk construes as an attempt to operate behind the back of the opposing consciousness. Ideology critique amounts to a kind of ‘anything you say will be taken down and used as evidence against you’ attitude. It relies on suspicion, espionage and the involuntary confessions of those whom the enlighteners wish to unmask. Yet ideology critique is no more effective than dialogue, Sloterdijk maintains, and it is this blunting of the instrument of critique which led him to produce this particular text. Ideology critique has been worn down as it attempted to operate against consciousness become cynical, for cynicism is artful, clever and cleverer, knowing and uncaring. If we are to understand just why Sloterdijk regards ideology critique as another impotent gesture on the part of dissatisfied enlightenment, we must look at the central diagnostic theme of the book, the analysis of the phenomenon of cynicism.

III Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernised, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has laboured both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Welloff and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered. (p. 5)

Sloterdijk describes cynicism as the modern addition to the formal sequence of structures of false consciousness, following on from lies, error and ideology. Hence a critique of cynical reason is a contemporary project, for it is only now that ideology critique has become exhausted. The entire text is a mapping out of cynicism, in its historical, phenomenological and logical manifestations, and those locations are regarded by Sloterdijk as constitutive of cynicism. Yet his first definition captures the paradoxical nature of cynicism (how can an enlightened consciousness also be false?) as that which makes it unassailable. A consciousness which already knows and already knows better will be immune to ideology critique. Cynical consciousness knows that it is false, it knows that it should be vulnerable to a critique of the ideology with which it is filled, but at the same time it ‘buffers’ itself against its own vulnerability. The drive to cynicism is historically, politically and psychologically linked to the drive for self-preservation in Sloterdijk. Cynicism combines both truth and falsity, its structures and artfulness ensure that it can live between both these positions, never resting in either one.

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The cynical consciousness is concerned to render itself invulnerable to further suffering. It has been fundamentally shaped by the twentieth-century experience of war, indeed the experience of suffering in the First World War historically precipitated the emergence of modern cynicism, which Sloterdijk discusses in relation to Weimar Germany. So cynicism can be regarded as the response of an injured consciousness trying to avoid further pain by a self-hardening or closing off to the claims of others. Yet Sloterdijk’s analyses echo those of Adorno and Horkheimer in that he shares a sensitivity to the fine line drawn between self-preservation and self-destruction. An important manifestation of this appears in Sloterdijk as an engagement with the questions of war and the nuclear bomb. Sloterdijk regards the hardening inherent in cynicism as being concomitant with the emergence of armed and armoured subjects. The fate of our identity is irreducibly linked to armament. Self-preservation in philosophy has its counterpart in the phenomenon of defence, with a similar overkill potential. Hence Sloterdijk writes: Nuclear fission is in any case a phenomenon that invites meditation, and even the nuclear bomb gives the philosopher the feeling of here also really touching what is human. The bomb embodies the last, most energetic enlightener. It teaches an understanding of the essence of splitting; it makes completely clear what it means to set up a Me against a You, an Us against a Them to the point of a readiness to kill. At the summit of the principle of self-preservation it teaches how to end and conquer dualisms. (p. 130) The darkening presence of the nuclear threat is most important for Sloterdijk. The largest section of the book focuses on the Weimar years in Germany, as being times when modern cynicism crystallized but also as times exhibiting a psychopolitics most similar to our own. It is appropriate, then, that the threat of impending self-annihilation should under-pin Sloterdijk’s strategy of argumentation about the present. Indeed, he cites Fromm’s catastrophile complex, a kind of willing of disaster, a war psychosis when the last vestiges of freedom are used to bring about what is most terrifying. I think the suggestion here is that we too are prey to such a psychosis, for we get excited at the first sniff of a disaster, and share the same indescribable joy and pleasure in fear. Living in the shadow of the bomb requires a toleration of intolerable circumstances, and that toleration depends upon the persistence of cynicism in volatile times. Cynicism enables us to keep the lid on our suffering, in circumstances which otherwise we simply could not bear. Critique…is experiencing gloomy days…[but] it is time for a new critique of temperaments. When enlightenment appears as a ‘melancholy science’, it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation. Thus the critique of cynical reason hopes to achieve more by a work that cheers us up, whereby it is understood from the beginning that it is not so much a matter of work but of relaxation. (pp. xxxvi–xxxvii)

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Sloterdijk’s response to a desperate situation is to offer an affirmative gesture. He outlines the formations of cynicism but, along with it, uncovers another tradition, that of kynicism. By taking up the kynical strategy, Sloterdijk believes we have a way open to us with which we can warm up the frozen dialectic of self-preservation and self-destruction. So we must examine this second, mute tradition, to see just what sort of a response it is.

IV a skeptical shaking of the head; a malicious laugh; a return with shrug of the shoulders to things that lie closer to hand; a realist astonishment at the helplessness of those who are most intelligent; a stubborn insistence on the seriousness of life against the frivolous word garlands of abstraction. (pp. 534–5)

Cynicism exists in a volatile, vaporous state of intimacy with kynicism, the two form a kind of steamy zeitgeist that can change to air or ice depending on prevailing environmental conditions. To paraphrase Sartre, kynicism coils at the heart of cynicism, like a worm; they are neither antagonists nor dialectical opposites. As cynicism is cold, hard, repressed, so kynicism is warm, liquid and affirmative. Kynicism is a provocative philosophy of cheekiness, essentially embodied (and ‘physiognomic’), a response for disillusioned enlighteners who want a good time: Ancient kynicism…is in principle cheeky…. In kynismos a kind of argumentation was discovered that, to the present day, respectable thinking does not know how to deal with. Is it not crude and grotesque to pick one’s nose while Socrates exorcises his demon and speaks of the divine soul? Can it be anything other than vulgar when Diogenes lets a fart fly against the Platonic theory of ideas—or is fartiness itself one of the ideas God discharged from his meditation on the genesis of the cosmos? And what is it supposed to mean when this philosophising town bum [Diogenes] answers Plato’s subtle theory of eros by masturbating in public? (p. 101) Kynicism intends to debunk, but also to remind us of that which the ancient world knew but which we have forgotten—that life and doctrine must be in harmony, that to embody a doctrine means to make oneself its medium. In the low theory of Diogenes this embodiment, this practicality, takes on pantomime proportions. But it also gestures towards the poverty of philosophy, for: Since philosophy can only hypocritically live out what it says, it takes cheek to say what is lived. In a culture in which hardened idealisms make lies into a form of living, the process of truth depends on whether people

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can be found who are aggressive and free (‘shameless’) enough to speak the truth. Those who rule lose their self-confidence to the fools, clowns and kynics. (p. 103) The figure of the clown who speaks the truth is a familiar one to us, but for Sloterdijk the especially kynical element is that of embodiment. The kynic does not just speak the truth, he (or possibly she) shows it, lives it. And the message is quite simple: ‘Ethical living is good, but naturalness is good too. That is all the kynical scandal says’ (p. 106). Introducing the figure of the kynic involves Sloterdijk in bringing into his discourse some of the more anti-rationalistic elements of contemporary philosophy; this is his postNietzschean moment, a way of bringing a kind of affirmation into an analysis which, without it, would be more melancholy than Adorno’s. The shame Sloterdijk feels for the current state of philosophy is to be countered with shamelessness. Uncovering the phenomenon of kynicism as a kind of alternative tradition involves Sloterdijk in another uncovering. For he claims that there is a style of thought, physiognomic thought, which is part of the kynical gesture. He offers us the physiognomic main text as an elucidation. The idea of physiognomy is of: ‘a second, speechless language’ (p. 139) whereby it is possible to read off from our physiognomy something about our psychic state. This is the language of all that is reduced to silence by the enlightenment drive to discourse, and it is worth recovering for Sloterdijk because it is a language of intimacy, of erotics, of a warm, convivial, libidinal closeness to things. Physiognomics is concerned with the trivial, because it compensates for the cold discourse of objectification. Both sensory and sensual, it speaks of a closeness to the environment, living from a dyslexic set of sensory experiences, overstimulated by contemporary culture. The notion of physiognomics could be read as an attempt to factor the body back into a discourse which has relied on abstraction from materiality. But the very physicality and the muteness which characterize this alternative tradition lead one to think that the identification of such a tradition is only undertaken as a reaction to the existing state of thought, rather than as a move supposed to stand by itself. Whilst such a reactive, affirmative gesture obviously has polemical impact, it is prevented, by virtue of its very muteness and distance from the dominant tradition, from laying ground to facilitate a rapprochement between the two. The cultural encoding of the naturally given body renders it highly problematic theoretically, and those problems are not overcome by a simple assertion of the rights of the material. An example here would be the question of sexual difference. Sloterdijk’s premise, that abstraction from the body is reductive and a distortion of that which is truly human, is uncontroversial. The point at which this abstraction takes on political significance, though, is when philosophy tries to talk about women, whose exclusion from the discourse is based on cultural factors themselves grounded ultimately in ‘natural’ or physical differences. Sloterdijk’s physiognomics has no purchase on this question, for he takes the body as given, unproblematic, as simply requiring reinsertion into thought. Yet our embodiment, our physicality, is culturally a source of different treatment. The ‘natural’ given produces cultural diversity. Sloterdijk uses the example of the kynical hero Diogenes masturbating in the market-place, and the women who bared their breasts

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in Adorno’s lecture hall in the 1960s, and he treats both events as though they were unproblematic placings of bodies in a gesture against too much talk. He is perhaps invoking a utopian notion here, when kynicism would be a strategy available equally to both sexes because bodies of both sexes would not evoke culturally different responses. Given our present cultural and political situation, however, such a strategy represents no significant advance on the kind of abstractions from physicality it intends to counter.

V The intimacy between the states of cynicism and kynicism gives Sloterdijk licence to identify kynical strands and figures in the course of the overall analysis of cynicism. They co-exist in a state of volatility, and the slippage from one to another is exhibited when Sloterdijk describes the cynical attitude of the hegemonic powers as being gripped by a cheeky or kynical drive to confess: The consciousness of the master knows its own specific cheekiness: master cynicism in the modern sense of the word, as distinct from the kynical offensive. Ancient kynicism, primary and pugnacious kynicism, was a plebian antithesis to idealism. Modern cynicism, by contrast, is the master’s antithesis to their own idealism as ideology and as masquerade. The cynical master lifts the mask, smiles at his weak adversary, and suppresses him. C’est la vie. Nobless oblige. Order must prevail. The force of circumstances often exceeds the insight of those concerned, is that not so? Coercion by power, the compulsion of ‘things’! In its cynicisms hegemonic power airs its secrets a little, indulges in semi-selfenlightenment, and tells all. Master cynicism is a cheekiness that has changed sides. (p. 111) In some passages Sloterdijk writes as though there were a choice facing consciousness, a choice between embodiment or splitting, between cynicism or kynicism, between integration or schizophrenia. Cynicism and kynicism are forms of what Sloterdijk describes as polemical consciousness, one arguing from above, the other from below. They create two shapes: ‘Self-embodiment in resistance and self-splitting in repression’ (p. 218), and we can discuss these in relation to two important figures in the text, Diogenes and Odysseus. In looking at these, we get some idea of what Sloterdijk sees as the fate of consciousness under each of these forms. Also, this brings us to consideration of the thematic of self and self-preservation, which is the issue bubbling away underneath the whole text. Sloterdijk’s treatment of Odysseus is most curious. Odysseus should correspond to the figure of self-splitting in repression, as he who denies his physicality in the encounter with the Sirens. But Sloterdijk cites the episode from the Odyssey when Odysseus, in an attempt to escape from Polyphemus, took the name ‘Nobody’ in order to dupe the cyclops and thus ensure his own survival. The account given of the Odysseus myth is

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truncated, but in such a way that it is revealing of the status of the kynical strategy for Sloterdijk. Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of the same episode, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, points out that Odysseus’ strategy reveals the intimacy of self-destruction with self-preservation. By calling himself ‘Nobody’, Odysseus flirted with a renunciation of identity. But he could not sustain that state of Nobodiness—as soon as he and his men are free of the cyclops’ cave Odysseus shouts back to Polyphemus that it was he, Odysseus, who had blinded and tricked him. In so doing, Odysseus calls down the wrath of Poseidon, father of Polyphemus, on himself and his men, thus delaying the return to Ithaca for a few hundred pages more. Odysseus’ hubris, as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, reveals that the drive to preserve oneself, to assert a stable identity, immerses one once again in the fight against self-destruction. Any gesture intended to maintain stable identity recoils back on itself as identity oversaturates the indi-vidual to the point that self-destruction threatens. Sloterdijk overlooks this last part of the story, focusing only on the moment when Odysseus claimed Nobodiness for himself. He posits this as a liberating moment: Our true self-experience in original Nobodiness remains in this world buried under taboo and panic. Basically, however, no life has a name. The self-conscious nobody in us—who acquires names and identities only through its ‘social birth’—remains the living source of freedom. The living Nobody, in spite of the horror of socialisation, remembers the energetic paradises beneath the personalities. Its life soil is the mentally alert body, which we should call not nobody but yesbody and which is able to develop in the course of individuation from an areflexive ‘narcissism’ to a reflected ‘self-discovery in the world cosmos’. (pp. 73–4) Again we see that the affirmative moment is ‘natural’, pre-cultural, supposing the possibility of access to a state of unrestrained libido and polymorphous perversity. Sloterdijk welds together psychic deterritorialization with bodily affirmation. This is a purely reactive response, the valorization of that which has been excluded and repressed simply because it has been excluded and repressed. Critique is suspended as a way to open a space for affirmation. I think that one has to read the truncation of the story as symptomatic of Sloterdijk’s concern to present his kynical gesture as only one moment, but a liberating moment, in a wider set of developments which we cannot specify. Indeed, the kind of liquefaction of stable identity he is valorizing here is something so alien and utopian that it is difficult to grasp in any but the most abstract and apocalyptic fashion (Sloterdijk’s bomb analogy makes this moment of supposed affirmation seem especially undesirable). The adoption of Nobodiness is just one moment in an inevitable progression to repression for Adorno and Horkheimer; for Sloterdijk to posit it as something more reveals the difficulty and frailty of the strategy he has uncovered. It may perhaps also signify an optimism not justified given the strength of the drive for self-preservation. The important philosophical issue which this raises is the relation of affirmation and critique. Sloterdijk brackets critique in order to facilitate the possibility of a warming,

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affirmative moment that will itself precipitate another moment of critique—the aim of the book, as I noted at the start, is to introduce another critique, that of subjective reason, but a subjective reason which has had its cynical moment blasted out of it. Sloterdijk’s project in Critique of Cynical Reason is to spin together the threads of affirmation and critique, to bring about a rapprochement between Frankfurt and Paris. What we may be able to glean from this intention, despite the relative crudity with which Sloterdijk’s kynicism compels him to execute the project, is a simple reminder that critique requires something to affirm, some kind of positive moment, if it is not to whittle itself away into nuclear nothingness by relentless exposure and enlightenment. Ideology critique, in the hands of melancholy scientists, has its greatest strength in its sensitivity, its ‘a priori pain’, but also its greatest weakness. Sloterdijk is saying that sensitivity to suffering only makes sense if it is counterposed with a notion of the absence of suffering. His provocative text is a deliberate over-reaction against the micrological sensitivity of Adorno and Benjamin, in an attempt to warm us up sufficiently so that our frost-bitten fingers may attempt once more to untie the dialectic of enlightenment. Sloterdijk at one point accuses ideology critique of having become like a medical specialist, far more interested in the varieties of disease than any possible therapy. So he offers us a kind of shock therapy. But what about Diogenes, he who exemplifies ‘self-embodiment in resistance’? It is pertinent to ask of him what is the actual strength of the kynical strategy. In thinking about this, I am reminded of a quip from Peter Cook about Berlin in the twenties (a period which Sloterdijk analyses in the last and longest section of the text). Do you remember all those satires they did in Berlin in the twenties, asked Peter Cook, you know, the ones which helped to stop the Second World War? Diogenes, masturbating on the steps of the city, was regarded with nothing more than amused toleration even then, so why should we believe that the kynic today can achieve more? Sloterdijk’s text is problematic in that sometimes it reads as a handbook for disillusioned enlighteners. Unhappy? Cynical? Just affirm your pre-social Nobodiness and you’ll be a wow at parties. The locus of engagement for Sloterdijk is the individual, often taken purely psychologically, although these psychological analyses ask to be read as metaphors for societal psychopolitics. In focusing his moment of affirmation solely on the individual, Sloterdijk lays himself open to charges of naïveté and of being regressive politically. The position comes close to a caricature—the world would change if we just thought differently. Of course, thinking differently, attaining some kind of psychological loosening up may be a necessary moment, but to focus exclusively on such an aspect blinds theory to the claims of more public, inter-subjective problems and solutions. If one wanted to out-Sloterdijk Sloterdijk, one would perhaps have to produce an analysis which could encompass both public and private repressions by acknowledging their differences, rather than reading them as being reducible to each other. And there is another problem related to this. I said earlier that Sloterdijk’s primary site of engagement was the individual. The kynical figure of Diogenes is a lone one. So the questions arise, what is the relation of the kynic to other people, and what does the adoption of the kynical strategy do to our relationships to one another? The most powerful gesture of kynicism is its mocking, satirical laughter. But what is it to make someone the object of that laughter? Kynicism may be a conviviality towards things, but it seems to involve an uncaring arrogance towards other people. Sloterdijk’s espousal of

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the kynical strategy involves him in saying that the liberation of the individual will lead to a liberation for society. But if the method for achieving that liberation for the individual involves the objectification, or even the ill-concealed hostility to others which kynicism involves, then the issue of reintroducing societal or interpersonal harmony is rendered problematic. The very intimacy of cynicism and kynicism renders the moment of kynical affirmation vulnerable. If kynicism is being used by Sloterdijk as a strategy, then it flirts with its own appropriation by cynicism. After all, Sloterdijk does write of master cynicism as a cheekiness that has changed sides. Kynical gestures, with their hostility towards others, are a hair’s breadth from cynicism, and any strategy which is invoked in order to achieve an end is infected with instrumentalism. There is great risk involved with kynicism. Sloterdijk does not fight shy of this; he writes: The risk of such realistic metamorphoses is obvious: it can easily end up substituting the bad for something worse. It is a short step from the kynical ‘sublation’ of philosophy to the cynical self-denial of what great philosophy had embodied in its best aspects. (p. 536) However, given the gravity of Sloterdijk’s analysis of our present situation, this must be for him a risk worth taking. Critique of Cynical Reason may only be an introduction to a greater project, but requires as much bravery to embark upon this as it did to undertake the enlightenment project. Sloterdijk quotes Kant’s ‘Sapere aude’ (p. 545), and insists that this is the courage to relax, to let things be, as well as to work or to philosophize.

VI No discussion of this text would be complete without a consideration of its unusual style, both of writing and construction. Sloterdijk’s prose is witty, almost journalistic. One gets the feeling that if he were not a philosopher he would be in advertising. This makes the experience of reading his text an ambiguous one. Sloterdijk eschews technical philosophical jargon, preferring to recapture standard moves with a succinct phrase. The text offers innumerable opportunities to revel in Sloterdijk’s skill at the masterly summation which borders on caricature. He is at his best when dealing with those thinkers towards whom he is sympathetic. His description of the ideal speech situation is presented in such bare, neutral prose that it drips with irony, given its context. Sloterdijk is not unique in poking fun at other thinkers, nor in having an irreverent style, but with Critique of Cynical Reason the exuberance of the prose, its kynicism, makes it difficult to take the text’s serious points seriously. When writing of imminent nuclear destruction Sloterdijk appears glib. Yet the style of the piece is so obviously adopted, so deliberately post-Nietzschean, that one has to conclude that the ambiguity, or perhaps the tastelessness of some parts of the text is an intended effect. Sloter-dijk’s debunking is attractive and fun, but ultimately it, like the excessive kynical strategy itself, detracts from the importance of his ambitions for the text.

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The illustrations which pepper the text also render it attractive, but do not do any philosophical work, that is to say, one does not have to ‘read’ the pictures in order to understand the text. They are most definitely illustrations. This is somewhat disappointing, as a text concerned to engage with that which philosophy excludes could incorporate visual effects into the argumentative structure of the text. But perhaps what lies behind this dressing up of the text is an attempt to distance it from traditional philosophy, to reactivate a relationship to beauty which once was the philosophers’ concern. What is disconcerting about this, if it is the case, is that the kind of beauty Sloterdijk provides in the text is too easy. As with the affirmation involved in kynicism, it is reactive. We are melancholy, we should be cheerful; we are dull to read, we should be lively; we are boring to look at, we should be attractive. This is probably to be too hard on Sloterdijk, and his book is hugely enjoyable to read, but the studied frivolity of the text simply becomes boring. He describes the enlightenment paradigm, the ideal speech situation, as involving both a pain and a gain. The suspicion is that a book which involves so little pain represents no real gain in the end. This is not to say that the book should be more difficult to read, or that it should have been written in the complex, jargonistic style which can demand serious attention for the most insubstantial ideas. Rather the point is that what Sloterdijk does all seems a bit too obvious, too easy to take on board. As with the figure of Diogenes, the activity designed to provoke can be regarded with nothing more than amused toleration. Sloterdijk’s intentions are huge and admirable, but his project, like that of the enlightenment he wishes to rekindle, seems to have miscarried. University of Essex

ANTONY EASTHOPE

• Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction, ‘Images of Culture’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 248 pp., £27.50 Literary theory still limps some way behind film theory. Relative to work on the cinema, promoted largely outside universities in educational col-lege and polytechnic courses on communications and in media studies, the teaching of literature remains a massive academic institution retarded by inertia. Despite the extraordinary rise of interest in literary theory since 1968 and though most concepts are available there in some form, film theory has advanced further in working through the new criticism. One reason for this is that the study of film has proceeded unburdened by a sense of ‘the canon’, another is that the cinema, as Brecht recognized, is almost uniquely able to represent the contemporary world to a twentieth-century audience, including a popular audience (few contemporary fictional texts can give as pleasurable a sense of ‘how it is’ as, say, Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown, whose closing words have lent a saying to Modern English: ‘Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown’). Moreover, in Britain there was the special intervention of the film journal, Screen, which became in the ’seventies as progressive and influential as thirty years earlier Scrutiny had been. In a collective project grouped around writing by Ben Brewster, Jacqueline Rose, Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Laura Mulvey among others and following in the wake of the New Left Review’s late-sixties adoption of Althusserian Marxism, Screen committed itself to importing and reworking for the analysis of cinema the writings of Barthes, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault since recognized as poststructuralist. By no means a homage to Screen, Lapsley and Westlake’s book with scrupulous rigour re-examines twenty years of film theory and supplies a synoptic treatment of its background. Though particular films are discussed as they occur in the argument there in no space for examples—this is a book about theory whose entirely serious intentions can be judged by its seven chapter headings, three in Part I which make explicit the unstated context of theoretical discussion (‘Politics’, ‘Semiotics’, ‘Psychoanalysis’), four in Part II devoted to specific debates (over ‘Authorship’, ‘Narrative’, ‘Realism’, ‘The avantgarde’). These writers, perhaps because of their collaboration, have thought through their critique line by line and paragraph by paragraph. Symptomatic here is their generosity in giving rein to a line of argument before criticizing it; symptomatic of their care is the way they explicate Lacan’s psychoanalytic writing from his diagrams, even reproducing for clarification the graphe complet (p. 75). Film Theory is not an easy read but a valuable and necessary one, not only for the particular critique it offers but especially for any teacher of literature who wants to break with the written canon by trying to come to terms with contemporary popular culture.

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The narrative of the development of ideas which structures Film Theory has become clearer as history moves us forward from the first radical impact in Britain and North America of French writing from the ’sixties to the present moment of retrospection and rereading. In some ways it’s the old Oedipal story of paradise found, lost and regained in a less megalomaniac form. In France around 1970 film journals such as Cahiers du Cinema became rapidly politicized both because of 1968 and, at the level of theory, the influence of Althusser. Founded on his opposition between ideology and science, a political analysis took cinema as specific instance of ideological practice (and one with a powerful social effect) which an informed theoretical practice was able to stand outside and analyse critically as an object from the vantage point of a supposedly fully selfreflective metalanguage. Especially between 1973 and 1977 Screen carried this project forward, affecting decisively the way the new French thought was worked through here in relation to the national culture as a British poststructuralism. Sanctioned by the authority of Althusser’s 1970 famous essay, which drew on Lacanian psychoanalysis to redefine the function of ideology as equivalent to the operation of the conscious ego itself (so that we are constituted socially to misrecognize ourselves as individually constitutive) and by the Althusserian account of the relative autonomy of specific practices (which legitimated integration of previous structuralist analysis of cinema as a particular means of representation), as Lapsley and Westlake write, ‘Psychoanalysis was introduced into film theory as a supplement to historical materialism and semiotics’ (p. 95). A dangerous supplement indeed, for now, in a sense, the snake had entered the garden. At first all seemed to go on as before. In 1975, for example, to explain the movement of the narrative of the Orson Welles film Touch of Evil, Stephen Heath brought into film theory the psychoanalytic account of the fort/da game several years before it became current in English-language discussion of narrative (see Film Theory, pp. 148–52). But, once allowed in, the logic of psychoanalysis breached the inherently structuralist matrix of the theory. Before, Screen had assumed that the ideological force of a film could be known once and for all, that on the one hand a text assigned a position for its viewer as subject categorized along a line between the poles of realism (which supported the ego’s misrecognition of its sovereignty) and modernism (which challenged it), that on the other a subject received a film from a position determined within a social formation whose history the project at its hubristic peak (around 1977) presumed it could understand through the same yoking together of semiology, Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. But: if the dialectic of the subject was a reality, if the subject was as much a producer as produced, then the political effectivity of the text could not be determined by an analysis of the text alone…. The exchange, therefore, between text and society, between discourse and history, became so complex as to preclude anything beyond the most provisional and gestural of generalities. (p. 62) For psychoanalysis, markedly so in its Lacanian conceptualization, the subject becomes such through the endless metonomies of desire, an effect of its constitution by which, as

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Lacan describes with reference to a Venn diagram and implicitly to Heidegger, being and meaning can never coincide: choose being and the subject disappears into non-meaning; choose meaning and you lose your being; seek both and you lose both (‘Better’, as Roger Thornhill was advised by his mother in North by Northwest, to ‘just pay the two dollars’, p. 72). Founded in a lack it seeks but always fails to make up, the Lacanian subject arrives with subversive consequences in film theory. By insisting on a subjectivity whose object of desire must be engaged by the filmic text yet always outruns it, psychoanalysis compelled the Screen project to pass forward from its residual structuralism towards poststructuralism. Meanwhile, in another part of the garden, Eve stayed relatively untroubled by these difficulties. Ensuing directly from Screen’s concern with ideology and subject position, Laura Mulvey’s essay on ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ cheerfully deployed psychoanalysis to confront the cultural regime by which women are offered identification with images of themselves as objects while men are hailed as subjects looking at those objects. First appearing in the area of film theory Mulvey’s work has become originary in that it has been widely reprinted. From it developed a line of work—by Liz Cowie, Constance Penley, Joan Copjec and Mary Ann Doane among others—aiming to respond to the question, ‘What does a woman want when she finds pleasure in a film?’ Mulvey in another essay called on Freud’s assertion of the constitutional bisexuality of the human subject to propose that when enjoying patriarchal cinema women made use of that bisexuality by moving across to a masculine position with its attendant satisfaction of seeming to regain the subject’s first phallic phase. Other women writers have rejected any such fixed positioning as itself masculinist, preferring instead the desirability of not unitary but multiple and shifting points of identification. Film Theory traces this debate carefully (pp. 23–31 and 90–104), one which in its grasp of specificities and the possibility of textual gendering has advanced well ahead of corresponding discussion in art history and literary theory, and ought to be much more widely known. Film Theory’s conscientious critique of Lacan’s ready suitability for a feminist project leads to their (surely) devasting question ‘that if in patriarchal culture women are seen as lacking why should anyone assume feminine identity?’ (p. 97). ‘There is no Other of the Other’ (Lacan, cited Film Theory, p. 154): what Lapsley and Westlake write of (over-pessimistically I think) as ‘the collapse of the Althusserian project’ (p. 30) was effected by the critique of Marxism sustained by Barry Hindess and Paul Q.Hirst (well rehearsed here), by the incommensurability discovered in the intended melding of historical materialism and psychoanalysis but mainly because psycho-analysis affirms that no position of (theoretical) mastery really stands outside and looking on as it thinks. If there is no Other of the Other, there can be no (absolute) cognitive distance between ideology and science; and so ‘the difference between twenty years ago and now is that between the possibility of a metalanguage, a discourse that would describe and explain the workings of all other discourses, and the accept-ance that there is no such metalanguage, only different perspectives on whatever discourse is currently being used’ (p. 214). I doubt whether Althusser or even Screen in its proudest moments or indeed anyone has ever really trusted in a metalanguage which would explain the workings of all other discourses, but the assertion is well argued for. Faced with an apparent choice between historical materialism and psychoanalysis, Film Theory does, I think, tend more and more to opt in its subtext for Lacan but, strikingly, it does not fall into the casual

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(American) deconstructionist either/or, according to which the absence of a supposedly absolute metalanguage leads ineluctably to anything goes. Whatever theoreticist paradise was lost, critical analysis of cinema continues to be politicized and on this showing it has gained, particularly in feminist discussion. Lapsley and Westlake earn their conclusion that ‘the terrain of film studies, more so than any other area of cultural studies, has been won, and held, by the Left’ (p. 219). Manchester Polytechnic

ROBERT MIKLITSCH

• News from Nowhere. Raymond Williams: The Third Generation. (Oxford: Oxford English, 1989), 108 pp., £7.00 As I write this, it is December 1989. Ten years ago, the Thatcher government (I won’t say ‘regime’) installed itself, and if—as John O’Connor remarks in his new book on Raymond Williams—‘the crisis of socialism in Britain did not come in one day’,1 1979 still seems, in retrospect, a watershed in the post-war political history of the UK. The force of this proposition is even more apparent when one considers that thirty years to this month, New Left Review was launched and, with it, the journal of a generation—not, however, the first but the second generation (not, in other words, the Old but the New Left). In Williams’s second novel, Second Generation (1964), Peter Owen represents this new movement, ‘a whole younger generation of British cultural theorists’ who were emerging in their own right [left?] even as Williams wrote his novel, though, ironically enough, it is Peter’s mother, Kate, whose Francophilia ‘anticipates the structuralist “turn”’ and ‘heady blend of Louis Althusser and Jean-Luc Godard’ (p. 5) that would characterize this generation. However, if ‘at the level of ideas, and especially of assumptions and moods’, the generation of 1968 is, as Williams said, ‘almost as historical as those of 1956 or 1936’ (p. 9), then perhaps it is time—with the death of Williams and the demise of the New Left— to turn to the next, emergent generation. This, in fact, is the subject of the ‘new’, timely News from Nowhere which bears the subtitle Raymond Williams: The Third Generation and which comprises critical essays and reviews on Williams’s work that mark the third generation’s debt to the first generation in general and Williams in particular. Although this generational story or familial history is familiar enough, I rehearse its genealogy because as an historical member of the third generation, I necessarily share many of the same ideas, assumptions and moods as the contributors to News from Nowhere. That is to say, despite the inevitably American address of this review, the dominance of late capitalism in the United States and Great Britain is arguably as significant as national (i.e. Anglo-American) differences, constituting as it does a multinational Imaginary that both consociates us as a generation and distinguishes us from our predecessors. It is in this sense, I think, that one can also speak of the emergence of cultural studies—which of course derives in large part from Williams’s own Culture and Society (1958)—as the preferred ‘discipline’ of the third generation. And yet, as Terry Murphy notes in ‘The determinations of cultural materialism’, ‘the question which has still to be both posed and answered is not: what did Williams write? but rather: what wrote Raymond Williams?’ (p. 58). I would only add that to pose this question—which Williams himself posed (‘not Orwell writing, but what wrote

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Orwell’)2—is also simultaneously to ask: What is writing us, the third generation, as we read Williams? In the above article (which I take to be the central intervention in this collection, together with Carol Watts’s concluding essay on Williams’s feminism), Murphy traces the formation and development of ‘English Studies’ as an institutional response to the demands of early twentieth-century capitalism. Since these demands are linked to periodic crises, one might say, à la Murphy, that capitalism is always already in crisis, and that English Studies, as one among many ‘ideological apparatuses’, is inescapably implicated in the play of this (political) economy, especially in ‘the contradiction between the technological demands of the productive forces for a more literate society [illustrated most recently, and dramatically, by the economic ascension of Japan] and the conservative demands induced by the maintenance of capitalist relations to “police” this literacy’ (p. 58). As the titles of some recent, influential texts testify—I’m thinking of D.A.Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1987), Frank Lentricchia’s Ariel and the Police (1987) and Simon Watney’s Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (1987)—this contradiction between the ‘cultural literacy’ imperative and capital’s concomitant need for ‘discipline and punishment’ has not gone unnoticed in the academy. Still, if one understands this contradiction in terms of capital- rather than powerknowledge, if, that is, one takes a less Foucauldian view of the picture, one can remark the scare in the above ‘scare quotes’ (‘police’) and accent, at the same time, the consensual nature of capitalist crisismanagement (i.e. the interimplication of the post-war ‘age of consensus’ and what Manuel Castells calls ‘corporate monopoly capital’). Morever, with its stress on consent rather than coercion, such a shift allows one to introduce the notion of hegemony, or what Williams in Marxism and Literature (1977) terms ‘the hegemonic’.3 I want to examine this notion with respect to the ‘race’ and ‘woman’ question at the end of this review, but I insert ‘the hegemonic’ here in order to anticipate what I see as a potential problem in Murphy’s reading of ‘the rise of English’. According to this reading—which relies heavily on Ernest Mandel’s ‘overarching theory’ of capitalogic as it is developed in Late Capitalism (1975)—English Studies is to the Second Technological Revolution what Cultural Studies is, or will be, to the Third Technological Revolution. More specifically (and imperatively), Murphy proposes that at ‘the level of dominant institutional discourse’, ‘Marxists should welcome a mutation from Leavisism (general theory of English Studies) to cultural materialism (general theory of cultural and media studies)’ (p. 59). Now, on one level at least (the ‘general’), Murphy’s argument—the passing poke at Fredric Jameson aside—is not all that different from the latter’s own Mandel-derived account of a ‘new radical cultural politics’ in ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’.4 In fact, Murphy implicitly invokes Jameson’s ‘culturalist’ appropriation of Mandel when he argues that Jameson’s sense of the postmodern as the ‘end of subversion’ is a defensive and revolutionarily defeatist misreading. Of course, having invoked 1968 and the May Day Manifesto, ‘one of the high points of the critique of civil society’, Murphy in some sense is defending the ‘first generation’ fathers—in this case, Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Williams himself—against their ‘second generation’ sons, especially seemingly less engaged and militant ones as Jameson (who, as Murphy notes, ‘owes much to the work of Williams’ (pp. 70–1)).

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One can, I think, take Murphy’s charge in the general, polemical spirit it is given—as I do—and still contest its specific thrust. (Jameson’s recent understanding of postmodernism is, it seems to me, considerably more dialectical than Murphy’s comments suggest, though perhaps Murphy is referring to the earlier version of the ‘Postmodernism’ essay that appeared in The Anti-Aesthetic?)5 More to the point, both Murphy’s and Jameson’s reading of ‘the cultural logic of capitalism’—differently inflected as they are—betray a certain reflectionism that is a ‘direct’ result of their uncritical reliance on Mandel. In other words, it is not at all self-evident that Mandel’s exposition of late capitalism—‘systematic and powerful as it is’ (Jameson)—is in any sense definitive. Put another, stronger way: to use Late Capitalism to write the history of cultural politics is to buy Mandel’s history of (political) economy, a productivist history that has some dubious, not to say dire, political implications. These implications are, I want to argue, almost completely contrary to the spirit and letter of Williams’s ‘whole’ project. Thus, with respect to Late Capitalism, Paul Smith has persuasively argued that Mandel’s own reliance on classical Marxist categories—on, in particular, the grand récit or master-narrative of the modes of production ‘legislates against a thorough analysis of the ways, not only in which the mode of production has changed, but also in which it is newly and complexly articulated in (and from) contemporary modes of representation and ideological formations’.6 The net effect of this conceptual legislation, for Smith, is that it discursively reinforces the ‘hegemony’ of the economy within Marxism and thereby structurally subordinates, all-too-classically, other overdetermined/determining instances. Such an ultimately orthodox reinscription of the economic (in the last instance) could not be further from Williams’s insistent, even relentless, interrogation of the classical Marxist valorization of what one might call, recollecting Derrida, a ‘restricted’ as opposed to ‘general economy’.7 In fact, for those toiling in the sometimes withered vineyards of what Laclau and Mouffe call the ‘Marxist Vulgate’, one of the most tonic, exhilarating aspects of Williams’s work is its Marx-like scepticism about the received wisdom of Marxism. So, in that ‘classic’ revision of the base/superstructure model in Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980), Williams asserts that if we ‘look at the whole question of the base differently’, we are ‘less tempted to dismiss as superstructural, and in that sense as merely secondary, certain vital productive social forces, which are in the broad sense, from the beginning, basic’.8 The keyword here is ‘basic’, a graphic touch that punningly signals that Williams’s emphasis on re-production represents a transformation, not reversal, of this once classical-Marxist, now cultural-theoretical problem. One can put this another way by considering the linguistic difference, a seemingly insignificant one, between Williams’s and Murphy’s titles: Problems in Materialism and ‘Determinations of cultural materialism’. What for Williams is a ‘problem in’ is, for Murphy, a ‘determination of’. To be fair to Murphy, his attempt theoretically to reformulate cultural materialism does take into account, explicitly so, determination-asdeterminism. Thus, drawing again on Mandel, he explains that (to echo my earlier syntax) the ideology of technological determinism is to late capitalism as linguistic determinism is to English Studies. Yet even as one concedes the general force of this proposition (structuralism certainly was, in retrospect, an especially extreme example of language-as-system, as langue), one begins to wonder about the (use-) value of such

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homologies. If for Williams the relation between culture and materialism is a problem, and one within which we as subjects are situated, for Murphy—and even more so for Jameson—the determinations of, respectively, cultural materialism and postmodernism are rather unproblematically economic and periodic or, more pejoratively, infrastructural and ‘epochal’. One might even argue that the latter, genitive approach is itself a reflex, albeit perverse, ‘expression’ of a severely restricted understanding of economy (the Realas-Exchange Value) and, as such, re-reifies rather than demystifies the accumulation of cultural capital. Read this way (admittedly, against the grain), Murphy’s reformulation of cultural materialism constitutes a kind of theoretical reformism and in this sense is more Jamesonian, I’m afraid, than he would care to admit. If I now appear to be defending the father against his first- and second-generation sons, I hasten to add that any such defence is both impossible and unnecessary. What I am suggesting is that for all its specificity (and it is admirably specific about, for example, the institutionalization of English Studies at Cambridge (pp. 61–3)), Murphy’s account of the determinations of cultural materialism lacks a sufficiently articulated sense of complexity. For Williams, on the other hand, determination ‘is in the whole social process itself and nowhere else’: ‘a complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures’ (Problems in Materialism, p. 87). This is not, needless to say, an isolated enunciation; one can find this emphasis on complexity everywhere in his work. To address, for instance, the question of Williams’s ‘political theory’ (which I have neglected so far), his notion of ‘general interest’ is ‘temporally as well as socially complex’ (p. 17). That is to say, complexity, for Williams, is the precondition of political organization, that ‘linkage of institutions or systems of decision’ which Ken Hirschkop terms, felicitously, a ‘federative structure’ (p. 16). But I would be grossly remiss at this point if I did not mention, even en passant, that Murphy’s essay represents—as my sustained engagement with it should suggest—a substantial contribution to the genealogy of cultural studies, and is at its most provocative for me when it swerves from its sweeping overview of ‘major societal changes’ to zero in on the specificities of Williams’s work. Murphy rightly observes, for instance, that the question of race is a real, felt omission in Williams’s understanding of community. Indeed, because of the centrality of class politics in his thinking about community (community is very nearly consonant with, as Kevin Davey shows, ‘working class domestic life’ and, more generally, a residual ‘familial socialism’ (p. 41)), neither the ‘race’ nor ‘woman’ question is as complexly articulated in Williams’s work as one might wish. If only for this reason (if not for its contribution to the larger, sometimes stalemated debate between socialism and feminism), Carol Watts’s concluding essay—‘Reclaiming the border country: feminism and Raymond Williams’—reminds us of the work that needs to be done with respect to a ‘prospective’ rather than regressive sense of community. Before I turn to the Watts essay, however, I might note that the rather insistent rhetoric of fathers and sons in this review has been an attempt, however lame, to re-mark a certain patrimonial play in the discourse of cultural studies, especially in its first and second phases (though not surprisingly, given Williams’s fictional sixth sense, ‘the possibility of discredited fathers and separated sons’, or ‘patrilinear crisis’ (Davey, p. 47), is explicitly played out, for instance, in Volunteers 1978)). In other words, if the issue of race has not been engaged nearly enough in that invigorating but difficult labour to construct a viable

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institutional alternative to English Studies, the ‘feminist question’ has all-too-often been erased as well. So, turning to Williams’s novels (to which ‘one is usually directed to find “Williams on women”’), Watts is intent to examine those ‘interrelations of gender and class’ that are absent from his early theoretical work. Reading Second Generation, however, she finds that although it raises questions about ‘the role of women in the family-household nexus, and indeed the representation of women in commodity culture’ (p. 97), it reveals these issues, it seems, only the more effectively to re-contain them. Thus, while Peter Owen— ‘who is studying for his doctorate at Oxford’—commits himself to an inquiry into the condition(s) of the working class, his mother Kate subordinates her Oxford life and whatever liberatory possibilities it promises to the ‘“real class project”’. For Watts, this renunciation is a particularly problematic resolution to the very real problem of women’s oppression inasmuch as ‘the articulation of women’s lives and desires’ in Williams’s novel appears, ultimately, ‘as only so much modernist disruption’. A disruption, that is, of the class-ic realist narrative—or, more precisely, that ‘“fully developing narrative” of [Kate’s] class’ (p. 97)—which Second Generation privileges, wittingly or unwittingly. At the risk of defusing the specificity of Watts’s intervention (which itself disrupts any easy reading of Williams’s fiction), I want to suggest that both her and Murphy’s essays point to what is for me the most serious limit of Williams’s vision, a limitation that crystallizes around ‘the often contradictory process of social identity’ (Watts) or what is now called, conveniently albeit unsatisfactorily, the ‘new social movements’. Though Williams did take into account the emergence and role of these movements with characteristic intelligence and open-mindedness in the middle and late work, Watts’s complimentary characterization of him at the beginning of her essay captures the contradiction: ‘an advocate of the “new social movements” who insisted nonetheless on the centrality of class politics’ (p. 89). But if class, for Williams, is central, doesn’t this amount to saying that the politics of the ‘new social movements’ are peripheral? More bluntly, are there structural reasons why Williams was unable adequately to come to terms with, say, the ‘race question’? This is not, I cannot emphasize enough, a local or regional problem, a ‘particularism’. Rather, it has everything to do with the way we understand what Williams, following Marx, calls the ‘whole social process’, the way in which ‘men define and shape their lives’ (Marxism and Literature, p. 108; italics mine). Yet even as this passage suggests that hegemony is an indispensable concept for any ‘cultural materialism’ worthy of its name (and here I might add that the term ‘cultural materialism’ is itself, pace Williams and Murphy, a reductive misnomer), this same passage with its residual masculinism also suggests that Williams’s classism, like Gramsci’s, prevented him from thinking hegemony in all its conceptual complexity. For to think the ‘complexity of hegemony’ (Williams) is to think the social in all its ‘surplus’. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), for instance, Laclau and Mouffe argue that ‘class politics’ cannot be separated from, and therefore must be articulated with, the politics of race: That, in certain circumstances, the class political subjectivity of white workers in Britain is overdetermined by racist or anti-racist attitudes, is evidently important for the struggle of the trade union movement, which will in turn have consequences in a number of aspects of State policy and

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ultimately rebound upon the political identity of the immigration workers themselves.9 From this analysis of the complex, overdetermined relations between the new immigrant class-fraction and what one might call the old (white) working class, Laclau and Mouffe conclude that class struggle must be re-conceived as ‘hegemonic struggle’. This is not to say that the ‘new social movements’ are the new privileged point for the formation of ‘a socialist political practice’, nor that such movements are necessarily ‘progressive’ (since their political meaning is never given in advance). It is, however, to say that opposed to Williams’s ‘hegemonic’ understanding of ‘structure of feeling’ (with its proletarian, neo-Gramscian inflection) and Murphy’s Leninist notion of the community-as-soviet (‘community as the locus of the contradictions and convergences of the inner city “soviet”’ (p. 67)), Laclau and Mouffe’s critical reinscription of hegemony—problematic as it is—allows one to think the dispersion, fragmentation, and indeterminacy of the ‘postmodern condition’. It is also to say that if questions of race and gender are not peripheral but central to the struggle for the kind of radical, participatory democracy that Williams imagined, such an emancipatory political practice ‘can only come from a complex process of convergence and political construction, to which none of the hegemonic articulations constructed in any area of social reality can be of indifference’ (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 174). Hegemony, in this sense, makes all the difference. Since I began writing this review at the beginning of December, two events have occurred—the revolution ‘from below’ in Romania and the American invasion of Panama—that would seem to confirm the cliché that while some things change, some things stay the same, i.e. while a certain communism or Stalinism appears to be dead in one part of the world, imperialism, American-style, is alive and well in another. It strikes me, however, that such news only re-confirms that it is more imperative than ever to be able to read the world in all its bewildering, multimediated complexity—if things are going to change, if in fact we are going somewhere and not nowhere. As both the third-generation contributors to News from Nowhere and I have intimated, Williams’s work is not without its limitations, its flaws and lacunae. But then, hagiography aside, how could it be otherwise? In the final analysis (though no analysis, as Freud reminded us, is ever final), what is remarkable is how comprehensive and complex that work is, how richly contemporary, how—dare I say it?—human, attuned as it was to those changes in production, communication, and ‘everyday life’ that are daily transforming us even as we sit watching history unfolding on the evening news. I have no doubt that this world is a poorer place without Raymond Williams. I also have no doubt that his life’s work will remain a resource of hope well into the future— until 1999 and beyond. And that, I am certain as well, is very good news indeed. Ohio University, Athens

NOTES 1 John O’Connor, Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 30. 2 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: Verso, 1979), p. 388.

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3 Raymond Williams, ‘Hegemony’, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 (1977)), p. 113. 4 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (July-August 1984), pp. 53–92. 5 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and consumer society’, in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1987 (1983)), pp. 111–25. 6 Paul Smith, ‘Visiting the Banana Republic’, in Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 137. 7 Jacques Derrida, ‘From restricted to general economy: a Hegelianism without reserve’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 251–77. 8 Raymond Williams, ‘Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1982 (1980)), p. 35. 9 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1989 (1985)), p. 141. Though I am not wont to do so, I must bracket here a critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s radicalization of the notions of, inter alia, ‘hegemony’ and ‘democracy’.

R.A.STRADLING

• Wilfrid Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989), £25.00 ‘He has become an English institution.’ Even in the short time since this book was completed, the encomium which the writer bestows on his subject—once the apotheosis of the rites of passage to greatness—seems notably reduced in glow and glory. Not only are critics less stupefied by the ‘genius’ on his pedestal, but also English institutions themselves, once we widen our gaze to take in what is happening around the unstable monument, seem to be wobbling in sympathy with it. Let us refrain from burdening Wilfrid Mellers with such dubious honours. Nevertheless, due recognition there must be, for as he approaches his eighties, this indefatigable writer of music, criticism and history, continues to delight and stimulate on every page of his work. Like the subject of his book, Mellers takes the advice of Yeats about soul singing louder for every tatter in its mortal dress. His record is astonishing. A follower of F.R.Leavis, he was writing Lit. Crit. and music reviews in Scrutiny while still an undergraduate in the early 1930s. Whilst in other nearby laboratories Rutherford’s disciples struggled towards the analysis of molecular structure, Scrutiny’s experiments were directed at detecting and defining the organic, communitarian, and thus universal elements in English Culture. In its pages, Mellers recognized the presence of precisely these elements in the work of Vaughan Williams, and still subscribes to broadly Leavisite principles in his thinking about artistic essences. But as a young man he was also powerfully swayed by the discovery of jazz to an awareness of the vitality of populist culture—measurably distant from Leavis’s oligarchic elitism. Mellers came to accept urban industrialism as capable of producing perfection in all the variegated categories of music and literature; in the 1960s, for example, to a striking appraisal of Lennon and McCartney. Vaughan Williams’s own recognition of jazz was restricted to use of the saxophone in such deadly serious scores as Job (1930) and the Sixth Symphony (1948). Not for him the risky and risqué attempts at miscegenation which enliven some of Mellers’s own compositions. Yet Mellers has no hard words for the Grand Old Man, on these grounds or any other. His book is a tour de force of ideas, communicated with an infectious enthusiasm which seems hardly to have changed from the dazzling, giddy essays of his youth. With a range of reference which sometimes makes our heads swim, he weaves a glistening web of inter-connections and contextual meanings, which he revealingly applies to Vaughan Williams’s general career, to generic groups of works, and to individual pieces. The main argument, supported by a wealth of original and analogical examples, is that Vaughan Williams was a ‘double man’, a soul blessed by a benign polarity held in

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productive balance. This stands in contrast to the schizophrenia of Romanticism, that of a psyche pursuing self-destruction through creation. Reduced to the political core which (Mellers would hesitate to deny) is indispensable to the understanding of culture, the composer was a humanist utopian of broad socialist leanings, who was at the same time an emotional reactionary, distrustful of most aspects of post-industrial society. In his TLS review of this book, Roger Scruton dismissed Vaughan Williams’s socialism as merely the conscientious refuge of a certain type of English intellectual conservative. Clever as it is, this assertion represents an historical anachronism. It may ring true of many a public person of the fifties or sixties of this century. In fact, the composer’s socialism, born in the nineties of the last, came directly from Morris, which in turn came mostly from Marx, and as Paul Harrington has recently reminded us, the drive it provided his early ambitions should not be underestimated. At the same time the most palpable and persistent of these ambitions was expressed in the campaign to create an autonomous ‘national’ musical discourse, purged of most elements of what he called the ‘cosmopolitan’. To this end, Vaughan Williams consciously cultivated all the revealed genre of (allegedly) ‘original’ and (equally allegedly) ‘English’ music. In his harmonic language, he refused to be dominated by the accepted continental norms of tonality—the mainstream diatonicism of Brahms or the daring chromaticism of late Wagner. Instead, his mature music regularly regards harmony from the angular perspective of Tudor England, a modally-inflected language which flourished before its (alleged) corruption by Handel. If neither as complete nor as systematic as the contemporaneous achievement of Schoenberg, Vaughan Williams’s revolution had a similar objective—to procure the hegemony which comes from renewal (or ‘Renaissance’)—though in England’s case merely an internal hegemony. And although the exemplary counterpoint of Bach was by no means repellent to him, his preferred polyphonic procedures were the descant of Tudor Chapel and the diaphonous chorus of medieval monastery. Many of the crucial events in his work, from the Tallis Fantasia (1909) to the Ninth Symphony (1956), take place via canonic clashes atavistically derived from the rondel ‘Sumer is icumen in’, (allegedly) the earliest English written music. Vaughan Williams’s ‘doubleness’ is not dissimilar to that of many of the prominent Scrutineers. Since he too was a Cambridge man, who read History (as opposed to Mellers’s first degree in English Literature), and was close to Russell in the 1890s, this is not surprising. In the 1920s he celebrated the autonomous arcadia in his cantata Sancta Civitas, significantly enough first performed in Oxford during the General Strike of 1926. A decade later, Dona Nobis Pacem expressed the feelings of multitudes from all walks of life confronted by the Fascist menace. Eventually it became obvious, even to those resolutely opposed to both Fascism and war, that in practice the former could not be resisted without espousing the latter. Scrutiny retreated from ‘politics’—that labyrinth of division, compromise and ephemerality—into the womb of the Platonic absolutes. For his part, Vaughan Williams seems to have feared that a polycultural state could not survive the acid test. When, in 1940, the BBC commissioned him to compose a patriotic song, they left to him the choice of text, specifying only that it should carefully avoid any reference to ‘England’, as opposed to ‘Britain’. Vaughan Williams promptly set Henley’s poem entitled ‘England, My England’! A little later, he tried to withdraw the work—and returned his fee—in protest against the BBC’s banning of the music of Alan Bush, a

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voluble member of the Communist Party. (Since the Soviet Union was then in alliance with Nazi Germany, the BBC’s attitude was not entirely unreasonable.) On similar grounds, Mellers protested in the pages of Scrutiny when shortly afterwards Vaughan Williams was passed over as Master of the King’s Musick. University of Wales College of Cardiff

MYRTLE HOOPER

• David Ward, Chronicles of Darkness (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 191 pp., £30.00 (hardback) In commenting on his fictional relations with Africa, Joseph Conrad once remarked that ‘An Outpost of Progress is the lightest part of the loot I carried off from Central Africa, the main portion being of course the Heart of Darkness’.1 It is an assessment that should sound a note of warning for critics as well as writers of literature about Africa. The imperial spirit that inspired a ‘scramble for’ Africa is by no means dead: perhaps the firmest yet most oblique hold it has found is in the domain of literary criticism. However much time David Ward spent in Africa, his writing now ‘from the Centre’2 places him in imaginative exile from it—yet his attempt to deconstruct white writing about Africa leads him to claim the territory as his own. This is apparent if, in passing, we judge the book by its cover. The choice of illustration is a paradoxical one. We are told on the flyleaf: The photograph embodies a pastoral and a picturesque view of Africa as seen through the camera lenses of anthropologists on safari, and might still be seen as typological by some. Its relationship with the text should be taken as ironic, as an instance of the darkness which the book seeks to define. The photograph is in fact not of Africa—nor yet of the ‘darkness’ of Africa. It is a portrait in black and white of a Masai tribeswoman, against an obscure though perhaps forest background. The huge metal circles of her necklace and earrings dominate the frame. The rough cloth of her dress slips off one breast; the tight braiding of her hair bares her face to the downward view of the camera. Her expression is one of hostility, fear, undesired exposure. The picture is in the possession of the Royal Geographical Society, whose permission was granted for its use to cover Ward’s book. Only by a leap of the imagination could one assume the permission of the woman herself was sought or granted. In sharp contrast I have before me a reproduction of an acrylic-and-glaze-on-canvas by Tony Hudson, entitled ‘Massai Woman’.3 It is clear that Hudson’s imagination has indeed been ‘fired by the colour and the imagery’ of Africa, as he remarks. This woman is similarly dressed, though her jewellery is multi-coloured and her dress is toned in colours of flame. A simple shift in perspective—Hudson’s is angled upwards—accords this woman stature and dignity. The painter’s gaze rests lightly on his subject, who presents herself in confidence and serenity.

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Both views of Africa are taken (presumably) by white men. Yet the picture on Ward’s book leaves me with a sense not of irony but of discomfort, of a subject further exploited by the uses to which she is being put. ‘Chronicles of Darkness’ announces the title above her head, and of course its irony is present enough. Ward acknowledges in his preface that ‘many of the attitudes towards Africa with which I grew up were distorted. However much I wanted to write about black African writers, I had to negotiate my way through these distortions’ (p. 1). So Ward himself concedes that the book is his attempt to come to terms with the ‘darkness’ in his own mind. Yet the distinction remains obscure—and his cover photo does not help him—whether the ‘darkness’ resides in the chronicles made by the writers he discusses, or whether it resides in Africa per se. The Massai woman portrayed by Tony Hudson knows full well that, in the assertion of another chronicler, ‘Africa was never the dark continent to African people.’4 It is one assertion Ward forgets to make. That he forgets to make it springs directly from his decision to categorize African literature according to the race of its authors. Having quoted Nadine Gordimer on van der Post, he describes his endeavour thus: The two perceptions—a literature of egoism, a literature of exile—enclose a difficult and uncomfortable space. I decided that, before I could look at black-African literature clearly, I had to explore and understand that space, that beam in my eye. (p. 1) An admirable self-confrontation. Yet the ‘beam’ in his eye is, in my view, not the literature of the white writers he writes about, nor the ‘distortions’ they have originated in him (pp. 2–3), but the dualism which isolates them. By now we have not only ‘blackAfrican writers’ and ‘white-African writers’ but for these ‘white-Africans’ just two possibilities: ‘a literature of egoism and a literature of exile’ (p. 1). Whether Ward is right or wrong is not the point. The dichotomies have become prescriptions. Predictably, the prescriptions are most trenchant in relation to the ‘white-SouthAfrican writers’ included in the critique, and it is on the analysis of one of these writers that I would like to focus my attention. Even condoning, for the time being, Ward’s concentration on white writers, there are omissions: Dan Jacobson is cited only for his foreshortened critical perspective (pp. 3–4), and Harold Bloom gets no mention. Omissions we have been warned to expect. Yet the exclusions are less arbitrary than Ward suggests. The absences of Herman Charles Bosman and of Pauline Smith are due, one may speculate, to their concern with isolated rural Afrikaner communities. Although Afrikaners may—perhaps—count as ‘white-Africans’, they certainly aren’t real Africans. Hence the polarization with which the chapter on van der Post concludes: After Sharpeville and Soweto, the juggernaut years of the 1980s grind on, destroying everything except the hypocritical stubbornness of the white leaders and the courage, determination, and passion of the majority. (p. 46)

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Ward’s treatment of Alan Paton is, for this and other reasons, an interesting case in point. Having cited the narrative comment in Cry, the Beloved Country that ‘[t]here is no applause in prison’ (p. 75), Ward makes this pronouncement: The implication of this is deeply offensive to the new black culture, and the careers of Mandela and many others have abundantly proved its falsity. There is a proper anger, a decent discontent abroad; it is the blessed who are marching on Pretoria; the mutilated children of Soweto, the disinherited of Crossroads, those who survive their ‘independence’ in arid homelands, the workers who bear down every day upon every white city from egg-box townships to do the white man’s work for him. (p. 75) Of such political rectitude Ward is undoubtedly proud. Yet his rhetoric allows the begging of many questions, allows the blurring of critical judgement and the blunting of critical sympathies. Thus Paton is represented only by his first and most famous work, Cry, the Beloved Country. His second novel, Too Late the Phalarope, is a more tentative and a far better work: yet its subject is the iconoclastic relationship between a white Afrikaner, a man who epitomizes all that is most positively valued in his community, and a ‘coloured’ woman who epitomizes all that is most despised. The narrative strategy used to represent this relationship is subtle and ironic. It is only by ignoring the later work, therefore, that Ward can say of Paton: He acts the writer as pharmacist, stocking and labelling the products on his shelf as poison or as cure, expelling or absolving his persons according to the rhetoric of healing permitted by his faith, or his ideology. (p. 78) The critique offered of Paton’s style (pp. 73–5) and particularly of his rendition of the speech of black characters is designed to demonstrate how it sanctions the sympathy of white readers who ‘don’t want that sympathy to interfere too much with their view of the world’ (p. 73). Thus we are reminded, Zulu is as rapid, complex, and capable of subtlety as any other language, as Paton, who spoke Zulu, knew. The great majority of whites could choose to think otherwise, comfortable in the assumption that ‘kitchen kaffir’ or ‘fanagalo’ represents all that there is in the language and culture of the servant race. (p. 74) Yet Ward’s critique has been anticipated by that of J.M.Coetzee in an analysis of the attempts of three (white) South African writers to render ‘the speech, thought and experience of people of one culture…in the language of another’.5 Indeed Coetzee comes to similar conclusions:

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The phantom Zulu of Cry, the Beloved Country is in fact less the medium through which Paton’s characters speak than part of the interpretation Paton wishes us to make of them. It tells us that they belong in an oldfashioned context of direct (i.e. unmediated) personal relations based on respect, obedience, and fidelity.6 Yet unlike Ward, Coetzee’s sympathy is plain. Also unlike Ward, Coetzee does not seek his explanations for Paton’s style in the ‘real world’. His conclusion occurs in the context of a discussion of the literary practice of marking ‘transferred’ speech.7 Unlike Ward, Coetzee recognizes both the linguistic pressures upon writers attempting to render crosscultural encounter, and the legitimate diversity of their responses. Neither is the possibility allowed that Paton’s narrative strategy may be consistent with his purpose and effectively explained in terms of it. In an article that focuses, as Ward has done, on Stowe, as well as on Gaskell and Eliot, Robyn Warhol has posited that, the engaging narrator explicitly draws on the actual reader’s memory and emotion, through direct address to the narratee, to foster a commitment to improving the extradiegetic situation the fiction depicts.8 The narrative of Cry, the Beloved Country may not use direct address to the reader, but it is clearly designed, as Warhol puts it, to ‘induce tears and…to stir up sentiment’,9 and by doing so to have a direct impact on the realities it depicts. Paton’s intention, in other words, is a didactic one, and should be recognized as such. And if Cry, the Beloved Country didn’t have the political influence which Paton intended, and which Ward feels it ought to have had (‘Much less was achieved by Cry [than by Uncle Tom’s Cabin]’, p. 70), its literary influence has yet been substantial. Richard Rive is less trenchant than Ngugi and less ‘bland’ that Mphahlele, both of whom Ward cites, but like them he is a writer, and able to present a ‘black-South-African’ point of view. For this reason his 1983 article, ‘The liberal tradition in South African literature’, warrants serious consideration. Rive begins by describing the euphoria he felt (in spite of ‘being crammed with Shelley and Keats’) on first reading the novel: But I found I could identify much of my own feelings and emotions with Cry, the Beloved Country. Although I did not like Stephen Khumalo at least I had met him. Although I did not like Msimango’s arguments at least I had heard them before. I did not like Mr Jarvis’s boys’ club but I belonged to one at the Hyman Liberman Institute where whites with understanding in their eyes showed us how to play table-tennis.10 However fashionable may be the assault on liberalism, Rive implies, it is misguided to the extent that it loses sight of context and of purpose. Thus, comparing Cry, the Beloved Country with Peter Abrahams’s contemporaneous Path of Thunder, he observes: In both the liberal and protest types of novel the victims are negative and are portrayed as passive recipients of discrimination. What is done to them

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is as important as how they react to it…. It is very much later in our literature that we find the blacks who hit back.11 Given the absence of a substantial body of black readers, both books were read mostly by whites. It is in these terms that we need to understand the paternalism of Cry, the Beloved Country. ‘Because of its employment of didacticism, the liberal novel cannot help having a built-in paternalism, an understanding at a level removed from those with whom it is concerned.’12 In his conclusion he describes the literary impact of the novel: The reaction which Cry, the Beloved Country still arouses, and the controversy which still surrounds it, indicate how important a watershed Paton’s novel proves to be for all South African literature in English. It took this novel to end one type of literature and initiate new and different directions…. Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel which, if it did not bring about the political restructuring of this country (which was hardly its function) nevertheless appealed to the conscience of South Africa and the rest of the world, and made our own literature look seriously and critically at the society with which it was concerned.13 I have dealt at some length with Paton because the implications of Ward’s treatment of him are, in many ways, symptomatic. I accused Ward above of blurred critical judgement and blunted critical sympathies. Their effects, I believe, have been amply demonstrated. Their causes need a little more consideration. Certainly it is a scant consultation of critics (particularly Southern African critics) which allows Ward to ignore or overlook context, which blinds him to some of the realities with which Paton is attempting, artistically, to cope, and which deafens him to many of the nuances of Paton’s reaction to them. To be fair this scant critical consultation may be due less to a lack of humility than to a divide in Southern African studies entrenched long before the cultural boycott. Clearly Ward cannot have been expected, when he wrote Chronicles of Darkness, to anticipate recent political trends. The divide is nevertheless one which will take a lot more than F.W.de Klerk’s liberalizing policies to bridge, because it is one which affects ‘the attentive reader in Britain or America’ (p. 2) as much as it affects us here in the outposts of ‘Empire’. One might well redeploy Ward’s terms to accuse criticism itself—and particularly criticism abroad—of both egoism and exile. There is more to it, then, than indelicacy of touch. There is imperialism at a further remove. The indulgence in rhetoric, the entrapment in prescriptive agendas and categorical dichotomies are those of one who resides outside the domain of those for whom he prescribes. The premise underlying Ward’s attempt to clear ‘the beam’ from his eye, to negotiate his ‘way through distortions’, is that there is a right way and a wrong way to represent Africa, and the ‘white’ way, though interesting, is the wrong way. Such absolutism is self-defeating, because the dichotomies he has set out to define have to include him. His thus becomes a vanishing subject: as a ‘white’ deconstructing ‘white views’ of Africa he is no nearer reaching its ‘truth’ or its ‘reality’ than they are. The ‘darkness’ has remained in the eye of the beholder. The only way out, of course, is to renounce the categories, to forsake the ‘darkness’ of viewing Africa as ‘other’. One of the fundamental lessons white South Africans have

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been so slow to learn is the need to recognize, to apprehend, to respond to black views; to acknowledge their autonomy. It’s a painful process, but one that is vital, and, I believe, one that has irrefutably begun. What is happening in South Africa at present is not what Steve Biko rejected in anticipation: a breakthrough into white society by blacks, an assimilation and acceptance of blacks into an already established set of norms and codes of behaviour set up by whites… (p. 4) Black presence is far too strong to be thus subdued. What is happening in South African social, political, cultural and literary spheres is that the ‘norms and codes’ are being challenged and redefined. A dialogue has begun which, in literary terms, means an inclusive interchange between indigenous depictions of Africa and exotic ones, between external perspectives and internal ones, between black criticism and white, imperial theory and post-colonial. Let me conclude, therefore, by quoting from two recent articles by black Southern African critics. Njabulo Ndebele begins his ‘Redefining relevance’ with the assertion that ‘what has been called protest literature may have run its course in South Africa’.14 He continues: The rest of this essay is premised on the belief that the greatest challenge of the South African revolution is in the search for ways of thinking, ways of perception, that will help to break down the closed epistemological structures of South African oppression. Such structures can severely compromise resistance by dominating thinking itself. The challenge is to free the entire social imagination of the oppressed from the laws of perception that have characterised apartheid society. For writers this means freeing the creative process itself from those very laws. It means extending the writer’s perception of what can be written about, and the means and methods of writing.15 A somewhat more radical line might be expected from Andries Oliphant, editor of Staffrider, which has recently become the journal of the Congress of South African Writers. Yet the analysis and expansion he advocates is in a strikingly similar spirit: This tendency of criticism to lapse into dogmatic absolutism is symptomatic of the South African society where the liberating potential inscribed in literature, its critical and aesthetic reception, is often violated in order to bolster threatened or discredited philosophies of social inequality. And conversely, the same emancipatory discourses are often mechanically harnessed as instruments or so-called weapons of revolutionary struggles. These diametrically opposed positions, which are largely the products of a society in conflict, are reductive simplifications from which a more comprehensive and dialectically informed criticism has to distance itself. This can be accomplished by critically exposing the

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underlying assumptions of these reductive tendencies and advancing a broader and conceptually sharpened perspective.16 It is to be hoped that the Centre will join this debate. It is to be hoped that when Ward comes to write his sequel he too will have rejected the ‘closed epistemological structures’ and ‘reductive oversimplifications’ of apartheid categories of thought. University of Zululand

NOTES 1 J.Conrad, Tales of Unrest (London: Dent, 1921), ‘Author’s Note’, p. x. 2 The term comes from B.Ashcroft, G.Griffiths and H.Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). 3 T.Hudson, ‘Massai Women’ (UK: African Connection, n.d.). 4 B.Head, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (London: Heinemann, 1981), Introduction, p. xiv. 5 J.M.Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (Sandton: Radix, 1988), p. 116. 6 Coetzee, p. 129. 7 Coetzee, p. 117. 8 R.R.Warhol, ‘Towards a theory of the engaging narrator: earnest interventions in Gaskell, Stowe and Eliot’, PMLA, 101, 5 (1986), p. 815. 9 Warhol, p. 817. 10 R.Rive, ‘The liberal tradition in South African literature’, Contrast, 14, 3 (1983), p. 20. 11 Rive, p. 28. 12 Rive, p. 29. 13 Rive, p. 31. 14 N.Ndebele, ‘Redefining relevance’, Pretexts, 1, 1 (1989), p. 40. 15 Ndebele, p. 45. 16 A.W.Oliphant, ‘South African literature and the criticism of criticism’, Unisa English Studies, 28, 2 (1990), p. 27.