Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture This page intentionally left blank Lamentation and...

Author: Rebecca Saunders

48 downloads 1600 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

This page intentionally left blank

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

Rebecca Saunders

LAMENTATION AND MODERNITY IN LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND CULTURE Copyright © Rebecca Saunders, 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: 978-1-4039-8385-5 ISBN-10: 1-4039-8385-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: October 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Aux copains Tim, Dolly, the Other Rebecca, Nancy, Sarah, Laurent, Elise, Kathy, and Cheryl Des bateaux j'en ai pris beaucoup Mais le seul qu'ait tenu le coup Qui n'ai jamais viré de bord Mais viré de bord Naviguait en père peinard Sur la grand-mare des canards Et s'app'lait les Copains d'abord Les Copains d'abord (Georges Brassens)


C o n t e n ts

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

1

Heavy Losses: Modernity, Trauma, Philosophy

2

“And the Women Wailed in Answer”: The Lament Tradition

45

Lamentation and (Dis)Possession: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and the New South

83

Lamentation and Purity: Mallarmé’s “Hommage,” Wagnérisme, and French Nationalism of the 1880s

109

Lamentation and National Identity: Hatzis’s To diplo biblio and the (De)Construction of Modern Greece

129

Lamentation and Gender: Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable and the (De)Colonization of the Body

147

3 4 5 6

1

Epilogue

171

Notes

177

Index

225


Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

T

he germ of this book was my dissertation, and its roots were nourished by my professors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, particularly by my dissertation director, David Hayman, to whom I am grateful for generous intellectual encouragement during my years in graduate school; by Próspero Saíz, whose provocative seminars strongly influenced my thought; and by Mary Lydon, whose brilliance, inspiration, and friendship remain with me in the sorrow of her absence. I also gratefully acknowledge both the UW–Madison and the Camargo Foundation for their support of this early stage of my research. I wish to warmly thank the American Association of University Women for granting me a year’s fellowship to pursue this book. I also thank Ron Fortune, the former chair of my department at Illinois State University, for his exemplary support of junior faculty research. My work as co-editor of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East has afforded me new perspectives on this project, and I thank Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi and Duke University Press for this opportunity. A number of friends and colleagues—Rebecca Karoff, Tim Scheie, Elizabeth Dolly Weber, Jen Travis, and Max Gulias II—have enriched this work by reading and commenting on portions of it. I am grateful to each of them for their generosity and insights. Others, such as Nesta Ramazani, Nabil Abu-Assal, Coco Owen, and numerous interlocutors at the annual meetings of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, have shaped this work through ongoing discussions. Vaheed Ramazani read and discussed this work with me over the course of many years; I am indebted to him for innumerable references, insights, and corrections, as well as for his wisdom and encouragement. The judicious evaluation of Palgrave’s anonymous reviewer greatly strengthened the final version of the manuscript. The index is the handiwork of Rebecca Francescatti. Finally, I lovingly thank my partner and stepson, Max and Max Gulias (II and III), for surrounding me with the creative, intellectually fertile, and supportive home that made finishing this book possible. A portion of Chapter 3 of this book appeared as “On Lamentation and the Redistribution of Possessions: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and the New South,” in Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 4 (1996): 730–62. © Purdue Research Foundation. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “‘Shaking Down

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the Pillars’: Lamentation, Purity, and Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage’ to Wagner” in PMLA 111, no. 5 (1996): 1106–20. Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association. Portions of Chapter 6 appeared in “Decolonizing the Body: Gender, Nation, and Narration in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’enfant de sable,” in Research in African Literatures 37, no. 4 (2006): 136–60. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.

P re fac e

Nietzsche’s notorious announcement of the death of God depicted God’s

absence (the absence, that is, of transcendence, ideals, principles, values, and meaning) not as simple non-existence but as an epochal transformation: it described modernity in terms of traumatic loss. And Nietzsche’s announcement by no means stands alone. The conception of modernity as traumatic loss or crisis is a significant and frequent motif in literary, philosophical, and social texts from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We could as well begin this argument with the crisis of personal agency attendant upon Freud’s “discovery” of the unconscious, Marx’s descriptions of alienation, of loss of self and the fruits of one’s labor, Weberian “Entzauberung der Welt” (disenchantment of the World), or Durkheimian anomie. We could begin with the shaking of European imperialism and its attendant ideologies or the devastating events of World Wars: these texts, perceptions, or events could all be rallied to testify to the conception of the modern as a moment of traumatic loss, one that is radically new (or “re-originated”), a moment of epistemological upheaval, cognitive disorientation, symbolic crisis, and loss of values, a moment imbued with melancholy, anxiety, nostalgia, or dread. But to take this broad interpretation of modernity at face value, to read literature, history, and philosophy as simple records of loss, is, I believe, to overlook the troubled nature of loss itself, the ways in which languages of loss may produce crisis, and the dramatic social consequences those lamentations entail.1 Without in any way disavowing that many modern lives have been shaped by painful experiences of loss both personal and collective, this book aims to rethink the relation of traumatic loss to modernity in light of a number of crucial but often overlooked considerations: First, loss is characterized by confusion and the burden of belated reconstruction. The moment of loss—whether one loses a set of keys, a parent, dignity, a war—produces disorientation and bewilderment. Both the experience of loss and the object that has been lost must be retrospectively (re)constructed: I must retrace my steps to decipher the moment at which I lost my keys; we must (re)construct the character of the homeland now lost. Second, loss is not all one thing: it can be synonymous with destruction, with various kinds of obstruction (as when an object is misplaced or lost from view), or with conceptual transfer (as one loses an intact and visible piece of property through a legal transaction). Loss can also stand for defeat or failure (as one loses a lawsuit or game of chess), entail ideological as well

xii

Preface

as material property (as one loses rights, “face,” or nerve), and be used quasieuphemistically to stand for death. Indeed the term death, partaking of all these senses of loss without being contained by any of them, is often used quasi-metaphorically to stand for other kinds of losses. Third, losses vary not only in kind, but in degree. Losing my keys and losing a child may bear some structural affinities, but they are in no sense affectively equivalent. Indeed, even the same object may be invested with different meanings and hence produce dramatically different experiences of loss: whether or not a broken dish is a catastrophe may depend on whether I inherited it from my great-grandmother or got it at a garage sale. Even those quotidian losses whose repression constitutes the ordinary—the losses, for example, that inhere in the passage of time, the constitution of subjectivity, or the practice of signification—may at times erupt into consciousness and produce the symptoms of crisis: an overwhelming dread of death, a melancholic collapse, a symbolic aphasia. It is also quite possible to lose something partially; I may lose a portion of my investment or a traumatized friend may seem partly lost to me, although she is physically present. Fourth, as the foregoing examples attest, the concept of loss is imbricated in a complex web of interrelationships—with, for example, notions of mourning, trauma, crisis, negativity, absence, lack, memory, and death. A tremendous amount of semantic seepage occurs between these terms, and while it is crucial to recognize that they are not synonymous, it is equally crucial, as I shall contend at greater length below, to analyze the ideological work performed by their collusion. Such an analysis is, I argue, both clarified by, and a significant perspective on, a body of philosophy in which those nuances play a seminal role: Nietzsche’s description of nihilism, Heidegger’s discussions of equipmental breakdown and “being-towards-death,” and Derrida’s exploration of the deathliness in signs. Fifth, the symptoms of traumatic loss, as psychological and psychoanalytic work has taught us, are often disguised and displaced: they may not be overtly recognizable, may indeed be empowered by their very obscurity. Thus, modernity’s “sense of loss” may be manifest not only in texts that announce themselves to be elegies or laments, or that contain explicit portrayals of crisis, but also in the inconspicuous rhetorical gestures of a much larger body of texts. Finally and most importantly, loss serves ideological purposes. While loss is primarily negatively marked, it is also crucial to positively valued notions such as purity and progress, indeed to modernity itself. Moods related to loss, such as melancholy, anger, and dread, are also potent instruments of ideology, as is the confusion characteristic of trauma. Indeed, as I will demonstrate in the chapters that follow, modernity’s languages of loss have been central to the formation of national identity and processes of (de)colonization, to attendant conceptions of physical and metaphysical purity, to the construction of gender, and to the redistribution of (both ideological and material) property.

Preface

xiii

This book investigates the relation of modernity to loss through a study of a traditional response to loss: the lamentation. There are several reasons for this approach, the most significant of which is that loss itself is not there to be studied; it cannot be approached as a simple object of observation and description. The best we can do is follow after it, decipher the cognitive, affective, and material impressions it leaves behind, trace its contours from the responses it evokes. The lamentation is not only one such response, but also a long and rich tradition that is, in my view, of exceptional interpretative value because it is at once a cultural artifact, a gendered language, a ritual performance, a psychological witness, and a political tool. In many respects, this project can be seen as bringing together these two discourses: the traditional lamentation and the discourse of loss in/of modernity to see how they illuminate each other. Though there are some striking similarities across cultures, lamentations are inevitably embedded in specific cultural and social circumstances; they are concerned with particular losses. They are, moreover, traditionally the domain of women; in many parts of the world the lamentation is considered a gender-specific genre, formally, functionally, and thematically distinct from the epitaphios logos, encomium, or elegy. In contrast to these traditionally masculine genres, lamentations are communally and antiphonally constructed, emphasize inconsolable loss and unforgettable grief, insist on the inability of language to compensate for loss, often focus on the pain of the lamenter, and perform specific functions in mortuary ritual. The lament tradition encompasses a range of utterances from shrieks and cries to improvised oral performance to formal written texts. It is situated on the borders between language and the unutterable, between the highly formalized and the improvised, and between dance, song, poetry, and narrative. It often re-enacts psychological responses to loss and warrants investigation as an extrainstitutional meditation on trauma. Ritual lamentation, moreover, not only expresses and records grief, but is an expression intended to produce grief. A well-performed lament, even when recited long after the event of loss or performed by hired mourners, should evoke grief in participants and observers alike. The lamentation is performative, then, in J. L. Austin’s sense or, more specifically, in the way that this linguistic concept has been extended by theorists such as Judith Butler or Homi Bhabha to describe “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”2 Lamentations are also instruments of cultural power: they are significant in the construction of oral history; they ratify truth claims by the emotional force of pain and the jural force of antiphonic confirmation; they establish rights of inheritance. While performing lamentations, women’s labor becomes politically and culturally transformative. Indeed, from mourning mothers in ancient Athens to the “Women in Black” of the present, women have used mourning as a potent mode of resistance to religions, patriarchies, and states.

xiv

P R E FAC E

The traditional language of lamentation also bears an uncanny resemblance to many of the literary devices most commonly associated with literary modernism: its techniques of non-linearity and rearrangements of time and space, for example, which are strikingly like the discontinuity, uncertainty, and fragmentation of the language of lamentation; its streamof-consciousness narration, which positions itself, like the lamentation, on the threshold of the utterable; or its multiple perspectives analogous to the lamentation’s stichomythic form and shifting narrative stance. Indeed, the “extremely provisional,” “uncertain and indeterminate” articulations “heterogeneous to signification and to the sign,” by way of which Kristeva describes the modern’s revolutionary signifying practices, could equally accurately describe the hesitant, interrogative language of lamentation.3 In this book’s opening chapter, I situate my inquiry into lamentation and modernity within the broader contexts of debates on the meaning of the modern, theoretical discussions of trauma and loss, and a tributary of modern philosophy which conspicuously deploys a rhetoric of loss. This contextualization will, I hope, illuminate some of the more remote corners, and larger significance, of my argument. In my second chapter, I turn to the lament tradition and, drawing on both anthropological studies of women’s lament performances and collections of written laments, sketch the lamentation’s theoretical and social significance: its character as ritual performance, its gender specificity, its reference to a particular kind of time, its position on the border between the formulaic and improvised, its tentative and interrogative discourse, its invocations and calls to witness, its confrontation with foreignness, and its moods of melancholy, anger, and dread. The subsequent four chapters are case studies of temporally and spatially dispersed sites of modernity and provide the evidence from which my central argument is drawn. Each is focused on a specific aspect of the lamentation, its manifestation in a modern literary text, and its significance to a larger social, discursive, and material context. These chapters pay particular attention to the lamentation’s concerns with property, purity, national identity, and gender, concerns that are by no means unrelated: the demarcation of property (the proper) is largely a process of purification, while purity, which is often gendered, can function as a kind of “property”—an ideological possession synonymous with moral virtue or clear thought; nations, moreover, are customarily constituted through the construction of a “pure” ethnicity, purgation of foreign influence, and the (re)acquisition of property (a national territory).4 Chapter 3, on “Lamentation and (Dis)Possession” studies Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! in the context of the “Old” and “New” South. This chapter describes lamentation as both an act of retroactive possession and a rhetoric of dispossession. Faulknerian language and the rhetoric of the “Old South,” I argue, both demarcate territory and certify possession in a manner homologous to the lamentation. The lamentation’s rhetoric of dispossession,

Preface

xv

moreover, the manner in which its negations and privatives effect a redistribution of possessions, structurally corresponds, I argue, to both Faulknerian prose and the social program conceived by New South spokesmen. In Chapter 4, “Lamentation and Purity,” I study Mallarmé’s “Hommage” to Wagner, wagnérisme, and French Nationalism of the 1880s. I argue that Mallarmé constructs a “crise de vers” that mimes the moment of lamentation in the interest of producing his celebrated poetic purity, but that he constructs this purity out of the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement: contact with the foreign, semantic contagion, syntactic fragmentation. The significance of this defilement, I contend, spreads in multiple directions: it is instrumental in producing newness and in mediating Mallarmé’s professional rivalry with Wagner, it bears witness to the domestic crisis of the Troisième République, and it functions as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation. My fifth chapter, on “Lamentation and National Identity,” investigates Greek novelist Dimitris Hatzis’s To diplo biblio and the (de)construction of modern Greece. This chapter describes three sites of loss in the structure of the nation: an inaugural crisis sublimated into national myth, the recuperation of a lost identity, and a series of “losses-in-exchange” that the nation obscures beneath a mechanism of compensation. In Chapter 6, on “Lamentation and Gender,” I study Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable and the (de)colonization of the body. Through Ben Jelloun’s tale of a transgendered youth (a young Moroccan girl raised as a boy), I describe the losses that characterize the body colonized by gender and analyze the implicit analogy between this bodily colonization and the political (de)colonization of Morocco that functions as the novel’s background. These case studies have led me to ten hypotheses on the role of lamentation in modernity, which I set out skeletally in the preface and develop throughout the rest of this book. While these hypotheses need to be tried out in other, divergent local instances, the (con)texts I have studied suggest that the language of lamentation—here conceived as a mode that nomadically inhabits diverse genres, texts, and discourses—constitutes a significant and consequential thread in the fabric of modernity. 1. Lamentation establishes the event of loss. The formal and public gestures of a lamentation verify the fact of loss; by marking events as “loss” or “crisis,” the lamentation formulates inchoate and polysemic circumstances into loss. The lamentation thus regulates which losses merit being marked and mourned. For not all adversity merits ratification by the public ritual of a lamentation: crises suffered by those without proprietary rights, for example, losses accepted as part of an exchange relation, or the sort of sustained trauma that, rather than an exceptional, disjunctive moment, is merely a disregarded circumstance of the everyday. Formulating trauma into a language of lamentation has, for example, been central to the establishment of modern nations, which have

xvi

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Preface

appropriated the gestures of lamentation to kindle communal mourning, to inscribe present conditions in an affectively potent language of loss and mark that loss as intolerable. Lamentation is a form of retroactive possession. Language about loss is perforce language about possession: loss is always loss of something, and of a particular something perceived to be properly possessed by oneself. Prior to mourning, the lamentation must construct a lost object, lay claim to its possession, and (re)construct its value and significance. Though speculative and uncertain, the lamentation’s acts of retroactive possession are linguistically ratified by an insistent possessiveness and quite capable of constructing a “possession” that never existed—an Old South of cavalier landowners and happy slaves, a cohesive Greek (or Italian or German) national identity, or an idyllic, pre-colonial society. Lamentation furnishes a logic of loss and continuity. The lamentation at once retroactively constructs a lost object, declares it utterly destroyed, and preserves its memory. The language of lamentation can thus simultaneously place an object or event at an inaccessible remove— rhetorically destroy it—and declare an absolute fidelity to it. Lamentation is a return of the repressed. In modernity, it represents a return of the ritual and irrational that have been repressed by philosophy. Its anger and disorder, its indictment of justice and calls for revenge, are a return of a violence and chaos repressed by social order and law. Its melancholic mood exposes the losses repressed and obscured by signification. Its urgent concern with material conditions is a return of an embodied significance that has been repressed by symbolic systems and philosophical idealism. Lamentation is a sign of newness and purity. It marks a moment when destruction has produced the radically new: when the world, “reoriginated” through catastrophe, has become primeval, strange, and inexplicable. Indeed, destruction is so intimately associated with the production of newness and purity that it may function as a sign of the new or the pure. Such signs, moreover, increasingly function as substitutes for their referents; the very act of destruction itself—however excessive or gratuitous, however independent of the legitimately new—may produce the appearance of newness or purity, as may a language that “records” such destruction. The destruction of old knowledge, for example, is easily purveyed as the production of new knowledge, and—because formulations of knowing (revelation, disclosure, aletheia) often rely on a primary act of destruction (of cover or forgetting)—as knowledge itself, as truth. Lamentation constructs desire. Because desire is a kind of anticipatory loss—an anticipated possession and its lack—the lamentation, which chronicles loss, inevitably produces desire: for a lost object, a forgotten past, a less aversive future. Put otherwise, a language of loss rhetorically impoverishes the present and thus provides the justification for radically

P R E FAC E

7.

8.

9.

10.

xvii

altering it. This devaluation of the present often coincides in modern texts with the recuperation of an older, putatively more authentic past; it also serves the ideal of progress fetishized by modern industrial nations. Intense desire may, moreover, produce traumatic symptoms and thereby implicitly call for recovery, as well as confound interpretation and memory. Lamentation disrupts social discipline. The wild and disorderly behavior that characterizes the lament, its violent expressions of anger and blame (against personal enemies, institutions, the state) are alien to the equanimity demanded of social discourse and law; they are modes of expression associated with barbarians and the insane; they interrupt the microphysics of power governing disciplinary society. Re-enacting the dissolution of social order, the lamentation, in its performativity, may contribute to the destruction of (a) social order, to the collapse of the meanings and distinctions on which that order is founded. Lamentation resists logical resolution. The lamentation marks a moment when experience is at once incomprehensible and urgently significant, when circumstances resist sublimation into philosophically verifiable, or culturally useful, meaning. Not unlike numerous texts of modernism, it forages for significance in that which is discarded by, and disruptive to, philosophical idealism: the irrational and ambiguous, the particular and anomalous, the fragmented, provisional, and material. Embedded in rituals that are historically prior to philosophy, it mingles with the primitive, the illogical, and the feminine. It reiterates a moment when one can not see through or beyond material conditions and when philosophy, consequently, seems frighteningly impotent. Lamentation disorders the Symbolic. Expressive of a moment when relationships of correspondence have been shattered and experience no longer fits into language, lamentations reenact, and may precipitate, symbolic crisis. The inconsolable grief expressed in the lamentation, which rejects language as a replacement for the lost object and refuses to accept a sign as compensation for loss, contests the representational claims of language. For in the lamentation, words are no longer an adequate vehicle for representing the world and the very possibility of compensation is inconceivable. Lamentation ratifies discourse with the affective potency of death. The melancholy, angry, and dreadful moods that attach to the lamentation lend any discourse a formidable emotional intensity. Such moods, shielded from intervention and critique by their terrible power, spread from performers to witnesses; they infect judgment, incite exorbitant response, goad to action.


Chapter

1

H e av y L o s s e s : M o d e r n i t y, Tr au m a , P h i l o s o p h y

A swarm of contested meanings, inferences, and affects, modernity is a

term as vexed as the traumatic loss commonly associated with it; analyzing the collusion of modernity and trauma thus requires that we nuance and historicize both of those concepts, even if we resist defining them categorically. This chapter proposes a number of alternative descriptions of modernity—as a time period, a complex of institutions, a structure of social relations, an experience or attitude, an epistemology, a particular conception of subjectivity, a value judgment, and an instrument of Euro-American hegemony—then turns to a discussion of trauma and its history and theorizations within psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and literary analysis. Finally, I turn to an examination of three seminal thinkers of modernity: to Nietzsche and his conceptions of creative destruction, uncertainty, and (in)justice; to Heidegger and notions of breakdown, anxiety, and “being-towards-death”; and to Derrida, his language of catastrophe, and his elaboration of the deathliness in signification.

The Culture of Modernity Modernity designates neither a homogenous or clearly defined time period nor a stable object of knowledge. I want to suggest a series of interwoven narratives, however, that, while by no means exhausting the meanings of modernity, at least adumbrate its complexity, its various temporal and geographical incarnations, and its sometimes tense negotiations between diversity and uniformity.

2

L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s

Modernity as a Time Period Circumstances are routinely unfaithful to temporal containment, and the practice of delineating time periods is as much a process of disciplining untoward details as it is a means of understanding. The time period we call “modernity” is no exception; its onset has been variously identified with events such as Renaissance discovery and world exploration, the Protestant Reformation, the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution, or the rise of industrialized capitalism. These beginnings, conceived of as a rupture with the past, institute what Bernard Yack calls a “residual category”—antiquity, traditional society, the Middle Ages, monarchical government—which, by way of opposition, make modernity into a coherent temporal construct.1 But there is also a frequently marked rupture later within modernity, a “late modernity” that begins in the latter half of the nineteenth century and extends through the twentieth, when the term modernity itself comes into use. This later modernity makes of “early” modernity its own residual category to the degree that Matei Calinescu can speak of “two distinct and bitterly conflicting modernities.”2 Late modernity, which is the subject of this book, is largely constituted through its opposition to Enlightenment conceptions of the subject, reason, science, and liberal democracy, which it dismantles and mourns to produce its own sense of modernity. By no means irrelevant to this task is the concurrently appearing body of aesthetic practices known as “modernism.” For the purposes of this study, I take late modernity to extend into the period after World War II, into the purportedly “postmodern,” though I tend to resist this designation because the residual category on which it is constructed has so often been an oversimplified, and conspicuously Eurocentric, caricature of modernity.3

Modernity as a Complex of Institutions The traditional sociological depiction of modernity narrates the rise, and social effects, of a cluster of economic and political institutions in the nineteenth century: industrialization, capitalism, and urbanization; a large-scale market economy based on mass production and consumption and a complex division of labor; and secular political power, the nation state, liberal democracy, and the interstate system.4 These sociological transformations are collusive with other well-publicized characteristics of modernity, such as Enlightenment beliefs in human reason and progress, altered conceptions of subjectivity, and a body of experiences and moods supposed to epitomize modernity, such as perpetual change, uncertainty, alienation, or anomie. They are also often depicted as loss (e.g., the decline of a traditional social order) that may also be perceived as, and is the precondition for, gain (e.g., the rise of dynamic social systems).

H e av y L o s s e s : M o d e r n i t y, T r a u m a , P h i l o s o p h y

3

Two recent theorists of modernity, Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens, have revised this picture, Foucault depicting modernity less as a matter of institutions than as a new modality of power, and Giddens describing modernity’s institutional discontinuities as a matter of “time-space distanciation.” Foucault contends that the spectacular and discontinuous exercise of sovereignty characteristic of the ancien régime, was replaced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe by novel mechanisms of discipline that increasingly infiltrated the social body and transformed it into a disciplinary society. Characterized by the production of useful, legible, docile bodies, whose economic utility is increased and political force decreased, this microphysics of power was put to work in the military, in educational institutions and hospitals, and, later, in workshops and factories. It also inaugurated a new regime of surveillance, he argues, in which time, behavior, and speech are integrated into a microscopic gratification-punishment system in which the “the whole indefinite domain of the non-conforming” is punishable and in which discipline, formerly “expected to neutralize dangers,” now was “being asked to increase the possible utility of individuals.”5 Concentrating on late—or what he calls “reflexive”—modernity, Giddens proposes that we should reformulate the discontinuity between modernity and traditional societies in terms of “time-space distanciation”: The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between “absent” others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction. In conditions of modernity, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric: that is to say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them.6

Fundamental to the dynamism of modernity, this time-space distanciation makes accessible options and possibilities that would otherwise be unavailable locally as much as it entails a “loss” of locality, familiarity, and personal interaction. Giddens terms this process “disembedding”—“‘the lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”7

Modernity as an Epistemology Those institutions that star in the traditional sociological script, as well as the disciplinary mechanisms identified by Foucault and the time-space distanciation marked by Giddens, are indicative of specific manners of understanding and distinguishable ways of producing knowledge. Capitalism, industrialization, and liberal democracy, according to the most familiar plot, both condition, and are conditioned by, the Enlightenment valorization of reason, which seemed to promise “an unending era of material progress and prosperity, the abolition of prejudice and superstition and the mastery of the forces of nature based on the expansion of human knowledge and understanding.”8

4


In Weber’s depiction of modernity, the formation of capitalism is governed by the instrumental adaptation of means to ends; this instrumental reason is both subtended by the prestige accorded to the scientific method and collusive with a secular consciousness that focuses on the material present rather than a spiritual elsewhere. In Foucault’s view, modernity’s new ways of producing and classifying knowledge are also techniques of power. New systems of classification and discipline, such as the timetable, medical record, examination, and documentary archive “constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge.”9 “[C]ombining hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgment,” these classificatory systems are the “dark side” of Enlightenment processes: “the general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle” were subtended, that is, by multiple disciplinary “systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical. . . . [W]hereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate.”10 The knowledge produced by Enlightenment ideology, the furtive trajectories of which are traced by Foucault, begins to deteriorate in late modernity, according to Giddens, when knowledge becomes increasingly reflexive and unstable. “The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character.”11 This reflexivity, both the outcome and undoing of Enlightenment principles, subverts certainty and precludes mastery: “no knowledge under conditions of modernity is knowledge in the ‘old’ sense, where ‘to know’ is to be certain.”12 Indeed, “modernity institutionalizes the principle of radical doubt and insists that all knowledge takes the form of hypotheses: claims that may very well be true, but which are in principle always open to revision and may have at some point to be abandoned.”13 Giddens concentrates on the role of sociology in this epistemic shift, but others clearly have played their part in it: theorists such as Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin, and Marx, as well as numerous innovators in literature and the arts, contributed to the demise of Enlightenment rationality. So too did the fact that, for many, belief in progress or the emancipatory potential of reason was largely obviated by the experience of world wars, the brutalities of colonization, and the evident tenacity of racial terror. This undoing of instrumental reason, scientific method, progress, and mastery is widely narrated as an epistemological crisis, lamented as the loss of truth. The mechanisms, ideological commitments, and material effects of this epistemological “crisis” are a central concern of this book.

Modernity as Ontology Not unlike the story of knowledge, the fate of the subject in modernity might be narrated in two episodes: a first Enlightenment phase productive


5

of the individual and a second phase, coincident with aesthetic modernism, that challenges and fragments the subject. “The Enlightenment subject,” writes Stuart Hall, “was based on a conception of the human person as a fully centered, unified individual, endowed with the capacities of reason, consciousness, and action, whose ‘center’ consisted of an inner core which first emerged when the subject was born and unfolded with it, while remaining essentially the same—continuous or ‘identical’ with itself—throughout the individual’s existence.”14 This unified, stable identity, guarantor of both reason and mastery, is called upon to—and will inevitably—subordinate nature, irrational traditions, superstition, and deviant behaviors, as well as the unenlightened individuals and populations who perpetuate them.15 But as Virginia Woolf remarked, “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.”16 And indeed the institutional and epistemological transformations of late modernity entailed significant reconfigurations of the subject, often narrated as a “crisis” of essential Enlightenment identities. Marx and Freud both bear a certain responsibility for subverting the integrity of the Enlightenment subject, insisting respectively on its economic and unconscious determinations. The trauma of world wars also contributed to a sense of subjective fragmentation, to a loss of a stable sense of self, as did aesthetic conventions of modernism, which both expressed and constructed a multiperspectival, fractured, or fluid subjectivity. The Enlightenment subject, it is crucial to recognize, was almost entirely conceived of as European, bourgeois, and male. The idea of the modern was, as Rita Felski argues, “deeply implicated from its beginnings with a project of domination over those seen to lack this capacity for reflective reasoning,”17 most notable among which were women and non-Europeans. Even many modernist versions of the subject continued to figure “an autonomous male free of familial and communal ties,” that Felski depicts participating in “an Oedipal revolt against the tyranny of authority . . . grounded in an ideal of competitive masculinity.”18 But if the transformation was neither as sudden or comprehensive as Woolf’s ironic pronouncement suggests, the late modern period did witness major social realignments of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and “race,” all of which were increasingly perceived to inflect, and even constitute, identity. Feminism, anti-imperialism, racial justice movements, and global migrations contributed to a revised conception of subjectivity, seen as composed of multiple, even contradictory subject positions, capable of assuming different identities in different situations without necessarily cohering into a unified self.

Modernity as an Experience These transformations of society, knowledge, and subjectivity are also widely held to be accompanied by cognitive transformations, by “experiences” or “attitudes” that are prototypically modern. The most pervasive experience

6


produced by late modernity is, as expressed in that well-loved passage from Marx and Engels, one of ceaseless development, progress, and change: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them all the relations of society. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man at last is forced to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his fellow men.19

This experience of ceaseless transformation is accompanied by a sense of alienation that, for the proletariat, is a loss not only of the products of one’s labor, but of one’s “essential being”: What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? First the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. . . . The external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. . . . The worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.20

The “experience” of modernity has been darkly depicted by numerous other theorists: for Weber, the modern is a disenchanted world bereft of meaning, driven by an instrumental rationality that simultaneously discredits traditional belief systems but is incapable of producing meaning on its own; for Freud, it is largely a frustration of the pleasure principle, exacerbated by the fact that humans’ newly-won powers over space and time have not “increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and ha[ve] not made them feel happier”;21 for Durkheim, it is an experience of anomie, of disorientation and the loss of shared moral values; for Kierkegaard, a spiritual “leveling” that substitutes a sickly self-satisfaction for passion and truth; for de Tocqueville, the threat of social disintegration consequent upon the rise of individualism; and for Baudelaire or Kafka, the isolated, estranged experience of an anonymous character in a crowded city. Giddens’s account of modernity also arrives at the familiar experiential topoi of anxiety, dread, and meaninglessness. The experience of trust that, he argues, is central to late modernity is also a repressed anxiety. The disembedding processes and time-space distanciation characteristic of modern life necessitate trust in the expert knowledge of others (e.g., architects, engineers, medical doctors) and in the efficacy of mechanisms and systems (e.g., buildings, modes of transportation, medical treatments) that one cannot verify and


7

that largely take the form of faceless commitments. While trust in such systems is “central to ontological security in conditions of modernity,” it creates “novel forms of psychological vulnerability,” and when such systems falter, “existential angst or dread” result.22 In Giddens’s account, moreover, modernity represses not only the possibility of crisis, but the actualities of madness, criminality, sickness, death, and sexuality. He proposes the term “sequestration of experience” to describe the modern “separation of day-today life from contact with experiences which raise potentially disturbing existential questions.”23 The “internally referential systems” in which modern people largely operate provide ostensibly secure environments and protection from disturbing questions, but the routines that subtend them are largely lacking in meaning and provide few resources for individuals’ inevitable encounters with sequestered aspects of experience. As we shall see, the lament is precisely the sort of discourse that must be sequestered: it disrupts modernity’s speciously secure environments, poses disturbing questions, and acknowledges humans’ lack of control. Indeed, when and where lamentation emerges, it is often perceived to fuse with other sequestered aspects of modernity: it is a form of madness, indecently close to nature, sickness, and death, and sometimes against the law.

Modernity as a Value Judgment The earliest sense of the word modern, from Latin modo (just now), was nearer our sense of contemporary, according to Raymond Williams. But from the Renaissance onward, there existed a conventional contrast between the ancient and modern in which the modern fell consistently on the unfavorable side of the comparison. In the late nineteenth century, however, this valuation was largely inverted. No doubt in large part as an effect of capitalism, industrialization, and the values that subtended them, the term modern “became virtually equivalent to improved or satisfactory or efficient.”24 Thus despite the disconcerting experiences of modernity sketched above, in late modernity, the term modern had taken on an “unquestionably favorable or desirable” meaning in much of European culture, and it is clear that the transformations attendant upon modernity could be met with either anguish or celebration, experienced as either crisis or exhilaration, rhetorically performed as either loss or gain. “There are certainly forces there,” wrote Nietzsche, “prodigious forces, but ones which are wild, primordial, and completely merciless. One looks upon them with uneasy expectation, as one might look into the cauldron in a witch’s kitchen: at any moment there can be flashes of lightning heralding terrible appearances.”25 The “prodigious forces” of modernity have not, to be sure, lacked their zealous proponents. Matthew Arnold, Guillaume Apollinaire, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Le Corbusier are among the most notable, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti certainly the most delirious. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of

8


Futurism” exults in the “aggressive action” and “feverish insomnia” of modernity, the magnificence of speed, the techno-sublimity of planes and automobiles, and the eradication of time, space, and impossibility.26 Somewhat more soberly, Marshall Berman’s influential study All That Is Solid Melts into Air contends that modern society, “although racked with pain and misery and riven with uncertainty, nevertheless enables men and women to become freer and more creative than men and women have ever been. . . . The fact that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ is a source of strength and affirmation, not of despair. If everything must go, then let it go: modern people have the power to create a better world than the world they have lost.”27 But as Leo Bersani points out, these two attitudes—celebration and lamentation—are not so much opposed, as related to, even productive of, each other: The type of historical reflection about the times we live in, expressed by efforts to define discontinuities between the present and the past, is perhaps always motivated by a need for historical celebration or historical mourning. Modernism was rich in this type of reflection, and it included paeans to the presumably new consciousness of the times and elegiac expressions of regret for the invaluable and irrecoverable modes of consciousness presumably enjoyed in former times. And each of these moods can of course nourish the other: an apocalyptic sense of loss gives an unprecedented glamour to the notion of modernity; it summons the modern writer to nothing less than the reinvention of the terms and conditions of human experience.28

Modernity as Euro-American Hegemony The conspicuously European character of the subjectivities, institutions, and experiences foregrounded in conventional narratives of modernity is symptomatic of the degree to which modernity itself has been conceived of as “Western” or “European,” formulated as much as a geography as a time period, and defined as much by the residual categories of “non-Western,” “underdeveloped,” or “uncivilized,” as by the temporal category of the past. This conflation of the culture of European modernity (of industrialized, urban, secular society) with the temporal concept of modernity (the present) is underwritten by major theorists of modernity such as Hegel, Marx, and Weber. In Charles Taylor’s analysis, this “acultural” theory, rather than recognizing modernity itself as a culture (valuing scientific consciousness, a secular outlook, instrumental rationality, etc.), conceives modernity as culture-neutral and the transition to modernity as an inevitable, “natural,” development that all societies are destined to undergo.29 This conflation of modernity with Western culture relegates non-Western cultures and traditions to the past, to backwardness and irrelevance, and results in what Michael Hanchard describes as “racial time”: “inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate


9

groups . . . unequal temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources, power, and knowledge.”30 This teleological conception of modernity as inevitable trajectory was also a major ideological constituent of colonialism. If all societies are naturally moving toward modernity, the argument ran, some are clearly moving more sluggishly than others and advanced, Enlightened, civilized societies bear the duty to lead others from their darkness. This Eurocentric version of modernity, moreover, relegates to the unconscious the degree to which modernity has relied on the rest of the world for its identity, materials, and labor, facts that remain discreetly concealed by that “innocent modernity” that, as Paul Gilroy puts it, “emerges from the apparently happy social relations that graced post-Enlightenment life in Paris, Berlin, and London.”31 In addition to being a story of Enlightenment, secularization, and industrialization, modernity is also a period of maritime exploration, of Europe’s mutually transformative contacts with other peoples and cultures, and of the exploitation of those peoples through commerce, conquest, and colonization. “These ‘Others,’” Hall argues, “were incorporated into the West’s image of itself—into its language, its systems of representation, its forms of knowledge, its visual imagery, even its conception of what sorts of people did and did not have access to reason itself.”32 Such cross-cultural relations were, moreover, not just a matter of identity formation, but also of the material construction of the institutions of modernity, the raw materials and labor for which were in large part provided through the African slave trade and colonization. The counter-cultures of modernity constructed by those enslaved and colonized peoples not only refute any essentialized description of modernity, but, as both Gilroy and Hanchard have argued, mount trenchant critiques of the Enlightenment ideology and nationalist politics constitutive of Euro-American modernity.

Modernism as Aesthetic Practice The body of aesthetic practices gathered under the name modernism—which include formal and structural experimentation, various disarticulations of realism and representation, the fragmentation of time and space, multiple and shifting perspectives, interior monologues and streams of consciousness, and the breakdown of distinctions between genres and media—have largely been interpreted as a reaction to the circumstances of late modernity. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, for example, delineate modernism as a reaction to the epistemological crises, reconfigurations of subjectivity, and experiences of disillusionment sketched above. Modernism is, they write: the art consequent on Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty principle,’ of the destruction of civilization and reason in the first World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud, and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. It is the literature of technology. It is the art consequent on the dis-establishing of

10

L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities have become subjective fictions.33

But if modernism is in some respects an expression of late modernity, it can also be interpreted as a reaction against a dominant modernity: its bourgeois order, its stifling banality and conformism, and its repression of imagination and passion in favor of instrumental reason, pragmatic calculation, and the acquisition of commodities. There is “a tension, even an incompatibility between modernity and modernism,” writes Art Berman, who views modernism as primarily a critique of modernity.34 In a similar vein, Calinescu avers that “aesthetic modernity should be understood as a crisis concept involved in a threefold dialectical opposition to tradition, to the modernity of bourgeois civilization (with its ideals of rationality, utility, progress), and, finally, to itself, insofar as it perceives itself as a new tradition or form of authority.”35 Also at stake in any historicized analysis of modernism is the degree to which modernist artifacts not only express (or respond to) the circumstances of modernity, but produce them. As I have already proposed, to read modernist texts as records of the crises of modernity is not only to disregard the problems that inhere within the entangled notions of loss, trauma, and crisis, but to ignore the ways in which—and the reasons why—texts construct these crises. We have noted that many of the literary devices we associate with modernism bear a resemblance to traditional languages of lamentation, and we have also noted that the lamentation is intended not only to express, but to produce grief. This juxtaposition is but one indication that the languages of loss characteristic of modernity may, to a greater or lesser degree, create the effects they apparently document. Indeed, the confusion and disorientation produced by crisis are also often generated by modernist works of art, and this space of confusion is the playing field of both ideology and resistance. Elaboration of this point, and of the social and material consequences that follow from it, are, in large part, the substance of this book.

Creating Trauma We have already marked the degree to which the concept of loss is imbricated with notions of mourning, trauma, crisis, negativity, absence, lack, and death, as well as a number of sites that this semantic amalgamation inhabits in modernity. These terms also appear regularly in a body of poststructural and deconstructive thought concerned with the ways in which loss inheres in language and in the epistemologies, histories, and selves that are structured by it. These terms that we have been tracing in descriptions of modernity and that underpin a body of theory are neither synonymous nor commensurate, though a vast amount of semantic seepage occurs between them. Recognizing


11

just how much is at stake in this language, Dominick LaCapra has recently analyzed two of these terms—absence and loss—and argued for the necessity of distinguishing between them. “Losses cannot be adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalized discourse of absence,” he contends, “including the absence of ultimate metaphysical foundations.” Conversely, absence at a “foundational” level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses. . . . When absence is converted into loss, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community. When loss is converted into (or encrypted in an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of) absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted.36

LaCapra’s astute clarification of these terms not only demonstrates the significance of their distinction, but testifies to the frequent leakage between them, as well as to the necessity of exploring the ideological work done by their indistinction. While I cannot by any means consider all the terms that traverse this dense intersection of modernity, poststructural theory, and the lament tradition (and a number of these concepts have been cogently theorized by others),37 I do want to pursue the very significant example of the relation of loss to trauma, both as an illustration of the kind of conceptual indistinction I have signaled and as a site of some of the most troubling problems such porous nuances generate. It is no accident that it is precisely in a stipulation on trauma and its symptoms that LaCapra acknowledges the difficulty of managing the slippage between terms: “To blur the distinction between, or to conflate, absence and loss may itself bear striking witness to the impact of trauma and the post-traumatic, which creates a state of disorientation, agitation, or even confusion. . . . Indeed, in post-traumatic situations in which one relives (or acts out) the past, distinctions tend to collapse, including the crucial distinction between then and now.”38 So far we have admittedly finessed the difficult relation between trauma and loss by speaking of “traumatic loss,” but while the terms often overlap (for example, in depictions of modernity), not all loss is traumatic and trauma does not necessarily involve loss. Although it has come colloquially to cover a broad range of experience, including modern life itself, trauma is the product of a specific socio-political and clinical genealogy that emerges with late modernity. It is an artifact that responds to symptoms produced by modern technology, warfare, and social relations; it first appears in its modern form in the nineteenth century with attempts to treat “hysterical” symptoms, the anguish produced by train accidents and shell shock and, later, by concentration camp experiences and domestic abuse. While the term itself had been around for a long time—trauma is the ancient Greek word for wound—it is in late modernity, and following the work of Charcot, Janet, Breuer, and Freud, that it was “given more psychological meaning . . . to describe the wounding of the mind brought about by sudden, unexpected, emotional

12


shock.”39 The ancient image of wounding nonetheless left a profound imprint on modern psychological theory, which often conceived trauma as a rupture of the protective envelope of the psyche, a kind of physiological break-in that causes harm to the entire organism. Freud, for example, follows this figure in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he hypothesizes a “stimulus barrier” that defends the psyche against overwhelming external stimuli that threaten psychic coherence. Two key episodes in the social history of trauma are the two world wars. During World War I, when soldiers began to experience psychological breakdown on a massive scale—and the term “shell shock” was coined to describe the experience—medical descriptions of trauma were heavily inflected by two factors: first, the disconcerting fact that soldiers’ symptoms seemed identical to those of hysteria, which was assumed to be a strictly feminine disorder; and second, the entry into medical debate of national governments, which, not incidentally, needed functioning armies and fungible pension programs. In this context, traumatic symptoms were largely interpreted as effeminacy or moral weakness, and treatment was seen in terms of character rehabilitation and discipline. Physicians were encouraged not to indulge patients’ childishness, effeminacy, and passivity. Psychotherapists such as Paul-Charles Dubois “urged physicians instead to increase the soldier’s virile self-discipline and autonomy by strengthening his rational and critical power.”40 British psychiatrist Lewis Yealland recommended “a treatment strategy based on shaming, threats, and punishment,” in which “patients were excoriated for their laziness and cowardice.”41 Such a treatment program clearly reflects the threat trauma was perceived to pose to Enlightenment values of autonomy and reason, as well as to their manifestations in constructions of masculinity and disciplinary society. During World War II, psychiatrists developed another strategy called “forward psychiatric treatment,” which placed psychiatrists in combat zones. “Physicians in the military were taught that symptoms that might be considered abnormal in civilian life were to be regarded as normal in the stressful situation of battle; the ‘normal battle reaction’ thus defined was to be the standard against which pathological responses were henceforth evaluated.”42 The aim of such treatment was clear: returning men to active duty and minimizing long-term disability and pension expenditures. “According to one report,” writes Judith Herman, “80 percent of the American fighting men who succumbed to acute stress in the Second World War were returned to some kind of duty, usually within a week. Thirty percent were returned to combat units.”43 But some very different developments grew out of the Second World War as well. One was the introduction of narcotherapy for treatment of trauma victims: the use of drugs, particularly sodium amytal, to bring about catharsis or abreaction, which fueled debates about the nature of recovery, the significance of memory, and the role of interpretation. Another development resulted from the presence of concentration camp survivors, whose experience posed two critical difficulties: first, it presented a kind of trauma that,


13

unlike “shell shock,” did not conform to the image of a sudden intrusion or wound; and second, many of the psychic effects of this experience did not manifest themselves until some years later. It was also during World War II that American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner developed a description of trauma as a memory disorder that, half a century later, would become the basis of the diagnostic category of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): The idea is that, owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic memories. The experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in time, refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually reeexperienced in a painful, dissociated, traumatic present.44

Recognition of this category by the psychiatric establishment, however, would take another war—Vietnam—and a significant political struggle by its veterans. This struggle ultimately resulted in a five-volume study of post-war trauma and, in 1980, the adoption of PTSD as a clinical category by the American Psychological Association. According to the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the characteristic symptoms of PTSD include “persistent reexperiencing of the traumatic event, persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness, and persistent symptoms of increased arousal.”45 As Herman has been central in signaling, these symptoms are not only characteristic of men in war, but of many women in civilian life. “Only after 1980,” she writes, “when the efforts of combat veterans had legitimated the concept of posttraumatic stress disorder, did it become clear that the psychological syndrome seen in survivors of rape, domestic battery, and incest was essentially the same as the syndrome seen in survivors of war.”46 Though rarely read as a trauma theorist, Frantz Fanon draws attention to crucial, yet often overlooked, episodes in the history of trauma: to the specific forms of trauma produced by colonial wars, by colonization itself, and, more diffusely, by racism. Analyzing the “problem of mental disorders which arise from the war of national liberation,” he contends that many of these symptoms result as much from the colonial situation itself as from the war against it. “The truth is,” writes Fanon, “that colonialism in its essence was [before the war] already taking on the aspect of a fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals,” a state of affairs that is “easily understood if we simply study and are alive to the number and depth of the injuries inflicted upon a native during a single day spent amidst the colonial regime.”47 There is thus, he avers, even “during this calm period of successful colonization a regular and important mental pathology which is the direct product of oppression.”48 Fanon’s studies of the psychological effects of colonialism in Algeria extend and make more specific his earlier analysis of racism in Black Skin, White

14


Masks, where he diagnoses a “situational neurosis,”49 and where, in a series of powerful pages, he describes the quotidian experience of the man of color as an always already violated bodily integrity that, rather than the embodied consciousness that enables ordinary physical activity, is an incessant process of wounding: In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. . . . The elements that I used [to construct a corporeal schema] had been provided for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,” but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. . . . Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. . . . I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. . . . I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?50

Fanon’s correctives to the history of trauma institutionalized in psychiatry effect three substantial theoretical shifts: from the individual psyche to a social situation; from relations within the family unit to the relation between families and the national unit; and from the singularity of a traumatogenic event to the pervasive and diffuse inhumanity of colonialism. The first of these shifts, which challenges the very basis of clinical psychology as practiced on individuals, is inaugurated in Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon posits that “disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities.”51 The key recognition that “in some circumstances the socius is more important than the individual”52 also underpins Fanon’s analysis of Algeria, where numerous symptoms, diagnosed in terms of mental disorders by the psychiatric establishment, are more correctly viewed, he contends, as “the direct product of the colonial situation.”53 The second of these shifts is a critique aimed at the familial focus of European psychoanalysis and its assumption of continuity between the family and national culture. But, as Fanon writes, “we observe the opposite in the man of color. A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world.”54 Moreover, “the Antillean family has for all practical purposes no connection with the national—that is the French, or European—structure. The Antillean has therefore to choose between his family and European society.”55 What European psychology takes as natural agreement may, for colonized peoples, be a distressing incongruity, a source of, rather than protection from, trauma. The third shift, articulated on the evidence of the case studies presented in “Colonial War and Mental Disorders”—which suggest “a much more widely spread causality” of disorders than singular events—is formulated as a critique of the category of “reactionary psychoses.” In classifying disturbances under this heading, “prominence is given to the event which has given rise


15

to the disorder,” writes Fanon, whereas “it seems to us that in the cases here chosen the events giving rise to the disorder are chiefly the bloodthirsty and pitiless atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman practices, and the firm impression that people have of being caught up in a veritable Apocalypse.”56 Fanon’s work signals that while trauma theory has primarily been produced in Europe and the United States, trauma itself has, with equal if not greater regularity and urgency, been experienced elsewhere.57 His work also inaugurates an inquiry into the relation between individual and collective forms of trauma that has recently been renewed by scholars such as Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander. Eyerman insists that “there is a difference between trauma as it affects individuals and as a cultural process,” and, specifically, that “as cultural process, trauma is mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity.”58 Alexander develops this conception of cultural trauma, contending that trauma is culturally constructed through a claim to some fundamental injury that is then transmitted through influential cultural agents, such as the mass media and religious, aesthetic, legal, scientific, and state institutions that, as we will see, the lamentation often confronts and contests. These agents define the nature of the trauma and victim, establish the relation of trauma to those who experience it only indirectly, and frequently assign responsibility.59 There are five clusters of issues that emerge from this social and clinical history that are particularly germane to our consideration of loss, lamentation, and modernity and that I wish to explore in further detail: (1) the notion of recovery; (2) the scandal of interpretation; (3) the question of memory; (4) trauma as regression; and (5) trauma as a negotiation of normalcy.

The Notion of Recovery Trauma and loss, neither of which gives itself over to direct observation, are thus often considered from the perspective of recovery. Recovery, however, would seem to mean something quite different in each case. In relation to trauma, recovery would seem to be synonymous with cure, with the repossession of health and normalcy. In relation to loss, it would seem to be synonymous with (re)discovery, with the return of something missing, with indemnification or restitution. The notion would thus seem to respond to fundamentally different questions in each case: how to eliminate debilitating symptoms on the one hand, what is rightfully owned or deserved on the other. Yet it is striking the degree to which trauma has been clinically elaborated as a species of loss: as a part of the self lost to consciousness or identity, as a destruction or shattering of psychic organization, or as memory alienated from integration within the ego. Equally striking is the degree to which healing has been described in terms of restoration or repossession, a theme which has, for example, largely governed the treatment of PTSD. But it perhaps

16


bears inquiry whether this description derives from the intrinsic phenomenal resemblances between trauma and loss, or from the imprecision of descriptive language. To what degree may the latter have guided—or misguided— clinical and juridical practice as well as their involvements with each other? Is it not quite possible that healing may have nothing to do with restoring a lost object and that indemnification or restitution may have little or no therapeutic value? These questions, whose clinical implications I leave to others, also bear on the discourse of loss in modernity: What kind of recovery is implicitly called for in descriptions of modernity as crisis, or as a loss of certainty, values, or autonomy? Does such language solicit healing or indemnification? What ideological work is done by confusion between the two? Two other nuances of recovery are pertinent here. First, recovery also means to gain something by the judgment of a court, a nuance that indicates the degree to which loss is almost always embroiled with issues of justice. Indeed, justice itself is often conceived as a kind of equilibration of gains and losses, as evinced in the figure of the scales of justice. Both the judgments of legal bodies and this sense of balance are (as our brief genealogy above adumbrates) central to the conception of trauma, the parameters of which have been defined as much legally as medically, and the remedy for which has often been figured as a re-equilibration of psychic forces. It is no coincidence, moreover, that this legality and this equilibration are central to the maintenance of disciplinary society, to the balance produced by, and productive of, docile bodies organized usefully and legibly in space. Trauma disrupts this order, and this order, in turn, seeks to discipline or eliminate trauma and its effects. Second, recovery also means to obtain useful substances from waste, and embedded in this meaning is an insight into societal attitudes toward trauma victims. For from a societal perspective, the traumatized person is tantamount to waste: worthless to a disciplinary system that thrives on the utility of individuals, easily “disqualified and invalidated” by its hierarchizing operations.60 If, in the case of trauma, the aim of recovery is far from self-evident, so too is the process through which that recovery is accomplished. Does healing take place, clinicians have long debated, by emotional discharge or by cognitively integrating the traumatic event into a life narrative? Is therapy primarily a process of elimination (of pathogenic affect) or of restoration (of memory and self)? Of forgetting or remembering? Is trauma fundamentally an exorbitance or a lack? Freud’s cathartic method (developed in conjunction with the hypnotic treatments of the 1880s) conceived recovery, as the name clearly indicates, as a purgation, as an abreaction dependent upon an adequate discharge of pathogenic affects. On this model: • Trauma is conceived, along the lines of infectious disease, as a kind of deleterious substance that must be removed; not, that is, as loss or lack, but as a surplus that must be treated by elimination.


17

• Insofar as the “losses” of catharsis rebalance or re-equilibrate an economic system, they participate not only in the meaning of recovery as satisfying a debt, but also in the structure of retributive justice that, like the “reliving” of the traumatic event aimed at by certain therapeutic practices, endeavors to undo harm by repeating it elsewhere.61 • The cathartic cure, governed by a notion of adequation, both implies a calculability of harm and is associated with a certain and very pervasive model of truth. • Catharsis, adopted from the Aristotelian theory of tragedy as the “imitation of an action,” inserts recovery into an economy of representation and a problematics of simulation.62 If cathartic methods rely on emotional discharge, practices of integration, by contrast, depend on cognitive recognition, narrative construction, and interpretation. If catharsis conceives of therapy as elimination (of pathogenic affect), integration conceives of therapy as restoration (of memory and self). Freud’s theory of abreaction increasingly emphasized the latter, increasingly moved from mimesis to diegesis, from a therapeutic process of purgation to one of recollection, interpretation, and working through. Following World War I, psychiatrists such as Charles Myers and William McDougall also rejected the “emphasis on the emotions in hypnotic abreaction. They maintained that what produced the relief of symptoms was not the affective catharsis but the cognitive dimensions of the cure.”63 This position was later even endorsed by the pioneers of narcosynthesis, such as Roy Grinker and John Speigel, who would conclude that “affective discharge as such was not the essence of the cure, but the conscious integration and narration of the historical or psychic truth of the traumatic origin.”64 On this view, trauma is directly conceived in terms of a lost object, as an alienated memory or missing component of the self, and recovery is primarily a matter of recuperation. As we have seen in the diagnostic description of PTSD, this loss or alienation is often depicted as a “splitting” or shattering of the ego, or as mental “dissociation.” Sándor Ferenczi was an early proponent of this description, arguing that “in the moment of trauma the victim’s psyche is split apart in such a way as to lose all psychic coherence.” As Ruth Leys writes, “Splitting was imagined by him as the disintegration or fragmentation of the psychical apparatus: the effect of shock was to destroy or dissociate all mental associations and synthesizing functions.”65 Kardiner used similar imagery, describing trauma as dissociation and loss of cognitive integrity. But the fact that trauma is depicted as loss does not mean that a simple recuperation constitutes “recovery” in the therapeutic sense. The “return” of a lost memory or aspect of the self does not, unfortunately, guarantee its cognitive integration. Far from bearing inherent therapeutic value, such a return may indeed constitute further trauma. This is a point we must keep in mind in our analysis of modernity: return does not necessarily constitute recovery. For these descriptions of fragmented

18


subjects bear a clear resemblance to the depiction(s) of modernity we have evoked above: to the shattering of the Enlightenment subject, the “loss of self” of which Marx speaks, or the “depersonalization” and “self-division” elaborated by Fanon. But this very list is also a warning, an indication of how simple it is, because of the similar terms used to describe these losses, to lump them together as if they were identical, and to efface their distinct (philosophical, economic, social, and racial) etiologies and their sometimes differing effects. We must, in short, remain attentive to the subtle ways that modernity blurs these differences and to the interests served by doing so. What is at stake, for example, in subsuming an alienation produced by colonization into the “modern condition” or in offering an economic recompense for an affective loss? What kind of recovery is called for by the alienated philosopher, the estranged worker, or the victim of racism? Do their losses bear anything in common at all?

The Scandal of Interpretation Embedded in this question of recovery, in the question of the efficacy of catharsis or integration as cure, is the more fundamental question of the degree to which trauma can be represented, narrated, interpreted, or understood. For trauma has often been seen precisely as a crisis of understanding and of language (though the two are not necessarily commensurate); as a moment when ordinary mechanisms of understanding are overwhelmed; as a breakdown of the cognitive, affective, symbolic, and social structures that condition meaning; as the unspeakable; as incomprehensibility itself. Ferenczi, for example, wrestled with the fact that while the fragmentary nature of traumatic experience seemed to demand interpretation, “there is in the end something that cannot, need not, and must not, be interpreted.”66 Janet turned his attention to the way in which this breakdown was manifested in symptoms: in disturbances of affective and cognitive patterns and in disruptions of speech, self-reflection, and knowledge—a constellation of symptoms later named “alexithymia.”67 Focusing on the collective effects of trauma, Kai Erikson insists that these disturbances are as much social as psychological. He notes the perception in traumatized communities, “that the laws by which the natural world has always been governed as well as the decencies by which the human world has always been governed are now suspended— or were never active to begin with. Traumatized people can be said to have experienced not only a changed sense of self and a changed way of relating to others but a changed worldview.”68 He also suggests, in a passage that recalls Giddens’s analysis of modern trust and its discontents, that particular kinds of catastrophes may cause people to “doubt the findings of scientists and the calculations of engineers” and can lead to loss of “confidence in the use of logic and reason as ways to discern what is going on.”69


19

This crisis of understanding and of representation is one that is often thematized by the language of lamentation. It also bears a remarkable resemblance to the preoccupations of a body of poststructural and deconstructive thought concerned with, for example, representation, the instability of signification, the uncertain relation of language to experience, and the fallacy of hermeneutic notions of understanding.70 Situated at this intersection between poststructural theory and trauma, Cathy Caruth takes the position that trauma shatters consciousness and therefore resists representation; it can only be witnessed where the referential functions of language break down, in its telling aporias, in a complex relation between “knowing and not knowing.”71 In Caruth’s schema, however, the traumatic experience is nonetheless scrupulously recorded and reenacted in nightmares or flashbacks that are, she contends, “absolutely accurate and precise, [though] they are largely inaccessible to conscious recall and control.”72 Insisting on “the surprising literality and nonsymbolic nature of [such] traumatic dreams and flashbacks,” she avers that “it is this literality and its insistent return which thus constitutes trauma and points toward its enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming occurrence that then remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event.”73 These belated reenactments are, then, at once “absolutely literal, unassimilable to associative chains of meaning” and (hence) resistant to “psychoanalytic interpretation and cure.”74 Implicitly taking post–World War II modernity as itself a kind of trauma and suggesting, evocatively, that we rethink reference in such a way that permits “history to arise where immediate understanding may not,”75 she extends this conception of trauma into a theory of modernity: “Such a crisis of truth extends beyond the question of individual cure and asks how we in this era can have access to our own historical experience, to a history that is in its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access.”76 The crisis of understanding and representation that appears to be endemic to trauma means that interpretation of traumatic experience bears the threefold threat of simulation, interestedness, and betrayal. These specters of falsity lurk everywhere in clinical history and in therapeutic methods, in social discourses and in personal testimonies. If the traumatic event, as both Ferenczi and Kardiner suggest, produces “a state akin to hypnosis and at the cost of the ego’s cognitive integrity and control,”77 and if that event, marked by confusion, shock, and unawareness, is necessarily apprehended speculatively and belatedly, how then is the therapist, a witness, a judicial body, or the subject him/herself to know if a representation of it is accurate? Isn’t such a representation, like cathartic reenactment, by nature a simulation, an “imitation of an action” as Aristotle would have it, and therefore marked by a certain inauthenticity, by an epistemological, temporal, and affective décalage? What is to guarantee that the representation is not total fabrication? “The problem of the patient’s lack of confidence in the reality of the memory of the trauma,” writes Leys, “the victim’s inability to remember, and hence testify with conviction to, the facticity of the reconstructed event—will haunt not

20


only psychoanalysis but the entire modern discourse of trauma.”78 This quandary is, moreover, historically conditioned by the fact that traumatic symptoms were first clinically associated with hysteria, with feminine suggestibility, and with the uncertain testimony produced by hypnosis. It is also a predicament in which Freud plays a dramatic (if ambiguous) role, abandoning the seduction theory and thereby relocating trauma from the exteriority of an historical event to the interiority of primal fantasy, from the “real” to the “imagined.”79 If the problem of simulation was first theorized as a risk particular to cathartic reenactment, it increasingly became clear that similar questions would bear upon integrative treatments. For how does one warrant the accuracy or adequation of a narrative? Is it more or less reliable than cathartic reenactment? More or less therapeutic? And how, exactly, should adequation be measured—in terms of facticity, perception, affect? The swarm of questions surrounding simulation thus shades imperceptibly into that second threat we have noted—interestedness—the hazard, that is, that one might fabricate a trauma or simulate its symptoms for psychological, social, or material gain. Indeed the swampy terrain of traumatized and reconstructed memory would seem to be the ideal breeding ground for interested confabulation. During World War I, Paul-Charles Dubois fretted over how to distinguish between legitimate trauma victims and “army stragglers” who might be fabricating symptoms to get out of combat duty: “We do not know whether to believe in their hurts and put them in the infirmary, or to handle them roughly and send them back to the ranks.”80 Numerous governmental and indemnifying bodies (the German Restitution Authorities being perhaps the most egregious example), have charged that the symptoms of trauma can be manufactured, and such accusations of interestedness have had a significant influence on how trauma is defined, in delimiting the parameters, for example, of industrial disability, psychological harm, and the effects of combat.81 In the United States, this controversy has recrudesced in debates over “Gulf War syndrome” and, with redoubtable force, over “false memory syndrome,” the contention that certain accusations of child abuse stem from false memories suggestively implanted by therapists.82 This crisis of understanding and representation constitutive of trauma renders it subject to risks not only of simulation and interestedness, but also of betrayal. The scandal of interpretation, that is, is not only epistemological, but also ethical. Claude Lanzmann, for example, has argued for resistance to understanding as an ethical imperative, a resistance that he took as his guiding principle while making the film, Shoah: It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms—Why have the Jews been killed?—for the question to reveal right away its obscenity. There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding. Not to understand was my iron law during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah. I clung to this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical and at the same time the only possible operative attitude.83


21

These reflections on a witnessing that is a disruption of sense and understanding pose a number of troubling questions: what exactly does understanding mean in this context? Would this prohibition against understanding preclude interpretation? Does this mean that interpretation is always a betrayal? These questions press urgently on victims of trauma who are caught in a logically impossible situation, assailed by an event that demands both honor (it is part of my experience and being) and shame (it is hideous, indecent, offensive, unacceptable). “The transformation of the trauma into a narrative memory that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated, to be integrated into one’s own, and others’, knowledge of the past,” writes Caruth, “may lose both the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall.” The threat of losing the event’s “essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding” is the “dilemma that underlies many survivors’ reluctance to translate their experience into speech.”84 But Caruth’s articulation of this dilemma, which hovers indeterminately between the descriptive and the prescriptive, runs the risk of suggesting that any attempt at interpretation or understanding is necessarily a betrayal.85 And it rests on the by no means incontestable assumptions that translation and narration are forms of infidelity to a greater degree than they are a mode of respect, and that faithfulness consists in preserving an undiluted experience of the traumatic event—the therapeutic benefit, and indeed the very possibility, of which are dubious. Such an insistence on the inviolability of the traumatic event places it squarely (and problematically, in my view) under the governance of the metaphysics of the proper: unambiguously possessed, pure, literal, irreproachably appropriate.86 If, for Caruth, “the impossibility of a comprehensible story . . . does not necessarily mean the denial of a transmissible truth,”87 it is also necessary, I believe, to ask whether it is just truth that is at stake. What if, contrary to Platonic hopes, truth and the good life do not entirely coincide? Which should be privileged? What if witnessing and healing do not coincide? Which should take precedence?

The Nature of Memory These questions of understanding and interpretation are embedded, in turn, in questions about how trauma is remembered. We have seen that descriptions of PTSD conceive of traumatic experience as characterized by dissociation and by destruction of the mind’s ordinary recording mechanisms. We have also seen that, in Caruth’s view, “the literal registration of an event . . . appears to be connected, in traumatic experience, precisely with the way it escapes full consciousness as it occurs.”88 Both of these descriptions evince the prevalent influence of dual-memory hypotheses in understanding traumatic experience. It was Janet who, in the 1890s, first proposed that “traumatic memory” might be distinguished from “narrative memory,” the former being characterized by a repetition of the past as present, the latter by a narrativization of

22


the past as past.89 Kardiner subsequently proposed that trauma produced a dissociation between affect and representation, that affective responses to, and factical memories of, traumatic experience were stored in discrete memory systems, and that traumatic dreams functioned as a kind of mechanical replay of the traumatic experience.90 Based on these theories, as well as empirical studies of traumatic dreams, Bessel van der Kolk has elaborated a distinction between “declarative” memory, which involves conscious awareness and the subsequent ability to narrate events, and “nondeclarative” memory, which is more “like the memories of skills and habits, emotional responses, reflex actions, and classically conditioned responses.”91 These nondeclarative traumatic memories, dissociated from consciousness, are not accessible to normal recollection, he argues, yet are recorded with incontrovertible accuracy and precision, engraved in the mind in a mechanical, corporeal manner which cannot be simulated or implanted by a therapist. The traumatic experience, suggest van der Kolk and his colleague Mark Greenberg, “does not get processed in symbolic/linguistic forms, but tends to be organized on a sensorimotor or iconic level” and hence does not submit well to verbal or narrative representation.92 Leys has argued at length that this position “remains inadequately formulated and weakly supported by the scientific evidence.”93 While I leave clinical and scientific evaluation to others, I want to emphasize the importance of situating this theory within a specific social history and of attending to the theoretical difficulties it poses; both bear on analyses of modernity. Dualmemory hypotheses need to be read as emerging in response to libidinal theory (and its excessive emphases on childhood experiences, unconscious desires, and psychical transformations of life events), to compensation demands made by concentration camp victims, to the struggle for recognition of the traumas of rape and domestic abuse, and, most recently, to charges of “false memory syndrome.” From one point of view, then, dual-memory theory can be read as a brake on runaway psychoanalytic speculation; from another, it can be read as a kind of insurance for victims, for whom recognition, as well as legal and medical redress, rest on accurately establishing traumatic events. Both seem like laudable goals. But can we assume—as if theories with laudable goals were thereby confirmed—that the juridically warranted (the “just”), the theoretically sound (the “true”), and the therapeutically efficacious (the “good”) will always conveniently coincide? A number of crucial theoretical problems left in the wake of dual-memory theory would seem to suggest a more complicated picture: first, it is a theory that does not allow for any unconscious symptom elaboration and disregards both the history of theorization about dream analysis and the existence of psychosocial factors in symptom formation; second, it simply evades the threats of simulation and interestedness, rather than engaging and theorizing them, functioning as a kind of easy refuge from the uncertainties of interpretation; third, it makes no distinction between kinds of trauma (between, for example, a sudden accident, an experience of torture, or a prolonged history of isolation) and


23

indeed tends to focus on scenes of terror; and fourth, in positing two distinct memory systems, it insists on a clear break between traumatic and nontraumatic experience, between pathology and normalcy. In the context of modernity, positing such a separate memory system—one that is literal, infallible, and “absolutely true to the event”94—is also to set up a domain of literality that cannot be analyzed or critiqued (the ideological usefulness of which is not difficult to imagine); that dodges the fate of knowledge in modern societies; that, guarded by the metaphysics of the proper, escapes modernity’s reflexivity and uncertainty; and that eludes the reach of power, skirting the disciplinary regime of modernity and its effects. A domain, in short, that would bear the awful power of the sacred.95

Trauma as Regression Recognition of the degree to which cognitive functions are destroyed by trauma has led a long line of theorists to conceive trauma as a kind of regression to an infantile state, as equivalent to the pre-libidinal position of primary identification prior to ego separation and subject-object relationships, governed by an ambivalent, incorporative binding to the mother.96 Destroying the structure of the subject, trauma returns it to its point of earliest formation. This is a position that Ferenzci was central in proposing, “imagining the horror-struck adult confronted with danger as reverting to the condition of the helpless infant having to come to terms with the existence of other objects or persons.”97 This position implies, then, that trauma returns the victim to a moment of dependency on the mother, a state of passive subjection to the feminine which, as we have already seen, has been particularly threatening to militarized versions of masculinity: those who succumb to combat trauma are afflicted with an infantile weakness; they are associated metonymically with the feminine and its hysteria. Perhaps the most disturbing suggestion embedded in this account is the association implied between trauma and the ambivalent processes of primary identification. For Freud, these processes are at once a cannibalistic incorporation of the (m)other and the hostile wish to rid oneself of her. This ambivalent incorporation, which involves pleasure, destruction, and appropriation, functions as the bodily prototype for the series of psychical identifications that will constitute personality and is the condition of possibility for all subsequent object relations. In “Mourning and Melancholy,” Freud hypothesizes that the pathological factor that transforms the normal work of mourning into melancholia is a regression to primal narcissism and the conflict of ambivalence.98 Regression to such a stage of dependency may mean that one comes at once to love and hate, identify with while violently rejecting, an aggressor, and may be particularly applicable to instances in which there is a prior relation between a victim and perpetrator or when a victim passes long and isolated periods of time with a perpetrator. This is a defense

24


mechanism identified by Anna Freud, who described subjects under threat appropriating the aggression of the perpetrator (or other of his/her physical, moral, or symbolic characteristics), and further developed by Ferenzci, who proposed that “in the traumatic moment the victim’s best solution to the crisis [is] not to resist but to give in to the threatening person by imitating or identifying with him (or her).”99 The regression theory also suggests that trauma returns the victim to a pre-linguistic stage, to barbarism in its most literal sense. This position is corroborated by the functional disorganization of speech characteristic of traumatic neurosis and melancholy. The contemporary cognitive interpretation of this regression is that there exist three modes of information encoding in the central nervous system—inactive, iconic, and symbolic/linguistic—which correspond to stages of development. As van der Kolk and van der Hart write, “when people are exposed to trauma . . . the experience cannot be organized on a linguistic level, and this failure to arrange the memory in words and symbols leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares, and flashbacks.”100 Janet’s earlier and more assimilative description associated the inability to narrate characteristic of trauma not only with the infantile, but with women, primitive peoples, and animals. He called the process of narration “presentification” and contended that it is precisely what “animals, primitive people, young children, and hysterics are characteristically unable to perform—animals, because they are incapable of self-knowledge and self-representation; and primitive people, young children, and hysterics because, owing to their undeveloped or degenerate or weakened mental condition, they lack the mental synthesis necessary for paying attention to present reality and hence for locating their narratives in an appropriate temporal order.”101 We should not overlook Janet’s suggestion that trauma entails a kind of confrontation with the primitive; we will have cause to return to it frequently. Nor should we overlook the degree to which European modernity and aesthetic modernism both sought out the “primitive” as a site susceptible of exploitation or as a refuge from modernity and its ills. Indeed, it is not difficult to hear in Janet an echo of paternalistic colonialism—the contrast between the Enlightened, civilized, and reasonable subject and irrational, deviant, and backward ones, the former caring for the latter as would a diligent doctor his patient. We can also hear the resonance of the temporal disjunctions that structure modernity: trauma is a regression not only in individual, but in historical time, from a Euro-modern present to an “undeveloped,” backward, ostensibly nonWestern past. It is also, significantly, a lack of presence, of the ability to present or, in Heideggerian terms, to presence. This lack in presence, as I have argued at length elsewhere, is one way of describing the foreign.102 Below I will describe the moment of lamentation as a confrontation with the foreign, and we should hear these nuances in the term: regression, the undoing of modernity, a terrifying, death-like gap in presence.


25

But this is only part of the picture, for the “primitive” took on a double valuation in modernity, and Janet’s depiction of trauma begins to evince how ostensibly negative experiences (trauma, crisis, loss) might be useful precisely to induce regression: to transport moderns to a place more innocent, more authentic and “human,” to a reality less artificial and alienating, unencumbered with civilization and its discontents. As Fanon points out, Africa and Africans have long been called upon to provide just this service: “now and then when we are worn out by our lives in big buildings, we will turn to you as we do to our children—to the innocent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous. We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world.”103 Modernism also took up this task of imparting the “primitive,” under the inspiration of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, for example, and with the primitivist experiments of Gauguin, Picasso, Modigliani, Miró, and Klee, but also in some more subtle ways. Indeed Janet’s description of traumatic symptoms—of regression to a primitive state—might also describe a number of modernist literary texts: linguistic disorder, crises of self-knowledge and representation, lack of synthesis, disruption of a linear and progressive sense of time. If such symptoms express regression in trauma victims, perhaps they effect it in art. We should also bear in mind that both of these “primitive” sanctuaries from modernity—Africans and art—also produced significant counter-cultures within modernity. Another way of articulating this recognition would be to say that trauma is associated with the primitive, and “primitivism,” though often judged negatively and used as a pretext for domination, is also a vital source of critique and possibility.

Trauma as Negotiation of Normalcy From a number of different perspectives we have prefigured the principle that trauma is defined in opposition to the “normal,” that what is recognized as traumatic is everywhere implicated in negotiating the borders of normalcy. We have noted, for example, the degree to which “recovery” is seen as synonymous with (a return to) normalcy, the way in which dual-memory hypotheses must distinguish between traumatic and normal experience, and the tenacity of debates over the normalcy of combat symptoms, as well as over who does and does not deserve treatment or compensation. We have also marked the way in which traumatic symptoms are perceived to share semantic territory with the anomalous or “abnormal”: with foreigners, primitive peoples, infants, women, and animals. These are all fragments of the recognition that how we define “normal experience” excludes certain kinds of distressing occurrences from being acknowledged as trauma and that it legitimates, lays out the boundaries of, and creates tolerance for, “acceptable” forms of violence or suffering. This is a formation that Fanon identified in Algeria. Signaling the degree to which the medical establishment had, in treating the psychoaffective consequences of torture, concentrated on the

26


effects on the torturer, Fanon deemed it necessary to insist (astonishingly) that torture “upsets most profoundly the personality of the person who is tortured.”104 Not only had the medical establishment largely ignored the trauma of the tortured and colonized, but it was also called upon to legitimate the practice of torture itself—to establish it as a tolerable, even “normal,” form of violence.105 To “cure” a native, he further recognized, meant primarily to habituate him to the oppression of colonization, to disregard her distress, and to legitimate the colonial system of domination. This principle of a normalization that both excludes (from the classification of trauma) and includes (within the tolerable) also subtends Herman’s more recent insights that “political captivity is generally recognized, whereas the domestic captivity of women and children is often unseen” and that war trauma in men may be normalized by “broad social tolerance for emotional disengagement and uncontrolled aggression in men.”106 Whether such traumas can be acknowledged and examined at all, she argues, depends on a broader social and political context: “The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war. The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children.”107 Laura Brown lays out this problem in an important critique of the language of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which, until 1994, described PTSD as originating in an event “outside the normal range of human experience.” Recognizing, quite rightly, that such a definition begs the question of what exactly delineates “normal human experience,” Brown stresses that “human experience” as referred to in our diagnostic manuals, and as the subject for much of the important writing on trauma, often means “male human experience.” Or, at the least, an experience common to both women and men. The range of human experience becomes the range of what is normal and usual in the lives of men of the dominant class; white, young, able-bodied, educated, middle-class, Christian men. Trauma is thus that which disrupts these particular human lives, but no other.108

Brown’s essay asks us to consider how we constitute a traumatic event and to acknowledge how our conceptions of trauma have been “constructed within the experiences and realities of dominant groups in cultures. The dominant, after all,” she argues, “writes the diagnostic manuals and informs the public discourse, on which we have built our images of ‘real’ trauma. ‘Real’ trauma is often only that form of trauma in which the dominant group can participate as a victim rather than as the perpetrator or etiologist of the trauma.”109 In short, when we define traumatogenic events as “outside of normal human experience,” we exclude experiences, such as domestic abuse or racial terror, that “occur at a high enough base rate in the lives of certain groups that such events are, in fact, normative, ‘normal’ in a statistical sense.”110 Such a definition of trauma not only results in inadequate attention to forms of suffering


27

in more marginalized groups and contexts, but “sends a message that oppression, be it based on gender, class, race, or other variables, is to be tolerated; that psychic pain in response to oppression is pathological, not a normal response to abnormal events.”111 Dominant constructions of the traumatic have frequently been sanctioned, as Brown’s essay suggests, by attributing some individuals’ traumatic symptoms to pathology, such that the fault is with the subject, rather than what befalls him or her: with Algerians rather than colonization or torture, with women rather than patriarchy or domestic violence, with irresolute soldiers rather than war. Fanon notes this mechanism at work in the pathologization of traumatic symptoms produced by colonialism. One widespread symptom (a generalized muscular contraction) was explained as “a congenital stigma of the native, an ‘original’ part of his nervous system” that was simply lower on the neurological plane than the European’s.112 Likewise, resistance to colonial domination and to brutally inequitable material circumstances were theorized as innate criminality, a premise forged in the 1930s by Professor Porot of the faculty of Algiers and “the subject of authoritative lectures from the Chair of Psychiatry” for over twenty years.113 And lest we think such bigotry belongs to a bygone age, both Herman and Brown remind us of the degree to which the symptoms of domestic abuse have been dismissed as characterological disorders of “willing victims.” In the 1980s, a group of psychoanalysts proposed that the classification “masochistic personality disorder” or “self-defeating personality disorder” be added to the DSM to account for scenes of sustained abuse.114 The parameters through which we construct trauma contribute to a discourse on “normal” life that, as Brown points out, “imputes psychopathology to the everyday lives of those who cannot protect themselves” from distress.115 When we reflect on this principle in the context of modernity and its discourses of loss, it becomes clear that we need to examine how such discourses acknowledge certain kinds of experience as traumatic and accept others as “normal.” How do the traumas validated by theories and artifacts of modernity delineate “normal experience”? What is excluded from their range of concern? What kinds of distress do they tolerate? While it is evident that traumatic experiences are disruptive—to people, epistemologies, social orders— we must also attend to the ways in which trauma may be useful to, and even constitutive of, institutions of modernity such as the nation-state, capitalism, democracy, the division of labor, social class, gender relations, or racial politics. We must attend not only to the ways in which trauma upsets Enlightenment reason, but to the ways in which the processes that constitute trauma are obsequiously cooperative with it, to the ways in which they participate in those disciplinary processes described by Foucault that must, “if necessary, disqualify and invalidate.”116 We must also ask what forms of distress are legitimated and delegitimated by late modern celebrants of upheaval, by the aesthetic practices of modernism, or by the oppositional alarm sought out by other épateurs de la bourgeoisie.

28


Disastrous Philosophy I wish to visit, however fleetingly, three figures in modern philosophy— Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida—in part as a way of acknowledging how they inflect my own thought, but also because they are major theorists of modernity, all of whom regularly deploy figures of loss.

Nietzsche Let us begin with a scene from Nietzsche, that laughing prophet of late modernity. Coming into a town on the edge of the forest, Zarathustra finds a crowd gathered in the marketplace; they are awaiting a tightrope walker, and he takes the opportunity to speak to them of the overman: What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture [Übergang] and a going under [Untergang]. I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under [untergehen], for they are those who cross over [hinübergehen]. . . . I love him who works and invents to build a house for the overman [Übermensch] and to prepare earth, animal, and plant for him: for thus he wants to go under [untergehen]. . . . I love him whose soul is overfull [übervoll] so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under [Untergang].117

Seducing into play the German prefixes unter (under, below, less than) and über (over, above, across), this playful passage from the prologue inaugurates the figure that runs throughout Zarathustra of destruction as a crossing over—an overcoming. Untergang (here translated as “going under”) signifies a sinking, decline, destruction, downfall, or end; the verb untergehen also means to perish or come to an end. It is a common word for the setting of the sun; it is the mirror of Zarathustra’s own polysemic descent from the mountain and is both contrasted with, and the parent of, a series of “über” terms: here, notably, Übergang (a crossing, footbridge, transition, interim), which clearly prefigures the central role to be played by Überwindung (overcoming, surmounting, conquering, getting over or past), as well as the advent of the Übermensch. This deathly overture, this Untergang and Übergang, prepares the way for Zarathustra’s teachings on destroyers and creators. It also interrupts the parable that is its illustration: when Zarathustra’s address ends, the tightrope walker’s performance begins, which in turn is interrupted by a jester who, taunting the tightrope walker, admonishes him to make way for one better than himself, leaps over him, and causes him to fall. While Zarathustra pays tribute to the fallen tightrope walker—“You have made danger your vocation,” he says. “There is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands” (Zarathustra, 20)—it is with the leaping, death-causing jester that


29

Zarathustra identifies, an identification he affirms at the end of the prologue with a reprise of the tropes of Untergang and Übergang: “To my goal I will go—on my own way; over those who hesitate and lag behind I shall leap. Thus let my going [Übergang] be their going under [Untergang]” (Zarathustra, 24). These puckish figures are the opening act of Zarathustra’s celebration of destroyers and creators, which insists on the necessity of destruction and loss to creation, to newness and authentic modernity. “Whoever must be a creator always annihilates,” says Zarathustra (Zarathustra, 59), and the text of Zarathustra is largely an invitation to this destructive creativity. In bidding moderns to become (law)breakers, Zarathustra seeks fellow creators, “those who write new values on new tablets” though “destroyers they will be called, and despisers of good and evil” (Zarathustra, 24). Not unlike the dynamism characteristic of modernity, or the constant revolutionizing of production described by Marx—“There must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators. Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all impermanence” (Zarathustra, 87)—this relentlessly destructive creation is, for Nietzsche, the very principle of life itself. And life itself confided this secret to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself. . . . [W]here there is perishing and a falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself—for power. That I must be struggle and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends—alas, whoever guesses what is my will should also guess on what crooked paths it must proceed. “Whatever I create and however much I love it—soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it.” (Zarathustra, 115)

The perpetual overcoming (Überwindung), which is the work of the will to power, is also, as Nietzsche spells out in Beyond Good and Evil, the vocation to which the philosophers of the future are called: “With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power.”118 Also implicit in Nietzsche’s descriptions of Überwindung is a valorization of struggle and suffering not unlike what we have witnessed in soldierly variants of masculinity, nor unlike what we will find in classical theories of nationalism. Indeed suffering is not to be despised, as Nietzsche elucidates in his own version of the split subject of modernity, but, rather, creatively cultivated: This discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? . . . In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, formgiver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the “creature in man,” for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified—that which necessarily must and should suffer? And our pity—do you not comprehend for whom our

30

L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses? (BGE, 343–44)

Aimed at a certain self-satisfied and complacently pitying bourgeois ideology, this section of Beyond Good and Evil advocates a suffering in which the creative will dominates and activates the comfortably inert “raw material” of the human, all too human. Nietzsche wants the dynamism of modern societies to take hold in individuals; he wants modern man to make of himself the principle of modernity.119 But this principle of modernity is by no means to be confused with the actuality of the sickly present. Nothing could be farther from this vision than that small “almost ridiculous type,” that “herd animal . . . eager to please, sickly, and mediocre” that is the European of today (BGE, 266). Indeed, for Nietzsche, the term modern is almost always pejorative, not because modernity destroys traditional values (as per Durkheim), but because it so cowardly and deceptively clings to them. All its fuss about upheaval and transformation is just noisy spinning in the old wheel marks of Platonic Christianity. And what is most debilitating in this exhausted spinning is that it is a renunciation of life, a craven betrayal of the present in exchange for an elsewhere and an afterward. “I beseech you, my brothers,” says Zarathustra, “remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of otherwordly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary” (Zarathustra, 13). Put otherwise, Nietzsche is less concerned with the loss of something possessed in the past than with the loss of the present itself. The destruction to which he commits himself is of those values that defraud humanity of the present. Yet however contemptuous of the denizens of modernity, Nietzsche sees possibility in their broken condition: “Verily, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and limbs of men,” says Zarathustra. “This is what is terrible for my eyes, that I find man in ruins and scattered as over a battlefield or a butcher-field” (Zarathustra, 138). Yet Zarathustra interprets these “ruins” not as the wreckage of a devastated past, but as the pieces of a possible future: “I walk among men as among the fragments of the future—that future which I envisage. And this is all my creating and striving, that I recreate and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident” (Zarathustra, 139). Nietzsche’s favorite image for this uneasy moment of possibility is the tensed bow, the “magnificent tension” (BGE, 193) of which is experienced as distress.120 This tension, the creative cultivation of distress at the heart of modernity, is, in Nietzsche’s view, infinitely preferable to the smug moral certainty that dominates contemporary European society. Zarathustra puts it this way: When I came to men I found them sitting on an old conceit: the conceit that they have long known what is good and evil for man. All talk of virtue seemed


31

an old and weary matter to man; and whoever wanted to sleep well still talked of good and evil before going to sleep. I disturbed this sleepiness when I taught: what is good and evil no one knows yet, unless it be he who creates. (Zarathustra, 196)

This disruption of the somnolent morality of modernity is one manifestation of the larger project of revaluating uncertainty that is central to Nietzschean thought. “And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance,” Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, “could knowledge rise so far—the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but—as its refinement!” (BGE, 225). Might not untruth, he asks us to consider, be a condition of life? (BGE, 202). Might not the most urgent question modernity poses be the problem of the value of truth? Might not modernity be the moment that “the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?”121 This will to uncertainty, illustrated by Zarathustra’s insistence on an overcoming that promptly opposes whatever it creates, is also a risk, what Nietzsche names “the dangerous perhaps”—a phrase elaborated by Derrida as the “unheard-of, totally new, that very experience which no metaphysician might yet have dared to think,” an inassurance suspended between decision and the future, which “can be called the other, the revolution, or chaos . . . in any case, the risk of an instability.”122 Such a destabilization is at the heart of the genealogical method, which, as Nietzsche well recognizes, is likely to be perceived as a destruction of knowledge: “Let us articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed . . . a kind of knowledge that has never yet existed or even been desired. One has taken the value of these ‘values’ as given, as factual, as beyond all question” (Genealogy, 456). Genealogical understanding will inevitably entail undoing the truths of moral knowledge, common sense, and the allegedly self-evident. Genealogy will, in this sense, be destructive; it may well be experienced as traumatic.123 Nietzsche characterizes this intractably uncertain knowledge in terms that frequently recall our descriptions of both modernity and trauma, and that foreshadow our discussion of lamentation. It bears a clear similarity, for example, to Giddens’s description of the modern “principle of radical doubt [that] insists that all knowledge takes the form of hypotheses.”124 It entails a collapse of distinctions that is not alien to scenes of trauma: “what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’?” (BGE, 236). It aspires to the regressive status of the prelinguistic that characterizes both trauma and the faltering language of lamentation: “May your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names,” says Zarathustra, “and if you must speak of her, then do not be ashamed to stammer of her” (Zarathustra, 36). Like lamentation, it is largely composed of questions: “there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark

32


that you place after your special words and favorite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn gestures and trumps before accusers and law courts” (BGE, 226). It is a song for “whoever still has ears for the unheard-of” (Zarathustra, 24)—for, perhaps, the “unspeakable” through which Herman analyzes trauma or the voice of lamentation arriving from the far boundary of the real. This anti-knowledge (to resort to a crudely utilitarian formulation) is also a disruption of the balance of justice that bears on our analyses both of trauma (above) and of lamentation (in the following chapter). First, as we have seen, trauma is often metaphorized as an imbalance and hence, implicitly, as injustice. Recovery, concomitantly, is often conceived as a re-equilibration, a restoration of loss calculated through a quasi-juridical equation of commensurability and adequation. Both a cause and an effect of therapeutic notions of adequation, the parameters of trauma are often adjudicated by courts of law, and recovery is arrived at as much by juridical as by medical means. Second, questions of justice, as we will explore in the following chapter, play a central role within the lamentation. Yet while lamentation, like a courtroom, is largely interrogatory in structure, it poses questions it cannot answer (which no competent advocate would). While it often demands retribution, it lances judgments that remain tentative, paradoxical, invocatory. It presents evidence and calls for witnesses, but resolutely refuses resolution. At the heart of Nietzsche’s critique is the economic basis of justice, which, since Aristotle, has been conceived as a species of the proportionate. The unjust, like the untrue or the traumatic, is that which violates the principle of proportionality, of the analogos. As Wai Chee Dimmock puts it, justice relies on “converting the world into a common measure, a common evaluative currency, grounding the very possibility for adjudication on the possibility of such a currency, assigning due weight to disparate things.”125 For Nietzsche, the problem is not that justice is imperfectly exercised, but that the principle itself—which treats guilt as a dischargeable debt and ultimately presumes that “everything has its price [and] all things can be paid for”—is untenable: “the oldest and naïvest moral canon of justice” (Genealogy, 506). The problem is with the very idiom of equalizing that assumes that “what is right for one is fair for the other” (BGE, 339). Zarathustra, indeed, teaches the contrary: “For me justice speaks thus: Men are not equal” (Zarathustra, 101). Nietzsche demands—and the significance of this demand vastly exceeds the petty chauvinisms to which his (routinely decontextualized) remarks on rank, nobility, and slave morality have been ascribed—that we consider more rigorously in what sense(s) humans can and should be conceived as “equal.” Should humans be taken as interchangeable values? Should justice be a branch of accounting? To what must justice be blind in order to operate in such a manner? From what economic, cultural, racial, sexual, political, educational, or corporal dynamics must its eyes be shielded? Whom must it exempt from its measure—foreigners? Children? The insane? Creators? Philosophers? Would it not be precisely the


33

incalculable or incommensurate—that is to say, the traumatic—that would be ineligible for this justice? A justice based on “equality of rights,” Nietzsche cautions, “could all too easily be changed into equality in violating rights . . . into a common war on all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and the abundance of creative power and masterfulness,” into little more than an obliging comrade to the delineation and enforcement of normalcy (BGE, 328–29). The relation between (un)truth and (in)justice we have brushed by above is also far from inconsequential. As Nietzsche gives us to understand, the economic basis of justice is implicated in thinking as such. Conceived as measuring or evaluating, both are based in the “most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking as such” (Genealogy, 506). The redoubtable force of this cooperation between the just and the true can hardly be overstated. It is one reason why trauma and lamentation are perceived as so threatening: they are not only a crisis in justice, but in the equilibrium of thought itself. Nietzsche’s critique of the economies of justice and reason, of the calculability of loss and recovery, also returns us to a recognition with which we began this book: that loss, which may entail destruction, obstruction, conceptual transfer, or defeat, is rarely commensurate with itself; it can not stand as its own equivalent. If loss serves ideological purposes, moreover, it is quite possible that this desire for equivalence, this dream of just adequation that Nietzsche so pitilessly assaults, is also an open invitation to sleight of hand, a golden opportunity for exchanging one (kind of) loss for another. If the lamentation can be read as a critique of justice that intersects at key points with Nietzsche’s, among the most significant of these points is the refusal of this economic model of justice. While the moment of lamentation (as I will argue below) is often characterized by the redistribution of possessions both material and ideological, this redistribution is decidedly not based on mutually determined values; it is not an “exchange.” For the lamentation there is no equivalent for the loss that it mourns; there is nothing that can compensate for the pain it expresses. Another of these points of intersection is a denunciation of justice as a sublimation of affect—of hatred, envy, mistrust, rancor, and revenge. Justice, Nietzsche contends, is essentially a compromise with the anger of those directly injured. It “treats violence and capricious acts on the part of individuals or entire groups as offenses against the law . . . and thus leads the feelings of its subjects away from the direct injury caused by such offenses” (Genealogy, 512). This is just the sort of sublimation, displacement, and abstraction that the lamentation refuses; it will not allow its pain to be transformed into socially useful judgments, will not allow it to be distanciated from personal relationships. On the contrary, lamentations routinely express—though it is far too decorous a word in this context—fury, bitterness, and hatred. They claim these affects as their own;

34


they are among the few possessions left in the moment of lamentation. The lamentation clings to them, will not give them over to law.126 It is for these reasons—the philosophical poverty and vindictive silliness of justice conceived as economic adequation (the good as conceived by the man of ressentiment), and the well-publicized relation of justice with “truth” that only thinly disguises its backstreet dealings with all manner of ideology— that Nietzsche aligns himself not with projects of recovery, but with the unbalancing gesture of trauma.

Heidegger In Being and Time, Heidegger depicts Dasein residing in a useful, integrated, and meaningful world where equipment is Zuhandenheit (ready-to-hand) and Dasein is concernfully absorbed in work. But sometimes this world breaks down, and Dasein’s everyday understanding, which largely consists in using things, is disrupted. Heidegger theorizes three such instances—when a tool is damaged, a tool is missing, or a foreign object appears. These conditions interest me not only because they distinguish between different kinds of crises, but because, unlike the theory-disturbing scenes of trauma we have explored above, they enable a certain mode of reflection.127 All, however, represent a breakdown of the meaningful totality of references and assignments that makes the world intelligible.128 The cohesive relationality of the world is fractured: things fall apart. This account, which is not far from certain descriptions of modernity and widely applicable to trauma, is equally descriptive of the moment of lamentation. For, as I elaborate below, lamentation customarily marks a moment in which structures of significance have been destroyed, the materials of meaning are divested of the principle that organizes them, and the world, suddenly foreign, demands a new kind of attention. All are also a turn away from everyday concernful absorption in work to deliberate reflection and analysis. For Heidegger, who presumes that our primary life activity is hammering or chopping wood or some other form of robust labor, this analytical stance, though disclosive, is always derived or secondary and “operates by depriving the world of its worldliness in a definite way” (BT, 94).129 As this latter phrase suggests, decontextualized theoretical reflection—which Heidegger associates with metaphysics and scientific inquiry—is itself a species of trauma; it is a privation, a disruption of one’s familiar way of being in the world. The happy picture of absorbed coping that, such breakdowns notwithstanding, dominates the opening of Being and Time becomes, in Part IV, paled o’er with the sickly hue of inauthenticity. Here Heidegger shifts from analyzing Dasein’s encounters with an equipmental world to Dasein’s Beingwith Others and puts forward the unsettling possibility that “the ‘who’ of everyday Dasein just is not the ‘I myself’” (BT, 150). The others that interest Heidegger, and that he collectively names das Man, are, rather than the


35

others against which one defines oneself, “those for whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too” (BT, 154). These are the others that drain Dasein of its authenticity: “when Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern—that is, at the same time, in its Being-with towards Others—it is not itself” (BT, 163). “Its Being has been taken away by the Others” (BT, 164). This non-identity with the self (which Heidegger, in a river of negative images, describes as loss, turning away, cutting off, uprooting, distraction, covering up, and fleeing) bears resemblances to the psychic alienation and loss of self characteristic of trauma. It is also the ontological echo of the fractured, alienated subject of modernity. Indeed, although Heidegger is ostensibly describing a transhistorical ontological structure, his evidence is located unambiguously in the experience of modernity, in the context of industrialization, urbanization, mass media, and the large-scale production of goods and tastes: In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-oneanother dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” [das Man] is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the great mass as they shrink back; we find shocking what they find shocking. (BT, 164)

Three consequences of das Man’s hold on modern individuals are particularly relevant to our inquiry. First, “Dasein, tranquilized, and ‘understanding’ everything . . . drifts along towards an alienation [Entfremdung] in which its ownmost potentiality for Being is hidden from it” (BT, 222). This tranquility, which closes Dasein off from its authenticity and possibility, bears conspicuous resemblances both to the “sequestration of experience” that Giddens identifies in modernity and to the banal conformities of bourgeois modernity against which modernism reacted. Second, Heidegger, following Kierkegaard, describes the effect of das Man as a “leveling” of the possibilities of Being; this leveling plays a central role in maintaining averageness and disciplining the extraordinary: das Man “keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore” (BT, 165). Here we are neither far from Nietzschean ressentiment nor from Foucauldian discipline. Third, the everyday self is an occlusion, absorbed in and by das Man; it will take a certain kind of removal, a necessary loss, to unveil authentic being. The disclosure of authentic Dasein is “always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way” (BT, 167). Being (authentically) demands destruction. Such destruction, as Heidegger elaborates over a number of texts, is enabled by the mood of anxiety, and his analyses of both mood (in general) and of anxiety (in particular) also illuminate the functioning of lamentation in

36


modernity. Dasein reveals itself in, and all understanding is accompanied by, mood, Heidegger says, and the disclosive power of mood exceeds that of theory or reflection: “the possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition reach far too short a way compared with the primordial disclosure belonging to moods” (BT, 173). This is the philosophical acknowledgement of a discernment that escapes philosophy, that is often dismissed as irrational, irrelevant, or subjective. But in Heidegger’s analysis, mood is not only distinguished from individual experience or feeling—it is a publicness that invades the private; it is both external and internal—but its power is augmented by its refusal to submit to reflection. “[Moods] are so far from being reflected upon, that precisely what they do is to assail Dasein in its unreflecting devotion to the ‘world’ with which it is concerned and on which it expends itself” (BT, 175). Most significant to Heidegger’s ontological project and also persistent within the lamentation is the mood of anxiety. It arises at two crucial moments in Being and Time—in Section 40 (the turning point of Being and Time, where Heidegger devastates the significant world he has thus far laid out), and at the beginning of Division II (where his transition from thinking of Dasein as care to theorizing Dasein’s temporality pivots on “beingtowards-death”). We noted above that the disclosure of authentic Dasein necessitates a clearing away of concealments and that this task is carried out by anxiety. Elaborating this point in Section 40, Heidegger shows that anxiety collapses the referential structure that produces significance and that grounds the intelligibility of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Absorbed in its world of everyday significance, Dasein understands a doorknob as an object with which to open a door, but anxiety reveals the doorknob as simply a doorknob, an unrelated thing, an as such without significance. This is what Heidegger means when he writes that “Being-anxious discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world” (BT, 232), that this disclosure is a kind of collapse of the world into itself in which it takes on “the character of completely lacking significance” (BT, 231). Because Dasein understands itself as part of this world, anxiety “takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted. Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about—its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world”(BT, 232). The latter phrase should not be overlooked. If, in anxiety, Dasein loses its everyday way of understanding, what it gains is authentic potentiality, possibility, freedom: “Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for (propensio in . . .) the authenticity of its Being” (BT, 232). Heidegger thus prepares us for the discovery that the anxiety of lamentations is routinely implicated in disrupting habitual modes of understanding and in disclosing an awful freedom. But such freedom is rarely seized; Dasein flees from the anxiety it entails, from its indefiniteness and foreignness. For as Heidegger emphasizes, the collapse of significance that accompanies anxiety is characterized by a pressing


37

indefiniteness that is not a stagnant nihilism, that is not, indeed, without its resemblances to Nietzschean uncertainty. Dasein flees from this indefiniteness and is encouraged in its flight by a metaphysical tradition that labels such indefiniteness foreign, insignificant, irrelevant, impure. The collapse of the referential significance of the world is also an erasure of its familiarity, a confrontation with a world that has become foreign. But, as Heidegger insists, this confrontation with the foreign is less an encounter with an “other” than with the self, with Dasein’s essential uncanniness, its character as fundamentally not-at-home in the world: “anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the ‘world.’ Everyday familiarity collapses. . . . Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the ‘not-at-home.’. . . From an existential-ontological point of view, the ‘not-at-home’ must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon” (BT, 233–34). In the following chapter, I describe lamentation as a confrontation with the foreign. We have already noted the regression, nonpresence, and threat to modernity this term signifies. Heidegger has a different idea: the not-at-homeness with which the lamentation is preoccupied is potentially a disclosure of authentic Being. Rather than a form of loss, the lamentation’s unsettledness would, from this perspective, be a form of recovery (of Dasein’s lostness in das Man, of authentic possibility). And authentic being, in its unsettled, uncanny foreignness, would be a form of trauma. In Division II of Being and Time, anxiety returns, thickened into “beingtowards-death,” from which Dasein constantly flees. Several parts of this argument are particularly pertinent to our inquiry into lamentation and modernity. First, coming to an end, Heidegger says, can not be represented by another; “the authentic Being-come-to-an-end [Zuendegekommensein] of the deceased is precisely the sort of thing which we do not experience . . . we have no way of access to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying man ‘suffers’” (BT, 282). The other’s death remains that part of being that cannot be ex-posed or ex-pressed, the absolutely, wholly foreign, as much a scandal for ethics as an impasse for language. Thus it is that death becomes a figure—in literature, philosophy, and social discourse—for the unknowable or inaccessible. This is one of the most well traveled intersections between the lamentation, which frequently thematizes this crisis, and discursive constructions of modernity. Second, Heidegger describes death as a possibility that is certain and at the same time indefinite, and this depiction is, in many instances, equally appropriate to the circumstances to which lamentations respond. It is also among the most metaphysically unacceptable of the lamentation’s obsessions, this focus on a certainty that does not coincide with clarity, this proposition that one might be perfectly sure of what one cannot comprehend. Third, “with death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (BT, 294). This standing before death opens up a singular potentiality, one that retrieves Dasein from the clutches of das Man and functions as the uttermost clearing away of those concealments behind which Dasein hides from itself. Fourth, anxiety is anticipatory; it awaits. But this waiting is neither a passivity nor a temporal emptiness; rather, it is a dynamic anticipation that opens

38


and reveals. The anxiety that imbues the lamentation is thus not only the mark that lamentation is as much anticipatory as commemorative, but an indication of the way in which lamentation may unlock the future, function as a sign of authenticity, or elicit a passionate freedom. When Heidegger revisits anxiety in his later work, he increasingly historicizes it as a specific response to technological modernity and to the unsettled experience modernity produces. He also increasingly associates anxiety with an ontological stance of openness and a conception of truth as unconcealment. He reinterprets, with the help of a hyphen, the resoluteness posited in Being and Time as Ent-schlossenheit, a stance of un-closedness and, later (borrowing from Meister Eckhart to dispute Nietzsche), as Gelassenheit: letting be, an emptying out of will. He develops a notion of presencing that is dependent upon a clearing (Lichtung). And he claims to revive a forgotten formulation of truth—as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit), disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), or unforgetting (aletheia). In all these notions resides a figure of loss or elimination—of concealment, closure, or forgetting—that is both revelatory and liberating rather than harmful. In “On the Essence of Truth,” for example, disputing the notion of truth as homoiosis, adaequatio, or Richtigkeit (correctness), Heidegger contends that necessary and prior to any adequation is “an openness of comportment,” a freeing up of oneself “for what is opened up in an open region.”130 This (re)new(ed) conception of truth entails, rather than a task of evaluating and measuring, a standing out into the open region (an ek-sistence) that, in its essence, is freedom. Along similar lines, in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger attempts to uncover a kind of thinking that, neither scientific nor metaphysical, is non-calculative, that does not conceal what is with what is demonstratable. This thinking signals both the end of philosophy (its evolution into the sciences) and a new beginning for thought: “We are thinking of the possibility that the world civilization that is just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn” and recuperate the concept of truth abandoned at the beginning of philosophy: aletheia, an unconcealment or clearing “that first grants Being and thinking and their presencing to and for each other.”131 A breakdown that disrupts the familiar and demands a new kind of attention, a being alienated in publicness and modernity, an authenticity that requires destruction, a mood of anxiety that also harbors freedom and possibility, a notion of truth as removal: these are the contours that Heidegger intensifies in modernity’s lamentations.

Derrida Among the several epigraphs with which Derrida begins Speech and Phenomena is a citation from Poe:


39

M. Valdemar spoke, obviously in reply to the question. . . . He now said: “Yes; —no; —I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead.”132

Why this impossible, deathly voice to instigate an essay on Husserl and signs? Derrida will spend much of his early career elaborating this idiom: demonstrating that death—an irreducible non-presence—inheres in signification and that this death haunts the entire philosophical tradition that has taken presence as equivalent to being. Perhaps the most straightforward explication of this principle is to be found in his analysis of first person pronouns: When I say I, even in solitary speech, can I give my statement meaning without implying, there as always, the possible absence of the object of speech—in this case, myself? When I tell myself “I am,” this expression, like any other according to Husserl, has the status of speech only if it is intelligible in the absence of its object, in the absence of intuitive presence—here, in the absence of myself. . . . Whether or not I have a present intuition of myself, “I” expresses something; whether or not I am alive, I am “means something.” (SP, 95)

Signification means without us, without our presence, without the presence of its referent, and these absences are not only possible, but structurally necessary to the functioning of language.133 Signs must continue to carry meaning independently of both the intention that animates them and the objects or events to which they refer. By choosing the example of the pronoun “I,” which subsumes both intention and referent, Derrida not only dramatizes the outrageousness to which this non-presence is available, but broaches the theme of self-presence which Husserl, and much of the philosophical tradition, takes as equivalent to consciousness itself. Derrida continues: [W]e understand the word I not only when its “author” is unknown but when he is quite fictitious. And when he is dead. The ideality of the Bedeutung [meaning] here has by virtue of its structure the value of a testament. . . . Whether or not perception accompanies the statement about perception, whether or not life as self-presence accompanies the uttering of the I, is quite indifferent with regard to the functioning of meaning. My death is structurally necessary to the pronouncing of the I. That I am also “alive” and certain about it figures as something that comes over and above the appearance of the meaning. (SP, 96–97)

But can this story of language really be taken to have anything in common with death? With the loss of a loved one, the object of lamentations, or the tragedies of modern wars? Isn’t this simply a category error that avails itself of a metaphorical death to do the affective work of shock, of creating philosophical rupture, and sensationalizing its import—the sort of conflation of loss with absence against which LaCapra has warned? Perhaps. Derrida, to be sure, has rarely shied away from the exorbitant. Yet to understand the stakes of his language, to assess this warrant on death, we must, I think, fully appreciate the significance of presence to the history of metaphysics. It is a history,

40


as Derrida shows, consistently and constitutively committed to self-presence, which it takes as the locus of life, being, and sense. Not only are signs foreign to this region of pure self-identity, a defiling mediation and delay, but the non-presence that lurks in signs is the inverse of, and a threat to, the sense and consciousness that self-presence secures—in short, an interruption of what philosophy takes to be life itself. Whether or not we interpret the death within signification as “real death” depends on what we take to be “real life” and what Derrida sets out to expose is the degree to which philosophy has taken life to be identical to self-presence. Though ultimately carried out across a vast textual corpus, Derrida’s deconstruction of philosophy’s faith in self-presence begins with Husserl, who maintains the existence of a prelinguistic sense or intuition and “will ceaselessly strive to keep signification outside the self-presence of transcendental life” (SP, 31). To do so, he relies on the convention of “solitary speech” or “solitary mental life”—an inward communication that is nondifferent, identical to itself, unadulterated by alterity. But even if one speaks to oneself, Derrida asks, isn’t one involved in an act of re-presentation, of repetition and substitution that is as much an absence (of original presence) as an object available to presence? Isn’t the idea itself—the Platonic ideal or eidos— the “mastery of presence in repetition” (SP, 9)? “In its pure form,” Derrida writes, “this presence is the presence of nothing existing in the world; it is a correlation with the acts of repetition, themselves ideal” (SP, 10). And it is this “nothing existing,” this constitutive non-presence within self-consciousness, that underwrites Derrida’s language of death: “The relationship with my death (my disappearance in general) thus lurks in this determination of being as presence, ideality, the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relationship with death” (SP, 55). Derrida proposes, then, that “since self-consciousness appears only in its relation to an object, whose present it can keep and repeat, it is never perfectly foreign or anterior to the possibility of language . . . that nonpresence and difference (mediation, signs, referral back, etc.) [are lodged] in the heart of self-presence” (SP, 15). “I must from the outset,” Derrida writes, “operate (within) a structure of repetition whose basic element can only be representative. A sign is never an event, if by event we mean an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular. A sign which would take place but ‘once’ would not be a sign; a purely idiomatic sign would not be a sign” (SP, 50). From the Derridean perspective, the “irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular[ity]” of trauma—the exemplar of the “event”—is of a structurally, ontologically different order from signification. An event cannot be a sign; when it is made into a sign, through, for example, the repetitions of lamentation, recovery, or justice, it has undergone an irreducible surrogacy. This substitution is at the core of the problem of representing traumatic experience, of the threats of simulation, inauthenticity, and betrayal. It is, indeed, little wonder that trauma is experienced as a breakdown of language, as a moment when signs cease to function in the ordinary manner. For if we


41

regularly accept the substitutions proffered by language, recognizing them as the very possibility and bearer of meaning, trauma is the moment in which that substitution becomes unacceptable, unbearable, when experience resists resolution into meaning. In other words, there remains in traumatic experience, as the lamentation will repeatedly remind us, something that is (juridically, clinically, economically, and hermeneutically) irrecoverable. It is a similar irrecoverability, an uneven exchange in signification, that Derrida famously baptizes différance: “the economic character of différance in no way implies that the deferred presence can always be recovered, that it simply amounts to a temporary investment without loss.”134 The “deferred presence” that différance names—“the movement of signs [that] defers the moment of encounter with the thing itself”135—is not, then, without a significant resemblance to the way in which traumatic events, unavailable to immediate experience, must be belatedly constructed, or to the epistemological, temporal, and affective disjunctures that inhere in both cathartic and narrative treatments. Indeed, it is to Freud’s descriptions of psychic responses to trauma—the “effort of life to protect itself by deferring the dangerous investment”—that Derrida turns to elaborate the notion of différance, specifically, to the theory of Nachträglichkeit that prefigures modern descriptions of PTSD as alienated memory.136 When we recognize différance in self-presence, it also comes to resemble other descriptors of PTSD, such as the splitting or shattering of the ego, mental dissociation, or loss of psychic integrity. This primordial nonplenitude within presence, this “space of repetition and splitting of the self”—reminiscent of the interferences in self-knowledge and representation that Janet identified in trauma victims—is for Derrida characteristic of reflective consciousness as such.137 This thought is philosophically catastrophic, and indeed Derrida often affirms the calamitousness of his own project, warning us, for example, in Speech and Phenomena that he is aiming at “the core of consciousness itself from a region that lies elsewhere than philosophy, a procedure that would remove every possible security and ground from discourse” (SP, 62). In Grammatology, catastrophe is the trope that governs his description of the historical irruption of writing into present speech.138 Yet in an intriguing passage, Derrida prescribes a mood for engaging this catastrophe: it is to be one not of lamentation but of Nietzschean celebration: “It must be conceived without nostalgia; that is, it must be conceived outside the myth of the purely maternal or paternal language belonging to the lost fatherland of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation into play—with a certain laughter and with a certain dance.”139 Why the prohibition on a sense of loss in an oeuvre crowded with images of catastrophe? Would it entail a fixation on or in the past, an unproductive melancholy, or an effeminacy? Would it exclude one from the company of Nietzsche’s “philosophers of the future”? Or does the interdiction

42


enforce a distinction from discourses of modernity, construct an anti- or post-modernity? If such questions cannot be resolved with complete certainty, what is more certain is that Derrida’s catastrophic argument is also an epochal one—an argument about modernity. The notion of différance, for example, is presented as “the strategically most proper theme to think out . . . what is most characteristic of our ‘epoch.’”140 And the project of Grammatology is described as “a question of a reading of what may perhaps be called the ‘age’ of Rousseau,” of “an historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the closure” (Grammatology, lxxxix, 4). Derrida’s temporal demarcations largely correspond to those we have sketched above: a modernity beginning with “the moment of the great rationalisms of the seventeenth century,” an era, for Derrida, in which “the determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity” (Grammatology, 16), and coming to a close with those seminal thinkers of late modernity—Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger—who undermine that self-presence and heavily inflect Derrida’s thinking. Now, in Grammatology, the deathliness in signs evoked above, the rhetoric of catastrophe, and these epochal shifts converge on the theme of writing. Writing is the site where the non-presence in signification is most acute, where the distance from an animating intention is greatest, and where the operations of language are thus most hazardous. Both Husserl and Saussure, Derrida shows, retreat from this severance of signification from intuition; they script it as crisis, as an exile “far from the clear evidence of the sense” and the “full presence of the signified,” and hence from truth (Grammatology, 40). Both privilege instead the living voice, and in this they are representative of an entire metaphysical tradition for which “the privilege of presence as consciousness can be established only by virtue of the voice” (SP, 16). This privilege results from the fact that, in speech, the signified seems to be immediately present in the act of expression, to be in absolute proximity to the signifier. The prestige of the voice is augmented, moreover, by an associative web that links it to origin, conscience, the heart, sentiment, and the metaphorical nuances of “breath” and “spirit,” as well as by a series of philosophically weighty oppositions in which the voice is aligned with the temporal over the spatial, the spiritual over the material, the natural over the artificial, the direct over the devious. “The voice is heard (understood)—that undoubtedly is what is called conscience—closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in ‘reality,’ any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity” (Grammatology, 20). This interior voice, as Derrida’s language suggests, has routinely been conceived of as possessing a singular purity; as untainted by the external, the material, the contingent, and the empirical; and, indeed, as a safeguard against difference, against all that is exterior, unnatural, or foreign. From this perspective—and it is one that dominates an entire epoch, beginning with metaphysics itself, but reinvigorated in early modernity when


43

the science of writing appears—writing is an intrusion into the intimate union of signifier and signified, of voice and consciousness. The written word, Derrida demonstrates, is conceived as secondary and supplementary to the logos, to present meaning centered in the voice; if spoken language is already a mediation of consciousness, written language, which is a transcription of speech, is the mediation of mediation. It is fallen, cut off from selfpresence, from consciousness, from the animating intention of the live voice. This is what Rousseau infers when he writes that “to judge genius from books is like painting a man’s portrait from his corpse” (qtd. Grammatology, 17). It is also what undergirds Lévi-Strauss’s depiction of the entrance of written forms into oral societies as violent and alienating. In this logocentric tradition, writing—severed from presence and consciousness—is at once unnatural, dangerously dissimulative, and deathly: “it is the carrier of death; it exhausts life” (Grammatology, 17).141 While the substance of the lamentation is the living voice—it is a principally oral form—and while lamentations (through both metaphor and regulated breathing techniques) draw directly on those associations of the voice with breath, life, speech, and sentiment that Derrida marks, lamentations, as we will see, rarely indulge the fantasy of a harmonious union between signifier and signified. On the contrary, they often thematize the radical and ineradicable distance between signifier (the name of a homeland, an emotion, the dead) and signified, as well as the contingency, materiality, and foreignness that Derrida associates with writing. Like writing, lamentations themselves are often considered unnatural, dangerous, precariously close to death. Bolstering the privilege of the voice over writing is also a well-entrenched hierarchy of the soul over the body, one that distinguishes between the pure, animating, spirit of expression (its “interior”) and the physical, sensible and defiled mechanism of signification (its “exterior”): [W]hat governs here is the absolute difference between body and soul. . . . The word is a body that means something only if an actual intention animates it and makes it pass from the state of inner sonority to that of an animated body. This body proper to words expresses something only if it is animated by an act of meaning which transforms it into a spiritual flesh. (Grammatology, 81)142

This opposition also bears on the embodiment of lament performance, and on the lament’s defiling involvement with material matters and dead bodies. It is implicated in the dense semantic web of terms derived from Latin proprius—purity, propriety, property, identity, literality—and “the metaphysics of the proper” that for Derrida is subtended by the logocentric conception of the unadulterated “internal voice” of consciousness, absolutely identical to itself.143 We have already noted these notions as central to the lamentation, but it is a tangled web they weave: bewailing loss, defilement, and the shattering of identity, lamentations are nonetheless regularly implicated in the demarcation of property, processes of purification, and the establishment of identity.


Chapter

2

“A n d t h e Wo m e n Wa i l e d i n A n s w e r” * : Th e L a m e n t Tr a d i t i o n

Women shriek. They tear their hair and clothing, scratch at their faces and

beat their chests. They sway hypnotically and sometimes dance wildly, as if possessed. They scream out questions without answers, repeat themselves, call for vengeance. They will not be consoled. At times, their sobs, moans, and sighs compose themselves into song, into a searing melody or a mournful antiphony. They summon us to witness, but they seem mad. Unwashed and unadorned, they rub grime on their faces; they are alternately despondent and angry; they breathe unnaturally. They seem caught up in something both intensely sacred and dreadfully pagan, in an obscene exposure of women, their bodies, emotion: of the private in a public place. One is tempted to recoil, as if from contamination; one senses that the anguish will spread. How, then, do we respond to such a scene of lamentation, which invokes us as insistently from the margins of modernity as from the distance of Athenian tragedy? It is, to be sure, a rich and diverse tradition, incessantly reinvented in various times and places.1 In much of the modern world—and, conspicuously, in that part of the world that presumes to dictate the meaning of modernity—such practices have been left in the dustbin of history, disdainfully discarded with other forms of superstition and residues of the primitive, replaced by medicalized and professionalized responses to death—by Giddens’s “expert systems,” discreetly sequestered from everyday experience.2 There are, however, a number of regions where women’s lament practices have remained strong into modernity—Greece and North Africa, Ireland, Eastern Europe, Finland, and the Baltic region, as well as in some immigrant communities in Europe and the Americas. But these practices * “Epiv dev stevnaconto gunaivke~”: the customary Homeric phrase marking lament.

46


remain in the margins of modernity both geographically and temporally; they are primarily rural rather than urban and often disparaged within the communities where they exist, considered an embarrassing anachronism in the pursuit of modernity, a manifestation of ignorance, an impious indulgence in pagan rites.3 Rather than attempt to enclose the richness and diversity of the lament tradition in strict generic terms, I wish to suggest a series of descriptive propositions that seek to identify where lamentation emerges and how it functions as (among other things) a counterculture of modernity, an extrainstitutional meditation on trauma, and a disruption in and of philosophy.

Lamentation is a ritual performance. To say that the lamentation is a ritual performance is, on the one hand, to say that it is a public, communal form, that it depends on collective participation, and that it performs certain tasks within a community. “The lament for the dead is essentially functional,” writes Margaret Alexiou.4 It is necessary for carrying out certain fundamental tasks of dealing with the dead: aiding the psyche in leaving the body and journeying to the underworld, attracting the attention of the dead and communicating with them effectively, assuring that the dead are satisfied and will not inflict harm on the living. Women adept at performing laments are, in many societies, perceived to have the ability to communicate directly with the deceased and to function as mediators between the dead and the living.5 Angela Bourke, in her study of Irish laments, casts the lamenter as a grief therapist, leading the community through the stages of grief described by Kübler-Ross.6 Considered within the history of trauma we have sketched above, lamentation might be said to incorporate both cathartic and integrative methods of healing, moving between hypnotic emotional release that functions as abreaction and fractured narrations that endeavor to integrate the traumatic event into a larger interpretative framework. Like responses to treatment, lamentations are often judged by a community in terms of (emotional and narrative) adequation, on an informal calculation of the true and the just. 7 On the other hand, to say that the lamentation is a ritual performance is to say that it may or may not be coincident with personal grief. While the language of lamentation expresses the cognitive upheaval of crisis and the confusion of world-shattering grief, the degree to which that expression represents the feelings of individual performers will necessarily vary. Professional mourners—women skilled at lament performance and at evoking grief responses in others—have been employed since antiquity. And many women readily testify to the necessity of focusing on personal pain in order to acquire the requisite emotion for performance, a deliberative concentration not unlike that deployed clinically to induce re-enactment of a traumatic scene, disclose repressed memories, and effect abreaction.8 Experience of loss, such scenes seem to teach us, is not necessarily spontaneous, may, indeed, preclude

“A n d t h e W o m e n W a i l e d i n A n s w e r ”

47

spontaneity. Ritual lamentation, further, not only expresses grief, but is an expression intended to produce grief. A well-performed lament, even when recited long after the event of loss or performed by hired mourners, should evoke grief in participants and observers alike. The lamentation is performative, then, not only in the sense of creating a spectacle but also in the linguistic sense of performativity as it has been developed by theorists such as Butler and Bhabha to include “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”9 It is quite possible that performativity in this latter sense is conditioned by the nature of trauma itself. Marked by confusion, shock, and unawareness, a traumatic moment is necessarily apprehended speculatively and belatedly. “Massive trauma precludes its registration,” writes Dori Laub; “the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out.”10 Indeed we have seen this depiction of psychic fragmentation, of shattered cognitive and perceptual categories, throughout the history of trauma. That apparently simplest of questions—what happened?—turns out to be the most difficult; attempting to answer it is a task as central to the lamentation as it is to trauma therapists. But the “knowledge” thereby established, as Laub avers, “is not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right.”11 The traumatic event and a language, like lamentation, that responds to it are thus not easily distinguished, for the language of lamentation cannot simply record catastrophe, but must also speculatively construct it. The traumatic moment is thus simultaneously phenomenal and rhetorical, recorded and produced by the language of lamentation; and the language of lamentation is simultaneously representational and performative, both a record, and the creation, of the traumatic moment. It is quite possible, then, that by miming the gestures of lamentation—and thereby reproducing the symptoms of trauma—that social or literary texts may fabricate trauma: the gestures of a language that represents trauma may rhetorically effect trauma, may function, that is, to construct useful and interested catastrophe under the guise of merely recording it. We cannot retreat from the fact that these recognitions place us on the precarious terrain of the threefold threat we have sketched above: of simulation, interestedness, and betrayal. Much like the authorities who have suspected trauma victims of interested confabulation, anthropological culture collectors have questioned the authenticity of the emotions expressed in lamentations. Aili Nenola-Kallio, in his study of Ingrian laments, suggests that “the descriptions of grief, ill fortune, and anxiety” tend to be extended and exaggerated in the manner of lyrical poetry, “so that it is sometimes difficult to determine from the text itself of the lament how serious or concerete the pain is which the lament sets out to interpret”;12 and the formulaic language of the laments (which I explore below) lead him to ask, “How genuine are these laments, therefore? Are they in fact a form of rhetoric, demonstrations of lamenting skill for some ready audience?”13 But it is crucial to appreciate, I would argue, that it is precisely because lamentation is the site of

48


devastating and very real bewilderment that it is susceptible to ideological appropriation; because its pain can never be disinterested that it lends itself to use; because it carries an imperative of fidelity that it is ideologically potent. Lamentation can, on the one hand, be simulated and genuine; it can also be interested and genuine. On the other hand, it may be simulated and completely disingenuous, interested and entirely contrived. In short, simulation, interestedness, and betrayal are no more certain signs of falisty than sincerity is a guarantor of truth. Genuineness and authenticity cannot shake off ideological interest, any more than ideology can function without constructing authentic experience. In addition to expressing and producing grief, lamentations perform other social functions: they are, for example, instrumental in the construction of oral history and of the identity of the deceased person or lost object. These are tasks that, particularly in smaller communities, may carry large significance; they may contest written records or refuse the official story proffered by governments or other institutions. Lamentations are also expressions of social status: the greater the number of people gathered for mourning, the greater the dignity and status bestowed on the dead and on his or her family. Maniat women (in mainland Greece) distinguish between the “silent” or “naked” death when few mourners appear and the good death characterized by “fanerosi”—the appearance of kin and community members.14 In North Africa and the Arab world, the more beloved or more socially important the deceased, the higher the pitch of wailing. In his 1926 ethnography of Morocco, Edward Westermark recorded that “when a person mourns for a superior, he howls with all his might; for an equal, his noise is not quite so loud. Chiefs give vent only to a few sighs, unless it be for another chief.”15 Lamentations are also widely linked to the right to inherit. In Greek tradition, participation in mourning was expected of all who would inherit and could be used as an argument for inheritance; laws passed in fifth-century Crete and Athens restricted lamentation to immediate kin, ostensibly to limit property claims.16 While laments are first and foremost a ritual performance honoring the dead, they are also sung for weddings and for the departures attendant upon migration, exile, or military service. Indeed, in the idiom of lamentation, these events often metaphorically participate in, and are apprehended through, each other: death as a marriage, marriage as exile, exile as death.17 Consider, for example, the following lament from Arkadi, recorded by Sotirios Chianis: Who doesn’t know death, doesn’t cry for the dead, my Vasso And who doesn’t know foreign lands doesn’t cry for those abroad, my little Vasso . . . Ah! I know about death and I cry for the dead, my little Vasso, Ah! I know foreign lands and cry for those abroad, Vasso, my Vasso.18

Or the following lines from a Palestinian lament:


49

Why does the maiden depart so sadly? They walked with a wedding canopy past the graveyard.19

Laments are also composed for the fall of cities or for national tragedies, and here too one finds a remarkable figural intersection: the loss of a loved one expressed as the destruction of an entire universe—a “cosmos shaken and restructured by death” as Caraveli-Chavez puts it20—as in this lament for Druze leader Sultan Basha: The hero has died, darkening our hope and likewise the moon The east has lost one of its foundations.21

Or in this Maniat woman’s lament for her brother and parents: Yesterday at night, The earth was shaking, The winds blew and things were overturned in my father’s house. The foundations had been shaken, but now the roof is gone too, and the bad fate is fulfilled.22

A city or nation, concomitantly, may be addressed as an intimate loved one, as in the Hebrew “Lamentations of Jeremiah”: O wall of the daughter of Zion, Let tears run down like a river day and night: Give thyself no rest; Let not the apple of thine eye cease.23

If, moreover, the lamentation is primarily an oral and performative mode, it is also the site of a long and mutually enriching relationship with written texts. Greek tragedy, Arabic poetry, and Irish narrative, for example, all draw on the lament tradition and influence it in turn. Certain lamentations committed to writing—the Biblical Hebrew lamentations, the laments found in Greek epic and tragedy, or the Shi‘ite lamentations of Zaynab for the prophet Hussein—have had a particularly widespread influence on oral performances, and orally composed laments may take phrases or imagery directly from them. This dialogue between oral and written forms is also a dynamic intersection between popular and learned art forms. Indeed, lamentations are often characterized by a singular mixture of archaic and vernacular expressions, of elaborate classical locutions with disarmingly simple demotic declarations.24 Both Hifni (in the Arab context) and Tolbert (in Finland and Soviet Karelia) have noted women’s ability to skillfully deploy classical expressions whose literal meaning they do not know. This productive entanglement with written forms means that lamentation has wended its way through a number of genres: it is appropriated by epic and tragedy, and

50


appears intermittently throughout the history of narrative and lyric poetry.25 It is perhaps thus best conceived as a mode—a manner, a disposition, a red thread woven through other texts and discourses—rather than a discrete genre unto itself. Yet despite its itinerancy, the lamentation diverges distinctly from other mortuary forms such as the elegy or funeral oration. The most fundamental difference between lamentation and elegy is that between ritual performance and written text, between a communally constructed expression and an individual elegaic voice. But there are other striking differences as well. The classical elegy, for example, often takes the form of a consolatory or compensatory structure; it is often set in pastoral surroundings that promise seasonal rebirth; it focuses on the deceased, usually valorizing him/her, replacing him/her with an ideal image. The lamentation, by contrast, refuses consolation; it judges recovery impossible and compensation obscene; it will not let the horror of death be permuted into aesthetic value or political glory; it is imbued with an unresolved melancholy and dread. “O loved one, what you’ve broken in me, sixty thousand years will not mend,” cries one lament from bedouin Egypt.26 The Hebrew lamentations, similarly, close with unqualified despair addressed to an apparently unresponsive Yahweh: But thou hast utterly rejected us; Thou art very wroth against us.27

The lamentation also focuses, rather than on praise of the deceased, on the anguish of those who lament; it addresses the dead directly, sometimes with as much anger as sorrow. A widowed Palestinian woman laments: Your cousins turn against me; perhaps they never loved you Where should I stand; from whence should I call you and from whence will you answer He who said my beloved is like my father Is lying and should be mistrusted . . . Your death left us without a wall to lean upon Nor even a ladder.28

Another cries: Because of you I lost my heart And my raven hair eclipsed to white Our sooty clothes don’t suit anyone . . . My family has forsaken me and my friends abandoned me I wander between loneliness and my neighbor’s wall My evil neighbor has deserted me.29

Lament often emphasizes not only the mourner’s distress, but how that distress will be unremittingly preserved:


51

And if my teeth should desire to smile, I will break them on stones of basalt If my hair needs combing, I will comb it with thorns.30

Indeed, laments may be used to express longstanding bitterness and anger, to settle old scores, as in the following example from Greece: The old bitch used me up Fotos’ mother and grandma and Fotakos’ mother-in-law. And half-brother Fitilianikos hung me over the cliff by a length of cheap string at Pounta on Makyrna shore that cuts the boat ropes up. He left me to eat dry weeds And drink the brackish water.31

The elegy is historically a form written by men and about men, the lamentation composed by women and expressive of their experience. Alexiou notes that “early extant elegies range from sympotic to political and military in content, but none is addressed to the dead or even remotely mournful in tone”; elegiac inscriptions, she writes, bear a tone that “is detached and impersonal, almost serene, and in no sense like a lament.”32 This division associating women with a popular tradition and men with a literary one also holds for the funeral oration. “Both the epitaphios logos (funeral oration) and the epikedeion,” writes Alexiou, “have their origins in the literary rather than the popular tradition of the classical period. . . . Both composition and delivery belonged to the men.”33 A fifth-century invention, of which Pericles remains the standard, the epitaphios logos is an encomium traditionally delivered after burial and is largely concerned with making death useful for the state—with “telling the living how to remember the dead,” as Holst-Warhaft puts it.34 She also notes that “by avoiding the common verb apothanein (to die), and replacing it by the formula andres agathoi genomenoi,” the funeral speeches “placed the citizen soldiers that fell in combat in a realm of glory beyond the reach of death.”35 This expedient conversion of loss into gain “is in direct opposition to the lament of the female relatives, who . . . mourn their personal loss in terms of emotional, economic, and social deprivation, and look on death as an enemy,”36 as does this Ingrian lament: I cannot bear seeing how deserted my fireplace is how quiet my fields are because the elder has gone from my fields because there is no one to hurry on with the summer jobs.37

It is evident from these examples that some responses to death and catastrophe are more socially acceptable than others. And indeed, where lamentation

52


practices exist in modernity, they have survived a long history of repression and discipline by religious prohibition and state laws, as well as by domestication into rituals amenable to the purposes of religions and states. It is not difficult to understand why lamentation rituals might be viewed as threatening to patriarchy, social order, or religious belief. They are, after all, a disturbing and disruptive spectacle; they indulge in an irrationality that borders on madness; they mess with the paranormal, if not outright sorcery, refuse to resolve into useful knowledge, spread grief, anger, and dread. Islam and Christianity both have imposed restrictions on lamentation, have deemed such performances not only contaminated by their pagan roots, but inappropriate to a religion that promises an afterlife. The Prophet, for example, is recorded as saying that he was vexed “with the person who rends hair in misfortune, and raises his voice in crying, and rends the collar of his garment,” and that “a corpse over which lamentations are made will be punished on account of them on the day of resurrection.” Affliction should be borne with patience, and so far as the dead person is concerned there is no reason to lament his fate. Though dreadful to an infidel, death is a favour to a Moslem, who gets rest in death from the vexations of the world and arrives at God’s mercy.38

In Morocco, Westermarck noted that “the scribes try in vain to persuade the women in general to give up these customs” and that men often spoke “with much contempt of the women’s behavior at funerals,” accusing them “of not knowing their religion; they called them heathens or Jews.”39 Abu-Lughod notes that in Egypt lament practices are “disapproved of by learned religious authorities,” “share an uneasy relationship to Islamic piety,” and that “people often said that it was wrong (haram) for women who had been on the pilgrimage to Mecca to lament.”40 She records an example of a disconsolate mother mourning her son, who “was told by her sister-in- law to wash up and return to her religion.”41 “Excessive” lamentation was also deemed blasphemous by Christian church fathers such as St. John Chrysostom, who condemned the practices of hypnotic dancing and of tearing hair and clothes, as well as the “self-centeredness” of the language of lamentation. In a phrase that uncannily anticipates clinical depictions of trauma 1500 years later, he refers to lamentation as a “female disease.” In the seventeenth century, the Church of Ireland passed a number of laws aimed at limiting lamentation and threatening women who keened with excommunication.42 If the Orthodox Church has been more lenient in tolerating lamentation rituals—which partially accounts for the geography of survivals—it nonetheless remains officially opposed to them. A fascinating scene from Greece, described by Seremetakis, shows this ambivalence played out in a richly significant discursive struggle over the dead. While the priest’s “aesthetically, stylistically, and ideologically antithetical” funeral chant initially silences the women’s lamentations during the mourning ceremony, at the graveside the women’s lamentation begins again and culminates in an


53

acoustic and discursive confrontation between lamentation and Byzantine funeral chant, women and priest—a confrontation that, according to Seremetakis, “reproduces the tensions and antagonisms that are present in the lives of the mourners: the opposition between men and women, between religious or scientific rationality and local forms of divination, between clan and external institutions.”43 In the ancient world, philosophers added their voices to this chorus of condemnation. Plato contends that wailing and lamentations “are useless to decent women, let alone to men.” In tragedy, he says, they should be given to disreputable women characters, “so that those whom we say we are bringing up as guardians of our state will be ashamed to imitate them.”44 And Plutarch, in a series of familiar oppositions, states: “mourning is something feminine, weak, ignoble: women are more inclined to it than men, barbarians more than Greeks, commoners more than aristocrats.”45 Laws in ancient Athens intervened in lamentation rituals to regulate inheritance and, ostensibly, limit women’s informal influence on property decisions.46 Solon’s laws also attempted (fairly unsuccessfully it would appear) to regulate women’s lamentations by prohibiting the practices of self-laceration and soiling the clothing, of reciting dirges (threnoi), and of lamenting anyone other than the immediately deceased. A fear that lamentation might spread? That its anguish and disorder, its rage and uncertainty might run dangerously out of control? Such an anxiety also seems at play in later regulations that placed time limits on mourning and excluded women from the funeral procession, restrictions that increasingly contained lament within the private, interior, and temporary.47 This domestication of mourning is, in Loraux’s view, “the civic way of assigning limits to the loss of self, limits that for women are the familiar walls of the oikos. The reasoning is that the oikeion penthos (one’s own, private mourning) must not contaminate the city.”48 There are reasons for this: women’s lamentations, which refuse the conversion of death into state glory—into heroic, manly virtue and kleos—are contrary to the needs of the state. Mothers lamenting in the streets are conducive to neither maintaining an army nor carrying out a war. Solon’s restrictions on lament are also part of a larger regulation of women’s festivals that increasingly assigned them to the oikos, increasingly enforced an association of women with privacy, interiority, emotion, what should properly remain unexposed. It is not by law alone that lamentation has been disciplined, but by cooptation: by acquisence to forms that support the needs of religions and states. The Christian church, for example, not only assumed control of the funeral litany, but absorbed traditional lamentations into the Holy Week ceremony, into the lament of the Virgin Mary for her son, some versions of which draw directly on the Greek lamentations of Hecuba, but which are sung, decorously and solitarily, by a priest. In Shi‘ite tradition, while lamentations for Hussein have retained their spectacle of anguish, they have largely been taken over by men who perform them in public space and as part of official celebrations.

54


In the modern world, the greatest regulator of lamentation is incontestably modernity itself. It is increasingly difficult to find societies where lamentations are not pathologized or otherwise disciplined by a teleological modernity that is viewed as not only inexorable but “improved,” “efficient,” “enlightened,” “better.” In this context, which comprises much of the contemporary world, lamentations are an embarrassing leakage of those “residual categories” against which modernity defines itself, a sign that one is “backward.” Lamentation practices are, to be sure, incompatible with a certain dominant conception of secular modernity, its valorization of instrumental reason and individual agency, and its vigilance against eruptions of the irrational or superstitious. Lamentation does not participate in that timespace distanciation by which Giddens describes modernity, is not disembedded, is a defiant refusal of the sequestration of experience. It is an overt and discomforting admission that human knowledge has not mastered the forces of nature. It is where modernity cannot recognize itself.

Lamentation is gendered. It is no coincidence that the regulations we have been noting, as well as the condemnations of Plato and Plutarch, are, without exception, gender specific; nor that formalized responses to death should have separated into relatively distinct gender-specific genres. These gender markings are indicative of the way in which mortuary labor has traditionally been divided by gender. In many societies, women have the more physical relation with death and are responsible for washing and preparing the body for burial.49 They are often in charge of visiting graves, and the graveyard may be one of the few public spaces they control or in which they are permitted to appear. The funeral procession, by contrast, is often reserved for men; women may be prohibited from joining it at all or be obliged to follow the men and remain silent. This division extends into symbolic labor as well. Prescriptions on mourning dress, for example, seem to be primarily aimed at women. Traditionally, in North Africa it is a widow (though not a widower) who is obliged to dress in white, refrain from wearing jewelry or cosmetics, and from washing or bathing. This gender divergence pervades the form and content of lamentations themselves, which are markedly different for men and women: wailing is usually less intense and of shorter duration for women and governed by different imagery. But the lamentation is gender marked above all by its unmanly grief, its “hysteria”—a motif one encounters in ancient laws as well as in modern descriptions of trauma. Violations against Athenian restrictions on mourning were treated by the gunaikonomos, the magistrate for women’s affairs, and this included penalizing men who mourned excessively, who were “overcome by unmanly and effeminate passions”50—a judgment strikingly similar to those of the World War I shell-shocked soldier’s “childish and effeminate”


55

behavior. Though separated by millennia, both these attempts to discourage the expression of trauma emerge in the context of war, when it is crucial to maintain belief in recovery: in the possibility of obtaining useful substance from waste. But there is more to this story of femininity and the expression of trauma than simply military demand. For as we have seen, the shattering of cognitive and perceptual faculties attendant upon trauma, has, throughout its history, been conceived as a kind of regression to an infantile state, a state that is “feminine” because it is both logically immature and governed by a scene of maternal dependency, of passive subjection to woman. During World War I, as Leys shows, “the mother, conceived as the mesmerizing ‘object’ of the suggestible child’s first passionate identificatory tie, was scapegoated as the source of her son’s ‘feminine’ hysteria and lack of virile courage in actual battle.” The war neuroses were described as “a repetition of the child’s earliest reaction to the threatened loss” of the mother.51 The lamentation, moreover, dramatizes precisely those aspects of trauma that mime a pre-linguistic state—cries, bodily expressions, a functional breakdown of speech—characteristics that, as we have seen, Janet associated with animals, primitive peoples, and women. Lamentation, in its femininity, is also thereby primitive, animalistic, a threatening inversion of logos: of the speech and reason which are the foundation of the polis and which distinguish one from the barbarian. The gender inflections of the lamentation are nourished by a vast and unwieldy field of metaphoric and metonymic infection. It is a field that connects women with death because they are already associated with birth, attuned to painful separations. And this seems to assign them “naturally” to the role of overseeing rites of passage. Just as it is woman’s place to usher one into the world, so it is hers to guide one out, to be a mediator between being and non-being, and to inhabit the ambiguous space between them. Women likewise seem the natural proprietors of lamentation because they are on familiar terms with suffering. Indeed, they often employ the lament to express their own suffering, whether or not it has directly to do with the death or catastrophe ostensibly being mourned. “A common category of grievances,” writes Caraveli-Chavez of the Greek context, “is that of afflictions peculiar to women in a male-dominated social structure: widowhood and the ensuing loss of social status, desertion by male relatives who had acted as protectors, either by emigration or by death, sufferings wrought by childbirth or child raising.”52 Similar sentiments are expressed in this Ingrian lament: I have brought up my children with great pains. If I had a son, he would be some protection for me; but I have only daughters My only support is a [beggar’s] staff. I was widowed young, and thought I would suffocate of grief. I was left with a horde of children. With tears I have brought up my children. I had to go into service, and my tears poured like a stream. My children were left on the village streets, without protection.53

56


So bound are these notions of woman and suffering that the lament often employs woman as a metaphor for suffering. A classic example is the first of the Biblical Lamentations, where Zion is personified as a widow and bereaved mother with no one to comfort her; as a defiled, “menstrous woman”; and as a virgin “trodden . . . as in a winepress.”54 One does not have to travel far to find other well-forged links: of women and death with the irrational, the improper, or the foreign, links that both depend on and reinforce each other. To speak of the incomprehensibility of disaster or death, or of the destruction of cognitive systems characteristic of trauma, is to recognize their exteriority to logical systems. This is a place familiar enough to women—they have often been perceived as external to logos, rationality, science, enlightened thought, mental soundness—and the lamentation sustains this association through its disordered and fragmented speech, its unruly thought, and its corporal imagery of confusion. This disorder, fragmentation, confusion, and materiality are, as we shall see, tantamount to philosophical impurity and regularly associated not only with women, but with the primitive, the uncivilized, the infantile, and the barbarian. The irrationality of women and their lamentations also shades readily into the semantic domain of the improper. Women’s unwashed bodies and their disheveled hair, their wild movements and screaming in the streets, their exposed and injured flesh—what in Greek is termed the condition of anastasoi—are socially unaceptable; they reenact the disruption of social order produced by death or catastrophe. “It is through this imagery of bodily disorder and movement that women not only establish their shared substance with the dead but also establish themselves as the iconic representatives of the dead in the world of the living,” writes Seremetakis.55 Indeed it might be argued that nothing is more im-proper than death; for it is precisely the annihilation of the proprius: of what is one’s own, special, particular, characteristic; of what is lasting or permanent, and (uniting the progeny of this potent Latin father) of identity, propriety, purity, literality, property. These nuances pervade the lamentation, which concerns itself not with one lost object among others, but with that which is most one’s own, most familiar, most constitutive. It is precisely the semantic and phenomenal domain of the proper on which women have historically had only a tenuous or an indirect hold: on identity, straightforward speech (literal or “proper” meaning), property ownership, philosophical or material purity (irrationality as much as menstruation and childbirth constituting defilement). Nor are these nuances far from the trope of the foreign; they are symptoms as much of the lamentation’s contact with foreignness as of the tenacious conceptions of women as foreign and foreigners as feminized.56 When Seremetakis speaks of lamenting women establishing their “shared substance with the dead” she evokes not only the disorder and impropriety they reenact, but the mysteriousness and quasi-magical power that attaches to the lamentation. For insofar as women are perceived to share semantic properties with death or to have privileged contact with the dead through


57

their lamentations, insofar as this intimacy with death incites unease, insofar as lamentations raise the spectre of the supernatural or, simply, the inexplicable, lamentations place a certain frightening power in the hands of women. In some contexts, this power is connected to precisely formulated fears about the kinds of retaliation the dead might take if not treated well, about the magical potency of laments themselves or of the material tokens of death; in others, it functions by way of the vaguest uneasiness, through unwelcome imaginings that haunt the vicinity of death. A scandal to science and reason, the lamentation invokes possibilities that remain unverifiable, exasperatingly impervious to their address. This formidable social power women have not failed to put to use. As Seremetakis writes eloquently of Maniat women: “When the ‘whisper’ of death comes, these bent women, creatures of the back alleys, stand up. They stretch their upper body and throw the head back, pulling out their loosened hair. They raise fists against the sky, beating their chests in anger, scratching their faces, screaming. It is then that one sees Maniat women in their full height.”57 While performing lamentations, women’s bodies are made visible, their pain is made audible, and their labor becomes politically and culturally transformative. We have seen indications of this cultural power in the history of restrictions containing lamentations; there would be no need for such regulations if lamentations were politically innocuous. Indeed, as Loraux has shown, the unforgettable grief of lament may constitute a primal enemy of the state and may be a privileged example of those practices and emotions against which ancient cities defined the political. Certainly, in the case of Athens, it constituted a sufficiently significant challenge of civic order that it required effacement. In Rome, Fabius Maximus silenced women’s laments by confining matrons to their homes after the defeat at Cannae; Plutarch tells us that “During civil conflicts, it even happens that women are forbidden to mourn . . . or that mothers’ tears are likened to a crime of conspiracy against the empire and are punishable with death.”58 We have also seen women take the expressive opportunity that lamentation affords to articulate their own concerns, to air their grievances and give voice to their indignation and suffering—matters that often prevail over praise of the deceased. Seremetakis has demonstrated the way Greek women’s laments not only express such concerns, but construct historical truths and render juridical decisions. Ratified by the affective potency of pain, such judgments historically either reinforced or contested the verdicts of the allmale juridical council (the “yerondiki”) on issues such as “revenge code killings, inheritance and other property disputes, marital relations, and kin obligations.”59 An exceptional opportunity to participate in public dialogue, women’s lamentations sometimes resolve into direct political commentary or calls for action. They may rebuke local or national authorities, police, physicians, God, or any other party deemed accountable for a death or disaster. Holst-Warhaft notes in the Greek context that “From the late nineteenth century on, such laments are common, not simply blaming the government

58


or the king for the death of a son, but taking sides in local political struggles, and supporting fugitives of the state against the authorities.”60 During World War II and the German occupation of Greece, women used laments both to express nationalist sentiments and to criticize the state for its failure to repulse the foreign invasion. During the civil war, they employed laments not only to take sides in the struggle but to indict the war itself. Similar examples could be drawn from Shi‘ite lamentations for the prophet Hussein. The early versions of these lamentations, composed by women, were deeply critical of the Umayyad and Abbasid rulers, and though later versions have largely been taken over by male poets, their anger and protest has often been refocused, implicitly or explicitly, toward contemporary authorities.61 Indeed, in numerous and resourceful ways modern women have appropriated the signs of mourning for political purposes, often to contest states’ uses of violence and their interpretations of death. The Black Sash of South Africa, Las Madres of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina, and the international network “Women in Black” are all groups that have used public displays of grief as a mode of resistance. While the lamentation in many ways seems to reinforce traditional gender roles—to sustain gendered divions of labor and nourish the vast associative field correlating women with the irrational, primitive, animalistic, improper, and foreign—there are also ways in which the lamentation is a provocative site of gender non-conformity. Lamentations grant women a public presence and social power that is often reserved for men; while lamenting, women are allowed to play otherwise masculinized roles: they are revenge seekers, judges, bearers of authority, writers of history. Sometimes lamentations explicitly advocate the transgression of gender boundaries, as in this Greek lament for a murdered brother, where such transgression appears as a wish: If only I’d been a male and could wear pants myself! To have shouldered the gun myself and chased the murderer!62

Such gender non-conformity is an (already fulfilled) command in this Greek mother’s lament for a daughter who was killed avenging her brother’s death: —Now, black Vyeniki woman, become a man. Buckle up and arm yourself . . .63

In Muslim communities, the gender transgression of lament may take the form of throwing off the veil, which, as Grima points out in the context of Paxtun society, “is the dominant symbol of the female sphere and all the behavior expected to go with it. . . . Leaving one’s veil is equivalent to leaving one’s womanhood. Yet again and again it is precisely what women say they do when they are beyond themselves with emotion.”64 In North Africa,


59

traditional mourning entails a form of cross-dressing: In Tangier, Westermark notes, “many widows [in mourning] wear the shirt or drawers or some other garment belonging to their late husband’s dress.”65 Wake games, which in Ireland traditionally followed the lamentation, “offered an unusual license to women, who joined in the festivities on an equal footing with men, sometimes exchanging sexual roles with them for the duration of the wake.”66 If men who lament are feminine, women who lament—in the strange logic of impropriety added to impropriety—are masculinized.

Lamentation is a kind of time. The opening lines of lamentations are often set in time—they memorialize the day and the hour when time froze up; they mark the temporal fissure between “before” and “after”: Why this time the lanesides sorrowful, fencesides so sad? Previously when I came the sun was shining brightly—why this time such dark clouds have stopped above the yard? Previously the nightingales played, the swallows sang—why this time the feet of the nightingales are broken, the heads of the swallows crushed? Previously dear sister-in-laws after long walk stood at the gable end drying their skirts—why this time all drying racks are broken?67

They often narrate the lamenter’s discovery of death or disaster: “I knew nothing of your murder,” laments “Black Eileen” for her husband, Arthur O’Leary, “Till your horse came to the stable, / With the reins beneath her trailing.”68 Sometimes it is time itself that is indicted as the enemy, as in this Palestinian lament: O Time, why have you stolen my joy And left only pain and sorrow in its wake O Time, bring us no more sorrow.69

This moment of lamentation, at once located in the real but strangely unreal, is a moment perceived to be incommensurate with any other, an eruption of the inconceivable and irremediable, a weir in the river of time. It shares properties, if it does not entirely coincide, with certain philosophical formulations of time such as kairos or Augenblick. Insofar as kairos, for example, in its customary (Aristotlean) opposition to chronos, designates a disruption in the flow of time, or a moment of crisis situated outside of time, it aptly describes the moment of lamentation. But kairos also (and more precisely) signifies the right or proper time, in season, opportune; a point in time charged with significance, a fullness of time or a completion that bestows meaning on an entire history; its original meanings indeed included the notions of due measure, right proportion, and fitness. From this perspective, the lamentation

60


looks more like an antikairos: a disruption of chronos, but not a completion or fulfillment; a moment of urgent significance, but without apparent meaning, a time that is inopportune and improper, a fullness so overwhelming as to seem empty. Both Kierkegaard and Hiedegger develop another temporal notion that bears resemblance to the moment of lamentation: Augenblick.70 For Kierkegaard, Augenblick (or Oieblik in Danish) designates the exceptional moment in which one’s world is pierced by an unconditional commitment; a commitment that henceforth structures the world and necessitates a temporal reorientation, a revised sense of past and future. For Heidegger, Augenblick names the moment in which Dasein seizes its authentic possibility, when it is retrieved from its everyday absorption in das Man and embraces the anticipatory resoluteness of “being-towards-death.”71 Augenblick is often translated “moment of vision,” and in both Kierkegaard and Heidegger the term signifies a kind of time akin to the lamentation: a moment that is extraordinary, dread-filled, and terrifying, when structures of significance have been destroyed and a radical foreignness let loose, but which is also liberating and enlightening, a moment that enables an attention and reflection ordinarily obscured by the everyday, by the comfortable intelligibility of leveled and public “understanding.” To say that lamentation is a kind of time is also to restate certain recognitions we have made about trauma as a temporal effect. Insofar as it is a response to, and meditation on, trauma, lamentation bears the mark of trauma as a memory disorder, an obsessive reexperience of a past event, and a temporal regression. The strange time of the lamentation is also accentuated by the melancholy that pervades it, a mood that, in Kristeva’s analysis, is characterized by a skewed sense of time: It does not pass by, the before/after notion does not rule it, does not direct it from a past toward a goal. Massive, weighty, doubtless traumatic because laden with too much sorrow or too much joy, a moment blocks the horizon of depressive temporality or rather removes any horizon, any perspective. Riveted to the past, regressing to the paradise or inferno of an unsurpassable experience, melancholy persons manifest a strange memory: everything has gone by, they seem to say but I am faithful to those bygone days, I am nailed down to them, no revolution is possible, there is no future.72

Lamentations also thematize a moment of shattered identity, of a defiling breakdown of the boundaries between self and other; a moment characterized by a redistribution of possessions and remapping of territorial boundaries; a moment of strangeness, newness, primordiality.73

Lamentation is both formulaic and improvised. As in most oral traditions, the lament is composed in conventional formulas and meters complemented by improvisation to fit particular circumstances.


61

Improvised verses or metaphors that are particularly admired within a community may, in turn, be reused and become formulaic. In Homeric times, these two aspects of lament were distinguished forms: the threnos was the formal, musical lament performed by professional mourners, and the goos, which included wailing and spontaneous weeping, was the improvised form inspired by the immediate occasion, composed by women relatives or close friends. By classical times, however, the two types had largely merged and produced a form that inhabits a border not only between convention and invention, but between the eloquent and the inarticulate, the spoken and the unspeakable. Integrating both the faltering cry of anguish and a grief provisionally objectified into discourse, the lamentation might be said to reenact the infant’s entrance into language as much as the trauma victim’s regression and exile from it. Much of the lamentation, traversed by the language-shattering force of trauma, is of the order of the expressively inarticulate, comprised of sobs, moans, shrieks, and sighs, weeping and sudden intakes of breath, as well as of elements of dance: a rythmic sway of the body, physical gestures of despair, an ecstatic or trance-like manner of performance. But the lamentation also entails performance elements rarely seen in dance: women tear their clothing; beat clenched fists on their chests; scratch their cheeks or breasts, sometimes until they bleed; tear out their hair; throw dirt on their heads; soil their clothing with dung, soot, ashes, or mud. “Women represent the violence of death through their own bodies,” writes Seremetakis of that condition we have referred to as anastasoi: “Their postures, gestures, and general facial expressions function as corporeal texts which reaudit the experience of death as passage and disorder on behalf of the now silent and immobile dead.”74 These gestures, the aspect of the tradition that has drawn the fiercest condemnation from religions and governments, seem mad; they perform an insanity precipitated by grief.75 Yet however frenetic the scene of performance, lamentations are also a highly formalized mode of language. The “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” for example, are the most stringently structured of any Hebrew text. The book contains five lamentations, which comprise a kind of double triptych: the first two and the last two chapters (1, 2, 4, 5) are comprised of 22 verses each, and the central chapter (3) is comprised of 66. All except the last are alphabetic acrostics (the third is a triple acrostic); they follow a metrical pattern known as “qinah” and are largely structured in semantic parallellisms.76 The lamentations of Greek tragedy display a number of conventions and formulae that survive into modern lament traditions, such as the reiterated statement of death or destruction, direct dialogue with the dead, catechistic questioning, alliteration and assonance, parataxis, repetitive sonic patterns, phonetic structuring (words chosen for sound rather than meaning), highly metaphorical language, word play, and reiterated terms of possession and kinship.77 Two central conventions of the lament tradition identified by Alexiou are antithesis and antiphony. Antithetical structuring, an examination of loss through a series of contrasts, is fundamental to the cognitive and philosophical

62


work of the lament. Antitheses are often established, for example, between “then” and “now,” the hoped-for and the actual, the living and the dead, or the experience of trauma and the mourner’s ability to express it. The fourth of the Hebrew lamentations is particularly rich in such antitheses: How is the gold become dim! . . . The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, How are they esteemed as earthen pitchers . . . They that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets: They that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.78

In Greek tragedy, antitheses frequently took stychomythic form—a dialogue in alternating and contrasting lines, which often involved an appropriation and reinterpretation of the interlocutor’s words. Sometimes antithesis takes the form of catechistic questions, asked and responded to by the mourners themselves. Half-Chorus: Hecuba, what are these cries? What news now? . . . Hecuba: My children, the ships of the Argives will move today. The hand is at the oar. Half-Chorus: They will? Why? Must I take ship so soon from the land of my fathers? Hecuba: I know nothing. I look for disaster.79

Sometimes antitheses take the form of an unfulfilled wish—that death had waited until old age, that the mourner or dead person had never been born, or that the mourner had died instead of the dead—a convention that emphasizes the inconceivability of the present by contrast with what should have been (possible) and is now impossible. Making use of the convention of “lament names,” this Karelian lament is structured by impossible wishes: If I could were I able, weakling I would fly and flutter on the mouth of my comber on the grave of my warmer. I would lift her with ropes supported by tarry wires I would bring my bringer home to give us shelter to care for the children. I would give her words of my mouth I would talk warm talks.80

Antiphonal structure not only supports such antitheses, but facilitates the communal participation central to lamentation. Antiphonal practice originates (certainly in the Greek context and probably elsewhere) from the responsive


63

singing of two groups of mourners, strangers and kinswomen, each of which would sing a verse in turn. The refrain was sung in unison and, in tragedy, is taken up by the chorus. In modernity, lamentations are often constructed by a soloist and chorus, the former leading or improvising, the latter, echoing, revising, (dis)confirming. Seremetakis has cogently analyzed the antiphonal structure of mourning practice, noting that in Greek antiphony is both an aesthetic and juridical concept. In the laments of Maniat women, she argues, antiphony signifies (1) the social structure of mortuary ritual; (2) the internal acoustic organization of lament singing; (3) a prescribed technique for witnessing, for the production/reception of jural discourse, and for the cultural construction of truth; and (4) a political strategy that organizes the relation of women to maledominated institutions.81

Some of the lamentation’s formulae and conventions seem to serve fairly evident purposes—as mnemonic devices, enactments of traumatic response, or assessments of loss; for marking temporal rupture or negotiating historical truth; or for ensuring that the dead are satisfied, the psyche successful in departing the body, and the soul unencumbered in its journey elsewhere. If the function of other conventions—the acrostic form of the Hebrew laments, for example—is more obscure, what is indisputable is that the lamentation is a repetitive and reproducible language. Not only are its conventions, above all, a mechanism for reproducibility, but many are devices that repeat: incremental repetition, refrain, the reiterated statement of death, antiphony, stychomythia, or parallelism, for example. Such repetitions have most often been interpreted in terms of the work of mourning.82 From LaCapra’s viewpoint, this repetition might be seen as working through, “as a homeopathic socialization or ritualization of the repetition compulsion that attempts to turn it against the death drive and to counteract compulsiveness—especially the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes of violence—by re-petitioning in ways that allow for a measure of critical distance, change, resumption of social life, ethical responsibility and renewal.”83 But the lamentation’s repetitions are also complicit with the politics of memory and bear on questions of authenticity. The lamentation is recitable, for example, on commemorative occasions, and such recitations are significant to the construction of historical truths. On the one hand, this reproducibility would seem to be a gesture of fidelity to the event of loss—a way of remembering and of preserving the authenticity of a past. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the lamentation employs a reproducible language because the authenticity of the experience to which it responds is unbearable. We have noted above, by way of Derrida, that a traumatic event, of a structurally and ontologically different order from signification, undergoes an irreducible surrogacy when it is made into a sign. Furthermore, if reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin has argued, withers the “aura” of an object, the function of the lamentation’s reproducibility would be to mitigate

64


the horrifying aura of trauma: to forget, rather than to remember.84 Indeed, a reproducible “remembering,” as Derrida has signalled, may be, rather than a mode of faithfulness, a “most deadly infidelity”: “Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?”85 The lamentation’s repetitions, which may lend themselves either to the repetition compulsion or the work of mourning, have also been interpreted, equally paradoxically, as both a form of logical resolution and resistance to such resolution. For Lévi-Strauss, for example, repetition functions to resolve, or at least ease, the conflict between irreconcilable oppositions (such as belief in an afterlife and the evidence of a decaying body). Loraux, by contrast, theorizing the wrath of lamentations, “the principle of which is eternal repetition,” argues that “this tireless ‘always’” sets up a powerful rival to the resolution of the state, to its permanence, and to “the memory of institutions.”86 Kierkegaard, that idiosyncratic theorizer of repetition, perhaps affords a way to accommodate both these positions, contrasting recollection, the (melancholy and voluptuous) “repeating backward” of Greek thought, with the repetition that constitutes consciousness—the repetitive relationship between actuality and ideality.87 This latter form of repetition—the (cheerful) “recollecting forward” commensurate with Hegelian mediation—is the repetition on which metaphysics, ethics, and dogma are grounded and which, for Kierkegaard, is simultaneously their profundity and their downfall. What Kierkegaard privileges is repetition in the transcendental sense, which is marked by the exception, the ordeal, and earnestness. It is the interruption of the (metaphysical) form of repetition constitutive of consciousness; it is the inability to repeat the world in the mind, another way of describing the epistemological rupture and symbolic crisis characteristic of trauma. Might then the repetitiousness of the language of lamentation bear an affinity to this transcendental repetition, which is an exception to, and disruption of, the ethical and the philosophical, and hence of consciousness? Might the lamentation’s repetitions, rather than submitting to theory, be the principle that traumatizes it? We should also bring to this meditation the thought that repetition subtends both senses of the performative we have associated with lamentation: the iterable nature of ritual performances and the reiterative social processes that produce the effects they ostensibly represent. Both Butler and Bhabha, as we have signalled, extend the linguistic concept of performativity to describe the sedimented effects of reiterative practices that acquire the aura of the natural and real. Both, moreover, contend that the very fact that reiteration is necessary is itself a sign that referents—a sexed body for Butler or a native culture for Bhabha—are never quite complete, that bodies and cultures never quite comply with the norms by which their “nature” is impelled. A


65

similar argument might be made about the lamentation’s repetitions and the traumatic events that are their referent. Further, Butler and Bhabha both locate a space of agency, a transformative moment, in this process of reiteration: it is precisely because identity comes into being through repetition that it can be altered. This argument might be used to reinforce LaCapra’s contention that while repetition may become compulsive, it may also open a space for “working through,” for cognitive or social transformation.

Lamentation is tentative and interrogative. It is largely comprised of provisional and indagative gestures that seek out an apposite response to loss. These gestures bear the weight of those recognitions with which we began this book: that loss produces confusion and disorientation, requires belated reconstruction, and varies in both kind and degree. These features of loss are manifested in the lamentation’s incessant questioning, its tentative assessments and shifting hypotheses, its formulations of incredulity and anxiety, its frustration over finding language adequate to the circumstances. The ancient Greek threnos regularly began with an expression of the lamenter’s despair over the inadequacy of language, usually formulated in interrogative terms.88 Many lamentations, indeed, are largely comprised of questions, and such questions are often implicit refusals of consolation, expressions of irremediability and incomprehensibility, attempts to acknowledge what is evident but unbearable. “Where is greatness gone?” asks Euripides’s Hecuba: Where is it now, that stately house, home where I was happy once? King Priam blessed with children once, in your pride of wealth? And what am I of all I used to be, mother of sons, mother of princes?89

Similarly poignant, if more prosaic queries, structure the lament of this Bulgarian mother: Ah, Dimka, Dimka, unhonoured, who, mama, will dry her, mama, who will bathe her, who, mama, will wash her napkins?90

Frequently addressing the dead (as well as other entities that are unlikely to respond, like objects, abstractions, or deities), such questions often stress that lost does not mean absent from consciousness or concern: My son George, does the earth weigh on you, my son George, does the wind blow on you,

66

L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s my son George, does the sun burn you, my son George, do the girls come to you?91 Tell me, son, tell me dear Stoyan, is the earth-blanket soft is the stone pillow soft is the sky coverlet light?92

They sometimes include queries about the afterlife: I’m going to give my wish to my Nikos, the brave, to go to Hades and return to ask him to tell me how are the souls treated? Do the nuns tell the truth? Are [the souls] hanging by the hair in a dirty cave? And those who committed good deeds, do they sit in soft armchairs?93

Riddled with questions and resisting the stubbornly indicative impulse of language—its unbearable and overdetermined meaningfulness—the lamentation cultivates illocutionary ambivalence; it is a gallery of rhetorical mechanisms that inscribe the uncertain and the unspeakable. Exemplary is the opening line of the Hebrew lamentations, simultaneously and indistinguishably an exclamation and a question: “How doth the city sit solitary[?]!”94 In Karelian laments, “the most striking feature,” writes Nenola-Kallio, “is that usually nothing is called by its everyday name.”95 Because of the taboo on the use of proper names, much of the lament is comprised of elaborate identifying formulas or “lament names” that make them nearly impenetrable to the uninitiated. Okkuli Kirillova’s beautiful lament for her children, who were taken into forced labor during World War II, illustrates this practice: Now I am smothered, greatly agonized I am burning, burned, with the thought of my held-on-my-knees: had I covered them in our own graveyard, my flowers-under-the-arm had we laid them in the sod ourselves, my curly-heads I would not have wept so much for my flowers-under-the-arm nor would I have burned so much for my held-on-my-knees but I gave them into Hitler’s hands, my formed-with-my-hands in torment, my held ones that they had to suffer all agonies, my curly-heads they were burnt in fire, my held-on-my-knees the skin was torn off their backs, my apple blossoms.96

Ingrian and Karelian laments are also remarkable for their “oblique, obfuscated expression of meaning,”97 use of sonic patterning (for sound rather


67

than meaning), and “musical masking” (disguise of meaning through musical rhythms and accents).98 It is not difficult to hear in these gestures the dissonant strains of trauma, its disabling of perceptual, affective, and reflective capacities, its resistance to interpretation and understanding, or its regression to the threshold of language. Indeed, by way of its disarticulating expressions, the lamentation tacitly poses a series of questions central to therapeutic treatment: What has been lost or damaged? What can be recovered? What should be remembered? How does one express—or even experience—what can’t be contained in knowing? Is it ethically responsible to attempt understanding? It is perhaps not surprising that a language that responds to a moment of epistemological breakdown and shattered identity leaves very few rhetorical stones unturned. The language of lamentation indeed often contains motley juxtapositions of baroque figuration with prosaic literality. If the former distances and mediates the literal, the latter grapples with a materiality that obstinately refuses to signify. Even the assertions of lamentation, which regularly take the form of paradox and antithesis, are, by and large, disbelieving reiterations of the literal: They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured.99

The lamentation’s tentative and interrogatory gestures not only bear the imprint of trauma, but coincide, on a number of counts, with descriptions of modernity, with features of aesthetic modernism, and with specific strains of continental philosophy. They are expressive of a number of experiences and moods supposed to epitomize late modernity, such as uncertainty, anomie, alienation, and anxiety; they correspond to Giddens’s description of the reflexivity of modern social life—the constant questioning and reformation of social practices and information—and of its subversion of certainty and mastery. Neither are these gestures far from certain techniques of modernism that seek out the threshold of the utterable, defy realism and representation, or, in Kristeva’s terms, inscribe the extremely provisional, uncertain, and indeterminate articulations of the chora. Calinescu, we might recall, defines modernism as a relentless interrogation of tradition, bourgeois society, and itself. Accordingly, these interrogatory features of lamentation might be said to be at variance with the knowledge produced by disciplinary society and its systems of surveillance, as well as with the instrumental reason so central to Enlightenment thought. By contrast, such persistent questioning and rampant uncertainty might well warm the hearts of Nietzsche’s destructive creators, those purveyors of intractably tentative knowledge, who habitually place question marks after society’s “special words and favorite doctrines,” as well as after themselves.100 One can discern echoes of Heideggerian breakdown in this language, and Heidegger might also lead us to recognize that the anxiety inhabiting such gestures (a mode of indefiniteness, foreign to

68


metaphysics, and capable of dismantling that quotidian familiarity “in which everything looks as if it were genuinely understood”101) is also anticipatory—that questions, however unanswerable, inevitably await a response.

The lamentation is of the order of invocation. It is a calling out; it seeks for a witness. The primary task of invocation is locating an addressable other. Pre-predicative and performative, it is a speaking to before a speaking of. No doubt the most reappropriated lines of the Hebrew lamentations are just such a calling out, a plea to the stranger to pay attention, to witness: Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.102

The invitation to join in mourning, common to modern laments as well, sometimes requests specific kinds of aid, information, or solidarity and frequently appeals to reciprocal social obligations, as in this Greek daughter’s lament for her mother: Ah women of Dzermiathes, weep, sing laments for her; she too gave you her words to comfort and to soothe you. Where are you women of Dzermiathes, decked out in your best clothes? The midwife is going who used to hold your children.103

Scenes of lamentation are often subsequently judged by the success of such invocations, by the numbers of witnesses gathered to mark a death or catastrophe. This gathering of witnesses, an apparatus of corroboration and consensus building, establishes an event as traumatic, as worthy of notice and care. In this mission, it bears a clear similarity to therapeutic projects— Fanon’s on colonialism, Vietnam veterans’ on war trauma, Herman’s on domestic abuse—that seek public recognition of particular traumas. An integral part of the performativity of laments, such invocations are confrontational, even invasive: they draw others into the circle of grief, infect them with its moods. Discomfiting to be sure, the lament’s invocations refuse to leave spectators uninvolved or unimplicated; they too are called on to respond. The antiphony of the lament is the formal matrix of this invocatory preoccupation. But the lamentation also regularly invokes entities that are unlikely to respond: strangers, the walls or pillars of the house, metonymic objects, strangers, or natural elements, as in this Arab lament: O shining star, testify that I am miserable The Christians imprisoned me for the land of Rome O shining star, testify that I am destitute The Christians imprisoned me for the land of Sham . . .


69

O scribe, write in the margins Greetings to the resting place of our beloveds . . . O camel rider! Take me with you my beloved.104

A Greek mother, lamenting her son killed in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, develops an extended invocation to the crow: Hey, my crow that flies with your jet-black wings sailing through the sky if you by chance see my Dikio my heart of hearts could you bring me some sign either his foot or hand or his smallest finger where he wore the silver ring.105

The lamentation’s invocations are often characterized by a futile calling out that is the sign of an inordinate hope. Indeed, the most frequently invoked entity in the lament is the dead person him or herself. The dead are often encouraged to return to the living, sometimes with finely elaborated incentives, as these Irish and Bulgarian examples attest: My own beloved dear! Now get up on your feet And come on home with me. It’s time to slaughter beef— We’ll organize a feast— We’ll have musicians play, And I’ll make you a bed, With clean white sheets And colored patchwork quilts, To make you sweat with heat Instead of this awful cold.106 Rise up, beloved Stoyan, rise up beloved, come, good days are coming, St Dimiter’s day, love, St. George’s day, every child is shod, shod and dressed and ours, love, go naked, go naked, love, go barefoot. Rise up, love, and come. Your nuggetty little horse hasn’t been watered yet.107

70


Such invocations, which may carry as much reproach as affection, are a resistance to the inassimilable evidence of loss even when they acknowledge the hopelessness of their addresses. In a lament for her sister, Anna Ivanova sings poignantly: I still try to ask whether you could say goodbye forever with cold tongue . . . I am unable to evoke any words on your cold tongue. Your words are closed behind hundred mounds and your tongue is locked behind thousand locks.108

In addition to architecture, the natural world, and the dead, another striking object of invocation in many laments is the mourner’s own body. Hecuba’s laments in the Trojan Women are rich in this formulation: Rise, stricken head, from the dust; Lift up the throat . . . O head, O temples And sides . . . Come, aged feet; make one last weary struggle.109

Invocations to the body appear in many modern laments as well, as in these lines from a Palestinian lament: Weep my eyes, weep O eyes! Do not cease your lament.110

Such exhorations to an alienated body, over which the lamenter has, it would seem, ceased to have her habitual control, represents an estrangement of that which one has taken as most proper to oneself, as most one’s own. If it suggests an insistently material and embodied version of the alienated subject of late modernity or of the cognitive splitting characteristic of trauma, such invocations to the body also recall Elaine Scarry’s descriptions of pain: while “occur[ing] within oneself, it is at once identified as ‘not oneself,’ ‘not me,’” encountered as something alien.111 In the Mediterranean, the self-alienation brought about by death is sometimes reenacted in the ritual of cutting off (or pulling out) pieces of hair to be laid on the grave. Even when it is not engaged in explicit apostrophe, the lamentation is inherently invocatory insofar as it is language that calls out to itself to witness. It seeks in its shattered language to call itself to reflection, decipher what has happened, establish what has been lost; it is of the nature of testimony, as described by Dori Laub: As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference.


71

. . . In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge.112

Implicit in calling a witness, be it an other or the self, is the prior shattering of understanding, and it is here that the invocatory nature of the lamentation dovetails with the shattered, hesitant, and interrogative language we have evoked above. Distilling this shattered understanding, the most common apostrophe in the Hebrew laments, the imperative “Behold!” (hee-nay), signifies a breach in the symbiotic relation between perception and reflection. A call both to see and to consider, the word itself is an attempt to reconstruct the relationship between the phenomenal world and reflection that has been fractured by loss. Inextricably bound up with invocation and with this crisis of understanding is the threat not only of meaninglessness, but of injustice. The laments of Greek tragedy are so entangled with issues of (in)justice that it is difficult to say where the lament ends and juridical argument begins. Similarly, the ancient Hebrew poets call on Yahweh to witness the disproportion into which the balance of justice has fallen, and poetry drawn from the Shi‘ite lamentations for Hussein often casts Fatima as a prosecutor. Modern laments, supported by the juridical conventions of questioning and antiphony (the latter, Seremetakis reminds us, can refer to the process of contractual agreement or guarantee), regularly cast blame, indict, and call for revenge. A Greek mother, for example, lamenting her drowned son, takes a patron saint to task: St Dimitri, my master, didn’t I always praise you and honour you with light? Did I fail to light a candle? Didn’t I bring two silver candles on your memorial day and four candelabra? Why didn’t you help as well leeward of Tsirigou island when the north wind blew and the sea brimmed over and broke in crooked waves?113

Another Greek mother arraigns God himself over her lost son: God is a merciless criminal to have killed the orphan!. . . This thing that God did on the Savior’s Day, killing the orphan Is this not sinful and bad?114

Calling a witness—and here the legal trial is paradigmatic—is a preliminary moment in a process of assigning meaning and locating an event in an economy

72


of justice. But although lamentations call for revenge, such locutions remain largely invocatory and preliminary, on the order of summons, accusations, or indictments. As the following Palestinian lament illustrates, the lamentation tends to be more concerned with rejecting inadequate forms of recovery, with venting rage and inflicting harm, than with submitting to a system of justice: We will not accept blood money, of sirs Not even a precious coin Only a head for a head To blow off with a rifle We will not accept blood money Neither silver nor copper Only a head for a head To smash with our shoes.115

Indeed, if this verse seems to call for equivalence—“a head for a head”—it is clear that the head alone will not settle the debt or resolve the injury, that what is called for is the incalcuable and disproportionate effect of trauma. From this perspective, the lamentation might be said to share properties with Nietzsche’s critique of the idiom of justice, not only because of its refusal to displace rancor and hostility onto an abstract law, but because of its implicit rejection of the economic basis of justice, of the obscenity of conceiving an equivalent for trauma. As is already apparent, the initial “calling out” of the invocation facilitates numerous secondary tasks such as narration, exclamation, supplication, exhortation, blaming, and cursing. Invocations are often employed to assign attributes and responsibility, as does this Palestinian lament, which attributes generosity to a cousin: O Ibn Ammi, who sheltered me O like bracelets tumbling from my wrist.116

By contrast, an Irish widow’s invocation of her dead husband is a stinging attribution of stinginess: You used to give me The thick end of the stick, The hard side of the bed, The small bit of food.117

The secondary tasks of invocation are creatively diversified, but in them all remains an implicit but fundamental call for witness, a search for an addressable other, laden with a gaping responsibility and a desperate hope.


73

Lamentation is a confrontation with the foreign and fantastic. Lamentations, as we have seen, may be sung for exile or migration to a foreign land, and other forms of loss or sorrow are often metaphorically apprehended through these tropes. We have also noted the finely layered history associating women and death with foreignness, as well as with the irrational, improper, primitive, and animalistic. The time of lamentation, moreover, is one when the world has become strange and foreign, as if it suddenly spoke a different language, operated by unfamiliar laws. Foreignness also inheres in the lament’s anxiety, which, as Heidegger contends, discloses an indefiniteness foreign to metaphysics. Lamentations composed in wartime or under occupation, moreover, instances of which could be gathered from the Mycenean age to World War II, struggle with and thematize literal encounters with foreigners. But what constitutes “literal” foreignness is by no means self-evident; the use of the term foreign to designate those from another country or ethnic group, or those who speak a different language is, in fact, derived from a pool of more fluid primary meanings: from the outside, strange, unfamiliar.118 In this sense, death, trauma, and incomprehensibility are all foreigners. Death, indeed, is often figured as a stranger, as something that comes from the outside (foras), as not belonging, or as improper. Sermetakis notes the way in which, in Maniat culture, the semiology of death is governed by xenitia, “which encompasses the condition of estrangement, the outside, the movement from the inside to the outside, as well as contact and exchange between foreign domains, objects, and agents.”119 Perhaps the most culturally widespread image of death is of a journey, a voyage from this world to the next, to an undiscovered country. To die is to travel elsewhere, become foreign. In its classical description, trauma also comes from the outside; it is a physiological incursion, a foreign invasion of the borders of the psyche. The strangeness and unintelligibility characteristic of the moment of lamentation, rather than being merely metaphorically foreign, are materializations of the primary meanings of foreignness. This foreignness is reenacted in the performance of lamentation, which deploys sounds, language, and gestures that are alien—to music, speech, proper comportment. Acoustically violent, tonally unstable, and metrically interrupted by sobs, moans, or weeping, its meanings are estranged in broken lines, peculiar phrasing, and shifts in stress—in what Tolbert refers to as “musical masking.” Its gestures are unnatural, uncivilized, barbaric, mad. Partly for this reason Greek tragedy associated lamentation with foreigners, routinely displacing its immoderation onto the Oriental—Euripides’s Hecuba or Aeschylus’s Persians, for example—thus rendering it foreign to the polis, where the decorum of Logos and Dike preside. While there is probably some truth to the conception of lament forms originating in the East, this conviction has also been well nourished over the centuries by stereotypes associating all that is heathen, barbaric, feminine, and immoderate with the

74


Orient. Two millenia after Hecuba first appeared on the Athenian stage, Edmund Spenser wrote of Irish women: their lamentations at their burials with despairful outcries and ymoderate wailing . . . savor greatly of the Scythian barbarism. [Some] think this custom to come from the Spaniards for that they do so immesurably likewise bewail their dea[d]. But the same is not proper Spanish but altogether heathenish, brought in first thither either by the Scythians or by the Moors which were African but long possessed that country, for it is the manner of all pagans and infidels to be intemperate in the wailings of the dead.120

This schema which contrasts the proportionate, correct, and domestic with the disproportionate, erratic, and foreign governs not only the history of lamentation but, as Edward Said has compellingly demonstrated, much of the geopolitics of modernity. This disproportionality is also manifest in the fantastic language of lamentation, which, perhaps not surprisingly, responds to the world defamiliarized by trauma with a language of unabashed extremity. Situated on an uncertain border between the real and the fantastic, speaking to inanimate objects and the dead, fabricating impossible wishes and plotting improbable revenge, lamentations reach for a non-existent tongue. Among the most striking features of the language of lamentation are gestures that strive to describe the sudden foreignness of things, to express an experience which has itself become irreal, impossible, too strange for words. Such fantastic locutions include the categorical, the hyperbolic, and the paradoxical. They also often include personification, which, fantastically granting life to the insensible and inanimate, abounds in the lamentation, from the extended figure of the city as widow in the ancient Hebrew laments to the “tearful thresholds” and “weepful window frames” of the modern Ingrian lament.121 Also contributing to the lamentation’s fantastic language is an uneasy rhetoric of possession, which asserts grammatically a possession that it negates semantically: Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.122 Bring me back my treasure Though for me the interest is forbidden.123 My mother has travelled far away. To whom can I call out? . . . I have lost my courage. I have lost my hope.124

This contradictory rhetoric of (dis)possession, which I explore at length in Chapter 3, not only performs fantastic acts of retroactive possession, but claims to possess what is alien (e.g., the aversiveness of pain) and to be dispossessed of what is (linguistically) inalienable (kin and body parts).


75

If this propensity of the lamentation for the fantastic is bound up with confronting the foreign, there would also be other ways of describing it: as the trace of the supernatural powers the lamentation is widely believed to possess; as transcendental repetition which, in Kierkegaardian terms, is “hard to [speak of] in any human language” and comes into being “when every thinkable human certainty and probability [are] impossible”;125 or as an antecedent of Nietzsche’s tensed bow aimed at the unheard-of. Following such paths, a pattern begins to emerge in which the language of lamentation shuns—or is banished from—the middle ground that constitutes ordinary consciousness, from intermediary alliances between things and meanings. It oscillates between the literal and the fantastic, between an absolute materiality and the hyperessential; it clings to the outer edges of experience and sometimes, paradoxically, conflates them.

Lamentation is mood. Though we are thoroughly determined by mood, Heidegger contends, it regularly escapes reflection. In medieval philosophical terms, mood is neither a substance nor an essence, but a mobile distinctiveness that taints the substantial (a body, the material, the signifier) and unsettles the essential (the spirit, ideology, meaning). This description is, in large part, compatible with Kristeva’s recent psychoanalytic one, in which she describes mood as an “apparently very rudimentary [psychic] representation, presign and prelanguage” that is “irreducible to its verbal or semiological expressions.”126 Risking the inaccuracy of fixing moods with names, I wish to theorize three moods that play a central role in the lamentation: melancholy, anger, dread.127 Mingling freely with each other, these moods combine forces to form what amounts to an atmosphere of sacrality: a mood that sets the language of lamentation apart, shields it from scrutiny and critique, proclaims it untouchable. Lamentations are rarely interrupted; they are usually witnessed in respectful silence. Those who are not caught up in its frenzy often draw back: from fear of displeasing the dead or a god, the threat of contagion, the affective intensity, or the memorandum of one’s own mortality. Melancholy: The lamentation conspicuously employs the metaphors most commonly used to describe melancholy: darkness and heaviness.128 It also shares with melancholy the fundamental characteristic of disproportionality. As early as Aristotle, melancholy was described in terms of an affect out of proportion to circumstances, as an imbalance that is at once unjust and in error.129 The penthos alaston (unforgettable grief or interminable mourning), which in Loraux’s analysis characterizes lamentation, is equivalent to Freud’s depiction of melancholy as a mourning that can’t be worked through, that resists resolution and recovery.130 What Freud writes of the melancholic, moreover, aptly portrays the burden of the lamentation’s hesitant and questioning verse: “he knows whom [or what] he has lost but not what it is he has

76


lost in them.”131 Kristeva’s description of the speech of the melancholic also bears a striking resemblance to the language of lamentation: “It is repetitive and monotonous. Faced with the impossibility of concatenating, [sufferers of melancholy] utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a standstill. Even phrases they cannot formulate. A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody emerge and dominate the broken logical sequences, changing them into recurring, obsessive litanies.”132 Kristeva further describes melancholia both in terms of a symbolic crisis and as a return to an archaic position, both of which might describe the moment of lamentation. Melancholy is characterized by “intolerance for object loss and the signifier’s failure to insure a compensating way out,”133 a mourning for “the real that does not lend itself to signification”—what Kristeva terms the “Thing,” a non-signifiable “insistence without presence.”134 If, for Kristeva, a negation of (primary) loss is necessary for the subject’s entrance into the Symbolic, and melancholy is characterized by a denial of the negation of that loss, a similar dynamic arguably subtends the lamentation’s responses to more immediate losses. In both cases, the resistance to negating loss “deprives the language signifiers of their role of making sense for the subject.”135 According to Freud, the mood of melancholy conceals aggression; the self-reproaches that characterize it are actually “reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted onto the patient’s own ego.”136 It is experienced as a loss of one’s own being, a lowered self-regard that in Freud’s account “culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment”:137 the melancholic “represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any effort and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and chastised.”138 The mood of melancholy also commands an exclusive devotion; it focuses all of the attentions and energies of the melancholic on the lost “object,” “Thing,” or moment. The corollary of this absolutely focused devotion is at once an impotence—“abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity”139—and an omnipotence: “Through their empty speech,” writes Kristeva, “[melancholics] assure themselves of an inaccessible . . . ascendancy over an archaic object that thus remains, for themselves and others, an enigma and a secret.”140 The mood of melancholy, then, posits and protects a realm inaccessible to any signifier; it claims to commune with the ineffable and thus poses a significant threat to the Symbolic and to signs. It is the manifestation of a “modality of significance” that “insures the preconditions for (or manifests the disintegration of) the imaginary and the symbolic.”141 A mood that has the power to conceal agressivity, to persuade the self that it is a disdainful object, create an expectation of punishment, induce exclusive devotion and focus attention absolutely, protect a domain ulterior to signification, and disintegrate the Imaginary is a powerful instrument indeed. Anger: Rarely settling into a decisive or stable mood, the shifty language of lamentation also grows angry. Cursing, blaming, it lashes out against causal


77

agents, authorities, God, the dead. Loraux has written brilliantly on this dreadful marriage of grief and rage, of the “memory-wrath” that in Greek bears the name of menis. This “repetitive and endless” anger, she writes, is a kind of memory that is alastos, “reduces itself completely to nonoblivion” in which “the negation must be understood in its performativeness” as an active, tenacious unforgetting that, “immobilized in a negative will, and immortalizing the past in the present,” cultivates itself obsessively, but is never achieved.142 This unappeasable wrath, which demands vengeance but will not be satisfied by it, is not only “a relentless presence that occupies, in the strong sense of the word, the subject and does not leave,” but also “the worst enemy of politics,” a kind of memory and permanence that rivals that of institutions.143 That grief should turn into anger is not surprising. The one thing on which theorists of anger from Aristotle to modern psychology seem to agree is that anger is conditioned by a perceived slight or injury. “[A]nger is aroused by the direct impression of an injury,” writes Seneca, and Aquinas concurs: “the movement of anger does not arise save on account of some pain inflicted” and “the motive of a man’s anger is always something done against him.”144 Cognitive psychology’s version of this principle, which proposes (in Richard Lazarus’s formulation) that “a demeaning offense against me and mine is the best shorthand description of the provocant to adult human anger,” also emphasizes that anger is directly related to what or who is considered important—part of “me and mine,” my own (and) proper(ty).145 This rule was not lost on Aristotle, who specified that anger results from “those who speak ill of us and show contempt for us, in connection with the things we ourselves most care about.”146 Cognitive psychologists, using different terms for a similar argument, posit anger as a response to what is perceived to threaten the maintenance of ego-identity. Anger is not only conditioned by what is held to be important, but by who is considered important. This is certainly true in the sense that injury to those who are part of my identity gives rise to anger, but also because anger responds to perceived insubordination, to a disruption of “proper” hierarchical relationships. This is perfectly explicit in Aristotle’s argument—“A man expects to be specially respected by his inferiors in birth, in capacity, in goodness, and generally in anything in which he is much their superior,”147 as it is in Aquinas’s: “deficiency or littleness in the person with whom we are angry, tends to increase our anger, in so far as it adds to the unmeritedness of being despised.”148 Anger is, from this perspective, conservative and disciplinary; it appears, armed and dangerous, when one’s social or economic position is unsettled, hell-bent on restoring things and people to their proper place. In medieval Christian Europe, recognition of the instrumentality of anger in maintaining social hierarchy translated into notions of proper anger (on the part of kings, lords, and God) and improper anger (exhibited by, for example, peasants and women).149 The former was necessary to uphold divinely ordained social relations, emblematic of honor, righteousness, and justice; the latter was

78


socially disruptive, unjust, one of the seven deadly sins. While reconfigured in accordance with (among other factors) capitalist class formations and the secular power of the nation state, such a distinction is by no means absent from modernity. The virtuous indignation of legitimate states is not considered equivalent to the insane fury of terrorists; the judge’s anger is not the same as the criminal’s; the lawful owner’s not the same as the dispossessed’s, the citizen’s not the same as the foreigner’s. The undemocratic, double face of anger is the nub of a debate that has followed anger for centuries: whether it is, on the one hand, manageable, useful, and compatible with reason and justice or, on the other hand, uncontrollable, destructive, irrational, and wrong. Aristotle and Aquinas take the former view, Seneca, eloquently, the latter. Aristotle is interested in how anger is useful to politics and justice, how orators may use it to elicit bravery in soldiers or win a lawsuit. His analysis of anger is in the service of producing it; it is, significantly, part of the Rhetoric. Aquinas, whose God exercises an anger that is justice itself—perfectly measured, absolutely proper—while less keen on cultivating anger, is equally anxious to reserve its utility to justice. Seneca will have none of this: “there is nothing useful in anger,” he writes, “nor does it kindle the mind to warlike deeds; for virtue, being selfsufficient, never needs the help of vice.”150 It is unfit even for revenge: while “no passion is more eager for revenge than anger,” it is “for that very reason unfit to take it; being unduly ardent and frenzied, as most lusts are, it blocks its own progress to the goal toward which it hastens.”151 Seneca’s argument rests on the conviction that anger is fundamentally “unbridled and ungovernable,” even by reason.152 “For if it listens to reason and follows where reason leads, it is no longer anger, of which the chief characteristic is willfulness.”153 Anger is, he argues, a kind of temporary madness, “devoid of self-control, forgetful of decency . . . closed to reason and counsel, excited by trifling causes, unfit to discern the right and true.”154 In a phrase that bears directly on our analyses of recovery, adequation, and the economy of justice, he describes anger as “altogether unbalanced,” as, that is, inimical to health, reasoning, and ethical action. 155 This mad imbalance, this “most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions,”156 Seneca does not hestiate to associate with barbarians, women, children, old men, weakened minds, and the sick. In one passage, warning against the invasivness of anger, he tellingly portrays it as at once a dreaded foreigner, a threat to civic order, and an insidious imperialism: “The enemy, I repeat, must be stopped at the very frontier; for if he has passed it, and advanced within the city-gates, he will not respect any bounds set up by his captives.”157 Implicit in the anger of the lament, as well as in the critical weight accorded to injury and social relationships in the production of anger, is the presence of a blameworthy agent. Unlike melancholy or dread, anger requires an object, though in the complex societies of modernity, “because there are so many environmental levels at which it is possible to assign accountability and control,” a responsible agent may be difficult to identify;


79

anger may seek out a scapegoat.158 Attempting to specify the difference between anger and other negative emotions that derive from injury or loss, Lazarus argues that blameworthiness is central: “One attribution distinguishing anger from other negative emotional provocations is whether blame is directed at someone or something other than ourselves.”159 Responding to the crisis of justice that haunts the moment of lamentation, the lamentation’s angry invocations, as we have seen, hurl accusations, and cast blame. It is little wonder that they appear as a menace to religious and political institutions that claim a monopoly on such judgments. This menace is augmented by the formidable liaison of anger with desire. “[U]nsatisfied desires are prone to anger and easily roused,” writes Aristotle. “Further, we are angered if we happen to be expecting a contrary result.”160 Cognitive psychologists, who speak in terms of “goal-blockage,” once more arrive at a similar conclusion.161 Anger both results from and incites desire; and the desire it most commonly constructs is for revenge or counter-injury. This desire is central to Aristotle’s definition of anger and confirmed by nearly all who follow him: “anger is an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight.”162 While from one standpoint, this anger and the demands it entails can be frightening and even punitive, from another, it can be highly contagious, particularly if one believes oneself to share in the injury that produced the anger in the first place. Anger affects, spreads, gathers steam. This, as Aristotle recognized, is a redoubtable source of power: anger affects the judgment, influences how and what one thinks. Aristotle’s theory of anger, and its placement in the Rhetoric, emphasize that anger is performative, in the twofold sense of that term: it can be performed whether or not it is “felt”; it can create the effects that it apparently expresses. This indeed is Aristotle’s wager: that one can possess and perform anger without being possessed by it. This performativity is also the only concession Seneca makes to the utility of anger; it comes in the last line of his treatise, and is treated as a last resort. “Anger is therefore never permitted; sometimes we must pretend to possess it if we have to arouse the sluggish minds of our hearers, just as we apply goads and brands to arouse horses that are slow in starting upon their course. Sometimes we must strike fear into the hearts of those with whom reason is of no avail.”163 Anger, in short, is for performance purposes only. But it is clear from the foregoing that such performances can be powerful: they can spread or construct a sense of injury, shake up or reinforce social hierarchies, legitimate violence, unbalance reason and justice, cast blame, and construct desire. They may threaten what is most one’s own, what is most integral to the self, most proper. They can ignite a fury that runs out of control, takes on a life of its own. Dread: Dread is a term which has translated notions as divergent as Ricoeurian terreur, Kierkegaardian angest, and Blanchotian angoisse.164 It covers much of the same semantic territory as anxiety, including the Heideggerian sort, and while connotatively dread is slightly more concentrated and objectal

80


than anxiety, I take the two as largely synonymous. Unleashed by modernity’s ceaseless transformations and uneasily repressed by its “internally referential systems,” dread stalks the discourses, experiences, institutions, and cultural productions of modernity. In the lamentation, moreover, we can spot its shadow at nearly every turn: in the lamentation’s wrestlings with the unknowability of death, refusal of resolution and recovery, encounter with the improper and foreign, expressions of the inarticulate, anguished antitheses, hesitations, questions, and impossible invocations. We have also marked the affinity of dread for that exceptional, visionary moment that Kierkegaard and Heidegger call “augenblick.” While it might seem odd that a language that responds to the past and houses a retrospective mood like melancholy should also be inhabited by an anticipatory mood such as dread, the lamentation, it must be kept in mind, stands in the midst of a loss that is not yet known, a trauma which is still happening to consciousness. The forward-looking anxiousness of dread is also, for both Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, the persistence of an archaic moment, and it is thus not entirely surprising to spot it lurking in a language confronted with a newly primeval, “re-originated” world. Dread attaches to what precedes, or resists sublimation into, meaning or justice. It is the mood that corresponds to calling a witness, to the dual threats of senselessness and injustice that haunt the lamentation, to a materiality that refuses to signify. Heidegger articulates this principle in relation to both equipmental breakdown and “being-towards-death,” moments in which anxiety accompanies a collapse of significance. Ricoeur, examining the relationship of dread to perceptions of evil, describes dread as a non-conceptual “half-light,” logically and chronologically anterior to reflection: a pre-reflective association of misfortune with wrongdoing, the vague but persistent suspicion that suffering is a sign. Dread has also often been described in terms of a trial. In Ricoeur’s analysis, this trial necessitates the formulation of dread into language and is the portentous threshold between mood and reflection: Now it [the word dread] insinuates itself into the experience itself as an instrument by which the defiled self becomes conscious of itself . . . not only does [consciousness] begin to communicate but it discovers the unlimited perspective of self-interrogation. Man asks himself: since I experience this failure, this sickness, this evil, what sin have I committed? Suspicion is born; the appearance of acts is called in question; a trial of veracity is begun.165

For Ricoeur, this “trial of veracity” to which dread is submitted ultimately allows for judgment: dread is sublimated into philosophy. But because the lamentation stays suspended in the time of a preliminary hearing, because it remains interrogative, tentative, and paradoxical, because it rarely accedes to judgment or philosophy, it is inevitably inhabited by the suspicion that judgment cannot be reached, that the evidence does not add up to anything; it always suspects philosophy of being premature. The trial of dread proceeds quite differently according to Blanchot, for whom dread is not a “half-light,” but a fully lit, non-revelatory, clarity: “in


81

reality, dread has no mysterious underside; it exists completely in the obviousness that makes us feel it is there; it is entirely revealed as soon as one says: I am full of dread.”166 Like the arrested, repetitious literality noted above, which does not give rise to meaning, Blanchotian dread “challenges all the realities of reason, its methods, its possibilities, its very capacity to exist”167 and is a confirmation of the unbearably apparent: it is nothing to all those who pass by; my sorrow is like any other sorrow; it is insignificant, nothing: One dies at the thought that any object to which one is attached is lost, and in this mortal fear one also feels that this object is nothing, an interchangeable sign, an empty occasion. There is nothing that cannot feed dread, and dread is, more than anything else, this indifference to what creates it, although at the same time it seems to rivet the man to the cause it has chosen.168

Blanchot’s dread is vacuous and désouvré, but Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Ricoeur all find something instructive in it. For Heidegger, it is powerfully disclosive, clearing away the concealments that obstruct Dasein. Ricoeur’s sublimated variety of dread is “the soul of all true education” and remains, he contends, “an indispensable element in all forms of education, familial, scholiast, civic, as well as in the protection of society against the infractions of citizens.”169 But it is Kierkegaard who makes of dread the master teacher. Pitiless but liberating, it weans the human from the constraints of finitude: Anxiety [angest] is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness. And no Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readiness as anxiety has, and no secret agent knows as cunningly as anxiety how to attack his suspect in his weakest moment or to make alluring the trap in which he will be caught, and no discerning judge understands how to interrogate and examine the accused as does anxiety, which never lets the accused escape, neither through amusement, nor by noise, nor during work, neither by day nor by night. Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude.170

Dread is thus allied not only with instruction, but with freedom and possibility. This theme, as have seen, is reworked by Heidegger: disrupting habitual modes of understanding, anxiety discloses an awful, but impassioned freedom, one that “projects itself essentially upon possibilities” and “brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for . . . the authenticity of its Being.”171 Dread, then, designates a mood that is associated with the disarticulation of knowing, with the not-yet-known, and with that which resists, or is disruptive of, rational and ethical systems. It puts things, people, and ideas on trial, but exasperatingly and endlessly suspends judgment, retaining a remarkable resistance to philosophy. For Blanchot, it marks a perpetual failure to generate meaning and an exposure of the vacuity of reason. Dread is also a mood of freedom and possibility, and (though Blanchot remains

82


unconvinced on this point) may have educative value. It is possible, then, that dread inhabits languages that mess with the irrational or inconceivable. It is also possible that a language imbued with dread might be of utility in resisting philosophical resolution; in exposing the chicanery of reason, ideology, or common sense; in putting (a person, a class, a discourse) on trial; or in creating (a sense of) possibility or freedom.

Chapter

3

L a m e n tat i o n a n d ( D i s ) Po s s e s s i o n : Fau l k n e r’s A B S A LO M , A B S A LO M ! and the New South

R eaders of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! have often remarked the relent-

less torrent of loss that comprises the novel’s plot, the epistemological losses that inhere in its narrative structure, as well as the fundamental incomprehensibility of the narrated world both to the characters who participate in it and the narrators who describe it.1 If such recognitions prompt consideration of the novel within the lament tradition, so too do its tentative and contradictory narratives and shifting narratorial position; its propensity for paradox, antithesis, the hyperbolic, and the irresolvable; its narrators’ self-consciously belated position within a radically discontinuous time; and its invocations, which, under the dual threat of meaninglessness and unrequited injustice, call out to passersby to witness.2 The novel, in addition, shows recurrent symptoms of those moods we have associated with lamentation: the exclusive devotion to a lost object characteristic of melancholia, for example, and the simultaneous attempt and inability to make suffering a sign characteristic of dread. The specific concern to which I turn in this chapter, however, is the lamentation’s uneasy rhetoric of possession, which vacillates between claims of possession and acknowledgement of loss. The moment of lamentation is characterized by a redistribution of both material and ideological possessions, and (dis)possession is a central rhetorical preoccupation of the lamentation: though seized by strangers, the lamentation insists, they are our houses; though dead, he is my son; though destroyed, it is my city—a proprietary insistence that also characterizes the lamentation from which Faulkner draws his title:

84

L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!3

This possessiveness is not entirely surprising: language about loss is perforce language about possession. Loss is always loss of something, and of a particular something perceived to be proper to oneself. To lament something as lost is to presuppose that one once possessed it, and therefore (prior to mourning) the lamentation must construct and possess a lost object; it must engage, we might say, in an act of retroactive possession. But the lamentation is also and simultaneously a language of dispossession. Even its most insistently possessive gestures are descriptions of possessions that are lost or destroyed. This negative movement of dispossession, as I explore in the second part of this chapter, is buttressed in the lamentation by a proliferation of privatives that rhetorically (re)enact dispossession. But even beyond—or before—this semantic “taking away,” a double uncertainty troubles the proprietary claims of the lamentation, pervading both the object and the act of possession. The possession to which the lamentation lays claim, that is, is constructed belatedly, when it can no longer be observed or experienced. And the recollection through which this object is (re)constructed is plagued with singular difficulties because it is concerned with (re)possessing not only an object (e.g., a person or home) but its value and significance, and, further, because the possessions to which the lamentation lay claim are often the “wholly familiar”—the unreflective ground of being and thinking, the everyday, occulted by its very familiarity. If this repossessed object is contaminated with uncertainty, so is the act of possession itself. For while possession in an objective sense (such as physical or legal possession of a house) can be determined with a reasonable amount of certainty, possession in the subjective or affective sense (such as knowledge of, closeness to, or cognitive investment in, a loved one) is far less determinable. Obliged to construct and possess an object, but only able to do so speculatively and uncertainly, the lamentation is quite capable of constructing a “possession” that never existed—an Israel, for example, that “was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces” or an Old South of cavalier landowners and happy slaves.4 It is also quite capable of peremptorily “fixing” distressingly unstable modes of subjective possession. This is not to say that the lamentation’s claims are necessarily illegitimate, but merely that the lamentation is a language that insistently portrays as already and certainly possessed an object that it speculatively constructs and only indeterminately possesses. It is thus a language that lends itself to certifying proprietary claims and legitimating a certain (re)distribution of possessions. The moment to which the narrators of Absalom respond is, like the moment to which lamentation responds, characterized by the transfer of property, the redistribution of possessions, and the remapping of territorial boundaries: Sutpen’s apparently extortionary acquisition of land from Ikkemottube; the

L a m e n tat i o n a n d ( D i s ) P o s s e s s i o n

85

subsequent transfer of “Sutpen’s Hundred” to sharecroppers, and, ultimately, its transfer in toto to the state; Sutpen’s obscene (and fateful) exchange of baubles for an heir; Judith’s exchange of a store for a gravestone. Indeed a large portion of the narrative itself—that produced by Quentin and Shreve—is conditioned by the Compsons’ exchange of a piece of property for a room at Harvard, a by no means insignificant exchange of real property for cultural capital, and of Southern land for a Northern product. Indeed, as we have noted, lamentation is a moment when ideological as well as material possessions are transferred, when, for example, value, knowledge, and identity are redistributed. Material and ideological property are not, of course, unrelated; on the contrary, they are inevitably collusive because possessions function as signs. Material property is often the procurer and guardian of ideological property, as Sutpen acquires chairs, chandeliers, tapestry, Damask, slaves, and wife to be signs of respectability. Conversely, ideological possessions may be converted into material ones, as Shreve’s parodic lawyer systematically appraises the value of knowledge, records it in a ledger, and converts it into capital; or as Rosa, bequeathing her knowledge and identity to Quentin, suggests: “if you write down this story, you may sell it to the magazines and buy your wife a new gown or a new chair for the house.”5 Indeed it is because the customary functioning of such significatory systems are advantageous to the preservation of both material privilege and fixed identities that it takes a catastrophe to effect a redistribution of possessions. Catastrophes, hence, can be useful. To note the convertibility between material and ideological possessions is to recognize the degree to which material possessions function as demarcations of identity. The “sprigs of holly thrust beneath the knockers on the doors and mistletoe hanging from the chandeliers and bowls of eggnog and toddy on tables in the halls and the blue unwinded wood smoke standing about the plastered chimneys of the slave quarters” (267) all function, not only as signs of what Henry and Charles do not, in their state “something very like pariah-hood” (267) possess, but also as signs of what they are not: integrated parts of the social body, members of a respectable family, legitimate confederate soldiers, what Michel de Certeau calls “an identifiable and legible word in a social language.”6 Lamentations often emphasize that to be dispossessed of material goods is simultaneously to be dispossessed of the value of one’s identity. The logical extension of this argument is that property loss is always a loss of self, a formulation whose similarity to descriptions of trauma should not be overlooked. Accordingly, the transfers of real property portrayed in Absalom are everywhere accompanied by redistributions of identity—the hobbledehoy becomes master and, subsequently, landowner becomes merchant, slave-holding heiress becomes landlord-employer, slave becomes freedperson, a college boy becomes inadvertent plenipotentiary of the South. In the moment of lamentation, moreover, material objects take on new identities and undergo a process of transvaluation. Such objects not only

86


acquire new meanings—as the shield of Hector, which once signified strength, valor, arete, becomes in Hecuba’s lamentation “a hateful thing to look at”—but acquire new identities because they acquire new functions, because they are literally re-made.7 Judith, for example, by mid-War wears “the made-over dress which all Southern women now wore” and joins those other women “in the improvised hospital where (the nurtured virgin, the supremely and traditionally idle) they cleaned and dressed the self-fouled bodies of strange injured and dead and made lint of the window curtains and sheets and linen of the houses in which they had been born” (99–100). In this moment, then, material possessions assume new identities because they become functionally other. In the world of Absalom, rags become dresses, barns become hospitals, curtains become bandages, and boards from the carriage house become a coffin for Charles Bon. And this transformation is also a transvaluation: objects’ exchange value is transmuted into use value. A dress or a curtain’s value no longer inheres in its ability to function as sign— of taste, status, or prosperity—but in its ability to function as material with which to cover the body or a wound. This re-made property of the lamentation is, further, no longer “proper” to its possessor. Such redistributions of identity effect an alienating disjunction—a méconnaissance—between a “possessor” and objects. Such, for example, is the disjunctive relationship between Rosa and the “botched over” dresses she wears, the second-hand ring she is offered by a second-hand husband, or indeed the alien deaths she makes over with her elegies. My argument in this chapter is that the language of Absalom—and, specifically, Faulkner’s idiosyncratic use of the demonstrative pronoun and negations—is structurally, and often semantically, homologous to the lamentation’s uneasy rhetoric of possession. Further, I contend that Absalom’s narrators deploy the lamentation’s possessive and privative gestures in order both to lay retroactive claims of possession and to effect an interested redistribution of possessions. In the first part of the chapter, I focus on the demonstrative rather than the (perhaps more obvious) possessive pronoun for several reasons: because it is a striking stylistic feature of Absalom, because it illustrates the way in which the mode of lamentation may be displaced onto apparently insignificant rhetorical gestures, and because Faulkner’s crafty deployment of it exemplifies so beautifully the move of retroactive possession and its utility in constructing a mythical past. As we shall see, the demonstrative pronoun in Absalom regularly constructs knowledge, delineates identity, and redistributes value by portraying as already and certainly established those proprietary borders that it in fact speculatively draws. In the second part of the chapter, I turn from possession to dispossession and explore the rhetorical movement of the Faulknerian privative, which I will argue corresponds not only to the language of lamentation, but to the social movement conceived by New South spokesmen in the post-war Reconstruction era. New South spokesmen, I contend, appropriated the rhetorical destructions of the lamentation to produce newness, to construct


87

desire, and to effect a redistribution of possessions. I am thus tracing a triangular resemblance between the privative gestures of the lamentation, of Faulkner’s narrators, and of New South spokesmen, though the relation between these three discourses is, I would emphasize, less one of deliberate appropriation or influence, than a structural resemblance between languages performing similar ideological tasks.

Possession and the Demonstrative Pronoun The demonstrative pronoun is one of the primary mapping strategies of Faulknerian language, and Faulkner’s idiosyncratic and iterative use of it mimes the possessive activity of lamentation.8 In Absalom, demonstrative phrases—such as “that quality of gaunt and tireless driving, that conviction for haste and of fleeing time” (27), “that maiden revery of solitude which is the first thinning of that veil we call virginity” (118)—are a repeated device for demarcating ideological territory, for distributing knowledge, identity, and value. Moreover, the demonstrative pronoun carries out these proprietary distributions under the guise of “demonstration,” under the guise, that is to say, of merely making evident or manifest the already existent and true. When, for example, on the first page of the novel, Rosa is described as “sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair . . . that her legs hung . . . clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet” (3), the demonstrative phrase grammatically presupposes that it is commonly known that children’s feet possess an air of impotent and static rage. The demonstrative phrase simultaneously demarcates the ideological territory possessed by children’s feet and grammatically asserts, with its simple deictic gesture, that this “knowledge” already exists: it need not be justified, but merely pointed to. The demonstrative pronoun, hence, much like the retroactive possessive of the lamentation, cloaks speculative objects and acquisitional operations with the formidable power of grammatical legitimation, as well as with the mien of logical “proof.” The proprietary distributions effected and certified by the demonstrative pronoun are most often, however, of far greater consequence than determining the nature of children’s feet. For example, by the belated moment of the outset of the novel, it is commonly accepted knowledge that Thomas Sutpen possesses a “design”—a design which he pursues with “grim and unflagging fury” (31)—and this knowledge is established primarily through the repeated certifications of the demonstrative pronoun. While it remains uncertain whether this design exists prior to the moment when Sutpen recounts the story of his youth to Grandfather Compson (in a moment, significantly, conditioned by the insistent logical faultiness of the hunting dogs), and while it is quite probable that the design is Sutpen’s retroactive logic for recovering the past, this “knowledge” nevertheless consistently subtends the narratives through which narrators and the townspeople of Jefferson construct the

88


identity of Sutpen; and it is a knowledge, moreover, that is by no means disinterested. For example, it allows Sutpen to rename his abandonment of his Haitian wife, his dispossession of Charles Bon, his “affront” to Rosa Coldfield, his seduction of Millie Jones, and his repudiation of his unnamed child, “necessity,” and it allows him to describe inclusion and exclusion in terms of a possible/impossible binary set to which moral argument, or human distress, is simply irrelevant. Hence, in Grandfather Compson’s office, he explains, indeed quite logically, how the fact of his Haitian wife’s black blood “rendered it impossible that this woman and child be incorporated in my design” (212). Possession of the design thus enables Sutpen to describe his acts as the unavoidable effect of an already determinant and constraining entity, rather than as the activity of a responsible moral agent. In addition, possession of a design simultaneously renders Sutpen’s suffering significant and others’ suffering insignificant. Sutpen abandons his Haitian wife—discounts the significance of the suffering he causes her— because she would make “an ironic delusion of all that he had suffered and endured in the past and all that he could ever accomplish in the future toward that design” (211); that is, because he perceives her to pose a threat to the meaningfulness of his suffering, to his ability to convert his distress into meaning. When Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon and his annoyingly visible suffering will not go away, he redescribes the design as “vindication” (220), as an act that will retroactively render his previous action (approaching the plantation house door) right, and the action of the black man who answered that door wrong, an act that will thus nullify the condition of his suffering (wrongness), and delegate the emotional labor it involves to the slave. Indeed, Sutpen manages to use the design, however spuriously, as the justificatory basis for dispossession, though according to Quentin and Shreve, Charles Bon would be content to possess nothing more than a sign—a flash of recognition, a word, an unopened letter even—a sign that would immediately exhaust its signifying function and indeed be in exchange for any claim to material possession. Thus the sign that Bon asks of his father, and that Sutpen denies him, would in fact take nothing away from the design or its products than the fundamentally gratuitous ideological dispossession that it putatively “justifies.”9 Hence this movement that produces knowledge by grammatically fixing a speculative object, by moving it from the uncertain realm of speculation to the realm of certain knowledge, is a process through which interested and consequential speculations become established as truth. Sutpen’s “design” is one example among many. Similarly interested etiologies might be traced for the knowledge of “that innocence” (192, 194, 198, 203, 211), “that mistake” (215, 218, 219), “that durance” (73, 94), “that curious relationship which existed between [Henry and Judith]” (79), “that lawyer” (241), or “that furious protest”of Charles Etienne (164). This process of grammatical certification, moreover, fixes constraining and interested identities, making Ellen’s speech into “that meaningless uproar of vanity” (58), Bon into


89

“that indolent fatalist” (83), Clytie into “that curious blend of savageness and pity, of yearning and hatred” (161), and black men into nothing more than “that [apparently insentient] expression on a balloon face bursting with laughter” (190). Further, like the arrow on Faulkner’s map of Jefferson that points to a “Sutpen’s Hundred” beyond the edges of the page, the territory marked by the demonstrative pronouns of Absalom extends far beyond the novel’s diegetic terrain, drawing proprietary borders around such entities as women, youth, language, solitude, and darkness. These extradiegetic properties, certified by demonstrative pronouns, function as the major premises on which identities and value are deduced. Compson, for example, on the premise of “that amoral boldness, that affinity for brigandage of women” (61) deduces that Rosa is a thief and that she has stolen the materials for Judith’s trousseau from her father’s store. Similarly, Compson’s demonstrative phrases demarcating the nature of women and youth—he describes Bon’s marriage as “a ritual as meaningless as that of college boys in secret rooms at night” (93), for example—function to de-value the narratives of Rosa, Quentin, and Shreve, and thereby increase the value of his own. The demonstrative phrase, then, not only distributes knowledge, value, and identity, but presupposes assent to the particular distribution it has effected. Indeed, the finesse of the demonstrative pronoun rests on its ability to represent its own proprietary assignations as the “wholly familiar.” While the lamentation essays a speculative reconstruction of the wholly familiar that has been lost, a less ingenuous language, with the same movement, can construct and institute knowledge, value, or identity, by portraying it as the wholly familiar.10 The demonstrative pronoun, which speaks with the seductive voice of Charles Bon, “pleasant, cryptic, postulating still the fact of one man of the world talking to another about something they both understand” (89), is, then, the ready accomplice of ideology and the linguistic distillate of its movement. In addition to its acts of retroactive possession, the lamentation contends two kinds of present possession: inalienable possessions such as kin and body parts, and the possession of affliction. These assertions of present possession belong to the lamentation’s structure of antithesis and reversal, for in the lamentation one comes to possess what is alien (the aversive) and is alienated from that which one ordinarily possesses most immutably. By dint of linguistic constraint, lamentations posit present and rightful possession of kin and the body.11 While kin and body parts are possessions that are linguistically inalienable and possession of them is posited unequivocally, in the lamentation, references to kin are almost invariably to alienated— enslaved, exiled, or dead—kin. Likewise, references to body parts are, as we have seen, almost invariably part of a description of the body turned against itself in pain, descriptions in which the body is the alien agent of physical pain, a weapon turned against the self.12 Hence the inalienable—my children, my son, my daughters, my bones, my heart, my eyes, my flesh—has, in the lamentation, become alien. And like the lamentation’s figures of alienated

90


kin and bodies in pain, the demonstrative pronouns of Absalom repeatedly mark the alienation of inalienable possessions and are often complicit in effecting it. Mr. Compson, for example, deploys the demonstrative pronoun to linguistically alienate kin from each other in his abridged rendition of Sutpen family history: this father who should see that man one time, yet have reason to make a six hundred mile journey to investigate him . . . this brother in whose eyes that sister’s and daughter’s honor and happiness, granted that curious and unusual relationship which existed between them, should have been more jealous and precious than to the father even . . . and this lover who apparently without volition or desire became involved in an engagement which he seems neither to have sought nor avoided. (79; emphasis added)

Hence, rather than his father, her brother, his sister, her lover, in Mr. Compson’s narration, kin have become discrete entities dispossessed of familial relation. This disjunction between possessor and inalienable possession, indeed apposite to a family in which the father dispossesses one son, and the other son dispossesses the father, constructs “kin” who, like a discarded object or uninhabitable land, no one bothers to possess. Similarly, Rosa’s description of her confrontation with Clytie on the stairs repeatedly employs the demonstrative pronoun to deny Clytie possession of her body. This linguistic severance of Clytie from her body, ratified by the non-human terms in which she is described, is in marked contrast to the possessives that Rosa uses to speak of her own body: I was crying, not to someone, something, but (trying to cry) through something, through that force, that furious yet absolutely rocklike and immobile antagonism which had stopped me—that presence, that familiar coffee-colored face, that body . . . no larger than my own. . . . (110; emphasis added) I know only that my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt into something monstrous and immobile, with a shocking impact too soon and too quick to be mere amazement and outrage at that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman’s flesh. (111; emphasis added)

Clytie is thus dispossessed of the most rudimentary of possessions, of what Rosa calls “the citadel of the central I Am’s private own” (112), what we have called the proprius.13 The demonstrative pronoun makes alien her face, her body, her hand, linguistically reenacting, we might say, what the war has done to Grandfather Compson’s arm. But there is more to the passage than this: for while the lamentation represents the alienation of one’s own kin, and the pain of one’s own body, the demonstrative pronoun, with a similar gesture, perpetrates this alienation on (the representation of) another. This is to say, then, that the gestures of a language that represents loss can likewise discursively effect loss. This alienation of the inalienable, symptomatic of crisis, has the ability to construct a sense of crisis, to fabricate a moment which calls for the inconceivable, and which


91

warrants extravagant action; in such a moment of confused and loosened relationships between possessors and possessions, inconceivable acquisition becomes as possible as inconceivable loss. Moreover, Rosa’s description of her confrontation with Clytie demonstrates that this alienation of the inalienable, while characteristic of the lamentation, may be neither cataclysmic nor exceptional; rather, it exists alongside other narratives and discourses, and may be eclipsed by them. This passage, indeed, is not about Clytie’s alienated body, but about Rosa’s attempt to find out what has happened between Henry and Charles Bon. Not only is Clytie’s “loss” concealed by the narrative of another, it can not even be conceived of as loss because it exists, rather than as an exceptional, disjunctive moment, as a disregarded circumstance of the everyday. The second form of present possession asserted by the lamentation is the possession of affliction. The lamentation repeatedly describes affliction, aversiveness, misery, sorrow in terms of possession—as my sorrow, my trouble, our affliction or doom. The very proximity and presentness of sorrow, trouble, terror, and misfortune make them seem like one’s personal possessions: they comprise the immediate environment and designate one’s identity. Indeed, like the re-made material property of the lamentation that effects a disjunction between possessor and possession, or like the body turned against itself in pain, one’s relationship to one’s own knowledge, value, identity is, in the lamentation, both alien and adverse: to possess oneself is to possess affliction. Thus is the adversity of the Sutpen household repeatedly described as the possession of doom, and thus does this afflictive possession ultimately determine, for example, Charles Bon’s identity, an identity adversarial to its own possessor: [Henry:]—You are my brother. [Charles:]—No I’m not. I’m just the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister. (286)

While the lamentation’s assertions of wrongful possession indict adversity, the lamentation’s afflictive possessions figure that adversity’s inevitable suffusion into identity. For Quentin, that afflictive possession is, significantly, accumulated significance—hearing and knowing too much, too long, a knowledge so aversive, so inextricable from the self, that in the Spring of the same year (though in a previous novel), Quentin will kill himself to be rid of it. And to express this afflictive knowledge, Quentin turns to demonstrative pronouns that simultaneously call forth and elide the overwhelming, aversive significance of which they are the trace: Yes. I have heard too much, I have been told too much; I have had to listen to too much, too long thinking Yes, almost exactly like Father: that letter, and who to know what moral restoration she [Judith] might have contemplated in the privacy of that house, that room, that night, what hurdling of iron old

92

L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s traditions since she had seen almost everything else she had learned to call stable vanish like straws in a gale. (168; emphasis added)

If the demonstrative pronoun only incidentally marks afflictive possession in Absalom, its movement—which accumulates, circumscribes, and certifies—is quite capable of instituting aversive knowledge or identity. The lamentation’s assertions of possession, then, which we have characterized as retroactive, impossibly alienated, and afflictive, are all grammatically marked as certain possessions. Beneath that estimable mien, however, all are disturbed by semantic contentions that render their possessive claims equivocal. The assertion of prior possession, for example, is simultaneously and oxymoronically both an assertion of possession and a catalog of loss; it asserts grammatically a possession that it negates semantically. The lamentation’s two forms of present possession are both simultaneously an insistence on possession and a disruption of the customary relationship—of continuity and mastery—between proprietor and property. This dual movement between assertion and negation, between possession and dispossession, between language that acquires property and language that effects loss, runs throughout the lamentation and is manifested in a number of linguistic, grammatical, semantic, and figural forms.

Privatives, Dispossession, and the New South The lamentation is a language not only of possession, but of dispossession, and the work of dispossession is largely carried out by privatives and other forms of negation.14 Because unhinged from an assertion a privative means nothing, because it must assert in order to negate, establish in order to destroy, the privative, in re-making value, identity, and knowledge, reenacts loss. Like the remade property of the lamentation, moreover, the privative is by nature comparative, disjunctive, antithetical to itself. When Hecuba laments that she, as an old woman, will be forced in slavery to perform “asumforotata”—that which is most unfit, ill-matched, inappropriate—she illustrates the logic of the lamentation’s affinity for privatives. For the privative “asumforotata” not only signifies disagreement, but is a (structural) disagreement that mimes the disjunctive identity that Hecuba laments.15 The rhetorical dispossession effected by the lamentation’s privatives are structurally and often semantically homologous to the various and relentless devices of Faulknerian negativity. Faulknerian privatives—a term under which I am including negations, negative neologisms, figures of privation, as well as linguistic privatives—regularly function to dispossess owners of authority, identity, knowledge, and value.16 The narrators of Absalom deploy the lamentation’s privative gestures, I will argue, to effect an interested redistribution of possessions, and I will thus be as much concerned with the ways in which the novel’s narrators rhetorically construct catastrophe as with the way


93

they represent the underlying thematic catastrophe of the Civil War.17 I will argue, further, that if the privatives of Absalom reenact the historical moment of the Civil War and Reconstruction, they also inscribe a subsequent moment that the novel only sketchily presents: that era between Charles Etienne’s youth at Sutpen’s Hundred and Quentin and Shreve’s snowy night of storytelling at Harvard that we call the “New South.” The rhetorical movement of the privative, I contend, structurally corresponds to the social movement conceived by New South spokesmen during the period from about 1877 to 1913, when Southern journalists, educators, politicians, and preachers struggled to establish a new social and economic order. They did so, I will suggest, by appropriating the rhetorical destructions of the lamentation to produce newness, to construct desire, and, ultimately, to effect a redistribution of possessions. While thematically the period of the New South is only elliptically present in Absalom—glimpsed momentarily in Jim Hamblett’s truncated speech to Charles Etienne (165), for example, or the Ku Klux Klan’s visit to Sutpen’s Hundred (130, 134)—it is rhetorically, I would argue, pervasively present. In Greek lamentations, a-privatives (e.g., apolis [homeless], ateknos [childless]) regularly perform the loss of material possessions as well as the loss of value and identity that accompanies them. In similar fashion, Faulknerian via negativa descriptions designate and reenact the loss of identity concomitant to the material losses of the war: “It was winter soon and already soldiers were beginning to come back—the stragglers, not all of them tramps, ruffians, but men who had risked and lost everything, suffered beyond endurance and had returned now to a ruined land, not the same men who had marched away but transformed” (126). In this passage, the negations function first to distinguish those who possessed and lost property from those who cannot be dispossessed (“tramps, ruffians”) because they have never been entitled to possession in the first place, and second to mark the coincident contrariety (“not-sameness”) of property and identity: as a man’s land has become other, or become the property of another, so has the man become other to his former self. Likewise, when Sutpen returns from war, he, like the ruined fields, fallen fences, and crumbling walls of his property, has become other, indeed has become alien to his own physical presence: He [Sutpen] rode up the drive and into our lives again and left no ripple save those [Judith’s] instantaneous and incredible tears. Because he himself was not there, not in the house where we spent our days, had not stopped there. The shell of him was there, using the room which we had kept for him and eating the food which we produced and prepared as if it could neither feel the softness of the bed nor make distinction between the viands either as to quality or taste. Yes. He wasn’t there. . . . Not absent from the place, the arbitrary square of earth which he had named Sutpen’s Hundred: not that at all. He was absent only from the room, and that because he had to be elsewhere, a part of him encompassing each ruined field and fallen fence and crumbling wall of cabin or cotton house or crib; himself diffused and in solution held by that electric

94

L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s furious immobile urgency and awareness of short time and the need for haste. (129; emphasis added)

Hence, just as the physical presence of the fence no longer possesses the characteristics of a fence—the ability to enclose space, divide property, prohibit movement—so the physical presence of Sutpen no longer possesses the characteristics of a self. The repeated negations of presence (“not there,” “not in the house”), of sentience (feeling and taste), of effect (“no ripple” save Judith’s in-credible tears), and subsequently of absence, construct an identity which, like the privative itself, is disjunctive from, and antithetical to, the self—an identity figurally reinforced by the passage’s alternative descriptions of Sutpen as a “shell” (which implicitly likens him to the material alterity of the house),18 as “diffused,” and as “in solution” (transformed beyond identifiability by and into a dissimilar substance). These passages thus reenact that moment of remade property and disjunctive identities that we call “Reconstruction:” a term that, not coincidentally, also describes the remaking activity of the privative. If lamentation is a moment of remaking, it is also a moment when destruction has produced the radically new, when the world has been “re-originated” through catastrophe. Indeed destruction commonly functions as a sign of the new, and while the newly remade identities inscribed in the lamentation are alienating and aversive, newness is nonetheless often positively marked. Destruction of existing knowledge is, for example, closely associated with the production of new knowledge and indeed formulations of knowing itself—revelation, disclosure, unconcealment—often rely on a primary act of destruction (of cover or concealment). Thus the very act of destruction itself—however excessive, however independent of the legitimately new—is easily enough purveyed as the production of new knowledge. The fact that destruction may stand as a sign for the new begins to explain why Faulknerian narration often seems gratuitously destructive—narrators describe the knowledge they efface in more detail than the knowledge they affirm, employ privatives to construct suspiciously sophistic distinctions, and posit highly unlikely possibilities as if merely for the point of having something to negate. Faulknerian privatives are, moreover, frequently imbedded in a “not . . . but” sequence that not only destroys knowledge but functions to affirm a new knowledge. Mr. Compson, for example, explains that when Sutpen first arrived in Jefferson, he looked like a man who had been sick, yet “not like a man who had been peacefully ill in bed and had recovered to move with a sort of diffident and tentative amazement in a world which he had believed himself on the point of surrendering, but like a man who had been through some solitary furnace experience which was more than just fever” (24; emphasis added). Similarly, Shreve insists that Judith grew old: not as the weak grow old, either enclosed in a static ballooning of already lifeless flesh or though a series of stages of gradual collapsing whose particles adhere not to some iron and still impervious framework but to one another as though


95

in some communal and oblivious and mindless life of their own like a colony of maggots, but as the demon himself had grown old. (151; emphasis added)

Emerging from a frenzy of rhetorical destruction, such affirmations allow the Faulknerian narrator to lay claim to a radically new, and thus particularly valuable, knowledge: a pristine knowledge traditionally associated with purity of thought, with truth (a-letheia we should not forget, depends on a privative), and, later, with the originality that Romanticism valorized as authenticity.19 Even in those passages where narrators seem to be mired in a past that won’t go away, in a legacy that threatens to eclipse the very possibility of a New South, the “not . . . but” structure of their discourse insistently produces newness. Picking up the narrative from Quentin and Shreve, the omniscient narrator, for example, describes: the starved and ragged remnant of [the Confederate] army . . . swept onward not by a victorious army behind it but rather by a mounting tide of the names of lost battles from either side . . . battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say ‘Go there’ conferred upon them by an absolute caste system. (276)

This pervasive destruction of knowledge in Absalom, customarily propaedeutic to a new knowledge, structurally replicates that program which both urged and rhetorically enacted the destruction of old ideas, ideals, and identities in the interest of producing a New South. The project advocated by New South spokesmen like Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution and Richard Edmonds of the Manufacturers’ Record was contingent upon a series of destructions: of the South’s single-crop system, of its reliance on cotton, of its colonial raw-material economy, and of the leisure, manners, and elitism associated with the antebellum plantation. Such destructions, New South advocates wagered, would at once signify and produce newness: a South characterized not by plantation farming but by diversified agriculture; not by production of raw materials, but by the manufacture of finished products; not by Northern and freedmen’s governments but by Southern white supremacy—would effect, that is, a radical redistribution of both material and ideological possessions.20 To enact such a revolution and produce the new—and because destruction functions as a sign of the new—New South spokesmen inevitably relied on a battery of rhetorical destructions, deploying not only the literal sort of privative we have signaled in the lamentation and in Absalom but a particularly rich line of mortuary and burial imagery. On December 21, 1886, at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York, Henry Grady rose to speak to a group of New England businessmen and, in what would become the New South’s defining moment, began by quoting Georgia statesman Benjamin Harvey Hill: “There was a South of slavery and secession—that South is dead. There

96


is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour.”21 Grady’s opening statement at once structurally reproduces the Faulknerian “not . . . but” sequence, predicates a claim to newness on an event of destruction, and typifies the rhetorical construction of the New South. For just as Faulkner’s narrators repeatedly perform acts of linguistic destruction to produce new knowledge, so did Grady and his colleagues repeatedly perform rhetorical destructions to produce the New South. State Chronicle correspondent Walter Hines Page, for example, in a similarly seminal phrase, rhetorically decimated a generation of politicians by labeling them “mummies,” hoping thereby to bury “dead and now malodorous traditions,” make possible a new industrial school in North Carolina, and build a region distinguished not by unnatural preservation of already dead ideas and enterprises, but by “active and useful and energetic men.”22 New South spokesmen often mined for rhetorical materials in the destruction effected by Civil War, a destruction that, in New South terms, was less significant for the freedom it granted to blacks than for the new order—and economic opportunity—it produced for whites. Frequent rehearsals of the destruction of slavery thus expediently functioned as both a conciliatory gesture toward the North and the destruction necessary for production of the new. In Grady’s “New South” speech at Delmonico’s, for example, the South became the enslaved rather than the enslaver and the war, accordingly, about the South’s emancipation rather than its defeat: The South found her jewel in the toad’s head of defeat. The shackles that had held her in narrow limitations fell forever when the shackles of the negro slave were broken. . . . [The New South] understands that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave armies were beaten. (37–38)

Rhetorically appropriating the destruction of war also allowed New South spokesmen to insert themselves into that logic of lamentation that simultaneously declares the past utterly destroyed and proclaims loyalty to it—a position not unlike Mr. Compson’s insistence on the Old South as both “a dead time” and “larger, more heroic” than the “diffused and scattered” present (71).23 At once constructing, decimating, and eulogizing the Old South, the speeches and editorials of the New South routinely carried wrenching descriptions of either the dying confederate soldier or the surviving soldier who, like Sutpen, returns home to find “his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless, his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away.”24 Such lamentations ratified the New South program with the affective potency of catastrophic loss and the reverence afforded the dead: men and women wept when Grady spoke. Thus harnessing the elegiac sensibilities of the South’s Rosas and the tragic irony of its Compsons, New South spokesmen turned mourning to political advantage. Grady, for example, concluding his Texas Fair speech, launched an excruciatingly long description of a


97

wounded confederate soldier who, left by the surgeon to struggle for life until the following sundown, waited in “patient agony,” dreaming of the South. Following the story’s dramatic conclusion—in which, at long last, “the lanterns of the surgeons came and [the soldier] was taken from death to life”—Grady continued with an allegory: The world is a battle-field strewn with the wrecks of government and institutions, of theories and of faiths that have gone down in the ravage of years. On this field lies the South, sown with her problems. Upon this field swings the lanterns of God. Amid the carnage walks the Great Physician. Over the South he bends. “If ye but live until tomorrow’s sundown ye shall endure, my countrymen.” Let us for her sake turn our faces to the east and watch as the soldier watched for the coming sun. . . . [A]nd the Great Physician shall lead her up from trouble into content, from suffering into peace, from death to life.25

In a single deftly conceived paragraph, Grady thus depicted catastrophic destruction, rhetorically replicated production of the new (transposing the Faulknerian “not . . . but” into a “from . . . to”), transferred sympathy for the soldier’s pain onto the South, retrieved the South from identification with dead soldiers, lost battles, and “wrecks of government,” and made the adherent to New South ideology into a continuation of the confederate soldier—watching as he watched for the coming sun, fighting as he fought for the sake of the South. This identification of the New South with a soldier fighting the North also attests to the fact that the destruction most crucial to the New South program was the destruction of neither slavery nor of the Old South but of Reconstruction. For in many Southern whites’ view, Reconstruction was primarily a vindictive punishment conceived by Northern radicals to humiliate the South, a moment Southern historians long interpreted as “an era of corruption presided over by unscrupulous ‘carpetbaggers’ from the North, unprincipled Southern white ‘scalawags,’ and ignorant freedmen,”26 a moment the novel describes as “the winter when we began to learn what carpet-bagger meant and people—women—locked doors and windows at night and began to frighten each other with tales of negro uprisings” (130). New South spokesmen, both sharing and constructing the Southern white community’s sense of terror and dispossession, thus customarily portrayed Reconstruction not as a new society produced by the destruction of war (as did the Radical Republicans) but rather as a continuation of that destruction. In Facts About the South, for example, a book that summarized editorials from the Manufacturers’ Record, Edmonds’s rehearsal of the devastation of war continued with the assertion: “That was bad enough, but ten years of Reconstruction—Destruction it should be called—with its unscrupulous swindling and debauchery of legislation, its reign of terror greater than that of 1860–1865, was equally bad if not worse.”27 Similarly, in his Texas State Fair address, Grady described Reconstruction’s enfranchisement of freedmen, disfranchisement of rebels, military rule, and carpetbagger governments as an

98


extension of the North’s conquest of the South: “Not enough to have conquered our armies—to have decimated our ranks, to have desolated our fields and reduced us to poverty, to have struck the ballot from our hand and enfranchised our slaves—to have held us prostrate under bayonets while the insolent mocked and thieves plundered. . . .”28 By representing Reconstruction as loss—of ballot, power, and dignity— and by rhetorically negating Reconstruction and affirming Southern white power, Grady and his colleagues considerably fortified that process called, significantly, “Redemption.”29 Signifying at once a purification, a redistribution of property, and the recuperation of a lost object—a “but” retrieved from the “not”—“Redemption” named the Democratic overthrow of Reconstruction governments and the reestablishment of “home rule,” strict segregation, and white supremacy. The degree to which the Redeemer’s project was conceived as an act of destruction is evinced by the degree to which they defined their political platform via negativa; for as Edward Ayers notes: The Democratic Redeemers defined themselves, in large part, by what they were not. Unlike the Republicans, the Redeemers were not interested in a biracial coalition. The democrats would not seriously consider black needs, would not invert the racial hierarchy by allowing blacks to hold offices for which whites longed. Unlike the Republicans, too, the Redeemers would not use the state government as an active agent of change.30

The conceptual negativity of Redemption, moreover, materialized, for Redemption was ultimately accomplished by a series of material destructions that, continuous with and legitimated by the Redeemer’s rhetorical destructions, destroyed the bodies of blacks to affirm the identity of whites: the privative made flesh. During the “Redemption” of Faulkner’s Mississippi, for example, white leagues murdered as many as 300 blacks in Vicksburg, as well as a number of prominent blacks, including a state legislator, in Yazoo County; Republican officials resigned under threat of assassination.31 Absalom alludes to this violence in Rosa’s description of “the sheets and hoods and night-galloping horses with which the [KKK] discharged the canker suppuration of defeat” (134). Indeed, the novel’s climactic fire at Sutpen’s Hundred might stand as a figure for the materially enacted privatives of the Democratic Redeemers: it is at once the culmination and an incarnation of the novel’s privatives, a ritual purification, and the destruction of a black body.32 Yet it is in the novel’s rhetorical negativity, its destruction of old knowledge and affirmation of newness, that the conceptual negativity of Redemption is, I would maintain, most consistently chronicled. If the privatives of Absalom inscribe the rhetorical structure of the New South, so too does that indistinction between the phenomenal and the rhetorical that characterizes both the lamentation and Faulkner’s novel. J. Hillis Miller has argued that Absalom dramatizes the necessity but incompatibility of constative and performative language in narration:


99

If in one direction a storyteller tries to stick to the facts (the constative effort), and ends by inventing them (the performative element), in the other direction if a storyteller tries to invent a purely fictional story, wholly cut off from life, if he tries to absorb life into a perfect narrative design, he always ends by referring to life and to history, since the words he must use are after all referential.33

I wish to insist, however, that Miller’s first “direction”—in which the constative slides into the performative—describes a situation particularly acute in traumatic circumstances and thus particularly marked in the lamentation and that his second “direction”—in which the performative inevitably “refer[s] to life”—describes not only a mere reference to, but a consequential construction of, life. Mr. Compson, for example, narrating the moment of Mississippi’s redemption, employs the “not . . . but” structure to refigure the foreignness of Charles Etienne as unreal: this child with a face not old but without age, as if he had had no childhood, not in the sense that Miss Rosa Coldfield says she had no childhood, but as if he had not been human born but instead created without agency of man or agony of woman and orphaned by no human being . . . but produced complete and subject to no microbe in that cloyed and scented maze of shuttered silk as if he were the delicate and perverse spirit-symbol, immortal page of the ancient immortal Lilith, entering the actual world not at the age of one second but of twelve years. (159)

This rhetorical emptying out of age, childhood, natural birth, mother, the vulnerability of the body, and indeed mortality itself is not without consequences; for it not only enacts a sustained and fantastic loss of being, but legitimates the novel’s later constructions of Charles Etienne as insentient, as possessing “a strength composed of sheer desperate will and imperviousness to the punishment, the blows and slashes which he took in return and did not even seem to feel” (164). Indeed this rhetorical insentience solidifies into knowledge and, ratified by the deictic gesture of the demonstrative pronoun, becomes not only “that same fury and implacability and physical imperviousness to pain and punishment” (167) but, in a disturbingly eloquent elision of history, social conditions, and race, “that furious protest, that indictment of heaven’s ordering, that gage flung into the face of what is” (164). The mutual contamination of constative and performative language of which Miller speaks thus allows a rhetorical construction of identity—such as the catastrophic loss of identity suffered by Charles Etienne—to pass for a representation, that is, for a disinterested record of the real. The gestures of a language that represents catastrophe may, such passages suggest, function to construct useful and interested catastrophe, for a reenactment and an enactment are disconcertingly difficult to distinguish. In similar fashion, New South spokesmen, placing themselves like the narrators of Absalom at that site where the phenomenal and the rhetorical are indistinguishable, recorded as fact the very “New South” that they were in the act of rhetorically constructing. Grady opened his 1887 address at the

100


Augusta exposition, for example, with a rhetorical destruction of desolation and poverty that, like the exposition itself, was less an accurate record of phenomena than a performance intended to enact them: We give thanks to-day that the Lord God Almighty, having led us from desolation into plenty, from poverty into substance, from passion into reason, and from estrangement into love—having brought the harvests from the ashes, and raised us homes from our ruins, and touched our scarred land all over with beauty and with peace permits us to assemble here to-day and rejoice amid the garnered heaps of our treasure.34

Grady’s negation of post-war conditions and affirmation of “heaps of treasure” illustrate the manner in which a new knowledge or a New South, which is less a representation of phenomena than a rhetorical construction of them, grants itself the status of a representation and thereby disguises its own interested production of the real: a reenactment and an enactment are disconcertingly difficult to distinguish. Yet while such representations might well produce belief in a material heap of treasure, they did not, alas, always produce the material heap of treasure itself, a fact confirmed, for example, by the “carpetless room [in which Judith and Charles Etienne confer] furnished with whatever chairs and such which they had not had to chop up and burn to cook food or for warmth or maybe to heat water for illness from time to time” (167). Hence, at the Texas State Fair, while enlisting his customary series of performative destructions, Grady shrewdly combined his rhetorical destruction of the one-crop system and of raw material production with a description of loss of profits: with amazing rapidity [the South] has moved away from the one-crop idea that was once her curse. . . . With equal swiftness has she moved away from the folly of shipping out her ore at $2 a ton and buying it back in implements at from $20 to $100 per ton; her cotton at 10 cents a pound, and buying it back in cloth at 20 to 80 cents a pound; her timber at 8 per thousand and buying it back in furniture at ten to twenty times as much.35

At the same time that Grady’s constative language slides indistinguishably into the performative—precisely as the fair’s “exhibits” were intended to do—his description of loss of profits compensates for the failures of rhetorical performativity by producing desire. Desire is a kind of anticipatory loss: an anticipated possession and the (concomitant) lack of it. The lamentation produces desire—for a lost object, a forgotten past, a less aversive future—not only by chronicling loss, but by employing the privative, for in (re)enacting loss, the privative enacts desire. It is thus no coincidence that Absalom’s primary site of desire—Bon’s longing for the recognition of his father—is repeatedly constructed through privatives: “And he sent me no word? He did not ask you to send me to him? No word to me, no word at all?” (285). The very conception of the father


101

and his signs (as anticipated possession) conditions both Bon’s desire and his sense of perpetual “loss” of a father he has never possessed. “Thus desire for what is withheld,” writes Matthews, “is scarcely distinguishable from sorrow over what has been lost.”36 Just as the novel’s rhetorical loss of the father produces Bon’s incessant desire for the father, so does Grady’s rhetorical loss of profits produce desire for profits. And the privatives employed by New South spokesmen routinely functioned to produce a desire that compensated for the failures of rhetorical performativity: if language itself did not remake society, perhaps desire for that remade world would. Benjamin Harvey Hill, for example, in a widelyread article calling for educational reform, posited both a series of anticipated possessions and the lack of them and thus, enlisting the common technique of comparing the South’s productivity with the North’s, reenacts—and performatively enacts—desire: the persistent, pertinacious, persevering energy of the North has erected a hundred cotton factories where we have but one. . . . The facilities for manufacturing are all in our favor; and it is owing to our own inattention and neglect that we are so immeasurably behind. . . . We became dependent upon the North for everything, from a lucifer match to a columbiad, from a pin to a railroad engine. A state of war found us without the machinery to make a single percussion cap for a soldier’s rifle, or a single button for his jacket.37

In similar fashion, in what came to be known as the “funeral oration,” Grady cannily placed himself at the burial of a confederate soldier and, tapping the affective potency of the site of death, proceeded to describe not merely the loss of the soldier, but a series of losses calculated to produce desire for precisely those industries he wished to promote: lumber, mining, and textile mills: They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt form Cincinnati .38

Where rhetorical destruction failed to produce the New South, the privative thus offered the auxiliary function of formulating desire. The phenomenal redistributions of the moment of lamentation and the rhetorical dispossessions of the language of lamentation thus often follow a logic in which moment and language indissociably produce each other, in

102


which language both represents and effects a redistribution of possessions. If the privatives of Absalom chronicle the rhetorical destructions of New South spokesmen—their production of newness and desire—they also inscribe the redistribution of possessions that characterized the New South. Both the New South spokesmen’s explicit announcements—“a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace”39—and their remarkable affinity for tabulating possessions (statistics, tables, charts, and graphs abound) testify to the fact that a redistribution of possessions was fundamental to the New South program. Because material and ideological possessions customarily condition each other, moreover, New South spokesmen often attempted to achieve a redistribution of material possessions by rhetorically redistributing ideological ones. Hill’s argument for educational reform, for example, which redistributes value and aims to re-make knowledge, transfers value to the manual labor, hard work, and utilitarian knowledge necessary to the production of material possessions: “We want . . . [a] plan of instruction, which will embrace the useful rather than the profound, the practical rather than the theoretic.”40 Edmonds, likewise, rhetorically transfers value from the pleasures of material luxury to the hard labor and autonomy he believes will transfer material possessions to the South: “a loaf, whether of bread or educational opportunity, won by hard and honest work, by the sweat of the brow, means more for manhood than a thousand dainties accepted as charity from those upon whom they have no claim.”41 If the war remade the identity of the South, New South spokesmen, deploying a language of catastrophe and following the logic of their own privatives, attempted to remake the identity of the South once again, this time in the interest of attracting Northern capital. Edmonds, for example, in Facts about the South—a book distributed to hotel rooms and ostensibly aimed at traveling Northern investors—was at pains to re-make the image of the Southern gentleman, the man of leisure and letters, into an image of a Southern businessman, a man of energy and enterprise. “But this is only a small part of the evidence available,” he writes after a page of statistics on the South’s antebellum progress in industry, “to conclusively prove that great energy and enterprise were displayed by the people of the South”; the census of 1860, he contends, proves that Southern peoples “were not slothful in the business of money-making.”42 Edmonds also wished to re-make the identity of the South not as a place of monstrous social unrest but as a peaceful, secure place for investments. He thus advised newspapers to portray the South as “prosperous and contented, devoting her energies to the development of her unequalled resources, and to the education of her citizens, white and black.” Editors, he urged, should “reduce to the minimum their record of local crimes and should demand that new suppliers send them other matters,” especially “industrial information.”43 Thus if the moment of lamentation is a moment when transfers of real property effect redistributions of identity, New South spokesmen bargained that by miming the moment of lamentation and re-making identity they


103

might effect a transfer of real property. And while neither the causes of phenomena nor the effects of language are singular, to a certain degree they did. For such rhetorical redistributions of value and identity, subtly sliding from the constative to the performative, from “referring to” to constructing life, effected an actual, if not cataclysmic, redistribution of material possessions. The President of Emory College, Bishop Atticus Haygood, in his 1880 Thanksgiving Sermon entitled “The New South: Gratitude, Amendment, Hope,” described such a redistribution, catalogued the new material possessions of the South, and, adopting the “then/now” structure of the lamentation, urged his parishioners to compare the new with the old: The houses built recently are better in every way than those built before the war. I do not speak of an occasional mansion, that in the old times lifted itself proudly among a score of cabins, but of the thousands of decent farmhouses, comely cottages that have been built in the last ten years. I know scores whose new barns are better than their old residences. Our people have better furniture. Good mattresses have largely driven out the old-time feathers. Cook-stoves, sewing machines, with all such comforts and conveniences, may be seen in a dozen homes to-day where you could hardly have found them in one in 1860. Lamps that make reading agreeable have driven out tallow dips, by whose glimmering no eyes could long read and continue to see. Better taste asserts itself: the new houses are painted; they have not only glass, but blinds. There is more comfort inside. There are luxuries where once there were not conveniences. Carpets are getting to be common among the middle classes. There are parlor organs, pianos, and pictures, where we never saw them before.44

Not an occasional mansion but scores of cabins, not old time feathers but good mattresses, not tallow dips but electric lamps: while Haygood’s list of possessions, characteristic of New South hyperbole, is no doubt comprised as much of commodities his parishioners were encouraged to desire as those they actually possessed, it nonetheless indicates the kind of redistribution of possessions that resulted, at least in part, from the rhetorical redistributions of New South spokesmen. Moreover, many men and women in the New South enacted the structure of New South privatives and, like Judith, the mistress turned merchant, assumed re-made identities: the planter became industrialist, the industrialist became merchant, the merchant became planter.45 Many blacks, remaking their lives as freedpeople, acquired both a mobility and an opportunity to bargain for wages that allowed them to obtain material possessions; they were able, according to Ayers, “to acquire considerable amounts of clothes, furniture, musical instruments, bicycles, and buggies.”46 Many working class whites moving from farms to the South’s new mill towns, and many women and children re-making themselves as factory workers, acquired education, material possessions, and a new sense of respectability.47 Thus, if the war itself caused singular, cataclysmic transformations, New South boosterism brought about its own redistributions of knowledge,

104


identity, and material property—less dramatic to be sure, but arguably more sustained. And if, as we have argued above, Faulknerian privatives reenact the loss of identity concomitant to the material losses of war, they also construct an even more pervasive and continuous loss of identity. Faulknerian privatives repeatedly construct identities antithetical to the “natural,” the wholly familiar, identities that are not a disjunction from a temporally prior self, but rather a disjunction from the logically prior self posited (and subsequently negated) by the privative.48 Charles Bon, for example, “must have appeared almost phoenix-like, fullsprung from no childhood, born of no woman and impervious to time and, vanished, leaving no bones nor dust anywhere” (58). Just as Bon is here dispossessed of childhood, mother, and the marks of time, so are nearly all the characters of Absalom sooner or later described in terms of what they are not, as selves disjunctive from the natural or ordinary, from their environment, or, as in this passage, from the very materials through which identity is constructed.49 Indeed, this disjunction, in Faulkner as in the lamentation, takes on fantastic proportions. Many of the identities constructed by Faulknerian privatives are precisely of this fantastic nature— rhetorical constructions of the monstrous, the inhuman, and the fantastic, identities equivalent to sustained catastrophe.50 If the lamentation’s privatives construct identities that are fantastic, losses of and by knowledge effect an anti-knowledge which, like the fantastically disjunctive identity left by the privative, is antithetical to, and a negation of, that wholly familiar knowledge taken for the real, natural, and believable. Such privatives perform the ultimate transvaluation of knowledge, in which that knowledge of the world taken for the “real”—the believed because sensorially perceived—is made over so dramatically as to be unbelievable, fantastic. The Faulknerian privative, accordingly, repeatedly enacts a loss of knowledge that makes knowledge disjunctive from its own customary constituents. Mr. Compson’s “It just does not explain” speech, for example, employs a series of privatives—incredible, incomprehensible, impervious, inexplicable, indecipherable, inscrutable—that both describes the impossibility of constituting the past into knowledge and empties out the constituents of that knowledge, leaving, ultimately, “just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene” (80). Indeed, Faulknerian privatives routinely construct perceptions that are emptied out of both knowledge and the properties of the “natural”; Rosa’s description of her arrival at Sutpen’s Hundred following Henry’s murder of Charles Bon is exemplary: Rotting portico and scaling walls, it stood, not ravaged, not invaded, marked by no bullet nor soldier’s iron heel but rather as though reserved for something more: some desolation more profound than ruin as if it had stood in iron juxtaposition to iron flame, to a holocaust which had found itself less fierce and less implacable, not hurled but rather fallen back before the impervious and indomitable skeleton which the flames durst not, at the instant’s final crisis, assail. (108–9)


105

In this passage, privatives simultaneously establish and empty out the “natural,” causal relation between the activity of war and a destroyed house and leave only a residual anti-knowledge, an emptiness (“desolation”), which can only be gestured towards negatively (as not ravage, not invasion, not the result of bullet or iron heel), metaphorically (“as though”), and comparatively (“something more,” “more profound than ruin”). More generally, the privatives de-value that knowledge that imputes destruction of the house of Sutpen to an active agent; indeed, the passage reinforces the passivity left over from its initial privatives (“not ravaged, not invaded”) with a number of “figural privatives” (“rotting portico,” “scaling walls,” “skeleton”) and with a holocaust emptied out of its active properties both by a privative (“not hurled but rather fallen back”) and by the semi-privative “less” (“less fierce and less implacable”). Moreover, in dispossessing the material world of its “natural” constituents, the passage’s privatives are likewise a dispossession of that most certain of knowledges—the believed (because sensorially perceived) nature of the material world. Thus, house and body (skeleton), ordinarily vulnerable to invasion by fire, according to the passage’s privatives, are impervious and indomitable, and have a fantastic ability to resist the external and the active; likewise, fire, which in ordinary circumstances, actively and fearlessly overcomes the passive materials of house or body, is here “less fierce and less implacable,” is “not hurled, but fallen back,” and dares not assail. Yet this fantastic world where wood and flame are like iron, where passivity is stronger than any activity, where house and body are invulnerable and fire quails, is the site of a further perversion of the unbelievable beyond itself. For if war is already a perversion of “natural” peacetime, then Sutpen’s Hundred is a catachrestic perversion of that perversion—a “something more” in the language of the passage. And if this passage fantastically distorts the natural, it is also a (catachrestic) distortion of that (already fantastic) distortion. For unlike the fantastic body of the house, Bon’s body has been ravaged, invaded, marked by a bullet, and indeed by the iron heel of a soldier’s racist morality. Hence while the description of the house may function as a wish-fulfilling displacement, it also functions to cast the ostensibly natural (a body vulnerable to a bullet) as the fantastic. Likewise, this passage’s doubly duplicitous foreshadowing—this is not the final crisis, the house will be assailed by fire— proleptically casts the novel’s final holocaust not as the natural result of setting a match to a “tinder-dry rotten shell” (300) but as a final, fantastic permutation of the house’s fantastic imperviousness.51 Faulknerian privatives thus repeatedly construct the epistemologically fantastic, the most catachrestic of knowledges, a “knowledge” that indeed is often no knowledge at all, but the impossibility of knowledge. In this manner Faulknerian privatives chronicle, I would argue, the illfitting identities and fantastic knowledge of the New South. For while New South spokesmen rhetorically remade the identity of Southern whites into an energetic, enterprising, and industrious people, they simultaneously constructed an identity for blacks as an indolent, vagrant, deceitful, ignorant,

106


and violent people. Many freedpeople thus came to bear identities that were alien and to lead lives equivalent to sustained catastrophe.52 And with a conveniently circular justificatory logic abetted by the liaison between material and ideological possessions, blacks were often denied access to material property on the basis of their alleged lack of ideological possessions: rhetorically made violent and sexually aggressive, blacks were excluded from the prosperity of mill towns where white women worked; rhetorically made deceitful and ignorant, educated blacks were excluded from skilled jobs; rhetorically made indolent and prone to vagrancy, black laborers (with the help of fifty strikes against black labor between 1882 and 1900) were similarly excluded from many unskilled jobs.53 Black farmers, moreover, who comprised the vast majority of black laborers, “not only worked the white man’s land but,” according to Woodward, “worked it with a white man’s plow drawn by a white man’s mule.”54 Capturing both the shady calculations characteristic of the South’s notorious lien system and the general redistribution of possessions in the New South, an African-American lyric of the period ran: Naught’s a naught And five’s a figger All for the white man And none for the nigger.55

Similarly excluded from New South progress were white tenant farmers—the Wash Joneses of the South; for while New South spokesmen rhetorically constructed a South not of plantations, but of diversified small farms, the material enactment of that negation and affirmation was not only a destruction of the old plantation, but a rise of the new lien system—a system in which small farmers not only did not possess any land, but were soon dispossessed of both economic autonomy and freedom of movement.56 New South rhetoric, moreover, which continued to announce a fantastic progress, increasingly created a moment that was, like the moment of lamentation, characterized by a disruption of that most certain of knowledges—the believed because sensorially perceived, an incomprehensible moment in which the world no longer fit into language: not because the world had become fantastic and language was inadequate to describe it, but because language had become fantastic and the world was simply inadequate to perform it. That very incomprehensibility, moreover, provided a rhetorical subterfuge behind which to conceal material conditions: “the magnitude of the investments made in Southern railroads . . . is almost beyond comprehension,” declared Edmonds in Facts About the South; “the magnitude of the wealth of the South in coal is beyond computation”; the impact of Southern iron and steel supremacy “is beyond our power at present to fully grasp.”57 Such assertions, which rhetorically obscure the real by declaring it unknowable, demonstrate how the gestures of a language that records confusion can likewise be used to construct confusion, to produce disbelief in the sensorially perceived conditions of the material world. For the incomprehensibility that inheres in


107

the moment of lamentation—and that Faulknerian privatives repeatedly produce—increasingly functioned in the hands of New South boosters as obfuscation, a “can’t-be-known” that concealed what must not be known. Thus while the New South, from a number of perspectives, was a moment of dramatic change, those excluded from New South progress—particularly freedpeople and poor whites—testify to the degree to which a rhetoric that produces the appearance of newness may function to mask continuity. Indeed, both New South spokesmen and Democratic Redeemers aspired to re-establish antebellum social relations in a new, industrial atmosphere.58 And both the convict-lease system (which sold convicts to industries in need of labor and primarily affected blacks convicted on petty theft or vagrancy charges) and new codes of white supremacy—“vastly more complex than the antebellum slave codes or the Black Codes of 1865–1866”—effectively instituted a caste system that reproduced the social and economic dependency, and often the brutality, of slavery.59 Ultimately excluded from New South progress, moreover, was the South itself; for the language of New South boosters had neither the performative nor the motivational potency to enact the fantastic South to which it referred. Thus in 1913, the South remained a colonial dependent mired in a raw-material economy, a region of low-wage industries, and the poorest section of the nation; its railway system was in the hands of Northern investors—by 1890 more than half belonged to Northern companies; its mining industry was controlled by absentee owners; two thirds of its lumber industry belonged to men in Chicago, Michigan, and Wisconsin.60 Thus when Mr. Compson employs his customary privatives to describe Rosa “hearing and losing the knell and doom of her native land between two tedious and clumsy stitches on a garment which she would never wear and never remove for a man who she was not even to see alive” (61)—his privatives alienate Rosa from the products of her own labor in a disjunction both structurally homologous to the “hearing and losing” of the passage and semantically homologous to the doom of the native land. The New South program, for all its emphasis on progress, not only deployed enough nostalgia to rival any Faulknerian narrator but, through its very rhetoric of newness, disguised its continuity with that “lost” society on which Absalom so obsessively dwells. Conversely, if the narrators of Absalom seem thematically to resist New South optimism by dwelling on devastation and clinging to nostalgia, they are rhetorically as insistent on producing newness as any New South spokesman. The Faulknerian privative thus simultaneously marks the appearance of the mode of lamentation, refers to a fictional moment of catastrophe, and inscribes the historical moment of the New South. Those privatives record, that is, the production of newness and desire, the indistinction between the phenomenal and the rhetorical, the redistribution of material and ideological possessions, and the assertions of incomprehensibility characteristic of both the lamentation and New South discourse: in this unprepossessing rhetorical gesture resides capacities to remake the world.


Chapter

4

L a m e n tat i o n a n d P u r i t y : M a l l a r m é ’s “H o m m ag e ,” W A G N É R I S M E , a n d Fre n c h N at i o n a l i s m o f t h e 1 8 8 0 s

I

n no doubt his most celebrated pronouncement on poetic purity, Mallarmé declares, “L’oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots” (The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words);1 Mallarmé declares, that is, that poetic purity is subsequent to loss—to “la disparition élocutoire du poëte”—and thus tacitly declares that purity bears a resemblance to lamentation, which is also subsequent to loss. Simultaneously, his pronouncement authorizes an investigation of what words, including the words of the pronouncement itself, will say of their own initiative; and the word pure speaks from a long memory of ritual practice and philosophical symbolism. It is not surprising that Mallarmé should describe a purity established by loss, for purity is above all a negativity; it is primarily defined by negation—as that which is not defiled, not stained, not mixed, not foreign—and often established by subtraction: by a fire that eliminates foreign matter, a lustration that washes away semen or blood, an exile that removes an offender or scapegoat. Purity is meaningful, therefore, only by reference to (the threat of) defilement and bears a reciprocally constitutive relation to it. Defilement, accordingly, is a stain; the verbal form of miasma (miaivnw`), for example, means “to paint over, stain, dye, color.”2 But the relationship between the negativity of purity (the absence of stain) and the positivity of defilement (the presence of stain) is not, alas, so simple. For purity, which in the evaluative sense is a positive term, can designate the presence of moral virtue or clear thought—that is, of what we have called “ideological possessions”; and defilement, which in the evaluative sense is a negative term, can designate a loss of

110


possessions such as identity or social standing. “Dread of the impure,” writes Ricoeur, “beyond the threat of suffering and death, aims at a diminution of existence, a loss of the personal core of one’s being.”3 Indeed the uncertain origin of the Hebrew word kippur (purification) is an emblem of the simultaneously negative and positive nature of purity: on the one hand, if the derivation based on Assyrian and Babylonian is correct, kippur means “to wipe away”; if, on the other hand, the derivation based on Arabic is correct, it means “to cover.”4 Moreover, not only does defilement bear within it a sense of loss, but some forms of loss, such as death or destruction, produce defilement; an unburied corpse, for example, is a primary source of miasma.5 Loss, therefore, quite problematically, appears to condition both purity and defilement. This semantic indistinction, no doubt a result of the fact that purity and defilement are, before being concepts, matrices of logically unarticulated ritual practices, thus permits a language that responds to loss—a lamentation— to function as both a sign of defilement and an instrument of purity. On the one hand, then, the moment of lamentation is a moment of defilement and indeed the anguish of that moment is often expressed figuratively as defilement: Jerusalem is as a menstruous woman among them;6 And I . . . poor image of a corpse, weak shining among dead men.7

On the other hand, because the lamentation is subsequent to loss, and because loss logically precedes the establishment of both the new and the pure, the moment of lamentation may also mark a moment of unprecedented purity. Lamentation is, as we have noted, both a moment when destruction has left in its wake a re-originated, primeval world and a language that reenacts destruction and thus ostensibly validates the originality or purity of knowledge. Indeed, as we have also noted, knowledge has historically been established through destruction: of a veil (revelare), of a cover (dis-covery, dis-closure), of forgetting (a-letheia), or—as duBois has argued in her analysis of the role of torture in the construction of truth—of the body. Thus the language of lamentation, while mourning defilement, may be used as an instrument in cultivating purity. Defilement, furthermore, is simultaneously restricting and liberating. On the one hand, “once one is defiled, certain restrictions are placed upon him: He may not enter the sanctuary, nor offer up a sacrifice, nor participate in the Temple worship.”8 And restriction not only follows from defilement but anticipates and forestalls it, for as Ricoeur has noted, “the interdict anticipates in itself the chastisement of suffering.”9 Defilement, that is, is disciplinary; it functions, as Mary Douglas has shown, to “impose system,” “enforce conformity,” and “marshall . . . moral disapproval when it lags.”10 Defilement is, she contends, a danger by which a dominant social order protects itself.

L a m e n tat i o n a n d P u r i t y

111

On the other hand, Douglas also contends that defilement, a kind of disorder, can liberate one from the constraints of order: Ritual recognizes the potency of disorder. In the disorder of the mind, in dreams, faints and frenzies, ritual expects to find powers and truths which cannot be reached by conscious effort. Energy to command and special powers of healing come to those who can abandon rational control for a time. . . . In these beliefs there is a double play on inarticulateness. First there is a venture into the disordered regions of the mind. Second there is the venture beyond the confines of society. The man who comes back from these inaccessible regions brings with him a power not available to those who have stayed in the control of themselves and of society.11

A similar logic subtends Bakhtin’s description of the empowering defilements of carnival, Kristeva’s description of the “powers of horror,” and Kierkegaard’s description of the freedom of dread.12 Accordingly, the lamentation, which is a moment and language of defilement, is at once restricted— at a loss for words and thoughts, cut off from community—and capable of reaching “inaccessible regions” of thought or experience. In his letters and theoretical writings, as well as in his poetry, Mallarmé repeatedly returns to a notion of ideal purity—“l’oeuvre pure” (the pure work), “la notion pure” (the pure notion) (OC, 366, 368); “le livre comme pur ensemble” (the book as pure unity) (OC, 378); “poésie pure” (pure poetry), “une Conception pure” (a pure Conception), “poémes en vers . . . d’une pureté que l’homme n’a pas atteinte” (verse poems . . . of a purity that man has not reached),13 a poet who gives “un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” (a purer sense to the words of the tribe) (OC, 70). And he employs, in addition, repeated images of negativity—“[une] disparition vibratoire” (a vibratory disappearance) (OC, 368); “[les] chastes cris [de la poésie]” (the chaste cries of poetry) (OC, 372); “une notion ineffaçable du Néant pur” (an indelible notion of pure Nothingness) (C, 259); “le Rien qui est la vérité” (the Nothing that is truth) (C, 208).14 Indeed, in his letter to Eugéne Lefébure of May 17, 1867, he insists on loss and destruction as conditions of poetic truth: C’est bien ce que j’observe sur moi—je n’ai créé mon oeuvre que par élimination, et toute vérité acquise ne naissait que de la perte d’une impression qui, ayant étincelé, s’était consumée et me permettait, grâce à ses ténèbres dégagées, d’avancer profondément dans la sensation des Ténèbres absolues. La destruction fut ma Béatrice. (This is what I observe about myself—I only created my work by elimination, and each acquired truth was born only through the loss of an impression that, having shimmered, was consumed and allowed me, thanks to its clear darkness, to venture deeply into the sensation of absolute Darkness. Destruction was my Beatrice.) (C, 245)

112


It is evident, then, both that purity is central to Mallarmé’s thought—though, like the suppositions of ritual, it is never logically elaborated—and that elimination, loss, and destruction play a significant role in attempts to achieve such purity. I argue in this chapter that Mallarmé constructs a crisis—a Crise de vers— that mimes the circumstances of loss and the moment of lamentation, in the interest of producing poetic purity, but that he constructs his purity out of the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement: not only does his poetic theory valorize death and danger, but his poetic practice largely relies on contact with the foreign, on semantic contagion, and on syntactic fragmentation. That is, rather than mourning death, contamination, fragmentation, and incomprehensibility (all sources of ritual defilement) Mallarmé seeks them out, for a symbolic defilement—“Le reploiement vierge du livre, encore, prête à un sacrifice dont saigna la tranche rouge des anciennes tomes” (The virginal folding back of the book, still prepared for a sacrifice where the red edge bleeds from ancient tomes) (OC, 381)—is, it would seem, necessary to produce purity. The significance of this defilement, I will argue, spreads in multiple directions: it is instrumental in producing newness and in mediating Mallarmé’s professional rivalry with Wagner, it bears witness to the domestic crisis of the Troisième Republique, and it functions as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation. Further, because defilement is at once material and symbolic, and because that “symbolism” is, rather than a simple sign system, an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality—“a wellspring of sign for a non-object,” as Kristeva puts it15—Mallarmé’s cultivation of defilement is, I will argue, a recuperation of the scapegoats that “pure” philosophy necessarily exiles: the material and the hyperessential. I will turn to Mallarmé’s “Hommage” to Wagner, a poem that both formally responds to loss and figures that loss in terms of cataclysmic crisis—as a “tassement du principal pilier” (settling or shaking down of the principal pillar)16—though it is a ritual performance not, apparently, coincident with grief: “je suis le seul à qui cette tâche n’incombe pas exactement” (I’m the only one on whom this assignment isn’t exactly incumbent) (OC, 1496), Mallarmé protested to Dujardin, who commissioned the poem for the Revue wagnérienne.17 The poem nonetheless memorializes a double loss thematically—the loss, that is, of the old theater destroyed by Wagner and of Wagner himself— and laments an artist for whom death and purity were central concerns.

Contact and Contagion Because defilement is both produced and transferred by contact, purity maintains itself by separation. Defilement, that is, is produced by a particular kind of prohibited contact (with a corpse, a menstruous woman, a leper, a foreigner) and thus purity is maintained by avoiding that contact (burying the dead outside city walls, separating the sexes, marginalizing the ill, marking


113

the foreign).18 Contact with the foreign, for example, is a primary source of defilement. In the Hebrew Bible, “everything which has to do with alien gods or their cultus is condemned as unclean. . . . Foreign land and foreign food are therefore unclean. The use of many animals for food is forbidden for the reason that they figure in alien cults or magic rites.”19 Indeed, the adjectival form of the word for defilement (tame) is used in the Hebrew Bible as a simple synonym for alien and strange. As we have noted, not only does such defiling contact with the foreign characterize the moment of lamentation, but the foreignness of death is often reenacted in mourning practice in ways that make the defiled mourner foreign to the community—separated, prohibited from washing clothing, body, or hair; from engaging in sexual activity; from working; from studying scripture; and even from making a greeting of well-being.20 But the confrontation with foreignness that characterizes the moment of lamentation is not merely a metaphorical reenactment; it is often a literal confrontation with a mastering culture that poses the threat of a slower and more subtle death: a cultural assimilation in which it would no longer be possible to separate one’s own culture from the defiling other. The Hebrew lamentations and the stringent purity laws of Leviticus—which, for example, forbid sowing a field with mingled seed or wearing a mixed garment of linen and wool21—are both products of the Babylonian exile and a reaction to the formidable threat of cultural assimilation that it posed. If separation from the foreign guarantees the purity of a people, it is an analogous separation—from a threatening assimilation with the mother— that, according to Kristeva, constitutes the identity of a speaking subject. Reading the Levitical purity laws as a cultural extension of this subjective imperative, she argues: The place and law of the One [Yahweh] do not exist without a series of separations that are oral, corporeal, or even more generally material . . . carry[ing] into the private lives of everyone the brunt of the struggle each subject must wage during the entire length of his personal history in order to become separate, that is to say, to become a speaking subject and/or subject to Law.22

Purity, then—of a place, of a people, of a self—establishes itself by a separation from that which it designates as foreign. Moreover, restitutive separation is necessary to eliminate defilement when it occurs because defilement is contagious. When a member of a community becomes defiled, a separation is necessary to eradicate that defilement: an exile, an exclusion from cultic activity or community life, the dispatch of a scapegoat; in ancient Athens, even inanimate objects that had caused death were expelled beyond the boundaries of the city.23 Thus in the first tetralogy, the initial speech for the prosecution argues: The whole city is polluted by the guilty man until he is prosecuted, and if we connive at this by charging the innocent, the guilt for this pollution of the

114


city becomes ours, and the punishment for the mistake you would make falls upon us.24

The resiliency of this relation between fault and restitutive separation is evinced not only in the subjective experience of estrangement that Ricoeur contends clings to fault, even when it is no longer imbued with pollution beliefs, but in the material and institutional segregation of criminals and the insane that Foucault details in modernity. Yet while contact, stain, foreignness, and contagion threaten ritual purity, Mallarméan purity, according to the passage with which we began, is conditioned by an emphatic contact between words: “L’oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalite mobilisés” (The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words, which are mobilized by the collision of their difference) (OC 366; emphasis added). And the pure nothingness to which Mallarmé aspires—“une notion ineffaçable du Néant pur” (an indelible notion of pure Nothingness) (C, 259)—is an ineradicable stain. Thus, Mallarméan poetic theory, which quite unabashedly strives to give “les impressions les plus étranges” (the most foreign impressions) (C, 193), is, as far as ritual is concerned, defiled. Furthermore, if Mallarmé’s poetic practice produces the purity of which his other writings speak, it does so by contact with the foreign and by a kind of semantic contagion. The “Hommage,” for example, brings into contact the semantically and syntactically foreign, transfers significance across ambiguous boundaries, and thereby insists on a significance that is both indistinct and ulterior to logic.25 Contact between words, then, is semantically foreign. In lines such as “Notre si vieil ébat triomphal du grimoire” (Our so old triumphal sport of the magic book, 5), words contaminate each other with a radically foreign significance, with a significance, that is, that makes words anomalous to their own meaning. Unlike a familiar, domestic contact—“ébats amoureux” (love games), for example—a contact that imbues an “ébat” with age (“vieil”), militancy (“triomphal”), and the difficult seriousness of a “grimoire” is a contact that renders the word “ébat” foreign to the youth, playfulness, and insouciance that it customarily signifies, makes it a stranger, as it were, to its own semantic community. And “grimoire,” which is appropriately both a thirteenth-century defilement of the word grammaire and a semiotic reversal that proclaims the vulgar tongue pure by contrast with the unintelligibility of la grammaire latine, is accordingly semantically corrupted by its contact with “ébat.” Rather than distinguishing or clarifying, as does “domestic” modification, such contact disturbs the literal identity of words or sublimates literal meaning in favor of a figurative meaning: the ébat is mental, not physical; frolicking with the arcane is a figure for the compositional roots of Wagnerian music, or, according to an alternate reading, “the old poetry that is merely a matter for libraries.”26 Similarly, the word “fracas” (uproar, 9)—which signifies the acoustic sign of violently transformative


115

contact—is brought into just such transformative contact with the words “souriant” (smiling), “originel” (original), and “haï” (hated). “The noun and its adjectives together form an astonishingly improbable sequence,” contends Malcolm Bowie; “as we move from word to word we are obliged to leap the wide gaps which separate their fields of association—to leap from the physical to the moral, from the spatial to the temporal, from the outward to the inward.”27 And following the logic of contagion, the word “fracas,” jostled on all sides by the semantically foreign, becomes itself foreign, becomes alien, that is, to a literal fracas that, for example, is not capable of smiling, perhaps particularly not if hated.28 Words, that is to say, like material objects in the moment of lamentation, take on new identities, functions, and values. This contaminating contact with foreignness, moreover, initiates a chain of contagion: meaning spreads uncontrollably. A single word like “grimoire,” for example, signifies “the old poetry”;29 the inherent mystery of music and poetry;30 Mallarméan grammar; the legend material of Wagnerian opera, or what Mallarmé in “Rêverie d’un poëte français” (Reverie of a French poet) calls “le secret, réprésenté, d’origines” (the secret of represented origins) (OC, 544); “a Wagnerian score”;31 or irresponsible writing that must be “stack[ed] away in a cupboard,” that is, in the “armoire” of line 8.32 Its meaning spreads—both through the semantic association of “grimoire” as a forgotten language and practice and through the aural association of “grimoire” with “mémoire”—to the “manque de mémoire” (lack of memory) of line 4, which in turn signifies the fall of old poetry or its relegation to oblivion, a forgetting inherent in that poetry, a “lack of original inspiration in the contemporary public theater,”33 or Mallarmé’s own lack of mourning over Wagner; to the “hieroglyphs” of line 5, which figure the hermetic nature of linguistic signs, or the cause of the “frisson familier” (familiar shudder, 7), the instrument, that is, of a banal reproduction of the mysterious; to the “sanglots sibyllins” (sibylline sobs) of line 16, which signify the sound of poetry or Wagnerian music, “mystery and poignant sensibility, a ‘sobbing’ for beauty,”34 or an indecipherable lamentation—that is, the poem itself. This epidemic of meaning that critics, to be sure, have repeatedly attempted to quarantine and control, nonetheless spreads exponentially from words to phrases to poems to Mallarmé’s entire oeuvre. This spread of meaning, furthermore, not only results from ritual defilement, but produces philosophical defilement; for the purifying separations of ritual—which, according to Douglas, are organized around a logic that “requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong” and that “different classes of things shall not be confused”35—are an anticipation of the separation into categories, division of function, and disambiguation of terms that constitute the purity of philosophy.36 In Douglas’s lapidary formula, defilement is “matter out of place.” “It implies,” she argues, “two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order.”37 Maintaining the order demanded by ritual—separating out the foreign and the contagious—demands definition and discrimination: a principle

116


emblematized by the tetralogies, by the fact that the location of ritual defilement must be determined by the logical proceedings of a courtroom. Thus both the association of purity with order and the necessity of logical discrimination in maintaining that order initiate the historical transformation by which purity comes to designate ordered thought. “The group katharoskatharsis,” writes Ricoeur: thus comes to express intellectual limpidity, clarity of style, orderliness, absence of ambiguity in an oracle, and finally absence of moral blemish or stigma. Thus the word lends itself to the change in meaning by which it will come to express the essential purification, that of wisdom and philosophy.38

Philosophy, moreover, in its own separating, purifying act of self-definition— in its struggle to become a speaking subject—will spit out ritual as the irrational, will identify ritual as foreign to philosophy, as defiled.39 Thus it is that defilement—source of ritual fear and, subsequently, fear of ritual itself— comes to designate disordered thought: the irrational, the ambiguous, the confused, the anomalous. And thus it is that philosophy comes to associate disordered thought with the primitive, the uncivilized, the infantile, and the barbarian. It should not be overlooked that these are descriptors we have repeatedly encountered in analyses of both trauma and lamentation practice: in Janet’s description of the linguistic disorder, knowledge crises, and regression characteristic of traumatic experience, for example, or in the lamentation’s performance of the breakdown of speech, its threatening inversion of logos, its “Oriental” rage. This is to say, then, that in addition to the violated spaces and dead bodies of the lamentation, its disordered thought also constitutes defilement. Moreover, the Mallarméan spread of meaning we have been discussing— like the incomprehensibility, cognitive upheaval, and symbolic crisis that we have argued characterizes the moment of lamentation—constitutes that ambiguity which philosophy designates defilement; for rather than constructing distinction, such contact cultivates duplicity. Mallarméan words, set in foreign surroundings, are indistinct, the site of multiple and contradictory semantic identities. If Mallarméan purity is constructed by a semantically foreign and philosophically prohibited contact, it is simultaneously subtended by a syntactically foreign, linguistically prohibited contact: by the transformation of “grammaire” to “grimoire.” For example, the noun phrase, “Notre si vieil ébat triomphal du grimoire” (Our so old triumphal sport of the magic book, 5), rather than neighboring the syntactic familiarity of a predicate, abuts instead another noun phrase: “Hiéroglyphes dont s’exalte le millier” (Hieroglyphs that the thousands exalt). Although this second noun phrase may function as an appositive or as part of a compound subject, it is contiguous to a prepositional phrase—“à propager” (to spread)—a form not only foreign to the noun phrases but also to the syntactic elements in the preceding line—“hiéroglphyes,” “s’exalte,” and “le millier.” The pronomial


117

phrase “dont s’exalte,” moreover, is foreign in number to the ostensible subject of the phrase (“hieroglyphs”). Grammatically speaking, these lines are both incomplete and disordered. And while it is quite possible to rearrange the line so that “hieroglyphs” is the object of “s’exalte”—“The normal order,” according to Davies, would be “hiéroglyphes dont le millier s’exalte à propager un frisson familier de l’aile”40—and while such alternative syntactic arrangements pluralize meaning in a manner that compounds the semantic contagion we have described above, such rearrangements are not, strictly speaking, what the poem says.41 If we resist such syntactic manipulations, if we read Mallarméan syntactic foreignness itself, rather than a domestication of it, we confront the kind of significant incomprehensibility and symbolic crisis that characterize the lamentation. For lamentation is a moment when experience is at once incomprehensible, urgently significant, and alien to the meaning producible by language, a moment in which discrete materials of meaning may exist, but the structure which organizes them—the covenant, the name, the syntax— has been lost. It is not difficult to detect shades of Heideggerian breakdown in this depiction: the collapse of the meaningful, instrumental totality of references and assignments that makes the world intelligible, while conditioning an alternative form of reflection. Mallarméan poetic practice, however, rather than responding to an incomprehensibility and to a world become foreign, deliberately cultivates a defilement that propagates foreignness; a defilement, that is, that produces a significance alien to philosophically verifiable meaning, or in Mallarméan terms, “un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue” (a total word, new, foreign to the tongue) (OC, 368). Indeed, we might describe that “mot étranger à la langue” as a symbolic crisis in which language becomes alien, not only to worldly experience, but to its own meaning, a crisis in which language expresses a meaning that it can’t, properly speaking, signify. A part of the lamentation’s sense of defilement is the movement of anguish into a language that is foreign to it, a transformative contact in which experience that is not only not language, but outside the reflective domain of language, becomes and remains language. If, then, Mallarméan poetry produces the kind of crisis that characterizes the moment of lamentation, then his poetic language—and this indeed is the aim of Mallarméan “evocation”—produces experience that it can not describe.

Uses of Defilement In the lamentation the irrational significance of which we have been speaking marks a moment not only when structures of meaning have been destroyed, but when the world is alien because new. Thus in bearing resemblance to the moment of lamentation, Mallarméan defilement bears resemblance to a world re-originated through catastrophe. The irrational significance of defilement also resembles both a historical moment prior to the logical elaboration of

118


ritual practice—prior, that is, to philosophy—and a subjective moment prior to language.42 It is these fluid resemblances between defilement, the irrational, the infans, and the new that render defilement instrumental in producing the new, for once defilement comes to function as a sign of radical transformation and newness, it may increasingly function as a substitute for its referent, may by its very constative insistence become performative, that is, produce the appearance of newness.43 Just as the act of destruction that we have studied above may be purveyed as the site of new knowledge, so may the irrational significance of defilement construct an aura of newness: “un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue” (emphasis added).44 The “Hommage” to Wagner is customarily interpreted as a figurative destruction of the old and establishment of the new, as an elegy, that is, to Wagner the revolutionary; to the author of Art and Revolution and The Artwork of the Future; to the poet of death and regeneration; to the master who transformed theater musically, ideologically, and socially; to the guru of the artistic avant-garde and of other aspiring traducers of tradition.45 It is even, perhaps, an homage to Wagner the Dresden rebel, critic of modern society, and titular high priest of political reformers.46 But if the “Hommage” thematically celebrates Wagnerian innovation, the defilement of which we have been speaking poses, I would argue, a rival newness. For if the images in the quatrains, syntactically normalized and philosophically purified, symbolize the old theater and old poetics and the images of the tercets—“the theater regenerated by Wagnerian music, whose influence also transfigures the book,”47—this thematic Wagnerian newness is subverted by Mallarméan semantic and syntactic foreignness, by that significant incomprehensibility which, in practice, constitutes Mallarmé’s “mot neuf.” Indeed, such subversion is consonant with the ambivalent tribute proffered in Mallarmé’s other major text on Wagner, “Rêverie d’un poëte français,” in which he ostensibly praises Wagnerian newness and the “singulier bonheur, neuf et barbare” (singular joy, new and barbarous) of Wagner’s representation of origins (OC, 544), but nonetheless reproaches Wagner’s “harmonieux compromis” (harmonious compromise) between music and drama (OC, 543), his reliance on legend, and thus, ultimately, his failure to reach “la source.” “Tout se retrempe au ruisseau primitif,” Mallarmé writes, “pas jusqu’à la source” (Everything is reimmersed in the primitive stream, but doesn’t arrive at the spring) (OC, 544).48 But if the “Rêverie” tellingly casts Wagnerian Bühnenfestspiel as a “défi . . . aux poëtes” (challenge to poets) (OC, 542), if it constructs an aesthetic rivalry between musical dramatist and abstract poet, it also constructs a distinctly national rivalry between German and Frenchman. Not only did Mallarmé apparently equivocate between the titles “Rêverie d’un poëte contemporain” (Reverie of a Contemporary Poet) and “Rêverie d’un poëte français,” between a title that emphasizes his temporal similarity to Wagner and one that insists on his national difference,49 he refers to Wagner, as “cet étranger” (this foreigner) (OC, 542) and contrasts the German public with “l’esprit français”


119

(the French mind), the latter of which is equated with both artistic integrity and true innovation: “Si l’esprit français, strictement imaginatif et abstrait, donc poétique, jette un éclat, ce ne sera pas ainsi: Il répugne, en cela d’accord avec l’Art dans son intégrité, qui est inventeur, à la Légende.” (If the French mind, strictly imaginative and abstract, thus poetic, throws some light, it will not be thus: it loathes Legend, and in this agrees with Art in its integrity, which is the inventor) (OC, 544). Such language no doubt had particular resonance in the political atmosphere of the 1880s, when France was absorbed by the crisis over Alsace-Lorraine and by a vigorously antiGerman nationalism. While Wagnerian controversy had long been entangled with competing nationalist fervors—at least since the Franco-Prussian war and publication of Wagner’s unmistakably spiteful “Eine Kapitulation” (A Capitulation) (1873), which ridiculed French suffering during the German siege of Paris— that fervor came to a boil in the 1880s. Indeed, it was the year in which Mallarmé wrote the “Rêverie” that Georges Boulanger (with public adoration at his heels and revanchism on his mind) was appointed ministre de la guerre and that the so-called Lohengrin affair—the nationalist furor that broke loose over Léon Carvalho’s plans to stage Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Opéra-Comique—raged relentlessly in the press.50 If the siege of Paris had been a military conquest of spatial territory, the performance of Lohengrin, according to an increasing number of Parisians, would be an equally humiliating aesthetic conquest of temporal territory, an event tantamount to a German occupation of modernity. Juliette Adam, who had organized a “salon d’opposition” to Wagner a decade previously, and who would publish an influential pamphlet entitled La Question Wagner pour un Français, wrote in Le Figaro: “For me, when I hear the music of Wagner, I hear the march of the soldiers of the conqueror, the song of its triumphs, the sobs of defeat.”51 Despite the fact that his symphonic renditions of Wagner continued through the 1880s (with Mallarmé regularly in attendance), when Lamoureux attempted to stage a production of Lohengrin the year following, demonstrations by Paul Déroulède’s infamous “Ligue des Patriotes” closed it down after a single performance. Responding to such anti-Wagnerian sentiment, as well as to Wagner’s own strident nationalism, the Revue wagnérienne, whose very inception had been challenged on nationalist grounds,52 routinely deployed a rhetoric of natural ethnic specificity and diversity, a fin-de-siècle sediment of Herder and Schleiermacher.53 Indeed, Mallarmé’s “Rêverie,” characterized by just such rhetoric, is arguably a rejoinder to Wagner’s essay on Beethoven, the final installment of which appeared in the same issue of the Revue as the “Rêverie,” and a copy of which was found in Mallarmé’s writing desk after his death.54 For, as the Revue’s précis announces, “Wagner, taking advantage of the war that Germany in 1870 waged against France, shows in the history of modern art an analogous struggle between the German mind and French style”—a struggle conspicuously engaged by Mallarmé’s “Rêverie.”55

120


We might say, then, that both the subversive newness of the “Hommage” and the nationalist sentiment of the “Rêverie” bear traces of the kind of crisis of national identity that frequently characterizes the moment of lamentation. And such crisis—which indeed describes the early decades of the Troisième Republique, when a physically and symbolically fragmented France groped for political stability—arguably conditions Mallarmé’s proposal for modernity in the “Rêverie,” a proposal that both pits itself against Wagner’s and openly aspires to reflect French national identity. Portraying the “harmonieux compromis” of Wagner as responding to “la disposition de sa race” (the mood of his race) (OC, 543), Mallarmé—in a fascinating conflation of the impersonality to which his own work aspires with the very notion of nation— suggests that French theater is “dégagé de personnalité, car il compose notre aspect multiple: que, de prestiges correspondant au fonctionnement national, évoque l’Art, pour le mirer en nous” (freed of personality, for it composes our multiple appearance: that from prestige corresponding to the functioning of the nation, it evokes Art, to reflect it in us) (OC, 545).56 Hence, when the “Hommage” is read in conjunction with the “Rêverie” and in the context of its historical moment, behind the manifest lament for Wagner appears, I would argue, a lament for France. Yet neither Mallarmé’s “Hommage” nor his “Rêverie” is a simple representation of a social or political crisis, but as we have suggested, rhetorical constructions of crisis. For while the irrational significance of Mallarméan defilement may disclose an undiscovered country or produce newness, it also functions to alienate. We have noted that the Levitical purity laws, a product of exile, were a reaction to the threat of cultural assimilation; and if, in a foreign land, one resists assimilation by maintaining purity, it is quite possible that one might resist assimilation within one’s own culture by cultivating a defiling foreignness. Defilement, we should recall, separates; its consequences are exile, exclusion from community, a subjective estrangement. Indeed, the “Hommage à Wagner” may well be less a legitimate homage than a poem about Mallarmé’s discomfort with the mass cultural assimilation we call wagnérisme.57 For although Wagner began his career on the coattails of musical idealists for whom fashion and mass culture were anathema,58 by 1886 Auguste de Gasperini could nonetheless quite rightly call Wagner “the man à la mode,”59 and two years later Alfred Ernst could declare, “The art of Wagner had succeeded in being accepted by everyone. . . . Everyone accepts and profits from it even if only thirdhand. . . . From the point of view of Wagnerian art, the ‘heroic’ period is over, and to admire Wagner has become banal.”60 If, then, the “Rêverie d’un poëte français” emphasizes France’s distinction from another culture, the irrational significance of the “Hommage” insists, both syntactically and thematically, on a distinction within French culture itself. If the “tassement du principal pilier” (settling or shaking down of the principal pillar) of the first quatrain figures the death of Wagner—and it is a standard image of the lamentation61—and the “moire” the “tissu d’accords”


121

(fabric of harmonies) by which Mallarmé describes Wagnerian drama in “Rêverie” (OC, 544); if the “ébat” of the second quatrain is the “spiel” of Bühnenfestspiel, and the “grimoire” a Wagnerian libretto or its arcane referents, then the “Hiéroglyphes dont s’exalte le millier” (Hieroglyphs that the thousands exalt) would be Wagnerian drama itself, and the “frisson familier” the effect it produces. On this view, then, the last line of the second quatrain—“Enfouissez-le-moi plutôt dans une armoire” (Bury it for me rather in a closet), the pronoun of which might refer either to the cumulative subject of the quatrains (Wagnerian drama) or to the “frisson familier” of the previous line—would signify Mallarmé’s conviction that the now familiar, predictable, and reproducible shivers of wagnérisme, its mass-distributed and easily consumable difficulty, should be buried: abandoned altogether perhaps, obscured at least.62 Moreover, the disturbing intrusion of the word “simulacre” in the ostensibly panegyric tercets seems to confirm the uneasiness of the poem’s homage, for it suggests both a transformative contamination of the “sacre” of line 13 and the presence of a sham: indeed the word simulacre customarily functions in Mallarméan thought as a mark of what Lacoue-Labarthe calls Mallarmé’s “merciless critique of semblance.”63 And the “simulacre” of this poem seems less a neutral synonym for “dramatic representation”—as the conventional reading would have it—than a pejorative reference to the diverse and fuzzy reproductions of Wagnerian thought, which, as Large and Weber write, “was invoked for a large array of contradictory purposes and linked with a baffling variety of cultural fashions, political crusades, artistic controversies, and sweeping theories of human renewal.”64 Depending on how one reads the pronomial reference of “leur simulacre,” wagnérisme seems to have become either a bastardized repetition of others’ enlightenment (“elles de clartés maîtresses” [those of master lights], 10) or of Wagner’s own “trompettes tout haut” (loud trumpets, 12). This critique continues in the “Rêverie,” where Mallarmé speaks of Wagnerian music drama as “violent[ant] votre raison aux prises avec un simulacre” (assaulting your reason with a captivating simulacrum) (OC, 542) and, if we take “simulacre” and “faux semblant” as roughly synonymous, it is the “Rêverie’s” starting point: Mallarmé commences with the proposal “à réfléchir aux pompes souveraines de la Poésie, comme elles ne sauraient exister concurrement au flux de banalité charrié par les arts dans le faux semblant de civilisation” (to reflect on the sovereign pomp of Poetry, as it would not know how to exist jointly with the flux of banality carted along by the arts in the false pretense of civilization) (OC, 540). Although specific practitioners of such falsity are left unspecified, the following line of the “Rêverie”— “Cérémonies d’un jour qui gît au sein, inconscient, de la foule: presque un Culte!” (Ceremonies of a day that lodge unconsciously in the breast of the crowd: almost a Religion!)—seems by force of contiguity to link “le faux semblant de civilization” to the cult of wagnérisme, to its overtly religious pretensions and to the religious imagery—the parvis, the dieu, the sacre—of the poem.

122


Thus if the poem thematically signifies Mallarmé’s resistance to the cultural assimilation—the “frisson familier”—of wagnérisme, its semantic and syntactic defilements are techniques of alienation for resisting such assimilation. Its cultural distinction, that is, is produced by its syntactic and semantic indistinction. And in the “Hommage,” not only is contact between words semantically and syntactically foreign, but the very boundary that establishes the distinction between foreign and domestic is indistinguishable; as in many of Mallarmé’s poems and prose works, the boundaries between units of meaning are ambiguous and mobile. For example, in the phrase “un sacre/mal tu par l’encre” (13–14) semantic borders might be drawn around “un sacre mal” (an evil consecration), “un sacre mal tu par l’encre” (a consecration badly silenced by the ink), or “mal tu par l’encre” (evil itself silenced by the ink). Similarly, the “haï” of line 9 migrates freely from the phrase “souriant fracas orignel haï” (smiling hated original uproar) to “haï entre elles de clartés maîtresses” (hated among those of master lights), though such migration constructs meanings entirely foreign to one another. Such boundary disputes are, moreover, fueled by words that function as more than one part of speech: the “maîtresses” of line 10, for example, may function as a noun—as “mistresses of clarity” renaming “elles,” or as an adjective—as principal lights. Likewise the “vers” of line 11 may function as either a preposition— toward a temple courtyard, or as a noun—verse itself which “parvis” then renames. The ambiguity of semantic and syntactic borders, then, continues both the poem’s epidemic spread of meaning and—by miming the boundary confusion of the subject prior to language and thereby ostensibly “tap[ping] that pre-verbal ‘beginning’” that Kristeva contends remains within language65—its production of newness: of modernity, of “un mot neuf.” But is this resistance to assimilation—what we have been calling Mallarméan defilement—merely that sort of “distinction” that Richard Terdiman describes as a “characteristic sociocultural gymnastic of the later nineteenth century”?66 On the one hand, Mallarméan language is characterized by the distinguished stylistic choices and the disgust at the facile that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, construct social distinctions. Yet on the other hand, the semantic and syntactic defilements we have noted are precisely the sort of “unnatural union” that terrorizes that sense of distinction: The sense of distinction, the discretio (discrimination) which demands that certain things be brought together and others kept apart, which excludes all misalliances and all unnatural unions—i.e., all unions contrary to the common classification, to the diacrisis (separation) which is the basis of collective and individual identity—responds with visceral, murderous horror, absolute disgust, metaphysical fury, to everything which lies in Plato’s “hybrid zone.”67

Does Mallarméan indistinction, which transgresses the prohibitions that guard linguistic and philosophical purity, thus implicitly violate social order? While literary experimentation and social revolution cannot be simply equated, and while the former does not simply produce the latter, it might be


123

more modestly argued that the indistinction produced by Mallarméan language contaminates distinctions that separate and classify, and that such contamination may bear the capacity to debilitate certain disciplinary mechanisms that confer value, identity, and privilege.68 This poetic language that resists disambiguation into distinct, philosophically “pure” concepts is, moreover, not only a transgression of a boundary, but a defilement of the boundary itself, a systemic contamination that subverts the very possibility of distinction. The irrational significance symptomatic of a moment when a social order and its structures of meaning have fallen may thus be of use in resisting the distinctions—inextricably logical and sociological—imposed by that order.

The Material and the Hyperessential Mallarmé, then, as kathartis, constructs his “oeuvre pure” out of the materials of defilement—contact with the foreign, semantic contagion, philosophical ambiguity. In addition, both his theoretical valorizations of death—the “Conception pure,” according to the famous letter to Cazalis, is conditioned by death and an excursion into the impure region of eternity—and his poetic practices of fragmentation constitute the kind of ritual and philosophical defilement we have been describing.69 This cultivation of defilement is, in addition to a construction of newness and resistance to assimilation, a recuperation of the scapegoats that pure philosophy necessarily exiles: the material and the hyperessential, which idealist and metaphysical traditions banish beyond the borders of significance.70 By returning to ritual sources of defilement, Mallarméan poetic practice returns to a moment when defilement, before its domestication as philosophical ambiguity, is both material and symbolic, when defilement is neither just dirt, stain, blood, or semen nor just moral unworthiness, and when purification, accordingly, is a branch of both medicine and religion.71 “In truth,” writes Ricoeur, “defilement was never literally a stain; impurity was never literally filthiness, dirtiness. It is also true that impurity never attains the abstract level of unworthiness; otherwise the magic of contact and contagion would have disappeared.”72 Mallarméan defilement recuperates the materiality—the body—of language; it attempts to reintegrate into thought the opaque materiality of language that philosophy’s insistence on linguistic and conceptual transparency has exiled. For not only is defilement a material (a mark, a stain) that ritual purity laws read as sign (of moral unworthiness, danger to the community), but a materiality that itself constitutes defilement: the idolatry that contaminates Yahweh, the maternal that contaminates signification, the body that contaminates the soul.73 While ritual reads the material as sign, philosophy— from Plato’s Phaedo to the Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans to Kantian pure reason—designates materiality itself as defilement. Thus while the idealist tradition may speak about the material as other, and

124


indeed must do so to establish and maintain the purity of its identity, it simultaneously discards the materiality of the very language on which it relies. For like the body of a servant, the materiality of language is to philosophy merely instrumental—not of significance.74 By contrast, the word for Mallarmé does not function solely as a transparent referential instrument, but to a large degree through its material properties: by the visible and audible properties of the word, by appeals, that is, to sensations of the body. This description, we should note, bears similarities to “dual memory hypotheses” in which traumatic memory is conceived as being organized somatosensorially rather than symbolically. This concern with materiality—and the defilement of philosophy that it represents—also characterizes the moment of lamentation, which is urgently concerned with material conditions that don’t, as far as philosophy is concerned, mean anything. A poem such as the “Hommage,” in other words, resembles that moment when the transparency of material conditions—the comfortable familiarity into which they disappear when one is thinking of other things— is shattered, when one can not see through or beyond material conditions and when philosophy, consequently, seems frighteningly impotent. Mallarmé attempts, as do ritual and lamentation, to read the significance of the material and to create a significance that is material, that, unlike philosophy, is produced in the sensations of the body.75 While Symbolism had long envisioned a poetics that would fuse the properties of music, dance, and painting, it is, as Bernard notes, from the time of Mallarmé’s attendance at the Concerts Lamoureux that “the word symphony made a significant return in his writing to designate poetic works.”76 Valéry records of these experiences that “Mallarmé came out of the concerts filled with a sublime envy. He searched desperately to find a way to recapture for our art the marvel and importance the so powerful Music had concealed for (or stolen from) him.”77 This jealousy, as Valéry puts it, is in the Rêverie, transformed into an indignation at Wagner’s “simple adjonction orchestrale” (simple orchestral addition) (OC, 542) and into an implicit argument that music need not be added to poetry because poetry is music. Accordingly, when Debussy requested permission to set to music “L’après-midi d’un faune,” Mallarmé, as the story goes, replied, “But I thought I had already done that.” Thus the “multiplicité des cris d’une orchestration, qui reste verbale” (the multiplicity of cries of an orchestration that remains verbal) by which Mallarmé describes poetry in “Crise de Vers” (OC, 361) constructs a significance that is “materiellement la vérité” (materially the truth) (OC, 365; emphasis added) and ulterior to the symbolic meaning of words.78 This is a significance that suggests, for example, that memory (mémoire, 4), like a book of magic spells (grimoire, 5) or a place to store one’s possessions (armoire, 8), is an expansion of, or supplement to, a kind of wavy fabric (moire, 1), a fabric that might, associatively, be a shroud, “a cloth covering, laid over the furniture of an empty theater,”79 that restless “voile dans le temple avec des plis significatifs” (temple veil with significant folds) of the “Crise de Vers” (OC, 360), fate (moira), the texture of Wagnerian music, the successive


125

waves of wagnérisme, or the flamboyant dress of Wagner himself. Such sounds, read as signs, might by extension suggest then that memory (mémoire) adds to the covering of death (moire); that the techniques of Wagnerian music (moire), if expanded upon, may become a place to store one’s past (mémoire), one’s possessions (armoire), one’s magic (grimoire); or that wagnérisme (moire) may be as faulty as memory, as banal as a piece of furniture, as illegible as a grimoire. Likewise the materials of the poem may signal that the consecration that Wagner radiates (sacre, 13) is an excision performed on, or a contraction of, the polyvalent “simulacre” of line 11; that, accordingly, the religious trappings of Wagnerian music drama (sacre) are merely a gutted version of artistic representation (simulacre); or that just as “un sacre” (from Latin sacrare) sets apart, so the pure rites of Wagnerian music drama are set apart—here audibly extracted from—false representations. More complexly, the phrases “vers un parvis” and “pâmé sur les vélins” in consecutive lines (11–12) set up a kind of aural chiasmus in which six sounds (v, e, s, p, a, i) are repeated, but in which the inaugural “v” and “p” sounds are inverted: ve(rs)-pa(r)-vis . . . pâ(mé)-vé(lins). Read as sign, this aural configuration might suggest that the act of moving toward a sacred place or indeed the temple of verse itself (“vers un parvis”) stands in a chiasmatic relation to swooning on paper (“pâmé sur les vélins”), that the one is at once the image and the inversion of the other. Yet such idolatrous readings do not suggest that all the material properties of the poem must be read as signs. The poem’s alliterations, for example—to which we are initially alerted by phrases such as “principal pilier” (3), “manque de mémoire” (4), and “frisson familier” (7)—extend to its iterative “p” sounds (plus, pli, principal, pilier, précipiter, parvis, pamé, par), “t” sounds (tassement, triomphal, trompettes, tout, tu), “s” sounds (silence, seul, sur, souriant, simulacre, sur, sacre, sanglots, sibyllins), “m” sounds (moire, mobilier, manque, mémoire, milier, maîtresses, mal) and “f” sounds (funèbre, frisson, familier, fracas), as well as to the repetition created by the internal sounds of words (tassement, for example repeating “s” and “m” sounds). While such alliteration creates an audible relation that might conceivably be symbolically interpreted, it also constructs an intricate web of musical— indeed Wagnerian—leitmotives that produce recognition in the body even when they do not produce concepts for the mind. Such sounds, moreover, have a cumulative effect. Indeed, by the time we reach the final sounds of the poem—“sibyllins”—we hear in them an echo of previous sounds in the poem— “si(lence),” “si (vieil),” “(mo)bil(ier),” “(vé)lins,” “(pr)in(cipal)”— in such a way that the word itself, sensed as material rather than read as sign, functions as an aural collage of the poem’s own material memory. On the one hand, then, Mallarméan defilement recuperates the materiality of language that is purged by philosophy’s insistence on linguistic and conceptual transparency. On the other hand, defilement, as we have noted, is both material and symbolic. Yet to speak of defilement as “symbolic” is somewhat misleading, for the symbolism of defilement is, rather than a simple sign system, an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality. Indeed the obscurity of

126


our readings of the materiality of the “Hommage” illustrate the difficulty of reading the material and suggest that such readings are inevitably characterized by the irrationality of defilement and by the kind of “significant incomprehensibility” we have spoken of above. The difficulty of reading the stain of defilement literally has made defilement particularly susceptible to allegorical interpretation. Its recalcitrant materiality has often been read as a disguise for a significance extrinsic to literal signification, as a sign that, like allegory—from állos (other) and agoreúein (to speak)—speaks otherwise than it seems to speak. For example, the defilement of a corpse, which, according to Hebrew purity laws is contagious to open vessels under the same roof,80 has for Philo nothing to do with material pollution or cultic unworthiness; rather, it signifies that “wretchedness is due to the different parts of the soul having been left loose and gaping and unfastened, while proper ordering of life and speech is the result of those being kept close and tight.”81 Similarly, the defilement laws surrounding leprosy have, according to Philo, less to do with a contagious disease or moral inadequacy than with the inconstancy of the disease, which signifies “lack of firmness of judgment and an unstable, agitated life.”82 Significantly, in Midrashic literature, leprosy defilement functions as an allegory for the conquerors of Israel: Here the Scripture on leprosy is made to refer to the four conquerors of Israel: Babylon, Media, Greece, and Rome. All reference to actual leprosy or to leprosy as a sign of some closely related sin is lost. But the comparison of the situation of the leper to the “exile” of Israel had been made earlier and provided the point of departure for the allegorical use of leprosy to refer to the conquerors.83

The midrashic commentators, then, taking their cue partially from the lamentation’s own comparison between exile and leper, link defilement specifically to moments of lamentation and indeed make of defilement not merely a symptom of, but a symbol for, lamentation. In other words, midrashic allegory makes defilement a symbol for a moment of incomprehensibility; in the manner of philosophy and in a movement both circular and domesticating, it transforms defilement from a kind of incomprehensibility into a symbol for incomprehensibility. This tendency to read the incomprehensibility of defilement as allegory and as an allegory of incomprehensibility is a symptom of the fact that defilement, as Kristeva puts it, is “a wellspring of sign for a non-object,”84 a material possessing “an anaphoric, indexing value, pointing to something else, to some non-thing, to something unknowable.”85 Indeed, even when read allegorically, defilement, like the material conditions of lamentation, persistently confounds the literal, spiritual, and moral levels of allegory—to borrow Aquinas’s terms—and gestures toward the anagogical: toward the inconceivable and ineffable, toward that “transcendental repetition” that comes into being “when every thinkable human certainty and probability [are] impossible,”86


127

toward the “inaccessible regions” courted by ritual,87 toward a flower absent from all bouquets. In more prosaic terms, Mallarmé’s cultivation of defilement—the contact with foreignness, the semantic contagion, and the indistinction that characterize his poetic practice—recuperates the hyperessential, which philosophy, securing the borders of its own identity, marks as foreign to significant thought. By dwelling on incomprehensibility that cannot be subsumed within philosophical assertion, on significance that cannot be generalized, on anomalous and inessential attributes that betray identity, Mallarmé ventures into the foreignness beyond the orderly territory of metaphysical thought; he speaks to the barbarian at the border of philosophy. Mallarmé’s crisis of verse thus mimes the moment and the language of lamentation and in so doing appropriates a language that is at once a sign of defilement and an instrument of purity. Mallarmé not only deploys a theoretical rhetoric of catastrophe, I have argued, but also poetically reenacts the significant incomprehensibility characteristic of the moment of lamentation. This significant incomprehensibility, as we have seen, serves to produce newness, record domestic crisis, and resist assimilation; it allows Mallarmé to forage through the materiality of language and to reach for the hyperessential. Thus if Mallarméan poetic practice produces the celebrated purity of which his theoretical writings speak, that purity results from and produces defilement; and it is a messy business indeed, giving “un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” (a purer sense to the words of the tribe) (OC, 70).


Chapter

5

L a m e n tat i o n a n d N at i o n a l I d e n t i t y : H at z i s’s T O D I P LO B I B L I O a n d t h e ( D e ) C o n s t ru c t i o n o f M o d e r n G re e c e

While states may be threatened by lamentations—we have witnessed their

sometimes direct political engagement, as well as a history of restrictions against them—modern nations nonetheless make ample use of rituals of mourning and spectacles of trauma. There is clearly too much loose power lying around in such scenes, too much ideologically useful grief, anger, and anxiety, too many empty signifiers susceptible to errant meaning, for them to go unregulated or unexploited by nations. On the one hand, national rhetorics of loss, like lamentations, publicly recognize and interpret an event of loss and mark it as meriting response; they portray the present as a trauma demanding restitution and recovery; they deploy the lamentations’ gestures of retroactive possession for retrieving an identity—or a land—and claiming it as one’s own; and they exploit the ability of the lamentation to function as a sign of newness and purity, as well as its power to construct desire. On the other hand, the lamentation presents clear dangers to nations, to their demand for a unified and stable identity; their need for useful, legible, docile bodies; their clearly defined (territorial and ideological) boundaries; and their “homogenous, empty time.”1 Indeed, nation-states, for quite understandable reasons, have proven largely unreceptive to the lamentation’s disruption of social discipline and the Symbolic order, its irresolution and unquenchable anger, its thematization of shattered identity, and its brazen dealings with the foreign. From this perspective, the “lamentations” adopted by nations correspond less to the tradition of women’s laments we have traced than to forms such as the epitaphios logos or elegy, which offer resolution and consolation and often directly elaborate death’s usefulness for the state. This is a response

130


to loss that women’s lamentations have frequently critiqued and rejected, refusing to transmute death into national glory, heroic sacrifice, or manly virtue. As this chapter demonstrates, the mode of lamentation can thus work both ways—both for and against the state, depending on which of its attributes are appropriated and deployed. In this chapter, I explore three sites of loss widely constitutive of modern nations: an “inaugural crisis” generative of both the nation-state as the dominant political formation of modernity and of individual nations; the “lost identity” that nations are customarily figured as recuperating; and a series of what I term “losses-in-exchange”—that is, the losses one is asked to sustain in exchange for national belonging. Nations regularly mark and memorialize the first two of these forms of loss while repressing into insignificance the trauma produced by the third.2 Subsequently, I turn to Greek author Kostas Hatzis’s 1977 novel, To diplo biblio (The double book)—a novel explicitly structured as an inquiry into national identity and bearing the imprint of two salient features of the lamentation: its testimonial construction and antiphony.3 The fictional author portrayed in Hatzis’s text (the Singrafeas) sets out to explore the question: who or what is the modern Greek (romeiko)? He solicits a series of narrative testimonies: from Kostas, a “guest worker” in a German factory; Kostas’s father, a tailor and defeated communist; Anastasia, his sister (with whom the Singrafeas is in love); the owner of a lumber business in Volos; and a repatriated and embittered gasterbeiter from Pindos. But these narratives do not add up to the coherent national identity the Singrafeas seeks. Rather, they mock the losses hallowed by the nation while exposing and mourning the losses sublimated by it. Yet I argue that the scattered notebooks the Singrafeas leaves behind at his death are less the failed identity he conceives them to be than a productive construction of crisis that returns the nation to its point of origin, seizes its mode of production, and disrupts its system of exchange.

Inaugural Crisis Theories of the rise of the nation as diverse as Benedict Anderson’s, Ernest Gellner’s, and Elie Kedourie’s bear the similarity of conceiving the nation as inaugurated by loss or crisis—as a political unit generated out of the kind of epistemological uncertainty, cognitive upheaval, sense of radical newness, and redistribution of power and possessions that we have associated with both lamentation and modernity. For Anderson, that crisis involved the simultaneous demise of the dynastic realm and the religiously imagined community. The nation was conditioned, he argues, by the Enlightenment thought and Revolutions that “destroy[ed] the legitimacy of the divinelyordained, hierarchical dynastic realm”4 and by a series of traumas within the religious community: the defeat of sacred languages by the vernacular and a concomitant loss of confidence in linguistic signs as emanations of reality; the

L a m e n tat i o n a n d N at i o n a l I d e n t i t y

131

demise of a messianic conception of time in favor of “homogeneous, empty time”; and, above all, the Reformation, its complicity with print-capitalism and mass literacy, destruction of (priestly) privilege, and emphasis on individualism. Gellner locates the rise of the nation at the moment when the stable “purposive, hierarchical, ‘meaningful’” society of the agrarian world—based on kin structures and local organization—was disassembled by the innovative, homogeneous, mobile, and anonymous society of industrialization, an “unutterably profound break in human history” that he depicts as a moment of cognitive upheaval and social crisis: the age of transition to industrialism was bound, according to our model, also to be an age of nationalism, a period of turbulent readjustment, in which either political boundaries, or cultural ones, or both, were being modified, so as to satisfy the new nationalist imperative which now, for the first time, was making itself felt. Because rulers do not surrender territory gladly (and every change of a political boundary must make someone a loser), because changing one’s culture is very frequently a most painful experience, and moreover, because there were rival cultures struggling to capture the souls of men, just as there were rival centers of political authority striving to suborn men and capture territory: given all this, it immediately follows from our model that this period of transition was bound to be violent and conflict-ridden. Actual historical facts fully confirm these expectations.5

Kedourie, tracing the philosophical heredity of the nation, finds its roots in Enlightenment conceptions of human progress and, more specifically, in their valorization of crisis, upheaval, and struggle. Exemplary is A. R. J. Turgot who averred in a 1750 lecture, “It is only through turmoil and destruction that nations expand, that civilization and governments are in the long run perfected.”6 Kant, similarly, described history as ceaseless struggle; Fichte posited war as injecting “a living and progressive principle into History”;7 and Herder affirmed the necessity of violent struggle to national progress. “Only amid storms can the noble plant flourish,” wrote the latter, “when irrigated with blood [the seed] seldom fails to shoot up to an unfading flower.”8 If both the historical losses associated with modernity and philosophical valorizations of crisis conditioned the nation as political unit, particular nationalisms have largely formed as responses either to (perceived) injustice and adversity—to what we have called “sustained catastrophe”—or to the threat of losing power. The former characterized the earliest forms of nationalism that, according to Eric Hobsbawm, “represented the common interests against particular interests, the common good against privilege”;9 anti-colonial nationalisms responding to sustained losses of material necessities, the products of labor, and self-determination; and the “break-off” nationalisms of minority populations that perceived themselves to be at a disadvantage within larger nations. The latter—the perceived threat to power or privilege—characterized the majority of Latin American nationalisms;10 the

132


“official nationalisms” of Europe that, according to Anderson, were “from the start a conscious, self protective policy, intimately linked to the preservation of imperial-dynastic interests”;11 and the anti-Semitic nationalisms that emerged in Europe during the 1880s.12 Greek nationalism is officially narrated as arising from the “sustained losses” suffered by the Greek population under Ottoman rule, but it is probably equally accurate to argue the inverse: that it was Greek nationalism (largely imported from Western Europe) that translated those circumstances (many of which had been unchallenged for centuries) into intolerable loss. In the social and philosophical climate of the late eighteenth century, the fact that Muslims owned the majority of land, that a Christian’s testimony was not accepted in court against that of a Muslim, that Christians paid higher taxes, were not allowed to bear arms, and were forced to give children to serve as janissaries in the Ottoman state ripened into a politically charged lament.13 As the empire crumbled, moreover, peasants were increasingly oppressed with tax burdens levied by local landlords, and often with eviction and dispossession. But this is not the whole story, for support for Greek nationalism also came from a number of groups threatened with imminent losses of power as a result of the crises within the Ottoman empire: wealthy Greek merchants who perceived their security and capital to be at risk; the Western powers who feared loss of political and economic power in the Mediterranean; and, following the execution of Patriarch Grigorious V, the Orthodox Church, which increasingly feared loss of autonomy.14 Fashioned out of both the sustained losses that comprise adversity and fears of imminent loss of power, Greek nationalism also testifies to the principle that nations are typically the offspring of death, including the mass deaths of revolutionary wars.15 As Ernest Renan contends, the solidarity of the nation is “constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past,” and its unity is produced through common suffering. “Where national memories are concerned,” he writes, “griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.”16 Perhaps no incident did more to create nationalist sentiment among Greeks—many of whom were quite comfortably complacent in the empire and elsewhere— than the execution of the revolutionary theorist Rigas Velestinlis at the hands of Ottoman authorities in May 1798; indeed Rigas’s death had far greater impact on Greek nationalism than the political writings to which he had devoted his life.17 Similarly, it was a series of widely advertised deaths in the first half of the 1820s—Patriarch Grigorious V in 1821, the Christians of Chios in 1822, Lord Byron (however ingloriously) in Messolonghi in 1824— that, more than any other factor, solidified philhellenic sentiment in the West and transformed that sentiment into financial contribution and military support.18 The deaths that inaugurate a nation customarily accede to the status of national myth; they are, with the help of national mourning rituals, speculatively and belatedly (re)constructed as national artifact: Patriarch Grigorious


133

becomes a saint of the Orthodox Church; the massacre of Chios, as rendered by Delacroix, hangs in the Louvre; locks from Byron’s bonny head lie in the national museum. Yet unlike the lamentation, such myths exceed, resolve, and replace the incomprehensible experience and empty signifiers of crisis: trammeled fields, destroyed homes, and dead bodies are assigned nationally useful meanings, and the actual expressions of grief that accompanied such losses are largely eclipsed by their nationally appointed significance. The dead, indeed, are much more ideologically pliable than the living, a principle well illustrated by the Greek nation’s ongoing struggle with kleftes— brigands who became national heroes by providing badly needed paramilitary support for the revolution, and, subsequently, by realizing daring irredentist forays into Turkish territory, but who inconveniently persisted in attacking members of the newly formed Greek government, its citizens, and foreign travelers—acting, in short, like simple outlaws. Thus dead guerillas, as Michael Herzfeld writes, “could be apotheosized, since they no longer constituted a threat.”19 They became the subjects of heroic narratives, Romantic poetry, and an entire genre of lamentations known as “Klephtic ballads.” Yet at the same time that dead kleftes were being transformed into exemplary nationalists, live ones were being frantically purged from the “imagined community”: Greek journalists and politicians depicted them as Vlachian or Albanian agents of the Turks; the Holy Synod excommunicated them from Orthodox Christianity; and linguists revived an Hellenic term (listis) to designate ignoble, criminal brigands and clearly distinguish them from national liberators (kleftes). If the appearance of the nation state as a political formation is the result of a number of traumas associated with modernity, individual nations are regularly formed on the basis of perceived losses or threats of loss. They make use of deaths—often the mass deaths of wars—to inaugurate and sanctify themselves. Inscribed in monuments, national anthems, school books, holidays, and flags, the deathly presence that pervades nations often evokes awe, reverence, sacrality: the experience of nationalism, like the lamentation, is a brush with death.

The Recuperation of Lost Identity The majority of modern nations have fashioned themselves as the recuperation of a lost identity, an imperative that derives from eighteenth and nineteenth century theories of natural ethnic diversity, which implicitly obligated nations to produce and perform a coherent identity to justify their existence. “For the political unity of the nation,” as Bhabha puts it, “consists in a continual displacement of its irredeemably plural modern space . . . into a signifying space that is archaic and mythical, paradoxically representing the nation’s modern territoriality, in the patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism.”20 If a language of loss is particularly suited to carrying out

134


this task of recuperation—lamentations, as we have seen, function as acts of retroactive possession and are useful for certifying propriety claims—nowhere did this obligation weigh more heavily than on modern Greece, whose acceptance by the European powers rested largely on its ability to demonstrate continuity with the Hellenic civilization upon which Europe fancied itself to be built. The Greek-speaking peoples, as Vassilis Lambropoulos puts it, found themselves under immense external pressure to respond adequately to the inflated expectations and to adjust properly to the exalted demand of European and American romanticism which, from Goethe to Beethoven and from Shelley to Delacroix, needed to affirm and satisfy its classical yearnings. The pressure to be true Hellenes was presented to the Greeks as their only way or chance to define an acceptable identity and justify their political claims.21

The construction of neohellenism—of a culturally, linguistically, and historically viable Hellenic identity that would override regional and kinship identifications and justify the national state—was an enterprise that called into service multiple actors, including archeologists, anthropologists, folklorists, and linguists, all of whom deployed the mode of lamentation—made use, that is, of a discourse that at once valorized the past as lost object, impoverished the present as a moment of loss, and thereby provided justification for (social, cultural, and political) change.22 Linguists pointed to the survival of the word “Hellene” as evidence of the resilience of the Hellenic ideal that, even after centuries of foreign, Oriental oppression, waited to be liberated in the present (never mind that Greek-speaking peoples did not use the term for self-designation and often had little inclination to be its incarnation). Archeologists, recognizing the degree to which philhellenes perceived the “true identity” of the Greek people to reside in ruins rather than residents, contributed by recuperating classical artifacts, committing them to the controlled contexts of museums and monumental sites. Equally crucial were the “verbal monuments” recorded and classified by the nascent discipline of folklore, a significant portion of which were lamentations that performed the double duty of demonstrating continuity with, and producing desire for, past greatness. Collected by early folklorists such as Spyridon Zambelios, Emmanuel Vivilakis, and Nikolaos Politis, these lamentations were critical in providing what Vivilakis terms “irrefutable proof not only that ancient Hellas is as yet far from defunct but that, just as these customs dwelt in her millennia ago, so today they live on in her children’s children.”23 Zambelios contended that the “sense of tragedy in the Greek spirit” was a manifestation of the Hellenic ideal in modern Greek peoples.24 And however etymologically misguided his conflation of “tragoudia” (songs) with “tragodia” (tragedy), his “tragic sense” thesis, supported by lamentations that both demonstrated continuity between ancient and modern Greece and constructed a reproducible image of Greeks as a people of longing, was widely


135

influential, making its way into school textbooks and informing the development of a national literature.25 This lost—but not destroyed—Hellenic identity was also useful to the Western powers, who invoked it, for example, to train modern Greeks to be Western, to be good economic and military allies. In a letter dated December 18, 1823, Leicester Stanhope, a British agent of the London Greek Committee, wrote to the Committee’s secretary John Bowring: It is my practice, when the natives [Greeks] visit me, to draw their attention to those points which are most essential to their welfare, and to put the matter in a point of view that will interest them, and set their minds in labour. For example, if I wish to recommend military discipline to them, I speak of the combined operations and close order observed by their ancestors . . . speaking of education, I lament that their Turkish masters should have deprived their children of the means of acquiring that knowledge which their great forefathers so eminently possessed.26

Thus does the mode of lamentation function both to construct desire and to justify radically altering the circumstances of the present under the sign of recuperating a stolen treasure—the past, one’s identity, one’s territory. Often expressed in a metaphorics of rebirth or resurrection—awakening, regeneration, risorgimento—such recuperations also made regular use of the lamentation as a sign of newness.27 In Greek, this image—routinely deployed, for example, by nationalist Adamantios Koreas—was buttressed by the convenient lexical resemblance between epanastasis (revolution) and anastasis (resurrection).28 If the lamentation has been both empirically and thematically instrumental in recuperating nations’ lost identities, it also came prepared with a rhetorical preoccupation with purity well-suited to the nationalist conception of a distinct and inviolable national character. And the builders of neohellenism were, to be sure, engaged in numerous rites of purification. Linguists, who aided in the purification of national myth (distinguishing kleftes from listis), also created a “purified” language—katharevousa—based on ancient Greek, purged of Byzantine alterations and Turkish and Albanian influences, albeit impossibly foreign and difficult for the majority of Greek speakers.29 Folklorists, as Herzfeld has shown, “decontaminated” folkloric data in accordance with what was perceived to be genuinely Greek. And archaeologists, following the establishment of the Greek state in the 1830s, set about eradicating centuries of modification and reuse of the Acropolis, which had functioned, for example, as the cathedral for the Latin archbishop, a mosque, and a fortress, and which, by the early nineteenth century, was scattered not only with Byzantine constructions, but commonplace housing.30 Recovering the Acropolis—and here the metallurgical nuance of recovery is particularly apt— meant effacing the traces of the irrelevant past (the waste products of history), a task that was rapidly carried out as the site was transformed from diversely-used social space into disciplined, meaningful “monumental space.”

136


At the inauguration of the “restored” Parthenon, the German architect Leo von Klenze, who had overseen the work, vowed in a phrase that emphasized both the imperative of purification and the temporal remoteness of Greek identity (forever exiled in an archaic past or an uncertain future), that “all the remains of barbarity will be removed, here as in all of Greece, and the remains of the glorious past will be brought in new light, as the solid foundation of a glorious present and future.”31 While for most Western Europeans, Hellenism was associated with the classical past—a correlation consecrated by the choice of Athens as the Greek capital—many Greeks and Balkan peoples perceived their heritage to reside in Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantine culture, and the Orthodox patriarchate, the archrival of Catholic Europe and papal supremacy. Throughout the nineteenth century, Greek nationalists increasingly revived this Byzantine heritage, developing a more historically and geographically expansive identity than that envisioned by philhellenes. This newly delineated “lost identity” coalesced into an irredentist project known as the Megali Idea (Great Idea), which became the dominant ideology of the emergent state and was ratified by representing the present as loss: of the millions of “unredeemed” Greeks still living outside national borders, and of territory in Macedonia and Asia Minor (particularly Salonika, Smyrna, and Constantinople).32 Geographical aspirations were thus legitimated as an indemnification of loss; and the amount of due indemnity—payable in land— was measured by those ethnographers such as Politis who demarcated the territorial borders of Hellenism by the collection of “verbal monuments”: where Greek songs were found in foreign lands, that land was lost land. Among these verbal monuments, the most cogent support for irredentism was drawn from the lamentations for the fall of Constantinople, which served not only to reinstate the Byzantine period as the link between ancient and modern Greece, but as evidence that Asia Minor Greeks participated in the “national spirit” of Greece.33 Not only did Politis consider these lamentations over Constantinople “evidence of widespread national aspirations,” writes Herzfeld, “but he saw their extensive distribution throughout the Greek-speaking world as proof of the Greeks’ cultural homogeneity and shared sense of destiny.”34 Lamentations such as the “Song of Hagia Sophia”—which Christovasilis in 1902 referred to, significantly, as “our national lament”—were increasingly read as prophecies of the recapture of the city. As Herzfeld has demonstrated, in the years when irredentist euphoria was at its height, the last lines of this lamentation— —Swvpase, kura; devspoina, mh;n klaivgh~, mh; dakruvzh~

pavle me; crovnou~, me; kairouv~, pavle dikav sa~ ei`nai (Lady, don’t weep, don’t cry Through years and time, it is still yours)35


137

were subtly revised—or perhaps more precisely, standardized and reinterpreted—in accordance with the Megali Idea: dikav sa~ (yours) became dikav ma~ (ours); ei`nai (is) became “qa ei`nai” (will be); pavle (still, again) was read in the sense of “again”: With years and time, it will be ours once more.

Losses in Exchange Governing much of the eighteenth century political theory at the root of Greek nationalism is the principle that the nation constitutes itself through an exchange relation. Rousseau maintained “that neither individual nor state could attain happiness or virtue unless man exchanged a general will for his own selfish particular will, and willed the good of all, rather than his own.”36 As Fichte put it, “the realization of the real self in its real freedom is the annihilation of the actual self and of its imperfect freedom.”37 On this model, the nation functions as a commodity, offering individuals benefits for a price, and as a compensatory formation that replaces with an equivalent that which has been lost, suffered, or sacrificed in the exchange—a structure whose similarity to conceptions of recovery should not be overlooked. Such exchange may entail forfeiting regional, ethnic, linguistic, or religious identifications or practices in exchange for a more expansive network of associations and opportunities, a centrally enforced social order, and access to modernity.38 But such exchange is not always voluntary. Indeed, when the habits of Greeks failed to reproduce the community imagined by nationalists and philhellenes, loss became imperative: if you wish to be a nation, lose your Oriental manners, your clientelist business practices, your kinship and regional loyalties, the unsuitable parts of your history, your bastardized language. We have seen inklings of these necessary losses in the practices filtered out of ethnological data, in the “barbarity” von Klenze pledged to eradicate from the country, in the indiscipline and Oriental education Stanhope aspired to correct, and in the institution of katharevousa as a national language. The forfeit exacted by nations can be even more dramatic still: material possessions, land, and lives are also lost in the exchange, a point Hobsbawm illustrates with the example of Greece: The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities . . . [and] mass expulsion and even genocide began to make their appearance on the southern margins of Europe during and after World War I, as the Turks set about the mass extirpation of the Armenians in 1915 and, after the Greco-Turkish war of 1922, expelled between 1.3 and 1.5 millions of Greeks from Asia Minor, where they had lived since the days of Homer.39

For the majority of those involved, the enforced “exchange of populations” overseen by the League of Nations did not add up to an even exchange at all:

138


in many cases, it meant exchanging a comfortable urban lifestyle for an indigent rural one, resettling in a place where the customs and language were foreign, and where one was the object of contempt and discrimination by the indigenous population. Legg and Roberts record that approximately 20 percent of Asia minor refugees died within the first year after arrival in Greece and that fifty years after resettlement, refugees and their descendants continued to make up “a major segment of the disadvantaged.”40 This structure of exchange is sublimated as nations reproduce themselves, as, through centralized education systems and mass media, they establish themselves as primary and invisible matrices of meaning and value.41 Indeed, as Jean-Joseph Goux writes, “it is always through replacement that values are created”—a principle that extends to the nation, which acquires value by demanding sacrifice, offering itself for exchange, putting a price on itself.42 Like other forms of value, it “sublimates the damages by compensating for them. . . . [W]hat is required,” Goux continues, “to compensate for a violation, to redeem a loss, to offset or indemnify a crime, is the determination of value, which alone can erase and liquidate while conferring its validity and identity.”43 Yet the closer one’s personal circumstances correspond to the imagined community, the less will the act of exchange bear a sense of loss; the more the representation seems like an even exchange, the easier it can pass as no exchange at all. Such is the functionally homogeneous surface toward which nations strive, what Gellner describes as an “anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals,” and Anderson analyzes under the sign of “documentary exchangeability.”44 This functional replaceability does not, however, ultimately apply to the nation itself, which, unlike its citizens, accedes to the transcendent status of a general equivalent. Following the logic of “synthesis and subsumption” that characterizes the general equivalent, the nation synthesizes a diversity of peoples into a “national identity” and subsumes them beneath its authority; like the money form, it constitutes itself as the equivalent through which other exchange relations must pass and through which value is established.45 Analogous to a fetishization of the Sovereign People, this ascent to the status of general equivalent entails a forgetting of origin—“the erasure of a genesis, the obliteration of a history,” as Goux puts it—that clearly resonates with our account of the mythologized “inaugural crisis” of the nation.46 Indeed it is precisely this effacement of origin that subtends the transcendent status of the general equivalent: “The mysterious genesis of this privilege is effaced, leaving [its] monopoly absolute, absolved, exempted in [its] transcendent role as a standard and measure of values.”47 The general equivalent henceforth remains transcendent to variable values, characterized by permanence, disinterestedness, and neutrality in the arbitration of values; it is the keeper of law and justice, their guarantee. The nation’s position as general equivalent both institutes a detour of exchange and effects a loss of the materially present. First, then, it replaces


139

the particular and immediate relations of persons and goods with a detour through a centralized and uniform standard of measurement. Value is measured, rather than through the other in a simple specular relation (as in the elementary form of value or the Lacanian Imaginary), through a representation of the other: a representation that is at once a Symbolic father—a Patria—that determines value and resolves conflicts, and a fraternal “people” that is not an-other, but all others: “Greekness,” “the American people,” “the French spirit.”48 This implies not only that the nation masquerades as the more neighborly elementary form of value—it is “imagined as a community because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”49—but that it mediates the social relations of citizens; one can not immediately consume one’s freedoms or rights without passing through the detour of nationality, obeying its laws, adopting its practices, conforming (more or less) to a Greek (or French or American) identity. The value of the nation, accordingly, can no longer be measured by everyday life, for the nation is itself the standard of measurement: “the people” against which people are measured. Second, the nation’s ascent to the status of general equivalent entails a loss of the materially present, for, as Goux contends, “contained in the opposition between the commodity’s value and the commodity itself is not only the spiritualist opposition between soul and body but also the idealist opposition between the ideal and the real.”50 Accordingly, the substitution of the sovereign people that rule a nation for the peoples that comprise it constitutes a repression of that “body” and that “real.” The material has significance only insofar as it is convertible into the non-material: that is, into value. Indeed if the nation functions as a Symbolic Father, we should not forget that “the ‘standardizing identification with the paternal image’ is made possible only by the death of the real father, who then takes up the position of the dead father, first fetishized and subsequently symbolized and idealized.”51 Thus the material present of peoples must be effaced—forgotten if not literally destroyed—to produce a fetishized (overvalued and idealized) symbolic representation of the people, in which a sign replaces material presence. “The history of the money function is marked by a progression toward abstraction and convention,” writes Goux, that ultimately tends to “make matter indifferent.”52 Through its movement of sublimation and idealization, the nation aligns itself with the authenticity and authority of the Idea, and thus, in that far-reaching set of terms analyzed by Derrida, with the immediate presence of meaning over the mechanics of signification, the spiritual over the material, consciousness over deathliness, the natural over the artificial, the interior over the exterior, the familiar over the foreign. This is to say not only that materiality is, however ironically, recast as indirection and detour, but that the nation, as Idea, has the redoubtable power to supercede, eclipse, and render irrelevant material circumstances.53 Indeed, nothing is more inimical to the nation’s process of abstraction than the kind of recalcitrant materiality

140


thematized by the lamentation: a physicality that resists signification, that refuses to be submitted to exchange or governed by a general equivalent, to be transported from the defiled, foreign realm of matter to the clean, well-lit room of meaning.

Hatzis’s Antiphonal Testimonies The Singrafeas of To diplo biblio—the intradiegetic author who elicits the narratives that comprise the novel—initially aspires to craft a coherent national identity for the romeiko (modern Greek), to function as a sort of general equivalent that regulates and synthesizes relations between individuals. But this project largely fails. Not only do the multiple stories he collects dislocate Greek identity from both Hellenism and a national territory, they remain intransigently in the form of testimony—fragmented and unresolved, mourning the very losses that the nation finesses beneath the structure of compensation. The novel’s shifting narrative stance—a structure that, much like the antiphonal form of lamentation, functions as both an evidentiary technique and a political strategy—figures the romeiko as an intersection of heterogeneous voices and a site of contention. However, the Singrafeas’ invocation of witnesses, I would argue, is less a failed construction of identity than a productive construction of crisis that returns the nation to its point of origin, seizes its mode of production, and disrupts its system of exchange. The Singrafeas’ question, in one important sense, already determines the parameters of national identity, for his question is about the romeiko and thus a choice between dueling Greek identities—one grounded in the Orthodox, Byzantine heritage (romeiko) and the other in the pagan, classical heritage (hellene). “That contrast,” writes Herzfeld, “pit[s] against each other two cultural ideologies, two Greek languages [demotic and katharevousa, and] two readings of Greek history.”54 Indeed, Hellenic identity functions in the novel primarily as a joke, an ironic incongruity with the reality of modern Greek lives. Kostas, a gasterbeiter in a German factory and the novel’s main narrator, explicitly mocks the discrepancy between the timeless Hellenic ideal inculcated in the national education system and his own monotonous life in exile, mass producing modernity for others. Working in tandem with his Turkish counterpart, he muses: Katebaivnei fortwmevno~ aujtov~, trabavw kai; gw; xefovrtwto~ sto; diavdromo, na; pavw pavli sto; tmh`ma —kai; gurivzoume e[tsi pivsw kai; mprov~, ajpavnw kai; kavtw, xeftivdia paradarmevna, th`~ megavlh~ tourkikh`~ aujtokratoriva~ ejkei`no~, th`~ aijwniva~ ‘Ellavdo~ ejgwv, pou; ma`~ th; levgane sto; scoleiov. (As he goes down in his loaded cart, I pull into the corridor in my unloaded one, to go again to the office— and we go back and forth this way, up and down, dangling threads, him the great Turkish autocrat and me, the eternal Hellene, as they told us in school.) (25)55


141

Although pursuing something distinct from the resuscitated Hellene envisioned by early nationalists and European travelers, the Singrafeas nonetheless seeks a coherent national identity for the modern Greek. Converting narrative fragments into national meaning, he assumes the role of general equivalent: the transcendent center that synthesizes and subsumes, a symbolic father that determines value and governs the representation through which one’s relation to the other is mediated. Indeed, characters in the novel rarely speak to each other, but through the Singrafeas who converts their idiosyncratic verbal artifacts into national sense value. What the Singrafeas sees in Anastasia’s eyes on her wedding day is, significantly, not her tears or her sorrow, but the national identity they represent. When Kostas asks him: “tiv koitavzei~ e[tsi;” (What are you looking at like that?), he responds: “To; romeviko . . . {Ola ei\nai mevsa, koivtaxev ta mevsa, s’aujta ta; mavtia th~, Kwvsta” (The romeiko. . . . Everything is within them, look at it all within her eyes, Kostas) (55). Diverted through the general equivalent of “Greekness” (and purified through katharevousa), Anastasia’s eyes are converted, in the Singrafeas’ notebook, into a generalized elegy for Greek womanhood:

pernou`ne genie;~ ajt eleivwte~ basanismevne~ romiev~. ΔAkovma . . . gunai`ke~ sfagmevne~, ajt imasmevne~, sth; Ciov, sta; Yarav, gunai`ke~ mesologgivt isse~, mikrasiavstisse~ th`~ katastrofh`~, oJmadike;~ ejktelevsei~ th`~ katoch`~, oJ ejmfuvlio~ povlemo~ —oJ patevra~ th~. Ta; blevpw mevsa —cwravfia prasinismevna th`~ hJmeravda~ kai; stavcua mazi; th`~ ajpelpisia`~ kammevna ajp’ to; livba sto;n kavmpo th`~ Qessaliva~ —o}lo~ oJ kavmpo~ th`~ Qessaliva~ ei\nai mevsa sta; mavt ia th~—korfe;~ ajpavnw lampkopou`n cionismevne~ katakalovkaira . . . Kai; Blevpw mevsa —ti;~ panagive~ tw`n bravcwn, tou;~ plhgwmevnou~ ajrcavggelou~ se; sapismevna tevmpla ajpo palie;~ ejkklhsiev~ . . . Kai; ti;~ ajkouvw—kampavne~ ajpo; nucterine;~ litanei`e~ gia; ta; karavbia pou; kinduneuvoun sto; pevlago—gunai`ke~ ajpavnw sto; xavgnanto— a[llh mia; qavlassa—mau`ra manthvlia—kΔei\nai mikrh; kai; de;n th`~ pa`n ta; mau`ra. . . . Aujthnh`~ th`~ pa`ne. Perissovt ero ajp’ ta; nufiavt ika. (endless generations of the romeiko passing by, full of hardship. Still . . . slaughtered, raped women on Chios, in Psara, women from Messolonghi, from the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the mass executions of the occupation, the civil war—her father. Within them I see—green fields of gentleness together with despair, stalks burned by the hot wind of the Thessalian countryside—all the countryside of Thessaly is held within her eyes, snow-covered mountaintops which gleam all summer . . . And I see within them—the madonnas of the rocks, the wounded archangels of rotting icons in ancient churches . . . and I hear in them—church bells from nighttime litanies for the ships that navigate the open sea—women upon the promontory—another sea—black veils—she is young and black doesn’t suit her . . . it’s fitting for her. More fitting than a wedding dress.) (55–56)

Such florid description, however poignant, is in marked contrast to the novel’s testimonies and, however attentive to the losses sustained by the nation’s

142


women, an erasure of Anastasia’s experience, an occultation of the material present ostensibly indemnified by a timeless national presence. But this national character keeps falling apart; the center does not hold. And the Singrafeas increasingly recognizes that his collection of testimonies testifies, above all, to the inability of resolving such indeterminate evidence into knowledge or identity:

Tou;~ blevpw polu; kala; tou;~ spasmevnou~ aJrmou;~ tou` biblivou mou. Kai; blevpw pivsw ajpΔ aujtou;~ th;n sujs iastikhv tou ajnepavrkeia . . . De; mporw` na; procwrhvsw, na; ta; devsw provswpa kai; katastavsei~ se; mia;n eJnovthta . . . De;n ei\nai ajkribw`~ ejreivpia —ei\nai kommavt ia, yhfia; skorpismevna. Kai; de;n eJnwvnontai tovΔna me; tΔ a[llo. (I see them very well, the broken joints of my book. And I see behind them the extent of its inadequacy. . . . I can’t move ahead, can’t tie together characters and situations into a unity. . . . They aren’t exactly ruins—they’re pieces, scattered figures. And they aren’t joined one with the other). (185–86)

Such passages seem to suggest that the Singrafeas’ project ends in utter defeat, an interpretation arguably confirmed by his suicide. But I would like to suggest another reading, one that acknowledges the similarity of the “broken joints” and “scattered figures” of this passage not only to the (literally and symbolically) fractured bodies thematized by lamentations, but also to “the fragments and limbs of men” on Zarathustra’s figurative battlefield which, for Nietzsche, are the pieces of a possible future—the symptoms of a vibrant, regenerative crisis. This regenerative crisis is instigated by the gesture of the question that elicits the novel’s testimonies—a question that puts national identity on trial, infers that nationality is a site of shattered understanding. This gesture, I would argue, not only returns the nation to a point of “inaugural crisis,” but is fueled by the nationally unusable knowledge it elicits: testimonies that incessantly contest the structure of compensation that produces national value, noxious waste products that threaten the integrity of national processes of self-reproduction. The catastrophe orchestrated and lamented by the Singrafeas, that is, parodically reenacts the nation’s coming into being, returns it to its point of origin: both to the crisis through which it inaugurated its identity and to the scene(s) of loss through which it supplied itself with a past. This crisis is a way of appropriating the nation’s mode of selfproduction; it enables a re-formation of nationality by insisting on the present as a moment (of loss) that demands transformation. In the novel, this sense of crisis is formally, as well as thematically, fashioned: if the nation employs the gestures of lamentation to found itself, Hatzis makes use of the fragmented, testimonial, and antiphonal gestures of lamentation to found a difference within it.56 His is a creative—and performative—reorientation of the lamentation’s sense of fractured cultural identity, another example of its usefulness for resisting assimilation. The Singrafeas’


143

death, moreover, can be read as the productive destruction of a certain national imaginary, a dynamic reconception of the governing principle—“the general equivalent”—of nationality. In speaking to the Singrafeas, the novel’s characters start out speaking to, and being translated by, an invariable standard, but they end up addressing a dead body. This transformation could hardly be more symbolically dense. The general equivalent has been remade into an empty signifier, one receptive to all manner of inscription and appropriation. The novel’s characters end up speaking, like mourners, to and through death: through the unknown and the indeterminate, the incommensurate and immeasurable. On this interpretation, the body politic would govern not by an abstract identity that commands conformity, but by a limitless question: a Nietzschean politics, to be sure.57 It is the fragmented testimonies, then, rather than the Singrafeas’ conversion of them, that ultimately comprise both the novel and its response to the question of national identity. Those testimonies, moreover, produce a profligate heap of waste material—knowledge that is unusable in, and disruptive to, the process of national reproduction. Of the order of those “political and discursive strategies” that Bhabha describes, “where adding-to does not addup but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge,”58 the novel’s testimonies do not provide the kind of evidence that the nation can employ for assessing, intensifying, and refining its field of power. In part this is because, unlike the grid of optional identities posed by the national census (that, as Anderson puts it, are “intolerant of multiple, politically ‘transvestite,’ blurred or changing identifications”59), the question posed by the Singrafeas is madly indefinite, an opening onto particular, provisional, contradictory, and inconclusive divagations, an inarticulate materiality, and a scandalous diversion of resources. The Singrafeas’ informants also persistently impugn national exchange value by both tarrying over a banal materiality that resists sublimation into meaning and overtly “dis-identifying” with the nation. Insisting that governing representations of the romeiko are inadequate and inequitable (and that Greeks have largely been cheated in the exchange), they repeatedly lament the losses—of linguistic and regional identification, the self, and the materially present—that the nation converts into value. Recalling the lamentation’s refusal of compensation for loss and its reiterations of literality, Kostas regularly chronicles a prosaic materiality—the Real occulted by the structure of compensation. The novel opens, for example, with his enumeration of the products made in the factory in Stuttgart, and the second chapter is largely a catalog of the labor and materials of the lumberyard in Volos where he worked before emigrating. Such passages antagonize that system of exchange that “make[s] matter indifferent”60 and, in the context of the overriding inquiry of the novel, construct a confrontation of material peoples with their ideality. Further evidence of this repudiated exchange is characters’ disidentification with the nation, of their resistance to replacing people with the “Sovereign People.” The narrators of To diplo biblio repeatedly describe themselves as

144


foreign to such an image; Kostas is incredulous that the Singrafeas intends to learn something about the romeiko from him: “to; romeviko zhta`~ na; brei`~ ajpo; mevna; ’Apo; mevna;” (You’re going to find out about the romeiko from me? From me?) (29).61 Indeed, departing for Germany, Kostas has explicitly designated his nation alien—“Sullogivzomai mia; stigmh; —de;n e[cw tivpota n’ajfhvsw ejdw`. De;n e[cw tivpota pou; na; foba`mai —tiv qa; brw` sth; Germaniva— th; douleiav, to; kruvo, to;n xevno tovpo —ejtou`to~ ejdw` ei`nai pio; xevno~ gia; mevna.” (I contemplate a moment—I don’t have anything to leave here. I don’t have anything to fear—what will I find in Germany?— work, cold, a foreign land—this land here is more foreign to me.) (58)—and this sentiment is echoed five years later on his return: {Ena~ ejxovristo~ qav’mai me;~ sto;n dikov mou to;n tovpo, e{na~ provsfuga~, o{pw~ ei\nai o{loi tou~” (I’ll be an exile in my own country, a refugee, as they all are) (194).62 One root of this disidentification is the characters’ imbeddedness in an inescapably transnational context and globalized economy that renders Greece at a loss in developmental terms at the same time that it empties out its labor force. Greeks are, in the Singrafeas’ terms, “`Ena~ kovsmo~ pou; feuvgei” (a people that leaves).63 A metaphor incarnate—“kavnw th; metaforav” (I do transport and delivery/I make metaphor) (21)—Kostas is a figure for Greece’s relation to the industrialized world, for the products, profits, and modernity that are transported elsewhere.64

Hatzis’s Requiem for an Unsymbolic Father In the chapter entitled “Revkbiem gia; evna mikro; ravfth” (Requiem for a Little Tailor), Kostas learns from the Singrafeas of his father’s activities in the resistance and civil war. Hatzis’s evocation of the dead father is, significantly, not the Symbolic Father that, idealized and transcendent, determines value and resolves conflict—not a figure, that is, for the Patria—but rather an example of both the suppression of testimony on which the Patria is built, and the lives drained out by its expropriation of death. It is during the occupation of Greece in World War II (by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria) that the “little tailor” first conceives of “sosialismo;~ kai; dhmokrativa, patrivda k’ ejleuqeriva, ta; dikaiwvmata tw`n ajnqrwvpwn, hJ zwh; tw`n law`n —kainouvrgia pravmata oJlovtela, to;n spavzan ejkei`no to;n kuvklo k’ hJ mikrhv tou zwh; e[niwqe twvra na; eJnwvnetai me; th; megalosuvnh th`~ koinh`~ ajnqrwvpinh~ uJpovqesh~” (socialism and democracy, fatherland and freedom, the rights of man, the life of the people—new things entirely, they broke apart the cycle of his little life; he now felt part of a grand affair of the human community) (92). But over the course of the occupation and ensuing civil war, this newfound awareness is transformed into the disheartening recognition that freedom, human rights, and the life of the people are precisely what the nation sacrifices to produce the imaginary “Sovereign People.” Kostas’s father, a participant in the war in Albania and local secretary for the EAM (Eqnikov Apeleuqerwtikov mevtwpo, National Liberation Front), is ultimately


145

imprisoned, forced formally to abjure his beliefs, and declare (falsely) that he has denounced his comrades.65 This “testimony” extorted from Kostas’s father is instructive on multiple counts: it produces nationally quite useful meaning that is also entirely false; it evinces the national principle that the imagined version of “fatherland and freedom, the rights of man, [and] the life of the people” supercedes, and is more truthful than, the experience of individual peoples; and it sets up a starkly suggestive contrast with the fragmented, provisional, and uncertain testimonies that comprise the bulk of the novel. Following the execution of his comrades (a fate he has inexplicably and agonizingly been spared)— Tou;~ oJmolovghse tou;~ e{xh fovnou~ pou; de;n ei\ce kavnei, fortwvnontav~ tou~ stou;~ parapavnw pou; tou;~ ei[cane diatavxei, uJpovgraye th; dhvlwsh pw;~ parasuvrqhke, aujto;~ de;n h[xere th;n ajlhvqeia, tou;~ ajpokhruvcnei twvra tou;~ paliou;~ sunagwnistev~ tou, ti;~ ijdeve~ ejkeivnou tou` kairou`, pouv, ftwco;~ a[nqrwpo~, mhvte ti;~ h[xere —kai; t’ a[lla pou; uJpogravfane tovte. ‘H dhvlwshv tou dhmosieuvthke me; megavla gravmmata sti;~ ejfhmerivde~ th`~ Lavrisa~ kai; tou` Bovlou . . . (He confessed to six murders that he hadn’t committed, blaming those higher up who had ordered them; he signed the declaration that said he had been carried away, that he didn’t know the truth, that he now denounces his former comrades and his ideas of that time and that, being a poor man, he didn’t even understand—and the other stuff they signed then. His declaration was published, with capital letters in the newspapers of Larisa and Volos . . .) (104–5)

The evidence demanded by the nation is not genuine testimony, but assent to a prefabricated knowledge with a guaranteed use value. Far from the ambivalent, war-shattered reconstruction of self and world that the Singrafeas relates on Kostas’s father’s behalf, this unambiguous declaration of knowledge—permanent and technologically distributed—is a betrayal of perception and identity that, from the nation’s perspective, are necessary and negligible losses intrinsic to the production of national meaning. In a larger historical context, moreover, Hatzis’s narration of the “little tailor’s” story is also a memento of what has been systematically repressed from Greek national memory, sent to the overburdened shredder of unusable pasts.66 If the “Requiem” chapter of To diplo biblio narrates the suppression of testimony on which the Patria is constructed, it also interrogates the nation’s mystification of death. It is a bitterly ironic version of the deathliness of patriotism that circumscribes the post-war life of Kostas’s father. Denied both a nationally glorified death—however effective his part in the resistance, he would, as a communist, be branded a traitor—and literal death itself, he carries within him a deathliness neither triumphant, conclusive, nor meaningful: Gi’ aujtovn, loipovn, de;n e[mene tivpota —kai; mhvte ki oJ qavnato~. Aujth; ei[tan hJ dikhv tou hJ timwriva. ‘O ajpovhco~ th`~ megavlh~ trikumiva~

146


e[ftane livgo ki w}~ to; keliv tou. Nikhvqhkan —de;n ’evmeine tivpota. ‘H geniav tou ajkevria nikhvqhke —tevlo~. Aujto; to; tevlo~ douvleye mevsa tou mevra kai; nuvcta . . . {Ena~ a[nqrwpo~ pou; tou` klevyan to; qavnato kai; tou` klevyane kai; to; dikaivwma na; peqavnei. (For him, then, nothing remained —not even death. This was his punishment. Only a little echo of the big storm made it to his cell. They were defeated — nothing remained. His generation entirely defeated —the end. This end ate away inside him day and night. . . . A man from whom they stole death and the right to die.) (104)

An end without end, that destroys by refusing to kill. When the “little tailor’s” belated death at last arrives, his manner of burial—“Me; th;n paliav tou ajntavrtikh claivnh, diavtrhth ajpo; ti;~ sfai`re~ pou; xescivsane ta; kormia; tw`n suntrovfwn” (with his old rebel’s cloak, riddled with the bullet holes that ripped apart the bodies of his companions) (106)—emphasizes the anachronism and meaninglessness of his death: he is shrouded in signifiers that point to a non-existent event. Nations, then, make regular use of lamentation to recognize and interpret loss, sanctify origins, and retrieve lost identities, but lamentations also present clear dangers: they may expose the losses sublimated by national value, interrupt national identities, disrupt social order, or insist on radical transformation of laws or economies. Yet as Hatzis’s antiphonal testimonies teach us, such forces, however menacing from the nationalist’s point of view, may precipitate a crisis that arrests the nation’s processes of reproduction, counteracts its anesthetizations of trauma, recuperates its waste products, and returns it to a point of creative origin—may function, that is, as an antidote to the novel’s own requiem.

Chapter

6

L a m e n tat i o n a n d G e n d e r : B e n Je l l o u n’s L’ E N FA N T D E S A B L E a n d t h e ( D e ) C o l o n i z at i o n o f t h e B o dy

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel, L’enfant de sable is a lamentation for the body

colonized by gender: this chapter will attempt to explore this proposition, to understand why such a reading is called for and what it would entail, acknowledging that nearly every term in this proposition merits being taken to task.1 I am less concerned with campaigning for this proposition as a critical shibboleth than with attending to the productive problems to which it leads, exploring what it teaches us about the significance of lamentation to two critical articulations of modernity: gender and colonization. The first part of this chapter thus scrutinizes this proposition by exploring the novel’s narrative construction of it, by placing it in a theoretical dialogue with postcolonial and gender studies, and by considering it in the specific context of Morocco. The second part of the chapter interprets these analyses in light of the novel’s pervasive language of mourning and the tradition of lamentation we have been exploring throughout this book.

Body, Nation, Narrative L’enfant de sable proposes that gender is a colonization of the body; it formulates this proposition by melding together the troubled gender identity of its main character with the (de)colonization of Morocco and a reticulate narrative architecture of multiple and feuding storytellers, enigmatic journals, and mysterious letters. Having fathered seven daughters and wishing to salvage both his inheritance and dignity, Hadj Ahmed Suleiman decides to raise his

148


next child—whatever its sex—as a son. Thus commences the saga of Ahmed, biologically female but gendered male, who the novel follows through a series of life experiences: circumcision; gender lessons in the home, hammam, mosque, and street; the onset of menstruation and the libidinal agonies of adolescence; marriage to a disabled cousin; experiments with a feminine identity, the circus, drag performance, and global travel; and an uncertain rebirth as a woman named Zahra.2 This tale of gender unrest unfolds, not insignificantly, in the context of Moroccan decolonization. Tension between nationalists and officials of the French protectorate flicker regularly in the novel’s background: in “le bruit strident de l’appel à la prière . . . [qui] n’était plus un appel à la prière mais une incitation à l’émeute” (the strident sound of the call to prayer . . . that was no longer a call to prayer, but an incitation to riot) (8) or in the description of “ceux qui ont été chassés des campagnes par la sécheresse et les détournements d’eau” (those chased from the countryside by the drought and diversions of water supplies) (168)—both of which might depict the year 1937, when a drought devastated Morocco, famine and typhus ravaged the population, and the French colonial administration, in an astonishingly brutal response to protests, killed and injured numerous civilians.3 Fatouma also narrates events that resemble “les semaines sanglantes” (the bloody weeks) of 1944; she describes “tous ces gamins des bidonvilles, renvoyés des écoles, sans travail, sans toit, sans avenir, sans espoir. Ils était sortis dans les rues, d’abord les mains nues, ensuite les mains pleines de pierres, réclamant du pain. Ils hurlaient n’importe quel slogan . . . des femmes et des hommes sans travail les rejoingirent . . . [et] l’armée a tiré dans la foule” (all these kids from the shantytowns, turned away from school, without work, without shelter, without future, without hope. They took to the streets, at first with empty hands, then with their hands filled with stones, demanding bread. They yelled any slogan . . . women and men without work joined them . . . and the army fired into the crowd) (169). This passage evokes the events that followed French arrests of Istiqlal leaders in January 1944, which were apparently part of a deliberate strategy of provocation and repression and succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising that included a general strike and the closing of shops, schools, factories, and worksites.4 In Rabat, when protesters in front of the palais royal were ordered to leave, they were bludgeoned by French police, who subsequently began shooting blindly into the crowd. In Fez, a similar scene of civilian slaughter and mass arrest transpired a few days later. If the novel hints coyly at events of Moroccan decolonization, it also reflects on decolonization allegorically. As Lisa Lowe has suggested, Salem, Amar, and Fatouma (who narrate chapters 14, 15, and 16 respectively), in their alternative conclusions to Ahmed’s tale, allegorize possible scenarios for decolonization: a violent, suicidal struggle against a rapacious aggressor; a slowly decaying, nostalgic isolation; or the piecing together of an eclectic collage from the fragments of past and present, self and other, here and

L a m e n tat i o n a n d G e n d e r

149

elsewhere.5 Moreover, the uncertain brink of identity on which Ahmed seeks to balance him/herself regularly allegorizes the bewilderingly complex process of establishing national independence: Aujourd’hui je cherche à me délivrer. De quoi au juste? . . . de cette relation avec l’autre en moi, celui qui m’écrit et me donne l’étrange impression d’être encore de ce monde? . . . Alors je vais sortir. Il est temps de naître de nouveau. En fait je ne vais pas changer mais simplement revenir à moi, juste avant que le destin qu’on m’avait fabriqué ne commence à se dérouler et ne m’emporte dans un courant. . . . Quel soulagement, quel plaisir de penser que ce seront mes propres mains qui traceront le chemin. . . . (Today I seek to free myself. From what, exactly? . . . From this relation with the other in me, who writes [to] me and gives me the strange impression of still being of this world? . . . So, I shall go out. It is time to be born again. In fact, I am not going to change, but simply to return to myself, before the destiny that was fabricated for me begins to unroll and carry me off on its current. . . . What relief, what pleasure to think that it will be my own hands that will trace the path. . . .) (111–12)

The question Ahmed poses vis-à-vis his/her own body is, arguably, the urquestion of decolonization: from what (political, economic, cultural, or military forces) must I free myself to be truly liberated? And the figures in this passage—of an other that has permeated the self and on whose discourse I have come to depend for my very being, of a narrow escape from an engulfing destiny and a heady chance to make my own way—trace a pattern very similar to that of colonial disassembly and nation building. This entanglement of corporal and political decolonization is also deepened by the thwarted and inconclusive nature of Ahmed’s various attempts to “return to the self,” which allegorize the simultaneous impossibility of returning to a “natural” pre-discursive body and of recuperating an “authentic” native or national identity.6 Ahmed’s story is infinitely complicated by the fact that it is differently narrated by a professional storyteller, by Ahmed him/herself (ostensibly), by the brother of Ahmed’s wife, by a man recently arrived from the South, by three members of the audience who convene after the storyteller’s death (the aforementioned Salem, Amar, and Fatouma), and by a blind troubadour with an uncanny resemblance to Ben Jelloun’s literary mentor Jorge Luis Borges.7 This complex alloy of gender trouble, national unrest, and narrative revolt form a kind of fluid triangulation in which the body is the nation, the nation is the narrative, and the narrative is the body. Indeed, from birth, Ahmed’s body is linked to the body politic. When s/he is born, his/her father runs the following announcement in the national newspaper:

150

L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s Dieu est clément

Il vient d’illuminer la vie et le foyer de votre serviteur et dévoué potier Hadj Ahmed Souleïamane. Un garçon—que Dieu le protège et lui donne longue vie—est né jeudi à 10h. Nous l’avons nommé Mohamed Ahmed. Cette naissance annonce fertilité pour la terre, paix et prospérité pour le pays. Vive Ahmed! Vive le Maroc! (God is Merciful He has illuminated the life and home of your servant and devoted potter Hadj Ahmed Suleiman. A boy—may God protect him and bring him long life—was born on Thursday at 10:00 a.m. We have named him Mohamed Ahmed. This birth will bring fertility to the land, peace and prosperity to the country. Long live Ahmed! Long live Morocco!) (30)

Not only does this announcement inaugurate the figural association of Ahmed with Morocco, but it suggests that fertility, peace, and the prosperity of the country are contingent upon the birth of sons, that the destiny of the country rests in men’s hands. It thus founds both the novel’s analogy between sexual and political liberation—Ahmed’s attempts to decolonize the body and Moroccans’ efforts to decolonize the body politic—and its implicit interrogation of masculinist nationalisms.8 If Ahmed’s body is a figure for the space of the nation, so too is the narrative, which is consistently depicted in terms of the geographical space of a Moroccan city. The seven gates through which the primary raconteur organizes his narrative are also the gates that separate the medina from the ville nouvelle, the Arab from the European.9 The intricate circuitousness of the narrative, moreover—its “ruelles tres étroites . . . [et] circulaires [qui] n’ont pas de bout” (narrow little streets . . . endless and circular)—seem to identify it expressly with the medina (20–21). Yet this narrative space is also, like the body of Ahmed, inscribed by both genders, associated with both the public, masculine space of the street and market, and with the interior, feminine space of the home:10 “Le livre est ainsi: une maison où chaque fenêtre est un quartier, chaque porte une ville, chaque page est une rue. . . . Nous allons habiter cette grande maison. . . . ” (The book is a house in which each window is a quartier, each door a town, each page a street . . . . We are going to inhabit this big house) (108). To complete that triangular figure, the narrative is also figured as the body—of both the storyteller and Ahmed. “Vous ne pouvez y accéder,” says the storyteller of Ahmed’s narrative, “sans traverser mes nuits et mon corps. Je suis ce livre. . . . J’ai senti le livre s’incarner en moi” (You can’t get to it without traversing my nights and my body. I am this book. . . . I felt the book embody itself in me) (13). Ahmed, similarly, describes the material, embodied, and intimate reach of the anonymous correspondent’s “phrases [qui] me caressent la peau, me touchent aux endroits les plus sensible de mon corps” (sentences that caress my skin, touch me in the most sensitive parts of my body) (96). And in a similar vein, the correspondent writes, “je vous entends


151

parler à vous-même ou vous coucher nue dans les pages blanches de ce cahier” (I hear you speak to yourself and lie down naked in the blank pages of this notebook) (60). This nakedness and blankness, this embodied narrative clad in notions that se debarassent, might also be read as the nakedness of a story (like that of the nation or the transgendered body) that is yet to be written, that calls for an undressing or an erasure, a “decolonization” that entails confronting oneself exposed. It is through these figural, thematic and allegorical imbrications, that the novel formulates the proposition that gender is a colonization of the body. And the premise draws on a certain historicized logic. For not unlike the political variant of colonization, gender is a practice of taking possession of, and discursively occupying, putatively “undeveloped” bodies through an attachment to a “parent state,” a practice that is cast simultaneously as natural development and logical submission and that is carried out by disciplining desire, regulating spaces and time, persuasion, negotiation, or force. Both gender and colonization are imbedded in a language of natural development that assigns the pre-gendered, like the pre-colonial, the status of a child. Gender non-conformists, natives, and children are not subjects in their own right, but, to borrow Judith Butler’s language, abjected beings not yet properly gendered or civilized. They inhabit the uncontrollable and chaotic boundaries of civilization and “their very humanness comes into question; these excluded sites come to bound the human as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation.”11 Conceived via negativa (as the uncivilized, abnormal, undeveloped, inhuman), they are discursively associated with (figurally related to and often conceptually undifferentiated from) the insane, the poor, the ill, the physically disabled, the homeless, and the criminal, that is, with other pathologized groups, with whom they are perceived to share properties such as unreason, impurity, and social impropriety.12 For example, in one version of the story, Ahmed, reflecting on his/her marriage to a disabled female cousin, makes the following journal entry: “Je finis par penser . . . qu’elle avait accepté ce mariage en pensant que, si je l’avais demandée, ce nétait pas par amour, mais pour un arrangement social, pour masquer une infirmité ou une perversité” (I ended up thinking . . . that she had accepted this marriage thinking that, if I had asked for it, it wasn’t out of love, but for a social arrangement, to mask some infirmity or perversity) (76). Gender non-conformity, as Ahmed recognizes, is perceived as sickness or, like criminality, as a more willful deviation from normality;13 it thus bears a striking resemblance to the pathologies attributed to natives by colonial discourse, to the “Oriental” of European invention described by Edward Said, to those inhabiting the negative side of the Manichean allegory as elaborated by Abdul JanMohamed.14 Such pathologizing discourses operate, as Foucault has taught us, by submitting specific acts, practices, or characteristics to a structural extrapolation that makes of them signs of a condition. The colonial economy described by JanMohamed—“based on

152


a transformation of racial into moral and even metaphysical difference,” the allegorical extensions of which “come to dominate every facet of imperialist mentality”—is one example of this diffusion from specific characteristic to essential character.15 At least three facets of this pathologizing language of development merit our attention. First, it disciplines the idiosyncrasies of phenomena into a taxonomy of distinct and identifiable genres. “The European,” writes JanMohamed, “commodifies the native by negating his individuality, his subjectivity, so that he is now perceived as a generic being that can be exchanged for any other native.”16 It is no coincidence that genre and gender both derive from the same Greek root, genos (race, kind, sort, class, genus), and connote a particular style or manner. Indeed, we might rephrase JanMohamed’s contention to say that the native is perceived as a gender: for, negating individuality and subjectivity, gender also makes beings into interchangeable parts. As if to evoke reflection on this matter, the seminal word of Ben Jelloun’s novel— the title of the first chapter—is “Homme” (Man): a term that may refer to mankind, to men only, or to a particular man, a designation that is thus inspecifically generic and that specifies by gender, that inscribes not only the manner in which one gender eclipses the other, but the imperious power of gender to say who one is without saying anything about one. Second, the generic descriptors through which the native, the little boy, or the little girl are “known” are also the pedagogy through which they are taught to know themselves, and they are thus a formidable mechanism for overriding experience. In other words, the colonized subject is counted upon to take over the process of engendering: of making men, women, or natives, much as the child is counted upon to assume the law of the father, or, as in our narrative, Ahmed, at his/her father’s death, assumes the role of master of the household. Addressing his/her sisters s/he declares: A partir de ce jour, je ne suis plus votre frère; je ne suis pas votre père non plus, mais votre tuteur. J’ai le devoir et le droit de veiller sur vous. Vous me devez obéissance et respect. Enfin, inutile de vous rappeler que je suis un homme d’ordre et que, si la femme chez nous est inférieure à l’homme, ce n’est pas parce que Dieu l’a voulu ou que le Prophète l’a décideé, mais parce qu’elle accepte ce sort. Alors subissez et vivez dans le silence! (From this day on, I’m no longer your brother; I’m not your father, either, but your guardian. I have the duty and the right to watch over you. You owe me obedience and respect. Anyway, I don’t have to remind you that I’m a man of order and that, if women are inferior to men here it’s not because God wished it or the prophet decided it, but because women accept it. So submit, and live in silence!) (66)

A model of both logical and vicious circularity, Ahmed’s speech simultaneously asserts his/her authority by fiat and insists that power operates by consensus; s/he at once imposes an order and snatches away the consolation


153

of that order being god-willed or natural. Ahmed’s address to his/her sisters not only, like the novel itself, juxtaposes a pervasive and rigid system of gender relationships with a recognition that potentially undoes them, but demonstrates the manner in which subjects take over the process of their own and others’ colonization. Finally, in both colonial regimes and the gender system, the body and its coverings function as primary signs, as the style that identifies one’s genre. What Fanon writes of a society in “Algeria Unveiled” applies equally to gender: “The way people clothe themselves, together with the traditions of dress and finery that custom implies, constitutes the most distinctive form of a society’s uniqueness, that is to say the one that is the most immediately perceptible.”17 Often, as Fanon notes of the veil, a single accessory suffices to signify an entire gender or society, and, in its overdetermination, becomes a site where much larger political and social issues are contested: The officials of the French administration . . . committed to destroying the people’s originality and under instructions to bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the veil, which was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status of the [Maghrebian] woman.18

This logic, then, of natural development, of pathology and cure, and of fixed genoi expressed in, through, and on the body governs the way in which both gender and colonization have historically been conceived.19 If the proposition “gender is a colonization of the body” risks inflating the meaning of colonization to the point of effacing historical or geographical specificity, it might also be taken as an imperative to sort through the details suppressed by the very category of “colonization.” Indeed, I take it here as a spur to explore the story of Moroccan colonization imbedded in the novel, to see how that story maps the refractory semantic terrain shared by gender and colonization. The details of this story, it is perhaps worth emphasizing, are the residue of colonization deployed as a generic term; and this is true as much when the term is used “metaphorically” (gender is a colonization of the body) as when it is used “literally” (Morocco was colonized by France).20 In either case, such peculiarities are implicitly chased off to the unpacified territory of irrelevant exceptions where, like those “dissident tribes” forever troubling the edges of empire, they do not cease to beleaguer the identity of colonization as such. The most conspicuous of these specificities, in the Moroccan case, is that, from the perspective of French political terminology, Morocco was never a colony, but a protectorate. What, then, is obscured by subsuming Morocco into a generalized theory—or history—of colonization? How does the protectorate, as a form of political or economic intervention, differ from colonization proper?21 What is the ideological work done by this conceptual distinction? And, finally, how does the protectorate,

154


in its theoretical or materialized forms, refine, refute, or clarify the proposition that gender is a colonization of the body? Casting France in the role of the benificent guardian—as more adult, robust, and masculine—the notion of the “protectorate” concomitantly constituted Morocco as immature, weak, and unsound; it represented French intervention in Morocco as a kind of brace compensating for infirmity or developmental deficiency.22 Depicting Morocco as “still in her infancy,” Maréchal Lyautey, the theoretical and administrative architect of the Moroccan protectorate, regularly blended the image of France as benign guardian and emancipator—as Liberty unflinchingly leading the people—with a perfectly clear recognition of the direction of colonial profit flows.23 Ostensibly counting on rhetorical juxtaposition to pass for logic, he calls on France to play “the role of a tutor, a beneficent big brother, to whom it will be in [Morocco’s] interest to remain tied, and [who will] benefit from the advantage of having made here . . . a nation whose emancipation will be effected under our tutelage and direction, and to our profit.”24 Here emancipation is not from but through France, a formulation that handily disguises the threat posed by France itself, which becomes the protector rather than the agressor from which one needs protection, the liberator rather than the subjugator. This depiction of colonization as a protective envelope is, I want to signal, intriguingly similar to Ben Jelloun’s portrayal of gender, to the “voile de chair” (veil of flesh) that, for Ahmed, “le séparait et le protégeait des autres” (separated and protected him from others), that provides an asylum from the “curiosité, méfiance et même une haine tenace” (curiosity, disdain and even tenacious hatred), elicited by his strangeness (7). Performing a distinct gender, this passage suggests, not only protects the good citizenry from the threat of uncertainty—from confusion, anomaly, infirmity, defilement, hybridity, fitna—but safeguards the gender non-conformist from the violence of others.25 But in both these instances, the protector is really the aggressor: it is France that is occupying Morocco; it is a rigid gender system that is oppressing Ahmed; the protective envelope is a disguise of its own menace, the consequences against which it “protects” are both of its own production and among its most potent disciplinary mechanisms.26 If this ruse of protection performed smoothly enough in the metropole, Moroccans were not so easily duped by it. A central and explicit demand of the 1944 Manifeste de l’Indépendance was “the liberation of our sovereignty from every form of tutelage.”27 Having handed the text of the Manifeste to the Résident Général Gabriel Puaux, the Vizir de la Justice added, “We have come to put an end to the relation of tutelage that was imposed on us by the Treaty of Fez. . . . We, the people of the Makhzen, have lived since 1912 as puppets and monkeys, manipulated by the protectorate administration.”28 The Vizir’s words—his commitment to eradicating manipulation, external imposition, and paternalistic relations—propels Morocco, I would suggest, directly onto the terrain of that irreducible question posed by Ahmed: “Aujourd’hui je cherche à me délivrer. De quoi au juste?” (Today I seek to


155

liberate myself. From what, exactly?) In other words, the Manifeste de l’Independence is implicitly as interrogative as it is declarative: from what must we free ourselves to be truly liberated? To what degree is it possible to liberate oneself from all forms of tutelage, externally scripted desires, and foreign manipulation? How does one sort out one’s own desire and identity from this self-alienation? And by what mechanisms will this project be carried out? The questions posed by (Ahmed’s interrogation of) gender turn out to be highly correlative with the questions confronted at the moment of independence from imperial rule. If the rhetoric of the protectorate was one of benign guidance, the administrative structure, according to Lyautey, was to be one of indirect rule along British lines, of association rather than assimilation: The concept of the Protecorate is one of a country maintaining its institutions, governing and administering itself with its own organs under the simple control of a European power that, replacing external representation, generally takes charge of the administration of the army, finances, and the management of economic development. What dominates and characterizes this conception is the notion of control, as opposed to the formula of direct administration.29

More discreet, less obviously coercive, this mechanism of “simple control” is a way of letting the natives play grownup. It is more or less a game of pretend where, like dressing up in Mommy’s or Daddy’s clothes, one is guided into genre-appropriate behaviors. Indeed another way of describing this indirect rule would be by way of Amar’s narration in L’enfant de sable, which begins with an excursus on corruption as hollowing out: J’aime bien le mot arabe qui désigne la corruption— . Ca s’applique aux matières qui perdent leur substance et qui n’ont plus de consistence, comme le bois par exemple qui garde l’enveloppe extérieure, il garde l’apparence, mais il est creux, il n’y a plus rien dedans, il a été miné de l’intérieur; des petites bêtes vraiment minuscules ont grignoté tout ce qu’il y avait sous l’écorce. (I love the Arabic word for corruption. It’s used for materials that lose their substance, consistency, or stability, like wood, for example, that retains its external shell, it keeps its outward appearance, but it’s hollow, there’s no longer anything inside, it’s been worn away from the inside; minute insects have gnawed away the core.) (146)

Amar is describing Moroccan society, but much the same might be said of the edifice of indirect rule, which, as instituted by the Treaty of Fez, set out to “safeguard the religious conditions, the respect and traditional prestige of the Sultan.”30 The wording could not be more “corrupt” in the sense elaborated by Amar; it enacts the hollowing out of the sultan’s authority, reserving his “respect and prestige,” but not his power; it keeps up the appearance of his authority at the same time that it hands over formal “administrative, judicial, educational, economic, financial, and military” control to the interests that

156


have already gnawed away the substance of his rule.31 Cloaked in the impeccable attire of “mutual respect”—the “essential characteristic” of the protectorate is, in Lyautey’s words, “close association and cooperation between the autochtonous race and the protecting race, joined in mutual respect, and the scrupulous safeguarding of traditional institutions”32—indirect rule in essence gave the sultan “authority” over ceremonies, “tradition,” and “Muslim affairs”; that is, over the symbolic, but not the material; the spiritual, but not the wordly; the past, not the present or future; the cultural, but not the political or economic. He, along with his chorus of vizirs, pashas, and caïds, would function as a sort of poet laureate decorating—and legitimating—French rule with aesthetic beauty. This specifically Franco-Moroccan rendition of colonialism, inserted into Ben Jelloun’s analogy, throws into relief the degree to which gender may be conceived as a mechanism for keeping up the appearance of authority—of agency, self-definition, and individual expression—while substituting for such agency a well-guided identity and desire, exchanging decorative accessories for power. Trumpeted by Lyautey as a less expensive, more streamlined and efficient form of imperialism, as well as a more “humane” one, indirect rule meant, in practice, expanding the meaning of “supervision” to the point where it was exceedingly difficult to distinguish from direct rule or colonization proper.33 When he needed to please the hard line colonial lobby in Paris, Lyautey admitted as much: “The functions of supervision are in fact much more extensive than the word seems to indicate,” he writes. “In effect, the contrôleurs civils not only have the mission of supervising the systems of native justice and government per se; they are in truth the real administrators of the country, charged with centralizing and coordinating in all matters.”34 “Indirect rule” also entailed simply removing native leaders who were uncooperative, including the sultan himself: one of Lyautey’s first exploits in Morocco was removing the disobliging sultan Moulay Abdelhafid and replacing him with the more acquiescent Moulay Youssef. Similarly, while the “politique des grands caïds” ostensibly remained central to Lyautey’s method in the Atlas mountains and the South, it too meant simple elimination of leaders (like el-Hiba, Moha ou Hamou, or Abd al’Krim), who were not willing to cooperate with the French.35 The role of the native intermediary was, moreover, far from that of an equal partner; Lyautey expected the native leader to function essentially as a conduit for French ideology and interests: It is through the officer in permanent contact with the native leader that little by little the latter’s horizons will expand and through him those of his people. And it is through him as an intermediary that bit by bit we will introduce our ideas of justice, humanity, and progress, that is to say, we will involve ourselves in all that is beneficial and legitimate and stay away from all that is annoying and unacceptable to people for whom our intervention disturbs all customs and all traditions. This set-up has two characteristics which should make it incontestable: it is the only one that conforms to the reality of the situation and it is the most economical.36


157

The slither in Lyautey’s language from “justice, humanity, and progress” to the “economical” is both characteristic and telling; so too is the “little by little” and “bit by bit” by way of which he describes colonial advance. This perseverant stealth was, indeed, central to Lyautey’s conception of the protectorate—a “method” that he depicted in terms of a “tache de huile” (spot of oil). Developed on the basis of his experience in Vietnam and Madagascar, and his association with Gallieni, the idea entailed spreading French influence—unctuously, inevitably, imperceptibly—by gathering knowledge of native politics and culture, colluding with tribal leaders, establishing civil institutions, and constructing desire: “I want to make us loved by this people,” he wrote.37 As Pennell describes it, the basic strategy was that “the army would build posts on the edge of as-yet-uncolonised regions. These would show off French military power, and provide security, safe markets, and medical facilities that would win hearts and minds. Then French control would spread forward and the process would begin again.”38 If, in theory, this “tache de huile” was a peaceful and inevitable expansion of civilization, it was, as Pennell is quick to add, “backed by superior weapons and excellent intelligence.”39 While the metaphor of the “tache de huile” didn’t entirely correspond to, and did much to obscure, the forms of coercion and violence that took place on the ground, it did do an impressive amount of ideological work: it represented the advance of French civilization as unstoppable, and figured cultural borders as permeable, shifting, and undefined. The image, perhaps inadvertently, suggests that what is French or Moroccan (be it territory, desire, culture, economic interest, or political structure) can never be clearly distinguished; they will necessarily become blurred, indeed indecipherable, at the edges. This conception suggests a kind of protohybridity (where, as Bhabha would have it, cultures are not static entities but dynamic processes), but it also demonstrates the degree to which such “hybridity,” in circumstances of fundamental structural and material inequality, can function as the right hand of imperialism. Placed in the context of Ben Jelloun’s narrative, its corporal and national uncertainties, as well as in the company of Nietzsche and Derrida (and their progeny in gender and postcolonial studies) it becomes clear that such indeterminacy is doubleedged, fraught with risk: it can function as a fashionable disguise for hegemony as much as a tool for dismantling the prisonhouse of identity. Lyautey’s other viscous term for this method was “pénetration pacifique.” He never intended to be a “hammer” pounding away at Morocco, he wrote to a series of his colleagues, but a “drill which penetrates slowly but irresistibly.”40 Despite his regular recourse to military force, he preferred to represent the colonial mission as progressing by “the economic and moral penetration of a people, not by subjugation to our force or even our liberties, but by a close association”: a gentler, friendlier rape.41 Advocating a combined strategy of military force and political influence, he conceived this penetration as an insemination of organization and order, a mastery of “resistant and warlike populations” who, without the firm hand of the French, would inevitably

158


stray back to “the freedom of chaos, pillage, and oppression which had benefitted them for centuries.”42 This imposition of order was also, for Lyatuey, coincident with the reign of reason and understanding—“What is pacification in most cases anyway,” he wrote, “if not the end of a misunderstanding?”—as well as the institution of private property.43 Here, ostensibly, is the kind of “understanding” Lyautey had in mind: We are trying to convince them [the Moroccans], and we have already been able to make them understand, that the only real form of property is individual, private property. And thus, as we transform collective tribal property into private property, as we increase the value of the estate of each member of the tribe, we ask in return to have a part of the collective tribal property transferred to State ownership. It is on this same collective property that we are creating sectors to be made ready for French colonization.44

This tacit series of equivalencies between colonial penetration, order, reason, and the acquisition of property is the ideological bedrock of the protectorate. A protectorate, then, bears relation to gender insofar as it functions as control portrayed as benign guidance, as thoughtful parenting that is at once a kind of protective envelope and the enabling condition of freedom and individuality; insofar as it substitutes surface decoration for agency and authority, abjecting, or simply eliminating, those alien to the decorative scheme of the “centralizing and coordinating” power;45 and insofar as its development, while undergirded by violence, is so insidious as to seem inevitable—as synonymous with civilization, order, the reasonable, proper, and human. The Moroccan protectorate, as sculpted by Lyautey, might also—like the gender system—be described as a structure of difference intolerant to differences. It is a classifactory scheme, that is, that “safeguards” differences by rendering them static, essentialized, immutable, distinct. Lyautey’s valorization of association over assimilation, often touted as an admirable respect for native customs and a particularly magnanimous form of colonization, was also a kind of apartheid that, in the name of “natural differences,” insisted that ethnicities be kept distinct and separate and that they protect and perform their purity. In the domain of culture, as in that of gender, such a system assumes the existence of already constituted groups, rather than recognizing such categories as the effects of materially interested, and socially consequential, regulatory practices—as artifacts with a traceable and critiquable genealogy. It also erects normative ideals that abject, pathologize, and punish those characteristics—and those characters—that do not conform to the norms of the category.46 The entities underpinning Lyautey’s system of segregation, moreover, are, in both structural and ideological terms, separate but not equal. In Morocco, this hierarchized structure of difference functioned along three axes: European/Moroccan, Arab/Berber, and elite/common. These divisions bore similarities to other instances of colonization: the assumption of an irreducible difference between Europeans and natives was characteristic


159

of many colonial environments; the “divide and rule” impulse behind the distinction betweeen Arabs and Berbers resembled strategies deployed elsewhere, as did the filtration of a cooperative native elite from the masses. But the differential structure of the Moroccan protectorate, and Lyautey’s theorization of it, also bore some intriguing pecularities. For example, Lyautey’s radical reconstruction of Moroccan cities, carried out by Henri Prost (“Lyautey’s Haussman,” as Hoisington calls him), was a strikingly literal incarnation of the ideological separateness posited between Europeans and Moroccans.47 Conceived as saving the medinas from destruction—preserving a jewel of Moroccan tradition—the dual city design (where the French ville nouvelle was built next to, but a safe distance from, the medina) had the effect not only of fossilizing the medinas into impracticable museum pieces (there was no provision in Prost’s plans, for example, for a growing Arab population), but of reinforcing what Bouabid, one signatory of the Manifeste de l’Indépendance, identified as “a colonial presence tending to institute, in Morocco and the whole of North Africa, a regime comparable to that of South Africa.”48 The second dyad of distinctions deployed in colonial Morocco was that between Arabs and Berbers. Drawn partly from experience in Kabylia and partly from Édouard Michaux-Bellaire’s publications on his Mission Scientifique du Maroc, the received wisdom on Morocco was that there was a sharp divide between bled-el Makhzen (territory controlled by the sultan) and bledel siba (territory outside the sultan’s control), which roughly corresponded to the distinction between Arab and Berber.49 This theory, as Pennell puts it, “divided Arabs from Berbers and assigned to each a series of characteristics that were apparently based on scientific principles but which were really little more than prejudices that justified colonial methods and created a hierarchy of local populations.”50 Berbers, on this view, were seen as more assimilable to French policy and direct rule because they were only superficially Muslim, without loyalty to the sultan, and, as Rivet describes it, “fundamentally democratic and ready to adopt French republicanism as soon as someone helped detach them from the veneer of Oriental and Islamic civilization.”51 In this bifurcated scheme of things, the tribes of the so-called “unpacified” regions—those who had not fallen into the foreseen pattern of effortless absorption into French political dominance—were designated “dissident”: in disagreement, unorthodox, wayward. Lyautey’s oft-proclaimed esteem for Moroccan culture was, it should be stressed, respect for a specific elite sliver of Moroccan society, and it was instrumental in intensifying perhaps the most consequential mode of differentiation in colonial Morocco, that between an aristocracy and the “common people.” “We must remind ourselves,” he wrote to his sister, “that in all human society there is a ruling class, born to rule, without which nothing can be done, and a class to be ruled.” In this instance, he cast this distinction as a straightforward political and military expedient: “[We must] enlist the ruling class in our service. Once the mandarins are our friends, certain of us and needing us, they have only to say the word and the country will be

160


pacified, and at far less cost and with greater certainty than by all the military expeditions we could send there.”52 But more often this view was integrated into a romanticized view of a Moroccan elite capable of recuperating the magesty of the Ancien Régime. Aptly characterizing Lyautey as “the great lord captivated with tradition and hierarchy, passionately resistant to the individualistic and egalitarian society ushered in by 1789,” Rivet contends, This aristocractic mindset made him tremble with enthusiasm for the monarchy and the elites that comprised the Makhzen. In a certain way, Lyautey was to flourish in this old “fortuned empire” precisely because it was archaic . . . he gives to his stay of thirteen years in Morocco the tone of time regained: that of the Ancien Régime. . . . “This Moroccan race [he wrote] . . . has remained the refuge of courtesy, moderation, elegant manners, noble gestures, respect of social hierarchies, and all that which embellished our 18th century.”53

This distinction between an elite, authentic Morocco and a counterfeit, common one was produced and institutionalized by both French empowerment of the Makhzen and its construction of the “Écoles des Fils de Notables,” whose purpose, as Pennell puts it, was “to bind the fathers more closely to the French system, and to produce in the sons a loyal class of young men to help run the bureaucracy.”54 It also resulted, among Lyautey’s successors, in French support of some of the most reactionary and oppressive characters in the country, such as El Glaoui and Abdelhay El Kittani.55 The hierarchized distinctions of the Moroccan protectorate, then, exhibit significant resemblances to a binary system of gender differentiation: a structure of difference intoleratant to differences; discrimination (re)produced by spatial segregation; a hierarchy, justified by a “science” of differences, that constitutes its lower rung as “dissident”—at variance with, and prone to stray from, the established order; a politically institutionalized and educationally reinforced distinctivness, expressed through manners and guarded by an ethic of “loyalty”; a reproduction of privilege based on a conception of inherited, natural rights of domination in which the governing genre is also more genuine (and neither the etymological connections between genre, gender, genus, and genuine, nor the latter’s roots in conceptions of the native, freeborn, begotten, and natural, should be overlooked here).

Gender Wounds Body, nation, narrative, indistinguishably superimposed: this troubling and troubled spectacle is, in L’enfant de sable, expressed through the language of lamentation, into which we are immersed from the novel’s opening paragraph: Il y avait d’abord ce visage allongé par quelques rides verticales, telles des cicatrices creusées par de lointains insomnies, un visage mal rasé, travaillé par le temps. La vie—quelle vie? une étrange apparence faite d’oubli—avait dû le malmener, le contrarier ou même l’offusquer. On pouvait y lire ou deviner une


161

profonde blessure qu’un geste maladroit de la main ou un regard appuyé, un oeil scrutateur ou malintentionné suffisaient à rouvrir. . . . Il sentait passer [la lumière] sur son corps comme une flamme qui brûlerait ses masques, une lame qui lui retirerait lentement le voile de chair qui maintenait entre lui et les autres la distance nécessaire. Que serait-il en effet si cet espace qui le séparait et le protégait des autres venait à s’annuler? (First there was this face creased by vertical lines, like scars dug out by distant insomnias, a badly shaven face worked by time. Life—what life? A strange appearance made of forgetfulness—must have maltreated it, annoyed it or even offended it. One could divine there a deep wound that an awkward gesture of the hand or an insistent look, a scrutinizing or ill-intentioned eye would suffice to reopen. . . . He felt the light on his body like a flame that would burn off his masks, a blade that would slowly pull off the veil of flesh that maintained the necessary distance between himself and others. Indeed what would he be if this space that separated and protected him from others was suddenly removed?) (7–8)

In the beginning there is already a past: images of scars, deep wounds that are easily reopened, an embodied remembrance of things past, and a peculiar forgetting situate the narrative in the paradoxical moment of lamentation, at once oppressively present and irretrievably lost. This marked body is both the evidence and object of lamentation; materially and symbolically remade, it carries the memory of trauma and is itself traumatic. The novel’s opening, in other words, poses the body itself as crisis, as that incomprehensible but insistently significant materiality characteristic of the moment of lamentation. The storyteller reemphasizes this trope throughout his overture, describing the character’s retreat into solitude “pour ramasser ses membres” (to gather up his members) (9), a retreat that “avait du s’imposer à lui parce qu’il n’arrivait plus à maîtriser son corps” (must have been imposed on him because he was no longer able to master his body) (10), a result of the fact that “entre lui et son corps, il y avait eu rupture, une espèce de fracture” (there had been a rupture, a kind of fracture, between himself and his body) (10). This rupture between Ahmed and his/her body inaugurates the novel’s multiple figures of estrangement and exile —“Moi-même je ne suis pas ce que je suis; l’une et l’autre peut-être” (I am not myself what I am, the one and the other perhaps) (53)—that resonate not only with the imagery of lamentation and figures of trauma, but with the process of alienation effected through colonial education, political disempowerment, and economic domination. The novel is also replete with images of temporal estrangement that evoke the arrested time of lamentation. Ahmed writes in his diary, for example: “j’ai perdu la notion du temps. Curieusement mon calendrier s’arrête fin avril. Des feuilles manquent. . . . Mon temps n’a rien à voir avec celui du calendrier, achevé ou non” (I have lost the notion of time. Curiously, my calendar stops at the end of April. Pages are missing . . . but my time has nothing to do with that of the calendar, completed or not) (105); and the storyteller describes the historical moment as one in which

162


“L’horloge est une mécanique sans âme; elle est arrêtée, altérée par la rouille et l’usure, par le temps, respiration des hommes” (the clock is a machine without soul; it is stopped, altered by rust and use, by time, and men’s breathing) (126). These figures of bodily and temporal alienation are underscored by the fact that the agent of Ahmed’s wounds is “une étrange apparence faite d’oubli,” a figure that seems to name Ahmed him/herself but is grammatically alienated from him/her in the way we have found “inalienable” entities (such as kin and body parts) incessantly estranged in the lamentation. We should also not fail to hear the multiple nuances of foreigness in the word étrange, which entangle Ahmed in a complex web of meaning, relegating him/her to the status of philosophical impurity, associating him/her with a discursively undistinguished heap of pathologies (including insanity, illness, disability, homelessness, criminality, and childhood), and portraying his/her appearance as the site of hermeneutic difficulty—a scandal.56 This latter connection (between Ahmed’s étrangeté and interpretative difficulty) foreshadows the novel’s extended analogy between its own narrative uncertainty and the ambiguity of Ahmed’s gender identity, an analogy that frames one of the novel’s central inquiries: how does one read the body? Is it legible? Does Ahmed’s body become unreadable because of a “misassigned” gender? Or is the novel’s suggestion more radical still—that gender itself makes the body unreadable? The apparition figured here is made of forgetting (“faite d’oubli”), but what is the forgetting that comprises him/her? Is it the biological sex “forgotten” by her/his parents? Ahmed’s subsequent desire to forget her/his own engenderment?57 Or is it that the body itself has been forgotten—that gender is a forgetting of the body? The simultaneous memory and forgetting embodied in the scars through which Ahmed’s body is introduced also mime the lamentation’s reproduction of remembrance that, as we have noted, is also a form of forgetting. On this analogy, then, gender is a performance that is both a commemorative reenactment (of appropriate practices and comportment) and a ritual forgetting (of unacceptable behavior, desires, and possibilities), a performance that at once conditions the body’s “reality” and delivers it over to the Lethe that engulfs it in oblivion. In not dissimilar fashion it might be noted, the Moroccan protectorate was maintained by performances that, with increasing desperation, simultaneously manufactured memory and induced forgetting. As Delanoë contends, under Résident General Alphonse Juin, Morocco came to resemble a “Society of the Spectacle” in which the French public was only allowed to witness events and discourses orchestrated by the Residence, such as the “puppets . . . ordered by their Caids onto the Tizi N’Tretten plateau for a grandiose ceremony celebrating Juin as hero” or the “theatrical production” of “ten thousand Berbers united to affirm their solidarity with le Glaoui and their love for France.”58 In 1951 and 1953, hoping to disguise the deposition of the sultan as an indigenous uprising, Juin decided to:


163

have the tribes “descend from the mountains”—an action of course presented as “spontaneous”—in the hope of comforting Paris in its decisions. As to the “spontaneity,” it helps to know that no Berber could take off to “descend the mountain” as was the case in Rabat and Fez in 1951 and 1953 without having previously received, through his Caid and sometimes directly, an order from the French authorities, much less possess arms without the authorization of the Administration. Thus the “demonstration” of a whole people demanding the deposition of the Sultan . . . is in fact nothing but a manipulation by the French authorities.59

The protectorate is, like Ahmed, “une apparence faite d’oubli”—here a performative “memory” of indigenous support for France that is also a forgetting of the increasing power of resistance movements.60 It is hardly surprising that the novel’s meditation on gender should be expressed through a discourse of lamentation, for lamentation is, in some sense, always about gender: it thematizes and foregrounds gender difference. As we have seen, lamentations are almost exclusively assigned to women, sustained by an intricate semantic web associating women with death, and often a vehicle for expressing women’s experience and concerns. In L’enfant de sable, women are everywhere associated with mourning; the storyteller recounts that with the birth of each daughter, “(le) baptême fut une cérémonie silencieuse et froide, une façon d’installer le deuil dans cette famille frappée sept fois par le Malheur” (the baptism was a cold and silent ceremony, a way of installing mourning in this family struck seven times by Misfortune) (19), and Ahmed’s father affirms of his daughters that “leur naissance a été pour moi un deuil” (their birth was a sorrow for me) (22). Ahmed does not fail to recognize that “dans cette famille les femmes s’enroulent dans un linceul de silence” (in this family the women are wrapped in a shroud of silence) (53); he names his mother “le martyre d’une époque qui l’a humiliée, blessée et simplement niée” (the martyr of an era that humiliated, wounded, and simply negated her) (131). Alleging that she has always known Ahmed’s “secret,” Fatima says to him, “Nous sommes femmes avant d’être infirmes, ou peut-être nous sommes infirmes parce que femmes” (We are women because we are disabled, or maybe we are disabled because we are women) (80). Along similar lines, Ahmed writes in his/her journal, “Etre femme est une infirmité naturelle dont tout le monde s’accommode. Etre homme est une illusion et une violence que tout justifie et privilégie. Etre tout simplement est un défi” (Being a woman is a natural infirmity that everyone accommodates. Being a man is an illusion and a violence that everything justifies and privileges. Simply being is a challenge) (94).61 Ben Jelloun’s narrative, its association of mourning with a particular gender (woman) and with gender itself (as explored through the body of Ahmed) leads us to a position akin to Butler’s proposition in “Melancholy Gender,” that gender might be thought “as a kind of melancholy, or as one of melancholy’s effects,” that “a melancholic identification is central to the process whereby the ego assumes a gendered character.”62 Butler considers

164


this melancholic incorporation as transpiring primarily “through prohibitions which demand the loss of certain sexual attachments, and demand as well that those losses not be avowed, and not be grieved,”63 but the losses stipulated by gender, I would argue—and I believe Ben Jelloun demonstrates—are even more pervasive and diverse, foreclosing, for example, the right to bodily pleasure or full societal participation (in certain versions of femininity), the expression of pain or grief (in many constructions of masculinity), or engagement in certain kinds of labor, pursuits, interests, or behavior. If the storyteller’s language prompts us to read the novel—and Ahmed’s body—in terms of lamentation, so too does the fact that Ahmed’s selfexpressions so often rely on mortuary images. In the journal (ostensibly conferred to the storyteller at Ahmed’s death), Ahmed writes of “mon petit cimetière intérieur” (my little interior cemetery) (44), of the mirror as “le chemin par lequel mon corps . . . s’écrase dans la terre, creuse une tombe provisoire” (the path by which my body crushes itself in the earth, carves out a provisional tomb) (44), and of the family home as “une ruine dissimulant une fosse commune” (a ruin disguising a mass grave) (44–45). Ahmed’s troubled body, which functions as a metaphor for the body politic, is also repeatedly described in terms of the incomprehensibility of death, as an illegible materiality that, in numerous ways, recalls the language and moment of lamentation. His/her deathly strangeness is figurally imbricated, morever, with the novel’s recurring—and unsettling—image of a “fosse commune” (mass grave) that not only evokes a certain political history, but, extending the triangulation between body, nation, and narrative I have sketched above, weaves a dense semantic association between the unknowability of death and the plait of uncertainties between Ahmed’s gender, the novel’s narrative, and Morocco’s future. This text of associations both evinces the society’s panicked dread in the face of ambiguity and draws an analogy between the struggle for narrative power in the novel and the struggle for political and social authority in Morocco. Conceived theoretically before being conceived physically (a sequence that is not without its significance to gender), Ahmed first appears to his father as death; in a dream, “la mort lui rendit visite. . . . Elle avait le visage gracieux d’un adolescent. . . . L’adolescent était d’une beauté troublante. Son visage changeait, il était tantôt celui de ce jeune homme qui venait d’apparaître, tantôt celui d’une jeune femme légère et évanescente” (death paid him a visit. . . . It had the graceful face of an adolescent. . . . The adolescent was troublingly beautiful. His face changed, it was now that of a young man that appeared, now that of a young woman, gentle and evanescent) (20). A similar dream figure—revenant of a revenant—appears to the blind troubador in the Alhambra. In search of a woman who, we are led to suspect, might be Ahmed, the blind troubadour encounters a figure who possesses the voice of a woman and the body of a man, who engages him in a life and death struggle reminiscent of the “night of solitude” after death (in which one wrestles with Azrain, the angel of questioning) and who, the blind troubadour


165

concludes, “devait être la mort ou son compagnon” (must have been death or her companion) (196). What, then, is the significance of the fact that Ahmed’s father bases him on a vision of death? That Death is a transgendered figure? These semantic collusions not only suggest that Ahmed’s body, by virtue of its gender ambiguity, bears the absolute, unthinkable strangeness of death, that gender ambiguity is as threatening as death itself, but also that the transgendered body, a form of radical solitude, is the site of an ultimate reckoning at once physical and psychical. The incomprehensibility of Ahmed’s body, its illegible materiality, recalls a number of our depictions of lamentation: its tentative and interrogative language, its paradoxes and stunned reiterations of literality, its figures of impossibility, and its nature as testimony that “cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition.”64 The deathliness that Ahmed bears, moreover, is both metaphorically and metonymically related to the unsettling image of the “fosse commune” that reappears throughout the novel as if an unremarkable detail of setting. From the outset, the storyteller warns that “cette histoire . . . risque de nous enterrer tous dans le même cimetière” (threatens to bury us all in the same cemetery) (24), and Ahmed, as we have seen, describes his home as “une ruine dissimulant une fosse commune” (45). Fatouma muses that it would be “facile de mourir piétinée par cette foule et d’être ensuite jetée dans la fosse commune quotidienne” (easy to die trampled by this crowd and then be thrown into the ordinary mass grave) (164), and the blind troubadour describes rummaging in dictionaries “pour narguer l’angoisse du temps qui creuse chaque jour un peu plus notre fosse commune” (to thwart the anguish of time that every day digs out more of our common grave) (181). But it is with the return of the storyteller (who has disappeared when young urban developers clean up the public square) that the image of the “fosse commune” shifts from evoking anonymity and the dismal fate of the “common people,” to political terror. Pursued by Death in the guise of Ahmed (as well as by a number of his other characters), the storyteller falls asleep beneath a tree: “quand je me suis réveillé le lendemain” (when I awoke the following day) he relates, “je me suis trouvé dans une cimetière où il y avait une foule de gens en blanc qui enterraient dans une grande fosse des adolescents sans linceul, nus. J’étais horrifié. Je me suis approché de la fosse et j’ai cru voir le corps de mon fils” (I found myself in a cemetery where there was a crowd of people in white who were burying adolescents in a mass grave without shrouds, naked. I was horrified. I approached the grave and thought I saw the body of my son) (204–5). If the storyteller’s dreamlike experience echoes nightmarish realities of 1944 and the years following, Fatouma’s subsequent rumination on the state of the country makes the political context even more explicit: “C’est curieux ! Les gens passent leur vie à encaisser les coups; on les humilie quotidiennement; ils ne bronchent pas, et puis un jour ils sortent dans les rues et cassent tout. L’armée intervient et tire sur la foule pour rétablir l’ordre. . . . On creuse une grande fosse et on y jette les corps. ça devient chronique” (It’s strange!

166


People go through their life taking blows; they’re humiliated day in and day out; they don’t flinch, and then one day they go out into the streets and smash everything. The army comes in and opens fire on the crowd to reestablish order. . . . A mass grave is dug and the bodies are thrown in. It’s becoming chronic) (205). This turn in the signification of the “fosse commune” from the common grave of paupers to the mass grave of war, from the anonymously abject to the horrifying, not only reflects social reactions to Ahmed’s increasing gender ambiguity, but colonial reactions within Morocco: the shift from a contemptuous neglect of “the masses” (under Lyautey) to a deliberate scheme of provocation and repression (under Puaux and Juin) during which the army opening fire on demonstrating crowds did, unfortunately, become chronic. These figures of death and incomprehensibility that, in L’enfant de sable, stretch across the narrative, gender system, and political context, evince an intolerant recoil from ambiguity—from, for example, indefinite genders, narrative irresolution, and national indeterminateness—that, I would argue, impedes the work of (bodily, discursive, or political) decolonization. In addition to the daily distresses produced by “le regard inquiet” (worried look) (115) of strangers, and by those “qui n’avaient cessé de le poursuivre de leur curiosité, de leur méfiance et même d’une haine tenace” (who hadn’t ceased to pursue him with their curiosity, suspicion and even tenacious hatred) (7), two incidents, in particular, illustrate the horror, dread, and violence with which society reacts to Ahmed’s gender “confusion.” Venturing out from the upstairs room where s/he has long been enclosed, Ahmed initially encounters: une vieille femme, mendiante ou sorcière . . . (qui) me barrait le passage. . . . Ainsi, dans ses premiers pas sans masque, mon corps qui se voulait anonyme et quelconque sous la djellaba affrontait l’épreuve matinale face à un visage buriné et intransigeant. La question fut incisive: —Qui est-tu? J’aurais pu répondre à toutes les questions, inventer, imaginer mille réponses, mais c’était là la seule, l’unique question qui me bouleversait et me rendait littéralement muette. . . . La question revint avec le même ton autoritaire: —Que caches-tu sous ta djellaba, un homme ou une femme, un enfant ou un vieillard, une colombe ou une ariagnée? Réponds, sinon tu ne sortiras pas de cette rue, d’ailleurs ce n’est pas une rue mais une impasse; j’en détiens les clés et je filtre l’air et la lumière qui la traversent. . . . Comme j’hésitai, elle se précipta sur moi et, de ses mains fortes, déchira ma djellaba, puis ma chemise. Apparurent alors mes deux petits seins. (an old woman, a beggar or a witch, who blocked my way. . . . Thus, in its first steps without a mask, my body that wanted to be anonymous and ordinary beneath its djellaba confronted a morning ordeal in the craggy and intransigeant face of this old woman. The question was piercing: —Who are you?


167

I could have responded to any question, invented or imagined a thousand replies, but this was the one, sole question that threw me into utter confusion and rendered me literally speechless. . . . The question came back with the same authoritarian tone: —What are you hiding under your djellaba, a man or a woman, a child or an old person, a dove or a spider? Answer! If you don’t, you won’t get out of this street which isn’t a street anyway, but a dead end; I hold the keys to it and filter the air and light that enter it. . . . As I hesitated, she threw herself on me and, with her strong hands, tore off my djellaba and then my underslip. Then my two small breasts appeared.) (112–14)

An image of the grotesque intransigence with which society demands gender clarity, this scene of confrontation and coerced exposure illustrates the imperative of maintaining the mask of a determinate gender, an identity legible within the gender system. To resist this legibility is to be hermeneutically and socially scandalous, merely (and defilingly) material, to be suspected of not being human at all (a bird or a spider), to be threatened with obstruction or even extinction. In even more violent fashion, the circus-mistress Oum Abbas traps Ahmed in a dark alley and forces her fingers painfully into Ahmed’s vagina. “J’avais un doute” (I had my doubts), she says, stifling Ahmed’s screams. Although this dubiousness renders Ahmed largely offensive elsewhere, Oum Abbas is more than happy to capitalize on it in the circus “où tout baigne dans la derision” (where everything is bathed in derision) (120), and where Ahmed, not unlike the colonized people exhibited at the Exposition Coloniale, is displayed as a safely caged freak. Yet if—or perhaps because—Ahmed’s gender ambiguity commonly elicits contempt, his/her primary act of bodily decolonization is to insist on its value. To the anonymous correspondent, s/he writes: “Si j’ai accepté d’entretenir avec vous un dialogue épistolaire, ce n’est pas pour que soit reproduite la morale sociale. La grande, l’immense épreuve que je vis n’a de sens qu’en dehors de ces petits schemas pscyhologiques qui prétendent savoir et expliquer pourquoi une femme est une femme et un homme est un homme” (If I accepted to undertake a dialogue with you in letters, it wasn’t to reproduce social morality. The great, immense ordeal that I am living has no sense except outside these little psychological maps that pretend to know and explain why a woman is a woman and a man is a man) (88–89). This redrawing of psychological maps, like the reconstruction of imperial maps, entails acknowledging and engaging a desire that exceeds categories like masculine and feminine, colonizer and colonized, citizen and foreigner, that envisions what Marjorie Garber calls “the third,” which is neither a sex nor a term but “a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility,” the sign of a productive “category crisis,”65 and what Ahmed describes as the “echo d’une pensée pas encore formulée” (echo of an as yet unformulated thought) (95).

168


This as yet unformulated thought designates not only Ahmed’s gender and its unheard-of desire(s), but the political structure (and desires) of an independent Morocco. A dynamic and sometimes precarious alliance between a conservative monarchy, militant nationalists, religious zealots, radical revolutionaries, and moderate proponents of democracy, Moroccan nationalism is discursively evoked in the novel’s multiple narrators and their disputes over who is authorized to speak and, thus, determine the outcome of the narrative. The analog of the power struggle between the novel’s narrators— who variously base their authority on seniority, personal relation, a privileged subject position, textual veracity, experience, and logical development—is the field of competing claims brought into dialogue and dispute in preindependence Morocco between an educated elite, an urban middle class, an expanding and increasingly unionized working class, and an illiterate rural peasantry. The conflicting and ambiguous field of desires and interests called Moroccan nationalism was, in essence, a discursive and ideological struggle over the identity of the nation—over how to integrate the sultanate with democratic representation, how to transform the traditional system of caïds into a centralized nation-state, what to do with both French colons and business interests (which dominated the economy), and where exactly the geographical boundaries of the nation were to be drawn.66 National independence could hardly be a more ambiguous plot; nationalism could hardly be a more “confused” desire. Now from the standpoint of the colonizers, such ambiguity—which irreducibly structures democracy taken in its literal sense—is a scandalous disorder, chaos, as unthinkable a possibility in the political order as Ahmed’s gender identity is in the social order. The Moroccan protectorate had from the beginning been subtended by a rhetoric of establishing regularity and order—the Treaty of Fez insisted that it was “establishing in Morocco a regular regime founded on interior order and general security”67—and Lyautey conceived this imperative of order as in explicit opposition to revolution, democracy, and modernity: “Now, I will always be for order, wherever I find it, even in our adversaries, against disorder and Revolution, wherever I find it, even among our friends . . . I affirm with a growing conviction that our strength and future in Morocco rests on a conservative, traditional, and hierarchical politics, and not on a democratic and modernistic evolution, quite the contrary.”68 By the later years of the protectorate, “maintaining public order” had become the routine justification for crushing protest, dissent, or national aspiration, evinced, for example, by the fact that the dead, wounded, and incarcerated in the demonstrations of 1944 were, according to French authorities, “necessitated by the imperative of maintaining order,”69 or by Juin’s ultimatum to the sultan: “If you do not immediately abdicate of your own accord, I am charged with removing you from the country in order to maintain public order.”70 Both Ahmed’s gender confusion and Morocco’s perceived political confusion are, moreover, regulated through the body; indeed the body is as crucial a signifier in the political sytem as it is in the gender system. Bouabid


169

(nationalist leader and signatory of the Manifeste) records the following scene of his arrest and arrival at the commissariat in January 1944: Nearly thirty other friends were already there, standing, completely undressed, for the routine search, it was said. I was given the order to get naked like a worm, as the others had done. Jeers and other vulgarities. There, several meters away, the French population of Salé, men, women, and children, were offered the spectacle of our humiliation. Some cheered sadistically. Hadn’t they, thanks to Leclerc’s soliders, escaped massacre, rape, multilation, and pillage? An overexcited woman, owner of a café, declared: “Shoot them all here, right in front of us!”71

This spectacle of naked Moroccan bodies, made to signify a wormlike humiliation and vulnerability, restricted in movement and threatened with destruction, contrasted with the well-protected French bodies secure from death, rape, mutiliation, and discomfort, could hardly make more apparent the way that colonial relations, like gender relations, are written on the body. Enveloped in a language of lamentation, Ben Jelloun’s provocation to consider gender as a colonization of the body beckons us into a dense thicket of questions. The three broad branches of this thicket I have attempted to follow here are a theoretical interrogation of this proposition through postcolonial and gender studies, a historicized analysis of it from the site of the Moroccan protectorate, and a reconsideration of it through the lens of lamentation. The first branch of inquiry led us to a critique of the language of natural development common to both gender and colonization, as well as to an examination of its processes of abjection, reliance on a taxonomy of distinct genres, self-engendering capacities, and dependence on manner, style, and ornamentation. My second branch of inquiry into the historical and political specificites of Moroccan colonization disclosed some significant nuances in the way the gender system operates: as a protective envelope from its own disciplinary effects, a safeguard from uncertainty, an inculcation of desire subtended by violence, and as a structure of difference intolerant to differences. The final branch of this thicket in which we have entangled ourselves leads back to the lamentation. From the opening paragaraph, as I have shown, the novel embeds its exploration of gender and colonization in the language of lamentation, representing the body as crisis, describing it in deathly terms, and portraying gender as a form of estrangement and uncertainty. Associating mourning with both a specific gender (women) and gender itself, the novel evinces the way in which gender and colonization both function through a performative spectacle that, like the lamentation, is a reproduction of forgetting as much as of memory. We have also found that, in L’enfant de sable, both the body and the body politic are represented as a significant but incomprehensible materiality, one that figurally overlaps with lamentation in its mortuary images, interrogative propensities, indistinction, and defiance of impossibility. This examination of incomprehensibility led us to a recognition of society’s intolerance of ambiguity, perceived as a

170


defiling and threatening disorder, regulated, sometimes violently, through the body. But such ambiguity (like that generated by the structure of Ben Jelloun’s novel) may be necessary, I suggested, for decolonization of both body and nation. L’enfant de sable thus stages a crisis in two crucial articulations of late modernity—gender and colonization. If gender is customarily the kind of sustained trauma left unlamented and unacknowledged, Ben Jelloun’s lament for the body colonized by gender is one that aims to resposses both the body and the body politic, to perform a new form of (sexual and political) desire—a project that, like all lamentations, threatens to disrupt social discipline as well as reason itself.

Epilogue

L et us return, briefly, to where we began: with descriptions of modernity as

an epochal transformation, a moment of traumatic loss, epistemological upheaval, cognitive disorientation, and the radically new. What is at stake in this language? What roles does it play in shaping modernity? What interests does it serve? Inquiring into modernity’s languages of loss, it becomes quickly evident that loss itself is a troubled and troubling phenomenon; it is unobservable, bears multiple and fluid meanings, varies in both degree and kind, and is deployed for diverse and often contradictory ends. It may be used to describe experience as incommensurate as that of the war widow, the estranged worker, the political exile, the colonized subject, the gender noncomformist, or the alienated poet. It may mark the loss of racial privilege, national prominence, or personal prestige. Some of these losses are, of course, more celebrated aspects of modernity than others, and the discourses of lamentation we have been scrutinizing are centrally involved in determining what varieties of loss are foregrounded in modernity, what kind of suffering is legitimated, and what qualifies as “normal,” “pathological,” “modern,” or “backward.” We have also noted that loss can be positively valued: in the cathartic treatments of trauma, for example, or in the removal of artifice, the regression to a more innocent or authentic time, or the construction of newness, purity, or truth. I have taken the route of investigating modernity’s languages of loss through the tradition of women’s lamentations. Conceiving of lamentation as a mode—a kind of language with a specific history and conventions, but susceptible to appropriation by other discourses—we have found the language of lamentation to be highly adaptable, and its rich store of devices widely distributed in discourses of modernity. A ritual performance as much about producing grief as expressing it, lamentations reinforce, elaborate, and

172

EPILOGUE

may even fabricate a sense of loss or crisis. While regularly disciplined by states, religious institutions, and modernity itself, the mode of lamentation, I have endeavored to demonstrate, has played an influential role in both constructing and contesting modernity. Exploring a number of ways such language has been deployed in specific sites of late modernity, I have argued for ten primary functions of lamentation. We have found that lamentations regularly serve to establish an event of loss, to formulate inchoate circumstances into a graspable event, and to mark those circumstances as meriting recognition, mourning, or restitution. Such a language is also necessary for establishing what precisely has been lost, as well as the significance and value of the lost object. The lamentation’s combination of improvised and formulaic idioms, that incorporate an incommensurate event into a structure of repetition, establish a traumatic event within iterable history. Its invocations summon witnesses, appeal to social obligations, and make suffering public. We have seen, for example, the ways in which the incipient Greek nation formulated the sustained losses suffered under Ottoman rule into a demand for independent nationhood and memorialized the deaths of Rigas, Grigorious V, and Byron to rally international support, or the ways in which Faulkner’s narrators, like New South spokesmen, relentlessly commemorate the passing of the “Old South.” But we have also recognized that numerous kinds of losses—the economic and cultural losses inflicted by colonization, Black Americans’ sustained deprivation of selfhood, dignity, and property, losses sublimated in “exchange” for national belonging, or the losses demanded and “naturalized” by gender conformity—may be disregarded circumstances of the everyday: unmarked as loss or as subject to mourning. Certain modernist texts perform laments for just such disregarded losses, as does Hatzis’s requiem for communist resistance fighters expunged from Greek national memory, or Ben Jelloun’s lament for the body colonized by gender. Lamentations also function in discourses of modernity as a form of retroactive possession: language about loss lays claim to a prior possession. While the rhetoric of possession in the lamentation is nearly always paradoxical— grammatically asserting possession of what is semantically declared lost—it nonetheless lays claim to rightful and proper possession of both material and ideological forms of property. Because the possessions to which the lamentation lays claim are lost, it also has the capacity to construct possessions that never existed, like the “Old South” imagined by New South entrepreneurs or the undiluted Hellenic heritage “recovered” by modern Greek nationalists. We have further recognized, via Faulkner, that ideological and material property are often related, that possessions function as signs, and that such sign systems serve to protect property and privilege. Indeed, disrupting such sign systems may well take a catastrophe. The gestures of lamentation, recording and constructing such a moment of catastrophe, may thus be instrumental in effecting a redistribution of possessions—in laying claim, for

Epilogue

173

example, to the geographical territory of a homeland or the cultural and political terrain of modernity. The gestures of lamentation institute a logic of loss and continuity. Sustained by illocutionary ambivalence, addresses to the dead, the disjunctive nature of privatives, traumatic and obsessive repetitions of the past, and a melancholic attachment to a lost object, this logic governs the cognitive splitting of traumatic experience as much as the “remade property” that characterizes the moment of lamentation: beings are there but not there, I am me but not me, things are themselves but not themselves. This contradictory logic has, as we have seen, conditioned various ill-fitting and fantastic identities in modernity, like those of freedpeople in the New South or of subjects caught in the Manichean mechanism of colonization. Such a logic also allows for a simultaneous loyalty to, and negation of, an idea, identity, or object and makes it possible rhetorically to substitute continuity for transformation or, conversely, disguise radical change as continuity. The former we have seen in the New South’s maintenance of antebellum social relations and its exclusion of freedpeople and poor whites from the South’s new industries. The latter we have witnessed in the Moroccan protectorate, where the sultanate was retained as a vestige of “Moroccan culture,” disguising the country’s actual loss of sovereignty. The appearance of lamentation in modernity might also be described as a return of the repressed: of the anger and disorder repressed by political systems and law; of the irrational, material, and hyperessential repressed by philosophy; of the semiotic repressed by the Symbolic; of a femininity repressed by patriarchy; or of pagan rituals repressed by institutionalized religion. Aesthetic modernism—through, for example, its shifting perspectives, illogical structures, and disordered forms, its privileging of material manipulation over semantic coherence, its affinity for “primitivism,” and its explorations of the unconscious—reintegrated into modernity aspects of experience and thought that had been repressed by an earlier modernity’s insistence on instrumental reason, autonomous and rational subjects, temporal progress, disciplined and coherently classified bodies, and distinct, ordered thought. A similar recrudescence of the repressed became manifest in the form of anticolonial movements that, from the perspective of much of Europe, appeared as an angry disruption in the order of things, a return of the primitive and irrational, a vulgar insistence on materiality, and an obscene exposure of processes of production customarily camouflaged by bourgeois fetishism. In both instances, these movements, appropriating gestures of lamentation, were interpreted from one perspective as a frightening triumph of barbarity and the absurd, but from another as libratory, a site of possibility—a significant critique of, and corrective to, a repressive modernity. The symptomatic eruption of modernity’s repressions might also be traced through descriptions of trauma as a disorganization of cognitive and linguistic faculties, as feminine weakness, or as regression to an infantile position; in modernity’s moods of melancholy and anxiety, or its outbursts of

174

EPILOGUE

anger; through a philosopher like Nietzsche who grants significance to uncertainty and untruth, critiques the suppression of affect, and pursues a method (genealogy) that unearths what moral philosophy has buried; in a thinker like Derrida who stages the return of the signifier and its (artificial, supplemental, and foreign) materiality into the logocentric tradition that has repressed it; or through a poet like Mallarmé who cultivates the material, courts indistinction, and pursues a significance ulterior to logic. Lamentations further function as a sign for newness and, insofar as modernity is conceived as a rupture with the past, such a language is clearly instrumental in effecting (a sense of) such rupture and making things (seem) new. The experience of constant revolutionizing through which Marx describes modernity can also, I have argued, be fabricated through a language that performatively reenacts loss. Indeed, we have seen in a number of instances that the powerful performativity of lament practice, which signals a rupture in time and a re-originating of the world, may function to indicate newness whether or not it actually exists. This production of newness through rhetorical destruction we have witnessed in Faulknerian narrators’ habitual “not . . . but” sequence, for example, and in Mallarmé’s orchestration of a semantic and syntactic crisis to elicit “un mot neuf.” In similar fashion, and because purity is produced by loss or elimination, lamentation functions as a sign of purity. But lamentation is also, ironically, a scene of defilement: of trauma, dead bodies, material waste, anastasoi, confusion. This apparent contradiction becomes comprehensible, however, when we recognize, as Mallarmé and other theorists of purity show us, that the passage through defilement—through deathliness, waste, disorder—may be necessary to producing purity. This simultaneous dependence and opposition between purity and defilement perhaps begins to explain why trauma, in certain theoretical formulations, is considered a form of deleterious excess that must be undone by catharsis, and in others as erecting a citadel of purity—a melancholic sacrality inaccessible to signification or a literality inviolable by interpretation or analysis. The lamentation’s processes of purification, as we have seen, are employed in modernity toward various ends: in Mallarmé, to resist assimilation, produce cultural distinction, and lay claim, on behalf of both France and poetry, to aesthetic dominance; in Greece, to construct a distinct and undiluted national character devoid of cultural, linguistic, or architectural adulterations; or, in Ben Jelloun’s depiction, to produce gender through a socially regulated taxonomy that disciplines and purges ambiguity. Lamentations also construct desire: for a lost object, for meaning or justice, or for a less aversive future, for example. Expressed in its ambivalent rhetoric of possession, intensified and spread through its moods, the desire created by lamentations has proven useful to women, philosophers, reformists, colonizers, and nationalists. We have seen, for example, the way in which Nietzsche spurs desire for writing new values on new tablets by portraying the present as lost; the way in which “New South” advocates deployed the

Epilogue

175

imagery and negativity of lamentations to construct desire for commodities, industrial development, and social change; the way in which Greek nationalists portrayed the past as a lost object, prompting desire for a resuscitated Hellenic identity, independence, and a national territory; and the way in which Lyautey, in Morocco, aspired to colonial domination through the cultivation of desire. We have also seen that the desire expressed by lamentations may be creatively and productively ambiguous, as is Ahmed’s desire for bodily liberation and Moroccans’ desire for independent nationhood. The mode of lamentation further functions in modernity to disorder the symbolic, resist logical resolution, and disrupt social discipline. In modernist literary texts, these endeavors are often related: language as a symbolic system is disarticulated precisely with the aim of resisting logical resolution, and often with the hope of creating social change. Reenacting the disorganization of speech and understanding, resistance to interpretation, and regression to an infantile state characteristic of trauma, as well as the inability to concatenate that typifies melancholy, lamentation inhabits the border between the articulate and unspeakable. Cultivating conventions that undo the symbolic nature of language, resist indication, embrace incomprehensibility, and welter in the tentative and interrogative, lamentations distinguish themselves from other mortuary forms (such as the elegy) that resolve, and offer consolation for, death and that tender compensation in the form of public memory, artistic immortality, or national glory. This disarticulation of the symbolic, and the strange usefulness of alexithymia, we have witnessed at multiple junctures in modernity: in New South spokesmen’s disordering of ideas, ideals, and identities in the interest of resignifying the South; in Mallarmé’s poetic transformation of grammaire to grimoire, which disturbs the literal meaning of words and constructs syntactic and semantic ambiguity; and in Hatzis’s narrative of the death of the Singrafeas—of the transcendental signifier, the center that synthesizes and subsumes—to stage a crisis in the significatory substitutions through which the nation reproduces itself. In many instances, this disarticulation is also a resistance to logical resolution, a direct affront to the Enlightenment’s valorization of reason, normalizing judgments, and dreams of mastery. This is why Nietzsche loves catastrophe, because in it he finds a perpetual overcoming of logic, an indispensable and significant uncertainty, and an exhilaratingly dangerous “perhaps.” The language of lamentation, drawing on pre-philosophical traditions, associated with the feminine, hysterical, irrational, and quasimagical, imbued by the incomprehensibility of death and potent moods that escape reflection, is not only crucial to representations of central aspects of late modernity—anomie, anxiety, subversion of mastery, the critique of instrumental reason—but useful for liberating thought from the constraints of metaphysics and exploring modes of experience and significance that do not submit to logic. We have seen this aspect of the lamentation at work in Faulkner’s incessant epistemological losses, his paradoxes, and his privative devices that obsessively unmake knowledge; in Mallarmé’s cultivation of the

176

EPILOGUE

semantically foreign, confused, and anomalous, his collaboration with an obstinately obscure materiality, and his construction of a significant incomprehensibility; and in the testimonies gathered by Hatzis’s Singrafeas that won’t translate into a coherent national identity and that ultimately confront idealist philosophy—in the form of the “sovereign people”—with the material peoples that defy conformity to it. The mode of lamentation, associated with social indiscipline—with disruptive and unruly bodies, with the primitive, feminine, barbarian, Oriental, hysteric, and infantile, and with the social unreliability of traumatized subjects—has proven threatening as much to modern disciplinary societies as to pre-modern hierarchical ones. This threat is evinced in the history of laws prohibiting lament practices, as well as in their domestication by states and religions, and their marginalization within modernity. The disruption of social order performed by lamentations we have witnessed in the form of “shellshocked” soldiers (whose trauma, in the early twentieth century, was treated with increased mental regulation and bodily discipline), in the “redemption” of Southern states from Reconstruction, in the traumatic body of Ahmed that elicits violence (and, for at least one narrator, represents a generalized social disintegration), and in resistance to colonial order represented as a menacing indiscipline, chaos, and barbarity. Finally, lamentation ratifies discourse with the affective potency of death, with the impact of traumatic wounding, and the inviolable intensity of grief. To critique such a language, even to interpret it, might be a betrayal, would certainly be improper, if not absolutely unethical. To interrupt it might elicit an otherworldly rage and this threat provides a formidable protective shield. The moods that mingle in lamentation, moreover—melancholy, anger, dread—resist reflection; they are aggressive, threatening, and infectious. It is advisable to flee from them before one is either swallowed up or becomes their object. Such moods function in diversely powerful ways in modernity: we have seen, for example, how nationalists sanctify their projects through the horror of death; how social reformers and colonialists deploy melancholy to effect redistributions of property; how societies unleash anger to discipline bodies, their “race,” and gender; and how modernist texts construct a disorienting dread to perform cultural distinction, invalidate knowledge and histories, and open up (social, political, or bodily) possibilities. The temporally and spatially dispersed fragments of modernity I have explored in this book, then, illustrate the diverse ways the mode of lamentation functions in modernity: to mark an event as loss, lay claim to possession(s), deploy a contradictory logic of loss and continuity, invoke the repressed, signal newness or purity, construct desire, disorder the symbolic, resist logical resolution, disrupt social discipline, or infuse discourse with a compelling mood. These conclusions, drawn inductively from my case studies, need to be investigated in other texts and contexts, and to be corrected, expanded, and refined by them. But the evidence that has led to these conclusions leaves little doubt that the mode of lamentation is a significant and consequential thread in the fabric of modernity.

N ot e s

Preface 1. Albeit in varied and nuanced ways, numerous works of the last decades interpret modern texts as records of loss or crisis. See Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Richard Stamelman, Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ronald Schliefer, The Rhetoric of Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Peter Homans, The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Stephen Dowden, Sympathy for the Abyss: A Study in the Novel of German Modernism (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986); and Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 2. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. See also Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). 3. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25, 36. 4. This nexus of meanings descends from Latin proprius (one’s own, special, particular, characteristic, what is lasting or permanent) and encompasses identity, propriety, purity, literality, and property. I demonstrate how these nuances negatively delimit foreignness in The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), chaps. 1, 3, and 7.

Chapter 1: Heavy Losses 1. Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 2. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 41. 3. I am not particularly interested in combating “postmodernism” as a critical term but rather in resisting the ways in which it homogenizes modernity and authenticates Western imperialist culture as modernity. Frederic Jameson, for example,

178

N ot e s to C h a p t e r 1

depicting postmodernity as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” astutely describes this period from the perspective of contemporary Western culture but tends to disregard those cultural productions systematically repressed by transnational capitalism and relegate to belatedness and inauthenticity contemporary (or post-war) works that employ “modernist” techniques. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). David Harvey’s reliance on a residual category that conflates the “Enlightenment” and “modernism” is hard to reconcile with much of the artistic emphasis of late modernity. His depiction of modernism, largely derived from analysis of urban space and the built environment, cannot be simply transported from architecture to literature, the visual arts, or performance, and indeed largely represents what aesthetic modernism reacted against. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). For similar critiques of the term “postmodern,” see François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979); Yack, Fetishism of Modernities, 4; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8ff; and Agnes Heller, A Theory of Modernity (London: Blackwell, 1999), 4. On the difficulties of defining modernity, see also Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 493–513. 4. See Hall’s deft synopsis of this position in Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (London: Blackwell, 1996), 8. See also ibid., 426–28; and Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 12–14. 5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977), 178, 210. 6. Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 18–19. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. Hall et al., Modernity: An Introduction, 4. 9. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 192. 10. Ibid., 192, 223. 11. Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 38. 12. Ibid., 40. 13. Ibid., 3. 14. Hall et al., Modernity: An Introduction, 597. 15. On the roots of this conception of the subject, see ibid., 603. 16. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 96. 17. Felski, Gender of Modernity, 4. 18. Ibid., 2. 19. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin, 1967), 83. 20. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1959), 72–73. 21. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 38. 22. Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 113, 100.


179

23. Ibid., 244. This sequestration, it should be noted, is far more characteristic of Western societies than of the rest of the world. 24. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 174. 25. Qtd. Karl Löwith, “European Nihilism: Reflections on the Spiritual and Historical Background of the European War,” in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 191. 26. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism,” in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 433. 27. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 33–34. 28. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 47. 29. Taylor associates the acultural theory of modernity with an ideology of loss and as echoing the conflicting value judgments of modernity we have just evoked. See Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” Public Culture 27 (1999): 154–55. 30. Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 27 (1999): 252. On the temporal disparities of modernity, see also James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Walter Mignolo, “Globalization, Civilization, and Languages,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 58; Saskia Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization,” in Globalization, 267; and Rebecca Saunders, ed., The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), chap. 4. 31. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 44. 32. Hall et al., Modernity: An Introduction, 6. 33. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1920 (New York: Penguin, 1978), 27. For more recent theorizations of modernism within the same vein, see Stephen Dowden, Sympathy for the Abyss: A Study in the Novel of German Modernism (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986); Art Berman, Preface to Modernism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Thomas Vargish and Delo Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); and David Ellison, Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On other aspects of modernism, see also Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987);

180


David Hayman, Re-Forming the Narrative: Toward a Mechanics of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Peter Childs, Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). 34. Berman, Preface to Modernism, viii. 35. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 10. 36. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 45–46. LaCapra further aligns absence (on the one hand) with structural trauma and the transhistorical, and loss (on the other hand) with historical trauma and the historical itself. LaCapra’s argument, here and elsewhere, is particularly significant for its elaboration of “a nonreductive, sociopolitically and critically inflected notion of working-through” (LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004], 11) that develops the implications of working-through for history, historiography, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, and functions as an important corrective to certain “insufficiently qualified valorization[s] of trauma, the traumatic sublime, symptomatic acting-out, melancholia, the repetition compulsion, and endless aporias” (History in Transit, 142). See Writing History, Writing Trauma, 65–76, 141–53; and History in Transit, 92–105 and chap. 3. 37. On negativity, see Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds. Languages of the Unsayable: the Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt ˘ iz˘ek, Tarrying with (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Slavoj Z the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Simon Critchley, Very Little. . .Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Diana Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 2000). On memory, see Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996). On mourning and melancholy, see Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and William Watkin, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). On disaster, see Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 38. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 46. 39. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 4. 40. Qtd. ibid., 88. 41. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 21. See also D. Adrian and L. R. Yealland, “Treatment of Some Common War Neuroses,” Lancet 1 (June 9, 1917): 867–72. 42. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 219. 43. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 26.


181

44. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 2. See also Abram Kardiner, The Traumatic Neuroses of War (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1941). 45. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 467. On PTSD, see also Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 35ff.; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 57–58; and Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 183–86. 46. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 32. 47. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 249–50. 48. Ibid., 251. 49. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1991), 60. 50. Ibid., 110–12. Fanon’s quotations in this passage are from Jean Lhermitte, “L’Image de notre corps,” Nouvelle revue critique (1939): 17. 51. Ibid., 10–11. 52. Ibid., 105. 53. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 309. 54. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143. 55. Ibid., 149. 56. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 251. 57. It is only very recently that trauma studies in the academy have begun to focus on the specificities of trauma in “non-Western” contexts. See, for example, Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999); Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson, Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Rebecca Saunders and Kamran Aghaie, eds., “Mourning and Memory,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005). 58. Ron Eyerman, Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1. 59. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 21. 60. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 223. Herman, Erikson, and Henry Krystal all emphasize the social isolation of trauma victims. See Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 115; Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” 186; and Henry Krystal, “Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-Up,” in Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations, 76–99. 61. This “elsewhere” is embedded in the term abreaction, the prefix of which (ab-), as LaPlanche and Pontalis note, signifies “distance in time, the fact of separation, diminishment, suppression etc.” J. LaPlanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 2. 62. Although Freud abandoned the strictly cathartic cure, it was revived during World War II by William Sargant in conjunction with narcotherapy. Sargant

182


conceived abreaction as purely mechanical and dependent on emotional collapse. See Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 209ff. 63. Ibid., 86. 64. Ibid., 196. 65. Ibid., 124. On Leys’s reading of Ferenczi, see LaCapra, History in Transit, 89–93. 66. Qtd. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 187. 67. The term was introduced by Peter Sifneos in 1972. Common in PTSD and regularly described in terms of a “deficit,” alexithymia entails an inability to cognitively process and express emotion. See Graeme J. Taylor, R. Michael Bagby, and James D. A. Parker, Disorders of Affect Regulation: Alexithymia in Medical and Psychiatric Illness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Ren`y J. Muller, “When a Patient Has No Story to Tell: Alexithymia,” Psychiatric Times 17, no. 7 (July 2000). Available at www.psychiatrictimes.com/p000771.html. 68. Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters (New York: Norton, 1995), 94. 69. Ibid., 196. 70. On the relation of trauma to deconstruction, see also Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, chap. 1 and 68–70; and History in Transit, chap. 3. 71. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 72. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 151. 73. Ibid., 5. 74. Ibid., 5. Caruth’s suggestive and often elegant work is, in my view, frustratingly undercut by theoretical imprecision. As an example, in the sentence just quoted, she seems to take “absolutely literal” as synonymous with “unassimilable to associative chains of meaning,” which it is not. The literal is routinely integrated into meaning; it is also regularly interpreted, as the history of literary criticism bears out. It is also not the same thing to say that something can’t be interpreted as to say that every interpretation involves distortion; indeed the latter assumes that interpretation is regularly carried out. I also find it difficult to reconcile this insistence on the literal with what Caruth elsewhere identifies as the literary; trauma produces, she writes, “a language that is always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding . . . a literary dimension that cannot be reduced to the thematic content of the text” (Unclaimed Experience, 5). This formulation seems particularly incongruous in a text that draws heavily on de Man, for whom the literary is precisely the non-literal (i.e., the figural). I am equally troubled by several other aspects of Caruth’s argument: the way in which trauma becomes a site protected by absolute purity, a stronghold of the metaphysics of the proper; her rejection of interpretative and integrative treatments, the therapeutic efficacy of which many clinicians affirm; her implicit (though not always consistent) rejection of traumatic symptoms aside from the literal dream or flashback, which seems not only a dubious avoidance of the problems of condensation and displacement but contrary to much clinical evidence; and her implicit rejection of sociocultural features in the way trauma is interpreted and experienced—of, as Leys puts it, “subjective meaning, personal cognitive schemes, psychosocial factors, or unconscious symbolic elaboration” (42). For a detailed critique of the scientific evidence underpinning Caruth’s literality theory and her interpretation of Freud, see Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 254ff.,


183

270–83. For further discussion of Caruth’s work, see LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 107–9n20, 181–84; and History in Transit, 119–24. 75. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11. 76. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 6. See also LaCapra’s important analaysis of the relation of traumatic memory to history in Writing History, Writing Trauma, x–xii, chaps. 1 and 3; and History in Transit, Introduction and chap. 1. Also relevant is LaCapra’s distinction between traumatic event and experience. See e.g., Writing History, Writing Trauma, 89ff.; and History in Transit, 55–56. 77. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 147. 78. Ibid., 103. 79. Both Leys and Caruth stop short of reproaching Freud for this reversal, but feminist therapists such as Judith Herman and Laura Brown are less indulgent. “Out of the ruins of the traumatic theory of hysteria,” writes Herman, “Freud created psychoanalysis. The dominant psychological theory of the next century was founded on the denial of women’s reality” (Trauma and Recovery, 14). Brown describes Freud’s terms as a “betray[al of] the truth of what we know of the immediacy and frequency of traumatic events in daily life.” Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations, 110. 80. Qtd. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 87. 81. On work with the German Restitution Authorities, see Krystal, “Trauma and Aging,” 89ff. On political gains conferred by a “victim identity,” see Antze and Lambek, Tense Past. On “trauma envy” that, in the context of identity politics, seeks a legitimating wound as guarantor of moral authority, see John Mowitt, “Trauma Envy,” Cultural Critique 46 (Fall 2000): 272–97. 82. See Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); and Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 245–47. 83. Qtd. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 204. See also Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, chap. 4. 84. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 153–54. 85. Caruth occasionally falls into an unnuanced version of deconstruction that replaces critique of a categorical statement (“translation cannot be perfectly faithful”) with another categorical statement (“all translation is betrayal”). 86. On the metaphysics of the proper, and the family of meanings inhabiting the Latin root proprius, see my discussion of Derrida below and in Concept of the Foreign, chap. 3. 87. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 154. 88. Ibid., 152. 89. See Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy; Herman, Trauma and Recovery; and Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Onno Van Der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations, 158–82. See also E. Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver, “Getting ‘Stuck’ in the Past: Temporal Orientation and Coping with Trauma,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 5 (1998): 1146–63. 90. Ferenczi (in Leys’s words) also “pictured the individual shattered by trauma as dissociated into two distinct psychical systems, a subjective emotional system which feels the emotions of a trauma that it cannot represent, and an objective intellectual system which perceives a trauma that it cannot feel” (Trauma, 131).

184


91. Qtd. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 239. See also Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisath, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York: Guilford, 1996); van der Kolk and van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past”; and Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, chap. 7. 92. Qtd. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 248. 93. Ibid., 265. 94. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 5. 95. For an important critique of the sacralization of trauma, see LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 22–23, 92–95, 190–92; and History in Transit, 11, 120–23, 262ff. 96. While during World War I Freud set out to reconsider his position on infantile psychosexual drives, many of his disciples treated the symptoms of the war neuroses as regression to an earlier, narcissistic stage of libidinal development. Central to Freud’s thinking on trauma and regression is “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74). See also Leys’s contextualized analysis of this essay, Trauma: A Genealogy, 24–34. 97. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 129. 98. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1949): 152–70. 99. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 124–25. 100. Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past,” 172. 101. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 112. 102. See Saunders, Concept of the Foreign, chap. 4. 103. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 132. 104. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 252. 105. See ibid., 269–70. 106. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 74, 64. 107. Ibid., 9. 108. Brown, “Not Outside the Range,” 101. 109. Ibid., 102. 110. Ibid., 103. 111. Ibid., 105. 112. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 291. 113. See ibid., 298. 114. See Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 117; and Brown, “Not Outside the Range,” 107. 115. Brown, “Not Outside the Range,” 103. 116. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 223. 117. Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 15–16. Hereafter cited as “Zarathustra” in text. 118. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 326. Hereafter cited as “BGE” in text. 119. While in this passage it seems clear enough that this creative suffering is to be cultivated in oneself (as opposed to inflicted on others), the point is admittedly


185

murkier elsewhere, and everywhere beset by Nietzsche’s addiction to provocation. It does seem clear, however, that the struggle inherent to the will to power is distinguishable from, and the inevitable overturning of, the Christian valorization of suffering and its attendant pageants of pity. “Almost everywhere in Europe today,” writes Nietzsche in a passage reminiscent of the gender markings we have noted in clinical descriptions of trauma, “we find a pathological sensitivity and receptivity to pain; also a repulsive incontinence in lamentation, an increase in tenderness that would use religion and philosophical bric-a-brac to deck itself out as something higher—there is a veritable cult of suffering. The unmanliness of what is baptized as ‘pity’ in the circles of such enthusiasts is, I should think, what always meets the eye first” (BGE, 421). 120. These images, among others, attest to the porousness of lamentation and celebration, to the way in which Nietzsche’s laughter mingles with mourning. As Zarathustra evinces in the tomb songs of Part II, some losses may entail mourning and bear a significant testamentary trace. 121. Frederich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 597. Hereafter cited as “Genealogy” in text. 122. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 29. This analog between uncertainty, disorder, and the foreign (or “other”) reappears frequently in my analysis of the lamentation. 123. Nietzsche everywhere emphasizes the danger and risk of this undertaking. See e.g., BGE, 199, 201, 242, 315, 324. It is the inverse and overcoming of morality as a species of timidity. See BGE, 303–4. 124. Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 3. 125. Wai Chee Dimmock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2. 126. More resistant to any schematic compatibility or opposition is the relationship of the lamentation to ressentiment. It is quite possible that Nietzsche might class lamentation among the reactive feelings, a “senseless raging of ressentiment among the weaker powers” (Genealogy, 511). On the other hand, as we have suggested, the lamentation is not without its affinities to the project of Überwindung or the dangerous uncertainties of the philosophers of the future. This is less a paradox, in my view, than an indication of the sometimes razor-thin separation between a value and its overcoming, between lamentation and celebration. 127. Dasein understands its world by manipulating things and putting them to use. For Heidegger, this “circumspection” or skillful concern is our most familiar and habitual state of mind, and is distinguished from theoretical reflection or scientific observation. 128. Individual tools or pieces of equipment, according to Heidegger, blend into a referential whole. “Equipment,” he writes, “in accordance with its equipmentality, always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves . . . [but within] a totality of equipment.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 97. Hereafter cited as “BT” in the text.

186


129. On the way such breakdown refigures the Enlightenment subject, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991), 76. 130. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1993), 123. 131. Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1993), 437, 445. 132. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 1. Hereafter cited as “SP” in text. 133. Derrida also develops this argument in relation to the proper name. See Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 49–50. 134. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 20, translation modified. 135. Ibid., 9, translation modified. 136. Ibid., 18. 137. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 163. Hereafter cited as “Grammatology” in the text. 138. See, e.g., ibid., 201–2, 255–58. 139. “Différance,” 159. This prohibition against nostalgia also appears elsewhere. See, e.g., Derrida’s critique of Lévi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 278–93; and Gaytari Spivak’s comments in “Translator’s Preface,” Grammatology, xvi–xx. 140. “Différance,” 135, translation modified. 141. See also Derrida, Grammatology, 25, 37. 142. See also ibid., 34–35, 77–81. 143. See also “La parole soufflée” on “the unity of the proper as the nonpollution of the subject absolutely close to himself” in Writing and Difference, 183; and “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” on the “explo[sion of] the reassuring opposition of the metaphoric and the proper,” in Margins of Philosophy, 270.

Chapter 2: “And the Women Wailed in Answer” 1. While all societies mourn their dead, and striking similarities in mourning practices can be found across cultures, there are also significant differences in mortuary rituals not only between but within cultures. My portrayal of lamentation is inductively constructed on ethnographic, historical, literary, theological, and psychological literature on the lament tradition, as well as on transcripts and recordings of lamentations. While I draw most heavily on the lament practices of the Mediterranean (particularly from Greece and North Africa), I also reference laments from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Finland, and the Baltic region, where strong lament traditions remain. On the classical Greek tradition, see Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments


187

and Greek Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). On the Biblical “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” see Claus Westermann, Lamentations: Issues and Interpretation, trans. Charles Muenchow (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994); Delbert Hillers, The Anchor Bible Commentary on Lamentations (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992); Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Norman K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations (London: SCM Press, 1954); and Francis Landy, “Lamentations,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 329–34. On the history of lamentations for the Shi‘ite prophet Hussein, see Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of Ashura in Twelver Shi‘ism (The Hague: Mouton, 1978); Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, The Revolution of al-Husayn: Its Impact on the Consciousness of Muslim Society, trans. I. K. A. Howard (London: Muhammadi Trust of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1985); Annemarie Schimmel, “Karbala and the Imam Husayn in Persian and Indo-Muslim Literature,” AlSerat 12 (1986): 29–39; Lynda Clarke, “Elegy (Marthiya) on Husayn: Arabic and Persian,” Al-Serat 12 (1986): 13–28; David Pinault, The Shiites: Ritual and Popular Piety in a Muslim Community (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993); David Pinault, Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Kamran Scot Agahie, The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi‘i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Kamran Scot Agahie, ed., The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi‘i Islam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Ali Hussain, “The Mourning of History and the History of Mourning: The Evolution of Ritual Commemoration of the Battle of Karbala,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005): 78–88; and Laura Deeb, “Living Ashura in Lebanon: Mourning Transformed to Sacrifice,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005): 122–39. For comparative studies of ancient near east lamentations, see Paul Wayne Ferris Jr., The Genre of Communal Lament in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992); and F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Rome: Editice Pontificio Instituto Biblico, 1993). On modern Greek lamentations, see Alexiou, Ritual Lament; Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices; Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Loring Danforth, The Death Rituals of Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Anna Caraveli-Chaves, “Bridge Between Worlds: The Greek Women’s Lament as Communicative Event,” Journal of the American Folklore Society 93, no. 368 (April–June 1980): 129–57. On North Africa and the Arab world, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Islam and the Gendered Discourses of Death,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (1993): 187–205; Abdel Halim Hifni, “An Introduction to Al-Adid:

188

N ot e s to C h a p t e r 2 Lamentation in Arabic Folklore,” Folklore 26, no. 4 (April 1985): 61–67; Mishael Maswari Caspi, “‘My Brother, Vein of My Heart:’ Arab Laments for the Dead in Israel,” Folklore 98, no. 1 (1987): 28–40; Mishael Maswari Caspi and Julia Ann Blessing, Weavers of the Songs: The Oral Poetry of Arab Women in Israel and the West Bank (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1991); Nagib Khouri, Le Feu et la cendre: travail de deuil et rites funeraires dans un village libanais: Abdilly-Batroun (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1993); Benedicte Grima, The Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women: “The Misfortunes which Have Befallen Me” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); Zineb Geurroudj, “Femmes en deuil,” Cahiers Intersignes 10 (1995): 181–86; J. Delheure, Vivre et Mourir à Ouargla (Paris: SELAF, 1988). On Jewish communities in Morocco, see Elie Malka, Essai d’ethnographie traditionnelle des Mellahs, ou Croyances, rites de passage et vieilles pratiques des israélites marocains (Rabat, Morocco: Omnia, 1946); and J. Goulven, Les Mellahs de Rabat-Salé (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1927), chap. 13. On Ireland, see Angela Partridge, “Wild Men and Wailing Women,” Eigse: A Journal of Irish Studies 18, no. 1 (1980): 25–37; Angela Bourke, “The Irish Traditional Lament and the Grieving Process,” Women’s Studies International Forum 11: 4 (1988): 287–91; and “More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry,” in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 160–82. On Eastern Europe, see Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, “Text and Context in Serbian Ritual Lament,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 52–60; Raina Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments,” trans. D. Minkova and A. L. Lloyd, International Folklore Review 2 (1982): 112–30. In the Baltic region, see Elizabeth Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words: Symbolization of Affect in the Karelian Lament,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 22 (1990): 80–105; Aili Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments,” Temenos 17 (1981): 45–80; Aili Nenola-Kallio, “Two Genres for Expressing Sorrow: Laments and Lyrical Songs in Ingria,” in Genre, Structure and Reproduction in Oral Literature, ed. Lauri Honko and Vilmos Voigt (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980): 41–54; Lauri Honko, “The Lament: Problems of Genre, Structure and Reproduction” in Genre, Structure and Reproduction in Oral Literature, 21–40; and Patricia Arant, “Aspects of Oral Style: Russian Traditional Oral Lament,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 42–51. For a comparative study of modern lamentations, see Nikolai Kaufman, “Laments from Four Continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, and America),” International Folklore Review 7 (1990): 22–29. Numerous historical, ethnographic, and psychological studies of death also furnish valuable information on lamentation rituals. See, for example, Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); M. Bloch and J. Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Louis-Vincent Thomas, Anthropologie de la mort (Paris: Payot, 1980); Tobie Nathan, ed., Rituels de deuil, travail du deuil (Paris: Éditions La Pensée Sauvage, 1995). On the musical aspects of lamentations, see Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words”; Kaufman, “Laments from Four Continents”;


189

and Albert Lloyd, “Lament,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980): 407–10. 2. See Ariès, Hour of Our Death, chap. 12; Colin Murray Parkes, Pittu Laungani, and Bill Young, Death and Bereavement Across Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1997); Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices; and The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chap 1. 3. Such practices are indeed survivals of ancient (pre-Islamic and pre-Christian) traditions. Although for many this means that they bear the imprint of the “days of ignorance” or pagan superstition, it also means that lamentations participate in the ambivalently valued realm of the primitive we have discussed above. On the tensions between Orthodox Christianity and lament practices, see Seremetakis, Last Word; between Islam and lament practices, see AbuLughod, “Gendered Discourses of Death”; and Grima, Performance of Emotion; in immigrant communities, see Parkes, Laungani, and Young, Death and Bereavement. Despite such tensions, pagan and Christian, or Jahilic and Islamic imagery often comfortably inhabit the same lamentation. 4. Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 3. 5. The conception of the lamenter as pychopomp is widespread and found, for example, in Greek, Serbian, and Finnish traditions. Musicologists note the way in which the sound of the lament “engenders the trancelike state necessary to make a succesful journey” to the underworld (Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words,” 81). Different societies perform laments at different times. In Finland and Soviet Karelia, laments accompany funeral preparations, washing the body, or building a coffin; in rural Greece, they accompany the body to the grave, whereas in North Africa and much of the Arab world (where Islamic law dictates that the body be buried by sundown), it is only after burial that women’s lamenting begins. 6. See Bourke, “The Irish Traditional Lament.” Similar claims have been made for the elegy. Peter Sacks, for example, reads elegy as a genre commensurate with the Freudian work of mourning in The English Elegy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and Ramazani as a “mimesis of mourning” (Modern Elegy, 28). Holst-Warhaft, by contrast, argues that the written elegy, “articulated by male poets removed from a ritual context . . . loses its functional quality as a communal expression of grief” (Dangerous Voices, 9) and Tolbert speaks of the written text as “a shadow of a lament, missing the improvisatory utterances needed to make the lament truly efficacious” (“Women Cry with Words,” 92). 7. Numerous scholars have argued for the therapeutic value of the lament. HolstWarhaft contends that “the poetic expression of grief is perceived by the lamenters themselves not only as an emotional outburst but as a means of mediating that emotion and thereby avoiding the excesses of madness that death might otherwise provoke” (Dangerous Voices, 28). Caraveli-Chaves emphasizes the salutary effect of communal bonding through shared suffering. See CaraveliChaves, “Bridge Between Worlds.” While I do not want to underestimate the therapeutic value of the lamentation, I think it is also necessary to acknowledge that the very notion of recovery remains semantically foreign to it. It rejects the idea of indemnification, restitution, consolation, does not semantically establish a re-equilibration of psychic forces, does not accept a return to normalcy.

190


8. This pain may be wholly other than the ostensible object of the lament and is reminiscent of Sargant’s findings that abreaction from a fictional scene may be as effective as from a “real” one. Tolbert notes in the Finnish context that “although lamenters deliberately ‘fake’ signs of emotional intensity at the beginnings of their performances, this ‘faking,’ which consists of assuming the physical attitude of sorrow, could be an extremely effective means of reaching an altered perceptual state” (Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words,” 99). 9. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. 10. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57. 11. Ibid., 57. 12. Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments,” 67. 13. Ibid., 78. See also Edward Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco (London: Macmillan, 1926), 440. On the problems presented to anthropology by emotional performance, see Metcalf and Huntington, Celebrations of Death, chap. 2. 14. See Seremetakis, Last Word, chap. 10. 15. Westermarck, Ritual and Belief, 518. 16. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 14–22. 17. In some parts of Greece it is considered bad luck to lament outside the context of the funeral; it could even cause another death. Kerewsky-Halpern notes similar prohibitions in Serbia. See Kerewsky-Halpern, “Serbian Ritual Lament.” According to Tolbert, however, no such interdictions exist in Finland and Soviet Karelia. See Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words.” Nenola-Kallio records numerous occasional laments composed in the Baltic region. See Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments.” Many lament traditions associate death with marriage or erotic abduction. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 10, 120–22; Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 369–95; Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 5; and Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Feminine Figures of Death in Greece,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 95–110. On these associations in North Africa and the Arab world, see Khouri, Le feu et la cendre, 84, 112–14; Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 132; Abu-Lughod, “Gendered Discourses of Death,” 189–90; Westermarck, Ritual and Belief, 448–53; and Terri Brint Joseph, “Poetry as a Strategy of Power: The Case of Riffian Berber Women,” Signs 5, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 418–34. For other examples, see Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments,” 130n14; and Metcalf and Huntington, Celebrations of Death, 13. 18. Qtd. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 49. 19. Caspi, “My Brother, Vein of my Heart,” 35. 20. Caraveli-Chavez, “Bridge Between Worlds,” 153. 21. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 124. 22. Seremetakis, Last Word, 203–4. 23. Lamentations 2:18. On the differences between individual laments, communal laments, and dirges in Hebrew, see Gottwald, Studies in Lamentations, chaps. 1–2; Hillers, Anchor Bible Commentary, chap. 1; and Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations, chap. 2. On the Homeric world, see Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 11–13. 24. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 87–90.


191

25. See, for example, Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Laments for the Dead in Medieval Narrative (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1966). On the relation of lamentations to classical Arab poetry, see Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs; in relation to Greek tragedy, see Alexiou, Ritual Lament; Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices; and Loraux, Mothers in Mourning; to theories of orality, see Arant, “Aspects of Oral Style”; to the Romantic sublime, see Linda M. Austin, “The Lament and the Rhetoric of the Sublime,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (December 1998): 279–306. 26. Abu-Lughod, “Gendered Discourses of Death,” 192. 27. Lamentations 5:22. 28. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 127. 29. Ibid., 133. 30. Ibid., 108. 31. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 52. 32. Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 104. Ramazani makes an argument for the modern elegy as melancholic, as a mourning that is “unresolved, violent and ambivalent,” and which thus might be read as a recrudescence of the (ritual and feminine) mode of lamentation into the (more philosophical and masculine) genre of elegy. See Ramazani, Modern Elegy. 33. Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 107. 34. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 124. 35. Ibid., 120. 36. Ibid., 5. 37. Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments,” 58. 38. Westermarck, Ritual and Belief, 494. Shi‘ite ta’ziya (lamentation) has been the object of numerous suppressions; they were largely performed in secret during the Ummayad period. 39. Ibid., 440, 441. 40. Abu-Lughod, “Gendered Discourses of Death,” 189. 41. Ibid., 193. Similarly, Grima records a Paxtun woman saying, “Death and funerary rites are shari’at, but our weeping and lamenting is our own custom, quite against the law in Islam” (Performance of Emotion, 46). She notes that the women’s zhara (lament or formalized weeping) is “highly condemned in Islamic shari’at. Mullahs often reiterate this in their sermons, and it is not uncommon for men from the deceased’s family to remain in the women’s midst at mournings, reprimanding them severely for this sung lament and, if necessary, ordering them to cease their outbursts” (Performance of Emotion, 61). 42. See Bourke, “More in Anger,” 161; and Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 67. 43. Seremetakis, Last Word, 165, 167. The opposition between klama (lamentation ritual) and kidhia (funeral), according to Seremetakis, is simultaneously an opposition between gender discourses, between orality and textuality, between personalized connection with, and depersonalization of, the dead, and between household and public institution. See Last Word, 170. Bourke records the following astonishing exchange from the Irish tradition. A mother admonished by the priest to cease her keening responded: Shut up, Priest, and stand up straight! Read the Mass and you’ll get paid. He didn’t spend nine months next to your heart, Or nineteen years around your house. (“More in Anger,” 167)

192


44. Republic III, qtd. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 98. As Loraux interprets these passages, “grief and lamentation [are] among the feminine forms of behavior that are not to be imitated. . . . The object of the prohibition is the potential threat that women’s mourning constitutes for civic order.” Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 11. 45. Qtd. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 98. 46. On Solon’s laws, see Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 19–25; Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 14–20; and Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, chap. 4. 47. On similar laws in Rome, see Loraux, who, in the following passage, quotes from Seneca: “Since ‘women cry by nature,’ the city recorded that fact and assigned time limits . . . ‘to compromise with the stubbornness of female sorrow by way of a public decree’” (Mothers in Mourning, 31). According to Shi‘ite tradition, Zaynab was exiled from Medina because of her inflammatory lamentations. 48. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 26. 49. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 6; Seremetakis, Last Word, 97; Metcalf and Huntington, Celebrations of Death, 49; and Khouri, Le feu et la cendre, 49–50. 50. The phrase is from Plutarch, qtd. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 23. 51. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 92. 52. Caraveli-Chavez, “Bridge Between Worlds,” 138. 53. Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments,” 65. 54. Lamentations 1:15, 17. 55. Seremetakis, Last Word, 75. For some intriguing parallels, see Metcalf and Huntington, Celebrations of Death, 90–94; and Thomas, Anthropologie de la mort, 449–52. 56. The foreigner is often delineated precisely by his/her lack of the proper, and the foreign is often conceived as disruptive of metaphysical categories and thus philosophically impure. See Rebecca Saunders, ed., The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), chaps. 7 and 3. 57. Seremetakis, Last Word, 75. 58. Qtd. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 30n1. 59. Seremetakis, Last Word, 126. 60. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 90. 61. Grima rejects the idea of lamentation as protest in Paxtun society which she views, rather, as socializing girls into an ethic of suffering. See Grima, Performance of Emotion. 62. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 58. 63. Ibid., 86. 64. Grima, Performance of Emotion, 40. 65. Westermarck, Ritual and Belief, 473. See also Thomas, Anthropologie de la mort, 441. 66. Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 8. 67. Anna Ivanova’s lament for her sister, recorded in Soviet Karelia by Honko, “The Lament,” 36. This stanza is also an excellent example of the tortuous syntax and indirection of many lamentations. 68. Qtd. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 7. 69. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 115. 70. Augenblick is Luther’s translation of the Pauline phrase “ejn riph` ojfqalmou`” (in the twinkling of an eye) (1 Corinthians 15:52).


193

71. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), section 65; and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991), 321–23. 72. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 60. 73. For close analysis of the texts and contextual “moment” of the Hebrew “Lamentations of Jeremiah” and of the lamentations of Hecuba from Greek epic and tragedy, see Rebecca Saunders, Poetics of Loss: The Modern and its Lamentations, PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1994, chap. 2. 74. Seremetakis, Last Word, 75. 75. Partridge notes the way in which lamenting women are described in the same terms as Sweeney or other mad characters of Irish tradition. See “Wild Men and Wailing Women.” 76. On these forms, see Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, chaps. 1 and 2; and Hillers, Anchor Bible Commentary, chap. 1. 77. On formulaic elements in Karelian, see Honko, “The Lament”; in Ingrian see Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments”; in Russian, see Arant, “Aspects of Oral Style”; in Arabic, see Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs; in Paxtun, see Grima, Performance of Emotion; in Serbian, see Kerewsky-Halpern, “Serbian Ritual Lament”; in Bulgarian, see Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments.” 78. Lamentations 4:1–2, 5, 7–8. 79. Euripides, “Trojan Women,” trans. Richmond Lattimore, Euripides III, The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), lines 153–64. Hereafter referenced by line. 80. Honko, “The Lament,” 48. 81. Seremetakis, Last Word, 100. 82. For a discussion of repetition in the elegy, see Sacks, English Elegy, 23–26. 83. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 66. 84. See “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–51. 85. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 6. 86. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 98. 87. See Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 88. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 161–64. 89. Euripides, “Hecuba,” trans. William Arrowsmith, Euripides III, The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 618–22. Hereafter referenced by line. 90. Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments,” 115. 91. Ibid., 122. 92. Ibid., 122. 93. Seremetakis, Last Word, 197–98. 94. Lamentations 1:1. 95. Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments,” 42.

194


96. Ibid. 97. Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words,” 87. 98. Ibid., 93. 99. Lamentations 5:11–12. 100. Frederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 226. 101. Heidegger, Being and Time, 217. 102. Lamentations 1:12. See, for example, Dante’s appropriation of these lines in La Vita Nuova. Comparable are a number of early Greek tomb inscriptions that call on the passer-by to take notice of, and remember, the dead. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 138. 103. Caraveli-Chaves, “Bridge Between Worlds,” 133. 104. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 133–34. 105. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 66. 106. Bourke, “More in Anger,” 169. 107. Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments,” 122. 108. Honko, “The Lament,” 37. 109. Euripides, “Trojan Women,” lines 89–120. 110. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 122. 111. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 52. 112. Felman and Laub, Testimony, 5. 113. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 76. 114. Seremetakis, Last Word, 75–76. 115. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 129–30. 116. Ibid., 127. 117. Bourke, “More in Anger,” 174. 118. See Saunders, Concept of the Foreign, 11, 117–18. 119. Seremetakis, Last Word, 85. 120. Qtd. Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 37. 121. Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments,” 60. 122. Lamentations 5:2. 123. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 123. The idiom refers to the prohibition against charging interest on a loan to another Moslem. 124. Caraveli-Chaves, “Bridge Between Worlds,” 134. 125. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 212. 126. Kristeva, Black Sun, 21. 127. These moods correspond roughly to what Parkes, Laungani, and Young cite as the most culturally ubiquitous emotions expressed in funeral rites and mourning: crying, anger, and fear. See Parkes, Laungani, and Young, Death and Bereavement. 128. The word melancholia, from mevla~ [black] and colhv [bile], is itself a metaphor of darkness. See Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 395–99. 129. On the history of melancholy, see Jackson, Melancholia and Depression; Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and magazine littéraire 244 (1987), “Littérature et mélancolie.” 130. While lamentation may represent a stage in the work of mourning, as critics such as Holst-Warhaft and Bourke contend, it does not, in my view, affectively resolve


195

or conceptually complete the mourning process, but remains in the mode of melancholy. This is part of what is disturbing and threatening about the lamentation, as compared to other mortuary forms, and why it is (unlike those other forms) pathologized, criminalized, and otherwise disciplined by legal and medical regimes of recovery. 131. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), 155. 132. Kristeva, Black Sun, 33. 133. Ibid., 10. 134. Ibid., 13. 135. Ibid., 52. 136. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy,” 158. 137. Ibid., 153. 138. Ibid., 155. 139. Ibid., 153. 140. Kristeva, Black Sun, 64. 141. Ibid., 22. 142. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 100. 143. Ibid., 100, 98. 144. Seneca, “On Anger,” trans M. Russo, The Sophia Project, http://www.molloy.edu/ academic/philosophy/Sophia/Seneca/anger.htm. Aquinas’s comments on anger can be found in Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae Partis, Sections 46–48, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 145. Richard Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 222. See also James R. Averill, Anger and Aggression (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982); and Andrew Ortony, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 146. Aristotle, Rhetoric II, Book 3, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (1954). Or, as Aquinas puts it, “those who excel in any matter, are most of all angry if they be slighted in that matter” (Section 46). 147. Ibid. 148. Aquinas, Summa, Section 47. 149. See Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 150. Seneca, Book 1, Section 9. 151. Ibid., Book 1, Section 12. 152. Ibid., Book 1, Section 9. 153. Ibid. 154. Ibid., Book 1, Section 1. 155. Ibid., Book 1, Section 18. 156. Ibid., Book 1, Section 1. 157. Ibid., Book 1, Section 4. 158. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, 223. 159. Ibid., 218. 160. Aristotle, Rhetoric II, Book 3. 161. See Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, 226. 162. Aristotle, Rhetoric II, Book 3. 163. Seneca, Book 2, Section 15.

196


164. See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Maurice Blanchot, “From Dread to Language,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981), 3–20. 165. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 41. 166. Blanchot, “From Dread to Language,” 15. 167. Ibid., 6. 168. Ibid., 6. 169. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 44–45. 170. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 155–56. 171. Heidegger, Being and Time, 232.

Chapter 3: Lamentation and (Dis)Possession 1. The Old South, the Civil War, the Sutpen estate, and nearly all the novel’s characters are ultimately “lost,” as are honor and pride as a result of the War, Rosa’s youth and dreams, and, by her account, “life” itself. The novel, in addition to its titular reference to Biblical tragedy, contains frequent mortuary metaphors—its houses are “mausoleums,” the room at Harvard is “tomblike”—and allusions to Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. Its central character falls from an Edenic origin and subsequently embodies the “Lost Cause,” while one of its principal narrators (Rosa) is an elegist. On the thematic losses of Absalom, see Gail L. Mortimer, Faulkner’s Rhetoric of Loss: A Study in Perception and Meaning (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Leon S. Roudiez, “Absalom, Absalom!: The Significance of Contradictions,” The Minnesota Review 17 (1981): 61–62; and Linda J. Holland-Toll, “Absence Absolute: The Recurring Pattern of Faulknerian Tragedy,” Mississippi Quarterly 51, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 435–53. On the relation of loss to Faulknerian language, see John T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); and Linda Kauffman, “Devious Channels of Decorous Ordering: A Lover’s Discourse in Absalom, Absalom!” Modern Fiction Studies 29, no. 2 (1983): 183–200. On uncertainty and the narrative structure of Absalom, see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1984), chap. 11; Robert Dale Parker, Faulkner and the Novelistic Imagination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); James Snead, Figures of Division (New York: Methuen, 1986); J. Hillis Miller, “The Two Relativisms: Point of View and Indeterminacy in the Novel Absalom, Absalom!” in Relativism in the Arts, ed. Betty Jean Craige (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 148–70; and Gerhard Hoffmann, “Absalom, Absalom!: A Postmodernist Approach,” in Faulkner’s Discourse: An International Symposium, ed. Lothar Hönnighausen (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989), 276–92. On the relation of loss to Faulkner’s creative process, see Matthews, Play of Faulkner’s Language, 18–23; and John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns


197

Hopkins University Press, 1975), 170–72. On the relation of the novel to the Biblical tragedy of Absalom, see Ralph Behrens, “Collapse of Dynasty: The Thematic Center of Absalom, Absalom!” PMLA 89, no. 1 (1974): 24–33; and Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 149ff. 2. Rosa’s summoning of Quentin is paradigmatic of the call to witness, as is Shreve’s invocation to Quentin to witness his own heritage. These scenes of testimony, in addition to Shreve’s testimony to Grandfather Compson, Mr. Compson’s testimony to Quentin, and the complex series of cross-examinations between Henry and Charles Bon, are motivated by precisely the dual threat of meaninglessness and unrequited injustice of which we have spoken above. 3. 2 Samuel 18:33. 4. Lamentations 1:1. 5. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1986), 5. Hereafter cited in text. In the world of Absalom, in order to be perceived as legitimately owning material possessions, one must already possess respectability—a tenet which accounts to a large degree for the outrage over Sutpen’s material accumulations; yet it is often material possessions which, by their significatory powers, acquire ideological ones. Rosa no doubt chooses Quentin as a repository of her ideological property because he possesses apposite familial relations, respectability, and an education. Sign systems, however, as the novel repeatedly illustrates, are exasperatingly deceptive. The metal case that Judith gives to Bon, for example, is a hermetic sign with a distressingly variable content: with Judith’s picture in it, it is a sign of affection; with the octoroon mistress’s picture in it, it is, according to Shreve, a (necessarily posthumous) sign that says, “I was no good; do not grieve for me” (273). To Rosa, who reads it comparatively with Judith’s lack of tears at Bon’s death, it is a (misread) sign of Judith’s indifference; while to the reader, it is an unreadable sign that never discloses its contents; like the lamentation’s reiterations of literality, it is a sign that merely points back to itself. 6. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 140. 7. Euripides, “Trojan Women,” trans. Richmond Lattimore, Euripides III, The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), line 1158. 8. While there are distinctions to be drawn between the discursive styles of Absalom’s various narrators, the demonstrative pronoun and privatives are among those rhetorical patterns used in essentially the same manner by all narrators. For arguments on the consistency of narratorial style in Absalom, see Matthews, Play of Faulkner’s Language, 121; and Stephen Ross, Fiction’s Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 220. 9. On Bon’s desire for recognition from his father, see Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 49ff., 93ff.; and Matthews, Play of Faulkner’s Language, 144. 10. Snead argues that “the most insidious operation of [racial] division is its selferasure as ‘nature’” (Figures of Division, 108) and that “the Sutpen story hides its truths in seemingly guileless forms—everyday figures of speech, innocuous habits of expression, sudden forgettings” (Figures of Division, 129). 11. Linguistics distinguishes between “alienable possession,” which describes an alterable relation between entities and “inalienable possession,” which describes a non-alterable relation. Cross-culturally, the most consistent linguistic examples of inalienable possession are kin and body parts.

198


12. “The person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony. The ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain . . . contains not only the feeling ‘my body hurts’ but the feeling ‘my body hurts me.’” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 47. “Even though [pain] occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as ‘Not oneself,’ ‘not me,’ as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of” (Body in Pain, 52). 13. While Rosa asserts that “there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering,” that makes to “fall all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color,” her response to Clytie’s hand on her arm could not be a more brutal reinforcement of caste and color: “Take your hand off me, nigger!” (112–12). Indeed, the only respect in which this touch unsettles the grip of caste and color is that it is the first and only moment in which Rosa refers to a part of Clytie’s body as her own: “Take your hand off me.” 14. Grammatically, a privative designates an affix that expresses negation or privation; as an adjective the word means having the quality of depriving, tending to take away, characterized by the loss or want of some quality (OED). It is precisely the relation between these two meanings that I am exploring below. I use the term in its strict grammatical sense, as well as to name both words formed by privatives and other forms of linguistic negation. 15. Euripides, “Trojan Women,” line 492. For an extended discussion of this trope in relation to the novel, see Rebecca Saunders, “On Lamentation and the Redistribution of Possessions: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and the New South,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 4 (1996): 750–53. 16. A helpful catalog of Faulknerian negating patterns can be found in Walter J. Slatoff, Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), chap. 8. See also Winfried Herget, “The Poetics of Negation in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” in Faulkner’s Discourse, 33–37; François Pitavy, “Some Remarks on Negation and Denegation in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” in Faulkner’s Discourse, 25–32; Mortimer, Faulkner’s Rhetoric of Loss, 77–78; and Ralph Flores, The Rhetoric of Doubtful Authority: Deconstructive Readings of Self-Questioning Narratives, St. Augustine to Faulkner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 157ff. 17. On the latter, see Donald M. Kartiganer, “‘So I, Who had Never had a War . . .’: William Faulkner, War, and the Modern Imagination,” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 3 (1998): 619–45. 18. See, for example, 105, 108, 111, 173. 19. On purity in Greek thought see Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 75–84; and chap. 4 below. See also Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the word katharos in The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 25–46, and its equivalence with “the essential purification, that of wisdom and philosophy” (38). On Quentin’s struggle to possess authority through authoring narrative, see Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 113ff. On Faulkner’s production of newness in modernism, see Richard Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 4–5.


199

20. On the period of the New South, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1951); Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Knopf, 1970); and James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chaps. 3–6. On the relation of Faulkner to New South ideology, see Wesley Morris with Barbara Alberson Morris, Reading Faulkner (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), chap. 5; and Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism, 24, 75n10, 87. On the New South and nostalgia, see Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: A House Divided (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 98ff. On the life of the Falkner family in the New South, see Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chaps. 1–5. 21. Henry Woodfin Grady, The New South and Other Addresses (New York: Maynard, Merrill, 1904), 23. Grady’s speech, which followed an address by General Sherman and a rendition of “Marching through Georgia” by the band, made a strong appeal to national unity and garnered considerable sympathy for the New South program. Generations of southern schoolboys, including no doubt William Faulkner, were required to memorize it. See Gaston, New South Creed, 87–90. 22. Walter Hines Page, Raleigh North Carolina State Chronicle 16, no. 1 (February 4, 1886) and 2 (February 11, 1886). 23. Such a logic explains the apparently paradoxical fact that, as Woodward puts it, “one of the most significant inventions of the New South was the ‘Old South’” (155). The United Confederate Veterans, the cult of the Confederacy, town monuments to Confederate soldiers, and the plantation romance are all products of the New South era. 24. Grady, New South, 30. 25. Ibid., 88–89. 26. The phrase is drawn from Eric Foner’s description of the Dunning School’s position on Radical Reconstruction (1867–1877). See Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), xix. 27. Richard H. Edmonds, Facts about the South (Baltimore: Manufacturer’s Record, 1902), 12. 28. Grady, New South, 58. 29. See Foner, Reconstruction, chap. 12; and Woodward, Origins of the New South, chap. 1. Grady wrote his first article entitled “The New South” on the occasion of Georgia’s redemption; Edmonds entitled his 1890 book on the New South The South’s Redemption. 30. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 8. 31. According to Foner, the 1875 campaign, which sealed Mississippi’s redemption, “quickly degenerated into a violent crusade to destroy the Republican organization and prevent blacks from voting” (Reconstruction, 558). When the state legislature assembled, it completed redemption by first impeaching black Lieut. Gov. Alexander K. Davis (to prevent him from succeeding to the governorship) and then compelling Governor Ames to resign and leave the state. See Foner, Reconstruction, 558–63.

200


32. However, if it is Clytie that we witness being “destroyed” in this scene, Henry is ostensibly consumed by the fire as well, while the partly black Jim Bond escapes. 33. Miller, “Two Relativisms,” 167. 34. Joel Chandler Harris, ed. Joel Chandler Harris’ Life of Henry W. Grady, Including Writings and Speeches (New York: Cassell, 1890), 121–22. 35. Grady, New South, 79–81. 36. Matthews, Play of Faulkner’s Language, 60. 37. Benjamin Harvey Hill, “Education,” The Land We Love 1, no. 1 (May 1866), 1–11. For the continuation of this article, see The Land We Love 1, no. 2 (June 1866): 7–9. 38. Grady, New South, 133. 39. Ibid., 38. 40. Hill, Land We Love (May 1866), 11. Along similar lines, William S. Speer, in The Law of Success, declared, The educator of the future . . . will teach his pupils what will pay best. He will teach them the art of thinking, which, for the purpose at hand, I may define to be the art of turning one’s brains into money. He will not teach dead languages, obsolete formulas, and bric-a-brac sciences . . . which are never used in the ordinary transactions of the forum, the office, the shop, or the farm. (Qtd. Gaston, New South Creed, 111) On education in the New South, see Woodward, Origins of the New South, 61–64 and 153–54; and Ayers, Promise of the New South, 417–26. 41. Richard H. Edmonds, The South’s Prosperity Its Danger: Strength of Character Needed as Never Before (Baltimore: Manufacturers’ Record, 1907), 7. 42. Richard H. Edmonds, Facts about the South, 9, 11. 43. Qtd. Gaston, New South Creed, 73. 44. Atticus G. Haygood, D. D., “The New South: Gratitude, Amendment, Hope.” A Thanksgiving Sermon for November 25, 1980 (Oxford, GA: n.p., 1880), 9. 45. A disproportionate quantity of the South’s material property was, however, transferred into the hands of a new elite that consisted primarily of merchants, industrialists, and planters. According to Woodward, “A strong tendency early asserted itself for merchant and planter to become one—that is, for the merchant to acquire the farms of the hapless landowner, and for the more fortunate planters to move to town and become supply merchants” (Origins of the New South, 184)—a tendency encouraged by the lien laws and lowered land levies of Redeemer governments. 46. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 69–70. 47. On southern mill towns, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 5; and Woodward, Origins of the New South, 222–27. 48. This reading follows and extends Herget, who reads negation as an “interplay of norms and deviations” (“Poetics of Negation,” 34); and Pitavy, who argues that negations “function as referential indexes” (“Negation and Denegation,” 27). 49. See via negativa descriptions of Bon, 100, 120; of Rosa, 55, 57, 61, 116; of Ellen, 84; of Judith, 95; of Sutpen, 184, 199. 50. While Slatoff draws his thesis primarily from thematic readings and is concerned with Faulkner’s “temperament,” my rhetorical reading is consistent with his notion of the “polar imagination”: “a deep-seated tendency in Faulkner to view and interpret experience in extreme terms and to see life as composed essentially of pairs of warring entities” (Quest for Failure, 79).


201

51. On the fantastic and gothic elements of Absalom, see also Sundquist, A House Divided, 98ff.; Olga Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1964), 88ff.; and François Pitavy “The Gothicism of Absalom, Absalom! Rosa Coldfield Revisited,” in A Cosmos of My Own: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, ed. Ann J. Abadie and Doreen Fowler (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), 199–226. 52. A number of widely read works of the period—such as The Negro a Beast, The Negro, A Menace to American Civilization and Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman— constructed a monstrous, “unnatural” identity for freedpeople much like the selves constructed by Faulknerian privatives. On racial identity and race relations in the New South, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 6 and 426–37; Woodward, Origins of the New South, chap. 13; and Foner, Reconstruction, chap. 12. 53. On labor relations in the New South, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, 67–72, 431. On pre- and post-war labor relations between blacks and whites as depicted in Absalom, see Godden, Fictions of Labor. 54. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 206. The census of 1880 indicates that in 33 Georgia counties, not more than one in 100 black farmers owned land; seventeen Mississippi counties reported the same proportion; “twelve others reported not one in twenty, and many not one in fifty” (Woodward, Origins of the New South, 205). By 1900, blacks in the cotton South owned a smaller percentage of land than at the end of Reconstruction. See Foner, Reconstruction, 597. 55. Qtd. Williamson, Faulkner and Southern History, 153. Whites were often outraged when blacks did acquire material possessions precisely because they functioned as signs of social equality. “Just generally,” a black woman from South Carolina testified, “if you were black, you were not supposed to have either time or money, and if you did, you ought not to show it. Some of them did think colored people oughtn’t to have a certain nice thing, even if they had money enough to buy it” (Qtd. Ayers, Reconstruction, 88). Klansmen, who functioned as the police force of Redeemer governments, often killed blacks’ livestock in an effort both to deny blacks’ right to own material possessions and to make them more dependent upon their white employers. 56. On the lien system, see Woodward, Origins of the New South, chap. 7; Foner, Reconstruction, 594–96; and Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 8. 57. Richard H. Edmonds, South’s Redemption: From Poverty to Prosperity (Baltimore: Manufacturers’ Record, 1890), 35, 24; and Facts, 27. 58. John Matthews makes a similar point about the political unconscious of The Sound and the Fury: What seems to be the simple passage from old to new turns out to be in The Sound and the Fury the disguised reinvigoration of the dominant ideology. Mercantile capitalism obscures its affinity with the exploitative mechanism of agrarian, slave-holding capitalism precisely because it rests on the same foundation of economic and racial exploitation. (“The Rhetoric of Containment in Faulkner,” in Faulkner’s Discourse, 60) 59. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 212. On the convict lease system, see Woodward, Origins of the New South, 212–15, 232–34, and 424–25; and Ayers, Promise of the New South, 154–55. 60. On railroad industry, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 1; and Woodward, Origins of the New South, 120–24, 292–99, and 379–84; on mining industry, see

202

N ot e s to C h a p t e r 3 Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 5; on lumber industry, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, 123–31; and Woodward, Origins of the New South, 115–20.

Chapter 4: Lamentation and Purity 1. Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945), 366; hereafter cited in text as OC. All translations mine. 2. Page duBois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13. 3. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 41. 4. See Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 162; and Emanuel Feldman, Biblical and Post-Biblical Defilement and Mourning: Law as Theology (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1977). Concomitantly, the Hebrew word for defilement, “tame,” originally meant “to be lacking or wanting” (Feldman, Defilement and Mourning, 74). 5. Similarly, according to Gerhard von Rad, “In the life of Israel . . . every uncleanness was to some extent already a precursor of the thing that was uncleanness out and out, death.” Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper, 1962), 277. 6. Lamentations 1:17. 7. Euripides, “Trojan Women,” trans. Richmond Lattimore, Euripides III, The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), lines 190–95. 8. Feldman, Defilement and Mourning, 14. 9. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 33. 10. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 4, 40, 132. On situations in which pollution beliefs uphold a moral code, see Douglas, Purity and Danger, 133. On the relation of defilement to blame and punishment, see Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 31; von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 266; and Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 11. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 94–95. 12. On the carnivalesque, see M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), chap. 1. Kristeva contends that the speaking subject, like other forms of purity, is simultaneously threatened and attracted by defilement. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Dread is a mood that we have associated with defilement and that Kierkegaard describes as “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 42. Similarly, for Heidegger, the authenticity of Being is enabled by the mood of anxiety that brings Dasein “face to face with its Being-free for.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 232.


203

13. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance 1862–1871, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 105, 240, 242. Hereafter cited in text as C. All translations mine. 14. On Mallarméan negativity, see Charles D. Minahen, “Poetry’s Polite Terrorist: Reading Sartre Reading Mallarmé,” in Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture, ed. Michael Temple (Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 46–66; and Amy Billone, “‘Cette Blanche Agonie’: Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the Ice of Sound,” Nineteenth Century French Studies 27, nos. 3 and 4 (2001): 287–301. 15. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 11. 16. The full text of the poem appears in OC, 71, hereafter cited by line. My complete translation of the poem appears in “‘Shaking Down the Pillars’: Lamentation, Purity, and Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage’ to Wagner,” PMLA 111, no. 5 (1996): 1110. 17. It would no doubt be revelatory to carry out a comparative analysis of this sonnet with the “Tombeau for Anatole,” which strives to express Mallarmé’s very real anguish over the death of his son, and which (left in fragments that never coalesce into a finished poem) perhaps does so most poignantly in its faltering incompletion. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), chap. 4. 18. On tum’ah produced by contact, see Feldman, Defilement and Mourning, 14; for a summary of arguments on the magical nature of tum’ah contact, see Jacob Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 10ff. On tum’ah and the Old Testament’s “concern with separating,” see Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 93 ad passim. On miasma and agos produced by contact, see Parker, Miasma, 3–4. 19. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 134. See also Neusner, Idea of Purity, 13ff.; and Feldman, Defilement and Mourning, 72. See Parker, Miasma, 23, on Greek rituals of purification after foreign incursion. For Kristeva, the foreignness excluded by pollution beliefs is the feminine, which she defines as “an ‘other’ without a name, which subjective experience confronts when it does not stop at the appearance of its identity” (Powers of Horror, 58). While theoretically compelling, her argument is on several counts empirically problematic: it contains misinformation on defiling substances in Hebrew; a questionable reading of the cipher of blood stain (which she interprets as having first to do with menstruation and only subsequently with murder); unsupported divergences from Douglas’s research regarding separation of the sexes; an untenable reading of “relations” between items in Levitical lists, whose long redactive history she does not take into account; and inaccurately categorical statements about “maternal cults” and laws “converging on the maternal” (Powers of Horror, 64). 20. This list describes traditional Hebrew mourning practice. See Feldman, Defilement and Mourning, 84–106; on Greek mourning and conceptions of defilement, see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 79. 21. Leviticus 19:19. 22. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 94. 23. According to Parker, “there was, in Greek belief, no such thing as non-contagious religious danger. Some dangers were more commonly seen as communicable by contact, while others rather threatened the guilty party’s descendants; but the

204


difference was one of degree rather than of kind” (Parker, Miasma, 257). On the Hebrew notion of sin as a social category, see von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 264. On separation from cultic activity as a result of defilement, see Neusner, Idea of Purity, 15; and Parker, Miasma, 37. On scapegoat rituals, see Parker, Miasma, 24 and 258; and Burkert, Greek Religion, 82–84. 24. Qtd. Parker, Miasma, 104–5. 25. Several critics have explored the significance of English as a foreign language to Mallarmé’s writing. See Françoise Meltzer, “Mallarmé and English,” in Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene, ed. Todd Breyfogle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 256–68; Mary Lydon, Skirting the Issue (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), chap. 2; Rabaté, Ghosts of Modernity, chap. 5; and Jacques Michon, Mallarmé et Les mots anglais (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978). 26. Albert Thibaudet, qtd. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, “Notes et variantes,” in OC, 1496. 27. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 7–8. 28. For a summary of controversy on this line, see Michael Wroblewski, “Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage à Richard Wagner,’” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1980): 103. 29. James Lawler, “Three Sonnets,” Yale French Studies 54 (1997): 92. 30. Serge Meitinger, “Baudelaire et Mallarmé devant Richard Wagner,” Romantisme 11, no. 33 (1981): 88. See also David Ellison, who reads the grimoire, and the hiéroglyphes of the following line, as “textual mysteries inaccessible to the multitudes” (48) that must be deciphered by the poet/priest. David Ellison, “A Reading of Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage’ (A Richard Wagner),” Comparative and General Literature 42 (1994): 46–56. 31. Gardner Davies, Les “Tombeaux” de Mallarmé: essai d’exégèse raisonnée (Paris: José Corti, 1950), 141. 32. Lawler, “Three Sonnets,” 92. As Ellison points out, there are two distinct nuances of “loss” at play in the poem: the destruction depicted in the opening quatrain and the concealment evoked in the second. See Ellison, “Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage,’” 47–48. 33. Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 180. 34. Lawler, “Three Sonnets,” 93. 35. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 53. Douglas is speaking here of the Levitical dietary laws. 36. Descartes’s foundational precepts in the Discourse on Method are exemplary: accept only the clear and distinct, divide difficulties into as many parts as possible, think in an orderly fashion, make enumerations complete. See René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (New York: Penguin, 2000). On purity and the Cartesian “passion for intellectual separation, demarcation, and order” (77), see Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: State University of New York, 1987), chap. 5. 37. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 35. This is a position corroborated by Parker—“a culture’s beliefs about pollution . . . are by-products of an ideal of order” (Parker, Miasma, 325–26); by Ricoeur—“the dread of avenging punishment is


205

the negative envelope of a still more fundamental admiration, the admiration for order” (Symbolism of Evil, 43); and by Kristeva—“it is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Powers of Horror, 4). 38. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 38. 39. In the late nineteenth century, science conducted a similar purgative campaign against ritual. “Indeed science only emerged as an autonomous set of discursive values,” write Stallybrass and White, “after a prolonged struggle against ritual and it marked out its own identity by the distance which it established from ‘mere superstition’—science’s label for, among other things, a large body of social practices of a therapeutic kind” (Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 174). 40. Davies, Les “Tombeaux,” 144. 41. On the disciplinary nature of syntax and Mallarméan resistance to it, see Rebecca Saunders, “The Syntactic Panopticon and Mallarméan Resistance,” Romanic Review 87, no. 3 (1996): 363–75. 42. Kristeva describes resemblances between ritual defilement, the semiotic infans prior to (and within) symbolic language, and “the aesthetic task” thus: In the contemporary practice of the West and owing to the crisis of Christianity, abjection [defilement] elicits more archaic resonances that are culturally prior to sin; through them it again assumes its biblical status, and beyond it that of defilement in primitive societies. In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task—a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct— amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless “primacy” constituted by primal repression. (Powers of Horror, 17–18) 43. On the complex relation between a poem and its occasion, see Marian Zwerling Sugano, The Poetics of the Occasion: Mallarmé and the Poetry of Circumstance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 44. We are here in the proximity of both Zarathustra’s celebration of the necessity of destruction to creation and newness, and Nietzsche’s revaluation of uncertainty. 45. “[F]or all the varieties of Wagnerism,” write David Large and William Weber, “its representatives had one important characteristic in common. They shared deep reservations about aspects of their society and culture and were looking for a vital new alternative.” David C. Large and William Weber, “Introduction,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David C. Large and William Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 16. Edouard Dujardin writes of the objective of the Revue wagnérienne: “[Houston Stuart] Chamberlain and I wanted to spread our discovery: Wagner a great musician? It was too obvious; but Wagner a great poet; Wagner a great thinker; and above all, Wagner creator of a new art form.” Edouard Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens (Paris: Messein, 1936), 201. All translations from this text are mine. For a discussion of Wagner’s social and musical transformations of nineteenth-century opera, see Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, 28–71; and Barry Millington, The Master Musicians: Wagner (London: Dent, 1984). On Wagner’s ideological transformations, see Alan David Aberbach, The Ideas of Richard Wagner: An

206


Examination and Analysis of his Major Aesthetic, Political, Economic, Social, and Religious Thoughts (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988). 46. In 1849, Wagner participated in the Dresden revolt against the King of Saxony and was subsequently exiled. His writings of the same period stress social regeneration through the music drama. Franz Brendel, editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, was crucial both in spreading Wagnerian thought and in combining it with a leftist social program. See Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism,” 57–64. The ambiguities of Wagner’s thought, however, left it open to the most diverse appropriations. For example, Louis-Napoleon’s order to the Imperial Opera to perform Tannhäuser was apparently an attempt both to ingratiate himself with the Hapsburgs, and particularly with Princess Pauline von Metternich, and to court the domestic Left, whose support he needed in the Assembly. See Gerald D. Turbow, “Art and Politics: Wagnerism in France,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, 147; and Elaine Brody, Paris: The Musical Kaleidoscope 1870–1925 (New York: George Brazilier, 1987). On Wagner, social reform, and politics, see Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism”; and The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music, ed. Barry Millington (New York: Schirmer, 1992). 47. Thibaudet, qtd. Mondor and Jean-Aubry, “Notes et variantes,” OC, 1496. 48. This is thus a failure to reach the abstract and nontheatrical origin of representation that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe terms the “archi-theatre.” See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 76. Further investigation is warranted into the relation of this ambivalence to what Freud, in his elaboration of traumatic regression, describes as the “conflict of ambivalence,” in which one loves and hates, identifies with while rejecting, an aggressor. See chap. 1 above. While Mallarmé never saw a production of a Wagnerian music drama and apparently had a limited technical understanding of the music, he nonetheless regularly attended Lamoureux’s symphonic performances of Wagner and frequently discussed wagnérisme at his “mardis” (Tuesday salons). Indeed, much of his knowledge of Wagner, in addition to being “a result of his admiration of Baudelaire” (OC, 1593), came through Dujardin, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Catulle Mendès. On Mallarmé’s knowledge of Wagner, see Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens; Mondor and Jean-Aubry, “Notes et variantes,” OC, 1592–93; and Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959). On Mallarmé’s rivalry with Wagner, see Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé, 177; Leo Bersani, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 53–55; Wroblewski, “Mallarmés ‘Hommage’”; Meitinger, “Baudelaire et Mallarmé”; and Ellison, “Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage.’” 49. In the table of contents of volume one of the Revue wagnérienne, Mallarmé’s title is “Rêverie d’un poëte contemporain,” while the text itself bears the title “Rêverie d’un poëte français” (Revue wagnérienne 1:4, 195). 50. On the history of the Lohengrin affair, see Revue wagnérienne 2:33–64. 51. Ibid., 2:53. All translations from the Revue wagnérienne are mine. 52. When Dujardin proposed creation of the Revue wagnerienne in 1884, “The enthusaism was not great. I was asked if it wouldn’t be better to consecrate my efforts to the new school of French music” (Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens, 204).


207

53. See, for example, articles in the Revue wagnérienne by Dujardin (1:62–73); Mendès (1:28–35); and Fourcaud (1:308). 54. According to Bernard, “an unedited letter of Mallarmé to Gustave Kahn . . . allows it to be stated that in fact, the poet had not read this ‘bedside book,’ had never had the time to read it: ‘I’ve been meaning all the time to study closely Wagner’s volume—one of the books I must read—for fifteen years without doing it, my nose always in my own work’” (Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique, 25). All translations from this text are mine. It is equally arguable, I think, that having perused it for fifteen years, even without “study[ing it] closely,” that Mallarmé was well acquainted with this text. 55. Revue wagnérienne 1:211. I would thus argue against—or at least historicize— Rabaté’s contention that Mallarmé “refuses . . . jingoist nationalism”; if this was true in 1861, as Rabaté claims, it certainly was not by 1885. 56. The nationalism of both Wagner and Mallarmé contains an undeniable impulse to universalize and a penchant for cultural imperialism. “La Cité, qui donna pour l’expérience sacrée un théâtre,” writes Mallarmé in the “Rêverie,” no doubt referring to Paris, “imprime à la terre le sceau universel” (The City that offers the sacred experience of the theater imprints a universal seal on the earth) (OC, 545). Similarly, Large writes of Wagner: “Wagner’s original conception of the German mission was not narrowly nationalistic but quite cosmopolitan: in ‘healing’ themselves, the Germans would heal the world. In articulating this vision of the Germans as the most ‘universal’ of peoples, Wagner was restating one of the central tenets of German idealist thought” (David C. Large, “Wagner’s Bayreuth Disciplines,” in Large and Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, 81). 57. Wagnerism as a movement arguably began in France, the term “wagnérisme” preceding both “Wagnerismus” and “Wagnerism.” Wagner first came to the attention of the French public through his writings published in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris between 1840 and 1842; two events at the end of the decade spread his renown further: first, the publication of an article by Franz Lizst, who had recently conducted Tannhäuser in Weimar, and second, François Segher’s performance of the Tannhäuser overture at Sainte-Cécile in 1850. From 1859–1861 Wagner lived in Paris, was received in a number of salons, and received a motley assortment of devotées at his own salon on Wednesdays. See Turbow, “Art and Politics,” 140–47; and Brody, Musical Kaleidoscope, 34–35. Perhaps wagnérisme’s most famous moment occurred on March 13, 1861 at the Imperial Opera when, at the ill-fated performance of Tannhäuser ordered by Louis-Napoleon, members of the Jockey club rioted against both the emperor and the absence of a ballet in the second act. On April 1 of the same year, Baudelaire published his “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris” in the Revue européene, and throughout the 1860s wagnérisme was significantly furthered by Léon Pasdeloup’s orchestral “Concerts Populaires” at the Cirque Napoléon, by Parnassian poets, and by Judith Gautier’s articles in La Presse. As we have noted, the Franco-Prussian war embroiled wagnérisme in heated nationalisms in the 1870s. On the history of wagnérisme in France, see Turbow, “Art and Politics”; Richard Sieburth, “1885, February: Symbolist Poets publish La revue wagnérienne: The Music of the Future,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Raymond Furness, Wagner and Literature (New York: Manchester University Press,

208


1982), chap. 2; Alain Satgé, “Wagner rêvé par Mallarmé: ‘Le Chanteur et la Danseuse,’” Romantisme 19, no. 57 (1987): 65–73; and Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique, 29ff. 58. “The central theme in musical idealism,” writes Weber “was a suspicion of mode and fashion” (“Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism,” 34). 59. Turbow, “Art and Politics,” 147. 60. Revue wagnérienne 3:293–94 61. See Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 193–95. 62. This resistance to assimilation can also be read as a resistance to the Revue wagnérienne and its attempt to fuse wagnérisme with Symbolism. Indeed the irrational significance of Mallarméan defilement subverted the journal’s very existence, for it was in part the patron’s outrage over the issue that contained Mallarmé’s “Hommage”— an outrage over Dujardin’s use of the Revue as a journal of Symbolist poetry, and particularly over the obscurity of the poems by Verlaine and Mallarmé—that initiated the patron’s displeasure with Dujardin’s handling of the Revue. Dujardin writes of the January 1886 issue: “The repercussions over it were enormous; at a dinner of journalists that took place at the time, over which Auguste Vitu presided, nothing was spoken of but Mallarmé’s sonnet—to figure out, of course, whether one should laugh at it or be angry over it” (Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens, 41). Musicologists, moreover, complained directly to two of the journal’s patrons, Lascoux and Bossier: “The musicologists were not content to be indignant; several of these gentlemen had already secretly met; someone had gone to see Lascoux; someone had drawn his attention to the harm done to wagnérisme by this manner of championing it; one of the gentlemen, who combined his musicographic skill with composition, even wrote to Agénor Boissier” (Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens, 221). On the history of the Revue wagnérienne, see Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens; Isabelle de Wyzewa, La revue wagnérienne: essai sur l’interprétation esthétique de Wagner en France (Paris: Librarie Académique Perrin, 1934); and Brody, Musical Kaleidoscope, 52–55. Precedents for my reading of the poem include Cohn’s and Wroblewski’s. 63. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 49, translation modified. 64. Large and Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture, 16. 65. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 61. 66. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 273. 67. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 474–75. 68. This reading of Mallarméan poetic practice as contagious defilement suggests, then, a position that differs from both Terdiman’s reading of Mallarméan resistance as a failed exclusion of dominant discourse and Kristeva’s equation of literary with political revolution. I would argue that Mallarméan purity, rather than, as Terdiman contends, a necessarily contradictory attempt to exclude a dominant discourse by which it is always contaminated, is itself an act of contamination—a language that, in addition to miming a moment that threatens culture, appropriates the defilements of that moment to contaminate culture. As Minahen puts it, Mallarmé’s strategy “is to wage a kind of guerilla warfare from within the


209

bourgeois system of authoritarian values and received ideas, which is the true object of his attack and which he will attempt to undermine by discreet acts of linguistic sabotage” (Minahen, “Poetry’s Polite Terrorist,” 65). Taking issue with Kristeva’s position that “the infraction of formal literary codes of language is identical to challenging official law,” Stallybrass and White quite rightly contend that “Not only is this very rarely the case, but unless one addresses the domain of discourse and the degree to which carnivalesque practice has actually shifted or realigned domains, then the equation is politically meaningless” (Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 201). 69. The passage of the letter to which I make reference reads as follows: Je viens de passer une année effrayante: ma Pensée s’est pensée, et est arrivée à une Conception pure. Tout ce que, par contrecoup, mon être a souffert, pendant cette longue agonie, est inénarrable, mais, heureusement, je suis parfaitement mort, et la région la plus impure où mon Esprit puisse s’aventurer est l’Eternité, mon Esprit, ce solitaire habituel de sa propre Pureté, que n’obscurcit plus même le reflet du Temps. (I have just passed a terrifying year: my Thought thought itself, and arrived at a pure Conception. All that my being has consequently suffered during this long agony is laughable, but fortunately I am perfectly dead, and the most impure region where my Mind can venture is Eternity, my Mind, this habitual hermit of its own Purity, that no longer even darkens the reflection of Time.) (C, 240) 70. I use the term hyperessential to designate the accidental, the nondefinitive, or nonidentical, the inconsistent or contradictory, in short, the detritus of metaphysical categories. Also relevant would be the irrecoverable différance in signification signaled by Derrida. 71. “The relation between these two forms of purification, by rite and by medicine,” writes Parker, “is a delicate one to define. To see the one as a secular transposition of the other would make it seem secondary, whereas there is, in fact, nothing advanced about the use of purgative drugs. Rather, the two methods both derive from an undifferentiated idea of purity, physical and metaphysical, necessary both for health and for proper relations with the gods” (Miasma, 215). 72. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 35. 73. On idolatry, see Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament; and Neusner, Idea of Purity, 13. Kristeva argues that “if language, like culture, sets up a separation and, starting with discrete elements, concatenates an order, it does so precisely by repressing maternal authority and the corporeal mapping that abuts against them” (Powers of Horror, 72). See Ricoeur, 38ff. on the Greek conception of the soul exiled in the body. 74. Indeed, this exclusionary gesture might be said to correspond to the pattern described by Stallybrass and White in which “the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other (in the classic way that Hegel describes in the master-slave section of the Phenomenology), but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life” (Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5). This figure also appears in Derrida’s analysis of the materiality of writing, and of its subordination to the purity and presence of the voice. See Chapter 1.

210


75. While the sonnet form of the “Tombeaux” and the “Hommage” might be said to visually construct the solidity of a monument, Mallarmé’s more explicit explorations of the significance of the visual are to be found, for example, in the “Eventails,” “Oeufs de Pâques,” and “Un Coup de dés,” and the “Hommage” is, not inappropriately, more remarkable for its aural significance. Quoting a phrase from Mallarmé’s early writings—“il faut penser de tout son corps—ce qui donne une pensée pleine et à l’unisson” (one must think with the whole body, which affords a full, unified thought)—Heather Williams argues that Mallarmé conceives a form of thought in which sensory experience is no longer seen in opposition to philosophical thinking. See Heather Williams, “Mallarmé and the Language of Ideas,” Nineteenth Century French Studies 29, nos. 3 and 4 (2001): 311. 76. Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique, 24. Bernard divides Symbolism’s concern with music into three phases: “an impressionistic and anti-conceptual Verlainean phase; an instrumental and scientific phase; and a Wagnerian phase aspiring to ‘total art’” (Mallarmé et la musique, 12). 77. Qtd. ibid., 23. 78. This is to argue against Bernard, who, following Schopenhauer and her own idealist reading of Mallarmé, reads music as non-material, as not “tied to matter, nor to space, such that it puts us in direct communication with the essence of things”; she argues that, “escaping the servility of the material,” Mallarmé was able through music “to liberate himself from the material world” (Mallarmé et la musique, 38). This view, however, which describes music as philosophy, seems to overlook the fact that sound is material that makes contact with, and produces sensation in, the body. For further symbolic readings of the sounds of Mallarmé’s poetry, see Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 209–63. On Mallarmé’s relation to other twentieth-century musicians (particularly Pierre Boulez and John Cage), see Kate van Orden, “On the Side of Poetry and Chaos: Mallarméan Hasard and Twentieth-Century Music,” in Meetings with Mallarmé, 160–79. 79. Cohn, Poems of Mallarmé, 178. 80. Numbers 19:15. 81. Qtd. Neusner, Idea of Purity, 47. 82. Qtd. ibid., 49. 83. Ibid., 79. 84. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 11. 85. Ibid., 42. 86. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 212. 87. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 95.

Chapter 5: Lamentation and National Identity 1. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 24. 2. While my focus is on modern Greece (which, like all nations, exhibits ungeneralizable specificities), theoretical studies of nations and nationalism, as well as historical evidence from multiple locales, suggest that these sites of loss are far from


211

unique to the Greek context. Among the theoretical works considered here are: Anderson, Imagined Communities; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); and Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977). 3. Dhmhvtrh~ Catzh~, Tov diplov biblivo (Aqhvna: [Ekdosei~ Kastaniwvth~, 1977) (Dimitris Hatzis, The Double Book [Athens: Kastaniotis Editions, 1977]). Hereafter referenced in text; all translations are my own. Throughout this chapter, I have transliterated the title of the book (To diplo biblio), proper names, Singrafeas (Author), and romeiko (modern Greek). 4. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 5. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 40. 6. Qtd. Kedourie, Nationalism, 45. 7. Qtd. ibid., 47. 8. Qtd. ibid., 48. 9. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 20. 10. “One key factor initially spurring the drive for independence” in Latin America “was the fear of ‘lower-class’ political mobilizations” (Anderson, Imagined Communities, 48). 11. Ibid., 99. 12. Hobsbawm contends that “the modest middle strata” perceived themselves to be threatened “from workers, from foreign states and individuals, from immigrants, from the capitalists and financiers so readily identifiable with the Jews, who were also seen as the revolutionary agitators” (Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 120–21). 13. See Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 14. Under the Ottoman empire, populations were grouped into millets based on religion. Greeks belonged to—and dominated— the millet-i Rum, presided over by the patriarch of the Orthodox Church. See also Victor Roudometof, “From Rum Millet to Greek Nation: Enlightenment, Secularization, and National Identity in Ottoman Balkan Society, 1453–1821,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 16, no. 1 (1998): 11–48. 14. Straddling these two groups, the Philiki Etairia (Friendly Society), established in Odessa in 1814 and committed to a militant liberation of Greeks from Ottoman rule, was comprised largely of “marginalised members of the mercantile diaspora” (Clogg, History of Greece, 32). The Phanariots, influential Greeks in positions of power in the Ottoman state, largely identified their interests with the preservation of the empire. Although the patriarchate had actively discouraged revolutionary activity, the execution of Patriarch Grigorios was ostensibly in retaliation for his inability to control it. 15. The decisive battle in establishing the Greek state was fought at Navarino in 1827 by a combined British, French, and Russian fleet that defeated the Ottoman navy. The ensuing state, which contained less than a third of the Greek inhabitants of the empire, was established as an independent monarchy in 1832 and was comprised of the Peloponnese, southern Roumeli, and a handful of islands.

212


16. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19. 17. Strongly influenced by the French revolution, Rigas envisaged establishment of a republican version of Byzantium. See Clogg, History of Greece, 29–32; and John S. Koliopoulos and Thanos M. Veremis, Greece the Modern Sequel: From 1831 to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2002), chap. 10. 18. Philhellenic societies, which sprouted up in numerous European cities, collected funds and raised loans for Greek resistance and nation building. The society in London, under the influence of Byron, was particularly notable. Numerous Romantic writers such as Byron, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, and Hugo rallied to the Greek cause. Byron died of a fever in April 1824 before he could actually join the war. 19. Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 60. See also 60–68; Koliopoulos and Veremis, Greece the Modern Sequel, chap. 11; and Rodanthi Tzanelli, “Haunted by the ‘Enemy’ Within: Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian Greekness, Turkish ‘Contamination,’ and the Narratives of Greek Nationhood in the Dilessi/Marathon Affair (1870),” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002): 47–74. 20. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” in Nation and Narration, 300. 21. Vassilis Lambropoulos, Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of Modern Greek Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 8. On the fictionality of such “retroactively possessed” national identities, see Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 49; and Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 65. Kedourie contends that the performance of “recuperated” ethnicity is a compensatory formation that represses the reality of loss. The relentless developments of modernity, he argues, have worked to debilitate and destroy tribalism and its social and political traditions. The consequence is an atomized society which seeks in nationalism a substitute for the old order, now irrevocably lost. Its members find for themselves a link with obscure and mysterious kingdoms, seeking solace in archaeological speculations; or else, in search of the fulfillment which reality denies them, they re-enact with conscious and deliberate frenzy tribal practices which anthropologists had surveyed and recorded and which Western rule, by destroying their social context, had robbed of significance. (Nationalism, 107) On this interpretation, see also Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 117; and Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 41. 22. On neohellenism, see Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Clogg, History of Greece, 216–17; Herzfeld, Ours Once More; and Lambropolous, Literature as National Institution. 23. Qtd. Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 86. 24. Qtd. ibid., 44. Zísimos Lorentzátos, similarly, spoke of “a low voiced super flumina Babilonis whispering through the most secret cells of the nation: in the folk


213

tales, the dirges, or the songs of our people, of our poets and prose-writers . . . an indefinite tone of spiritual anguish, a sense of catastrophe harking back to some lost paradise; the deep awareness of some great tribal longing which remains unanswered through the ages” (Qtd. Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 92). 25. On the formation of the modern Greek literary canon, see Jusdanis, Belated Modernity; on its appropriations and transformations of Hellenism, see Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, Part II; and Mary N. Layoun, ed. Modernism in Greece? Essays on the Critical and Literary Margins of a Movement (New York: Pella, 1990). 26. Qtd. F. Rosen, Bentham, Byron, and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 15. 27. Anderson notes the way in which “the new (European) nationalisms almost immediately began to imagine themselves as ‘awakening from sleep’”—a metaphor that allowed the intelligentsia “who were becoming conscious of themselves as Czechs, Hungarians, or Finns to figure their study of Czech, Magyar, or Finnish languages, folklores, and music as ‘rediscovering’ something deep-down always known” (Imagined Communities, 195, 196). 28. Herzfeld notes books such as Evlambios’s The Amaranth: the Roses of Hellas Reborn and Hantseris’s A Collection of the choicest poems of Reborn Greece that titularly reinforced this metaphor. 29. The teaching of katharevousa was heavily emphasized in the educational system and was seen as central to the project of developing Hellenic identity. Inaccessible to most Greek speakers, it deepened class distinctions between the elite and uneducated. While various compromises were made with demotiki throughout the twentieth century, katharevousa remained the official language of state administration until 1977. For a brief history of the Greek language controversy, see Keith Legg and John Roberts, Modern Greece: A Civilization on the Periphery (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 96–99; on the role of linguistic purity in Greek nationalism, see Kedourie, Nationalism, 119; on linguistic nationalism in general, see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 108ff. 30. See Effie F. Athanassopoulou, “An ‘ancient’ landscape: European ideals, archaeology, and nation building in early modern Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20, no. 2 (2002): 273–305. The use of antiquity for inculcating national identity has a fascinating history in Greece. In Makronisos, the concentration camp set up during the civil war (1946–1949) to reeducate political dissidents, inmates were obliged to build, and reflect upon, replicas of classical monuments; a similar strategy was adopted by the Metaxas dictatorship and the junta of 1967–1974. See Yannis Hamilakis, “‘The Other Parthenon’: Antiquity and National Memory at Makronisos,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002): 307–38; and Philip Carabott: “Monumental Visions: The Past in Metaxas’s Weltanschauung,” in The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories, ed. K. S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 23–37. 31. Qtd. Athanassopoulou, “An ‘ancient’ landscape,” 13. 32. The Megali Idea dominated Greek policy from 1843 to 1922 and envisioned a Greek nation territorially based on Byzantium, with Constantinople as its capital. Ioannis Kolettis, prime minister from 1844 to 1847, first articulated the Megali Idea, though its great champion was Eleftherios Venizelos. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the state undertook significant educational, linguistic, and cultural endeavors aimed at inculcating a sense of Hellenic identity

214


in residents of Macedonia and the Greek populations of Asia minor. While by 1913 Greece had added 70 percent to its original land area, dreams of conquering Asia minor came to a crushing end with the Turkish recapture of Smyrna in 1921. In what Greeks refer to as “h katastrofhv” (the catastrophe), the newly nationalized forces of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) massacred 30,000 Greek and Armenian Christians and devastated the Christian parts of the city. The orthodox archbishop was hacked to death by a mob. Panic-stricken and destitute refugees flooded the Aegean islands and mainland. 33. On the lamentations for Constantinople, which date from shortly after the fall of the city in 1453, see Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 85–90; on the relation of these lamentations to irredentism, see Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 128–35. 34. Ibid., 129. 35. Ibid., 93. 36. Qtd. Kedourie, Nationalism, 32. 37. Qtd. ibid., 80. 38. These advantages explain why, in Gellner’s terms, most ethnic groups “go meekly to their doom, to see their culture (though not themselves as individuals) slowly disappear, dissolving into the wider culture of some new national state. Most cultures,” he writes, “are led to the dustheap of history by industrial civilization without offering any resistance” (Nations and Nationalism, 47). 39. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 133. Gellner makes a similar point about the populations of eastern Europe; see Nations and Nationalism, 100–101. 40. Legg and Roberts, Modern Greece, 83. The exchange of populations significantly altered Greece’s ethnic makeup. The census of 1928 shows that almost half the inhabitants of Macedonia were of refugee origin; many of the new Orthodox arrivals were Turkish speaking. See Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); and Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London: Granta, 2006). On the population exchange contextualized within European immigration history, see Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1998), 88–90. 41. On national self-reproduction through mass media, see Anderson, Imagined Communities; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 126–27; and Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 142; through national education systems, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 121ff.; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 34; and Kedourie, Nationalism, 78. On Greek national education, see Yannis Hamilakis, “‘Learn History!’ Antiquity, National Narrative, and History in Greek Educational Textbooks,” in The Usable Past, 39–67; and Ephe Avdela, “The Teaching of History in Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18, no. 2 (October 2000): 239–53. 42. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9. 43. Ibid., 58. 44. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 57; and Anderson, Imagined Communities, 56. 45. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 43. While Goux has signaled that “the genesis of the money form represents a theoretical homology to the genesis of political representation” (39), I am revising his account of the general equivalent as


215

monarchy to a correlation with the nation (which is also more consistent with his citations from Marx). 46. Ibid., 33. 47. Ibid., 10. 48. See also de Certeau’s description of the construction of belief in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 188-89. 49. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 50. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 19. 51. Ibid., 18. 52. Ibid., 49–50. 53. I analyze a similar formation in processes of globalization in Rebecca Saunders, “Uncanny Presence: The Foreigner at the Gate of Globalization,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 22, no. 2 (2002): 88–98. 54. Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 38. As Herzfeld notes, the Hellenic version of national identity was more influential in gaining European support for the war for independence, while the romeic version was crucial in irredentist claims to Constantinople. See Ours Once More, 18–21. He also notes that “When a Greek wishes to make an affectionate or a disparaging comment on some aspect of the national culture—in other words, on something very familiar—the object is appropriately described as romeiko; this is equally apt for the ills of the bureaucracy, the crafty antics of the shadow-theater antihero Karagiozis, or the stereotype of the sexually aggressive male” (Ours Once More, 20). 55. Similarly, the “Diotima” of the novel (Anastasia), rather than inspiring profound thought in the Singrafeas, functions as an inspiration to defeat. On Hatzis’s novel as a critique of nostalgia for a classical past, see Mary Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), chap. 5. 56. Layoun reads the provisionality of Hatzis’s narrative as an exposure and disintegration of the individual, bourgeois subject. See Travels of a Genre, chap. 5. 57. Perhaps most radically, Hatzis’s witnesses declare the nation of the romeiko non-existent: it is atopic, a nowhere, a conspicuous absence. Kostas’s father, for example, advising him to leave the country and seek work elsewhere, says simply, “De;n ei`nai tovpo~ aujtov~” (This isn’t a country/place) (33). And the place to which Skouroyannis returns after his years in exile is similarly void: “Kai; tovte~ oJ Skourogiavnnh~, gurivzonta~ sto; Ntomprivnobo pouv’ce ejrhmwvsei, mporou`se pia; na; to; xevrei pw;~ oJ tovpo~ aujto;~ ei[tan oJ tovpo~ th`~ teleutaiva~, th`~ teleiwtikh`~ ejrhmiva~. ’Anuvparkto~ tovpo~. Pw;~ ei[kosi crovnia paideuvthke, ojneireuvthke, s’aujto;n to;n ajnuvparkto tovpo na; ftavsei” (And then Skouroyannis, returning to Dobrinovos, which had been deserted, could now see that this place was the last place, the last solitude. A non-existent place. That twenty years he had struggled, dreamed, only to arrive at this non-existent place) (137). 58. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 312. 59. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 166. 60. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 50. 61. Narrating his life in Stuttgart and refusing to generalize, Kostas advises the Singrafeas to solicit other Greeks as informants: “phvgaine brev~ tou~ –mporei` na; sou` pou`n aujtoi; perissovtera gia; to; romeviko pou; zhta`~. ’Egw; –gia; mevna sou`

216


levw.” (Go find them. They can tell you these things about the romeiko that you ask. Me, I speak for myself.) (63). 62. This sense of the nation as foreign entity is reinforced by witnesses’ evident sense of regional identity. Skouroyannis, for example, describes himself as a Dobrinovitis (not a romeiko), and Anastasia perceives herself to be moving to a different land when she migrates to a different part of the country. 63. See, for example, 183, 184, 202. Greece has long been a labor exporter; in the 1960s, Greece became a major labor-supplying country to Northern Europe, a trend that peaked in the early 1970s. Approximately one-fifth of the population has sought work or education outside of Greece. Eighty-six percent of Greek immigrants in Europe are in Germany. See Sassen, Guests and Aliens, chap 6; and Layoun, Travels of a Genre, 166. Because Greece was formed as a nation largely in the absence of industrialization and the attendant social factors out of which, according to Gellner, nations originally emerged, it has been characterized by a series of losses similar to many nations of the “developing” or “third” world: a deficit in relation to the concept of nationality and in relation to “first world” or industrialized nations, as well as a literal loss of its work force. 64. Hatzis’s witnesses also repeatedly employ figures of uprootedness, emptying out, and non-existence. Kostas, for example, describes himself as orphaned, identifies with stray animals, and insists on his own social, economic, and emotional vacuity. “Ta; logavriase~ povsa de;n e[cw;” he says to the Singrafeas, “Ta; qhma`sai;; Tivpota de;n evcw. Kai; mporei`~, loipovn, na; mou` pei`~ ejsuv, poiov~ ei`mai, poiov~ mporei` nav’mai —e{na~ a[nqrwpo~ pou; de;n e[cei tivpota;” (Have you accounted for how much I don’t possess? Do you remember? I don’t have anything. And can you, then, tell me who I am, who I can be —a man who has nothing?) (87). In Anastasia’s testimony, this emptiness is explicitly contrasted with national sentiment; when she moves to a new region, it is not longing for a homeland that she feels, but a melancholy over the absence of any sentiment: “De;n ei[tan hJ nostalgiva tou` dikou` th~ tou` tovpou. Gi’ aujto; to; livgo pou; mevnei sto;n a[nqrwpo — gi’ aujto; melagcovlhse.” (It wasn’t nostalgia for her homeland. For that little that remains in people—for this she grew melancholy) (162). 65. Coerced declarations of repentance, renunciations, and denunciations of comrades had been instituted by the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941) as a way of combating communist opposition. This practice was intensified during the civil war (1946–1949), which saw communist-led groups, particularly the EAM (which had mounted by far the most significant resistance to the occupation), struggling for power against right-wing forces, former fascists, and monarchists. The obsession of Greece’s post-civil war governments became the containment of communism. 66. Layoun signals that Hatzis himself (like nearly two hundred thousand of his compatriots) was exiled as a result of the civil war and that the role of Greek resistance fighters in WWII remained officially unacknowledged by the government until six years after the publication of To diplo biblio and “some thirty-five years after Hatzis’s first novel, E fotia (The Fire), which recounted the Greek resistance to Fascist occupation” (Travels of a Genre, 165). Hatzis remained in exile for 26 years; approximately one hundred and fifty thousand refugees of the civil war still remain exiled.


217

Chapter 6: Lamentation and Gender 1. Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’enfant de sable (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985). Hereafter referenced in text. All translations are my own, but I have consulted Alan Sheridan’s for guidance. See Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child, trans. Alan Sheridan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 2. This name merits consideration as allusive to both the Madinat Al-Zahra, the tenth-century caliphate of Andalucía built by Abd al-Rahman III and, at least as legend has it, named after his beloved, and Zarah Leander, the German actress and chanteuse, gay icon, and role model for generations of transvestite and drag performers. On the latter, see Alice A. Kuzniar, “Zarah Leander and Transgender Specularity,” Film Criticism 23 (1999): 74–93. 3. The French administration militarily occupied the medina of Fez, dissolved the Parti National, exiled nationalist leaders Allal El Fassi and Mohammed Ouazzani, and declared that reformist movements would be hunted down and crushed. See Bernard Lugan, Histoire du Maroc: des origins à nos jours (Paris: Critérion, 1992), 256–60; and Guy Delanoë, Lyautey, Juin, Mohammed V: fin d’un protectorat (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), 195; the larger economic and social scene is sketched in C.R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 239–53. Similar scenes transpired in Rabat, Casablanca, and Salé. Water rights were one of the first issues around which Moroccan nationalism coalesced. See Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 211–16; and William A. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 121–23. 4. In an attempt to crush the power of the newly formed independence party, Istiqlal, the Résidence Général accused its leaders (absurdly) of collusion with the Axis and arrested A. Balfrej, Mohamed Lyazidi, Ahmed Mekkour, Hachemi Filali, and Abdelaziz Ben Driss. The action was clearly a reprisal for the Manifeste de l’Indépendance which Istiqlal leaders had presented to the sultan, the consulates of Great Britain and the United States, and the Résidence Général. The manifeste rejected a reform of the protectorate “treaty,” and, referencing the Atlantic Charter, demanded independence. See Parti de l’Istiqlal, Bref aperçu sur le Maroc avant le protectorat, sous le protectorat et les aspirations du peuple marocain (NP: Bureau de Documentation et d’Information, ND); Marvine Howe, “The Birth of the Moroccan Nation,” The Middle East Journal 10, no. 1 (1956): 1–16; Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 209–17; and Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 264–68. A copy of the manifesto can be found in Lugan, Histoire du Maroc, 265–66. 5. Lisa Lowe, “Literary Nomadics in Francophone Allegories of Postcolonialism: Pham Van Ky and Tahar Ben Jelloun,” Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 43–61. Lowe analyzes these endings in terms of (anti)colonialism, nativism, and nomadism. The three narrations are rich in allegorical detail. In Salem’s narrative, Ahmed/Zahra’s transformation into a caged circus freak is reminiscent of the exhibition of Africans at European colonial expositions; his/her loss of language associates him/her with the barbarian and the infantile—standard images of the colonized. His/her method of simultaneous homocide and suicide is, in a perverse reworking of the “demonstration effect,” appropriated from the Indochinese war. Amar’s narrative is replete with images of self-negation—of, for example, mirrors that don’t return an image—which figure the erasure of indigenous identities under colonization, or the méconnaissance of Fanon’s

218


“split self.” Fatouma’s first-person narrative of travel, gender crossing, and imagined voyages, while shaped by historical events and material conditions, is in many ways a fantasy of freedom, boundary transgression, and self-determination. On the latter, see John D. Erickson, “Veiled Woman and Veiled Narrative in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sandchild,” boundary 2 20, no. 1 (1993): 55–59. Wishing to maintain Ahmed’s gender ambiguity, I retain the awkward constructions of “he/she” and “his/her” throughout this chapter. 6. See Lowe, “Literary Nomadics,” 56. 7. On the narrative structure of L’Enfant de sable, see Mustapha Marrouchi, “Breaking Up/Down/Out of the Boundaries: Tahar Ben Jelloun,” trans. Patricia Geesey, Research in African Literatures 21, no. 4 (1990): 71–83; Robert Elbaz, Tahar Ben Jelloun ou l’inassouvissement du désir narrative (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1996), 44–66; and Valérie Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), chap. 2. On the connection with Borges, see Marie Fayad, “Borges in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable: Beyond Intertextuality,” The French Review 67, no. 2 (1993): 291–99; and Robert Harvey, “Purloined Letters: Intertextuality and Intersexuality in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child,” in Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French, ed. Dominique D. Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 229–31. 8. On the centrality of producing male children to Maghrebian masculinity, see Lahoucine Ouzgane, “Masculinity as Virility in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Work,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 4 (1997): 1–13. On the relations of compulsory heterosexuality, patriarchy, and national identity in the Maghreb, see Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On gender role expectations in Morocco, see Daisy Hilse Dwyer, Images and Self-Images: Male and Female in Morocco (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 9. On the number seven, see Elbaz, Tahar Ben Jelloun, 45–48; and Erickson, “Veiled Woman,” 63. 10. On the gendered division of space in North Africa, see Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), chap. 8; and Dwyer, Images and Self-Images, chap. 2. 11. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8. 12. See Rebecca Saunders, ed., The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), chap 3. 13. “Gender identity disorder” is classified as mental illness by the DSM-IV. See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 532–38. 14. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); and Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 78–106. On the pathologization of natives, see also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963); Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Chistopher Miller, Blank Darkness:


219

Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Such pathologization has also made its way into readings of the novel. Odile Cazenave, for example, judges Ahmed’s transgendered identity as a resistance to “the natural order,” a species of “infirmity,” and a a falsification of his/her “true subjectivity.” See Odile Cazenave, “Gender, Age, and Narrative Transformations in L’Enfant de sable by Tahar Ben Jelloun,” The French Review 64, no. 3 (1991): 437–50. 15. JanMohamed, “Economy of Manichean Allegory,” 80. 16. Ibid., 83. 17. Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans. Adolfo Gilly (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 35. 18. Ibid., 37. 19. Elsewhere I analyze ostensible differences between gender and colonization, distinguish Ben Jelloun’s proposition from feminist arguments on the “double colonization” of women, and consider whether Ben Jelloun’s proposition untenably inflates the meaning of colonization in a manner that obliterates its historical and political specificities. See Rebecca Saunders, “Decolonizing the Body: Gender, Nation, and Narration in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’enfant de sable, Research in African Literatures 37, no. 4 (2006): 143–44. 20. Acknowledging the necessary error of such a focus, I am concentrating here on the French protectorate (1912–1956), established by the Treaty of Fez in 1912. However, it should be recognized that both Spain (officially) and Britain (unofficially) had their hand in imperial control of Moroccan commerce and administration, and that such control began long before 1912. Earlier manifestations of this influence include the 1904 Entente Cordiale between France and Britain and the 1906 Conference of Algeciras. The history of the Spanish protectorate (1913–1956), as well as its relation to the French regime, is well elaborated by Pennell, Morocco since 1830. 21. The nature of the protectorate, while theorized and heavily inflected by Maréchal Lyautey, its first Resident General, was redefined on the ground by his successors, generals in the field, and French colons. By the time of the events of 1937 alluded to above, for example, the protectorate as governed by Charles Noguès was a very different creature than that conceived by Lyautey. A good review of the transformations effected by Lyautey’s successors can be found in Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat français au Maroc, 3 vols. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), chap. 4. 22. We should also bear in mind the instability in the entities we are calling “France” and “Morocco.” In numerous instances, French officers in the field acted independently of the dictates of the Résidence Général; in equally numerous instances, the Résidence Général acted independently of instructions from Paris. There was also significant contention regarding Morocco throughout the period of the protectorate between the Quai d’Orsay, the président de la republique, the ministre de l’étranger, the colonial lobby, and French public opinion. Similarly, nationalism in Morocco was less a unified political program than a contestatory struggle between actors with very different ideas about the identity of the nation. Many Moroccans and other Africans were, moreover, fighting on the side of the “French.” On such collaboration, see Moshe Gershovich, “Collaboration and

220


‘Pacification’: French Conquest, Moroccan Combatants, and the Transformation of the Middle Atlas,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 21, no. 2 (2004): 139–46. 23. Qtd. Alan Scham, Lyautey in Morocco: Protectorate Administration, 1912–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 40–41. France’s first Resident General in Morocco, a disciple of Joseph-Simon Gallieni, and among the most renowned of French colonial administrators, Maréchal Lyautey was also known as a military theorist who argued for military officers to play an active social role in France and the colonies. See Maréchal Lyautey, Le rôle social de l’officier (Paris: Christian de Bartillat, 1994). He was general commissioner of the 1931–1932 Exposition Colonial, which, as Miller contends, was largely an artifact of Lyautey’s ideology and career. See Christopher L. Miller, Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 68–69. He was also a royalist aristocrat contemptuous of the bourgeoisie, whose vision of North Africa was heavily influenced by the Arabian Nights and Romantic Orientalism. See Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco; Scham, Lyautey in Morocco; Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat; Benoist-Méchin, Lyautey l’Africain ou le rêve immolé (Lausanne, Switzerland: Clairefontaine, 1966); and André Maurois, Marshal Lyautey, trans. Hamish Miles (London: Bodley Head, 1931). For a trenchant indictment of Lyautey’s “politics of a smile and tea,” see the 1945 text of exiled nationalist Mohamed Hassan Ouazzani, Le Protectorat crime de lèse-nation: Le cas du Maroc (Paris: Fondation Mohamed Hassan Ouazzani, 1992). 24. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 33. All translations from this text are mine. 25. On defilement and hybridity, see chap. 4 above. On fitna (disorder or chaos) and its gender entanglements, see Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), chaps. 1 and 2; and Orlando, Nomadic Voices, 80–81. 26. It should be emphasized that in neither of these cases is the represented threat not “real.” In pre-colonial Morocco, the Makhzen operated through an intricate system of caïds, patronage, and reciprocity in which rivalries against the sultan were not uncommon. Similarly, a parent guiding a child into the gender system is protecting him/her from very real contempt and violence aimed at the differently gendered. On the former, see Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 98–100, 114–15, 126–29. On the latter, see Steven J. Onken, “Conceptualizing Violence Against Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Intersexual, and Transgendered People,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 8, no. 3 (1998): 5–24; and Patrcia Gagné and Richard Tewksbury, “Conformity Pressures and Gender Resistance Among Transgendered Individuals,” Social Problems 45, no. 1 (February 1998): 81–101. 27. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 203. 28. Qtd. ibid., 203. See also Ouazzani, Le protectorat, chaps. 1–3. 29. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 29. Lyautey was particularly influenced by British examples in India and Nigeria. On the political structure of the protectorate, see Abdellah Ben Mlih, Structures politiques du Maroc colonial (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990); and Parti de l’Istiqlal, Bref aperçu. Pennell notes that even in the “Islamic ministries, Moroccans had little control, for a parallel administration, the Secrétariat-Général du Gouvernment Chérifien, shadowed them and


221

ran the technical services. Every department of modern government—finance, public works, health, communications, education, justice, agriculture, land use (Eaux-et-Forêts), commerce, industry and mines, labour, social affairs, public security and ancient monuments—was run by French administrators. The two systems ran in parallel and the boundaries between them were the boundaries of modernity” (Morocco since 1830, 162). See also Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 48–53; and Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, chap. 2. 30. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 17. 31. This is the precise wording of the treaty: “les réformes administratives, judicaires, scolaires, économiques, financiers et militaries que le Gouvernement Français jugera utile d’introduire sur le territoire marocain.” Qtd. ibid., 17. 32. Qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 29. All translations from this text are mine. See also ibid., 224; and Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 48–49. 33. Indeed, this was increasingly a rhetorical, rather than an actual, distinctiveness. By 1944, the concerted Moroccan position was that France had substituted direct rule for protection. See Ouazzani, Le protectorat, 15; Parti de l’Istiqlal, Bref apercu, 11; Howe,“The Birth of the Moroccan Nation”; Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 27–33; and Mohamed Lahbabi, Le Gouvernement marocain à l’aube du vigntième siècle (Rabat, Morocco: Les Éditions Maghrébines, 1975). 34. Memo to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, October 1917. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 51. 35. See Ibid., 46–47. 36. This letter dates from 1902, when Lyautey was serving under Gallieni in Madagascar. Qtd. ibid., 20. 37. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 25. See also Lyautey’s 1922 lecture to the Institut Colonial, qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 40–41. 38. Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 130. See also Miller, Nations and Nomads, 68; and Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 7. 39. Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 130. Lyautey saw this violence as regenerative destruction, in terms similar to that of New South spokesmen and not entirely alien to Nietzsche. In Rabat, opening the third trade fair, he opined that “While the terrible European War is heaping up ruins and daily destroying the work of centuries, the grandeur and beauty of the colonial war—which our troops are engaged in here—is that soon, on the very day following the cessation of fighting, it begins to create life, and instead of leaving the earth dead behind it wherever it goes, it makes it productive, and cities and harvests arise, thus making available all sorts of possibilities for the future in regions until now bogged down in inertia” (Qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 34). 40. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 27. As Hoisington points out, Lyautey essentially developed “a new language of conquest to describe the army’s colonial mission” (Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 16). On the diversity of fronts through which this “penetration” was enacted, see Ben Mlih, Structures politiques, 192–204. 41. Qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 224. See also Ouazzani’s polemic against the euphemism “pénetration pacifique,” Le protectorat, 90–92. 42. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 73. See also Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 214–33. 43. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 92.

222


44. Qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 118. For a Moroccan account of expropriation, see Ouzzani, Le protectorat, 66–69. 45. These are Lyautey’s terms for the supervisory functions of the protectorate. 46. In “Decolonizing the Body,” I develop this analysis via three similarities in the work of Butler and Bhahba: their conceptions of gender and culture as effects of regulatory practices; their elaborations of the concept of performativity; and their location of a transformative space of agency in iterative practices. See “Decolonizing the Body,” 142–43. 47. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 110. On the remaking of Rabat, see Hoisington’s excellent analysis in chap 6. Hoisington notes that “Almost everywhere in the Rabat that Lyautey remade and Frenchmen ruled, Moroccans lost prestige, influence, and authority as well as land and money” (Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 134). 48. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 182. 49. See Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 158–60 and chap. 6. 50. Ibid., 159. 51. Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat, 42. All translations from this text are mine. This (mis)conception led to the rather disastrous “Berber policy” that, institutionalized in the Berber dahirs of 1914 and 1930, assumed Berbers could be de-Islamicized (if not Christianized), resulted in a war that lasted thirty years, and created an issue around which Moroccan nationalism could solidify. On the 1930 dahir, see Parti de l’Istiqlal, Bref apercu, 30ff.; and Howe, “The Birth of the Moroccan Nation.” 52. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 6. 53. Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat, 36. 54. Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 177. On the divisiveness of colonial education, see also Ouazzani, Le protectorat, 69–82. 55. Pashas and caïds in such positions opposed independence because it represented for them a significant loss of power. 56. On these associations, see Saunders, Concept of the Foreign, chaps. 3 and 7. In medieval hermeneutics, scandal—derived from Hellenic skandalon (snare, trap, or cause of moral stumbling)—signifies a point of obscurity, ambiguity, or exegetical difficulty. 57. This desire is evinced in Amar’s version of the journal. See 157. 58. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 103. 59. Ibid., 113–14. 60. See Zaki M’Barek, Resistance et armée de libération: portée politique liquidation 1953–1958 (Rabat: n.p., 1973). 61. Numerous readings of L’enfant de sable focus on the treatment of the Maghrebian, Arab, or Islamic woman. See, for example, Marrouchi, “Breaking Up/Down/Out”; Erickson, “Veiled Woman”; and Abbes Maazaoui, “L’Enfant de sable et La Nuit sacrée ou le corps tragique,” The French Review 69, no. 1 (1995): 68–77. 62. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 132–33. 63. Ibid., 135. 64. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.


223

65. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11. 66. Pennell is particularly helpful at untangling this dense web of nationalist contention; see Morocco since 1830, chap. 6. See also M’Barek, Resistance et armée de libération; Howe, Birth of the Moroccan Nation”; and Charles-André Julien, “Morocco: The End of an Era,” Foreign Affairs 34, no. 2 (1956): 199–211. 67. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat , 17. 68. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 24. 69. This is Bouabid’s characterization, qtd. ibid., 211. 70. Qtd. ibid., 178. I do not mean to suggest either that pre-colonial Morocco was democratic or that post-independence Morocco lived up to the imperatives of radical democracy, but merely that the colonial argument for the necessity of the protectorate as well for the destruction of independence movements was based on the regulation of disorder. 71. Qtd. ibid., 216–17.


INDEX abreaction, 12, 16–17, 46, 182, 190 Absalom, Absalom!, xii, 83–100, 102, 103–5, 172, 196–98, 200 See also demonstrative pronouns; dispossession; New South; possession; privatives absence, x, 10–11, 39, 65–66, 180 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 52, 191 adequation, 46, 78 See also equivalence affect, 18, 22, 57, 84, 96, 174, 176, 182 See also mood aletheia, 38, 95, 110 See also truth, formulations of Alexander, Jeffrey, 15 Alexiou, Margaret, 46, 51, 61, 187, 189, 191–92, 194 alexithymia, 18, 182 Algeria, 13–14, 25–27 alienation, 2, 6, 18, 35, 38, 67 ambiguity, 35, 123, 165–70, 207 See also ambivalence; defilement, philosophical; indistinction ambivalence, 66, 166–70, 224 See also uncertainty Anderson, Benedict, 130, 131–32, 138, 143 anger, x, xii, xiv, xv, 33, 50, 52, 77–80, 129, 173–74, 176 anomie, ix, 2, 6, 67, 175 antiphony, xi, 45, 61–63, 68, 71, 130, 140–46 antithesis, 61–62, 67, 83, 89, 104 anxiety, 6, 35–38, 65, 67–68, 73, 80–81, 129, 173, 175 See also dread Aquinas, St. Thomas, 77–78, 126, 196 Aristotle, 19, 32, 59, 75, 77–79 augenblick, 59–60, 80, 193

authenticity, 139, 149 of lamentations, 46–48, 190 Martin Heidegger, 34–38, 60, 67–68, 80–82 and trauma, 19–23, 25, 183 Walter Benjamin, 63–64 Ayers, Edward L., 103, 201–2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 111 barbarians, 8–9, 24, 53, 55–58, 73–74, 78, 116, 118, 127, 136–37, 176, 218 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 147, 149, 154, 156–57, 163–64, 169–70, 172, 174, 220 See also L’Enfant de sable Benjamin, Walter, 63–64 Berman, Art, 10, 180 Berman, Marshall, 8, 179 Bernard, Suzanne, 124, 211 Bersani, Leo, 8, 179 betrayal, 20, 40, 47–48 Bhabha, Homi, xi, 47, 64–65, 133, 143, 157 Blanchot, Maurice, 80, 81, 186–87 body, 14, 19, 98–99, 105, 175–76, 198, 210 gendered, 147–56, 158, 160–70, 172, 222 of language, 123–26 and nationalism, 142–43 and possession, 89–91, 198 role in lamentation, 45, 52–54, 56–57, 61, 64, 70, 73, 113 Bourdieu, Pierre, 209 Bourke, Angela, 46, 192 Bowie, Malcolm, 115, 205 Bradbury, Malcolm, 9–10, 179 Brown, Laura, 26–27, 183

226

INDEX

Butler, Judith, xi, 47, 64–65, 151, 163–64 Byron, George (Lord), 132–33, 172, 213 Calinescu, Matei, 2, 10, 67 capitalism, 3, 4, 7, 9, 27, 78, 130, 178 Caraveli-Chaves, Anna, 49, 55, 190–92 Caruth, Cathy, 19, 21, 182–83 catastrophe, xiv, 14, 18, 41–42, 47, 51, 56, 85, 92–94, 96–97, 99, 102, 106, 117, 131–32, 42, 172–73, 175, 196, 202, 213–14 See also crisis catharsis, 16–17, 41, 46, 171, 174, 182 Certeau, Michel de, 85, 198 Chianis, Sotirios, 48 Christianity, 30, 52–53, 78, 132–33, 136, 185, 189, 214–15, 222 Civil War American, 92–93, 96, 103–4, 196 Greek, 58, 141, 144, 214, 217 colonization, 4, 9, 18, 68, 156–63, 166–67, 170, 175, 176, 218–22 and gender, 147–55, 168–69, 172 and genre, 152–53, 155 Manichean structure of, 151–52, 173, 219–20 and “normalcy,” 24–27 and trauma, 13–15, 181 See also decolonization; Morocco contagion, xiii, 16, 113 and mood, 45, 53, 55, 68, 75, 79 semantic, xiii, 112, 114–17, 123, 127, 209 See also defilement creative destruction, xiv, 28–31, 67, 94–96, 118, 206 crisis, x, 5, 10, 16, 18–20, 34, 37, 46, 76, 90–91, 112, 116, 117, 120, 130–31, 140–42, 162, 169, 172, 174, 177 See also catastrophe Darwin, Charles, 4, 9 death, xv, 7, 37, 39–40, 43, 45–46, 48, 50–52, 54–57, 59, 61–63, 69, 70, 73, 80, 113, 116, 129, 132–33, 163–65, 169, 173, 175–76, 190 See also lamentation; mortuary metaphors

decolonization, x, xiii, 147–51, 166, 170 See also colonization defilement, xiii, 40, 56, 60, 109–11, 162, 174, 177, 202, 203, 209 and contagion, 112–16 philosophical, 112, 115–18, 123–27, 206, 210 uses of, 117–23 See also indistinction; Stéphane Mallarmé; purity demonstrative pronouns, 86, 87–92, 99, 198 Derrida, Jacques, x, 31, 38, 63, 139, 157, 174 deathliness in signs, x, 39–43 différance, 41–42, 210 interior voice, 42–43, 177 nostalgia, 41, 64, 186 self-presence, 39–40, 42–43 writing, 41–43, 210 See also signification Descartes, René, 123, 205 desire, xiv–xv, 86–87, 93, 100–1, 129, 135, 156–57, 174, 196 Dimmock, Wai Chee, 32, 185 discipline, 2, 23, 27, 206 disciplinary society, 3, 4, 12, 16, 27, 35, 67, 77–78, 110, 176 of gender, 152–56, 158, 160, 174, 176 of laments, 52–54 See also pathologized groups dispossession, xii–xiii, xiv, 74, 83–92, 97, 101, 105, 196–97 See also possession; privatives dissociation, 17, 21–22, 35, 41, 47, 55–56, 70, 184 See also trauma distinction, 11, 122–23, 176, 209 See also Pierre Bourdieu Douglas, Mary, 110–11, 115, 203–5 dread, x, xii, xv, 6, 7, 50, 52, 60, 80–82, 83, 111, 176, 186–87, 203 See also anxiety dual-memory hypothesis, 21, 22–23, 25, 124 duBois, Page, 109–10, 203 Dubois, Paul-Charles, 12, 20 Dujardin, Edouard, 112, 206–7, 209 Durkheim, Émile, ix, 6, 30

INDEX elegy, 50–51, 96, 118, 129, 141, 175, 189–91, 193, 197–98 L’Enfant de sable, xiii, 147–55, 160–70, 174–76, 219–20 See also gender; Morocco the Enlightenment the autonomous subject, 4–5, 9, 18, 24, 86 and nationalism, 130–31 reason, 2, 3–4, 5, 12, 24, 27, 67, 175 epitaphios logos, xi, 51, 129 equivalence, 32–34, 41, 50, 72, 78, 137–43, 158, 172, 190, 215 See also adequation Erikson, Kai, 18 European culture, 7–9, 14–15, 24, 30, 45, 78, 134–37, 141, 151–52, 155, 159, 173, 185, 216 excess, 16–17, 52, 67, 102–7 Eyerman, Ron, 15 false memory syndrome, 20, 22 Fanon, Frantz, 13–15, 18, 25–26, 68, 153, 181, 184, 218 See also race; racism Faulkner, William, xii–xiii, 83, 86, 87, 89, 92–95, 98, 104, 172, 174–75, 196, 200, 202 See also Absalom, Absalom!; demonstrative pronouns; negation; privatives Felman, Shoshana, 47, 190 Felski, Rita, 5, 178 femininity, xi, xii, xv, 51, 53, 54–56, 58, 74, 78, 150, 154, 164, 167, 173, 175, 185, 192, 204 See also hysteria; lamentation Ferenczi, Sándor, 17, 18, 19, 23–24, 184 foreign, xiii, 24–25, 32, 34, 36–37, 42, 56, 73–77, 80, 112–18, 120, 122–23, 127, 129, 162, 167, 174–76, 185, 192, 204 See also contagion, semantic Foucault, Michel, 3, 4, 27, 35, 114, 151 See also also discipline, disciplinary society; pathologized groups France, 153–60, 162–63, 168–69, 174, 220–22 See also Stéphane Mallarmé

227

freedom, 81–82, 96, 106, 111, 137, 144–45, 158, 202, 218 Freud, Sigmund, ix, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11–12, 16–17, 20, 23, 41, 42, 75–76, 182, 183, 184, 207 Garber, Marjorie, 167, 223 Gellner, Ernest, 130–31, 138, 213, 217 gender, 156, 167, 176 as colonization, 147–55, 168–69, 172 and genre, 152–53, 160 and lamentation, xi, xii, xiii, xv, 51–52, 54–59, 63, 160–66, 169, 185 as protective envelope, 154, 158, 169, 221 transgression, 58–59, 147–55, 158, 161–68 and trauma, 12–13, 20, 23–27, 52, 54–55, 173–74, 185 See also L’Enfant de sable Giddens, Anthony, 3, 4, 6, 7, 18, 31, 45, 54, 67 Gilroy, Paul, 9, 179 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 138–39, 215 Grady, Henry, 95–101, 199–200 Greece and architecture, 135–36, 214 communism, 58, 141, 144, 214, 217 laments, xi, 45, 48–49, 51, 52–54, 57–58, 61–63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 73, 86, 92, 93, 110, 133–37, 190, 213, 215 language (katharevousa), 135, 137, 141, 214 Maniat women, 48–49, 57, 63, 73 Megali Idea (Great Idea), 136–37, 214 nationalism, 132–43, 172, 174–75, 212–17 neohellenism, 134–37, 172, 175, See also Civil War, Greek; nationalism; To diplo biblio Grima, Benedicte, 191–93 Hanchard, Michael, 9, 179 Harvey, David, 178 Hatzis, Kostas, 130, 140–6, 172, 175–76, 216, 217 See also To diplo biblio; Greece

228

INDEX

Heidegger, Martin, x, 24, 42, 60, 75, 203 and anxiety, 35–38, 67, 73, 80–82, 203 “being-towards-death,” x, 37, 80 breakdown, 34, 67–68, 80, 117, 185–86 das Man, 34–35, 37, 60 See also mood Herget, Winfried, 201 Herman, Judith, 12–13, 26–27, 32, 68, 183–84 Herzfeld, Michael, 133, 136–37, 140, 213, 216 Hill, Benjamin Harvey, 95, 101, 200 Hobsbawm, Eric, 131, 137, 212 Hoisington, William, 159, 222–23 Holst-Warhaft, Gail, 51, 57–58, 190–93 Husserl, Edmund, 39–40, 42 hysteria, 11–12, 20, 23, 24, 54–55, 175, 183 identity, 5, 9, 15, 56, 65, 67, 77, 85–95, 98–99, 102–4, 109–10, 114–15, 120, 127, 129–30, 133–46, 149, 155, 157, 168, 176–78, 216, 220 incomprehensibility, 18, 21, 37, 46–48, 56, 61–62, 65–66, 74–75, 106–7, 114–16, 133, 166, 169–70, 174 in Absalom, Absalom!, 83, 104, 186–87 of moment of lamentation, 34, 59–60, 73, 76, 78, 113, 124–26, 161, 164, 173 Stéphane Mallarmé, 112–17, 124–26, 175–76, 205 indistinction, 11, 122–23, 174, 209 See also distinction; Pierre Bourdieu infantile, 23–25, 40, 60, 67, 78, 116, 117–18, 151, 175–76, 184, 206, 218 See also primitive interestedness of language of lamentation, 47–48, 86–88, 92, 99–100, 158 of trauma, 19–22 irrational, 5, 7, 10, 12, 23–25, 31, 36, 53–58, 73–74, 78–81, 117, 173–74, 187–88

Islam, 52, 58, 132, 156, 159, 189, 191–92, 222 Janet, Pierre, 18, 21, 24–25, 41, 55, 116 JanMohamed, Abdul, 151–52, 219–20 Johnson, Frederic, 178 justice, 32–34, 41, 72, 78 Kardiner, Abram, 13, 19, 21 Kedourie, Elie, 130–31, 213 Kerewsky-Halpern, Barbara, 190 Kierkegaard, Søren, 6, 35, 60, 64, 75, 80, 81, 111, 203 See also anxiety; freedom; repetition Kirillova, Okkuli, 66 Kristeva, Julia, 60, 67, 75, 76, 111–13, 122, 126, 193, 203–6, 209–10 LaCapra, Dominick, 11, 39, 63, 180, 182–83 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 207, 209 Lambropoulos, Vassilis, 134, 213 lament traditions Arab, 48–49, 58, 59, 68–70, 193 Eastern European, 45, 47, 65 Baltic, 45 Bulgarian, 65, 69 Egyptian, 50, 52 Finnish, 45, 49, 190 Greek, See also Greece Hebrew, 49, 50, 56, 61–63, 66, 67, 68, 71, 74, 84, 110, 113, 191, 194 Irish, 45, 46, 49, 52, 59, 69, 72, 74, 192, 193 Moroccan, 48, 52, 59 North African, 45, 48, 50, 52, 54, 58–59 Palestinian, 48–50, 59, 70, 72 Russian Ingrian, 47, 51, 55, 66–67, 74 Shi‘ite, 49, 53, 58, 71, 191–92 Soviet Karelian, 49, 62, 66–67, 70, 189, 193 lamentation and the body, 160–62 and celebration, 8, 41, 48, 185

INDEX communal and public, xiii-xiv, 38, 45–46, 50, 58, 62, 68, 172, 175 and consolation, 65, 129, 175, 189 and contamination, 45, 53, 75 and cultural assimilation 113, 142 and the East, 73–74, 116 and equivalence, 33, 41, 50, 72, 139–40, 190 and event, xiii, 40, 47, 172 fantastic, 73–75, 99, 104–7 formulae and improvisation, xii, 60–65 genres, 49–50 goos, 61 and identity, 60, 65, 67, 91, 104, 115, 129, 177–78 and insanity, xv, 61, 73, 193 as invocation, 68–72, 80 and justice, 32–34, 40–41, 46, 71–72, 79 knowledge, resistance to, xiv, 47, 52, 70–71, 104, 106, 110 and literality, 67, 165, 198 and literary traditions, xii, 10, 25, 49–51, 182 logic of loss and continuity, xiv, 96, 103, 161, 173, 200 and logical resolution, 64, 175, 187 moods, 75–82, 195 “musical masking,” 66–67, 73 and newness, xiv, 60, 86, 93–94, 115, 117, 129, 130, 135, 174, 196, 214 and normalcy, 171, 190 oral tradition, 43, 49, 60–61 as pagan, 45–46, 52, 74, 173, 189 performativity, xi, xv, 10, 47, 49, 64, 68, 77, 98–99, 142, 162–63, 169, 171–72, 174 as political tool, xi, 57–58 and the primitive, xv, 45–46, 54–56, 73–74, 171, 173, 176, 189 privatives, 92–95, 104, 173 and property, xi, xii-xiii, 48, 53, 56, 84–85, 134, 177 proportionality, 74–75 proprius, 56, 80, 177 and purity, xii, xiii, xiv, 109–10, 112, 129, 135, 174, 177, 202

229

questions, 7, 31–32, 65–68, 71, 76, 80 and recovery, 37, 40, 50, 71, 80, 190 regulation of, 7, 51–54, 57, 61, 129, 173, 176, 191–92 religion, relation to, 52–53, 61, 71, 173, 191–92 as ritual performance, xi, xii, 46–54, 61, 64, 73, 171, 177 social discipline, disruption of, xiv-xv, 7, 51–52, 56, 129, 170, 175–76, 192 social functions, 33, 48–49, 51, 172 and the state, 7, 43, 46, 50–53, 57–58, 61, 77, 129–30, 146 Symbolic, disordering of, xi, xii, xv, 31, 65, 66–67, 73, 117, 129, 173, 175 as therapy, 46, 67–68, 190 threnos, 61, 65 as time, xii, 59–60, 62, 85, 103, 161–62, 174 trauma, xi, 15, 46–47, 61–64, 66–68, 80, 161, 172–73, 175–76 the unutterable, xi, xii, 31, 55–56, 61, 67, 73, 116, 117, 175, 190 witness, xi, xii, 32, 45, 63, 68, 70–72, 75, 172 and women, xi, xii, xiii, xv, 45–59, 63, 73, 85 See also abreaction; adequation; anger; antiphony; antithesis; anxiety; death; defilement; desire; dread; elegy; gender; lamenters; melancholy; modernity lamenters, xi, 45–46, 50, 52, 55–57, 61, 69, 70, 173, 189–90 communication with dead, 46, 50, 52, 56, 61, 69, 173 pain of, xi, 50, 55–56, 70 Lanzmann, Claude, 20 Large, David C., 206 Laub, Dori, 47, 70–71, 190, 194 Lazarus, Richard, 77, 79, 195 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 43, 64 Leys, Ruth, 17, 19–20, 22, 55, 182–84, 192 libidinal theory, 22, 184 literality, 19, 21, 23, 182–83

230

INDEX

logos, 43, 55–56, 73, 116 Loraux, Nicole, 53, 57, 64, 75, 77, 192–93, 195 loss, ix, xi, xiii–xiv, 1, 2, 3, 16–18, 27, 33, 35, 38, 41, 70–71, 83–85, 97–98, 109–10, 171–72, 174, 196 and desire, xvi–xvii, 79, 100–101, 103, 134–35, 162, 174–75 distinguished from absence, x, 10–11, 39, 65–66, 180 and recovery, 15–18, 32–33, 37, 50, 55, 72, 75, 135, 137 See also privatives; trauma Lowe, Lisa, 148–49, 218–19 Lyautey, Maréchal, 153–60, 166, 168, 175, 220, 222 See also Morocco Mallarmé, Stéphane, 125–26, 174, 204–5, 207–208 “crise de vers,” xiii, 112, 117, 120, 124 cultural assimilation, resistance to, 113, 120–23, 174, 204 defilement, 109–12, 114–18, 120, 122–27, 175–76, 202, 209–11 and foreign, xiii, 112, 114–18, 120, 122–23, 127, 175–76 “Hommage à Wagner,” xiii, 112, 114, 118, 120, 122, 124, 209, 210 and loss, 109–12 and materiality, 123–27, 210–11 and newness, 112, 118, 120, 123 nationalism, 118–21 poetic purity, xiii, 109–12, 114–16, 122–23, 202, 209–10 “Rêverie d’un poëte français,” 118–21 See also contagion, semantic; Revue wagnérienne; Troisième Republique; Richard Wagner; wagnérisme Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 7–8 Marx, Karl, ix, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 18, 29, 174 masculinity, xi, 5, 12, 26, 29–30, 41, 51, 53, 54–55, 58–59, 129–30, 150, 154, 164, 167, 191, 185 See also elegy; shell shock materiality, 4, 56, 75, 80, 112, 143

incomprehensible materiality of lamentation, xiv, 67, 126–27, 139–40, 161, 169, 173 of body, 56, 123–6 Stéphane Mallarmé, 112, 123–26, 174–76 Matthews, John, 202 McFarlane, James, 9–10, 179 melancholy, x, xii, xiv, xv, 11, 50, 60, 75–77, 80, 83, 163, 173, 175, 176, 195 memory, 46, 77, 125 commemoration, 49, 63, 162 in lamentation, 46–47, 60, 63–64, 67, 70–71, 162–63 national, 49, 145 traumatized, xv, 12–13, 15, 16–17, 19–23, 41, 47, 60, 63, 67, 124, 161, 182–83 See also false memory syndrome Miller, J. Hillis, 98–99, 200 modern (the term), 7, 30 modernism, 2, 5, 9–10, 24–25, 27, 35, 67, 173 modernity, ix-xv, 17, 29–31, 34, 36–37, 40–41, 45, 78, 80, 114, 120, 130, 133, 137, 147, 173–74, 176, 178 “early” modernity, 2, 43 as epistemology, 3–4 as Euro-American hegemony, 8–9 experience of, 5–7, 35, 38 institutions of, 2–3 “late” modernity, 2, 3, 5–7, 9–11, 28, 42, 67, 172, 175 as ontology, 4–5 and the primitive, 24–25 as time period, 2, 8 and trauma, 1, 11, 19, 22–25, 27, 171 and trust, 6–7, 18 See also colonization; gender; nationalism; “time-space distanciation” mood, x, xii, xv, 35–38, 41, 67, 68, 75–83, 186–87, 195 See also anger; anxiety; dread; melancholy Morocco, xiii, 147–48, 153–60, 164–65, 224

INDEX national independence, 149–50, 168, 175 protectorate, 153–60, 162–63, 168–69, 173, 221–22 See also L’Enfant de sable; Lyautey, Maréchal mortuary metaphors, 95–97, 100–1, 164–66, 169, 175, 197 mourning, 8, 10, 23, 45–73, 76, 84, 112–13, 115, 129–30, 147, 172, 185, 187, 191–92 See lamentation nationalism, 29, 58, 118–20, 129, 144–46, 157, 168, 176, 208, 213–14, 220 and death, 132–33 as exchange relation, 137–43, 172, 215 inaugural crisis, 130–33, 142 losses in, 130–46, 172, 211–12, 215 and masculinity, 150 and materiality, 139–40 See Greece, nationalism; nationalism; Stéphane Mallarmé; Morocco negation, 10, 74, 76, 77, 84, 86, 92–98, 104–6, 109, 111, 151, 173–74, 180, 199, 201 See New South; privatives; William Faulkner Nenola-Kallio, Aili, 47, 66, 190, 193–94 New South, xii–xii freedpeople, 95–98, 103, 105–7, 173, 200–2 possessions, redistribution of, 101–4, 106, 201–2 program, 96, 101–2, 196–97, 199–200 rhetoric of, 98–101, 103, 105–7, 173 and Southern identity, 102–3, 105–6 spokesmen, xiii, 86, 93, 95–103, 105–7, 172–75, 222 See excess; Henry Grady; mortuary metaphors; Old South; privatives

231

newness, xiii, xiv, 29, 60, 86, 93–97, 103, 107, 112, 115, 117–18, 120, 122–23, 129, 130, 135, 142, 171, 174, 196, 202, 214 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix, x, 1, 4, 7, 37–38, 41, 42, 67, 143, 157, 174–75, 206, 222 and justice, 32–34, 72 modernity, 29–31, 185 “the perhaps,” 31 ressentiment, 34–35, 185 the tensed bow, 30, 75, 185 Überwindung, 29–31, 185 See creative destruction “normalcy,” 25–27, 33, 171, 190 Old South, xii, xiv, 95–96, 197 myth of, xiv, 84, 172, 200 See also New South Ottoman Empire, 132, 172, 212 Parker, Robert, 204–5, 210 pathologized groups, 7, 24–27, 52–54, 114, 151–54, 158, 162–63, 171, 176, 219–20 Philo, 126 philosophy, ix, x, 28, 30–36, 39–43, 46, 56, 59, 80–81, 132, 173, 187 and defilement, 115–18, 122–25, 205, 206 metaphysics, 37, 38, 43, 64, 67–68, 73, 127, 175, 192 philosophers, 18, 29, 53, 174, 185 philosophical idealism, xiv, xv Pitavy, François, 201 Plato, 30, 40, 53, 54, 122, 123 Plutarch, 53, 54, 57 possession, xii–xiv, 34, 94, 174–75 of affliction, 91–92 and defilement, 110–11 and destruction, 95–97, 100, 102–4 Friedrich Nietzsche, 7, 30–31, 142 (in)alienable, 89–91, 198 and identity, 84–89, 91–94, 102–3, 110, 197–98 ideological, 33, 83–85, 87–89, 102, 109–10, 196–98

232

INDEX

possession (continued) retroactive, xii–xiii, xiv, 74, 84, 86, 87–88, 92, 129, 134–35, 172, 213 redistribution of, xii–xiii, 33, 60, 84–87, 92–93, 95, 101–4, 106, 130, 172–73, 176, 201–2 See demonstrative pronoun; dispossession possibility, 7–8, 30–1, 35–7, 57, 60, 81–2, 95–7, 100, 102–4, 110–11, 117–18, 142, 193, 203 and defilement, 110–11 Friedrich Nietzsche, 7, 30–31, 142 Martin Heidegger, 35–37, 60, 193, 203 and destruction, 95–97, 100, 102–4 and ritual, 117–18 Søren Kierkegaard, 60, 81–82, 203 See augenblick Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 41, 182 See dissociation; trauma postmodernism, 2, 40–41, 178 the primitive, xv, 24–25, 45–46, 54–56, 73–74, 115, 118, 127, 171, 173, 176, 189 privatives, 92–98, 101–5, 107, 173, 175, 199 See New South; Reconstruction progress, 131 modern conceptions of, 3–4, 6–8 in New South, 99–100, 102–3, 105–7 property, xi, xii–xiii, 48, 53, 56, 78, 84, 92, 98, 106, 134, 176–78 and identity, 85–89, 93–94, 102–3, 202 ideological, 85, 106, 172, 197–98 re-made, 86, 92, 94, 173 See also identity; lamentation, and property; possession; proprius; purity proprius, xii, 21, 56, 80, 90, 177, 183, 192 See identity; literality; property; purity purity, x, xii, xiii, 42, 111, 122–23, 129, 135, 158, 171, 174, 177, 209–10 and defilement, 109–10, 115–16, 202

and destruction, xiv, 95 and the foreign, 112–14 laws, 113, 126 and loss, 109–10 as order, 115–16 poetic, See Stéphane Mallarmé race, 4, 5, 8–9, 27, 32, 90, 176 “racial time,” 8–9 racism, 13–15, 18, 88, 90, 96–8, 105–6, 172, 198, 200–2 See Frantz Fanon Reconstruction, 86, 93–8, 176 See also “Redemption” recovery, xv, 12, 15–21, 25–6, 32–4, 55, 78, 135, 137 “Redemption,” 98, 107, 176, 200 Reformation, 130–31 regression, 23–25, 37, 55, 60, 61, 67, 116, 171, 173–74, 207 Renan, Ernest, 132, 212 repetition, 41, 55, 81, 125 of lamentations, 40, 45, 63–65, 75, 76, 172–73 Søren Kierkegaard, 64, 75, 194 Walter Benjamin, 63–64 repression, 174, 206 lamentation (as return of repressed), 46–47, 173, 190 traumatic, 13, 46–47 Revue wagnérienne, 112, 119, 206–9 Ricoeur, Paul, 80–81, 110, 114, 116, 123, 205 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42–43, 137 sacred, 121, 125, 130, 133, 205 mood of lament, 45, 75 sacralizing of trauma victims, 23, 184 Said, Edward, 74, 151 Sargant, William, 182 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 42 Scarry, Elaine, 70, 198 Seneca, 77–79 Seremetakis, Nadia, 52–53, 56–57, 61, 63, 71, 73, 190–93 shell shock, 11–13, 54–55, 176 signification, x, xii, xiv, 39–43, 63, 64, 76, 85, 123, 139, 140, 174–75, 197–98 simulation, 19–20, 22, 40, 47–48 Slatoff, Walter J., 201

INDEX Terdiman, Richard, 122, 209 testimony, 19, 70–71, 145, 176, 197 See witnessing “time-space distanciation,” 3, 6, 54 To diplo biblio, xiii, 130, 140–46, 172, 175–76, 216, 217 See also Greece, nationalism Tocqueville, Alexis de, 6 Tolbert, Elizabeth, 49, 73, 190, 194 trauma, ix, xi, xv, 10, 28, 34–35, 37, 46, 52, 56, 62, 66–67, 73, 80, 98, 116, 124, 130–31, 133, 161, 173–76, 180, 182, 185, 207 collective, 15, 18 combat, 11–13, 23, 25–27, 54–55, 68 and disciplinary society, 12, 16, 27 interpreting, 18–21, 22, 40 and justice, 16, 32–33, 41, 72 as loss, x, 1, 11, 15–18, 27, 41, 85 and “normalcy,” 25–27 and racism, 13–15, 91, 181 and recovery, 15–21, 25, 129 and repetition, 19, 21–22, 41, 63, 64 and signification, 40–41, 63 social history of, 11–14 sustained versus exceptional, xiii, 12–15, 22, 91, 172, 181 as temporal disorder, 24, 60 the unutterable, 18, 21, 31–32, 40–41, 55 victims, 11, 12–13, 16, 20–24, 26–27, 41, 47, 61, 68, 183 witnessing, 19–21 See catharsis; dissociation; dual-memory theory; gender; hysteria; lamentation; memory; modernity; PostTraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); the

233

primitive; recovery; regression; shell shock Troisième République, xiii, 112, 120 See also France truth, formulations of, 4–6, 17, 19–23, 31–33, 38, 47–48, 63, 87–89, 92, 94–95, 98, 102, 104–6, 110, 174 See also aletheia uncertainty, 2, 4, 10, 67, 88–89 Friedrich Nietzsche, 7, 31–32, 37, 174, 185, 206 and gender, 148–49, 154–55, 161, 163–68 of lamentation, 31–32, 80, 84, 185–87 See also ambiguity; ambivalence van der Kolk, Bessel A., 22, 24, 184 Velestinlis, Rigas, 132, 172, 212 Wagner, Richard, xiii, 112, 114–15, 118–21, 124–25, 206–8, 211 wagnérisme, xiii, 120–21, 125, 206–9 Weber, Max, ix, 4, 6, 8 Weber, William, 206 Westermark, Edward, 48, 52, 59, 190–91, 193 Williams, Heather, 211–12 Williams, Raymond, 7, 179 witnessing, xi, xii, 19–21, 32, 45, 63, 68, 70–72, 75, 80, 83, 140, 172, 197, 216 Woodward, C. Vann, 106–7, 201–2 Woolf, Virginia, 5 World War I, 9, 12, 17, 20, 55, 137, 184 World War II, 2, 12–13, 58, 73, 144, 182, 217 wrath, See anger

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Music, Philosophy, and Modernity

Lamentation

Lamentation

Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (Jewish Literature and Culture)

The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-Culture (Suny Series in Philosophy)

Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture

Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Lamentation

Lamentation

Lamentation

Lamentation

Women, Philosophy and Literature

Lamentation

Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Libertinage in Russian Culture and Literature (Russian History and Culture)

Lamentation

Modernity and Postmodern Culture (Issues in Cultural and Media Studies)

STUDIES IN HEBREW LITERATURE AND JEWISH CULTURE

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance

Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture

Culture and consciousness: literature regained

Derrida's Legacies: Literature and Philosophy

Women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in Weimar culture

On Philosophy Culture and Peace in Islam

Philosophy In Literature

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Music, Philosophy, and Modernity

Lamentation

Lamentation

Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (Jewish Literature and Culture)

The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-Culture (Suny Series in Philosophy)

Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture

Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Lamentation

Lamentation

Lamentation

Lamentation

Women, Philosophy and Literature

Lamentation

Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature (Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature)

Libertinage in Russian Culture and Literature (Russian History and Culture)

Lamentation

Modernity and Postmodern Culture (Issues in Cultural and Media Studies)

STUDIES IN HEBREW LITERATURE AND JEWISH CULTURE

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity

Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance

Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture

Culture and consciousness: literature regained

Derrida's Legacies: Literature and Philosophy

Women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in Weimar culture

On Philosophy Culture and Peace in Islam

Philosophy In Literature

Recommend Documents