Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early 20th Century Britain

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Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early 20th Century Britain

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Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early 20th Century Britain

Craig A. Gordon

LITERARY MODERNISM, BIOSCIENCE, AND COMMUNITY IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY BRITAIN © Craig A. Gordon, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7754–0 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7754–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: May 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

Part 1

Germ Cultures: D. H. Lawrence and the Vital Question of the Tubercular Body 1

2

Part 2

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death”: Lawrence, the Sanatorium, and the Bare Life of the Tubercular Body

23

Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness: Incorporating the Work of Community or Assembling a Multitude?

81

Atoms Upon the Mind: Virginia Woolf and the Nervous Body at the Limit of Community 3

4

Organizing the Nervous Body, Regulating the Self: The Psychological Production of National Community in Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves

129

Breaking Habits, Affecting the Neuropsychological Body: Toward the “Unsubstantial Territory” of Disorganized Community

161

Appendix

207

Notes

211

Works Cited

223

Index

231


Acknowledgments

My most sincere gratitude is due to both Kim Michasiw and Thomas Loebel, whose consistently acute commentary and substantial patience fundamentally shaped this work at an early stage. The project has also benefited enormously from the insights of Lauren Gillingham, Jennifer Henderson, and Julie Murray, who have offered me the benefit of both general dialogue and very specific and detailed readings of my work. It equally has been a privilege, and a source of inspiration, that they have so generously shared their work with me and have provided sustaining friendship when I needed it most. I also want to thank Keith Denny, Chris Douglas, Rob Hemmings, Lori Kiefer, Phil Kiff, Peter Sinnema, Lisa Sloniowski, and Janet Wesselius for their intellectual comradeship and friendship. They each deserve more specific thanks than I am able to render here, and I can only hope that they will allow me to attend to that debt in other ways and at other times. In having shared with me their humor, intelligence, and energy, not to mention countless meals and drinks, they have made life much more than merely livable and have demonstrated to me, in innumerable ways, the value of the communities in which I am fortunate to participate. Most of all, I would like to thank Alison Lee. Thank you for your insight, intelligence, support, and patience. Thank you for talking and listening. And thank you for making life fun. Finally, it would be impossible to adequately acknowledge the debt I owe to my parents, Elaine and Murray. Through their interest, curiosity, encouragement, sympathy, friendship, confidence, and periodic anxiety, they have allowed me to trust my abilities, affirmed my ambitions, and reminded me of the much broader perspective within which those ambitions are most productively contemplated. Without their love and unflinching support, this book would have been utterly impossible. My initial preparations and the early writing of this manuscript were supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the final stages of the work were supported by a grant from the College of Arts at the University of Guelph. My work also

viii • Acknowledgments

owes a debt to the expertise and assistance of the staff at the British Library, and the Wellcome Library, London, England. Parts of Chapters 3 and 4 were previously published in “Breaking Habits, Building Communities: Virginia Woolf and the Neuroscientific Body,” which appeared in issue 7, volume 1, of Modernism/Modernity in 2000. They are reprinted here with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. The cover image appears courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

List of Abbreviations

CE

Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 4 vols., ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1966–67).

F

D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

MD

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

MM

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: The Modern Library, 1955).

PS

D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcoatl), ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

PT [1910]

David C. Muthu, Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Sanatorium Treatment: A Record of Ten Years’ Observation and Work in Open-Air Sanatoria (London: Baillière, 1910).

PT [1922]

David C. Muthu, Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Its Etiology and Treatment: A Record of Twenty-two Years’ Observation and Work in Open-Air Sanatoria (London: Ballière, 1922).

RDP

D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

S

Donald O. Stewart, Sanatorium: A Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930).

W

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).


Introduction

riting in 1922, D. H. Lawrence rails that “science is wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort of complex mechanism made up of numerous little machines working automatically in a rather unsatisfactory relation to one another” (F, 95). “Our science,” he insists, “is a science of the dead world. Even biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life” (F, 62). Eight years later, Virginia Woolf claims that “with a few exceptions . . . literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear” (CE, 4:193). Despite this literary occlusion of the somatic, she argues, “All day, all night the body intervenes. . . . The creature within . . . cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness” (193). As a consequence, she calls not only for “a new language . . . more primitive, more sensual, more obscene,” but also for “a new hierarchy of the passions.” Love, she demands, “must be deposed in favor of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of the villain, and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste—that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral” (194–95). Sharing an interest in the human body and its relation to biomedical science, Lawrence and Woolf approach the questions posed by that relationship from opposite directions. Whereas Lawrence identifies a deficiency in the procedures of bioscience, which he seeks to redress through his literary elaboration of what he calls “subjective science” (F, 62), Woolf indicates a lack in literary discourse, which she attempts to supplement, in part, with recourse to the language of bioscience. This interest in questions of embodiment as they are articulated in and between literary and bioscientific cultures shares pride of place in Lawrence’s and Woolf ’s late work with their persistent interrogation of problems of

W

2 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community

community. For Lawrence, the complex theory of affective embodiment he elaborates most fully in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) is intertwined with, and indeed forms the foundation for, his thinking and writing about community. This conjunction is, moreover, by no means limited to the Fantasia, widely considered a relatively minor piece, even amidst the large, if generally underconsidered, body of Lawrence’s nonfiction prose. The relationship between bodies and different forms of community is an almost obsessive concern in Lawrence’s essays from at least 1920 on, forming a significant basis of everything from his Study of Thomas Hardy, “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” and Studies in Classic American Literature to more obviously topical pieces such as his Review of Trigant Burrows’s “The Social Basis of Consciousness,” “Individual Consciousness vs. the Social Consciousness,” “Education of the People,” and “Democracy.” It is equally important to his fictional corpus. The embodiment of community is a major problematic animating Women in Love and becomes an almost single-minded object of inquiry in the late novels such as The Plumed Serpent, Aaron’s Rod, and Kangaroo. If embodiment is a fairly self-evident thematic focus in a corpus of writing so consistently engaged with problems of subjectivity, sexuality, and affective relations more broadly conceived, the relevance of community to a consideration of Lawrence’s work may be slightly less obvious—in part because of the notorious imprecision of that word. I will return shortly to the theoretical implications of different concepts of community, but for the moment suffice it to say that in Lawrence’s case that imprecision is also part of its power, insofar as community potentially refers to a wide variety of social formations—from intersubjective and familial relations to much larger-scale national and geopolitical configurations. In terms of Lawrence’s thought, this range of relations is intimately intertwined: his constant concerns with intersubjective dynamics or the family are inseparable from his utopian imaginings of Rananim or his responses to problems of national identity and the shifting formations of global politics. And all of these entangled forms of community are, for Lawrence, equally inseparable from his thinking about embodiment. His approach to problems of incorporation in terms of what Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter refer to as “the finer grained processes of embodiment—those strategies through which human life combines with, and assimilates, the minute, shifting, often invisible patterns and rhythms of the concrete historical milieus within which it unfolds” (14)—cannot be divorced from his exploration of the other register on which Crary and Kwinter ask us to understand the processes of incorporation: “the integration of human life forces into . . . larger-than-human systems of social and technical organization” (14).

Introduction • 3

Though Woolf ’s literary preoccupations and political commitments arguably take very different forms from Lawrence’s, this double logic of incorporation also animates her work. The problems of embodiment are apparent everywhere in her writing: from the materialist feminism of A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, to Orlando’s shifting morphology, to her analysis of the consequences of medical scientific language and institutions in Mrs. Dalloway or “On Being Ill.” For Woolf, it is an area of concern too pervasive to necessitate (or easily accommodate) a brief summary. Woolf ’s simultaneous, and related, interest in questions of community are equally manifest: from the familial permutations of To the Lighthouse, to the post–Word War I critique of patriotic national identity offered by Mrs. Dalloway, to her participation in and writing about the Women’s Cooperative Guild, to the only slightly pre–World War II response to the demise of customary forms of English community in Between the Acts (naming only a few of the most obvious examples). Throughout her career, Woolf intensely focuses not only on the critique of extant communal forms, but also on the call to renovate or reimagine the demands of community—what she often refers to as the difficult necessity of “coming together.” To return, then, to the two quotations with which I began, they gesture to a cultural field within which the human body lies at the crux of intersecting literary and bioscientific discourses, and as such frame the broadest contours of this study. I want, in other words, to examine the interrelation of literary and bioscientific cultures in early twentieth-century Britain as an important way of understanding how the comprehension, representation, and manipulation of the human body becomes crucial to the imagination, formation, and maintenance of different forms of community. If the period between 1900 and 1940 is, as Tim Armstrong has suggested, one within which “the body is re-energized, re-formed, subject to new modes of production, representation, and commodification” (2), it is also one in which the question of community is subject to an equally profound and varied upheaval at both macro- and micropolitical levels. Whether one considers the global transformations entailed in the decline and dissolution of European empires, the frenetic and widespread attempts to define, redefine, and contest various national formations and their relations to the institutions of the state, or the more local attempts to come to terms with the new and shifting social forms produced by the demands of increasingly industrialized and commodified urban existence, the problem of understanding and articulating structures of collectivity is nearly unavoidable. The questions posed by both the body and community can, thus, be understood equally as problems of incorporation, in the double sense that Crary and Kwinter give that


term. A historically situated exploration of this double logic of incorporation is, more precisely, the project that I undertake in the pages to come. Because the early twentieth century is marked by the increasing consolidation of the cultural prestige and epistemological authority of biomedical science and the vital sciences more broadly, the comprehension and representation of various somatic modes is materially crucial (if not always explicitly so) to understanding the mechanisms through which large- and small-scale forms of community literally incorporate themselves. Medical and scientific discourses that take the body, and life in general, as their focus come to have an unprecedented role both in the conceptualization of human subjectivity and in the incorporation of individual subjects within a broader social fabric. As such, raising the question of the social body in the context of the human bodies that are constituted as objects of inquiry by bioscientific and medical disciplines, situates the period’s bioscientific culture as a particularly powerful means of approaching the individual bodies that different communal projects inevitably seek to grasp as their objects. Divided into two parts, Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early Twentieth-Century Britain pursues this project by articulating a web of high modernist and popular literature; public health pamphlets; and medical, bioscientific, and psychological texts that is punctuated by four exemplary figures. The work of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf serves to situate different types of literary modernist production, while the tubercular body and the nervous body thematize particular convergences of medical and bioscientific projects. More specifically, Part 1 examines the relationship between Lawrence and the medical science that organizes itself around the tubercular body, while Part 2 turns to the literary example of Woolf in relation to the bioscience constellated around the nervous body. In terms both of bodies and communities, these discursive conjunctions are characterized by varying degrees of competition and collaboration within and between the spheres of literature and bioscience. As the opening juxtaposition of Lawrence and Woolf suggests, this discursive nexus is one in which starkly divergent examples of modernist literary production—animated, nonetheless, by a shared object of interest—condition, and are conditioned by, contemporaneous bioscientific culture. If these examples of literary modernism are marked by significant divergences (both aesthetically and politically), the related bioscientific discourses fail to offer a notably higher degree of unanimity or discursive consistency. Consequently, my exploration of these two spheres of culture proceeds on two registers at once. On the one hand, I pursue those moments in which literature and bioscience converge and collaborate in the consolidation of norms and regulative regimes governing the

Introduction • 5

intelligibility of different forms of embodiment and the incorporation of individual bodies into (or their exclusion from) various structures of collectivity. On the other hand, attention to instances of dissonance both within and between literary and bioscientific cultures makes visible the emergence of logics of incorporation that both contest those that were historically dominant and provide conceptual resources whose usefulness extends beyond the historical moment of their articulation. More specifically, my approach in what follows engages simultaneously in historical analysis and theoretical speculation—or, rather, it seeks to theorize the embodiment of community by analyzing and responding to the logics of incorporation that are articulated within a historically situated sample of discursive production. It is my hope that the historical work involved in mapping the discursive relays by way of which various forms of cultural production articulate or contest specific logics of incorporation will provide resources to develop theoretical frameworks that will both help us to understand the embodiment of community at this moment early in the twentieth century, and provide tools with which to explore the double problem of incorporation as it continues to unfold with ever-increasing variety, force, and urgency in the latter half of the century and beyond. If this study is committed to the analysis of a historically situated cultural field, it is simultaneously oriented by examples that gesture beyond their historical moment and toward a still-unfolding history of the logic of incorporation. Commenting on the centrality of “the very problem of ‘life’” to our understanding of “twentieth-century modernity,” Crary and Kwinter observe that, to the extent that “a specifically biological modality” has become largely unavoidable, “it is an indication of the vast transformations in techniques of knowledge that continue to occur since the demise of the mechanical model of explanation in the nineteenth century” (13–14). Though my analysis is limited to the period between 1900 and 1940—during which the effects of the “mechanical model of explanation” continued to be felt—its contours, and the choice of examples that sustain it, are partially determined by a glancing recognition of this broader trajectory of transformation. More precisely, the pages that follow are conceived as a contribution to a genealogy on the basis of which we might approach the problem of incorporation as it only increases in intensity and scope. In our moment early in the twenty-first century, the technologically mediated manipulation of the very substance of life at ever more minutely differentiated levels, the problems of immunology and contagious disease, the regulation of our communities by social medicine, and the prominence and pervasiveness of what Nikolas Rose refers to as the “psy” disciplines all constitute unavoidable sets of coordinates that profoundly


shape our experience and understanding of our bodies, selves, and places within various social forms. The proliferation and complication of these coordinates equally indicate the processes of transformation that continue to produce new and different forms of bodies, selves, and communities, which we are only learning to experience, the potential and limitations of which we are just beginning to assess. As such, various manifestations of the tubercular body and the nervous body in the early twentieth century present important historical antecedents to aspects of bioscientific culture that have become almost incalculably pervasive by the end of the century. If the corporeal forms that this study explores are determined by substantially different historical forces than those which condition our situation at the beginning the twentyfirst century, they are nonetheless not separated from us by an absolute chasm of historical discontinuity. Though I am able to but gesture toward the trajectories of development, differentiation, complexification, and divergence that might link the period, which is the object of this study, to our place in the present, it remains my hope that a detailed exploration of a cultural formation that profoundly marks the early part of the past century will provide certain resources for attempts to approach those links and discontinuities. Histories of Incorporation, Histories of Modernism Let me begin, then, with the historical stakes of the study. The contours of my analysis, and specific choice of examples, are largely determined by the two types of bodies around which the study is organized. Neither “the tubercular body” nor “the nervous body” refer, however, to singular or neatly specifiable somatic manifestations. Rather, both designate contested bodily spaces traversed by a variety of discursive regimes, the analytic potential of which derives in large part from their sociocultural prominence in the first decades of the century. Both types of body enjoy a degree of popular visibility that makes them virtually ubiquitous, and they are certainly unavoidable in functioning to localize concerns about both bodies and communities. The extravagance of Roy Porter’s claim, for example, that until the middle of the twentieth century tuberculosis occupied a singular place as the “greatest catastrophe, the greatest catalyst of political perturbation in the Western World” (“The Case of Consumption,” 179), gives some indication of the impact of the tubercular body. Similarly, Michael North’s observation that by 1922 “the enthusiasm for things psychological was so extreme, both in the United States and in Great Britain, that it might quite reasonably have seemed a psychological symptom itself ” (66) attests to the cultural centrality of the nervous body.

Introduction • 7

More specifically, these two exemplary somatic spaces function (at least implicitly) to articulate the two parts of the book insofar as they are fundamentally shaped by, and comprehended in terms of, many of the same diagnostic categories and therapeutic procedures. Tubercular and nervous bodies are frequently understood as bespeaking a susceptibility to the deleterious effects of overstimulation (whether understood in terms of moral laxity or the demands of an increasingly frenetic modern world), and as a result the techniques of the rest cure and the sanatorium treatment figure prominently in relation to both. Indeed, tubercular and nervous somatic forms are frequently copresent in individual bodies to the extent that nervous conditions such as neurasthenia and hysteria are often prominent sequelae to a tubercular diagnosis. Similarly, it is telling that Joseph Breuer’s contribution to the understanding of hysteria—arguably the cornerstone of the period’s most widely influential approach to the nervous body—positions his research through direct analogy to medical scientific research on tuberculosis. “I regard hysteria,” he observes, as a clinical picture which has been empirically discovered and is based on observation, in just the same way as tubercular pulmonary phthisis. . . . Aetiological research has shown that the various constituent processes of pulmonary phthisis have various causes: the tubercle is due to bacillus Kochii, and the disintegration of tissue, the formation of cavities and the septic fever are due to other microbes. In spite of this, tubercular phthisis remains a clinical unity and it would be wrong to break it up by attributing to it only the “specifically tubercular” modifications of tissue caused by Koch’s bacillus and by detaching the other modifications from it. In the same way hysteria must remain a clinical unity even if it turns out that its phenomena are determined by various causes. (“Studies on Hysteria,” 261)

This diagnostic and therapeutic proximity is particularly significant insofar as it foregrounds a certain structural isomorphism of the tubercular body and the nervous body in relation to the discursive fields they serve to organize: they both function as hinges between the narrowly somatic and the communal. The space of the tubercular body is contested, on the one hand, by medical scientific disciplines, such as bacteriology and immunology, which approach individual bodies as organic machines governed by physical and chemical laws, and accessible by technologically enhanced scientific procedures at the level of increasingly minute constituent components. On the other hand, it is a principal site for the mobilization of the hygienic impulses of social medicine, which are directed less at individual bodies per se, than at certain types of bodies that provide the occasion for the exercise of programs


aimed at the formation and maintenance of particular kinds of communities. Similarly, the nervous body is traversed simultaneously by psychological projects that are heavily marked by neurological and neurophysiological research—approaching individual bodies, once again, as physical systems accessible to positivist intervention—and group-psychological theories that seek to comprehend the ways in which those bodies (and the psyches that they bear) are organized within different collective forms. The contested somatic spaces I have designated the tubercular body and the nervous body function as exceptionally powerful examples, in other words, precisely because they localize the lines of force along which regimes directed at the comprehension and manipulation of individual bodies fold over into projects aimed at the articulation, production, and maintenance of various structures of collectivity. Increasingly prestigious and influential bioscientific disciplines provide citizens of the early twentieth century with new ways of visualizing their bodies (often from the inside out) and new languages within which to imagine and represent their embodied existence. As I suggest in what follows, these new means of seeing, conceiving, and speaking about the body are absolutely crucial to the simultaneous attempts of these same citizens both to understand and locate themselves within the various forms of community within which they participated, and to imagine alternate forms of community to those they found already in existence. In literary historical terms, approaching these questions in relation to the work of Lawrence and Woolf is explained easily enough in terms of their biographical proximity to the bioscientific discourses under interrogation. Their life experiences rendered them all too intimate not only with the popular perceptions of tuberculosis and nervous disorders, respectively, but also with the details of the relevant medical and scientific practices, procedures, institutions, and theories. This familiarity has a profound (if not always explicit) impact upon their literary negotiations of the problems associated both with human embodiment and community. Without entirely dismissing the significance of this biographical proximity, I should emphasize that my consideration of Lawrence and Woolf in relation to bioscientific culture is neither strictly biographical nor hermeneutic nor thematic. My interest does not lie in the attempt to trace the infusion of life experience into literary texts, nor in positioning aspects of bioscientific culture as crucial interpretive keys to Lawrence’s and Woolf ’s texts. Still less do I seek simply to elaborate the lines of influence along which their texts present literary rearticulations of phenomena evident in other spheres of culture. Rather, I address the ways in which examples of the period’s literary production participate in the more broadly cultural processes through which logics of

Introduction • 9

incorporation are articulated, consolidated, and contested. Though such a project inevitably entails the negotiation of literary attempts to represent or thematize certain kinds of bodies and communities, the emphasis falls not upon the adequacy of such attempts to an underlying reality (a reality defined, for instance, by scientific discourse) but upon the logics by which they are supported. Beginning by discerning the logics implicit in Lawrence’s and Woolf ’s approaches to the body and its relations to structures of collectivity, one can then ask to what extent those logics are marked by, converge or collaborate with, depart from, or pose challenges to the logics of incorporation produced in bioscientific culture and elsewhere. Beyond the fact that Lawrence’s and Woolf ’s texts participate in the discursive formations situated around the tubercular body and the nervous body, their exemplary status also derives from their different, even divergent, positions within the critical history of British literary modernism. This study is conceived, in part, as a contribution to the rapidly expanding body of literary scholarship that attempts more adequately to situate literary modernism within a broader cultural horizon. In the context of an attempt to trace some of the links between modernist literary production and contemporaneous bioscience, Lawrence and Woolf constitute powerful examples precisely because, on most critical accounts, it would be difficult to locate two more divergent representatives of British literary modernism. Even as this study is informed by recent work in what has come to be known as the “New Modernisms,” it is equally conceived as a critique of what I take to be the not insubstantial limitations of the new historicist and cultural studies methodologies that currently dominate the field. Though the widespread attempt to situate modernist literary production in relation to the social and cultural fields within which it is produced is undoubtedly important, many such attempts remain satisfied (intentionally or not) to articulate the relationship between literary texts and other modes of cultural production in relatively crude terms: essentially according a simple privilege to either the literary or the nonliterary in their interpretive strategies. Two recent studies—Holly Henry’s Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003) and Jessica Berman’s Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (2001)—whose projects intersect with my own in important ways, exemplify the opposing faces of this difficulty. Henry is very thorough in tracing the links between Woolf ’s aesthetics and the science associated with developments in astronomy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, citing Bruno Latour’s work as providing an important model within which to take up this sort of project. “Like Latour,” she says, “who attempts to articulate the ‘imbroglios’ or networks of interconnection


between scientific practices and public and political discourse, I have set out to imagine the imbrication of advances in astronomy, emerging visualization technologies, and popular science writing, with discourses among modernist artists that produced in part Woolf ’s experiments in fiction” (7–8). Even as she invokes these “networks of interconnection,” however, Henry’s language tellingly reduces them to one-way streets as she goes on to argue that “Woolf ’s texts demonstrate how the new vistas of space that emerged at the same time that modernist writers were forging new literary forms that might account for a modernist human decentering and re-scaling” (8). Though there is a certain degree of referential imprecision in these key sentences, it seems clear enough that the nonliterary aspects of Henry’s discursive web are accorded a significant explanatory privilege: they “produce” Woolf ’s fictional experimentation and become the basis on which one might “account for” the contours of particular modernist projects. Whereas Henry ultimately reduces the interrelation of the literary and nonliterary to a largely causal relation in which we understand literary production on the basis of scientific culture, Berman’s text takes the opposite tack. While Berman productively historicizes recent attempts to theorize community, and cogently criticizes some of the more obvious liberal models thereof, her argument remains heavily invested in the transgressive power of literature. This historicization notwithstanding, community remains firmly tied to narrative, to the “stories of connection we have been told or are able to tell about ourselves” (3). Though she is careful to offer the qualification that the “fragmented perspectives or experimental styles” of the writers she studies “do not always coincide with the shattering of real-world political verities” (21), her notion of “radically new forms of cosmopolitan communities” (27) is firmly linked to the formal “radicalism” of modernist narrative style. Despite the considerable sociohistorical detail within which Berman couches her argument for the power of modernist fiction in “recasting the idea of political community” (21), she remains committed to the transcendence of that fiction vis-à-vis the material contexts within which it is situated. “Because,” she contends, “I argue that community is performed in its narratives and is not derived from an originary position or outside source, I restrict myself to those narratives. Thus, while the James family, or Bloomsbury, or Stein’s salon all make fascinating study, they rarely concern me here. I include these ‘real-world’ communities as part of the conditions of authorship of these novels, but not as the benchmarks by which to judge them. In this sense too, I would claim, I avoid limiting the possibilities of community enacted in these novels to the political positions espoused by their authors” (26). This desire to limit the notions of community elaborated in the texts

Introduction • 11

she reads neither to authorial intention nor to forms of community actually realized at the time of their composition is salutary enough; however, in emphasizing the transgressive “radicality” of literary discourse, Berman significantly limits her own ability both to account for the ways in which literary imaginations (and narrations) of radical forms of community interact with the ostensibly less radical conceptions and realizations of community extant in the period, and to theorize the material conditions through which the stories we tell come to influence the worlds in which we live. To the extent, then, that Henry’s and Berman’s texts might be taken to exemplify particular permutations of the “New Modernisms,” the strategies they employ seem rather familiar: not unlike, respectively, “old historicist” and poststructuralist approaches to modernism. On Henry’s account, the literary text is very largely determined by its historical context, whereas for Berman the literary is marked by its “radical” ability to transgress or transcend its historical conditions of articulation—an ability that seems to coincide with a certain proximity to more contemporary theoretical positions (notably, in this case, that of Jean-Luc Nancy). In turning to Henry’s and Berman’s studies as examples of the New Modernisms, I don’t want to overstate their limitations, as I largely share the historical and theoretical preoccupations that motivate their work. In fact, a stronger version of the New Modernisms, such as that provided by Michael North’s Reading 1922 (1999), is perhaps more properly the critical object of my argument here. While North’s text has been influential in shifting the focus of modernist literary scholarship toward new historicist or cultural studies models, and instrumental in indicating the richness of the discursive fields in relation to which the period’s literary production can be approached, it has the unhappy effect of leveling the discursive playing field such that the various forms of discourse he analyses become virtually indistinguishable one from another. North’s intention is, in part, to dislodge modernist literary production from its ostensibly high-cultural perch by demonstrating its links to various forms of mass or popular culture. Contending that the “‘matrix of modernism’ . . . is generally constructed in temporal terms, as a genealogy, and is restricted to literature and perhaps philosophy,” and that such an approach “produces . . . a modernism disconnected from all other varieties of historical crisis” (6), he asks: “But what of modernism as a social fact, as part of the lived experience of a reader of The Waste Land or Ulysses . . . ? What connections might have been made in the mind of such a reader between literary modernism and the other innovations of the same year?” (6). It is in this sense that I characterize North’s work as a stronger form of “New Modernist” scholarship: he attempts more fully to trouble the interpretive primacy of literary discourse


and seeks neither to explain literary texts on the basis of, nor to demonstrate the radical difference of literature from, other forms of cultural production. Though the interpretive procedure through which North attempts to trace the connectedness of modernist literature and other contemporaneous cultural phenomena is both powerful and instructive, his readings tend not merely to locate literary production in relation to other forms of cultural production but to insist that there is virtually no difference between them.1 In the attempt to displace a hermetically sealed form of modernism, a modernism “that lives primarily in the deepest imaginings of its most radical perpetrators” (6), he promotes a form of interpretive practice that implicitly equalizes all forms of discursive production as bearers of sociological data and fails to account adequately for the specific discursive procedures and institutional contexts that differentiate—substantial connections and similarities notwithstanding—different modes of cultural production. Thus, in situating Lawrence and Woolf, I want to avoid treating the bioscience of the period merely as an explanatory context, or a source of influence, and seek instead to locate their work within the discursive web that the study constructs and analyses—drawing attention to the fact that both literary and scientific language has a particular material history. Given that units of language operate simultaneously in different cultural domains, the borders of which are relatively permeable, attention to the vicissitudes of specific linguistic units—Part 1 focuses on the language of tuberculosis, while Part 2 attends to the language of the nerves—allows one to trace a path marked by the linguistic remnants of the processes through which different forms of embodiment and community come to be articulated through the mutually transforming interactions of the ostensibly discrete discursive domains of literature and medical science. To say that these domains are ostensibly discrete, however, is not to suggest that there are no distinctions at all, and thereby to posit a smooth surface of culture on which all discursive production becomes equalized as the repository of sociological facts. Rather, it is to insist on the necessity of attending to the ways in which the boundaries between domains are maintained or breeched. To the extent that instances of linguistic contamination or cultural proximity are insufficient to establish relations of strict and unidirectional historical causality, this study seeks neither to identify a determining historical context for Lawrence’s and Woolf ’s literary production nor to adduce its sociological or historical conditions of possibility or intelligibility. Equally uninteresting is the attempt simply to demonstrate the transformative effects of their literary practice upon other forms of cultural practice. In positive terms, attention to the material history of language provides a means of addressing the sociohistorical relations in which modernist

Introduction • 13

literature is embedded and of elucidating those relations as more than a narrowly determining set of conditions. It allows one, first, to ask to what extent literary negotiations of the relationship between embodiment and community are strongly conditioned by their contact with bioscientific culture; second, to explore the ways in which literary interventions into the somatic and communal projects of bioscience enable us to think differently about the problem of incorporation; and third, to consider the circumstances through which literary and bioscientific cultures collaborate both in enforcing existent logics of incorporation and providing the basis on which we might imagine alternatives. Insofar as I seek to explore the ways in which various forms of discursive production in the early twentieth century—both literary and bioscientific—are able to do more than merely replicate the logics of incorporation already realized in the period, I seek to do so not by positing the power of some forms of cultural production to transcend their historical conditions of articulation but by asking how those material conditions themselves might produce new and unprecedented ways of thinking about the embodiment of community. The Stupid Materiality of Bodies: Unthinking Communities In briefly rehearsing some of the tendencies of the work which has come to define the New Modernisms, my intention is not merely to quibble over the niceties of historicist approaches to modernist literature but to emphasize the theoretical stakes of the kind of historical work I undertake in the pages to come. To the extent that new historicist and cultural studies methodologies that largely define the New Modernisms tend either to explain literary texts in terms of other contemporaneous cultural phenomena or simply to efface the distinctions between literary and other forms of cultural production, they are good examples of what Tim Dean describes as “the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced” (21). This symptomatic approach to aesthetics, he argues, “has become so widespread in the humanities that it qualifies as a contemporary critical norm”—a norm according to which we “read literature, film, and other cultural texts primarily as evidence of the societies that made them” (21). The implications of Dean’s argument are that this symptomatic focus fails to account for the aesthetic as such and in so doing reduces the specificity and alterity of the aesthetic artifact by insisting on its familiar resemblance to the cultural fields out of which it arises. “This is an ethical problem,” he contends, “because it eradicates dimensions of alterity particular to art, making any encounter with the difficulty and strangeness of aesthetic experience


seem beside the point” (23). While I share Dean’s general concerns, I am perhaps less sanguine about the efficacy of positing the aesthetic as a relatively exclusive site of opacity or alterity that resists the hermeneutic drive to master texts by rendering them symptomatic of familiar cultural or ideological problematics. My interest lies, rather, in exploring the ways in which both literary and bioscientific texts must be understood simultaneously as symptomatic and “opaque” in Dean’s sense.2 Inasmuch as I will insist on remarking the extent to which both literary and scientific cultures participate in the familiar ideological forms of the early twentieth century (Dean’s symptomatic reading), my interest lies more fully with those moments in which both literary and scientific texts emerge as irreducible to the hegemonic forms organizing their discourse. More specifically, the tension between symptomaticity and the ethical import Dean attributes to the opacity of the aesthetic provides a useful means of framing the theoretical problematics that my study draws into focus. In general terms, the details of the historical analysis offered here are oriented by the tension between two broad conceptual movements. I examine, on the one hand, the functioning of disciplinary regimes and regulatory mechanisms through which bodies are rendered intelligible and incorporated into (or excluded from) various communal forms, and, on the other, I explore the possibilities offered by a confrontation with somatic modes that intransigently resist cognitive grasp, and therefore function as instances of what I call sheer materiality. To refer to the emergence of bodies as instances of sheer materiality is not simply to make the “anti-constructionist” argument that Judith Butler criticizes in Bodies that Matter: namely, that there must be some level at which the body is not merely construction. Or, as Butler ventriloquizes this position: “surely bodies live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these ‘facts,’ one might skeptically proclaim, cannot be dismissed as mere construction. Surely there must be some kind of necessity that accompanies these primary and irrefutable experiences” (xi). While it will be important to address the ways in which what Butler (after Foucault) calls “regulatory ideals” have an impact upon the possibilities for apprehending and/or comprehending the body, the analysis of bodies as materialized through the regulatory ideals operant in various discursive systems periodically gives way, in the pages to come, to the question of what is at stake in the confrontation with the body as impossibly material. Exploring the tension between these two ways of thinking about the embodiment of community allows us both to consider the extent to which the discursive grasp (both literary and bioscientific) of different kinds of bodies participates in logics of incorporation already available in the period, and

Introduction • 15

to encounter moments in which bodies remain irreducible to those relatively familiar logics and thereby demand new and different ways of thinking about incorporation. The first half of this tension I associate with post-Foucauldian approaches to the body, perhaps the most influential example of which is Butler’s work. While this theoretical tradition obviously provides a powerful means of approaching problems of incorporation, my concern is that it is often aligned in significant ways with what Dean identifies as the symptomatic impulse of cultural studies methodologies: specifically, it frequently approaches bodies as essentially transparent and knowable. To take Butler as an example, her insistent focus upon the materialization of bodies through the discursive inscriptions to which they are subject ultimately constitutes bodies as objects of knowledge. This aspect of her work elaborates Foucault’s alignment of power and knowledge, and even those bodies to which she refers as “unintelligible” or “unlivable” present no real challenge to the power of cognition. Indeed, from Butler’s perspective, unintelligible or unlivable bodies can only be understood as such with reference to the epistemological regimes to which they have been subject. Certain kinds of bodies become “unlivable” under certain historical and cultural circumstances precisely because they have been known in specific ways through particular sets of discursive procedures—procedures that are frequently instrumental in the production and maintenance of humans subjects through the disciplinary interiorization of their norms. As we inhabit discursive systems which inscribe our bodies with the effects of particular regulatory ideals, certain of our bodies are rendered intelligible and livable within the bounds of the social forms (or communities) guaranteed by those systems, even as those social forms constitute themselves as coherent through the exclusion of certain other bodies that it identifies as “unintelligble” and therefore unlivable. The point here is that these unlivable bodies are only unintelligible in a very limited (which is not to say insignificant) sense: they are unintelligible within the bounds of the norms governing specific social forms—norms that are themselves largely established and maintained by epistemological procedures. So, to take one of Butler’s prime examples, queer bodies may be unintelligible and/or unlivable within the norms of our society, but their status as such is the product of countless discursive regimes—psychoanalysis, psychology, medicine, biological science to name only a few of the most obvious— whose ways of knowing queer bodies render them unlivable. Or, to turn to the examples which animate this study, tubercular and nervous bodies could certainly be considered both unintelligible and unlivable in the early decades of the twentieth century, but their status as such is largely the product of the bioscientific, medical, and psychological discourses that take them as objects


of knowledge. In this sense, Butler’s unintelligible and unlivable bodies necessarily exist within a broader horizon of intelligibility. This is not to say that the analysis of the ways in which bodies are discursively inscribed, or of the constitution of communal and social forms on the basis of the inclusions and exclusions enabled by such inscriptions, is unimportant. It is, however, to say that relying exclusively upon a theoretical model according to which bodies are never truly unintelligible runs the risk of limiting one’s analysis to describing the existent and emergent regimes of regulatory ideals to which bodies are subject, and to elucidating the means by which those bodies are incorporated into familiar ideological, social, and political forms. Indeed, I am committed, in what follows, to this sort of critical description, convinced of the importance of specific and detailed analysis of the ways in which both bioscientific and literary discourse participates— through their comprehension and representation of the body—in the disciplinary maintenance of various structures of collectivity available in the early twentieth century. However, I simultaneously seek to disrupt the rhythms of this critical description by attending to those moments in which the discourses I study come up against bodies that firmly refuse the demands of intelligibility, bodies that manifest themselves as sheerly material. If Dean is concerned with the ethical consequences of a critical practice that “eradicates dimensions of alterity particular to art” and thereby makes “any encounter with the difficulty and strangeness of aesthetic experience seem beside the point” (23), my concern lies with consequences for the ethics of community, of approaches to problems of embodiment that refuse to encounter the difficulty and strangeness of the bodies that come to be incorporated into the social body and on the basis of which the social body is frequently conceived. The impossibly material bodies upon which I thus come to focus are significant not because they open onto a space of primal and incontestable bodily experience prior to discursive inscription, but precisely because they mark a certain limit to thought in their resistance to cognitive appropriation. They exemplify, in short, Jean-François Lyotard’s claim that “matter is the failure of thought, its inert mass, stupidity” (The Inhuman, 38). Or, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it: Bodies are first masses, masses offered without anything to articulate, without anything to discourse about, without anything to add to them. Discharges of writing, rather than surfaces to be covered by writings. Discharges, abandonments, retreats. No “written bodies,” no writing on the body. . . . For indeed, the body is not a locus of writing. No doubt one writes, but it is absolutely not where one writes, nor is it what one writes—it is always what writing exscribes. (Birth to Presence, 197–98)

Introduction • 17

To refer to the body as an instance of sheer materiality, or to the impossibly material body, is to invoke precisely this aspect of the body, as the stupid mass on the other side of which thought, discourse, or writing begins. Whereas the normative materialization of bodies through the mechanisms of regulatory ideals is precisely an inscription of the body that renders it accessible within the bounds of various regimes of intelligibility—regimes which inevitably function to produce and consolidate certain social forms—the emergence of bodies as instances of sheer materiality marks a point of resistance to such mechanisms, a limit on which they are undone. As such, the appearance of such impossibly material somatic manifestations marks the points at which I move from the analysis of the ways in which historically extant structures of collectivity are elaborated and maintained to the theoretical consideration of avenues along which the affirmation of alternative subjective and communal forms becomes possible. Chapter 1 takes as its starting place Lawrence’s two long essays, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, and argues that despite a paucity of critical attention, they have the virtue of being his most extended and systematic exploration of intersubjective and communal relations—an exploration that is especially important for insisting on the significance of science’s increasingly aggressive encroachment into the processes of life to the understanding of those relations. Though Lawrence’s call for a reexamination of intersubjectivity renders unsurprising his titular choice of psychoanalysis and the notion of the unconscious as ostensible objects of critique, I ask why his elaboration of a “theory of human relativity” (F, 72) takes place in closer proximity to the bodily coordinates of bioscience than the psychic categories proper to psychoanalysis. Tracking Lawrence’s persistent and telling reliance upon a bioscientific tropology—the language of bacteriology looms especially large in this respect—I argue that his polemic against psychoanalysis is ultimately motivated by a more generalized attack on science, and the life sciences in particular, for which psychoanalysis comes to stand in. The elaborately schematic model of affective embodiment he describes as the “true unconscious,” and upon which his understanding of intersubjective and communal relations is founded, more properly takes its contours from an engagement with the medical scientific culture (with which he was all too intimately familiar) surrounding tuberculosis. Having identified this problematic in Lawrence’s text, the remainder of the chapter turns to the discursive field that organizes itself around the tubercular body in order to explore the latter’s function as a hinge between the positivist tendencies of biomedical science and the community-forming thrust of public health activism and social medicine. Considering a range of


literary production (including the popular writing of Donald Stewart and John Ferguson, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and Andre Gide’s L’Immoraliste), alongside the writing of various bacteriologists, immunologists, physicians, and public health advocates, I argue that on the one hand the tubercular body is approached as an organic machine whose functioning is assimilable by the reductionist procedures of positivist science, while on the other it becomes little more than the occasion for the application of hygienic regimes aimed less at the comprehension and treatment of the individual body than at the production and maintenance of a specific form of the social body. Describing a social field within which a variety of competing discourses at once presuppose and seek to fix the significance of the tubercular body, I locate a number of important textual instances in which the tubercular body discloses itself (and the human body more generally) as fundamentally and persistently resistant to meaning. More specifically, I argue that the consistency of the various discursive regimes seeking to grasp the tubercular body is dependent upon the occlusion of the latter as the instantiation of a bodily non-sense, and that in papering over this wound of sense, scientific and social medicine collaborate to produce an organic corporeal model whose form ultimately underwrites a corporatist vision of community. Chapter 2 returns to Lawrence’s work—providing extended readings of the Fantasia, The Plumed Serpent, and a variety of other essays such as “Education of the People,” “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” “Democracy,” and “Aristocracy”—and asks to what extent his articulation of corporeal and communal economies (and their interrelationship) is mediated by the structures made available by the bioscientific culture surrounding the tubercular body and to what degree his texts produce discursive connections unrealized in the medical scientific field narrowly construed. Having identified amidst the bioscientific and medical approaches to tuberculosis a persistently residual vitalism that offers alternatives—ultimately recuperated—to the logic of organic totality governing the tubercular field, I critically reconsider the possibilities made available by Lawrence’s vitalism. Perhaps the most obvious (and often remarked) ramification of his vitalist logic culminates in the processes of social and moral regulation that buttress the thoroughly organic subjective and communal modes familiar from my analysis of the tubercular field—not to mention the longstanding accusations of protofascist tendencies in his work. If this logic finds its most recalcitrant and macropolitical articulation in the late novels, such as The Plumed Serpent, I argue that it does not constitute the entirety of Lawrence’s engagement of bioscientific culture. Most clearly legible in the nonfiction prose is a competing elaboration of the vital, affective body that orients a logic of radical singularity, and

Introduction • 19

as such provides the resources necessary to approach the embodiment of community outside of Lawrence’s sometimes organicist framework. This notion of singularity is especially promising insofar as it enables a critique of organic subjective and communal totalities without retreating into positions based in atomistic particularity and dispersed multiplicity. The chapter concludes by developing Lawrence’s logic of singularity toward a notion of the Multitude, a form of social assemblage uniting a group of individuals (and thereby allowing a degree of universality) without sacrificing the singularity of the individual to a seamless collective whole. Chapter 3 opens the second part of the study with a move from tubercular bodies to nervous bodies, and from Lawrence’s work to that of Virginia Woolf. The chapter begins by critically reconsidering two of Woolf ’s most famous and oft-cited statements, both taken from her essay on “Modern Fiction”: namely, her claim that “for the moderns . . . the point of interest lies very likely in the dark places of psychology,” and her call to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind . . . [and] trace the pattern . . . which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (CE, 2:107). I argue that these statements—more than merely figurative accounts of formal and stylistic principles—deserve to be read rather more literally as indicating Woolf ’s abiding concern with the reductionist preoccupations of turn of the century experimental psychology. If she seeks to explore and represent human psychology, she reminds us that the psychology of the day frequently sought to apply the principles of physical science to the human psyche and thus comprehended phenomenological interactions in terms of determining alterations to the very substance of the body. Examining the neuroscientifically inflected work of Henry Maudsley and William James, the chapter elaborates the corporeal model underlying this psychological mode and considers its extension in the moral psychology of J. A. Hadfield. Turning to Mrs. Dalloway as Woolf ’s most obviously thematic interrogation of psychological discourse, it explores her engagement of these psychological models with an eye to the ways in which their bodily economies are implicated in the production and maintenance of interiorized subjective spaces. Her analysis of the regulatory function of the characterological project played out in the discourses constellated around the nervous body, especially as it is directed toward the maintenance of a patriotic national community, is particularly important in this context. To the extent that Mrs. Dalloway takes up the language and institutions of psychology, primarily as engaged in a project of moral regulation, the chapter concludes by briefly turning to The Waves as a text that much more fully interrogates the somatic modes articulated by nervous discourse. Exploring the implications of psychological theories of habit, Woolf approaches the models of somatic


organization that they represent as intimately linked to both the moral organization of individual selves and the coordination of those selves within the communal space of imperialist nationalism. Chapter 4 returns to The Waves in order to examine the relationship between the habitualized neuroscientific body and the influential models of the social body elaborated in the group or mass psychologies of Gustave Le Bon, William McDougall, and others. Carefully reading The Waves—perhaps the apogee of Woolf ’s narrative innovation and a text whose almost poetic representation of consciousness has frequently earned it a reputation as one of her least political novels—I contend that it presents an extended consideration of the relationship between the human nervous system and structures of communal and national identification. Interrogating the deterministic effects of neuroscientific bodily schemas within which the nervous system is understood as little more than the medium through which the world imprints itself on individual bodies—a medium whose plastic character facilitates the formation and maintenance of discretely differentiated individual subjects—the text figuratively appropriates the language of neuropsychology to articulate an alternate mode of embodiment. The affective body at which Woolf thus arrives provides the basis for a critique of reductionist scientific discourse and the atomistic individualism it bolsters; no longer functioning to separate and differentiate individuals, the nervous system is reconfigured as a unifying web whose lines of force connect individual bodies. This incorporation of the group runs the risk of lapsing into an organic communal architecture, and despite its critical efforts the text remains, in places, dangerously close to fusional structures of imperialist national identification. Finally, though, Woolf ’s notion of affective embodiment marks the limit upon which such identificatory subjective enclosures are undone and prompts the text to pursue a narrative mode that troubles the mythic production of organic collectivity. If Woolf ’s articulation of affective embodiment in The Waves finally functions primarily to mark a limit upon which organic models of national community are undone, the chapter concludes by arguing that a more positive attempt to articulate alternative structures of collectivity was already visible in Mrs. Dalloway. In taking up the psychology of the crowd and the organized group—in terms that share much with William McDougall’s group psychology—the earlier text turns to the unruly contours of the crowd and the unpredictable flows of life through the heavily commodified urban space of London as the bases upon which to think both the disruption of the organizing processes that produce the national group and the production of contestatory subjective and communal forms.

PART 1

Germ Cultures: D. H. Lawrence and the Vital Question of the Tubercular Body


CHAPTER 1

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death”: Lawrence, the Sanatorium, and the Bare Life of the Tubercular Body

e are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein,” begins D. H. Lawrence in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), “for knocking that external axis out of the universe” (72). “The universe,” he continues,

“W

isn’t a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. . . . So that now the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushed through it, like an impaled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multiple universe flies its own complicated course quite free, and hasn’t got any hub, we can hope also to escape. We won’t be pinned down either. We have no one law that governs us. For me there is only one law: I am I. And that isn’t a law, it’s just a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. . . . I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. (72)

Producing his “fantasia” in response to this perceived need for “a theory of human relativity,” the analogy Lawrence draws seems comprehensible enough, even cliché: just as Einstein marks the subversion of the physical laws that were thought to govern the relations between various components of the universe, Lawrence remarks the erosion of the laws that have hitherto governed relations between humans and announces the necessity of developing a new way of understanding such relations. The figural compression with


which the essay opens, however, complicates this schema. As the orderly mechanical metaphor of a spinning wheel is supplanted by the dynamic organic figure of a swarm of bees, the pin which once formed the “axis,” the “hub,” of Newtonian physics simultaneously is refigured; in its new tropological context it becomes the instrument of the bioscientist (or, at least, of a caricatural bioscientist gone bad, the bioscientist as sadistic enfant terrible) who seeks to immobilize, dissect, and taxonomize the organic machines that constitute various forms of life. The precise form of the analogy renders Lawrence’s gesture less easily comprehensible for it is neither the moral philosopher nor the ethicist who is isomorphic with the Newtonian physicist, but the bioscientist, here personified by the entomologist. The demand for a “theory of human relativity,” according to the logic of Lawrence’s trope, comes to be predicated not upon the subversion of longstanding moral, ethical, or political systems of value, but upon an escape from the forces exerted by a bioscience that cruelly seeks to pin us—or more specifically, our bodies—down. If Lawrence opens his text by proclaiming the need to rethink intersubjective relations, this chapter will begin by asking why his project is taken up in relation to scientific discourses which take not the subject but the body as their object. What is at stake in Lawrence’s insistence upon the close proximity between a rethinking of intersubjective relations or structures of collectivity and a rethinking of the body? The trajectory of Lawrence’s psychological essays—Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious1—leads us from the body to a theorization of intersubjectivity and then toward a thinking of community. He ultimately posits a form of community predicated upon a “dynamic contact . . . a unison in spirit . . . [and] in understanding, a pure commingling in one great work . . . [a] mingling of the individual passion into one great purpose” (F, 136) and describes a process by which individuality is surrendered in the becoming “one of a united body” (F, 137). These concerns are obviously by no means peculiar to the psychological essays. The questions of vitality, intersubjectivity, and scientific and technological development are presiding concerns throughout Lawrence’s work, and the problem of community all but dominates the work produced in roughly the last decade of his life. The so-called leadership novels—Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), and The Plumed Serpent (1926)—are key examples in this respect, as are a range of his late essays, including “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” “Democracy,” the review of Trigant Burrows’s The Social Basis of Consciousness, “Education of the People,” and “Aristocracy,” to mention only the most obvious. Despite the relative paucity of critical attention to the psychological essays, however, they have the virtue of being Lawrence’s most

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death” • 25

extended and systematic exploration of intersubjective relations and structures of collectivity, an exploration that additionally insists on addressing the importance of science’s increasingly aggressive encroachment into the processes of life to the understanding of those relations and structures. Setting aside for the moment the form of community toward which Lawrence moves in the psychological essays—a question to which I return in detail in Chapter 2—I will focus initially on the steps by which he arrives at that community. Why does he choose psychoanalysis as his interlocutor, and why does the body become the terrain upon which his polemic takes place? The titular concern of the essays would seem to assign Freud a position in relation to theories of human relativity not dissimilar to that occupied by Einstein vis-à-vis a general theory of relativity. Because Freud’s challenge to turn-of-the-century understandings of the human subject is commonplace, it seems unsurprising that Lawrence seeks to theorize intersubjectivity in relation to psychoanalysis and specifically the notion of the unconscious. As soon as he introduces us to his understanding of the unconscious, however, the Einstein-Freud parallel becomes somewhat more complicated. “The unconscious,” he writes in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, is never an abstraction, never to be abstracted. It is never an ideal entity. It is always concrete. In the very first instance, it is the glinting nucleus of the ovule. And proceeding from this, it is the chain or constellation of nuclei which derive directly from this first spark. And further still it is the great nervecenters of the human body, in which the primal and pristine nuclei still act direct. The nuclei are centers of spontaneous consciousness. It seems as if their bright grain were germ-consciousness, consciousness germinating for ever. If that is a mystery, it is not my fault. Certainly it is not mysticism. It is obvious, demonstrable scientific fact, to be verified under the microscope and within the human psyche, subjectively and objectively, both. (38)

If the interest in the unconscious attested to by the titles of Lawrence’s essays is fairly banal in the context of a well-remarked modernist fascination both with what Virginia Woolf calls the “dark places of psychology” (CE, 2:108) and with the problem of representing those dark places, the form of the Lawrencian unconscious presents something more of a challenge to our expectations. Drawing less on the discourses of psychology or psychoanalysis than on those of cellular biology and physiology, Lawrence theorizes an unconscious that is inextricably linked to the human body in its most minute constituent parts. Given this turn to the body, and to the bioscientific discourses that take it as their object, I want to ask what is enabled by his microscopic focus. And what is at stake in the purportedly scientific narrative of


bodily genesis that takes his reader from the “first spark” of the “glinting nucleus of the ovule” to an elaborately schematic understanding of the affective body as organized around the complicated interrelation of the “great nerve-centers”—an interaction he describes as the “dynamic polarized intercourse of vital vibration . . . an exchange of wireless messages which are never translated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have no need to be” (F, 106)? These questions demand to be taken up on a number of different registers: in relation to the critical reception of Lawrence’s essays, in terms of his model of community, and more generally with an eye to their symptomatic cultural significance. Much of the critical response to Lawrence’s foray into science, the psychological essays occupying exemplary status in that respect, tends to be dismissive of his claim that he is dealing with “demonstrable scientific fact” (38). With a nodding recognition of a generalized reaction against scientific and technological development, Lawrence’s engagement of science is most often understood primarily as a sort of creative borrowing. Scientific discourse becomes a new vocabulary that he pillages as a means of developing his artistic vision, and the interpretation of his appropriations is most often pursued in the service of commenting upon his fiction. Katherine Hayles, for instance, reads the psychological essays as a fairly vague critique of positivist science and a celebration of the only just unfolding “new science.” She notes that “in his own way [Lawrence] was wrestling with some of the same issues that were occupying the attention of contemporary science” and remarks that both his metaphysico-aesthetic system and the new physics “are characterized by a movement from the ‘either-or’ categories of Cartesian ontology to the ‘both-and’ epistemology implied by the Uncertainty Relation” (89). Positioning Lawrence as a somewhat ambivalent fellow traveler to the new scientists, her main critical task becomes an interrogation of the relation of his “‘metaphysic’ . . . to his fiction” (89)—as exemplified primarily by The Rainbow and Women in Love—and she is led to conclude that his “theories are finally mystical rather than scientific” (108). Choosing a different scientific interlocutor for Lawrence, Michael Wutz follows a similar procedure. Locating Lawrence’s texts not in relation to the new science but to the Victorian field of thermodynamics, he elaborates the thermodynamic theory of “the circulation of energy within the system of a hot and a cold body” (89) as the key to understanding the gendered thematics of hot and cold within Lawrence’s fiction. David Ellis, in contrast, seeks to read Lawrence’s recourse to science in the psychological essays not as a key to the fictional texts but as a contribution, of sorts, to scientific discussion. Arguing for the intuitive psychological value of Lawrence’s theory, Ellis


attempts to set the polemic against Freud in context. Lawrence’s obvious distance from Freud’s text and his rather creative use of scientific discourse—a sort of poetic license that Ellis undifferentiatedly locates in Freud’s text as well—becomes little more than a series of “problems of terminology” (89). In addressing these linguistic difficulties, Ellis ultimately argues that they constitute nothing more than “a temporary obstacle to the recognition that what may not be scientifically valid can nevertheless serve as a valuable description of experience” (108). If each of these approaches responds to Lawrence’s call for a theory of human relativity by exploring his understanding of intersubjectivity, they are unable to account for the specificity of his position in the psychological essays. For Hayles and Wutz, science appears to be something that Lawrence has largely absorbed from his cultural context and provides him with a new means of reiterating familiar themes. The polemic against the determinism of positivist science and the mechanism of technological advance is already writ large in both The Rainbow and Women in Love, to take only the two most canonical fictional examples. The Lawrencian unconscious with its nerve centers and vital flows is little more than a synonym for “blood consciousness,” and Lawrence’s understanding of the flows which connect nerve centers in different bodies is simply an abstraction of the interpersonal relations that are such a pervasive thematic concern in the fiction. There is, on this reading, nothing substantially significant about Lawrence’s detailed engagement of scientific discourse. Ellis, on the other hand, ostensibly seeks to forestall this sort of collapse of the essays into the thematics of Lawrence’s fiction but is unable to account for the former as a meaningful encounter with science. While he draws attention to Lawrence’s description of his notion of the unconscious as the “biological psyche,” he does not pursue the implications of this term. Though he does not quite follow James Cowan in dismissing Lawrence’s model of the body as “anatomical nonsense” (20), he concludes that when one considers the rapidly changing state of science at the time, it was more or less inevitable that Lawrence would ultimately be misinformed or mistaken about scientific fact. Arguing that the self-consistency and explanatory power of Lawrence’s system is finally what matters, the relation of his text to either scientific or psychoanalytic interlocutors becomes largely inconsequential for Ellis. In this context I want to explore the consequences of attending to Lawrence’s engagement with scientific culture—and especially biomedical science—as a means neither of elaborating fictional thematics nor of adjudicating the truth-claims of his theory. Without taking Lawrence’s periodic claims to scientific validity too much at face value (it is clear enough from


his frequently sardonic tone that he does not) I want to ask, nonetheless, what it would mean to approach Lawrence’s texts as seriously engaged with the scientific culture of his time. In so doing, I want ultimately to consider the possibility that the intersection of bioscience and discourses of intersubjectivity and community that characterizes Lawrence’s text bespeaks a broader cultural formation. The Unconscious from Freud to Koch: Lawrence’s Bacteriological Turn in Psychoanalytic Theory In order to specify the nature of Lawrence’s intervention in scientific discourse, let me begin with the polemical context that explicitly frames both of the essays. Given that psychoanalysis is the most obvious target of Lawrence’s polemic, I want briefly to examine his relationship to Freud. If the object of Lawrence’s critique is the “new doctrine” of psychoanalysis—a doctrine that he contends “has been subtly and insidiously suggested to us, gradually inoculated into us” (F, 7)—the substance of his criticism, in its broadest strokes, would seem to be legible in his contention that “Freud is with the scientists” (67), and that “psychoanalysis [is] the advance-guard of science” (15). Warning that “psychoanalysts . . . have crept in among us as healers and physicians; growing bolder, they have asserted their authority as scientists” (7), Lawrence makes the exasperated claim that “science is wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort of complex mechanism made up of numerous little machines working automatically in a rather unsatisfactory relation to one another. The body is the total machine; the various organs are the included machines; and the whole thing, given a start at birth, or at conception, trundles on by itself ” (95). In short, the Freud against whom Lawrence sets himself occupies the status of exemplary scientist, and the science he represents is characterized primarily by its deterministic and reductionist mode. “The scientist,” Lawrence asserts, “wants to discover a cause for everything” (67), and in this case, the search for causes manifests itself in the desire to reduce the body to an ever more minutely differentiated system of physical processes—a reduction which renders the human body little more than an automaton. “To my mind,” states Lawrence, there is a great field of science which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their cause-and-effect relationship. I have

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death” • 29 nothing to say against our science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life. (62)

Given this emphasis on the reductionism of science, Lawrence’s choice of Freud as avatar would seem to suggest that his objections to psychoanalysis can be located in relation to Freud’s contentious claims to scientific status, and particularly in those aspects of Freudian theory which have regularly been accused of biological determinism. One might think, in this context, of the opening words of the prepsychoanalytic Project for a Scientific Psychology, where Freud avows his intention to “furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles” (295). Though Freud famously disavows this early neurology-influenced work, its traces are legible throughout the psychoanalytic corpus. Rather than a considered response to the specifics of Freud’s work, however, Lawrence’s text seems to take its trajectory from a more general perception of psychoanalysis as an exemplar of reductionist science, and moreover as a particularly galling example insofar as the object of its reduction is precisely the instinctual realm.2 The appropriateness of Freud as embodiment of positivist science, that is, depends less on Freud’s actual position than on the ways in which his name functions as a cultural signifier. Given the plethora of examples of positivist science at whom Lawrence might have directed his polemic, however, the assimilation of Freud to “science” remains somewhat surprising, and is not well supported on the basis of the latter’s text. The trace of scientific discourse within psychoanalytic theory notwithstanding, Freud’s claims of scientificity (as rendered by cognates of the German Wissenschaft) have more to do with a drive to systematicity than with disciplinary allegiances.3 Without entering a detailed consideration of the vexed status of science within psychoanalytic discourse, one would need minimally to remark that, at least at the level of declared intention, the institution of psychoanalysis as a “science” is coextensive with a rejection of hard science (e.g., physiology and neurology) as adequate to the task of psychological research.4 Even when Freud appears closest to science—as in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” where he argues that “the source [Quelle] of an instinct is . . . the somatic process which occurs in an organ or part of the body” and admits that we “do not know whether this process is invariably of a chemical nature or whether it may also correspond to the release of other, e.g., mechanical forces” (119)—he is at pains to remark a distance. While willing to grant science its


provenance and posit a determinative somatic source of the instincts when he writes that the “study of the sources of the instincts lies outside the scope of psychology” and that the “instincts are wholly determined by their origin in a somatic source,” these statements are quickly qualified by the claim that “an exact knowledge of the sources of an instinct is not invariably necessary for purposes of psychological investigation” (119–20). Freud seeks, that is, a systematic approach to the psychic for which brute somatic processes are not utterly irrelevant but equally not logically necessary preconditions. Leaving the somatic largely to one side, Freud is concerned instead with the stimulus produced by the body insofar as it is “represented in mental life by an instinct” (119). This aspect of Freud’s project, with its emphasis on processes of representation, opens on to a competing movement within Lawrence’s critique. Despite his characterization of Freud as an example of positivist science, it is not the determination of the mental by the somatic against which Lawrence primarily struggles. Rather than attacking the reduction of the mental to the cerebral, his understanding of the mind-brain relationship situates the brain in instrumentalist terms, and somewhat surprisingly places the mind within a second-order instrumentality. “The brain is,” he contends, the terminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness. It transmutes what is a creative flux into a fixed cypher. It prints off, like a telegraph instrument, the glyphs and graphic representations which we call percepts, concepts, ideas. It produces a new reality—the ideal. The idea is another static entity, another unit of the mechanical-active and materio-static universe. . . . Ideas are the dry, unliving, insentient plumage which intervenes between us and the circumambient universe, forming at once an insulator and an instrument for the subduing of the universe. The mind is the instrument of instruments; it is not a creative reality. (F, 41–42)

In what seems to be a stark opposition to his excoriation of positivist physicalism, Lawrence here levels the charge of idealism. Instead of the reduction of the body to a series of mechanical processes (and by extension the comprehension of the mind in terms of corporeal mechanics), the problem has become the subsumption of something called “dynamic consciousness”—a form of consciousness that, as we will see, Lawrence seeks to present in radically corporeal terms—under the abstract representational categories of the mind. Translating these concerns into explicitly psychoanalytic terms, he asks whether “a repression [is] a repressed passional impulse, or is it an idea which we suppress and refuse to put into practice—nay, which we even refuse to own at all, a disowned, outlawed idea, which exists rebelliously outside the


pale?” (13); Lawrence thereby raises the possibility that the repressed content of the Freudian unconscious is primarily ideational. Psychoanalysis is thus located at the crossroads of two seemingly opposed Lawrencian concerns. On the one hand, Freud functions as the embodiment of a positivist scientific enterprise that Lawrence criticizes for its materialist attempt to explain the body on the basis of mechanical processes. And on the other, psychoanalysis is rendered an idealist project that comprehends the “passional impulse[s]” of “dynamic consciousness” through the conceptual mediation of the mind. This tension becomes less contradictory, however, with closer scrutiny of Lawrence’s notion of idealism. Defining the latter as “the motivizing of the great affective sources by means of ideas mentally derived” (14), he concludes that “an ideal established in control of the passional soul is no more and no less than a supreme machine-principle. And a machine, as we know, is the active unit of the material world. Thus we see how it is that in the end pure idealism is identical with pure materialism, and the most ideal peoples are the most completely material. Ideal and material are identical” (14). At least in relation to what he here calls the “affective soul” or the “passional soul,” the difficulties posed by both the materialist and idealist aspects he attributes to psychoanalysis are the same.5 Given Lawrence’s desire to posit a form of “dynamic consciousness” that is characterized by its immediate vitality, and as a source of spontaneous creativity, both idealist and materialist impulses function as forces of determinism and automatization. The physicalist reduction of the body submits the latter to principles of mechanical causation, simultaneously rendering it inaccessible as a source of undetermined, spontaneous creativity and making it available to the conceptual categories of cognition. Other idealist modes—other, that is, than the materialist mode which, in this light, reveals itself to be idealist insofar as it functions positivistically to render the body accessible to thought—equally operate as forces of determining automatization in refusing the immediacy of vitally corporeal “dynamic consciousness.” Firmly representational, idealism can only recognize the “creative flux” of the biological psyche in the mediated forms of “percept, concept, and idea,” and this process of representational mediation robs the affective soul of its spontaneous vitality. The elucidation of this janus-faced conjunction of idealism and materialism is one of the cardinal moves in Lawrence’s argument. To be somewhat schematic for a moment, Lawrence’s engagement with psychoanalysis, or with the figure of a Freud who bears only a tenuous relationship to the body of writing that inaugurates psychoanalytic theory, produces a stark series of conceptual oppositions. Reducing the standard opposition between idealism and materialism, Lawrence’s conceptual schema aligns scientificity, mechanism,


automatism, representationalism, and determinism in opposition to valorized terms like life, vitality, spontaneity, immediacy, and freedom. At the crux of this series of oppositions lies the body. For if Lawrence pits himself against “science” (as the principle of materioidealism), it is in order to contest the status of the body and the values or potentialities which are ascribed to, or allowed it. Working to produce a space in which “life” can escape the mechanistically reductive grasp of “theory” or “science,” Lawrence articulates his notion of the unconscious. If the “vicious” Freudian unconscious is the emblem of a scientific rationality that denies such a space insofar as it is constituted merely by the repressed ideational content of the mind, Lawrence grounds his contestatory model of the unconscious in a form of embodiment accessible neither to materialist reduction nor idealist representation. Defined in opposition to a form of experience that is direct, unmediated, and spontaneous, the automatism that Lawrence contests stands in stark opposition to the force of “creative life” (43). It is this force to which Lawrence devotes his attention, and the “true unconscious” is the very principle of that life in all its spontaneity. I will, at this stage, defer until the next chapter a full-scale analysis of Lawrence’s model of the unconscious in its own right. Pausing at the point of description, I return instead to the questions with which I opened: what is at stake in Lawrence’s engagement with the discourses of science? and what are we to make of his choice of Freud as exemplary scientist? Though there are clearly specific reasons for Lawrence’s polemic against psychoanalysis, given the extremely generalized notion of science with which Freud’s name is freighted I would suggest that when one considers the broad contours of Lawrence’s argument, Freud is ill-suited as an interlocutor. If, then, the response to my second question—what are we to make of Freud’s status as exemplary scientist?—is ultimately “very little,” we are returned to the stakes of Lawrence’s polemics against science in general. Are they a sort of creative borrowing from the language of science? Are they an unfocused attack on rapidly expanding scientific enterprises of various sorts? Are they simply a pretext for the elaboration of his notion of embodied consciousness—a notion which stands in relation to, but has little serious interest in, competing understandings of either consciousness or the body? While all of these possibilities are at least minimally suggestive, I want to make the stronger claim that Lawrence’s notion of embodied consciousness and the form of community that he predicates upon it are legible as an engagement with a specific field of scientific discourse with which he was intimately familiar, though it makes only fleeting appearances on the margins of the psychological essays. Given that “idealism” (whether in its standard or “materialist”


guise) comes to be the principal charge leveled by Lawrence against the scientists, it is notable that this charge is itself repeatedly mediated by specific bioscientific tropes. We have already noted that Lawrence describes the “doctrine of psychoanalysis” as having been “subtly and insidiously suggested to us, gradually inoculated into us” (7, my emphasis). In this light, his statement that “Psychoanalysts . . . have crept among us as healers and physicians; growing bolder, they have asserted their authority as scientists” (7) takes on vaguely bacteriological tones (if the tones of a bacteriology gone wrong), whereby a purportedly therapeutic agent is introduced to the system only to fester and grow, finally making its reappearance as an ominous pathogen. More than merely a throw-away jab at the psychoanalyst-cum-germ, this bacteriological turn of thought, which graces the opening pages of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, takes on an expanded significance in the Fantasia as it both encompasses Lawrence’s criticism of idealism in general and relates to a specific branch of the bacteriological enterprise. “To tell the truth,” Lawrence insists in the Fantasia, “ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever been injected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for. . . . And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call the Ideal” (115). Pursuing this thought, he is led to ask, “By what right . . . are we going to inject into him [the precious child] our own disease-germs of ideas and infallible motive? By the right of the diseased, who want to infect everybody” (116). And finally, having laid out this dire picture of widespread infection, Lawrence concludes on an exhortatory note, reassuring his reader that: We still have in us the power to discriminate between our own idealism, our own self-conscious will, and that other reality, our own true spontaneous self. Certainly we are so overloaded and diseased with ideas that we can’t get well in a minute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against the disease, once we recognize it. The disease of love, the disease of “spirit”, the disease of niceness and benevolence and feeling good on our own behalf and good on somebody else’s behalf. . . . We can retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain there alone like lepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease of self-conscious idealism. (118)

Borrowing a page from a flourishing genre of medical self-help and advice literature, Lawrence recasts his battle against idealism in the language of the public health crusade against tuberculosis. Taking up the rhetorical form made available by antituberculist literature, Lawrence draws upon its model of selfpolicing behavior in his campaign against idealism. In the space of roughly six pages that appear midway through Fantasia, the critique of idealism (and of


science as an exemplary instance of idealism), which has been developed throughout the entirety of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and the first half of the Fantasia, is abruptly refigured in terms of the discourses of bacteriology and social medicine. We are not only introduced to the germ theory of idealism, but are asked more specifically to understand idealism as “this ghastly white disease.” Indeed, when Lawrence turns his attention to the consequences of the derangement of dynamic consciousness, and to the type of derangement preeminent in his society with its perverse over-emphasis of the spiritual and the ideal, he remarks a resulting “tendency now towards phthisis” (93). “Weak-chested, round-shouldered,” he laments, “we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves” (93). In so doing, he points to both an actual prevalence of tuberculosis and the preponderance of a body type that is absolutely consonant with the image of the tubercular diathesis, or habitus phthisicus, a physical type that was thought to reveal, if not the presence of the disease, then at least a hereditary predisposition toward it.6 It is notable in this context that Lawrence’s model of the body, with its system of nerve centers that constitute dynamic consciousness, places a heavy emphasis on the importance of the solar plexus. Though this is perhaps unsurprising in light of his promotion of visceral “blood consciousness,” it resonates more specifically with the period’s language of tuberculosis. If the prominent features of the tubercular diathesis included a shallow chest and protruding shoulder blades (bodily features believed to indicate reduced cardiopulmonary efficiency) individuals exhibiting opposite physical traits were thought unlikely to be victims of tuberculosis; an 1887 commentator in the prestigious periodical Science, for example, suggests that an individual “with large breast, and its accompanying small lungs, an enlarged and powerful heart, well-developed abdominal viscera, and a hearty appetite, rarely, if ever, becomes consumptive” (Ott, 11). Given this emphasis on the importance of “well-developed abdominal viscera,” it is difficult not to hear in the Lawrencian valorization of the solar plexus a response to prevailing notions of the tubercular body. This, of course, begs the question of what work is done by Lawrence’s refiguration of his much-hated idealism in terms of tuberculosis, the infamous white plague. The most immediately available form of explanation is perhaps Lawrence’s biography. Famously tubercular, Lawrence was also spectacularly reticent about the disease that eventually killed him. Suffering from chronic respiratory ailments since early childhood, he would have been acutely aware of the specter of pulmonary tuberculosis. At a time when the disease was still largely understood in hereditary or constitutional terms, and when the diagnostic capacity of clinical medicine prevented the accurate differentiation of various respiratory disorders (this undifferentiated diagnosis is


evident in the popular designation of tuberculars as “lungers”), the appearance of lung disease in early childhood would have at the very least raised suspicion of a tubercular predisposition (or diathesis), if not of the presence of the disease itself.7 Although, as Wayne Templeton suggests, Lawrence “rarely referred to [the disease], and then . . . only in a decidedly abstruse way” (184–85), it is relatively clear that he considered himself to be suffering from tuberculosis from as early as 1911. Templeton canvasses a variety of biographic sources in support of this date, and Brenda Maddox confirms it, usefully observing along the way that Lawrence’s response to this perception included an obsessive interest in the widespread self-help literature surrounding the disease. “If the diagnosis was not yet consumption,” she writes, “Lawrence from January 1912 onward lived his life exactly as if it were. Short of consigning himself to a sanatorium, he followed all the instructions laid down in popular books such as Advice for Consumptives on how to behave. He sought the sun, the fresh air of sea or mountains; he stuffed himself with butter, eggs, and milk; and as far as he could, he avoided cities” (87–88). If this brief foray into biography establishes that Lawrence was familiar both with tuberculosis and the medical scientific discourses surrounding it (at least as popularized in advice literature that explains the disease and describes therapeutic measures to the lay public), and that his general reticence concerning the disease might account for the fleetingness of its appearance in the psychology essays, it does not provide substantial resources for assessing the significance of these manifestations. Rather than pursuing the logic of Jeffrey Meyers’ claim that “Lawrence’s life and character were strongly influenced by the progress of his disease” (325) to the conclusion that so profound an influence would inevitably make itself felt in his writings, I will make a stronger claim for the figurative transmutation of this particularly pervasive aspect of Lawrence’s personal experience. More than merely fortuitous eruptions of the experiential, Lawrence’s bacteriological metaphorics indicate a particularly significant interlocutor for the essays. Whether or not Lawrence actively conceived the essays as (at least in part) a response to the bioscientific discourses surrounding tuberculosis, or to the sort of bioscience of which the discourses surrounding tuberculosis provide a particularly forceful example, I shall argue that tuberculosis provides a powerful context within which to consider the stakes of Lawrence’s work in the psychological essays—especially as it concerns the relation of the body to community. This is not to say, however, that the discourses surrounding tuberculosis constitute the necessary background or context of Lawrence’s project—the sociological key to the interpretation of his texts. Rather, both tubercular discourse and Lawrence’s work share a cultural space in which an


interest in the body, its susceptibility to scientific explanation, and various projects of community formation collide or intersect. This space is far from rarified, and my decision to consider Lawrence’s elaboration of these questions in relation to the specific set of discourses associated with tuberculosis derives from the exemplary status of the latter. On an individual level, the range of social forces circulating around tuberculosis clearly held a particularly strong affective charge for Lawrence, and therefore go some distance in explaining the persistent eruption of bioscientific tropes in a text that, at the level of argument, takes an extremely generalized and undifferentiated notion of science as its object. In more broadly cultural terms, it would be equally hard to underestimate the impact of tuberculosis and the discourses pertaining to its comprehension and treatment. Enjoying a prominent cultural history and (despite expectations to the contrary generated by the much-touted bacteriological advances of the closing decades of the nineteenth century) continually impressive effects on mortality rates, tuberculosis remained an unavoidable landmark on the cultural horizon well into the twentieth century.8 Discussing the cultural and political impact of disease, Roy Porter claims that until the middle of the twentieth century tuberculosis occupied a singular place as “the greatest catastrophe, the greatest catalyst of political perturbation in the Western World” (“The Case of Consumption,” 179), citing the fact that it “became for a couple of centuries the greatest single adult killer on both sides of the Atlantic” (180), and that it “was still exceedingly virulent in the first decades of the present century, carrying off some 40,000 victims a year in Britain” (181). Or, as Arthur Ransome makes the case on a more emotive register in the opening essay of his 1915 Campaign Against Consumption: There is no need for me to give you a medical description of this fell disease. It is so common, that I venture to say that there is scarcely one amongst my hearers who has not had some one near and dear to him, a relative or a friend, affected by it. Most of you, then, know something of it, from its first insidious onset to its final painful ending—the loss of strength, the short hacking cough, the want of breath, the wasting of the flesh, the deceitful lulls in the course of the complaint, then the fever, the sweating, the distressing paroxysms of coughing and spitting, and finally, the last scene of all, in which the overburdened spirit lays aside its worn-out garment of flesh. (1)

Tuberculosis, in short, functions as a crucial cultural relay, traversed by an impressive range of social forces and discourses. In medical scientific terms alone, tuberculosis marks the intersection in the early twentieth century of a wide spectrum of residual and emergent understandings of the body and its


relation to society, a spectrum that ranges from the persistence of the stereotypical romantic consumptive to the colonies of germs made visible by the bacteriologist’s microscope, from the politically variable hereditarianism of the eugenicist to the environmental emphasis of social medicine. More significant still though, is the fact that the near-ubiquity of tuberculosis (however understood) as an element of personal experience further complicates this complex intersection of medical scientific discourses. More than merely the object of contestation between various scientific approaches, tuberculosis marks a cultural space that was virtually unavoidable, a space in which fluid and conflicted scientific models are engaged by, and engage, popular notions of the body and its relations to community. The Tubercular Body, Everywhere and Nowhere As I have suggested, the sheer pervasiveness of tuberculosis as a social fact renders the cultural space occupied by the disease particularly expansive, a space that is traversed by a formidable range of social and political forces. In medical scientific terms alone, it is a privileged site of what is certainly among the period’s most prestigious areas of bioscientific research. The bacteriological enterprise of the likes of Pasteur and Koch provided especially compelling examples of a technologically enhanced, positivist bioscience whose therapeutic promise was revolutionary. Simultaneously, tuberculosis proved to be a key locus for the burgeoning of social medicine and the concern for public health, a context in which the microscopic niceties of the tubercular body took a back seat to questions of social reform along hygienic lines. As a point of convergence between bioscientific procedures that take the body’s most minute constitutive components as their object and the communal focus of social medicine, the tubercular body, thus, becomes an unusually powerful example of the interanimation of modes of embodiment and forms of community—an example whose relevance to Lawrence’s concerns in the psychological essays should be clear. It is with an eye to examining this interanimation that I turn to the question of how the tubercular body was understood by, and represented in, the literary and medical scientific writings of the early twentieth century. Because Lawrence does not represent the tubercular body as such in his writing, I will focus for the remainder of this chapter on the relationship between a range of medical scientific texts and a number of both popular and high literary texts for which the representation of tuberculosis is an explicit concern. Having explored this discursive formation, I will return in the next chapter to the question of its implications for Lawrence’s project.


If the cultural space marked by tuberculosis has a particular power in relation to the understanding of embodiment and community in the period, it is a power that is bound up with the historical evanescence of the tubercular body around which that space organizes itself. What I refer to as the “tubercular body,” that is, did not exist at the turn of the century in any fixed or definitive form. Katherine Ott is emphatic on this point in her compelling history of tuberculosis.9 “There is neither a core ‘tuberculosis,’” she writes, “constant over time, nor a smooth conceptual trajectory leading from the lungs of ancient Greeks, to the AIDS ward of a modern hospital. What we call ‘tuberculosis’ was not the same disease in 1850 that it was in 1900 or even 1950” (1).10 Writing in a more circumscribed historical context, she insists that in the late nineteenth century “there were nearly as many consumptions as there were patients” (9), an observation that, when paired with the contemporaneous commonplace that “everyone is sometime or another a little bit consumptive” (Ott, 1),11 leaves one with a sense that tuberculosis is at once everywhere and nowhere, that the tubercular body has very specific forms and almost any form at all. This insistence not only on the fluidity of the meanings of disease and the experience of illness over time but also on the multiplicity of such meanings and experiences within a given historical moment is particularly telling when we turn our attention to the first decades of the twentieth century, for in some sense that historical moment is marked simultaneously by diachronic diversity and synchronic multiplicity. Indeed, it is precisely this compression that, for my purposes, constitutes the discursive space of the tubercular body. With the ascendancy of the germ theory of disease (punctuated by Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus, or mycobacterium tuberculosis, in 1882), and the ensuing development of bacteriology and scientific medicine more generally, there is a shift in the understanding of the disease at the turn of the century away from that of consumption as a constitutional disorder (which is to say a disease that is at once physical and spiritual) and toward tuberculosis as a disease with a particular bacterial aetiology. Despite the shift in medical-scientific paradigms, the first decades of the twentieth century are marked by the persistence of the nineteenth-century model of the disease within the emergent bacteriological framework. As Sander Gilman suggests in his discussion of the social significance of tuberculosis as it relates to notions of race at the turn of the century: Two concepts that should have vanished with Robert Koch’s discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus nonetheless powerfully persist in the medical literature of the age. . . . [Assumptions regarding the predispositional and constitutional nature of the disease] would seem dispensable once the etiology of tuberculosis is established, but they stay in the discourse of tuberculosis after Koch,

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death” • 39 where they had been for centuries before him. . . . [W]hile the new bacteriology did restructure the image of the disease and of the patient, older models of disease were also adapted within the new model, continuing pre-Kochian notions. (171)

As a result, the “tubercular body” both marks the space within which these competing discourses intersect and collide, and functions as the object that they attempt to grasp in a variety of ways. It acts as a hinge between emergent and residual discourses which variously address the relationship between the body and the formation or maintenance of communal structures. If Ott and Gilman (among others) are at pains to remark the historical complexity of the disease we now know as tuberculosis, their observations also raise important theoretical questions. In particular, what is the status of the tubercular body in the midst of these shifting paradigms and conceptual systems? Given that the “tubercular body” occupies a place within a variety of codes that would attempt to fix its significance in particular ways, a number of questions become pertinent: What are the ideological functions of different attempts to capture the “tubercular body”? How is the tubercular sociosymbolic field reorganized by the various discursive regimes which attempt to fix its meaning? To what extent, and in what ways, do tubercular bodies escape capture by these different regimes of significance? And if the “tubercular body” designates what José Gil calls an “indeterminate zone” of culture, what are the codes that it straddles, and what lines of semiotically impossible energy or force does it make manifest? In order to describe the contours of the sociosymbolic field that organizes itself around tuberculosis at the turn of the century, and thereby preliminarily to map the indeterminate significatory zone to which the “tubercular body” corresponds, I will turn to two examples of the period’s literary production that take tuberculosis as a thematic concern: John Ferguson’s Thyrea: A Sonnet Sequence from a Sanatorium (1912), and Donald Stewart’s Sanatorium: A Novel (1930). Though neither of these texts enjoyed any significant literary or popular reputation, their representation of tuberculosis and its treatment interestingly compresses a range of contemporaneous discourse—literary, popular, and medical-scientific—concerning the disease. To begin with Thyrea, Ferguson himself (though less than poetically inspiring) seems acutely aware of the sanatorium as precisely a sort of liminal space, insofar as his text repeatedly locates the sanatorium at a number of significant sociocultural interstices. The opening two sonnets of the sequence (see Appendix I), with their prayerful pleas for the strength to endure “The everlasting sameness of the days, / The never-ending sadness of the nights, /


The weariness each rising hope that blights, / The fevered restlessness that slowly slays” (1.1–4), harken back to nineteenth-century notions of the disease and invoke the cult of the good death.12 The poems present their readers with the image of the slowly wasting consumptive submitted to a purifying purgation of the flesh that renders him progressively closer to his spiritual essence and leaves him anticipating the moment at which that purification will finally and completely absolve him of his fleshly dross. Yet, by the third sonnet of the sequence the somewhat anachronistic framing of tuberculosis as an essentially spiritual matter is abruptly displaced by the introduction of the vocabulary of social medicine’s environmental focus. We here find ourselves removed from the “sounding deeps and starry heights” (1.6) of divinity and resituated in the resolutely material context of “this grim dwelling, bare, and clean, and cold” (3.3). Narrating a case history in iambic pentameter, the poem begins with the arrival at the sanatorium of a patient who “caught a chill in Leicester” and “came here with his little store of gold” (3.1–2). Relentless in its material emphasis, the text first gives voice to the antituberculist focus on the causative role of poor hygienic conditions associated with industrial urban existence when it identifies the patient as a product of “Leicester’s city drear” (3.5); it then proceeds to articulate the gross bodily effects of the disease in the description of a hemorrhagic “flood” of “warm crimson” that “down his garment rolled” (3.6–7); and concludes with an indictment of the economic opportunism of the sanatorium movement, as the patient leaves not because cured, but “Because his little store of gold was done” (3.10)—“My God!” the speaker exclaims (if a bit naively), “I knew not gold and life were one” (3.11). The transcendent tone of the first two poems threatens to resurface in the third sonnet’s representation of the sanatorium as the threshold across which “life joins hands with death, and hope with fear” (3.4), but the fourth sonnet continues its predecessor’s emphasis on the materiality of the disease as it resituates the question of life and death. In this poem we are introduced to the sanatorium ward and the scientific medical model that functions there. Representing the nocturnal death of one of the poet’s compatriots, the text presents us with the strictly partitioned ward, in which each patient is “screened from [the] sight” (4.5) of the others, and through which the doctor makes his rounds, “sounding” (4.12) the patients in turn—the latter a reference to stethoscopic auscultation, the first major clinical advance in the systematic diagnosis of tuberculosis.13 Though these allusions to the clinical practice of the sanatorium staff seem a minor aspect of a poem that is at least initially preoccupied with the representation of the ominous approach of “Death,” the metaphysical tones of the octave are predictably reversed in the sestet.


The poem opens with the recollection that “There was a shuffling of strange feet last night / Along the naked corridor of stone; / Dull creakings, and much talk in undertone / In the next room to mine; [where] Death’s chill and blight / Lay on my brother” (4.1–5); the poem thus lends to the banal observation of movement on the ward, the sense that the “strange feet” whose “shuffling” the speaker hears belong as much to an approaching “Death” as to members of the sanatorium staff. And though the turn from octave to sestet consists of the overwrought outburst: “And I all wakeful in my chamber lone, / Quailed in the deathful dark, and longed for light. / O God! that some should stumble by the way—” (4.7–9), the final five lines recontextualize the preceding meditation on the approach of death. “They do not like us to die here, we know,” the speaker resumes, “They talk about the credit of the place— / The Doctor, when he sounded me today, / Said never a word about last night, and lo / Her customed smile lights up the Nurse’s face” (4.10–14). Less a metaphysical problem than the extreme manifestation of the disease as material fact, death becomes, on this account, merely a distasteful factor in the managerial calculations of the superintending physician, and the theologically freighted “light” for which the speaker “longs” in the poem’s seventh line is refigured as a superficial feature of the nurse’s hypocritically reassuring face. Situating both the spatial organization of the sanatorium and the scientific clinical techniques of the sanatorialist within a disciplinary economy, the sonnet’s emphasis once again falls on the indictment of a bankrupt system of social management whose concerns ultimately lie less with the treatment of its patients than with the maintenance of its institutional authority. This focus on social control is absolutely consonant with the position of prominent sanatorialists. Arthur Latham, for instance, in his 1903 Prize Essay on the Erection of “The King Edward VII Sanatorium” for Consumption, rationalizes his detailed architectural plans largely in terms of the control afforded by segregation (including the separation of the sexes, patients of different social classes, and patients in differing stages of illness),14 a principle that finds its most sweeping formulation in his statement that “sanatorium treatment is based upon a careful regulation of a patient’s life in all its hygienic and medical details. . . . In order to direct a sanatorium efficiently, the physician must have absolute power; he must be an autocrat, and his word must be law” (58–59). Whereas sanatorialists like Latham justify this autocracy on medical grounds, Ferguson’s text places it in a less flattering light by connecting it to the doctor’s overriding concern for “the credit of the place.” Though the management of death was always part of the sanatorium treatment, and was frequently explained in terms of patient morale and the


avoidance of unnecessary excitation, as the open-air cure was increasingly challenged by scientific medicine this managerial role came overtly to serve a statistical function. Seeking to protect the credibility of their therapeutic model, many sanatorialists sought to bolster the perception by both their patients and the population at large of the efficacy of the open-air cure—a drive which led to the occlusion of examples of unsuccessful treatment and at its extreme to the routine discharge of “moribund patients” as a means of avoiding the association of their imminent deaths with the sanatorium. Insofar as Ferguson’s sequence represents an experience of tuberculosis in the early decades of the twentieth century, that experience is mediated by a number of different cultural paradigms and founded upon an understanding of the tubercular body that is consequently highly variable. If the very production of the poems invokes (and unwittingly gainsays) the persistent romantic type of the consumptive genius whose tubercular body becomes the basis of heightened creative capacity, the first, second, and fifth sonnets that frame the sequence recall another aspect of the nineteenth-century configuration of the disease. In their prayerful supplications and theological tones, they bespeak an approach to the tubercular body notable for its emphasis on the progressive disappearance of the latter, at once remarking the grossest material aspect of the disease—the literal consumption or wasting of the body—and sublimating that materiality into a spiritual teleology. Adjacent to, and in some measure competing with, these residual tubercular formations are the emergent approaches to the tubercular body represented in the third and fourth sonnets and exemplified by social and scientific medicine. In the case of the former, the body as such is rendered relatively inconsequential as it is comprehended, on the one hand, as an index of environmental conditions and, on the other, as the object of disciplinary control. In contrast, the tubercular body which becomes the object of medical science is grasped precisely at the level of its material being. It is reduced to an organic mechanism to be “sounded,” systematically penetrated by technologically mediated practices aimed less at the body as a whole than at a series of disarticulated and quantifiable interior states. The only major element of tuberculosis discourse that does not find itself represented in the brief sequence is eugenic hereditarianism. In its dispersion of the tubercular body across a range of discursive regimes, Ferguson’s representational project is in no way unique. Donald Stewart’s Sanatorium presents an anatomy of tuberculosis whose general contours are remarkably similar. Narrating its protagonist, Clive’s, arrival and subsequent life at Whitcombe sanatorium, the novel provides a more extensive articulation of many of the features of Ferguson’s account. Rudimentary


in its plotting, the novel proceeds more or less chronologically from the point of Clive’s discovery of his illness through the years of his stay at “the san.” Itself an instantiation of one of its character’s desire to write a book that “would be different from most of the others, . . . a glorified clinical history of an illness” (233), Sanatorium is notable for its detailed and frequently technical account of tuberculosis. If the aspiring novelist Baxter reacts to his perception that “disease is almost taboo in literature” as anything other than a “subsidiary element” (234), and imagines a text in which tuberculosis itself becomes the main character, “each chapter . . . start[ing] with a temperature reading and a pulse rate or a chest diagram, something to give the keynote of the chapter” (233–34), the impulse would seem to be one that Stewart shares. As a result, the relative paucity of attention to the “human relationships and psychological changes” that Baxter disparagingly identifies as the “principal subject” (234) of conventional literature finds some compensation in the novel’s obsession with the medical details that form the substance of the clinical history, a genre whose virtues Baxter’s devoted reading of The Lancet leads him to extol as “a genuine form of literature” (232). Ventriloquizing the full range of tuberculosis discourse in turn, the novel unsurprisingly includes residual nineteenth-century notions of the disease alongside those native to the early twentieth century. The persistent type of the romantic consumptive once again makes its appearance, predictably embodied by the protonovelist, Baxter. “If you treat it carefully,” he contends, “sickness can give you a new character. It can give you a new viewpoint, a philosophy of living—especially tuberculosis. It’s most conducive to high thinking. You can live for years with it and get endless sympathy and encouragement for the development of your philosophy. I suppose that’s why the best people choose it—Chopin, Tchekov and Gissing and Katherine Mansfield. It’s so aesthetic and imaginative” (170–71). In addition to this gesture to the aesthetic potential of tuberculosis, Sanatorium shares much with Ferguson’s sonnets in offering its readers an introduction to, and critique of, the practices of the sanatorialists. In his focus on the management of death, and its conjunction with concerns for the maintenance of institutional authority, Stewart presents a scene that is remarkably similar to that of Ferguson’s fourth sonnet. In a case where one of the patients “had died suddenly and created a great deal of excitement,” Clive informs us that, returning from breakfast, he finds that the staff “had arranged a passage of screens between the bed and the door so that they could get the stretcher out unseen” (129). And if there is any doubt regarding the motivation for this disappearing act, the text has already prepared its readers for this scene with Clive’s preceding comment that “the bed cases were like the deaths which occurred from


time to time, and which made a reluctant appearance on the reports. The Old Man [the superintendent] detested death on the premises, and usually managed a transfer to a hospital for the moribund patient. A death at Whitcombe was a form of personal affront” (79). While the patients’ denomination of the sanatorium superintendent as “the Old Man” bespeaks the absolute authority of the paternal autocrat much valued by the sanatorialists, the text remains unwilling to accept a purely medical account of that valorization. Moving through the usual contenders in debates over tuberculosis, the novel opens, for instance, with a nod to the eugenicist’s notion of the disease as based in an inherited constitutional predisposition. Having arrived at the san, Clive remembers the moment of his diagnosis and imagines that “it was as if he had been prepared years beforehand for this August evening in the doctor’s consulting-room. It was as if his whole life had been a preparation, a leading up to this encounter. . . . That being so,” he asks, “how could one regard the doctor’s verdict but as the most natural and expected thing that could have happened?” (5). This hereditarian emphasis on the inevitability and naturalness of disease is quickly succeeded by its hygienicist opposite, and we are confronted with the environmental and educational emphases of social medicine as Clive is made to reflect that: “They say that the atmosphere [at the san] is very much like that of a school. . . . A school where, as one might say, good health is the only subject taught” (10). Reflecting the sanatorialist move toward a self-policing internalization of a regimentedly hygienic lifestyle (what Sir Robert Philip refers to as the “supreme value . . . [of ] the incessant promulgation of the principles of healthy living—the practical re-creation of the ordinary dwelling on physiological (sanatorium) lines” [3]), Baxter comments that “there’s only one treatment for tuberculosis—and that isn’t a treatment really. There are no treatments and no cures. But there’s one thing which can be a tremendous help, and that’s discipline” (S, 97). The text is equally interested in the bodily materiality of tuberculosis, an emphasis that is manifest in its representation of the therapeutic models to which the characters are subject. On the one hand, Clive’s illness is grasped through the model of the rest cure with which the sanatorium is perhaps most closely associated. Predicated upon a vitalistic model of the body, and a vaguely humoral model of disease, the rest cure comprehends tuberculosis as the product of overstimulation and the resulting depletion of vital energy, which makes the individual less able to resist the encroachment of disease.15 Clive’s initial hemorrhage, for example, is understood to be the effect, and external sign, of the excessive excitation to which his journey to, and arrival at, the sanatorium have subjected him. As a result he is immediately prescribed a


course of complete rest designed to eliminate both physical and emotional excitation (and the toxins they were thought to produce), thereby replenishing his body’s reserves of vital energy. This complete rest is then followed by a course of controlled exertion, a treatment predicated upon a protoimmunological model of autoinoculation. Presuming that excitation released tubercular toxins into the body, sanatorium physicians frequently sought to draw on the body’s own resources by prescribing exercise in small, gradually increasing increments in order to release controlled amounts of toxin, which would in theory provoke the body into the production of antitoxins. Founded in a vitalism that was rapidly receding by the turn of the century, this therapeutic regime shares some elements with the emergent scientific medical model to which Clive is subject in turn. Specifically, the apprehension of particular bodily manifestations (the hemorrhage is the most dramatic example) as signs of internal bodily states is a feature of the rest cure that scientific medicine takes up and seeks to transform. The introduction of thermometry as a key element of the rest cure is an important example in this respect, for if Clive’s hemorrhage is the first sign of his overexcited body, the sanatorium physicians immediately turn to the finer, more carefully calibrated set of signs provided by the thermometer. Correlating febridity with levels of disease activity, the Old Man reads Clive’s progress in the detailed charts of temperatures that are taken on a regular basis. Perhaps the most canonical literary representation of tuberculosis and sanatorium treatment at the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain provides an exemplary account of the role of thermometry. In an early chapter, appropriately entitled “The Thermometer,” Mann articulates Hans Castorp’s induction into the culture of the sanatorium in terms of his reluctant acceptance of the imperative that he purchase a thermometer of his own and take up the regime of charting the fluctuations in his temperature. As the text makes clear, thermometry occupies a crossroad of two distinct approaches to tuberculosis. On the one hand, it functions within the disciplinary economy of social medicine as a means of regulating lifestyle, or of making the disease a primary work of life (the typical regime includes the measurement and recording of temperatures at regular intervals, at least four times a day), and on the other it finds a place within the scientific medical model. Behrens (the sanatorium superintendent) is notably an expert with the stethoscope, x-ray machine, and scalpel (regularly performing artificial pneumothoraxes on his patients), and it is within this positivist approach to the tubercular body that his attention to temperature charts also finds a home. While this recourse to graphic representations of internal states plays its role within the regime of the rest cure, and contributes to the disciplinary regulation of life at which


social medicine aims, it also opens on to the positivist thrust of scientific medicine and its bacteriological impetus. Approaching the body mechanistically and microscopically as the relation between micro-organisms and the larger bodily structures with which they interact, the scientific medical approach to tuberculosis is largely uninterested in the body as a totality and instead apprehends the tubercular body only in bits and pieces. As Ott explains, “The bacillus as seen through the microscope provided an image of a peculiar and disembodied entity, not obviously related to any human being. . . . In scientific journals, the image of the bacillus began to substitute for the identity of the consumptives themselves” (64). This process of substitution is, in fact, one by which Clive is eventually affected, as the Old Man proves to be, more than merely an autocratic regulator of lifestyle, a champion of the new scientific approach to disease. The diagnostic techniques that begin with the introduction of the stethoscope and thermometer, and eventually come to include the microscope and radiography, bear witness to an approach to the body that is no longer content to read the signs of disease on the body’s surface and aims instead at penetrating its interiority, discerning the functioning of its mechanism, and quantifying the information thus obtained. This impetus finds its therapeutic analogue in the development of surgical techniques that sought to treat the tubercular body through physical intervention into its functioning. Emerging at a time when the rest cure was the dominant, if only pseudo-scientific, therapeutic regime for tuberculosis, rudimentary thoracic surgery— the predominant forms of which were artificial pneumothorax or thoracoplasty—sought to appropriate the principles of the latter, while detaching them from their ambiguous foundation in nonmechanistic, vitalist theories of the body. If the rest cure aimed at reducing the overstimulation of the body as a whole, thereby replenishing its reserves of vital energy, the thoracic surgeon sought to apply the principle of rest at a mechanical level. In the case of artificial pneumothorax, various gases (or in some cases other foreign objects such as ping pong balls) were injected into the space between the two layers of pleura, thereby deflating the affected lung and forcing it to rest. Thoracoplasty sought the same end through much more radical (not to say gruesome) means. As Vere, another sanatorium patient, luridly describes it: The operation’s so severe . . . that they have to do it in three stages. There’s only a few men in England can do it successfully. Naturally, they’re rather pleased with themselves. First of all, they cut the phrenic nerve in your neck [which controls the movement of the diaphragm]. That’s nothing, just a preliminary canter. Then, when you’ve got used to being without that, they get down to

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death” • 47 the job properly. They turn you over on your face and split you right down one side as far as your seat nearly. Then they saw off yards and yards of rib, and, if you’re still alive, they sew you up again. The idea is, roughly that the free ends of the ribs will knit together and, in the process, pull the diseased side of your chest right in. (81)

One of the few, self-satisfied men to whom Vere refers, the Old Man finds in Clive a perfect candidate for surgical intervention, and though he proves not to require thoracoplasty, he reluctantly becomes one of the “AP” (artificial pneumothorax) patients upon whom the Old Man bestows a privileged status within the san hierarchy. Indeed, the occasion of his AP leads Clive to reflect upon the therapeutic crossroads at which he finds himself located. “Laying there with the air pouring steadily into his side,” the narrator informs us, “Clive wondered what was going on inside. What were the T.B.’s thinking of this new move on the part of the enemy? It was unfair really, the sudden introduction of mechanical aids in a hand-to-hand fight” (251). Employing the martial figures of speech common to the vitalist rest cure (with its emphasis on the body’s vital power of resistance and its ability to repel microscopic invaders), Clive remarks the shift away from such vitalism initiated by the “introduction of mechanical aids.” Both Stewart’s and Ferguson’s texts, thus, bear witness to a certain mobility of the “tubercular body” as a signifier. They at very least evince its indeterminacy as a product of historical processes. Within the same moment and space (in both cases the sanatorium performs this localization) bodies designated “tubercular” are understood through a range of more or less discontinuous discourses. If I have described these somewhat schematically as the spiritualizing teleology of the residual nineteenth-century models, the hygienicism of the social medicine, the hereditarianism of the eugenicists, the positivism of the scientific medical model, and the vitalism of the rest cure, this schematism unjustifiably suggests harder distinctions and greater degrees of discursive self-consistency than there are to be found in fact. Rather than distinct positions, these tendencies bleed into one another in complex ways. If one attends to the details of any of these discursive regimes, one discovers less a spectrum or a progression, than a web in which each regime is articulated by its connections to a variety of others. Both Thyrea and Sanatorium demonstrate how tubercular bodies move through this discursive web, at times marking the intersection of multiple discursive strands, and at times finding themselves disjunctively situated in the spaces between competing strands, bordered by their lines of force but unassimilable to any particular line. If this dispersion bespeaks the historical process


of transformation to which the understanding of tuberculosis was subject at the time, the body produced by these discursive relays as their impossible object is also symptomatic of a cultural formation that is not simply reducible to changes in medical-scientific paradigms. Making Non-Sense of the Tubercular Body; or, Sometimes You Hack Up the Strangest Dings Though there is, in certain instances, a degree of overlap or cooperation between discourses, it would be misleading to characterize their relationship as one of benign coexistence, or of simple contradiction. Though Stewart and Ferguson admirably represent the complex and contradictory discursive web that inhabits the sanatorium, their texts stop short of analyzing the mode of relationship between the individual discourses that constitute that web, a mode in which each discursive regime attempts to capture the tubercular body and fix it within a particular sociosymbolic formation. This process tends, moreover, to be one in which competing regimes are either completely overthrown or somehow assimilated. The hygienic and environmental emphases of social medicine, for instance, attempt to overcome the constitutional and hereditary focus of a eugenicist account of the disease; though bacteriological approaches to tuberculosis are viewed as potentially complementary to the hygienic model, their role remains subsidiary. Almost precisely the opposite position is maintained by the eugenicist, for whom hygiene and germs are not utterly irrelevant but occupy the status of contributing factors that might be taken into account after the question of genetic predisposition has been addressed. Similarly for bacteriology, competing accounts of the disease come to have at best a secondary role in relation to the all-important germ. We might understand the sociosymbolic field thus constituted and contested by tubercular discourse in terms of the “ideological quilt” that Slavoj Zizek describes in The Sublime Object of Ideology as “the multitude of ‘floating signifiers’, of proto-ideological elements, [that are] structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ . . . which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning” (87). In this context, it is clear enough that a variety of tubercular discourses attempt to structure and unify the sociosymbolic field they occupy in different ways, and that in so doing they fix upon different signifying elements from within that field as the nodal points which perform the quilting. The hygienicist quilting of the ideological field might totalize itself around “sputum” as its nodal point, whereas the field might be bacteriologically quilted by “mycobacterium tuberculosis” or


“tubercle bacillus,” and a eugenicist quilt might be punctuated by “tubercular diathesis.” Zizek contends that “the point de capiton is . . . the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes its identity: it is, so to speak, the word to which ‘things’ themselves refer to recognize themselves in their unity” (95–96). Though the nodal point ostensibly derives its ideological function from the qualities to which it refers, from its power to describe or encapsulate a certain aspect of reality, the ideological quilting performed by any particular point de capiton does not simply depend on this reference to a series of qualities. Capitonnage, to the contrary, does not occur until those aspects of reality apparently described by the nodal point come to find their identity through the image it presents.16 This model of ideological totalization finds examples in each of the tubercular points de capiton I have suggested. “Sputum,” for instance, arguably connotes a series of qualities associated with tuberculosis: a vector of disease transmission, the possibility of uncontrollable and unpredictable contagion, the specter of unsanitary conditions, the confusion of boundaries distinguishing bodily interiority from exteriority, the disorganization of bodily structures (such as the striated tissue which envelops tuberculous matter in closed tuberculosis) in the chaotic eruption of tubercular lesions in open, or active, tuberculosis, etc. The totalization of a hygienic ideological quilt occurs, however, not through this power to describe the disease, but at the moment when the tubercular, or potentially tubercular, subject comes to find its identity as the producer of sputum—as the dreaded promiscuous expectorator or the welldisciplined owner of the spit flask. A similar chain of tubercular signifiers could, of course, be stabilized into a different ideological configuration should they come to refer to a different nodal point. The substitution of “tubercle bacillus” for “sputum,” for instance, puts the qualities to which the latter ostensibly refers to a different sort of ideological use. Rather than the master signifier to which the tubercular signifying chain refers, “sputum” becomes, in this instance, just another fact of tuberculosis that takes its meaning from “tubercle bacillus”—the point de capiton of the bacteriological quilt. Sputum becomes significant as a substance that possibly reveals the presence of the dreaded bacterium. While “tubercle bacillus” once again ostensibly derives its power within the tubercular sociosymbolic from the qualities it connotes (e.g., tuberculosis as a microscopic phenomenon, tuberculosis as a disease governed by physical and chemical laws, as susceptible to explanation and treatment in terms of those laws, etc.), the function of “tubercle bacillus” as nodal point is once again located not in its ability to encapsulate a certain description of the disease but in the extent to which the experience of being tubercular comes to be identified with that signifier. Such an identification


can be located, for example, in the popular substitution of the microscopic image of the germ culture for the image of a human patient as the dominant representation of the disease. Obviously, the totalization performed by this process of identification fixes the tubercular sociosymbolic very differently than that performed by the expectorative identification. Rather than tracing the particular ideological ramifications of these different attempts to totalize the tubercular sociosymbolic, however, I want to focus on their general symptomatic significance. Instead, that is, of taking up the implications of the different meanings to which the “tubercular body” is made to refer, I want to pursue the significance of the very attempt to stabilize such references. This symptomaticity is to be conceived in the strong (not colloquial) sense: as designating “a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject” (Zizek 21). In keeping with this logic of the symptom, it is necessary to consider the extent to which the struggle to totalize the tubercular sociosymbolic, to fix the meaning of the “tubercular body” (regardless of the specific form of the totalization or of the particular meaning assigned) indicates a necessary epistemological lacuna upon which the consistency of the totalized formation is predicated and which constitutes its limit. In this sense, the various formations of the tubercular sociosymbolic order, the different meanings to which the “tubercular body” is attached, rely for their consistency upon the occlusion of the possibility that the tubercular body is persistently and fundamentally resistant to meaning, or that tuberculosis as a mode of embodiment exposes the body as a sheer material fact. Whereas the discourses surrounding tuberculosis tend to understand themselves as competing to discover or establish the true character of the tubercular body, the consistency of the regimes of significance at which they arrive are founded precisely on their non-knowledge of tubercular bodies insofar as the latter reveal a persistent and profound lack of meaning—an instance of sheer, stupid existence over whose void of sense symbolic determinations of the “tubercular body” are papered. In this light, the tubercular body and its resistance to symbolic capture (to which both Thyrea and Sanatorium attend) appear as an index of more than historical vicissitudes in the experience and understanding of tuberculosis or of an incompletion in the state of relevant knowledge. Disjunctively sliding through the web of tubercular discourse it traces the locus of bodily non-sense around which those historical processes organize themselves and upon the ignorance of which their constitution depends. The repeated attempt to inscribe the meaning of the tubercular body, to comprehend that form of embodiment, announces the body as precisely that which cannot be inscribed—neither a surface upon which meaning can be written,


nor the source of meaning to be inscribed—and in so doing exscribes (to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s term) the body as a wound of sense, the limit of thought.17 This process of exscription notably takes place in relation to questions of vitality and mortality, questions to which Ferguson points in describing the sanatorium as a space within which “life joins hands with death, and hope with fear” (3.4) and its inhabitants as “this death-o’er-shadowed crew” (2.10). One might recall, in particular, the centrality to both Ferguson’s and Stewart’s texts of mortality, a phenomenon whose exploration ranges from the metaphysical to the managerial. This is admittedly a fairly banal observation vis-àvis the representation of a disease whose diagnosis was little more than a death sentence, yet the form and localization of this preoccupation are noteworthy. Specifically, Ferguson’s and Stewart’s shared interest in the sanatorialist desire to occlude manifestations of death through the carefully managed procedures for the removal of corpses and the frequent expulsion of “moribund cases” from the sanatorium is in no way peculiar to their texts. It also figures prominently, for example, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, whose protagonist, Hans Castorp, is increasingly disturbed by these managerial practices and finally is led to complain: “We live up here, next door to the dying, close to misery and suffering; and not only we act as though we had nothing to do with it, but it is all carefully arranged in order to spare us and prevent our coming into contact with it, or seeing anything at all—they will take away the gentleman rider [a deceased comrade] while we are at breakfast or tea” (295).18 Notwithstanding the therapeutic and statistical gentrification of these procedures by the sanatorialists (or critiques thereof ), the significance of the drive to occlude or domesticate death must be reconsidered in light of the processes of figuration through which death itself repeatedly is approached. The elementary form of this figural practice is available in the opening lines of Ferguson’s third sonnet: He caught a chill in Leicester, he came here;— He came here with his little store of gold, To this grim dwelling, bare, and clean, and cold. Where his life joins hands with death, and hope with fear: He told us how in Leicester’s city drear, On coughing, down his garments rolled The warm crimson flood. . . . (3.1–6)

A quick reading of this passage might suggest the interpretation implicit in my hasty quotation from it above: one in which death is understood as a quality that generally permeates the space of the sanatorium. The first two


lines’ repetition of the deictic “he came here,” followed by the third line’s deathly qualification of the sanatorium as “grim,” “bare,” “clean,” and “cold,” easily leads one to read the “where” with which the fourth line opens as a continuing reference to the space of the sanatorium. The punctuation with which the fourth and fifth lines conclude, however, complicates an attempt to read the fourth line as simply describing the sanatorium. The period at the end of line three grammatically separates the subsequent introduction of the space in which “his life joins hands with death” from the preceding description of the sanatorium, a grammatical separation confirmed by the colon with which the fourth line ends, and which suggests that the space in which life comes to feel death’s grasp is yet to be defined. The locus of death’s fearsome encroachment upon the hopefulness of life is, as the fifth and sixth lines indicate, ultimately less that of the sanatorium than of the patient’s lungs themselves. Making its appearance on the stage of life from the convulsing enclosure of the pulmonary system, death arrives in the form of the “warm crimson flood” which “down his garments rolled.” This figuration of death in terms of the violence of a pulmonary hemorrhage is hardly surprising, nor is the absolutely canonical status of the trope—the hemorrhage is, after all, the tubercular symptom par excellence. The full significance of this central tubercular figure, and the conjunction of the body and mortality it performs, is, however, obscured by Ferguson’s understated, not to say insipid, diction. A characteristic of this metaphoric embodiment of death, which is given voice only in terms of Ferguson’s somewhat anaemic “fear,” is more fully developed in other instances of the metaphor. The requisite representation of the hemorrhage in Stewart’s text is, for instance, markedly more eloquent in this respect. Immediately upon Clive’s arrival at the sanatorium, the vaguely diathetic signs of his disease are unequivocally replaced by a violent hemorrhage. Musing on this momentous event, the narrator informs us that sooner or later there arrives a moment when you may look in the bowl and face the bright blood with indifference, with contempt, sometimes with a sort of queer pride. But the first experience is overwhelming. Rarely can you subdue the feeling of panic, of being submerged in a flood tide of death. With a great effort Clive took the handkerchief away from his mouth. He dropped his hand to his lap and stared down at it. It seemed to him that a part of himself was crushed up in this square of linen. . . . Death washed back about him in great waves. (12)

This description shares its fundamental element with that of Ferguson: the hemorrhage is once again the “flood tide of death.” Whereas for Ferguson the


hemorrhagic embodiment of death is merely characterized as a source of “fear,” however, Stewart’s text understands it as “overwhelming” and a cause of “panic.” The significance of these qualifications should not be underestimated, insofar as they bear witness to an experience of both death and the bodily function with which it has been identified as cognitively ungraspable, even monstrous. It is not only incomprehensible but provokes a complete exclusion from consciousness. The monstrosity thus indicated comes, moreover, to take on a definite form as we witness Clive look down at the handkerchief in his lap and are told that “it seemed to him that a part of himself was crushed up in this square of linen.” Framed in its isolation there, Clive sees a coagulating mass, a wound that has detached itself from his body and taken up a sort of separate existence, haunting the body to which it belongs with its refusal to be integrated into the meaningful corporeal totality. A part of that which is most properly his own lies staring back at him, an incomprehensible, non-sensical, monstrous thing—a manifestation all the more horrifying for raising the possibility that it cannot be domesticated as a perverse exception to the presumed norm of bodily significance. If Stewart’s text remains slightly reticent in its attention to this monstrous, sheerly material bodily remainder that is unassimilable by those symbolizing processes that would grant the body its meaning, the language of a text like André Gide’s L’Immoraliste is more explicit. Another example of the period’s almost stock representation of the tubercular hemorrhage, Gide has his protagonist, Michel, narrate the event: It filled my mouth . . . but it wasn’t a flow of bright blood now, like the other hemorrhages; it was a thick, hideous clot I spat onto the floor with disgust. I staggered a few steps. I was horribly upset, trembling with fear and rage. For up till now I had thought my recovery would simply happen, step by step; all I needed to do was wait. This brutal accident was a step backward. Strangely enough, the first hemorrhages had not affected me; I remembered how they had left me almost serene. Then what was causing my horror, my fear now? The fact that I was beginning, alas, to love life. I turned back, bent down, took a straw and raising the clot of spittle, laid it on my handkerchief. I stared at it. The blood was ugly, blackish—something slimy, hideous. (25)

Whereas Stewart suggests that the fully incomprehensible initial eruption is possibly subject to a familiarizing process of recognition that would reinvest the body with meaning, even rendering it the source of a “sort of queer pride,” Gide represents the initial hemorrhages as innocuously consonant with the rationality of a “step by step” recovery, a meaningful bodily teleology that is suddenly interrupted by its exposure to the “hideous,” deathly


thing. This reversal of trajectory aside, Gide’s representation of the hemorrhage as the conjunction of embodiment and mortality is consistent with Stewart’s and strongly emphasizes its monstrosity. The description of the event as a “brutal accident” remarks its irrationality, while the “disgusting” character of the resulting object (the “ugly, blackish, . . . slimy” body that is the clot) situates the latter as radically unassimilable by the body as a totality. Signifying, as it does, in relation to notions of ingestion, assimilation, introjection, and incorporation (not to mention the commonplace figural extension of this gustatory paradigm to a range of relations between the subject and its world), “disgust” offers an especially powerful means of approaching the hemorrhagic thing. Insofar as disgust typically signifies the body’s (and the subject’s) inability to assimilate a foreign object or instance of alterity, the effects of the disgusting hemorrhagic mass are even more profound: no longer simply designating the limits of the body’s capacity to incorporate a form of otherness reassuringly marked as external, in this instance the body finds itself inhabited by, and belonging to, the object of disgust, the embodiment of horrible, deathly otherness, that exposes and divides it. A final, and especially instructive, articulation of this figural schema is provided by Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Immemorially operating under the sign of mortality, Hans Castorp loses both his parents to death in early childhood, followed shortly thereafter by his custodial grandfather. Though largely beyond the scope of memory, this series of deaths makes its impression upon Hans, an impression that provides the key coordinates for his subsequent exploration of mortality. These early encounters with death are encapsulated in Hans’s recollection of his grandfather’s funeral, an event that leads him precociously to reflect on the tension between the “aspect [of ] death [as] a holy, a pensive, a spiritual state, possessed of a certain mournful beauty,” and that in which it appears as “precisely the opposite, . . . very physical, . . . very material” (27). Struck by the sense of spiritual permanence provoked by the dead body of his grandfather as it lies in state, Hans nonetheless understands the function of the funeral rituals in embellishing this demeanor, as that of “palliat[ing] the other aspect of death, the side which was neither beautiful nor exactly sad, but somehow almost improper—in its lowly, physical side—to slur it over and prevent one from being conscious of it” (27). Approaching death as that which is at once one’s ultimate destiny and that which one is radically unable to make one’s own, the text simultaneously associates this “impropriety” of death with a gross bodily physicality. What is more, the tension between death’s two “aspects” is incapable of containing the insistence upon the senseless character of the dead body. The latter finally becomes a wound which must be “palliated”; affecting the living


body as well, it exposes the presumption of corporeal significance as little more than an attempt to “slur over” a profound lack of sense. The childhood connection of death and the body as limits to thought is eventually confirmed by Hans’s arrival at the sanatorium, even as the generality of the initial meditation on the relationship between embodiment and mortality is given a more specific form. Indeed, Hans’s inaugural experience of the sanatorium draws him immediately back to his youthful reflections. As his cousin introduces him to the grounds and buildings of the sanatorium, we are informed that Hans Castorp suddenly stopped, rooted to the spot by a perfectly ghastly sound coming from a little distance off round a bend in the corridor. It was not a loud sound, but so distinctly horrible that Hans Castorp made a wry face and looked wide-eyed at his cousin. It was coughing, obviously, a man coughing; but coughing like to no other Hans Castorp had ever heard, and compared with which any other had been a magnificent and healthy manifestation of life: a coughing that had no conviction and gave no relief, that did not even come out in paroxysms, but was just a feeble, dreadful, welling up of the juices of organic dissolution. (12)

So striking is this horrifying tubercular symptom that Hans is led to exclaim: “It isn’t a human cough at all. . . . It is just as if one could look right into him when he coughs, and see what it looks like: all slime and mucous” (12). Though Mann’s figuration of the deathly tubercular body does not return us to the scene of the hemorrhage, his description of the cough—as “ghastly,” “horrible,” even “inhuman”—clearly belongs to the same figural project. The cough, like the hemorrhage, is an unthinkable bodily manifestation. Having been confronted by the sound of the cough, Hans immediately resorts to taxonomy in an attempt to impose a sense of order and familiarity: “There are different kinds of cough,” he begins, “dry and loose, and people always say the loose one is better than the other” (12). This attempt is, however, ultimately futile, and Hans is forced to admit that his language is inadequate to the task—with each new denomination he is compelled to confess that “that is very far from being the right word for it” (12). As with the hemorrhage, the monstrously unrecognizable character of the cough resides in its exposure of the body as subject to a sort of senseless, mechanical existence. What seems most to horrify Hans is the notion that the cough serves no purpose; as the body is racked by uncontrollable convulsions, which “gave no relief,” the presumption of bodily significance is once again given the lie. Instead of an inherently meaningful organic whole, Hans is confronted by a body marked at its core by a tendency toward mindlessly repetitive eruption.


The particular power of Mann’s articulation of the relationship between incarnation and mortality is the clarity of its refusal to make the tubercular body (or the diseased body more generally) into an exceptional form of embodiment. When Hans feels that the sound of the cough allows him to see into the slimy, mucous-filled interior of the body, the state of “organic dissolution” he finds revealed there becomes the essential feature of, more than merely the tubercular body, the body in general. If the psychic discomfort produced by Hans’s shocking introduction to the sanatorium is limited by his ability to locate the monstrous cough at some distance from himself, ongoing attempts to contain its effects quickly prove futile. Within a day of his arrival, Hans is led to complain: If I only knew why I have palpitations the whole time—it is very disquieting; I keep thinking about it. For, you see, a person ordinarily has palpitation of the heart when he is frightened, or when he is looking forward to some great joy. But when the heart palpitates all by itself, without any reason, senselessly, of its own accord, so to speak, I feel that’s uncanny, you understand, as if the body was going its own gait without any reference to the soul, like a dead body, only it is not really dead—there isn’t any such thing, of course—but leading a very active existence all on its own account, growing hair and nails and doing lively business in the physical and chemical line, so I’ve been told. (71)

Given Hans’s oft-proclaimed health, it is especially troubling to find the essential features (if not the symptoms) of the coughing tubercular body replicated in his own. Whereas the tubercular cough derives its horrific power from the inability to locate its mechanical repetition within a meaningful schema, Hans finds the same propensity for meaningless activity within his own ostensibly healthy body. The palpitations of his heart are “disquieting” not because he fears they have some determinate sinister significance, but precisely because he suspects their utter lack of significance. He is unsettled to discover the possibility that his body has a life of its own, that it goes on “without any reason, senselessly, of its own accord.” Pinpointing the source of a profound insecurity, Hans’s cousin, Joachim, admits that “it may easily be that one involuntarily tries to find an emotion which would explain, or even half-way explain the [body’s] goings-on”(72). Unable to sustain an understanding of the body as an essentially rational system that is periodically subject to malfunction, both Hans and Joachim speak to the possibility that the body’s rationality is produced as an “involuntary,” and frequently unsatisfactory, reaction to the manifestation of the body’s senseless “goingson.” Indeed, Joachim’s description of the “involuntary” process of explaining


the body’s aimless activity neatly encapsulates the symptomatic function of the competing attempts to quilt the tubercular sociosymbolic order. In following this figural trajectory that announces the body’s exscription, we initially find the lungs (as synecdoche of the tubercular body) articulated as excretory organs whose excreta is that of a monstrous, death-permeated hemorrhagic object. To the extent that this objectal embodiment of death is understood as a form of excretion, it might be taken not as a limit to the body as a meaningful totality but as an unassimilable remainder whose expulsion confirms the rationality of the system from which it has been excluded. Mann’s extension of the figural schema, however, explicitly to include not only pulmonary excreta but the excreting organs themselves, confirms the impossibility of thus separating the horrible hemorrhagic (or in Mann’s case, sputal) object from the body that produces it. The power of Mann’s articulation of the tubercular cough, as an embodiment of death that shares the logic of the hemorrhagic clot, lies in its insistence on presenting this class of bodily manifestation as intractably bound to the body as a presumably meaningful whole. The monstrous tubercular thing becomes—rather than a resolutely senseless object whose exclusion from the corporeal system guarantees the rationality of the latter—a fundamentally non-sensical aspect of the body which underlies, and is the cause of, that aspect which would lend to the body the appearance of a rational system. What is more, Mann’s text reveals that this mode of embodiment establishes a paradoxical relation between life and death. Whereas Ferguson’s figuration of the tubercular lungs as that space “where . . . life joins hands with death, and hope with fear” immediately suggests an opposition between the tangible mortality of the tubercular body and the vitality of the healthy body, Mann’s exploitation of the same figural schema allows Ferguson’s image to be read on a different register. No longer held in opposition to the forces of life, the hemorrhagic “flood tide of death” comes to be isomorphic with the body (healthy or diseased) understood as an organism that simply “goes on,” an instance of something like “bare life.”19 It is within this logic that we must finally approach the tubercular body as the space in which “life joins hands with death.” The tubercular body, thus, instantiates the exposure of the body, and of the discursive regimes that both presuppose and attempt to fix its significance, simultaneously to the limits of death and bare life. If the confrontation with the first of these limits to, or fault lines within, the consistency of the tubercular sociosymbolic order results in the attempt to occlude manifestations of mortality, the reaction formation produced by the manifestation of the second limit is the transmutation of bare life into works of life—the working over of bare life. Stewart’s Sanatorium is once again exemplary in its


exploration of this process. We have already noted that the hemorrhagic eruption formalizes Clive’s induction into the space of the sanatorium and introduces the figural conjunction of the disease’s most material manifestation with the forces of life and death. If, however, the hemorrhage is the most well-known and dramatic sign of tuberculosis, the extended period of complete rest to which Clive promptly is assigned provides the occasion for his introduction to an only slightly less classic embodiment of the disease: the expectorating tubercular body. Making the acquaintance of the san’s most enduring and persistent patient, Vere, Clive’s initial impressions find their focus in the spit flask that is his comrade’s constant companion. With an “expression of wonderment” Clive receives Vere’s proud proclamation: This is my second bottle to-day. I filled one this morning. . . . Oh, I can spit quite well when I set my mind to it. It’s strange, isn’t it, how energetic the body can be when it’s sidetracked from the main purpose. After a lifetime of drifting I’ve found a single aim in existence—filling these bottles. And I work harder and more disinterestedly at this than I’ve ever done at anything else. My whole being is devoted to the work. I eat and sleep and rest solely that I may spit. (54)

This strange rearticulation of the Cartesian cogito at once reinforces the text’s location of a tubercular ontology in gross bodily eruption and provides a counterpoint to the metaphoric conflation of the hemorrhagic flow with the “flood tide of death.” Anxieties regarding tuberculosis frequently found their most intensely charged object in the unregulated production of sputum. Even in the absence of an accurate understanding of the vectors of disease transmission, the expectorative expulsion of bodily fluids generated a particularly hysterical response, one notable manifestation of which was the drive of public health reformers to secure legislative regulation of “promiscuous expectoration.” If transition from closed to open tuberculosis is marked by the breakdown of the striated tissue that once encapsulated and contained tubercular lesions, this invisible breaching of bodily boundaries and disorganization of bodily structures finds its visible and affectively charged analogue in the chaotic eruption of bodily interiority into environmental exteriority that is commonly known as spitting.20 Seizing one of the most socially volatile aspects of the disease, the text presents the bodily processes of sputum production as a well-regulated work of life—a work that, as Vere’s insistence that he has “worked harder and more disinterestedly” than ever before suggests, must be understood simultaneously in the terms of physical and aesthetic labor. Both sputum and the hemorrhage are, thus, particularly resonant manifestations of tuberculosis insofar as they function simultaneously on two


registers: they are, on the one hand, symbolic of social chaos and, on the other, unsettling reminders of the bare life of the body, a sort of bodily anarchy. Whereas the hemorrhage is overwhelmingly associated with death, and understood as an event that is visited upon the passive sufferer, however, expectoration becomes a perfectible activity and a work of life—as Vere insists, “My whole being is devoted to the work. I eat and sleep and rest solely that I may spit.” This modulation of expectoration as a work of selfproduction is perhaps most immediately comprehensible within the disciplinary program of social medicine, and the antituberculosis movement more specifically. Focusing on the role of the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis ([NAPT], founded in 1898), Linda Bryder’s analysis of the antituberculism in Britain at the turn of the century includes the compelling argument that while the NAPT sought to downplay eugenic inquiries into hereditary predisposition to the disease in favor of an emphasis on environmental influence, it studiously avoided advocating direct social reform (aimed at eliminating living conditions productive of deleterious environmental factors) and pursued instead an educational campaign that situated the problem at the level of individual responsibility (19–21). Central to this educational program was the production of propaganda, prominent among which were a wide range of self-help pamphlets instructing the masses in the prevention and treatment of the disease. Popularizing current biomedical knowledge regarding tuberculosis, these texts played a crucial role in effecting the antituberculosis movement’s dominant belief that the disease could be most efficiently combated through the education of potential and actual sufferers. A particularly interesting example of this phenomenon in the literature is F. E. Eaton’s The White Demon and How to Fight Him (1909). Vaguely Dickensian, Eaton’s text takes the form of a children’s morality tale in which young Sheilah Murphy (an impoverished Irish lass) is visited by the “Spirit of Light” and her attending “faeries”: “Cleanliness,” “Fresh Air,” “Nourishing Food,” “Good Temper,” and “Perseverance.” Appalled by the dingy and decrepit family home in which Sheilah is doomed to live, the Spirit takes the occasion of a parental absence to instruct young Sheilah in the principles of proper hygiene, an education she is expected to transmit to her family. The model of compassion in commenting on the death of a neighboring tubercular child, the Spirit is led to proclaim: “All this is very sad, . . . as far as that particular child is concerned, but there is to my mind a much more serious side to the matter. If one child chooses to throw away his life it is bad enough. In a great many cases—I do not say all—he has himself to blame; but, unfortunately, this particular child does not stop there. I told you he had become dirty and careless, and when he coughs, his mouth


is filled with SPUTUM—. . . .” (6). As the exhortation elliptically concludes by receding into an eloquent significatory fullness, the emphasis is distinctly removed from the social situation of an impoverished working-class Irish family within which the dreaded “SPUTUM” plays its role and falls instead on the fulfillment of individual responsibility (whether it be Sheila’s responsibility to compensate for the hygienic lack of her parents, or the irresponsibly “careless” behavior which constituted the now-deceased child’s choice to throw away his life and endanger those of others). A perfectly canonical example of the widespread paranoia regarding the socially deleterious effects of wanton sputum production, Eaton’s text makes the regulation of the anarchy it represents a matter of individual self-regulation, the logical extension of which is the ubiquitous presence of the spit flask. This regulation of promiscuous expectoration (via the self-regulation of the expectorator) takes its rationale not from the perfection of the physical body but of the social body. Of no therapeutic value, the discipline of the spit flask is a measure designed to reduce contagion, the social chaos with which sputum is symbolically permeated. The logic of this regulatory program is, however, more than merely hygienic in the limited sense of being governed by the desire to curtail contagion. It involves the reorganization of individual character, or the production of character, in the habitualization of spitting: dutifully filling one’s flask does not merely save one’s neighbors from possible contagion, but changes one’s mode of identification. Understanding the work of expectoration in disciplinary terms too narrowly conceived obscures the aesthetic register on which expectoration functions (at least within Stewart’s representation thereof ). The work of self-production for which Vere’s expectoration provides the occasion, after all, casts the disciplinary procedures of moral regulation in terms of aesthetic production and appreciation. Drawing on the category of disinterestedness, whose aesthetic genealogy ranges at least from Kant to Arnold, the text articulates the production of both life and character in terms of the work of art. It is necessary, in this context, to approach the “work” at which this formation aims simultaneously as the labor of production and as the object produced (the work or oeuvre as a complete and self-enclosed totality). To be somewhat schematic, the double logic of the work runs as follows. In laboring at spitting, one engages in a self-perfecting activity through which one produces oneself as a work. The essence that guarantees the completeness of this work is a form of perfectibility, and since the incurable nature of the disease precludes the possibility of locating this perfection within one’s own body (there is not even the pretense that the regulation of spitting has any therapeutic value), the horizon of perfectibility is found at the level of the


social or communal. Frequently understanding its mission as the promotion of “national efficiency,” social medicine strives for an ordered and efficient social body. Insofar as the notion of efficiency implies the ideal of a transparent and frictionless mode of relation between the constituent components of the system, the form of community it promotes is organic (in the sense JeanLuc Nancy gives to the term).21 The chaos represented by promiscuous expectoration constitutes a threat to that order and efficiency, and therefore the disciplinary regulation of spitting becomes a priority. When one considers the character-forming aspect of this regulation, however, the essentially organic form of community for which social medicine strives becomes the essence of the worked-over individual. I work, in other words, at fashioning myself into a work, and the essence that I realize in that process of self-fashioning is the essence of community. As the tubercular sufferer becomes his or herself through the identification with the essence of community, the identity of the individual becomes that of the community. This working over of life for which the expectorating body provides the occasion thus mediates between the ontological and the social. On the one hand, the work of life opens onto the domestication of the ontological insecurity to which the expectorating body—as an instance of bare life—bears witness, and on the other it draws our attention to the disciplinary procedures that aim to regulate the social body. Or, more precisely, the structures of identification inherent in the working of life deploy the disciplinary regimes that produce and maintain the organic form of the social body as a means of compensating the ontological lack made palpable by the bare life of the tubercular body. This community-forming mode of identification is, moreover, not limited to the example of sputum regulation and extends to a variety of tubercular technologies and therapeutic techniques. The culture of thermometry provides another key example that is amply represented in both Stewart’s and Mann’s texts. One might additionally consider, for example, the ways in which modes of surgical intervention (artificial pneumothorax and thoracoplasty) and radiology function within, or provide the basis for, similar processes of identification. Mann, for instance, eponymously devotes a crucial early chapter to “The Thermometer.” From his first encounter with Hofrat Behrens, Hans’s interaction with the sanatorium superintendent centers on what Behrens calls “the quicksilver cigar” (47). Addressing Joachim on the occasion of this inaugural meeting, Behrens prescribes some limited exercise followed by a temperature-taking. “And be good enough to write it [the temperature] down,” he says, “Saturday I’ll look at your curve [temperature graph]. Your cousin better measure too. Measuring can’t hurt anybody” (47). Though Hans initially resists this interpellation into the culture of


thermometry, he eventually succumbs and reluctantly replaces his beloved Maria Mancini cigars with a red leather- and velvet-encased thermometer of his own. If febridity lacks the degree of cultural resonance with which sputum is endowed, it provides another example of the commodification and fetishization of therapeutic instruments: the thermometer-as-luxury-item situates the discipline of temperature taking as a substitute pleasure and work of life. Once interpellated, Hans becomes increasingly obsessed with his “curve,” and the measurement of his febridity comes to be a crucial function of his existence. The temperature curve becomes, more than merely a representation of the disease, an image in which he is led to find himself reflected. Different from the spit flask insofar as the levels of febridity it measures have some diagnostic value as an indication of disease activity, the thermometer and the temperature charts it is used to generate nonetheless provide another basis for the disciplinary self-regulation of the tuberculosis sufferer. Though the temperature chart is literally a graphic representation of bodily disorder—Joachim, in fact, cites “fever” as another example of the bodily “goings-on” that his cousin finds so disturbing (72)—the act of quantifying that disorder at regular intervals, and fixing it in the stable form of a curve, functions to domesticate the threat of irremediable corporeal chaos. Synecdochically representing the process of ordering the anarchic body, the temperature curve provides an image with which the patient is led to identify. In so doing, the diseased body is put to work in the process of meaning making. If disease marks the breakdown of bodily meaning, and this lack cannot be papered over by the teleology of the healing process, it must be accommodated through other means. Precisely because the incurable nature of tuberculosis forecloses upon the possibility of actually reinstituting bodily order, of locating a source of meaning within a strictly bodily economy, a principle of order or organization must be located in another (i.e., noncorporeal) register, primarily that of the social body. As with the spit flask, the meaning provided by the temperature curve lies less in a therapeutic teleology than in the ordering effects of selfregulation it produces, effects whose significance derives from the efficient community into which the well-disciplined sufferer is inserted. Retracing Nature’s Path: The Vital Economies of the Sanatorium and the Open-Air Cure It is, of course, no coincidence that Ferguson, Stewart, and Mann all locate this process of working life within the space of the sanatorium. In addition to its general cultural status as the most widely recognizable symbol of tuberculosis and its treatment, the sanatorium is notable precisely because it


remarks the persistence of vitalistic understandings of the disease in the face of the advances in medical science that dominate traditional histories. Linda Bryder, for instance, pursues this disjunction when she queries the extent to which the rise of the antituberculosis campaign of the early twentieth century is actually attributable to Koch’s discovery. She views concerns for “national efficiency” as the driving force, and her suspicion of the causative force of bacteriological advance finds support in Ott’s claim that Koch found the bacteria that initiated the tubercle-making process to be associated with pulmonary consumptions, but its discovery had little practical influence outside a small circle of researchers. . . . [R]esearch was marked by failed attempts to produce germicides and vaccines. For those who wholeheartedly embraced it, Koch’s discovery created both a theoretical and technical void rather than any insight into therapeutics and prophylaxis. Most physicians gradually integrated the theory into their medicine bags as an additional “exciting cause” of the disease, without adjusting their practice. The concept of bacterial causation competed with stronger beliefs in environment and personal constitutional proclivity and so never totally dominated etiology and therapeutics. (53–54)

This process whereby physicians “gradually integrated [scientific medical] theory into their medicine bags” finds an institutional analogue in the sanatorium. Though the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures most closely related to the bacteriological revolution find themselves represented in the practices of the sanatorium (increasingly so in the ‘20s and ‘30s), this inclusion does not radically alter the ways in which the disease is understood. Emphases on environment, education, and vitality continue to have pride of place in this respect. If literary examples of tubercular discourse clearly afford a certain centrality to the category of life, I turn to the writings of D. C. Muthu, a British physician and sanatorium superintendent, as a means of exploring a parallel phenomenon in the medical literature. Of particular interest will be two monographs (published in 1910 and 1922 respectively) entitled Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Sanatorium Treatment: A Record of Ten Years’ Observation and Work in Open-Air Sanatoria, and Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Sanatorium Treatment: A Record of Twenty-two Years’ Observation and Work in Open-Air Sanatoria. While not quite simply subsequent editions of the same text, the bulk of their argument is substantially the same. One of the most notable differences is that, by 1922, the medical scientific models of which Muthu is so suspicious have become sufficiently institutionally entrenched and validated that they require a more thorough accounting. Beyond encapsulating the sanatorialist project, and functioning


as an index both of its historical transformation and of the impact of medical scientific developments upon the sanatorium, his texts are particularly valuable insofar as they make visible a logic implicit, if not extant, in a broad range of sanatorialist discourse. Though the spiritualist vitalism governing his writing places Muthu toward the margins of mainstream medical opinion, the question of life or vitality to which his text is so attentive remains, nonetheless, a crucial discursive relay through which the bulk of tubercular discourse circulates. The vitalism of which Muthu is a proponent had been, by the time of his writing, significantly contested by widely accepted scientific doctrine. There is, however, a notable distance between laboratory and clinical cultures, which makes it difficult to simply deem Muthu’s position anachronistic. If vitalism and its frequently spiritualist trappings can be largely assimilated to a reactionary response to the materialism of science, it nonetheless figures prominently in medical culture well into the twentieth century. This is particularly the case within a clinical culture that remained skeptical of the therapeutic value of medical science and persistently countered the emergent understanding of medicine as applied science with the view that medicine is best understood as the art of healing. At its most simplistic, the vitalism to which Muthu subscribes functions in the service of a relatively conventional reaction to the mechanism and determinism that he views as the culturally dominant consequence of nineteenth-century scientific advance. Writing in a short monograph entitled Science and Religion (1930), he voices the canonical complaint that this wonderful advancement of scientific knowledge has had the effect of creating a mechanical outlook on life in the minds of many scientific men who conceived matter as something solid and real and as the sole ultimate of the universe. They held that the mind was a kind of emanation of matter and the unseen world an illusion, and fondly believed in the possibility of a mechanical explanation of life and the universe. (7)

Especially troubling are the implications of this outlook for bioscience. Taking physiology as his example, he laments the fact that “materialists have confidently claimed that the laws of mechanics, physics, and chemistry were applicable to living matter, that chemical actions and processes would explain vital phenomena” (11). The turn–of-the-century scientific developments associated with the likes of Thompson, Rutherford, Heisenberg, and Einstein provide solace, however, in their complication and subversion of the mechanical principles that had hitherto grounded the materialist viewpoint. Making a leap from the contention that recent scientific advance had unsettled extant


scientific dogma by demonstrating the existence of phenomena as yet inexplicable, to the assertion that this shaking of scientific foundations reveals the fundamentally inexplicable character of the physical world, Muthu arrives at the vitalist claim that bioscientists recognizing the true nature of this scientific revolution will justly reach the conclusion that “the phenomena of life cannot be explained in mechanical terms” (11). “The physical basis of life,” he concludes, “has not only no basis of fact, but is discarded by all the results of modern science” (11). Muthu’s dubious account of the state of scientific knowledge in 1930 aside, the protocols of his argument reiterate those of his earlier treatises on pulmonary tuberculosis and the sanatorium treatment. In those texts he proceeds from the mutable and inconclusive character of scientific knowledge (specifically that pertaining to tuberculosis) and contends that the factors that go towards the causation of tuberculosis, the different modes of the spread of the disease, the sources and degree of infection, the part played by the tubercle bacilli and other organisms, the attitude of the human organism towards the microbes, the various means of cure, the social and economic agencies set in motion towards its prevention—all these problems are so complicated and interwoven that it is impossible to come to any definite understanding concerning them from the present state of our knowledge. (PT [1910], 1–2)

More than merely a description of a technical impasse, the impossibility of understanding at which Muthu’s account arrives finds its ultimate ground in his assertion that the key to the disease lies in the vital energy of organic life, a force that is in principle inaccessible to thought. “It is,” he writes, “above man’s reach and reckoning” (35); “The real cause of health or disease is what we cannot see. . . . The unseen creates and controls the seen. Life cannot be explained from a physical basis, and disease cannot be explained by physical agencies alone. Behind resistance is vital force, which is identical with man, the chief factor in the causation of tuberculosis” (PT [1910], 36). It is important to note Muthu’s qualifying claim that “disease cannot be explained by physical agencies alone,” for his recourse to vitalism does not merely ignore the competing explanatory schemas that inhabit the sanatorium. Instead, the notion of vital force that he articulates functions to comprehend and synthesize the range of complicating factors that his text recognizes at its outset. This synthetic drive is writ large in the very structure of his text: the introduction seeks primarily to posit the importance of “vital energy” to the understanding of tuberculosis, the second chapter accounts for “The Predisposing Factors of Tuberculosis,” while the third and fourth


chapters turn respectively to the questions of “Micro-Organisms in Health and Disease” and “The Relation of Tubercle Bacilli to Tuberculosis,” before the fifth chapter proclaims “Man the Final Factor in Tuberculosis”—a proclamation that, in its assertion that “vital force . . . is identical with man” (36), closes the circular trajectory inaugurated in the introduction. Accounting in turn for the hereditary emphases of eugenics, the environmental focus of social medicine (both of which fall under the aegis of “Predisposing Factors”), and the positivist approach of medical science, the questions begged by the spectrum of discourses pertaining to tuberculosis ultimately find their answers in the vital force that is, for Muthu, the essence of humanity. Indeed, the totalizing power of “vitality” resides in its ineffable nature. Deeming the lack of explanatory power exhibited by the range of competing discursive regimes insurmountable, Muthu’s text interprets that lack as an unavoidable necessity. A position that recognizes, indeed founds itself upon, this lack is therefore able to incorporate those positions that blindly seek their realization in anticipated cognitive progress. Bacteriology—Muthu’s main polemical target—provides a prime example in this respect. The germ theory of disease, he argues, “has not satisfactorily explained all the problems of the disease. The presence of the tubercle bacillus is not a decisive factor in the development of tuberculous processes” (PT [1922], 13). Indeed, he continues: “We have made too much of microbes and too little of man in the causation of tuberculosis, which more truly lies within the body than outside. There is no valid proof that the widespread prevalence of the disease is brought about by its contagious character” (13). Not denying the existence of the bacterium, or even its role in the disease, Muthu seeks to limit its explanatory power as causative force, an agency he reserves for the all-important vital energy. In so doing, he draws upon and incorporates recent advances in bacteriological and immunological research. Specifically, it had been discovered that there is no necessary correlation between the presence of the bacterium in the human body and disease activity. In fact, a far greater percentage of the population had been exposed to the bacterium (would have tested positive for its presence) than had been diagnosed with active tuberculosis. This discrepancy between the presence of the bacterium and the presence of the disease did not, of course, pose the problem for medical scientific research that Muthu suggests and actually provides the basis for immunological research: the practice of inoculation is predicated precisely upon this differential, which opens the possibility that there are certain conditions under which the introduction of bacteria into the body can produce beneficial, rather than pathogenic, effects. Microorganisms, he contends, “are really our friends . . . [but] they have


taken advantage of our weakness and lowered vitality and have become abnormally active and virulent, and have pounced upon our flesh and blood to our destruction” (PT [1910], 5). It would, in other words, be foolish to expect that the inability of bacteriology to “satisfactorily explain” or to provide “valid proof ” might be overcome with further scientific advance, for that which medical science seeks to explain lies not “out there” in the quantifiable space of the petri dish, but inside the body, in the ungraspable vital force that flows through it. “If man were mere body,” Muthu insists, “the methods of diagnosis and treatment worked out in the laboratory would be both rational and legitimate. But man is more than body, life more than serum and leucocytes” (PT [1910], 12). This line of argument, moreover, is not reserved for the narrow-mindedly materialist medical scientist and is applied in turn to the eugenicist and the practitioner of social medicine with whom Muthu finds himself more closely aligned. Admitting, on the one hand, that “although . . . there is a tendency to minimize the evil effects of heredity, I believe it is an important factor in the predisposition of tuberculosis” (16) and, on the other, “the relation of social conditions to tuberculosis” (19), Muthu is clear, nonetheless, that “Man is not the creature of circumstance entirely. His personality or vital energy can neutralize any evil tendency” (17). Muthu’s argumentative procedure is notable not because he seeks polemically to overcome competing positions regarding the nature and treatment of tuberculosis but because of the manner in which he does so. Within the discursive network described by Stewart and Ferguson—the same network traversed by Muthu—we have already noted the existence of competing explanatory schemes and of the procedures through which they attempt to totalize the tubercular sociosymbolic. That Muthu’s text engages in precisely this sort of procedure and attempts to account for all competing models of the disease in the terms of the vitalistic open-air cure is fairly unexceptionable. The factor that differentiates Muthu’s approach, however, becomes apparent when we consider the status of the tubercular body. As I have suggested with respect to Stewart and Ferguson, an important feature of the discursive space of the sanatorium is the very significant degree to which the tubercular body ultimately eludes capture by the discursive lines of force mobilized by various explanatory schemes. In its elusiveness, the tubercular body functions to remark a locus within the sociosymbolic space of the sanatorium around which the discursive regimes that constitute that space organize themselves but which they are unable to assimilate or fix. Whereas the tubercular body’s status as a sort of impossible object typically poses a problem insofar as it marks the limit of any particular discursive regime’s ability to totalize the tubercular sociosymbolic field, Muthu’s text


founds its totalizing power precisely in a notion of the tubercular body as essentially ungraspable. Disease, that is, cannot be accounted for in material terms precisely because the invisible, the unseen, the mysterious vitality of the body is paramount. What, then, is at stake in this series of rhetorical maneuvers by means of which Muthu’s text seeks at once to totalize the tubercular sociosymbolic order and to do so with reference to a resolutely unknowable object? If the gesture of totalization is familiar from the discourses that Muthu’s polemic engages, is it significant that the object which facilitates Muthu’s act of totalization is in principle indescribable, beyond cognitive grasp? Given the pivotal role played by Muthu’s notion of vitality, it will be necessary more carefully to attend to its derivation and functioning within his text. The contours of Muthu’s argument take their shape from the vaguely Rousseauvian State of Nature that he posits when he argues that the study of tuberculosis takes us back to the early history of a nation’s life. Disease seems to be the outcome of man’s nonconformity to his environment, without and within. The primitive man, while living the open-air life, was more or less free from disease; but as soon as he began to put on clothes and build houses he stepped into a new environment. Clothes made the skin sensitive to external influences, and thus man was deprived of Nature’s protection. . . . Life in the open air gave the savage an immunity from disease which he lost when he built houses that shut out pure air and sunlight. (PT [1910], 2)

Disease is, in short, “the outcome of civilization, [and] tuberculosis is distinctly a product of our social and civilized condition” (2). This valorization of the natural is common to the antiurban leanings of the public health and sanatorium movements, and predictably leads Muthu to a mimetic therapeutic logic. Positing a fall from a natural state of grace, the first step in this logic is the contention that “wrong living, carried on for centuries, the inheritance of ages of strenuousness and mental strain, the curse of riches and poverty, of overcrowding and underfeeding, of misery and despair, have weakened [man’s] vital energy . . . and brought an instability and loss of resistance which has prepared the soil for tuberculosis and other diseases” (4). Whereas disease is “brought about by departure from Nature and her laws,” “health can only be restored by retracing our way to her” (10); unsurprisingly, the sanatorium’s open-air cure, with its imitative return to Nature’s ways, is ideally positioned to become the agent through which paradise might be regained. Within sanatorialist discourse at large, this return to nature can be located in the sanatorium treatment’s rejection of the cramped unhygienic enclosures and the material, nutritional, and emotional excesses endemic to


urban civilization. Insisting instead on constant exposure to the open air and regularity of nutritional, exertional, and affective states, the therapeutic measures of the sanatorialists sought to reproduce the qualities of (an apparently disease free) preindustrial and preurban existence—an existence therefore in accordance with Nature’s law. In Muthu’s interpretation of this sanatorialist logic, however, the question of the nature of the “Nature” whose laws the sanatorium treatment seeks to replicate is complicated, a complication which lies precisely in the extent to which the standard therapeutic principles of the sanatorium are translated directly into vitalistic terms. Relatively unconcerned with the intrinsic value of the external environmental factors that his antiurban rhetoric foregrounds, his focus ultimately lies with the interiority of vital processes. Whereas his initial recourse to a disease-free state of nature might lead us to locate a mimetic therapeutic logic in the attempt to reproduce the external details of a precivilized, and therefore ostensibly natural, existence, Muthu’s text finally suggests that the environmental regulation at which the sanatorium treatment aims has value primarily insofar as it facilitates internal transformation. “Vitality,” Muthu insists, is outside man, and, like solar energy, comes from the great Author of all life. It is the free gift of Nature (Nature only represents the Source of all life), and, like fresh air, it depends upon our capacity to receive it. The capacity is modified according to environment. Man receives it according to his own measure. It flows in proportion as his vessels are kept clean. (8)

In this formulation, “Nature” designates not a set of environmental conditions associated with a preindustrial, preurban way of life, but simply the source of “life” or vital energy; the external states that the open-air cure aims to produce are of little intrinsic value and are significant only to the extent that they increase one’s capacity to access vital energy more effectively. Altering the standard sanatorialist emphasis on poor environmental conditions, Muthu comprehends the familiar argument for the deleterious effects of industrial urban life not simply in hygienic terms but in terms of a decreased receptivity to vital force. Access to the open air, good nutrition, and psychological regularity are productive of health only at a remove and primarily function to keep the body “efficient for the vital energy to flow through” (8). Rather than replicating a set of external conditions associated with a natural state of health, Muthu’s project seeks to reproduce a “natural” corporeal state—natural insofar as the vital energy that has become synonymous with Nature can flow unrestricted. There are, then, two broad movements to Muthu’s argument. Most immediately he seeks to counter medical scientific approaches to the body,


and to disease, by developing a notion of the vital body, a body whose defining characteristic renders it beyond the ken of a positivist grasp. Secondarily, his articulation of the vital force that comes to define the human body allows him to incorporate the hygienic and environmental impulses of social medicine. While not absolutely inconsonant with the latter, his formulation of the sanatorium treatment nonetheless subordinates them to his vitalist framework. The significance of this bipartite operation becomes particularly clear if we consider the social implications of the relationship between scientific and social medicine and their approaches to the body. These two approaches to the disease are usually held in strict opposition in the period’s literature on tuberculosis—an opposition that Muthu encapsulates using the commonplace distinction between “the specific and the social school, the seed and the soil school” (PT [1922], 13). Perhaps the profoundest tension within the tubercular discourse of the period, and the sanatorium movement in particular, is that which exists between the emphases of a positivism that takes the body to be ultimately graspable as a mechanism that is the object of medical scientific technique and those of a hygienically oriented social medicine that remains comparatively uninterested in the body as organism, even as it identifies the body as the primary site for its disciplinary exertions.22 Whereas the “seed school” grants primacy to the implantation of the germ and its interaction with the mechanisms of the body, the “soil school” insists that a range of predisposing factors, from social and physical environment to the legacy of heredity, provide the key to the disease. In short, there is an oscillation between the somatic and the communal or social. At one pole reside those approaches that claim to grasp the body as such, for which the body appears in its literality, and at the other pole lie those that take the body as the occasion for social management, those for which it is metaphorically transfigured into a model of society. Despite the canonicity of this opposition, it would be more accurate to understand the relationship between these two tendencies as one of interanimation. Though scientific medicine claims no overt communitarian impulse, the mechanical model of the body it produces is both affected by, and comes to affect, the pedagogical and communitarian focus of social medicine. This relationship is visible, for instance, in the development of immunology. Summarizing the strengths of an immunological approach, W. Carnac Wilkinson writes, in The Principles of Immunity in Tuberculosis (1926), that in certain diseases, the cells of the body produce a substance that neutralizes the toxin secreted by the specific (infective) agent. The substance is, therefore, called an antitoxin,

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death” • 71 which is formed by the reaction of tissue and discharged into the blood. By this antitoxic substance in the blood, the toxins in the circulation are deprived of their sting and remain inert. This is the simplest mechanism of immunity by which the disease is brought to a standstill. (62)

Bearing all the hallmarks of medical science, immunology seeks to address the processes of disease at the cellular level in terms of the chemical and physical character of intercellular relationships. When it comes to the question of “permanent immunity,” however, the language of cellular chemistry recedes, and Wilkinson suggests that the former is “secured because, should these infective agents again attack the body, the cells trained by a past experience (previous infection) promptly and effectively respond so that infection is resisted” (62, my emphasis). The scientific model of the body—with its cells, toxins, antitoxins, infective agents, in short its “mechanism of immunity”— is ultimately understood through the language of social medicine, with its pedagogic project and hygienic protocols. Just as social medicine seeks to secure the lasting health of the social body, not through direct intervention, but through the training of its constituent members in the principles of efficient and hygienic living, scientific medicine pursues the lasting health of the physical body through the processes that “train” its constituent units to effectively combat pathogens. The lines of influence between the two approaches are not, however, unidirectional. The educational focus of social medicine can as easily be seen to borrow its logic from immunological practice. Advances in inoculation, for instance, proceeded by way of an extraction of malignant organisms from the body in order to alter them such that, upon their reintroduction, they provoke the body into the production of antibodies against that organism. An analogous logic governs the public health movement insofar as it aims— either figuratively or, in the case of the sanatorium movement, literally—to extract diseased individuals from the social body’s prevailing economy, less in order to return them to a state of health than to alter them through hygienic education such that, upon reintroduction into the social body, they will function to educate other members of the body in the means of combating disease. As Muthu puts it in a moment that is absolutely consonant with this hygienic logic: When patients have been educated in a sanatorium as to the right modes of living, and have returned home, they in turn become teachers to their own household, showing them the benefits of living in the country, and of sleeping with open windows. Thus each patient, as with ruddy cheeks and returned health he faces a circle of friends, becomes an apostle of fresh air and sunshine,

72 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community and silently helps to bring about a revolution which aims at the happiness of home and the community. (PT [1922], 224)

Or, continuing in his bucolic mode: “Like a stone dropped into a still lake, [the sanatorium treatment] will set in motion influences and reforms which will extend with ever-widening circles, transforming the habits of life and the character of man and society, so contributing to the physical and moral efficiency of the nation” (225). As this introduction of the category of “efficiency” makes clear, in this instance the pedagogical impetus of social medicine is ultimately understood via the machinic logic of the medical scientific body, and the education of individual members of the social body becomes a fine tuning of an organic system.23 Beyond remarking the fact of discursive traffic across disciplinary boundaries that is facilitated by this structure of interanimation, it is important to note that the relationship between the bodily formations of medical science and the communitarian formations of social medicine is systematically affected by a shared logic—a logic that pertains precisely to the “organic” character of the systems it addresses. In the case of medical science, it may seem counterintuitive to characterize as organic the bodily systems it takes as its object. Much of the polemical import of Muthu’s argument, for instance—in this he is exemplary of a widespread concern about the deterministic implications of the scientific approach—lies in its opposition of an organic model of embodiment to the mechanization produced by medical science. If the medical scientific model of the body is frequently attacked (as it is by Muthu) on the basis of its mechanicity, and if it is therefore opposed to a more organic model of the body, it remains, nonetheless, resolutely within the logic of organicity. In order to substantiate this claim, it will be necessary to distinguish between the colloquial and technical senses of the “organic.” The former is, for instance, operative in the standard charge leveled against science: namely, that its taxonomic drive disarticulates the body, dissects it (literally or figuratively), renders its component parts exchangeable or prosthetizable, and thereby undermines its natural unity. In this context, the “organic” quality of the body lies in the supposedly natural unity that science undermines. The scientific model of the body remains profoundly organic, however, insofar as our understanding of organicity as a signifier of the natural is not limited by its opposition to mechanicity. Beyond that opposition it can be understood more specifically in terms of what Jean-Luc Nancy refers to as an “organic totality”: that is, as “a totality in which the reciprocal articulation of the parts is thought under the general law of an instrumentation which cooperates to produce and maintain the whole as


form and final reason of the ensemble” (Inoperative Community, 76). To the extent that medical science supposedly fragments the colloquially organic whole of the human body, the fragments (and relationships between fragments), which become its objects, continue to be thought within the logic of the whole, which is to say, thought as a technically organic totality. Installing a horizon of epistemological perfectibility, the taxonomic drive of science renders the body theoretically knowable, graspable, and articulable as a totality, and if the relations between the body’s constituent components are no longer governed by a natural necessity, they are united within a communicationally transparent, and remainderless, closed system. Notwithstanding the factual incompletion of scientific knowledge, the theoretical possibility of epistemological perfection makes available the form of the self-enclosed, transparently articulated system as the horizon which delimits and unifies the body as an organic totality. Though social medicine is frequently at odds with scientific medicine, its critique lies less with the latter’s understanding of disease, and of the bodies it affects, than with the priority it affords them. Indeed, in its attempts to address the social causes and effects of disease, social medicine imports the scientific model of the body in its understanding of the social body. Whereas for medical science, the physical body is circumscribed as an organic totality by a horizon of epistemological perfectibility, the social body to which social medicine addresses itself is rendered organic by way of a horizon of pedagogical perfectibility. Mirroring the organic corporeal logic made available by medical science, social medicine’s hygienic project aims explicitly at the education of the individuals that make up the social body; however, the model of personal responsibility into which it seeks to insert individual members of society ultimately finds its meaning at the level of the social totality. The pedagogic and disciplinary operations performed by social medicine upon the individual are finally significant within a communal economy—specifically that of a corporatist model of community. The hygienic community at which social medicine aims is almost invariably understood in conjunction with the rhetoric of social or national efficiency; the ordered and efficient form of community it strives to produce is, thus, organic insofar as the pedagogic impulse that forms it works toward the ideal of a transparent or frictionless system of relations between the constituent components of the social body. In the context of this organic model of community, which is the product of social and scientific medicine’s discursive interanimation, the possibilities offered by Muthu’s vitalism begin to appear. If Ferguson, Stewart, and Mann all speak to the ways in which the bare life of the tubercular body operates as a fault-line in the sociosymbolic edifice—at once an impossible object that


tubercular discourse functions ideologically to occlude or domesticate and the limit on which attempted ideological totalizations fail—Muthu’s texts also arrange themselves along the same fragile margin. Within the horizons of the working over of life through which tubercular discourse seeks to accommodate eruptions of bare life, the notion of life in operation is extremely limited, serving as it does only to paper over the unassimilable threat of a grossly material body which simply is but makes no sense. The promise of Muthu’s text lies, then, in the possibility of approaching life in a less restricted fashion. Despite being oriented, at the level of intention, by a totalizing project not dissimilar to any of the other tubercular discourses, the fact that Muthu’s act of totalization is enabled by a notion of the ineffably vital body leads his texts in an importantly different direction. The ungraspable vitality that becomes the cornerstone of his argument marks a limit on which the very possibility of totalization, and more particularly the logic of organicity, is unworked. Rather than insisting on the body’s inherent significance, or submitting a dangerously non-sensical body to a work that invests it with meaning, Muthu’s vitalism (at least theoretically) allows the body to exist as an outside to thought, a limit that cannot be put to work in the fashioning of organic community. Though Muthu’s turn to vitalism offers the possibility of marking the limit of organic bodily economies (both physical and social), and therefore of thinking both body and community outside of an organic model, his articulation of the vital body ultimately fails to live up to its promise. His texts finally return life to the realm of (the) work, economy, character, and organicity. Mobilized, as it is, in opposition to the deterministic implications of science’s mechanical model of the body, the notion of vitality that Muthu offers as an alternative is never thought outside the logic of the deterministic discourses it opposes. Given that the potential offered by the vital body lies in its resistance to cognitive appropriation, Muthu’s vitalism is severely limited by the weakness of the notion of vitality that he presents. Muthu is satisfied, that is, to derive the ungraspable nature of vital energy from the cognitive limitations of a particular historical state of scientific knowledge, and he remains unwilling to pursue a logic of the ineffable not founded in historical contingency. The ramifications of this weak version of the vital body are manifest, moreover, in the ease with which it is ultimately reassimilated to the deterministic discourses it is designed to resist. Even his fundamental assertion that health is dependent, not upon the mechanisms of bacterial transmission and interaction, but upon one’s ability to receive Nature’s gift of vitality—a gift that “flows in proportion as [Man’s] vessels are kept clean” (PT [1910], 8)—is posited within the model of a


mechanical system. Indeed, Muthu makes the metaphorical underpinning of his notion of vitality explicit when he comments that healthy living “keeps [the body] efficient for the vital energy to flow through, just as we keep an electric machine bright and clean so that the electric energy may easily flow” (8). If the invisible, unthinkable vitality upon which Muthu relies to combat the mechanism of science is mediated by the economics of physical systems on the one hand, it is transmuted into the terms of another economy on the other. Contesting the biological and social determinism of eugenics and social medicine, he argues that “Man is not the creature of circumstance entirely. His personality or vital energy can neutralize any evil tendency, or add his quota to the good” (17). Once again cast in opposition to the forces of determinism, “vital energy” is, in this formulation, also rendered grammatically equivalent to “personality,” and thereby translated into the terms of morality, character, and ultimately domestic economy. Bringing together the model of the electrical circuit or machine with a theory of moral character, Muthu understands the role of vital energy primarily in terms of “resistance.” Posing the question, “Then, what is it that gives the final determination to tuberculosis?” Muthu responds: “It is something which is peculiar and inherent in each individual, something identical with the organism itself, that controls health and disease. We may call that something vital force which creates resistance and immunity and controls susceptibility” (35). Following on from his assertion that this resistance-promoting vitality is a gift of Nature, he pursues a theory of the means by which this gift is made available, and in so doing turns his attention to the role of microorganisms in disease. Arguing against the position that some bacteria are essentially pathogenic, he arrives at something like a moral bacteriological and immunological theory. “Micro-organisms,” he contends, “begin their life as saprophytes, and help in various natural processes of life; but vicious environment changes their character, so that they take on new properties and become pathogenic. In the same way man has potentialities for good and ill, the good or bad predominating according to the environment in which he is placed” (23). Not satisfied with making pathogenic bacterial activity a product of environment, Muthu goes on to assert that, in addition to the productive work of uncorrupted microorganisms, even in their degenerate form bacteria ultimately work for good. “In disease,” he writes, “they help man to regain his health, for their very opposition stimulates the system to secrete anti-bacterial substances which neutralize their toxins—in the same way that summer and winter, good and evil, prosperity and adversity, are beneficial to man— both conditions playing their part in developing his moral life and character”(23). In short, “As in health, so in disease, Nature has prepared herself for


any contingency that may arise. . . . Even when friends have become enemies, Nature makes use of them in her economy” (30). This line of argument leads Muthu into a number of logical contradictions: his assertions that vital force should be understood as something “peculiar and inherent in each individual” and that “Nature’s economy” ensures the harnessing of even pathogenic activity for the production of resistance and health would seem to run counter to his basic position that the goal of the open-air cure is the promotion of increased receptivity to vital force. Whereas the first assertion suggests a sort of determinism that renders the promotion of increased receptivity irrelevant, the second introduces a circular logic within which Nature is at once the source of vital force and the agent that assures its efficient reception, once again obviating the utility of therapeutic intervention. In attempting to resolve these contradictions, the question of moral character—initially introduced as the terms of the analogy through which he understands the role of microorganisms—comes to the fore. Drawing a distinction between “resistance” and “vital force,” Muthu introduces an extended metaphor: The connection between vital energy and resistance can be explained in this way: If vital energy is represented by the income of a man, resistance would be the salary he gets for the daily work he performs—say £200 a year. But the salary does not actually represent all the source of his income, as he may have his wife’s income and income from the investment of land, property, stocks and shares, etc. If he has a salary we know he cannot starve; he has something to live on. So where there is resistance there is vital energy, though it is independent of resistance, as the income is independent of a man’s salary. Resistance creates immunity, and where there is immunity there is less susceptibility. If immunity is lost, susceptibility comes into play. But man stands above all these forces, related in one way and unrelated in another—controlling, vivifying all the processes of life, casting his final vote towards health and disease. (36)

This foray into domestic economy goes some distance toward accounting for these contradictions. To the extent that vital force is “inherent” in each individual, and that “Nature’s economy” works against unfavorable circumstances to guarantee the presence of that vital force, we might understand these propositions as referring to the vital baseline Muthu here distinguishes as “resistance.” But because “resistance” does not completely account for vital force, because “man stands above these forces” of resistance, immunity, and susceptibility, the need for the transformative project of the open-air cure remains intact.


In attempting to define this additional quantum of vital energy, which supplements the basic salary of resistance, Muthu introduces the case of “two brothers (twins), born of the same parents, brought up under the same roof, eating the same food, living in the same environment, working in the same office” (37)—in short, enjoying the same level of resistance. And yet, he asks, how is it that “one had consumption and the other escaped?” (37). The difference is, he asserts, something inherent and part of man. It is his own personality which is outside the pale of environment or micro-organisms. If environment controls man, man has the power of controlling environment and neutralizing any tendency, whether it be physical or moral. If it were not so man would be a mere machine, an automaton; virtue would have no reward and sin no punishment; goodness and evil would be meaningless terms, and life an unbearable enigma. (37)

In many respects another instance of Muthu’s familiar opposition to the forces of determinism that would reduce the human being to an automaton, this passage introduces, nonetheless, a telling turn in the argument. The ineffable vital energy that has hitherto been the crux of his opposition is here transmuted into the all too familiar force of “personality,” the moral content of individual character. Indeed, the turn to domestic economy with which he articulates this aspect of vital force is far from incidental, for in another attempt to define the surplus vitality that exceeds the salary of resistance, Muthu relates the story of a young woman, hopelessly ill with tuberculosis, who prior to her admission to the sanatorium had cared for the motherless children of her brother, to whom she was “passionately devoted.” Having tried everything in his power to no avail, her physician finally tells her “that her brother’s children wanted her, and that she must live for their sakes, and do her utmost to get well” (36). “The love of the children,” Muthu tells us, “acted like an electric stimulus. She said quietly, ‘I will get well for their sakes.’ And she did” (36–37). The therapeutic model implicit here simultaneously assimilates the vital energy that holds the key to health and disease to a voluntarist model of personality and exemplifies the substance of that personality with recourse to the most predictable and regulative moral norms. The general principle underlying these examples is also drawn from the realm of domestic economy. In a democratizing gesture that counters the suggestion that some individuals might simply possess a greater income of vital force than others, Muthu asserts that a sufferer’s “prognosis is to be reckoned not so much on the amount of vital resistance that is brought to bear upon the disease, as upon the way that resistance is utilized to aid recovery”


(75). Returning to his economic metaphor, he suggests that “a man of large fortune may, in his habits of extravagance, spend the whole of it, and become bankrupt in a very short time. But a man of very limited income, if he uses it economically, may live comfortably all his days” (75). Given that the bulk of sanatorium patients do not, on Muthu’s account, benefit from extraordinary vital wealth, the maximization of limited resources becomes key, and the responsibility for such maximization lies squarely with the individual. “To a great extent,” he insists, prognosis depends upon the patient’s own individual efforts. If he husbands his resources, stops the leakages, and uses what he has to a wise purpose, he will not only hold his own and recover, but will even overcome his disabilities brought on by heredity, bad environment, etc., and turn them to his advantage and blessing. One of the secrets of the sanatorium treatment is that it helps the patient to husband his strength, and utilize every particle of his vital force to the best purpose. (75–76)

Far from merely metaphoric vehicles useful in explicating the processes of disease and vitality, the discourses of moral character and domestic economy become the very substance of Muthu’s sanatorialist project. If the moral characteristics of regularity and good husbandry are here articulated as the means of optimizing the vital corporeal system, they have already been installed at the other end of the equation as organizing the voluntarist model of “personality” with which vitality has been made equivalent. The mimetic project of Muthu’s open-air cure, thus, finally plays itself out in a protocol of character formation—a protocol all too consonant with the organic logic whose unworking his vitalism might have made possible. The sanatorium treatment ostensibly encourages patients to return to “Nature’s way” and defines the Nature to which they must return as an ineffable vital force that is the essence of humanity but which is obscured or dismissed by the deterministic and mechanizing drive of positivist science (whether instantiated by industrial civilization or scientific medicine). This essence that patients are led to realize as natural, however, finally reveals itself to be a voluntarist and individualist notion of personality, and the therapeutic principles of the sanatorium function to provide the moral coordinates that regulate the process of self-fashioning. Far from exposing an ungraspable mode of vital embodiment, Muthu’s project ends up working over life: his exploration of vitality becomes the occasion for the submission of life to a project that aims to transform “the habits of life and the character of man and society, [and thereby contribute] to the physical and moral efficiency of


the nation” (PT [1922], 225). More than merely a contributing factor in the efficient functioning of community, the morally regulated “personality” (the essence realized in the self-fashioning work of character formation in which the sanatorium patient is engaged) is in fact the essence of community. “If personality is not overwhelmed,” Muthu writes, “the organism can begin to neutralize the evils of environment, and proceed to repair the broken edifice. Though it may not succeed in completing the structure in its own lifetime, it will at least lay a foundation for the building of a new type” (PT [1910], 38). According to this logic, in other words, one works to produce oneself as an efficient and morally well-regulated individual, and in so doing produces one’s essence as a human being; what is more, in producing this human essence as one’s work, one produces that essence as the form of community. Working to fashion oneself, one simultaneously fashions a mode of community governed by the logic of the individual.


CHAPTER 2

Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness: Incorporating the Work of Community or Assembling a Multitude?

t is in relation to the tubercular discursive network whose contours the previous chapter explores that I would like to return to Lawrence’s literary corpus. Especially pertinent from the preceding discussion is the double articulation to which life is subject. On the one hand, the medicalscientific discourses constellated around the tubercular body function to paper over or domesticate a “bare life” that cannot be incorporated into schemas of bodily significance, and on the other they are profoundly marked by a persistent vitalism that privileges an ineffable life force. Having argued that the working over of bare life functions in the service of an organic mode of community, and that the potential for the unworking of that communitarian form offered by a vitalistic impulse is contained by the practices and conceptual framework of the sanatorium and the open-air cure, this chapter asks to what extent Lawrence’s articulation of corporeal and communal economies (and their interrelationship) are shaped by the discursive relays of the bioscientific enterprise his texts engage. To what degree is his incorporation of community mediated by the structures made available by bioscientific culture, and to what degree do his texts produce discursive connections unrealized in the medical scientific field narrowly construed—connections possibly less amenable to the domestication of bare life? In order to engage these questions we will need initially to focus on the issue of vitalism in Lawrence’s work.

I


Though hardly an unnoticed problematic, Lawrence’s vitalism has been approached most frequently in extremely general terms.1 It would, of course, be virtually impossible to engage the Lawrencian text without, for example, attending to his insistent privileging of visceral “blood-consciousness” over “mental consciousness” or to his repeated opposition to scientific rationalism and technological advance. These concerns animate (to greater or lesser degrees) the bulk of Lawrence’s writing, and are frequently considered vitalistic in the sense that they remark an investment in the visceral, the instinctual, and the organic in the face of the perceived cultural dominance of the intellectual, the rational, and the mechanical; more precisely, a vitalist program is often detected insofar as Lawrence most frequently approaches these oppositions by arguing that the second set of terms is unable adequately to account for the first. Given the scope of these animating concerns, it could be argued that almost the entirety of the critical response to Lawrence has taken up his vitalism to some degree. Although this generalized approach undoubtedly responds to an important aspect of his thought, it tends to situate his vitalism simply as a form of irrationalist metaphysics elaborated in reaction to late nineteenth-century scientific rationalism. In thus forging a strong opposition between science and vitalism, however, the danger arises of underestimating the extent to which the power and influence of vitalism as a cultural formation in the early twentieth century— Lawrence’s included—derives precisely from its scientific heritage. Bruce Clarke makes this point when he argues, in Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, that vitalism has powerfully inflected the literary sensibility of the last two centuries, and these cultural effects were empowered by the residual prestige vitalism enjoyed from its discursive apprenticeship in the scientific academy. The transition of vitalism from science, to a scientific ideology, to a social ideology shows this complex historical dynamic in action. As it issued into its social formation, vitalist ideology still operated as a metonymy of the science from which it was in the process of being excluded. (28)

Drawing on Georges Canguilhem’s notion of “scientific ideology” to describe the movement of discursive formations from the purview of science proper—science as an institutional domain whose constitutive statements are strictly policed and normatively regulated—to their more broadly sociocultural deployment, Clarke indicates the process whereby “that which falls away from the merit of science retains some of the glamour of science as it enters into its social formations” (26). Although the scientific validity of

Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness • 83

vitalism had long been under serious attack by the turn of the century, it continued to inhabit a lacuna in the rapidly developing state of bioscientific knowledge: “Until a genetics capable of expounding the structure and function of DNA emerged, it seemed to many that life ‘forces’ would never be entirely opened to analytical comprehension. Vitalistic theories remained plausible well into the twentieth century” (29). Though clearly a response to excessive rationalism and the imperialism of mechanistic reductionism, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century incarnations of vitalism are thus best understood as operating (at least marginally) within the realm of scientific discourse. This observation allows us both to situate Lawrence and the scientists he challenges within the same discursive space, and to consider the sociocultural impact of his “scientific” writing less in terms of its truth-value or verifiability than as a question of the functions and effects of his activation of scientific discourse and scientific networks. This is a question, moreover, no less relevant to the scientific orthodoxy Lawrence challenges than to his deployment of science itself. For if Clarke draws our attention to the social activation of scientific prestige in statements that can no longer be considered strictly scientific, Bruno Latour has demonstrated the extent to which science itself—despite its positivist pretensions to explain the functioning of segments of the natural world through the closed, controlled, and repeatable procedures of the laboratory—is profoundly marked by the disavowed necessity of effectively traversing and mobilizing cultural networks. Defining what he calls the “modern constitution,” Latour describes a situation in which the constant proliferation of networks that combine, link, and translate between the human and the nonhuman, the cultural and the natural, the subject and the object must be disavowed by the “modern critical stance,” which operates through processes of “purification” that produce and maintain a strict dichotomy between those two realms (11). Modern science is exemplary of this constitution. On the one hand, it maintains the divide between the human and nonhuman, culture and nature, by claiming to concern itself only with the second half of the divide. It “discovers” the secrets of nature without reference to human culture. But on the other hand, Latour points out, the medium through which such a purification takes place is the laboratory, and insofar as the latter is a figure for the isolation from cultural contamination of the “natural events” that are reproduced within its walls, it simultaneously points to the cultural practices and institutional networks that enable the production and effectivity of knowledge. The universality that grants scientific statements their exceptional power is achieved only by “pulling away the subtle network of practices, instruments, and institutions that paved the way


from contingencies to necessities” (120). In this context, a certain symmetry appears between cultural formations that mobilize the prestige of science and a science whose theoretical production is effected through the mediation of cultural networks. Both operate with reference to what Latour calls the “quasi-objects” (51–55, 82–85) whose paths articulate the hybrid networks that translate between the supposedly discrete poles of nature and culture. Both “cultural” projects like Lawrence’s and scientific projects like those articulated in relation to tuberculosis can thus be approached less in terms of their differing degrees of truth-value or ability accurately to comprehend the bodies that are their ostensibly natural objects, than in relation to the “quasiobjects” they articulate. Vitalism and the Cellular Basis of the Lawrencian Unconscious Having described in the previous chapter the ways in which tuberculosis constitutes a particularly powerful site of confrontation between competing scientific discourses, and of their socio-cultural mobilization, I would like to return to Lawrence’s text in order to assess his engagement of this conflictual field. For as we have seen in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence specifically frames his polemic against the materio-idealism of science in relation to the bioscientific disciplines related to tuberculosis, and it is in the name of “life” that he “scientifically” opposes the scientific impulse he finds exemplified there. We will remember that for Lawrence, “Even biology never considers life, but only the mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life” (F, 12). Faced with the determining and automatizing effects of scientific rationalism, with “life-sciences” that cannot approach the life they claim to study and instead rely on the deadening reduction of their object to physical and chemical principles, he seeks to establish a principle of spontaneous creative vitality. In so doing, he turns to the body as the repository of a force that “bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality . . . innocent of any mental alteration” (F, 212). Naming this “pristine” life principle the unconscious, he specifies (in a disarmingly tautological fashion) that “by the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalyzable, undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced, in every single instance. And being inconceivable, we will call it the unconscious” (17). In opposition to the automatizing mechanism of the mind (of which science is the apotheosis), the Lawrencian unconscious is the very instantiation of spontaneity, and therefore provides a point of resistance against the relentless laws of cause and effect that govern scientific rationality.


Although Lawrence’s designation of the unconscious as the embodiment of vital force is somewhat unique, its function, and especially the opposition to the materialism of science for which it provides the foundation, is consistent with a long tradition of vitalist thought. We have already noted a vitalist resistance internal to medical science itself—as embodied in the therapeutic principles of the rest cure or open-air cure. This medical vitalist reaction can, moreover, be located within a more broadly based cultural trend in the early twentieth century, perhaps most famously associated with the philosophy of Henri Bergson, but also finding articulation (within a specifically British context) in the work of Edward Carpenter.2 Indeed, Muthu’s vitalism shares much with that of Carpenter. The recourse to a Rousseauvian state of nature that underwrites Muthu’s position is very close to the nostalgia for a Golden Age that animates Carpenter’s argument in Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. Diagnosing “civilization” as a disease of the social body, Carpenter anticipates Muthu’s correlation of social and bodily (metaphoric and literal) disease states when he suggests that the proliferation of ill-health among the members of “civilized” societies is directly attributable to the diseased social form that is civilization. Invoking the “savage races” as exemplars of a natural state of health, he comments that even they “do not escape the baneful influence.” “Wherever Civilization touches them,” he writes, “they die like flies from the small-pox, drink, and worse evils it brings along with it” (16–17). In a moment that almost completely prefigures Muthu’s argument, Carpenter elaborates the features of the lost Golden Age of which the “savage races” provide a reminder. Civilization begins, he suggests, with the forsaking of the hardy nature-life, and it ends with a society broken down and prostrate, hardly recognisable as human, amid every form of luxury, poverty and disease. He who had been the free child of Nature denies his sonship; he disowns the very breasts that suckled him. He deliberately turns his back upon the light of the sun, and hides himself away in boxes with breathing holes (which he calls houses), living ever more and more in darkness and asphyxia, and only coming forth perhaps once a day to blink at the bright god, or to run back again at the first breath of the free wind for fear of catching cold! (47)

For both Muthu and Carpenter, the mythic object of their retrospection is marked by a general state of health that is the consequence of the unifying effects of an unfettered access to vital force. In fact, Carpenter argues that “health” should be understood as nothing more than the unified holistic state produced by the recognition of, and harmony with, the vital connectedness of the universe.


Rather than defining health negatively as an absence of disease, Carpenter insists that disease should be comprehended as “the loss of unity. . . . The idea [of health],” he writes, “seems to be a positive one—a condition of the body in which it is an entirety, a unity—a central force maintaining that condition; and disease being the break-up—or break-down—of that entirety into multiplicity” (28–29). Given this definition of health, Carpenter also anticipates Muthu’s critique of medical science. Isolating specific bodily functions as the object of its study, medical science (indeed, science more generally) takes as its fundamental methodological principle the very disintegration of corporeal unity, which is for Carpenter the hallmark of disease. Granting that medical science doubtless has very good reasons for its procedures, he contends nonetheless that it makes a fetish of disease, and dances around it. It is (as a rule) only seen where disease is; it writes enormous tomes on disease; it induces disease in animals (and even men) for the purpose of studying it; it knows, to a marvelous extent, the symptoms of disease, its nature, its causes. . . ; its eyes are perpetually fixed on disease, till disease (for it) becomes the main fact of the world and the main object of its worship. Even what is so gracefully called Hygiene does not get beyond this negative attitude. And the world still waits for its Healer, who shall tell us—diseased and suffering as we are—what health is, where it is to be found, whence it flows; and who having touched this wonderful power within himself shall not rest till he has proclaimed and imparted it to men. (38–39)

In short, though the understanding of disease provided by science has its value, that value can only be subsidiary to a proper focus on the positive force of Health—a force that is coextensive with the unifying power of the vital principle. Due to its materialistic emphasis on the power of the human intellect to decompose the world into constituent components, and to abstract laws governing the relations between those components, science will remain unable to comprehend either that vital principle or the fundamental state of unity and wholeness that is its principal ramification. To the extent that this language of health and disease functions primarily on a metaphorical register in Carpenter’s text, Muthu’s deployment of a similar line of argument as the foundation of therapeutic principles and procedures constitutes little more than a literalization of a vitalist logic like Carpenter’s. Or more precisely, Carpenter and Muthu present inverted forms of the same argument. Carpenter’s use of the language of diagnosis and cure is principally figurative insofar as he aims to describe “civilization” as a disease of the social body, albeit one that has literal biomedical correlates in individual


bodies. Muthu, on the other hand, takes the diagnosis of physical disease states as his primary object, while secondarily extrapolating social analogues from his analysis of bodily disease. Lawrence shares the general contours of his argument with the likes of Carpenter and Muthu. The basis of his critique of science is the same, and there are moments when he too looks back to an idyllic past in which life had not been domesticated or suppressed by the abstracting and mechanizing effects of the modern scientific temperament. “I honestly think,” he says in the foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious, “that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms . . . had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life” (62).3 If, however, Carpenter and Muthu’s positions are firmly grounded in this nostalgic historical logic—characterizing the present moment as one dominated by the modern scientific temperament, and hearkening back to a past that purportedly exemplifies the vital principles that form the basis of resistance to the mechanizing effects of science—that foundation is ultimately one to which Lawrence is less than fully committed. Notwithstanding his invocation of the “great pagan world” in the foreword, the principal movement of Lawrence’s argument seeks not to reach back to a pre-scientific past with which to resist the effects of science, but to locate the point of resistance within the heart of the bioscientific enterprise itself. Lawrence acknowledges the imperative that drives Carpenter and Muthu to position the vital order as prior to the forces of idealization and mechanization that are its corruption, but his articulation of that imperative is different. Rather than turning to global history as guarantor of the priority of the vital, he finds it in the developmental history of individual bodies. Elaborating the originary logic that governs the bodily coordinates of the “pristine unconscious,” Lawrence appropriates the language of bioscience as he narrates the genesis of the unconscious.4 Beginning with the ovule that is the origin of human life, he argues that in the first division of the egg-cell is set up the first plane of psychic and physical life, remaining radically the same throughout the whole existence of the individual. The two original nuclei of the egg-cell remain the same two original nuclei within the corpus of the adult individual. Their psychic and their physical dynamic is the same in the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion as in the two nuclei of the egg-cell. The first great division in the egg remains always the same, the unchanging great division in the psychic and physical structure; the unchanging great division in knowledge and function. It is a division into polarized duality, psychical and physical, of the human being. It is the great vertical division of the egg-cell, and of the nature of man.

88 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community Then, this division having taken place, there is a new thrill of conjunction or collision between the divided nuclei, and at once the second birth takes place. The two nuclei now split horizontally. There is a horizontal division across the whole egg-cell, and the nuclei are now four, two above, and two below. But those below retain their original nature, those above are new in nature. And those above correspond again to those below. (F, 81)

Governed by the necessity that the bodily source of vitality—the unconscious—be pre-mental, that it “obviously cannot be ideal, cannot be cerebral, since it precedes any vestige of cerebration” (19), Lawrence locates its origin at the very inception of life. Arguing that the unconscious spins even “the nerves and the brain as a web for its own motion, like some subtle spider,” he places its genesis at the center of the web, “in the first fused nucleus of the ovule” (19). At its most schematic, the unconscious consists, for Lawrence, in the doubly polarized interrelationships of two pairs of nerve centers: the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, and the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion. Whereas the first pair is located below the diaphragm in the abdomen, and designated the “subjective” plane of consciousness, the second pair (composing the “objective” plane) resides above the diaphragm in the chest. In addition to the opposition between the upper and the lower planes of consciousness, Lawrence posits an opposition within each plane between the “sympathetic” centers, the plexuses, which are located near the anterior surface of the body, and the “voluntary” centers, or ganglia, located near the posterior surface. Though Lawrence primarily focuses on these four nerve centers and their interrelations, they do not account for his diagram of dynamic consciousness in its entirety, and in fact constitute only what he calls its “first field” (132). Within the developmental scheme he provides in Fantasia, the first four centers dominate until puberty, at which time normally a second set of four centers are activated. The second field of dynamic consciousness consists of the “hypogastric plexus” and the “sacral ganglion,” and the “cervical plexuses” and the “cervical ganglia” (132). Also coordinated by their sympathetic/voluntary and subjective/objective modes, the first pair are located “deep in the lower body” below the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion, whereas the second pair are situated above the cardiac plexus and thoracic ganglion “in the region of the throat and neck” (133). These two additional pairs of nerve centers supplement the system of “sensual comprehension” (the lower centers) and the “spiritual” system (the upper centers) of “dynamic cognition” respectively. Their function, however, is different than that of the first field of dynamic consciousness. Whereas the first field governs relations between the child and its family (primarily its parents),


the second field makes its effects felt in the extrafamilial realm, with the sensual centers playing their roles in sexual relations and the spiritual centers regulating the drive to larger-scale social relations. Within the first years of a child’s life, the subjective plane of the first field of consciousness precedes that of the objective plane, and indeed, Lawrence characterizes the energy of the former as calling the latter into operation. Similarly, puberty brings the second field of dynamic consciousness into play, and within that field the dark, sensual force of the lower plane calls for the activation of the upper, spiritual plane in response (see Figure 2.1). Embodiments of a dynamic vitality present even in the most fundamental elements of the body, the nerve centers and their functions are grounded in Lawrence’s rather anthropomorphic understanding of the process of cellular division. Focusing on the sequence that generates the first eight cells of the human body, Lawrence begins with what he deems the original unity of the ovule, and remarks the first vertical division of that cell, a division that “as science knows, is a division of recoil. From the perfect oneing of the two parent nuclei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new assertion. That which was perfect one now divides again, and in the recoil becomes again two” (79). The The Lawrencian Dynamic Consciousness SYMPATHETIC MODES (Anterior surface of body) UPPER SECONDARY FIELD

[5] Cervical Plexuses (Spiritual) Striving toward social relations

FIRST FIELD [3] Cardiac Plexus OF DYNAMIC Objective knowledge – CONSCIOUSNESS Mode: Wonder (Caress)

VOLITIONAL MODES (Posterior surface of body) [5] Cervical Ganglion (Spiritual) Striving toward social relations

OBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

[3] Thoracic Ganglion Objective knowledge – Mode: Curiosity, Instrumentality (Grasp)

DIAPHRAGM

LOWER SECONDARY FIELD

Figure 2.1

[1] Solar Plexus Positive, self-knowledge Indifferentiation Incorporation, unification

[2] Lumbar Ganglion Negative self-knowledge Differentiation Limitation, individuation

[4] Hypogastric Plexus Sexual (broadly defined) relations

[4] Sacral Ganglion Sexual (broadly defined) relations

SUBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS


relationship between the two cells produced by this recoil is subsequently reproduced in the horizontal division of the initial pair into a foursome, and of that quartet into an octet. Largely uninterested in the ensuing processes of division and differentiation that produce the various structures of the body, Lawrence is content to assert that each of these eight cells eventually comes to be embodied in the eight primary nerve centers that form the basis of dynamic consciousness. The initial cell corresponds to the solar plexus, while the cell produced in the first, vertical division finds its realization in the lumbar ganglion. Similarly, the cells produced by the second, horizontal, set of divisions come to be embodied in the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion, and so on. This foray into cellular biology, such as it is, is significant insofar as it determines the functions of the nerve centers. Beginning with the lower plane and its direct derivation from the pristine vitality of the ovule, Lawrence designates it “subjective” insofar as it accounts for sheer consciousness of being. Having derived from the profound unity of the two germ cells in the original cell, the solar plexus is the basis of a consciousness of undifferentiated subjective identity; it provides a form of dynamic, premental knowledge that “I am I.” This mode of consciousness is, moreover, deemed “sympathetic” insofar as it is a consciousness based in a fusion of self and other in a state of unified indifferentiation, which Lawrence finds first exemplified in the infant’s initial relation to the mother. In contrast, the lumbar ganglion (with its origin in the first cellular division that breaks the unity of the ovule) accounts for a subjective identity grounded in separation, individuation, and the differentiation of self from other. By way of the lumbar ganglion, says Lawrence, the individual is conscious that “because I am set utterly apart and distinguished from all that is the rest of the universe, therefore I am I” (80). This form of consciousness is understood as “voluntary” insofar as it involves a willful individuation that Lawrence finds first exemplified in the child’s differentiation of itself from the mother. In the case of the upper, “objective” plane of dynamic consciousness, the object of consciousness is no longer the existence of the subject but that of the extrasubjective world. “Here,” says Lawrence, “I know no more of myself. Here I am not. Here I only know the delightful revelation that you are you” (82). Within this consciousness that “you are you,” the polarity between the sympathetic and the voluntary subsists, with the cardiac plexus governing a “sympathetic” movement toward the Other in the mode of wonder and the thoracic ganglion facilitating a more reserved and instrumental approach to the Other in the mode of curiosity. The sympathetic or voluntary qualities of each center is additionally supported by a commonsensical recourse to gross physiology: for example, the proximity of the solar plexus to the navel, the mark of the individual’s umbilical link to the mother, is suggestive of the sympathetic impulse


it controls, whereas the proximity of the ganglia to the spinal cord, and its centrality to motor activity, is easily assimilated to the individuating function of the voluntary system. As Lawrence puts it, “the vertical division between the voluntary and sympathetic systems, the line of division between the spinal system and the great plexus-system of the front of the human body” constitutes the key duality of dynamic consciousness: “It is the great difference between the soft, recipient front of the body and the wall of the back. The front of the body is the live end of the magnet. The back is the closed opposition” (39). I should pause briefly at this juncture to point out that the preceding recapitulation of Lawrence’s position falls (with only partial justification) into the language of the subject—a subject, moreover, that constitutes itself primarily through the relationship between self and other. This is a fall that Lawrence’s text is itself not always successful in avoiding, and is symptomatic of a tension in his project between two relatively distinct and competing movements of thought. I will, in what follows, trace the consequences of this tension between those moments where the logic of the Subject comes to the fore and competing moments wherein he seeks to approach a mode of consciousness that both precedes and exceeds the self as a subjective formation. From the Ovule to the Individual and Beyond: The Developmental Dialectics of Communal Subjectivity The stakes of this elaborate bodily schema for Lawrence’s thought are extremely high. By developing a notion of dynamic consciousness whose foundation is consubstantial with the very origins of human life, Lawrence ensures that the source of vitality is ontologically prior to the mechanizing effects of mental consciousness. Moreover, in translating vital force into corporeal terms he significantly functionalizes it. No longer simply concerned with a vague and ubiquitous vital force, the “great affective centres” that embody his notion of vitality “are primary, integral mind-centres, each of a specific nature. There is a specific form of knowing takes place at each of these centres, without any mental reference at all” (RDP, 120). Countering the mortifying scientific drive to dissection, division, and differentiation, Lawrence’s model of dynamic consciousness foregrounds the unifying effects of vital force and to that extent is consonant with the vitalist position articulated by the likes of Carpenter and Muthu. The functions, the “specific forms of knowing,” facilitated by the various nerve centers are, moreover, not isolated, but exist in a state of communication mediated by flows of vital energy that are variously figured as wireless messages, circuits of electrical current, or resonant vibrations. The motion of dynamic consciousness “arises spontaneous,” Lawrence contends,

92 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community and is emitted in dark vibrations. The vibration goes forth, seeks its object, returns, establishing a life-circuit. And this life-circuit, established internally between the four first poles, and established also externally between the primal affective centres in two different beings or creatures, this complex-life-circuit or system of circuits constitutes in itself our profound primal consciousness, and contains all our radical knowledge, knowledge non-ideal, non-mental, yet still knowledge, primary cognition, individual and potent. (RDP, 128–29)

Because each nerve center is integrally linked to a group of organs and bodily functions, the “life-circuits” set up between the centers function to produce an integrated corporeal whole. And yet, the ramifications of dynamic consciousness clearly extend far beyond the narrowly somatic to provide the basis of a full-fledged theory of intersubjective and communal relations. To the extent that vital flows account for the integrative relations between various parts of an individual body, they also provide the medium of affective, nonmental communication between the centers in different individuals. Not satisfied to limit this mode of relation to the intersubjective, Lawrence insists that his corporeal model is ultimately the basis for a “lurch into cosmology” (F, 62). Arguing that vital circuits can be “established between the self and [any] external object: mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or even tree or plant” (F, 152), he goes so far as to include the inanimate world and suggest that “there is a definite vibratory rapport between a man and his surroundings. Any particular locality, any house which has been lived in, has a vibration, a transferred vitality of its own” (153–54). From the “glinting nucleus of the ovule,” in other words, Lawrence ultimately extrapolates a cosmology. In short, Lawrence’s vitalist position is elaborated according to protocols very much like those governing Muthu’s project. Vital force is initially deployed in the context of the human body as a means of countering the reductionist impulse of medical science and then extended to provide the basis of a communal form. In Lawrence’s case, the connection between the vitalist corporeal schema he develops, and the structures of collectivity to which he turns is especially clear: more than merely a metaphorical basis for social forms, the body is quite literally their foundation. If vital force integrates the body—producing an organic whole that incorporates everything from the minutely cellular to the broadly morphological—the intracorporeal connections it facilitates are extended to the intercorporeal realm, and it comes theoretically to account for a broad range of social connections: from the intersubjective, to the communal, to the geopolitical. And if the vitalism exemplified by Muthu is ultimately limited by its inability to escape the logic of the scientific models it seeks to critique—finally submitting the supposedly


spontaneous and ineffable vital force to economic models and the coordinates of moral regulation in such a way that it becomes consonant with an organic subjective logic—an important stream of Lawrence’s thought would seem to encounter the same difficulties. Having appropriated the discursive formations of medical science, Lawrence too frequently seems unable to take sufficient distance from their supporting logic. This tendency is perhaps most evident in the extent to which the vital force so central to his understanding of the body, and of dynamic consciousness, continues to be articulated within the terms of both a biological schema of development and a teleology of social regulation. Despite the fact that the optimal (if admittedly utopian) bodily state envisioned by Lawrence is that of a dynamic equilibrium between the divergent functions embodied in the different centers of the unconscious (and ultimately between the unconscious itself and mental consciousness), he frequently seems unable to escape the hierarchizing effects of the developmental model he employs in narrating the genesis of the unconscious. The intent of Lawrence’s polemic seems clear enough: having identified the deleterious effects (both individual and social) of fetishizing mental consciousness, he emphasizes the necessity of returning to the vitality of dynamic consciousness, and in so doing pragmatically privileges the latter over the former as a means of returning their relationship to its proper equilibrium. Similarly within the realm of dynamic consciousness, Lawrence identifies an infelicitous overemphasis upon the upper, spiritual centers: his era, he says, is marked by the fact that “we have tried as far as possible to suppress and subordinate the two sensual centres . . . [and] unduly insisted on and exaggerated the upper spiritual mode . . . [such that] we have caused already a dangerous over-balance in the natural psyche” (F, 113). This diagnosis leads predictably to Lawrence’s familiar privileging of the lower, sensual centers of dynamic consciousness, but it should be noted that this privilege is once again pragmatic rather than constitutional and arises in response to a historically specific disequilibrium. The hierarchical relationship between dynamic consciousness and mental consciousness, and between the lower and upper centers of dynamic consciousness, is, in other words, governed by the utopian desire for a state in which the hierarchy dissolves into a perfect equilibrium—the sensual balancing the spiritual, the subjective balancing the objective, the sexual balancing the social, and so forth. Despite Lawrence’s insistence that the “interplay of the . . . dynamic centres follows no one conceivable law” (125), that the vital unconscious strives toward an unpredictable state of equipoise, the narrative of genesis and ramification of the unconscious are marked by a clear teleology. The centers of


consciousness themselves are the physical product of elementary cellular development, and the functional relations of the resulting modes of consciousness are equally marked by a developmental trajectory. The different phases and fields of dynamic consciousness are articulated through a developmental psychology that is, formally at least, fairly conventional. The functions of the first field of dynamic consciousness are, for example, delineated through an account of infancy and early childhood. The subjective, sensual centers (the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion)—as befitting their cellular primacy—correspond to the experiences of the mature fetus and the infant, and initiate a dialogical progression. The “child in the womb,” writes Lawrence, “must be dynamically conscious of the mother,” and this vital exchange with the mother “suffers no interruption at birth. . . . The child has no conception whatsoever of the mother. . . . It knows her. But only by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic interchange” (106). This sheer subjective knowledge of self, which makes no distinction between the infant self and the mother, is embodied by the “sympathetic centre,” the solar plexus; it is from the solar plexus that “the child rejoices in the mother and its own blissful centrality, its unison with the as yet unknown universe” (80). As the infant develops—primarily as marked by the progressive acquisition of motor skills—the sympathetic mode of sheer, subjective, monadic existence calls forth the complementary mode of still- subjective, but now voluntary, consciousness (embodied by the lumbar ganglion). If the infant’s consciousness remains focused on itself, it begins to know that self in negative relation to the elements of its universe. This entry into self-consciousness through negation itself leads to an increased awareness of the external world, and so the demands entailed by the development of the first, subjective poles of dynamic consciousness call the second set of objective poles (the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion) into operation. It is through this second mode that dynamic consciousness of the objective world is attained. At this point in the child’s development, dynamic consciousness remains limited to the first field, but this is to change with the onset of puberty. “These first [four] poles constitute the first field of dynamic consciousness for the first twelve or fourteen years of the life of every child,” at which point “a change takes place” such that deeper centres of consciousness and function come awake. Deep in the lower body the great sympathetic centre, the hypogastric plexus, has been acting all the time in a kind of dream-automatism, balanced by its corresponding voluntary centre, the sacral ganglion. At the age of twelve these two centres begin slowly to rumble awake, with a deep reverberant force that changes the whole constitution of the life of the individual.

Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness • 95 And as these two centres, the sympathetic centre of the deeper abdomen, and the voluntary centre of the loins, gradually sparkle into wakeful, conscious activity, their corresponding poles are roused in the upper body. In the region of the throat and neck, the so-called cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglion dawn into activity. (132)

The significance of this change resides primarily in the fact that with the awakening of the lower centers “actual sex establishes its strange and troublesome presence within us” (132), and this presence itself will eventually necessitate the reciprocal awakening of the upper, spiritual level of secondary dynamic consciousness. The elaboration of this developmental narrative clearly presents a whole series of problems for the vitalist impulse by which Lawrence’s argument is motivated. In general terms, it seems that Lawrence’s biological psyche— purportedly an ineffable source of spontaneity and site of resistance to the determining effects of medical scientific discourse—is all too consonant with the mechanistic model of embodiment he identifies as belonging to medical science itself. Superficially, at least, this consonance is manifest in the highly schematic, systematic drive of Lawrence’s text, a drive that is consistent with the taxonomic impulse of medical science. If Lawrence does not exhaustively and explicitly attempt to map the contours of the unconscious (detailing the minute functioning of, and relationships between, the bodily structures that constitute it), the schema he elaborates functions, nonetheless, as a sort of systematic calculus. Understanding the unconscious as a source of sheer spontaneity, then, becomes difficult insofar as that calculus theoretically accounts in advance for the possible forms generated by an individual body (the different possible relationships between nerve centers and the structures they control) and its interactions with other animate and inanimate bodies. Moreover, the vital, embodied form of consciousness that Lawrence seeks to pit against the deterministic consequences of scientific materioidealism and its reductionist tendencies is largely determined by physiological processes that are eminently graspable by precisely the medical-scientific regime under contestation. Though Lawrence does not unequivocally specify the nature of the relationship between the various stages of dynamic consciousness and basic physiological facts, the developmental model he employs would seem to imply a fairly strict causality. The progression of the unconscious seems causally to presuppose, or at least to prop itself against, different stages of physiological development: the relatively undeveloped sensory apparatus of the fetus and early infant produces the narcissism of sympathetic subjective consciousness; the development of elementary motor skills conditions the


willful, negative mode of volitional subjective consciousness; a still more developed sensorimotor apparatus and its increasingly nuanced access to the external world generates the two poles of objective consciousness; puberty provides the obvious physiological spur to the awakening of a broadly sexual level of dynamic consciousness; and the physiological effects of sexual relations cause the emergence of the final communitarian impulse embodied in the upper second field of consciousness. This causal connection between the vital force of the unconscious and the strict progression of physiological development ensures that the actual unfolding of the former is significantly determined by the latter. The vital force of the unconscious is thus submitted to the predictable, even normative, narrative of physiology—a discourse that is among the key targets of Lawrence’s polemic. In fact, this would seem to bring Lawrence’s text dangerously close to a form of the mechanist reduction that it is designed to resist: the ostensibly spontaneous, vital unconscious is comprehensible in terms of, even caused by, the sort of bodily processes that are eminently susceptible to scientific rationality. Much like Muthu’s articulation of vital force in this respect, Lawrence’s elaboration of dynamic consciousness is underwritten by the economics of machinic efficiency, an economics that is introduced, in Lawrence’s case, by the operative ideal of a corporeal system that is directed toward a state of dynamic equilibrium. His text seeks to correct a variety of common “derangements” of the unconscious caused by the overreliance upon, or overdevelopment of, specific components of the bodily economy, and in so doing posits an organic bodily system in which each individual component is subsumed under, and takes its meaning from, the whole at whose realization it is directed. While Lawrence’s corporeal model is colloquially organic insofar as its (natural) system of vital flows is articulated in opposition to the mechanical scientific model, it is, moreover, technically organic in that the vital flows integrating all aspects of the body are oriented by the goal of producing a balanced, efficient system. In this system any overweening component parts claiming independent importance are returned to their proper place in an economy in which the function and significance of all parts are reciprocally articulated in the production and maintenance of the whole. An important corollary of this turn to corporeal economics is the incorporation of the resulting bodily economy into the economics of social regulation. Though Lawrence’s social ideals are clearly different than those of Muthu or the practitioners of social medicine, for example, and though his vision of social improvement does not coincide with their narrowly productivist promotion of social and national efficiency, his efficient model of the body is tied nonetheless to a project of social regulation that implies its own


economics of social (and even national) efficiency. This impulse is especially evident in the considerable textual space devoted to the question of education and educational reform. Lawrence proposes, for instance, a renovated system of childhood education, and imagines a public notice proclaiming pedagogical changes on the basis that “it is the intention of this State to form a body of active, energetic citizens. The danger of a helpless, presumptuous, newspaper-reading population is universally recognized” (115). The facetious tone notwithstanding, his reference to the perils of newspaper reading stands in contradistinction to his proposal for an education system that trains the bodies of young children without prematurely forcing them into mental consciousness, and this corrective is clearly directed by a form of improved national efficiency.5 It is crucial to note the highly normative drive governing the form of social regulation to which Lawrence’s understanding of the vital body contributes. While the kind of dynamic equilibrium toward which he imagines dynamic consciousness tending might suggest a sort of nonteleological, self-regulating system—a system in which the myriad and ever-shifting vital connections within and between bodies spontaneously generate accommodating social forms—Lawrence frequently constrains both bodily and social economies with an eye to normative regulation. Certain forms of vital connection are constantly promoted at the exclusion of others. This is nowhere more evident than in relation to questions of sex and gender. Lawrence’s absolute commitment to a particular understanding of sexual difference—“the great thing is,” he insists, “to keep the sexes pure” (195)—means that certain configurations of the vital body and certain forms of vital connection are appropriate only to men or to women. Because he does not go so far as to claim that possible configurations of dynamic consciousness are biologically limited by sex, the efficient functioning of the vital body and the social forms it mediates is ensured by the regulatory insertion of individuals into normative categories. The effect of Lawrence’s discourse seems ultimately to be less the multifarious bodily and social ramification of vital force, than the channeling of vital force into particular social forms. Given his repeated claims for the cognitively ungraspable, lawless, nonteleological, spontaneous character of dynamic consciousness, its physiological basis and normative constraints ensure that it remains rather uncomfortably within the realm of medicalscientific discourse against which it explicitly is posed. If Fantasia claims, in short, to approach the unfolding of bare life, that bare life, it seems, is once again worked over (rendered a work of life) in the production of organic structures of community. In calling his readers to engage in the personally and socially therapeutic activity of allowing vital force to reemerge within its


proper provenance, his text in effect calls them to a labor of naturalized social regulation in which the disruptive force of bare life is worked over. If organic bodily and communal structures are evident even in the physiological basis of the unconscious, what is more telling in this respect is the functional teleology into which the various modes of dynamic consciousness are inserted. While the narrative unfolding of the physiological structures of dynamic consciousness is dialogical in form—each center eventually calling its reciprocal into existence—when we consider the functions ascribed to those centers (especially the centers of the second field of consciousness), the narrative becomes fully dialectical. Proceeding from the solar plexus, and its sheer subjective knowledge that “I am I,” the volitional mode of subjective knowledge is activated in the lumbar ganglion, and the infant begins to develop a sense of itself as an individual through negation. This process of individuation does not, however, entail the simple abandonment of the first subjective mode. The latter, Lawrence insists, “continues all life long” (106), and so, rather than being surpassed in the process of subjective individuation, is incorporated within the second stage of dynamic consciousness. Similarly, with the invocation of the second and third centers of “objective consciousness,” the child’s increasing awareness of the objective world does not do away with the initial stage of subjective consciousness but merely folds it into a larger system. With the awakening of the lower secondary field, and the advent of sexual relations, dynamic consciousness is taken a stage further to account for extrafamilial, intersubjective relations. “There can be no vivid relation between two adult individuals,” writes Lawrence, “which does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force or magnetism or electricity, call it what you will, between these two people” (134).6 Though he insists that this vital flow is not always narrowly sexual in nature, sexual relations are especially important. “To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, a vital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital experience the life and very being of the individual largely depends” (134). The signal importance of the sexual relation derives precisely from the fact that it is, for Lawrence, the dynamic synthesis of the two modes that constitutes the first field of the unconscious. As dynamic consciousness progresses steadily away from the monadic subjective mode governed by the sympathetic force of the solar plexus, and toward increasing levels of individuation and objective awareness, the awakening of the sensual mode of the second field offers the mechanism through which the initial mode of consciousness is sublated rather than simply surpassed. Sex is, for Lawrence, the irresistibly magnetic attraction that sets itself up in the oppositely polarized blood of


two individuals—more specifically, of a man and a woman since by the time of Fantasia the fascination with the homoerotics of the Blutbrüderschaft, as we shall see in a moment, has been commuted fully into a spiritual form, and properly sexual relations have been normatively rendered resolutely heterosexual. Sexual relations begin with an individualized mode of consciousness, and in the act of coition “the two seas of blood in the two individuals . . . as near as possible, clash into a oneness” (134). This return to a mode of consciousness characterized by fusion, unity, and oneness instead of negation, differentiation, and individualization is, of course, only temporary, and the “two individuals are [ultimately] separate again” (134). Yet crucially, the renewed state of individuality is not the same as the one that preceded the sexual union. In their renewed state of individuality the blood of the man and the woman is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost re-created, like the atmosphere after thunder. Out of the newness of the living blood pass the new strange waves which beat upon the great dynamic centres of the nerves: primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion. From these centres rise new impulses, new vision, new being . . . . And so life goes on. (135)

Sexual relations thus serve to reincorporate the earliest mode of dynamic consciousness into the more highly individualized form that characterizes its later stages, a reincorporation which materially alters and renews that individualized mode. This is not, of course, the last stage in Lawrence’s dialectic of the unconscious, for the “new impulses, new vision” that are the consequence of the sexual phase of the dialectic themselves call the final plane of the unconscious into activity. “The new thrills,” says Lawrence, “are passed on to the great upper centres of the dynamic body,” and in this move from the lower sensual centers to the upper spiritual ones the “heart craves for new activity. For new collective activity. That is, for a new polarized connection with other beings, other men” (135). This new connection, Lawrence repeatedly and emphatically insists, is not sexual. The homoerotics evident in fictional texts like The Rainbow and Women in Love, yet notably excluded from the sexual phase of dynamic consciousness as represented in Fantasia, are accommodated and sanitized in this final stage of the dialectic.7 “The whole polarity,” he claims, is different from that of the sexual connection; “Now the positive poles are the poles of the breast and shoulders and throat, the poles of activity and full consciousness” (135–36). As opposed to the sexual union, this union between passionately connected men is “a unison in spirit . . . in understanding, and


a pure commingling in one great work. A mingling of the individual passion into one great purpose” (136). Significantly, this new form of vital connection surpasses that which is available in sex. Whereas the latter is limited to the individual, to the fusion and separation of two individuals, the former is fully communal. “We have got to get back to the great purpose of manhood,” writes Lawrence, a passionate unison in actively making a world. This is a real commingling of many. And in such a commingling we forfeit the individual. In the commingling of sex we are alone with one partner. It is an individual affair, there is no superior or inferior. But in the commingling of a passionate purpose, each individual sacredly abandons his individuality. In the living faith of his soul, he surrenders his individuality to the great urge which is upon him. . . . [O]nce a man, in the integrity of his own individual soul, believes, he surrenders his own individuality to his belief, and becomes one of a united body. (137)

This final stage of dynamic consciousness incorporates the creative energy generated in the preceding sexual stage—the very energy that spurs it into existence—while overcoming the limited individualism that is its governing principle. Here we have a more thoroughgoing reemergence of the fusional mode of the solar plexus; whereas sex represents a predominantly individual mode that remains significantly conditioned by the early monadic modes of the unconscious, this final stage represents an overcoming of individualism in favor of fusion in a united communal body, which nonetheless maintains the influence of individualized modes of consciousness. If the individual is led to sacrifice his individuality to “become one of a united body,” he “remains responsible for the purity of his surrender” (137). Once again it is important to remark that the progression to this final stage of dynamic consciousness is fully dialectical. The preceding sexual mode is not simply overcome, for “no great purposive passion [of social creation] can endure long unless it is established upon the fulfilment in the vast majority of individuals of the true sexual passion. . . . You have got to base your great purposive activity upon the intense sexual fulfilment of all your individuals” (137–38). The force of sexual passion is, thus, raised up and incorporated into the communitarian passion to which it leads. This dialectical narrative is completely consistent with the logic of the Subject, and in fact describes a fairly standard trajectory for subjective development: the individual subject comes into existence through a process of negation. In this case, the organic bodily architecture of the unconscious goes hand in hand, and provides the basis for, a full-fledged subjective logic governing both the individual and the structure of collectivity into which the


individual is eventually subsumed. The organicity of Lawrence’s model is especially clear insofar as he describes individuals as realizing their essence in the process of producing the community as closed and remainderless “work.” This form of community is, he writes, “a unison in spirit . . . in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great work” (136, Lawrence’s emphasis), and as such constitutes an organic totality. The entire process of individual development entailed in Lawrence’s schema of the unconscious tends toward this point at which the individual subject simultaneously fully and essentially realizes itself, and is led to sacrifice its subjectivity in the fusional fashioning of a communal form that is itself subjective. Taken in conjunction with a number of Lawrence’s concomitant preoccupations—specifically, his fascination with the cult of the leader, his perception of pervasive decadence and social degeneration, his disparagement of democracy, his advocacy of a governing elite (what he calls aristocracy), and evidence of anti-Semitism8—the line of thought that leads to this organic, subjective corporeal and communal framework is precisely that which has provoked various critics to decry the troubling political consequences of his work and even to argue for its protofascist implications. The culminating fusion of individuals in communitarian purpose is, according to Lawrence, “not the relation of love . . . nor of brotherhood, nor equality,” but instead “a relationship of men towards men in a spirit of unfathomable trust and responsibility, service and leadership, obedience and pure authority” (191). “Men have got to choose their leaders,” he continues, “and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader” (191). Taken at face value, and in conjunction with the organic corporeal and social economies his text elaborates, comments like these make it easy to recognize the grounds of political concern. This aspect of Lawrence’s thought arguably finds its most extreme articulation in what are generally referred to as the leadership novels (Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent).9 In the case of The Plumed Serpent, this extremity lies largely in the particular forms given to the organic structure of community developed in texts like Fantasia. The Plumed Serpent is consistent with Lawrence’s essayistic projects of the period and is animated by the same impulse as the psychological essays: in most general terms, the exploration of sources of vital resistance to the mechanizing effects of materioidealism. The bodily schema of the psychological essays is much in evidence as a means of characterization,10 and the tensions between mental and dynamic consciousness, and between various aspects of the latter, are played out largely in terms of the relationships between characters that embody different aspects of Lawrence’s schema. In contrast to the psychological essays, however, the


novel relies heavily on a primitivist nostalgia in its understanding of the origins of vital force and deploys that force in an explicitly geopolitical context. More specifically, the novel’s development of the importance of dynamic consciousness renders the manifestation of vitality coextensive with the unfolding of a mythic nationalist community—a move that is especially significant when we consider that the organic form of community posited in Fantasia remains comparatively independent of the parameters of the nation or the nation-state. Whereas the psychological essays, as we have noted, eschew primitivist nostalgia (like that of Carpenter or Muthu) in order to pursue a more strictly biological source of vital force, the hints of primitivism legible in the foreword to Fantasia are pursued wholeheartedly in The Plumed Serpent, and take on a distinctly racialist tenor. To the extent that the novel conforms to the conventions of the bildungsroman in its exploration of Kate Leslie’s individual development, it does so in large part along a geopolitical axis: Kate is, at a fundamental level, the product and representative of Europe, and her development is spurred forward primarily by the confrontation between the European aspects of her character and the influences of the “dark races” she finds in Mexico. Though her Celtic heritage is the basis of some affinity with Mexican culture—“Ah the dark races!” she thinks, her “own Irish were near enough for her to have glimpsed some of the mystery” (148)—she is primarily the representative of European culture and is in retreat from the influences of both Europe and the United States (the latter primarily embodied by Owen Rhys and Bud Villiers, her companions in Mexico). Whereas the Europe she has left is a declining civilization given over to the deadening effects of mental consciousness, the United States represents the crass, frenetic, commercial pursuit of the mechanical and the automatic under the guise of a drive to experience “Life” in its fullest. In this experiential quest for multifold manifestations of Life, however, the American temperament typically mistakes banal spectacle for “Life”; as Kate reflects of Owen Rhys, “he was a born American, and if anything was on show, he had to see it. That was ‘life’” (8). In contrast, Kate finds a powerful vitality embodied by Mexico and its inhabitants. “Perhaps,” she speculates, something came out of the earth, the dragon of the earth, some effluence, some vibration which militated against the very composition and the blood and nerves in human beings. Perhaps it came from the volcanoes. Or perhaps even from the silent, serpent-like dark resistance of those masses of ponderous natives whose blood was principally the old, heavy, resistant Indian blood. Who knows? But something was there, and something very potent. (55)


This racial distinction between the cultures of Europe and Mexico is nostalgically historical. Mexico is, for Lawrence, an example of a precivilized culture, and in terms of vitality represents a sort of Golden Age. We are informed, for example, that Kate “had a strange feeling, in Mexico, of the old prehistoric humanity, the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, before the glacial period” (414). It is the surviving vestiges of this prehistoric humanity that lead Kate to question the value of the mental consciousness that dominates her European sensibility. In continental America, we learn, sometimes the shadow of that old pre-Flood world was so strong, that the day of historic humanity would melt out of Kate’s consciousness, and she would begin to approximate to the old mode of consciousness, the old, dark will, the unconcern for death, the subtle, dark consciousness, non-cerebral, but vertebrate. When the mind and the power of man was in his blood and his back-bone, and there was the strange, dark inter-communication between man and man and man and beast, from the powerful spine. The Mexicans were still this. That which is aboriginal in America still belongs to the way of the world before the Flood, before the mental-spiritual world came into being. In America, therefore, the mental-spiritual life of white people suddenly flourishes like a great weed let loose in virgin soil. (415)

It is, of course, this flourishing and its social ramifications, that the novel primarily seeks to explore. Both terrified by and attracted to this powerful vitality, Kate ultimately seeks to abandon her old life, imploring: “Give me the mystery and let the world live again for me . . . ! And deliver me from man’s automatism” (105). This decision, in large part, is played out in her ensuing interactions with Don Ramón Carrasco and General Cipriano Viedma, the novel’s prime advocates for a national renaissance premised on the rejuvenation of the preColumbian cult of Quetzalcoatl. Because the narrative of Kate’s bildung—a narrative dominated by her progress toward the realization of dynamic consciousness—is thus intertwined with that of the burgeoning Quetzalcoatl movement, the text closely articulates its primitivist, racialized vitalism with a program of mythic (and in many critics’ eyes proto-fascist) nationalism. Ramón and Cipriano seek cultural renovation at both an individual and communal level by recuperating ancient Aztec myth and religion as a framework within which to establish a renewed connection to the vital force of the unconscious—a force that is, for them, racially rooted in the Mexican psyche but has been historically submerged beneath the weight of Christianity and the other cultural forms imposed by European imperialism. In so doing, social and political difficulties become almost completely coextensive with


the problem of Life, or rather, the former can only be addressed in the pursuit of the latter. Articulating his basic position, Ramón claims that in attempting to solve “the problems of the people, we lose the people in a poisonous forest of problems” (361). For him, Life makes, and moulds, and changes the problem. The problem will always be there, and will always be different. So nothing can be solved, even by life and living, for life dissolves and resolves, solving it leaves alone. Therefore we turn to life; and from the clock to the sun and the stars, and from metal to membrane. This way we hope the problem will dissolve, since it can never be solved. When men seek life first, they will not seek land nor gold. The lands will lie on the lap of the gods, where men lie. And if the old communal system comes back, and the village and the land are one, it will be very good. For truly, no man can possess lands. (361)

Ramón’s vision of a renewed form of community is thus predicated upon the pursuit of the vitality embodied in dynamic consciousness. At its most simple, his politico-spiritual program is encapsulated in his pithy exhortation to “seek life, and life will bring the change,” an exhortation that also finds articulation in the slightly less quietistic demand that his followers “fight for the vulnerable unfolding of life” (361). The formless and apparently contingent character of this notion of cultural renovation, however, is rather misleading, for Ramón has very definite ideas regarding both the processes that will bring about this change, and the shape it will ultimately take. The “unfolding of life” for which he would have his followers fight is structured by an elaborately organized program of cultural labor. Ramón’s villa becomes the heart of a sort of arts and crafts movement under the auspices of which the members of the Quetzalcoatl movement labor to produce everything from traditional clothing designed with an eye to its symbolic significance, to the icons around which that symbolism is organized, to the choreographed rituals and hymns that celebrate and give mythic form to the movement. In addition to promoting this eminently material labor of vitalistic cultural renewal, Ramón provides a detailed theory of the communal form into which it will be channeled. “I would like,” he says to Cipriano, to be one of the Initiates of the Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country its own Saviour, . . . or every people its own Saviour. And the First Men of every people forming a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have aristocrats, that we know. But natural ones, not artificial. And in some way the world

Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness • 105 must be organically united: the world of man. But in the concrete, not in the abstract. (248)

Though Ramón’s understanding of the “organic” unity for which he aims seems premised primarily on its ostensible naturalness, it is fully organic in the sense that the national community he works to create is predicated upon the fusion of its members in the identity of the leader by whom it is embodied. Organizing for revolution, Cipriano encapsulates this sacrificial structure by organizing the members of the movement into cadres. “He divided his regiment up,” we are told, “into little companies of a hundred each, with a centurion and a sergeant in command. Each company of a hundred men must learn to act in perfect unison, freely and flexibly. ‘Perfect your hundred,’ Cipriano insisted, ‘and I will perfect your thousands and your tens of thousands’” (366). The movement, thus, is organized functionally in a tiered hierarchy, with each tier a micro-communal structure based on the principle of efficient unification of its members under a leader, and each tier progressively incorporated into a superior level, all finally unified under the supreme leadership of Ramón, the “Natural Aristocrat.” This final level of communal unification is succinctly captured on the occasion of a mass rally whereupon the narrative reveals that: With his words Ramón was able to put the power of his heavy, strong will over the people. The crowd began to fuse under his influence. As he gazed back at all the black eyes, his eyes seemed to have no expression, save that they seemed to be seeing the heart of all darkness in front of him, where his unknowable God-mystery lived and moved. (337)

The novel’s communitarian logic thus begins by calling individuals to “seek life first” (361), to fight for the unfolding of a lost vital force that nonetheless will have already essentially constituted their racialized individual character. This quest for life is then facilitated by the labor of producing the symbolic and mythic matrix through which individuals can access vitality, a labor that produces the structure of organic community as a work of self-realization. Having elaborated that structure of collectivity, the work of vital self-realization and the work of community are coordinated in a culminating moment of fusion wherein the individual sacrifices him or herself to the enclosed and remainderless commonality essentially embodied by the leader who can gaze back at his followers and, untroubled by any remnant of individuality, see only that undifferentiated substance in which he “lived and moved.” If there is any doubt regarding the closed and remainderless nature of the communitarian


form toward which the novel works, it is dispelled in the oft-commented upon scene of political retribution in which Ramón and Cipriano mobilize the mythic framework of the Quetzalcoatl movement to “sacrificially” eliminate a number of traitors and would-be assassins. Presiding over the ceremony in his role as the vengeful Huitzilopochtli, “the purifier” (384), Cipriano designates the dissidents from the movement as “unclean” (377), as “men that are less than men” (379), and elicits from the mass of followers the demand for their sacrificial execution. This act of communal “purification,” moreover, remains incomplete until the traitors’ bodies are buried in “quick-lime, till their souls are eaten, and their bodies, and nothing is left” (378). The immediacy with which vitality itself is presented as the essence of community makes the organic character of this communal form especially evident. Community is produced and maintained by a mythic structure that ultimately seeks neither to represent the specific form of community, nor to present particular interests or political concerns as the shared basis of commonality. Functioning neither to communicate nor to represent, the myths and rituals Ramón and his followers labor to produce are instead forms of a power whose invocation or deployment is itself the taking place of community. Participation in the myth of community is not the realization of a substance shared in common, but the delineation of a space that allows a group of individuals simultaneously to be traversed by the vital force that is at once the realization of their essence as individuals and the essence of community. With perfect tautological symmetry, the moment of fusion, thus, closes the loop of organic communal logic. Ramón (as leader) is at once the exemplary embodiment of vital force and the operator of communitarian myth: his mythic words produce that space in which his followers identify with him as the apotheosis of vital force, and in so doing paradoxically realize their individual essences in the moment at which they are most thoroughly traversed and animated by the impersonal force of Life. Finally, stripped of the superficial trappings of the personal in their realization as temporary and shifting ramifications of the eternal flow of vital force, they become the embodiment of that dark, undifferentiated medium in which Ramón “lives and moves”—that which has already been established as the foundation of his identity as leader. A Singularly Persistent Infancy: Unfolding Bodies, Constellating Multitudes The Plumed Serpent is, thus, relatively unambivalent in its development of the organic corporeal and communal structures made available in the psychological essays; predicating the latter on the former, the novel works over


the ineffable life force so central to Lawrence’s understanding of the body, and founds its thoroughly organic model of community upon this work of life. It would, however, be a mistake to view this novelistic elaboration of Lawrence’s thought as the culmination or inevitable conclusion of his exploration of the relationship between human embodiment and community. Rather, it marks only the extremity of one stream of his thought. To the extent that the late novels (and The Plumed Serpent in particular) are committed relatively unequivocally to the playing out of this extremity, such a commitment constitutes the foreclosure of a powerful tension that shapes Lawrence’s position in the nonfiction prose of the period (and especially the psychological essays). Indeed, this difference between the fiction and the essays is partially attributable to generic constraint. Lawrence’s elaboration of his position through the novelistic development of fictional characters—not to mention the bildungsroman structure that significantly organizes The Plumed Serpent—serves to enforce the subjective logic that supports his organic line of thought and is considerably less amenable to those elements of his thought that seek to move outside the bounds of the Subject (as both a personal and communal form). The essays, on the other hand, fully pursue Lawrence’s thoroughgoing distrust of cause-and-effect rationalism, and as such eschew the tyranny of logical consistency—perhaps one of the tendencies T. S. Eliot had in mind when he diagnosed Lawrence’s “incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking” (After Strange Gods, 58)—in favor of a commitment to the productivity of a sort of thought experiment that frequently relies on the force of violent juxtaposition. The stream of thought that culminates in the organicism characteristic of The Plumed Serpent is not the only articulation available in Lawrence’s corpus of the relationship between the body and forms of community; within the psychology essays and his contemporaneous non-fiction, his vitalism is developed simultaneously in a different direction—one that contests, and provides resources for the unworking of, precisely that organicism. As I have argued, Lawrence’s engagement with, and appropriation of, medical scientific discourse provides the impetus for the organic corporeal and communal structures that he elaborates in the psychological essays and the leadership novels. Lawrence founds his vitalist project in the heart of the medical scientific enterprise he seeks to contest but, much like Muthu in this respect, seems unable to take sufficient distance from its governing logic. As a result he largely replicates the organic model of embodiment made available by medical science and then founds his notion of community upon that corporeal system. If this foray into medical science, thus, poses one of the greatest dangers for his project, it is also precisely the point at which an alternate trajectory remains most legible in his text.


To return to Lawrence’s developmental dialectic of dynamic consciousness in the psychological essays, we will recall that much of the texts’ organicist impulse derives from the logic of physiological development. The organic corporeal model the texts promote is predicated upon both the economics of efficiency implied by the notion of the body as a system tending toward balanced equilibrium, and the causal connection between the vital force of the unconscious and the physiological principles governing its genesis. If we turn, however, to Lawrence’s commentary upon the effects of various possible derangements of dynamic consciousness—states of disequilibrium into which the system is prone to fall—a different line of thought becomes apparent. As Lawrence considers the malfunctioning of his system, it becomes clear that the relationship between the unconscious and the physiological processes of the body is not unidirectional, and more specifically that the connections are not limited to the derivation of the former from the latter. If dynamic consciousness finds its wellspring among the most fundamental units of the human body, it also has a profound effect upon the body from which it flows. Taking very seriously his contention that the unconscious spins the “nerves and the brain as a web for its own motion” (19), Lawrence posits lines of force that move from the nerve centers of dynamic consciousness to the body’s organs, and grants a precedence to the vital force of the unconscious that affects the form of the body through which it flows and in which it actualizes itself. This relationship is perhaps most clearly manifest in the text’s brief taxonomy of the various pathological conditions resulting from the derangement of the nerve centers through the over- or understimulation of any given center. In the case of what Lawrence takes to be the preeminent pathological condition of his day, for instance, there is an overemphasis on the upper, spiritual nerve centers at the expense of the lower, sensual centers. “Since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centres,” he contends, there is a tendency now towards phthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. The great sympathetic centre of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs, burnt by the over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, the heart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful lower centres are no longer fully active, particularly the great lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride and independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression. And it is this ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested, roundshouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. (93)

On this account the vital flows of the unconscious are not determined by physiology, but actually shape the body through which they flow. In, thus,


reversing the developmental logic upon which he elsewhere relies, Lawrence specifically engages a powerful medical scientific model whose effects were felt not least in relation to the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis. Invoking the “tendency towards phthisis” embodied by the physical type of the “weakchested, round-shouldered” individual as the historically preeminent example of the way in which the derangement of the unconscious affects bodily morphology, Lawrence challenges the notion of physiological types extant in the clinical and social science of the day, and especially prevalent in the understanding of tuberculosis. Applied in the attempt to establish or buttress identity categories—wherein a certain set of physiological features distinguished a particular identity (based, for example, on race, class, sex, or some more specific characteristic like predisposition to a given pathological condition) and indicated a corresponding set of moral and psychological characteristics proper to that identity—physiological typing played a major role in the understanding of diseases (like tuberculosis) that were thought to have a constitutional basis.11 In the case of tuberculosis, the body type that designated a predisposition to the disease was referred to as the habitus phthisicus, and it is this type that Lawrence clearly invokes in the image of the stooped, weak-chested individual.12 Whereas the medical science that draws upon this notion of the habitus phthisicus posits a determining causal relation in which the features of the body dictate everything from susceptibility to disease to psychological and moral predilections, Lawrence recasts morphological features as structures produced by the flows of dynamic consciousness rather than causal agents. Extending and schematizing this understanding of the relationship between the unconscious and the body beyond the narrowly pathological, Lawrence goes so far as to claim that: just as the fullness of the lips and the shape of the mouth depend on the development from the lower or the upper centres, the sensual or the spiritual, so does the shape of the nose depend on the direct control of the deepest centres of consciousness. A perfect nose is perhaps the result of a balance in the four modes. But what is a perfect nose!—We only know that a short snub nose goes with an over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the centre of the upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great centre of curiosity, and benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual voluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn up our nose from a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness and subjective authority. The nose is one of the greatest indicators of character. That is to say it almost inevitably indicates the mode of predominant dynamic consciousness in the individual, the predominant primary centre from which he lives. (100–101)


The effects of the unconscious upon the body’s morphology, thus, are not limited to the tubercular body, or to nasal or respiratory conditions more generally. Instead, Lawrence’s schema systematically accounts for the relationships between the nerve centers and each of the five senses, not to mention a wide range of organs, major and minor. If one, perhaps, initially is seduced by the simple elegance and extensive classificatory reach of a rhinomorphic theory of character (and its possible analogues), it is important to note that the relationship described therein is ultimately more than merely expressive or reflective. Though it clearly engages the characterological impulse implicit in theories of physiological types, Lawrence’s model functions neither simply to map interior states and the values attached to them (here understood as the states of dynamic consciousness) onto the exterior surface of the body, nor simply to comprehend the visible features of bodily exteriority as reproducing the character of internal systems. Sharing with the typologists the belief that physiological features make legible elements of individual character, Lawrence parts company both in positing a significant degree of physical mutability, and in comprehending morphology not as the determining instance but as determined by the variable flows of the unconscious. Rather than a relation of reflection or representation, dynamic consciousness and the body find themselves inserted in something like a feedback loop. If dynamic consciousness derives its force, and indeed the basic contours of its functionality, from the body and its morphology, this derivation cannot be understood on a foundational model insofar as the body and its morphology are reciprocally susceptible (in very basic ways) to alteration by the forces of dynamic consciousness. The ability of vital flows to affect physiological features of the body is, in fact, a fundamental aspect of Lawrence’s understanding of dynamic consciousness. If, as we have noted, there are moments in which dynamic consciousness seems fundamentally determined by the laws of physiological development, in other moments Lawrence inverts the lines of causality, and physiological development becomes the effect of the unfolding of dynamic consciousness. This inversion is particularly evident in his elaboration of the second field of dynamic consciousness, paradoxically the element of his schema in relation to which the developmental logic also comes most to the fore. Though puberty is, at moments, cited as the physiological change that activates the second field, Lawrence also contends that there “are obvious physiological changes resulting from the gradual bursting into free activity” (133) of the upper and lower plexuses and ganglia—a logic he uses to explain pubertal development of the sex organs in addition to a variety of other changes such as the breaking of young men’s voices and the appearance of


facial hair. At its speculative extreme, this tendency leads Lawrence to wonder “why the growth of hair should start at the lower and upper sympathetic regions” (on the front of the body), a query to which he responds by considering a number of possibilities: Perhaps to preserve these powerful yet supersensitive nodes from the inclemency of changes in temperature, which might cause a derangement. Perhaps for the sake of protective warning, as hair warns when it is touched. Perhaps for a screen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of other suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the head acts as a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents of physical and vitalistic activity to and from the brain. And perhaps from the centres of intense vital surcharge hair springs as a sort of annunciation or declaration, like a crest of life-assertion. Perhaps all these things, and perhaps others. (133)

Whatever the case may be, all these options suggest that physiological change fundamentally derives from, rather than produces, the development of dynamic consciousness. “With the bursting awake of the four new poles of dynamic consciousness and being,” in short, “change takes place in everything: . . . the body resolves itself into distinctions” (133). This second line of thought is more consistent with Lawrence’s polemic in the psychological essays. To the extent that the unconscious escapes a developmental logic and its vital flows affect the bodies they traverse, it can function as a site of resistance to the materioidealism of bioscience and its corresponding model of the body as an organic machine governed by predictable physical laws. Because, according to this second line of thought, the unconscious is not determined by these laws, it is able to function as the source of spontaneity that Lawrence intends. But what are we to make of these two competing movements of thought that animate Lawrence’s text? Do they simply mark logical inconsistency or a contradiction that Lawrence is unable to resolve? In order to address these questions it will be necessary to consider the notion of infancy that arguably supports the essential contours of the Lawrencian unconscious. Exploring the figure of the infant presented in the psychological essays will both provide a fuller elaboration of the second line of Lawrence’s thought and clarify the points of articulation between it and the organicist tendency in tension with which it stands. Given Lawrence’s basic definition of the unconscious as “that essential unique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalysable, undefinable, inconceivable” (17), the infant is the essential figure of the unconscious. Lawrence gestures in this direction in an essay entitled “Education of the People” when he asks, “Wherein lies the mystery of a


baby, for us adults? From what has grown the legend of the adoration of the infant?” (RDP, 119). He responds to these questions by adducing the “fact that in the infant the great affective centres, volitional and emotional, act direct and spontaneous, without mental cognition or interference” (RDP, 119). This formulation remains within the bounds of a developmental logic insofar as it is enunciated from the perspective of a stage at which this spontaneity has been lost to mental consciousness, the perspective, in short, of the mystified and adoring adult. The impulse animating this gesture finds a more radical articulation, however, in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, where Lawrence claims that The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents. Something which could never be derived from the natures of all the existent individuals or previous individuals. There is in the nature of the infant something entirely new, underived, underivable, something which is, and will for ever remain, causeless. And this something is the unanalysable, undefinable reality of individuality. Every time at the moment of conception of every higher organism an individual nature incomprehensibly arises in the universe, out of nowhere. Granted the whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution, still the individual is not explained. The individual unit of consciousness and being which arises at the conception of every higher organism arises by pure creation, by a process not susceptible to understanding, a process which takes place outside the field of mental comprehension, where mentality . . . cannot and does not exist. . . . Individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, in defiance even of reason. (F, 16–17)

Though the appurtenance of developmental trajectories to the notion of the infant threatens to circumscribe it within a sort of primitivist impulse that would attribute its power to developmental priority, Lawrence’s gesture draws us beyond this logic. In addition to escaping forces of biological or hereditary determination, and existing outside the laws of cause and effect more generally, as the essential instantiation of the unconscious the infant actualizes a moment of absolute novelty that is characterized as the “unanalysable, undefinable reality of individuality.” In the figure of the infant, we find that “individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, in defiance even of reason,” and as such localizes an instance of sheer, spontaneous creation, the substance of which is “individuality.” It is important to note that this notion of individuality upon which so much comes to depend does not designate a subjective mode properly speaking. If the essence of the infant is its individuality, this is not to say that the


infant embodies a special form of subjectivity. Lawrence insists that the unconscious contains “nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self ” (28); in this context he calls us to understand the individuality of the infant. Given that “the first analyses [of the unconscious] are, or should be, so impersonal that the socalled human relations are not involved” (28), infantile individuality appears as an instance of absolutely impersonal, even inhuman, singularity.13 To the extent that the infant can designate the first stage in the development of the self-conscious human individual—an elementary being—it also, and more fundamentally, embodies that being as it is traversed by the actualization of impersonal and univocal Being, understood as the virtuality of vital force in the process of its unfolding.14 The unconscious, and the infant, are for Lawrence instances in which “life bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality” (15), and this “life” must be understood as an impersonal force that erupts within the human being, but cannot be comprehended as such. “It is no use,” says Lawrence, “talking about life and the unconscious in bulk. You can talk about electricity, because it is a homogeneous force, conceivable apart from any incorporation. But life is inconceivable as a general thing. It exists only in living creatures” (15). This formulation suggests not that vitality is a state of possibility limited to its realization in actual creatures, but that it is existentially available only in the specific forms through which it actualizes itself; we must attend, in other words to the relationship between “life” as an inconceivable, impersonal force (a virtuality) and the existential forms of its actualization. Alain Badiou provides a useful framework within which to approach this distinction. “To exist,” he writes, “is to come to pass on the surface of the One as a simulacrum and inflection of intensity. What results is that the One can indeed be, in what exists, the virtual of which the existent is an actualization or a differentiation, and that under no circumstances whatsoever can it be separated from the existent in the way that the possible is from the real” (49). Whereas the possible and the real are different only in their degree of reality— the possible designating a form that is copied in its realization—the virtual and the actual are not bound by this mimetic relation. The virtual is real (though not actual), and does not presuppose the form of its actualization. Thus, the actualization of the virtual necessitates the creative function so important to thinkers like Bergson, Carpenter, and Lawrence: the virtual must create the forms adequate to its actualization rather than imitate preexisting forms. In this context, the infant marks the point at which this essentially undifferentiated life force—the virtuality of Being—actualizes itself through a process of self-differentiation, which produces an individual that must be understood as a singularity.


Lawrence’s position, in this respect, falls within a fairly well-defined vitalist tradition. It is, for example, quite close to Henri Bergson’s notion of élan vital, as a form of pure, univocal Being in which difference exists not through external relations of mediation or negation, but only internally as a process of self-differentiation. Life is, for Bergson, an essentially unitary virtual state of Being, which differentiates itself through a process of actualization in a multitude of existential forms. As Michael Hardt suggests, In effect, we do find a conception of pure being in Bergson: The virtual is the simplicity of being in itself, pure recollection (le souvenir pur). However, pure, virtual being is not abstract and indifferent, and neither does it enter into relation with what is other than itself—it is real and qualified through the internal process of differentiation. . . . Being differs with itself immediately, internally. It does not look outside itself for an other or a force of mediation because its difference arises from its very core, from the “explosive internal force that life carries within itself ” [“La conception de la différence chez Bergson,” 93]. This élan vital that animates being, this vital process of differentiation, links pure essence and the real existence of being: “Virtuality exists in such a way that it is realized in dissociating itself, that it is forced to dissociate itself in order to realize itself. Differentiation is the movement of a virtuality that is actualizing itself ” [“La conception de la différence chez Bergson,” 93]. (Gilles Deleuze, 14)

Edward Carpenter (with whose work Lawrence was clearly familiar) also provides a useful articulation of this sort of problematic in his The Art of Creation. “There is a distinction between Mind and Matter (as of two aspects of the same thing),” he writes, “but no real separation. . . . We may say here, however, that the distinction between Mind and Matter forces us to conceive, or try to conceive, of a ‘stuff ’ prior to both—a something of which they are two aspects; and thus we come to the world-old ideas of primitive Being (before all differentiation, emanation, or expression)” (4–5). From the perspective of Carpenter’s monadic philosophy, Life force is a name of the One and is understood as a unitary and universal “Self ” that differentiates itself in the form of existentially realized “selves.” “We must believe,” he writes, “the final and real Self to be one and universal. . . . All our ‘selves’ consequently must be one, or at least united so as to be branches of the One—even though for a time deluded by the idea of separation” (76). For Carpenter, The fact is conceivable that the Self may become countless selves. The great Self is omnipresent in Space and Time; but if it appear [sic] or express itself at any one point of space and time (say as the ego of a single cell), then at once

Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness • 115 and in that moment it has determined an aspect of itself; and the ego in that cell is already an individual having within itself the potentiality of the whole, yet different from every other possible individual of the universe. (81)

In this formulation we can glimpse the problematic articulated by Lawrence in his notion of the unconscious. A unitary, universal, and ungraspable life force erupts into time and space in the body of an individual human being, and in so doing produces an instance of absolutely singular individuality to which Lawrence refers in his notion of the infant. The monadic conception of Being shared by Bergson and Carpenter is also evident in Lawrence. His notion of the unconscious—fundamentally synonymous with life force—is essentially embodied in the “glinting nucleus of the ovule” (F, 38), and this first cell, as we have noted, is characterized primarily by its unitary state. Similarly, that the infant comes to be the primary figure for, and best example of, the unconscious derives from the fact that within the schema of the unconscious infancy corresponds to the solar plexus: the source of that first monadic mode of dynamic consciousness in which one knows only that “I am I,” and the individual is not understood in relation to anything or anyone else. Lawrence’s characterization of the states subsequent to this original, unitary instance of vitality as ones in which the unconscious (as embodied in the ovule) “spin[s] the nerves and the brain as a web for its own motion” (19), thus, makes it plausible enough to understand the process he describes as the self-differentiation of life force. The unconscious embodies the limit along which unitary Being and absolute individuality meet, and as such raises the question of how a conception of Being as completely univocal can be commensurate with instances of sheer individuality. If Lawrence’s notion of vital force is predicated upon a univocal conception of Being, then are not the beings into which that vital force differentiates itself merely instances of sameness rather than individuality? It is important, in this context, to understand the individuality that is the primary characteristic of the infant as a case of singularity in the sense that Gilles Deleuze gives to the term. The infant is, for Lawrence, clearly a being different from all others, but the source of this difference is key. Because the essential individuality of the infant—its absolute difference from all other beings—is an originary characteristic proper to its monadic unity, and because its individuality is resolutely impersonal, it does not rely upon the constitutive interiority of a subject that both reflects upon itself and relates to its objects in the mode of negativity. Infantile individuality cannot arise, therefore, as the product of any movement of mediation or negation. Its individual difference is, in short, not the effect of a relation between interiority


and exteriority, but is immanent to itself, and it is precisely in this sense that the infant can be understood as singular. As Michael Hardt suggests, singularity is “the correlate of efficient causality and internal difference: The singular is remarkable because it is different in itself ” (63).15 The significance of the Lawrencian infant, and the notion of singularity it embodies, is multiple: it has implications for his model of embodiment, his understanding of the subject and intersubjective relations, and the structure of collectivity that is their predicate. In relation to the organicist movement of Lawrence’s thought, the infant provides a crucial counterpoint. Rather than designating merely the first stage in a process of development and an embryonic form of consciousness that is eventually surpassed or overcome, infancy becomes a persistent mode of dynamic consciousness. Insofar as dynamic consciousness is the emergent ramification of life force, those instances of pure creation in which dynamic consciousness affects an individual body—or through a body, some other aspect of the world—constitute a reemergence, or remarking of the persistence, of infancy. Given that Lawrence leaves uncontested “the whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution” (17), and thereby grants science its provenance in the understanding of life, he simultaneously posits, in the figure of the infant, a principle that ultimately defies and supersedes the explanatory power of science. On Lawrence’s account, the child (understood as a developmental category and therefore distinct from the infant) is faced with an inevitable and progressive entry into the instrumental order of cause and effect, habitualization, and adaptation to determining circumstances—the instrumental order, in short, from which mental consciousness derives its contours and with which it is designed to interact. “The brain is, if we may use the word, the terminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness,” writes Lawrence. It transmutes what is a creative flux into a fixed cypher. It prints off, like a telegraph instrument, the glyphs and graphic representations which we call percepts, concepts, ideas. It produces a new reality—the ideal. The idea is another static entity, another unit of the mechanical-active and materio-static universe. It is thrown off from life, as leaves are shed from a tree, or as feathers fall from a bird. Ideas are the dry, unliving, insentient plumage which intervenes between us and the circumambient universe, forming at once an insulator and an instrument for the subduing of the universe. The mind is the instrument of instruments; it is not a creative reality. (41–42)

There is, thus, a fundamental tension between two orders of reality: the fundamental creative flux of vital reality in which dynamic consciousness participates and the “mechanical-active, materio-static universe” produced by the


mortifying ossification of that vital reality as it is submitted to the linguistic and ideational constructs of mental consciousness. The material order is in effect the accretion of static particles that have precipitated out of the flux that is the vital order; it is that which is “thrown off from life.” Far from simply dismissing this material order, however, Lawrence admits its inevitability—even necessity—but is clear that it represents only a limited instrumental approach to the totality of the real. We must interact instrumentally with the world in order to satisfy material needs, and mental consciousness is the faculty that has adapted itself to that necessity. Indeed, mental consciousness and the “materio-static universe” are engaged in a relation of reciprocal implication; if mental consciousness is designed to apprehend and affect a material universe that is understood as a complex of discrete, static units, it simultaneously presupposes the form of matter in its operational reliance on the idea—itself nothing more than “another static entity”—and its focus on causal relations by which units of matter are tied one to the other.16 The necessity of mental consciousness notwithstanding, its approach to reality constitutes a deadening reduction of the vital flux of the universe. Given the pervasive tendency of this mental approach to become dominant and occlude vital reality, Lawrence is at pains to articulate a vital point of resistance to the instrumental order. If the child cannot escape its sacrifice to the “whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution,” the state of infancy it initially embodies is emphatically not the product of that process, and, moreover, constitutes a force that is inconvertible by the operations of that process. Though the form of consciousness represented by the infant may be occluded or displaced by mental consciousness— indeed, Lawrence clearly argues that this occlusion has become hegemonic in his culture—the latter cannot incorporate the former within its operations. Rather than a stage in a developmental progression toward mental consciousness, infancy designates a persistent mode of dynamic consciousness whose eruption within a hegemonic regime of mentality and the material order of reality it reflects Lawrence seeks to remark or facilitate. The mechanism of this eruption is notable, for the vital order of the unconscious does not exist in complete isolation from the materiostatic universe of mental consciousness. Though “the unconscious is the creative element,” writes Lawrence, “and though . . . it is beyond all law of cause and effect in its totality, yet in its processes of self-realization it follows the laws of cause and effect” (F, 18). More specifically, the processes of cause and effect are indeed part of the working out of this incomprehensible self-realization of the individual unconscious. The great laws of the universe are no more than the fixed habits of the living unconscious.

118 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community What we must needs do is try to trace still further the habits of the true unconscious, and by mental recognition of these habits break the limits which we have imposed on the movement of the unconscious. For the whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws and habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious. We have to try to recognize the true nature and then leave the unconscious itself to prompt new movement and new being—the creative process. (18)

Drawing a distinction between the unconscious and the “individual unconscious,” Lawrence thus explains a fundamental ambivalence in his usage of terms like the unconscious or dynamic consciousness, which are at times virtually synonymous with vital force itself, and at times name the elaborately differentiated faculty attuned to the vital order. Like mental consciousness and the materiostatic universe in this respect, Lawrence’s use of the unconscious reflects a relationship of reciprocal implication between the vital order and the system of consciousness that participates in it: if the unconscious fundamentally designates the emergent actualization of vital force, it also refers to the mode of consciousness produced in, and shaped by, that actualization. Importantly though, this vital mode of consciousness is subject to a kind of entropic slide toward material stasis and mental consciousness, an important form of which would be the misrecognition of the individual unconscious as an immature stage in the progression toward fully mental consciousness. In his notion of infancy, then, Lawrence appropriates a term that normally corresponds to the first stage in just such a developmental teleology in order to designate the “creative process” of the unconscious whose persistent eruption within ossified and habitual material forms (such as the logic of development) ensures the production of “new movement and new being.” Whereas the conceptual framework of mental consciousness would fix ideal forms to be replicated in the realization of the vital force of the unconscious, the infant figures the properly virtual character of the unconscious, and Lawrence’s insistence that the actualization of that virtuality proceeds not through the reproduction of preexistent forms but through the creative production of new forms adequate to its differentiation—what he refers to as the process through which the unconscious is “all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws and habits.” If the infant is, thus, the basis of Lawrence’s critique insofar as it manifests a point of resistance to the hegemony of mental consciousness and the material order of reality with which it interacts, it is no less critically powerful in relation to the less salubrious tendencies of Lawrence’s own text. Given his argument that the “self-realization” of the unconscious is inevitably affected


by the laws governing the materiostatic universe, and as such is subject to a rigidifying habitualization, we need look no further than the organicist movement of his own text for an example of this process. Ironically, Lawrence’s recourse to the language of habit seems especially appropriate in describing, for example, the way in which his own schema of dynamic consciousness comes to function as a systematic calculus that theoretically determines in advance all possible ramifications of vital force. Similarly, his dialectical model of development and the regulative norms in whose service he places dynamic consciousness arguably constitute its ossification into a degraded, habit-bound state. In this light, the taxonomic drive evident in his schematic rendering of dynamic consciousness, and the developmental model in which it sometimes issues, appear as effects of what Lawrence himself describes as the infelicitous yet inevitable drift toward mental consciousness and its instrumental approach to reality. Lawrence’s own text, in other words, unwittingly plays out precisely that tendency it seeks to diagnose, and this complicity in the cultural formation it critiques is nowhere more evident than in Lawrence’s organicist line of thought. Given that the organic structures through which Lawrence sometimes articulates his vitalist corporeal model constitute a form of complicity in the mechanical material order his vitalism is intended to resist, the second line of thought that runs through his text and culminates in the notion of the infant provides resources for the unworking of precisely those organicist tendencies. In light of his notion of infancy, for instance, Lawrence’s schema of dynamic consciousness appears less as a systematic calculus than a diagram of differentiation, a generator of singularities and their possible conjunctions. The dialectic of development equally appears as an effect of the material order of reality, and as such is confronted by the singularity of the infant insofar as the latter both remains unassimilable to a teleology of development, and challenges the subjective logic it instantiates. More than merely inverting the developmental model, and the lines of causality between the body and dynamic consciousness that it implies, the infant constitutes an opening up of its closed system. Rather than bodies composed of discrete material units interacting within closed corporeal systems that support the consciousnesses of discrete individuals, which themselves enter into a complex of intersubjective and communal relations predicated primarily upon structures of negation and identification, Lawrence’s notion of infancy demands that both bodies and selves be approached outside of such a spatialized subjective formation. The body and the self must equally be understood in terms of the infant’s singularity: as temporary and shifting forms through which vital force undergoes its self-differentiation, a process that necessitates


the creation of new and unpredictable forms in which the virtuality of life can become actual. The mode of selfhood produced by the self-differentiation of vital force is not predicated upon a constitutive interiority (object of self-reflection, and of mediation in its relations to instances of alterity), but is constantly open to the force of infancy and as such cannot properly be understood as a subject. Not a subject, this self is, one might say, subject to infantilization. Selves must be understood, in Badiou’s terms, as “local degrees of intensity” on the surface of Being, or “inflections of power that are in constant movement and entirely singular” (25); to the extent that they exhibit interiority, it must be thought as the effect of a fold in Being, whereby a “folding of the outside . . . creates the inside of a self ”—an interiority that, “far from being constitutive, is itself constituted” (81). Though this vitalist form of the self is vulnerable to ossifying entropic swerves toward the material order (in which subjective formations find a more congenial home), the effects of that tendency represent a distortion of its essential character. This opening up of the subject as an individual form by the genuinely creative force of infantile singularity is a process to which subjective communal forms, such as organic community, are equally vulnerable. If the communal ramifications of his notion of infancy are relatively underdeveloped in the psychological essays, Lawrence had already explored them at length in a roughly contemporaneous essay, entitled “Democracy,” originally published in 1919. His consideration of what he takes to be the preeminent and greatly idealized political form of his time reflects the divided nature of reality that is central to his consideration of the individual. The tension between the material and vital orders also manifests itself in relation to structures of collectivity, and for Lawrence the prevailing notion of democracy belongs firmly to the former. Democracy, he argues, is fundamentally predicated upon “the Law of the Average. . . . Upon this law rests all the vague dissertation concerning equality and social perfection. Rights of Man, Equality of Man, Social Perfectibility of Man, all these sweet abstractions, once so inspiring, rest upon the fatal little hypothesis of the Average. Since Man writ large is just the Average Man” (63). This “Average Man” is, in the fullest sense, the ideal democratic citizen: he is purely ideal, abstract, “the reduction of the human being to a mathematical unit” (63). Democracy is, thus, fully consonant with the material order of reality, a product of mental consciousness. Even in corporeal terms, the Average Man is divorced from the vital body; he is a “little organism . . . a very complicated organ, a unit” that has a “functional purpose” (63). In this light, democracy is clearly an unsatisfactory political form given that it properly belongs to the material order of reality and works to repress


the vital order. Yet Lawrence is not simply dismissive. Even though the “Average Man,” the “Man-in-the-Street,” is merely the “image and effigy of all your equality” and simply “represents what all men need and desire, physically, functionally, materially, and socially” (65), Lawrence is clear that such material needs are significant. For after all, “People must live together. And to live together, they must have some standard, some Material Standard” (69). “This is where the Average comes in,” he argues, And this is where Socialism, and Modern Democracy comes in. For Democracy and Socialism rest upon the Equality of Man, which is the Average. And this is sound enough, so long as the Average represents the real basic material needs of mankind—basic material needs—we insist and insist again. For Society, or Democracy, or any Political State or Community exists not for the sake of the individual, nor should ever exist for the sake of the individual, but simply to establish the Average, in order to make living together possible: that is, to make proper facilities for every man’s clothing, feeding, housing himself, working, sleeping, mating, playing, according to his necessity as a common unit, an average. Everything beyond that common necessity depends on himself alone. (65–-66)

Just as science has its place in the understanding of the individual human body and its relations to the world, Democracy and other political forms have their role in the functioning of the social body; in both cases, however, they are pertinent only to the functional material order of existence. The demands and needs of material existence are obviously significant, and require mechanisms suited to their negotiation, but the problem predictably lies in the extent to which these mechanisms have arrogated to themselves all aspects of existence. Misrecognizing themselves as universally applicable, the mechanisms of the materiostatic universe suppress the vital order and effectively promote the conflation of the material order with reality in its entirety. In the case of democracy (and other political mechanisms like socialism, not to mention the state and the nation more broadly), Lawrence argues that a system suited to sustain the material aspects of collective existence has been widely mistaken as an adequate expression of the entire communal impulse. “The proper adjustment of material means of existence: for this the State exists,” he rails, “but nothing further. The State is a dead ideal. Nation is a dead ideal. Democracy and Socialism are dead ideals. They are one and all just contrivances for supplying the lowest material needs of a people” (66). In thus hearing Lawrence toll the “death” of these political forms we must be somewhat literal minded: rather than relegating them to the dustbin of history, his statement limits their provenance to that of the dead material order.


Like science in this respect, they function in relation to the mortified reduction of the vital order but are inadequate to the demands of life itself. This inadequacy derives primarily from the understanding of equality upon which Democracy is based. In claiming to respect and grant equal privilege to the rights of each particular individual, Democracy ironically renders itself unable to account for individuality in its most meaningful sense: that produced by the vital order. Contrary to the democratic impulse, Lawrence argues that because “every individual is, in his first reality, a single, incommutable soul, not to be calculated or defined in terms of any other soul, there can be no establishing of a mathematical ratio. . . . We cannot,” he continues, say that all men are equal. We cannot say A = B. Nor can we say that men are unequal. We may not declare that A = B + C. Where each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made. One man is neither equal nor unequal to another man. When I stand in the presence of another man, and I am my own pure self, am I aware of the presence of an equal, or of an inferior, or of a superior? I am not. When I stand with another man, who is himself, and when I am truly myself, then I am only aware of a Presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness. (80)

Democracy, in short, is unable to discern the crucial difference between “two sorts of individual identity.” Whereas “Every factory-made pitcher has its own little identity, resulting from a certain mechanical combination of Matter and Forces,” and these “material identities” are susceptible to the sort of quantitative equivalence that is the basis of Democracy, the “identity of the living self ” (73) cannot be grasped in mathematical terms. Anticipating his articulation of singular individuality in the psychological essays, Lawrence contends that “every living creature is single in itself, a ne plus ultra of creative reality, fons et origo of creative manifestation,” and that this singularity is incommensurate with the quantitative register on which one might “abstract and generalise and include” (73). Although, “in its material reality” every individual “submits to all the laws of the material universe”—laws premised on abstraction, generalization, and quantification—in its true, vital identity the individual “uses these laws and converts them in the mystery of creation” (73). The significance of this distinction lies in the different forms of community with which each type of identity is associated. The reduction of singular individuality under the regime of quantitative equality (material identity) leads to the progressive loss of the “faculty for collective self-expression” (66). More precisely, the promotion of quantitative distinctions, and the material order organized in terms of such distinctions, facilitates structures of collectivity based on fusion of individuals into a unified whole. The


insistence on understanding individuals as discrete quantifiable units in effect renders individuals “functional units” (69) within a mechanical system, and thus allows groups of individuals to be incorporated into homogenizing totalities—a process that ultimately leads to “the ideal of Oneness, the unification of all mankind into the homogeneous whole” (78). These states of “Oneness, and collectiveness” are, however, “our lesser states, inferior; our impurity” (72); indeed, the “En-Masse is a horrible nullification of true identity and being” (77). “At best, our en masse activities can be but servile,” writes Lawrence, “serving the free soul. At the worst, they are sheer selfdestruction. Let us put them in their place. Let us get over our rage of social activity, public being, universal self-estimation, republicanism, bolshevism, socialism, empire—all these mad manifestations of En Masse and One Identity” (77). On its face, this litany seems to suggest a rather scattered attack on an idiosyncratically selected group of “isms,” but taken in context it suggests that the organic forms of community, articulated in their horrifying extremity in a text like The Plumed Serpent, do not constitute an exception realized only under fascist or other totalitarian regimes but rather constitute the horizon of modern politics more generally. On Lawrence’s analysis, a range of sociopolitical programs, which includes everything from democracy to bolshevism to imperialism, find their foundation in forms of material identity that promote organic structures of collectivity.17 The singularity of living identity, in contrast, is absolutely incommensurate with the quantitative equality of Democracy, and more generally with any structure of collectivity founded upon the fusion of individuals into a greater whole. When he writes of living identity, Lawrence contends that “not in any oneness with the rest of things can we have our pure being, but in clean, fine singleness,” and turns instead to “the myriad, mysterious identities, no one of which can comprehend another. They can only exist side by side, as stars do” (72). Imagining the “new Democracy,” he insists: “Not people smelted into a oneness . . . [b]ut people released into their single starry identity, each one distinct and incommutable” (73); the “great desire is that each single individual shall be incommutable himself, spontaneous and single, that he shall not in any way be reduced to a term, a unit of a Whole” (78). Indeed, for Lawrence, it is not an exaggeration to say that “the great development in collective expression in mankind has been a progress towards the possibility of purely individual expression. The highest Collectivity has for its true goal the purest individualism, pure individual spontaneity” (66). It would be a mistake, however, to hear in these statements a retreat from the problem of collectivity into an atomistic individualism, for in his paradoxical formulation of pure individualism as the highest form of collectivity,


Lawrence once again recalls his understanding of the individual as a singularity—an instance in which the self-differentiating movement of vital force is constrained to a genuine creativity in the production of new forms for its actualization. Rather than fusional totalities, Lawrence posits both absolute individuals and their constellation as singular creations produced by the unfolding of vital force, and these constellations figure the form of collectivity proper to the vital order. A particularly comprehensive articulation of this problematic appears in “Education of the People”: Instead of finding our highest reality in an ever-extending aggregation with the rest of men, we shall realise at last that the highest reality for every living creature is in its purity of singleness and its perfect solitary integrity, and that everything else should be but a means to this end. All communion, all love, and all communication, which is all consciousness, are but a means to the perfected singleness of the individual being. Which doesn’t mean anarchy and disorder. On the contrary it means the most delicately and inscrutably established order, delicate, intricate, complicate as the stars in the heaven, when seen in their strange groups and goings. Neither does it mean what is nowadays called individualism. The so-called individualism is no more than a cheap egotism, every self-conscious little ego assuming the unbounded rights to display his self-consciousness. We mean none of this. We mean in the first place the recognition of the exquisite arresting manifoldness of being, multiplicity, plurality, as the stars are plural in their starry singularity. (138)

In this moment, Lawrence evades both the drive to organic totality and the retreat into atomistic particularity. He does not, however, evade the necessity of thinking collective relations. Rather, drawing on his understanding of singularity, he approaches a form of collectivity adequate to Life, a form which I will (following Michael Hardt’s reading of Deleuze) refer to as the Multitude (Gilles Deleuze, 110–11, 120–21). The Multitude, as Lawrence understands it is a form of totality, a whole, composed in the assemblage of multiple singularities, but rather than a closed transcendent form into which individuals are incorporated or subsumed, it is a whole that is itself produced as a singular form through which vitality actualizes itself. The Multitude, as a totality that assembles singularities into a constellation, itself exists on the same plane as the singularities themselves as another local intensity in the self-differentiating movement of vitality. As such it functions to create new forms of life in the combinations of individuals that it actualizes, but it can never become a closed remainderless system. The Multitude remains a fundamentally open


form—open to, and opened up by, the innovating force of unfolding life— insofar as it is constantly traversed by the shifting forms of, and antagonisms between, the singularities it composes. The Multitude does not reduce the multiplicity of different individuals it assembles—its fundamental principle is that “no man shall try to determine the being of any other man, or of any other woman” (RDP, 80)—but makes possible something absent in a sheer multiplicity. In assembling a multiplicity of singular individuals it actualizes forms that would otherwise remain unthinkable, and in effect makes the constellated multiplicity more powerful. This empowerment of the multiplicity is manifest in Lawrence’s exhortation to: Have done, let go the old connections. Fall apart, fall asunder, each into his own unfathomable dark bath of isolation. Break up the old incorporation. Finish for ever the old unison into homogeneity. Let every man fall apart into a fathomless, single isolation of being, exultant at his own core, and apart. Then, dancing magnificent in our own space, as the spheres dance in space, we can set up the extra-individual communication. Across the space comes the thrill of communication. There is an approach, a flash and a blaze of contact, and then the sheer fiery purity of a purer isolation, a more exultant singleness. Not a mass of homogeneity, like sunlight. But a fathomless multiplicity, like the stars at night, each one isolate in the darkly-singing space. (RDP, 135)

In the constellation that produces the moment of contact between two singular individuals there is no reduction of one by the other, and instead something arises as the result of their coming into relation that would not have been actualized in their sheer separation: there is a “purer isolation, a more exultant singleness.” “Though man is first and foremost an individual being,” as Lawrence suggests, “yet the very accomplishing of his individuality rests upon his fulfilment in social life. If you isolate an individual you deprive him of his life: if you leave him no isolation you deprive him of himself. And there it is! Life consists in the interaction between a man and his fellows, from the individual, integral core in each” (RDP, 114).


PART 2

Atoms Upon the Mind: Virginia Woolf and the Nervous Body at the Limit of Community


CHAPTER 3

Organizing the Nervous Body, Regulating the Self: The Psychological Production of National Community in Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves

his second part of the book will turn from the discursive nexus articulated by the interanimation of Lawrence’s writing and the medical science organized around the tubercular body in order to examine a different, if closely related, confrontation between modernist literary production and the bioscience of the period. Specifically, I will focus in what follows on the relationship between the writing of Virginia Woolf and the bioscientific discourses—neurophysiology, neurology, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis—that, to be slightly imprecise, take the nervous body as their object. This imprecision is due partially to the fact that the bodies approached by these disciplines are at least slightly different in kind. These disciplines share an interest in the body insofar as it is traversed by a system of nerves, but they differ in their specific approaches to the enervated body: some are firmly founded in the study of the nervous system, some seek largely to discount the nervous system in the study of psychic phenomena, and still others occupy a middle ground between the two. Another means of characterizing more precisely the nervous body around which my argument will turn in the following two chapters would be with reference to the repertoire of diagnostic categories, prominently including neurasthenia, hysteria, and shell shock or war neurosis, through which it is understood in the period. Though the nervous body might be understood as

T


a general category that subsumes a variety of more specific somatic types, I will approach it instead as a highly visible and contested corporeal space that variably takes on the contours of a number of especially prominent diagnostic regimes. The neurasthenic body, for instance, makes its almost ubiquitous presence felt in the early part of the century as the example of the nervous condition that was seen both quintessentially to define, and be defined by, life under the frequently overwhelming demands of the increasingly frenetic and ever-accelerating conditions of urban industrial modernity. “Neurasthenia was introduced in the medical literature for the first time in 1869,” writes Tom Lutz, “but it became more and more common through the beginning of the century. By 1903, neurasthenic language and representations of neurasthenia were everywhere” (2). Similarly, the hysterical body can lay its claim to status as the representative locus of the period’s fascination with all things psychological. Less site specific than neurasthenia, insofar as it enjoys a prominent place in medical history that stretches back to classical antiquity, hysteria nonetheless becomes newly prominent in its rearticulation at the turn of the century, not least because it is famously the foundation upon which the definingly modern (and perhaps even modernist) edifice of psychoanalysis—publicly lauded and reviled in turn—is constructed. Indeed, the centrality of both the neurasthenic and hysterical body is only confirmed in the wake of World War I with the visibility of thousands of returning soldiers manifesting the effects of combat in the form of shell shock, that newly minted syndrome that drew heavily on theories of both neurasthenia and hysteria in attempting to come to terms with the psychological trauma inflicted by the war.1 To insist, nonetheless, upon the nervous body as the site of my analysis— rather than a body defined more precisely as neurasthenic, hysterical, or shell-shocked, for example—is indubitably to seem somewhat anachronistic, for the nerves and their pathological cognates, such as nerve disease, nervous illness, and nervous temperament, surely find a more comfortable home in the biomedical and cultural lexicons of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than in the highly scientific psychological atmosphere of the late nineteenth century, let alone the subsequent period over which Freud looms so large. As Peter Logan suggests, the “nervous temperament,” which finds its most canonical medical articulation in Thomas Trotter’s 1807 A View on the Nervous Temperament, constitutes perhaps the “characteristically late Georgian condition” and encapsulates “different strands of Georgian thinking about the nervous patient . . . that would persist throughout the nineteenth century” (15–16). If the language of nervous temperament reflects a somaticist disposition that focuses on the physiological structures of the

Organizing the Nervous Body, Regulating the Self • 131

nervous system and identifies an organic aetiology for mental disease—if only in positing a susceptibility to a variety of deleterious stimuli—this impulse seems at odds with the resolutely psychogenic emphases of psychoanalysis, arguably the quintessential early twentieth-century incarnation of the psychological enterprise. The constitution of psychoanalysis as such, after all, takes place in Freud’s rejection of the neurological approaches to hysteria that mark his own early work and find perhaps their most famous example in the pathoanatomical methods of Jean-Martin Charcot. These approaches sought, as Roy Porter suggests, “to pin down nervous phenomena to organic lesions, and thereby to bring regular system [sic] to general paralysis, neuralgias, seizures, epileptiform fits, spastic symptoms, tabes dorsalis, and, not least, hysteria” (“The Body and the Mind,” 257). The somaticism that supports the understanding of nervous illness throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does not, of course, evaporate with the dawn of the twentieth century and persists, for example, in the diagnostic categories and therapeutic procedures relevant to neurasthenia—a nervous diagnosis first introduced in the late nineteenth century, popularized to a great extent by the American physician George M. Beard, and increasingly in evidence by the turn of the century. In general terms, the aetiology of neurasthenia presupposes a finite reserve of nervous energy within an individual human body and posits the overtaxation of those limited resources as the cause of mental illness. This overtaxation can be related to any number of sources of excessive stimulation, but one of the reasons that the diagnosis becomes increasingly popular in the early twentieth century is that it allows nervous illness to be seen as the result of the demands posed by the unprecedented forms of modern existence. Though, by the turn of the century, neurasthenia covers much of the same symptomatological ground as hysteria, the former posits a combination of environmental and somatic factors as the chief causal agents in disease, whereas the diagnosis of hysteria increasingly accounts for a similar set of symptoms as the somatic effects of a psychic trauma, which plays the primary causal role. Even by their 1893 Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer are confident that their observations “establish an analogy between the pathogenesis of common hysteria and that of traumatic neuroses, and . . . justify an extension of the concept of traumatic hysteria” (56). Pursuing this analogy, they reason that because in “traumatic neuroses, the operative cause of the illness is not the trifling physical injury but the affect of fright—the psychical trauma,” it follows that “many, if not . . . most, hysterical symptoms, [reveal] precipitating causes which can only be described as psychical traumas” (56). This turn in the theorization of hysteria constitutes the first steps in the process through which, as Porter somewhat flippantly


describes it, “Freudianism [comes to represent] a final if backhanded vindication of the ultimate sovereignty of consciousness” (“Barely Touching,” 45)—a process in which, according to Dianne Sadoff ’s more measured analysis, “By surpassing physiological reductionism, Freudian psychoanalysis joined psyche and soma through a theory of representation (in which one realm stood for, indicated, or implied the other). . . . Pathological psychical structures were thus,” she argues, “inscribed in and upon or represented to the organism; the body, in turn, represented these mental structures and registrations as disordered perception, cognition, and subjectivity” (4). If the notion of the nervous body initially appears both unnecessarily baggy and somewhat anachronistic, its heuristic compensation is that it is expansive enough to indicate a corporeal space that is traversed and contested by multiple discursive regimes. It can incorporate both the historical disjunctions between residual and emergent medical scientific formations, and the tensions between contemporary formations that collaborate and compete in their attempts to grasp the bodies they take as their objects. If neurasthenia and hysteria present two exemplary and competing turn of the century forms of nervous embodiment, they equally instantiate a historical disjunction in their attempts to grasp the nervous body. Neurasthenia itself presents an essentially residual aetiological formation insofar as its somaticist foundation relies on increasingly antiquated understandings both of nervous energy (and the nervous system through which it flows) and of the constitutional nature of disease. Whereas the model of nervous exhaustion reflects a fairly direct transposition of an economic model derived from the study of mechanical systems, the constitutional model derives from a broadly positivist approach to the body and its interaction with its physical and social environments. The psychoanalytic construction of hysteria, on the other hand, constitutes an emergent form of nervous embodiment, rejecting as it does the reductionist investments of bioscience as adequate grounds for the understanding and treatment of nervous illness. This tension will be central to my argument in what follows, as I shall be interested primarily in how Woolf ’s engagement of nervous embodiment takes up the residual formations made available by turn-of-the-century neuropsychology. The decision to take the nervous body as the locus of my analysis is based additionally on its overwhelming popular visibility, a visibility due both to the growing prestige of disciplines that might loosely be described as psychological, and to the prominence of the pathologized bodies those disciplines frequently take as their objects of study. Like the tubercular body in this respect, it would be difficult to overestimate the sociocultural impact of the nervous body and the plethora of competing discourses dedicated to its cartography,


definition, explanation, treatment, or manipulation of various other sorts. Michael North, for example, comments persuasively on both the general cultural (and specifically popular) significance of psychology in the early part of the century, and the special place of psychoanalysis within this formation. Psychoanalysis, he writes, had become, in the words of the New York Evening World, “our most popular science”. . . . The science that seemed to put so much emphasis on the inner workings of the individual had become the focus of intense public attention, and the unconscious had become, mainly by virtue of its supposed inaccessibility, almost ubiquitous. Malinowski found the appropriately ironic term for this sort of popularity when he criticized psychoanalysis as “the popular craze of the day.” And, indeed, the enthusiasm for things psychological was so extreme, both in the United States and in Great Britain, that it might quite reasonably have seemed a psychological symptom itself. (65–66)

By 1922, he concludes, “the practice of psychology had itself become a factor in group psychology, and widespread self-consciousness about psychological matters had begun to redound upon itself and upon the science in ways that it could not have foreseen and perhaps could not explain” (67). This pandemic obsession with all things psychological, in other words, produces something of a feedback loop. In addition to the scientific protocols by which different psychological theories and practices variously impact one another and the bodies they study, the popularization of that scientific language itself becomes an important factor in those interactions. For the purposes of my discussion, then, the nervous body designates the space within which human bodies, the competing medical scientific discourses that grasp and shape the contours of those bodies, and the popular perception thereof, all come into contact. Moreover, as North’s analysis suggests in a limited way, the nervous body (again, much like the tubercular body in this respect) is of particular interest insofar as it functions as a hinge between the individual and the communal, the narrowly somatic and the social bodies into which individual bodies are incorporated. At its broadest level, my analysis in what follows will be dedicated to the exploration of this hinge as it is constituted by the interanimation of psychological discourse and Woolf ’s literary production. How do the vicissitudes of the nervous body thematize the processes through which medical scientific projects directed at individual human bodies and their constitutive components become articulated with— even form the foundation of—various structures of collectivity?


Streams and Drainage Ditches: Rearticulating Woolf’s “Dark Places of Psychology” and the “Daily Drama of the Body” Perhaps the simplest connection between the nervous discourse of the period and Woolf ’s work is biographical. As was the case with Lawrence, however, my turn to bioscience is certainly not motivated by an attempt to explain biographical fact; rather, the fact of what Hermione Lee warily refers to in a chapter title of her biography as Woolf ’s “madness” will function only to indicate Woolf ’s intimate familiarity with the nervous discourse of the period. As Lee points out, “During her life she, and Leonard on her behalf, consulted at least twelve doctors” (182) regarding her mental illness—a sample of medical opinion that ranged from a number of general practitioners to the eminent neurologist Henry Head. By no means a passive object of medical scientific intervention, Woolf was actively engaged with the question of her illness: “It affected her body as much as her mind” suggests Lee, “and raised the insoluble and fundamental question, which she spent a great deal of time considering, of the relation between the two: ‘What connection has the brain with the body? Nobody in Harley Street could explain’” (175). Far from simply a theoretical problem, of course, Woolf ’s experience was fundamentally marked by the material effects of the nervous discourse with which she interacted. Perhaps the most persistent example in this respect, though only one of many, was her repeated subjection to various forms of the rest cure that resulted from her almost invariable diagnosis as neurasthenic. If the most extreme manifestation of this therapeutic regime was her confinement to a sanatorium in 1910 and 1913, its more general effects derived from the fact that “all her doctors recommended rest cures, milk and meat diets for weight gain, fresh air, avoidance of excitement and early nights” (183). Though biography provides a useful bridge between Woolf ’s work and the period’s nervous discourse, it is, nonetheless, somewhat superfluous insofar as there is ample evidence in her literary production itself of her interest in psychological questions. Her fiction momentarily to one side, Woolf ’s engagement of psychology is absolutely central to two of her most important essays—“Modern Fiction” and Three Guineas—texts that, published in 1919 and 1938 respectively, roughly bracket her career as a writer and also serve to mark a shift in emphasis from the individual to the social. It is, of course, in “Modern Fiction” that Woolf programmatically announces that “for the moderns . . . , the point of interest . . . lies very likely in the dark places of psychology” (108), a statement that positions the depths of human consciousness, and more specifically the problem of representing them, at the heart of literary modernism. Nineteen years later, only three years before her death, the publication of Three Guineas makes it clear that the psychological


has lost none of its importance. Indeed, psychology arguably founds virtually the entirety of Woolf ’s position in that text. Though she is careful to distance herself from a certain form of psychology, insisting that “we need not have recourse to the dangerous and uncertain theories of psychologists and biologists” (132), her position is, nonetheless, firmly psychological. Considering the possible motivations of her interlocutor’s appeal to an “educated man’s daughter” for help in the prevention of war, she speculates that it is due to his belief that “human nature, the reasons, the emotions of the ordinary man and woman, lead to war,” and concludes that on these grounds his appeal is just, for “happily there is one branch of education which comes under the heading of ‘unpaid-for education’—that understanding of human beings and their motives which, if the word is rid of its scientific associations, might be called psychology” (120). It is, of course, this group psychological project, the analysis of what she calls the conscious and unconscious desires that lead to war (161), that animates Three Guineas, not to mention much of her late fiction. Because I explore the communal implications of Woolf ’s psychological engagement in Chapter 4, I will curtail further analysis of Three Guineas and concentrate for the moment on her earlier confrontation of psychology. “Modern Fiction” is among the most well-known and frequently cited pieces of Woolf ’s nonfiction prose, and is widely mentioned as a key, almost manifesto-like, Anglo-American articulation of the literary modernist project. It is a text in which, as Suzette Henke puts it, “Woolf raises a clarion call to a new aesthetics of psychological realism” (“Modern Tradition,” 623), and has the dubious distinction of being something of a critical locus classicus for arguments concerning modernist “stream of consciousness” narrative techniques.2 As it is in this context that Woolf ’s statement regarding the “dark places of psychology” most immediately becomes significant, a brief recapitulation of her argument—though its broad lines are generally familiar—is in order. Situating herself, and her fellow “moderns,” in stark opposition to the unfortunate Edwardian trio of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, Woolf condenses her grievance into a single word: “materialist.” “It is because [these three] are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us,” she writes, “and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them . . . and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul” (104). Admitting the technical accomplishment of a writer like Bennett, Woolf is led to ask, nonetheless: Can it be that, owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr Bennett has come down with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life

136 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. (105)

Though it is clear enough that she calls for a new form of fiction, the substance of the “life” to which this new form would be more adequate remains, if confessedly, rather vague. Nor is this vagueness greatly lessened by Woolf ’s notorious declaration that “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (106). If it is the “task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration and complexity it may display” (106), and if Mr. Joyce is exemplary in his “spiritual” concern to “reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (107), Woolf ’s language remains reticent in characterizing the stuff of “life.” Based on this minimal articulation we can do little more than associate “life” with human consciousness, and suggest that the brain is apparently the space in which it is most at home. Perhaps it is largely due to the persistently figural nature of Woolf ’s language throughout this text that readers have been willing to accept a rather vague notion of how she understands the “dark places of psychology” or, more precisely, to assume that it is simply her intention to characterize the psychological stuff of life, the object of truly modern literature, as vague, dark, shifting, ineffable—in short, as the ever-varied, intricately complex stream of human consciousness. Indeed, the move from the geometrical precision of symmetrically arranged gig lamps to the conceptual fuzziness of the “luminous halo” and “semi-transparent envelope” would seem to bear out the suggestion that vagueness is precisely the characteristic Woolf seeks to convey. This reading, after all, dovetails rather nicely with the critical commonplace that modernist literature is fundamentally shaped, if not by an explicit engagement with Freudian theory, then by the purportedly unprecedented and deeply unsettling discovery that Enlightenment reason must share its home in the human mind with the disruptively irrational force of something like the unconscious. Michael Bell, for example, in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1999), entitled “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” succinctly reiterates this position by invoking


the familiar troika of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as central critics of Enlightenment rationalism, the lines of thought associated with whom are crucial to the “intellectual formation” of modernism (9). “Freud,” he writes, “investigated the inner realm of the psyche and showed how . . . consciousness may itself act as a sophisticated barrier to recognizing the true nature of instinctual desire. And this is not just a personal problem to be diagnosed, it is the necessary basis of civilization” (9). Under the weight of discoveries such as this, he concludes, the “very principle of reason collapses unnervingly into possible rationalization while reason remains the only means of negotiating this recognition” (10). And perhaps it is in this spirit that Woolf ’s exhortation to “record the atoms as they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (107) has generally been received: one more in a string of clever metaphors through which she issues her “clarion call” to psychological realism.3 Her text certainly abets such a reading. The valorization of the spiritual in the face of limited Edwardian materialism, the figures of the “luminous halo” and the “innermost flame,” and the celebration of Joyce’s “courage” to disregard both “probability” and “coherence” in his representation of that which one “can neither touch nor see” (107) all work to suggest that the interiority of consciousness to which Woolf addresses herself resides at some distance from the bioscientific disciplines that might also claim some expert knowledge of those dark places. The psychology in which Woolf is interested, that is, would seem to be one that addresses narrowly psychical phenomena to the detriment of the physical processes that might be the object of a more materialist psychology. This privileging of the spiritual and psychical over the material and bodily is, in short, isomorphic with the theoretical move that is instrumental in situating psychoanalysis among the most culturally forceful psychological projects of the period: the somaticist emphases on the determining influence of the body on the mind so central to much turn-of-the-century psychology are overturned in the assertion of psychic preeminence. This reading has much to recommend itself insofar as it situates Woolf within the broad confluence of the highly influential reconsiderations of human consciousness undertaken by the likes of Freud, Bergson, and James, to name only three of the most obvious examples. In reductively general terms, Freud clearly made the dark places of the mind central to his psychoanalytic project, and Woolf ’s description of the ever-varied complexity of consciousness shares a sort of family resemblance to Bergson’s exploration of the experience of ineluctable temporal flux that he calls “duration.” Indeed, Woolf ’s description of the form of consciousness that she approaches in the


essay also shares much with James’s assertion—opening his chapter of The Principles of Psychology on “The Stream of Thought,” in relation to which “Modern Fiction” is so often, if loosely, situated—that “consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations” (224). And yet, thus to take the “spirituality” of Woolf ’s psychology at face value, and to understand the principal movement of her argument as the sheer insistence upon the elusive complexity of human consciousness, remains unsatisfying on a number of levels. Most immediately, such a position fails to account for the language of Woolf ’s text, an inability that is particularly glaring in the context of an essay that so explicitly thematizes its author’s acute awareness of her terminological choices and the effects of her tropes. Her replacement of the figure of the gig lamps, and her insistent use of “life” in place of “reality” despite the admitted vagueness of the former, both suggest that Woolf chooses her language carefully here. In this light, it is significant that her most positive articulation of the modern novelist’s task is cast in terms of recording “atoms as they fall on the mind” and tracing “the pattern . . . each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (107); these terms reiterate the central trope of her earlier statement that “the mind receives myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (106). Precisely at the moment in her argument that she most forcefully moves from elucidating the limitations of her predecessors to elaborating her understanding of what it means to approach the dark places of psychology, Woolf turns to the surprisingly materialist language of turn-of-the-century psychology, a psychology that frequently sought to apply the principles of physical science to the human psyche.4 She, thus, resituates her assertion that the development of fiction as an aesthetic form will necessitate the exploration of the dark places of psychology such that it eerily converges with another clarion call, issued in 1902 by the prominent British psychologist William McDougall, to the effect that “if the psychologist wishes to advance his science, he must descend into the dark places of physiology, and become himself a neurologist” (Hearnshaw, 186). Having set up the “spiritual” project of modern fiction, Woolf chooses to approach the space of psychological interiority upon which so much rides in terms not simply of the mind, but of the atomic interactions that constitute the bodily processes upon which consciousness depends—a decision she reinforces a few sentences later in choosing to describe the “innermost flame” that Joyce so adeptly captures as flashing its messages not through the mind but the brain. Rather than mysterious and disembodied mental or spiritual phenomena, the stuff of consciousness must


be understood, she suggests, as the effect of interactions between minute and elaborate bodily mechanisms and the external world. Far from insisting on the narrowly psychical, Woolf ’s understanding of human consciousness, it would seem, seeks to engage the relationship between the psyche and the nervous body that is its support. Indeed, if Woolf ’s characterization of the psyche recalls James’s stream of consciousness, the language through which she does so indicates the extent to which the figure of the stream functions on two different registers within the psychology of the period. Describing consciousness as ineluctably complex and ever-changing, Woolf evokes a sense of the Heraclitean stream James undoubtedly has partially in mind when speaking of the “stream of thought”; and yet when she writes of sensory and perceptual experience scoring patterns upon the mind, she draws our attention to the fact that for James, as for many of his peers, the stream of thought is no ephemeral entity, detached from the physical processes of the body.5 James is extremely clear that thought is affected by, and effective upon, physiological processes. “Whilst we think,” he contends, “our brain changes, and like the aurora borealis, in its whole internal equilibrium shifts with every pulse of change. The precise nature of the shifting at a given moment is a product of many factors” (234). Among these factors is the influence of habit, a notion that James treats in detail five chapters before his analysis of the stream of thought, which posits the processes of thought as altering the physical character of the nervous system in fundamental ways. I will return shortly to the question of habit in some detail, but, briefly, Woolf is not in the least fanciful in suggesting that sensation “scores [patterns] upon the consciousness.” For James (and in this he is representative of much turn-of-the-century psychology), the flow of nervous energy through the body actually grooves out progressively deeper pathways in the nervous tissue itself, and in this context the metaphor of the stream takes on distinctly different tones. “A path once traversed by a nerve-current,” James argues, “might be expected to follow the law of most of the paths we know and to be scooped out and made more permeable than before; and this ought to be repeated with each new passage of the current. Whatever obstructions may have kept it at first from being a path should then . . . be swept out of the way, until at last it might become a natural drainage-channel” (108). James borrows this drainage metaphor from G. H. Schneider, who renders it in somewhat more florid detail. “To recur to a simile,” writes Schneider, imagine the nervous system to represent a drainage-system, inclining, on the whole, toward certain muscles, but with the escape thither somewhat clogged.

140 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community Then streams of water will, on the whole, tend most to fill the drains that go towards these muscles and to wash out the escape. In case of a sudden ‘flushing,’ however, the whole system of channels will fill itself, and water overflow everywhere before it escapes. But a moderate quantity of water invading the system will flow through the proper escape alone. (James, 113)

In short, by the time James introduces the stream of thought, any temptation to locate the figure in too idyllic a setting has long since been preempted by the rather less pristine figure of the drainage-channel upon which it depends. If, for James, it is an unavoidable fact that “we think; and as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking”(241–42), this would seem to be a position that Woolf shares. Indeed, she articulates the same necessity in her 1930 essay “On Being Ill,” when—seemingly at odds with her earlier skewering of the Edwardian materialists—she laments the fact that “with a few exceptions . . . literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one of [sic] two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent” (193). “On the contrary,” she insists, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come into it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilized the universe. (193–94)

Far from a revisionist insight at which Woolf arrives in the last decade of her life, I would suggest that her exploration of the inseparability of body and mind is legible in her text from at least 1919 on. If, then, I want to insist that her invocation of the language of neuropsychology in “Modern Fiction” demands to be read rather more literal mindedly than is usually the case, I do so for a number of reasons. Most locally, such a reading establishes a trajectory of thought that articulates early preoccupations with the representation of consciousness with increasingly pressing later concerns over questions of embodiment. Wryly lamenting “the poverty of the language” that “hinder[s] the description of


illness in literature,” Woolf wonders at the fact that “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache” (CE, 4:194). “It has all grown one way,” she continues, The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. . . . Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of the villain, and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste—that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral. (CE, 4:194–95)

This call for a language of illness—a language of embodiment, really—takes very much the same form, and addresses many of the same problems, as the call for a new form of fiction in “Modern Fiction.” If we take seriously Woolf ’s engagement of neuropsychology in the earlier essay, however, the similarity ceases to be merely formal and the two essays become legible as a substantial continuation of the same project. More broadly, my insistence upon pursuing Woolf ’s neuropsychological language remarks the extent to which her advocacy of linguistic innovation—a new form of fiction, a new language of illness—is firmly embedded historically and culturally. Notwithstanding her characterization of the Babelian task of the sufferer forced to forge a language from nothing, or at best from a collection of confused and inarticulate sounds, Woolf clearly understands that the language she seeks will not be produced through any willful act of ex nihilo creation, but through the negotiation of a complex cultural matrix that includes the linguistic, the scientific, the social, and the political. If her turn to literary history—whether embodied by Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, or Shakespeare and Keats—is minimally suggestive of her insistence on the material history of language, I would suggest that her engagement of psychology constitutes a much more expansive space of negotiation across which we can trace the interanimation of literature and science. It allows us to explore one of the sites within which the period most forcefully articulates not only questions of individual embodiment but also of the incorporation of individual bodies into structures of collectivity.


“Scraped, Hurt in the Spine”: The Nervous Body at the Altar of Proportion Turning to Woolf ’s fiction, perhaps the most obvious place to begin tracing her interactions with psychology is Mrs. Dalloway. It is certainly the text in which she most obviously thematizes mental illness and the institutional power of psychology as a clinical discourse. Writing in her diary of her plans for the novel, Woolf famously describes her desire to “adumbrate . . . a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side” (Writer’s Diary, 77). This interest in psychology and insanity, of course, finds its primary representation in the figure of Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked ex-soldier whose frequently psychotic postwar existence culminates in his suicide. In its execution, though, the narrative attends only intermittently to Septimus, and is largely constructed around the crucially interlinked focalizing presences of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus, those two characters between whom, though they never come into direct contact, the text works so hard to articulate a tenuous connection. To the extent that this connection is forged in narrative terms through the web of consciousnesses that the text weaves, and in thematic terms through the geographical intersections of their respective trajectories through London, I want to argue that it is also produced through the representation of a shared mode of nervous embodiment. At least initially, this corporeal convergence is fairly superficial and is achieved through the deployment of a shared tropology in their physical description. Even as Clarissa makes her first appearance in the novel’s opening pages, for example, we are told that there is “a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious” (4), and she herself laments the fact that “she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous face, beaked like a bird’s” (12). Similarly, the text’s first mention of Septimus simply describes him as “aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed” (18). If this reliance on avian figures in the initial description of the novel’s two central characters forges a tentative connection between them, and anticipates the more substantial, if still mysterious, moment at the end of the narrative in which Clarissa experiences a profound somatic and spiritual connection to the unknown young man about whose suicide she hears, it provides no access to their psychic interiors. While this sort of superficial description functions formally to mark a similarity between the two characters, it does not so much as hint that this similarity finds a thematic basis in a shared sensibility. Indeed, the palpable social gap between the refined, self-controlled, and respected society hostess, and the alienated, raving psychotic is one that the text rarely ceases to maintain. Yet, Clarissa’s and Septimus’s shared avian morphology is indicative of a more substantial shared mode of embodiment. When the narrator remarks


upon Septimus’s “pale-faced” demeanor, this is a physical sign to which the reader has already been introduced in the text’s opening commentary on Clarissa’s appearance: she had grown, we are told, “very white since her illness” (4). Though the text remains reticent about the precise nature of this illness, it is clearly consistent with the diagnosis of neurasthenia, for in one of the few instances in which her illness is mentioned, the narrative informs us that she has been banished to a “narrow bed” in the attic because “Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed” (40). This rather diluted form of the rest cure to which Clarissa is subject, thus, anticipates the therapeutic regime Sir William Bradshaw, the Harley Street nerve specialist, will seek forcibly to visit upon Septimus and provides an important context within which to read the physical characteristics shared by the two characters. Insofar as this fleeting reference to Clarissa’s rest cure seems a slight basis upon which to argue that she shares with Septimus a state of mental ill-health—the rest cure was, after all, prescribed for a fairly wide range of conditions and was by no means limited to nervous illness—the text, once again in its description of their bodily modes, provides corroboration. For if Woolf initially draws our attention to a commonality between Clarissa and Septimus by characterizing them both as bird-like, pale, and ill, she quickly turns to the language of the nerves, a language whose terms she applies equally to both. During situations of heightened emotion, both are described as having a form of experience that is directly connected to the nervous body. Confronted, for instance, with the loathsome figure of Miss Kilman, her daughter’s tutor and companion, Clarissa is wracked with feelings of intense hatred. “It rasped her,” we are told, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! To hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine [and] gave her physical pain. (15)

Similarly, in the moments leading up to his psychotic episode in Regent’s Park, Septimus is urged by his wife to take in the bustling activity around him—“Look, look, Septimus!” she harps, in an attempt to follow Dr. Holmes’s advice that her husband must “take an interest in things outside himself ” (27)—and his attention is drawn in particular to the extraordinary sight of a plane skywriting an advertisement. As one of the onlookers spells aloud the letters of the airborne ad-copy, the narrative makes its way into Septimus’s consciousness and informs us that he “heard her say ‘Kay Arr’


close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up on into his brain waves of sound, which, concussing, broke” (28). Whereas Clarissa’s experience of the nervous body, of being “scraped” or “rasped” in the spine, is fairly limited, in Septimus’s case the effects of this form of nervous embodiment are profound. The initial rasping of his spine leads him to the “marvellous discovery . . . that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions . . . can quicken trees into life” (28), a discovery he experiences quite physically as being “beckoned” by the trees. “Leaves were alive; trees were alive,” he thinks, “and the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement” (28). And if we are left in any doubt that the fibres by which Septimus finds himself attached to the unusually vital trees are the very fibres of his nervous system, at the height of hallucinatory intensity he turns to the explanatory power of medical science for a moment of insight into his condition. “But what was the scientific explanation,” he wonders, (for one must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become men? It was the heat wave presumably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution. Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock. (88)

Clarissa’s inhabitation of the nervous body never achieves this extremity—a body reduced to its nerves and perilously at the mercy of a world full of stimulating impulses—yet she is, nevertheless, represented through the same nervous discourse that the novel employs in its characterization of Septimus. This recourse to the nervous body is crucial to the elaboration of Mrs. Dalloway’s two central characters, and the connection it establishes between them is ultimately significant in terms of the structures of collectivity that the novel works to explore—a question to which I return at length in Chapter 4. In this text, however, Woolf examines in detail neither the cultural matrix that makes intelligible the nervous body she invokes nor the ways in which that body functions. The relationship between the language of the nerves she develops and the dominant understanding of the nervous body elaborated by medical science remains unexplored insofar as the representations of nervous embodiment scattered throughout the novel are largely contained as products of Septimus’s hallucinatory vision. This is not, obviously, to say that Woolf is uninterested in medical scientific approaches to the nervous body, but


beyond establishing a link of commonality between Clarissa and Septimus, the novel pursues the nervous body primarily as the object of clinical and institutional forces rather than as a somatic system per se. It is, of course, something of a critical commonplace that, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf interrogates the nervous body as the site of moral regulation. The coordinates of the regulatory schema scrutinized by the novel can be traced back from our final, heavily ironized glimpses of the eminent Sir William Bradshaw as the text represents his arrival at and departure from Clarissa’s party. Bradshaw’s arrival is remarked by Clarissa as he stands talking to her husband: “They were talking about this Bill. Some case Sir William was mentioning, lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about the deferred effects of shell-shock. There must be some provision in the Bill” (240). This observation is shortly followed by the text’s final word on the eminent physician in its description of his departure: as he “stop[s] at the door to look at a picture,” the text coolly informs us that “Sir William Bradshaw was so interested in art” (253). As these two touchstones suggest, Bradshaw’s therapeutic mission is both civic and cultural insofar as his role as arbiter and promoter of properly cultivated sensibility is directed by the goal of the national good. Though less tinged with ridiculous pomposity, Bradshaw’s parliamentary machinations are clearly of a piece with the aptly named Lady Bruton’s eugenically motivated promotion of national and imperial health through her “project for emigrating young people of both sexes born of respectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada” (141). The novel’s infamous examples of medical authority, Dr. Holmes and Sir William (despite the professional distinction that separates them) are both basically promoters of moral, rather than physical, therapy—a therapeutic regime that is ultimately directed at the production and maintenance of an efficient national community. For Holmes, the somewhat antiquated general practitioner for whom medicine is less a science than the art of healing, Septimus’s illness is all but nonexistent as an organic phenomenon. “There [is] nothing whatever the matter” (118), he insists as he “brushe[s] it all aside—headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams—nerve symptoms and nothing more” (119), he declares. Vaguely invoking a diagnosis of neurasthenia and the principles of the rest cure, his therapeutic response comes in the form of the reflection that: If Dr Holmes found himself even half a pound below eleven stone six, he asked his wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast. . . . [H]ealth is largely a matter in our own control. Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some

146 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community hobby. . . . Some hobby, said Dr. Holmes, for did he not owe his own excellent health (and he worked as hard as any man in London) to the fact that he could always switch off from his patients on to old furniture? (119)

Implying that, as one of the busiest and hardest working men in London, he should be eminently susceptible to the nervous exhaustion he diagnoses in Septimus, Holmes sings the therapeutic praises of an extra plate of porridge in mild deference to the rest cure’s regime of rich and fatty diets. Little concerned with the somatic condition of his patient, the principle supporting his paean to porridge, self-control, and old furniture is rather the policing of a domestic sphere that revolves around a properly English form of masculinity. Greeting the news that Septimus has talked of suicide to his wife, Holmes proceeds from the penetrating observation that his patient is “in a funk” to the exhortation that, especially given Rezia’s Italian heritage, Septimus should consider the possibility that his behavior might “give her a very odd idea of English husbands” (120). “Didn’t one owe perhaps a duty,” Holmes inquires, “to one’s wife” (120). If Holmes’s vague diagnosis is indebted to the notion of neurasthenia and his therapy pays lip service to the rest cure, the more scientifically oriented Sir William confirms the diagnosis and turns in response to the principles of the sanatorium treatment—that therapeutic regime whose contours we have already examined in the context of tuberculosis. Averring that “he never [speaks] of ‘madness’; he called it not having a sense of proportion” (125), Sir William is more systematic, and thus substantially more sinister, than the bumbling Holmes in his ardent promotion of the core domestic values at the heart of the national economy. “Worshipping proportion,” we are told, “Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” (129). In this capacity, Bradshaw fervently wields the sanatorium as his primary tool. Laying bare the institutional apparatus that supports his social mission, the narrative reveals that Sir William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William frankly admitted was a difficult art—a sense of proportion. There were, moreover, family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career. All of these had in Sir William a resolute champion. If they failed, he had to support him police and the good of society, which, he remarked very quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that these unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of good blood, were held in control. (132–33)


Based in a constitutional notion of disease, Bradshaw’s practice predictably combines broadly physical therapeutic principles with social pedagogy. In physical terms, therapy is largely a question of “rest, rest, rest; a long rest in bed” (125). Syllogistically invoking the governing imperatives that “health we must have; and health is proportion” (129), Bradshaw proceeds according to the simple yet extensive principle that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve. (129)

Consistent with the diagnosis of neurasthenia (and, more broadly, the notion of asthenic disease) the nervous body is, in short, little more than a machine whose source of energy has been depleted, and the combination of rest and a diet designed to produce a weight gain of roughly five stone in six months’ time is sufficient to overcome this physical deficit. The period of rest, as was the case with the tuberculosis sanatorium, additionally provides the occasion for the ultimately much more important therapeutic process of education. Sir William assures Septimus that, at the sanatorium, “we will teach you to rest” (127), but the substance of this pedagogy is clearly far less physiological than moral. Removing the sufferer from a deleterious social context that includes family and friends, the good doctor and his institutional prostheses induce the patient to participate in the work of healing that, notwithstanding the trappings of a therapeutics directed at the depleted somatic system, which is ostensibly the organic cause of disease, is principally engaged in effecting his or her subjection to the system of social values so succinctly encapsulated in the Bradshavian watchword: proportion. Having successfully undergone this process of moral regulation, the patient can then be returned to society at large, presumably eager to participate alongside the likes of Sir William and Lady Bruton in the project of “making England prosper.” Beyond the immediate benefit of reincorporating a once-diseased individual within the social body, this therapeutic model additionally functions with an eye to collateral social benefits that include the reformatory influence of the erstwhile sufferer upon the social milieu that initially participated in the production of his or her disease. In Septimus’s case, for instance, one imagines that such activity would include the rectification of his wife’s skewed impressions of English husbands, and thus the assimilation of a potentially disruptive foreign influence into a properly English domestic sphere.


It is important to note that the characterological therapeutic regime represented by Woolf has specific correlates in the psychology of the day, and is, for example, fully consonant with the framework laid out by the British psychologist J. A. Hadfield in his Psychology and Morals: An Analysis of Character (1923). Hadfield’s application of psychological procedures to the moral question of character is especially apposite insofar as it is largely animated by the principle of psychological organization—a category that will be central to much of my argument not only in the remainder of this chapter but also in Chapter 4. Specifically, his discussion hinges on the notion of the “organised self,” a vaguely super-egoic entity that constitutes a limited subsection of the entire psychological individual, manifests itself in the form of “Will,” and generally acts in opposition to the collection of frequently undesirable and antisocial impulses, instincts, desires, and complexes that constitute the remainder of the individual. The “organised self,” for example, “consists of all the sentiments for home, family, and country, of the love of beauty, the love of the good, the love of the true, and such dispositions as sincerity, a tolerant and courageous spirit” (69), and designates that “part [of the whole psychological individual] which stands over against our impulses and desires” (69–70). “This is the self as organized,” writes Hadfied, “which is a very important conception of the self from the practical and moral point of view” (70). Drawing on an explicitly and resolutely organic model, Hadfield argues that the “self,” as an “organization of all the sentiments and dispositions,” finds its essential function in its ability to direct an otherwise disorganized panoply of psychological tendencies “towards a common purpose” (70). Drawing alternately on the examples of organic systems offered by physical and social bodies, he suggests that [w]e call it the “organized self ”, because it is that part of our whole individual which, on account of having common interests and a common purpose, is organized into a whole. It is because it functions as one. Every organism is an organism because the elements of which it is composed work together for a common purpose; it is, indeed, this which constitutes it as an organism. . . . So the individual “self ”, psychologically considered, is constituted of a large number of sentiments and dispositions, each of which has its own life, and of them alone. But because they have interests in common, and work towards a common end, they form the organization which we call the self. It is only because the self works as one that it coheres as one; otherwise when it ceases to move towards a common purpose it disintegrates: this is the unifying principle. The “self ” is a unity more in function than in structure. This function of the “Self ” we shall call the Will. The Will is the activity of the self; it is the “self ” in function, the “self ” moving towards the aims and ends of the personality as

Organizing the Nervous Body, Regulating the Self • 149 a whole. The quality and nature of these aims and ends determines our character, good or bad. (70–71, original italics)

The possibility of the disintegration of the self, of course, raises the question of psychopathology, and according to Hadfield’s framework, it occurs primarily in situations where unrestrained impulses overcome the organized self and the Will in which it is manifest. Generally speaking, the conditions under which the Will is rendered impotent to dominate the impulses are those in which there is an “absence of an adequate ideal or stimulus to the will,” an absence that frequently corresponds to “times when we have undergone some great strain” (77). “In such times,” Hadfield argues, “whether of fear, of grief, of failure, or of the fatigue of war, our self is weary and powerless to make an effort, and tends to become disintegrated, and our actions are left to the mercy of our impulses. These are often therefore the precipitating causes of a neurosis” (77). In therapeutic terms, however, “Such a disintegration may be prevented by the presentation of an ideal which has the power to arouse the will once more, and restore the power of the self, which is then able to rise above its misfortunes, weather the storm of its difficulties, and once more become master of its fate” (77). The “ideal” that, thus, plays such a central role in organizing, and maintaining the organization of, the self is, according to Hadfield, “the idea or object which leads to the complete realization of the whole individual” (82–82, original italics). “A man’s whole life and character,” he concludes, “as well as his mental health and happiness depend upon his having the right aims, ends and purposes in life—in other words, the right ideals. By right ideals we mean those which by their nature are capable of mobilizing, co-ordinating and directing all the potentialities of the personality towards its completeness and integration” (82–83). In this context, the Bradshavian invocation of proportion becomes legible as the sort of “organizational” therapy that Hadfield envisions. “Proportion” incorporates the range of values—family, career, beauty, valor, courage, patriotism—that Hadfield argues are central to the organized self; in relation to a case of psychological disintegration such as Septimus’s, proportion functions as the ideal designed to revitalize the will in the face of antisocial drives, and ultimately to restore psychological completeness and integration. This “proportional” reorganization to which Bradshaw is dedicated, notably has its effects both upon the individual self and the community. “When a large body of individuals, having interests in common,” writes Hadfield, “combine for common purposes to a common end, they form an organization” within which the constituent members “remain one only in so far as they contrive to function together; as soon as they cease to act as one they cease to be one” (71). Because


the psychological individual and the social body are defined isomorphically in terms of an organizational model, the organization of the self contributes to the organization of the collectivity, for it is through “proportional” organization that the individual is inserted into the well-organized community. If Woolf scrutinizes the ultimately unsuccessful—or perhaps, brutally efficient—therapeutic procedures employed in an attempt to organize the irrational presence embodied by Septimus within the normative social forms symbolized by the ideal of proportion, she is, of course, equally attentive to Clarissa’s more subtle subjection to the same communitarian regime. Though not obviously subject to the ministrations of Holmes and Bradshaw, Clarissa’s nervous body nonetheless plays an important role in the disciplinary mechanisms that maintain women like her—one thinks also of the pitiful Evelyn Whitbread whose innumerable and highly euphemized “ailments” mean that while “other people came [to town] to see the pictures; go to the opera . . . the Whitbreads came ‘to see doctors’” (6)—within a properly feminine domestic sphere. Clarissa’s nervous body is clearly central to the progression that takes her from the youthful radicalism she shares with Peter Walsh and Sally Seton to her primary role as social booster for her husband’s mediocre career as a Tory member of Parliament, and denies her access even to the limited parapolitical realm inhabited by the likes of the questionably feminine Ladies Bruton and Bexborough or the mackintosh-clad Miss Kilman. If, however, Woolf invokes the nervous body as the basis, or enabling condition, of the communitarian project she so ably analyses and critiques in Mrs. Dalloway, she remains at some distance from both the somatic processes that constitute that body, and the medical scientific techniques designed to grasp it. Whereas the text verges upon the domain of medical science in its deployment of the language of the nerves, its analysis of the implication of the nervous body within a nationalist communitarian project turns not to medical science narrowly conceived but to a form of social medicine that engages with the individual body primarily as a means of affecting the social body into which it is incorporated. Like the social medicine it critiques, in other words, Mrs. Dalloway seems ultimately satisfied to remain within the realm of what Sir William calls an “exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing about—the nervous system, the human brain” (129). The Problem of the “Raw, the White, the Unprotected Fibre”: “Bright Arrows of Sensation” and the Habituated Body Mrs. Dalloway, thus, pursues the interest in neuroscience inaugurated in “Modern Fiction” by introducing a particularly physiological figure of the


nervous body, but stops short of tracing the contours of that somatic mode beyond locating it as the largely unknowable site upon which the organizational production of the individual takes place and within which the disciplinary procedures of nationalist communitarian impulses are played out. This marks the end, however, neither of Woolf ’s exploration of the neuropsychological body nor of her interrogation of the implication of that body in the production of structures of collectivity. For an extension of this project, we must turn, somewhat surprisingly, to The Waves, a text whose broad critical reception would seem to suggest that it is notable primarily for its representation of a thoroughly disembodied form of consciousness and its paucity of political engagement. Even among critics exploring the political stakes of Anglo-American literary modernism—or, more narrowly, of Virginia Woolf ’s literary production—The Waves has been read persistently as a highly aesthetic (and therefore apolitical) experiment in the representation of consciousness.6 The much commented upon experimental nature of the text is, of course, evident from its opening pages: the disembodied narrative voice of the first italicized interlude, with its abstract and highly figural description of an unlocatable landscape, gives way in the first chapter to the cacophonic intermingling of the personalized yet significantly indistinguishable voices that emanate from within the unstable circumferences of individual characters—or, perhaps more accurately, that are attached to proper names that designate different but overlapping spaces of enunciation. Yet even as we immediately are confronted by the formal properties that arguably constitute the apogee of Woolf ’s narrative innovation, the text’s opening interlude introduces a figural trajectory that draws us beyond the purview of the aesthetic, narrowly conceived. Describing a seascape at dawn, the text posits an original state of relative indifferentiation in which “the sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles on it” (W, 3). Sundering this state of indifference, the sun rises and “the air,” we are told, “seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire” (3, my emphasis). This state of fibrotic differentiation is, however, only momentary, for we immediately read that “gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence”—a unity that is itself quickly qualified by the statement that this incandescence “lifted the weight of the woolen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue” (3). A high degree of abstraction notwithstanding, the opening interlude thus frames the novel by drawing our attention to a conceptual movement from indifferentiation to individualization to a renewed form of


wholeness or collectivity that is understood as a state of fusion that paradoxically maintains or supports a constellation of discrete atoms. It is, broadly speaking, this trajectory that Michael Tratner takes up in the chapter of Modernism and Mass Politics devoted to The Waves. Arguing the need to resituate British literary high modernism in the context of a variety of collectivist projects that were widely influential in the early part of the twentieth century, Tratner’s reading of The Waves productively understands the text as exploring a politically left collectivism.7 Whereas he turns primarily to the group psychology of Le Bon, Freud, and McDougall as the historical frame within which to approach the tension between individualism and collectivism in Woolf ’s text, however, I will suggest that the text itself identifies a different terrain upon which to explore structures of collectivity. Though The Waves is undeniably interested in questions of psychology, it is not preeminently in terms of the mind (whether of the group or the individual) that Woolf elaborates her understanding of collectivity or community. To do so, she turns instead to the bodily categories provided by neuroscientific discourse.8 To that end, it will be crucial to interrogate the text’s preoccupation with what it describes as “the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre” (178) of the human nervous system—a figure that is, as we have noted, powerfully if fleetingly introduced in Mrs. Dalloway—and to explore the various registers on which this figure functions. If The Waves inaugurates the figure in a nonphysiological mode in its opening page through the repeated description of the process of differentiation as one of increasing fibrosis, I want to pursue the trajectory suggested by this initial interlude in arguing that the text quickly redeploys this naturalistic metaphor and takes a different sort of fiber, that which constitutes the human nervous system, as the context within which to explore a movement from differentiation to fusion, from individualization to the fashioning of collectivity. Whereas Mrs. Dalloway pursues the relationship between individualization and collectivity primarily in terms of the production and maintenance of moral character, The Waves seeks to explore the incorporation of community more literally through the interrogation of those scientific discourses that understand both individuation and the fashioning of collectivity as substantially determined at the level of narrowly somatic structures and processes. Beyond allowing me to trace a line of thought whose trajectory marks a wide range of Woolf ’s texts, this situation of the nervous body as the term around which forces of individualization and structures of collectivity circulate draws into relief a significant methodological problem. Specifically, the interrogation of Woolf ’s nervous tropology in relation to contemporaneous neuroscience functions to extend and complicate the sort of historicist


analysis practiced, for example, by Tratner. Whereas his reading convincingly draws out thematic continuities between the novel and the work of various theorists of collectivity (including Harold Laski, Leonard Woolf, and R. H. Tawney), attention to the text’s engagement of neuroscience makes The Waves legible as more than a literary presentation of social problems that simultaneously find articulation in other modes of intellectual work. If Gillian Beer has argued that Woolf “was fascinated by communities,” and that “the deep value which she accords to communality . . . has to do with her practice of writing out of the mass and out of the body” (85, 87), I would add that by thinking community through the bodily categories of neuroscience The Waves functions as an example that calls us to theorize not only possible forms of collectivity but also the mechanisms through which communal projects of the early twentieth century literally incorporate themselves. The body becomes, in this context, more than merely a figure either for society or for those affective elements of experience that are markers of the intensely individual. In addition to its resonance on these figural registers, the body must be considered rather more literally: as it is constituted as the object of inquiry by a variety of increasingly prestigious bioscientific disciplines. By raising the question of the social body in this way, The Waves takes up the interest in neuropsychology evident in texts like “Modern Fiction” and Mrs. Dalloway but moves beyond those texts in insisting that we must approach bioscience as a particularly powerful means of accessing and comprehending the individual bodies that communitarian projects inevitably seek to grasp as their objects. To the extent that The Waves asks us to consider how historically extant structures of collectivity are incorporated in their bioscientific grasp of individual bodies, it simultaneously demands that we theorize the communitarian implications of a body that resolutely refuses to be assimilated by the language and procedures of bioscience. In exploring this affective body, a body that opens up and exposes the interiorized subjective space of the neuroscientific body, I will attempt to remark the limit on which an ethical collective impulse announces itself. More specifically the remainder of this chapter will examine in some detail Woolf ’s engagement of the neuroscientific body, before turning, in Chapter 4, to the communal implications of this engagement. If the opening interlude of The Waves frames the text’s overarching trajectory when it describes a movement from brute indifferentiation, to individualization, to a renewed state of indifference in fusion, the opening chapter takes up the first phase of that movement on a psychological register. Commencing with a series of short declarative sentences conveying basic sense-data—“I see a ring,” “I see a slab of yellow,” “I hear a sound” (5)—the


text introduces the characters as young children whose phenomenological existence initially is limited to rudimentary sense perception. Still within the confines of its first page, the chapter quickly represents a move from sensation to cognition, and the short declarations are supplanted by comparisons: “The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,” Susan tells us, and Louis chimes in with the observation that “a shadow falls on the path . . . like an elbow bent” (5). This progressive differentiation of perceptual objects leads in turn to some measure of differential identification on the part of the speaking subjects themselves, and by the third page Louis defines himself in relation to the presence or absence of others, suddenly realizing that “Now they have all gone . . . [and] I am alone” (7). The text’s opening pages, in short, present an extremely compressed developmental schema that takes the characters from a stage of barely developed perceptual consciousness to a level of significant cognitive ability and individualization, and that reaches its apogee in a scene so crucial that it will have been revisited four times by the end of the novel. If the language of the first chapter mimetically parades the characters through a process of psychological development, the chapter concludes with a scene that thematizes the inevitable procession toward individuality, and recounts the moment at which the characters “troop upstairs like ponies . . . stamping, clattering one behind another to take [their] turns in the bathroom” where Mrs. Constable awaits, “girt in a bath-towel” and brandishing her water-soaked, “lemon-coloured sponge” (19). Submitted in turn to this at least nominal representative of the Law, Bernard tells us that “holding [the sponge] high above me, shivering beneath her, she squeezes it. Water pours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered with warm flesh” (19). In interesting contrast to post-Freudian models, Woolf understands the processes leading to individualization not primarily in visual or linguistic terms but in terms of the physiological mechanisms that produce the “bright arrows of sensation.” The law to which the children are submitted is not social but somatic, and as a result Woolf ’s interrogation of individualism takes place in close proximity to the corporeal model articulated by turn-of-the-century neuroscience.9 That this physiological law has social correlates with which it collaborates—a question to which I will return shortly—is suggested by a scene that follows quite quickly upon the encounter with Mrs. Constable. The characters having embarked upon the process of their formal education, the text returns to the language of the ordered march. Instead of “trooping” upstairs to Mrs. Constable, however, Louis narrates an occasion on which the boys “march, two by two . . . processional, into chapel.” “I like the dimness that falls as we enter the sacred building,” says Louis, “I like the orderly process. . . . Now all


is laid by [the Headmaster’s] authority, his crucifix, and I feel come over me the sense of the earth under me, and my roots going down and down till they wrap themselves round some hardness at the centre. I recover my continuity, as he reads, I become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge wheel that turning, at last erects me, here and now” (25–26). Equally a scene of individuation, the laws of physiological organization are here succeeded and supplemented by an institutional embodiment of social law, which contributes to the habitualizing production of the individual. To briefly indicate the salient features of this neuroscientific model, I refer primarily to the widespread reductionist impulse evident in the psychology of the period. Technological development that increasingly allowed the bioscientist to decompose the body into ever more minute constituent components, and to establish the chemical and mechanical relations between these components, frequently resulted in the assumption that questions of the mind could be answered through appropriately scientific attention to the body. Programmatically encapsulating this orthodoxy, for example, Henry Maudsley’s extended argument in Body and Mind is premised on the general principle that The development of the senses . . . has been, as the progress of science proves, the foundation of intellectual advance; the understanding has been developed through the senses, and has in turn constructed instruments for extending the action of the senses. . . . By the microscope [for example] the minute structure of tissues and the history of the little world of organic cells have been made known. (221–22)

Extrapolating from this principle, Maudsley demands: “Surely it is time we put seriously to ourselves the question whether the inductive method, which has proved its worth by its abundant fruitfulness wherever it has been faithfully applied, should not be as rigidly used in the investigation of mind as in the investigation of other natural phenomena” (14). Indeed, shifting from the interrogative to the declarative, he is led to assert that “to begin the study of mind with the observation of its humblest bodily manifestations is a strictly scientific method” (14). In its broadest contours, this positivist impulse is directed by the belief that [s]o intimate and essential is the sympathy between all the organic functions, of which mind is the crown and consummation, that we may justly say of it, that it sums up and comprehends the bodily life—that every thing which is displayed outwardly is contained secretly in the innermost. We cannot truly understand mind-functions without embracing in our inquiry all the bodily functions and, I might without exaggeration say, all the bodily features. (29)


This drive to apply the principles of physical science to the psychological realm finds a home in the bulk of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychology and is manifest in the work of figures as diverse and influential as Sigmund Freud and William James. Whereas Freud opens his prepsychoanalytic Project for a Scientific Psychology with the avowal that it is his “intention to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles” (295), James introduces The Principles of Psychology with the dual claims that “a certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in Psychology,” and that the “psychologist is forced to be something of a nerve-physiologist” (5). Given this recourse to neurology and neurophysiology, the model of the nervous system made available by those disciplines is, in very simple terms, that of a series of relays conducting impulses from the bodily periphery to the center and then again to the periphery, with the central nervous system functioning as a switching station between sensation and motivity. Afferent nerves are understood to carry sensory excitation to the central nervous system, which then discharges the quantum of nervous energy to the periphery in the form of motor activity. Most contentious in this schema was the role of the central nervous system in determining by which path, among a multitude of possibilities, any given nervous impulse would be discharged. Suspicious of appeals to volitional categories in the explanation of this decision-making process, and in many cases attempting to account for supposed acts of will in physiological terms, neuroscientific models turned instead to the physical characteristics of the nervous system. Fairly representative in this respect is James’s description of the “plasticity” of nerve tissue and the notion of habit that becomes its predicate. “Plasticity,” James writes, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits. Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we may without hesitation lay down as our first proposition the following, that the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed. (105)10

Insisting that “the philosophy of habit is . . . in the first instance, a chapter in physics,” and that habit is “at bottom a physical principle” (105), James suggests that the nervous system is physically altered by the nervous energy it transmits. Once a given type of afferent impulse is discharged via a specific


motor pathway, the system is altered such that subsequent impulses of that type will be more likely to be discharged in the same way. Approvingly quoting William Carpenter’s Mental Physiology to the effect that repeated patterns of transmission and discharge literally “leave organic impressions” (112) on the substance of the nervous system, James goes so far as to suggest that “it is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain” (126).11 Beyond remarking the deterministic implications of this model, according to which patterns of behavior are physically scored into the nervous system, it is worth noting that James is also fairly representative in terms of the conclusions to which his psychophysiological model leads. On his account, the “physiological study of mental conditions is . . . the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. . . . The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way,” he warns. “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar” (127). Habit is, for James, the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. (121)

The model of the nervous system exemplified by James’s psychology, thus, has dual implications. In the first instance, it provides a physiological ground for the formation of moral character and the production of individual subjects, and in the second instance, it functions to differentiate individuals from one another through the maintenance of a rigid social structure that extends from the narrowly communal to the global. The nerves, and the forms of habit they facilitate, provide the key to understanding both the mechanical formation and functioning of individual subjects and the ways in


which such individuals are integrated as distinct constitutive components into the machinery of larger scale social bodies. More specifically, habit constitutes a process of physiological organization that corresponds to the moral organization central to Hadfield’s characterological project. As William Carpenter suggests, even “the cerebrum [is no] exception to the general principle that . . . each part of the organism tends to form itself in accordance with the mode in which it is habitually exercised” (James, 112), and this process of formation or organization can equally take place under the influence of volition, environment, or (at least on some accounts) heredity. Maudsley, for instance, insists that “if all mental operations are not in this world equally functions of organization, I know not what warrant we have for declaring any to be so” (54). On the one hand, he laments that “multitudes of human beings come into the world weighted with a destiny against which they have neither the will or the power to contend . . . and groan under the worst of all tyrannies—the tyranny of a bad organization” (43); and on the other he corroborates James’s ethicophysiological translation of gather ye rosebuds while ye may, by contending that “acts consciously designed at first may, by repetition, become unconscious and automatic, the faculties of them being organized in the constitution of the nerve-centres” (19). If, in short, the moral psychology exemplified by Hadfield and represented by Woolf in the figure of Bradshaw employs the principle of organization as the crux both of individuation and community formation, the neuropsychology of the period understands the body as subject to a physiological principle of organization that is directed toward the same bipartite goal. It is precisely these twofold ramifications of the neuroscientific body that The Waves interrogates. For if Bernard’s individualizing encounter with Mrs. Constable is represented initially as the source of a vaguely pleasurable ambivalence, as the narrative proceeds, its rememoration and rearticulation increasingly cast it in a different light. By Bernard’s summation in the final chapter he revisits that event, and its myriad subsequent analogues, and is led to conclude that: “Sometimes indeed, when I pass a cottage with a light in the window where a child has been born, I could implore them not to squeeze the sponge over that new body” (W, 200). This desire to protect the infant is indicative of Woolf ’s analysis of the bodily regime in which Mrs. Constable’s sponge is only the first step. The end result of the process inaugurated by Mrs. Constable, in contrast, is articulated by Neville. “Change is no longer possible. We are committed. Before, when we met in a restaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we could have been anything,” he laments. “We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us—a pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders.


I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre” (178). Or, as Bernard suggests in a similar vein, It was different once. . . . Once we could break the current as we chose. How many telephone calls, how many post cards, are now needed to cut this hole through which we come together, united, at Hampton Court? . . . We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade; . . . and in this unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction and part the weeds that grow over the mouths of sunken channels. We have to leap like fish, high in the air, to catch the train from Waterloo. And however high we leap we fall back again into the stream. (180)

In both these cases, Woolf articulates the threat posed by Mrs. Constable’s sponge with direct reference to the language of neuroscience. Both Neville and Bernard represent the consequences of a determining somatic mode. Whereas for Neville change and choice are no longer possible because he has been pinched between the shoulders, taken the print of life on the fibers of his nervous system, Bernard feels at the mercy of the unassailable torrent of the familiar, the habitual. Drawing on the commonplace neuroscientific trope of the nerves as a riverbed whose channels are progressively deepened by currents of nervous energy, the freedom he describes is not that of choice but of the freedom from choice produced by habit. Moreover, Bernard’s statement makes manifest an antagonistic relationship between this model of embodiment and the possibility of community. Aligning the habitualized body with forces of individuation and differentiation, he suggests that it is only to the extent that the frictionless flow of the familiar can be resisted that community is possible, that the characters can “come together, united.” Partly through choice and partly through circumstance, claim Neville and Bernard, the somatic process begun by Mrs. Constable has been extended in the habitual production of discrete individuals who are left at the mercy of the increasingly rigid physical organization of their nervous systems. By way of conclusion, it should be remarked that this claim constitutes a significant extension of the critical project upon which Woolf embarks in “Modern Fiction” and Mrs. Dalloway. The Waves moves substantially beyond Woolf ’s call in “Modern Fiction” to “record the atoms as they fall on the mind” in order not merely to replicate the neuropsychological processes of human consciousness, but to examine the consequences of those processes for the formation and understanding of the self. Whereas Mrs. Dalloway interrogates the psychological mechanisms that play a key role in the production and moral regulation—the organization—of individual subjects, The Waves goes so far as to suggest that these processes are substantially predicated upon


determining modes of somatic organization, which are directed toward the formation of increasingly discrete individuals whose bodies render them progressively less free. In so doing, The Waves explores in detail a culturally powerful corporeal model that collaborates with, indeed provides a foundation for, the broadly moral matrix of individuation analyzed in the earlier novel. Indeed, to the extent that Mrs. Dalloway underscores the function of moral regulation in the constitution of community—and national community in particular—the neuroscientific discourse of habit clearly maintains that processes of somatic organization are in no way at odds with those moral and communal coordinates. And yet if Woolf seems to dissent from this last premise in Bernard’s contention that, rather than contributing to the formation of community, the habitualized body presents an obstacle to the characters’ “coming together, united,” I will argue in what follows that this apparent opposition of individualism and community constitutes the problematic that is indispensable to her exploration of the relationship between the neuroscientific body and structures of collectivity (both extant and possible). In considering this exploration in my final chapter, I shall be particularly interested in the extent to which Woolf ’s analysis contends that historically extant forms of community (and again, forms of national community in particular) remain entirely contained by the logic of the individual, a contention that renders Bernard’s mourning of a diminished capacity for collective experience legible as a call to think community beyond the individual.

CHAPTER 4

Breaking Habits, Affecting the Neuropsychological Body: Toward the “Unsubstantial Territory” of Disorganized Community

have argued in the preceding chapter that Woolf ’s engagement of the nervous body—and of the neuroscientific discourse within which that body finds one of its principal articulations at the turn of the century— moves from an interest in the coordinates of a moral psychology aimed at the regulation of individuals and their insertion into structures of collectivity, to an exploration of the principles of somatic organization that are presupposed by, and collaborate with, such mechanisms of moral organization. To the extent that Mrs. Dalloway provides a critique of the procedures through which the nervous body becomes the occasion for the psychological and psychiatric regulation of individual selves with an eye to their incorporation into a specifically nationalist form of community, The Waves extends this critique in its examination of the nervous body as the physical substance through which both individuals and communities are quite literally incorporated. Whereas the characterological discourse examined in Mrs Dalloway is predicated upon broad (and fairly predictable) analogies between the human body and the social body, The Waves approaches the former not merely as fodder for communitarian metaphor but as the physiological system—constituted, for example, by nerve fibers and reflex arcs—elaborated by the neuroscience of the day. In pursuing this trajectory, Woolf is especially attentive to the role of habit as a mode of somatic organization that is instrumental in the production of the interiorized space of discrete, individual subjects.

I


Having focused primarily upon the relationship between Woolf and neuroscience as it pertains to the elaboration and contestation of that somatic space I have referred to as the nervous body, I want, now, to turn more fully to the question of how that body is imbricated in the production of different structures of collectivity. To what extent and in what ways does the nervous body provide the foundation for group psychological projects? How is the nervous body related to the extant forms of community Woolf critically explores? And to what degree does Woolf ’s engagement of the nervous body provide the space within which to think alternate structures of collectivity? In addressing these questions, I will begin by returning to Bernard’s claim, in The Waves, that the habitualized body—so instrumental in the production of discrete individual subjects—is actually antagonistic to community, to the possibility of the characters “coming together, united” (180). Though this claim of antagonism appears somewhat paradoxical in light of the evidence adduced by Woolf ’s own texts to the effect that the habitualization of the body clearly contributes to the formation of community—to wit, patriotic national community—the apparent paradox is reduced when we consider Woolf ’s analysis of the relationship between individualism and national community. Insofar as the extant forms of community she critiques are predicated upon individualism, and, even more fundamentally, are governed by the logic of the individual, the pursuit of alternatives must, indeed, confront a contradiction between the force of the individual and the possibility of “coming together.” Unsettling the Habitual—A “Great Society of Bodies” Before returning to the critique of existing structures of collectivity articulated in The Waves, however, it will be necessary to consider the alternatives posited in the text, for despite the lamentation of progressively habitualized atomization offered by characters like Bernard and Neville, it is precisely the possibility of coming together that constitutes one of Woolf ’s key concerns. She is not content merely to replicate positivist science’s mechanical model of the body, a body in which, as Bernard puts it, “muscles, nerves, intestines, blood-vessels, . . . make the coil and spring of our being, the unconscious hum of the engine . . . [which] function[s] superbly. Opening, shutting; shutting, opening; eating, drinking; sometimes speaking—the whole mechanism seem[s] to expand, to contract, like the mainspring of a clock” (217–18). Throughout The Waves, she is equally at pains to articulate an alternate model of embodiment—a model most clearly represented in her characterization of Jinny—and to explore its communal ramifications. Early

Breaking Habits, Affecting the Neuropsychological Body • 163

on in the text we are given an account of Jinny’s participation in a tennis match after which she tells us: Everything in my body seems thinned out with running and triumph. My blood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against my ribs. My soles tingle, as if wire rings opened and shut in my feet. I see every blade of grass very clear. But the pulse drums so in my forehead, behind my eyes, that everything dances—the net, the grass; your faces leap like butterflies; the trees seem to jump up and down. There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph. (31)

Reveling in the connective force of her pulsing blood, Jinny resides triumphantly in her body. Standing in stark contrast to both the rigidifying and ordering effects of neuropsychological habit and Bernard’s clockwork body, Jinny is defined by her body’s vital capacity to function as a source of spontaneity. Both her self-perception and her perception of the world around her are shaped by the dance of her blood: “there is,” as she says, “nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe.” In addition to the spontaneity it generates, Jinny’s mode of embodiment is equally defined in opposition to the dissective impulse of positivist science. Regarding herself in a mirror, for instance, she announces: So I skip up the stairs past them, to the next landing, where the long glass hangs and I see myself entire. I see my body and head in one now; for even in this serge frock they are one, my body and my head. Look, when I move my head I ripple all down my narrow body; even my thin legs ripple like a stalk in the wind. I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance. I never cease to move and to dance. (32)

Though the statement that she “sees herself entire” literally refers to the fact that she has just moved from a small mirror, in which only her head is visible, to a full-length mirror, it also remarks a certain allergy to the experience of somatic disintegration. Jinny must see her body as “entire”—as a whole that is integrated by the “rippling,” “flickering,” “leaping,” and “dancing” presence of vital force—and will not tolerate the influence of a technology (however rudimentary) that reduces it to constituent components. By countering the neuroscientific body in this way, Woolf ’s representation of Jinny’s form of embodiment is consonant with a well-established tradition of vitalistic reaction to the deterministic effects of positivist science—a tradition that, as we have noted, includes such prominent contemporaries as Edward Carpenter, Henri Bergson, and D. H. Lawrence.


Consistently represented through this metaphorics of dance, Jinny’s vitalistic mode of embodiment is extended to articulate a structure of collectivity. For Jinny there is “a great society of bodies” (49), which, when they come into contact, call out to one another. “Our bodies communicate,” she claims, and the form of this communication finds its example in dance. “We yield,” Jinny says, to this slow flood. . . . In and out, we are swept now into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressed together in its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. (82)

The form of community predicated upon Jinny’s embodied subjectivity is, thus, less a form of relation between fixedly discrete individuals than a process of merging in a dynamic flow of a corporate body. If the type of flow exemplified by both Jinny’s blood and the dance stand in contrast to the progressively more strictly and efficiently channeled flows of nervous energy in the habitualized body, Woolf ’s challenge to the individualizing and deterministic discourses of neuroscience becomes overt during the two dinner party scenes in which the six characters literally come together to form a community of sorts. Explicitly appropriating the language of neuroscience, Woolf has Jinny respond as follows to Rhoda’s observation that “one thing melts into another”: “Yes, . . . our senses have widened. Membranes, webs of nerve that lay white and limp, have filled and spread themselves and float round us like filaments, making the air tangible and catching in them faraway sounds unheard before” (110). No longer limited to their role as longsince-fixed relays between sensation and action, the nerves become, in this rearticulation—an articulation, incidentally, that rehabilitates the hallucinatory image deployed in Mrs. Dalloway of Septimus’s body violently reduced to a web of nerves—an extensive web that makes possible new forms of sensory experience and structures the melting of one thing into another. Extending this refiguration of the nervous system, Neville supports Louis’s claim “that these attempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that,’ which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false” (112), by representing the nerves as the basis of a sort of encompassing communal architecture. Shifting abruptly from his sense that “change is no longer possible” because he has taken “the print of life . . . upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre” (178), he declares: “I am merely ‘Neville’ to you, who see the narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am


immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales— huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering” (178). No longer functioning to individualize and separate, the nerves as Neville imagines them mark a collective space not dissimilar to what we have seen Jinny describe as the “perfectly encircling walls” of the dance. Within this space, the lines that divide one character from another, or the characters from the world that surrounds them, are no longer distinct. It is important to note the extent to which Woolf predicates this possibility of collectivity upon a mode of vital affective embodiment. Whereas the novel consistently associates forces of individualization and differentiation with taxonomic and traditionally narrative linguistic modes, the affective body remains unassimilable to the organizational regimes of these representational projects and as such provides a basis for community outside the parameters of the individual. If Jinny’s vital body places her at odds with the ordering effects of narrative language—“I cannot follow any word through its changes,” she says, “I cannot follow any thought from present to past” (32)—Louis presents perhaps the most obvious example of the taxonomic language of the individual. Armed with his businessman’s red pen and ledger book, he is driven to locate all aspects of life on their proper line and column, literally to account for the world in which he finds himself. Even the trivialities of day to day existence are submitted to this drive, and he insists that: “With my Australian accent I have sat in eating-shops and tried to make the clerks accept me, yet never forgotten my solemn and severe convictions and the discrepancies and incoherences that must be resolved” (167). His use of language aims at classifying and fixing that which is both without and within; perceptual processes, for instance, become the occasion for representational ordering as he announces: “This I see for a second, and shall try tonight to fix in words, to forge a ring of steel” (30). Insistently functioning to differentiate himself from, and situate himself in relation to, that which surrounds him, Louis’s endless taxonomies culminate in the moment at which he tells us: “on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I” (141), and in so doing exemplifies the process through which “all the furled and close-packed leaves of [his] many-folded life are now summed up in [his] name; incised cleanly and barely on the sheet” (138). It is this reiterative solidification of the “I” through which incoherences, negations, and multiplicities are compressed and unified within the space of the subject—a sort of linguistic analogue to the habitualizing and individualizing force of repeated patterns of nervous discharge—that must be overcome, the text suggests, if the possibility of community understood outside


of the model provided by the individual is to be realized. The two dinner party scenes once again provide the clearest instances of such an overcoming. On the occasion of the first dinner, Louis himself is led to claim that: It is Percival, . . . sitting silent as he sat among the tickling grasses when the breeze parted the clouds and they formed again, who makes us aware that these attempts to say, “I am this, I am that,” which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false. Something has been left out from fear. Something has been altered, from vanity. We have tried to accentuate differences. From the desire to be separate we have laid stress upon our faults, and what is particular to us. But there is a chain whirling round, round, in a steel-blue circle beneath. (112)

In the face of the individuating and qualifying force of language—insistently compelling claims of “I am this, I am that”—Louis posits the possibility of an underlying state of unifying commonality, beyond all particularity, and figured by the perfect symmetry of a “whirling . . . circle.” If Louis can only posit this form of collectivity, it is Neville who reminds us of its grounding in the affective body. Taking up Louis’s theme, he muses that these roaring waters . . . upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out these false sayings, “I am this; I am that!” Speech is false. But I eat. I gradually lose all knowledge of particulars as I eat. I am becoming weighed down with food. These delicious mouthfuls of roast duck, fitly piled with vegetables, following each other in exquisite rotation of warmth, weight, sweet and bitter, past my palate, down my gullet, into my stomach, have stabilized my body. I feel quiet, gravity, control. All is solid now. Instinctively my palate now requires and anticipates sweetness and lightness, something sugared and evanescent; and cool wine, fitting glovelike over those finer nerves that seem to tremble from the roof of my mouth and make it spread (as I drink) into a domed cavern, green with vine leaves, musk-scented, purple with grapes. Now I can look steadily into the mill-race that foams beneath. (113)

Another instance in which the nerves come to figure an encompassing, organic communal architecture, this passage makes explicit the embodied basis of community. Describing the sequence of events through which he is gradually drawn from the realm of reason, language, and individual identity to that of affective embodiment, it is only with the complete abandonment


of the former that Neville can access the dynamic collective source of stability that subtends his existence. Eschewing language and its normative function of individuation and particularization, he loses a sense of individuality as he sinks into a gastronomically induced affective state in which he “gradually lose[s] all knowledge of particulars.” Positing this tension between language, reason, and particularity on the one hand, and affect, embodiment and unity on the other, the text once again is consistent with a tradition of vitalistic thought. To reinvoke Bergson, Carpenter, and Lawrence in passing, it is worth noting that despite significant differences—differences that are especially apparent in terms of their communal implications—their projects all articulate an understanding, shared by this aspect of Woolf ’s text, of the vital order as a fundamental unity in relation to which supposedly discrete units or identities are viewed as the distorting, if necessary, effects of intellectual operations.1 If, as I argue in Chapter 3, The Waves interrogates the deterministic implications of the neuroscientific articulation of the nervous body as it functions to produce individual selves, it is clear that it also appropriates the language of neuroscience in an attempt to elaborate a vitalistic mode of embodiment that provides the basis for a form of community not predicated upon the logic of the individual. If Woolf equally moves beyond mere critique of historically extant structures of collectivity (such as the imperialist nationalism she examines in both Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves) in an attempt to theorize a somatic basis of community that does not share the coordinates delineated by medical scientific discourse, it remains to ask to what extent she is successful, and to explore the limitations and possibilities offered by the collective impulse predicated upon the vitalistic form of embodiment at which she arrives. Affecting the Work of Organic Community Given that Woolf turns the language of neuroscience against itself in an attempt to think and write community, the question remains: how are we to assess the vitalistic form of community her text articulates? In order to approach this question it will be necessary slightly to reframe Woolf ’s engagement of the neuroscientific body and more sharply to distinguish among the modes of community the novel presents. One such mode, as Jane Marcus has argued, is the patriotic English nationalism and its supporting “myth of individualism and selfhood” (137) that The Waves works to criticize. Michael Tratner makes a similar point when he draws on Leonard Woolf ’s understanding of imperialism as the principle of individualism transposed into the geopolitical sphere to argue that Virginia Woolf ’s critique


of individualism goes hand in hand with her critique of nationalism and imperialism. Given this alignment of individualism with a particular form of nationalist community, the text’s interrogation of the individualizing function of the neuroscientific body would seem to support the line of argument advanced by Marcus and Tratner. Beyond articulating the individualizing function of the habitualized body, neuroscientific discourse itself makes the link between individualism and an explicitly conservative communal project. In James, as we have noted, the habitualized body functions to preserve both class distinctions between “the children of fortune” and the “envious . . . poor,” and racialized distinctions between a presumably civilized European readership and the hostile “natives of the desert and frozen zone” (125). Unsurprisingly, Maudsley’s project supports, indeed presupposes, a similar social model. In outlining his “inductive” approach to the “investigation of mind,” he contends that: “we ought certainly to begin our inquiry with the observation of the simplest instances—with its physiological manifestations in animals, in children, in idiots, in savages, mounting by degrees to the highest and most recondite facts of consciousness” (148). By extension, then, the turn to the affective vital body and the form of community that becomes its predicate (a community not grounded in the individual) can be seen as an attempt to imagine a more desirable structure of collectivity. When, however, we return to the scene of the first dinner party as the fullest articulation of this alternate communal mode—in so doing, it will be necessary to differentiate more carefully between the novel’s two dinner party scenes than I have hitherto—it becomes clear that this affective community itself is not without its liabilities. If the text’s refiguration of the nervous system is attractive insofar as it provides the basis for a communitarian project that ostensibly stands in opposition to nationalist community and its cult of the great individual, the model of community at which it arrives remains dangerously close to what Jean-Luc Nancy has described as “organic community.” Suppressing social difference and leaving no place for an experience of being together in which the enclosed totalities of individual subjects are exposed on the limit of an unshareable alterity, this form of community is corporatist and manifests itself either in the subsumption of individual members under the figure of a leader whose body signifies the unity of all those in whose place it stands or in the sacrifice of individual subjectivity in an act of fusion that forms the higher-level totality of the community as Subject.2 Organic community is, for Nancy, “not only intimate communication between its members but also its organic communion with its own essence. . . . [I]t is made up principally of the sharing, diffusion, or impregnation of an identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies himself only


through the supplementary mediation of his identification with the living body of the community” (9). Perhaps his most succinct definition of this communal form is as one governed by “the goal of achieving a community of beings producing in essence their own essence as their work, and furthermore of producing precisely this essence as community” (2). Important here is the polyvocal sense of “work,” for if organic community is the product of its members’ labor, the form of that product is that of a work of art, understood as the self-enclosed remainderless totality of the oeuvre.3 It is the imperative of the work, in this double sense, that governs the form of community that the first dinner party works to produce, an imperative encapsulated in the characters’ projective creation of Percival, the absent center around which the text revolves. Absent from the text except in the memories and thoughts of the other characters, Percival exists only as the product of his friends’ imaginative and identificatory labor; in working to fashion the social space enabled by the proper name “Percival,” the characters produce him as the essential embodiment of their being-in-common. It is Percival who, as Louis reminds us, “makes [the characters] aware that these attempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that,’ which [they] make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false” (W, 112). And if Louis remarks the realized work of community with his announcement that “Something is made,” Jinny gives form to this vague “something” when she implores: “Let us hold it for one moment, . . . this globe whose walls are made of Percival” (118–19). The communal space that has hitherto been articulated with recourse to the language of the vital affective body is, in this instance, substantially embodied by “Percival,” a mythic production of the characters in which they initially recognize idealized versions of themselves and which ultimately constitutes the structure of collective space to which their individual selves are sacrificed. Indeed, the dependence of this structure of collectivity upon the vital affective body is apparent in the characters’ projective qualification of Percival as another example of that somatic mode. Neville, for instance, complains that when I read Shakespeare or Catullus, lying in the long grass, [Percival] understands more than Louis. Not the words—but what are words? Do I not know already how to rhyme, how to imitate Pope, Dryden, even Shakespeare? But I cannot stand all day in the sun with my eyes on the ball; I cannot feel the flight of the ball through my body and think only of the ball. I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life. (32)

Despite—or more precisely, because of—his mastery of language and his mimetic prowess, Neville, like Louis, feels he is denied access to a vital form


of existence and understanding that is directly linked to a state of affective embodiment. Succinctly connecting the sporting culture of the cricket field—training ground of imperial leadership—to the affective body, Neville interprets Percival’s linguistic ineptitude as bespeaking the ability to grasp something more in the poetry he hears than his friends. His understanding, Neville speculates, is based not upon a superior comprehension of the words but rather upon his vital somatic state. Lacking his ability to “feel . . . through [his] body,” Percival’s companions are doomed to the surfaces made available by language, while he is able to dwell in some mysterious and vital interiority. To return, in this context, to Tratner’s linking of individualism and imperialist nationalism, it will be important to take some distance from his somewhat too hasty valorization of collectivism as a sufficient countermeasure. For in sacrificing their particularity as individual subjects to merge in a form of collective consciousness, the form of collectivity the characters fashion remains Subjective. Distinguishing between the citizen and the subject, Nancy captures some of this tension when he writes that: “The citizen is, first of all, one, someone, everyone, while the subject is, first of all, self, that is, the circling back through which a one raises its unicity to the power of unity. The citizenship comprises numerous unicities, subjecthood comprises an identificatory unity” (Sense of the World, 104). The sacrifice of individuality to the community formed through the first dinner party can be understood, in this context, as the conversion of a number of unicities into the essential unity of a communal subjecthood. Though the community achieved in The Waves’ first dinner party, and predicated upon the affective body, functions to counter an atomistic individualism, it does not escape the logic of the Subject—a logic all too compatible with both nation and empire. If the mythic fashioning of Percival is initially emblematic of the problems potentially entailed by the vitalist mode of embodiment and corresponding structure of collectivity to which the novel turns, by the occasion of the second dinner party Percival—or more precisely, his death—will have become central to Woolf ’s response to these problems. Percival’s death is, of course, literally central to the narrative progression of The Waves; occurring midway through the text, it is announced by the short shocking statement: “He is dead” (124). While Percival’s death is key to Woolf ’s satirical attack on what Marcus calls “the cultural narrative of ‘England’ . . . created by an Eton/Cambridge elite who (re)produce the national epic . . . and elegy . . . in praise of the hero” (137), his ignominious demise should not be read as merely ridiculous or pathetic. Notwithstanding the irony of having Percival, knight errant and imperial champion, meet his end in an accidental fall from the back of a flea-ridden mare, his death initiates a critical reconsideration of


both the affective body and the structure of collectivity it enables. Following quickly on the heels of the first dinner party, Percival’s death calls the characters to ask what is at stake in the representational schema that fashions him. Having produced the myth of Percival as the myth of community, they must now reflect upon the ramifications of their labor and its product. In speaking of Percival’s “mythic” status, it will be important to recall Nancy’s understanding of “myth” or “fiction” as those linguistic modes that do the work of organic community and produce the community as their work. “Absolute community—myth—” he writes, is not so much the total fusion of individuals, but the will of community: the desire to operate, through the power of myth, the communion that myth represents and that it represents as a communion or communication of wills. Fusion ensues: myth represents multiple existences as immanent to its own unique fiction, which gathers them together and gives them their common figure in its speech and as this speech. (57)

Myth is, thus, distinguished not primarily by its referential status but by the extent to which it operates to produce community. Rather than representing community to a group of individuals, or communicating some information about community, which its members then hold in common, mythic speech is itself the operation of community—it is through the very act of mythic speech that community takes place. Given this tautological loop in which myth and community are locked—whereby myth can be said to communicate only itself as the taking place of community—it becomes impossible to think of community without myth, or blithely to pursue a project of demythologization. If, in Nancy’s formulation, all community necessarily takes place through the operation of myth, and that operation is independent of myth’s referential function, critical approaches that seek an unmythic form of collectivity through the exposure of a given myth’s suspect referential status finally will retain only slight critical purchase and only perpetuate the operation of mythic community. In this context the limitations of a reading that understands The Waves as simply engaged in satirizing imperialist national community—what Marcus characterizes as Woolf ’s “merciless parody” of the “myth of individualism and selfhood” (137) and of the figure of the imperial hero who is its manifestation—become evident, for the force of satire or parody lies in its ability to expose as ridiculous, to demythologize, its object. Woolf ’s text undoubtedly engages in this sort of satire, the height of which is encapsulated in the circumstances of Percival’s death, and in so doing critiques the ideological ramifications of the historically particular


form of community he represents. This aspect of her project, it should be noted in passing, is consonant with her ironic treatment, in Mrs. Dalloway, of the regulatory efforts of the redoubtable Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw. Woolf does not, however, limit herself to this critique, and the sheer event of Percival’s death allows her to pursue the logic of mythic community to the point of what Nancy calls its “interruption.” Beyond its demythologizing tactics, the text develops a mode of writing that gives voice to this interruption and remarks a limit on which the work of community—its individual member subjects and the logic of the Subject itself—is opened up and exposed by the interactions of singular beings that cannot be put to work in the operations of myth. This “voice of interruption” is most audible in the characters’ reactions to Percival’s death. Uninterested in what the myth of Percival represents, and unable to find language adequate to the fact of Percival’s death, Rhoda, for example, is led to ask, “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing” (134). No longer the “something [that] is made” (118) in the work of mythic community, he is, in death, merely “the thing” to which myth is inadequate and that constitutes its interruption. Faced with the unthinkable event of Percival’s death, Rhoda rejects Louis’s response, aware that “If we submit [Louis] will reduce us to order . . . [and] smooth out the death of Percival to his satisfaction” (132). She decides instead to go to a music hall, and her description of the vocal performance she witnesses is extraordinary: Swollen but contained in slippery satin, the seagreen woman comes to our rescue. She sucks in her lip, assumes an air of intensity, inflates herself and hurls herself precisely at the right moment as if she saw an apple and her voice was the arrow into the note, “Ah!” An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is warm; sound quivers within the bark. “Ah!” cried a woman to her lover, leaning from her window in Venice. “Ah, ah!” she cried, and again she cries “Ah!” She has provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And what is a cry? (133)

Unwilling to “smooth out” Percival’s death in the process of representation, narration, or mythologization, Rhoda recognizes, nonetheless, her obligation to bear witness to the “thing” he has manifested to her, and in the moment of the vocal performance she finds a means of understanding her obligation. Instead of the “‘like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like,’” of representation, she is confronted with the “‘Ah!’ and ‘Ah!’ and ‘Ah!’” of the vocalist’s “cry,” an utterance that


returns Rhoda to the affective body without allowing that mode of embodiment to become the basis of a communitarian myth. The affective charge of the singer’s cry is pregnant with a significance that it cannot signify, and as such allows Percival’s death to open onto a communal mode that is consonant with neither imperialist nationalism nor the organic affective community of the first dinner party. The language of the cry refuses to qualify his death, to make it comprehensible through the memorializing production of a communal fiction; it does, however, inarticulately indicate the sheer fact of his death, a fact that the characters share in common even as they are confronted by the painful insistence that they can neither properly make Percival’s death their own nor make it the ground of a shared subjective space.4 In a parallel moment, Bernard responds to Percival’s death with a visit to the National Gallery. Equally scornful of Louis’s desire to “smooth things out,” he insists: But I still resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made yet to accept the sequence of things. I will walk; I will not change the rhythm of my mind by stopping, by looking; I will walk. I will go up these steps into the gallery and submit myself to the influence of minds like mine outside the sequence. There is little time left to answer the question; my powers flag; I become torpid. Here are pictures. Here are cold madonnas among the pillars. Let them lay to rest the incessant activity of the mind’s eye, the bandaged head, the men with ropes, so that I may find something unvisual beneath. Here are the gardens; and Venus among her flowers; here are saints and blue madonnas. Mercifully these pictures make no reference; they do not nudge; they do not point. Thus they expand my consciousness of him and bring him back to me differently. (104–5)

Rejecting the sequentializing effect of the phrases he so constantly produces, Bernard finds solace in the sheer affective force of the pictures he views. The paintings make no appeal to the representational faculty of his “mind’s eye,” but present him with something “unvisual.” Areferential and nonindexical, the images do not inscribe Percival within a fiction of unity and foundational stability but “bring him back to [Bernard] differently.” This difference produced by Bernard’s affective experience pertains not only to Percival but to Bernard himself. If Bernard’s experience in the gallery brings Percival back differently by manifesting the persistent necessity of remembering him before and beyond the work of memorializing fiction, it also installs a difference within the subject, the “me,” to whom Percival returns. Exposing the individual to the singularity of an otherness that it can neither incorporate within the closure of the subject nor render the basis of a higher subjective mode (a “We”) to which it can sacrifice itself, the demands of remembrance


thematized by Bernard’s experience are also the demands of an impossible community—a community based not in the dedifferentiating fusion of its individual members in a transcendental whole, but precisely in their common exposure to, their sharing of, that which properly can be neither communicated nor shared. Turning from the affective body as a vital principle of integration and organic unity, to an understanding of the affective body as manifesting the limit remarked by the singularly unrepresentable “thing” that the characters hold in common but can never properly share, by the occasion of the second dinner party The Waves insists that the desire for community must be negotiated on a very different register, and in a different language, from that of the characters’ first “coming together.” In Bernard’s experience in the gallery, for instance, the language of the affective body is forcefully present, and yet it is made to signify outside of its normative usage, or more precisely, to signify a lack of sense. Sitting in the gallery, Bernard feels: The silence weighs on me—the perpetual solicitation of the eye. The pressure is intermittent and muffled. I distinguish too little and too vaguely. The bell is pressed and I do not ring or give out irrelevant clamours all jangled. I am titillated inordinately by some splendour; the ruffled crimson against the green lining; the march of pillars; the orange light behind the black, pricked ears of the olive trees. Arrows of sensation strike from my spine, but without order. (129)

Appropriating the quintessential figure of neuroscientific embodiment in this articulation of the affective body, the text returns us yet again to the scene of Mrs. Constable’s sponge and the resulting “arrows of sensation.” In this instance, however, those arrows, far from presaging processes of somatic organization, bespeak only a lack of order, and bear witness to a somatic force that fundamentally resists organizational programs of any sort. Closing in Bernard’s voice, Woolf equally refuses the mythologizing narrative of the “summing up” (199), the linguistic principle of organization that would be proper to an organic notion of community. Instead, she has him articulate a series of questions: “What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death?” (199). “I do not know,” Bernard responds, I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes

Breaking Habits, Affecting the Neuropsychological Body • 175 down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases. (246)

Forcing us to conceive community in terms of the demands of the “broken words, inarticulate words” (161) of a “howl” or a “cry,” Woolf rejects the totalizing fiction of organic community, and is able to exclaim with Bernard: “Heaven be praised, . . . we need not whip this prose into poetry. The little language is enough” (219). Traversing the Surfaces of Life: Disorganized Urban Flows and the “Unsubstantial Territory” of the Crowd The Waves thus functions simultaneously to critique an existing form of imperialist national community, and to mark the limit of community as such by giving voice to its interruption. On the one hand, Woolf interrogates the habitual processes of somatic organization that support the production of individual subjects and provide the coordinates for their insertion into a national community. These processes, as I have suggested, function in collaboration with more broadly institutional communitarian forces: the medicalized psychology of moral regulation in Mrs. Dalloway or the culture of education in The Waves.5 By interrogating both the cultural formations that enable the production of Percival and the form of community that crystalizes around him—a project whose institutional aspect she develops at length in Three Guineas—Woolf is able to critique existing forms of nationalist community. On the other hand, however, Woolf does not simply dismiss what Marcus describes as the elegiac production of national community around the figure of the hero. More precisely, while she does reject the mythopoetic memorialization and monumentalization of the imperial hero as the identificatory crux of national community, The Waves remains elegiac to the extent that Percival’s death constitutes a call to a sort of immemorial remembering and necessitates a “little language” that can bear witness not simply to a loss but to an incommunicable and unshareable limit upon which the interiority of the Subject in both its individual and communal incarnations is unfolded and exposed. The form of elegy to which the text ultimately turns, that is, approaches death not as the moment in which individuals and groups must mournfully conserve the presence of an object whose loss threatens their integrity but as the occasion of a silence through which the slight and inarticulate call to what Nancy refers as the “(k)not” of community must be allowed to become audible.


This “(k)not” describes a social tie that involves neither interiority nor exteriority but which, in being tied, ceaselessly makes the inside pass outside, each into (or by way of ) the other, the outside inside, turning endlessly back on itself without returning to itself—the link of mêlée and intrigue, confrontation and arrangement, need and desire, constraint and obligation, subjection and love, glory and pity, interest and disinterest. The tying of the (k)not is nothing, no res, nothing but the placing-into-relation that presupposes at once proximity and distance, attachment and detachment, intricacy, intrigue, and ambivalence. (Sense, 111)

Adequate as they would need to be to the demand of a communal bond understood as a “disjunctive conjunction,” the politics implied by the (k)not would entail an “incessant tying up of singularities with each other, over each other, and through each other, without any end other than the enchainment of (k)nots, without any structure other than their interconnection or interdependence, and without any possibility of calling any single (k)not or the totality of (k)nots self-sufficient (for there would be ‘totality’ only in the enchainment itself )” (111–12). Faced with the organic subjective logic into which the neuroscientific body inserts itself, it is precisely this sort of enchainment of singularities toward which Woolf gestures in appropriating the figure of the human nervous system to represent a web of links between selves and the world they inhabit. The text’s articulation of this nervous enchainment is, however, rather precariously poised. On the one side, there is the psychological organization of bodies, selves, and communities that, though it operates predominantly according to a mechanistic rationality, is firmly organic. Whether addressing itself to the cells and structures of the human body, the instincts, dispositions, and sentiments that constitute the self, or the subjects that compose a group or community, the psychology with which Woolf engages proceeds by way of a systemic logic whereby independent individuals are organized into larger units insofar as they are coordinated by the telos of the whole. One need only recall J. A. Hadfield’s concatenation of organized bodies, organized selves, and organized communities for an encapsulation of this discursive trajectory. On the other side, lies the model of vital affective embodiment to which Woolf turns in an attempt to circumvent the discursive relays of neuroscience. Though this somatic mode escapes the mechanistic presuppositions of the theorists of habit, the form of community that becomes its predicate teeters on the edge of organicism nonetheless. Whereas the organic character of the communal forms toward which neuropsychological discourse tends is a function of the instrumental coordination of discrete individuals, the affective community elaborated in Woolf ’s


text is susceptible to an organicism achieved in the sacrificial fusion of individual subjects into a subjective social totality. The movement from the (k)notting of collective ties to the fusion of organic community is nowhere more apparent than in the moment in which the figure of the web of nerves gives way to Louis’s rather more static, stable, and substantial figure of the “chain whirling round, round in a steel-blue circle” (W, 112)—an enclosure that becomes visible beneath, and ultimately eliminates, the confusion of particularity and difference. In this moment the mode of enchainment suggested by the incomplete, amorphous, and ever-changing nervous web whose surface places the characters in relation without enclosing them, rigidifies into the literality of a steel chain wherein the inflexible enclosures of individual links are not so much tied together as firmly bound, and ultimately become indistinguishable in the spinning form of the larger unitary enclosure they constitute. If, in short, Woolf ’s appropriation of neuroscientific discourse provides the resources for thinking the (k)notting of community, The Waves finally is most powerful in thematizing the risk of that (k)not becoming the cruel bond of organic community it seeks to undo. The Waves does not so much provide a positive articulation of this other communal form, that is, as allow it to become visible at the limit on which organic community is undone. This limit, as I have suggested, is constituted primarily in relation to the event of death that resides at the novel’s core. It is the confrontation of death that engenders the affective experiences that finally prevent the text’s alternate structure of collectivity from contracting into an organic, subjective enclosure. The tension that, thus, largely animates The Waves is encapsulated in Bernard’s early intimation that “when we sit together, close . . . we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory” (11). Woolf attempts to think a form of community that is understood as an “unsubstantial territory”—a form of social enchainment that ties and unties relations between singular selves, and tenuously connects that which is, in Neville’s words, “amorphous and wandering” (178)—and yet this territory is always haunted by the threat of an all too substantial fusion, a melting of each self into another. If The Waves eschews the task of imagining in positive terms the (k)notted nervous community toward which it gestures, choosing instead to safeguard its possibility in attending to the event of death as the limit on which organic community is undone, the risk of a positive articulation is one that Woolf had already taken (and taken in terms of life) in Mrs. Dalloway. By the publication of The Waves, the abstraction of Bernard’s “unsubstantial territory” had already been explored in much more literal and material terms in the ambulatory encounter with the urban space


of London in Mrs. Dalloway—an encounter that is extended in crucial ways by essays like “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” and “The London Scene” (both published roughly contemporaneously with The Waves). Similarly, characters’ repeated recourse, in The Waves, to the eternal figure of the steel ring, symbol of order and organic unity, can only appear nostalgic in light of the plethora of rings—all thoroughly temporal, fleeting, and even crassly commercial—that had already played such an important role in the configuration of urban collectivity in Mrs. Dalloway. Having argued that Woolf ’s exploration of community in The Waves significantly revolves around the central statement that “He is dead” (124), I now return to Mrs. Dalloway in order to examine its elaboration of community—an elaboration that is intricately bound up with an equally brief and central statement: “they loved life” (MD, 5). The problem of life, which is taken up, as we have noted, in the vitalistic tendencies apparent in The Waves, is absolutely central to Mrs. Dalloway and to the structure of collectivity that Woolf pursues therein. This centrality is manifest almost from the opening page, for even as Clarissa steps off the curb in front of her home in Westminster and embarks upon her excursion to buy the flowers for that evening’s party, we are confronted with the following extraordinary passage: For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. 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; the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (4–5)

Enmeshed in the tumult of urban existence, its “bellow” and “uproar,” its “traffic” and its commercialism, Clarissa is overcome with the question of “why one loves it so.” The unspecified “it” that one loves, sees, makes, builds, tumbles, and creates is, of course, finally qualified as “life,” and ultimately this love of “life” is no singular passion but one that is shared with “them,”


the people that she encounters as she walks through the city. Taking up once again the term that is so crucial, if admittedly vague, to her argument in “Modern Fiction,” life in this articulation designates something substantially more than the impact (to be recorded by the novelist) of the world upon the human sensoriperceptual system. It is, undoubtedly, that, but it is also more: life is not simply a force of whose blows one is the passive recipient, but is something in whose creation and manipulation one is active. And most importantly, it is something that one shares and by which one is shared out. As much as this articulation of life is intricately conditioned by the material details of urban existence, it is not simply synonymous with the flow of the city—the ever-changing interactions of people, machines, objects, sounds, sights, smells—but designates a specific interruption and configuration of that flow. Life, that is, seems dependent upon what the narrative describes as a “particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense” (4): to wit, the shocking interruption of the chaotic flow of the city by the striking of Big Ben. The novel, of course, is famously punctuated by the repeated chiming of Big Ben, which marks the passing of the twenty-four hour period the narrative represents; with each occasion upon which the clock imposes itself, the narrative remarks that “the leaden circles dissolved in the air.” This figuration of the passing of time speaks less to temporal flow, however, than to a momentary arrest and functions as a sort of narrative freeze-frame. The figure is, in fact, simultaneously temporal and spatial. While the expanding circles of sound take on a certain leaden substance, a heaviness that allows them to circumscribe a sort of enclosure and mark perspectivally determined geographical sections of the city within whose circumference a random group of individuals is momentarily connected, the connections forged in this process are tentative and temporary in the extreme. Despite their leaden solidity, these circles are not the eternal steel rings of The Waves, for even as they come into existence they are constituted by the temporality of their immediate and progressive dissolution. The figure of Big Ben’s leaden circles of sound, in short, articulates an evanescent urban topography characterized by a network of overlapping circumferences of connection, for if the flow of urban life through which Clarissa makes her way is momentarily interrupted such that a temporary space of connection becomes recognizable to her, the clock’s chimes hold the same potential for all those within its auditory range. The life that Clarissa so loves, then, is not so much a sheerly chaotic mass of urban experience but specific moments in which a shocking interruption allows one to participate in that chaos so as to realize a fleeting connectedness. Indeed, the text itself enforces the evanescence of the connectedness of “life,” for no sooner than it posits this unexpected and exceptional social tie,


it returns (in the very next paragraph, in fact) to the realm of the conventional social bonds that support a sense of national identity. Moving quickly from her revelry in the shared love of life, Clarissa’s thoughts shift abruptly, and somewhat inexplicably. They turn first to the thankful reflection that “the War was over” (5), and from there make the short leap to the consideration of female acquaintances who lost sons to the war—one of whom, Lady Bexborough, admirably refused to allow the tragedy to deflect her from the execution of her duties, for she “opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed” (5). From this example of steadfast patriotism, Clarissa is led to a comforting reflection upon the signs of restored national order: “It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it” (5). In its opening pages, the novel, thus, posits a stark contrast between two competing modes of collectivity. On the one hand, we are presented with the random and fleeting connections produced by life, and on the other, we are confronted by the rather more stable and persistent institutions of national identification. By articulating this tension, Woolf enters into a crucial area of psychological debate in the early part of the century: namely, the psychology of the crowd and the group. While the connectedness to which she gestures in positing urban life as a form of collective experience bears a certain resemblance to the unruly contours of the crowd, the institutional apparatuses of nation find their place in the theories of more highly organized incarnations of the group. Perhaps the most well-known contribution to the psychological literature on this subject is Gustave Le Bon’s La Psychologie des Foules, but prominent British contributions to the discussion include Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War and William McDougall’s The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology with Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character. For the purposes of my argument, McDougall’s articulation of group psychology is especially useful for a number of reasons. Most immediately, his understanding of group psychology is explicitly structured by the comparison of the unorganized group, or crowd, and the highly organized group best exemplified by the nation. In terms of my extended argument, his framework is of special interest because he insists that the psychology of the group is an enterprise that grows directly out of, and constitutes the proper culmination of, neuropsychological research. Anticipating The Group Mind in his slightly earlier and extremely popular Introduction to Social Psychology (first published in 1908, by 1926 it had gone through twenty editions), McDougall launches a polemical attack


on competing social scientific disciplines—from cultural anthropology to political science and sociology—by arguing that human society can only be properly (which is to say, scientifically) understood on a psychological basis. “Among students of the social sciences,” he suggests, there has always been a certain number who have recognized the fact that some knowledge of the human mind and of its modes of operation is an essential part of their equipment, and that the successful development of the social sciences must be dependent upon the fulness [sic] and accuracy of such knowledge. These propositions are so obviously true that any formal attempt to demonstrate them is superfluous. . . . It is, then, a remarkable fact that psychology, the science which claims to formulate the body of ascertained truths about the constitution and working of the mind . . . has not been generally and practically recognized as the essential common foundation on which all the social sciences—ethics, economics, political science, philosophy of history, sociology, and cultural anthropology, and the more special social sciences, such as the sciences of religion, of law, of education, and of art—must be built up. (1)

Seeking to remedy this situation, Social Psychology argues that the “department of psychology that is of primary importance for the social science is that which deals with the springs of human action, the impulses and motives that sustain mental and bodily activity and regulate conduct; and this, of all the departments of psychology, is the one that has remained in the most backward state, in which the greatest obscurity, vagueness, and confusion still reign” (2). McDougall wants, in other words, to bring to bear the more developed aspects of the psychological project—those dealing with “the relations of soul and body, of psychical and physical process, of consciousness and brain processes” (3)—upon these social psychological questions. According to this logic, whereby any study of social forms presupposes some understanding of individual psychology, and Psychology is, therefore, the only discipline capable of articulating a scientifically grounded analysis of social forms, experimental psychology and social psychology are situated in an inevitable progression toward group psychology as the enterprise that will secure Psychology its rightfully preeminent position among the social sciences. While The Group Mind is rather more speculative than McDougall’s scientistic rhetoric might lead one to believe, it remains useful for our purposes insofar as it presupposes that the principle of organization can be translated across somatic, moral, and social spheres. Understanding the neurophysiological organization of the body and the moral organization of the self are, in short, preliminary steps leading to the comprehension of group organization.


As the subtitle of his text suggests, McDougall’s group psychology is directed toward an analysis of the nation, that form of group that is, for him, the most highly organized (and thus the most desirable). Contrary to the more widely held view—articulated by Le Bon, for example—that group psychological phenomena typically entail collective intellectual and moral capacities well below the average level exhibited by the individual members, McDougall insists that while this deterioration may mark the unorganized group (the crowd), in the case of a highly organized group like the nation, “the whole is raised above the level of its average member; and even, by reason of exaltation of emotion and organised co-operation in deliberation, above that of its highest members” (Group Mind, 74). Predictably, these moral and intellectual dividends are directly attributable to the principle of organization; highly organized groups, in which the formation of what he calls a “group mind” is possible, are understood on the model of the organic system exemplified by the organized body. Among the preconditions for the existence of organized groups, McDougall insists upon the importance of “some degree of continuity of existence of the group”; the formation of “some adequate idea of the group, of its nature, composition, functions, and capacities, and of the relations of the individual to the group”; “the existence of a body of traditions and customs and habits in the minds of the members of the group determining their relations to one another and to the group as a whole”; and the “organisation of the group, consisting in the differentiation and specialisation of the functions of its constituents” (69–70). Like organic biological systems, that is, the organized group is marked by the habitualized coordination of individual constituent components whose identities are reciprocally determined by the telos of an enduring whole. Especially telling with respect to the thoroughly organic character of the organized group is McDougall’s contention that in cases in which organization is imposed from without, and relies on the authority of an external power, the group is little more than a simple crowd. The truly organized group, in other words, must generate internally the basis of its organization. While the examination of the “group mind” made possible by these conditions is McDougall’s primary interest, his ostensibly positivist approach demands that he proceed from the simplest examples of the group to the most complex, and it is in this capacity that his text opens with an examination of unorganized groups. Seeking to determine the degree to which the principles of group organization are discernible in even the most minimally organized group, McDougall tentatively approaches the crowd. However, “Not every mass of human beings gathered together in one place within sight and sound of one another,” he warns, “constitutes a crowd in the psychological sense of


the word” (33). In an attempt to mark this important distinction, he describes a scene that dramatizes the genesis of the crowd from within the chaotic mass. “There is,” he reports, a dense gathering of several hundred individuals at the Mansion House Crossing at noon of every week-day; but ordinarily each of them is bent upon his own task, pursues his own ends, paying little or no regard to those about him. But let a fire-engine come galloping through the throng of traffic, or the Lord Mayor’s state coach arrive, and instantly the concourse assumes in some degree the character of a psychological crowd. All eyes are turned upon the fire-engine or coach; the attention of all is directed to the same object; all experience in some degree the same emotion; and the state of mind of each person is in some degree affected by the mental processes of all those about him. (33)

While this scene effectively encapsulates, in the elementary form of the crowd, what are for McDougall the “essential conditions of collective mental action”—namely, “a common object of mental activity, a common mode of feeling in regard to it, and some degree of reciprocal influence between the members of the group” (33)—it is especially interesting insofar as Woolf replicates its contours in exacting detail in Mrs. Dalloway. In describing Clarissa’s excursion to the shops, the opening pages of Woolf ’s narrative present an elaborate example of the phenomenon McDougall describes, whereby an amorphous mass of people is transformed into a crowd. As Clarissa is comfortably ensconced with her Bond Street florist, her horticultural decisions are suddenly disrupted by what she initially takes to be a pistol shot outside the shop. Modifying this misperception, the narrative informs us that “the violent explosion which made Mrs Dalloway jump and Miss Pym go to the window and apologize came from a motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s shop window. Passers-by, who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind” (MD, 17). If the sound of the explosion initially transforms the jumbled mass of shoppers and shopowners into a fleeting crowd, the severely limited endurance of the sound as an object of common consciousness is quickly supplemented by the fascinating presence of the car’s mysterious occupant—variously identified as the Prince of Wales, the Prime Minister, or (despite the fleeting presence of the “male hand”) the Queen. What would have been a crowd in only the most limited sense, doomed to dissolution almost concomitant with its constitution, is solidified and prolonged by the presence of a more substantial object


of common consciousness, an object, moreover, more likely to produce the “common mode of feeling” McDougall deems necessary. As the car pulls away from the curb, Woolf embarks upon a virtuoso narrative performance whereby her text weaves its way through various of the consciousnesses that compose the crowd and mimetically traces McDougall’s principle of “reciprocal influence” as it is configured by the shared sense that “greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street” (MD, 20). Following the car’s progress over a number of pages, the narrative performs the constant reconstitution of the crowd as its contours change in relation to the geographical position of its ambulatory object. Lest we are apt, however, to understand the force of this episode by analogy to the effects of Big Ben’s leaden circles of sound, and their simultaneous constitution of a multifarious network of overlapping, perspectivally determined sites of social linkage, the text pauses self-consciously in the wake of the car. “The car had gone,” we are informed, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailor’s shops on both sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way—to the window. Choosing a pair of gloves— should they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or pale grey?—ladies stopped; when the sentence was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. (22)

Though the physical constitution of the crowd changes with the movement of the car, there would seem to be an almost utter homogeneity of response to the common object, and thus the character of the crowd remains stable. Indeed, as this remarkable homogeneity suggests, rather than a simple reproduction of McDougall’s example of crowd formation, Woolf ’s narrative represents both the genesis of the simple crowd, and the progressive organization of that crowd along the lines of force provided by powerful symbols of nationalist ideology. Even as the novel’s opening celebration of life seems definitively assimilated by the homogenizing production of the organized group—women, men, and members of all social classes alike “thrill . . . at the thought of Royalty looking at them; the Queen bowing; the Prince saluting; at the thought of the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon Kings” (24)—the narrative progression is once again shockingly interrupted. The very moment in


which the enraptured attention of a segment of the crowd that has gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace is about to find its satisfaction within the radiant ambit of the approaching car, we are told that “suddenly Mrs Coates looked up into the sky” (25). The expectant atmosphere is shattered by the “sound of an aeroplane [that] bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Everyone looked up” (25). The process by which the unruly and socially deleterious force of the crowd is organized and contained as part of a national group, in short, is disrupted at its apogee. Or more precisely, the newly organized group finds itself suddenly and shockingly distracted, its shared attention redirected by a startling embodiment of debasedly superficial and crassly commercial mass culture: the members of the crowd find themselves entangled in the virtually indecipherable loops of smoke formed by the plane’s skywritten advertisement. Tracing this scene back to the unprecedented demonstration of skywriting which took place in the skies over London on Derby Day 1922 at the behest of the Daily Mail, Michael North situates Woolf ’s novel within the advertising culture of the early twentieth century. Convincingly arguing that the “public constituted by advertising is finally not so very different from the intersubjective public that is coterminous with the novel itself,” he draws attention to the skywriting as “but one of a number of devices” (including the regal automobile and Big Ben’s leaden circles) “deployed by the novel to knit together subjectivities” (84). Commenting upon the fact that the “interior worlds of [Woolf ’s] individual characters . . . are always connected by various threads to the many others who make up the outer world,” North is led to conclude that Part of the mingled tragedy and exaltation of the end of Mrs. Dalloway comes . . . from the fact that people are never actually complete, because the thread of acquaintance and intimacy connect each individual to a wider group that is always changing and expanding. . . . Mrs. Dalloway also suggests what any sentient citizen of the twentieth century knows, that these threads of commonalty are often made up out of public materials, even commercial ones, so that even the most blatant advertising scheme can provide the point of contact for disparate individuals. (84)

North’s reading is persuasive, and while I certainly agree with his basic point that events like the skywriting function to forge connections between various characters, his argument is seriously inadequate to the specificity of Woolf ’s text in a couple of important ways. The somewhat strange combination of


his nostalgic wistfulness regarding the inability of mass commercial culture to “complete” the subjects it connects, and his slightly smug assertion that the works of “psychologically adept practitioners of the advertising art . . . are not so utterly distinct from those of the great modernists as they may appear” (86) suggests both that Woolf ’s understanding of collectivity is simply determined by the at least mildly impoverished terms made available by the massified public sphere, and that there are few distinctions to be made between different configurations of that sphere. I want to insist, to the contrary, both that there are important distinctions to be drawn (distinctions, moreover, that need not enforce an absolute divide between sleazy ad-men and “great modernists”), and that Woolf does not simply acquiesce to the available articulations of the public sphere, valiantly making the best of a bad situation in an attempt to imagine social connections. The various devices employed by Woolf to represent the forging of connections are not, as North suggests, assimilable one to the other but, as I have attempted to demonstrate, presuppose different understandings of the group, and of collectivity more broadly. The fact that Woolf turns to the form of connection produced by the skywriting in order to disrupt the form of connection produced by the car suggests that while she draws upon resources made available by early twentieth-century urban existence (including consumer culture), she does so selectively and with an eye to the exploration of specific forms of community. In what follows, I will suggest that Woolf ’s turn to consumer culture as a means of articulating collective ties is far from reluctant. Though they do not simply celebrate commodity culture, her texts nonetheless approach it as producing potentially valuable possibilities for the imagination and realization of community. Exposing an “Enormous Eye” to the Urban Marketplace: Enervated Consumption and the Communal Potential of Commodity Culture Precisely because the appearance of the skywriter disrupts the increasing organization of the crowd along nationalist lines and returns that homogenous group to the realm of the inconsistent and unruly crowd, I want to suggest that the scene of that airborne drama can be taken as exemplary of the structure of community that the novel works to articulate. Before turning fully to that scene, however, it is important to note that even at the height of patriotic identification produced by the passing car, Woolf ’s treatment of that national group is not unambiguous. While the manifest drive of the text in this respect is critical—aligning this constitution of the group with other mechanisms of nationalist identification that it interrogates—Woolf


nonetheless seizes the opportunity to remark a moment of disidentification that opens on to a contestatory articulation of community. The explosive annunciation of the car, which sets the entire sequence in motion, is, after all, the first instance of contact between Septimus and Clarissa. They are both arrested by the sound of the backfiring motor: “Mrs Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas,” the narrative informs us, “looked out with her little pink face pursed in inquiry. Everyone looked at the motor car. Septimus looked” (18). The semantics of this descriptive sequence effectively places both Clarissa and Septimus on the periphery of the crowd; though they are engaged in the same activity as “everyone” else, they remain grammatically unassimilated to the nascent collective. This disjunction is most evident in Septimus’s case, for his response stands in stark contrast to the homogeneity of patriotic reverie to which the rest of the crowd is apparently inspired. Rather than indulging the sharply curtailed metonymic skid that leads the crowd seamlessly from the details of the car to the symbols of national glory, Septimus is arrested precisely by the material details of the car. “There the motor car stood,” he thinks, “with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree . . . and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him” (18). The foreboding appearance of the arboreal pattern in the decorative detail of the blind commences the train of thought that culminates, under the influence of the skywriter, in his recognition that “the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions . . . can quicken trees into life” and the accompanying perception that “they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down” (28). Though, in this context, Septimus’s psychosis provides the most obvious explanation for his exclusion from the progressively more organized crowd, far from merely an hallucinatory episode, his attention to the car forges a connection with Clarissa and confirms an alternate form of social connection that the text had already articulated in relation to her. Septimus’s perception of the trees, that is, takes up the language of Clarissa’s consciousness, made available in a previous scene wherein she makes her way to the Bond Street florist’s shop and wonders: Did it matter then . . . did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part

188 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (11)

Even as the identificatory machine whose regulatory ideals organize the crowd begins its work, both Clarissa and Septimus share a sense of connectedness—a connection that the text performs in the randomness of their anonymous and unwitting confrontation on either side of the car—based in the pervasive force of an impersonal vitality. Though this connection, as Clarissa expresses it, shares the same conditions of possibility as the crowd, its form is different. Based, like the crowd, in the coincidence of geographical convergence—“the ebb and flow of things, here, there [in the streets of London]”—both of “people she had never met” and “the people she knew best,” the connection she feels is clearly not that of the incorporative identification of the group. Rather than assimilation into the interiority of a collective subject defined by the “group mind” its constitutive members share, Clarissa posits a collective form in which her sense of self and of connection are constituted in a process of being shared out. Instead of the organizational model of the group, the text turns to the figure of a “mist” whose particles are concentrated and dispersed by the shifting flow of life on whose surface they reside and by which they are configured. This figure, thus, forces us to think the self and the collectivity simultaneously, for Clarissa’s sense of self is that of a collection of particles sufficiently concentrated to form a discrete entity (a mist) and yet sufficiently diffuse that it can be characterized neither as homogeneous nor pure. Just as she feels that “she” survives as part of those people (strangers, friends) and things (trees, houses) with whom she both purposefully and contingently has become entangled, those people and things survive in her. We arrive, in short, at a notion of selfhood in which the self paradoxically exists largely outside of itself, surviving in the shared substance of an intermingling network of connections produced by the unpredictable undulations, the “ebbs and flows,” of an impersonal “life.” If this structure of collectivity—posited even as the text dramatizes the organization of the crowd into a patriotic group—is initially realized only as an extradiegetic product of Woolf ’s narrative technique, it becomes the object of thematic concern with the concussive appearance of the skywriter. I have already suggested that the sound of the plane distracts the group from its rapt and near-homogeneous attention to the car as the object of its patriotic common consciousness. As the text exclaims, “Everyone looked up” (25), and due to their new object of attention “the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it” (26). While, in McDougall’s terms, this shift in


focus does not dissolve the crowd, and merely substitutes one object of common consciousness for another, it clearly disrupts the nascent group into which the initial crowd had become organized. The ideal of patriotic commitment that had provided the organizing principle of the group—encompassing two of McDougall’s prerequisites for the existence of the group mind in suggesting both an “adequate idea of the group” and a “body of traditions and customs and habits” (Group Mind, 69–70)—is replaced by a spectacular object of common attention that is notably without any fixed or consistent ideational content. Whereas the car had provoked a virtually homogeneous response, and signified almost exclusively within an extremely restricted semiotic domain, the skywriter provokes something of an orgy of speculative response. Even more than the plane itself, the letters it produces are what fascinates the crowd. ‘Wherever it went,” the narrative reports, “out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But what letters?” (25). In response to this universal question, the unfocalized narrative voice asks “A C was it? An E, then an L? . . . a K, and E, a Y perhaps?” (25). “Blaxo” (25), posits Mrs. Coates. “Kreemo” speculates Mrs. Bletchley, followed by the observation “That’s an E, . . . or a dancer—” (26). And Mr. Bowley decides, “It’s toffee” (26). More expansively, the plane contributes to Mrs. Dempster’s thoughts of unfulfilled romantic aspirations, provoking her both to wager that “there’s a fine young feller aboard of it,” and to reflect that she had “always longed to see foreign parts” (5). And for Mr. Bentley, cutting turf at Greenwich, it becomes “an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol . . . of man’s soul; of his determination . . . to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought” (36). The convergence of these varied speculations is, however, persistently thwarted by the plane’s performance. “Only for a moment did [the letters] lie still,” the narrative insists, “then they moved and melted and were rubbed out in the sky” (25); no sooner than the skywritten message is formed, “the smoke faded and assembled itself round the broad white shapes of the clouds,” which “moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed” (26). Though the crowd constituted by the skywriter resists the process of homogenizing organization characteristic of its predecessor, Woolf is ambivalent about the effects of the spectacular promotional drama on its members. Mrs. Bletchley, for example, is said to murmur her interpretation of the letters “like a sleepwalker” (26), and Mrs. Coates is reported to respond to the scene “in a strained, awestricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up” (25–26). This somnambulistic, even infantile response—in her “awestricken” state, after all, Mrs. Coates


perfectly mimes the action of the baby she holds in her arms—is a form of habitual action and suggests that the members of the crowd have been reduced to an automaton-like state. Subject as they are to an unprecedented marketing tactic, the members of the crowd are effectively constituted as almost ideal consumers, at least within the terms of what Rachel Bowlby describes as the period’s emergent discourse of “consumer psychology” or the “psychology of selling” (Shopping, 96). As Bowlby argues, the psychological analysis of consumer behavior is ultimately directed toward the moment of the sale, that moment in which the consumer chooses to buy. Ironically though, the “moment of choice, or the exercise of the will, is in fact a relinquishing of the will; the whole task [of the salesperson] is to get the prospect to the point of capitulation, when there is no longer any question. Action is then spontaneous, irresistible; the mind has become purely biological or mechanical (the automaton)” (108). In this light, the mass marketing technique Woolf describes would seem to be an unqualified success, for even in the absence of an identifiable brand name, let alone an actual commodity, the members of the crowd are reduced to the physiological state that, according to the theorists of consumer psychology, is the arduously and only intermittently achieved goal of the salesperson. In, thus, explicitly setting the scene of the crowd’s reincarnation as one of mass consumption, and in describing the state of its members as akin to that of consumers at the point of making a decision (“a point,” as Bowlby suggests, “at which both control over actions and mental conflict—a tension between ideas—are eliminated” [109]), Woolf is clearly not uncritical of the collective form she invokes. Describing the form of collectivity produced by the skywriter as she does, Woolf invokes popular notions both of the consumer as object of mass-marketing techniques and of the crowd—notions, incidentally, that share many of the same psychological premises. If the consumer is frequently seen as inordinately susceptible to the persuasive techniques of advertisers and salespeople—from the perspective of advertising psychology even the purportedly rational mind of the responsible consumer “is considered to be no less subject to influence or solicitation: it simply has to be persuaded that its wants are not whimsical but sensible” (Shopping, 100)—the crowd is typically understood as excessively suggestible, driven by instinctual impulses, and prone to the contagious spread of powerful emotions. Despite this awareness of the limitations of both the crowd and the commodity culture of the mass market, it is precisely this conjunction of the two, I want to suggest, that forms the basis of Woolf’s attempt to conceive communitarian alternatives to the nationalism she critiques. More than merely functioning as a sort of shock effect that disrupts the formation of the national group, the scene of the skywriter and its spectatorship constitutes a


terrain that Woolf explores as simultaneously exposing the limitations of existing communal norms, and harboring the resources necessary for the affirmative articulation and production of alternative subjective modes and forms of social linkage. The contours of this affirmative articulation once again become most immediately apparent in relation to Woolf ’s characterization of Septimus. If the general response to the skywriter is irreducibly idiosyncratic, Septimus’s response famously represents the height of that idiosyncrasy. Participating in the hermeneutic frenzy unleashed by the plane’s acrobatics, Septimus’s interpretive efforts are ultimately played out in cosmological terms. So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him, in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness, one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks. (MD, 27)

Despite Septimus’s belief that the as yet undecipherable language of the advertisement bears a private personal message directed at himself, his initial response is not hermeneutic but aesthetic. Appealing less to his cognitive faculties than his senses, the promotional drama is primarily a bearer of beauty, not meaning. Though I will need to return shortly to the question of communication—in relation to Septimus’s sense both that he is the object of communication and that he has a duty to communicate with others—it is significant that his primary response is directed less by the reception of information than sheer aesthetic pleasure. In this respect, Septimus’s behavior once again mirrors that of Clarissa, for in the earlier scene of consumption, staged at Clarissa’s florist, she too is swept away in sheer aesthetic pleasure. Reveling first, “with her eyes half closed,” in the varied scents of the flowers, and then soaking in the visual luxury of the myriad colors, she feels “as if this beauty, this scent, this colour . . . were a wave which she let flow over her” (16). Beyond yet again forging a connection between Septimus and Clarissa, this aestheticized response to the commodity culture of the metropolis suggests a particular form of relation to the urban space they both inhabit. Indeed, this relation is one that Woolf explores in detail in her nonfiction prose. Representing another foray into London’s commodity culture in “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” Woolf has her narrator, not unlike Clarissa Dalloway in this respect, embark on an excursion to the shops.6 As


its narrator’s ambulatory quest—ostensibly motivated by her desire to purchase a pencil—begins, the text reports: We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house . . . we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own experience. . . . But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. . . . But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks. (CE, 4:155–56)

Venturing out into the streets, the narrator is literally transformed into “a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye,” which glides “smoothly on the surface” of the urban stream by which it finds itself supported. Indeed, the superficiality of the eye’s approach is something of an imperative. “Let us . . . be content still with the surfaces only,” the narrator implores, and the surfaces to which she refers are precisely those provided by commodity culture: “the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows” (157). A generalization of Clarissa’s experience in the florist’s shop, the enormous eye into which the narrator of “Street Haunting” has been transformed is characterized by what Bowlby refers to as its “spontaneous aestheticism” (Destinations, 211); in Woolf ’s words, it “rests only on beauty” (CE, 4:157). Crucially, this transformation of Woolf ’s narrator is effected through an alteration of her sense of self. As Bowlby suggests, “The move outside involves the removal of individuality for anonymity, and the shift from stability—one fixed place—to mobility, a peaceable ‘army’ on the move” (Destinations, 210). More specifically, this shift remarks another stage in Woolf ’s ongoing negotiation with psychological discourse. The passage from private to public space, and the corresponding transformation of self, with which “Street Haunting” commences is a passage from one mode of consciousness to another, the first defined as an interiorized space, while the second is understood as the exposed perceptual surface of the “oyster of


perceptiveness,” the “enormous eye.” More precisely still, this transition from the home to the streets represents a move away from habitualized consciousness. The self that is left at home is the habitual self, a self defined by a fixed environment and material possessions that express the determining force of past experience, an experience whose “oddity” (155) suggests degrees of atomism, distinctness, and particularity that cannot be held in common. If the enclosed space of the home produces and maintains this habitual form of experience, domestic interiority finds its somatic analogue in the image of the “shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves.” A trope that Woolf will redeploy in The Waves as a means of interrogating the neuroscientific body—much like Neville’s sense that he has “taken the print of life,” Bernard feels that a “shell forms upon the soft soul, nacreous, shiny, upon which sensations tap their beaks in vain. On me it formed earlier than on most” (W, 213)—the “shell-like covering” of the soul bespeaks the individualizing force of physical organization. Habit produces an interior space of the self that, predicated as it is upon progressively rigid somatic organization, closes itself off to contact with that which is outside in any terms other than those of the routinized processes by which it is constituted. In contrast, the urban flow of the streets and contact with its crowds opens up this carapace of the self and transforms it into the exposed surface of the “enormous eye,” a figuration of consciousness that, once again, will be redeployed in The Waves insofar as it anticipates the mode of consciousness at which Rhoda and Bernard arrive following Percival’s death. Much like their sheerly affective experiences in the music hall and the National Gallery respectively, the enormous eye sticks to the surface of things, registering the effects of the city’s kinetic force without indulging in processes of perceptual ordering. Significantly, it is the effects of these surfaces that rearticulate the figure of the stream. Woolf ’s repeated figuration of urban flows and flows of commercial culture as a stream that carries observers and consumers alike, represents an important appropriation of the psychological language of the stream of consciousness whereby human consciousness is comprehended as fundamentally supported, shaped, and conditioned by the material surfaces of a percussive urban space. No longer the stream of consciousness per se, the stream of commodified surfaces that supports the enormous eye is coincident with its soporific effects upon the brain. The transformation of the narrator’s private self is effected, that is, by the impact of the superficial urban flow upon the somatic apparatus of the habitualized self. Feeling herself floating “smoothly down a stream,” the narrator suggests that “resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks” (CE, 156). Tellingly referring not to the mind or the soul, but the brain, Woolf suggests not that the stream of urban


life simply produces a state of unconsciousness, but that it provides respite from that form of habitualized consciousness determined by the organization of the nervous system, and therefore that it opens the possibility of different perceptual processes, different kinds of consciousness. If “Street Haunting” suggests that the superficiality of the urban stream is at least partially a product of individual choice—that the “surface looking” Woolf ’s narrator advocates “does not imply that there is no depth, but that its evasion is part of what defines the pleasure of all-eye looking” (Bowlby, Destinations, 211)—another of Woolf ’s essays, “Oxford Street Tide,” locates that superficiality more firmly in the constitution of the massified sphere of commodity culture.7 Devoted to an aspect of “The London Scene” with which Clarissa and Septimus (and the narrator of “Street Haunting”) would be intimately familiar, “Oxford Street Tide,” as its title suggests, can be read as an extended gloss on Clarissa’s sense of being submerged in a wave of sensation produced by the commodity culture with which she interacts. Beginning rather bluntly, Woolf warns that “Oxford Street, it goes without saying, is not London’s most distinguished thoroughfare” (“London Scene,” 113). Moralists have been known to point the finger of scorn at those who buy there, and they have the support of the dandies. Fashion has secret crannies off Hanover Square, round about Bond Street, to which it withdraws discreetly to perform its more sublime rites. In Oxford Street there are too many bargains, too many sales. . . . The buying and selling is too blatant and raucous. But as one saunters towards the sunset . . . the garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. It is like the pebbly bed of a river whose stones are forever washed by a bright stream. (113)

Extending Clarissa’s rather localized wave of sensations to account for a much larger geographical space (similar, once again, to that traversed by the narrator of “Street Haunting”), the entire street becomes a conduit for the flow of gaudy perceptual stimuli. If Oxford Street is definitively not the site of sublimity, despite its brash commercialism and abundance of unrefined, glaringly artificial eye-candy, it clearly holds a certain “fascination.” Indeed, part of the fascination, part of the beauty Woolf repeatedly attributes to commodity culture, would seem to lie precisely in its blatant and superficial artificiality. Even the architecture of Oxford Street, thoroughly determined by the demands of consumption, has the air of a poorly executed stage set. It “cannot be denied,” Woolf writes, “that these Oxford Street palaces are rather flimsy abodes—perching-grounds rather than dwellingplaces. One is conscious that one is walking on a strip of wood laid upon steel


girders, and that the outer wall, for all its florid stone ornamentation, is only thick enough to withstand the force of the wind” (115). Lest this observation be taken as a simple criticism or dismissal of the aesthetic and cultural debasement effected by the forces of the mass market, Woolf once again invokes the figure of the moralist as a thematic embodiment of precisely such scornful disapprobation. “And again the moralists point the finger of scorn,” she reports, for “such thinness, such papery stone and powdery brick reflect, they say, the levity, the ostentation, the haste and irresponsibility of our age” (115). In contradistinction to this snobbish traditionalism, Woolf suggests that the charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass. Its glassiness, its transparency, its surging waves of coloured plaster give a different pleasure and achieve a different end from that which was desired and attempted by the old builders and their patrons, the nobility of England. Their pride required the illusion of permanence. Ours, on the contrary, seems to delight in proving that we can make stone and brick as transitory as our own desires. We do not build for our descendants, who may live up in the clouds or down in the earth, but for ourselves and our own needs. We knock down and rebuild as we expect to be knocked down and rebuilt. It is an impulse that makes for creation and fertility. Discovery is stimulated and invention on the alert. (115–16)

Framing once again the trappings of commodity culture as a source of aesthetic pleasure, different though it may be from more traditional forms, in this articulation Woolf ’s approach to the consumption-driven public sphere is not limited to aesthetic concerns. Or, more precisely, questions that are initially cast in aesthetic terms quickly reveal themselves as indicative of a profound shift in social and cultural formations. The flimsy temporariness of the architecture of commodity culture serves, on Woolf ’s reading, to release a vitality that has hitherto been imprisoned in the infrastructure of permanence and tradition. Here consumer culture is the engine of innovation. Despite its crassness, the mass market is fertile with possibilities for “discovery,” “invention,” and “creativity.” Not simply reflective of sociohistorical changes produced by the advancing forces of capitalism, the massified public sphere typified by Oxford Street—the stream of urban life that it composes—holds a potential for the creation of subjective and social forms that are strictly limited neither by the residual structures of tradition nor the emergent terms of the market. To the extent that the urban geography produced by the mass market is defined by its changeability and impermanence, it finds its human corollary in a sort of nervous temperament that is both conditioned by, and contributory


to, the same cultural formation. Surveying the scene, Woolf admits that “taking all of this into account—the auctions, the barrows, the cheapness, the glitter—it cannot be said that the character of Oxford Street is refined” (114). Rather, It is a breeding ground, a forcing house of sensation. The pavement seems to sprout horrid tragedies; the divorces of actresses, the suicides of millionaires occur here with frequency that is unknown in the more austere pavements of the residential districts. News changes quicker than in any other part of London. The press of people passing seems to lick the ink off the placards and to consume more of them and to demand fresh supplies of later editions faster than elsewhere. The mind becomes a glutinous slab that takes impressions and Oxford Street rolls off upon it a perpetual ribbon of changing sights, sounds and movement. Parcels slap and hit; motor omnibuses graze the kerb; the blare of a whole brass band in full tongue dwindles to a thin reed of sound. Buses, vans, cars, barrows stream past like the fragments of a picture puzzle; a white arm rises; the puzzle runs thick, coagulates, stops; the white arm sinks, and away it streams again, streaked, twisted, higgledy-piggledy, in perpetual race and disorder. The puzzle never fits itself together, however long we look. (114)

Returning to the language of the nervous body, Woolf describes the human participants in the Oxford Street tide in terms that are not dissimilar to those inaugurated in “Street Haunting.” Rather than the “central oyster of perceptiveness” or the “enormous eye,” the form of consciousness proper to Oxford Street is that of the “glutinous slab that takes impressions” from the “perpetual ribbon of changing sights, sounds and movement” to which it is exposed. Though this conception of the mind is quite close to the impressionable nervous body of The Waves—the body defined by the “raw, the white, the unprotected fibre” of the nervous system upon which life imprints its determining mark—it remains distinctly different. The “glutinous slab” of the mind is not governed by the somatic economy of habit. It is not the stage upon which the drama of Mrs. Constable’s sponge is played out. The difference between the two forms of embodiment seems to lie less in physiology than in environment. Like the enormous eye of “Street Haunting,” which comes into existence only once the interior space of domesticity has been left behind, the mind only “becomes” a glutinous slab through its exposure to the commercialized public space of the city. It, like the barrage of sensation and information that it both “consumes” and “demands” with unheard of frequency and in unprecedented quantity, would seem to be “unknown in the more austere pavements of the residential districts.” Precisely because of its sheer velocity and variability, the flow of urban life as it is conditioned by the mass market


is not simply a habitualizing force of somatic organization. Instead, it impacts upon the human nervous system with such rapidity and force that it resists processes of organization pertinent to both the physical and social body. Fragmented and random in the extreme, the stream produced by the Oxford Street tide persistently bursts any routinized banks that would channel its flow. The culture of consumption, that is, produces a space of “perpetual race and disorder” within which the “puzzle never fits itself together, however long we look,” and it is precisely insofar as it eschews the integrative drive toward a closed totality in favor of a network of contingent and shifting connections that it is able to function as a force of creative innovation. Because Woolf seeks to explore the urban culture of mass consumption as a site of creativity and innovation, as productive of new forms of selfhood and social linkage, we should not therefore assume that her exploration is unequivocal. The commodity culture she represents is no utopia, conceived through an effete act of foreclosure upon the limitations imposed and costs exacted by the high capitalist mode of production by which it is driven. Nor is she a liberal celebrant of the creative force of the market unbound. The ambivalence of her engagement with the commercialized space of the city is manifest, for example, even in the fundamental figure of the mind as a glutinous slab. Hardly glamorous or naively celebratory, though Woolf ’s metaphor functions to open up certain possibilities, it simultaneously bespeaks the extent to which the mass market reduces consumers to formless apparatuses of extreme impressionability, scarcely able to resist its numbing barrage. Similarly, even as she posits the innovative force of the Oxford Street tide, she takes a certain ironic distance when she comments on the vendors who, driven by the supreme exigency of the sale, “boldly attempt an air of lavishness, opulence, in their effort to persuade the multitude that here unending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach of everybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well” (116). Satirizing the language of the marketing pitch—a language whose residuum she cannot entirely avoid in attempting critically to articulate the creative vital force of the metropolis—she insists that we must take the trouble to distinguish between the genuinely and unpredictably innovative consequences of this emergent sociocultural formation and the illusion of novelty that is the all too predictable product of the marketing machine. Woolf is acutely aware of the thoroughly determining effects of high capitalism upon the space she describes. The thousands of “queer, incongruous voices” (116) whose random convergence holds so much potential for the articulation of new and contestatory forms of social linkage are, nonetheless, “all . . . tense, all . . . real, all . . . urged out of their speakers by the pressure


of making a living, finding a bed, somehow keeping afloat on the bounding, careless, remorseless tide of the street” (117). Unlike the moralist, for whom Oxford Street presents a luxuriously spectacular object for his leisured condemnation, the bulk of those who participate in Woolf ’s scene do so out of necessity. Indeed, the class differential that she, thus, remarks is one that is already clearly legible in Mrs. Dalloway. We need only recall Doris Kilman’s excursion to the Army and Navy Stores, accompanied by her privileged student, to be reminded of the situatedness of Woolf ’s sometimes aestheticized celebration of consumer culture’s creative possibility. Perhaps the most forceful recognition of the social determinants and consequences of commercialized urban culture comes, however, in “Street Haunting.” Confronted by that segment of the “vast republican army” that she refers to as “the maimed company of the halt and the blind,” Woolf ’s narrator is in the process of speculating (perhaps somewhat hopefully) that: “They do not grudge us . . . our prosperity; when suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like a hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey” (159). “At such a sight,” the narrator comments, “the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered” (159). There can be no doubt, in the light of this flare, that the cost at which the commodityladen urban space is achieved must be reckoned in terms of incomprehensible human suffering. The equivocal character of Woolf ’s response to the life of the city is absolutely crucial, for it suggests that her analysis is based simultaneously in the recognition of the violently alienating and oppressive effects of the socioeconomic system by which it is fundamentally shaped, and in the attempt to discern and elaborate the ways in which that system itself produces contestatory alternatives. On the one hand, she analyses the forms of life, both somatic and social, that are constituted as the object of the institutional and discursive operations of medical science, operations largely oriented by the logic of organization, consistent with organic forms of community, and directed toward the efficient maintenance of the structures of imperialist nationalism. Her analysis in this respect attends, first, to the institutional aspects of the medical scientific project whose procedures of moral regulation correspond to what Foucault has called disciplinary society; second, to the distribution of those regulatory mechanisms through the very substance of the human body; and third, to the intense interaction and coordination of those bodies within the space of the city and the culture of consumption.


Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s reading of Foucault’s distinction between disciplinary society and the society of control is instructive in this context. “Disciplinary society,” they write, is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices. . . . Disciplinary power rules in effect by structuring the parameters and limits of thought and practice, sanctioning and prescribing normal and/or deviant behaviours. . . . We should understand the society of control, in contrast as that society (which develops at the far edge of modernity and opens toward the postmodern) in which mechanisms of command become ever more “democratic,” ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviours of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves. Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the brains . . . and bodies . . . toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity. (Empire, 23)

The dynamics of Woolf ’s work to which I have been attending are, thus, situated on this “far edge of modernity.” Her analysis straddles the shift from disciplinary mechanisms to their dispersion and immanence in the social field, and her examination of urban space and the social forms produced by the expansion of consumer culture is clearly related to what Hardt and Negri identify as the society of control. On the other hand, Woolf turns from the organization of social life effected largely by the medical scientific grasp of the elementary biological substance of the body and toward those aspects of urban life that produce new subjective and social figures which—notwithstanding the fact that they are marked by the violence of the sociocultural matrix from which they have arisen, and that they remain susceptible to forces of organization—resist and contest the dominant norms. Just as her engagement of neuroscience makes available somatic figures that are irreducible to the regulative force of the organized nervous body, Woolf ’s interrogation of urban life remarks those spaces within which violent and oppressive communal forms constitute unforeseeable sites of communication and cooperation not governed by dominant social values. To return to Mrs. Dalloway by way of conclusion, these alternative sites of social linkage are most visible in the contingent connections between strangers produced by the chaotic and superficial flows of urban life, what Peter describes, for example, as Clarissa’s “odd affinities . . . with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter” (200). Indeed, in a text that is so obsessively concerned with the question of


connection, it is precisely this sort of random conjunction produced by the vagaries of urban existence that Woolf persistently places in contrast to more motivated and traditionally valued forms of sociality, whether those of family, friendship, or established social networks. Exploring the marital connection between Richard and Clarissa, for example, the text presents an extended scene that commences with Richard’s pained recognition of their relative estrangement. Prompted to attempt a rapprochement, he decides upon a surprise visit after lunch and sets off across London, armed with a bouquet of roses and a firm determination that he will “say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her” (150). As he makes his way home, his random thoughts (ranging in topic from the dereliction of duties common to London policemen, to the “problem of the female vagrant” [152]) are repeatedly punctuated by the reaffirmation that “he would tell Clarissa that he loved her, in so many words” (152). Arriving home just as Big Ben strikes three o’clock—tellingly one of the only occasions upon which the clock’s chimes are not glossed by the familiar refrain that “its leaden circles of sound dissolved in the air”—Richard predictably is able only to brandish his bouquet sheepishly while the narrator parenthetically informs us: “(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words)” (154). In the face of this pathetic and unmitigated failure to revivify a fundamental and sanctified social bond, Clarissa finds herself alone only a short while later as Big Ben strikes the half hour and, looking out the window to see an old woman in a neighboring house, thinks: How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching to see an old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell, making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go—but where? Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could still just see her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was still there, moving about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. (166–67)

Strikingly, this wordless, nearly anonymous, random encounter is exalted far beyond Richard’s abortive declaration of love, and takes on an air of mystery


and miraculousness. It is, indeed, an emblematic encounter, encapsulating as it does the “supreme mystery”—the mystery perhaps of life, or of human connections—in the simple fact of geographical proximity; “here was one room; there another.” It is precisely the value Clarissa attaches to the miracle and mystery of this sort of connection that motivates the party by which much of the plot is driven and which ostensibly constitutes its climax. Theorizing the love of life that the novel opens by representing, the narrative enters Clarissa’s consciousness as she attempts to justify the parties in which she is so invested: What she liked was simply life. ‘That’s what I do it for,’ she said, speaking aloud, to life. Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically existent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her, ‘Yes, yes, but your parties— what’s the sense of your parties?’ all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague. . . . But go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite consciously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create, but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance. (158–59)

The elusive “it” to which Clarissa addresses herself in the novel’s opening passage—finally identifying “it” as “life”—here manifests itself as “this thing which she felt to be so obvious,” and that becomes “physically existent” as the sounds of the street intrude upon her cloistered domestic space. With this intrusion, she finds herself reminded of the vital sense of connectedness she had experienced that morning as she made her way to the florist’s shop, and, addressing herself to life itself, comes to understand the parties she throws as a form of creative participation in the processes of life. Life is, for her, essentially a state of connectedness, and in her role as hostess she works to bring individuals together, “to combine, to create.” Despite her insistence that she is not motivated by a desire to “impos[e] herself . . . [or] to have famous people about her” (158)—that her party is a gift in the strong sense of the word, existing outside of an economy of investment and return—the links Clarissa works so hard to produce do not participate in the vital, and


truly innovative, creation of social ties that the text closely associates with the public spaces of the city. Clarissa’s desire to “combine, to create,” in short, is thwarted by the determination of the social space she attempts to manipulate. Her communal efforts can never be truly creative precisely because the individuals she seeks to bring together are already defined in relation to each other. Their relations are determined, for example, by their status as Richard’s professional colleagues or superiors, or as members of the youthful scene at Bourton, that almost obsessive object of Clarissa’s nostalgic remembrance. These preexisting social bonds ultimately prove too much to overcome and constitute the crux upon which Clarissa’s creative project fails. On the one hand, the numbing parade of dignitaries, major and minor, with whom she has “six or seven words . . . each,” reduces Clarissa to an unexpressive and nearly inanimate “post,” “a stake driven in at the top of her stairs” (223). On the other, her old friends from Bourton offer no more promise of meaningful connection. Peter Walsh, the youthful idealist, political radical, and erstwhile lover of Clarissa, cuts a poor figure in his middle age: a failure as both a minor colonial administrator and a philanderer, and unfortunately still attached to the telling habit of nervously fingering his pocketknife in public places. Similarly, Sally Seton, the object of Clarissa’s youthful, homoerotic attachment, is unable to live up to Clarissa’s idealized remembrance of their relationship as defined by a “purity” and “integrity” of feeling, unlike “one’s feeling for a man,” in being “completely disinterested,” and enjoying a “quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up” (43–44). In contradiction of Clarissa’s nostalgic reconstruction, Sally makes her unexpected appearance at the party as Lady Rosseter, wife of a northern manufacturer who has provided her with “myriads of servants,” “ten thousand a year” (246), and, as she announces in her sole communication with Clarissa, “five enormous boys” (225). If Woolf, thus, remarks the limitations of normative structures of collectivity in representing the failure of Clarissa’s party, the failure of her gift of life, the failure is, nonetheless, not absolute. For even in the infamous moment—wherein the Bradshaws dare to “talk of death at her party” (241)—that for Clarissa constitutes the nadir of her project, the text presents one of its most forceful articulations of an alternate form of social linkage. The announcement of Septimus’s suicide at the party, of course, initiates Clarissa’s oft-commented upon, if still rather mysterious, process of identification with the young man she had never met. Her initial somatic identification and detailed visualization of his suicide—“Always her body went through it, when she was told, first, suddenly, of an accident; her dress


flamed, her body burnt” (241)—is quickly followed by a moment of reflection. Having retired from the party to a private room, Clarissa is led to think: A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture fade; one was alone. There was an embrace in death. (241–42)

Returning once again to the consideration of the elusive “thing” that in her vocabulary consistently designates the ungraspable force of life, Clarissa’s reflection on Septimus’s death reaffirms her commitment to life as “that [which] mattered.” Cognizant of the social gathering she has momentarily left behind, she feels that whereas she has allowed that thing to be “defaced” by “corruption, lies, chatter,” Septimus had preserved it in his death. Because life is, for Clarissa, essentially defined as a state of connectedness, and because she understands Septimus’s final act as “an attempt to communicate,” his death paradoxically bears witness to his commitment to life, a commitment Clarissa shares. Her reception of this communication tends to cast it in the mystified terms of a thwarted attempt at “reaching the centre,” and to process it by way of an almost fusional identification. The vaguely focalized passage recounting Clarissa’s imagination of his death, after all, renders the violence of the railing’s “rusty spikes,” “blundering [and] bruising” their way through his body, followed by the “thud, thud, thud, in his brain,” and the final “suffocation of blackness” (241), an experience that she shares as part of her visceral reaction to the news of his death. Even at the height of this identificatory reverie, however, the text makes available another set of terms within which Clarissa, and the reader, can approach Septimus’s final act of communication. As she pauses, goes to the window, and parts the curtains, Clarissa’s train of thought is interrupted as she exclaims, “Oh, but how surprising!” (243). Once again at a crucial moment, she finds herself confronted with the figure of the “old lady” in the adjacent house: In the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. . . . It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed alone. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the

204 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! (243–44)

Caught up, as she was first thing that morning, in the contingent networks of connection produced by the clock’s leaden circles of sound, Clarissa finds herself placed fleetingly in communication with the anonymous old lady. Even as this sudden and surprising link to a virtual stranger interrupts her sheer identification with Septimus, it provides a context that is more adequate to his communication. For if Clarissa is placed in communication with the old lady, that communication is founded upon neither a preestablished form of sociality nor some substance, information, meaning, or sense that passes between them. Clarissa, after all, cannot even be sure that the old lady sees her. The social tie dramatized by this scene, in short, shares much with what Nancy, quoting Giorgio Agamben, describes as a “politics of communication” wherein “‘each communication is, above all, communication not of something held in common but of a communicability’ . . . [and] consequently, sense is not what is communicated but that there is communication” (Sense, 114). The scene of Clarissa’s second encounter with the old lady is once again explicitly set apart from those in which normative collective forms dominate. Aware of the “laughing and shouting” in the adjoining room, a noise that bears witness to the failure of her gift of life, Clarissa is able, nonetheless, to participate in the flow of urban life that had animated her preparations for the party earlier that day. Ironically, if her party, her attempt to “combine, to create,” is itself a failure, Clarissa’s mundane preparations for the party creatively produce the conditions for a form of “combination” or social linkage that is adequate to the “thing” both she and Septimus love so dearly. Clarissa’s tenuous and senseless communication with the old lady is founded upon neither the nostalgic reconstruction of past intimacies nor the ties of family nor the broader social system encapsulated by the party, profoundly marked as it is by the politics of nation and empire—whether in the form of Lady Bruton’s concern for the “state of India” (236) and her relentless promotion (even to the Prime Minister himself ) of her eugenic plan for emigration; Richard’s committee work on the situation in Armenia (or Albania, Clarissa can never be sure); or Sir William Bradshaw’s various activities as the guardian of proportion and the national good. Clarissa’s connection to the old lady is not predicated upon categories of identity—wife, friend, lover, British citizen—but represents the placing in communication of two singularities, a very small section of the vast networks of social (k)nots made visible by her earlier perambulations. This connection, moreover, presents a means of approaching the social value produced in another social tie,


no less contingent and anonymous, that Woolf ’s text articulates between Clarissa and Septimus. For even as she is surprised by the fascinating presence of the old lady staring across the darkness between houses, Clarissa unwittingly realizes the conditions of Septimus’s final gift, his final communication. Septimus is, of course, the novel’s primary communicator, desperately opposing his belief that “communication is health; communication is happiness” (122) to Bradshaw’s unwavering dictum that “health is proportion” (129), and pursuing a prophetic sense that he has been charged with the task of giving voice to a crucial message. Yet, just as the skywriter produces its effects despite the illegibility of its letters, the communication that Septimus facilitates is not limited to his “message,” that largely garbled body of information he is finally unable to articulate within the normatively enforced bounds of social significance. Failing to communicate his message of social reform, Septimus nonetheless opens up a space of communicability in his death. Preparing for his defenestration, he anticipates the normative recuperation of his impending act when he thinks of the “tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy; . . . Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing” (195). His suicide, however, will not be assimilated to the narrative of tragedy, for he affirms that “he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good” (195). Beyond indicating the reluctance with which he performs his final act, this pause is crucial, for in the instant before his plunge Septimus looks across the street from his perch on the window sill and sees that “coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him” (195). No sooner than this has happened, of course, Holmes bursts into the room, and Septimus throws himself out of window crying, “I’ll give it you!” (195). If this ambiguous final utterance can be read as an act of defiance directed at the approaching Holmes, it is equally, and perhaps more productively, legible as addressed to the stranger, the anonymous old man who has unwittingly become a spectator to the gruesome scene, and the recipient of Septimus’s final gift. The text has forged, from its opening pages, a strong connection between the indefinite object of Septimus’s final sentence and the flows of life that constantly tie and untie a network of ever-changing links between singular individuals. In this context, his utterance can be read quite literally as the gift of life that Clarissa also desires to give. Even in this moment of absolute extremity, his singularity about to be reduced in its violent assimilation to a variety of socially normative narratives—the generic scripts of tragedy or melodrama Septimus anticipates, the moralistic charge of cowardice that Holmes levels even as his patient plunges to his death, the story of the “sad


case” (240) that Mrs. Bradshaw tells at the party, or the more thoroughly medicalized language of a “case” of the “deferred effects of shell-shock” (240) that her husband favors—Septimus affirms the value of the most fleeting of connections with a complete stranger. In so doing, he communicates nothing else but the potential of communicability. What is more, both the futurity of his utterance and the indeterminacy of its addressee ensure that it is not constrained to the locality of his final scene. Instead, his gift is cast forward into the future and produces an effect not unlike that of Big Ben’s dissolving circles of sound. The nonspecificity of the you to whom Septimus gives his gift, suggests that his act of communication is not to be understood as a particular transaction between two individuals but as articulating a variable space of communicability within which an indefinite number of singular beings can find themselves (k)notted together. Septimus’s gift is a call to the affirmation of the value produced in this form of social linkage. It is a call that Clarissa receives as she responds to the news of a stranger’s death and that she affirms in turn as she realizes a connection to another stranger, the old lady who unwittingly participates in, and conditions, Clarissa’s moment of communication with Septimus. It is, perhaps most importantly for Woolf, a call to which her texts repeatedly seek to respond and that she would have reverberate beyond their limits.

Appendix

Ferguson, John. Thyrea: A Sonnet Sequence from a Sanatorium. London: Andrew Melrose, 1912.

Sonnet No. I The everlasting sameness of the days, The never-ending sadness of the nights, The weariness each rising hope that blights, The fevered restlessness that slowly slays— How heavy is my heart! O Thou Whose ways Are in the sounding deeps and starry heights, Illume my faith that in Thine Arm which smites I may behold the Arm that will upraise. Calm and subdue this peevish spirit of mine, Bid me be noble for her sake, whose cry— “Christ on the Cross, I would not have him die!” Like everlasting incense rises to Thy Shrine. Dear God! Let me be noble for her sake, Lest, disappointed, her brave heart should break.

Sonnet No. II “Let me be noble”—God forgive the prayer; Yet each man prays of this abandoned throng, And I prayed also; but I did you wrong, Peculiar brothers of my own despair. I would retract my words with scrupulous care, And to the Altar bring a gift of song; The pleas for pity unto you belong, The lengthening miles of Sorrow’s road who fare.

208 • Appendix A little longer in this dolesome place, Companioned by this death-o’er-shadowed crew, Only a little longer, it is true, Not mine the wasted frame, the hopeless case? The pleas for pity, brothers, are for you— And yet I pled for pity, God of grace.

Sonnet No. III He caught a chill in Leicester, he came here;— He came here with his little store of gold, To this grim dwelling, bare, and clean, and cold. Where his life joins hands with death, and hope with fear: He told us how in Leicester’s city drear, On coughing, down his garments rolled The warm crimson flood; and oft he told How softly he would tread from year to year. His wife came for him, and he left to-day Because his little store of gold was done; My God! I knew not gold and life were one Till he shook hands with us and went away: His limbs all fever-thinned, and hope all gone— O Christ in Heaven, how he longed to stay!

Sonnet No. IV There was a shuffling of strange feet last night Along the naked corridor of stone; Dull creakings, and much talk in undertone In the next room to mine; Death’s chill and blight Lay on my brother, who tho’ screened from sight, Was by his ominous cough endeared and known; And I all wakeful in my chamber lone, Quailed in the dreadful dark, and longed for light. O God! that some should stumble by the way— They do not like us to die here, we know, They talk about the credit of the place— The Doctor, when he sounded me today, Said never a word about last night; and lo Her customed smile lights up the Nurse’s face.

Appendix • 209

L’Envoi: To the Lord God O Thou to Whom our glorious fanes we rear, Unto Whose praise pontifical psalms are sung, And prayers of perfume rise from censors swung, And in Whose Presence angels tremble and fear:— I, strangely daring, crave Thy compassionate ear, Thy pity on these hearts by suffering wrung, So old in Sorrow, they, and yet so young, My hopeless brothers lying prostrate here. Not unto me, O Lord, but unto them Thy tender mercy and compassion show, Their destined road of dole and death who fare— Whose tremulous hands are stretched forth to the air, If haply they may touch Thy garment’s hem And from Thy Being virtue still may flow.


Notes

Introduction 1. 2.

I pursue this line of argument vis-à-vis North’s text in more detail in Chapter 4. Dean acknowledges that the alterity or opacity he attributes to aesthetic artifacts is not their exclusive purview, and suggests that: “otherness is a property of discourse, and the enigmas of otherness are exacerbated by art. We might even say that art’s purpose lies in intensifying those aspects of alterity that otherwise remain dormant in everyday discourse and conventional intersubjective communication. From this perspective, the disruption of normative communication would signal a proximity to aesthetic experience, and art would be defined less as the secluded reserve of high culture than as the practice or experience of disruption through which something like the enigmatic signifier becomes palpable” (38). Indeed he goes so far as to suggest that “we call ‘aesthetic’ those experiences in which meaning is disrupted by an encounter with alterity” (38). I sympathize with the general thrust of his argument in this respect but am unsure that even this more generalized sense of aesthetic experience does not unnecessarily risk replicating one form of the problem that Dean seeks to criticize. If one considers that historicist hermeneutics—one prominent form of the symptomatic reduction he criticizes—frequently rely on the opposition between aesthetic artifacts and other forms of discourse, implicitly or explicitly treating the latter as the relatively transparent basis on which to demystify the ideological operations of the former, it is perhaps more productive to avoid reinscribing the opposition, even in an attenuated form.

Chapter 1 1.

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was originally published in 1921, and Fantasia of the Unconscious was originally published in 1922. All references to these two works are from D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

212 • Notes 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

As David Ellis suggests in a footnote to his chapter entitled “Poetry and Science in the Psychology Books” in D. H. Lawrence’s Non-Fiction: “No one has yet been able to name any one book or article by Freud which it is even reasonably certain Lawrence read. His opportunities for hearing about Freud came not only from Barbara Low, Jones and the Eders but also from Frieda. Before meeting Lawrence, Frieda had had a long affair with Otto Gross, an important if eccentric figure in the early days of the psychoanalytic movement” (182, n. 28). If one wished to specify more concretely the source of Lawrence’s understanding of psychoanalysis, one might turn to the popularizing work of someone like Barbara Low (with which Lawrence was clearly familiar). The first major section of her Psychoanalysis: A Brief Account of Freudian Theory (published in 1920 with a prominent introduction by “Ernest Jones, M.D., M.R.C.P., President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society”) is entitled “Psycho-Analysis a Science” (19) and seeks to situate “Freud’s discoveries in comparison with some of the great scientific discoveries of the past” (19). While Low’s account does suggest, in places, that the scientificity of psychoanalysis consists in the “systematic method” (20) employed by Freud, this approach to Freud’s claims for psychoanalysis-as-Wissenschaft are heavily overshadowed by a fairly crass notion of empirical science. Aligning Freud’s work with the “great epoch-making discoveries of the past, for instance, Newton’s theory of Gravitation, or the Darwinian theory” (18), Low insists that “Psycho-Analysis belongs to the realm of Science, not to that of Philosophy, Metaphysics or Ethics,” and contends that “we are bound to accept Freud’s own definition of his own work, namely that his approach is scientific, that he has worked along scientific lines, and has tested all his conclusions by scientific methods” (19). The “special characteristic of Freud’s viewpoint and method of investigation” is, for Low, the fact that “it is established on an Empirical Scientific basis” (19–20). For an extensive account of the relationship between psychoanalysis and science, see Frank J. Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind. For a text which interestingly locates the question of the scientificity of psychoanalysis in relation to debates within the philosophy of science, see Isabelle Stengers’s “Black Boxes; or, Is Psychoanalysis a Science?” Lawrence’s approach to the ultimate object of his inquiry is marked by a high degree of terminological inexactitude. In referring to the mode of consciousness with which he confronts the “vicious” Freudian unconscious (itself, as we shall see, merely a disguised form of “mental consciousness”), Lawrence variably uses the following terms: the “passional soul,” the “affective soul,” the “true unconscious,” the “pristine unconscious,” the “living unconscious,” “primal consciousness,” “dynamic consciousness,” “spontaneous consciousness,” or the “biological psyche.” In what follows, my redeployment of these terms aims only for contextual consistency or stylistic variation and does not seek to suggest conceptual distinctions. See Katherine Ott’s Fevered Lives, pp. 11–20, or Sander Gilman’s Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient, pp. 196–217, for extended discussions of this diagnostic phenomenon.

Notes • 213 7.

Katherine Ott provides a concise account of this diagnostic vagueness. “Physicians,” she writes, “used the term ‘consumption’ to identify several varieties of wasting disease that involved weight loss, fever, and lung lesions, indicated by coughing and expectoration. The relational pattern defined as a consumption could be further broken down into catarrh, empyema, phthisis, tubercle, and so on, depending upon the exact symptoms and signs. In a sense, there were nearly as many consumptions as there were patients. Practitioners used the term ‘tuberculosis’ to refer to a condition in which elastic lung fibers, called tubercles, were coughed up. What people called tuberculosis throughout most of the nineteenth century was not the bacterial condition that came to be called by that name later. As one physician explained, pulmonary tuberculosis was ‘a great constitutional malady, which plays its most prominent part in the lungs’” (9). 8. Paramount among the bacteriological advances relevant in this context was Robert Koch’s isolation, in 1882, of the tubercle bacillus as the cause of the disease. Despite the widespread celebration of Koch’s discovery as the imminent beginning of the end for tuberculosis, advances in medical science that illuminated (under the microscope) the hitherto invisible face of the enemy had only limited effects on the mortality rates, popular perceptions, and clinical practices related to tuberculosis. Writing in 1922, David C. Muthu (a physician and sanatorium superintendent) laments that “more than a generation has passed away since Koch made his epoch-making discovery. The measures taken against the contagion of tuberculosis have not produced such a reduction in its morbidity as his followers had expected” (Pulmonary Tuberculosis [1922], 8). In a similar vein, R. C. Wingfield feels the need (in his 1924 medical textbook on tuberculosis) to make a “confession of failure—a confession that as yet we do not know of any specific cure for tuberculosis” (41). Commenting on the disjunction between bioscientific advances and popular perceptions, Charles Rosenburg argues that “though the causative organism [of tuberculosis] was discovered in 1882 (a discovery widely and instantly publicized in both lay and medical circles), tuberculosis continued for some time to be seen [in accordance with prebacteriological models] as an essentially constitutional disease” (163). (See also pp. 170–71 of Gilman for a similar argument.) 9. Other important historical accounts of tuberculosis include: Linda Bryder’s Below Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain; Barbara Bates’ Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938; Georgina Feldberg’s Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society; Roy Porter’s “The Case of Consumption,” and “Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?”; Sheila Rothman’s Living in the Shadow of Death; Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz’s collection From Consumption to Tuberculosis: A Documentary History; and F. B. Smith’s The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950. 10. As a point of information, tuberculosis is now understood as an infectious disease caused by the mycobacterium tuberculosis. The primary vector of transmission of the bacterium is the inhalation of aerosolized particles of sputum produced by the

214 • Notes

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

coughing of infectious individuals. Contrary to earlier models of transmission, which were predicated on the belief that the hard, waxy coating of the bacillus allowed it to survive for long periods outside of living bodies (and therefore focused, for instance, on dust containing particles of desiccated tubercular sputum as an important vector of transmission), it is now known that the bacterium can survive only brief exposure to the environment, and therefore that it is communicable primarily in the context of direct interpersonal contact. If, since the mass production of antibiotics around midcentury, tuberculosis has been perceived in the West as a disease of the past, it has remained a major force in the developing world. Moreover, as recent media attention to the rise of drug-resistant “superbugs” indicates, tuberculosis has recently begun to make a comeback in the West, with the appearance of strains of the bacterium that are resistant to one or more of the antibacterial drugs used to treat the disease. It has also resurfaced as a common opportunistic infection in those who are immunocompromised. Sander Gilman traces the following variation on the commonplace to Julius Cohnheim: “After all, everyone has a bit of tuberculosis” (200). See Patricia Jalland’s Death in the Victorian Family for an extended discussion of this phenomenon. See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, particularly the section (pp. 306–20) of chapter XI (“Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century”) that sets Laennec’s 1816 invention of the stethoscope within a larger trajectory. The standard layout of the sanatorium in Britain consisted of four long twostory wings, forming an X in their intersection at a central administrative building. Each wing was typically composed of a series of small wards separated by nursing stations, with the more serious cases located in closest proximity to the central block. Needless to say, female and male patients were not housed in the same wings. An additional feature of some sanatoria (especially those that were not operated on a strictly charitable basis) was a number of small wards located near the center of the complex, designed to house what Alexander Foulerton and Langton Cole call, in their A Model Sanatorium for the Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis, those patients of “the more necessitous classes” (4). Foulerton and Cole are very clear that the main difference in accommodation for the different classes of patient lies in the assumption that the “better classes,” being more highly educated, will be less in need of coercion to accept their treatment. Though the narrow, squat, extended, wings of the sanatorium ostensibly function to maximize exposure of the wards to the open-air, this design feature has the added benefit of ensconcing individual patients in a state of relative isolation from the patient population at large and of rendering impossible unsurveilled movement around the complex. See Ott, pp. 32–34, for a useful account of this asthenic model of disease and its vitalist analogues. “Consumptions,” she writes, “made good asthenic sense. According to asthenic doctrine, the human body could stand only so much excitement before breaking down. A person with a tubercular diathesis (that is, already in jeopardy) who had over-stimulating habits and emotions could not

Notes • 215

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

hope to avoid the disease. An organism strained beyond its capacity inevitably succumbed. Since over-stimulation lowered one’s vitality, the logical treatment was sthenic, or excitative. Physicians did not drain or deplete bodily fluids but sought to stimulate vitality and to invigorate the humors” (32). Zizek’s illustration of this process centers on the example of the Marlboro Man, an image which seemingly derives its ideological function from the qualities to which it refers. The Marlboro Man, Zizek admits, “‘connotes’ . . . a certain image of America (the land of hard, honest people, of limitless horizons . . .)” (96). Yet, he insists that the ideological quilting performed by “the Marlboro Man” does not simply depend on this reference to a series of qualities and suggests that “it does not occur until ‘real’ Americans start to identify themselves (in their ideological self-experience) with the image created by the Marlboro advertisement—until America itself is experienced as ‘Marlboro country’” (96). See, in particular, “Corpus” and “Exscription” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Birth to Presence. Linda Bryder points to the historical development of this drive to occlude manifestations of death in her discussion of the tuberculosis dispensary when she comments on the architectural exigency of providing a means of inconspicuously disposing of the bodies of recently deceased patients, a necessity all the more pressing with the increase in surgical intervention (see p. 176). In designating this form of bodily going-on as “bare life,” I have in mind Giorgio Agamben’s use of the term in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). Agamben articulates his notion of “bare life” by drawing on the classical Greek designation of zoe as “express[ing] the simple fact of living common to all living beings,” and as distinct from “bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1). For Agamben, “the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (4). Katherine Ott succinctly captures the pervasive symbolic power of spit: “The revulsion of spitting that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was partly fear of illness and partly anxiety over the anarchy it symbolized” (118–19). Ott’s fifth chapter, “Goods for the Medical Marketplace and Invalid Trade,” provides a compelling argument regarding the regulation of this potential anarchy symbolized by promiscuous expectoration through the commodification of the disease. The mass production of a wide variety of spittoons, disposable sputum envelopes, spit cups, and spit flasks (much like that sported by Vere), ranging from the merely functional to the ornately decorated, provided a means of disciplining the much-dreaded promiscuous expectorator. Writing in The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy describes organic community as follows: “Distinct from society (which is a simple association and division of forces and needs) and as opposed to emprise (which dissolves community by submitting its peoples to its arms and to its glory), community is not only intimate communication between its members, but also its organic

216 • Notes communion with its own essence. It is constituted not only by a fair distribution of tasks and goods, or by a happy equilibrium of forces and authorities: it is made up principally of the sharing, diffusion, or impregnation of an identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies himself only through the supplementary mediation of his identification with the living body of the community” (9). 22. See David Armstrong’s Political Anatomy of the Body for an extended Foucauldian analysis of the disciplinary procedures of the dispensary system (the institutional structure that historically succeeded the sanatorium but that arguably represents a fuller realization of the latter’s logic). 23. Linda Bryder’s Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain, makes a compelling and extended argument for the centrality of the logic of efficiency—particularly that of national efficiency—to the constitution of the antituberculosis movement.

Chapter 2 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

Bruce Clarke’s work in Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (1996) and Energy Forms (2001) is a notable exception in this respect. Though Carpenter is perhaps best known for his The Intermediate Sex, he makes an important contribution to turn-of-the-century vitalist thought, and his work anticipates important aspects of Bergson’s project. Carpenter is especially significant in this context, as his work strongly influences Lawrence’s vitalism and provides a precursor for the latter’s turn to the “Great Sympathetic” nerve system as an embodiment of the vital principle. The standard account of the relationship between Carpenter and Lawrence is Emile Delevenay’s D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition. For an analysis of Carpenter’s relationship to vitalist tendencies in British modernism more broadly (and in Lawrence in particular), see Bruce Clarke’s Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (especially pp. 26–46, 146–171). This is, as we shall see, the position to which Lawrence turns rather more unequivocally in The Plumed Serpent. Christopher Heywood argues in “‘Blood-Consciousness’ and the Pioneers of the Reflex and Ganglionic Systems,” that Lawrence’s “physiological thinking” (104) is heavily indebted both to Bichat’s ganglionic theory of the nervous system and the work on the reflex arc (a competing theory) pioneered by the British physiologist Marshall Hall. One aspect of this drive to national efficiency is developed in connection with Lawrence’s postwar perception that contemporary civilization was undergoing a period of destruction and dissolution such as those that were the undoing of ancient Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations. “But this time,” he writes, “we have consciously and responsibly to carry ourselves through the winter period, the period of death and denudation: that is, some of us have, some nation even must” (189). It is at least partially in service of this desire to ensure a nation

Notes • 217 capable of surviving and protecting contemporary civilization that Lawrence turns to dynamic consciousness and the forms of social regulation it entails. 6. While my analysis here focuses on Lawrence’s interactions with bioscience, statements such as this, which understand the body’s vital flows in terms of electricity (or his reliance elsewhere on the language of vibration), suggest the extent to which bioscientific discourse is not easily separable from physical science. Bruce Clarke productively explores (in both Dora Marsden and Early Modernism and Energy Forms) the relationship between the period’s biological and physical sciences. His discussion, in Energy Forms, of the ways in which Lawrence’s vitalism is informed by theories of the ether is exemplary in this respect. 7. This is at least the case for male homoeroticism, insofar as the desire for a passionate male-male connection gets played out in the context of a spiritual commingling in communitarian purpose. The possibility of female-female connection, on the other hand, remains unaccommodated by Lawrence’s schema, and indeed the development of dynamic consciousness in women seems to end with the sexual phase of the dialectic—an observation regarding Lawrence’s project that dates back at least to Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of female immanence and male transcendence in The Second Sex. 8. With respect to Lawrence’s anti-Semitism, it is notable that in the psychological essays the two exemplars of science are Freud and Einstein. Both psychoanalysis and the Theory of Relativity are ultimately understood as products of the “Jewish mind” or the “Jewish intellect,” which, writes Lawrence, “for centuries has been picking holes in our ideal system—scientific and sociological” (190). While this is a “very good thing for us,” the “Jewish mind” to which both Freud and Einstein are assimilated ultimately tends toward “anarchical conclusions” and “nihilism” through which “we” must find a way (190). 9. See Barbara Mensch’s D. H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality for an extended analysis of the leadership novels; though her reading of particular novels is limited in its attempt to conduct a sort of litmus test wherein a psychological profile of the “authoritarian personality” is applied to various of Lawrence’s fictional characters, the opening chapters present a thorough historical survey of critical responses to Lawrence’s politics. See also Chapters 2 and 3 of Lee Horsley’s Fictions of Power in English Literature: 1900–1950, for extended readings of the politics of the leadership novels. Chapter 3, in particular, attends to the relationship between sexuality and politics in The Plumed Serpent. For a more general account of Lawrence’s politics and their reception, see Rick Rylance’s “Lawrence’s Politics” in Rethinking Lawrence. 10. For example, the novel’s Mexican characters (and particularly those of native Mexican descent) are consistently represented as having strong spines. Kate observes at one point that “no men in the world can carry heavier loads on their backs, for longer distances, than these Indians. She had seen an Indian trotting down a street with a piano on his back: holding it, also, by a band round his forehead. From his forehead, and on his spine he carried it” (152). This physiological mode of characterization is consistent with the corporeal schema of

218 • Notes

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Fantasia insofar as the novel understands the “dark races” as dominated by the negating force of “will,” the volitional mode of the unconscious associated with the ganglia located along the spinal column. Sander Gilman explores the intersection of racial categories and disease states (especially that associated with tuberculosis) in Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient. In examining the importance of physiological types, Gilman gives the example of research by Francis Galton—one of the key figures in the British eugenics movement—into the racial type of the Jew. Focussing on what he called “Jewish physiognomy,” Galton produced composite photographs capturing the “typical features of the modern Jewish face” (Gilman, 66). Galton took an extensive series of photographs of Jewish schoolboys in London, in order to superimpose the individual images and produce composites that purported to present the essential features of the Jewish face. Having established the norms of Jewish physiology, this theory of types sought to establish the set of moral and psychological correlates that necessarily accompany the specified morphology. See Gilman, pp. 206–17, for an illuminating account of the habitus phthisicus. Lawrence provides a corollary to this formulation of impersonality when he writes of “democracy”: “No personalities in our Democracy. No ideals either. When still more personalities come round hawking their pretty ideals, we must be ready to upset their apple-cart. I say, a man’s self is a law unto itself: not unto himself, mind you. Itself. When a man talks about himself he is talking about his idea of himself in his brain. When a man is conscious of himself he is trading in his own personality” (RDP, 77). My analysis of the problematic of infancy, and in what follows my reading of Lawrence’s vitalism based on that problematic, is indebted to Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Bergson’s vitalism in Bergsonism and the two Cinema books. An exemplary and systematic exploration of this aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy is provided by Alain Badiou in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being; also helpful in this respect is Michael Hardt’s Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Particularly important to my argument in what follows is Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual, and more specifically his notion of univocal Being as an instance of “virtuality” that undergoes a process of self-differentiation in its multiple and fluctuating actualization. Badiou comments on this problematic as follows: “In each form of Being, there are to be found ‘individuating differences’ that may well be named beings. But these differences, these beings, never have the fixedness or the power of distribution and classification that may be attributed, for example, to species or generalities, or even individuals, if we understand by ‘individual’ something that can be thought under a species, a generality, or a type. For Deleuze, beings are local degrees of intensity or inflections of power that are in constant movement and entirely singular” (25). We might see here a parallel to Bergson’s distinction between intelligence and intuition, wherein the former proceeds from a spatial view of reality and addresses itself to matter as a complex of static entities, while the latter is that

Notes • 219 faculty that proceeds from a properly temporal view of reality, and because of its immersion in the constant change of real duration participates in the vital, creative flux of the universe. 17. Jean-Luc Nancy makes a similar point in his analysis of organic (or “immanentism”) community when he writes: “A community presupposed as having to be one of human beings presupposes that it effects, or that it must effect, as such and integrally, its own essence, which is itself the accomplishment of the essence of humanness. . . . Consequently, economic ties, technological operations, and political fusion (into a body or under a leader) represent or rather present, expose, and realize this essence necessarily in themselves. Essence is set to work in them: through them, it becomes its own work. This is what we have called ‘totalitarianism,’ but it might be better named ‘immanentism,’ as long as we do not restrict the term to designating certain types of societies or regimes but rather see in it the general horizon of our time, encompassing both democracies and their fragile juridical parapets” (The Inoperative Community, 3).

Chapter 3 1.

2.

3.

Shell shock, or war neurosis, was itself a heavily contested category, whose contours were highly variable due to a number of related factors. The status of sufferers depended, for instance, on the attitude toward the war held by the clinicians who treated them, with the military establishment tending to view the condition as a thin veil for what should more properly be understood as the malingering evasion of cowards unprepared to do their duty in the war. Where the disorder was not dismissed out of hand, the diagnostic categories applied to the condition also depended significantly upon the social class of the sufferer. Officers suffering from shell shock were typically seen to display the symptoms of a general nervous exhaustion similar to that of the neurasthenic, while private soldiers were much more regularly assimilated to the discourse of hysteria insofar as they were more likely to present classically hysterical symptoms such as localized paralysis. Bonnie Kime Scott, for example, reinvokes this well-worn critical tendency in Refiguring Modernism (vol. 1), where she situates Woolf in “a tradition of psychological realism identified by May Sinclair’s criticism,” and argues that principal among Woolf ’s literary commitments was the “probing of the depths . . . of the mind” (236). “Woolf is well known,” she asserts, “for the stream of consciousness of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and A Room of One’s Own” (237). Even a text like Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World—which claims to focus on Woolf ’s “complex sense of how historical forces and societal institutions influence the behavior of the people she describes” (3) and to map Woolf ’s interest in “the forces of ‘the real world’” (6)—participates in this critical tendency. Citing her call to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind,” he relies on the rather unreal, or at least heavily decontextualized, notion of the

220 • Notes stream of consciousness in his gloss. “Thought is more important than speech in Woolf ’s fiction, unsorted impressions more important than systematic thinking” (10), he claims, and goes on to argue that: “The most complete embodiment of this vision is Woolf ’s novel The Waves. It is a book almost entirely written in soliloquies recording the thoughts and impressions of its six major characters. . . . What matters is the interior monologue of the isolated character” (10). As I argue in what follows, Woolf ’s engagement with the material of the human nervous system, most notably in The Waves, moves a good distance beyond merely mimetically recording the thoughts and impressions of its characters. 4. Judith Ryan’s The Vanishing Subject presents an important exploration of the relationship between what she refers to as “early psychology” and literary modernism. Her analysis is, however, oriented primarily by an interest in the relationship between psychological accounts of sensori-perceptual mechanisms and various impressionist and postimpressionist aesthetics. 5. James explicitly invokes Heraclitus in arguing for the constantly changing nature of thought. However “we might in ordinary conversation speak of getting the same sensation again,” he writes, “we never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so; and [we should have to confess] that whatever was true of the river of life, of the river of elementary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus, that we never descend twice into the same stream” (233). 6. See Chapter 9 of Michael Tratner’s Modernism and Mass Politics for a genealogy of this critical trend. 7. Other important considerations of community in Woolf ’s writing (and of The Waves in particular) include Jane Marcus’s “Britannia Rules The Waves,” and Gillian Beer’s “The Body of the People in Virginia Woolf.” 8. My somewhat anachronistic use of “neuroscience” to describe the discursive field I seek to examine is intended to encompass a group of disciplines in relation to which psychology understands itself at the turn of the century. The texts that I approach as examples of “neuroscience” could more properly be described as psychological but represent a form of psychology that develops out of late nineteenth-century experimental psychology and therefore draws heavily upon neurological and neurophysiological research. As such the psychological categories they mobilize are heavily implicated in the positivist presuppositions and procedures of a scientific approach to the human body. 9. It is important to note that (as was the case with Lawrence’s recourse to bioscience in characterizing the vital flows traversing the body), one cannot neatly separate biological science from the physical sciences. Woolf ’s metaphor here points to the extent that the bioscientific discourse of nervous physiology is entangled with contemporaneous developments in the physical sciences. Characterizing the flows of nervous energy as “bright arrows” clearly draws us into the realm of optics, and, of course, the science of wave forms—and more precisely the analysis of light simultaneously in terms of particles and waves—is one of the text’s principal tropological sources, from the title on. 10. Emphasis original.

Notes • 221 11. James’s understanding of this process is in no way exceptional. Maudsley, for example, deploys a similar framework when he declares that “we are daily witnesses of, and our daily actions testify to, the operation of that plastic law of nervous organization by which separate and successive acquisitions are combined and so intimately blended as to constitute apparently a single and undecomposable faculty: we observe it in the formation of our volitions; and we observe it, in a more simple and less disputable form, in the way in which combinations of movements that have been slowly formed by practice are executed finally as easily as if they were a single and simple movement” (55).

Chapter 4 1.

2.

For fairly programmatic articulations of this problematic see: Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution or Matter and Memory, or Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation: Essays on the Self and Its Powers. Of particular interest in this context is Carpenter’s articulation of this tension in his understanding of the relationship between individual selves and what he calls the universal Self of the vital universe. In Carpenter’s view humanity resides predominantly in a state of consciousness (closely associated with the operations of the intellect and a scientific temperament) that emphasizes identity and distinction, and thereby renders inaccessible the realization of a vast vital connectedness that underlies such distinctions. In a passage whose similarity to Neville’s figuration of the nerves as a web that subtends and unifies all of existence makes it difficult not to read it as Woolf ’s source, Carpenter imagines the overcoming of this intellectual state of consciousness as follows: “This body, in fact, is the expression and grows out of those great creative feelings of which I have just spoken. Through Love it becomes a body built into the lives of others, and positively sharing their organic life and vitality. Since Faith and Courage inspire it, it is well based, firm to stand the shocks of Time and Accident; extending its domain over the elements; incorporating in itself the sea and the wild creatures, and so unafraid of them; surrounding Chance and taking it captive. Its consciousness of immense Extension in time and space indicates its ethereal character; its consciousness of Power indicates its strongly material composition; its consciousness of Knowledge, the penetrating subtle quality of it. And so we forebode, beside and within the very local body which we know best (and which is expressive of our more local selves), another body expressive of our more universal nature—a body built of swift, far-extending ethereal elements, subtle and penetrating, yet powerfully massive and material; closely knit in itself, not easily disturbed or dislocated, enduring for æons; yet sensitive in the highest degree, and twining its nerves and fibres through all Creation—sharing the life of all creatures” (232–33). Writing of an alternate model of community in “Finite History,” Nancy suggests that “Community is the community of others, which does not mean that several individuals possess some common nature in spite of their differences, but rather

222 • Notes

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

that they partake only of their otherness. Otherness, at each moment, is the otherness of each ‘myself,’ which is ‘myself ’ only as an other. Otherness is not a common substance, but it is on the contrary the nonsubstantiality of each ‘self ’ and of its relationship with the others. All the selves are related through their otherness, which means that they are not ‘related’; in any case, not in any determinable sense of relationship. They are together, but togetherness is otherness” (Birth to Presence, 155). Glossing this definition, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes that: “In immanentism [organic community] it is the community itself, the people or the nation, that is the work (oeuvre) following the conception acknowledged by Romanticism of the work as subject and the subject as work: the ‘living artwork’ indeed, though this in no way prevents it from working lethally” (Heidegger, Art and Politics, 70). This presentation of the vocalist’s “cry” shares much with Jean-François Lyotard’s understanding of avant-garde aesthetics in The Inhuman. He claims, for example, that “the aim for the arts, especially of painting and music, can only be that of approaching matter [the latter defined as ‘the failure of thought, its inert mass, stupidity’ (38)]. Which means approaching presence without recourse to the means of presentation. We can manage to determine a color or a sound in terms of vibrations, by specifying pitch, duration and frequency. But timbre and nuance (and both terms apply to the quality of colours as well as to sonorities) are precisely what escape this sort of determination” (139). He goes on to describe timbre and nuance in terms of “a singular, incomparable quality—unforgettable and immediately forgotten—of the grain of a skin or a piece of wood, the fragrance of an aroma, the savour of a secretion or a piece of flesh. . . . All these terms are interchangeable. They all designate the event of a passion, a passibility for which the mind will not have been prepared, which will have unsettled it, and of which it conserves only the feeling—anguish and jubilation—of an obscure debt” (141). Drawing on Althusser’s elaboration of ideological state apparatuses, for example, Tratner argues that “Percival represents a central part of the ideological system of England at the turn of the century” (226); The Waves thematizes, he suggests, “the alteration of ideology resulting from schools replacing churches: instead of an image of God, an image of the schoolboy such as Percival becomes the unique and central subject, the most important thing taught in school” (226). My reading of “Street Haunting” in what follows is indebted to Rachel Bowlby’s comprehensive reading of the text in an essay entitled “Walking, Women and Writing” (Destinations, 191–219). “Oxford Street Tide” is one of a series of six articles, collectively entitled “The London Scene,” Woolf published in Good Housekeeping in 1931 and 1932.

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Index

Please note that a page number appearing in italics indicates an endnote.

affective body, 153, 165–67, 168–75, 176 Agamben, Giorgio, 215 Althusser, Louis, 222 Armstrong, David, 216 Armstrong, Tim, 3 bacteriology: Lawrence and, 33–37; medicine and, 38–39, 46, 48–49, 63; Muthu and, 66–67, 74–75; psychoanalysis and, 33–34; tuberculosis and, 36–39, 48–49 Badiou, Alain, 113, 120, 218 bare life, 57–61, 73–74, 81, 97–98 Beard, George M., 131 Beer, Gillian, 153 Bell, Michael, 136; “Metaphysics of Modernism, The,” 136 Bergson, Henri: Being and, 114–15; Carpenter and, 115, 216; Deleuze and, 218; élan vital and, 114; on intelligence vs. intuition, 218–19; the virtual and, 113; vitalism and, 85, 167, 218; Woolf and, 137, 163, 167 Berman, Jessica, 9, 10–11; Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community, 9 Bowlby, Rachel, 190, 192, 194 Breuer, Joseph, 7 Bryder, Linda, 59, 63, 215, 216 Burrows, Trigant, 2, 24; Social Basis of Consciousness, The, 24

Butler, Judith, 14–16; Bodies that Matter, 14 Canguilhem, Georges, 82 Carpenter, Edward; Art of Creation, The, 114; Being and, 114–15; Bergson and, 216; Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, 85; intellect and, 221; Lawrence and, 87, 91; on civilization, 85; on disease, 86; the virtual and, 113; vitalism and, 85–87, 91, 102, 216; Woolf and, 163, 167 Carpenter, William, 157, 158; Mental Physiology, 157 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 131 Clarke, Bruce, 82, 83; Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, 82 Cohnheim, Julius, 214 Cole, Langton, 214 commodity culture, 186–206; in “Oxford Street Tide,” 194–96; in “Street Haunting,” 198–99; nationalism and, 190–91; urban society and, 191–98 communal subjectivity, 91–106 community: consciousness and, 32; crowds and, 176–78; habitualized body and, 162; identity and, 61, 122–23; in Mrs. Dalloway, 145, 149–50, 160, 186–87; in The Plumed Serpent, 104–6, 107; in The Waves, 152–53, 158–59, 164–67;

232 • Index individuality and, 167; infancy and, 120; Lawrence’s psychological writings and, 24–26, 28; medicine and, 61, 73; nationalism and, 102, 161, 175; organic, 73–74, 81, 97, 101, 167–75; organization and, 158; personality and, 79; tuberculosis and, 35–38, 62; urban life and, 198 Cowan, James, 27 Crary, Jonathan, 2, 3, 5 crowds, 175–78, 182–89; community and, 176–78; McDougall on, 184, 188–89; Mrs. Dalloway and, 183, 187 Dean, Tim: embodiment and, 16; on aesthetics, 13–14, 211; on cultural studies, 15 Deleuze, Gilles, 115, 124, 218 democracy: collectivity and, 120, 121–23; individualism and, 120–22; Lawrence’s view of, 101, 120–23, 218 dynamic consciousness: fields of, 94; human development and, 94–96, 116; in The Plumed Serpent, 103–4, 108; infancy and, 116, 117; mental consciousness and, 101; monadic modes, 115; nerve centers forming, 90, 93; “objective” plane of, 90–91; poles, 94; ramifications of, 92; reality and, 116; schema of, 88–89, 119; sexuality and, 97–100; unconscious and, 109–11, 118; vitality and, 91, 93, 96, 102. See also unconscious Eaton, F.E., 59–60; White Demon and How to Fight Him, The, 59 Einstein, Albert, 23, 25, 64 élan vital, 114 Eliot, T. S., 107 Ellis, David, 26–27, 212 embodiment: affective, 2, 17, 20; community and, 2, 5, 8, 12–13, 14, 19; dynamic consciousness and, 95, 104; hemorrhage and, 53–54; human embodiment, 107; incorporation and,

2, 5; infants and, 113, 116–17; leaders and, 105–6; mechanistic model of, 95; mortality and, 52–53, 55, 57; Muthu and, 72, 78; social body and, 16; tuberculosis and, 37–38, 50, 52, 56–58, 109; the unconscious and, 85, 93, 94, 115; vitality and, 85, 89–90; Woolf on, 1–2, 3 Fantasia of the Unconscious (Lawrence), 2, 17, 18; community and, 24, 101–2; consciousness and, 88, 97; critique of idealism and, 33–34, 84; sexuality and, 99; theory of relativity and, 23; vitalism and, 87 Ferguson, John, 18; mortality and, 51, 52–53; sanatoriums and, 39, 41, 43, 48, 62; Thyrea, 39, 47, 50; tubercular body and, 47, 52, 57, 73; tuberculosis and, 39, 42, 67; vitality and, 51 Foucault, Michel, 14–15 Foulerton, Alexander, 214 Freud, Sigmund: collectivism and, 152; Ellis and, 212; Enlightenment rationalism and, 137; “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 29; Lawrence and, 25, 27, 28–29; Low and, 212; natural science and, 156; positivist science and, 29, 31; Project for a Scientific Psychology, 29, 156; psychoanalysis and, 29–30, 130–32; the unconscious and, 31–32; Woolf and, 136, 137, 154 Galton, Francis, 218 Gide, André, 53–54; L’Immoraliste, 53 Gil, José, 39 Gilman, Sander, 38, 39, 214, 218 habit: disciplinary society and, 199; group psychology and, 182, 189–90; individuality and, 155; infants and, 116; James on, 139, 156–58; nervous system and, 157–58; neuroscientific discourse and, 160, 168;

Index • 233 plasticity and, 156; somatic organization and, 161, 175, 193–94, 196–97; The Waves and, 158–60, 162–65; unconscious and, 117–19 habitus phthisicus, 34, 109 Hadfield, J. A., 148–49, 158, 176; Psychology and Morals, 148 Hardt, Michael, 114, 116, 124, 199, 218 Hayles, Katherine, 26, 27 Head, Henry, 134 Henke, Suzette, 135 Henry, Holly, 9–10, 11; Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science, 9 Heywood, Christopher, 216 homoerotics, 99, 217 hygiene: Eaton on, 59–60; Ferguson on, 40–41; health and, 86; Latham on, 41–42; sanatorialism and, 68–71; social reform and, 37, 47–48, 68–73; Stewart on, 44; tubercular body and, 48–49 hysteria, 58, 129–32. See also neurasthenia idealism, 30–34 incorporation: community and, 81; corporeal economics and, 96; dynamic consciousness and, 98–100, 117; individuality and, 123–24; tubercular body and, 53–54, 81; unconscious and, 113; vital force and, 92 individualism: community and, 24, 167; democracy and, 120–22; habit and, 155; incorporation and, 123–24; Mrs. Dalloway and, 152–53; Tratner on, 167–68, 170; “Street Haunting” and, 194; tuberculosis and, 59–61; unconscious and, 84–87, 100–1, 117–18; Waves, The and, 160, 162, 167 intersubjectivity, 24–25, 27–28, 92, 98, 116, 119 James, William: Heraclitus and, 220; on consciousness, 138; on habit,

157–58; on nervous system, 156–57; on plasticity of nerve tissue, 156, 221; physical science and, 156; stream of thought and, 139–40; Woolf and, 137, 139 Joyce, James, 136, 137, 138 Koch, Robert, 37, 38–39, 63, 213 Kwinter, Sanford, 2, 3, 5 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 222 Laski, Harold, 153 Latham, Arthur, 41 Latour, Bruno, 9, 83–84 Lawrence, D. H., 1–4, 8–9, 12, 17–19; Aaron’s Rod, 2, 24, 101; Carpenter and, 87, 91; community and, 24–26, 28; “Democracy,” 120; democracy and, 101, 120–23, 218; dynamic consciousness and, 103–4, 108–11, 118; “Education of the People,” 111, 124; Freud and, 25, 27, 28–29; Kangaroo, 2, 24, 101; mental consciousness and, 82, 91–97, 102–3, 112, 116–20; Muthu and, 96, 102, 107; positivist science and, 26, 27; Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 24–25, 33, 34, 84, 112; Rainbow, The, 26, 27, 99; “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” 2, 18, 24; Studies in Classic American Literature, 2; Study of Thomas Hardy, 2; tuberculosis and, 33–35; the unconscious and, 94–96, 111–13; vitalism and, 24, 31–32; Women in Love, 2; writings on infancy: embodiment and, 113, 116–17; habit and, 116; identity and, 90, 94–95, 98; unconscious and, 94, 111–13, 115–20. See also Fantasia of the Unconscious; infancy; Plumed Serpent, The Le Bon, Gustave, 180, 182; La Psychologie des Foules, 180 Lee, Hermione, 134 Logan, Peter, 130

234 • Index Low, Barbara, 212 Lutz, Tom, 130 Lyotard, Jean-François, 16, 222 Maddox, Brenda, 35 Mann, Thomas: Magic Mountain, The, 45–46, 51, 54–57; mortality and, 51, 54, 55–56; sanatoriums and, 62; thermometry and, 45, 61; tubercular body and, 55–56, 57, 73 Marcus, Jane, 167–68, 170, 171, 175 Maudsley, Henry, 155, 158; Body and Mind, 155 McDougall, William: crowd formation and, 184, 188–89; Group Mind, The, 180–82, 188–89; group psychology and, 180–84; Introduction to Social Psychology, 180–81; on “dark places” of psychology, 138; on social sciences, 180–81; “reciprocal influence” and, 184; Tratner and, 152; Woolf and, 184 mechanicity, 72–73 Mensch, Barbara, 217 Meyers, Jeffrey, 35 “Modern Fiction” (Woolf ): James and, 138; life and, 179; Mrs. Dalloway and, 150; neuropsychology and, 140, 141, 153, 159; psychology and, 134–35 modernism, literary: bioscience and, 4, 129; collectivism and, 152; consumer culture and, 186; Freud and, 136; Henry on, 10–11; “Modern Fiction” and, 135; North on, 11–12; psychology and, 130, 134; The Waves and, 151; tuberculosis and, 9; unconscious and, 25 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf ): class and, 198; collectivity and, 20, 152–53, 167, 172, 177–78; community in, 145, 149–50, 160, 186–87; consumer culture and, 191–92; crowds and, 183, 187; embodiment and, 3; human body vs. social body in, 161; individualization and, 152–53; “Modern Fiction” and, 150; moral

regulation of community in, 159–60; nervous body and, 144–45, 150, 161, 164; neuroscience and, 150; North and, 185; organic community and, 177–78; psychology in, 19, 142, 175; urban life and, 199 Multitude, 124–25 Muthu, D.C., 63–79; bacteriology and, 66–67; Carpenter and, 85–87; hygiene and, 71; Lawrence and, 96, 102, 107; nature and, 69; Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Sanatorium Treatment, 63; resistance and, 76–77; sanitoriums and, 77–79; Science and Religion, 64; sociosymbolic order of tuberculosis and, 67–68, 70; tubercular discourse, 63–64, 65–66; vitalism and, 64–65, 66, 68–69, 73–75, 91, 92 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 11, 16, 51, 61, 72; citizens and, 170; community and, 175, 204, 219, 221–22; myth and, 171–72; organic community and, 168, 171, 215–16; otherness and, 222 national efficiency, 61, 63, 74, 96–97 nationalism: community and, 102, 105, 145–46, 150–51, 161–62, 175; crowds and, 186–87, 190–91; social medicine and, 96; The Plumed Serpent and, 102–3; Woolf and, 167–71, 175, 180, 184–85, 198 Negri, Antonio, 199 nervous body: Mrs. Dalloway and, 142–47, 150, 161–62, 199; psychology and, 129–33, 139, 162; “Street Haunting” and, 196; The Waves and, 151–52, 161–62, 167 neurasthenia: hysteria and, 131–32; medical history of, 129–32; Mrs. Dalloway and, 143, 145–47; The Plumed Serpent and, 108; Woolf and, 134. See also hysteria neuroscience/neuropsychology: community and, 176–77; embodiment and, 174; Freud and, 29, 131; hysteria and, 131; nationalism and, 167–68;

Index • 235 nervous body and, 161–62, 199; physical science and, 156; social body and, 153, 158; The Waves and, 161–64, 167, 193; Woolf and, 129–32, 140–41, 150–56, 159–60 New Modernisms, 9, 11, 13 North, Michael, 6, 11–12, 133, 185–86; Reading 1922, 11 open-air cure, 42, 62, 67, 68, 69, 76, 78, 81, 85 organic community, 167–75, 177–78; in The Plumed Serpent, 106–8; Lawrence and, 81–82, 97–98, 100–2, 119–20; Nancy and, 168, 171, 215–16; nationalism and, 102, 105, 123; nervous body and, 166; social medicine and, 61, 65, 72–74; vitality and, 105–6. See also organic dissolution; organic totality; organicity organic dissolution, 55–56 organic totality, 72–73, 123–24 organicity: consciousness and, 97–100, 108, 119–20; embodiment and, 24, 42, 72, 92, 96, 106–8, 111; Lawrence and, 23–24, 93, 116, 119; medicine and, 131, 147–48, 155–57; Muthu and, 65, 73–74, 78; tuberculosis and, 42, 55–56. See also organic community; organic dissolution; organic totality Ott, Katherine, 38, 39, 46, 63; on consumption, 213, 214–15; on symbolic power of spit, 215 Pasteur, Louis, 37 Plumed Serpent, The (Lawrence): community in, 2, 18, 24, 106; embodiment in, 106–7; political commentary in, 101–2, 123 Porter, Roy, 6, 36, 131–32 positivist science: Freud as embodiment of, 29–31; Lawrence on, 26, 27; Muthu and, 66, 70, 78; tuberculosis and, 37, 45–46, 47 psychoanalysis: consciousness and, 137; cultural significance of, 133, 137;

Ellis and, 27; hysteria and, 130–32; Lawrence and, 25–37; nervous body and, 130; Woolf and, 129. See also Freud, Sigmund; hysteria; neurasthenia psychology: moral, 161, 175, 181–82, 194–95, 198; of the crowd, 175–78, 180–89; social, 180–81 public health, 33–34, 37, 58, 68, 71. See also social medicine; tuberculosis Ransome, Arthur, 36; Campaign Against Consumption, 36 rest cure, 47, 85, 134, 143, 145, 146 Rosenburg, Charles, 213 Ryan, Judith, 220 Sadoff, Dianne, 132 Sanatorium: A Novel (Stewart): Ferguson and, 43; tubercular body in, 47, 50, 57–58; tuberculosis in, 39, 42–43 sanatorium treatment, 62–72, 146; Latham on, 41–42; Mann on, 45–47; Muthu on, 77–79; open-air cure, 78, 85; rest cure, 85. See also social medicine; tuberculosis Schneider, G. H., 139–40 scientific ideology, 82 scientific reductionism: democracy and, 120–22; Freud and, 28–32; Lawrence and, 92, 95–96; vitalism and, 83, 84, 92 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 219 sexuality: dynamic consciousness and, 93, 95–100; nerves and, 89; puberty and, 110; unconscious and, 98–99; vitalism and, 97 sheer materiality, 50, 53–54 shell shock, 130, 219 social medicine: bacteriology and, 38–39, 46, 48–49, 63; community and, 61, 65, 72–74; Lawrence and, 34, 36–37; nationalism and, 96; organicity and, 131, 147–48, 155–57; vitalism and, 70. See also public health; tuberculosis

236 • Index sputum, 49, 58–62, 213–14 Stewart, Donald, 18; expectoration and, 60; hemorrhage and, 52–54; mortality and, 51; sanatoriums and, 48, 62, 67; thermometry and, 61; tubercular body and, 39, 42–43, 47, 57, 73; tuberculosis and, 67. See also Sanatorium: A Novel stream of consciousness, 135–40 “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (Woolf ): commodity culture and, 191–92, 198; individuality in, 194; nervous body in, 196; urban space in, 178, 192 Tawney, R. H., 153 Templeton, Wayne, 35 Tratner, Michael: Althusser and, 222; on individualism, 167–68, 170; on The Waves, 152–53, 222 Trotter, Thomas, 130; View on the Nervous Temperament, A, 130 Trotter, Wilfred, 180; Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 180 tubercular body: Ferguson and, 47, 52, 57, 73; Mann and, 55–56, 57, 73; Stewart and, 39, 42–43, 47, 57, 73 tuberculosis: the body and, 37–43; cultural space and, 38–39; current understanding of, 213–14; Ferguson and, 41–42, 48, 52; Gide and, 53; identity and, 61–62; impact on society, 35–37; Lawrence’s battle against idealism and, 33–35; Lawrence’s biographical writings and, 35; literature and, 39–40; Mann and, 55–59; Muthu and, 63–68, 70, 73–74, 75, 77; NAPT and, 59; sanatoriums and, 62–68; sociosymbolic and, 50; Stewart and, 42–47. See also social medicine unconscious: the body and, 108; body morphology and, 110; in The Plumed Serpent, 103; individuality and, 100–1, 117–18; infants and, 112–13, 115; Lawrence and, 94–96,

111–13; mental consciousness and, 93; physiological basis of, 98; sexuality and, 99; vitalism and cellular basis of, 84–91; vitality and, 108–9 vitalism: and cellular basis of the Lawrencian unconscious, 84–91; Ferguson and, 51, 57; Lawrence and, 24, 31–32; medicine and, 70; Muthu and, 64–65, 67, 69–70, 73–74, 78; nature and, 69; sanatoriums and, 63, 69, 78; science and, 64–65; tubercular body and, 67, 74 Waves, The (Woolf ): Big Ben in, 179; collectivity and, 152–53, 162; community and, 170–71, 174, 175, 177–78; consciousness and, 151, 193; embodiment and, 162; individualization and, 160, 162, 167; nervous body and, 161, 167, 196; neuropsychology and, 158, 159 Wilkinson, Carnac, 70–71; Principles of Immunity in Tuberculosis, 70 Wingfield, R. C., 213 Women’s Cooperative Guild, 3 Woolf, Leonard, 153, 167 Woolf, Virginia, 1, 3, 4, 8-10, 12, 1920; Bergson and, 137, 163, 167; Between the Acts, 3; Carpenter and, 163, 167; Freud and, 136, 137, 154; James and, 137, 139; “London Scene, The” 178, 194; McDougall and, 184; Orlando, 3; “Oxford Street Tide,” 194–98; Room of One’s Own, A, 3; Three Guineas, 3, 134–35, 175. See also "Modern Fiction"; Mrs. Dalloway; "Street Haunting: A London Adventure"; Waves, The Wutz, Michael, 26–27 Zizek, Slavoj, 48–49, 215; Sublime Object of Ideology, The, 48 Zwerdling, Alex, 219–20

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