Towards a New Literary Humanism

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Also by Andy Mousley: RE-HUMANISING SHAKESPEARE: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity CRITICAL HUMANISMS: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (with Martin Halliwell) RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY NEW CASEBOOKS: John Donne (editor) He is also series co-editor of Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature

Towards a New Literary Humanism Edited by

Andy Mousley

Selection and editorial matter © Andy Mousley 2011 Individual chapters © contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23815–2

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Debbie

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

List of Contributors

x

Introduction Andy Mousley

1

Part I Literature as Ersatz Theology: Deep Selves Introduction Andy Mousley

23

1 Faith, Feeling, Reality: Anne Brontë as an Existentialist Poet Rebecca Styler

28

2 Virginia Woolf, Sympathy and Feeling for the Human Kirsty Martin

44

3 Being Human and Being Animal in Twentieth-Century Horse-Whispering Writings: ‘Word-Bound Creatures’ and ‘the Breath of Horses’ Elspeth Graham 4 Judith Butler and the Catachretic Human Inge Arteel

59 77

Part II Scepticism, or Humanism at the Limit Introduction Andy Mousley

93

5 Shakespeare’s Refusers: Humanism at the Limit Richard Chamberlain

98

6 Why Eliot Killed Lydgate: ‘Joyful Cruelty’ in Middlemarch Steven Earnshaw

113

7 Atomised: Mary Midgley and Michel Houellebecq Jeff Wallace

127

8 Humanity Without Itself: Robert Musil, Giorgio Agamben and Posthumanism Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter

vii

143

viii Contents

Part III Literature, Democracy, Humanisms from Below Introduction Andy Mousley 9

Mobilising Unbribable Life: The Politics of Contemporary Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina Damir Arsenijevic´

10

HUM (-an, -ane, -anity, -anities, -anism, -anise) Mark Robson

11

Humanising Marx: Theory and Fiction in the Fin de Siècle British Socialist Periodical Deborah Mutch

12

Civic Humanism: Said, Brecht and Coriolanus Nigel Wood

161

166 181

197 212

References

228

Index

239

Acknowledgements I am grateful to De Montfort University for granting me research leave to complete this book. Thanks to all the contributors for their chapters and support, and to Deborah Mutch, Steven Earnshaw and Jeff Wallace for their comments on the proposal and early drafts of the Introduction. Thanks also to Alex Keen for his fine proofreading under pressure, to Jane Dowson and Martin Halliwell for their insights, and to Paula Kennedy, Ben Doyle and Jon Lloyd at Palgrave Macmillan for their support, advice and efficiency. Special thanks go to Debbie and Dan for the kind of love and forbearance that allowed me to follow them round the house reading bits out (occasionally). Formal acknowledgments regarding work reprinted from other sources in this volume are as follows: Chapter 10: Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Orchards: 1’ and ‘The Valaisian Quatrains: 28’, from The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. Poulin, Jr. English translation copyright © 1979, 1982, 1984, 1986 A. Poulin, Jr. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www. graywolfpress.org. Chapter 10: Jo Shapcott, ‘Gilwern Lane’ and ‘Song’, from Tender Taxes, reprinted with the permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

ix

List of Contributors Damir Arsenijevic´ is Lecturer in Cultural and Literary Studies at Tuzla University, Bosnia and Herzegovina and is the author of Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2010). He is a critic, theorist, translator and international cultural projects worker whose activities span the fields of cultural, gender and literary studies. His research and art-theory political interventions examine as well as impact upon the terror of inequality, the solidarity of unbribable life, the production of knowledge and material memories of war and genocide. He is a member of artistic-theory Grupa Spomenik and is one of the founders of the international platform Yugoslav Studies – an arena for the interaction of art, theory, education and politics. Inge Arteel is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Flemish Research Fund at the Free University of Brussels. Her research interests include contemporary German and Austrian literature and drama, subject theory and gender theory. Her current research project concentrates on grotesque representations of violence in relation to humanist/posthumanist debates. Recent publications include: with Heidy Margrit Müller (eds), Elfriede Jelinek: Stücke für oder gegen das Theater? (2008); and ‘Nach dem Bilder- und Berührungsverbot. Kunst und Erotik in “die Umarmung, nach Picasso”’, in Alexandra Strohmaier (ed.), Buchstabendelirien. Zur Literatur Friederike Mayröckers (2009). Ivan Callus is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches courses in contemporary narrative and literary theory. With Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University), he is the editor of Rodopi’s monograph series, Critical Posthumanisms. The first volume in the series, co-written with Stefan Herbrechter, is due to appear in 2011. His other research, both published and forthcoming, centres on poststructuralism and deconstruction, on contemporary fiction and on the anagram notebooks of Ferdinand de Saussure. Richard Chamberlain is Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton, where he teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature. He is the author of Radical Spenser: Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism (2005) and is working on a new book, Shakespeare’s Refusers. x

List of Contributors xi

Steven Earnshaw is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University. His most recent book is Beginning Realism (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). Previous publications include The Handbook of Creative Writing (ed., 2007) and Existentialism (2006). He is currently working on ‘names and naming’ in literature and philosophy. Elspeth Graham is Head of English at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published on self-writing, religious radicalism and cultures of sport and play in the early modern period, as well as on contemporary fiction and literary theory. Stefan Herbrechter is Reader in Cultural Theory at Coventry University. He is the author, co-author, editor and co-editor of several books, including Critical Posthumanism (with Ivan Callus, 2011), Posthumanismus – Eine kritische Einführung (2009), Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges (with Ivan Callus, 2009), The Matrix in Theory (with Myriam Diocaretz, 2006), Returning (to) Communities (with Michael Higgins, 2006), Metaphors of Economy (with Nicole Bracker (2005), Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)resistibility of Theory (with Ivan Callus, 2004), Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity and Translation (2002) and Lawrence Durrell: Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity (1999). His work has appeared in the journals Angelaki, Parallax, Polygraph and Subject Matters, and he has translated works by Derrida, Cixous and Bernard Stiegler. Kirsty Martin is Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on literature and emotion and she is currently working on a book on ideas of sympathy in the novels of Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. She is planning a further book project on understandings of happiness in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel. Deborah Mutch is Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her field of research is focused on the fiction published in the British socialist periodicals of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth centuries. She has published English Socialist Periodicals, 1880–1900: A Reference Source (2005) and a number of articles in journals such as Victorian Periodicals Review and Literature and History. She is currently working on the development of a website of socialist periodicals and is researching the influence of form on socialist fiction. Mark Robson teaches in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he is also Director of the Analysis of Democratic Cultures Research Group. He is the author of Stephen Greenblatt (2008)

xii List of Contributors

and The Sense of Early Modern Writing (2006), co-author of Shakespeare, Jonson and the Claims of the Performative (2010, with James Loxley) and Language in Theory (2005, with Peter Stockwell), and editor of Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics, Politics, Philosophy (2005), Hester Pulter, Poems (2010) and What is Literature? (forthcoming, 2011). Rebecca Styler is Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. She researches women’s religious writing of the nineteenth century, which is the focus of her book Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (2010). She has also published articles on Victorian women’s spiritual autobiography and biography, and on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic tales. She is currently developing a book on religious Gothic. Jeff Wallace is Professor of Literature and Cultural History and Head of the Department of English, Film, Communication and Media at Anglia Ruskin University. He is the author of D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (2005) and Beginning Modernism (2011), and is co-editor of Gothic Modernisms (with Andrew Smith, 2001), Raymond Williams Now (with Rod Jones and Sophie Nield, 1997) and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays (with David Amigoni, 1995). He is currently writing on the concept of abstraction in modern literary studies and visual arts. Nigel Wood is Professor of Literature at Loughborough University. He is author of Swift (1986) and many essays on eighteenth-century and theoretical topics. He has also edited a selection of Frances Burney’s journals (1989), compiled and introduced the Longmans Critical Reader volume on Jonathan Swift (1999), and, most recently, edited She Stoops to Conquer and other Comedies (2007) for Oxford University Press. He was General Editor of the Theory in Practice series (1993–7) and edited 11 of the volumes. Alongside David Lodge, he is editor of the second and third editions of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory for Longmans (2001, 2008). He is at present a member of the team editing Alexander Pope’s poetry for the Longmans Annotated Poets series.

Introduction Andy Mousley

Utilitarian governmental initiatives, driven as all else is by that unintelligible modern god called ‘the economy’, may yet succeed in reducing education to skills, thereby endangering some of the traditional humanist imperatives of education. However, ‘we’ (meaning, for the purpose of this volume, ‘we’ of the academic community of English) may now, albeit belatedly, be reaching a position of being able to explicitly defend such imperatives instead of acquiescing (or seeming to) in their demise. Once vilified by anti-humanist theorists as bourgeois, essentialist and outdated – part of a waning episteme, according to Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (Foucault 1970, 387) – the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanism’ are currently being recuperated within literary studies and across the humanities more generally.1 These changed conditions of theoretical and critical discourse now make it possible to claim that humanism and the academic discipline of English have always belonged to one another, that the nature of this belonging has doubtless changed over time and has come under pressure from other developments within the subject, but that ‘English-as-humanism’ survived, albeit often incognito throughout the theory years, to emerge into the present where it now lives and breathes more openly. But what I mean here by humanism will need to be carefully spelt out because it is a concept which has been and continues to be variously defined (see Davies 1997; Halliwell and Mousley 2003). For example, concern – formulated independently of a religious paradigm – for the dignity and sanctity of all human life is as much a humanist stance as the idea, often voiced in the Renaissance, that human beings occupy a special place in the order of God’s creation. In a similar vein, some humanists, for whom Enlightenment ideas are a touchstone, may embrace science as an icon of human achievement, whilst others of a 1

2

Towards a New Literary Humanism

more broadly ‘Romantic’ persuasion may reject science on the grounds that it reduces the richness, complexity and imaginative faculties of human beings. The problem of even generously setting the parameters of humanism can be acutely felt when a thinker such as Nietzsche can be viewed as anti-humanist from one perspective and humanist from another: anti-humanist because he attacks Enlightenment confidence in human rationality and progress, but humanist because of the impulsive human creativity that is released by the death of rationality on the one hand and God on the other. Even when a tenet such as that of human agency seems inalienable from the humanist project, it can serve as the basis for wildly differing world views: Marx is as much a humanist as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and the line in John Lennon’s song ‘Give Peace a Chance’ is as much a humanist credo as the advice given by Victoria Beckham in her autobiography: ‘If you want something, go and get it. If you want to wear something, so what if no one else is wearing it, just wear what you want to wear. Do your make-up and your hair how you want, and sod everything’ (Beckham 2001, 136–7). In order to identify the kind of humanism that has always been wedded, though not always harmoniously or self-evidently, to literary studies, I will need to glance briefly at the history and pre-history of English, before addressing the question of what makes the literary humanism proposed in this volume ‘new’.

The double track of English: specialists and generalists English, broadly speaking, has two ‘tracks’, two trajectories. One is a specialist track, while the other is generalist and therefore, as I will argue, ‘humanist’. These tracks have sometimes converged and sometimes diverged. The extent to which they have done one or the other is partly a matter of perception. Some critics may complain that English has become over-specialised and out of tune with the pleasures and provocations of reading experienced by the ‘common reader’, but specialisation, as I will also argue, has sometimes been accommodated within the broad generalist ethos of English. All academic disciplines, literary studies included, grow their own specialisms. From bibliographical scholarship to New Criticism, and beyond New Criticism to the technical vocabularies of the 1970s drawn largely from continental philosophy, literary studies has developed a range of professional and specialised competences. In more recent years, the turn away from ‘High Theory’ to history (a move that was implied in some versions of theory) has spawned a variety of historicisms,

Introduction 3

including cultural materialism, new historicism, materialist feminism, the new economic criticism and presentism, each of which has contributed its own specialised or semi-specialised terminology to the way in which history is conceptualised and studied. In addition to these sub-specialist theoretical branches of historicism, which attempt to make explicit the terms on which history is or should be examined, is the panoply of more practical and eclectic (in terms of their theoretical provenance) excavations of literary and cultural context/s. These contexts contribute to the pluralisation of historical perspective, such that it is now necessary to speak not of one homogeneous ‘modernism’, ‘Romanticism’ or ‘Renaissance’, but of modernisms, Romanticisms and so forth. Such pluralisation is healthily democratic, as hitherto underrepresented aspects of a period, movement or cultural phenomenon are made visible. But pluralisation is also arguably driven by the tendency of intellectual work to become ever more specialised, ever more Aristotelian in its parcelling of concepts (including, but not exclusive to, period concepts) into divisions and subdivisions. The specialist literary/cultural contextualiser is supposed to know his or her corner of the universe – his or her five seconds of literary/cultural history – better than anyone else, which is of course admirable, and enhances the diversity and vitality of the discipline, but it can also contribute to the sense that ‘English’ is in danger of decomposing into fragmented expertises and of generating little ‘postmodern’ specialised narratives at the expense of anything grander. Cue humanism and, as one early example of what subsequently became a resilient part of the humanist ethos of English, the ‘generalism’ of Renaissance humanism (or at least of one aspect of it), as exemplified, amongst others, by Erasmus. Erasmus was in some respects a ‘specialiser’, for as a critical philologist, he was aware of the complexity of the human transmission of texts, arguing in his Letter to Martin Dorp of 1515 for care and attention to detail in the attempt to restore both classical and religious texts to some kind of authenticity (Erasmus 1971, 241–52). However, the ultimate aim of philology for Erasmus was not scholarship for scholarship’s sake, for that would have been to have repeated the mistakes of the scholastic past. In his Praise of Folly (1509), the narrator Folly ridicules late-medieval scholasticism for its super-subtle intellectualism which results in over-interpretation of the Bible. The satire on medieval scholastics’ ‘subtle refinement of subtleties’ depends upon the recognition that the theologians’ professional over-concern with technicalities has taken them far away from the spirit of the Bible and its perceived relevance to human experience (Erasmus 1971, 156).

4

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Erasmus wants a Bible which is accessible and speaks to people’s need for meaning, purpose and sustenance. He has little use for a Bible as the exclusive property of professional critics. Erasmus wants theologians to come out of their ivory towers (or monastic equivalent) and proselytise, as a way of reversing the tendency for ideas to become so specialised that they cannot be transported beyond the realm of professional interpreters. The morally enlightened – as they saw it – advice offered to princes and statesmen which Renaissance humanists derived from classical authors was another aspect of a worldliness that could no doubt warp into a narrow kind of pragmatism, but at its best affirmed an intimate relationship between literature and life, books and ‘selves’. As English literature began to compete for credibility with classical literature during the latter half of the seventeenth century, laying the foundation for its eventual transformation into an object thought worthy of academic study, so the ‘generalist’ figure of the literary critic emerged as someone with a wide spectrum of knowledge drawn from literary (but not only literary) texts thought broadly relevant to ‘life’. The critical histories of English which have appeared since Terry Eagleton’s The Function of Criticism (1984), including, most notably, Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1987) and Chris Baldick’s Criticism and Literary Theory: 1890 to the Present (1996), support the view that English during the period of its formation (and well into the twentieth century) was ‘humanist’ in this sense of ‘generalist’ and an antidote to the compartmentalisation of knowledge which threatened it from both within and without. While the technical vocabularies of ‘Theory’ can be taken as contributing to subject specialisation and sub-specialisation, the theory years and their aftermath can also be seen as maintaining, even as revitalising, the link between English and ‘humanism’, meaning (for the moment, still) generalism. The repertoire and range of English was exponentially expanded in the 1970s by its borrowings from linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, feminism and Marxism. The study of literature at this time was anything but narrowly compartmentalised, even as it demanded engagement with a variety of ‘in-house’ specialist vocabularies by means of which literature’s relevance to (socially and linguistically constructed) ‘life’ was to be understood (ideology, signifier and signified, langue and parole, écriture féminine, etc.). It is true that the broad relevance of literature to life was thought about in mainly social terms, thereby severing literature’s connection to deeper and more fundamental questions of human existence (or eliding such questions with questions of social existence). And it is

Introduction 5

also true that much theory and theorising from this period activated what has widely been referred to as a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, frequently targeted at the literary canon itself and literature’s supposedly timeless powers of revelation. Such a hermeneutics tended to privilege impersonally critical distance over intimate communing with books endowed with the capacity to ‘reveal us to ourselves’, as Helen Gardner once put it (Gardner 1973, 242). Notwithstanding these caveats, to study literature via Theory at this time was for many, including myself, to study an exhilarating range of life-affecting thought. And ‘after’ Theory? What happened then? ‘Everyone was thinking small’ writes Eagleton in After Theory of the postmodern cultural theorists of the 1980s (Eagleton 2003, 45). Looking less far back in time, Jean Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, in their introduction to Marxist Shakespeares, make the similar claim that: ‘The postmodern critique of master narratives has spawned its own demon fry – forms of criticism that fetishize the local, the particular … at the expense of considering the “big picture”, or at least the bigger picture’ (Howard and Shershow 2001, 3). These accounts tell part of the story ‘after theory’, but it is unlikely that the critic/theorist as generalist was or will ever be entirely extinguished. The chapters in this volume testify to this, as does the general resurgence of interest (to which this volume contributes) in large-scale issues, as these issues are currently being mediated through discussion of humanism, posthumanism, ‘new humanism’, ethics and aesthetics. Yes, the chapters collected here are specialised, but with the help of the literary texts they examine, they are also committed to asking expansive questions. Where there has been a tendency for the various historicisms in literary studies to restrict the ‘meaning of meaning’ to the culturally specific generation of meaning, these chapters reanimate the ‘meaning of meaning’ to elicit questions about who (we think) we are, why we are here, and how the significances, past and present, attached to human life are challenged by humanity’s traditionally excluded ‘others’, as well as by our own obliquities.

Humanism/literature as ersatz theology (1) So much for the longstanding, evolving, sometimes strained (because of specialising tendencies) bond between English and humanismas-generalism. What of English’s object of study, literature itself? Is literature immanently humanist or is this the way English has constructed it? To answer this, we need to revise the terms of the discussion and say, in shorthand for the moment, that a key component of humanism’s

6

Towards a New Literary Humanism

broad, generalist ethos is the role it has within modernity (as outlined below) as a surrogate form of theology, the richest and most complex expression of which is literature. What I mean (in a positive way) by the term ‘surrogate theology’, and why it can be used to describe humanism notwithstanding some secular humanists’ outright rejection of religion, will once again need to be carefully spelt out, initially by saying what, in my advocacy of a new literary humanism, I don’t want to embrace by the term (or at least not without some significant qualification). What I don’t want a new literary humanism unequivocally to embrace is the fundamentalist ‘religion’ that humanism has sometimes made of humanity. This religion has an inflated, god-like conception of ‘man’ at its centre, vested in an overly optimistic faith in human agency, progress and capabilities, whether these capabilities are located in rationality (for Enlightenment humanists), in the imagination (for Romantic humanists) or in the innate humaneness of humanity (for a range of ethical humanists). The Enlightenment version of this theology is summarised by Iain Chambers in Culture After Humanism (2001) as: ‘an inherited sense of the world in which the human subject is considered sovereign, language the transparent medium of its agency, and truth the representation of its rationalism’ (Chambers 2001, 2–3). This and all other cocksure versions of humanism as ersatz theology can justifiably be accused of: gender bias (because ‘man’ is taken to be the touchstone for the human); species narcissism (because the human is taken to be superior to other species thereby rendered exploitable and expendable); and simplification (because our barbarity is edited out from our supposedly ‘better selves’). They have resulted in numerous questionable actions and ideologies, uncompromisingly called ‘crimes’ by Alain Finkielkraut in In the Name of Humanity, which have been, he writes, ‘committed in the name of higher values – in particular, humanity’ (Finkielkraut 2001, 90). There are numerous literary texts which advance – or at least represent – selves with an overblown conception of their human abilities, the spectacular individualists of the Renaissance stage providing some prime examples (Shakespeare’s Iago and Richard III, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus, John Ford’s Giovanni in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore). But these self-appointed masters of creation (and their numerous successors), who are literature’s embodiment of what Claude Lévi-Strauss once called ‘unbridled humanism’ (quoted in Todorov 1993, 66–7), do not – as I shall argue in the next section – exhaust the meaning of the ersatz theology that humanism is, especially as mediated by literature.

Introduction 7

Before we take our leave of these confident, quasi-theological expressions of belief in humanity, we need to ask whether their optimism, aspiration and high-mindedness are in any way redeemable. Does scepticism of the kind expressed by Finkielkraut about the religion that humanists have sometimes made of humanity mean that we should relinquish all hope that humans beings can make a better, more just, more humane and fulfilling world? I can think of plenty of situations where to speak ‘in the name of the human’ still seems politically and ethically necessary: people are still objectified, quantified, commodified, de-humanised, de-personalised, denied all agency and ‘human-ness’ – a term which I know I am appealing to intuitively for the moment. To wax more parochial, about my own profession, speaking ‘in the name of the human’ could, as I suggested at the outset, be the basis for resisting recurring governmental attempts to reduce education to skills or for opposing the bureaucratic terminology of ‘learning outcomes’ as well as the management-speak of hitting ‘targets’. I don’t want impersonal bureaucratic processes to triumph over human/humanised engagement with literary texts and the questions they pose. Nor do I want to end up teaching students how to write advertising copy. I want education to be ‘deep and wide’. I want to encourage students to develop as ‘human beings’ and not just be cogs in the capitalist machine. Polemical statements of this kind, made ‘in the name of humanity’, no doubt occupy a high moral ground which needs to be tempered by an awareness of the way humans err, fail, are prone to inhumanity (including the inhumanity of bureaucratic self-reduction) and can often be misguided in their ideals and aspirations. But to end up despairing totally of the human condition would be a bleak conclusion. Taken as a whole, the chapters in this volume fall somewhere between optimism and pessimism, from those chapters (by Damir Arsenijevic´ and Deborah Mutch) which invest hope (though far from naïvely) in specifically socialist-humanist ideals to those (by Inge Arteel, Elspeth Graham, Kirsty Martin, Mark Robson, Rebecca Styler and Nigel Wood) broadly committed to democratic and/or ethical ideals of one kind or another, and to those (by Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter, Richard Chamberlain, Steven Earnshaw and Jeff Wallace) which express varying degrees and kinds of scepticism (from posthumanist but not only posthumanist perspectives) about the possibility as well as desirability of all such benign (or apparently benign) collective endeavours. Excessive faith in humanity thereby placed centre-stage in the scheme of things and elevated above other species is also strongly mitigated by those

8

Towards a New Literary Humanism

chapters which call into question strict divisions between the species (see the chapters by Graham and Robson). Hope, then, is balanced by scepticism, as it needs to be if humanism’s religion of humanity is to avoid being a blind faith. But now I want to move to a different way of conceiving of humanism as a surrogate theology, one that will draw us closer to more specifically literary matters.

Humanism/literature as ersatz theology (2) There is nothing new in claiming that literature itself is ersatz theology, is theology carried on in different wise from theology ‘proper’. As various critics have pointed out, the term ‘canon’ in ‘literary canon’, to refer to a revered body of writing, has distinct religious connotations which suggest parallels between the sacredness ascribed to texts in religious traditions and the quasi-sacredness ascribed to literary texts (see, for example, Guillory 1995). At stake here, though, is how literature as ersatz theology can be conceptualised in a way which avoids some of the positions that are usually staked out when such an analogy is invoked: of unthinking reverence towards the icons of the literary tradition on the one hand and irreverent demystification – canon-trashing – on the other. These foror-against positions are unhelpful because they do not allow for a more neutral description of how literature came to arrogate from religion some of religion’s key functions. A broad sense of the historical context and significance of modernity is important here, for it is with the irregularly phased onset of modernity (from at least the so-called ‘early modern’ period) that not only religion but also other traditional sources of meaning and identity are weakened and/or threatened. This broad-brush (generalist’s) conception of modernity can be filled out to give a sense of the different shapes and sizes in which ‘modernity’ comes, as well as the differing degrees of intensity with which it confronts ‘pre-modern’ mindsets (which, it should also be added, do not suddenly die out, but survive, mutated, into ‘the modern’): 1. The disenchantment, de-traditionalisation and de-sacralisation of world views set in motion either by the exercise of a sceptical critical reason or by instrumental rationality, or both. 2. The denaturing of the so-called natural, accompanied by the replacement of animist conceptions of nature by a secular, instrumental attitude towards nature as an inert resource: ‘the disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of animism’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979, 5).

Introduction 9

3.

The replacement of charismatic or customary authority by the need for rationally justified authority. 4. The opening up of gaps between values and facts, mind and world, knower and known. 5. Sceptical and/or ironic detachment from received ideas, habits and customs. In its postmodern form, sceptical detachment might be seen as manifesting itself in the widely appealed-to notion that meanings are always and everywhere constructed through society and language rather than given, and in a hermeneutics of suspicion which doubts the existence of any foundational principles, including human nature. 6. Specialisation and the division of the spheres of art, morality and science (implying a scepticism about the universality of any one of them). 7. The separation of ‘roles’, viewed as inauthentic and merely external, from ‘selves’. 8. Alienation, anomie and the sense that modern life has lost direction, foundations, meaning and telos. 9. Various attempts to ‘re-enchant’ the world and fill it with meaning and telos, humanism as a ‘religion of humanity’ constituting one such attempt. Literature, unlike religion (or some varieties of it), does not answer the various problems and challenges of modernity, as outlined above, but it stages them, throws them into relief, intensifies them. In doing so, it urges us to consider, yet not only to consider, but to feelingly experience the question of the meaning and purpose of human life. The newly important role of literature within modernity is therefore that of mediating ontology where religion had previously monopolised this role. Books come to matter intensely to ‘selves’ (and treated as lifelong sources of guidance, inspiration or provocation) because it is through books that we attempt to work out who we are and what the significance of life might be. It is the urgent sense of books ‘mattering’ to us which prompts Valentine Cunningham in Reading after Theory to draw an analogy between close, engaged reading, such as literature promotes, and the experience of the Eucharist: The Word of God, the body of Christ, become you: to your emotional, ethical, spiritual benefit. And so it is with reading where this model of reading as a selving, self-making process has prevailed. On

10

Towards a New Literary Humanism

this plan the words of the text that you seriously and closely engage with become you, get into you, have personal effect. (Cunningham 2002, 148) Less explicitly Christian, and more mindful of the context (of modernity again) in which reading literature assumes the kind of importance attributed to it by Cunningham, is this insight of Rita Felski’s from her Uses of Literature. ‘Cut loose’, she writes, ‘from the bonds of tradition and rigid social hierarchies, individuals are called to the burdensome freedom of choreographing their life and endowing it with a purpose. As selfhood becomes self-reflexive, literature comes to assume a crucial role in exploring what it means to be a person’ (Felski 2008, 25). As traditional bonds weaken, so literature acts as a form of surrogate community, as well as, as Felski implies, constituting an intimate psychological space in which questions traditionally ‘answered’ by religion – who are we and why are we here? – are taken over by literature and to varying degrees personalised: who am I and why am I here? These varying degrees of personalisation are also reflected in the elasticity as well as the contestation of the literary canon, such that different readers may derive ‘meaning’ from different books and petition for their inclusion within a continually reconstituted canon. Thus, if literature is ersatz theology, then the theology which it carries over is non-conformist in orientation. I have differentiated between two senses in which humanism/ literature can be taken to be surrogate theologies: one inflates humanity by making a religion of it; the other engages us in a ‘non-inflated’ way with meaning-of-life questions. There is reason to question this distinction, but that I shall leave for later.

The specialist track rejoined Thus far, I have discussed the nature of English’s (and literature’s) broad reach in quite broad ways, offering overviews of the nature, history and pre-history of English and, as part of this, of modernity as well. Overviews, by definition, are an attempt to make sense of the heterogeneous assortment of ‘stuff’ that is in the world, which, in a world as complex as ours, is probably as necessary as it is foolhardy. The foolhardiness is because overviews may iron out or ignore complexities, or, in the case of the overviews offered here, make it difficult to see how the general perspectives translate into practical criticism and specific engagements with literary texts. It is all very well to say that

Introduction 11

literature, as ersatz theology, confronts us with heavy-duty questions about the meaning and significance of human life, but how, in more concrete terms, does this bear upon, say, the representation of nature in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the novelistic structure of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss? Talk of how literary texts engage us on a human level and provoke us to ponder portentous ‘life issues’ may all seem rather vague and difficult to apply to particular cases. So, now I want to rejoin English’s specialist ‘track’ and suggest that what its counterpart – humanist English – needs, as I have recently argued elsewhere (Mousley 2010), is a semi-technical vocabulary (‘semi’technical because overly technical would not be in the generalist spirit of the humanism proposed here). Unlike other critical discourses, humanist literary criticism, past and present, lacks any precise critical vocabulary. As I noted earlier, the numerous approaches to the study of literature that have emerged since the 1970s have each developed their own specialised concepts and technical terms. These may not always have been originally intended specifically for literary analysis, but students do use them in this way and are encouraged to do so by those critical theory primers that explain and model them. Examples of such terms include: mimicry, hybridity and orientalism for postcolonialism; patriarchal binary thought, écriture féminine and the sex versus gender distinction for feminism; ideology and commodification for Marxism; signifier and signified, langue and parole, and binary opposition for structuralism; discourse, deferral and undecidability for poststructuralism. These are teachable and usable tools of analysis which when employed well are not only specialist tools, but concepts which expand and often transform students’ political, social and literary awareness. When used badly, however, I feel complicit in that phoney kind of specialisation we call ‘jargon’, and complicit also in the narrowing of education to a set of quantifiable skills. From this perspective, the provision of specialist terms for a new literary humanism might be accused of a reductive kind of instrumentalism (akin to rolling a ‘business plan’), and one which is paradoxically both ‘anti-human’ and anti-literary. Notwithstanding these various caveats, if humanist English is to survive in – and cut across – the ever-diversifying marketplace of theories and approaches, then it needs to make its origins and premises explicit and develop from those origins and premises a critical vocabulary which stands up to intellectual scrutiny. Humanist literary criticism will thereby be able to enter the modern world of academia and line up with other approaches whose premises are made explicit (and are debatable/negotiable because they have been made so). Moreover, and to take

12

Towards a New Literary Humanism

up once again the broad historical perspective on modernity outlined above, appeals to ‘the human’ and the ‘human’ value of literature have tended to be talismanic, magical, intuitive, immune to the scepticisms of modernity. ‘Of course’ we know what being human means. We do not have to spell it out. But we do need to do such spelling out if humanist literary criticism is to be more than a half-baked series of platitudes. Below, therefore, are eight cursorily elaborated principles, accompanied by some semi-technical, again cursorily elaborated terms, in italics, for a new literary humanism. Because I have developed – and applied – these terms more fully elsewhere, I will not do so here, but offer them, alongside the terms used in the individual chapters in this volume, as examples of what a common critical vocabulary for humanist English might look like. Some of this vocabulary is drawn somewhat eclectically from a range of other theories, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. One implication of this is that these other theories, despite the anti-humanist rhetoric in which they have sometimes been couched, express humanist ideas that can be used on behalf of the literary humanism proposed here.

The new literary humanism: key critical terms and principles 1.

2.

Reading can be an immersive experience. Readers habitually speak of being ‘gripped’, captivated, by books. Books can thereby become objects of attachment (surrogates for the maternal body in psychoanalytic terms) and function as an antidote to the alienation, characteristic of modernity, of subjects from objects. The ‘object’, when it takes the form of an aesthetic image, writes the Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno, ‘instead of following the bidding of the alienated world and persisting obdurately in a state of reification’ is ‘spontaneously absorbed into the subject’ (Adorno 1980, 160). Such spontaneous absorption is due to literature’s sensuous and emotional appeal. Although emotions and bodily sensations are subject to changing cultural perceptions, expressions and evaluations, certain primary emotions/sensations, according to neurological theorists of the emotions such as Antonio Damasio, are ‘biologically determined processes … laid down by a long evolutionary history’ (Damasio 2000, 51). However, this does not mean that what comes ‘naturally’ cannot be forgotten, lost or transformed. Literary texts are complicit in such forgetfulness, loss and transformation, but provide enough emotional and sensuous ‘hooks’ to engage us in the first place.

Introduction 13

3.

The attachment-encouraging difference between a literary text and a fact- or concept-based discourse is thus, to borrow a phrase from Charles Altieri, its ‘affectively charged sensuousness’ (Altieri 2007, 72, emphasis added), its incarnation or embodiment of facts or ideas in characters who simulate rudimentary human feelings/sensations/urges (pain, pleasure, joy, sadness, anger). If you want a systematically developed, concept-driven theory of capitalism, read Karl Marx’s Capital. If you want to vicariously experience how early twentiethcentury capitalism affected a particular working-class individual and his community, read Jack Common’s autobiographical novel Kiddar’s Luck (Common 1990). Marx abstracts for analytical purposes what he takes to be the concepts that drive the economic and social system of capitalism (use value, exchange value, etc.). Common’s book demonstrates how some of those concepts were lived out, embodied, incarnated. It is a record of how ‘the world [struck] the body on its sensory surfaces’, to appropriate a phrase from Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Eagleton 1990, 13). 4. Literature (often, but not always) constitutes an advanced form of emotional and sensuous immersion because it represents complex and often conflicting emotional states/urges. Thus, if literature’s mimesis of ‘life’ often takes the form of a condensation, as in intensification, of life, then this condensation does not equate to a reduction, because of literature’s creative impulse to explore all the facets of an emotion, theme or subject. It is this impulse which gives literature its richness and depth, thereby provoking thought, debate and commentary. Literature, then, is at once an immersive and distancing experience, one that elicits both emotion and thought. At various times in literary history, some writers/movements have favoured one over the other: the Romantics tending to privilege emotion and subjective intensity; the modernist Brecht, on the other hand, resisting emotional ‘wallowing’ (which he thought of as the dangerous vehicle of right-wing propaganda) in favour of understanding. Nevertheless, literary texts have often been valued for their organic yoking together of thought and feeling. Put in traditional moralistic terms, reaching back to classical conceptions of the role of the poet/orator, literature simultaneously moves and instructs. 5. It is literature’s unique ability to bring thought to feeling and feeling to thought (and both feeling and thought to ethics), which makes literature a form of ‘whole-person engagement’ (Cunningham 2002, 147, emphasis added) and helps to reverse modernity’s damaging separation of life into distinct spheres (as diagnosed by, amongst others, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas).

14

Towards a New Literary Humanism

6.

Alongside the universality of primary emotions/sensations, it is possible and usefully nuanced to speak of the ‘near-universality’ of certain human needs, urges and anxieties such as, to take one iconic example, in Shakespeare’s King Lear: the fear of abandonment, the chronic sense of insecurity arising from a world that has become utterly inhospitable; the fear that the human, natural and supernatural worlds have become entirely unpredictable; the fear that the human condition is a condition of metaphysical homelessness or, as Lear suggests, absurdity – ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools’ (Shakespeare 2005, King Lear: The Folio Text, 4.5.178–9). 7. Such ‘universals’ or ‘near-universals’ are partly the product of literature’s deployment of resonating particulars. If metaphor, as Mark Currie has suggested, is ‘a figure constitutively split between its particularity and its equivalence to something else’ (Currie 2003, 299), then ‘metaphoricity’ is the mechanism which aids and abets literature’s expansiveness, such that, for example, the opening lines of Hamlet – ‘Who’s there?’ – resonate beyond their particular context to imply questions about the (in)stability of identity in Elsinore, and beyond that, for some critics, to the precariousness of human identity in general (Shakespeare 2005, Hamlet, 1.1.1). The above needs qualifying: the passage from particular to general is not always smooth or obvious, and some literary texts stubbornly refuse to find the general within the particular. Nevertheless, such refusal is often elevated to a general ‘statement’ about particulars that will not be drawn into the field of shared metaphoric/symbolic significance (sometimes a rose is a rose is a rose). 8. If literature (as previous points suggest) is a means of developing ‘deep’, rich and complex selves, then these qualities are also often cultivated by the way that literary texts may sometimes estrange us, may take us out of ourselves, may transport us (to use a religious term appropriate to the ersatz theology that literature arguably is). Estrangement may be seen as a recurring literary trope or archetype, in that in (virtually) any narrative, there is an element of danger, and in narratives of estrangement, the danger is the threat posed to human identity – a danger which may also constitute an opportunity. It would be possible to develop a taxonomy of literature-as-estrangement, identifying different types of estrangement (which do not always produce ‘depth’) based on the literary or sub-literary genres and/or movements where they typically reside. Such a taxonomy might include: • estrangement as dispossession: this includes tales of gods, demons, monsters; gothic narratives; science fiction and its stories of

Introduction 15

androids, cyborgs, and human-machine or human-animal hybrids. In narratives of these kinds, the ‘human’ is dispossessed of its (supposedly) distinguishing features and morphs into its inhuman or non-human others. As Callus and Herbrechter argue in their chapter in this volume, science fiction has become a key literary (or ‘sub-literary’) canon for one influential strand of posthumanism; • estrangement as ‘expanded consciousness’: this includes some forms of quest narrative, Romantic poetry (in its leaning towards subjective intensity and heightened states of consciousness), comingof-age narratives, the Bildungsroman, tragedies and comedies in which psychological enlightenment/development is key. The list could go on because ‘literature’ has come to be defined and defines itself in terms of the notion that it expands and deepens our cognitive/emotional/psychological repertoires, and, as a crucially important adjunct to this emerging from contemporary political criticism and theory (such as Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism), our political and ethical imaginations. As Robson argues in this volume, because of the impurity of its mimetic ability, its unbounded powers of representation, literature may indeed be inherently democratic; • estrangement as ennui/depleted consciousness: this includes, most conspicuously, modernist texts. ‘The human’ here is represented as under siege, beleaguered, enervated, exhausted, diminished, depleted, unable to withstand the pressures of modernity (see Callus and Herbrechter’s chapter in this volume). However, what we witness (in, for example, Robert Musil’s monumental The Man without Qualities as discussed by Herbrechter and Callus) is the painful process of the depletion of the human. That is to say, we witness and are made aware of what the human was and how it has deteriorated. There is an undoubtedly a tension or, as I would prefer to call it, a dialectic between essentialist and anti-essentialist perspectives in the above, with sensuousness, ‘near-universals’, primary emotions and so forth suggesting the former, and the concept of estrangement the latter. Exploration of this dialectic will thread itself throughout the book in its introductions to each section and in the chapters themselves. The ‘mantra’ I have been repeating is that literature is a form of surrogate theology in that it takes over from religion fundamental questions

16

Towards a New Literary Humanism

about the nature and meaning of human life. Literary books therefore come to matter intensely to selves (as sacred books once did or still do). What this grandiose conception of literature lacks, however, is any precise critical terminology. The above terms and principles – and the book as a whole – are an attempt to make good this deficiency. They also fulfil that aspect of modernity (see above) in which the exercise of critical reason is crucial to gaining assent for a particular viewpoint, at the same time as they support the notion that literature’s role within modernity is to compensate for (some of the) damage done by it.

The new literary humanism as a reflexive, sceptical humanism The use of critical reason is one feature of modernity. Scepticism is another, as in, to recall another of the aspects of modernity outlined above: ‘sceptical and/or ironic detachment from received ideas, habits and customs. In its postmodern form, sceptical detachment might be seen as manifesting itself in the widely appealed-to notion that meanings are always and everywhere constructed through society and language rather than given, and in a hermeneutics of suspicion which doubts the existence of any foundational principles, including human nature’. Any ‘new humanism’ needs to be internally robust (by explicitly developing critical terms and principles), but it has also to be reflexive, sceptical and aware of counter-perspectives that are external to or at a critical distance from it. So, on a sceptical note (but not to the point of unravelling everything that has so far been said), and glancing at some of the chapters in this volume (which are more properly introduced in the prefaces to each section), I want to deal briefly with some important caveats in the argument for the new literary humanism I have been proposing. The first caveat is that human beings might not correspond to the picture which I have suggested literature paints of them. That picture is – mainly – positive: we are deep, we are complex, proven by our pursuit of meaning, significance and purpose through the surrogate religion of literature. This may be an inflated conception – one more variation on humanism’s tendency to make a religion out of humanity – which confers importance, dignity and gravitas upon us. Anyone who has seen Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) or read Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) might think it not only foolhardy to take seriously the question of the ‘meaning of life’, but also, given the comic belittlement of humans in both these examples, a sign of an overly self-important

Introduction 17

view of humanity. Perhaps we should not take ourselves quite so seriously. And perhaps we no longer do, for according to Jean-François Lyotard we have entered a period of slackening, where the big questions do not matter anymore. Now that ‘eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture’, writes Lyotard, ‘it’s time to relax’ (Lyotard 1992, 17). In answer to this, I would say that if the thirst for spiritual and other kinds of self-help books is anything to go by, people still seem to be in search of ‘meaning’. What the new humanist literary criticism proposed here is attempting to do is to reclaim ‘what-is-the-meaning-of-life’ questions from the triteness with which they can be often treated in the self-help genre. But still, tritely or otherwise dealt with, questions about who are and why we are here lend us self-important depth (even if ‘depth’ is superficially produced), which perhaps we do not intrinsically have (see Wallace’s chapter) or deserve. The ‘richness and complexity’ of the human condition is from this perspective the product of the high literary canon (see Callus and Herbrechter’s chapter) and is not universal. The second caveat, related to the one above, is that literature’s human/ humanistic value might be accused, along with all other humanisms, of a species narcissism which is blind to, and exploitative of, other species and/or which ignores the continuities between the human and nonhuman (see the chapters by Graham and Robson). The third caveat is that literature may not have a monopoly on complexity or may put such complexity into question by showing how we reduce ourselves or can be reduced (see Wallace’s chapter). The fourth caveat is that whatever (positive) description is given to ‘the human’ (whether rich, complex, deep, dignified, caring, humane, reasonable, emotional, etc.), ‘the human’ can still seem like a club with rules of membership and oppressive norms (see the chapters by Chamberlain and Arteel). This book is a broad church, which allows for heresy as far as the ersatz religions of literature and humanity are concerned. I’m not sure how it could be otherwise, when the academic community of English is itself such a broad church. But the scepticism, perceptive and corrosive as it sometimes is, is balanced by the sense conveyed by all the contributors to this volume that literature has something sufficiently important to say to us to be worth attending to.

The chapters in overview and the structure of the volume I have not asked the contributors to the new literary humanism proposed in this Introduction to ‘sign up’ to the critical terminology described

18

Towards a New Literary Humanism

above. I did politely ask them, for the sake of the intellectual coherence of the book, to engage with an earlier version of the Introduction ‘in some way’, but that does not mean ‘agree with it’ or ‘subscribe to its terms’. Some chapters (Arteel, Earnshaw, Martin, Mutch, Styler, Wallace and Wood) make some use of some of the above terminology. Some engage with the more general current of ideas attached here or by other recent theorists to the literary and/or human (such as the importance to both of the emotions), and develop these ideas in their own way (Styler and Martin). Some develop their own specific terms: ‘unbribable life’ (Arsenijevic´); or terms used by other thinkers: ‘“grievable lives”’ (Arteel, using Judith Butler); ‘“joyful cruelty”’ (Earnshaw, using Clément Rosset). A common critical language which can be used to specify literature’s human/humanist importance will not suddenly drop down from the sky, ready-made, as a template. It will be discussed, negotiated, contested, even to the point of wholesale refusal (see Chamberlain’s chapter). The book is divided into three parts, each with its own separate introduction précising the chapters, drawing connections between them and showing how they fit in with and develop the theme/s of the part in which they have been placed. The section headings correspond with some of the principal ideas, questions and/or critical terms developed in the Introduction. So, Part I, ‘Literature as Ersatz Theology: Deep Selves’, comprises chapters which demonstrate literature’s cultivation, often through the process of estrangement (see above), of ‘deep’, rich and complex selves devoted to the difficult pursuit of ontologically freighted meaning. Part II, ‘Scepticism, or Humanism at the Limit’, represents those already-referred-to sceptical perspectives which a volume on ‘new humanism’ needs if it is to be self-critical and reflexive: are all appeals to ‘the human’ an attempt to enforce membership? Do literary texts always cultivate depth? Is humanism too optimistically affirming of the human and a better, more humane future? These are the kinds of question posed by the chapters in this section. Part III, ‘Literature, Democracy, Humanisms from Below’, offers a countervailing perspective to Part II, in that the chapters included in this final part of the volume embrace (though not simplistically) one or another form of egalitarian/democratic politics and the hope for a better future which accompanies such politics. These chapters, like all the others, also focus upon specifically literary questions, and in particular the difference made to political and ethical commitments when mediated through literature.

Introduction 19

Note 1. Examples across a range of disciplines of a resurgence of interest in humanism include: Comparative Criticism (2001); Davies (1997); Diogenes (2005); Halliwell and Mousley (2003); Janicaid (2005); Norman (2004); Said (2004); Seidman and Murphy (2004); and Todorov (2002). For examples within literary studies, see Carey (2005); Cunningham (2002); Docherty (2003); Eagleton (2003); Felski (2008); Harpham (2005); Morris (2000); Mousley (2000a, 2000b, 2005, 2007, 2010); Showalter (2003); and Watson (1988).

This page intentionally left blank

Part I Literature as Ersatz Theology: Deep Selves

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Andy Mousley

I suggested in the general Introduction that the newly important role of literature within modernity is that of mediating ontology where religion had previously monopolised this role. Books come to matter intensely to ‘selves’ (and are treated as lifelong sources of guidance, inspiration or provocation) because it is through books that we attempt to work out fundamental questions about who we are and what the significance of life might be. To put it summarily, literature as surrogate theology engages us in deep and complex soul-searching. An important aspect of literature’s cultivation of ‘deep selves’ is its ability to expand our cognitive, emotional and psychological repertoires (see Styler and Martin, below), and, as an important adjunct to this emerging from contemporary criticism and theory, our political and ethical imaginations (see Graham and Arteel). Contemporary theory has frequently exposed the political and ethical assumptions of received humanist tenets, and insisted on rethinking them (if not rejecting them outright). Aspects of conventional Enlightenment humanism, which promote a rational, autonomous, integrated self, are thus questioned in some of the chapters in this section from gender, ecological, interspecies and intersubjective perspectives. In each case, literature is taken to be an ally in estranging us in positive ways in order to reach towards a better, more inclusive and holistic way of being, one which avoids the Scylla of a complacently integrated self and the Charybdis of complete disintegration.

Rebecca Styler, ‘Faith, Feeling, Reality: Anne Brontë as an Existentialist Poet’ Rebecca Styler’s chapter is about Anne Brontë’s struggles with her religious faith, and so is about ‘theology proper’. But it is also about 23

24

Towards a New Literary Humanism

literature’s quasi-religious power to connect us with fundamental problems of existence. Styler by no means ignores the particular, historically specific discourses which shaped Brontë’s religious sensibility, but she also focuses on the ‘depiction of emotional conflict and of states of being which transcend the cultural discourses through which [Brontë] expresses them’. To this end, Styler harnesses the ideas of a variety of existentialist philosophers, and Brontë herself as an existentialist poet, who begin not with ‘“a collection of fine theories”’, but with existence itself. ‘Existence itself’ is subtly and richly characterised by Styler through her analyses of Brontë’s poetry, but at its kernel are feelings of lack and alienation, and the desire to overcome these through meaningful, as in heartfelt, personally experienced connection (with God, in Christian terms). Existentialism is a particularly apposite philosophical medium for Styler to use because it not only enables her to draw out the theistic (as contrasted with atheistic) strands of existentialism, but it also enables her to demonstrate how, in a world in which even for a ‘believer’ meaning was often absent, Brontë’s poetry constitutes a complex and difficult search for meaning, self, wholeness. Through the ‘keenly conscious emotional reasoning’, which is her poetry, ‘in a never-completed project of self-formation’, Anne Brontë, concludes Styler, ‘works out her salvation’.

Kirsty Martin, ‘Virginia Woolf, Sympathy and Feeling for the Human’ Kirsty Martin’s chapter engages with the claims made in the Introduction to this volume that: a) emotion and the senses are central to the experience of being human (though this is not to say that emotion is species-specific); b) literature’s appeal is its emotional/sensuous appeal; c) literature constitutes an ‘advanced’ form of emotional engagement because of the way in which it often deals with emotional complexities of one kind or another (and/or treats human emotions as inherently complex). There are innumerable writers who one might turn to for their rich description and deployment of emotion, but one who claims particular attention, and the one discussed here by Martin, is Virginia Woolf. Taking as her starting point the work of Martha Nussbaum, a recent influential theorist of the emotions and their centrality to literature, Martin makes the case that Nussbaum’s cognitive theory of the emotions is not really complex enough and that ‘Woolf’s thinking both on emotion and on sympathy offers a more suggestive, poised sense

Introduction to Part I 25

of the human’. Nussbaum, for Martin, is too protective of a rationally grounded, Enlightenment humanist self for whom emotions provide a useful kind of knowledge. Martin via Woolf is keen to introduce a little more mystery and ‘wonder’ into the emotions, whilst acknowledging their ‘physical groundedness’. If emotion translates into knowledge, it is not an exact translation. Moreover, ‘the bodily nature of emotion’, writes Martin, ‘suggests that emotions might be at once intimately immediate and yet might gesture to something beyond the individual, centred in the individual but poised on the edge of sympathetic transcendence’. The word Martin uses here – ‘edge’ – is telling. Emotions take us ‘into’ but also ‘out of’ ourselves and towards a feeling for others that is itself inexact. Emotions in Woolf do not translate easily between one person and another (or between reader and text): Woolf’s interior monologues in Mrs Dalloway, writes Martin, ‘contain sudden obliquities, barriers to a complete intimacy of character and reader’. Woolf, in Martin’s discussion of her, emerges as perhaps one of the most subtle writers of emotion, and one who also exemplifies the power of literature to extend our thinking about feeling beyond the familiar.

Elspeth Graham, ‘Being Human and Being Animal in Twentieth-Century Horse-Whispering Writings: “Word-Bound Creatures” and “the Breath of Horses”’ The broad question with which Elspeth Graham’s chapter engages is ‘how a new literary humanism might speak to and for a de-integrated, de-centralised, but still meaningful, human-ness’. Using Freud, Lacan, Levinas, and Deleuze and Guittarri to discuss a selection of latetwentieth century ‘horse-whispering’ narratives (Tess Gallagher’s ‘The Lover of Horses’, Nicholas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses), Graham’s chapter remedies the complacent species narcissism which by definition all humanisms might be accused of advancing. However, what Graham is careful not to do is to dislodge the human so much as to empty it entirely of meaning and a sense of what might count as a fulfilling human life. Focusing on the ‘mediatory position between human and non-human animals’ occupied by the figure of the horse whisperer, Graham explores aspects of our species being in terms of our interspecies relationships, which she sees as a way of realising ‘our humanness-in-the-world’. Graham shows how the encounter between humans and horses represented in the texts she discusses estranges characters from their ‘wordbounded’ selves. There they find possibilities of ‘freedom, ‘intuitive

26

Towards a New Literary Humanism

connectedness’ and ‘bodily sympathy’ which are taken back into the human world to exercise a ‘therapeutic effect’ upon it. But estrangement taken to the point of ‘absolute alterity’ can also threaten the total dissolution of the self, discussed by Graham in terms of Freud’s theory of the death drive. A third, ethically oriented model of estrangement, examined via Levinas, and Deleuze and Guittari, is a state of what might be called perpetual suspension, where we are neither overwhelmed by ‘otherness’ nor tame it for our own purposes, but become attuned to the way that responsibility for the always unassimilable other ‘produces the self, not death’. This principle of an open encounter is enacted in McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, a text which according to Graham ‘strives to exploit … the flexibility of imaginative prose writing, to embody … the “inter” of interspecies relationships’.

Inge Arteel, ‘Judith Butler and the Catachretic Human’ Graham questions anthropocentrism in the name of interspecies sensitivity without discarding ideas of what it might be to lead a meaningful human life. Similarly, Inge Arteel, via the work of Judith Butler, questions philosophies of the subject (Hegel’s, principally), in the name of an intersubjectivity which estranges us from our supposedly autonomous selves, as well as from notions of our human-ness, without entirely abandoning such notions. Arteel’s is the only chapter in the collection to focus on the work of a single influential thinker. This is instructive, for, as Arteel notes, the way Butler’s thinking develops – ‘from an apparently anti-humanist position to a revisionary humanist one’ – is representative of numerous other contemporary theorists. It shows that ‘Theory’ was always at least a potential ally for a critically reflexive humanism. In Arteel’s discussion, Butler’s early poststructuralist feminism looks irredeemably anti-humanist (because humanism legislates oppressive norms supporting the heterosexual status quo) and antagonistic towards subjectivity (because subjectivity spells ‘subjection’), but Arteel is alert to various hidden humanist agendas in Butler’s early work, agendas which become more visible in her later writing. Butler’s anti-humanism can therefore be understood as a provocation to achieve a better kind of humanism, one that releases us from the cramped condition of subjection into a fuller responsiveness to what Butler increasingly takes to be the shared human experience of vulnerability and dependency. A pivotal concept here is again the concept of estrangement or, in Butler’s language, ecstasy, the experience of being, as Arteel explains,

Introduction to Part I 27

‘beside oneself, being dispossessed or “undone”’. Although Butler, as Arteel points out, does not write extensively about literature, literature (via Butler’s reading of Sophocles’s play Antigone) is drawn increasingly into Arteel’s discussion, for literature is, as Arteel puts it, an ‘exploratory site for re-imagining the human’. Reading disorients us, estranges us, is a catachrestic experience because we do not know for sure what the word ‘human’ means anymore. Therein lies the possibility that the term is completely emptied, but also the condition for its replenishment. Out of destruction comes (re)creation. The same might be said of Butler’s work itself, as meticulously interpreted and illuminated by Arteel.

1 Faith, Feeling, Reality: Anne Brontë as an Existentialist Poet Rebecca Styler

I How are we to approach the religious poetry of Anne Brontë? Written in the 1840s, her collection of short lyrics and longer didactic verse appear somewhat alien to the modern reader. Drenched in the language of evangelical belief, the poems swing between spiritual ecstasy, guilt, doubt and resignation, demonstrating a religious intensity alien to the secular reader and even, I think, to many modern readers who do hold a position of faith. On first impressions, Brontë’s work appears bound to her historical moment, of significance only in relation to the religious discourses current in the early to mid-nineteenth century. We hear echoes of Methodist enthusiasm and the hymns of Charles Wesley, of Puritan self-disgust such as that evinced by William Cowper and John Bunyan, of the Romantic epiphany familiar to readers of Wordsworth, and of the agonised inquiry into God’s nature and existence which fed into the stream of Victorian doubt. If we assume, as does J.R. de J. Jackson, that the goal of the historicist critic is ‘to read past works of literature in the way in which they were read when they were new’ (quoted in Hawthorn 1996, 76), then it is in these contexts that Brontë’s work must be understood; as historically-minded critics, our task is to appreciate Brontë’s writing as a rich engagement with understandings of faith in her own era (see, for example, Styler 2010). But is this all we can do with her work? To assign it only a historical interest, having no connection with readers beyond the point of its origins? Does Brontë’s poetry say anything about a human condition which might be recognised by others, non-Victorians, non-religionists even, in another cultural context? In other words, can we recover a human in the text? In recent years, calls have been made in literary 28

Rebecca Styler 29

studies to rediscover the personal connection between reader and text which has been significantly undermined by the theoretical approaches that have prevailed within the discipline for the last few decades. Both political and historicist perspectives tend to emphasise the disparity of human experience on the grounds that material and social factors shape subjectivity in radically different ways: people of different gender, class and race backgrounds, or simply of a different historical moment, cannot lay claim to a common human experience that can be universally understood. Furthermore, theories of the semiotics of language have raised serious doubts about a text’s ability to refer to a world outside the text, and thus to serve as a means of communication between one mind and another about ‘reality’. The net effect has been criticised by some (such as Valentine Cunningham and Rita Felski) as ‘a hermeneutics of suspicion’, a deep scepticism about the possibilities of human connection, and about the positive capacity of texts to engender this connection. Such a critical ethos, complains Cunningham, has ‘battered the notion of literary communication almost to death’ and goes against what most people (including those outside the academy) think that reading is about: ‘communication, description of the real and the human, insight, knowledge, companionship, consolation, moral effect, emotional effect’ (Cunningham 2002, 60). Without wanting to ignore the varieties of social experience which shape writers and readers in different ways, and while recognising a degree of instability in linguistic meaning, Cunningham nonetheless has faith in the capacity for texts to become part of us and to change our sense of our selves in the world (148). Rita Felski makes a defence for the experience of ‘recognition’ in reading, not in the sense of a naïve identification which ignores the differences between the world of the text and that of the reader, but one which nonetheless acknowledges ‘likeness and difference in one fell swoop’ (Felski 2008, 25). Reading produces a new self-knowledge: Suddenly and without warning a flash of connection leaps across the gap between text and reader; an affinity or an attunement is brought to light ... I cannot help seeing traces of myself in the pages I am reading. Indisputably, something has changed; my perspective has shifted; I see something that I did not see before. (23) Likewise, Jeremy Hawthorn reclaims readerly connection with texts of the past, in place of a traditional historicism which assumes that a text’s meanings simply diminish as its moment of origin recedes. Both

30

Towards a New Literary Humanism

‘immersion’ and ‘alienation’ are experienced in the textual engagement (Hawthorn 1996, 83). It becomes possible to restore recognition to a reading of Brontë’s poetry if we focus on her depiction of emotional conflict and of states of being which transcend the cultural discourses through which she expresses them. While her work is overtly Christian, her portrayal of inner life centres on feeling, and on that we can gain a purchase. Theorists of emotion in recent decades have concluded that: ‘In all places, and at all times, human beings have shared the same basic emotional repertoire’, a repertoire which includes ‘joy, distress, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust’ (Evans 2001, 8, 3; see also Damasio 2000, 50–1). These might be expressed in various ways from culture to culture, and they may have different significance attributed to them, but nonetheless the responses are innate, hard-wired into the human brain. Andy Mousley in the Introduction to this volume argues that literature can be regarded as ‘incarnating’ rudimentary feelings and impulses that are recognisable to a significant degree by many readers, and that texts embody rich and deep explorations of an emotion or theme, provoking reflection. Brontë’s religious poetry is also emotional discourse. This is not to suggest that the feelings Brontë writes of can be understood exactly as she experienced them, or to try to make them appear fashionably secular. But there can be some meeting of horizons, the recognition of something familiar as well as the shock of difference, which can make reading the poems meaningful and provocative. Through 20 or so poems written between 1840 and her death in 1849, Brontë works towards a religious world view that takes account of her subjective reality and presents an urgent challenge to her conceptual beliefs about God. In addition to the theories of emotion already referred to, the transhistorical dimension of this poetry can be illuminated by the reflections of existentialist philosophers, because while they often overtly refute a pre-defined notion of the human, they reason from a commonly felt experience of emotional conflict to find a subjective ‘truth’ which is valid for the individual. Brontë takes existence as her philosophical starting point, ‘[her] immediate sense of [her]self’, rather than ‘a collection of fine theories’ (Sartre 1980, 44). Although she never surrenders Christian doctrine, her sense of what salvation is and what the self can become is redefined through the personal struggle recorded in her poetry. Jean-Paul Sartre famously denied that existentialism was humanism in the sense of accepting pre-determined conceptions of what it is to be human. Nonetheless, he concedes that existentialist thought reveals ‘a human universality of condition ... the limitations which a priori

Rebecca Styler 31

define man’s fundamental situation in the universe’, out of which every human being is challenged to form a meaningful selfhood (Sartre 1980, 46). Brontë dramatises such a quest for self-realisation, and thus her work takes its place in the longstanding dialogue between Christianity and existentialism. She presents a sense of the human condition and an intense quest for emotional and psychological salvation, which have resonance beyond her specific terms of reference. ‘What use would it be if truth were to stand there before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I acknowledged it or not ...?’ So demands Søren Kierkegaard, frustrated with his culture’s faith in objective knowledge as the answer to humanity’s concerns (Kierkegaard 1996, 33). The kind of truth that provides personal meaning is not, he argues, to be found in systems of knowledge, but instead has to be forged from within the individual’s inner life. Truth in its profoundest sense is thus not objective, but subjective: ‘the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die’ (32). Sartre concurs that ‘man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity’ to possess an objective reality, and that only from inner experience can authentic personal truth be forged (Sartre 1980, 29). He contrasts factual knowledge (savoir) with a kind of knowledge that signifies intimacy, connection and appropriation (connaître). Nicolai Berdyaev, a Christian existentialist, makes a similar distinction between the knowledge which is mere ‘obedience’ to external facts versus knowing as a ‘creative perceptive act’, that is, ‘the giving of meaning to what comes from the object’. Hence, he argues that the philosophy needed is ‘not that which investigates objects, but that which is tormented about the meaning of life and of personal destiny’ (Berdyaev 1965, 131–2, 126).

II Brontë’s poetry confronts the experience that conceptual truth proves increasingly inadequate to feed her inner world. Her understanding of the nature of God is an essentially optimistic one, since she eschews the Calvinist image of God which influenced Victorian orthodoxy and which troubled many sensitive minds. To Calvinists, God was above all a judge, who operated according to mysterious criteria and was more to be feared than loved. But Brontë was a rationalist Christian humanist and drew on eighteenth-century rational philosophers who proclaimed God’s disinterested benevolence and reasonableness. Hence, her God is ‘the source of every good, ... purity ... gentle charity’ (Brontë 1979, ‘To Cowper’, 84–5). She satirises the Calvinists’ narrow sympathies, as she

32

Towards a New Literary Humanism

asks with mock incredulity: ‘Is yours the God of justice and of love …?’ Brontë went as far as to claim universal salvation, a controversial theological position in the 1840s, since her notion of God as ‘love’ could not countenance eternal damnation as anyone’s fate (Brontë 1979, ‘A Word to the Elect’, 89). In theory, then, Brontë’s religious ideas are benign and comforting, presenting her with none of the anxieties which led many other Victorians into doubt. The problem she voices is an emotional, not an intellectual one: how to subjectively appropriate this benign reality. God may be good, but is he accessible? At times, Brontë recounts joyous experiences when she is able to internalise the divine object of her belief, and this becomes a source of personal wholeness and fulfilment. ‘Faith’ is defined in emotional terms, as an intense feeling of divine intimacy and an accompanying sense of assurance. She celebrates the moment when intellectual knowing transfigures into feeling. The sensory stimuli of wind and sunshine become channels of the spiritual, and create: ... a rapture deep and strong Expanding in my mind! … a glimpse of truth divine ... I knew there was a God on high By whom all things were made I saw his wisdom and his power In all his works displayed. ... And while I wondered and adored His wisdom so divine, I did not tremble at his power, I felt that God was mine. ... I felt that I should rise again To immortality. (Brontë 1979, ‘In Memory of a Happy Day in February’, 82–3, emphasis added) Terms of perception first acknowledge the God of Christian doctrine, and the First Cause of external evidences which rationalist theologians argued were present in the natural and moral order. But contentment is only achieved when this progresses to felt conviction, and the poet

Rebecca Styler 33

escapes self-consciousness as her inner world unites with the divine reality that lies beyond herself. Feeling at one with God brings about respite from external conflict and inner self-division – ‘earthly cares’ and ‘restless wandering thoughts’ – and creates a sense of healing from the fragmentation which characterises present reality (Brontë 1979, ‘Retirement’, 77). The poet escapes temporal and corporeal limitations to reach a sense of her true self, which is located in the platonic realms of eternity. In the terms of her era, Brontë is drawing on the discourses of Evangelical and Romantic spirituality, which both centre on a moment of ecstatic communion with the divine other. Charles Wesley’s hymns celebrate the experience of being ‘lost’ in God and the ensuing sense of ‘perfect liberty’, declaring with full confidence ‘I know, I feel thee mine’ (Ferguson et al. 2005, ‘Hymn’, 652). Wordsworth, himself influenced by Methodist enthusiasm as well as by the culture of sensibility from which that and Romanticism both derived, likewise claims to ‘have felt/A presence that disturbs me ... a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused ... that ... rolls through all things’ (Wu 2006, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, 409–10). In this religious climax, the self communes with an external spiritual reality and is overwhelmed. But beneath the specifics, there lies the fundamental desire to escape self-consciousness and to regain the primal, pre-verbal unity between subjective and objective worlds. It is a pre-lapsarian state of union which is belied by everyday reality, as well as by orthodox Christian doctrine of the fall which envisions such ecstatic union as attainable only after death. While Brontë’s ecstasy is to some extent modified by orthodoxy (she anticipates a fuller participation after death ‘without the veil between’), faith as anticipation alone is not enough. She craves the experience of this heaven here and now, in a salvation which is psychological as much as spiritual. Far more often, Brontë mourns the utter severance of inner and outer worlds, and her failure to appropriate the religious reality in which she believes. She uses the language of sin and guilt to describe this predicament, as if the problem is a moral one, but what she essentially bewails is a failure of feeling: I have gone backward in the work, The labour has not sped, Drowsy and dark my spirit lies, Heavy and dull as lead. How can I rouse my sinking soul From such a lethargy?

34

Towards a New Literary Humanism

How can I break these iron chains, And set my spirit free? ... My sins increase, my love grows cold, And Hope within me dies, And Faith itself is wavering now, O how shall I arise! (Brontë 1979, ‘Despondency’, 80) Brontë describes her dull spirits and a sense of bondage. ‘Sin’ is equated with the loss of emotional warmth, which cannot be reinvigorated by an act of will. Imagery of darkness, heaviness, lethargy and entrapment characterise a psychological condition from which the suppliant cannot escape. ‘Faith’ is again aligned with the moment of intense conviction and well-being, and its absence is bewildering and uncontrollable. The terms of puritan guilt are misleading, since what Brontë diagnoses is a sense of distance from God and from her ideal self, which leaves her feeling fragmented and lost. Like some of Coleridge’s poems of inner dislocation, this presents a condition which could be termed depression, given in terms that predate clinical vocabulary. The poetry’s terms transcend the specifics of Christian discourse. Underlying Brontë’s presentation of religious life is a dialectical pattern of imagery, which structures emotional experience around the binary extremes of height and depth. Using images of the elements, she portrays joy in terms of uplift and expansion, and through the tropes of sky, light, warmth, sunshine and flight. Conversely, distress is figured in terms of downwardness, entrapment, earthliness, darkness and cold. This metaphor implies structures of consciousness which go beyond any particular religious tradition. It draws on the mythic oppositions of heaven and hell, sun-god and underworld, and also the underlying ‘concept metaphor’ embedded in English idiom that associates height and expansion with well-being, and descent and confinement with its absence (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 4, 14–18). The contrast of warmth and coldness likewise draws on deep-seated primal associations with comfort and deprivation. Every poem is a drama in which the speaker attempts to rise and connect, and to depart from the given earthly condition in which she feels abandoned. Thus, Brontë metaphorically suggests structures of feeling which surpass exclusively Christian, or even religious, reference. She writes of communion and isolation, wholeness and brokenness, coherence and conflict as the poles of emotional life.

Rebecca Styler 35

It is not only that Brontë dramatises the momentary highs and lows of inner experience. The overall drift of her poems is to present a prevailing condition in which personal needs are continually frustrated. Disappointment is the norm, and existence is marked by a painful disparity between longings and fulfilment which at times reaches the absurd – ‘the unreasonable silence of the world’ which confronts human longing, as Albert Camus described it. More fully, Camus explains: It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together. (Quoted in Solomon 1972, 279) This ‘divorce’ is demonstrated in poems such as ‘Fluctuations’, a bleak parody of the desire to connect and escape. Subjectivity is presented as hell, bereft of intimacy with the other for which the speaker longs, and without which there is no happiness. Whether this other is human or divine is left open by the suggestive metaphors employed, with the speaker alone in a night-time landscape, mourning the passing of the sun. She gazes at the moon, which appears but passes from view, then a star, and finally a pathetic meteor, hungry for the energy which she needs to draw from them for her inner sustenance. Hope becomes despair as the celestial bodies not only pass out of the sky, but even when present are inadequate to compensate for the primary loss: I thought such wan and lifeless beams Could ne’er my heart repay For the bright sun’s most transient gleams That cheered me through the day. ... Thick vapours snatched her from my sight And I was darkling left, All in the cold and gloomy night Of light and hope bereft. (Brontë 1979, ‘Fluctuations’, 103–4) Whether this deprivation is because of the innate weakness of the heavenly bodies or the star-gazer’s inability to appropriate their energy is unclear. Subjective and objective blur, but not in a way that resolves the viewer’s isolation: epithets are transferred between landscape and speaker, both described as ‘faint’ and ‘wan’, ‘trembl[ing]’ and ‘darkling’.

36

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Her ‘tearful gaze’ mirrors ‘the dim horizon’s haze’ in agonised psychic atrophy. Unable to transcend, she remains ‘locked in the prison of her own consciousness’, confronted by a ‘terrifying absence’, as did other nineteenth-century poets who mourned the disappearance of God from their immediate world (Miller 1963, 2–8). This fundamental lack, or alienation, is the given condition which the poet longs to but cannot transcend, and it is this experience which overwhelmingly constitutes Brontë’s poetic reality. For existentialist thinkers, emotional states have ontological value or, as John MacQuarrie puts it, they are ‘disclosive of being’ (MacQuarrie 1973, 126). How the world feels says something important about personal meaning, which is not resolved with reference to bald statements of belief. This fundamental feeling of being ‘not at home’ in the world is a sensibility which some Christian philosophers equate with ‘sin’ – not in terms of individual sins or moral failings, but as the given condition of original sin into which human beings are born. This is interpreted as alienation, as a person’s separation from God, from others and from his or her true self; it is the incompleteness or fundamental absence which is evident in the human condition (see MacQuarrie 1966, 128–32). The problem inherent in existence is therefore not so much a moral or supernatural phenomenon as an emotional and psychological one. Berdyaev defines the fall as ‘the rise of consciousness with its tormenting duality’, torn between the desire for Paradise and the reality of disappointment and suffering (Berdyaev 1965, 203). Out of this condition of estrangement the individual must aspire to reach an authentic selfhood. Brontë does not turn to promises of redemption or afterlife as a source of healing, even though she firmly believes in both. Hers is an existential, not a theological, problem, which demands a different kind of answer.

III Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is. (Sartre 1980, 410) For existentialist philosophers, the answer to the question of how to live meaningfully in a world from which meaning is absent becomes located in the will and in action. The true self is not inherent in the given state of existence – it must be forged by each individual’s efforts. Authentic being is achieved through a decisive commitment to a way

Rebecca Styler 37

of life, in which the whole self is invested. For the existentialist thinker, truth is therefore ‘performative’, not cognitive, realised in the self as agent (Solomon 1972, 79). In actions lie healing possibilities, since in them a person ‘is projecting and realising an image of personhood’; the lived-out commitment repairs personal fragmentation on a pragmatic level and in day-to-day actions ‘pulls the self into a coherent unity’ (MacQuarrie 1973, 136–7, 170). The Christian notion of salvation has in a sense always been existentialist, demanding a commitment to a person and to a way of life rather than assent to propositions of belief. ‘If I have all the gifts of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge ... but have not love, I am nothing’, wrote the apostle Paul (Bible 1611, 1 Corinthians 13:2). ‘What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?’ adds James, and ‘[c]an such a faith save him?’ (Bible 1611, James 2:14). Kierkegaard was therefore not new in insisting that ‘Christianity is no doctrine ... but an existential communication’ to be possessed only through its ‘actualisation’ in experience (Kierkegaard 1996, 323, 400). And Christian thinkers have found helpful secularised definitions of faith as ‘resolution’ and ‘commitment’, emphasising the individual’s choice of a way of life rather than a supernatural object to which belief is directed (MacQuarrie 1966, 134). For an atheist thinker such as Sartre, following any religion is contrary to the radical freedom which he claims to forge the self’s meanings; however, theistic existentialists acknowledge that a person might choose to draw on a religious tradition, recognising value in a collective wisdom acquired by a community over generations. If these are not adopted thoughtlessly, but taken on independently and applied with heartfeltness, custom can be part of authentic self-realisation. In her poetry of the late 1840s, Brontë abandons her escapist spiritual quest, and instead the theme of the ‘self as agent’ comes to the fore. The dialectical imagery of extreme states recedes, to be replaced by the dominant metaphor of the path and of life as a pilgrimage. The poetic speaker is no longer a passive, feeling subject, hoping for a supernatural invasion to redeem her desolate world. Rather, she is a traveller who self-consciously chooses her way and the guides who will direct her on her journey. This new religious philosophy invests the here and now with a value, albeit a modest one, which to a degree reconciles her to being in the world. To achieve this, Brontë turns away from emotional spirituality to an alternative (then more old-fashioned) Christian tradition in which the will was more important than the emotions. Counter to the Romantic faith in spontaneous feeling stood an Anglican scepticism of the passions and an insistence on disciplining impulse in order

38

Towards a New Literary Humanism

to do right. Herself a vicar’s daughter, Anne Brontë would have regularly recited the confession that ‘we have followed too much the devices and desire of our own hearts ... and there is no health in us’ (Book of Common Prayer 1662). As a more adequate philosophy of selfhood, Brontë adopts a code of moral effort and self-discipline which is bracing compared with the quest for ecstatic surrender, but is also realistic in accepting the conditions of existence. ‘Faith’ undergoes redefinition and becomes a practice through which a Christian self comes into being. Brontë’s poetry therefore takes a didactic turn, moving away from the previously dominant lyrical form. Poems such as ‘The Narrow Way’ are full of bracing imperatives, in which the pilgrim is enjoined to work for her or his reward, to ‘Watch …Toil … Crush pride into the dust ... Waive pleasure ... To labour and to love,/To pardon and endure’ (Brontë 1979, 161–2). This ethic invests the journey itself with a firm sense of purpose, in contrast to the desolation of the given world in ‘Fluctuations’. The theme of making one’s own life meaningful, in the face of the world’s ‘unreasonable silence’, is articulated in another poem (‘Vanitas Vanitatis’), which states the classic Puritan vanitas theme of earthly futility and the transience of human joys. Nature itself is characterised by restless repetition, such as the ever-thirsty ocean which ever ‘craves for more’, and the waves of human beings who pointlessly ‘come and go like ocean tides’. But in spite of this pessimistic sense of a world without telos, the poem takes an unexpectedly positive turn: What then remains for wretched man? To use life’s comforts while he can: Enjoy the blessings God bestows, Assist his friends, forgive his foes, Trust God and keep his statutes still ... Fixing his firmest hopes on Heaven. (Brontë 1979, ‘Vanitas Vanitatis’, 123–4) This is a kind of moral carpe diem, a decision to live for the moment in the face of unanswerable metaphysical questions. It demonstrates the ‘stern optimism’ which Sartre advocates, or the ‘courage and enthusiasm’ which Kierkegaard recommends as the only practical answer to the absurdity of the human situation (Sartre 1980, 42; Kierkegaard 1996, 459). Brontë endows life with value through wholehearted commitment to practical and relational Christian living, forged in the day to day. Conventional religious rules take on a deeply personal value when they are turned to as a way of resolving the struggle for meaning – not simply

Rebecca Styler 39

as a way to evade the bigger issue, but as an alternative understanding of where salvation is to be found. Brontë was deeply conscious of accusations that she returned to unthinking convention, unable to face the challenges of reality with an independent mind. This included her sister Emily, who continued to espouse an ecstatic, individualistic spirituality, longing for escape from the ordinary into the eternal realm through imaginative flight or death. Indeed, the tendency of many existentialist philosophers is ‘aristocratic’, insisting on the need to stand aloof from the common experience and form an intense individualism as a requirement for authentic being (MacQuarrie 1973, 144). To rise above the herd is presented as the only way to become a whole person. But Brontë makes a distinctive contribution to existentialist Christian reflection, claiming identification with the collective as the more humble, compassionate way. She imagines the voice of transcendent spirituality mocking those who ‘[w]alk on the common sod’ and who ‘trace, with timid foot and eye,/The steps that others trod’. She feels accused of being a ‘[c]oward’ who lacks the courage to ‘soar’ above average human cares (Brontë 1979, ‘The Three Guides’, 146–7). But the response of Brontë’s pilgrim is to criticise the ecstatic stance (which once so deeply appealed) for being arrogant and exclusive, and for leaving no room for the vulnerable and struggling, amongst whom she firmly locates herself. Her pragmatic solution to the problem of existence is also an ethical one, committed to everyday social morality and impatient of romantic, ‘aristocratic’ posturing. By re-identifying with the collective and with commonplace morality, Brontë finds an authentic mode of being which takes into account life’s realities more fully than does the desire to transcend the ordinary. However, this is not a straightforward solution. Brontë depicts the self in continual process, struggling to negotiate competing impulses. The duality dramatised in her earlier poetry is still often present, above all in the dialogue poems in which the pilgrim speaker debates with competing guides on how best to live. The final position is reached only through much persuasion and is often tentative, to be opened up and renegotiated again. The major voices in these dramas embody the emotional extremes of her earlier poems, emphasising fantastic possibility on the one hand and bleak reductivism on the other. But instead of being wholly immersed in one viewpoint or another, the poetic speaker considers the two and adjudicates between them as ways to approach life. State of mind becomes a matter of choice, at least to a degree. So the voice of ‘Youth’ competes with ‘Experience’ (‘Views of Life’) and

40

Towards a New Literary Humanism

the ‘Spirit of Pride’ counters the ‘Spirit of Earth’ (‘The Three Guides’). This negotiation resonates with what Sartre describes as seeking a balance between ‘facticity’ and ‘transcendence’ – the factors of the given condition which determine existence and the possibility of reaching beyond them to realise a self in which there is some autonomy. To surrender to either one aspect of experience is a form of ‘bad faith’, as it neglects the other important dimension. While it is delusional to dwell in a fantasy that the limiting conditions of existence can be wholly escaped, it is also defeatist to surrender entirely to those conditions and to fail to assert some control over how one responds to them. Sartre argues that the individual has the liberty and responsibility to choose their attitude even in very limiting or conflictual circumstances, ‘free’ (as Robert Solomon paraphrases) ‘to impose their own interpretations on the situation in which they find themselves’ (Solomon 1972, 281; see also Sartre 1980, 38–9). There is of course a particular imperative for the Christian to refuse to surrender to mere actuality. If there is a God, then the immediate world is not all there is, and salvation, whatever it means, entails a transfiguration of the state in which a human being finds himself or herself. Karl Jaspers insists that: Brute fact is not reality without possibility. If we remove possibility from any immanent being and then absolutely posit it as a knowable reality, we cause transcendence to disappear, freedom to weaken, and we deceive ourselves about reality. (Jaspers 1971, 77) Transcendence is therefore neither an escape nor a supernatural invasion by the sacred object: it is the possibilities discovered by the subject within his or her given situation. Saving grace is understood as ‘a perceptual capacity’ which is brought to bear on ‘sensibility and empirical actuality’, so that positive possibilities can be realised within the given conditions of existence (Jaspers 1971, 79, 84–5). So, Brontë evaluates both escapist spirituality and nihilism as inadequate ‘views’ of life, and seeks to mediate these extremes in order to find personal meaning within everyday reality. She modifies the counsel of ‘Youth’, who blithely promises that ‘summer’s glorious ray/Would chase those vapours all away,/And scatter glories round’, but also distances herself from ‘Experience’ who sees ‘a yawning tomb/Where bowers and palaces should be’, and who denies the value of human joys because they are imperfect and temporary (Brontë 1979, ‘Views of Life’, 117, 115). For Brontë’s pilgrim, the solution is a carefully nuanced negotiation

Rebecca Styler 41

of these extremes, in which she recognises that she is not fully at home in the world, but also that, if the right attitude is adopted, touches of homeliness can be found within it. She corrects Experience’s cynicism: Tell him that earth is not our rest, Its joys are empty, frail at best; And point beyond the sky; But gleams of light may reach us here, And hope the roughest path can cheer: Then do not bid it fly. (118) The attitude of hope is self-consciously adopted, since ‘itself a brightness throws/O’er all our labours and our woes’; there is no need, the pilgrim argues, to ‘enhance our doom’ by despising the gleams of grace that can be found within the mundane. The imagery of light and darkness which structured Brontë’s earlier mythical mode of thought here becomes a choice of lenses through which life can be perceived. This is a highly modified transcendence, compared to the ecstasy of her earlier imaginings, but one which can realistically be encountered within the path, and over which the individual can exert a measure of control. An important aspect of Brontë’s coming to terms with existence is the acceptance that it is time-bound. Her early poetry conceptualises the self in platonic terms as the soul unbound in infinity, compared to which earth is a ‘prison-house of the spirit’ (as Wordsworth describes it in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’: Wu 2006, 539). According to this philosophy, true selfhood is only attained when the subject loses its consciousness of the contingencies of time and place, and imaginatively or spiritually partakes of eternity. This notion of the self is abandoned in Brontë’s later work and is replaced by a sense that being is temporally bound, an idea foregrounded by the trope of the path prevailing over that of ascent. The authentic self is the product of experience gained over time, whose riches are culled through responsible reflection. While the pilgrim’s instinct is to bewail time’s passing and the pressing fact of mortality, her wise guide embraces the experience of being-in-time: Nay, though [Time] steals thy years away, Their memory is left thee still, And every month and every day Leaves some effect of good or ill. The wise will find in Memory’s store A help for that which lies before

42

Towards a New Literary Humanism

To guide their course aright. (Brontë 1979, ‘Self-Communion’, 153) Memory becomes an important element in this revised sense of faith, not in terms of preserving the lingering glories of a pre-natal realm (as in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’), but rather as cumulative wisdom which is used to shape response to the present and future. This sense of the time-bound self also takes into account mortality as a personal and imminent reality. Brontë’s pilgrim poems, like many hymns, end with mention of the ‘awful river’ which must inevitably be crossed. Martin Heidegger, whose ideas have influenced existentialist theologians, emphasises authentic living as ‘being-towards-death’. He argues for ‘an existential interpretation of death’ as one in which the subject embraces his or her own mortality (Heidegger 1962, 292). This inner recognition of death as a horizon towards which one travels is necessary for true being, since it liberates the subject into a realistic understanding of life’s possibilities. Instead of dwelling imaginatively in a realm of afterlife bliss, the individual focuses their energies on the here and now, and the everyday present becomes invested with particular intensity and significance once it is recognised as finite and unique (305–11). For Heidegger, ‘the this-world ontological interpretation of death takes precedence over any ontical other-worldly speculation’ (292). While Brontë often looks forward to a better life after death where ‘bliss shall reign for evermore’, it is not in a way that denies the importance of her earthly life. Incorporating death into her horizon of understanding intensifies the importance of that which must come to pass: ‘while we journey on our way,/We’ll notice every lovely thing,/ And ever as they pass away,/To memory and hope we’ll cling’, the poet enthuses (Brontë 1979, ‘Views of Life’, 119). Most poignantly, in an untitled poem written during her last illness, Brontë refrains from any mention of afterlife as a source of encouragement and instead prays ‘let me serve Thee now’ (Brontë 1979, 164). Through her commitment to the discipline of her inner life, the immediate moment becomes the site of spiritual value, where personal meaning is continually forged and struggled for. Brontë’s rethinking of Christian faith is humanist in the sense that she interprets its central tenets in terms of her emotional and psychological needs, rather than subduing her inner conflicts to fit a model of selfhood pre-determined by a theocentric world view. Her resolution is existentialist in that she works towards an understanding of religion

Rebecca Styler 43

that makes sense of how life feels, in which subjective criteria take precedence over propositional statements about the divine nature. The doctrines of redemption, and ideals of a transcendent God, are always upheld, but alone are found insufficient to grant personal meaning. For this, another, in a sense more secular, kind of truth must be sought which abandons the hope of supernatural intervention and instead locates grace substantially within the believer’s own efforts. Salvation becomes a matter of commitment to ethical action and the choice of a hopeful approach to life in order to realise its potential for meaning. For Brontë, this means re-engagement with the collective and common experience, not distance from it. However, this is no easy solution, nor is it ever a completely satisfying one. The argument is often hard-won through much self-persuasion and protest, and its resolution is precarious: the longing for an epiphany of wholeness often bursts plaintively through the grinding effort to discipline feeling. As Jaspers says, personal philosophy is ‘a never ending task which must ever be repeated’ (Jaspers 1971, 94). Through this keenly conscious emotional reasoning, in a never-completed project of self-formation, Anne Brontë works out her salvation.

2 Virginia Woolf, Sympathy and Feeling for the Human Kirsty Martin

In her ‘Sketch of the Past’, Virginia Woolf tried to capture ‘the most important of all my memories’: If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed at the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive. (Woolf 2002, 78–9) Woolf is describing a feeling of immediate sensation, rendered through present participles and the steady repetition of ‘this’: ‘hearing this splash and seeing this light’, and yet her feelings take her beyond herself, to the ‘purest ecstasy I can conceive’. The moment strains expression: ‘I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written’ (79), and part of its difficulty is connected to the problem of describing a person: Woolf feels that she would only have caught the moment successfully if ‘I had begun by describing Virginia herself’ (79). For Woolf, considerations of the human needed to take into account the capacity of human feeling to balance between physical groundedness and intimations of transcendence. Woolf’s thinking on emotion shaped an intricate sense of what it is to be human and what it is to understand another human being. In this chapter I will explore Woolf’s sense of feeling, and especially her sense 44

Kirsty Martin 45

of feeling for others, of sympathy; in addition, I will trace connections between her work and contemporary thinking on the body, soul and spirit. Through this I will present one intriguing historical perspective on the human, but I will also analyse the implications of Woolf’s work for debate today. The Introduction to this volume has proposed that emotion is foundational to thinking about a new literary humanism. Woolf’s work suggests that whilst emotion might be crucial to any understanding of the human, it also has the propensity to unsettle some of traditional humanism’s central tenets, such as the belief in the rationality and autonomy of the individual. Andy Mousley touches on various tensions at work in emotion, stressing both sensuousness and the possibility of ‘self-forgetfulness’. This chapter will look further at these and related tensions in an attempt to suggest the complexity of what it is to feel, and how literature might allow us to feel for the human.

Martha Nussbaum, humanism and emotion I begin with Martha Nussbaum because her emphasis on the emotions and literature’s power to stir the emotions are central to some of the concerns of this volume. Nussbaum’s influential work can be understood as recuperating emotion on behalf of a traditional-looking, Enlightenment humanism, referred to by Geoffrey Galt Harpham as ‘unmoderated’ (Harpham 2002, 57). This part of the chapter will argue that Nussbaum’s theory of emotion fails to account fully for the vitality of our emotional experience, and especially fails to take into account the delicacy of sympathy. By contrast, Woolf’s thinking both on emotion and on sympathy offers a more suggestive, poised sense of the human, and indicates that the traditional humanism represented by Nussbaum may need to be reshaped. Nussbaum’s humanism is manifest in her sense that literature is able to depict the concrete experience of life in a way that is ethically educative (an ideal partly echoed in this volume’s Introduction). In Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum, following an Aristotelian insistence on ‘fine tuned concreteness in ethical attention’, suggests that ‘there may be some views of the world and how one should live in it … that cannot be fully and adequately stated in the language of conventional philosophical prose … but only in a language and in forms themselves more complex, more allusive, more attentive to particulars’ (Nussbaum 1990, 38, 3). Nussbaum urges that literature provides such a form and that its capacity to record human life can be morally useful because the reader responds emotionally to literature’s depictions of life, sympathising with characters and situations. Nussbaum’s view of literature as prompting ethical

46

Towards a New Literary Humanism

sympathy through a concrete, particularised depiction of life is sustained by her conception of emotion, as expounded further in Upheavals of Thought (2001). For her, the emotions expressed and prompted by literature matter ethically because emotions are not ‘animal energies’ but are cognitively important, connected to our ‘thoughts, imaginings, and appraisals’ (Nussbaum 2001, 1). She argues that emotions are not merely internal states but are always ‘about something: they have an object’ (27). The particular urgency connected with emotion is not irrational, but instead is a sign of the object’s importance to the feeling subject. Thus, Nussbaum argues that emotion can be seen as a ‘judgement’ about the world: her grief at her mother’s death, for example, is directed at her mother and forms a judgement about her mother’s importance to her. Nussbaum’s view of emotion as cognitive supports her humanism because it suggests that emotions are rational, grounded phenomena which respond best to concrete depictions, and because it suggests that in feeling for fiction we respond rationally, maintaining our moral autonomy and making ethical judgements. Yet is emotion really as Nussbaum describes it? And if it is not, what might this mean for Nussbaum’s ideal of the self, for her sense of how we understand the emotions for others, and for her humanist expectations of literature? Sophie Ratcliffe has pointed out that Nussbaum’s sense of emotion supports, and is supported by, a ‘post-Freudian, rationalist view of the “human self”’ (Ratcliffe 2008, 15), but that when one considers certain types of emotional experience, this view of the self doesn’t seem quite right. Nussbaum’s theory – that emotions reveal the feeling subject’s valuation of objects – implies that things are important to us because they relate to our cognitive self rather than because they take us beyond ourselves. Yet, Ratcliffe argues, states such as the sympathetic ideal of feeling another’s emotions are difficult to discuss without touching on ideas of transcendence. Sympathy might involve something like wonder, which unsettles the idea of an autonomous human self, suggesting something at odds with liberal humanism (see Ratcliffe 2008, 18–19). Because Woolf’s sense of feeling as shown in her St Ives description suggests transcendence but also dwells on the sensory, her work reveals an added complexity in thinking about emotion. One of the acknowledged complications in Nussbaum’s argument is the possibility of a wondrous element to emotion, but another is her treatment of the body. Nussbaum urges that emotion is not solely bodily: what element in me is it that experiences the terrible shock of grief? I think of my mother; I embrace in my mind the fact that she will

Kirsty Martin 47

never be with me again – and I am shaken. How and where? Do we imagine the thought causing a fluttering in my hands, or a trembling in my stomach? And if we do, do we really want to say that this fluttering or trembling is my grief about my mother’s death? (Nussbaum 2001, 44) What troubles Nussbaum is the question of possession, evinced in the shifting of her italics. She focuses first on what emotion ‘is’ and is driven to think of the body, yet in doing so she is uncertain about whether this is ‘my grief’. Embodiment is a predicament because it means that one’s individual emotions might seem to be things which are not under the control of the self: one is not in total command of one’s own body. Recognising the bodily nature of emotion also suggests that emotions might be at once intimately immediate and yet might gesture to something beyond the individual, centred in the individual but poised on the edge of sympathetic transcendence. Both the role of the body and of sympathy complicate Nussbaum’s ideas of emotion, and thus complicate her humanism, placing in question her idea of the human and her expectations of literature. The work of Virginia Woolf offers a way of thinking through such issues. I shall now turn to Woolf’s work, briefly rehearsing first how it has been seen as challenging expectations when it comes to the portrayal of human beings.

Virginia Woolf, humans and characters E.M. Forster felt that Woolf failed on an important point as a novelist. For him, novels must be about human beings and ‘if one is writing about human beings, one does want them to seem alive’. Forster felt that Woolf’s characters were too often mere ‘wraiths’ (Noble 1972, 191–2). Lee Oser argues that modernist writers generally were fundamentally opposed to the Aristotelian humanism espoused by Nussbaum: In contrast to the Aristotelian body, what I shall call the modernist body is an aesthetic body. It is an image in the mind, an incorporeal voice, a ghost of style. It is epitomized by the persona or mask. (Oser 2007, 9) Such etherealising of the human seems to preclude humanist ethics in the terms of Aristotle and Nussbaum, where a reader might sympathise through seeing people embodied in the text.

48

Towards a New Literary Humanism

However, attention to Woolf’s own comments reveals a more subtle re-positioning of characterisation, which challenges Oser’s assertion. Woolf described the characters of Victorian literature thus: The character is rubbed into us indelibly because its features are so few and so prominent. We are given the keyword (Mr Dick has King Charles’s head; Mr Brooke, ‘I went into that a great deal at one time’; Mrs Micawber, ‘I will never desert Mr Micawber’). (Woolf 1988, 386) Whilst Woolf can empathise with those who have turned away from this mode of characterisation – ‘[t]here was … (if we think ourselves into the mind of a writer contemplating fiction about the year 1900), something plausible, superficial, unreal in all this abundance’ – her own literary practice suggests a delicate transformation of such techniques (Woolf 1988, 386). In Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf offers her own version of the ‘keyword’ as she meditates on the necessity of ‘character-mongering’: After all, what does it matter – that Fanny Elmer was all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs Durrant hard as iron? that Clara, owing (so the character-mongers said) largely to her mother’s influence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, and only to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which were positively alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon someone unworthy of her one of these days unless, so the character-mongers said, she had a spark of her mother’s spirit in her – was somehow heroic. (Woolf 2008a, 214) The poignant crescendo to Woolf’s sense of Clara’s character as ‘somehow heroic’ urges that such characterisation does matter, and her brief character sketches suggest what parts of the human matter most. The summaries – ‘all sentiment and sensation’, ‘as hard as iron’ – suggest the prominent features of Victorian characters. Yet whilst the Victorian keywords relate to habits of speech or external features, Woolf’s suggest something less easily discerned. Woolf’s descriptions emphasise aspects of the inner life made manifest in material qualities: ‘as hard as iron’. She balances between inner and outer character traits. Woolf was interested in something in human beings which both continued and transformed a humanist tradition; turning to Woolf’s description of feeling, and feeling for others, reveals exactly what conception of the human this entailed.

Kirsty Martin 49

Mrs Dalloway: emotion, physiology and vitalism ‘Few things in Virginia Woolf’s fiction have received so much attention from critics as her methods of treating the inner lives of her characters’, James Naremore has noted in discussing Mrs Dalloway (Naremore 1973, 60). Yet close attention to Mrs Dalloway (1925) and the contemporary debates it touches on reveals more about what exactly the ‘inner life’ was for Woolf. In ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), Woolf suggested that in portraying character, a Russian writer ‘would pierce through the flesh; would reveal the soul’ (Woolf 1988, 426). By contrast, Woolf’s interior monologues in Mrs Dalloway contain sudden obliquities, barriers to a complete intimacy of character and reader. Walking through London, Mrs Dalloway is filled with joy: For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (Woolf 2008b, 4) There is something highly wrought in Mrs Dalloway’s insistences: ‘Heaven only knows’, ‘she felt positive’, and something alienating about her over-certain judgements: ‘(drink their downfall)’, which puts the reader on edge instead of drawing them in. Yet, whilst the reader may not assent to the sentiments expressed, the rhythm cradles the reader’s attention – the punctuated listing of ‘people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge’ conveys a darting attention before breaking into declarative certainty: ‘was what she loved’. Our contact with Mrs Dalloway is anchored in rhythm, and this anchoring reveals something about the nature of the ‘inner life’ for Woolf that has yet to be recognised. The reasons for Woolf’s rhythmic presentation of others’ feelings can be further brought into focus by exploring more of her understanding of how emotion might be presented. The writer she felt was most able to ‘pierce through the flesh’ and reveal the soul was Dostoevsky.1 However,

50

Towards a New Literary Humanism

she found Dostoevsky’s portrayal of his characters’ emotions in The Possessed wearying, writing in ‘Phases of Fiction’ (1929) of how: Everything is done to suggest the intensity of their emotions. They turn pale; they shake with terror; they go into hysterics … Yet though they stamp and scream, we hear the sound as if it went on next door. (Woolf 2009, 69–70) The emotional transparency of the bodies of Dostoevsky’s characters exhausts Woolf. Her critique of his stamping figures suggests implicitly that there is something about the human that does not translate easily between mind and body. The nature of this aspect of the human becomes clearer through Woolf’s more expansive and fretful language of emotion. Whilst Dostoevsky in the scene which Woolf is discussing reflects emotion through voice tone, describing for instance Praskovya Ivanovna’s ‘breaking voice’ (Dostoevsky 1970, 146), Woolf, showing Clarissa meeting Peter Walsh for the first time in years, depicts a more tortuous passage of emotion: ‘Do you remember the lake?’ she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said ‘lake’. (Woolf 2008b, 36) Woolf carefully tracks Clarissa’s emotion to her heart, throat and lips. Yet emotion is something known in the convulsive resistances of her body rather than displayed exactly through it. Moreover, the emotion itself, the cause of all this wrenching pressure, retains a degree of ethereality – it moves through the body, but its exact relation to the body is unspecified. Woolf’s awareness of the difficulty of the relationship between mind and body, and her gesturing towards the ‘pressure’ of emotion, point to her awareness of contemporary debates over the nature of the human. During the nineteenth century, there had been advances in understanding the mind and emotion as properties of the body.2 Theo Hyslop, one of Woolf’s physicians, expressed this materialist bent in the title of his book on Mental Physiology (1895). However, as he noted, there were still people who believed in a ‘spiritual theory’ that our feelings and thoughts cannot be understood solely through understanding bodily process (Hyslop 1895, 15). Woolf was writing at a time when such debates were still potent. Such ideas ranged from dualist suggestions

Kirsty Martin 51

that there was a soul in opposition to the body, to the theory of vitalism. Vitalism, mediating between dualist and materialist ideas, suggested that there was something in every living thing which science could not understand, a type of vital spirit which defined and created life, and which was manifest as a type of energy infused in flesh.3 It is this conception of what it is to be alive that seems most attuned to Woolf’s sense of the energy implicit in the ‘pressure’ of emotion, in the energies of emotion expressed in the rhythm of her monologues and in her subtle sense of the body. Only one critic has hitherto called Woolf a vitalist: Craig A. Gordon has argued that Woolf’s representation of Jinny in The Waves (1931) is ‘consonant with a well-established tradition of vitalistic reaction to the deterministic effects of positivist science’ (Gordon 2007, 163). Gordon is interested in how Woolf’s vitalism opposes the neuroscientific claim of how individuals develop habits which fix them in social roles, and how it allows ‘less a form of relation between fixedly discrete individuals than a process of merging’ – yet vitalism is also important for fundamental thinking about how we understand the human at all, and for thinking about the delicacy of feeling for others (164). Woolf’s vitalism grounded her conviction of the difficulty of knowing others and of knowing oneself. One aspect of Mrs Dalloway’s response to contemporary physiology is its depiction of the relation between the nerves and the heart. Scientists had recently explained that diagnoses of heart disease and ‘nervous exhaustion’ might be confused as the nerves and the heart were interdependent, the nerves of the heart controlling its beating.4 Woolf seems to know this as she describes Clarissa’s emotions at her party: Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been good to come. And, walking down the room with him, with Sally there and Peter there and Richard very pleased, with all those people rather inclined, perhaps, to envy, she had felt that intoxication of the moment, that dilatation of the nerves of the heart itself until it seemed to quiver, steeped, upright; – yes, but after all it was what other people felt, that; for, though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for example, thinking her so brilliant), had a hollowness; at arm’s length they were, not in the heart. (Woolf 2008b, 148) Woolf is concerned to ground Clarissa’s feelings in a scientific description of the workings of her internal organs: ‘the dilatation of the nerves of the heart’, but again there are gaps in such description. Woolf’s

52

Towards a New Literary Humanism

description is vitalist in its intimation that ultimately physiological description is inadequate and that homely cliché better captures emotion: ‘at arm’s length they were, not in the heart’. Woolf’s divergence from medical orthodoxy insists that we might feel alienated from our own feelings even as they sweep our nerves, that there is something about our own feelings which might seem not to belong to us. It suggests, too, that there is something difficult to know about others, as the reference to Peter ‘thinking her [Clarissa] so brilliant’ extends the tissue of misunderstanding to relations between people. The intractable sense of alienation about feeling corresponds to a vitalist sense of the human as filled with mysterious animation. Woolf imagines the essence of oneself and one’s emotion as both forming the core of one’s being and being beyond one’s control. Vitalism thus unsettles questions of human identity; moreover, it suggests how people might be connected to each other. Whilst Clarissa and Peter struggle to understand each other, Woolf does suggest Clarissa is in touch with others, strangely inhabited by ‘what other people felt’. This suggestion is further expanded within Mrs Dalloway through the relation between Clarissa and Septimus, which shows how complete communication between people might be possible. Clarissa lies on her sofa: So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, that is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. (34) And Septimus falls into tune with her: Every power poured its treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more. (118) Septimus and Clarissa are connected by rhythm and by something inherent in their bodies – ‘the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach’ – and yet belongs to neither of them: ‘the body’. Vitalism suggested people’s individuality lay in an energy implicit in their bodies – this meant,

Kirsty Martin 53

as is clear at Clarissa’s party, that it is hard to understand others, but it also meant that understanding another might mean coming into contact with their ‘spirit’, not just their thoughts and feelings, but the shape and rhythm of these thoughts and feelings. It suggests that one understands another by somehow falling into tune with them. Woolf’s descriptions of feeling, and feeling for others, imply that human individuality is subtly enfleshed and that understanding the human involves an intuitive, bodily form of response and a rhythmic form of writing.

Sea anemones and the remains of humanism What then does Woolf’s vitalist, rhythmic sense of individuality and her intuitive, bodily sense of sympathy mean for the idea of the human suggested by Nussbaum? One perspective on such questions can be found in another of Woolf’s St Ives’ memories, that of finding ‘red and yellow anemones flourishing their antennae; or stuck like blobs of jelly to the rocks’ (Woolf 2002, 133). Sea anemones focus the complex balance between body, energy and transcendence that I have explored in Woolf’s thinking on emotion and identity: the creatures are both insistently fleshly (‘like lumps of jelly’) and translucently responsive (‘flourishing their antennae’). The anemones became one of Woolf’s favourite images for discussing the emotional life, and they are suggestive of her sense of the human. In Woolf’s short story ‘Together and Apart’, the anemones are used to convey how we feel for people, as Woolf’s central character muses on how her feelings towards those around her take shape: Fibres of her were floated capriciously this way and that, like the tentacles of a sea anemone, now thrilled, now snubbed, and her brain, miles away, cool and distant, received messages which it would sum up in time so that when people talked about Roderick Serle (and he was a bit of a figure) she would say unhesitatingly: ‘I like him’, or ‘I don’t like him’, and her opinion would be made up for ever. An odd thought; a solemn thought; throwing a queer light on what human fellowship consisted of. (Woolf 1986, 185) The sending of messages from fibres to brain suggests a neuroscientific understanding of feeling, but Woolf disrupts the physiological description, dislocating fibres and brain, and complicating matters by an expression of kinship to the anemone. The image suggests that feeling, and feeling for the human, is a matter at once fleshly and translucent, bodily and yet strangely disembodied. The sea anemone suggests the

54

Towards a New Literary Humanism

distance between Woolf’s idea of the human and that of Nussbaum. Emotion here is cognitive only in a subtle sense (complicating the unity of the head and the heart) and emotion is less a matter of autonomous judgement than bodily responsiveness. Woolf continued to use the image of the sea anemone throughout her career, and this section will trace how the anemones reveal the alternative sense of the human that Woolf’s writing depicts. The sea anemone is important in the history of thinking about feeling. Sea anemones puzzled natural scientists until the late nineteenth century, as it was unclear how much they felt and how they could have feeling at all. In 1860, Philip Henry Gosse insisted that the creature’s responsiveness meant that a ‘delicate sense of touch certainly exists’, but was unable to understand how this feeling could occur: ‘I have been as unsuccessful as my predecessors in my search for nervous thread and ganglia, still, I have little doubt that such exists’ (Gosse 1860, xiv). Gosse’s faith was eventually confirmed by a series of scientific experiments into whether feeling existed in the anemones. By the time Woolf was writing, scientists had discovered through various experiments that the sea anemones did indeed have a basic nerve function.5 They had thus accrued significance as an image for the primitive ancestry of human emotion and for the delicacy of identifying feeling. For Woolf, the sea anemone thus offered a way to think through the ideas of feeling necessary to her vitalist, bodily sense of feeling, and tracing her use of the image of the sea anemone suggests what remains of a humanist position in her work. Writing of unself-conscious emotion in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, Woolf wrote about sea anemones: I had wanted to go into the matter of profound natural happiness; as revealed to me yesterday at a family party of an English Banker; where the passion and joy of sons and daughters in their own society struck me almost to tears with self-pity and amazement. Nothing of that sort do we any of us know – profound emotions, which are yet natural and taken for granted, so that nothing inhibits or restrains – How deep these are, and unself conscious [sic]. There is a book called Father and Son, by Gosse, which says that all the coast of England was fringed with little sea anemones and lovely tassels of seaweed and sprays of emerald moss and so on, from the beginning of time till Jan 1858, when, for some reason, hordes of clergy and spinsters in mushroom hats and goggles began collecting, and so scraped and rifled the coast that this accumulation was destroyed for ever – A parable this, of what we have done to the deposits of family happiness. (Woolf 1977, 254)

Kirsty Martin 55

Woolf is referring to Edmund Gosse’s account of his father Philip Henry Gosse’s work on sea anemones, work which (according to Edmund Gosse 2009, 80–2) fuelled interest in collecting the creatures, leading to their depletion. Woolf is imagining anemones before they had been used to investigate emotion, when the perception that they were feeling creatures rested at the level of an intuition that there was something vital within them. Woolf, in her respect for the untouched sea anemones, implicitly urges a restraint of curiosity and a return to this type of awareness. The image of the sea anemones remained important to Woolf across her literary career and was bound up with the importance of understanding individuals – she recorded in her diary in 1940 that ‘L. sees people in the mass: I singly. I thought biography is like the rim of sea anemones left round the shore in Gosse’s Father & Son’ (Woolf 1984, 332). Woolf is imagining a tentative, faithful feel for the individual feelings of others. She is not, however, without her own self-consciousness – the mock-parable style speaks to the necessity of indirection in conveying such feeling, whilst clinging to the ‘deposits’ of family happiness does not altogether seem an attractive proposition. What remains of ‘profound emotions’ is a feel for the bodily, primitive nature of emotion, and an admission that such emotions cannot entirely be ‘natural and taken for granted’. Woolf’s sense of the human, then, stands at odds with that of Nussbaum. It emphasises the body, the complexity of the relation between emotion and cognition, and instead of maintaining moral autonomy, it suggests something more dependent and responsive. Moreover, the sea anemone suggests the form of feeling best suited to vitalist understanding. Woolf used the creatures in describing her friends, writing to Gerald Brenan: you should know Roger [Fry], whose mind, far subtler and more richly stocked than Clives [sic] [Bell], never ceases for a second to glow, contract, expand, like some wonderful red-tinted sea anemone, which lives in the deepest water and sucks into itself every scrap of living matter within miles. (Woolf 1977, 80) Woolf conveys Fry and Bell in a way that shifts between the embodied and the translucent, whilst the changing colours of the anemones suggest stirrings of energy as they ‘glow, contract, expand’. Woolf’s sea anemones are almost always portrayed with careful attention to light and colour, and the use of colour suggests a way of feeling shaped to Woolf’s concern with the sensuous and otherworldly. Questions of why

56

Towards a New Literary Humanism

we relate to shape and colour in art remain uncertain.6 When we relate to the type of particularised, human representations in which Nussbaum is interested, it can be argued that what we are doing is relating the art analogically to our own life experiences. When we relate to shape and colour as such, we relate to something both abstract and sensuous that has no specific referent in real life. Woolf’s use of colour is at once sensuous and abstract, and the type of feeling it asks for is crucial to her sense of how we might feel for human beings. It is clear that Woolf’s work indicates an idea of the human that is more bodily, less cognitive and less autonomous than that suggested by Nussbaum. My final section will begin to explore how Woolf’s vitalist understanding gives rise to a form of writing that is at odds with Nussbaum’s ideal of humanist fiction as mimetic and particularised, and that deepens a sense of how literature might ‘animate’ the human.

Abstractions of emotion in The Waves The Waves (1931) has prompted concerns about emotion and humanism. In 1977, Hermione Lee described how in the novel a ‘formal, rhythmic monologue subjugates the representation of personality or action to a series of physical images which are made to stand for a state of mind’ (Lee 1977, 163) and in 1987, Makiko Minow-Pinkney, writing from a psychoanalytic perspective, questioned Lee’s ‘liberal humanist assumptions about character’ (Minow-Pinkney 1987, 153). I hope I have shown that Woolf was committed to humanism in her concern for the representation of personalities, but that her views of emotion meant that such personalities and identities did unsettle certain humanist assumptions. Woolf’s conception of emotion, based on her vitalism, expands Nussbaum’s idea of the human. Moreover, Woolf’s sense of the human and of feeling means that one of her most vigorous challenges to humanist assumptions resides in her sense of how the human should be depicted. The assumption that has most troubled criticism on The Waves is the premise that emotion and abstraction are antithetical. Gillian Beer looks at The Waves in the light of contemporary physics and notes the difficulties of such an association: Yet is that abstracted insubstantial world enough for a novelist? How to find and sustain story? emotion? ordinary living without falling into the realist trap? (Beer 1996a, 118) This series of linked questions implies, perhaps, that the most apt mode for the human is storytelling, and that emotion is bound to ‘ordinary

Kirsty Martin 57

living’. Yet, for Woolf, ordinary living also involves an element of abstraction, and emotion includes the type of feelings we have for shape or colour. In ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ (1927), written shortly before Woolf began work on The Waves, she is interested in our feelings for both pure sensation and things that seem pure abstraction: ‘the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of colour, the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine’ (Woolf 1994, 439). The Waves manifests the expressive implications of Woolf’s sense of the human. The novel supports an individualistic view of the human, with first-person monologues revealing characters with distinct habits of thought and feeling. Simultaneously, people are taken beyond the individual, fusing together at the level of elemental, rhythmic energy, expressed in the syntactic harmony of their voices. The individual characters feel in a way that is intimate to each of them and yet is intimately connected with and shaped by the world around them, as is clear from Susan’s reflections: ‘Colour returns. The day waves yellow with all its crops. The earth hangs heavy beneath me. But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground.’ (Woolf 2008c, 79) Employing colour, Woolf allows for something simultaneously immediate and otherworldly. The questioning ‘who am I’ seems to support Minow-Pinkney in destabilising identity, but Susan is very steadily aware of identity. Susan’s identity is forged through her epiphanic, empathetic relation to the colours and things around her. In this way, the rhythm and images of The Waves provide a perfect expression of the human and the human capacity for feeling that abstracts one beyond oneself. Instead of Nussbaum’s insistence on the concrete, The Waves shows how we feel for something suggested by and beyond the body of another. Characters are highly attuned to the gestures of others and to the energy suggested by gesture. Louis watches Rhoda in the schoolroom: ‘There Rhoda sits staring at the blackboard,’ said Louis, ‘in the schoolroom, while we ramble off, picking here a bit of thyme, pinching here a leaf of southernwood while Bernard tells a story.

58

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Her shoulder-blades meet across her back like the wings of a small butterfly. And as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodges in those white circles …’ (Woolf 2008c, 15–16) Louis alights on particular detail, the crossing of Rhoda’s shoulderblades, but then moves to imagine the movements of her mind, which abstract the figures on the blackboard into endless white circles. Woolf’s conception of the spirit, rhythm and movement of the human incarnates itself in a text that darts from particularity towards the otherworldly. Woolf, like Nussbaum, links emotion and knowledge, showing intuitive feeling as the way we know each other. Yet, whilst for Nussbaum emotion is key to our thoughts about the world, for Woolf it is crucial to our being. Woolf’s sense of emotion shapes a new humanism which is hesitant about claims of autonomy, and thus casts doubt on the ethics of reading (or at least Nussbaum’s version of this), but which is determined to be true to all the sensuous and abstract ways in which one might feel. Woolf’s subtle reformulation of humanism suggests that one way forward for humanism, and one way of avoiding ‘fuzzy intuition’, may be to look more closely at intuition, enriching our understanding of the human to accommodate the complicating conditions of emotion.

Notes 1. Woolf singled out Dostoevsky for his presentation of the soul’s ‘depth and volume’ (Woolf 1994, 185) in ‘The Russian Point of View’ (1925). 2. For more on nineteenth-century science, see Shuttleworth and Bourne Taylor 1998. 3. For more on early twentieth-century vitalism, see Lofthouse 2005. 4. An anonymous newspaper article documenting this discovery was ‘Influenza and the Heart. Symptoms Explained. Lessons of Army Work’, The Times (21 April 1919, 7). 5. For a description of one such experiment, see ‘Mental Evolution’, The Times (Anon, 4 December 1883, 10). 6. See Christopher Butler 2004, 105–31.

3 Being Human and Being Animal in Twentieth-Century HorseWhispering Writings: ‘Word-Bound Creatures’ and ‘the Breath of Horses’ Elspeth Graham What does it mean to be human? Although this question has, selfevidently, always been central to thought in the humanities, it has been asked in new ways and with increasing frequency over the past few decades. In particular, what is variously referred to as late-modernity, high-modernity or postmodernity has raised questions about modernity’s predication on human-centred positivism. Postmodern and posthuman thought, with an emphasis on the systemic, has not only queried the absolute centrality of the human to the operations and significance of the world, replacing ideas of humanity as the crucial source of agency and meaning with a notion of the human as a generative intersection in a system, but has de-integrated the human itself. The human becomes the product of an accidental and temporary coalescence of forces, a site which is affected by, as well as affecting, larger systems, and which even in its existence as a temporary stasis is fundamentally riven, only ever occupying a position of provisional integration. A new humanism as explored in this volume (valorised in literature – that most central of humanistic practices, based as it is on language, often seen as definitive of human-ness) needs to affirm the human in this decentring context. This chapter contributes to the book’s aim by focusing on a cluster of late-twentieth-century writings featuring horse whisperers, figures who occupy a mediatory position between human and non-human animals. These whispering texts, along with a series of philosophical and psychoanalytic counterparts, foreground questions about the intersubjective nature of human subjectivity, the ways in which being human is predicated on that ‘inter’ at the heart of relational and systemic thought. Most directly, these writings are concerned with human relationships with animal others and, by extension, with a natural ecology. But they are also concerned with ways in which, throughout the thought of the twentieth 59

60

Towards a New Literary Humanism

century, Western humanity has struggled to recognise and conceptualise the other in the self: how interrelationship structures all aspects of being and how the somatic and the instinctual relate to the intellectual and symbolic in us. So, embedded in the chapter is the question of how – if, as one aspect of rethinking the human, we are to envisage a realignment of the human in relation to the non-human others that constitute the rest of the world, as well as to our own human otherness – we might speak to and hear those non-symbolic othernesses that surround and inform us. And in asking these questions in relation to novels and philosophical writings, the question also emerges as to what the implications are for writing of an attempt to speak the necessarily non-verbal and non-symbolic in definitively verbal forms. These questions circulate around that larger question of how a new literary humanism might speak to and for a de-integrated, de-centralised, but still meaningful human-ness.

Word-bound creatures Tess Gallagher’s short story ‘The Lover of Horses’, in exploring the limits of human verbality and reason, introduces key questions that traverse all the writings I am interested in. This story evokes the abiding idea of the mysterious otherness of horses and their association with a realm beyond the Law.1 The story is structured around an implicit opposition between two worlds: that of the responsible, regular, domestic and economically stable against that of freedom, risk and chance, and an inarticulable connection with forces of nature and life. Describing the origins of her great-grandfather’s intuitive understanding of horses, the narrator tells us: I did not learn, until I travelled to where my family originated at Collenamore in the west of Ireland, that my great-grandfather had most likely been a ‘whisperer’, a breed of men among the gypsies who were said to possess the power of talking sense to horses. These men had no fear of even the most malicious and dangerous horses. In fact, they would often take the wild animal into a closed stall in order to perform their skills. (Gallagher 1992, 2) Irishness and gypsiness are conflated in an evocation of an archaic, originating world where the proximity and necessity of horses to people is an unspoken fact. The whisperer is one of a minority within a minority (‘a breed of men among the gypsies’) who have a special ‘power’ to mediate between horses and humans, to introduce, or restore, hostile

Elspeth Graham 61

horses to human culture. With its connotations of breathy semiaudibility, whispering is the bridge between the wild and the domestic. It blends a suggestion of the breath of horses – that evocative, essential characteristic of equines who depend for survival on their powerful respiratory apparatus (large lungs and extended sinuses), who greet by offering breath, exhaling the scent of the self for the other, whose vocal communications include snorting and blowing, and who sigh to relieve tension – with reference to threshold human articulation, speech at the brink of audibility and thus of communication and meaning. The whisperer draws horses into alliance with the human through his esoteric skill. But the exclusivity of such a bond with horses may also work to entice the human over to the side of horses: ‘my great grandfather, at the age of fifty-two, abandoned his wife and family to join a circus’. This may not have been, the narrator speculates, ‘simply drunken bravado, nor even the understandable wish to escape family obligations’, nor again ‘the obvious transgression – that he had run away to join the circus – but that he was in all likelihood a man who had been stolen by a horse’ (3). This transgressive reversal, horses stealing men, prefaced by the conjectural but normalising phrase ‘in all likelihood’, provides the narrative link with other transgressive compulsions experienced by members of the family and the narrator’s arrival at acceptance of her own othersidedness. She, in spite of her mother’s protective guardianship against signs of ‘inexplicable manias’ (6), has manifested symptoms of othering compulsions in childhood, including: that I refused to speak aloud to anyone until the age of eleven. I whispered everything, as if my mind were a repository of secrets which could only be divulged in this intimate manner. (7) But it is the imminent death of her gambler father that brings her to the eventual acknowledgement of her heritage. Only the narrator, amongst all the members of her family, can be with him and care for him during his long final episode of card-playing compulsion when ‘many unspoken tendernesses passed between’ them (10). While the family searches for reasons, for causality, for meaning to his deathbed behaviour, the narrator herself is guided by chance, or intuition, in her response: I found myself in the yard sitting on a stone bench under a little cedar tree my father loved because he liked to sit there and stare at the ocean. The tree whispered, he said ... My thoughts drifted with

62

Towards a New Literary Humanism

its shiftings and murmurings, and it struck me what a wonderful thing nature is because it knows the value of silence, the innuendos of silence and what they could mean for a word-bound creature such as I was. (13) During the night when her father finally dies, the narrator, having torn the branches from this little tree with its ‘painful permission’ and made a bed outside, finds herself giving way to mysterious utterances and sounds: There was a soft crooning of syllables that was satisfying to my ears, but ultimately useless and absurd. Then it came to me that I was the author of those unwieldy sounds, and that my lips had begun to work of themselves. In a raw pulsing of language I could not account for, I lay awake through the long night and spoke to my father as you might speak to the ocean or the wind, letting him know by that threadbare accompaniment that the vastness he was about to enter had its rhythms in me also. (16) In a story full of reference to words, silence and the in-between realm of whispering, it is no accident that acceptance of other-worldliness, and other-wordedness, should be associated with a death. Although connection to that transgressive realm of horses as thieves of men, and men as whisperers to horses, which is also a world of nuanced silences and wide natural forces beyond the rational, practical and regular, may enable one ‘to plunge [oneself] into the heart of [one’s] life’, it also necessitates recognition that this is to be ‘ruthlessly lost forever’ (6). Through her presentation of this mysterious realm, Gallagher’s narrator presents paradox, or a necessity of taking up a position at the brink of being, as central to the fullness of human life. Love, an embrace of life, and completeness of being are dependent on a continuous attunement to that ‘vastness’ that bounds life and implies the ever-imminent dissolution of the self. This is a sacrificial vision of life, in which stability and everyday human security – positioned throughout in oppositional relation to the world of whispering connectedness – must be forfeited in order to live fully. But it is also close to being a vision in which attainment of freedom from restricting regularity necessarily entails an embrace of non-being. The problem raised is that of a human living in the realm of the non-verbal. To move outside the Symbolic and the realm of Law, for all the possibilities of freedom and intuitive connectedness offered,

Elspeth Graham 63

is also to be aligned with dissolution. If humans embrace absolute alterity and defy the limitations of ‘word-bound’ being, must that also involve an embrace of death? The dilemma at the heart of ‘The Lover of Horses’ is also that of Freud in his working out of ideas around the death drive, a psychoanalytic analogue to Gallagher’s story. Freud was perhaps one of the last great humanists and the first great posthumanists. Writing at a threshold moment between the confidence of high modernity and the beginnings of its unravelling in the aftermath of the Great War (later, of course, referred to as the First World War – a poisonous foretaste of later, more varied manifestations of the movement towards globalisation), he struggled to conceptualise the human capacity for destruction that the War evidenced, the trauma experienced by soldiers and the more general implications of mortality through his recurrent return in his later writings to the idea of the death drive (Freud 1955; 1964). He describes this as being implicated in psychic process in a variety of – often paradoxical – ways. The first aspect of the death drive represents the fundamental biological tendency of all organisms towards dissolution, or return to an inorganic state. This drive towards annihilation is in tension with the role of the ego, which aims to preserve life and to disavow the certainty of death, even while being aware of its inevitability. A fundamental paradox thus exists: the death drive (as primary process) operates in tension with the ego (an agent in secondary processes), which recognises but works against a return to a non-animate state. The death drive is further bound up with ‘repetition compulsion’, the attempt to control past traumatic situations, which thwart the establishment of an equilibrium between pleasure and unpleasure, by a recurring attempt to ‘bind’ dangerous energies. This repetition is not a simple act of gaining mastery (a matter of secondary processes), but is related to the instinctual and thus to unbound primary processes, or those processes inherent in organic life which aim towards restoration of an earlier state (Freud 1955, 35). Freud’s concept of the death drive primarily depends on two assumptions: first, that all psychic process is underpinned by biological necessity; and, second, that processes of separation are fundamental to the psychic make-up of humans. These include the separation of the secondary psychic processes, including the agency of the ego, from a somatic base and its agents, the instincts, as well as, more generally, those separations that occur in the psychic development of all individuals and which, in successive stages, mark a movement away from the undividedness and unity of prenatal life. Death – and the pull of

64

Towards a New Literary Humanism

the death drive – represents a return to undividedness, to unity or wholeness. The death drive is, of course, also the pull towards destruction, bodily disintegration and the inanimate. So, for Freud, the death drive, and the instincts in general which ‘represent the somatic demands upon the mind’, underpin all human experience (Freud 1964, 148). But if we are to enter into social life and function in the characteristic way of humans (through the dynamic, interactive division between the conscious and the unconscious that allows us memory and a sense of history, rationality and the capacity for symbol formation), it is necessary that the force of the somatic be bound: We have found that one of the earliest and most important functions of the mental apparatus is to bind the instinctual impulses which impinge on it, to replace the primary process prevailing in them by the secondary process and convert their freely mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic) cathexis. (Freud 1955, 62) The whole organisation of the ‘mental apparatus’, then, works to mitigate the instincts, disabling their power, so they are only experienced, untroublingly, at the level of the bodily or tonic. And, of course, central to Freud’s account of the mitigation of desire and instinctual impulsion is the organisation of the Oedipus complex. The assumptions about the precarious poise maintained by humans between an organic nature and a rational, social and language-centred nature that underlie Freud’s account of the death drive parallel those implicit in ‘The Lover of Horses’. In exploring the relationship between the instinctual and the social, the story depicts an intensified version of family dynamics that, through the heightened power of the father– daughter bond (described throughout in romantic and sexual terms), leads to an unravelling of the oedipal. Whether this – along with the sort of animist holism, associated with being beyond language that the daughter-narrator embraces at the end – opens her to the transgressive, unbounded, instinctual world of horses in affirmation of life or of death, or of the inseparability of the two, is the question the story raises.

Oedipal animals While intimate connection with horses serves as a trope for attunement to a wider realm of risk, freedom and connectedness in ‘The Lover of Horses’, it is the notion of horse whisperer as human healer

Elspeth Graham 65

which emerges more emphatically in Nicholas Evans’s novel The Horse Whisperer and in the film version directed by Robert Redford (Evans 1995; Redford 1998). These texts, beginning and ending with violent deaths, ultimately subordinate issues of interspecies intersubjectivity to the function of Tom Booker, the horse whisperer of the title, as an agent in the redemptive quest of Annie Graves who seeks healing for herself, her daughter Grace, and Grace’s horse. The story opens with a riding accident in which Grace’s friend and her horse are killed. Grace herself loses a leg and her horse, Pilgrim, is horribly maimed, subsequently becoming, in his distress, unmanageable by humans and detached from other horses. Grace’s mother, Annie, a ‘celebrated journalist’ and workaholic magazine editor in New York, already troubled by guilt over the lack of time she has for her daughter, her inability to sustain further pregnancies and give birth to another child, and the tensions this produces in her marriage, traces a horse whisperer in Montana who she believes can heal the horse and thereby cure them all. Tom Booker, the horse whisperer, insists on the practicality of his knowledge. He laughs at the notion of whisperers and the mythologising history of such men that Annie has researched through her reading (Evans 1995, 284). Instead, he perceives himself as a rancher with intimate knowledge of animals and the natural derived from lifelong experience. Nevertheless, the narrative persistently spiritualises his attunement to nature and animal others. Just as the redemptive nature of Annie’s quest is clearly signalled by the names Grace and Pilgrim, and by the reinforcing allusion to the old copy of Pilgrim’s Progress given by a Baptist couple to Annie and Grace on their journey from New York to Montana, so Tom Booker is presented as someone intuitively attuned to others and the other. He values a Zen-like acceptance of life and a non-verbal, non-cerebral understanding of natural patterns: ‘“Seems to me if you talk about these things too much, the magic gets lost and pretty soon talk is all there is. Some things in life just … are”’ (141–2). His understanding of and harmonious interactions with others depend on bodily sympathy: ‘“Dancing and riding, it’s the same damn thing … It’s just about trust and consent … You’re in harmony and moving to each other’s rhythm …”’ (136). He perceives himself as having, ‘a kind of innate balance’ or being ‘simply part of a pattern, a cohesion of things animate and inanimate, to which he [is] connected both by spirit and blood’ (149). The healing of Grace, Annie and Pilgrim occurs in the context of a wholesome, unsophisticated ranch life, in contrast to the tense, brittle world of control and competitive self-promotion represented by Annie’s life in New York. Tom’s work with horses is organically related to

66

Towards a New Literary Humanism

notions of community, extended family and the traditional life of the ranch. However, Tom’s empathic understanding of horse and human sufferers leads, inevitably enough, to his affair with Annie. It is not, in the end, his capacity for connective interaction with equine others that is decisive in restoring health, but the extension of, or transgression beyond, the boundaries of his healing relationship that allows for the culminating, fragile assumption of grace by the suffering family. Prefigured in his concluding act of treatment of the horse Pilgrim, which is perceived as uncharacteristically brutal, but which Tom defends as involving a choice for the horse (Evans 1995, 442), Tom’s death brings together key ideas clustering round the figure of the horse whisperer: The settling dust was still too thick for Grace to be sure, but she thought she now saw Tom open his arms a little and, in a gesture so minimal that she may have imagined it, show the horse the palms of his hands. It was as though he were offering something and perhaps it was only what he’d always offered, the gift of kinship and peace. But although she would never from this day forth utter the thought to anyone, Grace had a sudden, vivid impression that it was otherwise and that Tom, quite without fear or despair, was somehow this time offering himself. (468) He is thus, in saving Grace, killed by a wild stallion. In this scene, which re-invokes the accident with which the novel opens, Tom, through a passive opening of himself to violence, extracts his living presence from the family dynamic of Annie, her husband and Grace, leaving only the experience of the curative period in Montana, and its traumatising conclusion, as the catalyst to their further healing. Sacrifice of the self, in a literal form, is revealed to be linked to that generosity and connectedness which are necessary to a full humanity. Likewise, acceptance of loss is demonstrated to be central to the ability to love and to live. It is the capacity for psychic integration of suffering that produces wisdom. Grace, at the end, is perceived by her mother as a sort of fully spiritualised being: ‘[Annie] found it hard to think of Grace nowadays without a feeling of reverence and wonder’ (476). The birth of a new child, with undecided paternity, to Annie, the posthumous gift from Tom to Grace of one of his foals, and Pilgrim’s return to her in New York prompt Grace’s final decision to survive rather than be destroyed by tragedy: ‘Twice gone to hell and twice returned. She had seen what

Elspeth Graham 67

she had seen and had gleaned some sad and stilling wisdom that was as old as time itself’ (477). It is perhaps inevitable that popular fiction and film, responding to a commercial need for extensive appeal, should address culturally familiar preoccupations, subsuming issues of interspecies relationship to issues of interhuman subjectivities. Nevertheless, regardless of whether any particular text is fictional or non-fictional, popular or more traditionally ‘literary’, the horse-whispering texts I have so far considered both work with similar difficulties that emerge from the concept of an intersubjectivity that goes beyond the boundaries of the human. Both invoke a potentially transformative power of connection that might be brought about when a commitment to the demands of culture and verbality is abandoned in order to access the way-of-being of the animal. The necessity for silence, or its shadow quietness, an attentive opening of the self to the other and a willingness to relinquish the desire for traditionally valued forms of power all recur as characteristics of the whisperer. But if these are revealed as attractive characteristics, they are dangerously so. Entering into a silent encounter with the animal other is commensurate with movement beyond or retreat from what is definitive of the human: the capacity for and dependence on the symbolic. Transcendence of or regression from the verbal (the two seem undecidable in these texts) leads to death. The implication that death must be a necessary conclusion to an intimate encounter with the animal other can only be avoided if there is either a narrative splitting between the dangerous and the life-enhancing aspects of the figure of the whisperer (as with the death of Tom Booker) or a re-routing of the whisperer’s understanding of the other back into the domestic, so that such understanding is valorised by its therapeutic effect on the damaged and distorted in the familiarly human. The paradoxes inherent in Freud’s conflation of those aspects of the psychic that exceed or undercut the ego’s drive towards survival and creativity, which he identifies as the death drive, appear to be embedded in these texts. These texts oscillate between presenting the whisperer as an embodiment of the death drive, as the central paradox of human life, and avoidance of such implications through a reinflection of the whisperer’s work as restorative of the oedipal.

Love, skin and the face of the other Taken as a group, then, these texts present something of an impasse in the attempt to identify how a full encounter with the being of the other might be represented, without leading, on the one hand, to the

68

Towards a New Literary Humanism

potential annihilation of the encountering subjects or, on the other, to an assimilation of the knowledge of the other into a pre-existing ontology. Nevertheless, the formal and ethical questions they raise relate to a wider set of concerns, voiced most urgently in the second half of the twentieth century in two of those Western intellectual disciplines which most centrally seek to comprehend the nature of the human: philosophy and psychoanalysis. As Todd May shows, a philosophical concern with ‘the articulation of an adequate concept of difference … as well as a proper sense of how to valorise it’ derives from the twentieth-century experience of genocidal wars, especially as underpinned by totalitarian thought (May 1997, 1–2). But the need to find a way of conceptualising difference and non-destructive forms of interaction equally extends into other pressing concerns, such as those that shaped Western identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s and, most especially, those of environmental sustainability and the maintenance of eco-diversity. The idea of death on a massive scale and the shadow of Freud’s thought underlie a series of attempts to rethink the implications of a body-psyche dualism and the related links between encountering otherness and embracing annihilation – whether that involves annihilation of the self or the other. The philosophical writings of Levinas provide one of the most urgent and influential analytic investigations of what it means to fully valorise the other. Building on Martin Buber’s emphasis on the core importance of dialogical encounter and his distinction of the subject-object relationship of I-It from the fully intersubjective I-Thou relationship, Levinas’s notion of an ethical interrelation focuses on how it might be possible to live in the permanence of a face-to-face encounter with the other. For him, this involves not adherence to a set of rules, but an ‘inexorable and constant exposure to alterity’ (Nealon 1998, xi). Levinas’s concept of the other also emerges as a critical divergence from his teacher Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, or Being, which originates in the experience of being-in-the-world, but is focused through reflexive self-recognition crucially achieved by awareness of death and, most particularly, of ‘[t]he fact of dying for and by ourselves [which] is what gives the self authenticity, making it a “being-toward-death”’ (Levinas 1989, 3). For Levinas, infinity resides within the human rather than in the surrounding nothingness that Heidegger’s thought presents as the ‘complement’ of being. Levinas’s idea of the face-to-face encounter with the other works to produce this concept of infinity, to restore (this time, in critique of Husserl) a focus on the quiddity of being, and to critique the totalising philosophies of the West that are based on a desire for mastery and thus denial of the other. The face-to-face encounter reveals

Elspeth Graham 69

that in spite of – or rather because of – attention to particularity (all others cannot be lumped together as other, nor can the other merely be seen as a reflection of the self), the other cannot be fully known. The other exceeds all idea of the other in the self. And because the other exceeds what is already known and thought of, it represents the infinite (rather than Heidegger’s death or nothingness) within the human. From this, Levinas’s concern is with the responsibility that each individual has to otherness, which for him signifies both the personal otherness (autrui) of other people and an impersonal, abstract Otherness (autre) (Levinas 1988, 139, n.24). Since otherness, whether personal or abstract, is never reducible to the categories of the self or of knowledge of the world, Levinas’s notion of ethical responsibility implies not a sort of liberal caring, based on perception of the equality of the self and the other, but a commitment to a simultaneous recognition of the quiddity of the other in the sense of its particularity and of the fact that it exceeds recognition. In his later work, Levinas insists even more strongly that the responsibility for the other (where ‘[m]y responsibility for the other is the for of the relationship’) appears not as the annihilation of the self, but as constitutive of the self and sensibility (Levinas 1989, 90). For Levinas, the excess of the other over understanding produces the self, not death. Many strands of post-Freudian psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic philosophy have similarly taken those paradoxes central to Freud’s work, and formulated so clearly in his speculation on the death drive, in new directions, replacing movement towards death with the idea of a perpetual becoming. However, whereas in Levinas’s writing the concept of the other is only ambiguously related to non-human others,2 in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari recognition that humanist and humancentred thought denies the experience of what they call the inhuman (the experience of animals, non-organic life and even imagined life) provides a starting point. Like Freud (and Levinas), they assert the organic basis of humanity and, like Levinas, they insist on interaction as crucial to all life. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and the companion volume, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate their commitment to the flow of life. Their idea of the ‘schizo’ invokes a way of thinking that is not dependent on the normative, or on any cohesive idea of the self. It implies instead a self that is always in flux, always becoming, refusing the Law. Anti-Oedipus constitutes a plea for an anti-organisation of experience and is specifically written in antithesis to Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, a synecdoche of his entire work. For Deleuze

70

Towards a New Literary Humanism

and Guattari, the Oedipus complex is perceived as an organisation of desire that is, in the end, no more than a (bourgeois) convention. If the death drive for Freud, deriving from the organic base of humanity, is what lies behind the drive to the non-animate, as well as being the force that compels one to repeat unpleasure, for Deleuze and Guattari it is participation in deep laws of interchange and becoming that link all organic and inorganic elements of life on earth. Human life is not marked by a pattern of origin in, separation from and eventual return to a non-conscious organicism, as for Freud, but is perceived as one element in a wider continuum that includes all molecular structures. Repetition is crucial to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, not as return as in Freud, but as central to becoming, since apprehension of difference must be repeated rather than grasped. (As with Levinas, once otherness is fully grasped, it is no longer other, but is reduced to the selfsame.) The encounter with the external or other is a stuttering act. In keeping with this, their idea of opening and becoming, a being-in-process, is articulated a thousand times over in speculation on every actual or imagined form of metamorphosing interaction, contact, exchange, symbiosis, infection, act of contagion or mutation. But it is perhaps most strongly expressed in their notion of the ‘transversal’, the hybrid becoming-animal. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish three kinds of nonhuman animals as conceived of by Western culture: ‘First, individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, “my” cat, “my” dog’; second, ‘animals with characteristics or attributes; genus, classification, or State animals’; and, third, ‘more demonic animals, packs or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a tale’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 240–1). The transversal describes a fourth possible relationship with the animal other. It implies openness to the animal other and its way of being, in all its haecceity, a concept that can be likened to Levinas’s notion of quiddity. The transversal, or becoming-centaur, describes what is created in the open encounter between human and non-human animals, where it is the ‘between’ that is significant.3

Becoming-centaur The final novel about horse-human relationships considered in this chapter seeks to articulate what is between horses and humans in a way that is faithful to all that is implied in these ideas of openness of encounter. In particular, it strives to exploit its novelistic structure and the flexibility of imaginative prose writing to embody ideas

Elspeth Graham 71

of multiplicity and the ‘inter’ of interspecies relationships. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, is all about crossing boundaries. Set at a pivotal moment after the Second World War when the traditional way-of-life of the American West is being replaced, the narrative follows the horseback journey across the border from Texas into Mexico of John Grady, himself on the brink of full adulthood, his friend Rawlins, and the boy, Blevins, whom they encounter on the way. In the world of this novel, horse lives and human lives are enmeshed at every level. The impetus of the plot is produced by the issue of the ownership of Blevins’s horse: its appearance as too fine a horse for Blevins, the capture of the horse by the men of the Mexican pueblo of Encantada and its recapture by Blevins, with Grady and Rawlins as accomplices. The plot, produced from this chain of events (along with those brought about by Grady’s illicit affair with the daughter of the aristocratic hacendado who gives them work as vaqueros on his hacienda) thus serves to replicate the way in which horses – as possessions, as status, as work, as passions, as economic tools – shape human life. Likewise, thematic patterning functions as an exploration of horse-human relationship, extending the sense of the centrality of horses to human concerns. Early on we are told of John Grady: What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. (McCarthy 1994, 6) The tone of melancholic rhapsody, produced by lexical and phrasal repetitions, the biblical resonance of ‘would always be so’ with the religiously-connoted ‘reverence’ and the accumulation of nouns, particularly where the noun is used in place of a more common adjectival or verb phrase (‘his fondness was for’ rather than ‘he was fond of’, ‘the ardenthearted’ rather than ‘ardenthearted beings’, etc.) to emphasise states of being and feeling, transmits the suffusing sense of loss in the novel, which elegiacally evokes a world that is passing. However, the valorisation here of the ‘heat of … blood’ and the ‘ardenthearted’, or a passion of temperament that is both corporeal and moral, is complicated rather than sustained by the unfolding of the narrative. Blood is not merely intensity and truth of heart, but also comes to be associated with breeding, bloodlines and violence. Ardour as life-force,

72

Towards a New Literary Humanism

and romantic manifestations of ‘the heat of the blood’, transform into bloodshed and the implication of passion in acts of aggression. John Grady’s subsequent discovery of his own capacity for killing, even as an act of self-preservation, further darkens the idea of the truth of passion. In his transformative cross-border journey, John Grady comes to learn experientially those truths already suggested by his father and by the voice of the narrative early in the novel. His father, traumatised as a soldier in the Second World War and, on his return, unable to integrate his experience of war back into his roles as cowboy and husband, dwindles in a shadowy, sickly existence. He is a grieving and damaged witness to change: The last things his father said was that the country would never be the same. People don’t feel safe no more, he said. We’re like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We don’t know what’s goin to show up here come daylight. We don’t even know what color they’ll be. (26–7) Change is constant, marking the transience of human endeavours and epochs, yet linking opposed peoples through the shared uncertainty of their lives and histories. History itself is a series of repetitions of movements into the unknown. Yet the passage of time and human event with all its vibrancy, passion and cruelty are part of a larger flow of things in which the human and its environment are meshed. After the opening death of the novel, that of John Grady’s grandfather, Grady rides into the evening: He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road … At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing

Elspeth Graham 73

of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of the travelling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives. (5) In this passage, which summarises much of the method of the novel, it is horses that embody the meeting of the human and the wild. Humans with all of their history, their language and their culture become strangely inseparable from the animals they use but are intimately connected with. Beyond intimate relation with horses, people become fused with the environment which human culture shapes, but which also gives rise to and allows the possibility of human experience. Just as, here at the start of Grady’s journey, past and present, humans and animals, history and landscape are fused in this picture of being that extends beyond the individuated, so such a blending of human, animal and environment occurs at the ending of the novel. Blood, symbolising a continuous life-force throughout, here colours the physical world and the face of the man who rides into the shadowy future: he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come. (301) In this novel, the sacrificial does not stand in opposition to that which must be preserved: life and death, the law and freedom, the wild and the human are not separated terms. Rather, just as humans and animals and natural environment, past and present and future, are part of a continuum, blood as death and blood as life are inseparable. The image of the single shadow of the rider and horse in this passage again summarises the centrality of the symbiotic – in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terms, becoming-centaur – horse-human relationships of

74

Towards a New Literary Humanism

the novel. John Grady is presented as the focal human character of the novel in contradistinction to his father, Rawlins or the pitiful Blevins through his openness to change, full-blooded experience and moral growth. But his moral stature, gained through suffering, commitment to life, capacity for pity and remorse, and his troubled acceptance of his own and the world’s violent destructiveness has an equivalence in his affinity with horses and his ability as a rider and horseman. It is, first of all, his quality of being with horses that renders Grady a figure of stature in the novel: The boy who rode on slightly before … sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been. (23) Grady talks to and of his horses with matter-of-fact acceptance of their equal being with humans: ‘“He ain’t goin to like it.” “Who, Wallace?” [human] “No. Redbo” [horse]’ (24) or ‘He thought the horse had handled itself well and as he rode he told it so’ (125). And, although not specifically named as a whisperer, it is his special ability to back wild horses quickly, gently and with understanding of their understanding – in precisely the manner attributed to whisperers in other texts – that gains him privilege at the Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la Purisma Conception. Throughout the novel, McCarthy describes the actions of humans and horses as having equal agency and particularity: ‘They waited for him to arrive if he would. It wasn’t long before the horses raised their heads and stood staring downstream’ (44); ‘Midriver the horses were swimming, snorting and stretching their necks out of the water, their tails afloat behind. They quartered downstream with the current, the naked riders leaning forward and talking to the horses’ (45); ‘He rode back in the dark. The horse quickened its step’ (6). In the swift shifts between subjects, and between human modes of thought and action and horse perception and action, there is a recognition of the particularly human combination of speculative thought with activity as existing alongside, and in sympathetic relation to, the particularity of the horse’s bodily way of perceiving, recognising and acting. Thus, horses in this text are

Elspeth Graham 75

not depicted as other. This is not, as in the earlier texts I have discussed, because knowledge of them is recuperated into the human, but because horses, like humans, are participants with their own quiddity in a larger whole. Difference between horses, like difference between humans, is marked and recognised, but not assimilated. (Among humans, dialogues in Spanish are not translated for any non-Spanish speaking, Anglophone reader or character.) Difference is. All forms of being are acknowledged in their own particularity and are presented as aspects of a wider life. The human and the horse both participate in a natural world where all elements are, and act according to, their essential way of being. This is not a mystified, animist vision of nature, but one in which humans, animals and environment are all active and acted upon in their interfused being. McCarthy’s characteristic stylistic manipulations, in which sentences pared down to a single subject, verb and object are interspersed with sentences that depend solely on accretion of phrases (often depicting continuous action, states of being and sensory reception of an environment and the movements within it), serve as an enactment of this vision of interparticipative being. Although All the Pretty Horses is full of deaths, the animal and the natural environment are not allied with death as something which the human must ward off in order to protect and preserve its humanity. Rather, death and life participate in one another. Likewise, in the novel’s central thought about horse and human intersubjectivity, it is what is between horses and humans that produces horses as horses and humans as humans. John Grady, as rider, is not an initiate in a mystery, but is a figure who embodies, through the very combination of his physical and psychic attunement to horses, full commitment to the passionate ordinariness of life’s struggle in a past world where humans lived in direct contact with the natural.

Conclusion: ‘A breath that touches in words’ Horses as domesticated working animals occupy a highly particular place in human culture. As large, fast, strong animals, they embody ideas of freedom, strangeness and the unpredictable power of the natural other. According to archeological evidence, however, they have also been a familiar part of human life for 6,000 years – and in the Western world they were central to life from antiquity to the 1930s (Budiansky 1997, 5). The fascination with horses evident in the selection of horse-whisperer texts I have considered here is perhaps an effect of the relatively recent loss of that everyday, central relationship with

76

Towards a New Literary Humanism

horses. It is both the proximity and the distance of the history of the human relationship with horses – and, by extension, with other animals and the natural world – that allows that relationship to become a focus for wider thought about the place of humans in the world and about what it means to be human. The fictional texts explored here are shadowed by nostalgia for a past where humans lived in awareness of natural processes and rhythms even as they recognise the inevitability of historical process, and of benefits that have occurred to humanity (and maybe to some animals too) from a liberal, technologically enhanced modernity. But, just as keenly, these texts are also shaped by those broader anxieties about what it means to be human that inform the series of more abstract questions posed in the philosophical and psychoanalytic writings of late modernity invoked here. All these writings, fictional or philosophical, seek to articulate a way in which the animal, the intuitive, the fully relational can be recognised as an aspect of our embodiment as humans living in the world – a world of human, organic and non-organic others. They all embody, in their thought or the fabric of their textuality, the idea that if we are to realise fully our humanness-in-the-world, we need to recognise the non-human in and around us, in our living of life and, particularly, through our use of the most defining of our attributes, our human capacity for meaning and language. As Luce Irigaray’s essay ‘A Breath that Touches in Words’ reminds us: ‘a language ... that is founded on speech, yet pays no heed to the silence and breath making it possible, might well lead to a lack of respect for life; for one’s own life, for the other’s life, for others’ lives’ (Irigaray 1996, 122) It is perhaps such a reminder, these texts suggest, that is whispered to us in the breath of horses.

Notes 1. My reference to the Law here and throughout my essay, as to the Symbolic, is an allusion to Lacan’s terminology. 2. See Clark (1997) for a full account analysis of Levinas’s thought about animals, beginning with the role played in identifying humanness by the dog Bobby who befriends him and other Jewish prisoners during their internment by the Nazis in Camp 1492. 3. This is exemplified by reference to Melville’s Moby Dick (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 244).

4 Judith Butler and the Catachretic Human Inge Arteel

In recent years, literary theory and cultural studies have witnessed a conspicuous revival of the human subject. In the wake of its poststructuralist deconstruction – and facilitated rather than thwarted by that same deconstruction – a renewed conception of the human subject is emerging that is neither outspokenly anti-humanist nor nostalgically humanist. Indeed, it might be called posthumanist in its infusion of the notion of the human with poststructuralist and postmodernist insights and knowledge (Geddes 2007, 70). A telling example out of many is the 2005 international conference The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics, which had as one of its main organisers Judith Butler, a name not commonly associated with a return to humanist principles. Co-organiser Domna Stanton, in her foreword to the collection of the conference papers, explicitly distanced the conference from Enlightenment humanism with ‘its blind spots and its dramatic failures’ (Stanton 2006, 1518). However, she does not reject the concept of humanism in the humanities altogether; instead, she regards the many ‘discourses of difference’ that have emerged within the humanities since the 1970s as tools to ‘dissent from and revise traditional or dominant readings and understandings’ (1519). Endorsing Todorov’s phrase ‘critical humanism’ (Todorov 1993), Stanton speaks of ‘critical humanities’ that she considers to have an explicitly political task in rethinking ‘progressive, emancipatory practices’ (Stanton 2006, 1523). Differing from Todorov, however, who states that ‘“it is not possible, without inconsistency, to defend human rights with one hand and deconstruct the idea of humanity with the other”’ (quoted in Stanton 2006, 1523),1 Stanton wants to think together the possibility of defending human rights and the deconstruction of the fixed ideas about the human that 77

78

Towards a New Literary Humanism

may lie at the basis of them. It is exactly here that Judith Butler joins in with her project of rethinking the human.

Poststructuralism, literature and the human Though nearly two decades and more than a handful of important book publications have gone by since the publication of Gender Trouble (1990), Butler’s reputation is still almost exclusively associated with the notion, often couched by Butler herself in explicitly anti-humanist terms, of gender performativity. However, her recent work – though far from returning to an ‘old school’ humanism – does indicate a growing and more systematic concern to build alliances between her poststructuralist view on the human subject and the need to redefine the human and humanity in the context of transnational globalised conflicts and debates. In what follows, I want to argue that this redefinition or rethinking of the human has been a motivating urge in Butler’s writing all along. I will therefore retrace the presence of this urge in her earlier work before examining her more explicit rethinking of the human in her recent publications. The narrative which this chapter charts – about the journey of a thinker from an apparently anti-humanist position to a revisionary humanist one – is a narrative that could be told about a number of other thinkers and critical movements, but in the case of Butler it is one that also has a particular bearing on literary studies. Literary criticism and theory over the last decades have been conspicuously influenced by Butler’s theory of (gender) performativity (Armstrong 2006, 106). Although Butler herself only rarely analyses literary texts, her success in the field is not surprising. Prior to a philosopher of the subject, Butler can be considered a philosopher of language and rhetoric: it is the performative quality of language and the linguistic performativity underlying all discourses and ‘subjectivating’ dynamics to which her interests return again and again. In the context of a ‘new literary humanism’ which has ‘affectively charged sensuousness’ as one of its key terms (see the Introduction to this volume), Butler’s work seems especially relevant, because throughout her work she has been concerned with the affective force of linguistic performativity, with what language ‘does’ to people and what they do to each other in and through words, whether this is to coercively essentialise their gender identity, to wound each other or, conversely, to recognise their vulnerability. However open to (discursive) transformation Butler as a poststructuralist philosopher thinks the ‘human’ is, there is a continuing ethical awareness in her work which

Inge Arteel 79

provides a tentative normative basis for human interaction, based on the recognition of the primary existential categories of vulnerability and mourning. It is in her (albeit few) comments on literary texts that Butler offers us some of the most striking examples of how literature activates the ‘upsetting’ (in two senses – emotional and disruptive) power of language.

Subjectivity as subjection, humanism as oppression Judith Butler started her philosophical explorations of the human subject with a study of Hegel. In Subjects of Desire (1987), she critically analyses the desire for pure self-knowledge of the Hegelian subject. In Butler’s reading, Hegel himself undermines the autonomy of this process: the self only gets to know itself through the usurpation of the other in the self. Consequently, the relation between self and other can be called one of subjection. However, the resulting positions of master and slave are not bound up in a fixed dichotomy: the master depends on the slave to support and strengthen his self-knowledge, and the slave in his turn acquires a certain freedom in being the one upon whom the master depends. In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997a), Butler sets out a more encompassing ‘theory of subjection’, with, apart from Hegel, chapters on Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault and Althusser. Here, the philosophical perspective is combined with discourse theory and a stronger psychoanalytic orientation. Butler asks how power structures are internalised in the psyche of the subject in a way that empowers the subject to exceed the original subjection. This implies that the power of the subjected subject, in being a repetition or imitation of the originating subjecting power, also always brings about a displacement of the originating power (Butler 1997a, 17). One form of subjection with which Butler is especially preoccupied is gender identity. In Gender Trouble, Butler applies the linguistic turn to her Hegelian subject theory and analyses the production through language of ‘discrete’, ‘intelligible’ genders – that is, genders that can be recognised as either feminine or masculine within the heterosexual norm. In the dominant symbolic order, only the ‘intelligible’ genders are considered to be human genders; this gendering is ‘part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary culture’ (Butler 1990, 139). The hidden agenda, as it were, behind this gendering is to ‘safeguard certain tenets of humanism’ (9), tenets which Butler identifies as ‘the metaphysics of substance’ and the ‘heterosexual matrix’. These notions imply a stable sex category (male or female) expressed through

80

Towards a New Literary Humanism

a stable gender category (masculine or feminine) and defined and sanctioned through a stable sexual desire (heterosexuality). It is in the failed questioning of this heteronormativity and the presentation of a coherent category of ‘women’ that Butler sees grounds to reject ‘a humanist feminist position’ (10).2 Gendering is, in other words, ‘prior to the emergence of the “human”’ (Butler 1993, 7), something Butler elaborates upon in her next book, Bodies that Matter. Here she demonstrates the normative process of ‘humanization’ with examples from gender discourses that ‘orchestrate, delimit, and sustain that which qualifies as “the human”’ (8). Butler is careful to distance her project from a strictly structuralist reading of construction that would reduce construction to determinism and presuppose an impersonal Subject (Power, Discourse) initiating the act of construction. Instead, she considers construction as ‘a process of reiteration’ (9) which produces and destabilises categories. Construction is, in other words, also always deconstruction, producing along with the normative category of the gendered human something or someone other, ‘a constitutive “outside”’: ‘for the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less “human”, the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable’ (8). As the title of her book indicates, Butler explicitly sets out to focus on the relationship between bodily materiality and humanisation. In the regulatory system of normative humanisation, only bodies that we can identify as fixed ‘matter’ do matter, that is, count as human. Consequently, it is in ‘abject’ bodies, bodies that ‘fail to materialize’ (16), that Butler not only situates the fortification of the norm but also the potential for the disruption of normative gendering and for a radical rearticulation of bodies that matter. The human as a prescriptive category is thus opened up to other, hitherto marginalised possibilities. Norms become questionable once they are ‘troubled’ by what they leave out. So far – we might say – so poststructuralist, if by poststructuralist we mean a linguistically rooted embrace of difference and a resistance to normative subjectivity, equated with subjection. Butler does not use explicitly humanist discourse to describe her resistance to subjection because humanism is part of the problem rather than the antidote to it. Nevertheless, appeals to norms have always been shadowed by ideals of emancipation in humanism’s diverse (sometimes contradictory) lexicon, and emancipation, broadly speaking, is the driver of Butler’s version of poststructuralism. But it is not the only driver, as she is also increasingly concerned with the issue of responsibility and especially responsible speech. This concern brings back into play the issue of

Inge Arteel 81

norms, and whether norms are always and everywhere oppressive or can instead contribute to a shared recognition of human vulnerabilities, for which we should as ethical beings take responsibility. This dialectic between anti-normative and normative perspectives can be traced in Butler’s Excitable Speech. Here, as in Bodies that Matter, ‘rearticulation’ and ‘reappropriation’ are key words in a book that also signals her preoccupation with the emotional impact of language. In naming, categorising and ordering reality, language can be considered to be unavoidably violent, harmfully normalising. Especially violent is the phenomenon of hate speech, on which Butler concentrates. Hate speech is the speech act that hurts, violates and eventually – and this is where a normative perspective of a positive kind is implied – dehumanises the other. Butler answers this violence with the dynamics of language itself. Each speech act contains an element of failure in at least two senses: the speaking subject is never fully in control of its speech act and the addressee is never fully addressed by the speech act. In this failure lies the possibility of ‘insurrectionary speech’ (Butler 1997b, 163), rebellious speech that can counter linguistic violence through its reappropriation, recontextualisation or contestation of the violent, injuring speech acts. In poststructuralist fashion, Butler links the failure to control the speech act to the notion of ‘excess’: the meaning of a speech act always ‘exceeds’ the utterance (28). The excess cannot be controlled by the sovereign speaker and causes the speech act to miss its intended effects. Exactly this excess can be used by the addressee to subvert or redirect the effect of the utterance. Although we could read this analysis of speech acts as either excusing the ‘perpetrator’ at least to some extent or as unduly stressing the responsibility of the addressee, it seems in the first place to stem from Butler’s endeavour to provide an answer to the unfruitful dynamics of victimisation which often assume the total success of the reduction of the addressee to a paralysed, silenced victim.3 Excitable Speech is a key work in Butler’s oeuvre, as it shows the relevance of poststructuralist language philosophy for countering the coercive norms of state-produced speech acts. But it is also relevant because of its critical revision of an absolute – and perhaps ‘uncritically humanist’ – defence of the freedom of speech, a defence maintained even when dealing with overtly dehumanising speech acts that originate from speaking subjects situated in a dominant position of power. Butler adds an explicitly ethical and again affective dimension to her speech act analysis: not only does the book contain a call for a responsible use of language, it also invites the speaking subject to

82

Towards a New Literary Humanism

consider its own linguistic vulnerability. Each human being becomes a subject by its being addressed by the other. This implies that each subject, even the ‘perpetrator’ of linguistic violence, is subjected to language. An awareness of this subjection might stimulate a responsible attitude towards language. The fundamental vulnerability of each human being – which, it should be clear, does not equal victimisation – becomes a key concept in the volumes Precarious Life and Undoing Gender. It is in these two collections of essays that Butler turns to a more explicit analysis of what counts as a human life and what is considered less human from a Western perspective. Together with the recognition of vulnerability, the notion of ‘grievable lives’ enters the picture here as a foundational emotive and ethical category. In the introduction to Precarious Life, Butler situates the essays in the post-9/11 era: they were written ‘in response to the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from those events’ (Butler 2004a, xi). Butler learns two lessons out of 9/11: the fundamental dependency of human beings on others and the importance of mourning to make for a human life. The first lesson implies a thorough rethinking of the notion of the human subject as autonomous or of autonomy as an aim worth fighting for, be it on the personal or the political level. Again, Butler distinguishes between the subject in power, which wants to maintain its autonomy, and the powerless subject, which strives for autonomy. In the first case, wanting to maintain one’s autonomy inevitably leads to aggression against those who (supposedly) threaten it. Butler proposes the term of ‘interdependency’ as a way to imagine a more peaceful global political community, rather than ‘radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty’ (xiii). Only when you let go of your own supposed autonomy and acknowledge your fundamental dependency on others can you prevent your fear, injury or anger from turning into aggression. On the other hand, subjected people’s striving for autonomy should always be embedded in a reflection on ‘myself as invariably in community’ (Butler 2004b, 21), on the dependency that is inherent to one’s longing to be recognised by the other as autonomous, and should be accompanied by a critical view on the exclusionary effects of one’s yearnings. Recognition of the dead and the right to mourn them are additional principles that Butler uses to analyse the humaneness of a society. What counts as human is closely connected to what counts as grievable. Lives that are considered worth grieving for count as human lives. Only the dead we can mourn publicly, the bodies we are allowed to bury, count as human. Butler

Inge Arteel 83

takes her examples not only from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reminds us of the huge taboos at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the US, a silencing now imposed upon the African AIDS victims. In the title essay of Precarious Life, Butler deals critically with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and proposes some first outlines of what she hopes to become an ethics of non-violence. This ethics, based on vulnerability, on the awareness of ‘how easily human life is annulled’ (2004a, xvii), has hardly anything to do with softness or passivity. Rather, it originates in an irresolvable tension at the centre of human life and human encounters: the desire to live and survive and to kill the one who threatens your life, who confronts you with your vulnerability on the one hand, and the anxiety about hurting the other on the other hand, a tension that does not make any rational sense. Butler explicitly calls for the humanities to confront this tension: ‘If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense’ (151). One could define Butler’s reading of Levinas as a Nietzschean reappropriation of Levinas’s quasi-religious conception of otherness: Levinas’s godlike face of the Other – which at the same time provokes and prohibits murder – is stripped of its divinity. The struggle between life and death that the face of the other engenders is put at the heart of human subjectivity itself.4 To conclude this outline of Butler’s rethinking of the human, I will consider her view on the human as a ‘category’. In a Foucaultian way, Butler draws attention to the historical character of the human and the need for a critical archeology of the term (Butler 2006b, 1659). The definition of the human has changed over the course of time, as have the ‘inhuman’ minorities which the category has produced. That means that it is not and need not be an absolute category, a foundation. Butler proposes the human as an unpredictable category, open to future changes and without us knowing or controlling what form it will take: ‘This means that we must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world’ (2004b, 35). Consequently, her aim is not to adapt ever more forms of the human to the existing categorisation, but to alter the category itself. One way of doing this is through the notion of ‘ecstasy’. Being ‘ec-static’ means, according to Butler, being beside oneself, being dispossessed or ‘undone’, ‘whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage’ (20). Regarding the human as ‘ec-static’ implies seeing the subject as being invariably in community – a notion

84

Towards a New Literary Humanism

she distinguishes from ‘relationality’, the latter implying that individuals remain intact in their relation to each other. This view might build the first step to the formation of an alternative political ‘collectivity’ that – referring to her radical democratic stance – avows ‘that one’s own position is not sufficient to elaborate the spectrum of the human, that one must enter into a collective work in which one’s own status as a subject must, for democratic reasons, become disoriented, exposed to what it does not know’ (36). In the field of international human rights – to return to the topic at the beginning of this chapter – Butler argues in favour of cultural translation (38). Translation is a process that is mutually affecting: both the self and the other are changed. It is a process that resignifies and confounds supposedly fundamental categories, and questions the exclusionary effects that these categories inevitably produce. International human rights see themselves confronted with the task of constantly redefining and renegotiating the human. The notion of universality can be rescued or reappropriated if it is understood as the endeavour to ‘include in the human the very “other” against which the human was defined. In this sense, in this more radical usage, “universality” … becomes an antifoundationalism’ (190). And yet, as we have seen in Butler’s persistent emphasis upon vulnerability and mourning, this anti-foundationalism, which she advances to counter the dehumanising effects of a normative concept of humanity, is not so ‘open’ as to empty the term ‘human’ entirely of normative content. Vulnerability and mourning are the affective categories that set the lines along which cultural translation should take place. Butler’s growing concern with the notion of the human, as outlined above, bears testimony to an equally growing interest in an ethical project. Over the years, her writing style has consequently become more practical, increasingly turning its attention to concrete human beings in the local or global reality, to embodied experiences of (de)humanisation.5 Butler does not strive towards an ethics that could be universally applicable, but does search for an ethics that could be universally negotiable. She is careful to reflect critically on the violence of an ethics whose rules of behaviour are supposedly grounded in a firm, transparent and infallible subject position, disconnected from rhetorical and social critique (Butler 2005, 135). Instead, and in line with the above-mentioned critique of sovereignty, she proposes an ethics of ‘humility and generosity’ (42) that takes as its subject the ‘fragile and fallible’ (104) human being struggling with its constraints and confronting the social context in which it is embedded.6 Notwithstanding her resistance to what she sees as the violence of normative categories, Butler does allow her ethical

Inge Arteel 85

project to be normative: ‘But there is a normative aspiration here, and it has to do with the ability to live and breathe and move and would no doubt belong somewhere in what is called a philosophy of freedom’ (2004b, 219).7 It is interesting to compare this quotation – with its existentialist and passionate tone and its stress on corporeality – with Butler’s reserved reference, signalled by the use of quotation marks, to normativity in Bodies that Matter, and voiced in exemplary poststructuralist terms: ‘If there is a “normative” dimension to this work, it consists precisely in assisting a radical resignification of the symbolic domain, deviating the citational chain toward a more possible future to expand the very meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body in the world’ (1993, 21–2). By contrast, the recent text imagines ‘becoming possible’ as an acknowledgement of, and struggle with, bodily and material constraints (‘breathe and move’) rather than linguistic limitations.

Towards the catachretic human As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Butler only rarely presents an extensive reading of a literary text. The few readings that are available in print, however, are informed by the above-examined dialectic between a poststructuralist anti-foundationalism and foundational categories of human existence. For Butler as a philosopher of language, literature provides a realm of recognition of the deeply affecting performative force of language. In literary texts, we witness, and are invited to identify with, wounded selves, selves that are wounded largely because of their exclusion from the realm of normative human identities inscribed in language. Yet, for Butler as a moral philosopher, literature also offers an exploratory site for re-imagining the human which, though implicated in ideological and social constraints – Butler never opts for an escapist utopianism – moves beyond them to produce more equitable notions of the human. In Butler’s texts on literature that I want to discuss here, a specific rhetorical and literary figure comes to the fore that in an almost exemplary way embodies the dialectic between a normative ethics and a questioning of norms, a figure we can term the ‘catachretic human’. It is important to stress, however, that this figuration or trope does not aspire to a tidy synthesis of the dialectical tension. Interestingly enough, Butler extensively develops her thoughts on the catachretic human in her reading of a classical text, Sophocles’s play

86

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Antigone. Butler’s interest in the figure of Antigone is raised by her concern that feminism increasingly seeks recourse to the state and the legal system in order to implement its aims, a concern she already voiced in Excitable Speech.8 She contrasts this current feminist strategy with the defiance and anti-authoritarianism that traditionally have been linked with the figure of Antigone and is even momentarily tempted to present Antigone, ‘as many humanists have’ (Butler 2000b, 2), as ‘an example’ (1). Butler identifies two main questions the play poses: ‘whether there can be kinship – and by kinship I do not mean the “family” in any specific form – without the support and mediation of the state, and whether there can be the state without the family as its support and mediation’ (5). In an exemplary deconstructionist reading, Butler demonstrates the mutual implication of kinship and state, both on the thematic and the linguistic level of the play. To make her rebellious claim, Antigone adopts the language of the state and the law, by doing so investing her oppositional politics with scandalous impurity (5), ‘confounding the distinction between the two [state and opposition] at a rhetorical level’ (11). Impurity is also at stake regarding Antigone’s gender: she is referred to as ‘manly’ on more than one occasion. But it is especially her kinship bonds that represent impurity, being determined by incestuous ties. Butler offers an extended reading (57–82) of the ‘kinship trouble’ (62) at the heart of the play and questions the restrictive kinship rules as promoted by a structuralist psychoanalysis that cannot imagine any symbolic order outside of the oedipal scheme: ‘The symbolic is precisely what sets limits to any and all utopian efforts to reconfigure and relive kinship relations at some distance of the oedipal scene’ (20). Instead of reading ‘the symbolic place of the father’ as contingent and thus variable, psychoanalysis considers it to be contingent but still universal, granting it a nearly theological status (21), which prompts Butler to conclude that it is the symbolic that leads to Antigone’s death: Antigone’s love for her brother implies her condemnation to death under the symbolic law of the father, as her desire ‘abrogates precisely the kinship relations that articulate the Lacanian symbolic, the intelligible conditions for life’ (53). Instead of subscribing to Lacan’s view that Antigone positions herself outside of the law by acting on a ‘death-driven movement internal to desire’ (52), Butler puts the responsibility on the symbolic kinship rules and questions the constraints they put on the liveability of human desire. Though Antigone allegorically points to the crisis of kinship norms, her story is not that of a successful subversion (indeed, her collision with the imposed limits of kinship lead to her death), let alone of a promising view on the future. Her fate therefore should not be romanticised or

Inge Arteel 87

presented as an example (23). However, the play can provide a starting point to reflect on ‘a poststructuralism of kinship’ (66, emphasis added), which does not content itself with a subversion of the law but strives for the law’s radical redrawing. Butler therefore does not subscribe to the liberal Lacanian view that the symbolic place of the father and the mother can have multiple inhabitants, even of any gender. Instead, poststructuralist kinship has to let go of the fixation on heteronormativity, family and blood ties. Kinship can for instance also find its basis in ‘consensual affiliation’ or ‘the social organization of need’ (74).9 For Butler, Antigone’s struggle with state-imposed kinship norms reveals itself in the first place as a struggle with linguistic norms. Butler points to the highly ambivalent connotations of the words Antigone uses, an ambivalence Antigone herself is not aware of and that she cannot control. The most prominent example is her use of the word ‘brother’, which for her can only refer to Polyneices – ‘she continues to insist on the singularity and non-reproducibility of this term of kinship’ (77) – but for the reader allows for links with her other brother Eteocles and even her father/brother Oedipus. Butler defines this ambivalence as ‘a place of being between life and death’ (78). Antigone’s desire and grief for her brother have no place in speech but nevertheless claim one, ‘figuring the nonhuman at the border of the human’ (79), the excluded non-human claiming for itself the category of the ‘human’. For Butler, then, the notion ‘human’ has a double meaning: ‘the normative one based on radical exclusion and the one that emerges in the sphere of the excluded’ (81). In this ‘shadowy realm’ (81), a phrase Butler borrows from Hannah Arendt, ‘the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage’ (82). It is this semantic uncertainty, drawn from literary analysis and summed up in the rhetorical trope of catachresis – the use of a wrong or improper word for the context – that in the publications following Antigone’s Claim Butler will work out into the positive political notion of ‘becoming possible’. Antigone’s Claim is Butler’s only lengthy reading of a literary text.10 However, in the work of Franz Kafka, whose name crops up regularly throughout her books, Butler seems to find equally important material to develop her thoughts on the catachretic human. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler deals with two of Kafka’s short stories.11 Drawing on the late Foucault, she considers both narrating the self and reading the other as aesthetic and ethical practices. For self and other to ‘become recognizably human’ (Butler 2005, 30), to be ‘readable’ (29) as human, fitting within these normative frames, is a condition sine qua non. The limits of these frames of recognition are tested to the extreme in Kafka’s

88

Towards a New Literary Humanism

story ‘Cares of a Family Man’, where the reader is confronted with Odradek, a figure that, though son-like in his function in the patriarchal household, bodily or materially speaking bears hardly any resemblance to the human. Following Adorno’s reflections on the story, Butler reads Odradek’s ‘vacating the human form … in the face of parental judgment’ (61) as opening up a possibility of overcoming the violence in the family, that is, in the social institution in which Odradek is subjected to dehumanising violence (in the name of the human) in the first place. With his uncertain ontological status, Odradek’s sheer presence interrupts the circle of violence. Though he might be as equally unsuitable an example as Antigone – as for his survival he pays the price of vacating his human form – Odradek, in his scandalous defiance of the (de)humanising frames of recognition, in his becoming the catachretic, improper and unfitting human, does express a moment of hope. Both Adorno and Butler do not present the in- or non-human as an ideal, but as a necessary step in a critical assessment of the conditions that produce the human. The confrontation with the unfitting human therefore provides ‘an essential means by which we become human in and through the destitution of our humanness’ (106). Butler’s reading of Odradek makes it abundantly clear that the notion of the catachretic human does not strive toward an inclusion of the inhuman in the human, but explores an opening up, an upsetting of the human by the inhuman. We can connect the trope of the catachretic human that Butler identifies in literary works with her thoughts on insurrectionary speech. For Butler, literature as a critical force is not initially concerned with elaborating upon utopian alternatives for a more human future; instead, it rhetorically and semantically can work to undermine the ontological status of dehumanised exclusion, thereby creating moments that interrupt the circle of violence.12 Literature then, in escaping any final meaning and even stimulating ‘failures’ and ‘misreadings’ to unfold themselves,13 can provide the ideal stage for ‘doing’ or ‘performing’ theory on the catachretic human.14 Whereas in her earlier works Butler mainly stressed linguistic and rhetorical rearticulation and reappropriation of language as a means of critique – and was confronted with the question of how one could distinguish between a critical and an uncritical rearticulation – in her more recent works she does embed her poststructuralist linguistics more strongly in social critique, in the examination of ‘diverse social formations of power’ (Hanssen 2000, 175). Nevertheless, it is right to say that reading and interpreting words remain central to her methodology. Interpretation is for Butler not a process to be shunned. She stresses the

Inge Arteel 89

importance of hermeneutics for her discourse analysis (Butler studied with Hans-Georg Gadamer in Heidelberg), a critical hermeneutics, that is, ‘that would know and mark its inability to capture what it seeks to know’ (Butler 2006a, 283). In a recent article written as a tribute to the deceased French writer Monique Wittig (Butler 2007), Butler emphasises the importance of reading as allowing for the subversion of conceptual frameworks and provoking disorientation. Rather than defining the potential of literary writing, Butler seems to be concerned with reflecting the potential of the reading process. Her reading does not set out to look for literary solutions to ethical dilemmas, but rather considers the cognitive and emotional effects on readers of their interaction with literature: the potentially unsettling process of reading might sharpen the awareness for ethical dilemmas rather than solving them.15 Though Butler can be said to partake in the ethical turn in the humanities, she makes sure to safeguard a right to ‘ethical ambivalence’: hers is a way of reading that results in ever more questions rather than answers, but ones that are nevertheless anchored by her concern to place the concept of human vulnerability at their centre.

Notes 1. Stanton here quotes Todorov 1987, 190. See also Halliwell and Mousley 2003, 16. 2. Interestingly enough, and illustrating Butler’s current more nuanced understanding of ‘humanism’, she retrospectively inscribes Gender Trouble with a humanist concern, when she writes in ‘The Question of Social Transformation’ (mark the confessional tone!): ‘But let me be more honest than that. I wanted something of gender trouble [sic] to be understood and accorded dignity, according to some humanist ideal, but I also wanted it to disturb – fundamentally – the way in which feminist and social theory think gender’ (Butler 2004b, 207). 3. Butler’s reading of excess can be considered as an example of what Halliwell and Mousley call ‘humanising excess’ or at least as an example of putting excess in the service of subject agency (Halliwell and Mousley 2003, 15). 4. For a first exploration of the differences and correspondences between Nietzsche and Levinas, see Butler 2000a. An excellent analysis of Butler’s ethics and her critical readings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault and Levinas is provided in Loizidou 2007, especially 45–86. 5. A good example is Butler’s analysis of demonstrations in California in the spring of 2006 by Spanish speaking immigrants, living and working illegally in the US (Butler and Spivak 2007, 66ff). The singing immigrant workers are a good example of insurrectionary speech. 6. Especially interesting in the context of humanism and literature is Butler’s critique of the demand for coherent narratives, in that they force the

90

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

Towards a New Literary Humanism speaking subject to make up a narrative that is not his/hers. The critique is equally illuminating on the level of human rights, when thinking, for instance, of the situation of political refugees, of whom the state demands that the autobiographical stories with which they seek asylum be flawless. What Butler terms here rather abruptly ‘philosophy of freedom’ – she usually opposes the notion of freedom – is analysed as ‘moral philosophy’ by Annika Thiem (2008). Butler is one amongst many to turn to Antigone in search for answers to contemporary ethical questions. See McCance 2007. An example of the latter is the relationship between people living with HIV/ AIDS and the buddies who care for them (Butler 2000b, 74). Bodies that Matter contains two chapters in which Butler reads literary texts in detail. In ‘Dangerous Crossing: Willa Cather’s Masculine Names’, she considers Cather’s ‘destabilization of gender and sexuality’ (143) through the practice of naming; in ‘Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge’, she deals with Larsen’s intertwining of ‘normative heterosexuality’ and ‘racially pure reproduction’ (167). Butler herself does not use the notion ‘catachretic human’ in this book, but her thoughts here are similar to those she explores in her reading of Antigone. Beatrice Hanssen detects in Butler’s linguistic theory a kind of ‘avant-gardist belief in the power of poetry’ (Hanssen 2000, 173). However, it should be added that Butler does not naïvely believe in ‘emancipation through language’ (Butler 2003, 203). See Purvis 2006, 447. For Butler, literary narrative is ‘a place where theory takes place’ (Butler 1993, 182). Dorothy Hale presents an intriguing analysis of the similarities she detects between Martha Nussbaum’s and Judith Butler’s ethical reading of literature – a provocative analysis too, given the antagonistic tension between the two philosophers. However, Hale’s analysis might be less convincing when the divergent political motivations inspiring their respective ethics are taken into account (Hale 2009).

Part II Scepticism, or Humanism at the Limit

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Andy Mousley

Is humanism, literary or otherwise, too naïvely ‘sociable’, too companionable, too clubby in its insistence on whatever it is ‘we’ as human beings are supposed to have in common? And is humanism also too optimistically affirming of ‘the human’, even if, as proposed in the general Introduction, such affirmation is based on literature’s cultivation of deep, rich and complex selves, as opposed to some simpler avowal of, say, our supposedly innate love of beauty, truth or justice? The chapters in this section express scepticism about the values and optimism to which humanism traditionally asks us to subscribe. In interrogating humanism’s positive account of the human, its ‘religion of humanity’, they can be broadly located within the sceptical traditions of modernity (see Introduction). Any ‘new humanism’, as the general Introduction argues, has to be internally robust (by explicitly developing critical terms and principles), but it also has to be reflexive, sceptical and aware of counter-perspectives (some of them coming from posthumanism) that are external to or at a critical distance from it. These chapters provide that necessary kind of critique, although in the case of one of the chapters, by Callus and Herbrechter, the critique also operates in reverse, by showing what ‘high’ literary-humanist values may have to offer posthumanism. The next and final part of this volume does not ‘answer’ the scepticism expressed in this part, but attenuates it, offering as it does a series of contrasting perspectives, which invest to varying degrees and in different ways in humanism as a hopeful social politics.

Richard Chamberlain, ‘Shakespeare’s Refusers: Humanism at the Limit’ Despite their seeming differences, Richard Chamberlain takes as his starting point the connections which exist between humanism and 93

94

Towards a New Literary Humanism

anti-humanism. Notwithstanding the fact that humanism, especially in its liberal manifestation, has often centred upon the free, autonomous individual, and anti-humanism has countered this through its emphasis on the socially constructed nature of subjectivity, both tend to assume that ‘people are essentially sociable beings’. For Chamberlain, the individualism of (liberal) humanism is a circumscribed individualism, ‘relying upon a sense of self which is recognisable, within certain limits, and based on elements of a common culture’. Meanwhile, he argues that anti-humanists ‘tend to make this in-built sociability more explicit’ by decentring the individual ‘who no longer speaks a common language, but is spoken by it’. What both ‘agree to ignore is an account of the genuinely singular’. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, the main focus of Chamberlain’s chapter is on the figure of the refuser in Shakespeare’s plays, a figure who says ‘no’ and keeps on saying no ‘despite the powerful sway of cultural imperatives’. The refuser ‘resists the symbolic’, ‘refuses to be a “subject”, cancelling their social being, which is to say, their being’. Moreover, such figures (Timon, Apemantus, Barnadine, Malvolio, Horatio and Hamlet, amongst others) cannot, according to Chamberlain, be assimilated to the ‘“principled refuser”’ of liberal mythology who ‘might be able but not willing to remain part of a bad society’, for ‘the Shakespearian refuser, even if willing, would not be able’. Instead of heroically affirming agency and resistance, refusal ‘appears to emerge from the individual in an impersonal way’, more as a ‘drive’. Refusers are both human and inhuman, ‘agonised people’ and ‘disturbing, inhuman presences – irruptions of the Real which question the reality we have constructed, and suffer’. Nevertheless, argues Chamberlain, ‘the refuser … must stand as the high point of our humanity: damaged, benumbed, but still saying “no” to false constructions of the human in which we are constantly encouraged to invest’.

Steven Earnshaw, ‘Why Eliot Killed Lydgate: “Joyful Cruelty” in Middlemarch’ Steven Earnshaw’s wide-ranging chapter begins by identifying two key ‘homologies’ between religion and humanism. The first is the ‘narrative movement towards something better if certain conditions are followed: ‘the Kingdom of Heaven for the religious narrative, improvements in the standard of living in the here-and-now for humanism’. The second is ‘a belief in an invisible force’: God in the case of religion, ‘the human spirit’ in the case of humanism. The nineteenth century, argues

Introduction to Part II 95

Earnshaw, was a century when belief in invisible forces became especially difficult, due to the converging emphases of realism, naturalism and positivism upon observable realities. Nevertheless, numerous writers (George Eliot included) ‘do not necessarily concede the contradiction between their emphasis on observing the world as it is … and … a belief in something beyond the visible, in something which cannot be measured by science’. Drawing on the French philosopher Clément Rosset’s view that traditionally philosophy has always added something (typically ‘“God”’, ‘“soul”’, or ‘“spirit”’) to the stubborn, inconvenient particulars of reality in order to make overarching sense of them, Earnshaw’s chapter unravels the intricate relationship not only between novelistic realism and humanism in Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, but also between realism, the ‘really real’ (via Rosset), symbolism and humanism. Rosset’s ‘really real’ is a cruel reality because things happen there which cannot be accommodated – or only with difficulty – within one or another benevolent overarching scheme. The humanistic Eliot may attempt to plot humanist narratives in which characters are assigned meaningful humanist destinies and in which metaphors (such as the scientific metaphor of ‘tissue’ in Middlemarch) take on humanist significance, but plot, character and metaphor can all be read otherwise, as instances of a realism which does not comfortingly add up.

Jeff Wallace, ‘Atomised: Mary Midgley and Michel Houellebecq’ Jeff Wallace’s at once intricate and expansive chapter questions the (Leavisite) perception that literature always and everywhere cultivates humanistic ‘depth’. His specific topic is the relationship between the reductionism with which science has often been associated and literature, the supposedly richer, deeper, more complex humanist counterpart of science. This distinction, which as Wallace points out paradoxically depends on a reductive view of science, is one that underpins Leavisite literary criticism onwards from the foundation of the journal Scrutiny in the 1930s. The two texts discussed in Wallace’s chapter – Science and Poetry (2001) by the English philosopher Mary Midgey and Michel Houellebecq’s novel Atomised (2000) – both identify, according to Wallace, ‘atomistic theory as the source of a fatal reductionism, and attribute[s] the persistence of atomistic thinking within science, and the wider culture, to a prevailing biologism’ (of which Richard Dawkins’s work is an iconic example). However, for Wallace, both these texts

96

Towards a New Literary Humanism

fail in different ways to make good their claims (or assumptions) that literature saves us from such a ‘fatal reductionism’ by restoring a picture of humanity as deep and complex. Two important conclusions emerge from Wallace’s chapter and both have far-reaching implications for this volume. The first is that: ‘In the new, robustly utilitarian environments critically addressed by this current volume, and by literary studies as a discipline, we can ill afford to perpetuate older forms of nebulousness or platitude where either “literature” or “humanism” is concerned.’ Wallace has Midgey in mind here, for while her book ‘in its attention to conceptual detail is unquestionably philosophical’, its claims about the humanistic richness of literature are ‘hollowed out by paucities of theoretical and practical demonstration’. The second conclusion, illustrated through Wallace’s reading of Houellebecq’s novel, is the ‘steadfast refusal of human life to be humanistic … to be human is precisely to have to come to terms with the anti-humanistic aspects of our personalities, behaviours and environments’. This volume provides one answer to the first point in that it furnishes humanist literary criticism with theory, critical terminology and worked examples. The second is a salutary reminder that the ‘richness and complexity’ of the human cannot be guaranteed.

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter, ‘Humanity Without Itself: Robert Musil, Giorgio Agamben and Posthumanism’ Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter’s chapter focuses, as the title suggests, on the challenge presented by posthumanism in its various different guises to humanism’s ideas and assumptions about the human. However, what distinguishes Callus and Herbrechter’s chapter from other such posthumanist challenges is their use of a ‘high modernist’ literary text – Robert Musil’s monumental The Man without Qualities – as their posthumanist representative. Posthumanism, they argue, has tended to establish its own ‘canon’, one that is rooted in popular culture and fiction – and primarily science fiction – rather than in the ‘high’ literary canon to which Musil’s book seems so naturally affiliated. The choice of Musil is shaped in part by Callus and Herbrechter’s desire to examine ‘“a posthumanism without technology”: that is, a posthumanism not solely driven by technological considerations’. But it is also shaped by the urge to think through ‘what it is within literary culture and within the theoretical humanities [represented in their essay by Agamben] that might be worth revisiting by mainstream, technology-minded

Introduction to Part II 97

posthumanism’. What, ask Callus and Herbrechter, does the ‘“high” literary imagination’, as represented by Musil, ‘offer the posthuman?’ The answer, over-baldly stated, is depth. But there is a rich irony here, of course, of which Callus and Herbrechter are all too keenly aware, the irony being that such depth is attached to a character – the ‘man without qualities’ – who becomes progressively depthless. What this novel as a high literary novel shows us is the psychological process of depletion. A bildungsroman in reverse, Musil’s novel, argue Callus and Herbrechter, ‘may offer the most complete dramatisation we have of the psychology of human(ist) qualities suspending themselves before the prospect of pervasive technoculture’.

5 Shakespeare’s Refusers: Humanism at the Limit Richard Chamberlain

I Hamlet. Horatio. Barnardo Horatio.

Very like, very like. Stayed it long? While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred. and Marcellus. Longer, longer. Not when I saw’t. (Shakespeare 2005, Hamlet, 1.2.235–8)

What should we make of Horatio’s negativity, in the light of renewed interest in a humanist response to Shakespeare? Such a return might entail a positive mental attitude, healing our presently alienated condition and enabling literature to act, once more, as a guide to the good life – or at least as a way to face the whole variety of our experience. Yet this second of discord between allies points to an alienation which runs against the ingrained critical assumption that Shakespeare’s plays are life-enhancing and all-embracing. Perhaps Horatio merely seeks to add a detail – ‘Not the time I was there, by the way’ – but his words could be an uncompromising denial of his companions’ account (his curtness and the clipped ‘saw’t’ seem to urge this view). By replying in this style, he draws attention to the suspiciously collective, clamorously asserted aspect of their version. A brief moment of blank refusal manages to question both the immediate factual assertion and a wider context of human relationships. In doing so, it emphasises tensions inevitable in any humanist reading of Shakespeare: the collective, socially agreed or commonsensical attitude is glimpsed as a route to untruth. That Horatio is neither a villain nor a threatening ‘outsider’ (whether a social misfit or a cultural alien), but rather a social insider, Hamlet’s friend and confidant, makes the problem more acute. The refusal of the insider

98

Richard Chamberlain 99

suggests that there is something rotten in the link between the human and the shared. Humanism is often identified with the individual, and anti-humanism with the collective, shared or cultural. Yet humanism is equally ‘cultural’, relying upon a sense of self which is recognisable, within certain limits, and based on elements of a common culture. Despite the theme of the individual, humanists tend to assume, just as much as anti-humanists, that people are essentially sociable beings, that each can exist only through their interaction with others. Anti-humanists tend to make this in-built sociability more explicit, whilst Marxism, in both its humanist and anti-humanist incarnations, pushes that dependence on sharing to a logical, political conclusion. Implicitly, humanist criticism assumes a limitless audience that will share, approve and identify with the picture of the free individual it paints. Anti-humanism decentres the individual, who no longer speaks a common language, but is spoken by it. In poststructuralism and postmodernism, the autonomous individual of humanism becomes a cultural construct, a nexus of interacting and competing discourses, or the product of a disciplinary gaze. Each subject is constituted by its entanglement in the field of culturally-produced meanings. Notably, both broad trends of critical thought tend to view Shakespeare, above all others, as a ‘sharer’ – either as the repository of a universal humanity or as evidence of the ‘circulation of social energy’ (Greenblatt 1988). The untutored genius with whom we share our understanding of the ever-renewed emotions turns out to be a theatrical shareholder embroiled in the material production of early modern culture. Shakespeare’s sociability is an article of faith for both sides. What the two camps agree to ignore is an account of the genuinely singular. Humanism, which defends the individual, is likely to be uncomfortable with humans who fall outside of its unspoken norms or who reject what currently passes for ‘the human’. Anti-humanism is happy with eccentricity and psychosis, as long as these can be positioned within a cultural matrix. The logical conclusion that Marx draws from human interdependence is that the singular individual (at once single, unique and extraordinary) is an end in itself, but at present is precisely an end rather than a reality. That ideal of singularity might be realised in a society in which each is the condition for the development of all, in which individuality is not the product of social coercion, but of liberated – that is, essentially human – relationships: This is communism as the complete and conscious return of man conserving all the riches of previous development for himself as a social,

100

Towards a New Literary Humanism

i.e. human being. Communism as completed naturalism is humanism and as completed humanism is naturalism. It is the genuine solution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man. It is the true solution of the struggle between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. (Marx 1979, 148) Communist society would therefore be one in which it was genuinely possible to enjoy oneself in company, as an expression of one’s social and ‘species’ being. In this condition ‘communal activity and enjoyment, i.e. activity and enjoyment that is expressed and confirmed in the real society of other men, will occur everywhere where this direct expression of sociability arises from the content of the activity or enjoyment and corresponds to its nature’ (Marx 1979, 150). In the here and now, however, as Theodor Adorno might note, there is something deeply suspect about the concept of sharing as the foundation of so much humanist and anti-humanist cultural commentary (Adorno 1974).1 In today’s globalised world, the ideal of participation informs everything from the illusory freedom of ‘social networking’ websites to the spurious collectivity of employers’ demands for ‘teamwork’. The language of communion in the world of the focus group, the paintballing weekend and the interactive TV reality show is incurably contaminated. A culture that champions the individual’s freedom to choose their own way of life enforces more insistently than ever the imperative to join in. The genuinely solitary experience is regarded as unhealthy – sick – and also subversive of a ‘democratic’ social order. The critical force of appeals to the collective is weakened when capital itself insists on comradeship. Consequently, one wonders whether the invention of a new ‘approach’, ‘method’ or ‘theory’ of literary humanism envisaged – albeit with an awareness of the risks involved – in Andy Mousley’s Introduction, with a technical vocabulary ready to go into the latest editions of primers and readers, is not to embrace the logic of that ‘market-place of theories and approaches’ within which critical thought is forced to dance. Can literary humanism, as one more commodity in such a mart, ever be anything other than self-parody, uneasily playing along with the principle of exchange which (in other more pressing contexts) is so indifferent to the survival, let alone the rich inner life, of living people? Shakespeare’s refusers sit uncomfortably with the idea that a literary humanist approach will help us to embrace the possibility of a common humanity, however complexly defined, because, in their own stories,

Richard Chamberlain 101

they change the world or perish – usually the latter – rather than pull up a chair to the table.

II Given these problems with an ethic of shared humanity based on social participation, how disappointing it would be if Timon became reconciled to the Athenians: First Senator. I like this well; he will return again. Timon. I have a tree which grows here in my close, That mine own use invites me to cut down, And shortly must I fell it. Tell my friends, Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree From high to low throughout, that whoso please To stop affliction, let him take his haste, Come hither ere my tree hath felt the axe, And hang himself. I pray you, do my greeting. (Shakespeare 2005, Timon of Athens, 5.2.89–97) Timon learns his refusal from the ‘cynic philosopher’ Apemantus. Once he has become advised of the false friendship of the other nobles and the folly of his own conspicuous generosity, he refuses not just social enjoyment and fellowship, but every standard of human decency: inviting the doomed citizens to come and hang themselves from his solitary tree, right at the end, where there should be some redemptive resolution. It is of no consequence that he is not an admirable character. What is exhilarating is the way he persists so absolutely in his opposition to society. His is a case of sour grapes, but sour grapes with an element of truth that becomes visible through his exaggerated, dramatic refusal. In a world of continual compromises, it is inspiring to see someone utterly unwilling to be persuaded from his course by anything whatsoever. This is the guilty pleasure of reading Timon of Athens. As teachers and critics (and, more generally, members of liberal society) we are expected to value a common culture of reciprocal involvement and balanced, nuanced, collectively ratified judgement. Shakespeare’s plays present a number of figures who develop the implications of Horatio’s inflexible unilateralism, thereby posing significant problems for humanist and anti-humanist criticism. These individuals, who might be called ‘refusers’, live out a traumatic sense of damaged or disingenuous social life, declining to conform to the sociability prescribed

102

Towards a New Literary Humanism

by both philosophies. They often exhibit an unreasonableness, a driven endurance of pain, which makes them scarcely a fit subject for humanist commentary, except as disturbing aberrations. They are probably best represented outside Shakespeare by Sophocles’s Antigone and Melville’s Bartleby: whatever the circumstances and despite the apparently invincible pressure of social expectation, they simply ‘would prefer not to’. Similarly, they unsettle anti-humanist understanding insofar as they absent themselves from a constraining cultural network. Neither way of thinking can fully come to terms with the contradictory nature of the refuser. They remain living, feeling, remembering beings, but are too mutilated by their rejection of, and exclusion from, society to be recognised as fully ‘human’ subjects. They thus function both as agonised people and as disturbing, inhuman presences – irruptions of the Real which question the reality we have constructed, and suffer. As Slavoj Žižek puts it: It is against such a disengagement that Bartleby repeats his ‘I would prefer not to’ – not ‘not to do it’: his refusal is not so much the refusal of a determinate content as, rather, the formal gesture of refusal as such … There is a clear holophrastic quality to ‘I would prefer not to’: it is a signifier-turned-object, a signifier reduced to an inert stain that stands for the collapse of the symbolic order. (Žižek 2006, 384–5) This suggests that Shakespeare’s refusers should be treated as central to his plays. As individuals at the limit of what it means to be human, they are a source of considerable artistic power. However, they go beyond mere studies in alienation: the absolute character of their disengagement is felt, by their oppressors, to threaten the bases (economic, linguistic, psychological) of the social order from which they withdraw their assent. Moreover, refusers prefer not to disappear, but persist as signs of an impossible yet indelible challenge brought into being by some immanent fault in the social-symbolic system.2 These plays, more than most others of their time, are built around this tear in reality, deriving much of their emotional and dramatic impact from its infuriating permanence. Timon, the pupil, and Apemantus, the master, arguably represent the definitive instance of refusal in its Shakespearian form: 1) discontinuing one’s assent, as an insider, to a collective opinion or form of behaviour which is felt to legitimise and integrate the group; 2) persisting as a problem for that group and consequently suffering self-exile or ostracisation. The refuser’s withdrawal of participation casts doubt (and, in effect, aspersions) upon the group; their violation of bonhomie brings to light its inherent violence, its anxious self-regulation as

Richard Chamberlain 103

a coercive entity rather than a free association of individuals. Suffering this opprobrium, there is nowhere for the refuser to go. They might thus be counted as a kind of suicide, impelled to destroy themselves as meaningful subjects because society offers them no place they are able to accept. They are, however, a distinctive kind of suicide because they stay on as the living dead, preventing the processes of social healing which serve to keep an unjust society in place. As experienced by the group, refusal is something like a suicide attack: unexpected, unreasonable and irreversible. One would have to be crazy to refuse, but people do it anyway. This particular brand of insanity, which exposes, through its own extremism, the hidden irrationality of the reasonable and commonsensical, is one to which Shakespeare insistently returns. Anecdotal evidence reinforces this Shakespearian emphasis on rejected enjoyment in acts of refusal. Think of the cold horror felt when one finds oneself in the midst of a friendly social group who suddenly embark upon a drinking game or some other form of formalised, self-policed enjoyment. To demur in such circumstances is felt to be impossible, which suggests that a lot of coerced pseudo-enjoyment must be endured by those who would really ‘prefer not to’. In fact, it is possible to refuse, but the consequences of sitting mutely among others engaged in trying to keep the game going, once punctured, are terrible in a manner disproportionate to the triviality of the situation. Indeed, it is the overtly signalled lightheartedness of the game that unleashes the unbearable consequences of non-compliance: the refuser feels bad; the group who feel refused feel bad. Although they rarely lead to carnal, bloody and unnatural acts under such outwardly convivial circumstances, some of the darkest human emotions are released by the deceptively simple dynamics of this situation. When someone refuses to an absolute degree, it raises the problem, either for the state or the friendly goodfellows, of what to do with this sign of their failure as an all-embracing entity, the embarrassingly hegemonic nature of which has been rendered newly apparent to all. Faced with such a challenging face-off, the state may be driven to kill the refuser, but this too is an admission of failure. The plays make it clear that refusal is not simply admirable. Whilst it might be tempting to imitate Antigone’s principled stand or to fall in love with Bartleby for his quiet subversiveness, we see that Timon overreacts and should have known better, and that (despite certain charming quirks) Malvolio is a fraud. The latter is the best known Shakespearian social suicide, the refuser of cakes and ale, whose purpose is partly to stand as a satirical portrait of Puritanism. Nevertheless, despite the fact that he is there to be ‘notoriously abused’, this does not

104

Towards a New Literary Humanism

quite neutralise the ‘inert stain’ of his refusal. As the butt of the joke, he provides an occasion for everyone else to combine in good fellowship, but his ‘revenge’ is at work, corroding and tainting the collective. His own hypocrisy has exposed the madness of behaviour that everyone considers sane: smiling, dressing up, seeking the approval of others. His calling into question of all festivity is left ringing in the ears of the whole pack of us, characters and audience alike. Enjoyment becomes very complex in this situation. Several refusers seem to elaborate in grimly playful terms upon the systematic ideological destruction wreaked by the gesture of saying no and meaning it, so that refusal appears to produce a parodic version of the ‘game’ of social reality. Timon takes an excessive pleasure in his refusal, toying with the opposition in the most humourless way. His playful redoubling of refusal (also seen when he serves warm water at his last feast) negates the sinister fun of good fellowship. In Measure for Measure, the theme of game-playing and the rules of social enjoyment arise in the treatment of the condemned murderer Barnadine, one of Shakespeare’s most marginal but spectacular refusers: Provost. A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal. (Shakespeare 2005, Measure for Measure, 4.2.144–7) Barnadine is an abject remainder of the human, a leftover within society that proves extremely disconcerting for those attempting to remain in control. He will not be persuaded – he ‘wants advice’ but ‘will hear none’. The man who has no dread of death has no fear of social authority (whether collective or hierarchical) and the maximum punishment it can inflict upon him, but this does not quite capture the special character of Barnadine’s intransigence, his endurance of an alienated condition; neither does it recognise the quandary in which it places his captors. The Provost is partly making it easier for himself by presenting the situation like this. Despite the argument that Barnadine can resist authority because he has nothing to lose, this is to miss the disconcerting effect on that authority which his insouciant disregard for it has.3 The Provost’s words reinforce the sense that, within the thematic world of Shakespeare’s plays, questionable social authority is associated with festivity and play: He hath evermore had the liberty of the prison. Give him leave to escape hence, he would not. Drunk many times a day, if not many

Richard Chamberlain 105

days entirely drunk. We have very oft awaked him as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it; it hath not moved him at all. (4.2.149–54) Barnadine collapses the consensual mechanism of law in response to the deathly enjoyment demonstrated by his warders. Why should they have woken him and pretended to take him away to execution? It is a cruel joke which reveals the arbitrary relation of unjust authority to the individual human being, also suggestive of the boredom felt by those with arbitrary power. This unsettlingly ludic quality to the prison business also comes out in Pompey’s way of summoning the prisoner: Barnadine. (within) A pox o’ your throats! Who makes that noise there? What are you? Pompey. Your friends, sir; the hangman. You must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death. Barnadine. Away, you rogue, away! I am sleepy. Abhorson. Tell him he must awake, and that quickly too. Pompey. Pray, Master Barnadine, awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards. (4.3.23–30) Yet there is also a sense of experiment in the Provost’s trick: would Barnadine continue to refuse even if he thought he was about to die? The experiment is provoked by astonishment at his refusal of the game which the prison has been set up to play. He does not even want to leave, and in this is perhaps most thoroughly a refuser. He embraces his unhappiness, pushing his incarceration to a parodic logical breaking-point. As a refuser, he knows that there is no way out and resolves to persist in this state of torture – although this is not to attribute to him heroic qualities.4 The prisoner’s refusal to countenance the logic of these social transactions, to the extent of refusing to be killed, is worrying for those who are supposed to be pulling the strings. The effect is to wrong-foot those in control. Either they must haul him to death in a horrific struggle or they must give in to their religious qualms and hope to kill him when he is better shriven: Barnadine. Friar, not I. I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets. I will not consent to die this day, that’s certain. Duke. O sir, you must; and therefore, I beseech you, Look forward on the journey you shall go.

106

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Barnadine. I swear I will not die today, for any man’s persuasion. Duke. But hear you – Barnadine. Not a word. If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward, for thence will not I today. Exit. (4.3.56–60) Perhaps significantly, it is ‘fellows’ who are sent after him – ‘After him, fellows; bring him to the block!’ (4.3.62) – those who must still operate within the bonds of social enjoyment and duty in wrenching him to a violent and ignominious end. As it turns out, his execution is delayed in favour of Ragozine’s and then waived, as part of the play’s purportedly redemptive conclusion. Nevertheless, the prison scenes, and Barnadine in particular, highlight one example of Shakespeare’s fascination with the fragility of society in its current coercive form and its curious vulnerability to the impotent, self-destructive gesture of refusal. If he starkly illuminates the issue of the law’s dependence upon assent, he also embodies the doubled-sided character of refusal, being cancelled, abject, yet permanent and immutable.

III Criticism has traditionally sought to defuse the crisis provoked by Shakespeare’s refusers. On this reading, the plays confirm a companionable view of existing society – or, at least, a society that can be renewed or reformed through the process of comic crisis and resolution. It assumes that the plays, the critics and the audience are pleased that the refuser’s challenge can be put aside once it has fulfilled its dramatic function of creating conflict, comic relief or a limited degree of critical reflection on the current social order. The refuser is thus seen as an important part of Shakespeare’s art, but not a central one; he or she does not offer a perspective from which to read the plays and their account of human life. As Leslie A. Fiedler remarks in The Stranger in Shakespeare, ‘the figure of the mocker … seems not to belong to the deepest and earliest level of Shakespeare’s fantasy, the private mythology which preceded any poem or play’ (Fiedler 1974, 16). The stranger, the demonised ethnic or sexual ‘other’ in the plays (of whom Fiedler offers one of the first sympathetic accounts), is to be distinguished from ‘the spoilsport’: the kind of bad boy who, irked by the rules of the game, wants to take his ball and go home – or failing that, will sit on the sidelines and sulk. The spoilsport appears frequently in Shakespeare – initially as a courtly mocker like Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost and the

Richard Chamberlain 107

‘melancholy Jacques’ [sic] in As You Like It, perhaps also, vestigially, as Hamlet himself; and he reappears in surly and unregenerate form as Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Thersites in Troilus and Cressida … (16) The intransigent insider remains for Fiedler an irredeemably selfindulgent, narrow-minded spoiled brat. For the liberal branch of humanist criticism, it is particularly important that Shakespeare the Sharer should continue to flourish. Whilst the presence of the refuser must be acknowledged, their capacity to corrode the bonds of common humanity should be played down. In a recent series of papers surveying Shakespeare’s ‘comic refusers’, Douglas A. Northrop provides a much more subtle and detailed account of them than Fiedler’s brief sketch, but the broad implications of his argument are along the same lines. For him, ‘Shakespeare uses the role of the comic refuser to sharpen the sense of comedy and to highlight the particular issues of the play by having one character conspicuously absent from the comic resolution and from the festivities that signal the resolution’, adding that: ‘The refuser often functions as a critic of the emerging society’ (Northrop 2005, 1).5 Even if the ‘new society’ towards which the comedies point is still flawed, the feeling is still that criticism should align itself with the mainstream, that the message of the plays is, in the end, that the individual should seek social integration. The power of Shakespearian comedy is to reunite the fractured social totality, not to plunge it into a transformative catastrophe; the tragic cost of this, however, is that someone has to be left out: ‘[t]he comic resolution gathers together those people who are able and willing to become something they should have been or were before but have departed from … It excludes the one who does not grow internally, who is not cured of his illness’ (Northrop 2003, 74–5). As the metaphor of disease suggests, this is (once again) not the exclusion of a threatening other, but of one of us, an insider who must be jettisoned because they have ceased to function in the approved way. However, the phrasing of this formulation leaves open the possibility of a more radical, if unsettling view of refusal. That the saved are ‘able and willing’ to adapt implies that the damned are incapable of assenting to their social element and that the refuser is impelled to refuse by a pressure which cannot be reduced to personality. Whilst the ‘principled refuser’, a familiar figure in liberal mythology, might be able but not willing to remain part of a bad society, the Shakespearian refuser, even if willing, would not be able. Refusal appears to emerge from the individual in an impersonal way, short-circuiting both humanist agency and an anti-humanist vision of the subject continually caught up in

108

Towards a New Literary Humanism

the play of desire. This makes its experience even more agonising for the person who finds themselves in the position of the refuser, and even more dangerous to the symbolic order which refusal seems to bypass with a fatal blankness. Žižek’s counterposing of constant psychic drives to the promiscuity of desire might offer a useful analogy. As he explains, desire is often read as subversive or destructive, but it also keeps us alive as sane and useful citizens, ever seeking to heal that wound which engenders yet threatens the subject. Lacan proposes an ethics premised on ‘not giving way relative to your desire’, for which Antigone is an exemplary figure: refusal is non-negotiable, it is not to be swayed by involvement, persuasion, compulsion or seduction. Yet the notion of drive seems to describe the character of refusal, according to which refusers are propelled by alien forces emerging from the centre of the human, more faithfully. Comparing it to the implacable Terminator of James Cameron’s films, Žižek reminds us that drive simply persists according to its own demand, not caring about reasonable accommodations or changing tack when circumstances alter (Žižek 1991, 172). There is a danger that, in its involuntary aspect, refusal will roll onwards, attacking the ties of sociability and spreading this disease throughout the social body. Northrop perceives the possibility that the critic is vulnerable, that the intolerance and dogmatism of the refuser might pass from text to commentary: ‘Critical or directorial efforts to turn any of them into saints or mark off others (even Barnadine) as irredeemable sinners is to fall into not the fault of Angelo but the fault of Lucio and to become a comic refuser’ (Northrop 2003, 77). That is, the wrong lessons might be learned from Shakespearian drama; something of Malvolio, Apemantus or Barnadine may rub off on the reader and end up damaging the humanistic mission of the academy. Even though refusers highlight the dangers of a premature identification of literature with ‘the human’, the critical desire to deflect the force of negation, to absorb the problem by treating it as a salutary call to limited reform, is strong. For instance, Julia Reinhard Lupton has argued recently that Shakespearian refusal at first questions but ultimately helps to create citizenship, healing fault-lines in civil society: ‘If Antigone dies into citizenship, Isabella [from Measure for Measure] marries into citizenship’ (Lupton 2005, 154). Similarly, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, in a different but related context, has noted that: ‘Despite the great differences between them, each of the four critics discussed in this book [Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Žižek and Edward Said] has responded to terror by affirming universal values and the human community’ (Harpham 2006, 156). Yet it is unfortunate to minimise or overlook the

Richard Chamberlain 109

serious examination of these questions in Shakespeare, looking to him for ideological mystification rather than penetrating observation. His refusers critique the historically premature ethos of participation which the institution of criticism, in both ‘traditional’ and ‘theorised’ forms, has long privileged, and they do so with a negativity which is hard for that institution to recuperate. Although refusal is premised on an absolute, the contribution of the plays lies in their exploration of its various problematic instances. Apemantus is perhaps closest to being a ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ refuser, a regulative ideal which no one can quite match. Other refusers – among them Jaques, Katherina, Caliban, Cordelia, Shylock, Alcibiades, Coriolanus, Thersites and Iago – occupy their own distinctive positions and affect their societies in different ways. Hamlet, meanwhile, is one of the most compromised. His story may illustrate the capacity of desire to overrun drive, as the refuser capitulates to the tainted symbolic order which his parodic language has so mercilessly baited. Despite the fact that his refusal is more effective than anyone’s at undermining the system of coercive social consensus, he ultimately fails as a refuser and (unlike Timon or Malvolio) becomes fully a social subject, putting off his ‘antic disposition’ in an apologetic, pre-duel speech and separating himself from the ‘madness’ which has attended him throughout the play. Barnadine, who never consents to play the game of imprisonment and execution, is pardoned in a royal act of mercy which, annoyingly, steals his thunder. However, throughout all these differences, the Shakespearian refuser shows us humanity in the grip of an agonising contradiction. The plays leave us in no doubt that ‘the human condition’ in its present state is a thoroughly miserable one about which we cannot be complacent. This is not just a matter of unfavourable economic conditions (whether imagined as tragically inevitable or just waiting to be resolved by the triumph of the market), but rather of the very bonds that create and nurture the human, and which depend upon and emerge from those economic conditions. Reading them, we do not see heroic resistance or plans for a future society, but only the wreckage of the human. Each of the refusers is defeated or compromised. Refusal, by its nature, is flawed, unheroic, undignified; in addition, as Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley have emphasised, some versions of humanism see limitations, rather than glowing possibilities, as the defining characteristic of the human: ‘Given a rapacious capitalist system that restlessly refashions human desires in order to keep itself going, do we not need to rescue a notion of what people “really” need?’ (Halliwell and Mousley 2003, 10). Yet an ‘holistic’ model of literary humanism as ‘affectively charged sensuousness’

110

Towards a New Literary Humanism

(see the Introduction to this volume) seems distant from Shakespeare’s writing of refusal, which is at once subjective and inhuman. The kind of refuser the dramatist imagines would reject everything that state and capital define as human through tests of participation – today, perhaps, passing the Citizenship Test, being a ‘developing nation’ not a ‘rogue state’, paying by Direct Debit. He or she would recoil from this glut of specious humanisms in the name of a basic humanity which paradoxically does not recognise ‘the human’ as a cosily collective enterprise. Aesthetically speaking, the negative energies released by the refuser’s protest at such enforced ‘human’ fellowship are as remote from modern expressive realism as any ‘inhuman’ work of medieval Christendom. The blankness of refusal negates the richness of literary art posited in a Leavisite or Eliotic marriage of the concrete and the abstract. Unless there is to be a revolutionary transformation of society, the refuser must stand as the high point of our humanity: damaged, benumbed, but still saying ‘no’ to false constructions of the human in which we are constantly encouraged to invest.

IV It is often supposed that Hamlet rejects suicide. Yet, in a special sense, he cannot escape self-annihilation and remain a refuser. The refuser resists the symbolic: despite the powerful sway of cultural imperatives, systems of signification, the ingrained expectations and conventions of social activity, the individual subject is impelled to refuse the course pre-ordained for them; or rather, the individual, in holding back from the continual reaffirmation of community, refuses to be a ‘subject’, cancelling their social being, which is to say their being. At the limitpoint, the refuser is a suicide: it is impossible to be an authentic refuser and ‘live’. Unlike the rebel, they do not build an identity or exhibit challenging behaviour which takes that identity as its source. Unlike the revolutionary, they do not join in collective action to bring about a transformed society. Instead, they create problems for existing society and its managers through their self-cancellation. The refuser is not ‘able or willing’ to participate in certain forms of socially expected behaviour, and so occupies no place within the licensed corridors of human existence, incomprehensible to their fellows and themselves. Until the final Act, Hamlet breaks the feast at Elsinore and refuses the forfeit in the drinking game which Claudius has made of Danish political life. In doing so, he violates the nervous pretence that constitutes sociability itself, the brittle crust of common cause across which company tiptoes,

Richard Chamberlain 111

both in Shakespeare’s Denmark-world and in our own. Hamlet dies the social death of a refuser, or would have done – his status as a prince insulates him from the consequences somewhat. He returns to life (which to a refuser is death) as an honourable duellist, only to perish once and for all at the point of Laertes’s poisoned blade.

Notes I would like to thank Paul Norcross for many indispensable discussions of the themes and thinkers mentioned here. 1. See his Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, in which fragmentary autobiographical notes indicate the stricken nature of humanism and the individual at the mid-twentieth century: Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the casual, amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, in that the concessions made to the interlocutor debase him once more or in the person of the speaker … All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains. (Adorno 1974, 25–6) 2. Julian Murphet argues convincingly for an imperative not to recuperate Bartleby’s challenge to capital by resymbolising the crisis it brings to the symbolic order. However, it is worth holding on to the fact that Bartleby does not quite simply ‘refuse’ – he does, in effect, refuse to do his work; it doesn’t get done and yet he will not go away, and that is a serious problem. Whilst Bartleby’s ‘formula’ (as Deleuze calls it) is important, so is the way in which he cannot be compelled to do what he is expected to do, or to behave with the expected humility. In a sense, this transcends even the symbolic ‘void’ he opens up in discourse (Murphet 2007, vii–xi). 3. Terry Eagleton is right to speak of Barnadine’s ‘living death’ and to say that ‘[t]here is no more effective resistance to power than genuinely not caring about it; since power only lives in exacting a response of obedience from its victims’, but this misses some of the power of Barnadine’s example as a refuser (Eagleton 1986, 54–5). In disruptively refusing to perform his death-as-punishment, he is simultaneously performing his (for the Duke and Provost) irritatingly extended life. 4. It is important to distinguish this persistence in refusal from the kind of existential revolt described by Albert Camus: One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence on an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second … That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it. (Camus 2005, 52)

112

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Human life achieves a tragic dignity when one is fully conscious of its absurdity, resolutely facing the meaninglessness and pain of it all, rather than giving in by ‘assenting’ to suicide: ‘Suicide … is acceptance at its extreme’ (Camus 2005, 52). While the existential hero ends up with human dignity, and a great rock, the Shakespearian refuser will either destroy herself, the rock or both. 5. I am very grateful to Professor Douglas A. Northrop for sending me this and other unpublished papers in this series.

6 Why Eliot Killed Lydgate: ‘Joyful Cruelty’ in Middlemarch1 Steven Earnshaw

One common understanding of humanism, and the one upon which this chapter will rest, is that humanism replaces God with ideas of individual autonomy and the belief in progress through our own endeavours. What carries over from religion are analogous structures, or homologies. The first is the narrative movement towards something better if certain conditions are followed: the Kingdom of Heaven for the religious narrative, improvements in the standard of living in the here-and-now for humanism. A second homology is the carry-over of a belief in an invisible force. For religion this is God. To be sure, for the religious, God is visible in certain ways – both metonymically and metaphorically – but God himself remains always invisible. Similarly, for humanism, the human spirit remains invisible in itself but visible in certain other ways, for example, acts of kindness and indomitableness in the face of overwhelming negative forces.2 Eliot commented in a letter (1874): ‘the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man … the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i.e. an exaltation of the human)’ (quoted in Davies 1997, 27). This is the religion of humanity that Auguste Comte’s positivism wished for and to which George Eliot half-subscribed (Knoepflmacher 1965, 39–41).3 The nineteenth century is the century when this second structural carry-over from religion becomes particularly problematic. The convergence or overlap of Realism4 and Naturalism in art and literature, and Naturalism and positivism in science throws the issue of visibility and invisibility into some difficulty, or at least it should do. Yet writers like George Eliot and a host of others do not necessarily concede the contradiction between their emphasis on observing the world as it is, on 113

114

Towards a New Literary Humanism

observing the real or reality, and at the same time adhering to a belief in something beyond the visible, in something which cannot be measured by science. In this chapter, I want to trace through some of these ideas primarily in relation to Middlemarch, since this is a novel which self-consciously explores the possibility that science can provide a metaphorical model for human behaviour, particularly through Lydgate’s work on tissue. More generally, the novel explores the possibilities of humanism through the attention it gives to acts of kindness and generosity, to the limits of individual autonomy and to Lydgate’s belief in the potential for progression through rationality and science. In treating Middlemarch in this way, we can see how in the novel Eliot is trying to tease out a humanism that is not too far removed from that outlined in the Introduction to this volume, one which offers a qualified approach to the idea of the human and what it is possible for humans to achieve with their own endeavours. Humanism is a belief in the human as a universal, which is partly aspirational (what we hope the best of humankind is) and partly descriptive (but described in a way which is generous, ‘humane’). This volume’s Introduction gives due attention to emotional intelligence and to the value of holistic experience, qualities that the narrative voice in Middlemarch, I would suggest, both implicitly and explicitly endorses. And, again comparable with the working-through of humanism suggested by this volume’s Introduction, here is a novel which is exemplary in its attention to ‘richness and complexity’, terms which we could take ‘neutrally’ if we wished, but which are most likely to be understood as part of the humanist’s lexicon of positive attributes. There is one more thing I would like to incorporate into this chapter, an aspect which is the counterpoint to the humanist tradition and throws both Eliot’s novel and current thinking on humanism into relief. I will incorporate the French philosopher Clément Rosset’s views on philosophy and ‘the real’ in Joyful Cruelty as a way to understanding what is happening when we talk about visibility, invisibility and the real. Rosset stands in a self-proclaimed philosophical tradition running counter to the main one (Rosset 1993, 71ff). His forbears are Lucretius, Pascal, Montaigne and Nietzsche. Rosset’s argument in relation to ‘the real’ in his writings in the 1970s and 1980s is that every philosophy is a theory of the real, if by ‘theory’ we take it in its etymological sense of ‘theoria’ or ‘observation’ (71). Rosset claims that in its attempts to generalise, philosophy moves away from the particular items which constitute the real to a point where the real in its particulars is either

Steven Earnshaw 115

irrelevant or inconvenient. The real ‘real’ is therefore insufficient for philosophy and consequently philosophy always supplies something extra in order that we may understand the real, typically ‘God’, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’. Furthermore, because reality itself is insufficient for the all-embracing requirements of philosophy, it cannot provide the theoretical means – the code, the methodology, the key – for offering up the generalities that philosophy requires, and this too must be supplied by the philosopher as something external to reality (73). Rosset sees novels and paintings, for instance, as dealing with the particular, whereas philosophy wants to deal with the general. This makes for an interesting way into Middlemarch. For one thing, the Realist novel in the hands of George Eliot is sometimes regarded as taking on the role of philosophy in the nineteenth century,5 precisely, I think, because it makes this move from the particular to the general. Its particulars, to use the term deployed in the Introduction to this volume, ‘resonate’ outwards. But the Realist novel doesn’t have to do this – Zola certainly doesn’t do it within his novels. In moving from the particular to the general, Eliot moves from naturalist observation to humanism, from the visible to the invisible. In moving from the particular to the general, Eliot also appears to follow a basic tenet of humanism, that properly humanist values are by definition universal (as discussed above), not parochial, not provincial. Put another way, Middlemarch in its typical particularity both leads us to and represents the universal. All this is very neat – well, at least I think so. But – what I think Eliot does is then partly return us back from the general to the particular within the novel, and in doing so has no option but to counter the leaning towards humanism that is everywhere and elsewhere present in the novel. Eliot does what a good scientist should do and re-tests the general hypothesis – in this case, humanism and its specific credo of progress – against the stories the novel itself offers. Ultimately, Middlemarch casts significant doubt on humanism, leaving us with, with what? In Rosset’s terms, it potentially leaves us with a ‘joyful cruelty’, a Nietzschean embrace of the world as it is. I remember when I first read Middlemarch as a teenager being frustrated by Lydgate’s failure to make any progress. How could somebody with such ability and drive let himself be deflected from his purpose by the machinations of small-minded provincial folk and Rosamond’s pretty face? Re-reading the novel, it is possible to focus more on the ‘how?’ than the ‘what?’, and I suppose it is fairly clear why he fails. Eliot’s genius here is in bringing out Lydgate’s story in a way which is plausible, in a way which is the action of social

116

Towards a New Literary Humanism

environment on character, as any nineteenth-century Realist novel should reveal or set out to do. We know that this is what she is doing because it is the first thing the novel tells us: Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? (Eliot 1965, 25) I will return to the Saint Theresa reference, but for now let us stick with the broader point about the particular and the general. When Rosset argues that philosophers always come up with systems which rely on things not visible in the real world, he claims that the reason for this is that the real world is cruel, so philosophers mitigate it with ideas of Spirit, Soul or, shall we say, in the case of humanism, the human spirit. To return to Lydgate, not only does he fail in his ambition to improve the discipline of medicine both theoretically and practically, he ends up pandering to the well-healed sick in London and dies young. A tragic waste, the reader cannot help but feel.6 That the reality of life is tragic or cruel is Rosset’s understanding. Tragic not in any classical sense of people brought down because of innate character flaws, or because it is the will of the gods or God, but simply because when we look at the world as it is, this is how it is. This is how it is, and it is not redeemable if we are to stay true to the real in the very particulars that we observe. According to Rosset, every philosophy makes the sum greater than the parts, and this traduces the inconvenient truth of what the real really is. I have focused on Lydgate’s narrative. It appears to endorse Rosset’s view of what ‘the real’ truly is. Rosset calls it joyful cruelty, following on from Nietzsche’s joyful wisdom – the gay science – because we should willingly accept that this is how it is. But what of the other main narratives?7 Am I not missing the point, since the book has multiple plots, not just Lydgate’s? Many readers no doubt feel that the missed opportunity is a coming together of Lydgate and Dorothea, two people with the good of the human race at heart and able to balance out the other’s faults, that is, Dorothea’s naïve sympathy and Lydgate’s scientific detachment.8 Well, they don’t come together. Cruel again, perhaps, on Eliot’s part. But doesn’t Dorothea’s narrative suggest that the human spirit in its generous, warm-hearted form can prevail over the impersonal

Steven Earnshaw 117

will-to-knowledge of Casaubon? And isn’t the moral centre of the novel the Garths, who quietly and uncomplainingly go about their lives in a practical, sympathetic, Anglo-Saxon manner? Isn’t the centre of the novel, well, humanist? If only the world were full of Garths, where every marriage ended in ‘solid mutual happiness’ (890). So why does Eliot kill Lydgate, without allowing him to contribute to ‘the growing good of the world’ (896) – Middlemarch’s humanist credo? Delving further, what we find is a constant tussle between humanism and the ‘real real’. One reading of Lydgate’s death suggests that he deserves to die because he lacks precisely that practical sympathy and empathy that Dorothea is capable of. This interpretation suggests that Lydgate must die because his egoism outweighs any possible benefits he might produce for humanity through his scientific endeavour. When Raffles is dying, Lydgate is interested only in the medical view – he evinces no sign of common humanity. Whilst George Eliot can save Bulstrode, perhaps because he can bring out the best of human sympathy through his wife’s reaction when his mendacity is revealed to her, Lydgate cannot be saved from his scientific arrogance. Lydgate thinks that he should prevail because of his scientific and medical ambition in the service of humanity. Eliot begs to differ and so she gives him a legacy of four little Rosamonds, meting out justice to someone who sets himself higher than the common human lot: no other character suffers nearly so cruel a fate.9 But here the cruelty appears to be the author’s, in the service of humanism rather than ‘a real real’. As we will now see, the novel as a whole moves ambivalently between two possible interpretations of the world: the ‘real real’ and a philosophically-minded humanistic Realism. For instance, there is further punishment when we see that Lydgate’s inability to make headway with his research is inversely proportionate to the novel’s own success with webs and tissues as metaphors that explicate the workings of provincial life. Caldwell, partly drawing on comments by J. Hillis Miller, notes the importance of this ‘reigning metaphor’ for the novel (Caldwell 2004, 159–60). There may be a further cruelty when we consider Susan Graver’s point that Eliot’s endings often emphasise the continued importance of Gemeinschaft (older, rural, organic community structures) in the present Gesellschaft (urban society) (Graver 1984, 90–1). Lydgate’s refusal to engage in the everyday politicking of provincial society would thus align him with the spiritless societal structures Eliot’s fiction seeks to modify and would be another reason why he must die. Graver suggests that Lydgate’s death ‘is noted but not really commemorated, because his own sense of failure makes

118

Towards a New Literary Humanism

his later life a living death’ (Graver 1984, 92) – in other words, Eliot, through the actions of Rosamond, has already killed him. We might also note, along with Jeremy Tambling, that Lydgate’s birth is the same year (1802) as Xavier Bichat’s death (Tambling 1990, 941), offering further possible ironies for us through the idea that Bichat’s death is redeemed by Lydgate (long live Bichat through Lydgate!), only for this ‘growing good’ to come to a dead end. Tambling sees Eliot in the role of Bichat, an ‘author-doctor’, something else which would therefore serve to usurp Lydgate and lead to his death, since the author must by necessity succeed in her analysis at Lydgate’s expense. There is another possible ‘cruelty’ in the comparison the novel offers between the life of Lydgate and that of one of his medical heroes, Vesalius (Eliot 1965, 497). Lydgate observes that when Vesalius was as old as he is now, he ‘had already begun a new era in anatomy’, and Graver comments: ‘The fact that Lydgate dies at exactly the same age as Vesalius, their lives even spanning the same years of their respective centuries, continues the identification between them, but it becomes increasingly ironical as the novel progresses’ (Graver 1984, 207–8, drawing on Greenberg 1975, 39–40). There is one final way in which Lydgate’s death is cruel. As the novel states at the very start, its interest is in the action of time on character. We know the novel is underpinned by scientific ideas, and in this way Eliot transports the role of the natural historian into provincial English society. Time, in this sense, is secular grace: it is bestowed upon Dorothea in order that we might see how a latter-day Saint Theresa fares in the modern world. We observe her character over time. In killing off Lydgate relatively young, the author does not give him ‘time’. Well, you could argue that Lydgate had nowhere else to go, that we are able to observe the effect of time on his character well enough in this truncated lifespan. Maybe, but the fact remains that time is a gift in the author’s hands and, having given Lydgate just enough time to condemn him, she kills him. His death stands out from the more fully-rounded lives of the other characters. Is this Eliot’s (humanist) revenge upon Lydgate or an embrace of joyful cruelty? You could argue that Lydgate deserves to succeed and Eliot wants him to succeed, that Eliot could have given him more time, more opportunity, a better second life or time enough for a fruitful autumn of 20 more years, and that she doesn’t because she can’t, because life’s not like that. You could argue that she sees the lot of humanity absolutely clearly and that Lydgate thus dies because people die, and it just happens to be Lydgate rather than a more deserving case, or that, in

Steven Earnshaw 119

the democracy of humanity, we cannot apportion ends according to deserts. That is not our lot. In this view, Eliot is not the God of the novel but the slave of a reality that she as a Realist novelist can do nothing with but reflect faithfully: this is Eliot’s ‘real real’. But perhaps I am making too much of Lydgate’s death. Granted, it looks odd that he dies and the others live, but in the grand scheme of things perhaps it doesn’t matter. I will approach Lydgate’s death in two other ways: by comparison to the deaths of Tom and Maggie Tulliver at the end of Eliot’s earlier novel The Mill on the Floss and by asking how available the ‘joyful cruelty’ anti-philosophy strand was to Eliot.

The deaths of Tom and Maggie Tulliver The Mill on the Floss, Eliot’s second novel, is part of her project to produce novels firmly within the Realist aesthetic. Much of this Realism, for Eliot here as in Middlemarch, is the slow unfolding of biographical detail to mirror the incremental nature of our mental and physical lives. This project, to show how we suffer on earth in a virtually Godless world and yet how the bonds of sympathy might be maintained in spite of ourselves and other people, is both humanist and Realist. For Eliot, to be Realist in this manner is to be humanist as well. There are of course differences between the two novels. The Mill on the Floss is often elegiac, playing to our sense of loss in general and to the falling away of our childhoods. But Eliot means something by Tom and Maggie’s deaths because they are symbolic as well as ‘just happening’. In offering their deaths as symbolic, the novel at this point suggests an anti-Realist stance to language and life which is contrary to its Realism elsewhere. For much of the novel, Realism and humanism can seem ‘as one’, since the novel can display aspects of humanism which accord with putatively Realist particulars. However, the move from particulars to the invisible spirit of humanism, which the end of the novel desires, cannot be fully achieved from within the techniques of Realism itself. It must resort to symbolism precisely because such an aesthetic is able to suggest powers above and beyond the visible, material world. Much could perhaps be made of the contrast between Maggie and Tom. Tom is single-minded and sure of his opinions, opinions that he will not and cannot change. This assuredness and inflexibility make him akin to Lydgate, at this level at least. Maggie on the other hand is impulsive and naturally empathic; she embodies a certain humaneness which pretty much none of the other characters in the novel is able to show at a sustained level. If you think about the narrative logic of

120

Towards a New Literary Humanism

the novel, you will see that actually Eliot has to kill off either Tom or Maggie, since Tom’s whole character is this great inflexible will, which is a strength when it comes to redeeming his disgraced father, but is his weakness when stretched out over a lifetime of social relations. Therefore, as long as Tom lives, he cannot plausibly be reconciled with Maggie, who adds to the family’s disgrace by half-eloping with Stephen Guest, her best friend’s fiancé. So, a flood arrives and carries both Tom and Maggie away, at which point they are found clasped to each other, symbolic of ties that run deeper than anything that can be articulated by the characters. The flood is symbolic in different ways and so is the rather elevated manner of the final image we have of them. Eliot then submerges their fates back into the vicissitudes of natural cycles, just as the flood is part of nature (Eliot 2003, 543–4). This contrasts starkly with the manner in which Eliot submerges the lives of the characters at the end of Middlemarch. Apart from perhaps the Garths, these characters are not part of nature, they are part of provincial life and their stories are provincial stories. How then are we to evaluate the stories? Eliot is hardly going to appraise according to rise in social status. It is simply that they have stories, but they are not stories of nature, as in The Mill on the Floss, they are just stories from life, that is, except the oddity of Lydgate’s demise: his story ends when his life ends, while the lives of the other characters continue past the close of their Middlemarch stories. In this way, Lydgate’s death does seem comparable with those of Tom and Maggie: they are the only ones to die at the end of The Mill on the Floss and only Lydgate dies at the end of Middlemarch. The deaths at the end of The Mill on the Floss are given a symbolic loading since Tom and Maggie are borne away on a flood, just as Maggie has previously been ‘borne along with the tide’ in the chapter of that title, when she half-consciously floats off with Stephen Guest. In parallel, then, Lydgate’s death becomes symbolic, in contrast to the prosaic tying up of the lives of the other characters in Middlemarch. Yes, Dorothea has a certain symbolism attached to her through the Saint Theresa reference, but this is a domestication of what would otherwise stand as poetry. The pressure Eliot puts on Lydgate’s demise runs counter to the endings of the others and thus covertly, or inadvertently, casts his death in a symbolic mode. This leads us to a conclusion opposed to the idea previously outlined that Lydgate’s death is ‘really real’. The contradiction in interpretations – Lydgate’s death as ‘really real’ yet also ‘symbolic/poetic’ – is a consequence of Eliot’s treatment of Lydgate’s end in a way different from the other characters, and a consequence of the tension in the novel between

Steven Earnshaw 121

humanism and a potential ‘real’ Realism. The novel has to kill off Lydgate for one or more of the various reasons given above, but this means that it is out of kilter with the accommodation the novel generally achieves between Realism and humanism: Lydgate’s death becomes ‘realer’ once the ‘humaneness’ of a morally-informed Realism is jettisoned, but paradoxically also becomes symbolic, precisely because it is outside the usual means of Middlemarch’s representations: it has to ‘mean’ something more because it is different from the nature of every other character’s humanist treatment.

Eliot and joyful cruelty Most evidence would tell us that Eliot, as we have already suggested, was a humanist who retained a strong spiritual sentiment. For instance, when she reviews Darwin’s Origin of Species, she admires it – ‘So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty!’ – but then still believes that these explanations ‘produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes’ of development (Knoepflmacher 1965, 30). Well, yes, but what about that underlying mystery? Are we to get at it, and is science in the form of Lydgate to do it for us? Lydgate’s work is into tissue, which refers us again to the work of Bichat, the father of histology, that is, the scientist at the end of the eighteenth century who first drew attention to the importance of tissue in the functioning of the human body. The significance of Bichat, tissue and humanism is demonstrated when we see that Comte uses him in his Positivist Calendar in 1849. The Calendar, intended ‘to serve as an introduction to the abstract worship of Humanity’, was divided into 13 months named after figures from religion, science, philosophy, industry and art. The first month was ‘Moses’, followed by ‘Homer’. Month nine was ‘Gutenberg’, month ten ‘Shakespeare’ and month eleven ‘Descartes’. The thirteenth month was ‘Bichat’. It is interesting that Eliot uses Bichat’s work on tissue to provide one of the controlling images for Middlemarch. Histology applies the scientific method at the microscopic level – to things that cannot be seen by the naked eye, yet can be rendered visible. This is how Eliot introduces his work: That great Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary

122

Towards a New Literary Humanism

webs or tissues, out of which the various organs – brain, heart, lungs, and so on – are compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up in various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest, each material having its peculiar composition and proportions. No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its parts – what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials. (Eliot 1965, 177) Is Eliot proceeding by analogy or is the idea of a ‘tissue’ common to humanity something to be made visible? Are these tissues the universal ideas of humanism? Is that tissue humanist? If she is proceeding by analogy, again, why is Lydgate, whose work on tissues – now with the aid of a microscope, a tool ‘avoided’ by Bichat (Porter 1999, 265; Forrester 1990, 4, 5)10 – not the person to uncover the mystery of the processes? By analogy, Lydgate endeavours to do within the novel what Eliot endeavours to do at the novel’s philosophical level. Perhaps, we might say, in that conflict between humanism and Realism, Eliot wishes for the invisible web of humanist sympathy to win out over Realism’s cruelty. We can see the effects of sympathy, but not the mystery of its processes. Farebrother fits this design perfectly, but of course that is to concede a certain religious aspect to the matter which neither humanism nor Realism can allow. Perhaps it is that in Middlemarch Eliot is drawn to the empirical nature of science but not to the experimental side that Zola insisted should inform the Realist novel. Eliot in Middlemarch is I think pessimistic as to the possibilities of systematic improvement that scientific experimentation might offer, leaning instead more towards the piecemeal, empirical progress of people like Garth. She identifies ‘tissue’ as key, but the analogy ends there: neither the scientific method for the study of it nor possibilities for identifying and curing any corruption of the tissue is part of the novel. There is more evidence here then of a contradiction in Middlemarch. The argument for Realism in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede is a defence against those who believe that good should triumph over bad – Eliot refuses to make people better than they are in real life because she subscribes to the Realist aesthetic which demands you show things just as they are. Zola has a virtually identical argument in ‘Naturalism in the Theatre’: Thus, like the scientist, the naturalist novelist never intervenes. This moral impersonality of a work is of capital importance, for it raises

Steven Earnshaw 123

the question of morality in the novel. We are violently reproached with being immoral because we place scoundrels and honest men on scene without judging either of them … No longer do people ask merely that we prefer virtue; they demand that we embellish virtue and make it lovable. Thus in presenting a character we must select, picking out his good points and passing over the bad ones in silence. (Zola 1963, 208) Where Zola sees this as moral impersonality, Eliot sees it as a method of representation, but presumably still in the service of a generosity of spirit that is broadly humanist. She is determined to show the world ‘as it is’ as long as the world ‘as it is’ is one held together by that web of invisible sympathy which is so characteristic of humanism. She will accept Darwin’s view of the world as long as we do not get to the bottom of the mystery of life’s processes, as Lydgate wishes to do. He is an honest man condemned to die a scoundrel. This final section was going to be on the possibility of Eliot embracing a Nietzschean-style approach to the world, to wonder just how far Eliot could have gone in producing the ‘real real’. I haven’t quite produced that counterfactual, showing instead that Middlemarch offers the idea of the organic community, analysed in mid-perspective perhaps, as the novel’s title indicates, rather than at the microscopic level of tissue that Lydgate promises and the novel itself sometimes promises. Eliot obviously predates any knowledge of Nietzsche (although interestingly Nietzsche was to later cast Eliot as typical of a post-Christian Englishness that replaced religion with moral fanaticism [Dolin 2005, 188]), yet the possibility of acknowledging egos trapped in a will-to-knowledge emerging out of a centrally-placed self-consciousness was certainly available to Eliot, as is evident in her quite remarkable poem, ‘I grant you ample leave’: I grant you ample leave To use the hoary formula ‘I am’ Naming the emptiness where thought is not; But fill the void with definition, ‘I’ Will be no more a datum than the words You link false inference with, the ‘Since’ & ‘so’ That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl. Resolve your ‘Ego’, it is all one web With vibrant ether clotted into worlds: Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’

124

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Turns nought but object, melts to molecules, Is stripped from naked Being with the rest Of those rag-garments named the Universe.11 Eliot offers here a bald confrontation with what in another context we would identify as an incipient existentialist line of thought, for this verges on the way that Sartre invests the world with ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ and the way that Nietzsche dismisses the ‘I’ as nothing other than an insubstantial if convenient grammatical construct (for example, Nietzsche 2003, 46; Sartre 1995, 24), but she chose not to go down this route of open confrontation. Eliot’s poem hardly suggests a humanist’s Realism, after all, and the poem was unpublished in her lifetime, as if the real real alternative were simply too much.12 Instead, we get this as the actual Middlemarch ending: But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible … But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (Eliot 1965, 896) It is in Eliot’s interest that things remain hidden, although she presents this very invisibility as the reality she tells us she has faithfully copied. It draws a generality from Dorothea’s life, and perhaps in doing so bears out Rosset’s argument that this method inevitably throws a veil over the real real. The closest the novel gets to the real real is Lydgate’s death, but its very singularity suggests that what Eliot provides is ‘punishment’ for Lydgate at the novel’s end, rather than revelation. Without resort to the overt symbolism Eliot mobilises at the close of The Mill on the Floss, it is evident to the reader of Middlemarch that the transition from stubborn and harsh particulars to the representation of a benevolent humanist design is fraught.

Notes 1. In writing this chapter, I am indebted to discussions with Jill LeBihan, Susan McPherson and Sarah Dredge. I would also like to thank Andy Mousley for his encouragement, and for his comments on the ideas expressed here.

Steven Earnshaw 125 2. For the relationship between Realism and the idea of the invisible, see my Beginning Realism (Earnshaw 2010, 80–2). For a discussion of the Victorians and the invisible, see Beer 1996b. 3. See Davies 1997, 26–30 for a discussion of ‘the religion of humanity’, with Eliot described as a ‘half-hearted Comtean’, and Susan Graver notes something similar as the ‘more usual estimate’ (1984, 6, n.8). Mathilde Parlett specifically addresses the issue of George Eliot and humanism in an article of that title (1930, 25–46) and identifies a hostile attitude, an attitude which promotes the Positivist attention to present actualities rather than the humanist scholar’s attachment to the values of the Classics (26–8). I am here taking humanism in the broader, cultural sense of ‘religion of humanity’ rather than in the narrower doctrinal or educational form that Parlett focuses on. The relationship between Eliot and positivism is discussed in Bernard Semmel (1994), who notes in his Prologue the prevalence in the nineteenth century of ‘social and political ideologies that aimed at achieving on earth what the religions of earlier centuries had postponed for heaven’, with Comte identified as one of these thinkers (7). As well as Knoepflmacher, see also Tim Dolin’s chapter ‘Eliot and Religion’ (Dolin 2005) and Barry Qualls’s ‘George Eliot and Religion’ in Levine 2001. 4. I will use capital ‘R’ to denote an aesthetic specific to the nineteenth century (see Earnshaw 2010, 5–6). 5. See, for instance, Suzy Anger, ‘George Eliot and Philosophy’ in Levine 2001, particularly the section ‘The Novels as Philosophy’, 92–6. 6. Carol Christ asserts that ‘People die conveniently in George Eliot’s novels’ and shows the way in which the deaths of some characters are tied in with ‘their personal failings’ (1976, 130). However, Lydgate’s death is not ‘providential’ in this way since it does not occur for the sake of plot convenience. 7. J. Hillis Miller’s essay on the ending of Middlemarch, for example, focuses on its ‘openness’, where each ‘end’ is also a ‘beginning’, but mainly in relation to Dorothea’s life (2006, 133). 8. ‘It is part of the novel’s tragic irony that its two leading figures possess all the elements necessary for heroism, only divided between them. Lydgate has the potential and the opportunity but lacks the moral courage; Dorothea has the potential and the courage but lacks the opportunity’ (Deresiewicz 1998, 737). 9. Arguably, Casaubon also meets a cruel end in that it becomes clear to him that his search for the key to all mythologies – his life’s work – is consigned to the graveyard of failed projects. He has not taken into account recent German work on the subject, and Dorothea refuses to take up the baton when he dies. There is thus a parallel with Lydgate’s fate, since Lydgate is not able to follow through his work on tissues. Like Casaubon, he is a failure. It might also be noted that in his search for ‘the primitive tissue’ (Eliot 1965, 178), Lydgate appears to be heading down the same fated track as Casaubon. However, Lydgate is in fact moving in the right direction, since this particular ‘sequence to Bichat’s work’ is ‘already vibrating along many currents of the European mind’ (178) and, as Eliot would have known, would lead to ‘cells’ being instantiated as the primary building blocks, with ‘tissue’ continuing to remain an important focus of study (Forrester

126

Towards a New Literary Humanism

1990). More immediately in terms of the novel’s chronology, Raspail succeeds where Lydgate fails, since Raspail publishes Nouveau Système de Chimie Organique Fondé sur des Nouvelles Méthodes d’Observation in 1833. Lydgate is aware of Raspail’s work (Eliot 1965, 495) and although Raspail’s success is a year after the end of Middlemarch, Robert A. Greenberg sees that this is an irony (or what we might regard as the author’s cruelty?) that the reader would pick up on (Greenberg 1975, 46–7). There is a related, sly condemnation of Lydgate’s intellectual abilities and ultimate fate when the narrator suggests that Lydgate’s research fails in the way that many other seekers after knowledge fail: ‘What was the primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question – not quite in the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right word befalls many seekers’ (Eliot 1965, 178). Not only does he not have the requisite intellectual insight, but to fail as others do is no doubt another one of his ‘spots of commonness’. It should also be pointed out that ‘tissue’ remains a valuable idea for Middlemarch – largely synonymous with ‘web’, since, following Bichat, ‘living bodies’ ‘must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues’ (177) – in a way that ‘the key to all mythologies’ never is. The latter never has significance in the novel beyond Casaubon. 10. There is a complexity in tracing the visible/invisible motif in Eliot’s use of Lydgate’s histological endeavours. Bichat used the naked eye for observation and this reasonably suggests that the primary material of tissue is ‘visible’. However, ‘seeing’ in the history of this aspect of medicine is also a matter of overturning traditional medical ‘blindness’. Greenberg quotes this from Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life (1860): ‘The first man who had sufficient strength of mind to use his eyes, and say what he saw, was Vesalius, the father of modern anatomy’ (I, 299) (Greenberg 1975, 39). Lydgate is partly punished for what he cannot ‘see’; put another way, he is unable to apply the scientific method to his own relations with Middlemarch folk, especially Rosamond. When he reads a recent book on Fever, the narrator comments that he brings ‘a much more testing vision of details and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage’ (Eliot 1965, 193). His sight for the latter complexities is provided by ‘literature, and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial conversation of men’ (193). 11. This first appears in Paris (1959, 544–5). 12. Paris notes how this poem ‘is completely alien to the thought and to the characteristic attitude of a woman who, with a clear perception of the difficulties, strove, in almost everything she wrote and said, to give value to human existence’ (Paris 1959, 553).

7 Atomised: Mary Midgley and Michel Houellebecq Jeff Wallace

The concept of reductionism has been and remains, as Andy Mousley’s Introduction to this volume illustrates, a crucial reference point for the counter-assertion of humanistic values. To speak for the humanistic, whether as a theory of human subjectivity or as an approach to disciplinarity, has tended to involve speaking in the name of those qualities of depth, breadth, richness and complexity which are implied to be lacking in alternative domains where the threat of ‘reduction’ to a simpler or shallower set of coordinates is in play. Thus, Mousley worries both that his enumeration of eight key principles of a new literary humanism will seem reductive ‘(like “rolling out” a business plan)’ and that his use of specialised terms in the teaching of literary theory may have left him ‘complicit in the reduction of education to a set of quantifiable skills’. Literature itself, the locus of reinvigorated humanistic value in this volume as a whole, retains by contrast an holistic embrace of thought and feeling, mind and body; the quintessentially literary principle of symbolic condensation ‘does not equate to a reduction, because of the creative impulse to explore all the facts of emotion, theme or subject’. While business values and the new utilitarianism in education are here figured as literary humanism’s reductive others, this antithetical role may be said to have been most frequently occupied by science. As Mousley rightly notes, depending on the particular instantiation of an alwayscapacious concept of humanism, some humanists may see Enlightenment science as an exemplum of human intellectual endeavour, while others more decisively influenced by Romanticism – the Romanticism of, let us say, Wordsworth’s ‘we murder to dissect’ – may, Mousley argues, ‘reject science on the grounds that it reduces the richness, complexity and imaginative faculties of human beings’. In pointing up a crucial distinction, 127

128

Towards a New Literary Humanism

the philosopher Henri Lefebvre insists that reduction, defined as a strategy of simplification, is the necessary springboard of ‘every scientific undertaking’, designed as it is to ‘deal with the complexity and chaos of brute observations’ (Lefebvre 1991, 107, 105). However, the perpetual danger as Lefebvre sees it is of the failure of analysis to restore, as soon as is methodologically possible, a sense of the true complexity of the phenomenon under consideration: in this way the reduced model becomes a ‘supposed absolute knowledge’, the professional specialist ‘makes this methodological moment into a permanent niche for himself where he can curl up happily in the warm’ and reduction becomes reductionism, ‘infiltrat[ing] science under the flag of science itself’ (Lefebvre 1991, 106–7). For Lefebvre, reductionism then passes easily into political practice wherever the aim of this practice is the dismantling of awkward contradictions. Lefebvre’s diagnosis of reductionism broadly parallels the critique of ‘scientism’ that underpinned Leavisite literary criticism from the foundation of the journal Scrutiny in the 1930s, through the ‘Two Cultures’ debates with C.P. Snow at the end of the 1950s and on into Leavis’s later work in the 1970s. As I have argued elsewhere, the image of reductionist science deployed by this foundational school of literary humanism became itself a reductionist manoeuvre: whilst subtly discouraging any detailed engagement with scientific texts or logics, literature was emphatically and insistently presented as the only domain that could fully address the nature of human needs and human creativity (Wallace 1990). In 1978, recalling an overheard discussion amongst teachers of humanities subjects at a Princeton seminar, Hilary Putnam highlighted the sharply adversarial cultures that could result. The ‘consensus’, Putnam records, was that scientists were ‘ignorant clods who never read anything more literary than the latest number of Galaxy’ and were ‘cocksure’ and ‘simplistic’ about the extent of their influence outside of their specialisms and, especially, on governmental policy-making (Putnam 2005, 137). Set in the broader context of a set of comparative reflections on literary and scientific understanding, Putnam is at pains to point out the perils and fragility of such a consensus. The humanists, he protests, ‘saw nothing odd about characterizing themselves as “cautious”, “aware of the complexity of things”, etc.’, and contrasts this, albeit somewhat shrilly, with the alleged tendency of twentieth-century humanist intellectuals to ‘jump on bandwagons’ such as existentialism, psychoanalysis and sexual revolution, usually entailing wholesale commitment to a single framework of interpretation (for example, that all dreams are wish fulfilments) in a way inimical to science. More soberly, in characterising literary and

Jeff Wallace 129

especially fictional knowledge as ‘the imaginative re-creation of moral perplexities’, Putnam maintains that while it is one thing to see this as a rival or alternative form of knowledge to the scientific, it is quite another to see it as in some way higher, more important – or, we might add, more ‘human’ – than science. In the latter case, he writes, we would have ‘a full-blown obscurantist position – not the position of the serious student or critic of literature, to be sure, but the position of the religion of literature’ (Putnam 2005, 136, 138). Significantly, Putnam nevertheless does not appear to see this argument as incompatible with his own consistent deployment of the familiar humanistic trope that to turn something into a science – whether how to make wine, to cook or ‘how to live’ – is to ‘reduce’ it. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to draw into comparison two relatively recent critiques of scientific reductionism, Mary Midgley’s excursus on Science and Poetry (2006) and Michel Houellebecq’s novel Atomised (2000). While superficially this will seem an unlikely pairing – Midgley the distinguished English moral philosopher, Houellebecq the French controversialist whose work has been variously arraigned as pornographic, sexist, homophobic and racist – each text has at its core the identification of atomistic theory as the source of a fatal reductionism, and attributes the persistence of atomistic thinking within science, and the wider culture, to a prevailing biologism which has proved unable to assimilate the revolutionary discoveries of twentieth- and early twenty-first century physics. Deploying ‘poetry’ as a figure for literary imagination, Midgley’s polemic seems to identify itself with the tradition of literary humanism I have so far sketched out. Science and Poetry openly endorses the view that literature offers a richer and more complex understanding of the human than reductionistic science does, albeit without ever overtly describing this position as a mode of ‘humanism’. Houellebecq’s novel is written from the perspective of a human clone in 2079, looking back upon a ‘brave and unfortunate’ human species on the verge of extinction and in particular upon the lives of the scientist Michel Djerzinski and his halfbrother Bruno (Houellebecq 2000, 379). Djerzinski is the scientist whose integration of relativity physics with molecular biology enables the technology of human cloning and thereby the transcendence of a fundamentally unhappy and dysfunctional human condition. The narration of the novel’s fierce critique of social and scientific atomism appears, however, to be ambiguously coloured by the voice of his schizophrenic half-brother. To cite such an ambiguity of literary effect in Houellebecq is immediately to highlight the faultlines in my proposal to draw a literary text and a discursive work that polemicises on behalf of the literary into

130

Towards a New Literary Humanism

comparison as modes of ‘critique’. Would it not, for example, constitute an integral aspect of the humanistic complexity of literature to precisely defy reduction to the kind of critique advanced by a discursive work such as Science and Poetry? How far might a text like Atomised, in the gesture of embodying or articulating a critique of reductionism, at the same time fulfil Midgley’s criteria or aspirations for the antireductionist character of literature itself? Are Midgely’s nostrums for ‘poetry’ adequate to the particular literariness of Atomised? And how successful might she be in avoiding what Putnam characterises as the obscurantism of a ‘religion of literature’? In drawing this comparison together, I want to propose that, despite the sense of a shared critique, the divergences between Atomised in its powerful literariness and Midgely’s theory of an anti-reductionist poetry are significant enough for us to insist upon a more searching definition of what literature is and does than literary ‘humanism’ in its established senses is likely to provide. By the same token, and paradoxically, I will argue that the newly-humanistic value of Atomised derives in large part precisely from its efforts to call humanism to account and to scandalise the implicitly humanistic reader. My main purpose in surveying the critique of atomism advanced in Science and Poetry is to investigate and query the role assigned to ‘poetry’. From the outset, Midgley seeks to complicate the ‘alleged clash between “the two cultures” (humanities and science)’ by adopting a broad conception of the role of imagination in human life (Midgley 2006, ix). Defining atomism as ‘a notion that the only way to understand anything is to break it into its ultimate smallest parts and to conceive these as making up something comparable to a machine’, Midgley argues that this early Greek theory of matter persists in colonising both the popular imagination and that of contemporary scientists who might be expected to know better (2). At the source of the immense influence of atomism is, she argues, a ‘single great philosophic poem’, De Rerum Natura or On the Nature of the Universe by the Roman poet Lucretius, a work energetically adopted by Renaissance Europe and which came to forge ‘a much wider strand in Enlightenment thinking’ (30). Situating Lucretius’s poem within the context of Epicurean pagan rationalism and the moral drive to offer an alternative to a religious-superstitious view of the universe, Midgley thus uses the concept of imaginative ‘vision’ to dismantle a conventional ‘two cultures’ hierarchy in which literature could only ever consist of expressive reflections or interpretations of a faculty of knowledge reserved for science, as exemplified for Midgley by the view of the eminent chemist Peter Atkins that neither poets nor

Jeff Wallace 131

philosophers contribute anything ‘novel’, ‘“until after novelty has been discovered by scientists”’ (28). Instead, she argues, imaginative visions generate new ideas and involve ‘changes in our larger world-pictures, in the general way in which we conceive life’ (31). If Midgley here reflects a distinctly re-balancing tendency in studies of literature and science over the last 30 years or so, an unsettling vagueness might be said to surround such generalised ‘world-picture’ sentiments. Counteracting this, however, is a much more precise emphasis upon the linguistic determinants of scientific assumptions or, more particularly, upon the emergence of what Midgley calls ‘a very interesting asymmetry about rhetoric’ (61). In Baconian science, she argues, a vocabulary of nature as aggressive, warlike and threatening attains to a truth-value which displaces an earlier Renaissance vocabulary of reverence typified by the use of ‘love’ and ‘attraction’ to conceptualise gravitational forces. In the general clamour of seventeenth-century rationalism and the appeal to principles of objectivity and neutrality, it goes relatively unnoticed that the new vocabulary is as highly emotive and anthropomorphic as its predecessor. On into the later twentieth century, the Baconian vocabulary remains embedded, Midgley maintains, in the common sense of scientific writing, so that ‘words such as spite, cheat, selfish and grudging’ are ‘the accepted coin’ of sociobiological discourse, even though no Western scientist would now ever dare to use a term such as ‘love’ to refer to gravitational force (61). Such competitive aggressivity can then be further identified in the currently widespread insistence in public and popular science that we must rigorously disabuse ourselves of certain humanistic illusions – for example, that human consciousness is a condition of evolutionary advance, conferring agency and free will. Two typical kinds of counter-claim are characterised: first, that life on earth is an almost unthinkably random event; and, second, that once set in train, life takes its course with a ruthless if unpredictable determinism that mere humans are virtually powerless to influence. Midgley finds the first at work in the influential Chance and Necessity (1972) by French molecular biologist Jacques Monod, where for example Monod writes of life on earth: ‘“its a priori probability was virtually zero … Before the human did appear its chances of doing so were almost non-existent … The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man … Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game”’ (in Midgley 2006, 46). An example of the second is found in Richard Dawkins’s theory of selfish geneticism, according to which, Dawkins writes, ‘“we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish

132

Towards a New Literary Humanism

molecules known as genes”’ (in Midgley 2006, 143). Dawkins is a main antagonist in the initial stages of Midgley’s argument and a key reference point for her critical analysis of reductionist logics, if for no other reason than that, as Midgley rather graciously puts it, the pellucid clarity of Dawkins’s writing makes him the perfect interlocutor. However, the question of what kind of work ‘poetry’ might do in countering reductionist arguments remains somewhat at issue. Literature might be the vehicle of ideas that would otherwise be recognised as scientific; techniques drawn from literary analysis might reveal the detail of our scientific imagination, yet neither in themselves helps to reveal the precise nature of atomism’s epistemological deficiency. When Science and Poetry takes on this work, and with particular emphasis upon the theories of Dawkins, its patient questioning of logic and insistence on the clarification of concepts inevitably call to mind philosophy, a term curiously absent from the book’s title. Midgley pinpoints the reductionism of atomism in a logical slide from the idea of reduction as a necessary preliminary of all scientific method (as in Lefebvre) to the assumption that, as reduction proceeds, we are brought closer to the state of things as they really are. ‘Understanding the world’, she points out, with regard to Parmenides’s philosophy of stasis and the consolidation of this in Democritus’s theory of the atom as a changeless, fundamental unit of matter, ‘seemed to be essentially a matter of simplifying it so as to locate those ultimate units’ (82). ‘Ultimate’ thereby implies the importation of an ontology, so that those ultimate phenomena – for example, DNA or the amino acids that make them up – are seen not just to be smaller and simpler, but to possess a greater fundamental authenticity than the entities which form the more evident data of our experience. By the same logic, this authenticity is taken to reside in something called ‘matter’, a substrate or origin from which everything else, including human consciousness and culture, has emerged. ‘What can it actually mean’, Midgley asks, ‘to suggest that the things we directly deal with are in some sense less real than certain selected parts – or alleged parts – of them?’ (5). To do so implies the ‘rather mysterious idea that only matter is real’ and, following from this, the ‘surprising notion’ that physical explanation is ‘always ... more “fundamental” than all others’ (89, 171). Atomism is not simply predicated on a materialism or belief in the existence of matter, but effectively raises materialism to the status of a metaphysic through the implication that matter, and its resolution into ever more discrete particles, is real in comparison to other identifiable phenomena. By comparison, modern physics, ‘far ahead of biology’, proposes that ‘reality’, if we insist on

Jeff Wallace 133

using such a word, consists of many different kinds of pattern on many different kinds of level and understands particles not as separate, inert objects, but as aspects of those patterns of complexity, connection and disconnection. In this sense, for Midgley, if the anachronistic persistence of atomism is a scientific failure, it is also a failure of thought and of biological scientists to accept that ‘doing philosophy’ might be a completely normal and in fact crucial part of scientific practice: reductionism is as much a logical as a biological issue. The logic of Monod’s theory of the unlikelihood of life on earth – ‘the universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man’ – is unsettled even by modern biology itself, which shows, Midgley asserts, that ‘the causes of complex things like this must accumulate gradually’ in a patterned way ‘so that their probability steadily increases’ (48). Of Dawkins’s conception of humans as survival machines, she observes: [T]his kind of image is not one that could be literally believed in. It belongs essentially to third-person talk. It is a way of thinking devised for describing other people. There is no way in which we ourselves could set about living if we really envisaged ourselves as cogs or vehicles. (143) ‘Third-person talk’ derives here from Midgley’s emphasis on how the grammar and syntax of human subjectivity count in science: ‘A self is not a given distinct object like a ball or a stone’ (204). However, Midgley’s implication is that normal science in a Kuhnian sense trains scientists to regard rational thought as following ‘only the pattern designed for studying objects’ (165). Yet subjects are as true as objects, and the difficulty of acknowledging this two-sidedness leads scientists less into scientific error as such than into category trouble, the confusing of concepts and the posing of the wrong kinds of question: the proposition that humans are really the pretext for communities of genes or bacteria is therefore, it is implied, not so much scientifically as semantically wrong. Discussions of consciousness as a (reductively – or reductionistically?) material entity are therefore most prone to category trouble and, in Midgley’s sceptical view of scientific professionalism, to predicating the illusory ‘problem’ of how matter might become conscious. Consciousness, she argues, is the condition of subjectivity and so should be thought of neither as ‘a function roughly parallel to digestion or perspiration’ nor as an epiphenominal ‘substance’, but adverbially, as ‘a mere matter of our acting consciously’ (153). ‘The

134

Towards a New Literary Humanism

real question’, Midgley posits, is not ‘what stuff is the world made of?’ but – as Thomas Nagel writes – ‘how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of the same world, the person and his viewpoint included’ (Midgley 2006, 132; Nagel 1986, 3). Given the prominence of ‘poetry’ in Midgley’s title, it is therefore surprising to note how little of the weight of her critical argument against scientific reductionism is actually carried by the concept of literary imagination in Science and Poetry, and indeed how little of the text is devoted to an account of what it is that literature does. Most of this literary material is clustered in two early chapters, ‘Rationality and Rainbows’ and ‘The Shape of Disillusion’, in which the key term is ‘vision’: literature and the arts, Midgley argues, ‘supply the language’ in which new imaginative visions are directly articulated, before they become more generally available to the intellect and to praxis. This is an uncomplicatedly romantic, Shelleyan conception of the prophetic artist ‘generating forceful visions’, with the proviso that novelists and dramatists can more forcefully show how new ideas or patterns of life ‘would work in real life’ (Midgley 2006, 51–2). As a very brief example, Tolstoy’s Pierre in War and Peace is seen to attempt a model of Epicurean detachment, and the difficulties he faces ‘cast a sharp light on its problems’ (53). We are invited to glimpse here the very practical sense in which imaginative ‘vision’ can mean helping us to visualise various life-choices, a deployment of literature which Midgley insists should be at the heart of pedagogy in literary studies. Thereafter, Midgley’s account moves away from this practical orientation for literature and into more familiar territory on the map of relations between science and literature. The key reference points are again the Romantics: Blake, Keats and Wordsworth. The poetry is valued not for its illustration of life choices, but for its overt assault on Newtonian ‘single vision’ in Blake’s terms and on the emergence, through the eighteenth century, of a reductive ideology of rationalism and scientific mechanism. The predictable and ready-made feel of Midgley’s touchstones – Blake on Newton’s sleep, Keats’s Lamia and philosophy’s unweaving of the rainbow, Wordsworth’s ‘we murder to dissect’ – is reinforced by the fact that these are cross-referenced from Richard Dawkins’s account of the Romantics and science, Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), for the strategic purposes of critical dialogue. Satirising Dawkins’s essential take on the Romantics – as they were such clever chaps, what a waste of intellect not to engage seriously with science! – Midgley puts the case that the Romantic counterposing of aesthetics against reductive science was historically necessary, ‘very

Jeff Wallace 135

badly needed’ after a century of the unobstructed growth and ideological ascendancy of Baconian scientism. Moreover, as atomism still has its grip on our imaginative vision, Midgley maintains that the Romantics are still crucial to the identification of ‘inhumane’ scientific ideas through which people are treated as cogs in a vast machine: of Wordsworth’s ‘we murder to dissect’, she notes, ‘the need to say this has certainly not gone away today’, particularly in relation to ‘a great deal of folly’ surrounding the use of computers (Midgley 2006, 70–1). I need at this point in the discussion to pause and explain why it is that my heart sinks at Midgley’s use of ‘we murder to dissect’ and at the more general deployment of literature in Science and Poetry. There is, I suggest, a considerable discrepancy between the prominence given to ‘poetry’ as a means of critiquing atomistic science and the ability of the book to explain how literature carries out this epistemological work. As I have proposed, where Midgley is most nuanced in her examination of the logics of atomism, and, for example, of the imperialistic claims of Dawkins that science represents ‘the only way we know to understand the real world’, the nature of this work in its attention to conceptual detail is unquestionably philosophical. In Midgley’s hands, philosophical method appears not as the ‘private property’ of disciplinary specialisation, but as the addressing of common semantic problems that ‘belong to anybody who can help to solve them’ (136). The everyday vocabulary of a relatively unreflexive humanism can thus be reconfigured as a historically hard-won, endlessly refined conceptual toolkit, with a primarily epistemological and even pragmatic value, rather than a moral or sentimental one. Midgley writes: Words like mind and body do not have to be the names of separate items. They, and the other many-sided words we use for these topics – words such as care, heart, spirit, sense – are tools designed for particular kinds of work in the give-and-take of social life. They are essentially vernacular, and that is just their strength … They are not a cheap substitute, an inadequate ‘folk-psychology’, due to be replaced by the proper terms of the learned. (15–16) In contrast, the claims made for literature are hollowed out by paucities of theoretical and practical demonstration. Reducing the literary to a series of apposite quotations, even if these do revolve around a critique of atomism, runs directly counter to an exposition of what kind of knowledge might be derived from the careful reading of a literary text in its entirety and of the way in which this might differ from reductionism. ‘We murder to dissect’ may be cited with glib approval,

136

Towards a New Literary Humanism

without an acknowledgement of the many kinds of reactionary or irrationalistic service into which it can be pressed – for example, as many teachers of literature will know, as a means of repudiating the close critical analysis of poetry itself. In later chapters, as if to confirm this neglect, Midgley slips into the use of quotations from literary texts as a means of echoing or confirming points of argument made, leaving no sense of what difference it might make that these points occur within a literary aesthetic. Therefore, counter to the early claim that ‘philosophy … is a branch of literature’, these deployments suggest, at best, the reverse (53). ‘Poetry’ is left by Midgley to speak largely for itself, its value self-evident or actually inarticulable as such, in a way reminiscent of the epistemological cul-de-sac into which literary studies was driven by the Leavisite school. Without any sustained attempt to examine the particularities of literary effect, the concept of literature is compromised, along with any conception of the ‘humane’ or ‘humanistic’ for which it might be held to speak. Here we must also note the highly selective, traditional and canonical conception of the literary operationalised by Midgley, with the Romantics, Shakespeare, Pope, Dickens, Tennyson and Eliot as key reference points. Some of these, and certain traditions of criticism supporting them, might make it easy to see literature as an embodiment of the kind of restorative, humanistic project of holistic richness signalled by Midgley’s seventh chapter, ‘Putting our selves together again’. But does literature tout court endorse this humanism or only certain carefully selected instances of the literary? Why should it? If it does so, how does it do so (straightforwardly or contradictorily)? Why not, for example, consider the literature that is contemporaneous with Monod, Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, in terms of its own ability to issue the latest reports on a human condition contextualised by molecular biology, neuroscience and cybernetics? Were Midgley to do so, what might she find there? Michel Houellebecq’s novel Atomised is framed by an unnamed human clone, looking back from the year 2079 on the demise of sexually-reproductive humanity and of an ‘Age of Materialism’, where materialism is critically defined, as in Midgley, as belief in matter as an ‘underlying reality’. The main narrative, more ambiguously focalised as I have already indicated, charts the life of the brilliant scientist Michel Djerzinski, whose work in dovetailing early twenty-first-century molecular biology with quantum physics paved the way for the first cloning of a human being on 27 March 2029. This story cannot be told, however, without equal attention to the life of Michel’s half-brother

Jeff Wallace 137

Bruno. As the narrative delves into the history of their mother, Janine, and their respective fathers – parents who abandon the boys to different grandparents because they found having children to be ‘incompatible with their personal freedom’ – a caustic overview of later twentiethcentury French social history emerges. This history encompasses the advance of an aggressive-competitive capitalist individualism and the challenge thereby posed to European models of social democracy, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the 1970s, and the rise of NewAge idealism and its gradual co-optation into business culture. In this sense, the age of materialism is synonymous with an age of humanism, where the latter is no longer defined as the holistic model of ‘richness’ and ‘complexity’, which was my opening proposition, but in terms of the progressive emancipation of the human individual. According to Bruno, then, the ‘humanist proposition’ is a ‘striving to maximise individual pleasure without causing suffering to another’ (Houellebecq 2000, 262). The destructive effects of atomism as a reductive world view translated into social life are figured in Michel and Bruno as a version of the literary trope of the double, torn halves of a whole that can never be constituted in contemporary life. Michel spends most of his life alone; when the novel opens, he is embarking on a voluntary sabbatical from his research, without a clear goal, and spends most of this sabbatical either in bed or steadily working through the diet of ready meals provided by his local Monoprix supermarket. He is largely celibate and unable to feel sexual pleasure even when apparently partaking of it. Bruno’s life, in stark contrast, is a tale of sexual libertinism and, partly because of his own physical unattractiveness, takes the form of a constant struggle to manufacture the often precariously public and darkly comedic circumstances for ejaculation. In extended satirical accounts of experiments in collective sexuality – the New Age Lieu de Changement and the Cap D’Agde nudist colony – it is clear that Bruno finds the ‘freedom’ of these scenarios and the opportunities for individual competitiveness and rejection they open up far more oppressive than conventional social situations. The inevitable logic of a human exceptionalism based on the individual is that suffering to others cannot be avoided; rather, physical violence is the active result, as exemplified in the extreme by the satanic atrocities committed by David Di Meola’s hippy commune (‘pure materialists’) or as in Michel’s theory that ‘the metaphysical mutation brought about by modern science depends on individuation, narcissism, malice and desire’ (191). Having failed as a writer of cultural commentary, Bruno becomes a teacher and at the end of the novel is

138

Towards a New Literary Humanism

ensconced in a psychiatric clinic, having lost his job following a sexual advance to a female pupil. It is not difficult to see how Atomised might be read as an antihumanistic novel. The lives of Michel and Bruno convey a pervasive and misanthropic cynicism about the systematic failure of human relationships, familial and sexual, to deliver love and happiness. Fathers are ‘disturbed’ by the sight of their sons; each misrecognises the other. After the funeral of his grandmother, the young Bruno ‘witnessed something strange. His father and mother – neither of whom he had seen before – discussing what should be done with him’ (46). In his early life Michel is rescued by his father from a room in which he is found sliding around in urine and excrement, while Janine is at the beach with her hippy friends. As a young man Bruno pretends not to see his father in a brothel; later, when he has to look after his own son Victor while his wife is on holiday for a fortnight, he spends the time on his bed drinking bourbon and staring at the radiator, while his son watches TV for 15 hours a day in the living room. Later still, Bruno watches from a car as his son returns from school to his mother’s apartment, carrying his satchel and talking to himself, but can say or do nothing. Family relationships may be longstanding, the text notes, but ‘then, finally, they too gutter out’ (186). Bruno seems to journey without love through the marriage and fatherhood he eventually attains, and when each brother is given a glimpse of happiness, Michel with his childhood sweetheart Annabelle and Bruno with Christiane, a libertine he meets at an orgy in a nudist colony, it is quickly snatched back: both women develop cancers and commit suicide. In the words of Bruno’s grandmother, left with her young grandson after the funeral of her husband, which his own daughter Janine had failed to attend, ‘there had been a mistake. Someone, somewhere had made a dreadful mistake’ (43). This bewilderment at the sheer dysfunctionality of human life and of its consistent failure to deliver the more benign humanistic consolations that modernity leads us to expect is scientifically contextualised by Michel, whose work in genetics leads him to the insight that ‘mistakes’ are programmed into human life by the constantly imperfect mutations of sexual reproduction. The reader is thus invited to reflect upon the posthuman narrator’s observation of the ‘meekness, the resignation, perhaps even the relief of humans’ at their own gradual passing away towards the end of the twenty-first century (378). The critique of atomistic thinking encoded in Michel Djerzinski’s work is entirely consistent with Midgley’s in Science and Poetry. Biologists’ view of the atom, Michel’s boss Desplechin ruefully reflects, ‘had evolved little

Jeff Wallace 139

since that of Democritus’, yet once they were forced to confront its reality, ‘the very basis of modern biology would be blown away’ (19). Michel becomes convinced of the need to move from ‘an ontology of objects to an ontology of states’ (358). However, one senses that Atomised as a work of ‘poetry’ would struggle to fulfil Midgely’s criteria for a restorative epistemology that would ‘put the self back together again’; the outcome of Michel’s science is the necessary demise of the human, which has been symbolised in Michel and Bruno by obstinate division. The novel stages an extremely serious discussion of what and how it is to live in late modernity, yet deposits a deep scepticism about the extent to which any decisive choices can be made and resolutely refuses any models of redemption other than the genetic obsolescence of the human. In maturity, Bruno for example realises with dismay that his obsessions are clearly related to his childhood: ‘his only goal in life had been sexual, and it was too late to change that now’; the narrative (in the kind of audacious transition that I am about to discuss) further sees that in this Bruno is ‘characteristic of’ a generation that had emerged from ‘two hundred years’ of ‘fierce economic pressures’ in France (73). What these instances in fact begin to suggest is that Atomised does not coincide with the critique of atomism it embodies in Michel and Bruno; its literary effect is to elude this simple identification. In highlighting the precise nature of this literary excess or slipperiness, however, I want to suggest that the novel propounds an account of the human which is not heartless but heart-rending, painfully acute and dialectical in its approach to what humanism might amount to. Attention must turn here to the notorious peculiarities and inconsistencies of tone and discourse in Houellebecq’s narrative technique. First, there is an open flaunting of a crude idiomatic reductionism, registered in sudden and darkly comic shifts into what sounds uncannily like Bruno’s prejudice and insensitivity. Michel’s cousin Brigitte is, for example, succinctly described as a ‘pretty, gentle girl of 16, who some years later would marry a complete bastard’ (35). This predicament of the pretty girl likely to be a prey to callous womanisers is later generalised: ‘More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what can prove to be the first step in an irrevocable decline’ (68). At another moment, Annabelle is reading the Greek thinker Epicurus: ‘brilliant, liberal’, notes the narrative voice, ‘and, to be honest, a pain in the arse’ (105). The effect is of unexpected tonal modulations between a humane narrative – let us say reasoned and polite – and an uncompromisingly impolite and anti-humanistic one, if by humanism here we refer to imputations of the ‘dignity and sanctity’ of the human. Closely related

140

Towards a New Literary Humanism

is a second kind of modulation, further contributing to a general sense of unflinching explicitness which has been controversial in Houellebecq’s writing, by which regular yet unexpected raids are made on the social and natural sciences in order to point up a ruthless determinism in natural processes such as physical degeneration, parasitism or patterns of sexual selection. With reference again to Michel’s cousin Brigitte, the mildly kitsch description of a summer afternoon in which as teenagers they embrace in a field of newly-mown grass is followed by an account of the parasite that makes them both itch the next day: ‘Thrombidium holosericum is plentiful in summer meadows. Two millimetres in diameter, with a fat, fleshy, bright red body’ (35). More darkly, the death of Bruno’s grandfather is immediately marked by a sustained description of the decomposition processes of the human body: ‘Under the combined action of bacteria and the digestive juices disgorged by the larvae, the corpse begins to liquefy’ (42). Clearly, each instance of parasitism unsettles the notion of human autonomy and presents ‘nature’ as pitiless and relentless – for the young Michel, a ‘repulsive cesspit’ that ‘deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust’ (38), while for the older Bruno, briefly released from his institution in order to sit at his mother’s deathbed, ‘“Nature? I wouldn’t piss on it if it was on fire … I’d shit on its face”’ (314). Why should a novel that at one level persuasively condemns reductionistic science and posits, through Michel, the view that ‘the notion of cause simply isn’t scientific’ (324) at the same time flaunt, both through Bruno and its own narrative voice, a pitiless and deterministic materialist science? To what end should its narrative ambiguity leave the reader perplexed about the relationship between these imaginative visions? Confronting the issue of narrativity in Houellebecq’s fiction, Martin Ryle has affirmed a sense that this ‘unsettled experience’, allied to the tendency for any novel to ‘confer dialogic power even on the most banal statement’, puts a particular onus on the judgement of the reader – for example, to decide on how far a certain depthlessness in Houellebecq’s characterisations might involve a choice between ‘humanist and anti-humanist’ interpretations (Ryle 2004, 25). I would argue, however, that Atomised moves beyond this conception of choice. What is consistently moving and deeply poignant about Houellebecq’s narrative is the steadfast refusal of human life to be humanistic; alternatively, to be human is precisely to have to come to terms with the anti-humanistic aspects of our personalities, behaviours and environments. The intense pity evoked by the plight of Michel and Bruno is a pity directed at the failure of ordinary human lives to

Jeff Wallace 141

be human in the way that we might ‘humanistically’ want them to be, allied to an admiration of the qualities of stoicism and perseverance it takes to live through such failures. The more humanistically and ideologically scandalous Bruno’s misogynistic and racist postures, the more poignantly we feel, through the context of the novel as a whole work of art, that the desperate reduction to these postures is also human. More precisely, Houellebecq’s novel clinches this redemptive effect though a further pattern of unexpected tonal oscillations into ‘moments of extraordinary tenderness’ (Houellebecq 2000, 294). These appear or emerge, hard-won, out of passages that begin in bleak or callous cynicism; the phrase in question refers to Christiane and Bruno making love together the morning after a night at a swinger’s club, which is described with rugged explicitness, Bruno surrounded by gaping orifices and Christiane letting herself be ‘fucked by several men while trying – usually vainly – to get him hard’. Michel and Bruno will at times discover that they are distraught, as if overtaken by the involuntary manifestation of their own human-ness. Michel is surprised to find that Bruno’s eyes are wet with tears as his brother describes how he met his unloved wife: ‘“I met Anne in 1981 … She wasn’t really beautiful, but I was tired of jacking off”’ (203). The chapter dealing with Annabelle’s death begins by asserting that ‘from the family’s point of view it was probably for the best. When death occurs it’s usual to come out with some shit like that’ (344); at the end, Michel sits in the garden with Annabelle’s parents after scattering the ashes: He looked at the earth, the sun, the roses; the suppleness of the grass. It was incomprehensible. Everyone was silent; Annabelle’s mother had poured wine for a toast. She offered him a glass and looked into his eyes. ‘You can stay here for a couple of days if you like, Michel,’ she said in a low voice. No, he would go; he would go back to work. He did not know how to do anything else. The sky seemed to be streaked with sunlight; he realised that he was crying. (346) ‘In conceptual emergencies like this’, Mary Midgley writes of the current global environmental crisis, ‘what we have to attend to is the nature of our imaginative visions – the world-pictures by which we live’ (Midgley 2006, 238). By this advanced point in Science and Poetry, however, Midgley has long left off seeking such imaginative vision in poetry and has instead taken to exploring the value of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Science and Poetry demonstrates the perils of citing literature as the rich and complex source of a holistic humanism without grounding the epistemology of the literary in the same level of detail

142

Towards a New Literary Humanism

that one might expect of discussions of science or philosophy. In the new, robustly utilitarian environments critically addressed by this current volume, and by literary studies as a discipline, we can ill afford to perpetuate older forms of nebulousness or platitude where either ‘literature’ or ‘humanism’ is concerned. In this sense, Atomised could be said to deliver both more and less than Midgley requires of ‘poetry’. Houellebecq refuses to claim for the novel a humanistic high-ground of richness and complexity that reductive science is said to lack, just as the novel engages with Michel and Bruno’s existential despair and does not try to confer a transcendent humanistic nobility upon them. It seems that we both are, and are not, materially determined beings. Given the extent of damage that might be attributed, historically, to certain versions of humanism, Houellebecq seems to propose that our continuing humanity must consist in rigorously calling the efficacy of this concept into question. His scandalous modulations of tone and juxtapositions of incongruous material edge the open-minded reader towards a similarly more open conception of the human – that is, one more appropriate to the contemporary conceptual emergency, and which might even countenance the disappearance of the humanistic if in the name of a – better? – concept to replace it. ‘Was it possible to think of Bruno as an individual?’, asks Michel; his science tells him that this must remain provisional, even though Bruno is able to derive some comfort from the illusion of humanistic identity (212). To Michel, ‘“You’re not human”’ is an accusation that appears somewhat rich, coming as it does from Bruno (216). But the phrase might be taken less as a sign of inadequacy in Michel than as a symbolic condensation of the historical limits and possibilities of humanism, to which question Atomised addresses itself with the tenacity that we should expect of literature.

8 Humanity Without Itself: Robert Musil, Giorgio Agamben and Posthumanism Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter

What are the affinities between two works with seemingly related titles, Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities [1930–42]) and Giorgio Agamben’s L’Uomo senza contenuto (The Man without Content [1999])? What might be their contribution to that rethinking of humanism which posthumanism warrants? And what might be made of the fact that both these works, each of which strains at the boundaries of the discourse to which it is affiliated – fiction in the case of Musil, aesthetics in the case of Agamben – diagnose a (post)human condition that becomes evident in a lack, one designated in their titles through the preposition without? This chapter will attempt a response to those questions. First, however, some context is necessary. It is over ten years since the publication of N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (1999). During that time, posthumanism, a term which may have been tendentiously sensationalising on its first deployments, has come to mark reoriented priorities within the humanities. Among the major studies that have driven the exploration of two extreme prospects that emerge from the term – the waning of humanism (post-humanism) and the exceeding of the human itself (post-human-ism) – are Hayles’s other major study, My Mother Was a Computer (2005), R.L. Rutsky’s High Techne¯ (1999), Elaine Graham’s Representations of the Post/human (2002), Bruce Clarke’s Posthuman Metamorphoses (2008) and Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? (2010), as well as the monographs within Minnesota’s Posthumanities series. To these should be added an extensive host of studies that, even if they do not invoke the words posthuman or posthumanism directly in their title, address the impact on the integrity and survivability of the human, and on what has traditionally been the province of the humanities, of a number of concerns that contribute 143

144

Towards a New Literary Humanism

to posthumanism’s range and repertoires. Among those concerns are the ubiquity of digital technologies; the potential and reach of biomedia and bioengineering; the re-explored ontology of ‘humanness’ in the face of prosthetic technology and ‘human enhancement’; the awareness of how the progress of robotics and a cultural imaginary increasingly ‘peopled’ by cyborgs, hybrid humans and ‘post-bodied’ minds renders the contrastingly organic ‘question of the animal’ both pressing and nostalgic; the autopoietic dynamic of the systems with which we are surrounded and within which we are embedded; and, most accessibly to media-driven sensibilities, the wagers re-laid daily on the apocalyptic propensities of humanity and of the planet itself. Within the humanities, all this tends to have greater intuitive reach than, say, ‘inaesthetics’ or ‘dis-enclosure’ (Badiou 2005; Nancy 2008). Indeed, posthumanism probably names current sensibilities at least as economically as any other term designating the contemporary cultural and critical imaginary. If and when the term is not applied – which may occur because, quite simply, it does not please or possibly because of awareness of the refracted temporalities suggested by the post- prefix explored by figures like Jean-François Lyotard or Bruno Latour, such that posthumanism is recognised as not necessarily specific to our time but as an achronological condition of the human – there nevertheless remains the irrepressible sense that posthumanism has matured into a label that is more reality-responsive than it is sensationalising. It is therefore arguable that posthumanism’s agendas have led routine reports on humanism’s or literature’s or philosophy’s crises to seem just a little unexaggerated to readerships who might be convinced by the accumulated evidence, of which the examples cited above form only a small proportion, that something different really is alive – or post-life as we knew it and read it – in the humanities. The above preamble cues our consideration of Musil and Agamben, who can otherwise seem incongruous in posthumanist contexts. In question here, however, are the revised canons focused on by ‘post/ human genealogies’, as Elaine Graham has it: Where once the ancients told tales of centaurs and djinns, demons and angels, contemporary popular genres entertain androids, cyborgs and extraterrestrials. Is the enduring popularity of such creatures a way of exploring what is fascinating and frightening, of testing the limits of our own humanity against ‘the Different, the Alien, the Monstrous, the Uncanny, the Marginal and the Other’ …? (Graham 2002, 59)

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter 145

As Graham indicates, there is a strong tradition in myth and science for ‘exploring the blurring and interpenetration of boundaries’, so that it is ‘those contemporary products of fictional and technoscientific worlds who inhabit the uncharted extremities of humanity, nature and artifice’ that attract her attention (55). The ‘products’ she reads are not typically drawn from literature or from the ranks of Modernism or High Modernism to which Musil is affiliated. In the posthumanist canon that emerges once it becomes possible to observe who is being recurrently cited in posthumanism’s standard works, it immediately becomes apparent that literature is not privileged. Hence, for instance, in the literary genealogies of the posthuman that she recognises, Graham reserves some incisively-used chapter space for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); other literature, however, comes in for incidental rather than formative mention. The main field of reference continues to take in, instead, science fiction and popular culture in their diverse mediations. Fredric Jameson, no less, reinforces this development. In Archaeologies of the Future – the genealogical focus on prefigurations of posthumanism is foregrounded by the title – the future-minded imagination is identified with science fiction and its political unconscious. This, for Jameson, is the discourse that understands that ‘closure or the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go’ ( Jameson 2005, 283). His range of reference when demonstrating ‘the new post-human lifestyles designed to replace the older natural ones’ (163) takes in canons of science fiction, not literature. Indeed, he is very specific about science fiction’s standing in that regard: It would in my opinion be a mistake to make the ‘apologia’ for SF in terms of specifically ‘high’ literary values – to try, in other words, to recuperate this or that major text as exceptional, in much the same way as some literary critics have tried to recuperate Hammett or Chandler for the lineage of Dostoevsky, say, or Faulkner. SF is a subgenre with a complex and interesting formal history of its own, and with its own dynamic, which is not that of high culture, but which stands in a complementary and dialectical relationship to high culture or modernism as such. (283) Jameson, whose understanding of Modernism is scarcely mean, as indicated by A Singular Modernity (2002) or The Modernist Papers (2007), sees it as self-evident that science fiction is not straightforwardly amenable to the protocols of the literary aesthetic, for which Modernism

146

Towards a New Literary Humanism

provides a touchstone (hence, no doubt, its invocation in the passage quoted). And as science fiction is a genre of choice for the posthuman imagination, it must follow that posthumanism itself must be relatively unconcerned by high literary values or the texts sustaining them. Henceforth there will be other agendas to push, and Musil is unlikely to be among them. Nevertheless, there is something distinctly odd in Musil’s absence from posthumanist studies. Musil’s interest in what he will call ‘the subjunctive of possibility’ (Musil 1997, 14) is not entirely distant from science fiction’s experience of a limit beyond which thought cannot go. In addition, his exploration of self-voided humanity itself has some bearing on prefigurations of the posthuman. Admittedly, it is hard not to concede that The Man without Qualities, which exceeds 1,000 pages and nonetheless contrives to be unfinished, is scarcely an obvious focus for posthumanist inquiry, not least when one could instead be speaking of Philip K. Dick or Avatar (2009), biotechnology or ‘the world without us’ (Weisman 2007). So what are the reasons for considering Musil’s exclusion from posthumanist studies to be anomalous? The reasons are in fact related to the question of the world (or, at any rate, life) without us (or, at any rate, without humanity – whatever life and humanity may be). To humanity without itself. Before we explain this, however, it is as well to declare our programme of exploring the possibilities of ‘a posthumanism without technology’, that is, a posthumanism not driven solely by technological considerations. This is not, of course, to downplay the trenchancy of technoculture for contemporary discourse in the humanities. What posthumanism envisages and critiques in terms of the diverse impacts of digital culture and of the ‘technological/postbiological sublime’ on ‘the many meanings of being human’ is vital for a rethinking of what it is that the ‘post-humanities’ might involve ( Jameson 2005, 234). None of that is in question for us. Rather, the main thrust of any posthumanism without technology would be to supplement those many viable and necessary posthumanisms with a careful thinking through of what it is within literary culture and within the theoretical humanities that might be worth revisiting by mainstream, technology-minded posthumanism. This may prove particularly intriguing with works that yield some productive reflections on how the ‘high’ literary imagination might both prefigure and refigure as well as trouble, and in turn be disturbed by, the repertoires of posthumanist discourse. What, then, does Musil offer the posthuman? We suggest below that The Man without Qualities intriguingly allegorises some of the tensions within posthumanism. But in the first place, of course, there is

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter 147

the richness of Musil’s title and the question of whether the novel’s protagonist, Ulrich, is sufficiently human. The novel, in fact, explores ‘the abiding question of what it is to be human’ (Graham 2002, passim) at the onset of the Modern. Ulrich’s progressive disaffiliation from the human helps us glimpse the scope inherent in calling him post-human(ist). A man without qualities is a man without state, of a dehumanised sort if he is of any sort at all, and deprived of any natural or accrued nobility. In other words, he would be an affront to the humanistic idea that is at least as old as Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528): namely, that man (within humanism it was, for a long time, class-privileged man rather than generalised humanity that was at stake) should work for self-betterment and the cultivation of better qualities – and for sprezzatura, ‘courtly gracefulness, the quality which makes the courtier seem a natural nobleman’ (Castiglione 1967, 66–7). This graciously blasé acquisition of a blason of refined attributes is therefore a staple of humanism. It coheres reasonably with Enlightenment projects for modernity. Any counterimpulse must seem unnatural, ungracious, unrefined, inhuman, dark and regressive. Yet this is precisely the posthumanistic rationale that drives the all too refined Ulrich, the protagonist of Musil’s novel. Ulrich reverses the bildungsroman dynamic to a process of self-divestiture, of a willed shedding of his distinctive talents and qualities: ‘And one day Ulrich stopped wanting to be promising’ (Musil 1997, 41). There cannot be much sprezzatura there: ‘He had expected to find himself on a stage of world-shaking adventures with himself as hero, but now saw nothing but a drunken young man shouting on a wide, empty square, answered only by the paving stones’ (32). Before we go further, let us acknowledge a degree of tiresomeness in all this. There is something in Musil’s novel that is a little too jejune (even if, or because, Ulrich is 32 and has sterilely progressed from the army to civil engineering to mathematics). His is an irresolvable, enervated sensibility that finds itself circumstanced in the ‘pseudoreality’ played out against the backdrop of Kakania – ‘a country for geniuses; which is probably what brought it to its ruin’ (31). The novel restages all ‘the maddening disorders, confusions, vertigos’ that George Steiner discerns in Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (Young Torless [1906]), Musil’s earlier novel (see Steiner 1995). The compulsive soul-searching in which Ulrich indulges is mirrored in a passage describing his friend Walter, who is the one who will actually call him a man without qualities: Such people exercise an unusual attraction, because the moral flaw in which they incessantly live communicates itself to others. Everything

148

Towards a New Literary Humanism

in their conversation takes on a personal significance, and one feels free in their company to be constantly preoccupied with oneself, so that they provide a pleasure otherwise obtainable only from an analyst or a therapist for a fee … (59) It is not surprising, then, that it is Musil whom Georg Lukács dubiously credits in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) with ‘introduc[ing] the problem, central to all modernist literature, of the significance of psychopathology’. Ulrich exemplifies the ‘abstract potentiality’ that worries Lukács. ‘[It] belongs wholly to the realm of subjectivity’, as distinct from the ‘concrete potentiality … concerned with the dialectic between the individual’s subjectivity and objective reality’ (Lukács 1963, 23–4): Innumerable possibilities for man’s development are imaginable, only a small percentage of which will be realized. Modern subjectivism, taking these imagined possibilities for actual complexity of life, oscillates between melancholy and fascination. When the world declines to realize these possibilities, this melancholy becomes tinged with contempt. (21–2) Responsibility arises for Lukács because ‘if man’s inwardness is identified with an abstract subjectivity, human personality must necessarily disintegrate’. Lukács, significantly, quotes T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ in support: Shape without form, shade without colour Paralysed force, gesture without motion. (25) It is this predicament that Ulrich exemplifies, disinclined as he is, despite all his consorting with diplomats like Arnheim and his dabbling with abortive political projects, to participate in ‘a concrete terminus ad quem; the establishment of a new order’: How different the protest of writers like Musil! The terminus a quo (the corrupt society of our time) is inevitably the main source of energy, since the terminus ad quem (the escape into psychopathology) is mere abstraction. The rejection of modern reality is purely subjective. Considered in terms of man’s relation with his environment, it lacks both content and direction. And this lack is exaggerated still further by the character of the terminus ad quem. For the protest is an empty

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter 149

gesture, expressing nausea, or discomfort, or longing. Its content – or rather lack of content – derives from the fact that such a view of life cannot impart a sense of direction. (30) Lukács here anticipates the hollowness, the ‘without content’, that we shall witness Agamben developing. Meanwhile, and interestingly, all this takes place in the context of Ulrich’s own awareness of ‘possibilism’ and the ‘delicate medium of the subjunctive mood’ (Musil 1997, 11). In one of the ‘secular sermons’ (Kermode 1971, 189) that characterise the novel, Musil writes that: It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. Even so, it will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above the idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them. (Musil 1997, 12) However, perhaps even more than Hamlet, Ulrich, who might have been such a ‘possibilitarian’, is indecisive. He is overtaken by the ‘obsession with morbidity’ to which Lukács keeps returning: ‘With Musil – and with many other modernist writers – psychopathology becomes the goal, the terminus ad quem, of their artistic intention’ (Lukács 1963, 29). It drives an abdication from facing up to Geworfenheit that is replaced by ‘an abstract polarity of the eccentric and the socially-average’ (31). In the case of Ulrich, who estranges himself from himself, this is almost willed: And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities. (Musil 1997, 13) Musil here offers posthumanism an emblematic staging of how the human shrinks from the immensity of both abstract and concrete potentials instantiated by a new technocultural order. Ulrich’s predicament is that of not knowing how and what to desire in the face of his foresight that he will never be avant la lettre because he is now forever avant le nombre. This enigma is opened up below. For the moment, let us note that it suggests that Ulrich is potentially as evocative and alienated a figure as Victor Frankenstein’s monster, Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas or

150

Towards a New Literary Humanism

William Gibson’s Henry Dorsett Case in terms of the mythography of prefigurations of the posthuman. He shares their anomie before the beguilements, menace, energies and entropies of re-engineered humanity and/or an autopoietic technoculture. Indeed, Ulrich finds that his foresight, like his qualities, is unavailing. If he dispenses with the latter, it is surely because he cannot quite restyle himself to his time, whose demands he otherwise reads well: ‘Time was making a new start just then (it does so all the time), and a new time needs a new style’ (15). Central to this point, and to any defence of Musil’s novel from Lukácsian attacks, is the fact that Ulrich’s crisis is brought about precisely because of the situatedness of his enervated rationality before technology, system and the order of the number. One of the best-known scenes of The Man without Qualities, the one in which Ulrich studies and measures traffic, that simple symbol of modernity, is emblematic in this respect, not least as ‘he toyed with calculating the incalculable’ and with ‘estimat[ing] the enormous undertaking it takes nowadays merely to be a person who does nothing at all’ (7). So is his view that ‘science had developed a concept of hard, sober intelligence that makes the old metaphysical and moral ideas of the human race simply intolerable’ (43). Let us see how these points are played out in the commentaries, before moving on to considering some related passages in Agamben. In a 1995 article in the New Yorker that asserts the high literary values that Jameson downplays in Archaeologies, George Steiner values Musil as an author who stands for ‘the highest art’ and who alone, together with Proust, exemplifies ‘the writers of fiction who are also major systematic intellects’, whose work is shaped at ‘depths that are inaccessible to the rest of us’ (Steiner 1995, 101). He then reminds us that: Musil was a highly trained and qualified mechanical engineer with a keen grasp of mathematics and mathematical logic. His thesis bore on the technical aspects of Ernst Mach’s philosophy of physics … From 1903 to 1908 Musil was also occupied with the study of experimental clinical psychology and of theories of behavior. There is hardly a page in his immense oeuvre … that does not argue, by precept and example, for the radical unison of the philosophical and the poetic … For Musil, thought – be it mathematical, analytic, discursive or aesthetic – is form. To think rigorously is to shape rigorously: the concordance between genre and content should be as logical and as inevitable in a novella or a play as it is in the blueprint of a machine tool or in an algebraic proof. There is nothing cold or mandarin about this heroic conviction. It gives to Musil’s stories

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter 151

and to The Man without Qualities, a subtle lustre, a summons to adult response, an imaginative authority of the rarest force. (101–2) We also know from David S. Luft, in his introduction to Musil’s Precision and Soul, that Musil’s mentor Carl Stumpf ‘set the tone for the positive treatment of science and empiricism in Austrian universities’, that Musil was interested in experimental psychology and that he worked as an archivist in the Technical Institute at Vienna (Luft 1990, xvi). On the analogy that our knowledge of Auguste Comte having influenced George Eliot makes positivism discoverable in the latter’s pages, is all this enough to make Musil amenable to posthumanist appropriation? In other words, is The Man without Qualities interesting in these contexts because it is one of the few novels that is somehow informed by science and technology? Perhaps. But the focus should instead surely be on how Musil’s novel may offer the most complete dramatisation we have of the psychology of human(ist) qualities suspending themselves before the prospect of pervasive technoculture. Steiner attends to the significance of that dramatisation: It is a rendering that omits crucial connotations of selfness, of singular appropriation to oneself, almost of ‘self-possession’, with all its philosophical-moral-economic attributes. ‘Qualities’ lets drop the decisive analogies with the ontological-psychological investigations into the ego not only in Freud but in Husserl and Heidegger. ‘The Man Whose “I” Is in Search of His “Me”’ would be an absurdly awkward paraphrase, but it might be more exact. (Steiner 1995, 102–3) The ‘me’, here, is still very humanist. It confirms that for Ulrich, in the midst of unfamiliar and accelerated realities, the reflex of thinking the self and personality according to familiar and unhurried categories is insuppressible. Steiner further describes how Musil ‘sets out to chronicle, to elucidate critically, the death of Europe and its culture’ (106). This accords with Luft’s view that Musil ‘craft[s] a way of thinking that encompasses order and disorder, the elasticity of humanity and culture, and the enormous complexity of modern life’ (Luft 1990, xviii). The Man without Qualities is assuredly posthumanist in its understanding that humanism is exhausted if it cannot inspire an intellectual response to such complexity. Hence, if we are to bring out the posthumanist affinities of Musil’s novel, it is not enough to acknowledge that ‘Musil felt strong affinities with German classical humanism (with Goethe, Schiller, and the late eighteenth century)’ or that ‘he also looked forward to a second beginning

152

Towards a New Literary Humanism

for this tradition after the defeats of the 1930s’ (Luft 1990, xviii–xix). We may need to see also how Musil understood, in essays like ‘The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics’, that in the scenarios of modernity, what was desired were truths that might set ‘new and bold directions to the feelings, even if these distinctions were to remain mere possibilities; a rationality, in other words, for which thinking would exist only to give an intellectual armature to some still problematic way of being human: such a rationality is incomprehensible today even as a need’ (quoted in Luft 1990, xviii, emphasis added). Being human ‘today’, as Musil realises, requires a different rationality. A different scope for the human, for human-ism, is called for. So it is that Ulrich understands this challenge but, before it, quails, fails: ‘With wonderful clarity he saw in himself all the abilities and qualities favored by his time … but he had lost the capacity to apply them’ (Musil 1997, 44). Ulrich’s abdication of the responsibility of/to the human, of the suspension of ‘qualities’, is not quite the rationality required. As Walter tells Clarisse of him, ‘“the strength you marvel at in him is pure emptiness”’ (62), whereupon he ‘burst[s] out’ with the diagnosis that ‘“He’s a man without qualities!”’ (62) and ‘“It’s the human type produced by our time!”’ (62–3). Clearly, Musil understood what it was like to be living in a time like ours that was on the cusp of a new technological order. The idea of possibilism in that context, and the view that the human itself thereby changes, offers to the posthuman the glimpse of what a work of literature can do in offering a re-imaginative and psychologically acute diagnosis of the conditions of its time and of the effect of those conditions upon subjectivity. Luft, who understands that Musil ‘emphasized the transformations of modern life that make it difficult for individuals to find sense in their experience, to feel themselves part of a meaningful community, to balance their thinking and feeling, and to adjust to constant changes in their way of living’, and that ‘the sheer scale of modern life had transformed the individual’s relation to culture … [such] that science and technology created new conditions for human experience’ (Luft 1990, xxiii), is exactly right to identify this passage from the essay ‘Mind and Experience’ as a key focus: What characterizes and defines our intellectual situation is precisely the wealth of contents that can no longer be mastered, the swollen facticity of knowledge (including moral facts), the spilling out of experience over the surfaces of nature, the impossibility of achieving an overview, the chaos of things that cannot be denied. We will perish from this, or overcome it by becoming a stronger type of human being. (Quoted in Luft 1990, xxii–xxiii)

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter 153

This is what Ulrich, in the novel, is attempting, so that his trajectory becomes an interesting test of whether a stronger type of posthuman being can be configured through an act of will, through ‘a spirituality commensurate with the conditions of life in modern civilization’ (Luft 1990, xxiii). Luft further shows how in his essays Musil developed a distinction between the ratioid and the non-ratioid, the former linked with testable scientific knowledge amenable to articulation through laws and rules, the latter associable with the more personalised literary intellect. Musil wished for a workable relation between them, such that ‘the life of the mind’ would ‘not [be] antagonistic to intellect and science’ if moved ‘from academic philosophy in the direction of art and literature’ (Luft 1990, xxvi–xxvii). This desired relationship also bears upon what Musil called ‘the other condition’, in which ‘the routine of everyday life’ is related to ‘heightened conditions of the ethical-aesthetic self’ (xxvii). It is, of course, a tremendous challenge, this attempt to achieve complementarity between the ratioid and the non-ratioid, between ‘everyday life’ and the contrary emphases of convergent and divergent thought – and more so in an age of progressive specialism, when the circumstances are more auspicious for latter-day ‘contests of faculties’ to become more fraught rather than equilibrated (see Kant 1991). Ulrich, we would suggest, attempts the challenge and fails. In regard to his commitment to engineering, for instance, ‘Ulrich’s … attempt to become a man of stature, through technology, came quickly to an end’ (Musil 1997, 35). And he later ‘refuse[s] to be a human being’ because ‘it has an unpleasant feeling of dilettantism about it’ (231). The allegory implied here is one in which contemporaneity’s routines, as much as modernity’s, are co-involved. It is an early exploration of an imperative occasioned by the affordances of the ‘post-natal plasticity’ of our time, in which the ‘“phenomenological horizon” still exists but not through the reflexive turn that amounts to repetition … but as the endless proliferation of provisional drafts that interact and supersede each other as cognitions with material relations and effects’ (Smith and Jenks 2006, 258). For that writing, Musil’s Ulrich, given to ‘living hypothetically’ (Musil 1997, 269), provides one draft. Agamben provides another. In The Man without Content, published more than 50 years after Musil’s death, Agamben describes a process of alienation very similar to Ulrich’s: [W]hen a culture loses its means of transmission, man is deprived of reference points and finds himself wedged between, on the one hand, a past that incessantly accumulates behind him and oppresses

154

Towards a New Literary Humanism

him with the multiplicity of its now-indecipherable contents, and on the other hand a future that he does not yet possess and that does not throw any light on his struggle with the past. (Agamben 1999, 108) This occurs because art, which Ulrich cannot commit to, is unable to resolve what, for Agamben, only it can achieve; that is, ‘transforming man’s inability to exit his historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action’ (Agamben 1999, 114). Instead, what takes place is all too unsatisfactory, as the only passage where Musil is invoked makes clear: Today, however, it seems that this irritating yet irreplaceable instrument of our aesthetic apprehension of art is undergoing a crisis that could lead to its eclipse. In one of the ‘Unfriendly Observations’ collected by Robert Musil in his Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten (Posthumous papers of a living author), Musil jokingly asked ‘whether kitsch, increased by one and then two dimensions of kitsch, would not become increasingly bearable and increasingly less kitsch’, and trying to discover the relationship between kitsch and art by means of a curious mathematical calculation, concluded that they appear to be the very same thing. After aesthetic judgment taught us to distinguish art from its shadow and authenticity from inauthenticity, our experience, on the contrary, forces us to face the embarrassing truth that it is precisely to non-art that we owe, today, our most original aesthetic emotions. (49) The experience leads, for Agamben, to a lack of ‘content’. It is, indeed, the artist who is ‘the man without content’. He is without himself, possibly even without humanity in an age where art ‘has completed the circle of its metaphysical destiny and has reentered the dawn of an origin in which not only its destiny but the very destiny of man could be put in question in an initial manner’ (54). In this very different conception of the posthuman, ‘content’ is linked to the fortunes of art and the human itself (54). ‘Artistic subjectivity without content’, Agamben explains: is now the pure force of negation that everywhere and at all times affirms only itself as absolute freedom that mirrors itself in pure

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter 155

self-consciousness. And, just as every content goes under in it, so the concrete space of the work disappears in it, the space in which once man’s action and the world both found their reality in the image of the divine, and in which man’s dwelling on earth used to take its diametrical measurement. (56–7) The experience is all the more voiding because the artist knows that ‘artistic subjectivity is absolute essence, for which all subject matter is indifferent’, such that ‘the pure creative-formal principle, split from any content, is the absolute abstract inessence, which annihilates and dissolves every content in its continuous effort to transcend and actualize itself’ (54). There is more, of course. But perhaps the salient point will have emerged. The figure of the artist in our time is the one that, for Agamben, stands for the man without content. To this view, the artist is always already posthuman. He is always without himself. He is always split: If the artist now seeks his certainty in a particular content or faith, he is lying, because he knows that pure artistic subjectivity is the essence of everything; but if he seeks his reality in pure artistic subjectivity, he finds himself in the paradoxical condition of having to find his own essence precisely in the inessential, his content in what is mere form. His condition, then, is that of a radical split; and outside of this split, everything is a lie. (54) And, in one final thrust that drives the point home: The artist is the man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness of expression and no other ground than this incomprehensible station on this side of himself. (55) It is as well to pull back from this rarefied idiom at this stage and ask: how does all this help us understand The Man without Qualities, this novel based on a ‘Baroque of the Void’ (Musil 1997, 286) better? How can it complement a rethinking of posthumanism? Let us recall that the posthuman as Musil constructs it for Ulrich is an experience of aimlessness – as if one were an artist, or genius, without content not for the specific reasons adduced by Agamben, but because apprehension of pure essence is untethered to any purpose. In the process, Ulrich

156

Towards a New Literary Humanism

becomes a man suavely at the end of his tether. That experience of dissociation is felt as a split, as a disaffiliation from the human itself. Ulrich is the literary character who, well before Agamben’s formulation of the man without content, lives Agamben’s view that the ‘crisis of art in our time is in reality, a crisis of poetry, of ␲␱␫⬘␩␴␫␨’. That is because: ␲␱␫⬘␩␴␫␨ does not designate here an art among others, but is the very name of man’s doing, of that productive action of which artistic doing is only a privileged example, and which appears, today, to be unfolding its power on a planetary scale in the operation of technology and industrial production. (Agamben 1999, 59) Ulrich, as is well known, is unproductive, unengaged in doing (whether artistic or otherwise) and hence fully in the midst of the crisis diagnosed here. He is like Agamben’s artist, who, without content, without qualities, performs the disorienting coming together of a sterile will-topoetry, unable to respond to the spirit of a fragment of Schelling’s that expresses the spirit of humanism itself: ‘“Humanity is so to speak the higher meaning of our planet, the eye that it raises to the sky, the nerve that links this limb to the higher world”’ (Schelling, quoted in Agamben 1999, 78). Musil, in his novel, sets up the same idea: ‘Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the “I” itself’ (Musil 1997, 159). Granted, both of these posthumanist experiences – that of Agamben’s man without content and that of Musil’s man without qualities – are extreme representations of contemporary predicaments. One is occasioned by the overweeningly felt encounter with ‘the pure creative-formal principle’ of art, the other by the pathological dismay occasioned by the overwhelming experiencing of contemporary instantiations of technoscience and politics that appear entirely autonomous of any intervention Ulrich might bring to bear. In both, the outcome is a discomposing encounter with the posthuman, if by this we can now also infer, supplementary to all the term’s extensions, the prospect of exceeding the measure of the human – to a degree where doing appears futile and where neither departing from nor arriving at ‘the I’ appears viable. The old reassurances, including the timelessness of human nature (see Habermas 2003), are overcome by the awareness of the potential for a re-engineering and retooling of Dasein itself and of those integrities of the human determined by body, place and time. In regard to this, it is significant that Agamben, who without invoking Musil very directly has

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter 157

to all intents and purposes glossed Ulrich’s experience of alienation, is surprisingly close to rephrasing Lukács on the same author: Availability-toward-nothingness ... constitutes the most urgent critical appeal that the artistic consciousness of our time has expressed toward the alienated essence of the work of art. The split in the productive activity of man, the ‘degrading division of labour into manual and intellectual work’, is not overcome here but rather made extreme. Yet it is also starting from this self-suppression of the privileged status of ‘artistic work’, which now gathers the two sides of the halved apple of human pro-duction in their irreconcilable opposition, that it will be possible to exit the swamp of aesthetics and technics and restore to the poetic status of man on earth its original dimension. (Agamben 1999, 67) In other words, we are up against the paradox that art, that human(ist) quality, may need to go unindulged for (post)human poetry to take root again. In conclusion, what we have tried to show in this chapter is that these kinds of searching engagements with the posthuman are at least as readily (some might say more readily) encountered in literary and theoretical texts as in the counter-literary canons of posthumanism that we pointed to earlier. This is important, as it can motivate a resistance, if that were needed, to the field’s orthodoxies being overdetermined by technocultural considerations or by familiar tropes in science fiction and popular culture. It is actually possible to read posthumanism otherwise and (counter-)textually, through mediations of the very literary texts and aesthetics-referenced approaches that appear exceeded by the ubiquitous technological turn. In this respect, it is emblematic that the first time we encounter Ulrich is when we see him in ‘the elegant serenity of a scholar’s study with book-lined walls’ (Musil 1997, 6). Ironically, we do so in a novel that ‘[n]obody is ashamed, yet, of not having read’ (Kermode 1971, 182). This is not to suggest an opposition between the order of the lettered and the order of the digital. Rather, it is to promote awareness that recalling the prefigurations and explorations of the posthuman in literature and theoretical discourse, exemplified here through Musil and Agamben, amplifies and deepens posthumanism. It is Musil, after all, who anticipates that most posthuman of scenarios: an age of disembodiment, in which ‘a world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them’ (Musil 1997, 158). In his novel, it ‘led directly to the barbaric fragmentation

158

Towards a New Literary Humanism

of the very self that was what made Ulrich a man without qualities, or qualities without a man’ (666). To that world and to such characters, humanity is ‘a mere buzzword’ (521). There is a warning there and a psychology which perhaps only literature can sound so acutely. The question then, of course, and the challenge to the instincts of literary culture, is whether reading Musil and Agamben is in fact an excuse for not reading the specific qualities and content of that posthuman condition whose immanence/imminence somehow becomes obscured by the reinscription of familiar operations within the humanities.

Part III Literature, Democracy, Humanisms from Below

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Andy Mousley

As the first chapter in this part, by Damir Arsenijevic´, powerfully demonstrates, humanism may not be an ‘option’ amongst other theoretical options but, in the face of genocide, a pressing political necessity. Yes, humanism, as shown by other chapters in this collection, has been and still can be an oppressive signifier, but it can also be a tool against oppression. This final section of the book examines humanisms ‘from below’, humanisms which seek to bear witness to the disenfranchised, the silenced, the oppressed, the dehumanised and the dead. Literature, as these chapters in different ways illustrate, can be a powerful ally in this broadly democratic project, a ‘surrogate theology’ (to persist with the term I have been using) whose pursuit of ontological meaning, significance and purpose is not limited to the few – to the ‘elect’ – but to the many. The collective and egalitarian ideals invoked in this part are not invoked naïvely. The possibility that human beings might have it in them to create a meaningful and more humane collective life, one in which we are emancipated from our own inhumanity and tribalisms, might be against the odds, ‘against the facts of the matter’. These chapters nevertheless wrench some sort of hope out of despair and guard against cynicism becoming a new realism.

Damir Arsenijevic´, ‘Mobilising Unbribable Life: The Politics of Contemporary Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ Like some of the other chapters in this volume, Arsenijevic´’s is about humanism at the limit. But what Arsenijevic´ has in mind when he writes 161

162

Towards a New Literary Humanism

that ‘to speak of the human, I have to confront its limit-experience’ is genocide. ‘I have to begin at the edge of a ditch’, he writes, ‘at the opening of the mass grave, if I want to bear witness to anything resembling a human’. Arsenijevic´’s moving and powerful chapter is written from within the personally affecting context of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drawing on the work of (amongst others) Walter Benjamin and Shoshana Felman, the chapter is about history’s ‘expressionless remainder’, about those thousands of still-missing bodies ‘buried in clandestine mass graves’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose violent reduction, through genocide to silence, is compounded by ‘the silence of the dominant, official history (victor’s history) in relation to [them]’. Humanism, in such a context, seems as difficult as it is necessary. Contemporary poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina, several examples of which are translated and discussed by Arsenijevic´, is the vehicle of such a difficult but necessary humanism. This poetry, argues Arsenijevic´, ‘testifies to those denied expression’ at the same time as it ‘holds open the constitutive gap between trauma and all symbolisations that attempt the foreclosure of trauma’. Moreover, in bearing public witness to suffering and refusing to ‘accept the view that suffering is a private event’, these poems challenge the existing status quo, embodying hope for a more just and equitable future, based upon an ‘openness about the type of universal normativity [the poetry] claims and on behalf of which it speaks’, but whose ‘sine qua non’ is what Arsenijevic´ terms ‘unbribable life’: life that ‘refuses to be drawn into the sticky web of the transitional political economy, in which, whatever the cost, the name of the game is the chase after bloodied capital’.

Mark Robson, ‘HUM (-an, -ane, -anity, -anities, -anism, -anise)’ Arsenijevic´ theorises about poetry and the expressive power of poetry out of the politically pressing context that is post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. The argument he develops, that poetry gives voice to the voiceless (but without usurping those voices through an act of ventriloquism), is also, though in a quite different way, the focus of Mark Robson’s chapter, which takes a broad historical perspective (stretching back to classical antiquity) on the relationship between poetry and politics, before discussing Jo Shapcott’s versions of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems. Robson’s interest in not-yet-heard or semi-audible

Introduction to Part III 163

voices, in the ‘hum’ (as he puts it) that lays claim upon the ‘hum-an’, extends beyond the human to the non-human, thereby calling into question their divisibility (a divisibility which has, Robson shows, political implications). Robson is specifically concerned with the difference that poetry makes to conventional concepts of politics, which he traces back to Aristotle and Plato. Poetry, he argues, is an impure, ‘seemingly indiscriminate’ mimetic art, which scuppers Aristotelian notions of what counts as acceptable political speech and disqualifies poetry from admission into Plato’s ideal republic on the grounds that the poet, ‘not tied to speaking in his own voice’, mimics ‘not only humans of uncertain moral worth, but also animals and monsters’. This impurity, for Robson, is the key to the ‘democratic potential of literature or art’, for politics, he suggests, ‘occurs at the point at which the hum becomes audible, when the interference that accompanies speech is recognised not as interference but as another form of speech’. Conversely, though, such ‘interference’ is ‘not only … the trace of the articulate human, the political animal’, but ‘the trace of the human animal’s relation … to the crowd, to the machine, to the insect, to the hesitation between words’.

Deborah Mutch, ‘Humanising Marx: Theory and Fiction in the Fin de Siècle British Socialist Periodical’ Deborah Mutch’s chapter is also about democracy and, in particular, socialism, that still pressingly relevant but discarded term (and not only by mainstream politics) which, in describing the social and economic injustices of capitalism and its dehumanising effects, insists upon change. But like the other chapters in this section, Mutch’s chapter is also about the democratising potential of literature. Mutch argues that for nineteenth-century British socialists, those parts of Marx’s Capital which were first translated into English seemed abstract, mathematical and themselves ‘inhuman’. One of the ways in which Marx was made accessible to those who did not have ‘the time necessary to read a book of almost 1000 pages’ was via the ‘sensuous realism’ of the serialised fiction that was a regular part of two particularly influential socialist periodicals of the late nineteenth century: Justice and Clarion. Mutch is careful, however, not to drive a wedge between the abstract and the sensuously immediate, or the ‘“issue-led”’ nature of the periodicals’ journalism and ‘“the character-led”’ nature of its fiction, for

164

Towards a New Literary Humanism

the internal dynamics of the fiction (supported by the surrounding journalism) was to raise awareness of the currency of socialist ‘ideas’ and principles through their concrete embodiment in fictionalised characters. Another binary which Mutch is keen to avoid is that between essentialism and anti-essentialism. Where the concept of alienation, as it applies to capitalism or the abstractions of Marxist theory, assumes the existence of an essential human nature which has been thus alienated, the call for change which is part of any progressive politics is, argues Mutch, ‘premised upon the notion that humanity has not yet realised itself. “Essence” is future-oriented and therefore, by definition, as yet undisclosed’. Literature again performs a vital function here, which is – to recall one of the terms used to shape Part I of this volume – to estrange selves from what they already know and experience.

Nigel Wood, ‘Civic Humanism: Said, Brecht and Coriolanus’ The democratic and liberating potential of literature is also the theme of Nigel Wood’s discussion of civic humanism in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. But ‘potential’ is a key word here, as Wood is keen to highlight the critic’s role in unleashing this potential amidst other options and possibilities. What political readings (of Coriolanus) tend to ignore, he argues, are ‘the difficulties and difficult choices involved in making sense of the play’s strangely fraught assertions of allegiance and alignment’. This emphasis on choice (which is not ‘merely’ voluntarist because it is inseparable from issues of responsibility and commitment) radiates outwards to include not only the play, but the choice a critic might make between the competing humanisms used to frame it: ‘To align or re-align “civic” with “humanism”’, argues Wood, itself ‘marks a choice, a mode of engagement, amidst other choices and other humanisms.’ ‘An embrace of the vitality and centrality of Man’, he writes, ‘can lead as much to an abstraction (the Rights of Man, suffragism or civic responsibility) as to a celebration of heroic and individual virtue, where ego development and its recognition breeds an irritation with the demos.’ The surviving humanistic term amongst these rival inflections of humanism is agency. Literature, for Wood, is itself about choosing, for literature (‘at least in realist mode’) gives us ‘a thick description of how human beings are at once complexly constrained by multiple ideologies and circumstances which are nevertheless sufficiently in flux to make possible (varying degrees of) agency’. In his detailed reading of

Introduction to Part III 165

Coriolanus, which he describes as ‘more open to the law of unforeseen consequences … than a tragedy with a more pronounced sense of the inevitable’, he shows what the choices and dilemmas for a critic are. If Coriolanus has democratic potential, then that potential lies in the difficult choices of alignment and allegiance which it presents.

9 Mobilising Unbribable Life: The Politics of Contemporary Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina Damir Arsenijevic´

Humanism – yes, but from a mass grave I have to begin at the edge of a ditch, at the opening of the mass grave, if I want to bear witness to anything resembling a human. To speak of the human, I have to confront its limit-experience and the gaps such limitexperience leaves in the lives of people and in the landscape. To speak of, to bear witness to any kind of humanism that still invests in the possibility of a just future, I have to speak of, to bear witness to, genocide. I am aware, just like any storyteller after Walter Benjamin,1 that death sanctions my story, but, in this case, such sanctioning is not enough. I also want to evoke the unpleasant corporeal remainder that, after genocide, stays with you, one which resists all the ideological mechanisms of quantification, identification, burial and sacralising – the excess of scattered bones, the dead-but-alive organic matter, whose smell builds up like a thin residue and clings at the rooftop of your mouth. This remainder itself is expressionless and yet I want to evoke it and bear witness to it. And if, to tell a story, I borrow authority from death, I also want to borrow authority from the life that is left after genocide, because such life is also an expressionless remainder – that which cannot be integrated in society, but is confronted by the demands of society for closure, further prolonging injury through the mundane violence against this left-over life. Life after genocide is thus: in a photo, a woman is holding a framed picture. In the framed picture, there are three figures: the woman herself, a young man in uniform and a young girl. The young man in uniform is the missing husband of the woman who holds the picture. The image of him – her most beloved image of him – is one of him wearing the JNA uniform, the uniform of the Yugoslav People’s Army, 166

Damir Arsenijevic´ 167

the same army which took him away, killed him and buried him in a clandestine mass grave. The teenage girl, standing next to her father in the picture, is their daughter, who was just one or two years old when he fled to the woods and she and her mother were expelled from the Srebrenica region by that same army who then went after him in the woods. This image of him, digitally inserted into the relatively recent image of mother and teenage daughter, is how the woman and the young girl remember him – the husband and the father – as they wait for him to be located, excavated, re-associated, identified and then buried, this time properly buried by these two women. And this is when the family, as a family, will be physically present once again, when these two women are reunited with the bones of the man. The woman, the young man and the teenage girl in this picture are a Frankenstein family – the family that never was, never could be like this and never will be – patched together in the work of mourning. In this collage of disparate elements, idealised in the idyllic surroundings provided by the background setting, the figures are digitally combined, like the disparate parts of Frankenstein’s monster. It is the result of the woman’s desire – the desire of a mother and of a wife – to assemble and re-create the long-gone family and the long-gone man. The picture is the only monument the woman has, both to him and to the family. The picture is an image through which the teenage girl can remember her father – that and her mother’s stories.

The theatre of literature: where history meets justice ‘Witness’2 Trucks with the corpses passing through the misty morning I didn’t see I closed my eyes hard could only hear the humming of the engines and the drumming of light rain Didn’t see a thing took no part in the loading too weak for that the other guy the crazy one from the village did it I went for a walk further off beyond the houses beyond the twigs cracked under the soldiers’ boots didn’t see a thing don’t know who they were they didn’t shout, they didn’t speak

168

Towards a New Literary Humanism

twigs breaking under boots I didn’t hear a thing, don’t know a thing the doctor wrote I had psychiatric problems how would I know whose faces under the canvas … those trucks went down the road down towards the village I didn’t see my eyes closed hard that’s where the sound was coming from three maybe four trucks not more how many people there were I don’t know sometimes I dream of them they say nothing they just don’t want to close their eyes I close mine hard hard Until I don’t see a thing. Poetry bears powerful and politically productive witness to what the dominant politics in a society after genocide wants to foreclose. Our enforced blindness is cured, our eyes are open at the site of genocide, the limit-experience of the human cannot be foreclosed and it is poetry that expresses fidelity to the collective of the expressionless. The expressionless, after Benjamin’s term (das Ausdruckslose), as Shoshana Felman argues, ‘are those whom violence has deprived of expression; those who, on the one hand, have been historically reduced to silence ... [who] have been historically made faceless, deprived of their human face – deprived, that is, not only of a language and a voice but even of the mute expression always present in a living human face’ (Felman 2002, 13). In their mute insistence, the dead of the poem resemble Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, who looks at history as one single catastrophe. The dead gaze upon crime and injustice and invite us to assume this perspective in order to blast the linear continuum of history open. The past, the traumatic past – for there is no past without trauma – becomes ‘an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again ... For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ (Benjamin 1999, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 247). In bearing witness to the past by bearing witness to the expressionless, past injustices are made to bear productively on future struggles. Poetry after genocide is not only possible but, through bearing witness to the expressionless, proves that genocide is at once speakable and unspeakable, for it testifies to those denied expression and holds open the constitutive gap between trauma and all symbolisations that attempt the

Damir Arsenijevic´ 169

foreclosure of trauma. Poetry after genocide confronts the political context of multicultural apartheid, which, like its ideological backbone ‘transition into capitalism’, insists on difference as the only structuring principle. In this context, multiculturalism is yet another attempt to foreclose social trauma, for it reduces social conflict to an inherent friction among many identities, recasting cultural, religious and ethnic difference as ‘sites of conflict that need to be attenuated and managed through the practice of tolerance’ (Brown 2006, 15). Against the imperative of ‘tolerance’, politically relevant poetry after genocide stages an encounter between justice and history. In this theatre of literature, history is brought to justice in a way that the law cannot achieve. This is precisely because the ‘historical unconscious’ rests on the double silence of which it is constituted: the silence of the expressionless remainder – Benjamin’s ‘tradition of the oppressed’ (Benjamin 1999, ‘Theses’, 248) – and the silence of the dominant, official history (victor’s history) in relation to the expressionless remainder (Felman 2002, 34). Poetry provides a ‘concrete embodiment and a language of infinitude that, in contrast to the language of law, encapsulates not closure but precisely what in a given legal case refuses to be closed and cannot be closed’ (Felman 2002, 8). The expressionless remainder must and does signify in the face of multiple demands of ideological management – medical, political and mythological. It is ‘an utterance that signifies although and because it has no possibility of statement’ (13). Only that witness to the expressionless remainder ‘will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins’ (Benjamin 1999, ‘Theses’, 247). Through poetry that constitutes and is constituted of ‘the language of infinitude’, such a witness to the expressionless remainder will blast open the linear ‘continuum of history’ knowing all too well that the enemy ‘has not ceased to be victorious’ (247, 254). This is because genocide is genocide in perpetuity – each day in Bosnia and Herzegovina, through strategic collaboration of forensic science, multiculturalist post-conflict management through the tools of its politics of reconciliation and religious ritual (the uncouth alliance between the Scientist, the Bureaucrat and the Priest), ‘the enemy’ exhumes, counts, re-associates, manages and consecrates the bodily remains as ethnic remains. Against the build-up of lies which fetishise a particularist, ethnic identity, the task of witnessing through poetry, bearing witness to the expressionless remainder, is to bring history to justice in such a way as to build a collective memory after genocide ‘as a constitutive dissociation between truth and power’ (Felman 2002, 30). This battle for the memory of the collective is inherently political.

170

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Poetry after genocide provides ‘a unique experience with the past’ (Benjamin 1999, ‘Theses’, 254). In this mode, it wrenches the memory of the collective away from the anaesthetic miasma of conformism, reads and constructs it ‘against the grain’ of the dominant, and so contemplates a new politics. It possesses, as Adrienne Rich puts it: the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom – that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the ‘free’ market. (Rich 2006, 3) Poetry after genocide has the capacity not only to tell us how ‘un-free’ we are, but also to shift the criteria of possibility of our freedom. Poetry that bears witness to the expressionless remainder brings about ‘a real state of emergency’ (Benjamin 1999, ‘Theses’, 248–9), reminding us that the struggle for dissociation between truth and power in history is a fight for the assertion of the ‘material force of the idea’: not only in relation to the ‘production and the practice of possibility’ (Williams 2005, 273), but also in relation to the ‘possibility of possibility’ (Badiou 2010).

Bringing about a ‘real state of emergency’ ‘The unidentified’ … It is a particular question From what will we reassemble ourselves If again we decide to love one another …

‘Neidentificirani’ … Posebno je pitanje Od ˇcega c´emo se mi sastaviti ako se ponovno odluˇcimo voljeti … (Dautbegovic´ 2003, 271)

I first started writing on this subject over a year ago in an effort to highlight the ways in which some contemporary poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina imagines alternative modes of belonging and identification in solidarity with the excluded and, in doing so, argues for a more equitable societal transformation. Despite the time-gap, I continue my original effort, with some crucial events having taken place in the intervening time since August 2008 – crucial, that is, to understanding what this equitable societal transformation actually means in everyday life. These events have clarified for me how poetry can and does disturb the comfortable and dominant consensus between those who support historical revisionism and those who use the ban on hate-speech to propagate

Damir Arsenijevic´ 171

oblivion in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. It is these events that have also helped me discover what I consider to be politically relevant and enjoyable in such poetry. In other words – why and how it continues to give me hope that things can and do change for the better. This chapter therefore builds from a situation that is occurring in everyday life, from a concrete practice, wherein, when it comes to bearing witness to war and post-war transition, poetry has the power to disturb a dominant political consensus. However, the strength of this poetry lies not only in its capacity to disturb and provoke, but also in its openness about the type of universal normativity it claims and on behalf of which it speaks. This poetry speaks loud and clear about injustices, but from the position of mobilising and fostering such life whose sine qua non is that it refuses to be drawn into the sticky web of the transitional political economy, in which, whatever the cost, the name of the game is the chase after bloodied capital. This is the universal normativity of what I entitle unbribable life, by which I mean life that refuses to be bought off in the face of a politics that aims to desensitise it in relation to the workings and effects of the terror of inequality. It is a life that enacts its refusal to be bribed in its demand for and its insistence on the politics of equality for all.

The International Day of Missing Persons The date of 30 August 2008, as the International Day of Missing Persons, was marked in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a day which was to make visible and encourage the idea that the problem of missing persons – at that point, 13,500 of them, still buried in clandestine mass graves – is the responsibility of us all. At the time, I coordinated the activities of the Department for Civil Society Initiatives at the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP) in Sarajevo. Together with other colleagues in the Department, I wanted to encourage and support practices in which solidarity with the families of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina is based on such responsibility. My aim was to confront both the ethno-national mythologisation of missing persons and political point-scoring by the dominant political elites (some of whom know the whereabouts of these clandestine mass graves). I also wanted to confront all of us living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the majority of whom, although haunted and overwhelmed by an ever-shapeless future, see missing persons as just one of so many problems. Missing persons, however, insist on being found: through their surviving families; through those who executed, buried and subsequently relocated and hid them in clandestine mass graves; and through those who claim that what we term as the way ahead, out of the predominant feeling

172

Towards a New Literary Humanism

of paralysis, will not happen unless we start openly requesting that those responsible for the execution, burial and hiding of those who are now missing must be named. The 30 August 2008 public initiative was entitled ‘I have the right to know’ and it focused on the right of families of missing persons to know where their loved ones are buried. The initiative was jointly supported and carried out by the ICMP and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As part of the initiative, the state Parliament was committed to convening a special session to declare publically its commitment to resolving the fate and whereabouts of missing persons as well as to assist the families of missing persons with their basic socio-economic rights. The initiative was widely supported by the media and also by a number of poets. As an act of solidarity, each poet contributed a poem to accompany works by families of missing persons which, collected together, were to be displayed at the entrance of the Parliament. Just hours before the preparations for the marking of 30 August were completed, ICRC representatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina made known their strongly antipathetic reaction to some of the poetry that was to be offered – to be more precise, to two poems: ‘Three cigarettes’ (‘Tri cigare’) by Marko Vešovic´ (Vešovic´ 2004, 82) and ‘Srebrenica, Potoˇcari, 9.5.2004’ by Šejla Šehabovic´ (Šehabovic´ 2008, 14):3 ‘Three cigarettes’4 At day’s end, I went outside to right myself in black and white. The sun, a coin descending onto a dead man’s eyelids. My God, the speechlessness all round me, harder to pierce than tank armour. Life’s as brutal as the nightly sound of bootsteps in the logor, the Serbian camp, announcing to the Muslim captives that a squad of thugs is coming. I light a first cigarette, so my eyes can briefly wander, screened by its smoke, out of this logor. Last night’s dream came back again: my hands held a thread, tied to the hawthorn growing from my father’s grave in the Sandžak, in the gorge called God-Never-Seen. A thread which can guide you out of hell. I light my second. So my soul can float away on its smoke towards the ghosts from a deaf and grizzled past. Which whisper to my soul: a single stride between never-seen and nevermore, that’s all there is to your life.

Damir Arsenijevic´ 173

And the world’s as grim as the guffaws of laughter from the blinded in Canto 2 of Kovaˇcic´’s Pit. And then I light the last. So I can hold, for a moment, a star between my middle and index finger. An evening star. And to give me, through its bluish veil, a clearer insight into Karadžic´’s universe whose Logos is the Logor. ‘Srebrenica, Potoˇcari, 9. 5. 2004.’ From under the scarves their hair was sticking out. One of them had covered herself with two scarves; the second scarf lying over her shoulders. The colours did not match She smelled of soap The second scarf hung over her silk blouse with its gold sheen Holding scarf-ends, her hands were clasped over her stomach Another of them wore lipstick. We had brought a group of Dutch teenagers Translating into two languages Did you travel well? the women enquired How are you? they asked at the entrance to the cemetery These youth look so lovely! Their looks dwelt on each of them in turn Later, they said: Come over! They wept, one by one; they all showed albums with photos of their dead We stood in a semi-circle, as if sitting on a corner sofa They were in the middle with hands clasped over their stomachs Hospitable. They offered To take us To the Oak tree (Standing there you can see the places where people were led to the slaughter! ) And to the battery factory

174

Towards a New Literary Humanism

where they were kept tied up for three days. The sons were taken later, all hungry. They offered to show us how UNPROFOR soldiers gave their uniforms to Chetniks as if offering food and drink to a traveller. On departure, I hugged them, one by one. They hugged me back, like aunties hug their guests when they see them off from the doors of their homes. I was informed by a representative of the ICRC, in a phone call, that these two poems could not be displayed in the Parliament. The reasons given were that this was ‘not good poetry’ because Vešovic´’s poem mentions ‘concentration camps’ for Muslims and, in her poem, Šehabovic´ uses the word ‘cˇetnik’. At the end of the call, I was told that the ICRC was covering part of the expenses of the initiative, therefore implying that it had the power to determine of what the event would or would not comprise. The phone call turned into an altercation, after which I rang Marko Vešovic´ and explained to him the details of what was, for me, a clear case of censorship and a confiscation of the right to remember. I then forwarded Marko an email with all the details surrounding the poetry selection, including with it a copy of Šehabovic´’s poem. Vešovic´ reacted publically, publishing a piece in BH Dani in the 29 August 2008 issue of that magazine. A representative from the ICMP acquiesced to the ICRC demands, with the result that the two poems were not displayed or spoken in the Parliament. Shortly after, as I was de facto suspended for having facilitated a public reaction against the censorship of pertinent, contemporary Bosnian poetry, I left the ICMP. The driving force in the ‘30 August’ case is the politics of those representatives of the international community, who not only dictate and set conditions as to how missing persons ought to be remembered in the public discourse, but, more insidiously, deny any right to citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina to make universal analyses and draw universal lessons from the war and the genocide. Ultimately, this is a denial of and a gag on the politics of unbribable life – life that claims that Logos cannot be Logor (camp), as in the final line of Vešovic´’s poem. What is at stake in such universal lessons and analyses? A witness who is drawing on such lessons is locked in the complex dynamics between political community and trauma with respect to survivors and their

Damir Arsenijevic´ 175

need to speak and act. The tension between the urge to bear witness and the impossibility of representing trauma enables ‘radical repoliticizations of the violent exclusionary political and social deadlocks around us’ (Husanovic´ 2009, 103). The very title of Šehabovic´’s poem engages with and intervenes in the complex dynamics between political community and the trauma of the Srebrenica genocide. Such dynamics are characterised by the ideological struggle to foreclose the meaning of the signifier ‘genocide in Srebrenica’, ranging from denial, through ethno-nationalist mythologisation and medicalisation to post-conflict management. In other words, in its very title, what the poem bears witness to are a concrete crime (genocide in Srebrenica) and the effects of the genocide (the cemetery at Potoˇcari), and it subsequently testifies to what both ‘I’ and ‘we’ (speakers of the poem in first-person singular and plural) have done with such a crime in the years after it (the temporal reference to 9 May 2004 which also evokes the day of victory over fascism). The poem opens up by focusing on women survivors who are caught in the gap between what, for the mourner, has become an enactment of everyday life and the act of receiving guests with its particular habits and norms. The tension of the gap that opens up between their mourning and their welcoming of guests is evoked in the excess of scarves, with their mismatched colours, and the discrepancy between the everydayness of the scent of the soap and the festiveness of the ‘best’ silk blouse with its gold sheen: ‘the second scarf lying over her shoulders. The colours did not match/She smelled of soap/The second scarf hung over her silk blouse with its gold sheen.’ The tension is further heightened in the discrepancy between the content and the location of the utterances of these women – the homely, welcoming inquiry taking place at the cemetery: ‘How are you?/they asked/at the entrance to the cemetery.’ The surviving women inhabit and structure their lives in the gap between societal demands for the foreclosure of trauma and the insistence of their memories, wherein domesticity is relocated to the cemetery. The intimacy of such identifiable hospitality taking place in a cemetery is a poignant testament to the prolongation of war injuries in which these women still suffer the violence of war and its effects. In their collective urge to bear witness to crime – genocide in Srebrenica – and the societal demand for the foreclosure and normalisation of trauma, these women themselves, by their very request for justice, become defaced and excluded. The shifting of the speakers in the poem between ‘we’ and ‘I’ relates to a broader uneasy personal and collective attitude towards the suffering of these women. Both ‘we’ and ‘I’ are guests in the suffering ‘home’ of

176

Towards a New Literary Humanism

these women, but both ‘we’ and ‘I’ are already also complicit in the prolongation of the injury. For this is also crime in perpetuity – how ‘we’ and ‘I’, collectively and personally, are responsible for allocating a fixed position to these women, thus further imprisoning them within the geography of their tragedy. However, the poem insists on singling out and emphasising our far-too-easy individual and collective assumption of a ready-made attitude towards these women. In relation to these women, through this splitting, both ‘we’ and ‘I’ are revealed to be deprived of subjectivity in the sense of having no other kind of ideological position to assume other than the one proscribed by the dominant ideology. As a powerful reminder, after Felman, ‘the language of infinitude’ of the poem is the language of an infinite loop of trauma, which always bounces off any attempt at normalisation. Indeed, this language dislocates everyday custom to draw attention to injustice and injury and, in doing so, insists on the need for justice. Marko Vešovic´’s poem makes direct claims on poetic language to bear witness to the expressionless. In the very opening of the poem, the speaker merges writing with his very existence and in doing so affirms the unequivocal stance of the witness: ‘At day’s end, I went outside to right myself/in black and white.’ Writing thus enables a language through which reflection and affirmation of the unequivocal stance of the witness are possible. This reflection contemplates the limit-experience of humanity, portrayed, in this poem, at the moment of being silenced and ‘“petrified as if spellbound in a single moment”’ (Benjamin, in Felman 2002, 38). The speaker pronounces humanity as dead and, in the face of that, death creates the act of witnessing as an act of extreme solitude. Following Felman, it could even be claimed that the ethical impetus and necessity of writing originates from such aloneness (Felman 2002, 39). Writing as witnessing also enables a work of memory, whereby the images of the past and their relevance to the present are recognised by the speaker. Unlike the wisdom of resignation, reduced to a proverb by the ‘ghosts from a deaf and grizzled past’ for whom life is ‘a single stride between/never-seen and nevermore’, the witnessing speaker insists on specifying and naming the source of this particular injustice, in which life is ‘brutal as the nightly sound of bootsteps/in the logor, the Serbian camp, announcing to/the Muslim captives that a squad of thugs is coming’. The present injustice of the Serbian camp is connected with the past injustices and crimes carried out by fascist collaborators, through the intertextual reference to Second World War partisan poet Ivan Goran Kovaˇcic´’s poem Pit, in which ‘the world’s as grim as the guffaws of laughter/from the blinded’.

Damir Arsenijevic´ 177

The speaker is driven to draw attention to and critique the terror of injustice and inequality – a continuous and lasting fascism – that imposes its norm and claim over the very definition of what it is to be human. It is unbribable life itself – writing as witnessing as being – that is affirmed in the poem. The intertextual reference evokes the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ as the anti-fascist tradition, on behalf of which unbribable life fights against fascism and the terror of inequality in all its forms. Logor, the legacy of fascism, cannot be the norm or structuring principle of life, the speaker asserts in the final line. And this is how this poem announces its hopeful politics: after Benjamin, our task is ‘to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism’ (Benjamin 1999, ‘Theses’, 248–9). The censorship by the international community representatives came in the guise of the ‘protection’ of multiculturalist discourse and the ban on insulting language and hate-speech. What is interesting in this case is the perspective from which the content of the poem was recognised as problematic. Marko Vešovic´ was censored on the grounds that his poem mentions concentration camps for Muslims and Šehabovic´ because her poem mentions the word cˇetnik. In their close reading of the poems, the international community members assumed the perspective of an imagined member of each of the three ethnic communities, predicting what one or other of them might object to and, on that basis, ‘cleansing’ the poetry along ethnic lines. What is this if not a prime example of how the bureaucratic terror of the international community operates? Poems are scanned for shibboleths and the speaking subject is given permission to speak only in a language cleansed of what is deemed to be inappropriate content from an imagined ethnic perspective. Furthermore, in claiming that it occupies a neutral position, the international community simultaneously maintains a cynical distance from it: it knows very well that the problem of the poems is not because they mention what is deemed to be inappropriate content (and for that matter it knows really well that both the concentration camps and the cˇetniks did exist). The far greater problem for the international community is that the speakers of both poems do not accept the bounds of a false distinction between private and public language in relation to all those who have been executed and sacrificed in the chase for the capital that was stolen through the blood of war and genocide, and the post-war legacy of everyday violence. In other words, the speakers in both poems do not accept the view that suffering is a purely private event. In doing so, they assume and uphold a position that an adequate,

178

Towards a New Literary Humanism

expressive public language already exists through which suffering can be communicated and that poetry can and does provide such a language. Therefore, the censorship of these two poems on the grounds of ‘insulting content’ is a downright lie. Ideologically speaking, such censorship sets multiculturalist parameters for the reading of these two poems, reducing social conflict to a friction among ethnic identities. Within these weak, depoliticised parameters, cultural, religious and ethnic differences are recast, to recall Wendy Brown again, as sites of conflict, which have to be managed through the politics of tolerance (Brown 2006). This scenario further supports the ethnic element as the dominant reference of political collectivity, which then leads to a retroactive re-inscription of the war as a conflict between three ethnic groups. Such levelling politics by the international community is part of the dominant consensus rather than part of its solution. Most importantly, the true reasons for censorship lie in the total opposition of those who comprise the dominant consensus in Bosnia and Herzegovina today to the position insisted on by those who have survived and who are striving to produce a hopeful future that breaks the bounds of the everyday horror of transition. Such a position maintains two important premises: the first is that suffering, which results from war and genocide, is the effect of societal injustice and is, as such, a par excellence public matter; the second is that, in relation to this suffering, the emancipated process of becoming a subject can only take place when freed from the shackles of a victimised position or any other position that is merely focused on the interests of any particular identity. It is through the espousal of claims for a more equitable sociality for everyone that the concept of unbribable life is mobilised.

Of love and of reassembling ourselves ‘The unidentified’ Like in a mass grave, everyone has died of one’s own death, apparently, love of the same cause

‘Neidentificirani’ Kao u zajedniˇckoj grobnici svatko je umro od svoje smrti navodno ljubav za istu stvar

What is his collar bone doing being next to this frontal bone And what will he look like

Što radi njegova kljuˇcna kost uz ovu ˇceonu I na štoc⬘e dotiˇcni nalikovat

Damir Arsenijevic´ 179

Reassembled from different parts When the day of resurrection comes

sastavljen od razliˇcitih dijelova kad dode ¯ dan ustajanja

It is a particular question From what will we reassemble ourselves If again we decide to love one another

Posebno je pitanje Odcˇega c´emo se mi sastaviti ako se ponovno odluˇcimo voljeti (Dautbegovic´ 2003, 271)

As for the dead – ‘the dead are dead, why didn’t you give them a hand when they were alive?’, as Damir Avdic´ asks.5 Today in Bosnia and Herzegovina, supported by the international community, the comingled remains of the dead from mass graves are put through a juridico-scientific-religious process of re-association and identification of ‘missing persons’. Retroactively re-inscribing the war as a war among ethnic identities, victims are re-associated and identified as ethnic victims. Paradoxically, the perspective taken in the process of this reassociation is the perspective of the original perpetrator of the crime: like the original gaze that looked on the remains of those who were executed, this gaze puts them together and names them, assuming the perspective of the execution’s perpetrators, for it is in the fantasy of the perpetrator that the executed person is the ethnic other. If ‘the dead are dead’ and if we never decided to give them a hand, what about the living? Paraphrasing Jozefina Dautbegovic´’s poem ‘The unidentified’, we might say that the post-war transition itself resembles a mass grave. The collectivity of those who have survived is comprised of those who are ‘alive but dead’.6 One should read this not as the ‘living dead’ but, literally, as the most alive bit of the dead – unbribable life itself – as that which insists on justice and equality, and demands such societal transformation as will break through the mortifying isolation that is brought about by the allocation of segregated identities. This is precisely what the title of Dautbegovic´’s poem refers to – the unidentified are not just those who are buried in clandestine mass graves or those whose remains are currently on tables in the re-association centre, but, more importantly, it is this ‘we’ for whom we still have no name. ‘We’ will have to assume the position of the unidentified, ‘if again/we decide to love another’ and, in doing so, claim a universal norm for who ‘we’ are and what the world

180

Towards a New Literary Humanism

is. If love is a matter of decision, it is also a matter of recognition of the loved one who answers my question – ‘who am I?’ (Miller 2009). This community of unbribable life will recognise the answer to this question and will not under any circumstances uphold the gaze of the perpetrator. It will also have to go beyond the territorial, but in such a way that it does not give up on the right to define the territorial. This new definition of territory will be one of love and soil, one that goes beyond the mass grave of the living and is a res publica of unbribable life.

Notes 1. See Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ in Benjamin 1999. 2. Stupar-Trifunovic´ 2008, ‘Svjedok’, 29. All poetry translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 3. Both poems were published in BH Dani, 29 August 2008. 4. Translation by Francis Jones. My enormous gratitude goes to Francis Jones for making this translation for this chapter. 5. I am quoting here a poet-performer Damir Avdic´ and his poem-performance Mrtvi su mrtvi. 6. This is again with reference to Damir Avdic´’s poem-performance Mrtvi su mrtvi.

10 HUM (-an, -ane, -anity, -anities, -anism, -anise) Mark Robson

I To hum: to make a low continuous murmuring sound like that of an insect, such as a bee; to make a low inarticulate vocal sound, especially to express dissent or dissatisfaction, more rarely for approbation and applause; to sing with closed lips, without articulation, as if to oneself; to make an inarticulate murmur in a pause in speaking, arising from hesitation, embarrassment, etc.; to give forth an indistinct sound by the blending of many voices, the sense of humming perhaps an effect of distance; a hum is also a rumour, the buzz, one might say; to make something hum is to see it as busy, to make it a hive of activity (to continue a metaphor); in electronic terms, hum is the noise produced in a loudspeaker as a kind of interference, most often as an effect of the alternating current of the mains supply. Hum in this sense is the signal that accompanies the signal (or, better, that in the signal which is not recognised as of the signal); it is that which emerges from the speaker without being that which is spoken. All of these senses are to be found in the definitions provided in the OED. Hum is poised, then, in ways which might lead us to wonder how secure such dictionary definitions are: it is the sound of one who remains on the edge of articulacy; alternatively, it is the sound of the many who, in the intermingling of their voices, seemingly produce a single noise; it is a song without words, in or for which words are deemed unnecessary, are forgotten or recovered (perhaps only recalled in brief snatches) or else are never known at all – what is produced is an approximation that uses melody alone; or it is the inhuman hum of the machine or of the multitude (here the drone of the machine again enacts the metaphor of the bee-become-swarm, the buzzing mass). Hum is continuity and 181

182

Towards a New Literary Humanism

change, both background and foreground, the space – and that with which it is filled. Hum is individual and collective; origin and repetition (‘you hum it and I’ll play it’); forgetting and an aid to memory (‘how does it go again?’): humnemotechnics. Why evoke the ‘hum’ here, in a discussion of the human, of humanism and of the humanities? Because when, a couple of entries later in the dictionary, we reach ‘human’, one of the first things that we encounter is the suggestion that humans are to be distinguished from animals by their capacity for articulate speech, by the fact, then, that they are capable of doing ‘more’ than hum. It is the judgement implied in this more that is precisely going to be called into question in my discussion, for it already moves us into a sense of progression from inarticulacy to articulacy rather than recognising speaking and humming as different activities, or otherwise allowing for a recognition that the difference between them might be the product not of different origins but of different modes of perception. It is in this focus on perception that my discussion is concerned with some of the crucial aspects of the distinctive mode of human perception which literature encourages and which Andy Mousley discusses in his Introduction to this volume. The emphasis in his key terms and principles on incarnation, animation and sensation conjures up a body composed, as he puts it, of heart and head, emotion and intellect. There is a similar sense of embodied experience in the poetry that will occupy the latter parts of this chapter, but what I also want to suggest is that the human is constituted in these texts as a form of relation to the other-than-human. In a passage quoted elsewhere by Mousley from Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, in which she speaks of her consciousness of the ways in which ‘“the world exists and ... flows so gently into my head. Occasionally, a few blocks away, I hear the hum of the tramway, and I’m filled by a sense of utter contentment”’, Hoffman’s memory centres on a pleasure evoked by a humming machine (quoted in Mousley 2007, 66). The world and its objects ‘flow’ through the human body, making it respond not just intellectually but sensuously, just as a text such as Hoffman’s invites a similarly doubled response from its readers. Indeed, any text makes a demand on the senses of its readers in its own striving to make sense (see Robson 2006a). Sense begins in sight and sound. But in her use of the word ‘hum’, Hoffman also prompts us to ponder the extent to which definitions of the human being and its place in the world tend to rely on differentiations between the human and the other-than-human (subhuman, superhuman, inhuman, etc.). The human is frequently judged through an economic calculation that wants to

Mark Robson 183

see it as either more or less than something perceived as definitively other-than-human. Reversals are all too common, in which that which is initially thought of as non-human is revealed as having characteristics which are usually associated with the human (in poetic personification, for example, or pathetic fallacy). In both cases, a structure of differentiation allows for the delimitation of the human in both negative and positive terms: to be human is to be like this but not like that. Similitude and simile govern this structure. And yet, in some of the poetic invocations of hum that I will begin to read in the latter part of this discussion – and perhaps also in the use of it in Hoffman’s text – the hum appears in and as the suspension of this differentiation: the human is suspended in the hum. If the hum is at the same time the sound of the insect or the machine, then what are we to make of the moments at which humans can be said to hum? The OED links several instances which we might paraphrase in the following terms: humans hum when their vocal sound falls short of articulacy. This is most commonly located in three instances: i)

in interruption (embarrassment, hesitation, etc., that is, the hum emerges in and as the alternation between articulacy and inarticulacy); ii) in dissent, where the hum is the sound of discontent or dissensus; and iii) in the indistinction of the ‘voice’ (singular plural) of the crowd. (Humans, it is also worth noting, are said to hum when they smell bad, thus appealing – or, more accurately, revealing themselves to be unappealing – to another of the senses.) What the OED gives us to read here – in this repeated transition between the hum and the human – is a lesson in political theory. The definition of the humble ‘hum’ is in effect a précis of Plato and Aristotle, or at least of the most readily recognisable parts of their most pronounced political statements. In Aristotle’s Politics, for instance, man is the ‘political animal’, and this capacity for politics is in large part a question of the distinction that may be made – by Aristotle at least, but also it seems by the editors of the OED – between the human and the non-human animal. Man is a political animal for Aristotle due to his ability to create articulate sound, that is, speech (logos) as opposed to voice (pho¯ne¯). In the Politics, Aristotle explicitly names bees as the example of the non- or inadequately-political animal: And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee   or any gregarious animal [   ] is clear. For nature, as we

184

Towards a New Literary Humanism

declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals   ], it is true, can indicate possesses speech [ ]. The mere voice [   pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations  ς]  of what is painful and pleasant [¨      and to signify those sensations to one another), but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception [¨ ] of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state [  ]. (Aristotle 1984 and 2005, 1253a1) Aristotle can thus make a distinction between the political nature of the human and that of other animals in part by stressing the non-gregarious nature of human beings as preparation for a description of those entities which are based on a consciously articulated shared moral sense. Isolation is not good for the citiless individual, who becomes overly attracted to war and must be thought of either as a lower form of human or else as a god. What Aristotle calls partnerships allows for a mediation between these two insufficiently human states. Aristotle founds both the household and the city-state on this notional partnership in morality, while at the same time asserting the priority of the state as polis over the individual, family and household, claiming that just as a body must exist as a whole for the parts to be meaningfully thought of as alive and functioning, so the polis as a whole must come before any of its constituent parts. What Aristotle seems to be doing, then, is making a distinction between two forms of collective being. One is the animalistic mass in which simple gregariousness makes human beings equivalent to lower forms of animal life such as bees. The other is a form of positively-coded moral partnership that founds the city. In his denial of gregarious collective being, Aristotle brings us back to the denigration of the crowd that we find in Plato, but he also wants to evade the dangers posed by isolated and unfettered individuality. In the Gorgias, we find reference to what the Loeb translator calls mob-oratory – the Greek reads   (Plato 2001, 503A), shameful speech – that sways the crowd. In the Republic, as part of the description of democracy in Book 8, we find reference to a dominant class that is divided into those who make speeches and transact business and those who ‘swarm’ around the speaker. The swarming drones are described using the word ¯ı, which means to buzz or to hum

Mark Robson 185

(Plato 2006, 564D). Earlier, in Book 6, Socrates has bemoaned the influence of the multitude () and the relation between that animalistic mass and the sophist: It is as if a man were acquiring the knowledge of the humours and  desires of a great strong beast [ ς  ] which he had in his keeping, how it is to be approached and touched, and when and by what things it is made most savage or gentle, yes, and the several  sounds [  ς] it is wont to utter [ ] on the occasion of   each, and again what sounds uttered by another [

   ] make it tame or fierce. (2006, 493A–B)  The key term here is phtheggomenou (    ). According to Liddell and Scott, its use in Greek texts is ambiguous with respect to its relation to human speech: either it is used to describe the human voice or else it is a term for the characteristic noises made by particular animals such as the whinny of a horse or the scream of an eagle. Yet the same word is also applied to sounds created by inanimate objects – the creak of a door, for example – or is associated with the character of musical instruments. And intriguingly, in one of Liddell and Scott’s (1996) examples, it is also seen to be used to denote acts of naming or calling by name as well as being associated with singing, celebrating and recounting tales. Plato’s use of the term phtheggomenou in his description of the multitude as the beast, then, renders both the voice of the beast and that which tames or angers it as ambiguous in their relation to the human/non-human division upon which Aristotle’s sense of man as the political animal rests. But it also acts as a preparation for or reminder of the distinction that is going to be made later in the Republic concerning the problems surrounding mimetic art. Part of the difficulty with mimesis is its seemingly indiscriminate nature: the mimetic poet is not tied to speaking in his own voice and thus is not tied to the representation of only good characters. In fact, one of the crucial elements in the Platonic rejection of the poets from the ideal state is motivated by the poet’s ability to mimic not only humans of uncertain moral worth, but also animals and monsters. In Plato’s insistence on the division between diegesis and mimesis, the threat posed by the human speech of the poet lies in the fact that it is capable of becoming indistinguishable from the voice of the non-human. Such are the roots of a persistent critique of art and, more extensively, of mimetic powers that have themselves been incorporated into certain definitions of the human. The ramifications of the mimetic capacity of human beings have been noted – most often with disapproval – by figures

186

Towards a New Literary Humanism

as apparently diverse as René Girard and Steven Pinker. But might this capacity for a blurring of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman not also open up an opportunity for a positive valuation of poetry that lies precisely in its violation of the strict political and social categories that both Plato and Aristotle establish? Might we say, in fact, that the democratic potential of literature or art might be located in the impurity of its mimetic capacities? I will come back to this idea in a moment. This sense of a politics of mimesis related to the definition of the human brings us close, then, to Jacques Rancière’s gloss on this Greek inheritance in his attempts to think democracy beyond the doxa of political theory or of modern commentators on the evils of democratic life. Rancière focuses precisely on this distinction between speech and voice, and in several texts this hinges on a movement from logos as speech to logos as account. In Disagreement, for example, he proposes that: Politics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissociably the account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what is just, whereas some other emission is merely perceived as a noise signalling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt. (1999, 23) Logos is a much trickier term than it at first appears to be (see Heidegger 1975). The reduction of the charge of logocentrism to a diagnosis of some kind of hyper-rationality or Enlightenment delusion – it always meant and means much more than this, for example, in Derrida’s texts, from which many of those who have levelled the charge draw their justification – has perhaps led to a simplification of the understanding of the logos. But as Liddell and Scott’s examples testify, its range in Greek usage is enormous and rarely allows for simple oppositions to emerge. Logos is: an account or reckoning; measure, esteem or value; relation, correspondence, proportion or ratio; explanation, plea, case or argument; reason or debate within the soul; word as opposed to deed; narrative, fable, legend, story; speech, verbal expression, utterance; common talk, tradition, rumour (here it crosses hum again), a proverb or maxim, worldly praise; a branch of philosophy (logic); ‘the constituents of lyric or dramatic poetry’; a word, phrase, sentence or complete statement; later the word of God, or the identity of Christ. The sense of account that Rancière draws on is – as it is in the Greek texts that he is reading – a question of aisthesis, that is, it is a question both of the perception of objects as objects (whether they can be seen at all) and the status accorded to them (the judgement that accompanies the act of seeing).

Mark Robson 187

At the root of modern notions of the aesthetic, but extending far beyond the rather etiolated vision of the aesthetic that many would like to see as the inheritance of romantic and idealist thought, aisthesis ties together perception and judgement at a structural level, since both are read by Rancière as modes of making sense of the world that involve partition, division or sharing. In an interview with Davide Panagia, he explains this by rewriting the definition of man as a political animal in specifically literary terms: We can conclude, then, that humans are political animals because they are literary animals: not only in the Aristotelian sense of using language in order to discuss questions of justice, but also because we are confounded by the excess of words in relation to things. Humans are political animals, then, for two reasons: first, because we have the power to put into circulation more words, ‘useless’ and unnecessary words, words that exceed the function of rigid designation; secondly, because this fundamental ability to proliferate words is unceasingly contested by those who claim to ‘speak correctly’ – that is, by the masters of designation and classification who, by virtue of wanting to retain their status and power, flat-out deny this capacity to speak … Political subjectivity thus refers to an enunciative and demonstrative capacity to reconfigure the relation between the visible and the sayable, the relation between words and bodies: namely, what I refer to as the ‘partition of the sensible’. (Rancière 2000, 115) The partition of the sensible draws together politics and aesthetics as structures, not through the interpenetration of one in the other that has been made familiar in the Benjaminian discourse of the aestheticisation of politics. Both politics and aesthetics are concerned with perceptual possibilities within a given mode of organisation of the world, and this has profound implications for any notion of the politics of literature based on mimesis (see Robson 2009). As Rancière puts it, it is a matter of what can be counted, of what can be taken into account; that is, it is a question of recognition in which a space opens up for the part of those who have no part in society (see Rancière 1999). To translate this into the terms that I am employing here, politics occurs at the point at which the hum becomes audible, when the interference that accompanies speech is recognised not as interference but as another form of speech, as more than just the vocalisation of pleasure and pain and instead as a claim, not least the claim to have the capacity for speech. The hum becomes the enunciation of a claim to be heard.

188

Towards a New Literary Humanism

As such, I want to propose that the hum – and here I want to be heard the extension of the hum into the human, humanism, the humanities and so on – is structurally necessary to that which we call democracy. But only within limits.

II For the second half of this discussion, I want to turn towards lyric poetry. In particular, I will be focusing on a poem by Jo Shapcott. In the section of her book Tender Taxes (2001) that is entitled ‘Gladestry Quatrains’, Shapcott offers versions of Rilke’s French poems which are not exactly translations, but are nonetheless close approximations to the originals. I want to centre my discussion here on two poems – ‘Gilwern Lane’ and ‘Song’ – because they seem to me to offer compelling examples of lyrics that utilise the possibilities of the ‘hum’. To turn to Rilke’s French poems already raises an issue around the characteristics of voice, to provoke a questioning of the idea of linguistic belonging, since for a German-language poet to choose to write in another language is already to perform an act of unusual self-estrangement, to enter into what Derrida might call an act of ex-appropriation. Rilke’s Les Quatrains Valaisans in particular offers a pastoral vision that is set in Switzerland, a nation itself poised between (at least) three languages (German, French and Italian). Shapcott’s poems ‘translate’ this exappropriation into a similarly complex linguistic relation to belonging. She shifts Rilke’s texts not into a cleanly ‘English’ English, but instead into a border country in which it is possible to ask – as she does in ‘Llan’, another of the Gladestry Quatrains – whether the goddess of the place, if there is one, speaks English or Welsh? The titles of her poems alone seem stretched like tripwires awaiting the unwary Anglo-English speaker: how does one pronounce ‘Gwaithla’, ‘Cefn Hir’, ‘Dolyhir’, ‘Glascwm’ and so on? But why choose the lyric at all? Well, the obvious reason is that lyric has always been considered the subjective genre par excellence (see Lacoue-Labarthe 1999). Yet what I want to stress here is that – as Paul de Man and those who have followed him, such as Jonathan Culler, have themselves insisted – lyric is primarily a mode of reading. Commenting on de Man’s approach to lyric, Culler proposes that: The current formulation of this [essentially New Critical sense of lyric as a species of dramatic monologue] view is that the lyric is a fictional imitation of personal utterance, so that to interpret a sequence as a

Mark Robson 189

lyric is a matter of working out who is speaking, in what situation, with what concerns, in what tone – aiming ultimately to articulate the full complexity of the speaker’s attitudes, as revealed in the tones of the overheard utterance. To interpret a sequence as a lyric is to find ways of hearing in it a speaking voice, which is taken as a manifestation of consciousness. (Culler 1985, 99) Despite the age of this piece, Culler’s account of the then current view largely holds true (and this was also reinforced in a paper that he gave at a conference in Paris in June 2008). What readers of the lyric such as Culler and de Man would point to is that the presentness of voice that lyric seems to offer is not testimony to lyric’s ability to ‘contain’ a speaking voice, but rather that the sense of the presence of a voice is one of the effects of lyric. That is, lyric is what makes us believe in the power of lyric, not in a constative referential mode but instead in a performative one; what lyric testifies to, before and beyond any other consideration, is the possibility that something like lyric might be possible. As de Man puts it in ‘Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory’: ‘The principle of intelligibility, in lyric poetry, depends on the phenomenalization of the poetic voice’ (quoted in Culler 1985, 103). Phenomenality presumes the existence of a world that is open to perception, just as perception relies on the notion of a phenomenal world; this returns us to issues of disentangling aesthetics and aisthesis. Any act of aesthetic judgement must attempt two things: first, to identify the nature of the object that is being perceived by reference to available concepts and, second, to accord a value to that object by reference to broader categories of value. It is here that the interest lies for Kant, of course, in attempting to demonstrate the underlying unity of pure and practical reason through an appeal to judgement in the Third Critique. But aisthesis is not limited to art-objects, and thus such judgements often founder on attempts to identify securely the characteristics that will make an object an art-object, even though it is on such identifications that aesthetic judgement is founded. This is rendered more complex by the notion that such characteristics – or the belief that an object possesses the necessary characteristics – may present themselves in a performative mode. As Culler put it in his recent paper (2008b), performativity is the name of a problem, not a solution. In this sense at least, this renders any idea of literature as a body of knowledge – and especially a mimetic idea of mapping literature’s linguistic performativity onto the world – deeply problematic, in ways which impact on the teaching of literature and its purposes (see Robson 2006b).

190

Towards a New Literary Humanism

As I have already suggested, this might be exemplified by a reading of Jo Shapcott’s versions of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, to one of which she gives the title ‘Gilwern Lane’: Sometimes I hum while working, and I think the hedge does too: hawthorn, gap, dog rose, fence. Of course, we know about the loud stream making the rest seem quiet though its song is just the hush between words which, in rhythm, advance. (Shapcott 2001, 47) To get a proper sense of what this poem is doing, of course, would involve at least relating it to the rest of Shapcott’s sequence of Rilke poems. For now, I would like to offer simply the sketch of a possible reading within the bounds of the concerns of this piece, and to point to where such connections might lead. ‘Gilwern Lane’ apparently begins with a repeated emphasis on the speaking ‘I’, but the importance of this ‘I’ gradually diminishes as the poem progresses. The humming that this ‘I’ sometimes engages in is linked in the first line to working, that is, if we make the obvious identification that all lyric to some extent encourages and read the voice here as that of the poet, the invocation of work is primarily to be taken as a reference to the act of writing poetry. Humming thus accompanies words in a way that might recall the original designation of lyric. Lyric’s relation to music is drawn upon to stress the divergence of humming and utterance. And yet humming is, by the time we reach the second line, not an exclusively human activity: the hedge is thought to hum as well, and this hedge is conceived in the next line as a combination of the human and the non-human that deserves some pause. Shapcott’s speaking persona is careful to give us a range of non-human entities: hawthorn (nature); fence (human product but not human); dog rose, which in the invocation of ‘dog’ brings the animal into connection with the vegetable; and gap. Human subject is linked – by humming – with the natural, the man-made, the animal and the void. Full stop. And then a contrast, a break in the unity that humming has allowed but also a contrast with the ‘I’ as it becomes a ‘we’. The loud stream: volume overtakes but is rendered ambiguous by its relation to ‘the rest’

Mark Robson 191

(the rest, after all, is silence). The sound of the stream is itself a song, but a song that is only the hush between words – the pause in poetic activity, perceptible in the moment at which the poetic voice falls quiet, pauses, is interrupted or hesitates, perhaps hums and haws (is this why it is a hawthorn?). But rhythm points to advance: rhythm depends as much on interruption and silence as on the beat or the stress. In other words, rhythm is an alternation between signal and non-signal, but such that the signal is only recognisable by virtue of the non-signal. The gap is structurally necessary, not transcendental or insignificant. If we turn to the Rilke poem to which Shapcott responds, we can immediately see one or two major features of that response. Rilke’s version in Les Quatrains Valaisans reads: Pays qui chante en travaillant, pays heureux qui travaille; pendant que les eaux continuent leur chant, la vigne fait maille pour maille. Pays qui se tait, car le chant des eaux n’est qu’un excès de silence de ce silence entre les mots qui, en rythmes, avancent. (Rilke 1978, 114) To give a sense of what Shapcott has done here, it is worth drawing on A. Poulin Jr’s translation: Country singing while working, happy working country; while waters continue their song, the vine grows link by link. Country that keeps quiet because the water’s song is only an excess of silence, of this silence between words that advance in rhythm. (Rilke 2002, 119) Rilke’s poem is apparently more impersonal: his poem speaks of country or land (pays) and the contrast between the stanzas is neatly demarcated in a way that Shapcott’s enjambment across the caesura denies. Rilke opts for a personification of the pays, making it sing, making it happy, blending with and ultimately subduing its song to that of the waters; its

192

Towards a New Literary Humanism

rhythm is that of the stitches of the vine that echo the advancing of words. Now let us turn to another of the Rilke poems to which Shapcott’s versions respond: Ce soir mon cœur fait chanter des anges qui se souviennent ... Une voix, presque mienne, par trop de silence tentée, monte et se décide à ne plus revenir; tendre et intrépide, à quoi va-t-elle s’unir? (Rilke 1978, 172) Poulin offers the following: Tonight my heart makes angels sing, remembering … Lured by too much silence, some voice, barely mine, rises and decides never to return; tender and intrepid, what will it unite with? (Rilke 2002, 133) It is possible to attempt something between a translating paraphrase and prose commentary that would reconstruct the central movements here. To begin with, there is nothing surprising in a lyric that opens with a notion of singing, just as to identify the singing voice as stemming from the actions of the heart merely revives a familiar trope from the tradition. But from this point on, the question of identification becomes steadily more complex. What memory is it, for example, that the angels conjure up when they are made to sing? Rilke’s elision of the de (indicating something or someone) or que (indicating ‘that’) that would usually follow se souvenir suspends the poem’s movement of referral into a concentration on voice itself, a voice that is almost but not quite that of the speaker (or, in Poulin’s version, barely manages to be recognisable to the speaker); identification is promised or approximated, but falls short – the voice remains at the level of familiarity, like

Mark Robson 193

that of a nearly very good impersonator of whom the best that we can say is that we know who he or she is meant to be. We are thrown back on similitude and simile. It is this impression of the speaker’s voice that threatens to fall silent, but instead ‘makes up its mind’ or ‘decides’ no longer to come back (from where? to where?) or not to come back to someone (the angels? the speaker? the reader?) in memory (in the sense of ‘it’s coming back to me’). Revenir connects to souvenir, to a movement of arrival that comes or fails to come from the past or the future, to become a present memory. Loving and fearless, the voice stretches itself to join forces with … what exactly? The rhyme scheme alternatively prompts a link between revenir and unir, that the coming back to someone or something is a form of unification that is perhaps in the process of being broken by the decision no longer to return. Rilke’s poem repeatedly points to that which apparently lies beyond it, but repeatedly frustrates any attempt to identify what that ‘beyond’ might be. To think of this too quickly in the terms made familiar by traditional criticism of the lyric runs the risk of missing the complication of any notion of voice here. What emerges is a division of voice: that which the speaker identifies as almost or barely his or her own voice refuses any full identification with that voice. At the same time, the voice which refuses that identification – that which can say presque mienne – sidesteps some of the effects of this elision of referral by allowing itself the more stable position of questioner. But, as Culler has articulated both in the texts already mentioned and in his recent contribution to a discussion of lyric in PMLA, all of this falls too easily into the dominant mode of reading lyric as if it were a species of dramatic monologue (2008a). To read Rilke’s poem as a drama of consciousness in which the (almost always male) speaker meditates on his relationship to the world that confronts him is to miss aspects of the lyric that are central to any understanding of its normative dimensions. If, for example, we take into account the peculiar form of the lyric present (Culler cites Yeats’s ‘I walk through the long schoolroom questioning’ as a classic example [2008a, 205]), then this might lead us to observe that Rilke’s shuttling between the revenir and the souvenir activates a sense of this lyric capacity for and insistence on presentness that cannot be reduced to a narrative understanding of a speaker’s consciousness. That this is readable in the use of verbs based on -venir calls attention to the verbal patterning that similarly falls outside the purview of narrative comprehension and that also eludes a sense of ‘the words on the page’. Although this connection is, I have suggested, readable in Rilke’s use of the verb souvenir, the poem actually leads in a further

194

Towards a New Literary Humanism

direction: se souviennent rhymes with mienne, effecting a reading that holds out the promise of joining memory and the subjective voice, but this is disarticulated both by the ellipsis that follows se souviennent and the presque that hollows out the mienne. Culler’s insistence, then, that one of the desires of lyric is to inscribe itself in memory, to be – as he puts it – ‘introjected’ might also be pointed at in metalyrical fashion by this poem. When Shapcott produces her version of this poem, she returns to the hum, as she does elsewhere in her Rilke sequence (especially – as in this poem – towards the end of the ‘Tender Taxes’ section, although it would also be worth pausing over the bees that recur in the ‘Roses’ sequence). Shapcott offers up her poem to reading in terms of the relation of poetry and introjection. This comes close to Adorno’s reading of Rilke. In his essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, Adorno proposes that Rilke’s ‘thing poems’ (Dinggedichte) are part of a tradition in the lyric of what he calls ‘idiosyncratic opposition’. For Adorno, it is the distance between the poetic work and ‘mere existence’ which offers the measure of all that is deficient in that existence, and the ground upon which this measurement takes place is that of subjective expression. Rilke’s thing-poetry ‘attempts to assimilate even alien objects to pure subjective expression and to dissolve them, to give them metaphysical credit for their alienness’ (Adorno 1991, 40). This holds true, I think, for other poems by Rilke such as those I have discussed here. Adorno’s concern, as he explains later, is with ‘the poem as a philosophical sundial telling the time of history’ (46). It is in this respect that the lyric poem can for him act as an indicator of the nature of the disenchanted world even when it appears to stand at the furthest remove from direct political engagement (for more on the roots of Adorno’s sense of lyric, see Kaufman 2008). In Shapcott’s Tender Taxes, lullabies are hummed in ‘Prelude to Rilke’, their sound just below the surface of the breath, but this prelude is followed by ‘Song’, which takes Rilke’s song of the heart and transforms it into a hum that resounds deep inside the body: Which of the organs inside vibrates when angels sing? Somewhere between my kidneys and small intestine a voice, tender and intrepid, is humming tonight: a bubble of wind, memory, all my invisible mortality. (Shapcott 2001, 93)

Mark Robson 195

What Shapcott’s poem lacks in heart, it makes up for with kidneys and intestines. The heart is not the only organ, and the humming voice is located lower in the body in an ironically literal ventriloquism. One of the effects is that it does seem to stem from a body rather than simply from a tradition of lyric that privileges a heart that too often seems lacking in flesh and blood. That which makes things happen is similarly displaced: in Rilke’s poem, the heart makes the angels sing, while in Shapcott’s, a bodily organ is made to vibrate by a voice that seems initially to come from outside. Is this singing, then, the same voice that hums inside the body? Perhaps. The bubble of wind evokes and parodies the breath of the singing or speaking voice; it arises from the animal flesh of the body rather than the rarefied flesh of the poet. Isn’t this one of the reasons that it is said to hum? Where Rilke links revenir and souvenir to bring together (or disunite) future and past, Shapcott’s ‘Song’ ends with an invocation of mortality that envelops memory, submerging it. Both are invisible, but the humming voice offers a way for them to be recognised. The poet sings through the body, introjecting external voices only to offer up versions of these verses for further turns of reading. Such stress on embodiment is of a piece with the project of Shapcott’s rewriting of Rilke. As she explains in her Foreword to Tender Taxes, there is in her sequence always a sense of the need to write in the shadow of the impossibility of writing from Rilke’s male perspective. Most apparent in her versions of Les Roses, Shapcott explains that the key to this is the question of address, of who addresses whom and how. In Rilke’s rose poems, the speech goes in one direction: ‘he speaks to them, tells them what they are like, what makes them up, where their essence is to be found. My roses are given their own voice. They speak’ (Shapcott 2001, xi). In speaking back to Rilke’s poems, those of Shapcott flesh out the gender relations of translation, and her versions present a distinct reading of the ‘Roses’ section: Rilke’s roses are women, but Shapcott characteristically draws attention to the physicality of these gendered bodies. Rilke’s poems are read as versions of female genitalia, and it is this flesh to which she attempts to give a voice. In ‘Gilwern Lane’, Shapcott’s apparent personalisation of the elements of Rilke’s poetry allows for a recognition of the ways in which the pays, the country or land, is distributed between the human, natural, manmade and inhuman elements. This is made possible by an openness to the mimetic impurity that Plato decries. Shapcott’s hum – loaded as it is with attempts to divide the human and the non-human – becomes a model of imaginative synthesis or what Mousley calls condensation,

196

Towards a New Literary Humanism

but only where that hum becomes an accompaniment to words, to the words of the poet. What I want to argue is that it is in such openness to impurity – to a mimesis that can only ever be impure – that the lyric might be read as a promise of readability of the human trace. But this is not – or not only – the trace of the articulate human, the political animal; it is also the trace of the human animal’s relation to all those other effects of the hum: to the crowd, to the machine, to the insect, to the hesitation between words. This is what the version of Rilke to be found in ‘Song’ also shows. This is the trace of a human animal that hums from somewhere deep in the body, not only with a heart or mind that seems to be as light as the air of the lyric voice. What Shapcott’s poetry stretches towards – following the marks left by Rilke’s feet – are the traces of songs without words that every lyric strives and fails to be, and to which every word of the lyric testifies.

11 Humanising Marx: Theory and Fiction in the Fin de Siècle British Socialist Periodical Deborah Mutch

In the opening chapter of H.J. Bramsbury’s ‘A Working Class Tragedy’ (1888–9), serialised in the periodical of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), Justice, Mr Cranston, the factory owner, meets with his workers to admonish them for poor timekeeping: When the men had all collected he turned and confronted them. ‘Now, look here men,’ said he, ‘I have called you here to tell you plainly that I’ll stand no more of the kind of thing that has been going on in this establishment.’ (Bramsbury 9 June 1888, 2) The imbalance of power between Cranston and his employees is visible to the reader by the difference in external appearance: the workers’ clothes are ‘blackened with toil’ while Cranston is dressed ‘in faultless broadcloth’ (2). But the extent of the imbalance is made evident through the characters’ visual acknowledgement of each other. The men summoned to the address, the reader assumes, are facing Cranston, but Cranston displays his back to his workers and must ‘turn’ to ‘confront’ them. Although turning to face another human being, or in this case group of human beings, could suggest mutual recognition, Cranston is only concerned with his employees’ recognition of his own self, as he commands them to ‘look here’. By refusing the mutual gaze, demanding their acknowledgement while denying them his, the character of Cranston stands as the representative of the capitalist class and their attitude to the working class. His demand for recognition reinforces his position as an individual in society (‘look here’ implying ‘look at me’), while defining his employees as one indistinguishable homogeneous mass (‘Now, look here men’). Nevertheless, his power is not limited to his ability to command recognition, nor does he leave the individuals 197

198

Towards a New Literary Humanism

of his workforce wholly unacknowledged. When one of his workers suggests a compromise, Cranston not only faces his questioner, ‘turning fiercely’, but also names him as an individual: ‘That will do, Wilson’ (2). The identification of the individual does not indicate equality in power, but quite the reverse, as Cranston withdraws Wilson’s employment: ‘I am master here, and mean to be obeyed. You work here on my terms or you don’t work at all. As for you, Wilson, you had better go at once. I won’t have discontented men about the place.’ (2–3) The recognition of the individual worker by the capitalist class in this instance has devastating consequences. The removal of work equates to the removal of money in a society which does not allow the human to function without it. The gaze of the capitalist could be as lethal as the gaze of Medusa, but rather than turning the object of the gaze to stone, the capitalist has the power to freeze the flow of money to the individual, halting the life-blood of capitalism. The powerless and dependent workers are viewed by the capitalist class as no more than an integral part of the means of production. Cranston has no sympathy for those facing redundancy at his factory, which he views as ‘rather a bad job for the men who will be discharged, but, of course, that’s their business, not mine’ (2–3). Cranston’s use of the word ‘business’ refers both to the responsibility of each to themselves (minding one’s own business) and to the division of labour under capitalism: Cranston’s business is to buy labour at the lowest price; the workers’ business is to sell their labour at the highest. It might be argued that the capitalist was not indifferent to the worker, but was blinded by the association of the worker with the machine and the wealth they both produce. In Unto This Last, John Ruskin recognised the human buried beneath the dehumanising fetishisation of money-wealth: Perhaps it may even appear, after some consideration, that the persons themselves are the wealth – that these pieces of gold with which we are in the habit of grinding them, are, in fact, nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness or trappings, very glittering and beautiful in barbaric site, wherewith we bridle the creatures. [Once the harness is removed] they might themselves be more valuable than their bridles. (Ruskin 1985, 189) However, Ruskin’s sympathy for the workers does little more to humanise them than the capitalist attitude: he separates the living from the

Deborah Mutch 199

machine, but describes them as ‘creatures’ and maintains their association with wealth (they might be more valuable). For nineteenth-century socialists, the battle to have the workers recognised as human needed to be fought on two fronts: against the conscious dehumanising of the worker by the capitalist for his own benefit, and against the abstract and ostensibly anti-human theories of Karl Marx.

Marxism, humanism and fin de siècle British socialism Marx’s Capital was central to the development of the British socialist movement during its foundation and establishment in the 1880s and 1890s,1 but was not published in English until the 1886 Friedrich Engels and Edward Aveling translation. Even then, because of both the sophistication of understanding required and the time necessary to read a book of almost 1,000 pages, reading Marx was more likely to be the privilege of the leisured and educated upper and middle classes. The upper-class SDF chairman, Henry Mayers Hyndman, recognised this during his first reading of Capital: ‘I did not at the time fully grasp all the significance of his theories, which indeed are rarely apparent to the student who reads him for the first time’ (Hyndman 1911, 209). Hyndman recognised the importance of Marx’s theories of profit, labour and economics, and plagiarised the first two chapters of Capital in England for All, the book he published for the inauguration of the Democratic Federation in 1881. The chapters on labour and capital paraphrase Marx’s ideas, using the same products of cloth, tea, iron, wheat and gold to explain exchange value, tailoring to explain the value of labour, and the same calculations of work and output in the cotton mills to explain surplus value. Hyndman’s refusal to acknowledge Marx’s work caused a rift between himself and Marx, and even though his later, attributed translation serialised in his periodical To-Day (1886–9) was acknowledged as useful by Marx, it did little to heal the rift. Hyndman’s translation of the predominantly abstract chapters on economy brought into the English language what Althusser argued was Marx’s anti-humanist writing. In For Marx, Althusser argues there were three stages of Marx’s output. The early Marx was concerned with the philosophical issues of the essence of the human which he saw as freedom and reason, expressed in the form of the state. The second stage he designated the ‘politics of practical re-appropriation’, where ‘politics is no longer simply theoretical criticism, the enlightenment of reason through the free press, but man’s practical reappropriation of his essence’ (Althusser 1997, 226). The state is no longer the essence of

200

Towards a New Literary Humanism

human reason, but its existence under capitalism is the embodiment of unreason. The third stage, Althusser argued, came in 1845 when Marx made a radical break from his previous theory of history and politics as the essence of the human. This break itself consisted of three elements: 1. That history and politics are based on externals such as social formation, productive forces, etc. 2. The production of a critique of the theoretical aspect of philosophic humanism. 3. The definition of humanism as ideology – essence is now ideology, something which exists outside the human. (227–32) Since Althusser published his readings, the relationship between early and late Marx has been subject to debate. Does the early work form a foundation necessary for the understanding of the abstract later works? Or is there a fundamental break of philosophical ideas between the pre- and post-1845 works? Or did Althusser, as Matt Perry and others suggest, simply give a limited reading of Marx on behalf of his own antihumanist brand of Marxism (Perry 2002, 110)? Many theorists have rejected Althusser and have recognised the human and humanism in Marx’s theories. Philip J. Kain, for example, argues that: The ultimate goal for Marx is not a theoretical one – it is not knowledge of the fit between theory and reality. The ultimate goal is practical – the realization of a humanized society free of fetishism. (Kain 1986, 101) And in Critical Humanisms, Andy Mousley and Martin Halliwell, in their discussion of theories of affect, identify the emotion underlying Capital when Marx deals with the brutality of the effects of nineteenth-century capitalism: Emotions, in Capital, are neither sub-rational nor supra-rational. They are themselves rational, eloquent and intelligent. When Marx moves from abstract analysis to concrete situation and describes, with the help of officially commissioned reports, mid-nineteenth-century working conditions in Britain, he writes with considerable emotion. (Halliwell and Mousley 2003, 31) The structure of Capital, as Halliwell and Mousley recognise, moves from ‘abstract’ economics into ‘concrete situation’ as the work progresses. For many fin de siècle British socialists, Capital was only available in

Deborah Mutch 201

English through Hyndman’s periodical and his translation of the first parts which constitute the most abstract and mathematical aspects of the work. For fin de siècle socialists, the human was central to the criticism of capitalist society, and society must change to benefit all. British socialists used the periodical, and the serialised fiction included in it, because it could act as a vehicle for their interpretation of socialism and as a method of persuasion for the necessity and possibility of change. For the fin de siècle socialists, literature’s ‘sensuous realism’ enabled its readers to recognise their individual experience, while also encouraging them to reflect on their position and power, and to attach their individual experience to the more general perspectives offered within the fiction itself and by the surrounding journalism.

Humanism, literature and the periodical The importance placed on the periodical by British socialists aligns British socialism with the humanist Marx. As Althusser noted, the early, essentialist Marx viewed the press as the voice of reason: ‘the free Press, the free reason of humanity, becomes politics itself … the journalist’s public criticism … he saw as political action par excellence’ (Althusser 1997, 224). British socialists similarly saw the press as a vehicle for human agency in social change, a means to promote and define their interpretation of socialism, and activate the essence of power they saw inherent in the working class. The periodicals sought to create a balance between the individual recognition of his/her power and the collective action necessary to overthrow capitalist relations. British socialists recognised that capitalism had persuaded the working individual of their powerlessness and isolation from others through the promotion of a survival-of-the-fittest form of individualism. The socialist periodicals re-appropriated individualism by distinguishing the individual worker from the capitalist ‘mass’ and by stimulating recognition of both their own agency and the overwhelming power of united action. The two longest running and most influential socialist periodicals were Justice (1884–1925), the official organ of the SDF, arguably controlled by SDF founder and chairman Hyndman, and the Clarion (1891–1931), which was edited by Robert Blatchford and eschewed party politics. Blatchford had stated in the inaugural issue of the Clarion: ‘The policy of THE CLARION is a policy of humanity; a policy not of party, sect, or creed; but of justice, of reason and mercy’ (Blatchford 12 December 1891, 1). His aim was to ‘[c]onvince the people and never mind parties’ (Blatchford 1891, xiii). While Blatchford’s Clarion was livelier and more

202

Towards a New Literary Humanism

entertaining than the often ponderous Justice, both periodicals used serialised fiction to further humanise what might have seemed to many readers of Marx (via Hyndman) to be an impersonal theory of economics which mirrored the impersonal operations of capital. The fiction did not sit apart from the journalism and commentary that surrounded it, but reflected and refracted debates that were ongoing due to the regular and consecutive publication, the interaction between periodical and readers through the letters pages and beyond, the debates with other socialist periodicals, and the challenges to the mainstream press. The apparently ‘eternal’ and ‘natural’ capitalist economic system was interrogated through the reportage, commentary and literature, with the latter also drawing the debates into what Raymond Williams called the ‘lived experience’ of individuals (Williams 1973, 57–88). The slide between the abstract and the sensuous, between the general and the personal encouraged the reader to consider as well as to feel the necessity of, and ways to, socialist humanism. Such interaction may be illustrated by taking the Justice page which included Bramsbury’s first chapter, and the Clarion page which included the final chapter of Blatchford’s serial ‘The Sorcery Shop: An Impossible Romance’ (1906–7).2 Bramsbury’s story follows the trials of Frank Wilson (or Watson as he becomes known) from his arbitrary dismissal from his post as engineer, through poverty, the descent into crime to feed his family, a false accusation of murder, his escape, rescue by a local aristocratic family and his eventual destruction by the capitalist who marries his aristocratic love. The first chapter opens on page two, placed along the bottom of the page below an article on ‘Liverpool Dock Labourers’ by J.C. Kenworthy. Both the fiction and the journalism deal with the issues of surplus value and profit, the uncertainty of employment and the requirement by capitalism of a pool of labour to draw on during periods of expansion and release during recession. While Kenworthy’s journalism takes a more general perspective on dock labourers as a group, Bramsbury personalises the experience by focusing the narrative through the eyes and experience of a single worker. The reader moves between Kenworthy’s ‘issue-led’ article about the unskilled dock labourer and the more ‘character-led’ re-presentation of issues in Bramsbury’s story about Frank Wilson. The concerns of Cranston, Frank Wilson’s employer, about punctuality – ‘we are working overtime, when by rights you ought to be on three-quarters time’ (Bramsbury 9 June 1888, 2) – personalise the tensions between the employer and employee over ‘surplus’ value, while Kenworthy expands the issue to the Liverpool dock labourers as a group, ‘perhaps, the largest and most important’ in

Deborah Mutch 203

dock work (Kenworthy 9 June 1888, 2). For both Frank as an individual and the dock workers as a collective, the struggles with employment and money illustrate the effects of the capitalist appropriation of surplus value on the workers. In the fiction, Bramsbury re-works what Raymond Williams terms ‘secular tragedy’ (Williams 1966, 30–2) by lifting the emphasis on individual moral error, which can be redeemed by the embrace of bourgeois moral codes, and removes the mainstream literary drive for individual instruction through the tragic genre where the ‘[reader] will be moved to live well by the demonstration of the consequences of good and evil’ (31). Bramsbury in effect personalises the tragedy of a whole class whose irreparable action is to resist the ‘fate’ of workers under capitalist power, while the editorial positioning also considers the collective experience. The fiction intensifies life, but the effect of serialisation and the interplay between literature and journalism prevents the total absorption of the reader into the fiction. Blatchford’s ‘The Sorcery Shop’ was serialised in the Clarion between November 1906 and March 1907, and follows the incredible journey of the capitalist, Mr Jorkle, and the landowner, General Storm, as they are guided through the utopian socialist state of New Manchester in New England by Mr Fry, a sorcerer. Whereas the interplay in Justice between journalism and fiction drew together degrees of generality and particularity to critique the pressure of capitalism on the human, Blatchford’s livelier layout draws in advertising to suggest the way to potential change. From left to right, the page includes: adverts, for example, for ‘The People’s Classics’, whose aim was to aid enlightenment and understanding by offering affordable reprints of such texts as Mazzini’s ‘Thoughts on Democracy’ and Tolstoy’s ‘The Scribes and Pharisees’; the final chapter of ‘The Sorcery Shop’, which returns Jorkle and Storm to their capitalist reality; Blatchford’s ‘Explanatory Remarks’ on his choice of genre; and a report on Upton Sinclair’s failed co-operative household experiment. The interaction of columns across the page provokes debate about both the necessity and practicability of socialism, through Jorkle’s dismissal of his experiences in the socialist utopia, an advert for texts explaining ‘The Money Problem’ and ‘Industrial Depression’, and the impossibility of building a communal society within capitalism due to the failure of Sinclair’s project (22 March 1907, 1). Thus, in terms of the key principles of the ‘new literary humanism’ set out in the Introduction to this volume, the literature brings sensuousness to the more abstract considerations of the journalism, the ‘heart’ and ‘emotion’ to the ‘head’ and ‘intellect’ of economic theory. The reader is prevented from becoming immersed in the fiction at the expense of the

204

Towards a New Literary Humanism

‘fact’ of socialist argument, and both aspects work towards igniting the potential agency of the (working-class) individual. The notion that literature both moves and instructs is a traditional one (see the Introduction), but is one that has often had to fend off the idea that fiction is merely entertaining, merely sensuous pleasure. A variation on the traditional view was voiced in the nineteenth century by Matthew Arnold. In Literature and Dogma (1873), Arnold argued that the Bible, in light of scientific advances, could not be taken literally but was to be read as ‘literature’. This elevated the status of what Arnold deemed ‘good’ literature from mere entertainment to a source of moral and cultural enlightenment, equivalent to religion. As Michael Bell explains in F. R. Leavis, Arnold argued that: The Bible in effect should be seen as literature, but not as ‘mere’ literature; rather with literature now assuming something of the burden traditionally borne by religious belief. Instead of ‘reflecting’ spiritual values and significances it provides their very mode of being. The great authors of the modern movement also saw literature as having this primordial value with respect to the creation and definition of human meaning. (Bell 1988, 17) The socialists can be seen as adapting this Arnoldian view to their own cause by writing fictional texts which were at once immediate in their appeal, enlightening and ‘spiritually uplifting’ in the hope vested in deliverance from the ills of capitalism. If sensuousness, combined with socialism’s redemption of ‘the human’ from its alienated condition in capitalism, suggests a form of essentialism, then this needs to be modified by the anti-essentialist tenets of a movement whose watchword was revolutionary change. Essentialists and anti-essentialists have often divided themselves into separate camps, but a sharp distinction between the two does not always hold, especially in the context of progressive forms of politics premised upon the notion that humanity has not yet realised itself. ‘Essence’ is futureoriented and therefore, by definition, as yet undisclosed. Literature was an additional ally for socialists in imagining this undisclosed future. Where Arnold saw literature as reinforcing the status quo, Friedrich Engels understood the power of the imagination to overcome what Patrick Joyce has argued was the workers’ fatalist perspective on the inevitability of capitalism ( Joyce 1991, 117, 126). Without hope for change, there would be no point in socialism. Engels recognised the role of literature in bringing about change, stating, in proto-Brechtian

Deborah Mutch 205

style, that socialist realism should ‘“[dispel] the dominant conventional illusions … [shake] the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably [instil] doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists”’ (quoted in Goode 1971, 224). The resistance to the supposed permanence and naturalness of capitalist society, and the acknowledgement of human agency in change, were central both to the socialist argument and to the inclusion of fiction which worked against its mainstream counterpart, naturalistic realism, and the sense of pessimism often inscribed there. It is from within the fiction that the potential to imagine a different world is expanded into the ‘real’ of the surrounding reportage and vice versa. Moreover, the interaction between fiction and explicit political argument means that the fiction cannot be successfully read through the same aesthetic expectations readers have been taught to bring to ‘mainstream’ fiction. To the reader expecting the development of the individual within the novel (the development of the human protagonist, affected and changed by circumstances but who remains recognisably individual), the characters of socialist fiction appear stilted and two-dimensional. Nevertheless, the characterisation should not be dismissed as poor writing, but rather read as a deliberate literary effect. Character in the socialist periodicals is advanced via metaphor or synecdoche, or what Andy Mousley, in the Introduction to this volume, refers to as the ‘resonating particular’. The nineteenthcentury working class had often been homogenised either by reference to its component parts (the industrial workers referred to as ‘hands’) or through a single, often derogatory, label applied to all (‘Hodge’ for the agricultural labourer). What the socialist periodical attempted to do was to reverse this process: rather than homogenise the individual into the mass, the socialists encouraged the elevation of the individual within the collective. In order for the literature to be understood through the prism of socialism rather than capitalism, the fiction needed to simultaneously create the attachment to ‘character’ necessary for empathy, and the distance necessary for the reader to recognise social generalisations that might otherwise be obscured by becoming absorbed in the trials of an apparently anomalous individual. The protagonists in the fiction of Bramsbury and Blatchford are the particulars which resonate with the general characteristics of a British class system simultaneously disclosed through individual character: the industrious but oppressed worker, the greedy and unsympathetic capitalist, the paternal but aloof aristocrat. The OED definition of resonance in nuclear physics describes ‘a short-lived particle … manifested as an increase … in the probability of interaction of other particles’,

206

Towards a New Literary Humanism

and these synecdotal characters not only resonate with the characteristics of the class they represent, but also class-based attitudes towards others. Both serialisations deal with the three main class groups in capitalist society and align them with the three broad political stances described by Raymond Williams as historical epochs: the residual Tory/ feudal upper class, the dominant Liberal/capitalist middle class and the emergent socialist working class (Williams 1977, 121–7), although their positions in the historical continuum do not always align with Williams’ chronology.

Socialist humanism, agency and responsibility Given the glaring economic and social injustices of global capitalism, the socialist humanism described in this chapter is just as relevant today, despite its conscious rejection by mainstream politics; ‘relevant’, but, it seems at present, unachievable by being presented as a political anathema. It is therefore all the more important to counter the propaganda that encourages us to fear socialism and to consign the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist humanism’ to a dim and distant past. To recall past struggles is to make them ‘live again’ in the present, if only in the confines of an academic tome.3 With these issues in mind, it seems appropriate to end by revisiting some of the obstacles that stood in the way of the agents of socialist change in the nineteenth century and the role that socialist fiction played in countering these obstacles. One further preamble: terms such as agency and responsibility have often been part of humanism’s lexicon, but a detailed description of how they (complexly) function in particular historical circumstances can be obscured by more abstract considerations of agency (in discussions of ‘free will’, for example) or by equally abstract anti-humanist disavowals of agency (in generalised notions of the individual as ‘subject’ to language/ideology). The account that follows of the issue of leadership within nineteenth-century socialist debate demonstrates how, in practice, questions of responsibility and agency played out and were struggled over. If words like responsibility and agency are to be reinvested with meaning by any ‘new humanism’, then a detailed understanding of particular struggles over agency and responsibility can contribute to this and, in addition, show how hard-won agency has often been for disenfranchised groups. The issues of leadership, responsibility and agency were at the centre of British socialist debate: who was responsible for the disempowered workers? Who was going to show them the way to a better society?

Deborah Mutch 207

Who was going to educate them on the collective power and agency they unconsciously held within them? Again, the issue of leadership is dealt with in the socialist periodicals through the double mediation of fiction and conceptual discussion. British socialism was divided between those who expressed socialist principles through the prism of Liberal (political independence for the workers through parliamentary representation and trade union collectivism) or Tory (leadership and governance of the workers by responsible and sympathetic socialists) politics. Both Blatchford and Hyndman favoured the Tory model. In Work, Society and Politics, Patrick Joyce argues that the success of nineteenth-century Tory political ideology over that of the Whigs was due to the Tory adaptation of rural leadership to industrial paternalism ( Joyce 1982, xxi, 137). It could be argued that this apparently compassionate, humanising relationship between employer and employee masked the real conditions of power. Such mystification of hierarchical social relations supports the antihumanist perspective that humanism and appeals to humanity have always been used to justify oppressive social arrangements. However, the premise of this chapter has been that humanism was and is a multivalent and therefore contestable term. Even the anti-humanist Althusser distinguished between Christian and bourgeois humanisms, and socialist humanism: As for socialist humanism, it can see itself not only as a critique of the contradictions of bourgeois humanism, but also and above all as the consummation of its ‘noblest’ aspirations. Humanity’s millenarian dreams, prefigured in the drafts of past humanisms, Christian and bourgeois, will at last find realization in it: in man and between men, the reign of Man will at last begin. (Althusser 1997, 222) Translating Althusser’s categories back into the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold can clearly be seen as exemplifying the kind of ‘bourgeois’ humanism which socialist humanists were attempting to supersede. Arnold claimed that ‘without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection’ (Arnold 2006, 149), but Arnold’s definition of order is the perpetuation of social hierarchy, which to the socialists is anarchy. Capitalist society compelled workers to labour for their bare existence, forced those prevented from working by capitalist profit into starvation and the workhouse, and allowed the suffering of working-class women and children while simultaneously placing upper- and middle-class women and children

208

Towards a New Literary Humanism

on a pedestal. The success of the individual under capitalism is always at the expense of another. ‘Order’ and ‘anarchy’ were redefined by socialist humanists and such redefinition was part of their exercise of agency. In his journalism, Hyndman criticised the ‘order’ of a society which demanded that ‘honest men … see their wives and children starve in silence’ and the morality of ‘the resolute denials of the authorities that any exceptional distress existed’ (Hyndman 18 February 1886, 1) and which defined socialist change as ‘anarchy’. Both Blatchford and Hyndman, however, have been described as ‘Tory-socialists’: Mark Bevir claimed Hyndman ‘sought to avoid anarchy by means of aristocratic statesmanship’ (Bevir 1991, 132) and Blatchford described himself as ‘a Tory-democrat’ (Thompson 1951, 230). The emphasis for Hyndman was on the responsible leadership of the upper classes and he retained the Tory attitude to social ranking. This was clear in the recollections of SDF member and anarchist Joseph Lane: ‘[Hyndman] asked me if I meant to say that a loafer at the East End of London was to be placed on an equality with myself’ (Tsuzuki 1961, 30). Blatchford’s leadership of his readers took a different direction: while the upper-class Hyndman established his position of authority and that of his socialist group, the working-class Blatchford emphasised the ‘natural’ humanity and collectivity of the British worker, and placed responsible leadership within the working classes rather than seeking to impose it from outside. While Stephen Yeo argues that Blatchford had an ‘almost pathological desire to avoid “leadership” positions’ (Yeo 1977, 37), there is still an element of guidance toward socialism in his writing. His influential polemic Merrie England, serialised in the Clarion in 1893 under his pseudonym Nunquam, established a personal monologue with ‘John Smith’, an everyman figure who embodied all the working-class prejudices against socialism. Blatchford placed the human at the centre of his argument in the first chapter, claiming ‘that we should first of all ascertain what things are desirable for our health and happiness of body and mind, and that we should then organise our people’ (Nunquam 4 March 1893, 8). To achieve this, ‘John Smith’ is guided toward further reading, with many chapters ending with a reading list giving the texts’ publisher and price. The reader is advised that ‘if you will read the following books for yourself, you will be in a better position to follow me in my future letters’ (Nunquam 4 March 1893, 8). Thus, Blatchford encourages ‘John Smith’ to make his own decisions, but leads him towards those decisions nevertheless. The same is true of the fiction, ending as it does with Blatchford’s ‘Explanatory Remarks’.

Deborah Mutch 209

In these, Blatchford makes clear the relationship between ‘The Sorcery Shop’ and Merrie England, fiction and polemic: ‘I have written this story for propagandist purposes, and because I thought it might be easier to write and to read than a revised edition of “Merrie England”’ (Blatchford 22 March 1907, 1). In the fiction of both Bramsbury and Blatchford, the interaction of the class-resonant characters gives hope for the future, which rests on the selection of those who could lead the workers out of contemporary anarchy and into a humane society. For Bramsbury, the tragedy of ‘A Working Class Tragedy’ is not the impossibility of change, but the potentially conservative attitude of the working class towards social hierarchy. Frank’s tragedy is that he favours the waning power of residual upper-class leadership over an emergent socialism that promises autonomy and agency: his decision to leave London and the socialist movement to become a land steward for Colonel Ashville in rural Benton is a backward step. Although the Colonel is benign and paternal, allowing Frank to create a farming collective on his land, his death represents the death of aristocratic paternalism and allows the capitalist (through the marriage of Cranston’s son to the Colonel’s daughter) to extend his power. When Frank turns his back on socialism by leaving London, he is rejecting the only group to be entrusted to lead society to freedom. For Hyndman and Bramsbury, sympathetic leadership was the ultimate goal, but for Blatchford leadership was the vehicle to a socialist, or perhaps communist, society where freedom is paramount and the human individual within the collective is their own government. When the sorcerer Fry in Blatchford’s ‘The Sorcery Shop’ first introduces Storm and Jorkle to the socialist society of New Manchester, one of the first magnificent buildings they see is the Town Hall. Both are shocked when, in response to Storm’s comment on it looking like a palace, ‘[t]he wizard, in his driest tones’ replied: ‘“Sir, this healthy, wealthy, and happy people, this great people, have no government at all: none of any kind, sir”’ (Blatchford 16 November 1906, 7). The most extreme sort of government the two visitors can imagine is that of a republic having replaced the monarchy; neither can comprehend a society based on selfgovernment and individual responsibility within a collective ideal. But while Blatchford can create a society where socialism is already established, he is, like his characters, incapable of imagining a society without government until socialism is achieved. While for both Bramsbury and Blatchford the force for change was the creation of socialists through argument and education, within the fiction the author was at liberty to introduce a single catalyst for change. For Bramsbury, the catalyst was

210

Towards a New Literary Humanism

the socialist movement, whereas Blatchford’s hope was located in the paternal upper class. Returning Jorkle and Storm to their own present world, during a parade of the unemployed, Fry leaves the two men to consider their experiences. Jorkle, the capitalist, dismissed by Fry as early as Chapter 3 ‘as hopeless in his philistinism’ (Blatchford 23 November 1906, 9) – a reference, perhaps, to Arnold’s labelling of the middle class as philistines – merely returns to his normal routine. But for Storm it is suggested, by his spatial positioning and gaze, that the experience has changed him. While Jorkle removes his gaze from the unemployed and retreats further into the club house, Storm leaves the club and goes to the workers. Here, for the first time, he fully ‘sees’ the workers and the acknowledgement is shown through the mutual gaze. The workers generally avert their eyes from the club: ‘They tramped on silently, looking straight before them, or on the ground’ (Blatchford 22 March 1907, 1), rejecting the leadership situated in the club. But Storm’s emerging sympathy removes him from his elevated position at the window and places him on an equal level with the marchers. Once on the street, he is approached by a worker collecting for the marchers, and it is here that the recognition between the two groups separated by capitalist society suggests the possibility of hope for the future. Storm ‘looked him hard in the eye’ and when he donates generously, the worker’s ‘pale blue eyes dilated’. The collector’s response illustrates the Tory relationship between worker and aristocrat as ‘he touched his old cap’: there is deference, but the workman maintains his gaze as Storm ‘left him staring’ and the General’s recognition is widened to the whole demonstration, as ‘he gazed dubiously at the grim regiment tramping past’ (1). Thus, the gaze of mutual recognition is not restricted to the individual, as it might be argued that philanthropy under capitalism is – the soup kitchens, alms and other localised acts of charity can only temporarily alleviate the suffering of a few. Storm, the representative of a new type of leadership, moves his gaze to the masses, looking ‘at the grim regiment tramping past’ (1). The reader does not enter into Storm’s thoughts on the demonstration, but the emphasis on the gaze in the last chapter (there are ten references to sight in a chapter little over a column long) suggests a new connection being made between the two disparate social groups. The General’s final words, the final words of the fiction, point, ambiguously, to this changed reality: Hah! Dammit! Hah! What a devilish odd dream. Hah! by Jove! The – the unemployed. Hah! the unemployed! Hah! Damn! (1)

Deborah Mutch 211

The reference to the dream could suggest his dismissal, similar to Jorkle’s, of the experience; the final ‘Damn’ may be an exclamation of impatience with his feelings of responsibility now the utopian alternative has been revealed. Or it may be that he is realising the hardships of the unemployed for the first time. What is clear is that the General is unable to dismiss the suffering of other human beings as Jorkle does and the hope intimated is that he recognises himself as a potential leader to socialist order. Thus, the necessity for change in the surrounding periodical is once again personalised, humanised and suffused with hope through the inclusion of fiction. Regardless of whether readers and critics consider Marx humanist or anti-humanist, late-nineteenth-century British socialists worked to draw the human into Marxist economics. Through the interaction of journalism, debate and fiction, the reader of the periodical was presented with both the abstract and the personal, the general and the specific. If Marxist theory could not illuminate the essence of working-class power, then literature could show readers where the power for change lay.

Notes 1. Ideas on the role and usefulness of Marxist thought and economics ranged from the anti-Marxist Fabian Society, who favoured the permeation of existing political structures with socialist ideology over revolution, through the SDF and William Morris’s Socialist League’s alternation between education and revolution, to the anarchists, who followed the violent teachings of Kropokin, Bakunin and others. 2. For further discussion on the importance of the whole page/periodical in the development of socialist ideas, see Mutch 2005 and 2009. 3. To this end, my next project is to establish a website which will give free access to the socialist periodicals of the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, including the Clarion and Justice.

12 Civic Humanism: Said, Brecht and Coriolanus Nigel Wood

Brought up as many modern critics have been on a highly technical vocabulary derived from linguistics, sociology and/or philosophy, we might find humanistic enquiry disarmingly lucid and thus simplified. There is a wealth of difference, however, between a sense of humanistic emphases (on human agency, moral responsibility, conscious critical choice and answerability) that fights shy of ‘Theory’ and one that embraces it as a means rather than an end. For what set of humanist goals might we note différence or dialectical materialism or patriarchal entrapment? Similarly, it is still a matter of judgement to winnow away adventitious formative influences from more lasting and valuable ones, the commercially opportunistic, say, from the genuinely alternative gestures of contestation or negotiation. We are not prey to everything that intervenes between a text and our subsequent understanding of it, in some prison-house of artistic, social or intellectual history. We can be at the same time well-read in Theory and yet not be overwhelmed by it. And, as the Introduction to this volume attests, we can make humanism itself more theoretically robust, without codifying it to the point where it becomes static and unresponsive to changing circumstances. In his posthumously-published Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), Edward Said noted that there was an unfortunate human propensity to codify and standardise: In my understanding of its relevance today, humanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what ‘we’ have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties, including 212

Nigel Wood

213

those contained in the masterpieces herded under the rubric of ‘the classics’. (Said 2004, 28) Often one to shun hermetic thought, Said embraced a public role for the critic, one that spoke for, and to, a wide constituency, whilst acknowledging that there was no ‘master plan’ or ‘utopian teleology toward which human history can be described as moving’. Implicitly, this recognises the role of a politically aware intellectual, one who exhibits an ‘engaged involvement’ outside the guild expectations of the academy. Such a committed intellectual would invent goals ‘abductively’ – and one might perhaps have to live with the sense of illegality accruing to that term – in light of the ‘known historical and social facts’ or by ‘reassembling from past performances’ one’s strategic focus on human values and tendencies in an essentially communal effort (Said 2004, 140). From this perspective, any ‘master-theory’ (that would seem to negate human agency and historical contingency) always has an ingredient of historical causation and opportunism in that it answers, and provokes answers from, particular constituencies. It may not declare a wish to, but it does. In keeping with the tenor of this volume as a whole, then, this chapter works with rather than against ‘Theory’, but attenuates the inclination of any theory towards codification by placing theoretical insights in the service of a worldly and engaged ‘civic’ humanism, alert to the contingency of history and to the agency, circumscribed of course, which such contingency brings with it. A heightened sense of the contingent is one of the things we might mean by ‘literature’, because literature at least in realist mode gives a thick description of how human beings are at once complexly constrained by multiple ideologies and circumstances which are nevertheless sufficiently in flux to make (varying degrees of) agency possible. While such thick description is in itself no guarantee of civic engagement and ‘realism’ is a notoriously elastic term that can just as easily advance anti-civic agendas, they can equally be mobilised and adapted to the ‘cause’ of a civic humanism. Similarly, the marriage between ‘civic’ and ‘humanism’ was not made in heaven. Notwithstanding the endurance from Aristotle onwards of the (variously inflected) notion that ‘the highest form of activity in which we can engage is the pursuit of the common good’ (Halliwell and Mousley 2003, 79), humanism does not inevitably mean ‘civic humanism’. To think so would again be to remove the sense of agency and contingency embraced by Said. It would also be to ignore the hard-won outcomes of struggles which still have to be fought for. To align or re-align ‘civic’

214

Towards a New Literary Humanism

with ‘humanism’ marks a choice, a mode of engagement, amidst other choices and other humanisms. The specific focus of this chapter, upon Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is itself an awkward reminder that all the ingredients of early modern humanistic revolt do not themselves always add up: in throwing off the yoke of pre-determined character and behaviour, other fissures in the modern definition of ‘humanism’ open, for an embrace of the vitality and centrality of Man can lead as much to an abstraction (the Rights of Man, suffragism or civic responsibility) as to a celebration of heroic and individual virtue, where ego development and its recognition breeds an irritation with the demos. If there is a ‘civic humanist’ impulse in Coriolanus, then this impulse is at odds with other humanist possibilities, as well as with various other compromising pressures. We may begin opening up some of these issues by citing an observation about the play by Jonathan Dollimore, from his influential Radical Tragedy. Coriolanus, he writes, ‘does not show the defeat of innate nobility by policy, but rather challenges the very idea of innate nobility’ (Dollimore 1984, 220). This is persuasive, yet is reticent on the significant question as to whether this position is conjured out of the play by the astute critic or whether the play (and so its author) provided its readers with this view, especially as it tallied with many humanist tenets of contemporary belief. For example, it is very much in the spirit of Richard Hooker’s apparently conformist jurisprudence in his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593: Books I–IV; 1597: Book V), where Natural Law, not unconditional obedience, is the sustaining prop of the world: ‘The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, nature herself must needs have taught’ that nature’s works are investigable ‘without the help of revelation supernatural and divine’ and that Man, ‘made according to the likeness of his maker resembleth him also in the manner of working’, namely, to choose to consult our own understanding (Hooker 1989, 76, 81, 70). While Dollimore’s interpretation, supplemented here by the extract from Hooker, is compelling, it tends to ignore some of the difficulties and difficult choices involved in making sense of the play’s strangely fraught assertions of allegiance and alignment. These assertions are possibly more open to the law of unforeseen consequences – to the ‘law’ of the contingent – than a tragedy with a more pronounced sense of the inevitable. We may have to search for models of accountability, of agency and of a mobilised political consciousness, which cannot simply be deciphered, like the figure in the carpet, within the aesthetics or the

Nigel Wood

215

verbal texture of the work, in its assertions and set-pieces. For this, we can turn to Bertolt Brecht, one of Dollimore’s allies in his interpretation of the play (and throughout Radical Tragedy), but one who is enlisted on behalf of Dollimore’s anti-humanism. Humanism, for Dollimore, mainly means ‘essentialist subjectivity’ and this he uncompromisingly opposes to an understanding of subjectivity as culturally determined. But the problem with this position is that alternative human/humanist concepts (of agency, responsibility, accountability and emancipation) tend to be obscured and the dialectic between contingency and freedom marginalised in favour of a ‘hard-line’ cultural materialism. What drew Brecht to so many of his adaptations of early modern theatre was the difference between what he saw as the naturalised complacency of bourgeois theatre and the harder edges of a more popular and secular art form. In the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, different kinds of untidily represented agencies and social determinations compete with each other within a mode of realism whose principles of aesthetic coherence were difficult to assimilate to those of Brecht’s own culture: Shakespeare doesn’t have to think. Nor does he have to construct. He leaves construction to the spectator. Shakespeare would never twist the course of a man’s fate in Act 2 in order to prepare for Act 5. With him everything takes its natural course. The lack of connection between his Acts reminds us of the lack of connection in a man’s fate as reported by someone who has no reason to want to tidy it up so as to strengthen an idea which can only be a prejudice by an argument which is not derived from life. (Brecht 1998, 20) This was from a broadcast introduction for Berlin Radio in 1927 that was a trailer for his adaptation of Macbeth, directed by Alfred Braun. There is a basic resemblance between this perspective and Brecht’s more general dramaturgical procedures and their resistance to narrative assimilation that also proved to be an insulation against Romantic empathising. More relevantly for a civic humanist agenda, he wishes to trace a provisional human freedom from fate and generic inevitability. ‘Life’ and artistic coherence diverge, and in that invaluable gap lies Shakespeare’s distinction. Brecht’s long-lived interest in Coriolanus might seem no surprise in that his political beliefs in the human creation of structures of government are widely debated in the play. He was working on an adaptation at his death in 1956 and left behind a record of the Berliner Ensemble’s deliberations on how to render the first scene, Menenius

216

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Agrippa’s encounter with the Citizens en route to attack Caius Martius. In conversation with (probably) Helene Weigel, Kathe Rülicke and Peter Palizsch, Brecht attempts to ignore the prevalent sense of tragic greatness that would normally be expected of the tragic protagonist in favour of a more analytic attitude, less conclusive in effect (and thus more dialectical): R. Although Shakespeare never allows Agrippa to mention that his parable has managed to convince the plebeians, only to say that though they lack discretion (to understand his speech) they are passing cowardly – an accusation, incidentally, that’s impossible to understand. B. We’ll note that. R. Why? B. It gives rise to discomfort. (Lodge and Wood 2008, 175) Menenius, indeed, expresses this verdict at 1.1.198–200 (Shakespeare 2000), yet the ensemble’s ‘analysts’, in their determination to adapt (add or delete) only as a last resort, dwell on the play’s ‘realism’, the way that it refuses to provide us with a streamlined dramatic experience, the only focus of which might be an unfolding of Coriolanus’s tragic predicament and thus an exploration of individual ‘character’. Is the undoubted dramatic epicentre that is Caius Martius/Coriolanus a means to get us to sympathise with him? What might the approach to the play’s ‘politics’ actually involve? In the event, the adaptation made it to the stage a full six years after Brecht’s death, and the goal of working just with Shakespeare’s text was abandoned. The 1962 version (dir. Heinrich Koch, Frankfurt Schauspielhaus) actually included a collage of passages from Dorothea Tieck’s 1825 translation, and the full adaptation was only completed by Manfred Wekwerth and Joachim Tenschert in 1964. Here, far from being cowed by Caius Martius’s expulsion and enlistment with the Volscians, the plebeians organise themselves into a redoubtable defence militia and it is as a result of noting the plumes of smoke rising from their foundries that Martius decides against the attack on Rome – not at the entreaty of his mother, wife and son. Whilst Shakespeare ends the action with Coriolanus’s body being borne off stage by a mourning Volscian guard, this adaptation concludes with the Senate too busy to recognise the women’s mission and even to mourn its erstwhile hero’s death. If Brecht has here (eventually) ‘abducted’ the text to an extreme degree – to the point where those ill-disposed will feel safe in ignoring his basic

Nigel Wood

217

premises about the need for adaptation and claim that it can tell us little about the source text – then one could not say as much about his attempt in the Versuche to read against the critical grain and resurrect the status of civic duty in the play, even if it gives rise to ‘discomfort’. Brecht does not reveal himself as a negligent reader at all in the close analysis of the first scene. He is alive to the individuals that make up the Citizen force and has read his Livy and Plutarch. The plebeians may ‘steale away’, according to the stage direction at 1.1.249 (Shakespeare 2000), but his explanation for this dissolution of their revolt is viable: ‘The wind has changed, it’s no longer a favourable wind for mutinies; a powerful threat affects all alike, and as far as the people goes this threat is simply noted in a purely negative way’ (Lodge and Wood 2008, 180). He also questions whether the play is a vehicle for Coriolanus or, on the contrary, whether his relative prominence is framed by the net effects of the whole action and so is questioned. Brecht may seem an unlikely ally for humanism, especially when enlisted to anti-humanist causes such as Dollimore’s, but his emancipatory platform for critical revision and reassessment is not so different from some of humanism’s values. Just as humanism comprises a perennial strand of opposition to bloodless abstraction (a strand consolidated in this volume’s Introduction through its promotion of ‘affective sensuousness’ to a key critical term) and understands the necessary role of human agency and responsibility, one might conclude that a dialectical materialist and a humanist are united at least in some of their enemies. This is not just some overly-ingenious expedient; the last exchanges of the Coriolanus essay return us to a sense of common human experience: B. We want to have and to communicate the fun of dealing with a slice of illuminated history. And to have first-hand experience of dialectics. P. Isn’t the second point a considerable refinement, reserved for a handful of connoisseurs? P. Even with popular ballads or the peepshows at fairs the simple people (who are so far from simple) love stories of the rise and fall of great men, of eternal change, of the ingenuity of the oppressed, of the potentialities of mankind. And they hunt for the truth that is ‘behind it all’. (Lodge and Wood 2008, 183) The aim here is positively Reithian, the Brechtian emphasis falling on ‘first-hand’ and ‘mankind’.

218

Towards a New Literary Humanism

The path also often followed by humanists from the ‘human’ to the ‘humane’ is not an easy one, given that the path from the human to the inhuman has just as often (if not more often) been taken, but notwithstanding this note of caution, the ‘humane’ demands some attention in the play as a contributor to its civic humanist discourse. Aside from suggestive accounts of Coriolanus’s pathological impulses,1 the ‘humane’ within the play has received relatively little critical consideration, in terms of its complex recognition of what it takes to involve oneself in individual choice, to maintain a sense of self and of sympathy with others, whilst also attempting to fulfil one’s more abstract obligations to the state. The root ‘humane’ occurs twice in the play, but invites close scrutiny on both occasions. In the very first scene, the First Citizen is unsparing in his analysis of patrician ‘charity’ with scarce grain: If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely, but they think we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. (Shakespeare 2000, 1.1.16–21) Confronting Coriolanus’s most extreme, undemocratic behaviour, the First Senator accepts Menenius’s advice that ‘lawful form’ be followed and legal process be invoked: ‘It is the humane way. The other course/ Will prove too bloody, and the end of it,/Unknown to the beginning’ (3.1.328, 330–2). It is not coincidental that these sentiments come from generic, even choric, figures. Indeed, the increased attention Shakespeare gave to inset scenes and the way that he allowed the brief appearances of Aufidius, Menenius, the Tribunes and Volumnia in Plutarch and Livy to blossom into a varied gloss on the main action show an attraction for wide political comment (see Shakespeare 2000, 10–17). For the First Citizen, the profound pun on ‘dear’ (cherished or costly) emphasises the lack of active civic humanism in the Patrician ranks. Indeed, we sense its very opposite: a determination to shore up a superiority by pauperising the plebeians.2 It has only comparatively recently been noted that this perspective was one that characterised popular dissent throughout the grain crises in England of 1605–8, a model for the play’s depiction of civil unrest, principally in 1.1. As Lee Bliss in particular has outlined, the Warwickshire Diggers had a manifesto that summed up the arguments against enclosure and the stockpiling of grain that was also replicated in the Citizen complaints in that scene (in Shakespeare 2000, 17–27; see also Manning 1988; and Riss 1992).

Nigel Wood

219

Similarly, civic responsibility seems highest in the senatorial ranks; it is from these orders that the recourse to law is enunciated, a cry rather more trustworthy than any from Menenius’s lips, whose loyalty to familial and thus caste ties (and support for Caius Martius is surely part of that) vitiates any altruistic impulses in his dealings with plebeian spokespersons. His peacekeeping is, in essence, conservative; his intervention on his young friend’s behalf must be ‘patched/With cloth of any colour’ (Shakespeare 2000, 3.1.253–4) and his deployment of the Fable of the Belly (1.1.93–151) is in effect just a temporising expedient. The breach between Coriolanus and the Roman citizens is best exemplified in an exchange in the marketplace when, donning the ‘gown of humility’, he is supposed to sue for the citizens’ good opinion: Coriolanus. First Citizen. Coriolanus.

Well then, I pray, your price of th’consulship? The price is to ask it kindly. Kindly, sir, I pray let me ha’it. (2.3.70–2)

Again, the language of common humanity is placed in the mouth of a generic Roman. Coriolanus, on the other hand, understands ‘kindness’ (or appears to) only as a sign of conventional good form, an expression of family or class kinship. What the play forces an audience to appreciate is that the language of indivisible courtesy and fellow-feeling is always apt to be displaced by more immediate and pragmatic forces. Dramatically appealing and certainly more graphically powerful than any discourse of abstract rights and social responsibility, the ‘personality’ of individuation and personal goals is caught up in the web of destiny and tragic (and perhaps aesthetic) coherence. The qualification ‘perhaps’ is merited, for as soon as a full account of dramatic possibilities is placed against any Aristotelian template, generic coherence as a predictor of audience response is questioned. Are we supposed to admire tragic heroes, always excusing a tragic flaw or two? Are they exemplary, in the sense that their isolation from social norms is desirable and should be imitated? The critical line on the play that accepts patrician heroism as virtuous and thus Coriolanus as fatally misunderstood by puny bourgeois/plebeian interests might also ponder the elusiveness of the protagonist’s character throughout the dramatic action. Is he Caius Martius or Coriolanus – or perhaps both? His Folio speech-prefix illuminates a radical difference at 2.1.157, when he first enters as Coriolanus, ‘crowned with an oaken garland’. After drawing his sword on the Citizens the scene before – and thereby rendering himself vulnerable to expulsion from the Roman state – he confronts his mother, whose concern for him involves a

220

Towards a New Literary Humanism

confusion between the actual self and her/his telos, a potential and imagined self: Coriolanus.

... Would you have me False to my nature? Rather say I play The man I am. Volumnia. O, sir, sir, sir, I would have had you put your power well on Before you had worn it out. Coriolanus. Let’t go. Volumnia. You might have been enough the man you are With striving less to be so. (Shakespeare 2000, 3.2.14–20) It is telling that the mother refuses to entertain her son’s self as a natural expression, verbal or spiritual; the additive of power is the sole point aimed at. The result of this ‘self’-sacrifice is a ‘striving’ to be what one may or would not be. This is crystallised at the moment of greatest crisis, in the Volscian camp when visited by his family. He hopes that he might not be such a: gosling to obey instinct, but stand As if a man were author of himself And knew no other kin. (5.3.35–7) That ‘as if’ is crucial. Within three lines, he likens himself to a ‘dull actor’ who, in forgetting his ‘part’, is ‘out/even to a full disgrace’ (5.3.40–2). The irony here is structural as well as verbal: Volumnia had, in 3.2, willed her son to play the part decreed by family expectation and Roman need; she is now willing him to obey his deepest instincts to the same end. When we first meet Caius Martius, this division of loyalty is expressed in terms of a perhaps excessive identification with Aufidius: I sin in envying his nobility, And were I anything but what I am, I would wish me only he. (1.1.225–7) This cuts across family and city loyalties in order to establish a kinship based on martial prowess and the values based thereon. Largely due to Shakespeare’s invention, this camaraderie in arms is rendered one-sided as early as 1.9, where we meet the object of such regard: ‘I would I were a Roman, for I cannot,/Being a Volsce, be that I am’ (1.9.4–5). This heavily compressed effusion of the ‘self’ is actually a projection of deracinated

Nigel Wood

221

aspiration; neither warrior can be both themselves and true to their national identity. For Coriolanus, this is a matter of regret, yet Shakespeare is explicit when exhibiting Aufidius’s pragmatism, where ‘One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;/Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail’ (4.7.54–5). Nothing is constant; in Aufidius’s protoDarwinian universe, one might wish for the clarity of a constant character, yet events always overtake the individual. Any sense of right persists only so long as it has the power to sustain its existence. Consequently, our ‘virtues’ might simply exist relativistically, ‘in th’interpretation of the time’ (4.7.49–50), and Rome appear before the resurgent Volscian force as a ‘fish’ to the thoughtlessly rapacious ‘osprey’ that acts by ‘sovereignty of nature’ (4.7.34–5). Shakespeare pits character against role, a split that was also a preoccupation of contemporary humanist thought.3 There is, however, a more basic search that both the protagonist and play display in that the reassurance provided by the performative act of naming often proves evanescent. Lacanians would claim that this is a basic psychic lack, constitutive of desire, where we strive to equate nature with words. At the point of exile, Coriolanus wants to drive a wedge between his new self and his Roman affiliation, to become ‘a lonely dragon that his fen/Makes feared and talked of more than seen’ (4.1.31–2). As R.B. Parker notes in relation to 4.1.31 (Shakespeare 1987), there is a startling transference here, as one scene earlier, this imagined habitat was plebeian, for, when confronting the citizens, he associates their breath with ‘rotten fens’ (Shakespeare 2000, 3.2.122). His exile will make him a textual trace only for his family: While I remain above the ground you shall Hear from me still, and never of me aught But what is like me formerly. (4.1.52–4) This knotty formulation is over-determined in its semantic range – and even in its contradictions. Parker’s note on 4.1.53–4 is accurately oblique: ‘A line of considerable irony in both its inexactitude and, at a deeper level, its correctness’ (Shakespeare 1987). Bliss is less guarded: ‘anything that does not correspond to what you have known of me’ (Shakespeare 2000, 4.1.52–3n.), whereas Brockbank, at the same time as acknowledging its value ‘in Shakespeare’s analysis of Coriolanus’ fame and reputation’ (Shakespeare 1976, 4.1.51–4n.), regards it as salient evidence of his heroism.4 The syntactical integration (or the attempt at it) also suggests loss: Caius Martius will be Caius Martius still to his family, true, but that will be but a portion of the whole.

222

Towards a New Literary Humanism

This mismatch also contributes to an increasingly precarious verbal grasp on reality the more the action proceeds towards its bloody denouement. Once Coriolanus defects, it inevitably re-establishes him as Martius – as a derogative (in every sense). Menenius as well as Brutus regress in calling him thus at 5.1.40–2 (Shakespeare 2000). This is felt in the dramatic action as soon as he throws off his disguise before Aufidius in 4.5, where a suspicion lingers that he might not be the man he is unless he names himself (4.5.56–8). Indeed, it is Coriolanus who presents himself as Martius. As Coriolanus, ‘only that name remains’ (4.5.74). Cominius recounts his failed attempt at obtaining Martius’s clemency and goes further in describing how Coriolanus is no more, for he ‘forbade all names’, as a ‘kind of nothing, titleless’ until he had razed Rome to the ground (5.1.11–15) and honoured deeds in a new process of naming. By 5.6, the honour has drained from the name, more likely now to be associated with treachery by Aufidius than truth (5.6.85–92). Menenius had offered a last token of praise before Sicinius in remembering him as wanting ‘nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in’ (5.4.23–4), an accurate painting of his ‘character’ (5.4.26), yet the eulogy stops short of granting him a suitable earthly impact. Two scenes later, Aufidius forbids Martius to name a God (Mars) as he is now simply a ‘boy of tears’ (5.6.103), with all the associations of social inferiority and (sexual) passivity evoked by the term. Even Menenius discovers that the resonance of a name is vulnerable to a form of entropy given a change of circumstances, when his approach to Coriolanus/Martius falters, and the ‘virtue’ and ‘spell’ of his name dissolves (5.2.13, 94). The Second Watch is content to find his general a ‘rock, the oak not to be wind-shaken’ (5.2.109), a pious wish as much as a gesture of complete confidence, much like Martius’s own hope, where his son is concerned, that he prove to be ‘a great seamark’ in times of war for ‘those that eye thee’ (5.3.74–5). The mood is conditional and ironic. However, this may be construed as a form of theatrical conceit, part of Shakespeare’s regard for the poor player strutting his stuff for an hour or more and then banished to the wings. Yet in Coriolanus, this interest in character formation is surely more structural and extends to others in a form of metonymic truth. Thus it is that even the Third Citizen is aware of the gap between naming and being. In response to the First Citizen’s distrust of Coriolanus’s motives, his knowledge of the plebeians as simply the ‘many-headed multitude’ is only an observer’s category: We have been called so of many, not that our heads are some brown, some black, some abram, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely coloured; and truly I think if all our wits were to issue out of one skull,

Nigel Wood

223

they would fly east, west, north, south, and their consent of one direct way should be at once to all the points o’th’compass. (2.3.15–22) This is not quite mob psychology at its basest. It is consistent with their reduction to just ‘voices’ or ‘tongues’ as part of this symbolic logic, yet the metonymy can cut both ways. When Sicinius equates the people with their location – ‘What is the city but the people?’ (3.1.200) – the context does not confirm its accuracy or its even-handed analysis, for the Tribunes are at this moment opportunistic in their rabble-rousing and the identification omits in effect other sectors of the polis, and we see it enunciating an uncomfortable truth (for those who align themselves with patrician virtues) about the realpolitik of late Republican Rome. It is, however, a gesture nearer to Jacobean electoral realities than Roman ones.5 The politics of the play can get confused with others that figure the mob, such as the events of Julius Caesar (3.2 to 3.3), where the Plebeians help Mark Antony let slip restless ‘mischief’ (3.2.249) as well as ‘the dogs of war’ (3.1.276), starting with the murder of Cinna the Poet. There are the spineless London citizens in Richard III, who, in 3.7, are taken in by the sophistries about Hastings, leading to the disinheriting of Edward IV and his heirs. Citizenship, however, is not always negligible. As many recent studies of the association between humanism and incipient republicanism have shown, a civic consciousness called forth ideas of significant social progress (see Hadfield 2005, 54–95; Kuzner 2007, 174–99; and Archer 2005). When Portia catches Shylock on the hip in The Merchant of Venice, the Venetian law protects the lives of citizens against aliens (4.1.343–6), and it was precisely the status of ‘citizen’ that was undergoing such scrutiny and change in Elizabethan London and such control thereafter (see Archer 2005, 147–8). Certainly, the ‘City’ appears in the play in an enhanced form: Livy’s narrative of the popular uprising has Menenius enter the Plebeians’ camp not in Rome, but on Mount Sacer, and their protest is rather more at the exorbitant charging of interest than simply at the stockpiling of grain. This remains vestigially in the play (see the First Citizen’s appeal against the patricians’ support for usurers [Shakespeare 2000, 1.1.76–83] and Menenius’s understanding of one of their aims as ‘corn at their own rates’ [1.1.186]). The patricians rely on the assertion that there is enough corn for all. Coriolanus despises the populace’s reliance on proverbial ‘wisdom’ at 1.1.202–5, when less than 50 lines earlier Menenius had self-consciously traded in such truisms in his use of the Fable of the Belly, and even Menenius concedes that the plebeians are indeed hungry at 2.1.9. What of Coriolanus’s sinister relish that the Volsces are in arms, so that war will purify and simplify ‘unity’ by venting Rome’s ‘musty superfluity’ (1.1.223–4)? As the war-leader,

224

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Coriolanus surprisingly makes use of generalities about Roman values in his rhetoric. In retreat, his fellow soldiers seem ‘shames of Rome’ (1.5.2), yet on capturing Corioles, they are, in retrospect, worth ‘four Volsces’ (1.7.79). He even refuses the bounty of a tenth of the spoils of war as he stands ‘upon [his] common part with those/That have upheld the doing’ (1.10.39–40). This is a form of psychic chiascuro, where comrades in war cannot equate with those in peace and where one only recognises the value of a commonwealth when it suits.6 His concluding parade amongst the Volsces sees him enter ‘marching with drum and colours, the Commoners being with him’ (5.6.70), a counterpoint to 2.1, the triumphant return to Rome, ‘with captains and soldiers’ (2.1.157), where it was his family that greeted him; here it is his killers. If there is any precision in including ‘Citizens’ in the play (as opposed to Plebeians, Rebels or ‘the People’), then it would be to summon notions of achieved rights within the protection of the law, the status attained (and preciously guarded) by Romans as opposed to Bondsmen or, indeed, slaves. Where the tragic action moves to efface human impact and will, its (Brechtian) realism rescues those means by which the individual might need society and its laws, for it is precisely the people and their representatives (however flawed) that have most regard for social progress and custom. It is Sicinus who insists ‘on the old prerogative/And power i’th’truth o’ th’ cause’ (3.3.17–18) and that Coriolanus had ‘resisted law’ (3.1.269). Even he recognises that his route to the Consulship must be by ‘custom’ (2.3.113) – and yet he too is an example of the anti-social forces that lead to strife and a law based on prerogative (and thus ownership), not rights (see Kuzner 2007). It is in 3.1 that this comes to a crisis, for Coriolanus approaches the marketplace determined to stand firm against any hope that the ‘rank-scented meinie’ might ‘mingle’ with ‘the honoured number’ of society (3.1.69, 75). Brutus realises that this ‘unkind’ sentiment would introduce authority as ‘a god to/Punish’ where he would aspire not to be ‘a man of their [the people’s] infirmity’ (3.1.84–85), and Coriolanus knows full well that: when two authorities are up, Neither supreme, how soon confusion May enter ’twixt the gap of both and take The one by th’other. (3.1.111–14) What he regards as inevitable, the play surely invites us to ponder as Coriolanus’s asocial pathology.

Nigel Wood

225

This linguistic and dramatic irony can be analysed in a number of psychoanalytic and deconstructive ways. Coriolanus’s desire for martial valour and virtue could be a never-satisfied (because unrealistic) need for approval from the absent father projected onto the mother. It is, after all, his wife who notes ‘the father’s son’ not perhaps without some reservation, identifying an aggression transmitted down the patriarchal line and manifest in her own son’s dismembering of a ‘gilded butterfly’ for sport (1.3.60–8). The quest for self-identity – and the stability of all naming – falters before the Real and the aporia of how the deed might provide the substance of all definitions – without satisfaction or closure, because the deed cannot ever be definitive and its impact cannot ever lead to resolution (or the cessation of history). What Brecht and his ensemble companions unearth are possibilities about citizenship and responsible civic virtue that are usually effaced by the interpretative focus on heroic individualism, the undue equation of the Political as separate from the Aesthetic or the desire to track the contours of language, freed of any intended ‘content’. Take the intervention of the adaptation that was finally completed for its 1964 premiere, where Volumnia and the women are thwarted in their plea for due mourning for the dead hero: does the play afford ‘due mourning’ for Coriolanus? The ‘noble memory’ Aufidius wishes to preserve for Martius (5.6.154) is possibly more in answer to the Second Lord’s conclusion that the Volscians should ‘make the best of it’ (5.6.147) and there is the lingering possibility that the guard that transports the hero’s body off the stage might very well be composed of those who had murdered him just 20 lines or so previously. Plutarch’s account gives us several details of his tomb, decked out with ‘great store of armour and spoyles’, and includes the fact that Volumnia and Valeria were allowed to mourn for him for the full ten months (Bullough 1964, 544). On the other hand, the last we see (not hear) of them in the play is the mute parade in 5.5, where, in an ironic allusion to her son’s triumphal return to Rome in 2.1, it is now Volumnia who is lauded as ‘the life of Rome’ (Shakespeare 2000, 5.5.1). There is no space allowed for a Roman response to his death, much less any definitive sense that Volumnia had stage-managed the plea to her son for anything other than Roman political gain. Despite the plentiful airtime given to the patrician distrust of the mob, the full weight of their disdain, as long as Coriolanus’s rants are lifted out of the equation, is reserved for the Tribunes, not the people directly. It is one thing to claim that the play excites political responses (a relatively straightforward reaction to the dramatic action), quite another to define just what that might mean then and now, and this is the route that both Said and Brecht invite us to take. As Markku

226

Towards a New Literary Humanism

Peltonen (2002) has exhaustively demonstrated, the Jacobean populace accepted political participation as a hallmark of civilised behaviour (a stake that James himself seemed increasingly willing to curtail), and Kathy Shrank’s enterprising account of early modern civic responsibility derives this from humanist models of thought: ‘The political participation of the Roman citizens of Coriolanus is … dependent on their ability to make themselves heard and understood. Their verbal proficiency in this area is further highlighted by comparison with the marked inarticulacy of Aufidius’ servants’ (Shrank 2003, 416). The obvious political agenda of the Tribunes should not distract us from the fact that, unlike in either Livy or Plutarch, their status in government is created as a result of the opening revolt; the voice of the people proves effective. Indeed, this was the hope of many early modern commentators, especially those who felt that a closer definition of monarchical responsibility was necessary to maintain political stability. An interest in the ‘human’ as a critical distinction and as an attempt to renew interest in the possibilities of individual and collaborative human agency does not mean a return to the bedrock of ‘essential’ humanity. Nonetheless, for both Brecht and Said, the ‘human’ is a yardstick of ‘worldly’ relevance. This is almost proverbially recognised in Brecht’s ideas, less so in Said’s, yet his own intellectual practice is consistent with this. He is clear that his understanding of the ‘human’ does not entail ‘withdrawal and exclusion’, but rather leads to a practice where ‘more things [might be] available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present’ (Said 2004, 22). To this extent, we might indeed be Marxist or psychoanalytic, say, but always tactically, whilst reserving the right to change tack according to local or particular, textual circumstances. It is not to overstate to claim that Coriolanus has become a significant text for those who trace the ‘human’ in a less dialectical way. To accomplish this is to place the character of the protagonist in the spotlight at the expense of many other matters that the play forces us, both implicitly and explicitly, to contemplate. It is to be Aristotelian about an experience that does not tally. For Brecht, this was down to Shakespeare’s ‘realism’, where contradiction was inevitable (Lodge and Wood 2008, 180); according to Said, it was to achieve ‘perspective’, where one’s ‘work as humanists’ involved ‘transitions from one realm, one area of human experience to another’ (Said 2004, 80). The teaching and study of the most rewarding texts are not academic rituals. For example, negotiating with a text like Coriolanus is not quite what is normally known as providing a ‘reading’ of it, that is, by obeying

Nigel Wood

227

a favoured template, unearthing its hidden truths or textual patterns accordingly. As W.J.T. Mitchell has noted about Said’s agenda for a new humanist involvement in the public sphere, it means taking dialectical knowledge seriously, where it generates ‘oppositions it [can] neither absorb nor avoid’ (Mitchell 2005, 462) or, one might add, render neatly. It might mean returning to Erich Auerbach, Lionel Trilling or Leo Spitzer, and tussling with Foucault, Irigaray or Derrida with an eye on the ultimate question of what difference do their theories eventually make? Crucially, it means casting a cold eye on any canon and engaging with the question of locating human agency both as our critical responsibility, our engagement, and also on the part of the author(s)-in-the-text as well. Back in 1967, E.D. Hirsch Jr set out to show that meaning ‘is an affair of consciousness and not of physical signs or things’ and that it was an impossibility that ‘linguistic signs can somehow speak their own meanings’ (Hirsch 1967, 23). These traces have to be conjured from voice, print or pixel – and this act is purposive, arising out of commitment.

Notes 1. See Adelman 1980 and Bristol 1987. 2. It is worth recording Philip Brockbank’s concession to Patrician sensibilities in his note to the Arden edition: ‘if the thought refers to what follows it could mean, “they set too high a value on us”’ (Shakespeare 1976, 96). The immediate dramatic context would surely disallow this as a possible meaning. 3. Most significantly for Shakespeare and his contemporaries is Cicero, principally his De Officiis. Robin Headlam Wells discusses this topos in relation to a humanist protection of the self (Wells 2005, 16–19, 82–3). See also Hadfield 2005, 168–83. Wells’s main line, that a persistent strand of humanism is a belief in an essentially unchanging ‘human nature’ as attested by ‘neo-Darwinian’ premises, seems a contradiction in terms. 4. Expanded in Shakespeare 1976: ‘Coriolanus’ inhumanity is felt in the play as a consummation of his virtue’ (50). 5. Parker is astute in decoding Sicinius’s politics at 3.3.12–22 (see his note to lines 9 to 11), and the whole procedure in the election of a consul is one that was a source of some dissent between James I and his Parliaments: ‘Inflation enabled more people to reach the income of forty pounds a year that determined eligibility to vote; local voters began to demand more say in whom they chose and more influence over their representative’s choice of policy’ (Shakespeare 1987, 42). See also Shrank 2003, 406-23; and Bonahue Jr 1998, 61–85. 6. The references to common action and intentions run through the play too often to be merely narrative items. From the Citizens’ claim that Martius is ‘a very dog to the commonalty’ (Shakespeare 2000, 1.1.26), to Menenius’s trope that ‘the belly digests things rightly/Touching the weal o’th’common’ (1.1.148), to Martius’s denigration of the soldiers shying away from Corioles’ gates as of ‘the common file’ (1.7.43), to his pose as one who had stood with ‘the common part’ (1.10.39), to the Tribunes’ resort to the common as a political factor (2.1.223, 3.1.31).

References Adelman, Janet (1980) ‘“Anger’s my Meat”: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus’, in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (eds), Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 75–91. Adorno, Theodor (1974) [1951] Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, E.F.N. Jephcott (trans.) (London: Verso). ——— (1980) [1977] ‘Reconciliation under Duress’, in Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso), pp. 151–76. ——— (1991) ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, in Notes to Literature, Volume I, Shierry Weber Nicholsen (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 37–54. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer (1979) [1944] Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming (trans.) (London: Verso). Agamben, Giorgio (1999) [1994] The Man without Content, Giorgia Albert (trans.) (Stanford University Press). Althusser, Louis (1997) [1965] For Marx, Ben Brewster (trans.) (London: Verso). Altieri, Charles (2007) ‘The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory’, New Literary History, 38:1, 71–98. Archer, John Michael (2005) Citizen Shakespeare: Free Men, City Wives, and Aliens in the Language of His Plays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Aristotle (1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes (ed.), 2 vols. (Princeton University Press). ——— (2005) [1944] Politics, H. Rackham (trans.), Loeb edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Armstrong, Nancy (2006) ‘What Feminism Did to Novel Studies’, in Ellen Rooney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory (Cambridge University Press), pp. 99–118. Arnold, Matthew (2006) [1869] Culture and Anarchy (Oxford University Press). Badiou, Alain (2005) [1998] Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alberto Toscano (trans.) (Stanford University Press). Badiou, Alain, ‘Is the Word “Communism” Forever Doomed?’, http://www.lacan. com/essays/?page_id=323, accessed 12 January 2010. Baldick, Chris (1996) Criticism and Literary Theory: 1890 to the Present (London: Longman). Beckham, Victoria (2001) Learning to Fly: The Autobiography (London: Penguin). Beer, Gillian (1996a) The Common Ground (Edinburgh University Press). ——— (1996b) ‘“Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things”: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century’, in Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (eds), Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions (New York: Routledge), pp. 83–98. Bell, Michael (1988) F. R. Leavis (Abingdon: Routledge). Benjamin, Walter (1999) Illuminations, Harry Zorn (trans.) (London: Pimlico). 228

References 229 Berdyaev, Nikolai (1965) [1901–53] Christian Existentialism: A Berdyaev Anthology, Donald A. Lowrie (trans.) (London: Allen & Unwin). Bevir, Mark (1991) ‘H. M. Hyndman: A Rereading and a Reassessment’, History of Political Thought, 12:1, 125–46. Bible (1611) King James Authorised Version. Blatchford, Robert (1891) Clarion, Inaugural Editorial, 12 December, 1. ——— (1906–7) ‘The Sorcery Shop, An Impossible Romance’, Clarion, 9 November 1906–22 March 1907. Bonahue, Edward T. Jr (1998) ‘Citizen History: Stow’s Survey of London’, Studies in English Literature, 38, 61–85. Book of Common Prayer (1662). Bramsbury, H.J. (1888–9) ‘A Working Class Tragedy’, Justice, 9 June 1888–13 April 1889. Brecht (1998) Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches, rev. edn, John Willett (trans. and ed.) (Methuen: London). Bristol, Michael D. (1987) ‘Lenten Butchery: Legitimization Crisis in Coriolanus’, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London: Methuen), pp. 207–24. Brontë, Anne (1979) The Poems of Anne Brontë: A New Text and Commentary, Edward Chitham (ed.) (London: Macmillan). Brown, Wendy (2006) Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton University Press). Budiansky, Stephen (1997) The Nature of Horses: Their Evolution, Intelligence and Behaviour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Bullough, Geoffrey (1964) Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols., Volume V (New York: Columbia University Press). Butler, Christopher (2004) Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting and Music (Oxford University Press). Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge). ——— (1993) Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge). ——— (1997a) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press). ——— (1997b) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge). ——— (1999) [1987] Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press). ——— (2000a) ‘Ethical Ambivalence’, in Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds), The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge), pp. 5–28. ——— (2000b) Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press). ——— (2003) ‘Values of Difficulty’, in Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (eds), Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford University Press), pp. 199–215. ——— (2004a) Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso). ——— (2004b) Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge). ——— (2005) Giving on Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press). ——— (2006a) ‘Afterword’, in Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St Ville (eds), Bodily Citations. Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 276–91.

230

References

——— (2006b) ‘Afterword’, PMLA, 121:5, 1658–61. ——— (2007) ‘Wittig’s Material Practice: Universalizing a Minority Point of View’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13:4, 519–33. Butler, Judith and Gayatri S. Spivak (2007) Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull Books). Caldwell, Janis McLarren (2004) Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press). Camus, Albert (2005) [1942] The Myth of Sisyphus, Justin O’Brien (trans.) (London: Penguin). Carey, John (2005) What Good are the Arts? (London: Faber & Faber). Castiglione, Baldassare (1967) [1528] The Book of the Courtier, George Bull (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Chambers, Iain (2001) Culture after Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity (London: Routledge). Christ, Carol (1976) ‘Aggression and Providential Death in George Eliot’s Fiction’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 9:2, 130–40. Clark, David (1997) ‘On Being “The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas’, in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (eds), Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (New York: Routledge). Clarke, Bruce (2008) Posthuman Metamorphoses: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press). Common, Jack (1990) [1951] Kiddar’s Luck (Newcastle: Bloodaxe). Comparative Criticism (2001) ‘Humanist Traditions in the Twentieth Century’, Special Issue, 23. Culler, Jonathan (1985) ‘Reading Lyric’, in The Lesson of Paul de Man, Yale French Studies 69 (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 98–106. ——— (2008a) ‘Why Lyric?’, PMLA, 123:1, 201–6. ——— (2008b) ‘Lyric’. Plenary paper presented to ‘The Relevance of Theory/La Résonance de la Théorie’, University of Paris X, Nanterre, 12–14 June. Cunningham, Valentine (2002) Reading after Theory (Oxford: Blackwell). Currie, Mark (2003) ‘Universals: U is for Universals’, in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 297–307. Damasio, Antonio (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (London: Vintage). Dautbegovic´, Jozefina (2003) Sarajevske sveske, 4, 271. Davies, Tony (1997) Humanism (London: Routledge). Dawkins, Richard (2006) The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary edn (Oxford University Press). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1983) [1972] Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). ——— (1987) [1980] A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, B. Massumi (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Deresiewicz, William (1998) ‘Heroism and Organicism in the Case of Lydgate’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 38:4, 723–40. Diogenes (2005) ‘Emerging Humanisms’, Special Issue, 52. Docherty, Thomas (2003) ‘Aesthetic Education and the Demise of Experience’, in John Joughin (ed.), The New Aestheticism (Manchester University Press), pp. 23–35.

References 231 Dolin, Tim (2005) ‘Eliot and Religion’, in George Eliot (Oxford University Press). Dollimore, Jonathan (1984) Radical Tragedy (Brighton: Harvester Press). Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1970) [1871–2] The Possessed, Constance Garnett (trans.) (London: Heinemann). Eagleton, Terry (1984) The Function of Criticism (London: Verso). ——— (1986) Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). ——— (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell). ——— (2003) After Theory (London: Allen Lane). Earnshaw, Steven (2010) Beginning Realism (Manchester University Press). Eliot, George (1965) Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (London: Penguin). ——— (2003) The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin). Erasmus, Desiderius (1971) [1509, 1515] Praise of Folly and Letter to Martin Dorp, Betty Radice (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Evans, Dylan (2001) Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). Evans, Nicholas (1995) The Horse Whisperer (London: Bantam Press). Felman, Shoshana (2002) The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Felski, Rita (2008) Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell). Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (eds) (2005) The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edn (London: Norton). Fiedler, Leslie A. (1974) [1972] The Stranger in Shakespeare (St Albans: Paladin). Finkielkraut, Alain (2001) [1996] In the Name of Humanity (London: Pimlico). Forrester, John (1990) ‘Lydgate’s Research Project in Middlemarch’, The George Eliot-Henry Lewes Newsletter, 16/17, 4–5. Foucault, Michel (1970) [1966] The Order of Things (London: Tavistock). Freud, Sigmund (1955) [1920] Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (London: The Hogarth Press). ——— (1964) [1938] ‘The Theory of the Instincts’, in An Outline of PsychoAnalysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (London: The Hogarth Press). Gallagher, Tess (1992) [1982] ‘The Lover of Horses’, in The Lover of Horses and Other Stories (St Paul, MN: Graywolf Press). Gardner, Helen (1973) ‘The Argument about “The Ecstasy”’, in Julian Lovelock (ed.), Donne: Songs and Sonets (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Geddes, Jennifer (2007) ‘Attending to Suffering in/at the Wake of Postmodernism’, in N. Brooks and J. Toth (eds), The Mourning After. Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi), pp. 65–78. Goode, John (1971) Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen). Gordon, Craig A. (2007) Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early Twentieth Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Gosse, Edmund (2009) [1907] Father and Son, Michael Newton (ed.) (Oxford University Press). Gosse, Philip Henry (1860) A History of the British Sea Anemones and Corals. With Coloured Figures of the Species and Principal Varieties (London: Van Voorst). Graff, Gerald (1987) Professing Literature (University of Chicago Press). Graham, Elaine (2002) Representations of the Post/human; Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester University Press).

232

References

Graver, Susan (1984) George Eliot and Community (Berkeley: University of California Press). Greenberg, Robert A. (1975) ‘Plexuses and Ganglia: Scientific Allusion in Middlemarch’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 30:1, 33–52. Greenblatt, Stephen (1988) Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press). Guillory, John (1995) ‘Canon’, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edn (University of Chicago Press), pp. 233–49. Habermas, Jürgen (2003) The Future of Human Nature, Hella Beister and Wilhelm Rehg (trans.) (London: Polity). Hadfield, Andrew (2005) Shakespeare’s Republicanism (Cambridge University Press). Hale, Dorothy J. (2009) ‘Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century’, PMLA, 124:3, 896–905. Halliwell, Martin and Andy Mousley (2003) Critical Humanisms: Humanist/AntiHumanist Dialogues (Edinburgh University Press). Hand, Sean (ed.) (1989) The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell). Hanssen, Beatrice (2000) Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge). Harpham, Geoffrey Galt (2002) ‘The Hunger of Martha Nussbaum’, Representations, 77, 52–81. ——— (2005) ‘Beneath and Beyond the “Crisis in the Humanities”’, New Literary History, 36, 21–36. ——— (2006) The Character of Criticism (New York: Routledge). Hawthorn, Jeremy (1996) Cunning Passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the Contemporary Literary Debate (London: Arnold). Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press). ——— (2005) My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (University of Chicago Press). Heidegger, Martin (1962) [1926] Being and Time, John McQuarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell). ——— (1975) ‘Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50)’, in Early Greek Thinking, David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row). Hirsch, E.D. Jr (1967) Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press). Hooker, Edward (1989) [1593, 1597] Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Arthur Stephen McGrade (ed.) (Cambridge University Press). Houellebecq, Michel (2000) Atomised, Frank Wynne (trans.) (London: Vintage). Howard, Jean E. and Scott Cutler Shershow (eds) (2001) Marxist Shakespeares (London: Routledge). Husanovic´, Jasmina (2009) ‘The Politics of Gender, Witnessing, Postcoloniality and Trauma’, Feminist Theory, 10:1, 99–119. Hyndman, Henry Mayers (1886) ‘Starving Men Refuse to Wait’, Justice, 18 February, 1. ——— (1911) The Record of an Adventurous Life (London: Macmillan). Hyslop, Theo B. (1895) Mental Physiology, Especially in its Relations to Mental Disorders (London: J and A Churchill).

References 233 Irigaray, Luce (1996) I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, Alison Martin (trans.) (London: Routledge). Jameson, Fredric (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia (London: Verso). Janicaid, Dominique (2005) [2002] On the Human Condition, Eileen Brennan (trans.) (London: Routledge). Jaspers, Karl (1971) [1956] Philosophy of Existence, Richard F. Grabau (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell). Joyce, Patrick (1982) Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (London: Methuen). ——— (1991) Visions of the People (Cambridge University Press). Kain, Philip J. (1986) Marx’ Method, Epistemology and Humanism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel). Kant, Immanuel (1991) ‘The Contest of Faculties’, in H.S. Reiss (ed.), Political Writings (Cambridge University Press), pp. 176–90. Kaufman, Robert (2008) ‘Lyric Commodity Critique: Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire Baudelaire Baudelaire’, PMLA, 123:1, 207–15. Kenworthy, J. C. (1888) ‘Liverpool Dock Labourers’, Justice, 9 June, 2. Kermode, Frank (1971) ‘Musil’, in Modern Essays (London: Fontana), pp. 182–204. Kierkegaard, Søren (1996) Papers and Journals: A Selection, Alastair Hannay (trans.) (London: Penguin). Knoepflmacher, U.C. (1965) Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton University Press). Kuzner, James (2007) ‘The Unbuilding of the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 58:2, 174–99. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1999) Poetry as Experience, Andrea Tarnowski (trans.) (Stanford University Press). Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press). Latour, Bruno (1993) [1991] We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Lee, Hermione (1977) The Novels of Virginia Woolf (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers). Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell). Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) [1961] Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority, A. Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press). ——— (1985) [1982] Ethics and Infinity, Richard A. Cohen (trans.) (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press). Interviews originally broadcast 1981. ——— (1988) [1947] Existence and Existens, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers). ——— (1989) [1974] Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, in Sean Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell). Levine, George (ed.) (2001) The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge University Press). Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott (1996) Greek-English Lexicon, Sir Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie (ed.), 9th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Lodge, David and Nigel Wood (eds) (2008) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Longman).

234

References

Loizidou, Elena (2007) Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics (Oxford: RoutledgeCavendish). Lofthouse, Richard A. (2005) Vitalism in Modern Art, c. 1900–1950: Otto Dix, Stanley Spencer, Max Beckmann, and Jacob Epstein. Studies in Art History, Volume X (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellon Press). Luft, David S. (1990) ‘Introduction’, in Robert Musil, Precision and Soul, Burton Pike and David S. Luft (eds and trans.) (University of Chicago Press), pp. xv–xxviii. Lukács, Georg (1963) [1957] The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, John Mander and Necke Mander (trans.) (London: Merlin Press). Lupton, Julia Reinhard (2005) Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (University of Chicago Press). Lyotard, Jean-François (1992) The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985, Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (eds) (London: Turnaround). MacQuarrie, John (1966) Studies in Christian Existentialism (London: SCM Press). ——— (1973) Existentialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Manning, Roger (1998) Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Marx, Karl (1979) ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Karl Marx: Early Texts, David McLellan (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). May, Todd (1997) Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze (Pennsylvania State University Press). McCance, Dawne (2007) ‘Derrida and the Ethics of Mourning After’, in Neil Brooks and Josh Toth (eds), The Mourning After. Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi), pp. 249–61. McCarthy, Cormac (1994) [1992] All the Pretty Horses (London: Pan Books). Midgley, Mary (2006) [2001] Science and Poetry (London: Routledge). Miller, Jacques-Alain (2009) ‘We Love the One Who Responds to Our Question: “Who am I”?’, http://www.lacan/com/symptom/?page id, accessed 24 October 2009. Miller, J. Hillis (1963) The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (London: Oxford University Press). ——— (2006) ‘A Conclusion in which Almost Nothing is Concluded: Middlemarch’s “Finale”’, in Karen Chase (ed.), Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press), pp. 133–56. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko (1987) Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester Press). Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005) ‘Secular Divination: Edward Said’s Humanism’, Critical Enquiry, 31, 462–71. Morris, Wesley (2000) ‘Of Wisdom and Competence’, in Michael P. Clark (ed.), The Revenge of the Aesthetic (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 136–56. Mousley, Andy (2000a) Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Literary Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan). ——— (2000b) ‘Renaissance Literary Studies after Theory: Aesthetics,History and the Human’, Literature Compass, 1, http://www.literaturecompass.com. ——— (2005) ‘English after Anti-Humanism’, in Philip Martin (ed.), The Condition of the Subject (London: Palgrave), pp. 101–7. ——— (2007) Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity (Edinburgh University Press).

References 235 ——— (2010) ‘The New Literary Humanism: Towards a Critical Vocabulary’, Textual Practice, 24:5, 819–39. Murphet, Julian (2007) ‘On Refusal’, in Caroline Hamilton, Michelle Kelly, Elaine Minor and Will Noonon (eds), The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press). Musil, Robert (1955) [1906] Young Törless, Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (trans.) (London: Secker & Warburg). ——— (1990) [1912] ‘The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics’, in Precision and Soul, Burton Pike and David S. Luft (eds and trans.) (University of Chicago Press), pp. 21–5. ——— (1997) [1930–42] The Man without Qualities, Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (trans.) (London: Picador). Mutch, Deborah (2005) ‘The Merrie England Triptych: Robert Blatchford, Edward Fay and the Didactic Use of Clarion Fiction’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 38:1, 83–103. ——— (2009) ‘Re-Righting the Past: Socialist Historical Narrative and the Road to the New Life’, Literature and History, 18:1, 16–34. Nagel, Thomas (1986) The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press). Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008) [2005] Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Bettina Borgo, Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B. Smith (trans.) (New York: Fordham University Press). Naremore, James (1973) The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press). Nealon, Jeffrey T. (1998) Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press). Nietzsche, Friedrich (2003) Beyond Good and Evil (London: Penguin). Noble, Joan Russell (ed.) (1972) Recollections of Virginia Woolf (London: Peter Owen). Norman, Richard (2004) Humanism (London: Routledge). Northrop, Douglas A. (2003) ‘Shakespeare’s Comic Refusers II’, in Michelle M. Sauer (ed.), Proceedings of the 11th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature (Minot State University). ——— (2005) ‘Comic Refusers IV’, a paper delivered at the 13th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature (unpublished). Nunquam (Robert Blatchford) (1893) ‘Merrie England. A Series of Letters on the Labour Problem. Addressed to John Smith of Oldham, a Hard Headed Workman, Fond of Facts’, Clarion, 4 March–23 September. Nussbaum, Martha (1990) Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press). ——— (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (Cambridge University Press). Oser, Lee (2007) The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett (Cambridge University Press). Oxford English Dictionary (1992) 2nd edn (Oxford University Press). Paris, Bernard J. (1959) ‘George Eliot’s Unpublished Poetry’, Studies in Philology, 56, 539–58. Parlett, Mathilde (1930) ‘George Eliot and Humanism’, Studies in Philology, 27:1, 25–46.

236

References

Peltonen, Markku (2002) ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England’, in Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols., Volume I (Cambridge University Press), pp. 85–106. Perry, Matt (2002) Marxism and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Plato (2001) [1925] Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, W.R.M. Lamb (trans.), Loeb edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ——— (2006) [1935] Republic, Paul Shorey (trans.), 2 vols., Loeb edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Pope, Alexander (1989) [1733] ‘An Essay on Man’, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, John Butt (ed.) (London: Routledge). Porter, Roy (1999) The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Fontana Press). Purvis, Tony (2006) ‘Sexualities’, in Patricia Waugh (ed.), Literary Theory and Criticism (Oxford University Press), pp. 427–50. Putnam, Hilary (2005) ‘Literature, Science, and Reflection’, in James O. Young (ed.), Aesthetics: Critical Concepts in Philosophy: Volume III, Issues and Challenges (London: Routledge). Rancière, Jacques (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Julie Rose (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). ——— (2000) ‘Dissenting Words – A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, Diacritics, 30:2, 113–26. Ratcliffe, Sophie (2008) On Sympathy (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Redford, Robert (Dir.) (1998) The Horse Whisperer. Rich, Adrienne (2006) ‘Legislators of the World’, The Guardian, 18 November. Rilke, Rainer Maria (1978) Vergers Suivi d’autres Poèmes Français (Paris: Gallimard). ——— (2002) The Complete French Poems, A. Poulin Jr (trans.) (St Paul, MN: Greywolf Press). Riss, Arthur (1992) ‘The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language’, English Literary History, 59, 53–75. Robson, Mark (2006a) The Sense of Early Modern Writing: Rhetoric, Poetics, Aesthetics (Manchester University Press). ——— (2006b) ‘Impractical Criticism’, in Philip Martin (ed.), English: The Condition of the Subject (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 168–79. ——— (2009) ‘“A Literary Animal”: Rancière, Derrida, and the Literature of Democracy’, Parallax, 52, 88–101. Rosset, Clément (1993) Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real, David F. Bell (trans.) (Oxford University Press). Ruskin, John (1985) [1860] Unto This Last and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Rutsky, R. L. (1999) High Techne¯: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Ryle, Martin (2004) ‘Surplus Consciousness: Houellebecq’s Novels of Ideas’, Radical Philosophy, 126, 23–32. Said, Edward (1993) Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage). ——— (2004) Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Palgrave). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1980) [1945] Existentialism and Humanism, Philip Mairet (trans.) (London: Methuen).

References 237 ——— (1995) Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge). Šehabovic´, Šejla (2008) ‘Srebrenica, Potoc´ari, 9.5.2004’, BH Dani, 29 August 2008, p. 14. Seidman, Barry. F. and Neil J. Murphy (eds) (2004) Toward a New Political Humanism (New York: Prometheus Books). Semmel, Bernard (1994) George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (New York: Oxford University Press). Shakespeare, William (1976) Coriolanus, Philip Brockbank (ed.) (Methuen: London). ——— (1987) Coriolanus, R.B. Parker (ed.) (Oxford University Press). ——— (2000) Coriolanus, Lee J. Bliss (ed.) (Cambridge University Press). ——— (2005) The Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd edn, Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon). Shapcott, Jo (2001) Tender Taxes (London: Faber & Faber). Showalter, Elaine (2003) Teaching Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell). Shrank, Kathy (2003) ‘Civility and the City in Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 54, 406–23. Shuttleworth, Sally and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds) (1998) Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (Oxford University Press). Smith, John, and Chris Jenks (2006) Qualitative Complexity: Ecology, Cognitive Processes and the Re-emergence of Structures in Post-humanist Social Theory (London: Routledge). Solomon, Robert C. (1972) From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds (London: Harper & Row). Stanton, Domna (2006) ‘Foreword: ANDs, INs, and BUTs’, PMLA, 121:5, 1518–25. Steiner, George (1995) ‘The Unfinished’, The New Yorker, 17 April 1995, pp. 101–6. Stupar-Trifunovic´, Tanja (2008) O c´emu misle varvari dok doruc´kuju (SarajevoZagreb: Zoro). Styler, Rebecca (2010) Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate). Tambling, Jeremy (1990) ‘Middlemarch, Realism and the Birth of the Clinic’ English Literary History, 57:4, 939–60. Thiem, Annika (2008) Unbecoming Subjects. Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press). Thompson, Laurence (1951) Robert Blatchford: Portrait of an Englishman (London: Victor Gollancz). Todorov, Tzvetan (1987) Literature and its Theorists: A Personal View of TwentiethCentury Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). ——— (1993) On Human Diversity, Catherine Porter (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ——— (2002) Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (Princeton University Press). Tsuzuki, Chushichi (1961) H. M. Hyndman and British Socialism (Oxford University Press). Vešovic´, Marko (2004) Poljska konjica (Sarajevo-Zagreb: Zoro). Wallace, Jeff (1990) ‘“Taking Possession of the Ordinary Man’s Mind”: Literary Studies and History of Science’, Literature and History, Second Series, 1:1, 58–74.

238

References

Watson, Robert N. (1988) ‘Teaching “Shakespeare”: Theory versus Practice’, in James Engell and David Perkins (eds), Teaching Literature: What is Needed Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 121–50. Weisman, Alan (2007) The World Without Us (New York: Thomas Dunne Books). Wells, Robin Headlam (2005) Shakespeare’s Humanism (Cambridge University Press). Williams, Raymond (1966) Modern Tragedy (London: Chatto & Windus). ——— (1973) The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin). ——— (1977) Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press). ——— (2005) Culture and Materialism, 2nd edn (London: Verso). Wolfe, Cary (2010) What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Woolf, Virginia (1977) The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III 1923–1928, Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds) (London: The Hogarth Press). ——— (1984) The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume V 1936–1941, Anne Olivier Bell (ed.) (London: The Hogarth Press). ——— (1986) Complete Shorter Fiction, Susan Dick (ed.) (London: The Hogarth Press). ——— (1988) The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume III 1919–1924, Andrew McNeillie (ed.) (London: The Hogarth Press). ——— (1994) The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume IV 1925–1928, Andrew McNeillie (ed.) (London: The Hogarth Press). ——— (2000) [1925] Mrs Dalloway, David Bradshaw (ed.) (Oxford University Press). ——— (2002) Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, Jeanne Schulkind (ed.) (London: Pimlico). ——— (2008a) [1922] Jacob’s Room, Kate Flint (ed.) (Oxford University Press). ——— (2008b) [1925] Mrs Dalloway, David Bradshaw (ed.) (Oxford University Press). ——— (2008c) [1931] The Waves, Gillian Beer (ed.) (Oxford University Press). ——— (2009) The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume V 1929–1932, Stuart N. Clarke (ed.) (London: The Hogarth Press). Wu, Duncan (ed.) (2006) Romanticism: An Anthology, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell). Yeo, Stephen (1977) ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896’, History Workshop, 4, 5–56. Žižek, Slavoj (1991) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). ——— (2006) The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Zola, Émile (1963) ‘Naturalism in the Theatre’, in George J. Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton University Press).

Index abstraction 56–8, 148–9, 164, 214, 217 Adorno, Theodor 12, 88, 100, 111n, 194 aesthetics 5, 12, 47, 87, 110, 119, 122, 134–6, 143–5, 150, 153–7, 187–9, 205, 214–15, 219, 225 Agamben, Giorgio The Man Without Content 96, 143, 153–8 agency 2, 6, 59, 74, 94, 107, 131, 164, 201, 206–11, 212–17, 226–7 aisthesis 186–9 alienation 9, 12, 24, 30, 36, 52, 98, 102–4, 153–7, 164 alterity 26, 63, 68 Althusser, Louis 79, 199–201, 207 animals 15, 25, 46, 59–60, 64–76, 163, 182–5, 190 animism 8, 64, 75 anthropocentrism 26, 131, 156 anti-essentialism 15, 164, 204 anti-humanism 1, 2, 12, 26, 77–8, 94, 96, 98–102, 107–8, 138–40, 199–200, 206, 207, 211, 215, 217 Aristotle 47, 163, 183–4, 213 Arnold, Matthew 204, 207 Atkins, Peter 131 atomism 95, 129–39 attachment 12–13, 205 authenticity 3, 9, 31, 36–42, 68, 109–10, 132, 154 autonomy 40, 45–6, 55, 58, 79–82, 113–14, 140, 209 autopoiesis 144, 150 Avdic´, Damir 179 Baldick, Chris Criticism and Literary Theory Beckham, Victoria 2 Beer, Gillian 56 Bell, Michael 204

4

Benjamin, Walter 166, 168–70, 177, 187 Berdyaev, Nicolai 31, 36 Bevir, Mark 208 Bible 3, 4, 204 Bichat, Xavier 118, 121–2, 126n biology 12, 63, 95, 129, 132, 136–8, 146 Blatchford, Robert 201 ‘The Sorcery Shop’ 203, 208–11 Bramsbury, H.J. ‘A Working Class Tragedy’ 197–8, 202–3, 209 Brecht, Bertolt 13, 164, 204, 215–17, 224–6 Brockbank, Philip 221 Brontë, Anne 23–4, 28–43 ‘Despondency’ 33–4 ‘Fluctuations’ 35–6 ‘In Memory of a Happy Day in February’ 32 ‘The Narrow Way’ 38 ‘Self-Communion’ 41–2 ‘The Three Guides’ 39–40 ‘Vanitas Vanitatis’ 38 ‘Views of Life’ 40–2 Butler, Judith 18, 26, 77–89 Antigone’s Claim 85–7 Bodies that Matter 80, 81, 85 Excitable Speech 81–2, 86 Gender Trouble 78–9 Giving an Account of Oneself 87–8 Precarious Life 82–3 Psychic Life of Power 79 Subjects of Desire 79 Undoing Gender 82 Caldwell, Janis McLarren 117 Calvinism 31 Camus, Albert 35, 111–12n capitalism 7, 13, 109, 137, 163–4, 169, 197–210 catachresis 27, 85–8 239

240

Index

censorship 174, 177–8 Chambers, Ian 6 Christian faith 10, 24, 30–42, 123, 207 civic humanism, see humanism, civic commitment, see humanism and commitment communism 99–100, 209 complexity, see literature and complexity consciousness 15, 34, 36, 131–3, 157, 182, 189, 193, 214, 223, 227 Culler, Jonathan 188–9, 193–4 Cunningham, Valentine Reading After Theory 9–10, 13, 29 Currie, Mark 14 Damasio, Antonio 12, 30 Darwin, Charles 121, 123, 227n Dautbegovic´, Jozefina ‘The unidentified’ 170, 179 Dawkins, Richard 95, 131–5 Unweaving the Rainbow 134 death drive 26, 63–4, 67–70, 86 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 25–6, 69–70, 73 de Man, Paul 188–9 democracy 3, 7, 15, 18, 84, 100, 119, 137, 161–5, 184–8 Dollimore, Jonathan 214–5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 49–50, 145 Eagleton, Terry 4, 5, 13, 111n ecstasy 26, 28, 33, 41, 44, 83 education, see literature and education Eliot, George 110, 151 ‘I grant you ample leave’ 123–4 Middlemarch 95, 114–24 The Mill on the Floss 11, 95, 119–20 Eliot, T.S. 136, 148 embodiment 6, 13, 26, 47, 67, 73–6, 157, 164, 169, 182, 195 emotion/affect 78–9, 81–2, 84, 85, 103, 200; see also literature and emotion/affect empathy 48, 57, 66, 117–19, 205, 215

Engels, Friedrich 204–5 Enlightenment 1, 2, 6, 23, 25, 45, 77, 127, 130, 147, 186 Erasmus Letter to Martin Dorp 3 Praise of Folly 3–4 ersatz theology, see humanism as ersatz/surrogate theology; literature as ersatz/surrogate theology essentialism 1, 15, 164, 201, 204, 215 estrangement 26, 36, 149, 188; see also literature and estrangement ethics 5, 6–7, 13, 26, 38–9, 43, 68–9, 78–9, 81–9, 108; see also literature and ethics Evans, Dylan 30 Evans, Nicholas The Horse Whisperer 25, 65–7 existentialism 24, 30–42, 79, 85, 111–12n, 124, 128, 142 Felman, Shoshona 168–9, 176 Felski, Rita 29 Uses of Literature 10 feminism 3, 4, 11, 15, 26, 80, 86; see also gender Fiedler, Leslie A. 106–7 Finkielkraut, Alain In the Name of Humanity 6 Forster, E.M. 47 Foucault, Michel 79, 87, 227 The Order of Things 1 freedom 25, 37, 40, 60–4, 75, 79, 85, 90n, 100, 137, 154, 170, 199, 209, 215 Freud, Sigmund 25–6, 46, 63–70, 79, 151 Gallagher, Tess The Lover of Horses 25, 60–3 Gardner, Helen 5 gender 6, 11, 23, 29, 78–83, 87, 89n, 195 generalism/generalist 2–5, 6, 8, 11 genocide 68, 162, 166–78 God 1, 7, 9, 24, 28, 30–6, 40, 43, 94–5, 113–15, 119, 186 Gordon, Craig A. 51

Index 241 Gosse, Edmund 55 Gosse, Philip Henry 54–5 Graff, Gerald 4 Graham, Elaine 144, 147 Graver, Susan 117–18 Halliwell, Martin and Mousley, Andy Critical Humanisms 109, 200, 213 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 45, 108 Hawthorn, Jeremy 29 Hegel, Georg 26, 79 Heidegger, Martin 42, 68–9, 151, 186 Hirsch Jr, E.D. 227 history/historicism 2–3, 5, 24, 28–30, 45, 65, 72–3, 76, 154, 162, 167–70, 200, 206, 212–13 Hoffman, Eva 182 Hooker, Richard 214 Houellebecq, Michel Atomised 95, 129–30, 136–42 Howard, Jean and Shershow, Scott Cutler 5 human nature 9, 16, 50, 55, 59, 64, 68, 119, 156, 164, 184, 227n; see also nature human rights 77–8, 84, 90n humane 6–7, 14, 18, 82, 114, 119–21, 136, 139, 161, 209, 218 humanism civic 164, 212–18, 223–5 and commitment 18, 36–7, 43, 67, 74–5, 164, 227 as ersatz/surrogate theology 5–10, 113, 125n literary 2–17, 25, 45, 60, 78, 93, 100, 109, 127, 129, 203 and politics 15, 18, 23, 29, 77, 82–7, 93, 145, 156, 168–78, 183–7, 200–7, 225–6 Renaissance/early modern 1, 3–4, 6, 130–1, 147, 214 and science 1–2, 114, 121–2, 127–9, 131–5, 150–3 and unbribable life 18, 162, 171–80 humanity 5–10, 16–17, 59, 69–70, 75–6, 77–8, 84–5, 99–101, 107–11, 117–19, 121–2, 142, 143–7, 156, 201, 204, 207–8, 219

Hyndman, Henry Mayers 199, 208 Hyslop, Theo 50 individualism 39, 94, 137, 201, 225 International Day of Missing Persons 171–8 intersubjectivity 23, 26, 59, 65–7, 75 Irigaray, Luce 76 Jackson, J.R. de J. 28 Jameson, Frederic 145–6 Jaspers, Karl 40, 43 Joyce, Patrick 207 joyful cruelty 18, 94, 114–19, 121–4 Kafka, Franz 87–8 Kain, Philip J. 200 Kenworthy, J. C. 202 Kermode, Frank 149, 157 Kierkegaard, Søren 31, 37–8 Lacan, Jacques 25, 76n, 86–7, 108, 221 language 6, 9, 16, 29, 45, 59, 60–4, 75–6, 78–89, 99, 134, 168–9, 176, 177, 187–8 Lee, Hermione 56 Lefebvre, Henri 128 Lennon, John 2 Levinas, Emmanuel 25–6, 68–70, 83 Liddell, Henry George and Scott, Robert 185–6 literature and complexity 13, 16, 45–6, 55–6, 93, 96, 114, 127–42, 189 and depth 13, 14, 16–17, 18, 23, 30, 56, 93, 95–7, 127, 150 and education/enlightenment 1, 3–4, 7, 11, 127, 189, 203–4, 226 and emotion/affect 12–15, 24–5, 28–43, 44–58, 79, 89, 99, 109–10, 114, 127, 182, 203, 217 as ersatz/surrogate theology 5–10, 11, 14, 15–16, 17, 23–4, 161 and estrangement 14–15, 23, 18, 26–7, 164 and ethics 9–10, 13, 15, 18, 23, 45–6, 58, 87, 89, 176

242

Index

literature – continued and mimesis 13, 15, 56, 163, 185–9, 195–6 and sensuousness 12–13, 15, 24, 45, 55–8, 78, 109–10, 163–4, 182, 201–4, 217 and science 51–5, 95–6, 113–14, 115–18, 121–2, 127–42, 151, 153, 204 and theory 1–5, 11–15, 23, 28–9, 77–8, 88, 96, 100, 127, 130, 135–6, 142, 212–13 and wholeness 13, 24, 33–4, 36–7, 39, 43, 110, 137 Lodge, David and Wood, Nigel 216–17 logos 173, 174, 183–4, 186 loss 12, 34–5, 66, 71, 119, 221 love 32, 37, 49, 62, 66, 67–70, 86, 93, 131, 138, 178–80 Lucretius 114, 130 Luft, David S. 151–3 Lukács, Georg 148–9 Lupton, Julia Reinhard 108 Lyotard, Jean–Francois 17, 144 MacQuarrie, John 36, 37, 39 Marx, Karl 2, 13, 99–100, 199–202 Marxism 2, 12, 15, 99, 163–4, 199, 211 McCarthy, Cormac All the Pretty Horses 25–6, 71–5 metaphysical 14, 38, 137, 150, 154, 194 Midgley, Mary Science and Poetry 95, 129–36, 139, 141 mimesis, see literature and mimesis Minow-Pinkney, Makiko 56–7 Mitchell, W.J.T. 227 modernism 3, 13, 15, 47, 96, 145–6, 148–9 modernity/modern 6, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 23, 59, 63, 76, 93, 110, 118, 137, 138, 139, 147, 148, 150–3, 187, 204, 214 Monod, Jacques 131, 133 mourning 35–6, 79, 82–4, 175, 225 Murphet, Julian 111n

Musil, Robert The Man without Qualities 15, 96–7, 143–58 Mind and Experience 152 Nagel, Thomas 134 Naremore, James 49 naturalism 95, 100, 113, 115, 122, 205 nature 8, 11, 38, 60–5, 75, 100, 120, 131, 140, 183–4, 214, 221; see also human nature New Criticism 2, 188–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 79, 114, 116, 123–4 Northrop, Douglas A 107–8 Nussbaum, Martha 24–5, 45–7, 53–8, 108 Love’s Knowledge 45–6 Upheavals of Thought 46–7 Oedipus complex 64, 69–70, 87 ontology 9, 18, 23, 36, 42, 68, 88, 132, 139, 144, 151, 161 Parker, R.B. 221 performative 37, 78–9, 85, 189, 221 philosophy 2, 4, 31, 37–43, 68–9, 85, 95, 96, 114–16, 130–6, 142, 150, 153, 212 Plato 33, 41, 163, 183–5, 195 pluralisation 3 poetry 15, 120, 129–36, 139, 142, 156–7, 162–3, 166–80, 182, 186 lyric 188–96 politics, see humanism and politics; see also capitalism; communism; democracy; socialism positivism 51, 59, 95, 113, 121, 125n posthumanism 5, 7, 15, 63, 77, 93, 96–7, 143–58 postmodernism 3, 5, 9, 16, 59, 77, 99 poststructuralism 11, 26, 77–81, 85–8, 99 psychoanalysis 4, 12, 56, 63–4, 68–9, 79, 86–7, 102, 108, 128, 221, 224–5 Putnam, Hilary 128–9, 130

Index 243 Rancière, Jacques 186–7 Ratcliffe, Sophie 46 rationality 2, 6, 8, 9, 23, 25, 31–2, 45–7, 62, 64, 114, 130, 131, 133–6, 150, 152–3, 186, 200 realism 95, 110, 113–24, 125n, 148, 161, 163, 201, 205, 213, 215, 216, 224–5, 226 recognition 29–30, 69, 88, 179–80, 187, 197–9, 201, 210 reductionism 2, 7, 17, 70, 80, 95–6, 127–42 refuser/refusal 94, 100–11 religion 1, 5–10, 15–17, 23, 28–42, 93–4, 113, 122, 123, 129, 130, 169, 204 Renaissance, see humanism, Renaissance/early modern responsibility 40, 69, 80–1, 86, 148, 152, 164, 171, 198, 206, 209, 212–19, 226–7 Rich, Adrienne 170 Rilke, Rainer Maria 162, 188, 191–6 Les Quatrains Valaisans 191 Romantic poets 15, 28, 127, 134–6 Romanticism 2, 3, 13, 28, 33, 37, 127, 187, 215 Rosset, Clément 18, 95, 114–16, 124 Ruskin, John 198 Ryle, Martin 140 Said, Edward Humanism and Democratic Criticism 212–13, 226 Sartre, Jean-Paul 30–1, 36–7, 38, 40, 124 scepticism 7–8, 9, 12, 16–17, 29, 37, 93, 139 science, see humanism and science; literature and science science fiction 14–15, 96, 145–6, 157 Šehabovic´, Šejla ‘Srebrenica, Potocˇari, 9.5.2004’ 173–5 self 10, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30–1, 33–4, 36–43, 45, 46–7, 51, 52, 57, 60, 61, 62, 66–9, 79, 82, 87, 94, 99, 100, 123, 133, 139, 151, 153, 154–5, 156, 220–1, 225

sensuousness, see literature and sensuousness Shakespeare, William 6, 11, 14, 93–4, 98–111, 121, 136, 164 Coriolanus 164–5, 214–27 Hamlet 14, 98, 109–11, 149 Measure for Measure 104–6, 108, 111n Timon of Athens 94, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109 Twelfth Night 94, 103, 107, 108, 109 Shapcott, Jo 162, 188–96 ‘Gilwern Lane’ 190–1, 195 ‘Song’ 194–6 Shrank, Kathy 226 sociability 94, 99–101, 111n, 108 socialism 7, 163–4, 201–11, 211n Solomon, Robert 35, 37, 40 Sophocles Antigone 27, 85–7, 102 specialist/specialisation 2–5, 9, 10–16, 127, 128, 135, 153 species narcissism 6, 17, 25 speech 48, 61, 76, 80–1, 86–7, 163, 182–7 Stanton, Domna 77 Steiner, George 150–1 structuralism 11, 26, 77–8, 80–1, 85–8, 99 subject/subjective/subjectivity 13–15, 23, 26–7, 29–35, 41, 43, 46, 59, 68, 77–8, 79–85, 94, 102–3, 107–8, 110–11, 127, 133–4, 148–55, 176, 177, 188, 194, 215 suspicion, hermeneutics of 5, 9, 16, 29, 89 sympathy 24–6, 45–7, 53, 65, 116–23, 218 Tambling, Jeremy 118 technology 76, 96, 129, 144–6, 150–7 theory, see literature and theory tragedy 165, 203, 209, 214 unbribable life, see humanism and unbribable life

244

Index

Vešovic´, Marko ‘Three Cigarettes’ 172, 176–7 vitalism 51–6 vulnerability 26, 39, 78–84, 89, 106 Wesley, John 28, 33 wholeness, see literature and wholeness Williams, Raymond 202–3, 206 Woolf, Virginia 24–5, 44–58 ‘Character in Fiction’ 49 Jacob’s Room 48

Mrs Dalloway 49–53 ‘Sketch of the Past’ 44 ‘Together and Apart’ 53 The Waves 56–8 Wordsworth, William 28, 33, 127, 134–5 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ 41–2 Yeo, Stephen 208 Žižek, Slavoj 94, 102, 108 Zola, Emile 115, 122–3