Textual Practice: Journal, Volume 8, Number 3 (Textual Practice)

TEXTUAL PRACTICE Editor Terence Hawkes University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE US associate editor Jean E.Howard Columbia University Postal address: Department of English and Comparative Literature, 602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York NY 10027, USA Reviews editor Fred Botting Lancaster University Postal address: Department of English, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT Editorial board Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Malcolm Bowie All Souls’ College, Oxford Terry Eagleton University of Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Ania Loomba Stanford University, USA Editorial Assistant Louise Tucker

Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University of Wales College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Fred Botting, Department of English, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT. Advertisements Enquiries to Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £60.00; UK personal: £22.00; Rest of World full: £65.00; Rest of World personal: £24.00; USA full: $95.00; USA personal: $35.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP10 5BE. ISSN 0950-236X Phototypeset by Intype, London. © Routledge 1994

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Notes for contributors

Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English, to Professor Alan Sinfield at the Department of Cultural and Community Studies, Arts Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN. It will be assumed that authors will keep a copy. Submission of a paper to Textual Practice will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript the author agrees that he or she is giving the publisher the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the paper, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microfilm or any other reproduction of a similar nature. Authors will not be required to assign the copyright. The manuscript Submissions should be typed in double spacing on one side only of the paper, preferably of A4 size, with a 4cm margin on the left-hand side. Articles should normally be of between 7000 and 8000 words in length. Tables should not be inserted in the pages of the manuscript but should be on separate sheets. The desired position in the text for each table should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. Photographs Photographs should be in high-contrast black-and-white glossy prints. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained by authors before submission, and any acknowledgements should be included in the captions.

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References These should be numbered consecutively in the text, thus: ‘According to a recent theory,4…’, and collected at the end of the paper in the following styles, for journals and books respectively: J.Hartley and J.Fiske, ‘Myth-representation: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), pp. 12–33. C.Norris, The Deconstructive Turn (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). Proofs Page proofs will be sent for correction to the first-named author, unless otherwise requested. The difficulty and expense involved in making amendments at the page proof stage make it essential for authors to prepare their typescripts carefully: any alterations to the original text are strongly discouraged. Our aim is rapid publication: this will be helped if authors provide good copy, following the above instructions, and return their page proofs as quickly as possible. Offprints Ten offprints will be supplied free of charge.

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 8 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1994

Contents

Editorial

viii

Articles Twoccing and joyreading JOHN HARTLEY

1

Uncanny spectacles: psychoanalysis and the texts of King Lear PHILIP ARMSTRONG

17

Richard Rorty and Star Wars: on the nature of pragmatism’s narrative IAN SAUNDERS

38

Poetic constitutions of history: the case of Shelley SHARADA NAIR

52

Mrs Dalloway and the Armenian Question TRUDI TATE

70

Reviews Susan Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics LINDA CHARNES

91

Simon During, Foucault and Literature; Joseph Natoli, Mots d’ordre NICHOLAS ROYLE

97

Sandra Kemp and Paola Bono (eds), The Lonely Mirror ALESSANDRA TANESINI

103

Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory JAMES R.BENNETT

106

Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism THOMAS DOCHERTY

109

Margaret E.Gray, Postmodern Proust MICHAEL WOOD

114

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James Kelman, Some Recent Attacks WILLY MALEY

116

Stephen Crook, Modernist Radicalism and its Aftermath PETER BAEHR

123

Philip Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices-, Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations STEPHEN COPLEY

133

John Hartley, Tele-ology and The Politics of Pictures SEAN CUBITT

137

Eve Tavor Bannet, Postcultural Theory, Vincent B.Leitch, Cultural Criticism JOHN STOREY

142

Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics BRIAN WINSTON

146

Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice; Robert Hampson and Peter Barry (eds), New British Poetries, Mary Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose; Antony Easthope and John O.Thompson (eds), Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory TIM WOODS

148

Paul Carter, Living in a New Country, Denis Wood, The Power of Maps PHILIP ARMSTRONG

154

Editorial

This is the last issue of Textual Practice to be produced under the present editorship. What was planned as a stint of five years has extended itself stealthily but enjoyably to eight. The challenges inherent in the establishment of any new presence on the academic scene have naturally made this an exciting time, and the opportunity to watch and perhaps encourage the development of new ideas, new perspectives, new voices has also ensured that it was uniquely rewarding. We aimed to reach an expanding constituency and, happily, we seem to remain engaged with it. But if Textual Practice’s involvement in such a process has been to any extent fruitful, that is owing not just to the undoubted learning, wit and ingenuity of our contributors. The journal simply could not have been produced with-out the efforts of those at Routledge, our publishers, and at Cardiff, our base, who committed themselves from the first to those work-a-day tasks of proofreading, production and promotion which make an editor’s job not just bearable but, finally, possible. It is, nevertheless, time for change and the new opportunities and advantages that that will certainly bring. Indeed, the only evident disadvantage in prospect is the extent to which it may give the former editor the chance to become a more frequent contributor. Terence Hawkes The new editor of Textual Practice is Professor Alan Sinfield. Future contributions and correspondence should be addressed to him at the Department of Cultural and Community Studies, Arts Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN 1 9QN, UK.

© Routledge 1994

Twoccing and joyreading JOHN HARTLEY

T.W.O.C Without consent I begin by taking some words that were themselves taken without consent (long ago and far away): I feel I might well begin by proclaiming, as one of my own students once did, that ‘before I start to speak, I want to say something’.1 Three somethings, in fact. First, in the face of various postmodern theorizings about the indeterminacy of language, I’m trying to find a way of describing what readers do, and I suggest it is a form of low-grade theft, characterized not by a reading position at all, but by a mobility which I will argue is vehicular in mode. Readers steal from writings much as juveniles take cars without consent for the purposes of joyriding. In police-court jargon this is known as ‘twoccing’, i.e. t.aking w.itho.ut c.onsent. Second, I want to discuss notions of mobility and ‘unpositionality’ (if there is such a word) by reference to writings as well as readings; specifically metaphors of travel. Recently, ‘on the road’ metaphors in cultural studies have been criticized as being male and patriarchal, even when used by feminist writers. Against this, I suggest that readers are not in practice stalled by the gender-history of their chosen metaphorical vehicle. This is not just to observe that women readers do ‘twoc’ male discourses, but also to argue that the ‘unpositionality’ or indeterminacy of women in this context is a model of readership in general, and so it needs to be rethought in other terms than those of power or weakness. In writer/reader, geopolitical and gender relations, ‘unpositionality’ may turn out to be more challenging than at first appears, while circulation and mobility may be not gendered but general, especially in the

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contemporary phase of history with the globalizing circulation of knowledge, people and capital. Third, a reading of actual twoccing—juvenile car crime as covered in the Western Australian press—shows that in the public domain ‘society’ can be equated with traffic lights, while (it follows) joyriding is subversive of society itself. I take this to be a suggestive metaphor for reading. From these instances of writing about race, gender and crime, through the discourses of science, intellectual culture and journalism, I conclude that the present conjuncture between the domains of writing and reading is characterized by disjuncture, to the extent that the ‘speaking position’ of writing can be seen as a red traffic light, ready to be run by the stolen vehicle of joyreading. Most familiarly, juveniles twoc cars. But, I suggest, readers twoc writings. In both cases the offenders are mobile, travelling for the sake of it, in vehicles not belonging to them, without instrumental purpose. Twoccing requires a moral code at variance with that of possessive individualism; it’s an offence to ownership, intellectual or vehicular, being in the end a kind of pure or total gesture of travel, wherein the vehicle, the streets, moving quickly, and being out of time and place are enjoyed for themselves, foregrounding the act and skill of driving (reading), not the possession of the car (text) or the promise of a destination (closure). In a twocced vehicle (book), driving (reading) is its own reward, travel (sense-making) is its own end, and time is the duration of the trip itself, not the steady state which travel disrupts. Twoccing (of cars or writings) is not a glamorous crime of cultural politics or personal passion, not epic or heroic; it’s a routine, low grade, show-off offence, and as such it cannot be romanticized as a form of consumer resistance. Not all modes of reading (and not all readers) can be described in its terms, but just as those who joyride in twocced cars often know and care more about their chosen vehicles than do the owners, so it is the more astute and committed fans of reading who are most likely to be twoccers. In fact, if reading is a kind of twoccing, then the readers I’m most interested in are not those who potter about in the mental equivalent of an ageing Datsun, but the petrol-heads of the republic of letters—the joyreaders. It is my purpose in this essay to show what twoccing is and how it works, rather than to survey its social existence, but I do argue that it is not only a personal mode of reading but also a sociocultural phenomenon. In other words, not only can texts’ meanings be twocced by individual readers, but also by whole readerships.

© Routledge 1994

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FIRST The end of the world2 Take, for instance, the writings of Thor Heyerdahl, especially the popular adventure stories based on his expeditions, such as Aku-Aku, which is about his trip to Easter Island in 1956–7, accompanied by his wife Yvonne and two children, Thor Jr and Anette (all of whom are duly and scientifically indexed at the back of the book). Thor Heyerdahl was the adventurer-academic of his age; no one in the twentieth century managed to combine quite so successfully as he did the eyewitness ideology of science, the thrill of Viking voyages, the exoticism of the South Seas, and the racial fantasies of those for whom civilization has white skin and a red beard. Pursuing a Nordic quest for whiteness to a little island in the Pacific may seem quixotic (it may seem altogether nastier too, though you wouldn’t guess from the chatty Aku-Aku), but it is the very uselessness, the ‘hair’-brained outlandishness of Heyerdahl’s quest, that makes it good copy—so the Kon-Tiki man got a year, a crew, a vessel, and a bestseller out of his conspicuously unscientific project, on the strength of his own red-bearded narrative appeal. THE MYSTERY OF EASTER ISLAND FROM THE MAN WHO WROTE KON-TIKI Thor Heyerdahl, famous author of Kon-Tiki, has written another magnificent true adventure story that you can’t put down. It’s about a strange, remote island in the Pacific—Easter Island, where giant god-like statues brood over the countryside. With the powerful help of a devil—Aku-Aku—Heyerdahl solved the mysteries of Easter Island that had puzzled the world for centuries. He rolled back the years to uncover amazing facts about the colossal, glowering statues. He brought to light treasures that had lain hidden in caves for generations. He has discovered the secrets of the lonely inhabitants in a way that only Heyerdahl can do. This is a thrilling adventure you must not miss! It starts this Sunday. Reserve your copy now. STARTING IN THIS WEEK’S SUNDAY DISPATCH3 Knowledge vs. travel (science vs. narrative) ‘I felt sorry for my own aku-aku,’ writes Heyerdahl:

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It had followed me for a year on a lead, without the freedom to wing its way into the unbounded universe. I thought I could hear its complaining voice. ‘You’re getting stale, and too prosaic,’ it said. ‘You’re no longer interested in anything but dry facts.’… ‘This is a scientific expedition,’ I said. ‘I’ve lived most of my life among scientists and have learnt their first commandment: the task of science is pure research. No speculation, no attempt to prove one thing or another.’ ‘Break that commandment,’ said my aku-aku. ‘Tread on their toes.’4 You probably remember Thor Heyerdahl, if at all, for his exploits on research vessels; not only Kon-Tiki but also the reed boat, Ra. What is less well remembered is that these Boy’s Own adventures with indigenous shipping had a purpose, namely to demonstrate the possibility that an advanced, white-skinned, red-bearded people could have sailed from Peru to Polynesia (Kon-Tiki), and previously from an outpost of ancient Egypt to South America (Ra), ending up on Easter Island (Aku-Aku), thereby encircling the non-Asian globe with a civilization that predates but exceeds the cultural competence of the known or surviving indigenous society.5 What Heyerdahl was looking for on Easter Island was a ‘red-haired strain’ within the indigenous population which could be traced back to a white-skinned, statue-building, ‘long-eared’ ancestry. His conversation with his imaginary aku-aku culminates in this: ‘We were talking about a possible link between Malays and shortears,’ I said. ‘What would your view be, as an aku-aku, if language said yes and race said no?’ ‘If language suggested that Harlem negroes and Utah Indians came from England, I’d back the race expert.’6 It seems that what’s sauce for the aku-aku is a source for the scientist, so Heyerdahl collects from various unsuspecting Polynesian islands ‘a bag full of test tubes filled with blood’: Chiefs, elders, and local authorities had helped [the expedition’s doctor] select those who could still be considered pure blooded. We had sent the samples by air in ice-filled thermos bottles from Tahiti to the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne…. Never before had any living blood from natives of these islands reached a laboratory in such good condition that all the hereditary genes could be studied and determined.7 The point of this archaeological vampirism was to isolate ‘all the hereditary factors arguing Polynesian descent from the original population of the American continent and at the same time clearly separating the Polynesians from all Malays, Melanesians, Micronesians, and other Asiatic peoples of the West Pacific.’8 Such an argument, for blood over language, wanting the great pre-

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contact civilizations of the Americas and the Pacific to be white, is the purpose of Heyerdahl’s expeditions. The argument is presented as having something to do with science, even when it wishes to tread on scientific toes with its fantasyspeculations; the gist of the book’s last chapter is to achieve in narrative what cannot be ‘proven’ by normal archaeological and anthropological methods, but to do this, paradoxically, with a combination of traditional ethnographic research and modern high-tech forensic science methods. A moderate form of ancestor worship9 However, narrative is the clear winner over science. What drives Heyerdahl’s quest in Aku-Aku is much more personal than the ‘prosaic…dry facts…of pure research’; it’s the combination of red hair, family, travel and race. His acknowledgement of his family’s presence on the expedition is more than mere cutesy parental pride. The family serves a crucial narrative purpose, since the book closes with an anecdote about how his daughter Anette’s flower wreath, thrown from the departing Research Vessel as the expedition left Polynesia, failed to clear the rail. Heyerdahl relates how he retrieves the garland and tosses it overboard to join the others—a superstitious gesture which earns him the approval (and symbolic integration with the culture) of his aku-aku.10 Heyerdahl’s aku-aku was assigned to him by Easter Island’s ‘mayor’, the only descendent of the ‘long-ears’, a man who wanted his grandson to be christened ‘Thor Heyerdahl Kon-Tiki El Salvador de Niños Atan’ —a boy whose ‘skull was covered with stiff, flaming red hair’, who was ‘the last scion of the long-ears’ race’ and over whom Heyerdahl claims symbolic parenthood (‘I was to be godfather and sat on the first bench on the women’s side’). There’s more, including the death of an unnamed granddaughter of the mayor from flu brought to Easter Island annually by the Chilean Navy, and for whom the ‘strapping grandson’ was ‘compensation’.11 All of this, including the unselfconsciously patriarchal and quite cheerful sacrifice of the young female child in favour of a masculine ‘scion’, tends to overwhelm Heyerdahl’s ‘science’ with his desire for his red-haired, white, male, Nordic seafaring strain to be fused with that of the indigenous populations he studies. The Heyerdahl family sails the seven seas with dad not to keep itself intact but to provide racial purism with a local habitation and a name. Vehicular theory Everyone I’ve asked, without exception, has heard of Heyerdahl and even read one of his books,12 but not a single one of them remembers why he went on his expeditions. Heyerdahl has crossed a Derridean divide—the distance between self and identity, between subjectivity and text—shorn of his own purposes and endowed with a later generation’s racial preferences; he’s remembered as being a Good Guy vis-à-vis indigenous peoples, since he demonstrated that they could do

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a great many technological, navigational and spectacular travelling tricks of their own, never mind modern science. Heyerdahl’s perverse desire to have human migration go from east to west (i.e. not from Africa via Asia to the Americas but from Egypt via Peru to Polynesia) actually helps him—it reads as if the ancient Peruvian viracochas were privy to knowledges that modern science scarcely suspects. Perhaps it no longer matters that these prehistoric wanderings were, for Heyerdahl, racially motivated, white-skined, longeared, red-haired, Nordic sorts of journeys. Heyerdahl’s overseas study trips are remembered for themselves— not at all for their intellectual content, academic theorization or scientific rigour, but for their status as travel. Here ‘taking without consent’—twoccing—is raised to the level of historical practice, engaged in by a popular readership. Heyerdahl himself is twoccing; travelling in a series of vehicles that don’t belong to him, he attracts the admiration of the crowd for his devotion to pure travel, without instrumental purpose. Like so many other popular performers, he’s embarrassing when he confides his own beliefs, but when he does wheelies in a balsa raft, and handbrake turns with a reed boat, we know we’re watching pure talent. But this isn’t the end of the story, for Heyerdahl’s own vehicle—his text—is twocced by his readers. The meaning of the performance turns out, as always, to be in the hands of the driver, not the intentions of the manufacturer. Heyerdahl’s readers have misunderstood Heyerdahl’s purposes so thoroughly that while he was tracing diachronic (longitudinal) connections among humans—i.e. origins in time, blood-flows through generations, authenticity in racial ‘stock’—his public has simply flipped the theory sideways, and taken him to be a Derridean whose voyages perform the synchronic (latitudinal) connections between peoples; erasing the différance between indigenous and western, primitive and advanced, magic and science. Heyerdahl was talking nineteenth-century grand narrative of origins, but his popular readership was hearing twentieth-century structuralist relations, positing humanity not temporally but spatially, not as ancestors but as a simultaneous network. This is vehicular theory, where the motive intentions of the author (pure race), embodied in the purposes of the institution (pure science), upholstered in the colours of rhetoric (pure narrative), become but an empty vehicle which is parked, keys in the ignition (published), ready to be twocced by the popular readership (pure travel). Vehicular theory presupposes in principle that meanings are stolen, but for use only, not possession. SECOND Intellectual travel—a gendered genre…? Ever since the Renaissance, and before that in Classical times, travel and knowledge have been seen as so similar that each is understood through metaphors of the other. Travel broadens the mind, and the most trusted knowledge (i.e.

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science) is still that of the eyewitness who’s ‘been there, done that’. But the language of travel is more frequently encountered than actual foot-slogging; the itinerant jobbing academic, hawking knowledge from town to town like a medieval colporteur, is nowadays mostly a citizen of the imagination. Postmedieval academics usually conduct their travels via the vehicle of metaphor, communicating with the rest of the planet by publication, airmail and email. As Charles Chaplin might have put it, we live in Modem Times; as Charles Dickens nearly did, the one thing needful (in these hard times) is faxes. These days, when metaphors are considered as factual as you can get, Janet Wolff thinks metaphors of travel in intellectual writing are gendered ‘in fact and perhaps in essence’.13 Their prevalence in critical writing is not only a postmodern migratory move but also a temporal leftover from Classical and Renaissance methodologies, wherein knowledge was thought to be a direct product of bodily displacement from the familiar. This was certainly gendered historically as a practice, not only because it reproduces an Aristotelian binary opposition between outside (active, rational, male, foreign) and inside (refuge, desire, female, home), but also for the simple reason that men undertook voyages of exploration and the European ‘grand tour’, and wrote them up for publication afterwards more frequently than women did, as Wolff points out. Given the long history of masculine voyaging into realms of knowledge, it’s not surprising that the resultant store of metaphor is rich, varied and gendered. But vehicular theory suggests that human travel is bipedal (as it were), and women do it, both metaphorically and across actual countries, independently of the ‘provenance’ of the metaphorical baggage. For Wolff, this is not the point, for a different kind of temporality is in play in the ‘somewhat suspicious timing’ of academic fashions: ‘just as women accede to theory, (male) theorists take to the road.’14 They’re mostly taking to the mental road, doing the Deleuzian detour in footnotes, not footsteps, but still the suspicion remains, and it’s not Wolff’s alone. Lidia Curti, for instance, in her essay in the Monster-Book-of-CulturalStudies, cites Patricia Waugh on the same subject: During the 1960s, as Vonnegut waves a fond goodbye to character in fiction, women writers are beginning, for the first time in history, to construct an identity…. As male writers lament its demise, women writers have not yet experienced that subjectivity which will give them a sense of personal autonomy, continuous identity, a history and agency in the world.15 If both theory and identity are understood in terms of a difference between mobility and stability, they can thus be seen not as neutral points of discursive productivity, but as gendered scarce resources; the men are going on the road, waving a fond farewell as they depart Whitman-style (‘a backward glance o’er travel’d roads’), just as (‘for the first time in history’) women writers hie into town; and the implication is that this near miss is not accidental…the blokes are

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scarpering, taking as much theory and identity, as much autonomy, history and agency as they can carry, because the women are beginning, from places which are situated —Wolff lists such places as borderlands, exile, margins, edges, ‘less visible spaces’16—to criticize the very place the men were occupying, namely the ‘dominant centre’ of, among other things, theoretical discourse-production and metaphor-generation. Tinker, tailor, beggar(man)…thief For Wolff, ‘in a patriarchal culture we are not all, as cultural critics any more than social beings, “on the road” together’.17 And so, as far as she’s concerned, the Meaghan Morris guide to feminist travel—the article ‘At Henry Parkes Motel’18—is ‘wrong’ at the most fundamental level: The already-gendered language of mobility marginalizes women who want to participate in cultural criticism. For that reason, I believe there is no point in tinkering with the vocabulary of travel (motels instead of hotels) to accommodate women. Crucially, this is still the wrong language.19 Wolff’s critique is provocatively inclusive; all metaphors of all travel are suspect, at least for the time being. But precisely because she has raised a challenging issue, it is important not to let the matter rest there. At the very least mobility implies multiple vehicles, travelling at their own speed, for their own purposes, in all directions. A journey can be as long as Heyerdahl’s (to the ‘End of the World’), or as short as a trip to a motel in a Morris Minor; but the journey isn’t predetermined as patriarchal even if the vehicle one borrows or twocs for the purpose is gender-built.20 If travel can be used to reach feminist as well as male destinations, and if a Morris Minor can be on the road alongside (pootling right on past) the heroic blokes of high modernism, then the familiar metaphors of not-being-positioned, such as indeterminacy, decentring and marginalization, do not have to be counted as loci of powerlessness. If ‘unpositionality’ is categorized not only as weak but also as somehow ‘female’, then it’s not surprising that feminist suspicion falls on the language as well as its most prominent (male) speakers. But perhaps there is a problem (a strategic mistake) with the presumption that indeterminacy, undecidability and displacement are weak at all. One possibility is that cultural criticism may be(come) successfully ‘feminine’/ feminist without regressing to traditional presumptions about where a woman’s place might be. But in order to generalize the implications of the argument, I want to approach these questions of gender indirectly, via a detour around Japan, whose geopolitical indeterminacy is instructive in this context. And for this trip to Japan I’m twoccing from Mark Gibson.

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Law vs. circulation After analysing the metaphorical appropriation of Japan in the Australian business press, Gibson theorizes Japan as ‘a centre of flux’. This contradiction in terms, wherein Japan is figured as both determinate and indeterminate, significant and insignificant, substantial and insubstantial, provokes two possible analytical responses, he suggests. The first is a modernist ‘narrative of enlightenment’, which would argue that Australia needs to shed its orientalist prejudices and recognize the real strength, cultural ground and determinate identity which Japan must have. However, more radically, Gibson proposes a second response, which is the ‘rather more unsettling possibility’ that Japanese influence ‘does in fact differ from geopolitical influence as it has been traditionally understood’. Such a possibility has a profound implication: It is to question that strength is necessarily traceable to a ground, an energetic referent or disposition of force which contributes to the underlying structure and meaning of a political field. It is, in short, to question one of the most fundamental premises of Western thought: that strength lies always and only in a recognisable position.21 Gibson’s analysis of ‘Japan’ involves tracing the metaphoric transfer from traditional conceptions of ‘femininity’ to discourses of national power. Drawing from Baudrillard’s Seduction,22 he suggests that the Australian business press does in fact practice a ‘feminizing of Japan’; it is seen as weak, passive, insubstantial, unpositioned. However, as Gibson points out, the ‘power of neutrality and passivity’—i.e. not speaking from an authoritative position—is ‘a power which is beyond the strategies of discourse to contain’. Japan’s strength is economic (‘a level of circulation and flux which operates across boundaries and between positions’). But its weakness is political (the very area where ‘territoriality and positionality are defined’). Hence, paradoxically, ‘weak’ Japan challenges the entire framework of Western binarism, including ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, substance and indeterminacy—these opposed and valorized distinctions collapse altogether once the ‘increasing confusion between “here” and “there” ‘is admitted in evidence. Gibson concludes: As McKenzie Wark has argued, there is a real question whether cultural studies has yet confronted the full implications of the globalization of information, finance and entertainment. As Wark points out, the increasing instantaneity of interaction across traditional geopolitical boundaries makes impossible any easy assumption of distinct cultural positions or locations.23 Gibson calls for attention ‘not only to the way such binaries succeed in reproducing themselves, but also how they fail’. The ‘narrative of

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enlightenment’ and the ‘high moral denunciation’ of orientalism both ‘succeed only in supporting a myth of the West as an autonomous agent still in a position… to “lay down the law”.’24 Feminism Japonica In Gibson’s terms, Wolff’s feminism (positioned critique of a dominant centre) is a ‘narrative of enlightenment’—modernist, progressive, seeking to stabilize and extend ground that has been gained both socially and theoretically. However, it becomes clear that there’s. another possible theoretical response to metaphors of travel, which is not necessarily recognizable in advance, let alone stable; a ‘japonica’ feminism which looks weak while taking the ground from under the feet of what Elizabeth Wilson has identified as ‘the Western modernist male intellectual who believed he stood at the cutting edge of history’.25 Among the advantages of such a theory is the bipedal gender of its fellow-travellers; including feminists who are not comfortable with those myths of origin and progress that underlie claims to be able to recognize the ‘first time in history’ (this means Waugh),26 as well as including Western male intellectuals who have not developed full-blown Cutting Edge of History syndrome. In the end the challenge is not only to criticize masculist metaphors in intellectual writings, but also to analyse what Gibson calls ‘recent changes in the international capitalist system and the effect of these changes on discourses concerned with geopolitical relations’.27 McKenzie Wark, in the article cited by Gibson, describes as ‘antipodean theory’ the critical practice of analysing relations (distances and connections) between positions in the increasingly global enterprise of cultural studies. He uses a geographical metaphor which obviously has Australian resonances, but in principle ‘antipodality’ can describe any relationship between opposites in a given system. Indeed, the term is a hidden metaphor of bipedal vehicular theory, since the literal Greek meaning of antipodes is ‘having the feet opposite’ or ‘opposite-footed’, which I take to imply a mode of transport which relies on co-existent difference (even opposition) for ‘progress’ to be made—on both actual and metaphorical roads to understanding. Wark points out that the antipodean mode of analysis is feminist in the hands of Meaghan Morris, the tinker of language: The interesting thing about Morris is that she takes all this on board — colonial antipodality and feminism as minor and difficult speaking positions—and gets away with it. In multiplying the difficulties of finding a place and a rhetorical means to speak, Morris has improvised solutions. For example, she treats the question of defining the feminist content of an inquiry into everyday life as ‘an invitation to make up answers as I go along’.28

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There is in Morris’s, Wark’s and Gibson’s work a recognition that relations (sexual, theoretical and geopolitical) are neither binary nor equal, and so it is unwise in practice (literally crippling) to identify one’s subjectivity with one side only of an opposition, especially since it is possible (inevitable) to move (though not freely) between positions. The choice then is not between position (theory) and movement (practice), certainly not if these are also seen as position (female) and movement (male). The choice is one that every reader makes, including Janet Wolff— a choice of what meanings to take away from which textual or theoretical positions—a choice of vehicle, travelling in/between places. THIRD Overkill In November 1991 Western Australia was in the grip of an orchestrated media campaign. While the campaign was directed against ‘juvenile car crime’, everyone knew that this meant Aboriginal children’s car crimes.29 In fact, although white youths were quite capable of the most serious car offences, up to and including the murder of a young Aboriginal man who was run over by a carload of whites and left to die ‘because he was black’,30 it was the lesser crime of twoccing that seemed to inspire a fear in the organs of public enlightenment that the whole fabric of society was under threat. The police policy of high-speed pursuit of stolen cars, which had already resulted in several fatal crashes, was defended to the death—the Police Commissioner maintaining that ‘to do otherwise would be conceding to the actions of a few, which would lead to a breakdown of law and order’ (West Australian, 5 December 1991). On Christmas night 1991, while the then Premier of Western Australia, Dr Carmen Lawrence, was on holiday in Italy, a pregnant woman and her one-yearold son were killed in a collision with a stolen car containing three Aboriginal minors, which was being pursued at high speed by the police at the time. That was that: GET TOUGH ON CAR LOUTS: TAYLOR Acting Premier Ian Taylor has called for juveniles with records of car theft and violence to be given long jail terms…. Mr Taylor, a family man with two sons and a daughter, is at odds with the Premier, Dr Lawrence, and the Community Services Minister, Mr Ripper. They both believe long sentences do not deter young criminals. (Sunday Times, 29 December 1991) The Sunday Times Editorial, in a New Year’s message to the WA community, spelled out why the matter was so serious: like Japan and ‘antipodean’ feminism, Aboriginal car theft undermines the entire basis of Western binarism:

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The Sunday Times is on the side of the police. Their job is to uphold the law and they deserve total community support. Not to chase hopped-up young car thieves would be to invite traffic anarchy, surrendering the roads to young criminals and making hostage a community that already cannot put its trust in traffic lights. (ibid.) Being able to trust the difference between binary oppositions (red:green) is one of the fundamental premises of Western thought, so a challenge to it in the form of feral Commodores crashing through red lights at 200ks is naturally seen in terms of social dissolution—‘anarchy… surrender…hostage’. The Sunday Times reckoned that the ‘time is long overdue to stop rapping offenders over the knuckles with a feather duster’. What’s needed is ‘tougher sentences…long periods of secure detention for violent young offenders’. The Sunday Times has no time for ‘anyone who has more consideration for offenders than for their victims’, or ‘misguided critics’ who ‘bring allegations of press and television hysteria and charges that the media are somehow to blame for it all’ (ibid.). A week later the boundaries were all tidied up: WE’LL LOCK THEM UP, promised the Sunday Times headline; ‘“This small group is waging war on society” (Acting Premier).’ The government, ramraided by the local media, crumpled: new draconian laws were pushed through a hastily recalled parliament. As for Carmen Lawrence, the Premier who less than two months earlier said that ‘the prison system had proved a cataclysmic failure in the case of juvenile crime’ (West Australian, 18 November 1991), she returned early from her trip to Italy and got off the plane to announce the victory of a small coup d’état, duly and dispassionately recorded on the front page of the newspaper of record (West Australian, 6 January 1992): PEOPLE POWER WON: PREMIER. Circulation vs. law Deconstruction is therefore the means by which one operates from the ‘inside’ in order to reach an ‘outside’. Derrida is unable to stand some where else and explain how the change is going to come about—for there is nowhere else to stand; we are, of necessity, here.31 This paper started with the racial fantasies of a Nordic anthropologist, and it ends with those of Perth media. It illustrates what Gibson calls the ‘increasing confusion between “here” and “there” ‘in a world where positionality doesn’t confer strength or the power to lay down the law. Certainly in the case of the Perth campaign against twoccing, laying down the law was ineffective and flawed from the start, and the attempt to enforce ‘law and order’ proved lethal not only to offenders but to random individuals among the approved family model of citizens too. Conversely, the weakness and dispossession of a few dozen

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Aboriginal minors and their mates was not seen as weak at all when they turned twoccing and joyriding into class war; it was treated as a threat to law (and order), and it mobilized the full array of Repressive State Apparatuses, cheer-led by the local press, talk-back radio and TV news. Interestingly and unusually, the Perth media (together with their sources in the police, government and various lobby groups) locate the source of the social at the point of intersection between divergent pathways; society is constituted or originated at the moment of control—the traffic light. Without control to enforce stops to travel, society cannot be(come). This theory of the social is a theory of point, moment, origin; but it is refuted in a collision with a countermanding theory of twoccing—driving across the path of order in a dispossessed vehicle. The necessity for traffic lights at points of intersection, together with the inevitability of transgression, leaves us not with a theory of society, but, as Derrida has mentioned, a theory of writing (pure travel) as movement, and society as writing: Language, passion, society, are neither of the North nor of the South. They are the movement of supplementarity by which the poles substitute each other by turn…. Local difference is nothing but the difference between desire and pleasure.32 This is the antipodean difference between writing and reading: authorial red lights being run by hopped-up readers in twocced texts. I hope you’ll call it joyreading. Murdoch University NOTES I want to thank Dr Toby Miller and Dr Niall Lucy for their encouragement and comments on earlier versions of this paper; without their support it would not have been written. A version was given at the Speaking Positions Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, in December 1993, and I thank those who commented on it there. 1 Terence Hawkes (1969), p. 117. This was said during the international(e) year of the student, 1968; one year before I became one of Hawkes’s students, so it wasn’t me he was twoccing…. 2 The first chapter of Aku-Aku (Heyerdahl (1958)) is called ‘Detectives off to the end of the world’. 3 Plug for serialization of Aku-Aku, Daily Sketch (London), 10 April 1958, p. 6. 4 Heyerdahl (1958), p. 324. The last chapter is called ‘My Aku-Aku says…’. 5 Heyerdahl (1952); this book contains an entire section, pp. 217–345, on ‘Traces of Caucasian-like elements in pre-Inca Peru’, which concludes:

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When the Norman and Spanish conquerers reached the Canary Islands a few generations before the discovery of America, they found an aboriginal population part of which was of Caucasian race, light-skinned and tall, with blond hair, blue eyes, hooked nose and beard…. Any people living on the shores of the Atlantic, with vessels and maritime ambition capable of leaving racial vestiges on the Canary Islands, may run the risk of setting similar migrants or castaways ashore in the Gulf of Mexico. One may look east or north—or even for a local evolution— when searching for the origin of the Caucasian-like element in aboriginal America; it is incautious only to close one’s eyes to their existence. (p. 345)

East or north…but not black: ‘There is a popular but erroneous belief that black people, if anything, would be all that Central America could receive with the African current in prehistoric times. Let us not forget there are vestiges of a former people…who still have naturally red hair, blue eyes, beard, hooked nose and light skin’ (ibid.). 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

Heyerdahl (1958), p. 331. ibid. ibid. This is Heyerdahl’s phrase for what he finds among the present-day inhabitants of Easter Island (but he never asks whether it applies to himself). ibid., p. 333. ibid., pp. 275–6, 201, 245. One of my colleagues was so pleased with my question that he dredged up an anecdote about sporting-celebrity Lisa Curry-Kenny (Olympic swimmer and promoter of Uncle Toby’s breakfast cereals), who is reputed to have written more books than she’s read, but who counts Kon-Tiki among the few that she remembers. I don’t know if this is true, but it demonstrates the pervasion of Heyerdahl’s popular academic adventurism even if it’s an apocryphal story. Janet Wolff (1993), p. 232. ibid., p. 234. Lidia Curti (1992). Curti is quoting Patricia Waugh (1989), p. 6. Wolff, p. 235. ibid. Meaghan Morris (1988). Wolff, pp. 234–5. In passing, it can be noted that Thor Heyerdahl’s history of Easter Island includes reference to the fact that ‘there had been only two archaeological expeditions to this strange island. The first was a private British expedition headed by Katherine Routledge. She came to Easter Island in 1914 in her own sailing yacht and surveyed and mapped everything she saw above ground’ (Heyerdahl 1958, pp. 34– 5). See ‘Mrs Scoresby Routledge’ (1919), and C.S.Routledge (1917). See also Heyerdahl (1952), pp. 366–8 and Plates XXXVIIff., which show maps and photographs from Routledge’s expedition. Mark Gibson (1994), p. 85.

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22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

Jean Baudrillard (1990). Gibson, p. 102. He is citing McKenzie Wark (1992). Gibson, p. 102. Elizabeth Wilson (1990), pp. 232–3. Wilson’s phrase allows for differences within ‘the’ male intellectual. In this context, Lidia Curti points out that while Derrida’s own ‘thought owes much to women’, he has nevertheless a ‘contradictory and hesitant relation to feminism’: ‘Derrida’s difficulties are with its notion of progress and its simplistic dichotomy between the sexes, which make feminism, according to Derrida, another version of “phallocentric mastery”’ (Curti 1992, p. 140). Gibson, p. 85. Wark (1992), p. 434. Wark is quoting from Meaghan Morris (Fall 1988). WA Premier Carmen Lawrence reported in November 1991 that Aboriginal children were thirty-three times more likely to be put in detention than whites (West Australian, 18 November 1991). Two days after the new ‘juvenile crime’ laws were passed in February 1992, a small item in the Sunday Times revealed the same ‘latest’ figures: Aboriginal youths who break the law are 33 times more likely to end up in custody than young non-Aboriginal law breakers…. While Aboriginal youths comprise 16 per cent of all offenders who appeared before the Children’s Court in 1990/1, they made up 59 per cent of young people whose most recent punishment was detention…. The figures also show that Aboriginal offending rates dropped 11 per cent in 1990/1. Sunday Times, 9 February 1992

All this is printed under a headline which reads: DCS FIGURES SHOW YOUTH CRIME IS UP. 30 See Steve Mickler (1992). This report documents the death of Louis Johnson in January 1992 at the height of the media campaign against car crime, and shows how his murder was treated quite differently from Aboriginal car crime (i.e. it wasn’t mentioned) by Perth’s leading talk-back host and anti-juvenile campaigner on Radio 6PR. 31 Lawson (1985), pp. 112–13. 32 Derrida (1976), p. 268.

REFERENCES Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (London: Macmillan). Boyne, Roy and Rattansi, Ali (1990) (eds), Postmodernism and Society (London: Macmillan.) Curti, Lidia (1992) ‘What is real and what is not: Female fabulations in cultural analysis’, in Grossberg et al. (eds), pp. 134–53. Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

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Gibson, Mark (1994) ‘A centre of flux: Japan in the Australian business press’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 8, 2, pp. 83–102. Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Treichler, Paula (eds) (1992) Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge). Hawkes, Terence (1969) ‘Postscript: Theatre against Shakespeare’, in David Galloway (ed.), The Elizabethan Theatre: Papers given at the International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in July 1968 (Ontario, Canada: Macmillan, pp. 117–26). Heyerdahl, Thor (1952) American Indians in the Pacific (London: Allen & Unwin). (1958) Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island (London: Allen & Unwin). Lawson, Hilary (1985) Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament (London, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg: Hutchinson). Mickler, Steve (1992) Gambling on the First Race: A Comment on Racism and Talk-back Radio (Perth: Louis St John Johnson Memorial Trust/Centre for Research in Culture and Communication). Morris, Meaghan (1988) ‘At Henry Parkes Motel’, Cultural Studies, 2, 1, pp. 1–47. (Fall 1988) ‘Things to do with shopping centres’, Working Paper No. 1, Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Also in Sheridan (ed.) (1988). Routledge, C.Scoresby (1917) The bird cult of Easter Island’, Folk-Lore, XXVII, 4. (1919) The Mystery of Easter Island: The Story of an Expedition, London. Sheridan, Susan (ed.) (1988) Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism, (London: Verso). Wark, McKenzie (1992) ‘Speaking trajectories: Meaghan Morris, antipodean theory and Australian cultural studies’, Cultural Studies, 6, 3, pp. 433–48. Waugh, Patricia (1989) Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (London and New York: Routledge). Wilson, Elizabeth (1990) ‘These new components of the spectacle: Fashion and postmodernism’, in Boyne and Rattansi (eds), pp. 209–36. Wolff, Janet (1993) ‘On the road again: Metaphors of travel in cultural criticism’, Cultural Studies, 7, 2, pp. 224–39.

Uncanny spectacles: psychoanalysis and the texts of King Lear PHILIP ARMSTRONG

I Discussions of King Lear always begin again. For the text in question is irreconcilably double: there are two plays, a Folio and a Quarto, and each has an equal claim to ‘authenticity’. The Oxford Shakespeare offers the two versions under different titles, The History of King Lear and The Tragedy of King Lear.1 Both texts, however, represent the transcription of conflicting accounts of actors, shareholders, audiences, compositors… producing an intervening stage between ‘Shakespeare’ and King Lear, functioning as a glass to refract the (always lacking) ‘original’ text into an uncanny duplicity. This prohibits any recourse to a unique and authentic work, or to the invocation of a unified authorial intention.2 Jacques Derrida describes this effect of ‘a double that doubles no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least that is not itself already double’. He calls this movement ‘dissemination’, which ‘can never become originary, central, or ultimate signified, the place proper to truth. On the contrary, dissemination represents the affirmation of this nonorigin.’3 King Lear—but here quotation marks must illustrate the distance between that title and any hypostatized or unified work which it may be thought to name —‘King Lear’ opens with just such a disseminatory division: KENT: I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. GLOUCESTER: It did always seem so to us, but now in the division of the kingdoms it appears not which of the Dukes he values most; for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.

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(Q 1.1–7) These opening lines address the partition of ‘Britain’ between Albany and Goneril, Cornwall and Regan. This double realm continues to subdivide and multiply through the rest of the action, with the threat of a further conflict between Albany and Cornwall mentioned by Curan (F 2.1.11) and Kent (F 3.1. 10–12), the estrangement of Albany from Goneril (F 4.2), and of course a growing rivalry between the two sisters which eventually results in their deaths (F 4.3). Furthermore, the Quarto and Folio versions no sooner begin than they differ from each other. Where the former has ‘the division of the kingdoms’, the latter reads ‘the division of the kingdom’ (F 1.1.4). The earlier text, then, posits a division prior to the action, while the later paradoxically reinstates a unity to be divided during the course of the play. Tracing the trajectories and detours of the many letters that traverse the stage during the course of the action brings home this disseminatory, ‘postal’ structure. Both the ‘Lear’ plot and the ‘Gloucester’ plot—the narrative also has a double structure—begin with purloined letters, messages sent astray. Like the map of Lear’s Britain in Scene 1, drawn and redrawn with new boundaries, parcelled up and distributed to various recipients, the kingdom(s) continue to disintegrate into a network of competing narratives and messages which cross and double-cross between the protagonists: Edmond’s invented letter from Edgar, (ostensibly) diverted to Gloucester (F 1.2); the race between Lear’s message (via Kent) and Goneril’s (via Oswald) to Regan, and the conflict between these two messengers (F 2.2); the letter received by Kent from Cordelia, and the reply he sends with the Gentleman (F 2.2); the letter received by Gloucester from the French (F 3.3), diverted by Edmond to Cornwall and Regan, and then re-directed from Cornwall to Albany to inform him of the French landing (F 3.7); the messenger who brings Goneril and Albany news of the death of Cornwall and Gloucester’s blinding (F 4.2); Kent’s discussion with his messenger of Cordelia’s reaction to his letters (Q 17); Goneril’s letter to Edmond, which Regan attempts to delay and confiscate (F 4.4); the verbal ‘note’ she sends to Edmond in competition with Goneril’s (F 4. 4); Edgar’s interception of the first of these messages after he kills Oswald, and his redirection of it to Albany (F 5.1); and of course the writ given by Edmond to the Captain instructing Cordelia and Lear’s execution, which he sends Albany, slightly too late, to cancel (F 5.3). ‘Beginning with an exchange of letters avoids the problem of finding the right beginning since, in effect, it is “not to begin at all”’, writes Sarah Kofman, quoting E.T.A.Hoffmann’s story The Sandman’, which opens with a similar (though far less complex) digression of letters.4 The circulation of letters and writings generates an instability within the narrative structure, breaking down the limits—dramatic, fictional, generic and textual—which would define it. In ‘King © Routledge 1994

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Lear’, the division of the kingdom(s) in the first scene of the play stages a duplication which sends disseminatory repercussions both forward and backward. First, the division precedes the ritual (since the Quarto’s ‘kingdoms’ (1.4) refers back to a plurality ‘anterior’ to Lear’s staged dissection), and also precedes the play ‘itself’ (since its text(s) is(are) itself(themselves) never single). Second, this dissemination haunts the action of the play throughout, not only in the multiplicity of conflicting messages (mis)directed across the stage, but also in the doubling and division of plot, action and character. Finally, certain effects of division can be shown to exceed the play and structure the reactions of audiences, readers, critics and editors. Instances of this phenomenon can be discovered even in the most stolidly ‘realist’ of Shakespeare critics. A.C.Bradley comments that I tend to consider [Lear] from two rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly inferior as whole to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. When I am feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation of Shakespeare’s power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama…. The stage is the test of strictly dramatic quality, and King Lear is too huge for the stage.5 Bradley here articulates a division between ‘Lear’ as a stage play and that which exceeds this genre. This redoubling of dramatic effect causes the critic’s own response to bifurcate into ‘two rather different points of view’, structured by two different gazes or ways of ‘regarding’ the play: as drama, but also as something ‘greater’. What can it possibly mean for a play to be ‘too huge for the stage’ except that there must be in the play something more than the play, which returns upon the spectator. Other critics also encounter in ‘Lear’ a supplementary excess that overflows generic boundaries. G.Wilson Knight documents the same effect in slightly different terms: The peculiar dualism at the root of this play which wrenches and splits the mind by a sight of incongruities displays in turn realities absurd, hideous, pitiful. This incongruity is Lear’s madness; it is also the demonic laughter that echoes in the Lear universe…in King Lear there is a dualism continually crying in vain to be resolved either by tragedy or comedy.6 According to this passage, a ‘dualism at the root’ of the play provokes a dualism in the mind of the beholder, a state characterized by the ‘hideous’ and the ‘demonic’, which crosses the boundaries of tragedy and comedy. Such reactions suggest to the psychoanalytic reader the appearance of the ‘uncanny’, as discussed by Freud in relation to Hoffmann, which results from the

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apparition of the ‘double’, divided from the ego, and returning to it as a precursor of death: the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says, and probably the ‘immortal soul’ was the first ‘double’ of the body…. But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.7 In this sense, the double operates like Derrida’s ‘dangerous supplement’. The representation, as supplement, appears as a secondary addition or surplus to that which is represented, but comes to function as a replacement, threatening to efface the ‘thing itself’. The supplementary function ‘adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence.’8 In the reactions to ‘King Lear’ quoted above, this double takes the form of what Bradley describes as the ‘twofold character of the play’, an ‘overwhelming’ and ‘huge’ surplus that goes beyond the stage and returns to threaten the play ‘as whole’, and which Knight calls a ‘dualism at the root of this play’. Just as the ‘s’ in the Quarto’s ‘kingdoms’ retroactively signifies a political disintegration prior to Lear’s ritual, an ‘anterior default of a presence’, the Freudian double represents to the subject its deathly otherness-to-itself. For both Bradley and Knight, this excess provokes in the mind of the spectator a corresponding split, another double. Freud, moreover, attributes an uncanny effect to both of the particular instances Knight offers of this schizophrenia, ‘madness’ and ‘the demonic’, since ‘the layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-men, but at the same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being’.9 Another symptom noted by Bradley and Knight also appears in Freud’s essay. The crossing of generic boundaries, between ‘fiction’ and ‘real life’, and between specific modes such as comedy and tragedy, can induce an uncanny sensation too, for example when the author begins in a realistic mode and then crosses over into the fantastic, or else when the transgression works in the opposite direction, so that ‘an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced’.10 Critics emphasize the peculiar power of ‘King Lear’ to cross and recross precisely this boundary in both directions, between ‘real life’ and ‘fantasy’, between the stage and what goes beyond the stage. According to Bradley, following Samuel Johnson, the prime instance of this is the blinding of Gloucester. Johnson considered ‘the extrusion of Gloucester’s eyes…an act too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition, and such as must always compel the mind to relieve its distress by incredulity’.11 Bradley reinforces this remark, commenting that

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the mere physical horror of such a spectacle would in the theatre be a sensation so violent as to overpower the purely tragic emotions and therefore the spectacle would seem revolting or shocking. But it is otherwise in reading…the blinding of Gloster belongs rightly to King Lear in its proper world of imagination; it is a blot upon King Lear as a stage-play.12 Blinding, which Freud makes central to his reading of Hoffmann’s The Sandman’, becomes in Johnson’s and in Bradley’s comments the effect that most powerfully violates the boundary between imagination and reality, producing in the spectator a range of uncanny effects including horror, incredulity, shock and revulsion. The blinding is for Bradley too horrifyingly physical to take place on the stage, which should after all be the site of fantasy, and for Johnson too extravagantly fantastic to take place in drama, which must after all be lifelike. It is moreover the sight —rather than the mere idea—of blinding that cannot be endured, for while Bradley condemns it as a ‘blot’ upon ‘King Lear as a stage play’, he considers it acceptable in King Lear as a text to be imagined in reading (but which text…?). Does blindness therefore provide simply an exemplary case of the play’s transgression of generic boundaries, as well as the boundary between stage and audience? Or is the uncanniness aroused by blindness a more pervasive phenomenon altogether? This inquiry would put into question the status of blindness as a ‘trope’, a ‘theme’, or a ‘meaning’, and would focus instead on blindness as an unstable signifying movement, concentrating on its peculiar capacity to produce uncanny effects. In Bradley’s account, as noted above, the ‘overwhelming’ effect of the play returns upon the spectator, causing a duplication of vision, a twofold ‘point of view’ or ‘regard’. This seeing double in itself represents blindness according to the psychoanalytic logic whereby the repetition of an organ or function betrays (through a defensive reactionformation) the threat of its destruction. So in Freud, ‘doubling…has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or a multiplication of the genital symbol’.13 Freud’s essay on the uncanny goes on to associate blinding intimately with castration, though it portrays this relationship with considerable ambiguity: A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, a fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration, and may argue that it is very natural that so precious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a proportionate dread. Indeed, we might go further and say that the fear of castration itself contains no other significance and no deeper secret than a justifiable dread of this rational kind. But this view does not account adequately for the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies.14

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Unexpectedly, Freud’s account begins to doubt whether blinding functions as a supplementary representation of castration, or whether the castration anxiety itself (so fundamental to the Freudian account of sexuality) can be considered as nothing more than an analogue for the fear of blindness. The argument at this point manifests an instability or ‘dread’ deriving from the action of the supplement (blindness as representation of castration), which threatens to take the place of that which it represents (making castration representative of blindness). Thus Derrida remarks, in reference to this passage from Freud, that dissemination—which ‘entails, entrains, “inscribes”, and relaunches castration’— represents ‘that non-secret of seminal division that breaks into substitution’.15 Blindness, then, occurs in Freud, and in ‘King Lear’, and in Derrida, as the locus of a play of substitutes (blindness-castration-substitution-supplementationdissemination) among which the identification of a single or originary term again proves impossible. Blindness threatens to castrate castration itself in Freud’s text, by taking its place as the ‘deeper secret’, ‘other significance’, ‘justifiable dread’. Similarly, the blinding in ‘King Lear’ threatens to ‘castrate’ its audience, in so far as it represents that process by which the play renders a stable subject position untenable through the solicitation of conflicting responses, a multiplication of gazes, an excessive affect. Doubling, madness, the demonic, generic uncertainty, castration, blinding. Already ‘King Lear’s’ critical repercussions resemble a Freudian case study. But one more exemplary feature of the uncanny may also be identified, to disturb any prematurely complacent recognition. For Freud, das Unheimliche derives, in the first place, from ‘something which is secretly familiar…which has undergone repression and then returned from it’. This discussion, therefore, will attempt to move beyond the familiar array of psychoanalytic preoccupations to consider those ‘secretly familiar’ elements, repressed in both psychoanalytic accounts of the ‘uncanny’ and critical accounts of ‘King Lear’, which may re-emerge to produce the uncanny effects associated with both theatre and psychoanalytic reading. We should therefore ‘not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis’—like criticism—‘which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny’.16 II To begin again. The disseminatory play of letters, inaugurated but not initiated by Lear’s display of cartographic division, conveys a totally fragmented ‘Britain’. Gloucester describes this state early in the second scene of the play: Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason, and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction: there’s son against father. The king falls from bias of nature: there’s father against child.

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Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. (F 1.2.104–12) Gloucester’s enumeration of division and double-dealing in the realm might suggest the word ‘uncannily’ here as an appropriate substitute for ‘disquietly’. The disquiet of this land encompasses even the graves themselves, for in such a disordered realm, where letters and messages have such a tendency to follow detours and digressions, the path of life ‘to our graves’ also becomes liable to reversal, producing revenants from the grave. Characters banished from the life of the play will return as their own doubles: Kent, Edgar, Cordelia, and eventually Lear himself. In the first scene, Lear not only bisects the kingdom(s), but also divides himself into his own double. Or else, according to our ‘other’ reading (of the other text), the scene dramatizes an anterior schism in both the kingdom and its king. Of course both these splits do precede their dramatization, for when the play was first performed, the constitutional unification of England and Scotland under James ‘VI and I’ was only a few years old. Furthermore, early modern theories of sovereignty did rely on a fundamental duplication in the person of the king. The lawyers and judges of Elizabeth’s reign described how the King had ‘two Bodies’, the one whereof is a Body natural, consisting of natural Members as every other Man has, and in this he is subject to Passions and Death as other Men are; the other is a Body politic, and the Members thereof are his Subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the Corporation…as to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law…the Death of the King, but the Demise of the King, not signifying by the Word (Demise) that the Body politic of the King is dead, but that there is a Separation of the two Bodies, and that the Body politic is transferred and conveyed over from the Body natural now dead, or now removed from the Dignity royal, to another Body natural.17 Lear, by seeking to divest himself of ‘rule,/Interest of territory, cares of state’, inaugurates a split between his body politic and his body natural, expecting that the latter may then ‘unburdened crawl towards death’ (F 1.1.42–51). But according to the theory, only through his ‘demise’ can the king’s two bodies be divided. Therefore, if Lear’s body politic no longer inheres in his body natural, then indeed he must be ‘constitutionally’ dead, and hereafter his physical body can only represent a ghostly and extremely uncanny return from this death. The last scenes of the play make this increasingly clear, as Lear complains that ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave’ (F 4.6.38). Furthermore, according to early modern theories of kingship, not only has Lear returned from the dead, but the kingdom itself has become a realm of the ‘undead’. Since the subjects

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together with the king comprise the ‘corporation’ of the ‘body politic’, the person of the king does not merely represent, but actually performs the unity of the realm, a relationship indicated by the name ‘Great Britain’, suggested for the newly united kingdom of James I by Francis Bacon in 1603 as an expression of the ‘perfect union of bodies, politic as well as natural’.18 ‘Britain’ is of course also the name of Lear’s realm. Clearly, then, in dividing his own two bodies, Lear divides that kingdom just as the person of King James unites it. The body politic, the kingdom itself, also becomes caught in this zone between life and death. All Lear’s followers manifest this division, and this ‘undead’ revenance, by going into exile (Kent, Edgar, Cordelia, Gloucester), and then returning from it uncannily. ‘You are a spirit, I know’ says Lear to Cordelia, ‘Where did you die?’ (F 4.6.42). Edgar, similarly, returns in various guises: as a peasant, a fisherman, as one of Lear’s fellow-magistrates in the mock trial of his daughters, and as a lunatic. In the figure of ‘Mad Tom’, Edgar most clearly expresses the nature of the revenant, with his continual invocation of the demonic. Edgar’s demons, indeed, speak at several removes, for not only are they uttered by an actor pretending to take their part, but their names and attributes derive from another text, Harsnet’s Declaration.19 In more than one way, then, Edgar’s ‘Mad Tom’ exists as a quotation, spoken by texts that are not his own. Edgar’s mad double is himself doubled by ‘the foul fiend’, condemned to ‘course his own shadow for a traitor’ (F 3.4.43, 53). Again, this possession brings the blindness associated with castration and dissemination: ‘He gives the web and the pin’—that is, cataract— and ‘squints the eye’ (F 3.4.110). Along with blindness, we have seen that Freud attributes the uncanny to the appearance of this ‘demonic character’, which he associates with ‘the dominance in the unconscious mind of a “compulsion to repeat”… powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle’.20 Jacques Lacan will later describe his category of the symbolic in these same terms, as being ‘united with the diabolic’.21 The Lacanian symbolic in this sense takes over the functions of repetition compulsion, for in its entry into the signifying network, the human ‘individual’ becomes subject to a power that goes beyond it and ‘speaks it’, just as the demonic voice possesses Mad Tom. So each of the main characters manifests in some way the uncanniness of their return. Kent describes the realm of banishment and his own place in it when he says ‘Friendship lives hence, and banishment is here’ (F 1.1.180). ‘Britain’ has become the place where identity is foreclosed, in exile, out of place. The intimate is cast out (‘friendship lives hence’), and the alien ‘banishment’ irrupts within. Lacan coins a term for this inversion of the opposition between outside and inside, this state of intimate exteriority, calling it the ‘extimate’.22 Freud would call it ‘das Unheimliche’, the unhomely, a place ripe to produce revenants, ghosts, the return of the familiar in unfamiliar guise. This recurs once more at the end of the play, where Kent, having followed Lear into the uncanny zone between life and death (‘from your first of difference and decay’ (F 5.3.264)),

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has also been characterized, in the figure of his double, Caius, as ‘dead and rotten’ (F 5.3.261).23 Furthermore, the ‘Britain’ on stage in ‘King Lear’ remains ‘gored’, irremediably divided, even at the end, for no one will reign after the deaths of Lear and Cordelia. Here the play departs both from its sources and its most notorious adaptation, that of Nahum Tate—all of which have Lear and Cordelia survive and reign for some years—and also from the more usual Shakespearean practice of ending with some gesture of resolution: ALBANY. Friends of my soul, you twain Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain. KENT. I have a journey, sir, shortly to go: My master calls me; I must not say no. EDGAR. The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most. We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. Exeunt with a dead march, carrying the bodies (F 5.3.295–302) Instead of a restitution of unity, Albany repeats Lear’s inaugural abdication, splitting the realm once more between ‘you twain’. But Kent declines, and Edgar’s reply refuses to accept the crown, offering instead another series of doubles: old/young, speak/say, feeling/duty. The Quarto attributes this final speech to Albany—the texts, too, are as divided at the end as at the beginning— but ‘we that are young’ seems more appropriate to Edgar, and he would otherwise have no reply to Albany’s offer. Kent will continue to follow his master, Lear, in this uncanny orientation towards death, as indeed they all do. For the final couplet, which would conventionally evoke some hope of renewal, predicts only a foreshortening of both sight and life. The play leaves the audience with the image of the survivors, weighed down with corpses, leaving the stage with a ‘dead march’. III FOOL. Dost know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet fool? LEAR. No lad. Teach me.

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FOOL. [sings] that lord that counselled thee To give away thy land, Come, place him here by me; Do thou for him stand. The sweet and bitter fool Will presently appear, The one in motley here, The other found out there. LEAR. Dost thou call me fool, boy? (Q 4.132–43) The ‘difference’ rehearsed at this point in the play conforms to the logic of repetition and the double. The Fool calls Lear fool, addressing him with his own title, employing the pejorative form of the second person pronoun, and calling him ‘my boy’, just as the King calls the Fool ‘lad’. Furthermore, the Fool requires Lear to act in a brief ‘play within the play’. Such moments are frequent in ‘King Lear’: as in the mock-trial scene where the three ‘madmen’ act as magistrates, Edmond’s staged conflict with his brother, and the charade of suicide Edgar directs for his father. Here, the Fool requires Lear to ‘stand’ for ‘that lord that counselled thee’, an imaginary figure who in turn stands for Lear’s folly. Having placed this character beside himself, the Fool must represent the king receiving this counsel, so that this pair will then appear as ‘the sweet and bitter fool’. Lear and the Fool thereby enact an irreducible supplementarity, simultaneously representing and taking the place of other, self, other, self…in an oscillation that confounds the occupation of any fixed locus within the specular or discursive order. The passage thereby sets up a mirror identification between Fool and King. Allan Shickman has suggested that, in seventeenth-century performances of this play, the Fool actually carried a mirror on stage, ‘because in the metaphorical sense he is one’.24 According to Schickman’s interpretation of this scene, rather than actually making Lear stand next to him, the Fool holds out his mirror to provide, in the form of his own reflection, the ‘thou’ which will stand for the ‘lord that counselled’ Lear. As he recites the verse, the Fool speaks to his own image, pointing to it to identify ‘the other found out there’. Lear, turning to look where the Fool directs him, sees his own face appear in the glass, and as the realization of the trick dawns on him, asks ‘Dost thou call me fool, boy?’ For Lacan also, the subject’s identification with a specular image involves the assumption of an alienating identity. Classically, however, in the ‘mirror stage’ this imaginary identification takes place with the other as the more masterful, coordinated and dominant image of the subject.25 The Fool, on the contrary, invites a mirror identification with a servant, one who slips out of fixed roles and subverts

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the dominant: with folly. Obviously, then, this scene stages precisely that which escapes from the Lacanian mirror stage, the troubling remainder that eludes or must be repressed by the imaginary identification between the ‘ego’ and its ‘ideal ego’ in the mirror. Developing his theory of the mirror stage, Lacan describes this inherent possibility of reversal or decomposition in the relationship between the subject’s ego and its specular other: The fundamental position of the ego confronted with its image is indeed this immediate reversibility of the position of master and servant…. The ego’s fate, by its very nature, is to always find its reflection confronting it, which dispossess it of all it wishes to attain. This sort of shadow, which is simultaneously rival, master, sometime slave, keeps it at a distance from what is fundamentally at stake, namely the recognition of desire.26 While the imaginary provides an illusory dual relationship between ego and specular ideal ego, the symbolic introduces a supplementary play of substitution, effecting the subject with a radical instability. Introjecting or assimilating the specular ideal ego, the subject becomes other than itself. The Fool’s miniature drama mimes that process whereby Lear is doubled and redoubled into his own mirror image or, as Shakespearean usage has it, his ‘shadow’. Oscillating between master and slave, between subject and other, between ego, ideal ego and ego ideal, Lear’s identity fractures into a series of uncanny doppel-gangers: LEAR. Does any here know me? This is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied—ha, waking? ‘Tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? FOOL. Lear’s shadow. (F 1.4.208–13) The decomposition of a stable relationship with his mirror image disrupts Lear’s place in a visual economy, producing an uncertainty about both his own gaze (or lack of it) and that of the other: ‘Where are his eyes?’ Again, these moments display not only the split inherent in ‘King Lear’, but the duplication endemic to ‘King Lear’. For the two texts diverge dramatically here. The Folio cuts out altogether the Fool’s rhyme about the ‘sweet and bitter fool’, and its attendant ‘mirror staging’. The comparison between King and Fool undoubtedly remains, pervading various parts of the play, but the later text excises this most explicit dramatization of it. Shickman’s suggestion might point to one reason for this repression. The use of an actual mirror would exemplify the volatile impact of this passage, because it conveys most explicitly the destabilization of a secure relationship between

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audience and stage. For instance, in order for the nearest spectators to see the Fool’s face appear in the mirror, their own reflections would become visible in it from his oblique perspective. If, on the other hand, it turns directly towards the audience, the mirror shows them ‘in the act’ of looking, capturing them within the frame of the play. This incident therefore introduces to the position of the spectators an uncanny supplementarity, showing them represented as witnesses within the representation they witness. And if the mirror locates, no doubt in the best seat for a clear and unobstructed view, the King himself among those spectators…James I, or after him his son Charles, appears in the play as the sweet and bitter fool whose person and realm are split in two. Between the transcription of the Quarto and the Folio, Shakespeare’s company—first as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and then the King’s Men—becomes more closely associated with the Stuart monarchy and increasingly sensitive to its instabilities. In the context of their performances at court, in which this mirror might reflect all too clearly the face of its patron, this scene becomes, quite simply, far too uncanny. In order to come closer to a psychoanalytic formulation of this thing which is ‘in you something more than you’,27 this aspect of the reflection or double which causes uncanny feelings in the spectator, we might consider one place in which Lacan mentions das Unheimliche by name. Notably, this occurs again in relation to Shakespearean drama, in his discussion of ‘Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet’. ‘Das Unheimliche, the uncanny’, Lacan tells us, arises when ‘something from the imaginary structure of the fantasy’—that is, the imagined relationship with the object in desire, the objet a—becomes ‘placed in communication with…the image of the other subject, in the case in which that image is my own ego’.28 The mirror stage provides the classic case in which the ‘image of the other subject…is my own ego’, inasmuch as the subject assimilates the masterful image of the specular other to provide the support and morphology of its own ego. The imaginary relation of the mirror stage, like the Fool’s specular mime in ‘King Lear’, is ‘decomposed’ by the irruption of the objet a, the object in desire, into an alienating dualism between ego and ego ideal. And, as Lacan points out, ‘the objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze’.29 In visual perception, then, the uncanny would occur when the gaze crosses over to, becomes inscribed upon, or maps across, the image of the subject’s ego, which may take the form of its reflection in the mirror, or of another subject with whom it has a specular relationship. The gaze, added to the mirror image or ideal ego, creates the uncanny double.30 Thus Lear becomes his own Fool, gazing at himself not in, but from, the mirror. The primary symptom of this proximity of the gaze is, of course, the blindness which becomes so evident in Lear’s language as well as his actions. Other figures in the play will come to embody this gaze for him. Most obviously, Lear desires recognition from Cordelia’s gaze. However, at the moment he comes closest to apprehending this, Lear mistakes it:

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I fear I am not in my perfect mind… Do not laugh at me, For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. (F 4.7.63–7) Becoming aware of the gaze of the other which Cordelia embodies, Lear typically misrecognizes this moment as his own madness. For by definition, the objet a cannot be grasped. It slips away. Having construed his daughter as a ghost —‘You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?’— Lear’s entrance with her corpse in the final scene comes as no surprise.31 Nor does his attempt to regain her again, as objet a, in a mirror: Lend me a looking-glass. If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, Why, then she lives. KENT. Is this the promised end? EDGAR. Or image of that horror? (F 5.3.236–8) Lear once more seeks in the imaginary relation of the mirror stage that dreamt-of unity with the object of his desire, but of course he cannot find it, and is instead left only his own ‘image’, shadow, double. For the apprehension of the objet a, which belongs to the Lacanian ‘real’, is by definition impossible, because it constitutes exactly that which cannot be seen in the mirror: These objects have one common feature in my elaboration of them— they have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity…. It is this object that cannot be grasped in the mirror that the specular image lends its clothes. A substance caught in the net of the shadow, and which, robbed of its shadow-swelling volume, holds out once again the tired lure of the shadow as if it were substance.32 The objet a has no other (‘alterity’) because it functions as nothing other than alterity. As double, this object appears as a mirror image (‘the tired lure of the shadow’) which has escaped from the mirror and which therefore itself has no reflection (it ‘cannot be grasped in the mirror’). Cordelia incarnates this embodied specular gaze, repudiated by Lear yet returning to him uncannily, the object of desire which slips away from his grasp. Immediately before her return from outside the realm of action in the play, the Quarto includes a scene in which Kent discusses with a Gentleman the effect of his letters about Lear’s plight upon Cordelia.33 The description of her reaction focuses repeatedly on her eyes. Not only are these imagined as gems emitting

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rays of light, but the tears that well from them are also precious stones, ‘as pearls from diamonds dropped’ (Q 17.22), suggesting a multiplication of eyes and a disseminated play of irradiation. The lustre of the jewel-as-eye provides a powerful instance of the gaze of the Other. ‘In short,’ says Lacan, ‘the point of the gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the jewel.’34 This ambiguity resides, on the one hand, in the solicitation of the gaze of the subject by the jewel, and on the other, in this point of light emanating from the gem, which transfixes the subject as object in the sight of the world.35 Later in the play, Edgar will also make reference to gems, when he describes his first view of Gloucester ‘with his bleeding rings,/Their precious stones new-lost’ (F 5.3.181– 2). It is, of course, the increasingly uncanny figure of Gloucester who provides the primary focus for the play’s preoccupation with sight and blindness. IV The blinding, as discussed already, excites the most contradictory reactions of critics. And indeed this scene does seem especially designed to emphasize the physicality of Gloucester’s ordeal, through the inclusion of the most graphic stage directions and dialogue. Yet the most uncanny feature of this blinding must be that, despite the unequivocal explicitness of the act of enucleation—‘Upon those eyes of thine I’ll set my foot…. Out, vile jelly’ (F 3.7.66–81)—performed not once but twice before the very eyes of the audience, Gloucester nevertheless afterwards does keep looking. The rest of the play suggests that the only possible reply to Cornwall’s malicious question ‘Where is thy lustre now?’ must be ‘still there’. For although Gloucester has lost his ‘actual’ eyes, his blinded face thereafter embodies the uncanny luminosity of the gaze. When Edgar first sees the blinded Gloucester, he describes him as ‘parti-eyed’ (F 4.1.10), possessing a multiple, divided gaze, which in turn elicits partition in the object of its sight. Gloucester’s own comments repeatedly suggest something other than a simple ‘loss’ of vision: I have no way, and therefore want no eyes. I stumbled when I saw. Full oft ‘tis seen Our means secure us, and our mere defects Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar, The food of thy abused father’s wrath— Might I but live to see thee in my touch I’d say I had eyes again. (F 4.1.15–24) In Shakespearean usage, ‘want no eyes’ carries with it the meaning ‘lack no eyes’. Continuing to employ the rhetoric of vision, the paradoxes here postulate Gloucester’s blindness as another, prior form of visuality. As he utters the last two lines of this speech, Gloucester might stumble into Edgar, so that with the words

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‘see thee in my touch’ he does indeed have ‘eyes again’, in the form of the sheer visibility of the gaze. Lear (mis)recognizes this gaze when he meets Gloucester later in the play. ‘I remember thine eyes well enough’, he remarks, ‘Dost thou squiny at me?’ (F 4.5.132). As ‘blind Cupid’, Gloucester’s empty sockets function as ocelli or eye-shapes which embody the gaze, that which has become the object in Lear’s desire. It has become customary to comment of this play that the protagonists —Lear and Gloucester—both lose ‘sight’ but gain ‘insight’ in the course of the action.36 However, the claim that Gloucester’s blind face comes to embody the gaze represents the diametrically opposite view. For in so far as ‘insight’ would signify some consolidation of the stable position of the individual subject through the refinement of her or his perceptual or emotional sensibilities, what Lacan calls ‘the gaze’ is on the contrary characterized by the loss of these reassuring coordinates. The subject is dispossessed (or ‘castrated’) of precisely those guarantors of self-presence, self-consciousness and self-knowledge, and the gaze embodies this lack in the field of the visual. Gloucester does not therefore, according to this account, ‘gain’ anything but the capacity to represent brutally to others their deprivation of visual plenitude, their subjection to a mastering Other. The blinded and blinding visuality which overflows or irradiates from the eyes of Cordelia and the sockets of Gloucester recalls Lacan’s distinction between the geometral structuring of vision and that which goes beyond it: The whole trick, the hey presto!, of the classic dialectic around perception, derives from the fact that it deals with geometral vision, that is to say, with vision in so far as it is situated in a space that is not in its essence visual. The essence of the relation between appearance and being, which the philosopher, conquering the field of vision, so easily masters, lies elsewhere. It is not in the straight line, but in the point of light—the point of irradiation, the play of light, fire, the source from which reflections pour forth. Light may travel in a straight line, but it is refracted, diffused, it floods, it fills—the eye is a sort of bowl—it flows over, too, it necessitates, around the ocular bowl, a whole series of organs, mechanisms, defenses…. The eyelid, too, when confronted with too bright a light, first blinks, that is, it screws itself up in a well-known grimace.37 We might characterize this grimace as the subject’s reaction to the uncanny, shrinking back from the gaze in its menacing excess. And just as the gaze escapes geometral accounts of perception, it also seems to elude critical accounts of Shakespeare. ‘What we have to circumscribe’, therefore, ‘is the pre-existence of a gaze—I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.’38 This reappraisal of the place of the antecedent gaze returns us to Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, upon which Freud bases his account of the uncanny. Following

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Sarah Kofman, we might emphasize those instruments of artificial vision which precede and constitute the student Nathanael’s point of view, from the ‘glowing grains’ with which Coppelius threatens him, to the spyglass through which he becomes subject to the gaze of the automaton Olympia.39 These supplementary eyes are repeatedly described as fiery and bloody, characteristics which recall both the pearls that emerge from Cordelia’s eyes (Q 17.22), and the ‘sparks of nature’ that Gloucester invokes during his own blinding (F 3.7.84). The gaze operates as a threat to the subject’s sight through the proximity of an overabundance of vision, the surplus represented by a multiplicity of prosthetic eyes, like the ‘spectacles’ which Gloucester claims not to need in order to peruse the ‘nothing’ of Edmond’s forged letter (F 1.2.35–6), or the ‘glass eyes’ which Lear will later urge him to procure, so that he may ‘like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not’ (F 4.5.166–9). Glass eyes, like the jewel and the mirror, emit the rays of light or sight that dazzle the subject in its monocular blindness. Returning to Gloucester, we can now say that the lacking eyes of the blind man embody the gaze in two ways. First, because they inscribe the evidence of its own castration upon that part of the body concerned with sight, visibly displaying the subject’s incapacity. Second, they represent the gaze from the other which exceeds the eye and always eludes the perspective of the Albertian viewpoint or the Cartesian ego. Lacan describes the operation of this blind gaze as follows: In the domain that I have called the geometral, it seems at first that it is light that gives us, as it were, the thread… This is why the blind man would be able to follow all our demonstrations, providing we took some trouble in their presentation. We could get him, for example, to finger an object of a certain height, then follow the stretched thread…in the same way that we imagine, in pure optics, the variously proportioned and fundamentally homological relations, the correspondences from one point to another in space, which always, in the end, amounts to situating two points on a single thread. This construction does not, therefore, particularly enable us to apprehend what is provided by light. How can we try to apprehend that which seems to elude us in this way in the optical structuring of space?40 The blind man in Lacan’s seminar demonstrates emblematically what is missing from the optical structure of the seeing Cartesian subject. Similarly, the blind man in ‘King Lear’, in his journey to Dover cliff, provides an allegory of what eludes the spectator in the theatrical structuring of reality. Edgar’s panoramic speech performs the same demonstration Lacan describes: the blind man sees the world ‘feelingly’ (F 4.5.145), following the stretched thread of Edgar’s ‘lines’ in

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order to construct in verbal rather than visual space a geometral mapping of images. Critics as diverse as Jan Kott, Marshall McLuhan and Jonathan Goldberg have discussed how Edgar’s elaborate descriptions of the surrounding scenery and the progress of the climb stage in a self-reflexive or parodic manner the very means by which Shakespearean theatre creates any landscape.41 On a platform stage devoid of background scenery, the language of the characters must create what the audience are to imagine around them. But in this play, the audience are made aware—through his own asides, and through Gloucester’s inability to hear the sea or feel the slope—that Edgar’s ‘landscape’ is nothing but a discursive illusion. Similarly Goldberg, following McLuhan, points out that Edgar’s description of the view from the precipice adheres to the principles of Renaissance perspective painting in its creation of the illusion of a threedimensional space with vanishing point: The theory as presented in a treatise like Alberti’s Della Pittura depends on a few elements. The viewer is imagined as stationary. The surface of the painting is considered as a window frame, and the distance of the viewer’s eye from the frame determines the distance into space of the painting, which is organized around a vanishing point that represents the horizon of vision, and which is placed exactly correspondent to the fixed eye viewing the scene. All elements beyond the frame diminish proportionally until they reach the limit of vision which organizes the pictorial space. Blind Gloucester is positioned to have this illusionistic experience. Edgar roots him to ‘the place’ and insists that he ‘stand still’ (F 4.5.11). Between the spot where they are supposed to stand and the dizzying prospect, a series of midpoints are marked, dividing the space into mathematical segments.42 The scene at ‘Dover’, then, offers a vertiginous staging of the delusion behind the ‘reality’ as presented by both the theatre and the visual art of its day. In doing so, the play once again puts onstage the spectatorial gaze, inscribing within the picture its own construction, so the audience see themselves, as blind, in Gloucester’s place, at risk of falling into the abyss between the ‘representation’ and ‘reality’: what Derrida terms the mis-en-abîme, a succession of frames within frames.43 The uncanniness of the play derives once again from this permeability between what Freud calls ‘reality’ and the ‘imaginary’, or what Lacan terms the crossing of the fantasy through the limits assigned to it.44 In this scene, these boundaries are doubly or trebly transgressed, through the play of multiple ‘realities’: Gloucester’s (an ascent of, and a descent from, Dover cliff), Edgar’s (that therapeutic illusion he perpetrates to ‘cure’ his father’s ‘despair’ (F 4.5.33–4)), and the spectator’s (situated in an audience, watching a play). None of these levels remains distinct, each becoming subject to deconstruction by a gaze which always already ‘finds it out’ in its illusory blindness.

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However, the critics who discuss this scene fail to account for what takes place after Gloucester falls right through this perfect Albertian perspective painting, to be represented thereafter on the other side. He comes to embody this view from within the frame, looking back from the picture’s vanishing point: GLOUCESTER. But have I fall’n, or no? EDGAR. From the dread summit of this chalky bourn. Look up a-height. The shrill-gorged lark so far Cannot be seen or heard. Do but look up. (F 4.5.56–9) Prompted again by Edgar, Gloucester now occupies the locus of the gaze of the Other, which looks out of the perspective painting at the spectator. This position is, of course, impossible (‘a miracle’ as Edgar comments (55)), like that of the ghost or the specular other escaped from the mirror. This effect conforms strikingly to Lacan’s discussion of perspective painting in relation to Holbein’s The Ambassadors: The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be summed up thus —You want to see? Well, take a look at this! He gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. This is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting.45 The picture, in this account, operates in two antagonistic ways. First, it provides a trap for the viewer’s gaze, disarming the sovereign masterful gaze of the subject by offering it a lure, ‘something to feed on’. At the same time, however, this process renders that subject position and the gaze associated with it vulnerable to deconstruction by the other function present in the painting, the preexistent menacing gaze of the Other which looks out at the viewer. Therefore the picture captures one gaze, but releases the Other. The pacifying, harmonizing effect proves radically illusory. Edgar’s verbal perspective works in the same way. He says to his father ‘You want to see? Well, take a look at this!’, and Gloucester seeks the Apollonian, pleasurable laying down of his gaze (in the Freudian sense of a pleasure which seeks annihilation): ‘This world I do renounce, and in your sights/Shake patiently my great affliction off’ (F 4.5.35–6). He relinquishes his gaze in the ‘sights’ of the Other. But Edgar’s construction manifests the second function of the painting also, the instability of this illusion: ‘How fearful/And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!’ (F 4.5.10–11). He associates this vertigo, as does Lacan, with ‘the deficient sight’ which threatens always to ‘topple down headlong’ (22–3). In Lacan’s account of The Ambassadors, the realization of this threat comes at the moment when the viewer leaves the painting and sees the alternative perspective

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of the anamorphic skull in the foreground coming into focus: ‘you turn away, thus escaping the fascination of the picture…. It is then that, turning round as you leave…you apprehend in this form…. What? A skull.’46 Edgar turns away (‘I’ll look no more’ (F 4.5.21)), and Gloucester, after his fall, has also escaped the fascination of the picture. The perspective painting from the top of the cliff has gone, to be replaced by another perspective, a reverse view which embodies that gaze of the Other looking out from the painting: the view from the bottom of the cliff. From this alternative location, just as the skull becomes visible in Holbein’s picture, so the excess luminosity of the gaze appears in the image of ‘some fiend’ whose ‘eyes/Were two full moons’ (F 4.5.68–71). McLuhan and Goldberg both miss this perspective, turning away from the picture at the end of Edgar’s view from the clifftop and remaining blind to what happens after Gloucester’s ‘fall’.47 What eludes these critics, then, in ‘King Lear’, is the most uncanny element of all, the gaze, as that radical alterity inhabiting the scopic field. To the spectator in the theatre this gaze becomes apparent at several moments in the play: Lear’s mirror image of folly, Gloucester’s blind gaze, the aftermath of the ‘fall’ from Dover cliff. At these points the audience finds itself transfixed in the gaze of the Other, where the play both looks back at the audience and shows itself showing itself. ‘The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic—it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.’48 Provoking the gaze of the spectator, reader, or analyst, and returning it, this theatre displays intermittently what is excluded from a scopic economy precariously constructed out of Euclidean geometry and Albertian perspective. A reading of the uncanny moment suggests how an illusory relationship between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’ can only be maintained through certain repressions and the institution and naturalization of specific perceptual rubrics, and seeks to describe how Renaissance theatre, criticism and psychoanalysis ‘look’, as their various representational parameters—dramaturgic (between audience and stage), generic (between tragedy and what exceeds it), disciplinary (between psychoanalysis and theatre), and categorical (between literary and critical texts) —become liable to disintegration, duplication or reversal. The impossi bility of these relations, of which the gaze is symptomatic, returns as an excess which psychoanalysis and theatre cannot name, describe, or even gesture towards, except perhaps in the reverse of a movement, that shrinking away or warding off which characterizes all reactions to the uncanny. University of Wales, Cardiff NOTES 1 Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al. (eds), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 909. All references to the play(s) are from this edition, while the two texts are distinguished by reference to the Quarto

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2

3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

(Q) and the Folio (F). Although I give no critical priority to either, and aim to foreground their points of difference, where the texts agree I refer to the Folio, as only this version employs the division into acts and scenes upon which most modern editions rely. For discussion of the textual history of the play, see Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). For the theoretical implications, see Terence Hawkes, Meaning By Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 138, and Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Textual properties’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37, 2 (Summer 1986), pp. 213–17. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 206, 269 n. 67. Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 137; E.T.H.Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’, in Selected Writings, trans. L.J.Keat and E.C.Knight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 137–67. A.C.Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 225–6. G.Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1949), p. 161. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 14: Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 335–76, p. 356–7. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 145. Freud, “The Uncanny”’, p. 366. ibid., pp. 367, 374. Samuel Johnson, in Doctor Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W.K.Wimsatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 126. Bradley, p. 232. Freud, The “Uncanny”’, pp. 356–7. ibid., p. 352. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 269 n. 67. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, pp. 366, 368. Ernst H.Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 12–13. ibid., p. 24. G.K.Hunter, in his notes to the Penguin King Lear (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 254. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, pp. 360–1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 92. ibid., p. 139. Lacan describes Lear himself in precisely these terms, as one entering what he calls the ‘zone between-two-deaths’ (ibid., p. 320). Allan Shickman, The Fool’s mirror in King Lear’, English Literary Renaissance, 21, 1 (Winter 1991), pp. 75–86, p. 77. Jacques Lacan, The mirror stage’, in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 1–7.

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26 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 265– 6. 27 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 286. 28 Jacques Lacan, ‘Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlef, trans. James Hulbert, Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), pp. 11–52, p. 22. 29 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 105. 30 See also Mladen Dolar on this uncanny mirror relation, in ‘“I shall be with you on your wedding-night”: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October, 58 (Fall 1991), pp. 5–23. 31 See also The theme of the Three Caskets’, in Art and Literature, pp. 235–47, in which Freud attributes Cordelia’s ‘characteristics which border on the uncanny’ to her representing for Lear ‘the silent Goddess of death’ who, in a strange reversal of the final scene, ‘will take him in her arms’ (pp. 245, 247). Lacan, in turn, comments that Lear ‘appears in the end as still not having understood a thing and holding dead in his arms the object of his love, who is, of course, misrecognised by him’ (Lacan, Seminar VII, p. 310). 32 Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 315–16. 33 This scene is omitted from the Folio, which again seems to repress the more uncanny elements in the play. 34 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 96. 35 See also Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Pye discusses this function of the jewel as gaze in relation to both Shakespeare and the Elizabethan portrait (p. 80). 36 An editor such as G.K.Hunter can simply take this interpretation for granted in his introduction to the Penguin edition (Hunter, King Lear, pp. 24–5 and 38). 37 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 94. 38 ibid., p. 72. 39 Kofman, Freud and Fiction, pp. 151–4; Hoffmann, The Sandman’, pp. 143–56. 40 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 93. 41 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 114–17; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 15–17; Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the conditions of representation’, in Shakespeare and Deconstruction, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and David M.Bergeron (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), pp. 245–65. 42 Goldberg, ‘Perspectives’, p. 250. 43 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 485 n 64. 44 Lacan, ‘Interpretation of desire in Hamlet’, p. 22. 45 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 101. 46 ibid., p. 88. 47 Goldberg, at this point, does indeed go on to discuss anamorphosis, but he does so by leaving ‘King Lear’ behind altogether and turning instead to Richard II, Henry V and Twelfth Night (Goldberg, ‘Perspectives’, pp. 253–4). 48 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 75.

Richard Rorty and Star Wars: on the nature of pragmatism’s narrative IAN SAUNDERS

‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…’ Rorty’s pragmatism is at once alluring and disquieting, an elegant philosophical rewriting of realism that seems to walk hand in hand with a disabling ethical relativism. It is my contention that the specific ideological form of that relativism is encoded in Rorty’s version of pragmatism at a very early stage, and in particular in the nature of his account of narrative and metaphor, and that it is an account that has, unexpectedly, an ecological dimension. The story I shall be telling about how philosophy-as-epistemology attained self-certainty in the modern period will go like this….’1 Thus Richard Rorty in perhaps his most preferred role, that of the story-teller. Rorty is a natural teller of tales. His work has, almost always, the flavour of narrative, where the guiding principle seems less the arid present tense of analytic philosophy than the deep enjoyment of a story well told, less an argument invented than a story recalled from something like a shared past. Both Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity2 delight in telling and retelling philosophy’s family story, a narrative that recalls moments of blinding ambition as it does moments of bitter resentment, times of paradigmatic harmony, times of insistent division. In fine realist style, it is a narrative that concludes by reaching the present, where romantic defiance and triumphant vision are left, like one’s youth, in the past, and pragmatic acceptance and cautious optimism become the order of the day. Long wedded to a quest for the Key to all Mythologies, philosophy finally abandons it to find contentment at last, like Dorothea herself, in small ‘unhistoric acts’; and, to stay a moment longer with Middlemarch, like Fred Vincy and Mary Garth (and indeed, for that matter, like Richard Rorty),

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philosophy finds what Eliot describes as a ‘white-haired placidity’ in the smallscale, in the domestic, and in the contingent.3 In a recently published exchange with Umberto Eco, Rorty describes what he calls ‘a semi-autobiographical narrative’.4 He calls it ‘The Pragmatist’s Progress’. It goes, in part, like this: At the beginning of this particular quest romance, it dawns on the Seeker after Enlightenment that all the great dualisms of Western Philosophy— reality and appearance, pure radiance and diffuse reflection, mind and body, intellectual rigour and sensual sloppiness, orderly semiotics and rambling semiosis—can be dispensed with. They are not to be synthesized into higher unities, not aufgehoben, but rather actively forgotten. (pp. 91–2) Rorty goes on to describe a number of stages in his quest-narrative, and concludes that the final stage of the Pragmatist’s Progress is reached when one gives up all yearning for true description or accurate representation, and comes to think of oneself: as, like everything else, capable of as many descriptions as there are purposes to be served…. This is the stage in which all descriptions (including one’s self-description as a pragmatist) are evaluated according to their efficacy as instruments for purposes, rather than by their fidelity to the object described. (p. 92) According to Richard Bernstein,’ “Rorty bashing” is rapidly becoming a new culture industry’,5 so I should say at once that there are many aspects of the stories Rorty has been telling that I find deeply compelling, even reassuringly familiar. Like Rorty, my favourite philosophers are Wittgenstein and Davidson, and the pragmatist position he constructs has always struck me as having something like an inevitable common sense. So, if I do have some reservations, they are probably reservations about my own position, too. As I understand it, the pragmatist line that Rorty champions involves giving up the search for the kind of foundation that would guarantee rational argument, or provide indisputable standards against which the truth of representations could be checked, or anchor ethical decision making. Instead, we need to recognize that all such talk—as indeed all talk—takes place within so many different language-games, and that what counts as rationality, or truth, or the moral law is not a reflection of the way logic or the world or the self really is, but a product of the way that particular language-game is played. ‘Rational argument’ is just the © Routledge 1994

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name we give to compelling speech, we call a representation ‘true’ when it is like ours, and action is deemed ‘moral’ when it fits the pattern of behaviour we have learnt to accept. This is not, Rorty insists, an anti-realist argument. We can not just say or do as we like. Some sentences do help us cope with the world, some don’t. But to extrapolate from being able to cope to getting it right, from having a useful picture of reality to having a true picture, is, he thinks, unjustified. It is an empty chain which cannot be checked except, of course, within the protocols of the very language-game that produced it, which is no check at all. That does not mean to say that we don’t make such claims all the time, nor that we should give them up. It merely means that in our more philosophical moments, rather than pondering gravely on the grounds that would be required to guarantee truth claims and the like, we learn to accept that all such claims are the abbreviated versions of longer, more qualified sentences. We might think that it really is true that E=mc2, or that we are born with original sin, or that humanity is a disease upon the face of the earth. The pragmatist simply rewrites such claims in full, so they become of the form, ‘Given the assumptions of quantum physics, it makes sense to say E=mc2’ and so on. You can’t prove that we don’t have original sin, but you can change your language-game, or (as Rorty often puts it) adopt or fashion an alternative vocabulary within which talk of original sin begins to seem not so much in error as the quaint remnant of another age, and another way of thinking. The test of the vocabulary is not is it right, but is it useful, does it help us achieve what we want to do? On this account change between vocabularies is not a matter of progress in finding ever more accurate or rational or ethical models of the way things are (although of course in our non-philosophical moments that is just how we like to think). Rather, change is akin to the moments of paradigm shift Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If the old paradigm becomes less and less workable, increasingly cluttered with special cases, exceptions, and dead ends, one begins to cast around for a new way of doing things. Or, as Rorty likes to say, one invents new metaphors to replace the old, dead ones. This emphasis on metaphor needs a little spelling out. The argument goes like this. If there are no sentences that are grounded in the way things really are, but all are the product of one or another particular way of making connections, then all sentences are metaphorical in the sense that all are inventing, rather than truly reporting, instances of predication. Within the vocabulary of a familiar languagegame, though, sentences are read as literal because the connections they propose are habitual to us, we simply overlook their contingency. Inventing a new vocabulary is then a matter of coining new, unfamiliar metaphors because it is a matter of urging different ways of putting pictures together. The twist comes with this talk of metaphor. Rorty adopts Davidson’s account where, rather than supposing that there are two different kinds of meaning, literal and metaphoric, we are asked to see simply more or less familiar connections.6 Given that, it makes reasonable sense to say that a paradigm shift from the well

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known into the realm of the newly minted amounts to a switch from the literal to the metaphoric. Rorty goes on to say, though, that as metaphor is the stuff of poetry, such shifts are the province of the poet. It is the poet, not the scientist, to whom we should look for a capacity to invent new metaphors, and thus it is the poet who can lead us to refashion our sense of what it is to be rational, or of what is required to achieve the good life. Now it is a little unclear what Rorty means by a poet. On the one hand he declares that a poet is simply anyone that effects a paradigm shift, so that Hegel and Galileo are just as much poets as Yeats. Yet on the other hand it is to literature that he tends to look if he wants to find texts that might have that kind of power on the contemporary scene, although to be sure it is the novel that most often captures his attention, not poetry. Be that as it may, it is clear that Rorty brings with the concept of the poet more than a little of its romantic colouring. The poet is not only inventing new metaphors but also, and simultaneously, inventing herself. Unlike the philosopher or scientist, the poet is self-engendered. While the dreary old philosopher is stuck, Casaubon-like, in the grey web of abstract theory, the poet finds joy in the particular, the intoxication of inventing a way of seeing never before experienced, and of being bound to no system but one’s own. In sum, poetry here means change, and change means freedom. Now I want to return to this, but for the moment can I remark that in some ways, at least, Rorty might have been as well served by a different analogy, not scientist versus poet, but (recalling Lévi-Strauss) engineer versus bricoleur. The engineer solves problems within the rule structure of a high-tech system, she uses the material and theoretical resources purpose-built within that system, and does no more (or less) than any other similarly trained professional would do. By contrast, although the bricoleur may have knowledge of several disciplinary systems, he regards them with ironic detachment as he belongs to none. The bricoleur invents, he uses what is to hand but in a creative, unpredictable way, not according to rule but simply at the behest of a hunch that this particular combination just might do the trick. You cannot train to be a bricoleur, and that means you cannot replicate him. He is self-created, not system-functional. Taken together, then, we might say that Rorty’s hero could be best described as a bricoleur-poet: inventive, ironic, free. Rorty votes for Nietzsche as an exemplary figure in this regard, but I would like to suggest that Harrison Ford provides an analogy every bit as felicitous. Putting aside the uncanny physical resemblance between Ford and Rorty, and recalling Rorty’s redescription of ‘insight’ as ‘the contingent results of encounters with various [texts] which happened to fall into one’s hands’ (Interpretation and Overinterpretation, p. 92), I would pick out Star Wars and Patriot Games as the texts that most closely parallel the agenda pursued in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Harrison—named, aptly enough, Hans Solo—is the archetypical bricoleur-poet in Star Wars. In much the same way that Rorty himself moved through two thousand years of intellectual history in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,

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familiar with it all, but beholden to none of it, Solo moves across an entire galaxy with the easy confidence of the worldly-wise, and the ironic detachment of the self-made. Within the film the dialectical counterpoint of Solo is Darth Vader. As Solo’s career is unplanned, Vader’s ambitions, like his visage, are rigidly fixed. His ‘world’ is the regimented artificial nation-state, the ‘Death Star’; while Solo’s ship is its apolitical bricolage opposite. ‘What a piece of junk’, says Luke Skywalker when he first sees it. To which Solo, the ever confident bricoleur, replies: ‘She’ll make .5 past light speed. She may not look like much but she’s got it where it counts, kid. I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself.’ Assembled from bits and pieces, poorly resourced but somehow kept going by dint of ingenuity and know-how, the ship out-manoeuvres its vastly more powerful competitor through imagination and sheer cheek. Solo’s is a solo act, no one could replicate his performance, no one can direct it (‘I take orders from just one person’, he says, ‘me’) just as—you might recall—Luke finally comes into his own when, attacking the Death Star, he chooses to abandon the disciplinary crutch of computer-aided flight and go it alone. The power is with him precisely at that point where he slips the system and invents his own actions. If the field of Star Wars is no less than an entire galaxy, Patriot Games has to be read as Ford’s answer to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, in which the scale is decidedly more domestic, and in which both Ford and Rorty reveal an honest, moral decency tucked beneath their ironic swagger. Again Ford, like Rorty, wants none of the discourses that claim universal validity. Uninterested in the obsessive claims of a fundamentalist religious-nationalism (in this film, chiefly that of a breakaway group of the IRA), for him the world is de-divinized and, in turn, de-politicized. It’s not the a priori that makes him tick, but simple, unmetaphysical human fellow-feeling. Rorty has observed that metaphysical distinctions and concerns are not the stuff of everyday life, and that philosophers notice them because, and only because, they have been trained to do so. Advice to introspect in search of fundamental categories, he contends, would be like supposing that the ‘man in the street, untutored in philosophy, could simply be asked to turn his mental eye inward’ and notice such distinctions (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 150). But only those trapped in the coils of absolutist, universalizing philosophy can see in that manner. Here, quite literally the man in the street, Ford becomes contingently involved with people who, like Rorty’s philosopher-villains, are absolutist and universalizing; he becomes involved not because he is interested in their way of talking, but because he happens upon, and spontaneously reacts to, visions of a family under stress: in the first instance, it is that most paradigmatic of families, the Royal family, that is under threat, in the second it is his own. Always the bricoleur, he makes do with what is at hand (the car bonnet, a van door, a mirror he happens to pass, a dropped gun—these become ‘his’ weapons). The film, moreover, is—like Rorty’s work—obsessed with the idea of specularity, albeit in an ambivalent way. There is a long central section where the FBI locate the terrorist desert encampment through the use of computer-

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enhanced satellite photography. Identification, and subsequent destruction, unfolds as technological triumph but, while the military technologists are jubilant, Ford’s position is less certain. At once one of the team, and yet as the outsider, he stands to gain from the technology (one of the terrorists thought to be in the camp has taken out a personal vendetta against him), and yet is the only one to display disquiet, not as an outcome of some foundational rule or law, but simply generated by his sense of the ordinary: to the man in the street, there is something disturbing, even grotesque about the marriage of unbelievably sophisticated modes of representation with such a crude, non-discriminating outcome. Like the Solo of Star Wars, he is at once the beneficiary of the technological, and yet somehow detached from it. Its law is not his law. The technological machinery of satellite representation is itself justification enough for its practitioners, as the mirage of metaphysical distinction is justification enough for the philosopher; Ford, ultimately, can do no better—or worse—than trust his own eyes. Neatly symmetrical, the film ends with the terrorist counter-attack, again, at night, again, predicated on technologically assisted vision. They wear elaborate night vision goggles (and look not unlike Darth himself), while Ford and families (the film manages to load both royal and domestic into the one scene) have nothing more to rely on than native cunning and unassisted sight. Ford wins the day, of course—again, not because of superior resources or planning, but because he can bend what’s at hand to his own needs, transforming the terrorists’ equipment—climbing gear, boat, even the boat’s anchor gets a brief, if gory, role —into something he can use, pragmatist style, for the moment. The ambivalent dichotomy between technologically probing (and therefore allegedly more accurate) vision and the limitations (and joys) of having no more and no less than one’s own point of view remains foundational—and ideologically charged—to the end. Ford’s movie-wife (who, appropriately enough given the film’s Rorty-ish thematization of specularity, is an eye-surgeon) is pregnant, and the last scene involves her revealing to her family that the most probing of visionary devices, the ultra-sound, has identified the sex of the unborn child. After a seriocomic discussion, father and daughter agree they want to know whether it’s a boy or a girl. The camera cuts to mother, who smirks…and that, delightfully enough, is where the film ends, on the cusp between public information and private knowledge, ambivalently placed between the technological mastery of truly accurate representation, and a homely reliance on plain sight, at once endorsing the epistemological claims of that mastery, and yet remaining, finally, ironically detached from them. This thematic of specularity is emblematic of an ambivalence that is systemic to both films and, I think, to Rorty’s work. In both films, Ford is the complete master of the available systems, technology is there to be used, and he uses it— but, unlike his foes, he is not bound by it. Indeed, he is a likeable character precisely because of the ironic detachment that sets him apart from the rulebound, fundamentalist crowd. He is not without loyalties, of course, but these texts

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draw a sharp line between the ‘natural’ loyalty to one’s family or friends, and the artifice of dogmatic patriotism. If Ford, finally, becomes a patriot, he does so by refusing to play patriot games: in this textual landscape, politics is another country. Ford as ethical exemplar, then, personifies the goals of personal freedom and ‘natural’ affection read in terms of a double detachment, from the technology of control, and from the regime of the political. Rorty’s narrative style trades on a very like ambivalent detachment, I believe. The Pragmatist’s Progress’, for example, is remarkable for the way it both is, and is not, an argument. Rorty might have a pragmatist reading of Eco’s novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, and developed that into a pragmatist counter to Eco’s theoretical work, and in particular to Eco’s insistence that we draw a sharp line between interpreting texts and using texts. That is not how Rorty proceeds, however. Instead, he tells a story of what might happen if he were to offer such a reading, and how he might go about constructing such a counter-attack, should he choose to do so. So, for example, we get not a reading, but a report of a reading: When I read Professor Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum, I decided that Eco must be satirizing the way in which scientists, scholars, critics and philosophers think of themselves as cracking codes, peeling away accidents to reveal essence, stripping away veils of appearance to reveal identity. (P. 89) Equally, we get not an argument, but a report of an argument: so, These rhetorical questions are the initial softening-up moves I would make in order to begin to blur Eco’s use-interpretation distinction’ (p. 95). But we don’t get the final product: Rorty blithely notes ‘I do not know whether I could do all this’ and adds—happy thought—that maybe ‘three months of leisure and a modest foundation grant’ would do the trick (p. 96). There are, then, two Rortys in the piece—the one that interprets and argues, and the one that wryly puts together the first person story we actually read.7 Or, we could say, the one that is committed to the technological machinery of analytic philosophy, and the one that has easy mastery of it, but retains an ironic distance from it. Now one can see why Rorty might do this. If he is arguing that argument is not really up to much, and that shifts in paradigm or vocabulary are not the product of accepting a reasoned case, but happen haphazardly, he has to find a method of proceeding that looks like something other than argument itself. The rhetorical manoeuvre of creating a doubled self achieves just that: we get an argument but, when all is said and done, Rorty himself merely tells a story. As Hans Solo says to Luke’s fearful cry that the universalizing Empire’s ships have all but caught them, ‘I know a few manoeuvres, we’ll lose them.’

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Jonathan Culler, in response to Rorty’s piece, has observed that the pragmatist case enunciated by the likes of Rorty and Fish is more than a little self-serving. Both wrote engaged, non-ironic work which sent them to the top of the professional tree, but in then turning pragmatist, in becoming disengaged from the systematic discipline that nurtured them, he thinks they are in effect sabotaging the ladder that the next generation would have needed if it were to be able to scamper up after them and get a bit of the view too. In his words, they ‘seek systematically to destroy the structure through which they attained their positions and would enable others to challenge them in their turn’.8 I am not sure if Rorty and Fish are really quite that wicked, but it certainly is the case that it can be disabling, not to say infuriating, to argue with someone who so deftly creates an ironic buffer against engagement. Be that as it may, I think there may be something more to be said, in particular with regard to the fact that it is through adopting a certain narrative style that Rorty effects the disengagement. He tells a story about himself which, inter alia, helps him slip past the need to confront any alternative argument, which then become, by implication, just so many other stories. Narrative here, that is to say, is a mode of disengagement. Now this is a little odd, because the case pursued in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is precisely the opposite: there, narrative is of value, is morally important, because it engages sympathies, it helps us extend our sense of common feeling to a wider, more heterogeneous field. As he writes in the introduction: This process to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is the task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel…. The novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress. (p. xvi) Even remembering that by a word like ‘progress’ Rorty always means ‘progress as it seems to us’, it is striking how very different is the understanding of narrative here, construed as a vehicle of empathy, from the ironic voice of The Pragmatist’s Progress’. It is not that he has changed his mind; in the latter he recalls an anthology of readings of Heart of Darkness which—as he puts it—he ‘recently ‘slogged through’, and complains that ‘none of the readers had, as far as [he] could see, been enraptured or destabilized’ by the novel (p. 107). Rather, the difference between the warm-hearted faith in narrative as a mode of ethical engagement (a la Martha Nussbaum) and the cool disengagement effected by it here can be identified in terms of a distinction Rorty himself wishes to abandon, that between interpretation and use. Notwithstanding the fact that he would reject the redescription, his remarks on the value of the novel are about how we

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interpret narrative, whilst the rhetorical strategy of ‘The Pragmatist’s Progress’ is predicated on the use of narrative. And, I would contend, that if we want to understand the real value of narrative in Rorty’s work, we should (in true pragmatist style) look not to the interpretation of narrative, but to the way he uses it—and the way it uses him. Although Rorty does talk about narratives, in his story vocabularies come first. We invent a vocabulary, occupy it, and then are in a position to invent a narrative that redescribes past and incompatible eras as somehow or other leading to the present. Those stories don’t change things, change is the result of fundamentally inexplicable self generation. Nor do they really justify our present position. Indeed, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he is critical of John Locke for making just such a confusion, between reasoned justification and the narrative of how one got where one is. As he says, Locke’s mistake was to think that ‘a causal account of how one comes to have a belief should be an indication of the justification for that belief’ (p. 141). In fact, though, his strategy is rather more like Locke’s than he here acknowledges, in that he gives a ‘causal account’ of the history of philosophy in order to justify (or, the pragmatist redescription, push the case for) abandoning the absolutist ambitions of metaphysics. As we saw at the outset, a great deal of the force of Rorty’s work is achieved through his ability to tell a cogent story. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature— like the first chapters of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity—works as a text by telling a story in which the pragmatist twentieth century of Wittgenstein and Davidson (as read by Rorty) is understood as the most satisfying plot resolution to the twists and turns of the comedy of errors that characterized the preceding millennium or two. Both texts, that is to say, rely on the story Rorty comes to dub ‘The Pragmatist’s Progress’. His work is persuasive not because he invents a new vocabulary. Far from it, he is quite at home with the old one. Rather, the power lies in the narrative sense. As works of philosophy, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and The Pragmatist’s Progress’ may be startling in their originality; as narratives, though, they succeed (as most do) by recalling a story we already know. Rorty’s favourite plot is the American form of the Bildungsroman, where growing up is tracked not so much in the growth of knowledge as in the achievement of identity through becoming ever more independent of the structure of rules and requirements that surround one. Like Luke Skywalker, Rorty’s protagonist has to leave the comforts of home and go it alone; like Solo, he has to be prepared to act outside the law. ‘He’s got to follow his own path, no one can choose it for him’, the Princess tells Luke, but she could be speaking of Rorty’s bricoleur-poet as much as Han Solo or, for that matter, any one of the countless textual instantiations of the story of frontier independence. It’s a story about growing beyond—while reaping the benefits of —institutional constraint and conventional belief: the price, ironic detachment, the prize, self-determination. The names of the characters change; the story, though, remains the same.

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For all that it is about independence, it is not without political alignment, of course (although that alignment is articulated precisely in terms of the denial of politics). The artifice of constraint becomes read as the (dogmatically) political, the most disturbing features of which are in turn displaced on to the other: the cold-war Death Star, the distorted patriotism of the terrorist state, and (for Rorty) the shady, unnamed opposite of ‘the rich North Atlantic democracies’.9 The ironic hero remains detached, but that narrative displacement of the overtly political allows the recuperation of freshly minted notions of family and nation that ensure it is far from a lonely detachment, after all. In the end, freedom, family and nation coalesce. It is, though, a nation (or ‘society’, Rorty’s preferred term)10 imagined without politics, in which the desire to converse, not the will to convert, is the order of the day. ‘We Deweyans are sentimentally patriotic about America’,11 Rorty declares, but, as the emphasis on sentimentality makes clear, it is an innocent patriotism: in this story, paradoxically, irony and artlessness go hand in hand. Now, if the real engine of Rorty’s account is narrative, and this cultural narrative in particular, why then does Rorty choose ‘vocabulary’ as the key term? To be sure, narrative is mentioned, and Rorty is far from unselfconscious in his use of the trope of story-telling; ‘vocabulary’, though, does the serious work. Why so? Let me suggest two related reasons. The term vocabulary is, I take it, meant to be non-prejudicial: all we are talking about is a collection of words. At base level there aren’t truths or laws, just words. One might note, though, that choosing ‘vocabulary’ over ‘narrative’ or ‘social practices’ or, for that matter, ‘language-games’, suggests a kind of atomism where what really matters, what is really the most fundamental, are the smallest parts, the words themselves. That in turn seems to imply that we are in need of something like a theory of words. Now I do not think Rorty does believe we need a theory of words (in fact he’s pretty much given up on theory altogether), and would suggest at least part of the reason for speaking like that is that he is caught between two explanatory moments. In the first the key question of language is, how is meaning possible? In the second, how is language used? Rorty the pragmatist of course champions the second, but, or so it seems to me, is undermined in his choice of the word vocabulary. He’s hardly alone in this position: poststructuralism had no need for a theory of meaning and yet, mesmerized by Saussure put through the wringer by Lacan and Derrida, found a theory of words the all but inevitable first chapter of every text. Paradoxically the result is a certain foundationalism. Rorty rejects the idea that philosophy provides grounds, but while he values narrative, grounds them in vocabularies; an alternative would have been to say that the only non-foundational way to ‘ground’ action is to say, in circular fashion, that we understand actions in terms of stories we already know about other actions. Identity is not tied to fact, but to our facility in handling narratives which emplot it. And, as the personae of Rorty and Ford show, this is not a matter of self-creation: rather, it involves understanding oneself in terms of a story already well told. The story is about

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self-creation, of course, but using it to construe oneself is another matter altogether. The other reason Rorty sticks with the notion of vocabulary is that concentration at the level of words—rather than with larger-scale structures such as narrative—is important given his valorization of metaphor. Notwithstanding my suggestion that Rorty’s narrative, while about self-creation, is far from being self-created, we need to recall at this point that the poet is hero because, in this story, it is he or she that is inventor of metaphor. In brief: the ultimate goal is self-determination, self-determination means not speaking the language proposed to you, but inventing your own, and that means inventing new metaphors, new ways of linking words. Metaphor does the trick because, understood simply as non-anticipated predication, one can suppose that metaphors can be endlessly, and privately, generated. There is no obvious limit to the number of word-toword connections one can make, and one can imagine an endlessly repeated pattern of invention, familiarity, obsolescence and then invention once more. At the macro level, on the other hand, at the level of narrative or social practice or of language-games, the quest for the constantly renewed and replaced couldn’t really stick. Here, size and social constitution ensure a degree of inertia. Narratives, like the sort that fuel Star Wars and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, are deeply woven into the fabric of the social, and change can only occur where accompanied by a substantial and widespread change in material practice. We can sum up the argument so far by saying that Rorty’s own work is grounded in powerful narrative impulses, not an auto-incandescent vocabulary. In his story, the new vocabulary comes first, but that means, of course, it is the story that comes first, after all. I have been talking about features of that story that are common to a familiar, and ideologically loaded, narrative of selfdetermination, and about why, given the pre-eminent role of narrative, Rorty subordinates it to vocabulary. The philosophical reasons hazarded—that it reflects the vestiges of foundationalism, and that it best suits Rorty’s aligning of invention with the metaphor-producing-poet—can now be supplemented by the observation that the account of changing metaphor is an account of endlessly pursued and endlessly renewed consumption. Metaphor functions within the realm of politics as the structural equivalent of the role of consumption within a growth economics. Patriot Games ends in the kitchen, and if it is a film that celebrates family values, it is clear that central to the values of this particular family is (a comfortably well-heeled) consumption, the logic of which is endless repetition. If, like Ford’s movie-wife, your personal identity is, at least in part, constituted by your new model Porsche, you are like it or not simultaneously constituted within the structure of metaphor, and its cycle of invention, familiarity, obsolescence, and re-invention once more. That is, the story about the quest for freedom, pursued with the support of, but conveniently not aligned to, the institutional law, is read in terms of a continually repeated cycle of acquisition, the philosophical correlate of which is the notion of a continually repeated process of metaphor generation. The philosophical story becomes

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isomorphic with the values of growth economics. To per- form within the system that valorizes economic growth as the best measure of social well-being is then understood by it as ensuring the possibility of personal identity uncompromised by systems-constraints, an ideological reading that ensures the continual operation of the system as it neatly redefines social critique as a threat to personal fulfilment, and politics properly the property of some other place. Rorty argues that narratives such as film are a crucial engine of moral progress. I would agree they are important, certainly more important than vocabularies, but contend that narratives, like movies—or, for that matter, like philosophy texts—are above all important for the way they maintain and reinforce our sense of value. They are familiar, and powerful, because they remind us of the stories we have already learnt to ‘know’. Now I do not claim to be the first person to comment on Rorty’s liberalism— after all, he himself does.12 My argument is simply that we better understand the case if, rather than seeing this particular political preference as an add-on (as Culler sees Rorty’s laissez-faire devil-may-care attitude in contrast to his earlier ‘real’ philosophy), we can see that the social values Rorty’s work comes to endorse are in fact built into the work at an early stage, in terms of the narrative form he pursues, in the valorization of vocabulary over narrative, and in the key role that metaphor finds. Moreover, I would suggest, the particular role metaphor is pressed into neatly suggests the logic of consumption and economic growth that is part and parcel of our favourite stories of self-determination; or, to put that another way, the fact that Luke and Solo do find their true selves in the end is not simply contingently related to the fact that they come nearest to having their dreams crushed in a garbage compactor. It is a scene that is paradigmatic of a certain response to the ecological, at once expressive of the fear of the spectre of irreversible decline, and offering a (fake) resolution to it. In it, Leah, Luke and Solo evade their pursuers on the Death Star by plunging down a waste disposal chute, to end up trapped, with a putrid mass of disgusting but unidentifiable wastes, inside the compactor. It is a region markedly at odds with the sharp-edged readability of the artificial planet that produced, and surrounds, it. There, everything is codified in terms of an efficient functionalism; this, by contrast, as the site of the planet’s non-exchangeable excess, defeats interpretation and, crucially, defeats our bricoleur-poet. There is no self-fashioned escape available, no ‘manoeuvre’ that would enable them to extricate themselves from their apparently inevitable fate (here, the tool to hand, a lance-like metal rod, simply buckles against the force of the compactor). That they are saved is the outcome of an intervention that, in the real world analogue of their fictional location, could best be described as magical: the robot R2D2 picks up their cries for help, and is able to intervene in the artificial planet’s electronic nervous system, shutting off the otherwise irreversible process. For a moment the film brings the peripheral to focus, but the frame is anything but that of pragmatic know-how: the region of waste is frightening, fascinating and, finally, unreadable. That the solution to it is magical ensures that it can

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remain so. The scene, that is, both registers the terror of looming environmental catastrophe and evades it, narrative artifice effecting a resolution that disarms the threat, leaving its logic undisturbed. For an instant the monstrous is sensed, but we can not make sense of it and nor, in this text, do we need to. Rorty’s pragmatism does not in any meaningful way so much as register that threat, and it is hard to see how it could. Certainly, it could not work in a parallel way, having neither the visual capacity to represent (while yet not deciphering) the unread, nor the narrative resources to effect an analogous evasion of it. Moreover, the first principle of pragmatic realism is that there is a critical divide between statements we make about the world and the world itself. As Albert Borgmann puts it, ‘nature is utterly silent for Rorty’.13 Conversation is entirely a human affair, and its claim to authentic representational power—to get the real world right —spurious. If that is a failing, though, it is one we can be comfortable with, Rorty thinks. After all, while we may not be able to claim truth, we can at least point to the matter of fact that we are coping. This, it seems to me, is the rub. ‘Coping’ only makes sense in the realm of the isolated event, in respect to the specific problem that can be—pragmatist style—got around. That, despite the spectre of massive and increasing environmental breakdown, it has seemed plausible to say we are ‘coping’ suggests just how resistant this mode of thinking is to reading the macro, as it is resistant to attempting to narrate the logic of waste. A narrative based on the championing of individual achievement, and premised on the displacement of the political on to the other, it is blind to the kind of social narrative that might comprehend the ecological. Indeed, I have argued, the model it adumbrates erects a strong barrier against any readerly engagement with ecological threat: the valorization of vocabulary entrenches a systemic preference for the micro, while the account of metaphor it pursues offers a kind of conceptual template of the logic of consumption, thereby disastrously promoting its contours of endlessly repeated acquisition and abandonment as those ‘natural’ to both progress and authentic self-definition. University of Western Australia NOTES 1 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 136. 2 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3 George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 896 and 892. 4 Umberto Eco, and Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 91. 5 Richard J.Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 260.

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6 Donald Davidson, ‘What metaphors mean’, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 7 Nancy Fraser has also argued for ‘two Rortys’, but in terms of the contrasting Romanticist and pragmatist threads in his work: ‘Solidarity or singularity? Richard Rorty between romanticism and technocracy’, in Alan Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (and Beyond) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 8 ‘In defence of overinterpretation’, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, p. 118. 9 Richard Rorty, ‘Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism’, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 198. 10 See Michael Billig, ‘Nationalism and Richard Rorty: the text as flag for Pax Americana’, New Left Review, no. 202 (November/December 1993), pp. 69–83. 11 Richard Rorty, ‘Wild orchids and Trotsky’, in Mark Edmundson (ed.) Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 47. 12 And see, for example, Nancy Fraser, op. cit., Jo Burrows, ‘Conversational politics: Rorty’s pragmatist apology for liberalism’, also in Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty, and Sabina Lovibond, ‘Feminism and pragmatism: A reply to Richard Rorty’, New Left Review, 193 (May/June 1992), pp. 56–74. 13 Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 51.

Poetic constitutions of history: the case of Shelley SHARADA NAIR

It was a racially mixed classroom in America. I, an Indian woman graduate teaching assistant, was teaching a course titled ‘An Introduction to Literature’. Somewhere along the quarter, during the analysis of a black American writer, I suddenly discovered, to my horror, that my critical voice was that of a white American male! The shock of that discovery has been sublated in this study undertaken almost a decade later. Functioning in the discourse of literary criticism, using the language of theme, form, convention and so on, the historical and political activity of literary texts, especially their role in the formation and positioning of the reading subject, was something I had failed to reckon with. I found that Shelley, with his overtly political preoccupations, and repeated ventures into extended allegories of the vicissitudes of man in history, provides a collection of texts which strikingly illustrates this activity. Shelley wrote much occasional prose and poetry through which he hoped to incite a wide circle of readers to radical action. In the preface to The Revolt of Islam (1818), Shelley cites the reason for his venture. It has become a necessity, since, due to the ‘excesses consequent upon the French Revolution’, he feels that ‘many of the most ardent and tenderhearted of the worshippers of public good have been morally ruined’ by what appears to be the ruin of ‘all their cherished hopes’.1 This is due to their deficient understanding of the fact that ‘a nation of men who had been dupes and slaves for centuries were incapable of conducting themselves with the wisdom and tranquility of freemen as soon as some of their fetters were partially loosened’ (p. 33). The poet is thus venturing into an ‘experiment on the temper of the public mind, as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age’ (p. 32). Thus Shelley feels that the unhappy conditions of his time placed a special demand on the poet. Consequently, he sets out to jettison a narrative of history that is proving to be

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disabling, and constructing one that can produce a more hopeful political climate. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley states his desire to familiarize the ‘highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical reader with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence’ (p. 207). Shelley failed to win any significant readership during his lifetime. In an age of severe press censorsh ip, his political prose and poetry had only very limited private circulation. As for the ‘highly refined’ readers, while they lauded a few lines here and there, it is clear that, except in the eyes of friends like Leigh Hunt, he occupied no high place in the poetic pantheon. He failed to consolidate a readership either refined and idealistic, or radical and activist. But Shelley’s lines in Adonais (xxxvii) have proved prophetic. The critics of his time have become ‘noteless blot[s]’ and his name is well remembered as many of his poems occupy a respected place in the canon. In spite of T.S.Eliot’s lofty dismissal of the poet, Shelley continues to be read and studied inside classrooms of Romantic literature, and outside, well beyond the age of fifteen.2 It is the historical and political effect of the study of these canonized works that needs to be considered, since they represent a fine aesthetic achievement. Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey state that an author is neither ‘supreme creator, founder of the very conditions to which he submits…nor its opposite— expendable medium through whom is revealed the nameless power of inspiration, or history, or period, or even class’ (p. 94).3 Instead, they elaborate, he appears as ‘a material agent, an intermediary inserted in a particular place, under conditions he has not created in submission to contradictions’ (p. 94). Shelley can be shown to exemplify this. Moreover, the reader of these works is also caught in an equally tangled historical configuration. In Truth and Method, his extended treatise on the conditions and nature of the process by which we understand a work, Gadamer, attacking the ‘naïveté of so called historicism’ (p. 266) elaborates the notion of ‘effective history’ (p. 267), that is, the coming into play in an act of reading of the historical position of the reader in interaction with that of the writer as it emerges from the work.4 Thus any reading of Shelley is constituted by the historical situation of the reader discontinuously, yet connected to the milieu of the work, a reading that displays the ‘effectivity of history within understanding itself’ (p. 267). For Gadamer, thus, an encounter with the language of art emerges as an ‘encounter with a still unfinished process’ (p. 88). One has to acknowledge one’s debt to this dynamic hermeneutical approach to understanding even while veering away from it. It is pertinent to remember that texts are endowed with some degree of fixity by readers. Categories like period, influences, intentions, professed or implied, literary conventions, in short, all that makes the piece recognizable as literary are precisely what make it readable at all. Readers do find a decipherable content, which can, but is not allowed to dehisce or disseminate into a shifting welter of © Routledge 1994

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intertextuality where meaning is forever deferred and indeterminable. Prometheus Unbound (1820) continues to be read as man’s effort to master his own turbulent nature so that he can exert a creative control over the course of history. However, not what Shelley’s work means, but the mode of production of this meaning is what I would like to focus on. Such a thrust entails a reading practice, a hermeneutics, that highlights the political and histori- cal effects of literary discourse along with a study of our mode of comprehension of the work. It also involves, as Barthes puts it, the ‘inclusion of the activity of reading in textual practice—and not only the activity of fabricating the written’ (p. 41).5 The act of reading thus emerges in all its historical contingency. This reading of Shelley in the 1990s is an act in history inasmuch as it is made possible for an Indian woman reader after the perspectives thrown open by Edward Said in his pathbreaking book, Orientalism.6 In India, modes of reading canonized texts of Western literature have faithfully followed the trends dictated by Western academia. Thus Shelley has been subjected to thematic, platonic and metaphysical readings. English studies, introduced here in the nineteenth century, have remained faithful to Macaulay’s intention. He hoped to form ‘a class who may be interpreters between…[the British] and the millions’ they governed; ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.7 But up to a point. Said gave voice to the unease which had crept into this formation of the English literature classrooms of India, especially with the decades distancing British rule. The explosion of feminist studies in the West, and parallel though distinct women’s movements in the social arena here, have acted as catalysts in the forging of new textual practices. The emergence of resistant post-colonial and feminist readings have also been further invigorated by the critical theories circulating in English and American universities, themselves in turn reacting to Gallic and German voices. One has to contend here with Anthony Appiah’s scathing observation on readers and readings so positioned. He remarks: ‘Post-coloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia, a relatively small, Western style, Western trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.’8 This intelligentsia has also been targeted for attack in India in the past couple of years, by revivalist Hindu forces, as anti-national. It is an attack that has acquired special stridency after this intelligentsia, with some notable exceptions, emerged in the vanguard of those who condemned the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 by a well-mobilized crowd of Hindu fundamentalists. But it has been possible from this very beleaguered position to, at least, generate a dialogue for a form of national subjectivity which is bracingly self-critical and agile, and definitely not blindly ‘mediating the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism’. However peripheral this dialogue, it has not been lost on the forces of religious fundamentalism appropriating the nationalist label. Let us move now from this reader’s situation in history to that of the writer’s.

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At the time that Shelley was writing, England was contending with the forces unleashed by the revolutions in America and France, the rise and fall of Napoleon and the Industrial Revolution. Thousands of copies of Paine’s Rights of Man were in circulation. Godwin, the author of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, was in the words of Hazlitt ‘looked up to…and sought after… wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme’.9 These are the themes repeatedly rehearsed in Shelley’s poetry and prose. E.P.Thompson notes that in ‘the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interest between themselves…as against their rulers and employers’.10 Shelley declares, more dramatically, that it was ‘the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors’ (Preface to Hellas, p. 448), and it appeared to him that England had ‘arrived like the nations which surround[ed] it at a crisis in its destiny’.11 But it was also the age when the forces of conservatism closed ranks and came down with severe ferocity on radical thought and action. The Peterloo Massacre is but one celebrated example. Shelley, when noticed at all, aroused violent reactions to his attacks on church and king, and for his personal challenge to the institution of marriage. It was also the age when the British empire over India was being extended and consolidated by Hastings, Cornwallis and Wellesley, as it was also the age when England, France and Russia were struggling with the Ottoman empire for control over Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. The Turkish Forces were to be decisively routed by this alliance in the battle of Navarino in 1827. In the preface to his historical and definitely interventionist effort, Hellas, Shelley is at pains to demarcate his work from that of a historian. He states that ‘it will be impossible to obtain an account of…[the war] sufficiently authentic for historical material; but poets have their privilege’ (p. 447). Not rigidly bound to the factual, the poet supposedly functions in a realm of greater freedom. One grants Shelley that. A historian’s text, after all, while as much a constitution as any other text, has to have recognizable, unalterable facts and events even though the selection of what make up the ‘facts of history’ and the arrangement of these can result in radically irreconcilable perspectives of a period.12 Shelley repeatedly chooses to write about history selecting and interpreting particular epochs, events and cultures to stand for certain manifestations of the human character as it functions historically. What he produces, repeatedly, is an ethical allegorization of man in history. But in this production gets inscribed Shelley’s own implication in the histories of race, class, and gender. Discussing the ‘open boundary of history, and fiction’, Suzanne Gearhart notes: ‘If one cannot write history without writing fiction, one cannot write fiction without writing history.’ Neither can be reduced to the other as ‘each is part of the process by which the other is constituted’.13 In Metahistory, Hayden White analyses what he calls the ‘deep structure of the historical imagination’.14 White declares that ‘the historian performs an essentially poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain’ for his explanatory purpose (p. x). For him ‘a historiographical style represents a particular combination of modes of

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emplotment, argument, and ideological implication’ (p. 29). He further notes that there are ‘elective affinities’ among these (p. 29). Shelley, as he repeatedly plots the course of human history in his poems, would also yield to such an analysis, revealing a romantic mode of emplotment implying an anarchist ideology. But his mode of argument is not formist with its immersion in concrete particulars as required by White’s graph of ‘elective affinities’. Rather, we find in him an abstract mode of argument veering between mechanist and organicist. That is, he is interested more in deducing the principles and laws behind historical processes and the ends toward which they lead. But Shelley’s poems are also poetic in the special literary sense, where poetry is a mode of writing in which language is put to special emotive use. In a poetic constitution of history in this literary sense, the poetry performs a very special function. The poem emerges not just as another theorization of historical process, or as one of the documents studied by the historian, but as a form that can encode the subject position of the historian. Shelley clearly reveals his ambition to have a place in the canonized tradition of not just English but the European intellectual tradition. Aeschylus, Plato, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth are reverently cited as names he has to contend with. Queen Mab with the appended notes quoting Godwin, Holbach, Spinoza, Condorcet and so on makes clear the intellectual milieu he is operating from. The poems themselves, at their best, emerge as poetry charged with emotions subtle, delicate, or alternately dramatic and exalted. The subjective states presented through them are celebrated as universal. The mastery of an amazing variety of stanza forms, the creation of certain linguistic formulations characterized as Shelleyan are now part of English literary history. It seems all the more necessary to acknowledge the power of his canonized works, for it is this power which disarms the reader and, effectively, delays the formation of resistance to some of the positions taken. In his long historical poems, Shelley dramatizes the range of human emotions which propel historical forces. Emotion-filled scenes of violence charged by pride, anger or righteous zeal dominate the turgid verse of Revolt. Each Spenserian stanza encompasses a host of emotions in contrast to the superior modulation of emotions through the variegated lyrics and poetic speeches of Prometheus. The early Queen Mab, though less dramatic, is also filled with an emotionally charged survey of the wrongs of history. History as an emotional experience, as a host of feelings, is what is displayed in the chiefly lyrical and descriptive presentations. Political tyranny produces anger, malice, bitterness and sadness, to combat which resistance is formed in a spirit of vengeance, or a Promethean unyielding forgiveness and endurance which wears out evil. The rights of man or the possibility of political justice are produced as ecstasy, love, hope, calm and delight. The emotional being of various subject states becomes in these presentations not the underside or unconscious but the very energy of history. The reasoned, cognitive statements of a Demogorgon or the Spirit of the Earth appear anti-climactic and inadequate to account for these turbulent scenes. It is a fact that Shelley produces not a single original idea about historical man in his poems.

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Moreover, the ideas generated about man are full of contradictions. The panaceas to the ills of history are weak, whether it is the inexplicable promise of a second Eden by Queen Mab, the vague transcendental hope of change in Revolt or the romantic anarchism elaborated at the end of Prometheus. It is not in the realm of ideas, then, that Shelley’s constructions of history find their force, but the models of the emotional modes of being-in-history that his poetic evocations of characters and events are able to produce. Shelley chooses personae who can stand for the state of humanness, dramatizing mainly ethical states of good and evil to which he ascribes emotional characteristics. The principles of selection and arrangement of these states produce a history that Shelley is not quite aware of writing, and place him in histories of writing that he would not perhaps have liked to belong to. An avowedly radical, feminist Shelley is seen to coexist with an imperialist, patriarchal one. It is not that one is a truer Shelley than another. What we have in exemplary form are the intricate polarities that thwart the constitution of a stable or consistent historical self. By 1818–19, the Indian subcontinent was decisively the seat of empire. The establishment of this empire was not untroubled by moral questions in England. The protracted trial of Warren Hastings in the 1790s is an instance that imperial policy in India which was evolving gradually had to ‘remain legitimate in the terms of British political discourse’.15 Shelley questioned the very terms of this political discourse. In 1812, in ‘An Address to the Irish People’, he declared unequivocally: The interests of the poor gain nothing from the wealth or extension of a nation’s boundaries; they gain nothing from glory, a word that has often served as a cloak to the ambition or avarice of statesmen…. The conquests in India, by which England has gained glory indeed, but a glory which is not more honourable than that of Buonaparte, are nothing to them. (Prose, p. 55) Yet the mode of representation chosen for Asia in Prometheus serves unwittingly to erase the unease within the colonial enterprise. In Prometheus, as in Revolt, Shelley decides to enliven his evocations of historical man with the introduction of a romantic interest. Prometheus, a blend of Shelley’s reading of Milton’s Satan, the Prometheus of Aeschylus, and Christ, is endowed with a bride, Asia. The idea of Prometheus is generated through a range of lyrical interactions which display a tumult of emotions let loose and then brought under control. The mode used for Asia is distinctly different. A preponderance of images of beauty and light create an emotional state of being barely comprehending the actions it finds itself caught in. Scenes from history recede as we get propelled into strange spiritual voyages unwinding time. Asia waits, in that ‘far Indian vale’ (I, 1. 826) for Prometheus to evolve into a historically effective man. ‘Voices in the Air’ sing to her: ‘Life of Life! thy lips

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enkindle/With their love the breath between them.’ She responds: ‘My soul is an enchanted boat,/Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float/ Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing’ (II, v). She narrates the historical achievements of Prometheus before she parted from him (II, iv). She appears to have been merely the spectator. She is addressed as mother by the childlike Spirit of the Earth. Tenderness, sensuousness, beauty, intuitiveness, passivity are the qualities generated by the lyrics to evoke her. The political and historical organization of time are irrelevant to the timeless realm which Asia inhabits. Her subjectivity is placed outside history, as she waits, available to European man, while he suspends historical being to retreat into a pastoral cave. In his recent book, Culture and Imperialism, Said notes: ‘The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming…is very important to culture and imperialism and constitutes one of the main connections between them.’16 This power can be seen at its evocative best in Shelley’s enticing presentation of Asia. Even as Asia’s difference creates the sense of the diversity of life forms, the European is rendered dominant and decisive, and Asia rendered mute and opaque. The historical manoeuvrings of the process of empire building are totally elided, for Asia is the happy, willing bride of Prometheus. The world is encompassed, as it were. Ironically, in that very encompassing effort, there stands revealed the hegemonic exercise of power which fissures all unitary notions of the world. Shelley homogenizes a whole continent, and makes it a convenient complementarity, while giving to Europe the nightmare and privilege of history. ‘Past ages crowd’ on Prometheus (I, 1. 561) as he contemplates the effect of the ‘clear knowledge’ (I, 1. 542) he awoke in man. In seeking a form to impose on human history at large, a form which no actual history provides him, Shelley chooses to imagine it into existence by conflating various traditions, stories and scenes from European history. Thus scenes evocative of the Reign of Terror, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crucifixion of Christ all get dramatized as the nightmarish violence that characterizes history if man loses control over his moral self. Shelley attempts no chronology as he concentrates on an emotional detailing of history gone awry. He seeks no empirical or factual explanations. But while Prometheus evokes the history of peoples, Asia becomes just a space, a setting rugged or idyllic as required, a sensuous being distant or close as needed by the protagonist of all the action. For Warren Hastings, knowledge about India was linked with power, for he felt that ‘[e]very accumulation of knowledge and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state.’17 Shelley was familiar with Lawrence’s Empire of the Nairs detailing the matrilineal set-up in Malabar.18 Shelley’s stance on education is contrary to Macaulay’s: ‘Many native Indians have acquired, it is said, a competent knowledge in the arts and philosophy of Europe…. But the thing to be sought is that they should as they would if they were free to attain to a system of arts and literature of their own’ (Prose, p. 238). But in this poem, he chooses to negate the realm of Asia as any form of worldly

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knowledge. While Hastings’s ‘right of conquest’ would be anathema to him, he yet constitutes a form of representation for this region, a representation which has played, and continues to play, no negligible part in history and historical discourse. As late as 1967, G.R. Elton in his influential The Practice of History states that there is something ‘markedly ahistorical about the attitudes embedded… in the classic minds of India and China’!19 Shelley, who celebrates the acquisition of a constitution by Naples, exults in verse over the revolution in Spain, writes an ‘Ode to Liberty’, obviously fails to engage with the issue of the colonial appropriation of the Indian subcontinent in this verse drama which presents, ironically, a moral, emancipatory approach to man’s freedom. Here it seems to have been inevitable to fall into the dominant historical self-positioning of the West. Interestingly, S.Kaviraj has noted that the ‘delusion’ of an ‘eternal existence’ that representations like this provided for this region, proved a starting base for nationalist writers like Bankim in late nineteenth-century Bengal, as they were looking for a composite identity to forge out of politically disparate, immensely complex, scattered cultures and religions which occupied the space designated as India.20 It is also an image now deployed for profit by the tourist industry, and one used to counter the economic hegemony of the West implied in the category ‘third world’ into which this subcontinent is pushed, however arcane the designation ‘third’ might be. If the subjectivities we are displaced into for Prometheus, for Asia, for man, for woman, by the masterful lyrics of the drama are marked by a differential notion of power, similar is the lyrical differentiation of subjectivities created in the Revolt. ‘Can man be free if woman be a slave?’ (II, xiii) is the famous ringing cry of Cythna which, if quoted out of context, presents Shelley as worthy to be the son-in-law of Mary Wollstonecraft. Both Laon and Cythna are revolutionary leaders. But Cythna is evoked through a lyrical mode which makes her a veritable Wordsworthian child of nature endowed with beauty and mystical powers unavailable to man. She is a ‘spirit strong and mild,/Which death, or pain or peril could despise,/Yet melt in tenderness! What genius wild/ Yet mighty, was enclosed within one simple child!’ (Revolt, II, xxxii). In fact, contemporary reviewers singled out passages like this for praise while they damned the poem, especially its attack on religion. Cythna is tutored in revolution by Laon. She acknowledges that if she is ‘undaunted’ it is a power which he bestows. She hopes to ‘become good and great and free’ by ‘most resembling’ Laon (II, xl). When she leads the revolution in Laon’s absence, she takes on a female version of his name, Laone. She commands magically, he through the power of words. When people hear her voice, they stand and move ‘as men in whom new love had stirred/ Deep thoughts’ (VII, xli), while Laon studies great thinkers and from all those ‘deathless minds’ he ‘[a]s from a mine of magic store’ draws ‘[w]ords which were weapons’ (II, xx). Cythna gives birth to a child and her maternal self is evoked with great emotional depth: ‘I had no mortal fears/…. It was a human thing which to my bosom clove’ (VII, xix). Spiritualized beyond the bounds of credulity, she yet has a body the tyrant can rape. The female revolutionary leader

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then has a psychic dimension that makes her inspiring; but her physical self proves ultimately disabling in manoeuvring through complex historical forces. Her entry into maternity is a further indication of the marginalization of the political cause from her consciousness. Not strength but frailty emerges as the hallmark of the woman’s intervention in history. Laon pleads with the tyrant for a safe passage for Cythna to America which emerges ‘like an Eagle’ whose ‘golden plume’ ‘gleams when Earth is wrapped in gloom;/ An epitaph of glory for the tomb/Of murdered Europe’ (XI, xxiii). Shelley’s short occasional poems, too, lambast the tyranny in England and Europe. America is free from history as a ‘[p]eople mighty in its youth’, worship ‘with rudest rites, Freedom and Truth’ (XI, xxii). But, in this long poem, in which a model for revolution against tyranny is elaborated, the region evoked to display tyranny is Eastern. Shelley’s original title for the poem was Laon and Cythna. The overtones of incest between the protagonists and the virulent attack on Christianity had, however, to be changed to escape the wrath of the censors, and the poem was released with the title The Revolt of Islam. The change indicates a canny recognition of the cultural and political stereotyping acceptable to his readers, an effortless mastery of the emotional episteme of the times. While Shelley sees little to recommend the priest’s Christianity over Islam, there is a deft deflection of focus in the new title. Islam and tyranny blend into the Eastern setting diffusely evoked through scattered references to the sun bursting on the lurid battle scene ‘over wide Asia’ (VI, iv) and the ‘Ethiop’s hall’ (IX, xvii). In this allegory of the reign of evil which a virtuous love of liberty attempts to overthrow, the Eastern setting absorbs the connotations of tyranny in its extreme, unredeemed and violent form. The much anthologized sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ reveals a similar emotional map created for cruelty and pride in the desert sands, so skilfully is the setting made to appear inevitable for the portrayal. The ‘I’ of the poem becomes a persona for the English poet contemplating the ‘traveller’ from the ‘antique land’ (1.1). Since he is talking to the reader, she is irresistibly aligned to him in understanding, in contemplating this vision of pride and mockery mocked. Two contemporary reviews of the Revolt are revealing. John Taylor Coleridge writes: The laws and government on which Mr. Shelley’s reasoning proceeds are the Turkish, administered by a lawless despot; his religion is the Mahommedan maintained by servile hypocrites, and his scene for their joint operation, Greece, the land full beyond all others of recollections of former glory and independence, now covered with shame and sunk in slavery. We are English men, Christians, free, and independent; we ask Mr.Shelley how his case applies to us? or what we learn from it to the prejudice of our own institutions?21

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Leigh Hunt, attacking this reviewer, picks on this very comment. He counters: The Reviewer might as well ask what we learnt from any other fiction, which was to apply without being literal…. The reader of Gulliver’s Travels might as well ask how the big or little men applied to him, he being neither as tall as a church nor as short as a molehill.’22 The point of John Coleridge’s English perspective remains to be reckoned with, however. Whereas the names in Gulliver’s Travels do not reverberate with cultural connotations, Shelley’s historical names and representations obviously do. The historical effects are palpable in Coleridge’s reading. Hellas, written in 1821, anticipates the political allegiance that England was to form in the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire. As he writes, however, Shelley is in despair at England’s support for the Turks. Poetic licence is in full play as he constructs an emotional ideology which can impel what he considers as the right form of political action. The poem, written ‘at the suggestion of the events of the moment’, cannot treat the ‘subject, in its present state…otherwise than lyrically’ (p. 446). The Turks are tyrants while Greece is a civilization in thrall to the barbaric Turk. The Greece that Shelley evokes is not the early nineteenthcentury reality but an Athens whose ‘imperial spirits/Rule the present from the past’ (ll. 700–1). A near mythical Hellas gets created. Temporal sequence and empirical history are totally bypassed to create an emotional history of a civilization oppressed by barbarity. Shelley stages the drama as a renewed version of the Crusades, with Islam pitted against the cross. The chorus of Greek women sing that, as in the past, the ‘moon of Mahomet/ Arose, and it shall set:/ While blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon/ The cross leads generations on’ (ll. 221–4). A Phantom tells the fearful Turk ‘Islam must fall’ (l. 887); Britain by helping the Turk is giving the ‘Keys of ocean to the Islamite’ (l. 1017) and the ‘blazon of the cross’ is ‘veiled’ (l. 1018) with ‘British skill directing Othman might’ (l. 1019). The poetic ambience given to the Turk is strident, full of the chimeras of superstition with little trace of sagacity or historical will. He is surrounded by characters who deliver long involved speeches full of lurid portents. One reports: ‘Ominous signs/Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky/ One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun; It has rained blood’ (ll. 601–4). Their words, Mahmud states, stream ‘like a tempest/Of dazzling mist within…[his] brain’ (ll. 786–7). No sense of the mighty achievements of the Ottoman empire is allowed to intrude into this projection of the Turkish ruler. Shelley’s view of the Turk here conforms to those he expresses in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’: [T]he Turkish Empire is in its last stage of ruin, and it cannot be doubted but that the time is approaching when the deserts of Asia Minor and of Greece will be colonized by the overflowing population of countries less enslaved and debased, and that the climate and the scenery which was the birthplace of all that is wise and beautiful will not remain forever the spoil of wild beasts and unlettered Tartars. (Prose, p. 239)

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Yet in ‘An Address to the Irish People’, Shelley had stated: ‘political institution has…the greatest influence on the human character, and is that alone which differences the Turk from the Irishman’ (Prose, p. 54). The preface to Hellas declares that the Turks are the ‘enemies of… Christianity and civilization’. Shelley was attacked throughout his life, and even posthumously, for his atheism. The day after Shelley’s death, an article in the Courier began: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or no.’23 Yet it is from him that we get these delineations in Hellas, which is in consonance with his view in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ that the ‘zeal of the missionaries of…the Christian faith will produce beneficial innovation’ in the Indian peninsula ‘even by the application of dogmas and forms of what is here an outworn incumbrance’ (Prose, p. 238)! In a linear notion of the historical evolution of the peoples of the world, Christianity appears to emerge as the most highly evolved religion. Shelley uses a chorus of Greek captive women to create Hellas. Their lyrical cries, alternately graceful, vulnerable, despairing, hopeful or visionary, chart the troubled course of freedom in ancient Greece and in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Europe (11. 46–91). The feminine gender and plural number get used to evoke frailty, and yet a dignified collective will, which casts the Turk as isolated and individual ravisher. The ‘Indian slave’ is part of his despotic machinery. Asia feminized, and as the happy bride of Prometheus, is idealized out of active history while the helplessness of the Greek women is used to activate the beneficent forces of history to rescue them. Similar is the use of the rape of Cythna in Revolt. Her suffering is to aid us in hating and so acting against the tyrant Othman. The creation of the frail feminine self thus aids the construction of the hero and villain of European historical consciousness. As he details the discursive practices that fall under the rubric ‘Orientalism’, Said notes that the geographical and cultural proximity of Islam to Christianity caused it to be treated with the ‘sense of danger’ never felt regarding the Indian Orient which consequently was treated with ‘proprietary hauteur’.24 The final chorus of Hellas is justly celebrated. It expresses the visionary hope: ‘The world’s great age begins anew,/The golden years return’ (11. 1060–1). After the harnessing of lyrical force around Hellas, one has reservations about the distribution of power in this ‘golden’ world. What the lyric promises is renewal and promise for the Western world. The preface to the poem is explicit. The ‘final triumph of the Greek cause’ will be ‘a portion of the cause of civilization and social improvement’ (p. 446). Shelley also proclaims: ‘We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their roots in Greece. But for Greece we might still have been savages and idolaters; or what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China and Japan possess’ (p. 447)! That England has a decisive role to play in the making of the Western world, and at the time of writing seems to be muffing it, is what is so distressing to Shelley. The comfort Shelley is storing

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up appears to be an assurance of British might, though used perversely here. That Britain is emerging decisively on the world map in this post-Napoleonic era seems accepted without any reservation by Shelley even though he inveighs against its tyrannic use of force at home. The preface states: Russia desires to possess, not to liberate Greece; and is contented to see the Turks, its natural enemies, and the Greeks its intended slaves, enfeeble each other until one or both fall into its net. The wise and generous policy of England would have consisted in establishing the independence of Greece and in maintaining it both against Russia and the Turk. (p. 448) The dismemberment of the Ottoman empire and the consolidation of British interests working in tandem seem to arouse no ironic perspective. An empowering emotional mythology of the weight and significance of European history, no matter how often derailed, is used to shore up this dominant position. It is interesting that Shelley does not use scenes from British but European history for his delineations. What is foregrounded is an alliance of the historical forces of the Western world. Shelley’s audience of the discerning few thus gets constructed as European, male, and Christian. The poems work skilfully to create emotional resonances which make this mode of being the only one capable of historical effectiveness. In these poems, the poetry emerges forcefully as a performative act which naturalizes the reader into these positions. History does not merely serve as the backdrop or catalyst for the literary work. Rather, the work performs an historical function by creating readers who inhabit an emotional map of the world which serves partisan political ends. Nowhere is what Jerome McGann calls the ‘agenting function’ of the poetic act more clear.25 Louis Althusser notes how in 1778 Anquetil Duperron in Legislation Orientale opposed ‘the real East to Montesquieu’s oriental myth’.26 But, he remarks trenchantly: ‘[O]nce the geographical myth of despotism has been denounced, there remains an Idea of despotism that no Turkish protestations can refute.’ The images and emotions which underpin such ideas are forcefully provided by lyrical representations of history such as Shelley’s. The aesthetic ordering of historical material proves to be an active intervention in the history of interactions of the countries and continents chosen for representation. The poetic modes chosen constitute a variety of subject positions in which race, gender and historical space get produced as differentiated modes of being which inevitably result in marginalization from, or decisive control over, historical forces. The differential constructions which add to the poetic richness of the works camouflage the power play latent in the emotional subjectivities produced. The more aesthetically effective the work, the more effective is the concealment of the conscription of the reader into the subject position desired by the artist. In

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Prometheus, for example, an Indian woman reader is unwittingly, effortlessly positioned in the space designated as Prometheus. The celebrated lyrics of Asia conceal the political implications of her pacification. The much less skilful verse of the Revolt deters the reader from an easy positioning on the side of the hero or heroine. Similarly, the sonnet on ‘Ozymandias’ provides a more indelible emotional space for the Eastern character than the crudely dramatized Turk of Hellas or the Revolt. The beautiful lyrics evoking Hellas, needless to say, create a very desirable ethos for the Western world and lure the reader into a Western subject position. In the context of these earnestly undertaken historical poems, albeit of varying artistic merit, Shelley’s much anthologized lyrics and occasional poems acquire overtones otherwise suppressed. These transportable units of emotion, presented in unique linguistic formulation, are seen to make acceptable subject positions which a more prosaic presentation would have made us balk at. In this context, the notion of power, and the change it can bring about, so splendidly produced in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, leaves us wondering to whom this power would be made available. The song of the skylark read as ecstatic enchantment makes us uneasy. With the power of this compelling aesthetic force, the artist coveting it can make acceptable an interested, differentiated world of listening subjects, men, and women, Europe, and its others, who would then inhabit the lyrical modes crafted to evoke them. In the process, the actual historical position of those subjects would stand displaced. A socialist Shelley has been constructed out of his occasional political poems, especially powerful allegorical pieces like The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘Song to the Men of England’.27 These poems dramatize very effectively the conditions of the majority in England ground down by the economic recession after the Napoleonic wars and the effects of the Industrial Revolution. These poems were written in, and constitute, a historical juncture where mass political action was taking violent forms of expression and provoking equally violent repressive action. ‘The Mask’ was not published in Shelley’s lifetime as it would have invited prosecution. However, published as a pamphlet in 1832, it was quoted by political speakers during the struggle for the Reform Bill, and a hundred years later the poem was chanted by hunger marchers in Toronto.28 Shelley has obviously created with great success an emotional position of opposition to injustice transcending the immediate occasion. It is these unique forceful formulations of highly charged emotional states that protesters have found amenable to inhabit. But the emotional power generated by the poetic skill deflects attention from certain problems. What has come to be a much written about event in the history of English radicalism, is what roused Shelley to write ‘The Mask’. On 16 August 1819, the military fired into a crowd gathered at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to hear Hunt speak on parliamentary reform, killing eleven people. The poem begins on a selfaccusatory note: ‘As I lay asleep in Italy/There came a voice from over the Sea,/ And with great power it forth led me/To walk in the visions of poesy’(i). Thus

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the power of the historical event is the impetus for the poem. The allegorical vision of the contention between Anarchy and Hope is strikingly dramatized. To shore up hope against repression, the victims are reminded of the wrong done to them and told to ‘[r]ise like Lions after slumber’ (xxxviii) to resist with nonviolent force in ‘unvanquishable number’ and shame the oppressors out of their violent ways. ‘Ye are many—they are few’, intones the hortatory voice. The protesters, if they are the oppressed, would have to change it to ‘[we]…are many —they are few’, or stage it as a self-exhortation to the passive timid self by the revolutionary one, creating a portrait of the revolutionary subject as a divided one. Otherwise, ‘The Mask’ appears as one written for and by the leaders of the revolt who are somehow able to escape these divisions in the self. The anger and the indignation so successfully produced by the verse becomes a usable unit of emotion for leaders of movements, which rouses the led to inscribe themselves as angry victims, a position both activating and restraining. That the inscriptions carry along with them a new mode of leadership and a new set of power relations goes unremarked. When we read these poems in conjunction with the historical recovery of the English working class in the period by E.P.Thompson, it becomes clear that Shelley’s characterization and positioning of these men is from the elevated position of a ‘traditional intellectual’, to use a pertinent term from Gramsci.29 Thompson reveals that far from needing any such exhortation from above, there were plenty of ‘organic intellectuals’, i.e. ‘thousands of articulate working men’ questioning the social and economic structure (p. 225). In 1817, for example, the Leicester framework knitters put forward in a series of resolutions an ‘under consumption theory of capitalist crisis’ (p. 225). In 1818, Thompson notes, an ‘Address to the public of strikebound Manchester by “A Journey man Cotton Spinner” ‘outlines the grievance felt by working people with an acute insight into the character of capitalist exploitation (p. 226). In the era of Luddite riots, the March of the Blanketeers, and the Peterloo massacre, the ‘men of England’ surely needed no reminder from the poet: ‘Ye see/ The steal ye tempered glance on ye’ (‘Song to the Men of England’, vii). In his poems, then, the actual history of the working class is side-stepped by Shelley who positions himself as their champion. The poetic presentation of history fictionalizes the situation to produce a subject position for the working class which will always make it necessary for it to have leaders from above. It is a positioning of a poetic voice which, in the very act of inciting men to action, refuses them a voice and an initiative, which, as Thompson has massively detailed, were not lacking in these times. The poems successfully displace its listeners into emotional states of anger and indignation, concealing the power-conserving mode of the displacement. A similar patrician conservatism subverting an overt radical stance becomes even clearer if we look at the sonnet addressed to Wordsworth (p. 526). The lament for Wordsworth’s turn away from revolutionary politics simultaneously

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entails a lowly positioning of the ‘blind and battling multitude’ to whom he was like a guiding star. Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude. (11. 7–10) The height of the star above this dark mass makes us rethink the terms of liberty and truth which the devotee of revolutionary faith upholds. The sonnet draws us into a lamenting, eulogizing state which accedes to the placement of Wordsworth far above the multitude. Shelley’s positioning of the masses in these poems leaves us in no doubt about the iniquities of the ruling powers of his time. But in adopting a stance, as though he seeks to arouse a collective indignation, an indignation which existed in any case, and in detailing the modes of the oppression, he only reinforces it by making it appear inevitable that the masses will always be led and ruled from above. The emotional questioning of existing power relations has the effect of shoring up new power formations though more liberal and benevolent. The more successful the poem, the more effective it is in concealing this, in erasing the empirical historical selves of people, by making the form of subjectivities it draws them into appear real. The aesthetic effect is…an effect of domination: the subjection of individuals to the dominant ideology…the ideology of the ruling class’, declare Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey (p. 96). But they also point out that subjection ‘for the members of the educated “dominant class”’ is ‘a freedom to think within ideology, a submission which is experienced and practised as if it were a mastery’ (p. 96). As readers of Shelley, no matter how critical, we are already positioned amongst the ‘more select classes’ as we perform our function as aesthetic judges schooled by the conventions of reading poetry. But one has to emphasize that this aesthetic power is exercised only by some works, whether of Shelley or any other writer. One has to therefore account for the aesthetic effect as an a priori which facilitates the subjection of individuals to any particular ideology. It is what Barthes, echoing Kant, calls the ‘pleasure of the text’, its ability to create an ‘islet within the human’ (p. 16), its ability temporarily to suspend ‘the war of languages’ (p. 29).30 Kant noted that ‘pleasure is the determining ground’ of aesthetic judgement and located the ‘ground of this pleasure’ in the ‘universal, although subjective’ condition of all reflective judgements.31 It is in this amorphous confluence of the universal and the subjective that, paradoxically, histories get subtly erased and written. It is a total acknowledgement of the power of the texts that provide pleasure that underlies this exploration of the origins in history, and much more important, the effects in history, of poetry. The aesthetically successful work functions as a

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powerful mode of cognition. The images and emotions we are displaced into constitute our ideology, ‘the lived relation between men and their world’.32 The subtle poetic mapping of these relations between men and women, one class and another, one culture and another, constitutes our historical selves. Poetry thus plays a significant role in the contending forms of knowledge that move the agents and forces of history. Classrooms of literature where we enact what Balibar and Macherey call the ‘rituals of literary consumption and “cultural” practice’ prove to be powerful spaces of their dissemination (p. 94). Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi NOTES An outline of this article was presented at a seminar on nationalism organized by the English Department of Miranda House, University of Delhi, in April 1992. A full version was presented at the Shelley Bicentenary Seminar conducted by the Department of English, University of Delhi in September 1992. This is a revised version of the latter. I thank Zakia Pathak and Sara Joseph for their astute, unsparing comments which were of immense help in the revision. A pungent remark of Harish Trivedi after listening to the paper at the University Seminar also stayed with me during the revision. 1 Thomas Hutchison (ed.), Shelley: The Complete Poetical Works (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 33. All quotations from the poems and their prefaces are from this edition. The line and/or page numbers are incorporated in the text. 2 T.S.Eliot: ‘I was intoxicated by Shelley’s poetry at the age of fifteen and now find it almost unreadable’, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), p. 96. 3 Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, ‘On literature as an ideological form’, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 79–99. The page numbers for all citations from this article are incorporated in the text. 4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975). All page numbers cited relate to this edition. 5 Roland Barthes, ‘Theory of the text’, trans. Ian McLeod, in Untying the Text, pp. 31–47. 6 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 7 Macaulay, ‘Indian Education, Minute of the 2nd of Feb.’ (1835), in Prose and Poetry, selected G.M.Young (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1952), p. 729. 8 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the post in post-modern the post in post-colonial?’, Critical Inquiry, 17, 2 (Winter 1991), p. 348. 9 Hazlitt quoted by Isaac Kramnick in his introduction to W.Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 7. 10 E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollanz, 1980), p. 13. All page numbers cited are from this edition.

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11 ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, in Shelley’s Prose or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1954; rpt. 1988), p. 239. All page numbers for Shelley’s prose pieces are from this edition. 12 E.H.Carr notes how by the choice of some facts, rather than others, a historian distinguishes and transforms mere facts into ‘facts of history’. What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961; rpt. 1981), p. 10. 13 Suzanne Gearhart, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 27. 14 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. ix. All page numbers relate to this edition. 15 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On the construction of colonial power: Structure, discourse, hegemony’, Occasional Papers on History and Society, 2nd series, no. xxxv (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, February 1991), p. 33. 16 Edward, W.Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. xiii. 17 Quoted by Svati Joshi in her introduction to Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History (New Delhi: Trianka, 1991), p. 40. 18 Richard Holmes notes that this work by J.H.Lawrence was one of the most influential feminist tracts published in England by Thomas Hookham in 1811. Richard Holmes, Shelley: the Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 153. 19 G.R.Elton, The Practice of History (Collins Fontana and Sydney University Press, 1967, rpt. 1978), p. 12. 20 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ Occasional Papers on History and Society, 2nd series, no. xlii (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, August 1991), p. 40. 21 James E.Barcus (ed.), Shelley: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 129. 22 Barcus (ed.), Critical Heritage, p. 137. 23 Quoted by Richard Holmes in Shelley: the Pursuit, p. 730. 24 Said, Orientalism, p. 75. 25 Jerome McGann, Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgement of Literary Work (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 9. 26 Louis Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1982), p. 75. 27 Shelley’s Socialism by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling and Popular Songs wholly political and destined to awaken and direct the imaginations of the reformers by Percy Bysshe Shelley (London and New York: Journeyman Press, 1979). 28 Noted by Desmond King-Hele in Shelley: His Thought and Work (London: Macmillan, 1964), p. 149. 29 Gramsci draws a distinction between traditional intellectuals as against organic intellectuals and elaborates on it in his discussion, The formation of the intellectual’, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin

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Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971, rpt. 1983), pp. 5–23. 30 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975). All page numbers relate to this edition. 31 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H.Bernard (New York and London: Collier Macmillan, 1951), p. 28. 32 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979, rpt. 1982), p. 233.

Mrs Dalloway and the Armenian Question TRUDI TATE

The fact is,’ wrote Harold Nicolson in 1919, ‘that our Government for electoral reasons allowed the country to imagine that the Armistice meant peace. This it most assuredly was not’.1 When is a war over? For Britain, the Great War had several formal conclusions: the Armistice, the Versailles Treaty, ‘Peace Day’, the founding of the League of Nations, the burial of the Unknown Soldier. It also had a number of practical endings: soldiers returning home, demobilization, a return to a peacetime economy, the expulsion of many women from the labour force. Other aspects of the war had no conclusion; significant numbers of people were permanently disabled or war neurotic; others were suffering from the deaths of relatives, lovers and friends.2 Indeed, some historians argue that the war continued well into the 1920s, and shaped the history of the entire twentieth century.3 In December 1919, the economist John Maynard Keynes published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a forceful critique of the Versailles Treaty. Keynes had attended the negotiations, and was concerned that Britain (like France) had selfishly pursued its own immediate interests at the expense of the long-term needs of the whole of Europe. The war, he argued, had ruined the economies of Europe, leaving countries which had previously been selfsufficient now dependent on the United States for their basic food requirements. The Versailles Treaty made the situation much worse. The war had set Europe on the road to ruin; the Treaty threatened to complete this process.4 In Britain, however, people seemed unaware of the extraordinary dangers presented by the conditions of the peace. They simply ‘received the treaty without reading it’ (p. 4) and remained complacently detached from the real political and economic problems of the rest of Europe. At the same time, the British government was engaged in maintaining a blockade of central Europe for

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several months after the end of the war; a great many civilians died of starvation as a result.5 In Keynes’s account—unlike much post-war fiction—Britain seems remarkably untraumatized by the war. Economically, at least, its people are recklessly content: In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or realise in the least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of our life where we dropped them, with this difference only, that many of us seem a good deal richer than we were before. Where we spent millions before the war, we have now learnt that we can spend hundreds of millions and apparently not suffer for it. Evidently we did not exploit to the utmost the possibilities of our economic life. We look, therefore, not only to a return to the comforts of 1914, but to an immense broadening and intensification of them. All classes alike thus build their plans, the rich to spend more and save less, the poor to spend more and work less. (pp. 1–2) Such luxury is possible only in Britain and the United States. In the rest of Europe, ‘the earth heaves and no one is but aware of the rumblings’. It is a matter ‘of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilisation’ (p. 2). Britain is part of this ‘dying civilisation’ but does not know it. For British people, ‘England still stands outside Europe. Europe’s voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart and England is not of her flesh and body’ (p. 2). Like many commentators of the period, Keynes personifies the nation as a woman, at the same time as objectifying it as a body —a woman’s body. Yet the nation is no longer a single body, but a body part, detached from its proper place—an image of dismemberment which was particularly resonant after the Great War. Discourses of nationalism commonly depict the nation as a woman, at the same time as denying real women full citizenship of that nation.6 The dismembered limb of Britain is further reduced, to ‘England’7—a site of intense cultural activity in the 1920s, as a mythologized ‘England’ is constructed (by Lawrence, for example), partly in an attempt to suppress the trauma of the war. Other writers during this period were concerned to explore the political and imaginative consequences of the war, both for Britain and for the rest of Europe. They were also aware of the need to prevent future wars, and to establish an effective League of Nations. As Leonard Woolf argued in 1922: There can be no economic recovery in this country, no beginning to build up an educated and prosperous community, unless there is a complete © Routledge 1994

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break with the dangerous and extravagant foreign policy which has been pursued equally by Conservative and Liberal Governments. This country must stand out in Europe and the world as a sincere supporter of a policy of peace and international co-operation. The pivot of its programme must therefore be (1) a real League of Nations, inclusive of all nations, the members of which undertake a definite obligation not to go to war; (2) disarmament, beginning with drastic limitation of naval and military armaments, coupled with a general guarantee against aggression; (3) an equitable settlement of the reparation problem.8 Political action immediately after the war was even more important, Leonard Woolf argued, than it had been during the conflict,9 and he often despaired that the kinds of decisions which had taken Britain to war were being made again after it had ended. The early 1920s were ‘a time of continual crisis’,10 a period also dominated in Britain by a particularly unimaginative form of conservatism in parliamentary politics.11 People in Britain were strangely positioned in this period of peace, as the war continued in a fragmented form in various parts of Europe. In this article, I want to look at the ways in which Virginia Woolf represents the peculiar political climate in Britain after the war, focusing on Mrs Dalloway, a novel about postwar complacency and collusion in British political circles. Woolf’s explorations of subjectivity and gender have received a great deal of critical attention. How are these connected with the most pressing public issues of the period: the war and its consequences? MRS DALLOWAY (1925) Mrs Dalloway has been recognized as an important post-war novel, most obviously because of its representation of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked returned soldier. As Elaine Showalter notes, Woolf was one of the first writers to address the question of war-neurotic returned soldiers in some detail.12 Her representation of Septimus has received considerable critical attention. Here, I want to focus on a less obvious aspect of the war in this novel: the placing of Clarissa Dalloway and her circle. Mrs Dalloway is a novel which addresses questions of responsibility-both for the war and for the peace. It also poses some difficult questions about the ways in which women and men are located in relation to political power, and how to attribute blame for the disaster of the war. This is related to the complex ways in which the work directs both its satire and its sympathies. My argument is indebted to feminist re-readings of Woolf’s writing, but I also seek to challenge current feminist thinking about the novel. For it seems to me that Mrs Dalloway is more complex - and, ultimately, more challenging—than recent feminist readings have recognized.

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Mrs Dalloway has proved a troubling text for feminist readers, perhaps because of the text’s ambiguous attitude towards its central woman character, Clarissa Dalloway. Some feminist critics have sidestepped this problem by focusing on other women characters.13 Others have taken up the wider feminist issues raised by the novel—such as Woolf’s challenge to the boundaries of subjectivity, or her representations of compulsory heterosexuality—without engaging with the peculiar ambivalence of its central character.14 Feminist studies of women’s writing of the First World War, on the other hand, tend to treat the work as unproblematically endorsing Clarissa Dalloway.15 These studies tend to locate women outside the question of moral or political responsibility for the war. Women are either its victims or its critics. It seems to me, however, that Woolf’s novel takes a much more complex view of the relationship between gender, power, and the war. Her representation of Clarissa Dalloway is simultaneously sympathetic and satiric; this is what makes the work so unsettling. It is also crucial to the book’s politics. In the middle of June, 1923, Woolf wrote in her diary that she aimed ‘to criticise the social system, & show it at work, at its most intense’.16 Mrs Dalloway is set at precisely this period—the middle of June, 1923 —a time of profound and troubling change in both domestic and international politics. The dating of the novel is significant, locating it quite specifically in relation to public, shared events of the period, many of which are directly connected with the war. Mrs Dalloway takes place on a single day in the summer of 1923,17 nearly five years after the end of the war. But for many people, the war will never be over: For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed… (p. 5) Women mourn the dead, here represented as young and wealthy—men with titled parents; men who expect to inherit a manor house. The loss is both economic and emotional, with the economic mentioned first.18 The ‘favourite’ son being killed is of course a cliché of much war fiction (used without irony in Rosamund Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927), for example), as is the reference to the mother’s heroic effort to carry on regardless. However, it is Clarissa who sees Lady Bexborough in these terms, and wants to be like her (p. 12). This is the first of many satiric jabs at her view of the war. Clarissa Dalloway is not in mourning. For her, ‘it was over; thank Heaven— over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the Palace’ (p. 5). Everything seems to have been returned to its proper place. Mrs Dalloway, married to a Conservative Member of Parliament, is to give a party that evening for the

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members and supporters of her class—the politicians, courtiers, professors, Academy artists, physicians and business people who dominate the political, cultural and economic life of the nation. Mrs Dalloway is a political attack on those who managed the social and economic aspects of the war and kept its victims under control afterwards. The power might be concentrated in the hands of the men (such as Richard Dalloway), but they are supported by women (Clarissa, Lady Bruton); without the domestic and social base women provide, the political system could not function in the same way. Women’s ignorance, too, is part of the cultural structure which took Britain to war and continued to oppress its victims. Clarissa, with the ‘few twigs of knowl- edge Fräulein Daniels gave them’ is profoundly ignorant. ‘She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now’ (p. 10); ‘ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know’ (p. 160). She cannot tell the difference between the Armenians (refugees whose desperate situation was widely discussed in the newspapers) and the Albanians.19 Richard Dalloway is sitting on a parliamentary committee on the Armenian Question (pp. 156–7). Clarissa knows nothing about Richard’s work on the Armenians, and regards this as a sign of the dignity of their marriage. It is a token of respect between Clarissa and Richard as separate persons (p. 156). But more is at stake here than the status of their marriage. Clarissa has no interest in Armenian suffering as a political or ethical issue in its own right, and the text satirizes her mercilessly: [Richard] was already half-way to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled [Clarissa] on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say ‘Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.’ She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)—no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)—the only flowers she could bear to see cut. (p. 157) Clarissa thinks of herself as a child here, perceived by others as ‘spoilt’. She does not resist being infantilized; she allows Richard to put her down for an afternoon rest, enjoys the attention, allows him to settle ‘all her difficulties’ (about an invitation to her party). Yet even as she sinks into her most childish moment in the entire book, she reassures herself that the structure of their marriage secures ‘one’s independence, one’s self-respect—something, after all, priceless’ (p. 156)—because she does not remember the details of his committee work. Clarissa’s refusal to engage with the suffering of European refugees— also victims of the war—is masked by proto-feminist statements about marriage. Two quite separate arguments are elided. It is one thing to refuse to live vicariously through Richard, and quite another to ignore a political problem simply because

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he happens to be engaged with it. Her use of feminist ideas has proved attractive to later feminist readers, yet we need to be cautious about accepting them at face value. Here they are cynically employed as an excuse for refusing adult responsibility. Progressive rhetoric screens an absolute conservatism, which refuses even to think about the sufferings of refugees, much less act on them. Clarissa’s hope that her love for roses might help the Armenians is so preposterous that it draws attention to itself. People within and across societies are complexly linked, as the novel constantly demonstrates. But this does not mean that one person’s good fortune necessarily helps another. Indeed, in some cases what benefits one may harm others. This is made clear in the novel when characters have conflicting or irreconcilable aims. The struggle between Clarissa and Miss Kilman over Elizabeth’s affection, for example, can never be resolved so that both are satisfied or victorious. Towards the end of the novel Clarissa recognizes this, and relishes her discovery of the power struggle: ‘It was enemies one wanted, not friends’ (p. 229)—another legacy of the war. More than this: it is partly through the ‘enemy’ that the self is constructed, as Jacqueline Rose argues in Why War?20 THE ARMENIAN QUESTION But what was the Armenian problem in 1923? In Britain, the matter is now almost completely forgotten, yet it was extremely important at the time, and widely discussed in newspapers and political journals. It raised vital issues about human rights and Britain’s quasi-imperial responsibilities, and we need to recall the facts of the case if we are to grasp Woolf’s satire. That Woolf was well aware of the Armenians’ plight is almost beyond doubt. Indeed, no one who read the newspapers at all could have been unaware of the issue. Apart from dozens of reports in the newspapers between 1915 and 1923, the ‘Armenian Question’ was a topic of debate in the early 1920s in the Nation and Athenaeum, a journal for which she wrote, and for which Leonard Woolf was literary editor from 1923 to 1929.21 Lyndall Gordon notes that the Armenian massacres, like the Dreyfus affair, were fundamental issues in the shaping of Leonard Woolf’s political conscience; this was by no means an uncommon response.22 (The Albanians, by contrast, were only occasionally in the British news during the early 1920s, as Albanian refugees escaped from the Greek— Turkish war. Britain was indirectly involved in this conflict, too, but its effect on the Albanian people was not a subject which interested the British newspapers, unlike the Armenian Question.) The historian Arnold Toynbee was an active supporter of the Armenian cause, and published a number of books and articles on the matter. The Toynbees were friends of the Woolfs, and are mentioned several times in Virginia Woolf’s diary in the early 1920s.23 During the same period, the Woolfs were in contact with an Armenian friend, Altounyan, for whom they were literary executors.24

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The Armenian people, Christians in a largely Muslim area, had been colonized and expelled by various imperial powers since the eleventh century; by 1914, the original area of Armenia lay partly in Russia and partly in Turkey.25 During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman authorities made several attempts to clear the area of Armenians, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. In 1878, the Treaty of San Stefano was agreed between Turkey and Russia. Under this treaty, the Armenian lands and population came into the Russian sphere of influence where, historians seem to agree, they would have been safer. However, Britain perceived this arrangement as a threat to its interests in the region, and forced a revision of the treaty to keep the Armenian lands within the Ottoman empire. In return, Britain pledged to enforce political reform in Turkey, and to prevent further oppression of minorities. The pledges were not serious, however, and the oppression continued, and worsened. In the 1890s large numbers of Armenians were displaced and killed. Worse massacres occurred during the First World War, in 1915. Some historians consider it to be the twentieth century’s first act of genocide, and suggest that it provided a useful model for the Nazis in Germany: proof that an entire civilian population could be killed off without reprisal.26 Britain was partly responsible for this outcome. As Lloyd George wrote later: Had it not been for our sinister intervention, the great majority of the Armenians would have been placed, by the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, under the protection of the Russian flag…. The action of the British Government led inevitably to the terrible massacres of 1895–7, 1909 and worst of all to the holocaust of 1915.27 Many of those displaced died of hunger and exposure. The massacres during the war were widely reported. In the middle of September 1915, for example, The Times noted that ‘It is believed that it is the official intention that this shall be a campaign of extermination, involving the murdering of from 800,000 to 1,000, 000 persons.’28 Often its reports were strongly worded. The massacres were real, but they were also used as propaganda, to discredit Turkey—first, during the war, and later, during the carve-up of the Ottoman empire.29 During and after the First World War, however, only one view was represented in the British media, and that is the context for my reading of Woolf’s novel. For example, at the end of September 1915, The Times described the ‘nauseating and appalling character’ of atrocities against Armenians. From many Armenian regions came tales of men shot down in cold blood, crucified, mutilated, or dragged off for labour battalions, of children carried off and forcibly converted to Islam, of women violated and enslaved in the interior, shot down, or sent off with their children to the desert west of Mosul, where there is neither water nor

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food…. Many of these unfortunates did not reach their destination, because the escort so overdrove their victims that many fell out, and, as flogging and kicking were unavailing, they were left to perish by the roadside, their corpses distinctly defining the route followed. Many were tied back to back in pairs and thrown into rivers alive.30 It is difficult to imagine someone in political circles being vague about these matters, especially when they were so widely reported, but ignorant women are one of Woolf’s key targets in the novel. (Sally Seton, too, ‘scarcely ever read the papers’, p. 245.) Those who did read the papers, as Woolf did, would have seen a great many references to the Armenianv Question and to the need for an Armenian national home during 1922 and 1923. After the Great War, Britain and its allies entered into complex negotiations with Turkey over the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the London and Lausanne Peace Conferences of 1920 and 1923.31 One aspect of these negotiations involved protection of minorities— including Armenians—in Turkish controlled areas. A number of Armenian support groups had been established in Britain, arguing for the establishment of an Armenian national home.32 The British Government and papers such as The Times appeared to support this claim, and adopted the rhetoric of human rights for oppressed minority groups in the region.33 The issue was often mentioned in the Nation and Athenaeum during the early 1920s, including in a debate on the Greek—Turkish war between Arnold Toynbee and T.P.O’Connor in the letters pages in 1921–2.34 The Lausanne Treaty was finally signed on 24 July 1923—a few weeks after Mrs Dalloway is set. By then, Britain had secured its interests in the region—not in Armenia but in the Persian Gulf, partly by creating the new state of Iraq. The Armenians were effectively abandoned by the Lausanne Treaty; those in the Soviet Union were to remain citizens of that state, and the remaining survivors were to stay under the rule of Turkey, under a protectorate agreement. The idea of an Armenian national home in the Anatolia region was simply dropped.35 For many people, this was a grotesque betrayal of the Armenians, who had suffered so much, and for whom Britain had some responsibility.36 In Woolf’s novel, Richard Dalloway MP sits on the committee which is negotiating this final act of betrayal in June 1923. That is where he is going after giving Clarissa the roses. Clarissa’s refusal to think about the Armenian problem is a crucial moment in the novel, and provides us with ways into thinking about the structural relationship between Clarissa and Septimus. Who is the victim, who the victimizer; who is responsible for the suffering of others? These questions trouble Woolf’s text, just as they do HD’s war novel, Bid Me to Live. But whereas HD’s novel retreats into a private place of writing to contemplate the problem, Mrs Dalloway takes it into the heart of the political establishment. Even the Prime Minister is present at the Dalloways’ party (p. 227).

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THE PRIME MINISTER We need to pause on the figure of the Prime Minister.37 Because Woolf dates the novel so precisely, I want to read it as occupying a specific historical moment. In the middle of June 1923, Stanley Baldwin had been Prime Minister for about three weeks, having taken over from Bonar Law. Law had retired due to illness after only six months in office. This was the first non-coalition Conservative government for nearly two decades, and had been elected in November 1922, on a platform radically different from Leonard Woolf’s internationalist, pacifist manifesto.38 When he became Prime Minister, Baldwin was known mainly for one public act: as chancellor of the exchequer under Bonar Law, he had negotiated what many people felt was a disadvantageous agreement on Britain’s repayment of war debts to the United States.39 When he was first appointed, in May 1923, the New Statesman commented: Mr. Baldwin is Prime Minister of England. Nothing very much else is known of him. Not half of the electors of Great Britain, we suppose, had ever heard his name until this week. He is said to be an extremely pleasant fellow, and he is an Englishman. He smokes a briar pipe, he is an old Harrovian, and his politics are Conservative.40 He is ‘an enigma’, it says, ‘significantly enigmatic’; by the end of that year, the New Statesman considered him ‘a pygmy’ whose administration had achieved ‘precisely nothing’—not unlike Bonar Law’s rule, which it found to be suffering from ‘impotence’; lacking in ‘masculine policy’.41 Baldwin ‘presented himself as a simple country gentleman, interested only in pigs’. He read few official documents, and he never read newspapers.42 His manner was informal for a Conservative Prime Minister: he was the first to use first names among his colleagues, even if he did not know them well.43 Later commentators praise aspects of his second and third governments; his first did very little. Baldwin lost power to Labour in the election of December 1923; his first premiership lasted for about seven months. Perhaps the anonymous grey car which no one can quite identify at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is partly a wry comment on the greyness and futility of this government during such an important period in world history—a period of intense colonial and anti-colonial struggle, in which attempts to construct an effective League of Nations failed, and in which war debts and reparations crippled several European economies and led to the rise of fascism in the following decade. Later commentators suggest that the most significant achievement of the first Baldwin government was the Lausanne Treaty, which restored good relations with Turkey.44 As I have suggested, however, this treaty was by no means a morally unambiguous act.

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What is the significance of a Baldwin-figure at the Dalloways’ party? He represents the recent restoration to power of a wholly Conservative administration —the Dalloways’ set, back in power after sharing it with the Liberals during the war, and now threatened with the rise of Labour. It is also significant that Baldwin was perceived in 1923 to be a nonentity leading a very dull government. Richard Dalloway’s inability to get into cabinet, then, would have been a failure of some magnitude. The first reference to the Prime Minister’s arrival at Mrs Dalloway’s party occurs among the servants: The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said: so she had heard them say in the dining-room, she said, coming in with a tray of glasses. Did it matter, did it matter in the least, one Prime Minister more or less? It made no difference at this hour of the night to Mrs Walker among the plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chickens in aspic, icecream freezers [etc…]. All she felt was, one Prime Minister more or less made not a scrap of difference to Mrs Walker. (P. 216) In an immediate sense, the Prime Minister is no different from the other guests as far as the servants are concerned: they are all powerful people to whom the servants must defer, and whom they must feed. But let us consider this in historical context. Woolf set the book during the first Baldwin Conservative government, and published it during the second. In between, when most of the writing took place, Britain’s first Labour government was in power. It was a minority government, and able to do little.45 But the very fact that working-class people had the vote, and were starting to get seats in the Cabinet, was a significant change in the political system. A Prime Minister more or less, then, means a great deal to Agnes and Mrs Walker in one sense, and very little in another. How do Mrs Dalloway’s guests perceive the Prime Minister? One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits—poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa, then with Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch. (p. 225) He is a Conservative, one of them; he represents their current hold on power. Yet he is also slightly ridiculous; he has just come into office, and he doesn’t quite look the part—precisely how Baldwin, with his pig-breeding and his briar pipe, was perceived at this time. Where the New Statesman sees him as an anthropological misfit (a ‘pygmy’), Mrs Dalloway’s guests see his inadequacy in

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class terms: he looks like a shop assistant. As a symbol of real power, however, he makes them feel ‘to the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society’ (pp. 225–6). It is the man, not the gold lace, that the guests find faintly ridiculous. Putting on fancy dress in order to govern the country is something Woolf attacks strongly in Three Guineas, and it is implicitly criticized here, too. And women such as Clarissa Dalloway are vital to the structures which put a few men into gold lace or black gowns and let them rule the world. DEATH Also at the party is Sir William Bradshaw, the doctor who has been treating Septimus Smith’s war neurosis. Clarissa has consulted him once and found him oppressive (p. 240). Her memory of the visit engages our sympathy, but the text emphasizes the difference between Clarissa’s position and Septimus’s. She can choose whether to obey the doctors, and her spouse has power to protect her (unlike Rezia and Septimus). She is free to reject Bradshaw as her physician, and does so. As a hostess, however, she continues to patronize him, to maintain his position within the social structure. In other words, she is complicit in the processes which legitimate his disciplinary form of medicine—medicine which she knows to be oppressive, and which the reader knows has helped to kill Septimus. Mrs Dalloway’s party occurs only hours after Septimus’s death. She overhears Sir William Bradshaw talking to Richard Dalloway about a Bill she knows is to be passed through the House of Commons, though she is, characteristically, unclear about the precise details. They were talking about this Bill. Some case Sir William was mentioning, lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about the deferred effects of shell-shock. There must be some provision in the Bill. (p. 240) Mimicking her husband, in a mirror image of the men’s conversation, Lady Bradshaw draws Mrs Dalloway ‘into the shelter of a common femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands and their sad tendency to overwork’. The disciplinary structures which have killed Septimus simultaneously protect (in class terms) and oppress (in sexual terms) women such as these. ‘Sinking her voice’, Lady Bradshaw tells Clarissa that ‘A young man…had killed himself. He had been in the army.’ Clarissa’s response is enigmatic: Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought. (p. 240)

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What does this mean? The inarticulate ‘Oh!’ might be interpreted as a schoolgirlish response to what the reader knows to be an adult tragedy. And like a child, Clarissa thinks about her party first, before confronting the unpleasant news. Her acknowledgement of it is peculiarly concrete: ‘in the middle of my party, here’s death’. The idea of death might have entered her party, but its physical presence remains elsewhere. Septimus’s corpse, like those of the other dead millions, is safely out of sight. Most of the people at the party are protected from such spectacles. Even Peter Walsh, witness of the ambulance carrying Septimus’s dying body, misrecognizes what he has seen: One of the triumphs of civilization, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilization, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly, the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was civilization. (p. 197) The satiric force here comes partly from the repetition of the word ‘civilization’. Septimus’s death is indeed a symptom of the ‘civilization’ of the period—not just during the war, but after it, too, well into the 1920s. The victim is ‘some poor devil’—someone utterly separate from Peter, the witness. Yet he also identifies with the unknown person; the victim has had some kind of illness or accident, ‘as might happen to oneself’. But Septimus’s problems are precisely what cannot happen to the other characters in the novel. His suffering is peculiar to the combatant. Only certain members of the society (young, male—and by no means all of them) are vulnerable to this particular kind of war neurosis. When Mrs Dalloway hears of Septimus Smith’s death, she wanders into another room, looking for Lady Bruton and the Prime Minister. The room is now empty, however, with no sign but the imprints of the buttocks of greatness. They indicate that Lady Bruton has been sitting ‘turned deferentially’, while the Prime Minister sat ‘four-square, authoritatively’, representing the different relationships between gender and power (p. 241). They have been discussing ‘India’—a word which carried a complex of imperial values and anxieties in 1923.46 In solitude, Clarissa feels a delayed response to the news of the dead soldier: There was nobody. The party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in alone in her finery. (p. 241) She responds indirectly, through her party. Its splendour falls, like a discarded garment. Her sense of desolation occurs immediately after hearing about Septimus Smith, yet is displaced on to this moment of solitude. Away from her

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party, in an empty room, Clarissa the hostess suddenly ceases to exist. This turns her thoughts back to the cause: the news of Septimus’s death: What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party—the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her body went through it, when she was told, first, suddenly of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. She feels the news of an accident first in her clothing (which represents both her gender and her social position), then in her body. She then considers the details of this particular death. The reader is not aware until now that she knows these details. More importantly, the text provides a more graphic account of the death here, in Clarissa’s mind, than at the moment it occurred: He had thrown himself from a window [thinks Clarissa]. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. (P. 241) Mrs Filmer’s railings (p. 195), as imagined by Mrs Dalloway, pierce the soldier’s body like multiple bayonets. The next phase of Clarissa’s response is to compare the dead person with herself, a living person. This leads to a mystifying of death, a fantasy that the dead person is better off. In living, one becomes corrupted, she thinks. To be dead is to avoid corruption. (The knowledge of what happens to the physical body after death is firmly suppressed.) ‘Death was defiance’, thinks Clarissa: Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death. (pp. 241–2) Two different strands of thought became entwined. Her yearning for her youth at Bourton is elided with thoughts on the death of the unknown young man. Clarissa’s romanticization of death is an attempt to comfort herself for the happiness she feels she has lost. ‘There was an embrace in death,’ she thinks, yet her own picture of his death is quite the opposite. His body is pierced, his flesh separated. Far from being embraced, or symbolically reunited with the mother’s body (as Minow-Pinkney suggests), Septimus is completely alone at the moment of death, separated from everyone. It is worth pausing on Minow-Pinkney’s analysis of Mrs Dalloway here, for though it produces a fine Kristevan reading of the text, it does not do justice, in

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my opinion, to the problem of Septimus Smith. This partly derives from MinowPinkney’s treatment of Clarissa Dalloway as a predominantly sympathetic figure. As I have argued, the text is also judgemental of her and of her entire class, particularly on the question of the war and its consequences (including distant events, such as the sufferings of the Armenians). We need to recognize that she is a strongly paradoxical figure. The text constructs her quite explicitly as someone with whom we identify and whom we are forced to judge. If we fail to address both aspects of her function, then we miss much of the text’s political force. More alarmingly, we are in danger of replicating her romanticization of Septimus’s death. This problem surfaces towards the end of Minow-Pinkney’s chapter on Mrs Dalloway. Citing the scene in which Clarissa thinks of death as ‘defiance’ and an ‘embrace’, Minow-Pinkney writes: In psychoanalytic terms, the ‘embrace’ which Septimus aims at in death may be regarded as an embrace with the Mother…. What is crucial is not how Clarissa deciphers Septimus’ suicide, but that she deciphers it, that a relation is established between the two figures. If Septimus does indeed ‘embrace’ the Mother in death, it is because he now in a sense has a ‘mother’ who acknowledges him: ‘She felt somehow very like him.’47 This reading is unduly positive, it seems to me, and makes the soldier’s death too easy to bear. It draws too much comfort from the imagined familial structure, allowing Clarissa’s self-justification and refusal to confront her own complicity to pass unchallenged. In this sense, it replicates the blindness of the political establishment which, as I read it, is precisely what the text seeks to expose. Clarissa passes through a range of emotions and memories as she considers Septimus’s death, and comes to a point in which she feels that she, rather than Septimus, is the one experiencing ‘disaster’ and ‘disgrace’: It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. (p. 243) The sinking and disappearance of Septimus is of course precisely what she has not seen, though she has pictured it in her imagination. In the midst of her party, from the safety of her wealth and position, she feels as if she is suffering a ‘punishment’. Following the representations of Septimus’s and Rezia’s acute suffering in the earlier parts of the book, this is surely to be read as satirical. Yet even here the text shows the complexity and ambiguity of Mrs Dalloway’s position. The claim that she is ‘forced to stand here in her evening dress’ might seem risible. Forced by whom? It is a childish sulk; another example of Clarissa refusing to take responsibility for her own actions. The news of death alters the

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meaning of the party she has worked hard to produce, so she attempts to deny its implications, and to appropriate Septimus’s suffering as her own (‘her punishment’). Yet at the same time her denial of responsibility contains some truth. Uneducated, born and married into a particular class, Mrs Dalloway has few options for action. As Rachel Bowlby notes, her daughter will have many more choices in her adult life.48 Unless Clarissa is willing to sacrifice the comforts and privileges of her class, she is in some sense ‘forced’ to stand around in an evening dress, feeling foolish. From imagining herself punished, Clarissa moves into a new phase of emotion, via the memory of Bourton. The next paragraph is full of terms suggesting strength and joy; ‘she had never been so happy’, ‘pleasure’, ‘triumphs’, ‘delight’ (p. 243). Similarly, when Peter Walsh witnesses Septimus’s departure in the ambulance, he thinks: Ah, but thinking became morbid, sentimental, directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort of lust, too, over the visual impression warned one not to go on with that sort of thing any more. (p. 198; my emphasis) The terms linked with death here echo a narrative structure found in many soldiers’ novels of the war. Following a death, the living characters gloat, celebrating the fact they are still alive. This seems to be a necessary process of abjecting the dead; shedding the corpse from the social fabric. In the Dalloways’ London in 1923, this is not a difficult task, though the presence of a war corpse is perhaps momentarily more shocking, because more unexpected, than it might have been in the war zone. I have taken some trouble to demonstrate how Woolf satirizes Clarissa Dalloway, her class, and its responsibility for the war. As I argued at the beginning of this section, we also need to recognize that Clarissa’s character, memories and experience are treated with considerable sympathy, as other critics have demonstrated. It would be all too easy to construct a purely satiric view of her, a ruling-class woman who thinks ‘it was very, very dangerous to live even one day’ (p. 10); instead, Woolf’s representation of Clarissa Dalloway is deeply ambivalent, placing her complexly both on the margins and at the centre of circles of real power. I have traced the satiric element of Mrs Dalloway through Clarissa’s attitudes towards serious political issues of the day: war-neurotic soldiers, the Armenian Question, the new Prime Minister. Yet even if she were keenly interested in these matters, she has very little power to do anything about them. Richard Dalloway, by contrast, is well informed and deeply concerned about human suffering. He and his government have power to deal with such issues, but choose not to. That is where the real responsibility lies.

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This in turn raises questions about gender and power in the early 1920s, shortly after the vote has been extended to women such as Clarissa Dalloway. Will women’s participation in democracy transform politics; or will it transform women? Would readers want Clarissa, who cannot tell the difference between Armenians, Albanians and Turks, to be making decisions about these people’s fates? Obviously not, yet would her decisions be any worse than those made by the men she supports? Would she be different if she had direct responsibility? Through the figure of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf poses important questions about gender, power, and the war. Taking responsibility, the novel suggests, is extremely difficult, yet needs to be done if Britain is to avoid a repetition of the disastrous decisions which took it into the First World War. By the time the novel was published, it was becoming clear that further disasters— direct consequences of the war and its settlement—were unavoidable. University of Edinburgh NOTES An earlier version of this article was presented at ‘Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing’, a conference organized by Julia Briggs at Hertford College, Oxford, 1992. I am grateful to Gillian Beer, Hermione Lee and Suzanne Raitt for their comments. 1 Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (1933; New York: Universal Library, 1965), p. 290. This quotation comes from Nicolson’s diary of the Paris Peace Conference, January to June 1919, published as Book II of the volume. 2 J.M.Winter suggests that ‘war losses touched virtually every household in Britain’; nearly every family had lost a relative, lover or friend. The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 305. 3 For example, J.M.Winter, The Experience of World War I (Oxford: Equinox, 1988), pp. 202, 206. See also the discussion in the New Statesman and Nation and Athenaeum in the early 1920s. Wars continued in various parts of Europe well into the 1920s: between Greece and Turkey, for example (in which Britain was indirectly involved). Six wars broke out on the new borders of Poland shortly after it was established. 4 Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919; London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 1. 5 Winter, The Experience of World War/, pp. 202–3; C.R.Buxton and D.F.Buxton, The World After the War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1920), pp. 83–5. See also Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919: Nicolson was shocked to see the condition of people in Austria in April 1919: ‘Everybody looks very pinched and yellow: no fats for four years. The other side of the blockade…. I feel that my plump pink face is an insult to these wretched people’ (pp. 293–4). He also notes that British troops in Germany after the war complain about the ‘spectacle’ of starving children (p. 281). 6 Andrew Parker et al. (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 6. Nationalism in the late nineteenth century commonly formulated the nation as a woman, and the citizen as a man.

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7 Keynes describes himself at the very beginning of the book as an ‘Englishman’ with ‘British preoccupations’, who had to learn to be ‘a European in his cares and outlook’ (p. 2). The peculiar positioning of British people within Europe after the war is a suppressed issue in a number of modernist writings of this period. 8 Leonard Woolf, election speech given in October 1922, quoted in his Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939 (London: Hogarth, 1967), p. 38. 9 Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 40. 10 ibid., p. 94. 11 Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (1965; 2nd edn London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 350–1. 12 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1985; London: Virago, 1987), pp. 192–4. 13 See, for example, Rachel Bowlby, ‘Thinking forward through Mrs Dalloway’s daughter’, in Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 80–98; Karen L.Levenback, ‘Clarissa Dalloway, Doris Kilman, and the Great War’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 37 (Fall 1991), pp. 3–4. 14 For example, Emily Jensen, ‘Clarissa Dalloway’s respectable suicide’, in Jane Marcus (ed.), Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 162–79; Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). 15 For example, Emily Jensen, ‘Clarissa Dalloway’s respectable suicide’ Goldman, introduction to Women and World War I (London: Macmillan, 1993); Deborah Guth, ‘“What a lark! What a plunge!”: Fiction as self-evasion in Mrs Dalloway’, Modern Language Review, 84 (1989), pp. 18–26; Mark Hussey (ed.), Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (Syracuse University Press, 1991); Elizabeth Abel, ‘Narrative structure(s) and female development: The case of Mrs. Dalloway\ in Elizabeth Abel et al. (eds), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983). 16 Woolf, Diary, 19 June 1923, p. 248. This point is explored in Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 17 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 93. All page references are to this edition and will be cited in text. 18 J.M.Winter notes that many wealthy people became poorer in real terms after the war, while the living standards of many working-class people improved. The Great War and the British People, pp. 279, 281. 19 She also ‘muddled Armenians and Turks’: that is, the victims and the perpetrators of several notorious massacres. 20 Rose, Why War? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993). However, the enemy of war (Germany, Austria, etc.) is strikingly absent from Mrs Dalloway. Rather, the enemy who defines the self in these texts is to be found within British society: both across and within categories of class, gender, family. 21 Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 240, entry for 23 March 1923; Diary, vol. 3, 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 69, entry for 24 March 1926, and n.14.

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22 Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 139. Leonard Woolf also notes that a teacher in his early schooling was ‘obsessed with the horrors and the barbarism of the Armenian massacres’. Quoted in Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 274 n.9. Woolf rather trivializes the Armenian issue in her diary entry for 26 December 1929. 23 Toynbee was also a member of the British Armenian Committee, and involved in the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office. Akaby Nassibian, Britain and the Armenian Question, 1915–1923 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 48, 49, 111. See also Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, pp. 78, 151, 172; entries for 5 December 1920, 18 December 1921, 24 March 1922. 24 Woolf, Diary, vol. 1 (22 May 1919), p. 276; vol. 2 (3 November 1923), p. 274. 25 For this section, I have drawn on Akaby Nassibian’s useful study, Britain and the Armenian Question. 26 See, for example, Winter, The Experience of World War/, p. 215. 27 Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties, vol. 2 (London: Gollancz, 1938), p. 1257. 28 The Times, 16 September 1915, p. 7, under the subheading ‘Exterminating Armenians’. See also Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peace- making in Paris, 1919 (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 167, who argues that over a million Armenians were massacred in 1915–16. Evidence of this was used to forge an antiTurkish consensus in British politics. The Times, too, actively engaged in creating public hostility towards the Turks during and after the war. Nassibian argues that Britain’s publicizing of Turkish atrocities was motivated less by concern for human rights than a desire to discredit its enemies. Britain and the Armenian Question, p. 119. Recent Turkish historians emphasize Britain’s use of the Armenian Question for propagandistic purposes. See, for example, Sinasi Orel and Sureyya Yuca, The Talat Pasha ‘Telegrams’: Historical Fact or Armenian Fiction? (Nicosia: K.Rustem and Bro., 1986); Kamuran Gürün, The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed (1983; London, Nicosia and Istanbul: K.Rustem & Bro. and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985). Gürün cites a Foreign Office memo by Toynbee, which argues that ‘The treatment of the Armenians by the Turks is the biggest asset of his Majesty’s Government, to solve the Turkish problem in a radical manner, and to have it accepted by the public’ (p. 39). I have not checked this memo, which Gürün cites as FO 371/3404/162647. 29 The newspaper reports are not reliable; to this day, details of what happened are still disputed, especially by Turkish historians. 30 ‘Wholesale murder in Armenia: Exterminating a race’, The Times, 30 September 1915, p. 5. The Times claims here that Turkish leader, Talaat Bey, said of the deportations, ‘After this for 50 years there will not be an Armenian question.’ 31 Harold Nicolson was involved in the Lausanne negotiations as well as the Paris peace conference and is another possible source of information for Woolf. 32 An Armenian national home was proposed in the Treaty of Sèvres at the 1920 London Peace Conference. Sharp argues that by 1921 this treaty was seen as unworkable. Sharp, The Versailles Settlement, pp. 171–2. 33 The question of an Armenian national home, for example, is mentioned in The Times on 13, 14, 15, 16 and 27 December 1922; 8 January and 10 February 1923. See also Treatment of minorities: Turkey and the League’, The Times, 10 January 1923, p. 10.

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34 Arnold Toynbee, ‘The Graeco-Turkish conflict’ (letter), Nation and Athenaeum, 3 December 1921, p. 380; T.P.O’Connor, The Turks and the Greeks’ (letter), ibid., 17 December 1921, pp. 467–8; Toynbee, ‘The Turks and the Greeks’ (letter), ibid., 31 December 1921, p. 528; O’Connor, ‘The Greeks and the Turks’ (letter), ibid., 7 January 1922, p. 586; Toynbee, Turks and Greeks’ (letter), ibid., 21 January 1922, pp. 618–19. See also The liquidation of Mr. Lloyd George’, ibid., 23 September 1922, pp. 814–15; ‘How much longer?’ ibid., 7 October 1922, pp. 6–7; ‘War on tap’, ibid., 7 October 1922, pp. 7–8; ‘Back to ‘78’, ibid., 14 October 1922, pp. 43– 4; Wedgwood Benn, ‘Mr. Lloyd George’s defence’ (letter), ibid., 21 October 1922, p. 116; ‘The meaning of Lausanne’, ibid., 10 February 1923, pp. 710–11. See also ‘Events of the week’ during June 1923 for progress reports on the Lausanne Conference. 35 Sharp, The Versailles Settlement, p. 174. Britain’s commitment to an independent Armenia had already begun to disappear, however, in 1920. Nassibian, Britain and the Armenian Question, pp. 210–13. Dockrill and Goold argue that the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres was ‘negotiated on the basis of power politics and completely ignored the Allies’ professed principle of self-determination. When allied interests were not directly involved, as in the case of Armenia, promises meant nothing, lending weight to charges of Allied hypocrisy’. Michael L.Dockrill and I.Douglas Goold, Peace Without Promise (London: Batsford, 1981). pp. 213–14. 36 See, for example, Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs 1920–1923 (Oxford University Press, 1925), pp. 369, 373–4; cited in Nassibian, Britain and the Armenian Question, p. 222. 37 As Elaine Showalter notes, he was originally to have been a central character in the novel. Introduction to Oxford University Press edition of Mrs Dalloway, pp. xv, xviii. See also Jane Novak, The Razor Edge of Balance: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Miami University Press, 1975). 38 It has been suggested that the Conservatives had policies on nothing at this time except tariff reform. T.F.Lindsay and M.arrington, The Conservative Party (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 53. 39 Britain had hoped that all Allied war debts to the United States would be cancelled. The US, which owed nothing as a result of the war, did not agree, and eventually Baldwin agreed to pay £978 million. Other members of the government felt this was a poor deal for Britain. Bonar Law wanted to resign over the matter, and went so far as to write an anonymous letter to The Times, attacking the agreement. Baldwin insisted he had secured the best possible deal, but when France and Italy negotiated better repayment deals, it looked as if Baldwin had indeed botched the negotiations. Lindsay and Harrington, The Conservative Party, p. 48. A.J.P.Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 203. 40 ‘Mr Baldwin?’, New Statesman, 26 May 1923, p. 188. 41 ibid., pp. 188–9; ‘Honest Mr. Baldwin’, New Statesman, 17 November 1923, p. 168. 42 Taylor, English History, p. 205. 43 Lindsay and Harrington argue that Baldwin tried to make the Conservative party more democratic and less snobbish. The Conservative Party, p. 60. Taylor, English History, p. 173n. 44 Lindsay and Harrington, The Conservative Party, p. 47; Taylor, English History, p. 202.

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45 Taylor argues that Labour was ‘in office, but not in power’. English History, p. 210. 46 People in India were actively campaigning for independence in the early 1920s, and there are many references to the issue in journals such as the New Statesman and the Nation and Athenaeum. (See for example ‘The outlook in India’, New Statesman, 23 June 1923, pp. 320–1; ‘India’s demand’, New Statesman, 18 August 1923, pp. 539–41; ‘The gathering crisis in India’, New Statesman, 22 September 1923, pp. 668–9.) In his autobiography, Leonard Woolf comments that independence was granted at least two decades later than it should have been; Britain’s refusal to acknowledge the inevitable led to large numbers of avoidable deaths. In the early 1920s, then, ‘India’ signifies a site of struggle and the decline of empire. It is worth noting in passing that Indian activists were seen as such a serious threat in Britain that they were cited as one reason for the establishment of the first secret service in 1909. 47 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, p.79. 48 Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations, ch. 5.

Reviews

Susan Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 220 pp., £10.99 (paperback) LINDA CHARNES

Susan Zimmerman, the editor of this provocative and important anthology, poses her central questions right up front: can the subjective nature of Renaissance erotic experience be placed in its public, historical context? And ‘can the experience be examined without recourse to psychoanalytic theory?’ (p. 1). The latter question is largely moot, since Zimmerman and most of the volume’s contributors don’t give up this recourse, but rather, skilfully articulate aspects of psychoanalytic theory (particularly in its feminist-Lacanian versions) with the historicist-materialist project of establishing discursive context and mapping political effects. Then why ask it? Perhaps because even while the contributors engage a practice that doesn’t force this choice, the question of psychoanalysis as a methodology begs a tougher question about the nature of erotic experience, a question which the ten essays, read diacritically, enunciate. While none of the essayists here would argue for the ‘transcendence’ of erotic desire, the foregrounding of psychoanalysis as the volume’s identified critical ‘problem’ seems symptomatic of the slipperiness of an object of study that intersects the subject and the social, resisting containment by the critical hermeneutics of either. While the essays share a materialistic practice, for the purposes of this review we can loosely group them in two categories. The first situates sexual behaviours and their representation within the economic, political, legal, theological and social discourses and practices of early modern England. The second explores desire in more theoretically speculative, structural terms, such as absence, lack, fixation, the fetish, ‘difference’. This latter approach raises, however indirectly, the question of whether there is something about the erotic that necessarily exceeds its mechanisms of production, whatever their historical particularities. Zimmerman, invoking Althusser and Lacan, asserts that representation carves out the space of misrecognition, the site where social forms are shot through with

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affective investments that create new determinants all their own. This is most apparent in eroticism, a category of experience simultaneously under- and overdetermined, obvious and devious, ideological yet unpredictable. On the Renaissance stage, Zimmerman argues, ‘practices are not always consistent with proscriptions’ (p. 6). The concern with the relation between practices and proscriptions links the essays by Stephen Orgel, Lisa Jardine, Kate McLuskie, Susan Zimmerman and Jean Howard. Stephen Orgel, in ‘The subtexts of The Roaring Girl’, asks ‘What is the relation between the construction of gender and its performance, whether on stage or in society at large; or to put it more directly, what constitutes acting like a man or a woman?’ Concentrating on ‘Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse’ in The Roaring Girl, Orgel argues that it is acting that makes the man (or woman); and that the ‘masculine’ or cross-dressed woman was not automatically considered monstrous, since sumptuary laws aimed more at policing class than gender distinctions (pp. 14–15). In fact, it is precisely the masculinized female who becomes sexually exciting. The paradox of Moll Frith’s cross-dressing, in terms of the court case in which she was indicted, wasn’t that it was seen as ‘dangerously masculine, but [as] dangerously feminine’ (p. 21). In Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, the more convincing Moll Cutpurse is at playing the man, the more attractive she becomes as a woman. Arguing that within the discourse of patriarchy even supposedly ‘transgressive’ heterosexual attraction serves as a palimpsest for homoerotic desire, Orgel concludes that on the Renaissance stage, ‘acting like a man is the most compelling way of acting like a woman’ (p. 25). Jean Howard, in ‘Sex and social conflict: the erotics of The Roaring Girl’, argues that gender categories and sexual practices are not conflatable, and in early modern England were much less codified than they are now. Pointing out that the conditions of the theatre ‘created conditions of erotic volatility’ (p. 173), Howard explores the tensions between the cultural ‘imperative to marry’ and the erotic desires that refused to reside within its barricades (p. 178). For both Orgel and Howard, Renaisance drama (and Moll Cutpurse) figures the homoerotic fantasies of a homosocial culture that enforces heterosexist arrangements while wondering, why can’t a woman be more like a man? For Lisa Jardine, women are less like men than they are like boys. In ‘Twins and travesties: gender, dependency and sexual availability in Twelfth Night’, she argues that transvestism in textual accounts figures a ‘consistent positioning of dominant to dependent members of the early modern community’ (p. 28). Not only was sexual attention focused on boys as well as women, but since boys and women occupied a homologous position vis-à-vis domestic economy, both were coded as erotic objects by their dependency on and availability to patriarchal authority, both within and outside the household. In early modern England,

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Jardine asserts, desire is not gender specific…but is an expectation…of submissiveness’ (p. 34), constituted by the cultural relations of power. Kate McLuskie questions the distinction between the recorded ‘history’ of sexual behaviour—the Foucauldian scientia sexualis, which tends to ‘repeat the formulae by which it is sought out and represented to the judging institution’ (p. 105)—and ars erotica: ‘imaginative’ representations of erotic behaviour and fantasy. In her substantial discussion she claims that early modern depositions of sexual behaviour, like erotic poetry and dramatic satires, are themselves fetishistic in so far as they produce the very titillation they aim to ‘investigate’ or indict. Like McLuskie and Howard, Zimmerman argues that of all representational venues, ‘the theatre was powerfully enabled to effect sexual disruption’, since Jacobean theatre in particular blurs oppositional categories and moves towards indeterminacy, gesturing towards the polymorphous disposition of sexuality (p. 47). In ‘Disruptive desire: artifice and indeterminacy in Jacobean comedy’, Zimmerman links the psychoanalytic model of polymorphous perversity to the Renaissance medical model of the ‘inversion’ of the sexes (as it has been explored by Thomas Laqueur, among others), skilfully showing how the binarism of the resulting construct inevitably produced transgressive instability (p. 42). But if sexual indeterminacy vexed efforts to align sexual practices with social proscriptions, indeterminacy problematizes efforts to discern the nature of desire as well. Peter Stallybrass, Catherine Belsey, Bruce Smith and Valerie Traub explore erotic desire in more speculative terms. While the blurring of oppositional categories may have paved the way for ideological indeterminacy, the actual performance of plays by anatomically sexed bodies created another kind of instability. This is the matter Peter Stallybrass takes up in ‘Transvestism and the “body beneath”: speculating on the boy actor.’ Beginning by asking what Renaissance audiences actually saw when boy actors disguised as women disrobed onstage (usually in bed or in ‘revelation’ scenes), Stallybrass analyses ‘the prosthetic devices through which gender is rendered visible upon the stage’ (p. 64). Positing gender as a prosthetic effect rather than a bodily cause, Stallybrass theorizes a kind of looking that is deeply speculative in so far as it depends upon the capacity of fantasy to shape what we think we ‘really see’. Deftly linking ‘spectatorship, the specular and the speculative’ (p. 64), Stallybrass argues that sexual difference on the Renaissance stage depended on contradictory fixations and, therefore, on contradictory ‘knowledges’. While in the Restoration female actors disguised as men could reveal naked breasts—anchoring the ‘revelation’ of ‘real sex’ to real female body parts—boy actors playing women in disguise could do no such thing because they had no such ‘things’. ‘To be aware of the fetishistic staging of the boy actor [as female], of the insistence that we see what is not there to see, is to conceptualize the erotics of Renaissance drama in totally unfamiliar ways’ (p. 72). Deriving a theoretical proposition from a performative dilemma based on what women have that men and boys don’t (a nice change from the usual phallocentric hermeneutic based on the little thing

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women lack of a man), Stallybrass argues that by fetishizing the signs of gender through the metonymy of prosthetic effects, Renaissance theatre was able to transform an audience’s perception of ‘objective’ reality. In this view, seeing is not believing so much as believing is seeing. Empiricist knowledge and perception are dissevered as the very grounds for observation are reconstituted by a prosthetic epistemology. The audience speculates a female body. This is not only the nature of the fetish, but the nature of gender itself, which directs our attention not to the promised end of genital ‘truth’ but on truth-effects that generate desire for phantasmatic, rather than biological, bodies. If desire is phantasmatic, its logic requires a fundamental and constitutive absence in order to achieve realization. Catherine Belsey, in ‘Desire’s excess and the English Renaissance theatre: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello’, argues that desire is evoked not by the supplement for the missing ‘part’ but by absence itself, which gives ‘material form…to passion, endow[s] with dramatic substance the lack which motivates desire, and thus enable[s] a condition which is quintessentially negative to find a mode of representation’ (p. 84). Making a point that is as striking as it is subtle, Belsey argues that absence paradoxically, is not just the material condition of but also the material figure for desire—the very ‘type’ of signification, which is always substitutive. This ‘impossible project’ (p. 86) is best effected through the linkage of desire and theatricality, since love is a ‘theatre of illusions’ (p. 92). Marlowe’s Edward II figures desire as a game of fort-da (p. 84); Edward’s desire is fabricated through the poetic enunciations which ‘supply’ Gaveston’s absence. In Troilus and Cressida, desire is everywhere but in its objects; and ‘the figure of [its] excess is venereal disease’ (p. 92). If Stallybrass argues the necessity of the fetish—a ‘halfway point’—to secure desire outside (and therefore inside) the subject, Belsey suggests that Troilus and Cressida provides nothing adequate to fixate upon. We might say then that Troilus and Cressida records a failure of proper fixation: the symptomology of a desire that exceeds its objects yet can only recirculate with deleted and corruptive force. In Othello, Belsey argues, desire is routed into the impossible containment of marriage, which ‘makes desire legitimate’ (p. 96), inscribing it within law, a condition antithetical to the ‘chaos’ that is always the immanent threat of desire. When ‘chaos comes again’ to Othello it is because it never left in the first place: it cannot be kept out of a marriage based on desire— precisely what marriage is not to be based on in early modern England. For Bruce Smith and Valerie Traub, desire is defined not by absence but by the legibility of ‘differences’, anatomical and linguistic. In their respective essays they pose a similar question: how are we to understand representations of gay and lesbian desire in early modern culture? This question is important because it investigates forms of desire that are not based on the supplemental— or prosthetic—effects of gender. Smith, in ‘Making a difference: male/male “desire” in tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy’, points out that in ‘difference’, the two things marked out are never equal: the first element in a comparison— the radical—determines and defines the second (p. 127). ‘To unthink “male” as a

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radical [privileged term] is perhaps the greatest challenge’, Smith argues (p. 128). Linking gender, geography and genre, Smith addresses a series of distinctions in Renaissance theatre: English/male, Italian/female, Tragedy/ dignity, Comedy/lewdness, arguing that in many tragedies homosexual desire is figured in heterosexual language, a figuration that necessarily culminates in desire as violence. In tragedy the end of homosexual desire is death. It is only in romantic comedy that ‘homosexual “desire” can assume a face, a body and a voice that desire can congenially inhabit beyond the two hours traffic on the stage’ (p. 146). Whether a form of desire achieves representation at all is where Valerie Traub, in The (in)significance of “lesbian” desire in early modern England’, begins her discussion, asserting that the ‘lesbian’ desire of the title is a ‘comeon’ because it ‘doesn’t exist’ (p. 150)—at least not representationally—in early modern England. Looking at three figures: the French female sodomite, the English tribade and the theatrical ‘femme’, Traub argues that ‘femme-femme’ desire occupies an historical vacuum not because it didn’t exist but because historians have privileged theological, legal and ‘empiricist’ discourses (p. 152). If we shift our focus to gynaecological and theatrical texts, we can detect representations of these desires. Traub argues astutely that lesbian behaviour was only ‘seen’ when it threatened the functions of patriarchal hegemony. For example, in France, female ‘sodomy’ as a legal crime involved use of a prosthetic male ‘part’ and the act of functionally impersonating a man (p. 153). Crime here involves supplementarity, either prosthetic or (in gynaecological discourse) anatomical, as in the enlarged clitoris of tribadism. Noting the syntactical as well as the political proximity of supplementing and supplanting, Traub argues that it is this potential for usurping the male role that determines the legibility of female homosexual behaviour in textual accounts. The danger is that if the male ‘member’ is an imitable part, then man himself can be reduced to a simulacrum. But what about non-supplementary female homoeroticism? ‘Femme—femme’ love? Traub argues that when it is represented on the stage (in figures like Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Celia, or Helena and Hermia) it is usually rendered in an ‘elegiac mode’ (p. 158). In a theatrical move that adumbrates Freud’s, femme-femme love is relegated to the past, to a ‘stage’ before the real ‘thing’ enters. Femmes were perceived as available to give birth —no matter what their erotic dalliances with each other, on reserve—in a way that tribades and sodomites were not (p. 164). Female homoeroticism becomes an issue only when it supplants (or threatens to) sexual—and therefore social— reproduction and the patriarchal control of property. In ‘extrapolat[ing] a cultural presence from a discursive silence’ (p. 164), Traub speculates that it is precisely because the patriarchal imagination couldn’t conceive of a female homoerotic desire that might actually supplant the telos of male heterosexual desire that it could be dramatized, however anamorphically. The essays in this anthology are theoretically sophisticated, learned and refreshingly undoctrinaire; and will be of great interest to anyone working on

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sexualities and subjectivities in early modern England. There are real intellectual risks taken here and they pay off. That the volume doesn’t give definitive answers to the larger question of the nature of desire is its strength. However, it does provide answers about the erotic politics of the Renaissance stage, where desire is a function of the libidinal persuasiveness of good sexual acting. While the volume speaks to erotic politics in early modern England, I don’t think it would be inappropriate to make a postmodern connection. There is a moment in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, after the ‘revelation’, when Dill asks ‘Jimmy’ (Fergus) why he can’t just pretend that he’s a girl. When Fergus says that he can’t because she’s really not, Dill retorts, ‘details, baby, details’. Even though Fergus has seen Dill’s penis, he can’t—despite his ‘knowledge’—stop speculating a woman because her prosthetic gender is so utterly convincing. In a reversal of how mainstream culture usually constructs gender, the reality of the male ‘body beneath’ is prologue to a more essential—because so perfectly contrived—femininity. In The Crying Game, acting like a woman is the most compelling way of being a woman, even if you’re ‘really’ a man. Indiana University, Bloomington

Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), 259 pp., £12.95 (paperback) Joseph Natoli, Mots d’ordre: Disorder in Literary Worlds (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 290 pp., $14.95 (paperback), $44.50 (hardback) NICHOLAS ROYLE

The blurb on the back of Simon During’s book asks, ‘How has literary study been changed by the work of Foucault?’ Foucault and Literature is an absorbing and valuable book with explicitly pedagogical aims, namely to provide ‘an interpretation of Foucault’s analysis of modern society and culture for students of literature’; to introduce Foucault’s writings ‘in roughly chronological order’ and ‘to help disseminate the exciting shifts that his work embodies as widely as possible, presupposing no prior acquaintance with his work’ (p. 2). During’s book, then, offers accounts of Foucault’s principal writings, moving from Maladie mentale et personnalite and the Preface to Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1954), through Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Death and the Labyrinth (1963), The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (1976) and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Writings 1972–1977, and finally Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality Volumes 2 and 3 (1984). It also discusses numerous other Foucault texts, in particular some of the early 1960s essays on literature and the ‘long, path-breaking and resolutely antiliterary paper’ (p. 124) of 1969, ‘What is an author?’ Foucault and Literature is not merely introductory, but also explores ways in which Foucault’s thought can be elaborated and, in appropriately Foucauldian fashion, ‘help us to act in the present’, both ‘politically’ and ‘ethically’ (p. 3). During, then, transposes and develops Foucault’s thinking: exposition is consistently supplemented; it is mobile and, at times, engagingly unpredictable. The articulations of Foucauldian concerns on to British history are particularly striking. The account of The Birth of the Clinic, for example, leads into an assessment of ‘English Death’ (pp. 50–8) and most specifically corpse-control in the nineteenth century, from dissectionists to cremationists (the ‘new technology’ of mechanical cremation was introduced in the 1970s). During here

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suggests that ‘it is over the corpses of the poor, that absolute site of nonresistance but a mine of information…that we find the English welfare state stirring’ (pp. 56–7). ‘English Death’ is then further supplemented by readings of novels by Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot and Henry James. Elsewhere During moves from Hamlet to Theodore Dreiser, from intrepid summaries of Heidegger to accounts of the origins of the British police and the emergence of criminology; he elucidates the Foucauldian conception of modern power through helpful critiques of work such as that of Charles Taylor, Peter Dews and Habermas; and he also shifts into discussion of post Foucauldian work, such as Ian Hunter’s Culture and Government (1988) and Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (1987). Above all, however, During’s emphasis falls on the institution of literature and, more specifically, on the place and importance of literary studies in contemporary (chiefly Australian, British and North American) society. At the heart of Foucault and Literature is a passionate and compelling attention to a ‘post-humanist’ conception of the humanities and of university literature departments in particular. This involves an affirmative reversal of what is sometimes perceived to be the non-productive, even vacuous character of work in the humanities. For During it is precisely the point that the humanities continue to engage with problems and needs which ‘are not recognized as legitimate by politicians and, more particularly, by the media’ (pp. 143–4). He goes on: That is to say, humanities in the university can claim that their tasks are not performed under the sign of representation: they can insist that they represent neither a section of the market like the media, nor a sector of the established national will like politicians. It is because they do not belong to an institution legitimized through representation, but are pedagogical, future-oriented, and, furthermore, dedicated to training students in skills which are not immediately vocational, that they can focus on theoretical, methodological, practical problems and difficulties, that they can help prevent cultural objects, memories, points of view falling out of sight, that they can draw connections that have no functional or commercial interest to the market or the state, and can work to maintain the voices of those whom history, the market or the will of the people silence. (p. 144) This is where the subtitle of During’s book comes in. Elaborating on Foucault’s notion of a genealogy as ‘a history of the present’ (p. 125), During argues for the importance of conceiving literature departments as being concerned with ‘producing and disseminating genealogies of cultural work, especially, genealogies of writing’ (p. 144). Most significantly, he proposes, this entails ‘histories of the means by which differences between literature, scholarship, criticism and journalism have been articulated, evaluated and used to create

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power-effects’ (p. 144). Focusing this argument above all by way of a reading of the life and writings of Dreiser, Foucault and Literature concludes with the suggestion that ‘the history of writing may now most rewardingly be treated within the history of various overlapping industries and technologies (literature, journalism, advertising and film, for example), each with its own distribution network, some of which transmit texts across generations in a sustained and organized manner’ (p. 237). With its stress on kinds of history (from ‘archaeology’ to ‘genealogy’) which resist traditional, humanist conceptions of the unity of the subject, the oeuvre and so on, Foucault’s work finally remains decisive precisely on the basis of its insistence ‘that one cannot always—or simply—historicize’ (p. 238). Foucault and Literature conveys a responsible and frequently exhilarating sense of the Foucauldian perception (as stated in one of the comparatively few Foucault texts which During does not cite) that ‘Nothing is fundamental’.1 Inevitably, however, we may feel reservations about During’s book. One reservation has to do with the way in which it is structured and how it situates its subject-author, ‘Foucault’ himself. While the largely chronological discussion of Foucault’s writings can be readily justified by the book’s introductory and expository character, and while During is explicitly circumspect about treating ‘Foucault’ as if it were ‘a name with a single referent’ (p. 6), Foucault and Literature does not perhaps go as far as it might in clearing space for the ‘posthumanism’ it purportedly espouses. In certain respects, that is to say, Foucault and Literature is a highly traditional and decidedly un-Foucauldian study. The unities questioned and displaced by texts such as ‘What is an author?’ can all too comfortably slink back in an account, such as During’s, which is largely governed by the linear and smoothly ‘professional’ unfolding of its subject’s ‘career’. ‘At this moment in his [Foucault’s] career’, ‘at this stage of his career’ and ‘at the end of his career’ are recurrent phrases in this study (pp. 7, 79, 89, 135, 180). And when we are told half-way through the book, for example, that ‘Foucault will finally come to an affirmative understanding of literature which owes nothing [sic!?] to literary history or literary criticism’ (p. 118), it is difficult not to feel the imposition of certain kinds of fantasy and teleology (‘all will be revealed’, ‘finally he will understand’) curiously at odds with the disjunctiveness and heterogeneity of Foucault’s writings. This corresponds to the claim that During makes at the start of the book, that ‘Foucault’s reconciliation of the academic and the marginal or transgressive did not come easily’ (p. 1). Why—and how justify—this cosy logic of reconciliation? If, as During notes in his very opening sentence, ‘Michel Foucault was a different kind of intellectual from his predecessors’ (p. 1), might this not call for a rather more different and— in particular—more disruptive and transgressive kind of account than Foucault and Literature provides? Part of the problem here no doubt has to do with the question of the literary. During acknowledges and rightly questions the curious status of Foucault’s work as in certain respects identifying itself with the literary as a kind of counter-

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discourse: he notes, for example, the way in which archaeology ‘belongs itself, if somewhat tenuously, to “literature”’ (p. 114), and also how, for Foucault (especially in the earlier essays of the 1960s), ‘“literature” in its essence remains unavailable to commentary, interpretation, explanation’ in such a way that ‘literature is what escapes archaeology at the same time as it enables it’ (p. 116). During thus emphasizes, for example, how Foucault ‘finds literature in his own writing’ (p. 30) and quotes the following passage from ‘Dream, imagination, existence’: The subject of the dream, the first person of the dream, is the dream itself, the whole dream…. The dream is an existence carving itself out in barren space, shattering chaotically, exploding noisily, netting itself, a scarcely breathing animal, in the webs of death. It is the world at the dawn of its first explosion when the world is still existence itself and is not yet the universe of objectivity. To dream is not another way of experiencing another world, it is for the dreaming subject the radical way of experiencing its own world. (p. 30) But During tends to isolate such instances without attempting to analyse or elaborate their often uncanny effects. This is not to suggest that he fails to do justice to the ‘literary’ dimensions of Foucault’s work for their own sake, but rather to suggest that these dimensions have a more decisive role than has so far been acknowledged in the reading of Foucault’s work, in its transmission and ‘distribution network’, both within and beyond literature departments. During’s tendency simply to classify and bracket off ‘lyrical’ and ‘purple passages’ (pp. 97, 107) in Foucault’s texts correlates with a more pervasive traditionalism and homogeneity. Correspondingly, while During’s in many respects admirable willingness ‘to put a complex matter simply’ (to cite his phrase on p. 133) obviously helps to make the book more accessible and user-friendly, it does also run into difficulties. This is especially evident, for instance, in his characterization of ‘deconstruction’. Like ‘post-structuralism’ (p. 15), ‘deconstruction’ is presented as a ‘movement’ (p. 71) that has evidently had its day. To the extent that ‘deconstruction’ here can be taken to refer to US-based ‘deconstructionism’ or what he calls ‘a certain “deconstruction” popularized (so to say) in the American academy’ (p. 76), During is doubtless—and one can add, thankfully—correct.2 But side-sniping allusions to ‘a certain deconstruction’ (the phrase is used elsewhere, for instance on p. 42) do not shield his account from other, less parodic or strawmanish kinds of deconstructive thought. In particular, Foucault and Literature tends to skirt around the challenges presented by the work of Derrida. Apparently wishing to subsume it under the vague generality of ‘a certain deconstruction’ or ‘a routinised “deconstruction”’ (p. 222), characterizing Derrida (often only implicitly) as non-specific in his readings (p. 72), as non-

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historical (pp. 89–91) and as concerned simply with the affirmation of the ‘impossibility of deciding’ (p. 96), During’s study puts a complex matter rather too simply—more simply, for example, than David Carroll’s book Paraesthetics (1987), a book to which During does not refer but which provides what are in many ways more rigorous expositions both of Foucault and of Derrida and of the relations between the two.3 During’s book, then, does not help very much with the crucial question of how Foucault’s work is read alongside or after Derrida, even if it does offer a useful corrective reading stressing the importance of Foucault’s work vis-à-vis ‘routinised “deconstruction”’. If the inspiration behind During’s book is, in a specific and quite coherent way, the work of Foucault, it is far less clear what is going on in Joseph Natoli’s somewhat cumbersomely titled Mots d’ordre: Disorder in Literary Worlds. Deleuze and Guattari are obviously important, as are fractal geometry and chaos theory. But Natoli’s book is so multi-referential, so chock-full of citations and invocations of this or that theorist or theory, that reading it is at best mildly frustrating and at worst a rather grim business. The general lines of Natoli’s approach are undoubtedly significant, and his selection of literary texts stimulating: alongside Shakespeare, Brontë and Dickens, for example, there are readings of Bharati Mukherjee, Kathy Acker, Peter Taylor and Patrick Süskind. Fractal geometry provides, for Natoli, the controlling metaphor or ‘analogue’ for the way literary texts work and for the way ‘we’ are situated by them. Thus, of Mukherjee’s Jasmine, for example, Natoli observes: ‘This literary world’s parameters, its point of origin and point of ending, are of the fractal’ (p. 75). Roughly, it can be suggested, the pertinence of ‘fractals’ here corresponds (though Natoli does not pursue this idea) with what Derrida calls ‘context’, i.e. the fact that nothing can be determined out of context but no context is saturable: the movement of contextualization (and recontextualization) is incessant.4 The example of Natoli’s book strongly suggests, however, that the problem with the fractal ‘analogue’, and more generally with transposing ‘chaos theory’ to the reading of literary texts, is that it ties the critic up in a sort of dialectical strait- jacket of order and disorder. The acknowledgement and affirmation of the disruptive or disordering force of literary texts gets undermined by a theoretical framework which consistently falls back on the conceptual opposition of order and disorder. Paradoxically, then, the more Natoli wishes to argue for the constitutive place of disorder, the more preciously ‘orderly’ his account becomes. Chapter 4, for example, starts—looking ahead half a dozen chapters—as follows: In chapter 10 I will once again return to the fractal analogue, proving I suppose that a zigzag route to disorder is the straightest. What I believe however is that disorder is already here; no journey necessary. Even if we were to set an ambitious and highly problematic itinerary for ourselves— the itinerary of a progressing exploration and unravelling of the ‘meaning’

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of disorder—we might be wise to follow disorder’s own coastline: the zigzag route. (P. 71) And so on. Mots d’ordre is not an uninventive or uninteresting book but it staggers under its own load of theoretical ‘analogues’ and critical references (including the consistent running commentary on where Natoli’s own account is going and where it has been). It simply does not seem necessary (to this reviewer at least) to bring in, for example, in one paragraph (pp. 172–3), allusions to Derrida, Bakhtin, Euclidean and fractal geometry, plus a final helping of Stephen Greenblatt— simply for the purpose of asserting that, in the Henry IV plays, ‘what Shakespeare gives us is a never resolved drama between order and disorder’ (p. 173). The texts of critics and theorists are cited and explored far more extensively than the strange contours and interiors of ‘literary worlds’ themselves. Here, as in Simon During’s study, there is curiously little real engagement with the disruptiveness of the literary as such. In both books we are some distance from the extraordinary and haunting ways in which the work of a ‘critic’ or ‘theorist’ like Foucault dreams, inflects, parasitizes the ‘literary’. University of Stirling NOTES 1 Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–84), trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 267. 2 For a helpful account of the distinctions (as well as the forms of parasitism) between deconstruction and deconstructionism, see Jacques Derrida’s ‘Some statements and truisms about neologisms, newisms, postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms’, in The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 63–94. 3 David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (London: Methuen, 1987). 4 See, for example, Derrida’s clarifying comments on this topic in ‘Afterword: Toward an ethic of discussion’, in Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 136–7.

Sandra Kemp and Paola Bono (eds), The Lonely Mirror: Italian Perspectives on Feminist Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 251 pp., £12.99 (paperback) ALESSANDRA TANESINI

‘We is a challenge, it is not a familiar territory’ (p. 224) says Putino in ‘Jumping’, one of the essays in this collection on Italian feminism. The challenge is that of creating those conditions where it is possible to say ‘we’ when talking about women. Challenges of this nature are central to Italian feminist thinking which is characterized by its refusal to draw a sharp line between theory and practice, between political intervention and scholarly reflection. This is a characteristic of Italian feminism that the editors of this collection mention in their introduction but disregard in practice. The Lonely Mirror is conceived as a companion to Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader1 which is also edited by Kemp and Bono. Together these two books provide a useful introduction to some of the problematics of Italian feminism. However, the editors’ choice to publish political interventions in the first collection, while offering only ‘scholarly articles’ in this second book presupposes that there is a useful distinction between practice and theory. This is, in fact, a presupposition that many Italian feminists would question. The articles presented in The Lonely Mirror belong to different subject areas— namely, semiotics, psychoanalysis, history and philosophy—but address similar problematics. Thus, for example, most of them discuss the issue of whether, and how, women can share an identity and address themselves as ‘we’. In ‘In search of the mirror’ Minetti presents the experience of women’s ‘autocoscienza’ groups;2 using the tools of psychoanalysis, she explores how such groups fulfilled the narcissistic needs of their participants. She argues that, as a consequence, these groups functioned only when the participants saw themselves ‘within a common skin’ (p. 119)—that is, as an undifferentiated whole. Hence, these groups produced a sense of shared identity that did not admit of difference from within, and it is because of this that such groups fell

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apart. Far from being only an exploration of past history of the feminist movement, Minetti’s analysis suggests that the splintering of the feminist movement into different groups whose participants share the same fragments of their fragmented selves is another example of a search for an undifferentiated ‘we’ where we are all the same. The attempt to articulate a notion of ‘woman’ where not all women are the same is pursued by the already mentioned Putino and by Cavarero in Towards a theory of sexual difference’. Cavarero attempts to formulate a conception of woman’s essence that would constitute the foundation of our being alike, while avoiding ‘the opaque swamp of sameness’ (p. 215). This notion of ‘being alike’ is for Cavarero a marker of our sharing the same essence but being at the same time different in other respects. It has become common in Anglo-American feminism to use the words ‘essence’ and ‘essentialism’ as magical tools which, if pronounced loudly enough, are sufficient for demonstrating a theory to be mistaken. Italian feminists, instead, take seriously the risk of ‘essentialism’.3 They can afford to take this risk because, despite the distinctly separatist character of the Italian feminist movement, Italian thinkers have never fallen prey to the romantic view of a ‘women’s culture’ where women, undisturbed by the presence of men, naturally form relations of solidarity. The two essays written by historians presented in this collection exemplify such a critical attitude towards a romantic view of women and their relations to each other. Buttafuoco in ‘On “Mothers” and “Sisters”’ rejects the views of some American feminist historians because of their acritical use of the notion of ‘women’s culture’; Pomata in ‘Premiss and epilogue’ makes the even stronger claim that the very category of woman is, like that of the criminal, a bourgeoisie invention of a being ‘identified by medical and biological norms’ (p. 158). This latter claim is, I think, of crucial importance because it reveals how much of the Anglo-American debate about essentialism is entirely misguided since it fails to understand that ‘woman’ is a normative term rather than a descriptive one.4 If one accepts Pomata’s claim, one positions oneself outside the essentialist debate as it is conceived in the English-speaking debate; that is, as a debate about a static absolute notion of ‘womanness’. Vegetti Finzi in ‘The female animal’ is the only one among the contributors to this collection to fall squarely into the essentialist trap. Although her archaeology of the feminine is firmly situated at the level of the symbolic, and despite her claims of beginning with what is marginal to dominant discourses, she delineates a history of the feminine without changes from classical Greece to modern times which is rooted in the ‘natural’ biological characteristic of women. The result is then simply an appropriation of dominant discourse for different purposes without breaking out of its constructions; in her account ‘we’ becomes indeed a familiar territory. However, even if one accepts Pomata’s claim about the normativity of ‘woman’, there remains a question about essentialism with regard to political

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strategy. Pomata prefers a nominalist strategy, and claims that woman does not exist (p. 163), but other Italian thinkers prefer a strategic essentialism. Cavarero and others take seriously the fact that there is in our society a common social construct of ‘woman’ which has symbolic power. These thinkers make the strategic choice of working through this construct so as to subvert it from within. They also argue that to do so requires that one creates a new ‘woman’s essence’. Essentialism, then, for Italian feminist thinkers is a matter of social intervention rather than of pure theoretical reflection. One can find in Cavarero’s work an argument which provides good reasons in favour of strategic essentialism. She argues that, since the apparent neutrality of the universal concept of ‘man’ is in reality the result of the universalization of only one (male) of the two supposedly contingent genders, the being who is sexed as male can recognize himself in the universal essence of man, whereas the being who is sexed as female cannot. Hence, she claims that, according to this picture, what is specific to man is that he is an instance of the universal man, whereas what is specific to woman is that she is an instance of the universal man who is contingently sexed female. What results is that male-specificity is absolute, but female-specificity is only an accident. One can further develop Cavarero’s argument by saying that the normative structure of dominant discourse already prescribes that being a woman is a contingent feature of human beings. However, since gender is what is specific to each woman, to claim that gender is a contingent matter is to maintain that women’s specificity is contingent. Thus, the anti-essentialist position does not challenge the dominant view according to which what is characteristic of women is only contingently human. According to Cavarero, the dominant view about gender can only be challenged from an essentialist position. Cavarero, however, does not criticize the dominant belief that there are only two genders and that everyone is either a member of one or of the other. However, this is one of those dichotomies that needs to be explored and exploded if we are to create a new unfamiliar sense of ‘we’. University of Wales, Cardiff NOTES 1 London: Basil Blackwell 1991. 2 These were the Italian equivalent of consciousness-raising groups. However, as the Italian name suggests, these groups were more concerned with acquiring an autonomous consciousness than their American models. 3 See De Lauretis, ‘The essence of the triangle or, Taking the risk of essentialism seriously: Feminist theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain’, Differences, 1 (1989). 4 See my ‘Whose language?’, in Lennon and Whitford (eds), Knowing the Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 218 pp., $10.00 (paperback) JAMES R.BENNETT

Long preparation has reached this persuasive conclusion. In What’s Wrong with Postmodernism (1990), Norris brought together several years of published critiques of ‘postmodernism’, defined as ‘extreme epistemological scepticism… where consensus-values are the last (indeed the only) court of appeal’ (p. 4), and its consequence in ‘providing intellectuals with a welcome excuse to acquiescence in the way things are’ (p. 5). The subject of Uncritical Theory is identical. He would demonstrate ‘how these current styles of ultra-relativist thought are on the one hand devoid of argumentative warrant and on the other complicit with the widespread drift toward habits of inert consensus-belief’ (p. 185), by constantly confronting postmodernism with arguments of the humanist rational critique and the events of the Gulf War. Chapter 5, ‘Alternative resources: Against postmodernism’, is worth the price of this underpriced book, for there he forcefully summarizes his essential arguments against postmodernism and his defences of the Enlightenment intellectual values (truth as a moral imperative, not merely consensus). There he takes to task Jean Baudrillard’s ‘caricature postmodernist stance’ in his essays on the Gulf War, Stanley Fish’s and Richard Rorty’s ‘line of passive acquiescence in whatever currently and contingently passes as “good in the way of belief”’, Jean-François Lyotard’s formulation of historical events and intellectual theories (ethics, etc.) as ‘heterogeneous language-games’ (p 86), and J.Hillis Miller’s dissociation of ‘questions of ethical judgment from issues of factual-historical understanding’ (p 94). And he summarizes the positions of leading exponents of ‘standards of truth-telling accountability’: Tony Bennett’s resistance to ‘cognitive scepticism’, his distinguishing between historical and literary modes of representation, and his conviction that we can be intelligent activists in Outside Literature (pp. 89–91); and above all Noam Chomsky’s Kantian Enlightenment defence of a rationalist philosophy of mind and language, his consequent

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commitment to reasoned dissent and participatory democracy, and his Voltairean ‘opposition to conformist self-interest and cynical acquiescence’ (pp. 101–2) (mainly citing Edward Herman’s and Chomsky’s Manufactured Consent). ‘Intellectuals have a duty to question the prevailing ideologies or beliefs that make up the “political economy of truth” in a social order increasingly subject to the pressures of censorship, mass-media control, manufactured consent and other such forms of direct or indirect state intervention’ (p. 106). And the correctness of Chomsky’s perspective is affirmed by reference to the factual events of the Gulf War and the official web of lies suppressing and distorting them, while observing both Bennett’s and Chomsky’s cognizance of the contestability of truth-claims and of the limitations of Enlightenment reason and emancipatory promise over the past two centuries (pp. 91, 113). Surrounding this core, in chapters 1–4 and 6–7 and the Postscript Norris mounts a systematic attack on postmodernism as measured by both the actual events and the government/military/media representations of the Gulf War. A challenging aspect of chapters 1 and 2 is Norris’s dissociation of Derrida from the effete scepticism he denounces. These chapters and others provide epistemological finetuning regarding whether truth can be ascertained and minority oppositions might be right in a nation in which ‘coercive pressures of a wholesale ideological conformist crusade’ prevail (p. 59). Chapter 4 concentrates upon Lyotard’s ‘extreme anti-cognitivist stance’. Chapters 3 and 6 include analysis of ‘neopragmatism’ (Rorty et al.), which is equated with postmodernism (and distinguished from the original pragmatists, James and Dewey). In chapter 1 and in the Postscript he confronts Baudrillard’s two essays on the war, which purvey ‘some of the silliest ideas’ (p. 11) emanating from ‘French intellectual fashion’. To Baudrillard, society is now so fictive and illusory, and reality so thoroughly the play of multiplied simulacra, that truth and enlightened reason have become obsolete. The Gulf War, similarly, is an extension of video war games, a ‘hyperreal’ scenario, where truth was the government/media disinformation machine of TV saturating but misinforming coverage. To Norris this amounts to a cynical abandonment of the responsibility to expose propaganda and lies, as his model Chomsky tries to do, who seeks the truth through an effort of disciplined critical research and thought. Not all readers of Baudrillard see it this way. For William Chaloupka in Knowing Nukes (1992) Baudrillard, like Chomsky, recognizes the power over appearances now within the grasp of powerful institutions and their mass media (that is, a mass media over which the government, corporations, and the military possess dominant influence). In such a national order, the only resistance left is irony. Baudrillard, Chomsky and Norris equally well recognize the system of information control from the top down so well exemplified by the Gulf War —‘imposed from above by government agencies, think-tanks, military information-sources, press and TV control mechanisms etc,’ with no open ‘dialogical exchange’ (Chaloupka, p. 128); in fact, this is Chomsky’s central

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thesis. But he responds with liberal-humanist rational analysis, Baudrillard with paradox. The massive propaganda, secrecy and censorship now in the hands of modern nations, recognized by Norris, provide a critical context for assessing whether postmodernism is the threat Norris fears. He admits he may ‘have exaggerated the impact of these latter developments, confined as they are to a fairly small interest-group of critics, philosophers and cultural theorists with no great following beyond the academic or specialized intellectual sphere’, but he insists the postmodernists (Foucault et al.) ‘are at the very least worth attention when it comes to understanding how “public opinion” was swung into accepting the US line on the Gulf War’ (p. 184). Admittedly, but it is surely only a minute influence, compared, for example, to the White House propaganda centre or to national security secrecy. The explanation of the limited and feeble dissent by intellectuals (including journalists) against the war (though I think there was more opposition than he implies, and it is increasing) and the mass enthusiasm for it—minds turned into yellow ribbons—is not attributable to postmodernism, unknown to almost everyone except a few academics, but to the pervasive acceptance of militarism at the grassroots, in the homes, the towns, the counties. James R.Bennett compiled the bibliographies Control of Information in the United States and Control of the Media in the United States, and is now compiling a bibliography of political prisoners worldwide. University of Arkansas

Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 344 pp., £40.00 (hardback), £12.99 (paperback) THOMAS DOCHERTY

A useful place to begin this review would be in posing a simple question, thus: ‘Is it true that Emma Woodhouse is engaged to marry Mr Knightley?’ Would it make any difference if we were to change the tense of such a question: ‘Did Emma get engaged to Mr Knightley?’, in a formulation whose change of tense seems to imply a life for Emma ‘outside’ of Austen’s text? Such questions may appear trivial; but they have the purpose of instancing different levels, functions or expectations of truth. On one hand, as a description of historical fact, the statements are false, for there ‘is’ no such Emma Woodhouse of whom the action in question is predicated: this ‘event’ can never have happened. On the other hand, as a descriptive statement subject to tests of verification, the statements can certainly be validated by reference to a text which documents and narrates such an event. The first function of truth here relates to the ontological, referential status of truth; the second relates to a more limited epistemological dimension whose scope is carefully circumscribed by the context in which the question and its response makes sense, a context called ‘literature’. The possible confusion arises because we have a category of text called ‘fiction’, in which we expect different things of truth than we would do in a text categorized as philosophy. One might indeed vary my opening question with reference to a different type of text, thus: ‘Is it true that Norris tells the truth about postmodernism?’ On the evidence of the philosophical text under review, the answer to that question is negative. Yet while there is little in this text about postmodernism, there is a great deal in it about truth as a philosophical, ethical, linguistic and critical issue. Norris takes contemporary criticism to task for losing sight of its properly self-legitimating principles. He diagnoses a current troublesome trend towards radical scepticism, marked most clearly in the work of neo-pragmatists such as Rorty, a work which gives great solace to a revival of a specific form of relativism which denies the critic any opportunity to take a stand on issues of

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real importance. Norris’s enemies are those critics who have lost faith in the seriousness of their work, seeing the profession as one engaged in a trivial procedure of hermeneutic, losing touch with their real-life critical commitments while maintaining an attention only to their professionalized and specialized discourses. This would offer an extraordinarily clumsy title for a book; and it is a truth universally acknowledged that a book with a clumsy title is usually in want of an audience. Norris chooses to describe the position towards which he feels such antagonism as ‘postmodernism’, despite the obvious fact that the text itself barely touches the surface of the current postmodernism debates. My point here is not to accuse Norris or his publishers of bad faith, but rather to indicate that the very text in which Norris argues against relativism has its own presentation somewhat determined precisely by contextual economic factors, factors which make their primary economic sense ‘relative’ to current cultural debates, ‘relative’ to a specific philosophical or academic discourse. It does not follow from this observation that I adhere to a ‘relativist’ philosophical position which leads to the abandonment of any form of truth-claim or to the abandonment of ethical or political principles; it simply follows that I believe the question to be more complex than Norris suggests. Postmodernism is not inimical to truth, but is rather sensitive to the different forms and functions of truth and of knowledge. Before proceeding to argue with the text in some little detail, I should indicate that there is a series of extremely distinguished discussions here of, inter alia, Empson, Foucault, current fascinations with Kant, and Rorty (roundly attacked throughout). En route, there are numerous side-swipes at any number of critics whom Norris stigmatizes as those who have lost faith in enlightenment values (among whom Lyotard is singled out most insistently). There are also detailed engagements with a wide variety of other thinkers, such as Davidson, Frege, Derrida, all viewed with careful and sometimes heavily qualified admiration. The book is to be commended for its ability to deal concisely, succinctly and always extremely intelligently with an enormous range of linguistic philosophy. Where it falls short, in my view, is in its almost caricatural representation of its enemy as ‘postmodernism’. In the chapter entitled ‘“What is Enlightenment”: Foucault on Kant’, Norris alludes to Baudelaire’s ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, a text dwelt on by Foucault and by sundry other contemporary philosophers of the modern. In that essay, Baudelaire makes a distinction, allowing him to historicize notions of the beautiful, between the eternal and the ephemeral. The beautiful is: fait d’un élément éternel, invariable, dont la quantité est infiniment difficile a déterminer, et d’un élément relatif, circonstantiel, qui sera, si l’on veut, tour a tour ou tout ensemble, l’époque, la mode, la morale, la passion. Sans ce second élément, qui est comme l’enveloppe amusante, titillante, apéritive, du divin gâteau, le premier élément serait indigestible, inappréciable, non adapté et non approprié a la nature humaine.1

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Norris’s basic point is adequately explained in the suggestion that he sees a tendency in contemporary criticism to prioritize the amuse-gueule over the meat, to the point where the proof of the pudding is not in the eating at all, to the point where there is no proof of the pudding. Contemporary theory is in danger, according to Norris, of contenting itself with what Baudelaire describes as the ‘ephemeral’ at the cost of the substantial. It is not the case that Norris would disregard the ephemeral or the relative. Like his great precursor Empson (on the trajectory of whose work he increasingly seems to model his own), Norris would wish to attend precisely to the ephemeral, in the form in which Baudelaire intends this word to mean ‘the historical’. But while Norris sees the truth as something to be grasped in—and then abstracted from—the relation between the ephemeral and the eternal (to continue Baudelaire’s terms), the postmodern would rather proceed more cautiously in its pondering of the relation between ephemeral and eternal: the postmodern, while considering questions of truth, would also wish to ask questions about the forms, functions and specific expectations of truth in any given instance. This does not imply the reduction of truth to certain kinds of neo-pragmatist notions of what is better in the way of belief among a consensus (even if this may be Rorty’s way of dealing with the issue). Norris’s line on consensus itself is also slightly troubling. On one hand, he is opposed to consensus-based ideas of truth: he thinks that truth is not to be determined by what a consensus wishes to believe. To this extent, therefore, he is, like Lyotard (and despite himself) opposed to certain reliances on consensus. But whereas Lyotard sees, in consensus, a tendency towards an erasure of difference and of possible differends, Norris sees rather a lax approach to truth in favour of a social or mass subscription to ideology. Both see injustice in consensus-based notions of truth; both, likewise, see injustice in Rorty’s position. Yet Norris appears throughout this book unwilling to disentangle Lyotard’s thinking from that of neo-pragmatism, with the result that he misses the opportunity to strengthen his own case against relativism and for an ethical or politically ‘just’ attitude to truth by enlisting some of Lyotard’s arguments, not to mention the arguments of many others who, while engaged in debates around the postmodern, none the less retain high ethical and political principles. The search for the proof of the Baudelairean pudding is actually akin to a specific historical modernist problem, perhaps most directly addressed in the moment of the European Renaissance by Shakespeare’s Othello. That play depends for much of its impact specifically upon a sensible difference —the clearly signalled visible difference—between Othello the Moor and the rest of the white cast. Othello himself knows the full value of the visible, for at one crucial turn in the plot he places no faith in Iago’s narratives, demanding instead the ‘ocular proof’ of Desdemona’s infidelity. Empire and empiricism (in at least the form of the empirically self-evidential) are linked in this play, a text situated in a culture which explicitly modernizes itself by, among other things, the discursive

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trick of describing itself as advanced in relation to its colonies and to a subjected world of alterity. In this play, to see is to know; but it is not yet to know the truth in all its functions and levels. Norris’s work here continues this modernist problem in the desire to rest a case upon the ‘self-evident’, the self-seeing and self-seen. Norris would finally adjudicate a difference between competing and contradictory propositions either upon the self-evident ontological facts of the case (thus implying a primarily referential grounding for truth-telling statements), or he will rest his case upon a truth which is self-evident to the logical workings of reason (thus enabling the workings of a specific ‘reason’ to validate itself in a somewhat circular fashion). The former is, I would suggest, contaminated by a pathology specific to the modern, by an Othello-like desire or will to control, by means of surveillance and the specular, the real. The latter more clearly leads into the contemporary debate over enlightenment values. These two positions, further, are not necessarily consistent with each other. Once more in these matters, there is a simplification of what postmodernism is about, for Norris seeks to cast anyone who questions a specific version of ‘the Enlightenment’ as being thereby in favour of various modes of irrationality. Lyotard (and this is a random example; there are others), accused of revelling frivolously (p. 70) in the ‘outright rejection of…“enlightenment” values and truth-claims’ (p. 93), has written: When the German philosophers today, or the Americans, speak of the neoirrationalism of French thought, when Habermas gives lessons in progressivism to Derrida and to Foucault in the name of the project of modernity, they are making a serious mistake about what is at issue in modernity. It was not, and it is not (for modernity is not finished), simply the Enlightenment, what was and is at issue is the introduction of the will into reason.2 One way in which Lyotard sees this will introduced into reason is through a subscription to consensus which denies a differend; alternatively put, one way in which the will is introduced into reason is, for example, in Norris’s desire for the self-evident. Norris does not cite the passage from Lyotard just quoted. Nor does he cite much by Baudrillard, Vattimo, Rovatti, Bauman, Jameson, Jencks, Portoghesi, Gehry, Hutcheon, Gorz, Laclau, Mouffe, Crimp, much less the more recondite thinkers about postmodernism. He does not enlist much help from thinkers who have deep troubles with the postmodern, such as Lovibond, Callincos, Badiou, and so on. There is evidence here of a kind of resistance on the part of Norris. In an essay whose substance Norris has truthfully represented elsewhere, Paul de Man wrote of how much of the resistance to theory derives from within theory itself, in its occasionally wilful ignorance of recalcitrant materials. Another way of putting this might be to suggest that in resisting theory, some thinkers resist

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the dissonant voice of their various Others. Theory exerts a force which sometimes reduces its contradictions to silence; postmodernism, in its attention to alterity, wishes in general to avoid such a force. Postmodernism sees a force— an unjustified force—at work sometimes in arguments over the truth between speakers who try to resolve their differences without attending to the possibility of a differend. Postmodernism, thus, sees an injustice in the resistance to theory. Norris appears in this text to be guilty precisely of such an injustice. Typically in this text (but untypically for Norris more generally), rhetoric gets the better of logic. Whenever Norris gets a Rortean relativist in his sights and trounces the relativist argument on account of its self-contradictions or manifest lack of principle, Norris claims for good measure that he has also thereby trounced neo-pragmatists, cultural materialists, new historicists, general ‘textualists’ and all and sundry postmodernists all at one go. In his defence of enlightenment values and principles of emancipation, counter-oppression and such like, Norris occasionally indicates the great diversity of opinions among the philosophers of the Enlightenment. If it is folly to pretend that one might be able to homogenize all of this hugely differing material, it is equally folly, I suggest, to imagine that the postmodern is any more available for simple representation. This book may offer a number of truths, but they are not the truths about postmodernism. Trinity College, Dublin NOTES 1 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, in Critique d’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 345. 2 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Svelte appendix to the postmodern question’ (trans. Thomas Docherty), in Richard Kearney (ed.), Across the Frontiers (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), p. 265.

Margaret E.Gray, Postmodern Proust (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 189 pp., £ 21.00 (hardback) MICHAEL WOOD

In literary history each generation parodies its predecessor, sets up a travesty to highlight its own difference. The Modernists invented the complacent Victorians, incapable of seeing fear in a handful of dust, even if Eliot borrowed the phrase from Tennyson. Theorists of postmodernism convert the Modernists themselves into dinosaurs, lumbering questers for the certainties we all know are gone, incapable of any sort of lightness of being. A practical form of scepticism about such stories is to find the habits of one generation in the behaviour of the other; more specifically to see the past as alive in the present, and the present as already hard at work in the past. This is what Margaret E.Gray does in her elegant and witty study of Proust. Nothing postmodern is alien to him, she suggests: neither criticism as fiction nor the fragmented self; neither memory as invention nor écriture feminine, neither deconstructive figuration nor the refusal of ‘literature’. Gray accepts Lyotard’s reading of the postmodern as a precarious moment within modernity, the trace of modernism’s (late or early) attention to its own edges and aporias; but she also wants to see the postmodern ‘as a sort of lens’, a way of reading rather than a feature of texts or cultural artefacts. The second argument threatens to unravel the first—if the postmodern is a way of reading, then we shall meet it everywhere we look, even in the remotest past, because it is our look—but in fact Gray does something more intricate, and more historical, than her opening chapter proposes. She finds the postmodern in Proust, which is to say it is there to be found—‘there’ and ‘Proust’ being neither static texts nor free inventions but sites of reading, that strange collusion between what we know and what we don’t know. Gray is particularly persuasive about the shifting ground of narration in Proust, the crossovers between narrator and protagonist; about Proust’s taste for piling up hypotheses into a mockery of explanation rather than the thing itself, an

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activity which is ‘demonstrably futile’ (p. 60), and demonstrates its futility; about Proust’s metaphors and metonyms as means of holding off interpretation rather than succumbing to it. This last question is a delicate one, given Proust’s addiction to interpretation, and Gray takes some time to be clear about it. She starts out by saying that Proust’s images ‘refuse’ experience, or are to be seen as ‘turning against’ it (p. 121). Later she argues that ‘figuration seems not so much to convey the world as explicitly to oppose that world, overturning referentiality; worldly experience is made to serve as screen, prop, support for pure image’ (pp. 127–8). Her underlying argument is different, though. Proust, like the artist in Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement, uses images to save experience from the depredations of meaning, ‘to hide, distance, and protect the world’ (p. 123), ‘to shield experience from capture’ (p. 134). It is for experience’s sake that one lets go of experience; just as it is for the sake of writing, Gray suggests, that one might give up the consolations of literature: ‘Could, then, the story of how Marcel becomes a writer really be the story of how he doesn’t?’ (p. 147). It would be enough to overturn the traditional, triumphalist readings of A la Recherche if it were (seriously) seen as the story of how Marcel might not have become a writer. At another point Gray describes ‘art, or writing’ as ‘not the capture of essence, but the release from the appetitive, appropriative hunger for essences’ (p. 64, her italics). There are times when Gray seems to have bought a little too readily into the excitements of the postmodernist vocabulary, all daring and plurality and violence. She uses the word ‘coercive’ in an oddly complimentary way (pp. 2, 132), and in her enthusiasm for the idea that Proust’s defence of Baudelaire is really an attack (because all criticism may be ‘disfiguration’ and self-projection), she permits herself one of her rare clumsy readings. Proust seeks ‘to legislate what criticism should be’, Gray says, and it comes as something of a surprise to look back at the sentence she is glossing: ‘It seems to me…that…I should perhaps manage to say, as to what criticism should be and art is, some things I’ve often thought about’ (p. 30). We should note too, for the record, that Harold Pinter’s film script of A la Recherche has not been filmed, and therefore did not ‘eventually’ (p. 137) become Volker Schlöndorff’s rather dull movie Swann in Love. However, these are very small faults in a remarkably agile and engaging book, which enlivens familiar and unfamiliar corners of Proust’s work, intelligently raises questions too long thought to have been finally answered, and clearly possesses the courage of its hostility to convictions. University of Exeter

James Kelman, Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political (Stirling: AK Press, 1992), 91 pp., £ 4.50 (paperback) WILLY MALEY

Every writer has a politics of their own, in their lives and in their writings, in the writing of their lives and the lives of their writing. They retain copyright on their texts and politics, even when they become public property. But the relationship between a writer’s politics and a writer’s writing is complex, differentiated, heterogeneous and variegated. It is one thing to denounce a writer as misogynistic, racist, homophobic or a social chauvinist and another to find those traits in their work. It is one thing to find those traits in their work and another to construct a political profile from those writings. Authorial biography and textual practice do intercut, but not in dogmatic, hackneyed, or stereotyped ways. Similarly, the national, cultural, social, sexual and ethnic identity of a writer matters, but the levels of correspondence and contradiction in a text—any text— modify and qualify that identity in ways that make a mockery of simple models of reflection and representation. Where an author is coming from, and where they come from, will affect their writing, but not in an easily definable manner. Reading the ‘political’ writings of an author offers a fresh perspective on the so-called ‘fictional’ writings, supposing that one believes in that strange institution called literature, or that even stranger institution called politics. Sometimes the gap between the two ways of writing is slender enough to suggest that a text is a text is a text. A narrow isthmus between novel and critical essay lends itself to a generalized concept of text. (The first novel of Terry Eagleton, for instance, is full of the fun and figures, the polemics and passion of his critical writing.) At other times, the gulf between the ‘political’ and ‘literary’ discourses compromises and problematizes that catholic position. How many readers have been surprised by the political pronouncements, conversions, affiliations and opinions of authors whom they had read in a certain way, against the grain, perhaps, of their ‘actual’ politics? Sometimes the public expressions and the published expressions are opposed, or juxtaposed, rather than complementary or

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overlapping. We all know of ‘right-on’ writers who are politically incorrect in their putative ‘real lives’, and vice versa. The dialogic principle can be abandoned for confessional monologue. Can we bracket the real? An author, like an actor, can step out of character, out of line, out of order. (How does the turmoil in Woody Allen’s ‘private’ life mesh, if at all, with his ‘work’?) The recent reaction in critical theory against biography has no doubt gone too far in the direction of forgetting that texts have authors, however limited or incorporated they may be. There is nothing worn under the cult of the author. Reports of his or her death—beginning with the fatwah issued by Barthes—have been greatly exaggerated. Both the public and private spheres are political and textual. Authors are textual constructs only if biography is reconceptualized. Writers have responsibilities, to the world, to readers, publishers, editors, texts and authors. Those responsibilities assume diverse forms, and it may be that antihumanist criticism is better equipped to address them than subject-centred humanism. This is all by way of introducing somewhat elliptically a review of a book of critical essays by a writer best known for prose fiction. A ‘review’ implies, in one of its etymological guises, another look, and I want to take the opportunity to give more than a second glance to a text that raises some key questions about the links—or ‘linkage’—between literary theory and political activism. I want to attack something I’m still attached to. James Kelman is a novelist, playwright and short-story writer, born, bred and based in Glasgow. The cover of this collection of essays declares that he ‘will probably die in Glasgow’. But Kelman is by no means parochial. He is recognized as a major European author who sees himself, and is seen by critics, as a story-teller in the tradition of Chekhov and Kafka. He is a fierce critic of academia, partly as a result of his experiences as a mature student at the University of Strathclyde, where he did English. Exposure to the canon served only to harden his attitude to an ‘anglocentric’ literary establishment. He also ‘did philosophy, including a course on logic’ which helped him to ‘cope with the occasional difficult proposition’ (pp. 5–6). As well as being a writer, Kelman is also, again according to the publisher’s blurb, ‘an engaged writer’ and ‘a cultural and political activist’, someone who has campaigned vigorously on a whole series of issues. The ‘essays, polemics and talks’ gathered together in this volume are largely occasional pieces, responding to specific events, themes and pressing matters, and consequently have a very raw feel to them, uncooked and undiluted, but by no means crude in artistic quality or lacking finish. Most were originally delivered as informal talks before, during and after Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture in 1990, to which Kelman, associated with the radical group Workers’ City, was implacably opposed, seeing in the Saatchi and Saatchi marketing of his home town an attempt to give Red Clydeside a conservative gloss, the entire project being marked by ‘intellectual poverty, moral bankruptcy and political cowardice’ (p.31).

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The ‘talks’—Kelman’s language throughout might be described as gutsy, chatty, informal, folksy, plain-speaking (indeed, he often refers to people as ‘folk’)—were variously addressed, sometimes in revised forms, to MA students at Glasgow School of Art, a gathering of people at Harry McShane’s Centenary, an event organized by the SWP, the 1991 Edinburgh Book Fair, the Socialist Teachers group of the Educational Institute of Scotland, Amnesty International, Friends of Kurdistan, Friends of Palestine, European Action for Racial Equality and Social Justice, black members of Nalgo, Extra-Mural Department of Glasgow University creative writing groups, and Thanet College, Kent. Subjects broached include ‘Artists and value’, ‘English literature and the small coterie’, ‘On the Asylum Bill’, ‘Prisons’, ‘A brief note on the war being waged by the state against the victims of asbestos’, and the polemic that gives the collection its title, ‘Some recent attacks on the rights of the people’, which looks at the withdrawal of funding from the Citizens Rights Office in Lothian Region and the concomitant redundancy of the specialist on race and immigration throughout Scotland. These talks are also, of course, texts: ‘I don’t talk without writing the talk’ (p. 69). Kelman constantly posits a concept of identity that is multiple and open, challenging geographical determinism: Entities like ‘Scotsman’, ‘German’, ‘Indian’ or ‘American’; ‘Scottish culture’, ‘Jamaican culture’, ‘African culture’ or ‘Asian culture’ are material absurdities. They aren’t particular things in the world. There are no material bodies that correspond to them. We only use those terms in the way we use other terms such as ‘tree’, ‘bird’, ‘vehicle’ or ‘red’. They define abstract concepts; ‘things’ that don’t exist other than for loose classification. We use these terms for the general purpose of making sense of the world, and for communicating sensibly with other individuals. Especially those individuals from within our own groups and cultures. When we meet with people from different groups and cultures we try to tighten up on these loose, unparticularised definitions and descriptions. (p. 72) Kelman tightens up on his own cultural identity, describing himself as ‘a white middle-aged Glaswegian atheist protestant-bred male writer and father of two mature daughters, who spent his early years in Govan, Drumchapel, Partick and Maryhill’ (p. 69). In a talk entitled The Importance of Glasgow in My Work’, Kelman says he ‘could maybe start by saying why Glasgow isn’t important’, and he goes on to explain that: Glasgow just happens to be the city that I was born within and where some of my family, some of my relations, some of my friends and neighbours happen to live. I could have been born anywhere in the world I suppose. (p. 78)

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He proceeds to name a few other places that he could have been born in —’South Africa or Kenya, other parts of Africa…Iran, or Turkey, different parts of Asia, parts of South and Central America, parts of Europe’. This list of possible birthplaces—‘material absurdities’ by all means—is followed by a difficult proposition of sorts: If I’d been born in a different part of the world, a different social and cultural environment, then the fact of that in itself might have been crucially important. But I landed in a place where it is still possible to be as free as you want as a writer, provided you restrict yourself to certain media —I mean that you’ve got to stick to prose and poetry; once you want to write drama, film, radio or television, and become involved with the media at large, then you’re in trouble, you can no longer take freedom for granted. (p. 78) It is a Romantic image. The freedom of prose and poetry. The individual author carving out an existence outside of any interfering institution. It is also arguably a uniquely Western perspective. The claim for a specific literary form in a particular political context, where one can always rely on fiction as the last outpost of personal liberty. The author is lucky to land in a place far from those ‘loose, unparticularised definitions and descriptions’ like ‘different parts of Asia’ or ‘other parts of Africa’, where the birthright of artistic freedom, the ready and easy way to write poetry and prose, is not ‘still possible’. It is interesting that Kelman should include ‘Iran’ in his litany of alternative nativity places, because in one of his essays—not a talk but a feature in the Glasgow Herald newspaper—he dwells on the Rushdie affair and has some sharp things to say both about ‘contemporary literary criticism’ and the rampancy of racism, including ‘the endemic racism, class bias and general elitism at the English end of the Anglo American literary tradition’ (p. 20). Kelman wants ‘freedom of expression’ to be underpinned by ‘the right to reply’. There are times when two axioms are at cross purposes, when the right to free speech is contradicted by the principle of no platform for prejudice. Kelman calls for public accountability: ‘If contemporary literary criticism wants to be taken seriously then it must become socially responsible’ (p. 23). Kelman’s approach to literature is in some ways peculiarly old-fashioned. It is hard for someone who doesn’t understand the Scottish education system to grasp the anti-university sentiment that exists amongst even university-educated writers and artists. Terry Eagleton’s brilliant account of ‘the rise of English’ applies only belatedly to Scotland, where the injunction to ‘appreciate Shakespeare’ went against the grain of national feeling. Scottish secondary schools—and teachers—remain susceptible to Scottish nationalist sentiment. The increasingly anglicized universities—absorbing the overspill from the dominant nation in the Union—create a tension between primary and secondary learning and tertiary education. When Scottish writers like Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray

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and James Kelman criticize universities it is the voice of this very particular colonial experience that is speaking. As a Strathclyde alumnus myself I have always been amused at those English academics who perceive that institution as ‘Scottish’ in any way or—heaven forfend!— ‘radical’. Kelman’s own experience of the degree he never finished was quite negative: When I was at Strathclyde I became uneasy when a writer I didn’t think deserved to be called an artist was being described as ‘good’, and sometimes even ‘major’, by the lecturers. Even the very fact that you were given such writers at university meant that they were assumed to be ‘good’. The lecturers and university authorities hold the power: they can say something is good without having to prove it. If you, as a student, want to deny that something is good then you are forced to prove ‘it’. And proving anything is never easy. Atheists in the company will know what I’m talking about: it’s never the person who actually believes in God who has to find the proof, only those who don’t. (p. 8) But Kelman believes in the artist, and in ‘good’ literature, even if his concept of ‘good’ literature differs from that of the ‘university authorities’, who, as we all well know, bear very little relation to ‘lecturers’. Here is a tip on technique generally: when you work your way through every absence you can think of you’ll be left with a particular, something concrete; and this is usually where you discover the finest art, or at least the most satisfactory. But that is only an opinion, my own. (P.7) Working through absences to reach the concrete, presence, the kernel. But there’s more: ‘And also as a postscript I’m afraid most technique is metaphor.’ Including the metaphor of absences leading to concretions. Residual humanism: take for example the poet T.S.Eliot or the novelist Evelyn Waugh. Evelyn Waugh seemed to me to be so right-wing you’d be forgiven for calling him a fascist. And how could you call a fascist an artist. That struck me as by way of a contradiction in terms. So I wanted to say: here is a writer who okay might be ‘good’ but either s/he is a bad artist or s/he isn’t an artist at all— because surely someone who is a good artist cannot be someone who hates people of a different coloured skin, who hates people that speak a different language or whose racial origin differs from his own; surely a good artist won’t be somebody who hates people of a different religion or whose racial origin differs from his own; surely a good artist won’t be somebody who hates people of a different religion, people who come from a different

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cultural or economic background, who are not heterosexual, not homosexual, whatever. (p. 8) ‘Everyman, I will go with thee.’ A ‘good artist’ ought not to deny difference. If only life was like that. It is laudable but is it theoretical, textual, practical, political or cultural? After Benjamin, we know that there is no document of culture that is not at one and the same time a record of barbarism. Or do ‘we’? We ‘lecturers’, in our connivance with the ‘university authorities’—principals, vicechancellors, masters, wardens, of course, but also government ministers, and students too are authorities of sorts on and in universities—might be ultimately responsible in some way for the essentialist humanism that is prevalent amongst those whose narrow view of institutions compels them to think of themselves as being somehow outside of universities, as though there were some place beyond the university. Unfortunately, power and knowledge work in mysterious ways. The ivory tower is an elephant’s graveyard, and the university authorities— whose categorical imperative is not the Kantian notion of intellectual freedom but ‘police academy’—are everywhere. Kelman’s conviction that ordinary folk know best, know better than the ‘experts’, is shackled to a profound cynicism concerning the prospect of leadership, change from above, parliamentary reform, and so on. The Labour Party, for example, appear as ‘Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition’. Kelman has no time for party politics: ‘I have no faith in any political party, not the SNP, not the SWP, the WRP, the SDLP, or the RCP, not anybody—just to get that out of the road’ (p. 65). What Kelman does believe in is the ability or potential of the ‘folk’ to see through the machinations of the powers-that-be. Between the existential angst of the prose fiction and the self-evident commitment of the ‘essays cultural and political’ there is a kind of complicity. The innateness, the commonsensicality, is ideological through and through. The belief in the spontaneity of the masses; the suspicion of formal political organizations and structures; the anti-intellectualism; the view of the university as a state-controlled building rather than an institution that informs the state (there is nothing outside the university, and certainly not Kelman); the resistance to theory, not just theories which unilaterally try to explain everything, but theory per se; the antipathy to ‘experts’, stemming from an uncritical attachment to Chomsky, whom he refers to as ‘a “self-taught” academic’; the politics of obviousness; the language of Leavis; the cult of the ‘committed’ author as artist and the casual pigeon-holing of the ‘reactionary’ writer—‘there is just no question that Joseph Conrad was a racist’ (p. 9), or again, ‘I’ve nothing to say to writers who aren’t committed. There are no areas at any intellectual level I want to enter into with them’ (p. 80)—are all features of Kelman’s writing, his textual practice, but so too is the wit, perception and ingenuity that make the creative writing different from the essays political and cultural. Indeed, Kelman’s refusal to enter into dialogue with ‘bad’ writers, writers whom he does not deem to be

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‘artists’, conflicts with his claim that ‘We can’t afford to let dialogue become a lost art, not on the left, our networks and channels of communication have got to remain open’ (p. 52). Surely this openness has to embrace ‘right’ and ‘left’, even question the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘left’? Yet Kelman can say: There is absolutely nothing I would want to say to someone like Jeffrey Archer or Harold Robbins or Stephen King or Frederick Forsythe…. Nor is it simply the fact that the politics of the writers named strike me as beyond the pale; although that definitely does play a part. It’s just that I’ve nothing to say to writers who aren’t committed. (pp. 78–9) These writers are lumped unceremoniously together in the subset labelled ‘Not Artists’, but what critic or reader would be able to pinpoint accurately the ‘politics of the writers named’? All are popular novelists, but Kelman insists that his system of classification has ‘nothing to do with “high brow” literature versus “low brow” literature’. What has it to do with anything, for that matter? Are the politics of Stephen King any easier to bag and tag than the politics of Joseph Conrad? Writers, whatever their politics, remain to be read. We can’t afford to let dialogue become a lost art. Some Recent Attacks is a marvellous little book which offers a fascinating sidelight on an important author who prizes ‘the freedom to write stories’, as well as pointing up the problems of mapping out literature and politics as independent, rather than interdependent domains. Style in language and politics are not the same thing. Readers of Kelman’s fiction, with its agonizing introspection and ontological inquisitiveness, will have to reconcile this prose persona with the political activist who has all the answers. By way of a postscript—which is ultimately all that a review can be —I should add that my initial impetus to review this text arose from a chance remark by another reader that Kelman had said in it that the only thing worth reading of Marx and Lenin was the index. To prove that one cannot rely on hearsay, any more than on reviews, as indices of a text, let me leave the last word to Kelman, and conclude by quoting the passage in question: If there is one thing worth reading in the works of Lenin or Trotsky or especially Marx, then it’s the index. You don’t have to go away and study all the writers and thinkers that they did. You just have to recognise that that is what they did. They explored. Nothing’s sacred. That’s not how it works. Ideas come from people and nobody’s perfect. (p. 52) Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London

Stephen Crook, Modernist Radicalism and its Aftermath: Foundationalism and AntiFoundationalism in Radical Social Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), ix+261 pp., £35.00 (hardback), £10.99 (paperback) PETER BAEHR

Radical social theory, in Crook’s account, finds itself in an unhappy predicament. On the one hand, it is endangered by the tendency within the social sciences towards ‘self-absorbed academicism’ and ‘in a caricature of relevance, a research technology at the service of established interests’ (p. 8). On the other, the two genres of social theory most often mobilized in support of radicalism are themselves, Crook argues, hopelessly compromised. The first genre he calls ‘modernist radicalism’, a theoretical attitude and practice whose impact on social theory has been especially profound and pervasive. Its ‘classical’ exemplars are Marx and Durkheim, its greatest current representative Jürgen Habermas. The modernism of both Marx and Durkheim, Crook explains, turned on their belief that they had identified a new, autonomous kind of social order (the capitalist mode of production; societies governed by organic solidarity) and had produced a new kind of Knowledge (historical materialism; the science of sociology) with which to decipher that social order. Their radicalism consisted in the conviction that the new kind of Knowledge they had produced was qualitatively superior to the speculative philosophy and common-sense knowledge it decisively refuted and super-seded; their respective theories not only mirrored the social structures of the modern world, but could be employed as part of a practice which would help transform it for the universal good. To be sure, Marx and Durkheim recognized that their own theories were socially situated, i.e. unthinkable without the modern world such theories claimed to depict. None the less, both envisaged their contributions as a fundamental rupture with the ‘ideological’ conceptions of mere public opinion; both saw their work as a completion of philosophy and its legitimate scientific successor; and both harboured the conceit that their theory was supremely fit to guide humanity to a morally worthy and apolitical destination, that is to say one in tune with humankind’s telos, and one devoid of fundamental conflicts of interest.

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In short, then, ‘modernist radicalism’ is the Enlightenment project transposed to the register of social theory. Crook offers a number of related criticisms of it but all hinge on the contention that modernist radicalism fails because it is ‘foundationalist’, i.e. it rests on the dogma that its own claims are transcendental and certain, rather than perspectival and provisional, objectively true rather than conventional and pragmatic. Foundationalists labour under the delusion that they have discerned some animating principle of reality—the Proletariat, the Conscience Collective, Communicative Action—and some privileged means of grasping it, which evade the inescapably transient conditions of the historical moment. Ironically, then, far from being post-philosophical, modernist radicalism recapitulates some of the dominant motifs of classical empiricism and rationalism; for these too were convinced of their achievement in setting down ‘foundations’ of knowledge—Bacon’s ‘novum organon’, Descartes’ ‘cogito’— which preceded actual enquiry and could act as the tribunal of such enquiry. Modernist radicalism is the heir of these bogus claims. Intellectually it mistakes the metaphorical language of foundations for a stable, real-object-in-the-world. And politically its implications are authoritarian. For behind the quest for emancipation and value-commensuration lies a refusal to acknowledge the legitimate diversity of interests in society—interests which stubbornly decline to obey the universal edicts of the Legislator Theorist. At this juncture in the argument, many writers might be tempted to take the postmodernist fork. Crook refuses to do so. For postmodernism is the second option in ‘radical’ social theory he is determined to oppose. Postmodernism, according to Crook, is neither free of modernist assumptions nor indeed radical. In the first place, postmodernism, despite its pretensions, is just another species of foundationalism, albeit covert and delusive this time. What this foundationalism amounts to is a commitment to various philosophical monisms of a decidedly irrationalist sort. Monism is the doctrine that reality is ultimately explicable in terms of one category or principle. In Crook’s reading, the postmodernists either adopt a physicalist version of it (Baudrillard’s reduction of the social to ‘mass’, and its concomitant traits of ‘inertia’, ‘implosion’ etc.) or a formalistic version of it (the mid-1970s writing of Hindess and Hirst, where the distinction between thought-object and real-object appears to collapse into the logical relations within ‘discourse’). In the second place, none of this is radical. For a condition of radicalism is the ability to give reasons for pursuing one course of action, and one ideology, rather than others. Postmodernism lacks the tools to do this. Instead it degenerates into a nihilistic circus of anything-goes oppositionalism, or a discourse gymnastics that seems impermeable to substantive judgement: impermeable, that is, to the making of principled and responsible discriminations, which themselves might be a resource of directed practice in the world. Thus commenting on Guattari’s ‘micro politics’ of ‘expressions and experimentations’, Crook observes in disgust: There can be no reason inherent in Guattari’s argument why the “experimentations” of rapists, or child murderers, or racist fanatics should be excluded from the carnival’ (p. 159).

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What is the alternative, then, for a social theorist who still wants to be radical but wishes to avoid the pitfalls of Enlightenment metaphysics? Drawing on Simmel’s sociology, Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’, and ethnomethodology, Crook proposes a post-foundationalist option for radical social theory. Such an option will recognize the ironies of history and hence the tendency of all projects to rebound on their authors; the dependence of social theory on the everyday world of common-sense experience and philosophical reasoning; the impossibility of all definitive judgements; the recognition of the gap between conceptual syntheses and a world that is mercurial, elusive and constantly in flux. More positively and specifically, ‘post-foundationalist radicalism’ will be aware that the ‘second-order’ reflection of the social analyst is always predicated upon the ‘first-order’ constitution of the world by lay actors. Two reflexive strategies of enquiry emerge from such relational awareness: first, the analyst engaged in social interaction with lay actors may seek ‘pragmatic convergence’ with them. He/she will attempt to experience the world in the way they do, sympathetically identify with (but not necessarily agree with) their values and their constitution of reality. In such a rapport, ‘the analyst can share the interests of actors, or seek to modify them in some way, and can conduct enquiries designated to further those interests (or perhaps to persuade actors that they cannot be furthered except at great cost)’ (p. 194). This first approach offers a ‘mundane radicalism’ inasmuch as the analyst puts his or her resources at the disposal of the actors in question, particularly their social-political practice. The researcher acts as a kind of medium of, or springboard for, the interests and values of the people studied, as they articulate these interests and values. While claiming no privileged position in regard to the group studied, the researcher can none the less proceed actively by helping to ‘formulate new ways of conceiving, and solving, mundane problems’ (p. 196). The second post-fundationalist strategy of inquiry relates the social researcher more obliquely or, what Crook calls ‘orthogonally’, to the lay actors concerned. If the first strategy of ‘pragmatic convergence’ seeks to minimize the experiential distance between analyst and actors, blurring the distinction in fact between analyst and activist roles, the second seeks to open up that distance somewhat. Rather than aspiring to participate in the actors’ world-view, the analyst seeks to examine in a relatively detached manner the methods by which the world-view itself is accomplished. The kind of radicalism in prospect here is that of the ironist, whose practice consists in disclosing the potentially refractory outcomes of all projects, either lay or social scientific. Neither mundane nor orthogonal modes of inquiry imply any notion of Emancipation. Their role is rather facilitative (for the agents) and reflexive (for the social researcher); their object, development of research programmes which seek to gain empirical knowledge of ‘mundane problems’ and the ‘production of mundaneity’; these in turn may feed back recursively into the activity of the agents whose lives the sociologist is seeking to understand.

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The temptation for anyone acquainted with social theory is to contest various of Crook’s own interpretations of figures he arraigns as foundationalist and nihilist. However, though my reading of Marx and Durkheim, for instance, convinces me that ‘modernist radicalism’ is far too procrustean a category to capture the complexity and dynamism of their thought, I shall not get bogged down on this road. Let me concentrate instead on what, after all, is the point of this book: the defence of a post-foundational radical social theory. How persuasive is that defence? I shall argue that it is implausible because its various elements— anti-foundationalism, ethnomethodological sociology, and radicalism — conspire to undermine the general argument Crook seeks to advance. Crook’s argument runs into major problems once we consider the relationship between the version of anti-foundationalism he advances, and a signal feature of the current social reality one would expect the radical theorist to be particularly interested in. If we think about the issues which provoke debate today, and the groups that carry them forward, we find that these issues are framed using a rhetoric strikingly foundationalist in character. Social movement engagement, for instance, is not proverbial for its ambivalence; it is passionate, angry, sometimes self-righteous, sometimes violent. Where it displays public scepticism and irony—for instance in street theatre and political art—this is directed predominantly towards the social relations it is attacking, not towards its own commitments; the sense that the values embraced by the actors concerned might be ‘contingent’ (p. 213) is largely absent from their practice. That practice is not fired by a concern with ‘negative dialectics’ but with fierce indignation at perceived concrete social injustices; these are condemned through a discourse of rights and interests notable for the absolutist claims it makes. Examine, for example, the arguments regarding abortion. Pro-choice advocates typically affirm the unconditional priority of women’s rights over the merely putative, or derivative, rights of the foetus. Their opponents champion the rights of any (human) being to continue life unimpeded, the foetus considered as such a being. Or examine the writings and activity of those who resisted Soviet-type regimes in central eastern Europe: Charter 77 could mobilize the support it did partly because of its Enlightenment rhetoric of Human Rights; Havel sought to ‘live in Truth’, and this Truth was not negotiable. Or consider another case. As I draft this article, Canada is in the throes of rewriting its constitution. Demanding a new political status in that constitutional settlement are aboriginal peoples. In part, they seek to secure their objectives by insisting on the ‘inherent rights’ of aboriginal peoples to self-government; they remind other Canadians of the existence of Native ‘self-government’ prior to colonial conquest. Their claims are doubly foundational. To begin with, theirs is an argument about origins; they were in Canada first, that is, before the Europeans. Second, in virtue of these origins, it is claimed that aboriginal peoples have certain rights which current political arrangements and practices deny or infringe. When Ovide Mercredi, leader of the Assembly of First Nations (the organization that represents Canada’s ‘status’ Indians) protested against the

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way Canadian customs officials handle objects regarded as sacred by Natives, he asserted that this raised ‘an issue of fundamental religious freedom, a question of respecting fundamental human rights’ (quotations taken from The Globe and Mail, 1 and 11 November 1991). I assume that aboriginal peoples in Australia, where Stephen Crook now works, are employing a similar rhetoric. What these and countless other possible examples indicate is that we are witnessing today not a decline of foundationalist narratives so much as their proliferation, their democratization, expansion, loss of exclusivity. These narratives in turn are often linked to a broader theme which articulates the demand for equal consideration of interests,1 an idea which mingles and radicalizes Christian, Enlightenment and utilitarian metaphysical notions. It is precisely because these proliferating narratives are not incommensurable that they are able to have the suasive force, and political leverage, they sometimes do. Particularly noteworthy is the way that the metaphysics of rights and interests is being claimed for entities hitherto omitted from the mainstream of ethical consideration—non-human animals, the natural environment—and by agents who belong to, or identify primarily with, non-Western civilizations, but who shrewdly understand the power of the rights rhetoric: as in the case of the Tibetan opposition which agitates against Chinese occupation on the grounds that such occupation not only infringes Tibetan national Sovereignty, but denies the Tibetan people’s Human Rights.2 What began as the Rights of Man now encompasses—as an expectation and argument, at least—the Rights of Woman, Nations, Minorities and Nature. Moreover, this rights and interests rhetoric, a demand for parity, inclusion and respect, depends for its emotional impact (quite limited in reality) on evoking sentiments of human compassion and solidarity which first gained prominence in a recognizably modern form during the Enlightenment-Revolutionary period.3 These sentiments and others—the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual, the anathema attaching to the inflicting of needless suffering—are simultaneously an historical product and one now deeply etched into Western sensibilities. This explains Crook’s own outrage at Guattari’s carnival; Guattari’s ‘interventions’ collide with our civilized sense of what value is, and for that reason we (e.g. bourgeois intellectuals) respond to them as sick. To know sociologically that this civilization is an historical product, and that the rights rhetoric is a metaphysic, does not make either any less real or compelling. (I am not of course claiming that this rhetoric of rights and interests goes uncontested or is destined to succeed; set against it are rhetorics of exclusion—characteristic of racist political parties and movements, for instance—which, while foundationalist in their own way, are deeply hostile to the equal consideration of interests.) Now the situation theorized above places Crook’s mundane radicalism in a real conundrum. On the one hand, Crook has concluded that foundationalism is intellectually spurious; that is his presupposition henceforth. On the other hand, the very reflexivity demanded of the radical social theory he advances, together with its corresponding research sensibility—‘pragmatic convergence’—would

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seem to entail that it take this foundationalism seriously, i.e. not only seriously as an empirical problem, but give it some credence as situationally rational. It is important to see why this must be the case. Ethnomethodology’s distinctive contribution to sociology was to show that social action is not just, or mainly, a matter of motive and intention, but rather one dependent on actors’ (members’) knowledge.4 It helped sociologists examine the largely tacit ways this knowledge accomplishes social order. An ethnomethodological analysis of the social movements I alluded to above, for instance, would thus be concerned to study what one might call their mundane foundationalism. It would look at how this foundationalism is accounted for by the actors themselves. This is not a radical project—the point is not to suggest alternatives or modify the actors’ interests— it is a descriptive one with explanatory potential; and it gives credence to the knowledge activity of the people it studies. Ethnomethodologists are not, or course, committed to agreeing with those they study. But they are committed, theoretically, to taking the knowledge claims of actors as examples of practical reasoning, with a sense and a rationale; on the basis of these claims, ethnomethodologists argue, members construct their own pragmatic versions of reality. It is at this point that the practice of ethnomethodology that Crook recommends and the reasoning behind his own brand of anti-foundationalism start to pull in opposite directions. The former would involve a careful attempt to understand the mundane activity that produces mun- dane foundationalism; it would suspend the epistemological judgement of the theorist-researcher. But the latter insists that foundationalism per se is a figment of (e.g. Enlightenment) metaphysics: it is wrong (or at least, a language game we are enjoined to avoid playing). Crook is thus implicated in studying an everyday world—valorized by his conception of the primacy of first-order accounts—which turns out to be in important respects badly mistaken about itself. This is incoherent from an ethnomethodological point of view—which is concerned with the significance and formation of action, not its truth-value—and presumptuous from a consistently antifoundationalist one. What then of the ‘radical’ element in this equation? For a social theory to be radical in the post-foundational mode, we are told it must satisfy at least the following conditions: it must be accountable—i.e. be able to ‘articulate both the desirability and possibility of change’ (p. 200)—and it must be reflexive—the theorist should be as aware as possible of what he/she is doing and monitor their activity accordingly, scrupulously aware of the contingent and local aspects of such activity. Each of these conditions applies to the mundane and orthogonal dimensions of social theory and research. Note that the accountability of which Crook speaks is not primarily to the theorist-researcher’s ‘subjects’. The radicalism relates above all to the activity of the social theorist-researcher. Crook is aware of the dangers in this; notably the potential for self-indulgent preoccupation with the world of social science to the exclusion or detriment of attending to the wider world social science exists to study. But he seems unable

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to free his project of these dangers. He attempts to do so by suggesting that the theorist-researcher can help his or her subjects ‘foster an ironic perspective on values and their “fate”’ (p. 212) and also help people more generally to become aware of the dangers of ‘routinization’ (p. 213). But Crook the antifoundationalist cannot develop this argument in any systematic way: to do so would require him to invoke his own judgements about value which, once stated, would reveal his own ‘final vocabulary’,5 i.e. his own presuppositional ethical and political biases. And this would be pointless since, having divested social theory of any project of emancipation, or any reliance on metaphysics, his own final vocabulary can only be one among others, as contingent as everyone else’s. There is no compelling reason why people should be ironic (this may paralyse action rather than promote it) or fear routinization (for some, this may be preferable to the insecurity or marginalization they currently endure). I share Crook’s doubts about emancipatory social theory; I also have the strongest reservations about ‘radical’ social theory more generally which I shall come to in a moment. My concern at this point of the argument, however, is with the implications of Crook’s own radicalism for the enterprise of social theory itself. Orthogonal enquiry is unobjectionable: its empirical aim is to describe the ways reality and value get put together, to understand the ‘work of worlding’ (p. 211, citing Pollner); it is the bread and butter of anthropology, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and other kinds of ethnography, which have all enriched our knowledge about the making of the social world. The strategy of ‘mundane’ enquiry, on the other hand, is more problematic. Recall that central to mundane enquiry is ‘a pragmatic convergence with the interests of social members’ (p. 22), ‘a traceable relation to the values of social actors’ (p. 211). Now although the author offers certain provisos to this convergence— convergence does not mean agreement or passivity—they fail to convince. For it follows that the more successful the convergence of interests and values, the less possible it will be for the theorist to exercise the independent judgement which the provisos presuppose. In other words, the very practice of pragmatic convergence—to the exact degree it works—threatens to absorb the researcher into the group researched. It is difficult to see what kind of social theory can come out of this, as distinct from ‘solidarity politics’. To be sure, vivid and vital social theory will have a strong relation to the lived experiences of those whose world it theorizes; it will seek to understand it, through imaginative reconstruction, ‘thick description’6 and, where appropriate, participation. But theory does not seek simply to report those experiences, to be their cipher, but to explain them. And this involves the operation of critical distancing, a decentring practice, not a convergent one, a stepping back from the subjects of study. This distancing is a legitimate, as well as a necessary, activity of theory because the experience of members is never the whole story of their (our) behaviour; there are always structural or trans-local features of a situation, and historical legacies, which remain obscured from, or unarticulated by, the agents concerned; it is these features which theoretical enquiry can usefully identify. Distancing and

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abstraction allow, for instance, conversation analysts to identify the specific tacit rules—lists of three, contrastive pairs, projecting a name— which explain how certain kinds of political rhetoric draw applause.7 And it enables theoretically minded historians to develop concepts which uncover the hidden assumptions that inform social action: for instance James Hinton’s analysis of the ‘imperialist pacifism’ of the British peace movement.8 I think it unlikely that Crook would disagree about the necessity of critical distancing, for on a number of occasions he explicitly distinguishes between lay and sociological knowledge. My point is only that he fails to see how the success of mundane radicalism would threaten such distancing. More generally, I conclude that post-foundational radicalism is flimsy in its inability to enunciate or defend its own presuppositions; and that its implications in the ‘mundane’ mode undermine the specific contribution of social theory to the study of social life. Stephen Crook’s sense of the failure of social science—its scholasticism and its careerist appropriation by business and state interests—leads him to defend his own version of radical social theory. I have tried to show why that defence is not credible. But if Crook’s version of radicalism is problematic, what about radical social theory more generally? Clearly, social theory can be critical and often is. But can it also be radical? The term ‘radical’ has, pertinently enough, a foundationalist pedigree; common to its usage in botany, linguistics and mathematics, for instance, is the idea of arriving at the ‘root’ of some thing, discerning that entity’s primary, fundamental, hence non-derivative, element. In the context of social theory, the above connotation is muted, though still discernible in the two meanings the term normally assumes. The first is that of ‘reflexivity’, a version of which we have already discussed. Reflexivity is supposedly radical in its attempt to identify and reflect on the conditions of scientific practice.9 A reflexive social theory subjects the social scientist’s own work—its assumptions and practices—to systematic scrutiny. The purpose of engaging in this reflection is to become more aware of the limitations and possibilities of what one is doing; aware too of one’s responsibilities to those one studies and, in some cases, willing to have some accountability to them also. The ‘root’ at issue here is thus the reflective self, enquiring into its own activity, ideology, presuppositions. From the standpoint of ordinary language, the equation of radicalism with reflexivity might seem somewhat strained. Radicalism normally suggests not individual introspection or theoretical practice, but partisanship and engagement ‘rooted’ in the world outside the academy. The second meaning of radical social theory is closer to ordinary language. Radical social theory is theory in the service of social change; in principle this social change could be in any direction, but normally it has been associated with some version of leftist or ‘progressive’ politics. Social theory becomes radical where it identifies the agents of social change, encourages and ‘guides’ their activity; or/and where it theorizes the grounds for some project of empowerment, ‘consciousness-raising’, emancipation; it is a theory for a given constituency or cause (local or global),

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not simply a theory of that constituency or cause (academicism). Its purpose is to interpret the world as a prelude, and an accompaniment, to changing it. Relevant too, is the implication that agents may be unaware of the sources of their plight, or mistaken about their real interests; for this reason radical social theory, it may be maintained, has a significant educative role to play in society. The link between the two meanings of radicalism is the notion that a necessary condition of effective partisanship is theoretical reflexivity. I shall not examine this point here for reasons of space. Instead let me focus the remainder of my remarks on the second meaning of radical social theory identified above. For it is possible that some of the sense of failure dogging modern social theory can be attributed to a confusion about the nature of theory itself. The injunction to be radical, in the second sense, has promoted its own disappointment by seeking to impose on theory ambitions it can never fully realize. This is not only because people outside the academy rarely come into contact with social theory, and when they do, often find its language incomprehensible and repugnant, its ideas outlandish, and the moral authority of academics to champion radical social change highly questionable. It is also because a theory does not become radical by being a theory; in order to have effects in the world it must, obviously, secure a bearer. Marx’s social theory became radical when parts of it were taken up by certain groups; whether they did, or how they did, was out of his control. The theories of Hayek, marginalized for a generation, became radical when they became inspirational and convenient for the British and American Right. Social theory is thus faced with the situation that its radicalism is of necessity always vicarious and contingent; theories that aspire to be radical are in a very real sense hostages to fortune— and often this means oblivion or grotesque unintended consequences (the Gulag archipelago). Moreover, social theory that aspires to be radical is additionally faced by the irony that in the very process of being adopted it starts to lose its theoretical qualities: it begins to transmute into a creed. The theory’s subtleties, qualifications, dynamism, tensions—the features that help constitute it as a theory —go by the board, not because those who adopt aspects of it are less able than the theorist, but because theoretical complexity and ambivalence are not productive of the enthusiasms necessary to build commitment, and to translate ideas into the world. Marx’s work became a political force when it stopped being a complex theory and became a dogma—Marxism. Later it became a legitimating ritual of soviet-type societies. To really ‘take root’, then, theories must be reduced to a few simple and concrete ideas—ideas which, in their early phase at least, are effervescent, not intricate. The gap between social theory and political practice is thus a result of the nature of theory and politics themselves. On a number of grounds, then, post-foundationalist radicalism is not a sound alternative for social theory. I hope, none the less, that people read Stephen Crook’s text, for it is a challenging, trenchant book and is worth disagreeing with. If I believe its argument to be wrong in key respects, the way it is wrong is instructive and significant. Many of the ideas I developed to criticize the book

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emerged through engaging with it. For those who believe that those ideas themselves are flawed or misplaced this will count for little. I can think of no greater tribute to pay to a book, however, than to say it helped produce its own critique. Memorial University of Newfoundland NOTES Thanks to Judy Adler, Volker Meja, Hedda Schuurman and Ron Schwartz for their helpful critical comments on this paper. 1 On the equal consideration of interests, see P.Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. chs 2 and 3. 2 I owe this point to my colleague R.D.Schwartz. 3 See H.Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973; orig. 1963), esp. pp. 88–114. 4 See J.Heritage, ‘Ethnomethodology’, in A.Giddens and J.H.Turner (eds), Social Theory Today (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–72. 5 The expression comes from R.Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 73. 6 On ‘thick description’, see C.Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, (New York: Basic Books, 1973), ch. 1. 7 See M.Atkinson, Our Masters’ Voices (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 47–85. 8 See J.Hinton, Protests and Visions: Peace Politics in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1989). For a critical discussion of Hinton’s argument, see P.Baehr, ‘Peace “politics”’, in Politics, 11, 1 (April 1991), pp. 43–8. 9 The classic discussion remains A.Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1970), pp. 481–512.

Philip Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 224 pp., £40.00 (hardback) Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), xi+262pp., £25.00 (hardback) STEPHEN COPLEY Over the last thirty years the relation between law and literature in the eighteenth century has been a fruitful field for historical and literary research. Analysis of the social history of law, and of the operation of legal procedures and rituals as manifestations of hegemonistic social power, was a highly influential strand in the work of New Left historians of eighteenth-century Britain, and inevitably drew heavily on literary evidence. The model of hegemony deployed by those historians might have been open to question, and their reading of literary texts was at times naïvely referential, but they produced accounts of the period which were in many respects complemented by later Foucauldian analyses of the legal system, its texts, procedures, spectacle and changing codes of punishment. More recently, general surveys of crime and legal regulation by Frank McLynn (Routledge, 1989) and Ian Bell (Routledge, 1991) (amongst others) have read eighteenth-century accounts of the law from various sources with some acknowledgement of their generic status, while other commentators have been concerned to fill in the specifics of legal regulation in the period, which have often been taken too much for granted by commentators outside the specialized realm of legal history. The legal disablement of women in the period has thus frequently been referred to in general terms by literary commentators, but the specific patterns of regulation that produce that disablement—and the changes in those regulations—have only recently been traced in detail by Susan Staves, in Married Women’s Separate Property in England (Harvard, 1990). New editions of Fielding’s legal writings (ed. M.R.Zirker, Clarendon Press, 1988) and Robert Chambers’s law lectures (with Samuel Johnson’s advisory contributions) (ed. T.M.Curley, Clarendon Press, 1986) have prompted critical reinvestigation in literature departments of the specific claims made for law in the period; and attention has also focused on the multiplicity of narratives that surround eighteenth-century legal practice. The relation between the mass of popularly

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circulated criminal biographies and confessional narratives, and the early novel, has long been generally—if loosely—acknowledged by critics of the novel; and the criminal biographies themselves have been analysed as indexes of changes in the ideologies of punishment, notably by Lincoln Faller in Turned to Account (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Philip Rawlings’s collection of five criminal biographies of the period is a useful addition to this body of work. In a general introduction Rawlings surveys recent work in the area and considers the problematic biographical texts as ‘history’ and as ‘literature’: in introductions to each text he considers the plot structures and characteristic tropes which shape the lives. The lives themselves—of John Sheppard, James Dalton, Mary Young, John Poulter and Charles Speckman—are well chosen to illustrate the characteristics of such publications. The eighteenth century is also the starting-point of Alexander Welsh’s Strong Representations. The author suggests that, although the phrase ‘strong representations’ does not have any historical provenance, it can be used to mark out ‘representations of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ made ‘to prove a certain case’, which ‘openly distrust direct testimony’, submit witnesses to ‘the test of corroborating circumstances’ and claim to know things which have not been seen directly. These representations ‘may be religious or legal or literary’ (p. 8): in the course of the volume Welsh traces connections between the three categories through a series of case histories. Central to his argument is his account of the emergence of a new emphasis on, and concept of, ‘circumstantial evidence’ in English legal proceedings from the late eighteenth century on. He suggests that under both Anglo-American and Continental European legal regimes in this period, emphasis on ‘true representations’ replaces earlier dependence on ‘superior rhetoric…ordeal, combat, or compurgation’, and the procedures of ‘torture and confession’. Even under the new regimes, however, the nature of evidence and the uses to which it is put in trial procedures, as well as the definitions of ‘representation’ itself, change considerably over time, as part of a larger historical pattern of mutation. In this sense, although commonlaw trials rely upon the establishment of ‘a true representation of the facts’ as the basis for judgement, ‘their customs of representation, which directly affect people’s lives, are no more timeless than literary realism and natural religion are timeless’ (p. 10). According to Welsh, reliance on circumstantial evidence in legal proceedings has it roots in large intellectual changes such as the development of probabilistic modes of thinking in the seventeenth century. Resort to such evidence then emerges as a prosecution strategy in the second half of the eighteenth century, but it is not really adopted as a mode of defence until the nineteenth century, by which time the category of ‘circumstantial evidence’ itself has already begun to appear problematic. After a preliminary discussion of ‘evidence’ in a pair of eighteenth-century trials, Welsh compares the literal and figurative trials of Tom Jones and Waverley in the novels of which they are the eponymous protagonists. In different ways both novels show ‘the turn from prosecutorial use of the evidence

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to its potential for defense’ (p. 87) some time before this ‘potential’ became accepted practice in real trials; but whereas Tom is fully ‘acquitted’ by Fielding, Waverley is left in a more ambiguous position for reasons that are closely bound up with Scott’s historicism and with what Welsh later investigates as ‘the modern construction of guilt’ (p. 89). The emergence of that ‘guilt’ is also traced in Shakespeare criticism from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, where it is seen to be intimately connected to the development of judgemental criticism based on ‘character’ and ‘psychology’. Welsh argues that it can be inferred from Shakespeare’s plays that Shakespeare himself, writing ‘before the heyday of circumstantial evidence’, ‘opposed convictions about things unseen that are only inferred from circumstances’ (p. 103). None the less, nineteenthcentury criticism constructs a mode of treating the plays as narrative which allows critics to search for hidden causes through inferential evidence. Welsh outlines the development of this criticism with the examples of Maurice Morgann’s ‘trial’ of Falstaff in the eighteenth century, and the ‘trials’ of Hamlet and other Shakespearean characters conducted by A.C.Bradley and Ernest Jones in the twentieth. In his search for ‘hidden motives’ (p. 135) in Iago or Hamlet Bradley does not quite write as though he were criticizing a novel, but he does construct a narrative of investigation akin to nineteenth-century detective fiction, which is in some respects remarkably close to the psychoanalytic investigations of Freud, and which is thus linked to Ernest Jones’s application of Freud’s methods to Shakespeare’s dramatic characters. Returning to the law, Welsh dwells at length on James Fitzjames Stephen’s introduction to the Indian Evidence Act of 1872, and in particular on the surprising fact that the whole elaborate apparatus of the Act (which is still in force today as the basis of Indian legal procedures) is based on examples of the deployment of evidence in five British murder cases from the century preceding its composition. Welsh’s discussion in this chapter takes in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and ranges interestingly over Victorian debates about the nature of ‘relevant facts’, scientific evidence, natural religion, and the enhanced role of law in a society faced with decreasingly effective religious sanction. The final chapter is perhaps more predictable in its tracing of proto-modernist uncertainties about evidence even in ‘high Victorians’ such as Browning, Wilkie Collins and James; and the final reading of the ‘“Jamesian” point of view’ (p. 236) does not really depart far from previously established readings. This draws attention to a problem which also affects some other parts of Welsh’s argument. Put baldly, his claims about the literary texts he surveys sometimes come disconcertingly close to reiterating familiar claims from earlier criticism. It is thus not particularly startling to be told that Fielding’s novels are judgemental in ways which differentiate them from later nineteenth-century novels, or that, at the end of the period surveyed, the narrative of the Golden Bowl looks forward to modernism, with its emphasis on the investigation of the unsureties of unreliable and untrustworthy testimony rather than the ‘truth’ revealed by accumulated evidence. Equally, the critical discussion sometimes seems unduly locked into

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the terms of earlier critical debates. When Welsh lauds Ian Watt’s reading of Tom Jones in The Rise of the Novel as very close to his own, for instance, he seems to have bypassed the considerable body of recent commentary which has fundamentally challenged the terms of Watt’s strangely long-lived study; and when he discusses the representation of Allworthy in the same novel as the character ‘with whom he [Fielding] most identifies’ (p. 42) he likewise cuts across the terms of much recent critical debate. Similarly, in his discussion of historical treatments of Falstaff, in the section on Shakespeare criticism, his modern critical reference point in C.L.Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy seems strangely dated. Where the volume does make a real contribution to debate, though, is in replacing generalized gestures in the direction of the law— which characterize many earlier critical discussions—with detailed analysis of changes in legal practice and the framework of cultural and intellectual expectations which surrounds those changes. University of Wales, Cardiff

John Hartley, Tele-ology: Studies in Television (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 245 pp., £10.99 (paperback) John Hartley, The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 240 pp., £10.99 (paperback) SEAN CUBITT

Although it has been almost obligatory for every cultural commentator of the last fifty years to cite the enormous impact of television on every aspect of social life, there is to all intents and purposes no single discipline of television studies. The formative structures of media studies approaches form a tripartite object analysis—production, text, audience—in which the articulation of each of the moments with the others forms the crux of discussions which form the problematics of various sub-systems within the field: technology and technological determinism, policy and institutional organization; discursive structures of control and professionalism; the globalization of distribution and delivery systems; and, of increasing centrality in the last decade, the status of the viewer as passive consumer or active participant in the creation of televisual meaning. At the same time, the last five years or so have witnessed an important upsurge in historiographic work on institutions, textual practices and audiences, the initial inklings of a return to economic analysis, and sometimes fierce debates within and between theoretical models. Ironically for a discipline still close to the textual approaches of film studies and their not too distant roots in the schools of literature, it is textual analysis of television output that has become the poor relation in contemporary studies. The success of ethnographic approaches to audience in attracting readers among cultural studies academics and market research executives, and the impact of deregulation in the broadcasting policies of most of the industrial Englishspeaking world, have rather squeezed the critical appraisal of programme content, perhaps because of the parallel shift in TV reviewing practices, as previewing takes over from post-mortems, and media studies graduates begin to find work as newspaper columnists and researchers for television’s own accounts of its processes and performances.

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It is in this context that John Hartley’s new books arrive, arguing the case for a new centrality of textual analysis in the understanding of television culture. Teleology is a collection of pieces written over the previous decade, some of them already well known in the field; The Politics of Pictures is a monograph in two sections, the first covering a broad range of cultural practices but focusing on television, the second a form of archaeology of journalism. In a jaunty prose style dominated by extended metaphors, Hartley investigates the terms under which TV is, and might be, taken seriously, central to which is the contradictory marginalization of TV itself as trivial, and yet as all-pervasive, and, of course, pre-eminently blameworthy. Tele-ology argues that communication is fundamentally social and fundamentally mediated. Implicit in his argument is the failure of individualist critiques to deliver a politically viable sense of the audience, whether those critiques are ethnographic or psychoanalytic. Because communication is social, it is also historical, so that TV cannot be understood as either an ‘extension’ of speech, as McLuhanite technological determination from Innes to Baudrillard would have it, or as a corrupting influence on the purity of a mythologized faceto-face dialogue of equals. Core to Hartley’s counter argument is the figure of the audience, which he understands particularly as a construct, a rhetorical device enabling a series of discourses which he finds damaging to the understanding of television and to the mode of televisual politics which, in The Politics of Pictures, becomes somewhat more explicit. The rhetorical formation of the audience, he argues, is characterized by textual practices which shape it initially as child-like: he coins the term ‘paedocracy’ to describe television’s attempt to govern its textual production under the aegis of infantile qualities, in which the ‘lowest common denominator’ is not the vicious, porn-consuming vulgar, but the innocent and somehow dim-witted consumer. TV’s own texts, and those which gravitate around it—the policy statements of politicians, the construction of audiences as Other in ethnographic work or behavioural psychology’s attempts to analyse ‘response’—presume the simplicity and gullibility, the vulnerability and fickleness of a fictive audience which, he argues, these discourses have themselves constructed. But rather than attempt a sociology or psychology of the ‘real’ audience, Hartley argues effectively for a mode of discourse in which the audience can recognize themselves as active and critical users of the medium, looking therefore not to the empirical evidence sought in participant observation work, but in the discourses produced by viewers, including a fascinating photographic record of TV sets in Western Australia, and in certain kinds of programmemaking that recognize the intelligence of their audiences (he instances Z Cars and Edge of Darkness, rather curiously crediting both to their scriptwriter, Troy Kennedy Martin, in an uncharacteristically naïve acceptance of both auteurism and British TV’s own discourses of ‘quality’ as script-driven). Even more so, he argues the case for an academic/popular discourse of TV journalism that can

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break out of the pedagogic mould into which paedocratic regimes switch as solicitousness turns to chastisement. The Politics of Pictures is more precise in its formulation of the problem of addressing the audience, as befits a book, rather than a collection. An introductory chapter engages the argument that the ‘public’ is no longer —if indeed it ever was—outside the special confines of the Greek city-state, which in any case limited its definition of citizen to a small minority of the population—a group of people who could meet in some public forum. For us, he argues, the public only exists in mediated form: So it is not a question of contrasting a real public with the illusory media (almost vice versa in fact); it is a matter of showing how pervasive the textualisation of public life has become, and how it works…. [The] public, political aspects [of pictures, including talking pictures] are real, and engagement in them is personal and practical, so they are more directly participatory than representative politics could ever hope to be…for vast readerships they are the very form in which [democracy] is performed, and the means by which political issues and activists are tested, sometimes to destruction. (PP. 2–3) Even more than Tele-ology, The Politics of Pictures deploys a playful, inventive and at times scurrilous mode of address, arguing, for example, on the basis of an archaeology of the picnic, for an interdisciplinary semiotics which has everything to learn from popular discourses. Veblen, Kropotkin and Gramsci afford a critique of the academy which Hartley can then restate as the critical stance of a textually defined public which recognizes and understands itself in the discursive practices, including photography, television and journalism, in which it engages. The constant problem which emerges in coming to grips with Hartley’s position is the ease with which he identifies with the audience of which, as he rightly argues, he is a member. Constantly, and correctly again, arguing that the audience is not an aggregate of individuals but a social and socializing phenomenon, he is able to presume a kind of utopian coherence of the public sphere as thus newly defined. But it is precisely because of his choice of the word ‘public-ity’ to describe this formation that he opens up the door to a more macropolitical criticism than he otherwise allows himself space for. In translations of the work of Habermas and, perhaps crucially in this context, of Negt and Kluge, the term ‘publicity’ has been used as a (partial) translation of the German term Öffentlichkeit, otherwise translated as the ‘public sphere’. In Negt and Kluge’s analysis, the characteristic weakness of this description of civil society as a communicative process, defined by Habermas as grounded in the universal validity of the rationalist claims of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, is that

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According to these interpretations, the public sphere derives its substance from an intermediate realm that does not specifically express any particular social life-context, even though this public sphere allegedly represents the totality of society.1 Such problems are endemic to cultural criticism that attempts to fore-ground the communicative functions of society, tending as they do towards the Idealist fallacy expressed by Derrida as ‘il n’y a pas d’hors- texte’. Textuality certainly offers us the model for a utopian and democratic culture, but to argue that one already exists is to ignore the actually existing terms under which communication is possible. Hartley argues convincingly for the acceptance of electronic and photographic media as integral to contemporary communications, and even provides examples, such as the chemical properties of Eastman Kodak snapshot film, which define the kinds of image that can be made with it, and thus the kinds of communication that are ‘successful’ in the terms it sets. Yet he imagines an already achieved democracy in a world in which this is clearly not the case. Again, as is so often the case in cultural criticism in which power is a central category of analysis, resistance is presumed, as an automatic, systemic function, spontaneously generated in any discursive regime. This leaves him, once again, confusing the desire for democracy with its existence. For this reviewer, a key category for the extension of these thoughts must be the concept of fantasy. Hartley’s critique of the implicit individualism of much contemporary work on audiences misses the opportunity to unpack the centrality of individualism, not just as an ideological category of cultural analysis, but as an historically existing phenomenon, constructed, among other sites, precisely in the media with which he is concerned. This mode of individuality as textual production can be seen as a mode of incorporation and directed deployment of fantasy—for example, fantasies of domesticity, power and commonality which interest Hartley—in the interests of specific social formations. The erection of boundaries between subjectivity and sociality, and their precise historical locations, is a matter of ongoing hegemonic struggle, specifically in the domain of television and the debates which surround it. What is needed is a critique which refuses the borderlines offered by the dominant discourses of socialization, and which is capable of interpreting the internal complexities masked both by the category of individuality and the experience of enforced individualism. The conceptions of fantasy suggested by Negt and Kluge in their work on the public sphere, and by such textually oriented analysts as Constance Penley and D.N.Rodowick (in The Future of an Illusion, Routledge, 1989 and The Difficulty of Difference, Routledge, 1991 respectively) provide the kind of further critique of individualism as social and discursive formation which Hartley’s arguments require to gain a purchase on why television matters, to us. Hartley writes in a manner that charms some and tires others, but never without the will to maintain in his own prose the kind of openness which he prizes in popular culture and envisages for the discourses around it. His failing is

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that he allows hope to triumph over actuality, and although it is a good flaw, it is one that, ultimately, disarms the political critique that he is trying to build. Liverpool John Moores University NOTE 1 Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge, ‘The public sphere and experience: Selections’, trans. Peter Labanyi, October, 46 (Fall 1988), p.63.

Eve Tavor Bannet, Postcultural Theory: Critical Theory after the Marxist Paradigm (London: Macmillan, 1992), 226 pp., £35.00 (hardback) Vincent B.Leitch, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 186 pp., £19.50 (hardback) JOHN STOREY

Both Vincent B.Leitch and Eve Tavor Bannet are concerned with theoretical diversity. Leitch’s focus is the theoretical consequences of the continuing decentring of the literary text in American academia, whilst Bannet explores a range of what she identifies as ‘the other theories of the 80s’ (p. x). Her book, like Leitch’s, offers a survey of recent developments in cultural theory. Unlike Leitch, Bannet outlines what she claims is a cartography of a terrain mostly unknown. Her exploration is organized around the view that Cultural Theory—‘that unstable mixture of poststructuralism, deconstruction, political critique and materialist historicism which is variously known as Cultural Materialism, the New Historicism and Cultural Studies’ (p. ix): all under the sway of the marxist paradigm —has lost its explanatory power and analytical usefulness. Her book is structured around the question: what is to take its place? Her answer is what she calls Postcultural Theory, a mixture of French (de)construction, the feminist logic of both/and, possible worlds theory, and recent work in translation studies. Bannet argues that the relative neglect of these ‘other theories’ is mostly due to a lack of translations of the relevant work. But even where translations are available, other cultural theorists have been guilty of ‘looking the other way’ (ibid.). Her book is an attempt to make us pay attention. Bannet’s main complaint against marxism (which holds together and holds sway over ‘that unstable mixture’ she calls Cultural Theory) in all its many forms is not new: marxism is accused of being irredeemably deterministic; sometimes with crude vulgarity, at other times with eloquent sophistication; but from base-superstructure to social being and beyond, always reducing something to something else. In a rather convo luted argument, it is claimed that Cultural Theory is ‘incapable of speaking singularity, because [its] premises and methods reduce everything and everyone to the Same’ (p. 29). Moreover, Cultural Theory’s supposed insistence on conformity is helping to reproduce, contrary to

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its aims and claims, the very forces of conformity and sameness it seeks to dislodge. Saturated in the assumptions of the marxist paradigm, it produces a language which cannot speak difference, cannot speak otherness. To articulate freedom, we must embrace French (de)construction (an intellectual group which includes Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas). According to Bannet, ‘(de)construction affirms a truth and knowledge which is always other than historical concepts, identities, ideologies and languages—a truth and knowledge which infinitely exceed presence, the word and the finite mind of man’ (p. 51). Next she turns to what she calls the feminist logic of both/and. She argues that Cultural Theory’s ‘male-stream’ thought, locked into a binary view of the world, continually ignores ‘the both/and complexity of life’. Increasingly, feminists are looking for both/and solutions. They are beginning to argue…that women are both different and equal, or that we need both French and American feminist approaches, or that white middle class women have been both privileged and excluded, or that possessive power can be both life-preserving and destructive of the other. (p. 94) This produces a mode of cultural analysis which sees the literary text, for example, not as a unique product of genius, nor as the mere effect of discursive formations, but as ‘somewhere in between…in movement from one to the other… sometimes more this, sometimes more that’ (p. 104). Whilst I agree that people are not clones, dupes, the mere effects of structures, it is difficult to accept that such thinking belongs exclusively, or even principally, to the ‘other theories’ she celebrates. Another binary confronted by Bannet is fact (which duplicates reality) and fiction (which does not). Using possible worlds theory—‘possibility is a both/and category’ (p. 119)—she points out that failure to duplicate reality does not disqualify a text from being able to orientate readers within and through reality. Because fictions continually elaborate and explore the real—commenting on it, describing it, critiquing it, etc.— they offer educative possibilities about the real. The act of reading is in this sense an and/both situation in that we continually shift back and forth from fictional to actual world. Again, there is little here that I would disagree with. But I don’t really see why it is necessary to mobilize possible worlds theory in order to claim that a fictional text can articulate the real in such a way as to effect and affect our orientation within and through it. Moreover, the claim that this way of seeing fiction is in some way disqualified by theories influenced by the marxist paradigm is a position I find very difficult to accept. Finally, she discusses the critic as translator and the politics and ethics of translation. Translation is both an act of invention (there is a French Derrida, and an American Derrida), and an act of political and historical intervention (making

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Derrida available to a specific debate). Again, there is little here to disagree with. But then she adds, ‘from within the marxist paradigm…translation is a way one culture appropriates and/or naturalizes what properly belongs to another’ (p. 181). If we give but a moment’s thought to compiling a list of the classic texts of marxist cultural analysis—written in German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Italian, etc.—Bannet’s claim quickly begins to sound utterly ridiculous. In her concluding remarks, Bannet concedes that what she offers as ‘new discoveries’ may also prove to be ‘belated understandings of old ideas’ (p. 193). My response is that marxist cultural analysis and related theories influenced by the marxist paradigm may well be in crisis, but there is little in Bannet’s book to suggest that ‘the other theories of the 80s’ are either the reason for the crisis or a credible alternative to take us beyond it. Like Bannet, Vincent B.Leitch is interested in diversity. His focus is both theory and theory’s object(s) of study. He notes the changed and changing status of the literary text—both in terms of its loss of centrality as it is forced more and more to compete for critical attention with other types of text, and, moreover, increasingly to undergo interrogation by critical methods less than respectful to its supposed special aesthetic status. Leitch’s ‘primary objective…is to argue for a cultural criticism broadly informed by poststructuralist thinking’ (p. ix). Unlike others, myself included, who gave up on literary studies to work within cultural studies, Leitch argues the case to remain within literary studies in order to transform it. Although it is an undertaking marked by telling tensions and certain contradictions, the transformation of literary studies strikes me as a worthwhile endeavor. It is a project well under way and poststructuralism has a crucial role to play…. The choice between literary and cultural studies is best conceived as both/and, not either/or. (pp. xiv-xv) Leitch’s goal, as he in part acknowledges, has to a certain extent already been formulated by Robert Scholes in Textual Power, from which he quotes (the same quotation twice) with approval: We must stop ‘teaching literature’ and start ‘studying texts’. Our rebuilt apparatus must be devoted to textual studies…. Our favorite works of literature need not be lost in the new enterprise, but the exclusivity of literature as a category must be disgarded. All kinds of texts, visual as well as verbal, polemical as well as seductive, must be taken as the occasions for further textuality. And textual studies must be pushed beyond the discrete boundaries of the page and the book into institutional practices and social structures. (cited p. 38)1

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The problem with Scholes’s programme of an expanded literary studies, according to Leitch, is that it ‘tames the poststructuralist project’ (p. 141). Leitch’s own approach is to draw a map of the current theoretical terrain. The map unfolds through a series of so-called key topics, ranging from questions of authorship and intention to an assessment of what is now known in America as the Birmingham School of cultural studies. He constructs his version of poststructuralist cultural theory—‘a pragmatic blend of various poststructuralism’ (p. xv)—through a series of critical encounters with a number of other poststructuralists, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Robert Scholes, J.Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, Frank Lentricchia, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, Hélène Cixous, Michel de Certeau, Edward Said, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. His aim is less ‘an authoritative overview: it is instead an interested intervention in a dense field of argumentation’ (p. xv). Part of Leitch’s method is to measure poststructuralism against New Criticism. This might seem like pushing at an open door: New Criticism has been and gone. Leitch’s point is that ‘it has become immortalized in many places unconsciously [and not so unconsciously, in my experience] as “normal criticism”’ (p. xvi). He views ‘the reigning canon of so-called great literature as a sexist, racist, and classist construction’, aware that conflict(s) over what is literature ‘involves politics as well as aesthetics’ (p. 45). Against the claims of the canon he objects that ‘[t]here is no ontology of literature; there are only literature functions…. Major literatures are made, not born’ (pp. 59 and 103). Against the elitist complacency of ‘normal criticism’, he advocates a ‘contemporary academic reading practice [which, among other things] empower[s] readers to criticize the values and ideologies promoted by texts, question the selections of texts and the processes of selection’ (p. 125). According to Leitch, ‘an era of critical reading has yet to flourish’ (ibid.). This is a literary studies approach to cultural analysis. In the final analysis, Leitch’s project is an argument for an expanded literary studies, one that considers other texts, other contexts, and other theories. As he puts it himself, leaning heavily on Foucault, ‘intervening in regimes of reason constitutes the primary intellectual ethicopolitical work of cultural criticism’ (p. 171). To advocate seriously such an approach is, in my opinion, to begin to turn away from the contradictions of the radical teaching of literature and to commence to embrace instead the complexities of cultural studies. University of Sunderland NOTE 1 Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 16–17.

Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 239 pp., £12.99 (paperback) BRIAN WINSTON

First comes original work, then readers, then textbooks, then dictionaries and last common currency (at least in the arts pages of the broadsheets and the late night shows on the minority broadcasting channels). New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, as a recapitulation of all but the very latest contemporary film theory, is a work sited well along this road. But it is confused. It really wants to be a dictionary but is pretending to be a textbook. This makes it a good deal less useful than it might have been. The book is organized around ‘terms’ which are embedded in bold in the text and indexed; but within the text these ‘terms’ are very poorly cross-referenced. The problems this causes the reader are compounded by the fact that there is no second index of cited authors. The erratic cross-referencing seems to stem from the fact that the three authors have not effectively melded their contributions. This does not matter so much in the case of Sandy Flitterman-Lewis who wrote the section on psychoanalytic film theory. This material is largely independent of the other sections—despite her elegant attempt to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is nothing but a ‘development’ of film semiotics. As between Stam and Burgoyne, on the other hand, there are considerable redundancies. Burgoyne, for instance, offers an explication of Metz’s formal film classificatory system (The Grande Syntagmatique), ignoring the fact that some forty pages earlier Stam has a whole section describing it. Or: Stam deals with Shklovsky and so does Burgoyne, quite independently. A further difficulty arises because there is little consistency in citation. Major ideas are often referenced by volume only, if at all, and occasionally names are mentioned with no further references, or scholars are cited but cannot be readily found in the bibliography because they are co-authors.

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That the ‘terms’ are frequently glossed by citing secondary sources is but a final layer of impenetrability confronting the user—Coward, Heath and Rose are used to explain Lacan; Bordwell and Eagle, Tynianov; M-L.Ryan, MartinezBonati: Eagle, Shklovsky; Eagleton, Freud. This last speaks to the more substantive questions which the book raises as to the nature of film studies. On the one hand, it is possible to see the richness and variety of the material explicated in New Vocabularies as evidence of a vibrant intellectual enterprise, wherein the complexity of film stretches all available analytic tools to the upmost. On the other hand, those hostile to this enterprise can read this account as proof positive of the faddist and magpie-like nature of the field, its pretensions to scholarship, its bathetic search for legitimacy. And certainly there is much here that would support such a reading. For instance, there is a touching deference to the French: ‘Film sound, for Chion, is multi-track and has diverse origins. The synchronous voice in the cinema, for Chion, can be traced back to the theater; film music derives from opera; and voice-over commentary goes back to commentedon projections such as magic lantern shows.’ Thank you (as a Valley Girl ironist would say) for sharing that with us. There is also an almost talismanic belief in the power of the neologism. Chion might state the obvious about film sound but he clothes it in terms like vococentricism, point-of-hearing, acousmatic. Conversely, Burgoyne specifically remarks that two American scholars, Nick Browne and Edward Branigan, fail to develop a ‘separate terminology’. He makes it sound like a failing in them. The book makes no judgements about the relative worth of these neologisms, so fruitful analytic tools are not readily distinguished from sterile ones (e.g. the concept of the cineme as an analogue for the lexeme). This would, of course, be more forgivable in a true dictionary; but this is a text and its authors are not above grinding axes. It is, for instance, no surprise that New Vocabularies climaxes with Bakhtin since Stam was a pioneer in applying his thought to cinema studies. What is more surprising is that the new vocabularies are not deemed to include reception theory nor the impact of cultural studies in general. The book’s subtitle is Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. Had the book not included one area, the psychoanalytic, as being (despite Flitterman-Lewis’s claim to the contrary) ‘beyond’, it would be unfair to complain of this. As it is, we are indeed ‘beyond’ and these lacks give the book a curiously out-of-date air. This is unlikely to deter those hordes of students, especially American, who trudge the path of film studies. For them New Vocabularies is exactly the sort of comforting way station they seek. The book might be more difficult to use than it ought to be but it still allows readers to acquire the neologisms without the pain of engaging the original minds. University of Wales, Cardiff

Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 248 pp., $27.50 (hardback) Robert Hampson and Peter Barry (eds.), New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 247 pp., £35.00 (hardback) Mary Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet’s Calling (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 231 pp., $49.00 (hardback), $16.95 (paperback) Antony Easthope and John O.Thompson (eds.), Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 341 pp., £11.95 (paperback) TIM WOODS

When a cultural activity is marginal(ized), it is effectively engaged in a series of constant struggles. There are many setbacks, deliberate exclusions, overt failures; but these are accompanied by minor victories, snatches of success at public attention, and small illuminations of understanding in the wider public consciousness. Just such an uneven narrative describes the path of experimental and innovative poetries over the past thirty years. As Peter Middleton deftly puts the situation in ‘Who am I to speak? The politics of subjectivity in recent British poetry’ in New British Poetries: The virtual suppression of politically conscious poetry in England, achieved by its systematic exclusion from the establishment institutions, has occurred not because the arbiters of these institutions think radical poetry is worthless, but the reverse, because those institutions fear its effectiveness. Poetry in post-war England signifies cultural heritage. It sustains continuities with the past, with orderly class relations, and with the rationality (reasonableness) that finds its outward symbols in the monarchy, the church, the country estate and the educated voice. Poets who tamper with these orders might raise forces the establishment cannot control. You can be a shaman as long as you only talk to crows and other denizens of rural life. (Hampson and Barry, pp. 112–13)

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Serious theoretical attempts to understand the poetic work of shamans and other apparent ‘outsiders’ have therefore been rare. But Easthope and Thompson have provided such a space. As the editors’ preface states, theory has often been a belated response to previous artistic practices and innovations. In what the editors term the ‘Paradigm Shift’ of recent poetry, poets and critics inhabit the same world and historical space, and they argue that it is time to appraise the dialectical relationship between these two modes of discursive practice. Contributors’ critical engagements generally focus on a single work and treat this as metonymic of the writers’ oeuvres. This proves to be a concerted attempt to demonstrate that theoretical encounters with poetry cannot ‘do away’ with the text; and that poetry poses theoretical problems in new and different ways. The readings of poems lead to instructive and incisive explorations of modern poetics; and the results are exciting and stimulating accounts of the ‘difficulties’ and ‘impediments’ of contemporary poetry. Critical approaches are varied, often prompted by the text under discussion; deconstructive readings jostle with feminist, materialist, and more historical approaches. The book brings long overdue recognition to the radical aesthetics of the socalled American ‘Language’ Poets, with essays on Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffrey, Susan Howe and Robert Gluck, demonstrating their wide variety of practices. Their experiments with language and its role in the construction of ideology place new emphasis on issues of linguistic representation and ways to subvert the reification of the word in modernism. Some serious attention is also afforded to British poets whose practices are associated with the ‘Language’ Poets, as with Peter Middleton’s juxtaposition of J.H.Prynne with Susan Howe and Charles Olson, and Peter Brooker’s consideration of Tom Raworth’s tottering state. There are significant analyses of sexual politics in modern poetry in pieces on Robert Gluck, Pat Parker, Adrienne Rich and Ntozake Shange, which show how these poets find conventional sites of gender contradictory and disabling and how they endeavour to reconfigure gendered discourses within poetic forms. Finally, there are essays which focus on poets of more established status like John Ashbery, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison. These essays attend to the poets’ ‘postmodern’ affiliations, and open up some interesting debates about the way a poetics can ‘interrogate’ theory. This is undoubtedly a useful and important book, opening up a new and different matrix in contemporary poetics in accessible ways. These ‘new bearings’ in the work of poets and writers who have been generally overlooked and marginalized, gesture towards the manner in which modern poetry challenges assumptions about gender politics, and various positions of ideological ‘certainty’ with regard to ‘reality’, subjectivity, and conceptions of historical and social forces. Yet a feeling of missed opportunities lingers, as some of the less well known but nevertheless vitally important (post)modernist poetics practices are passed over once again: the work of Louis Zukofsky and the ‘Objectivist’ poets, such important precursors to the ‘Language’ Poets; the current linguistic practices of the British avant-garde, poets like Allen Fisher, Bob Cobbings, Bill Griffiths and Wendy Mulford, who are frequently associated with Tom Raworth and the ‘Language’ Poets; the ‘alternative’ poetries emerging

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from the ethnic practices in the multicultural societies of Europe and North America. While such a critical book will inevitably be selective, the lack of a guiding editorial conception of the development of the avantgarde and contemporary poetry seems to have resulted in a collection of essays on random writers, rather than a clear ‘project’ of why these writers are significant. The essays seem to appear simply because this is what the contributors returned to the editors. It is perhaps unfair to demand a critical historical study from a text which has no pretensions to be anything other than an introductory and groundbreaking anthology of essays. However, a clearer editorial sense of how these varying poetics relate to one another might well have made this otherwise valuable book more accessible for those ‘uninitiated’ in the developments of the work of contemporary shamans and people who talk to crows; and made clearer the reasons for putting these poetries on the map of contemporary aesthetic practices, rather than leaving them as ‘rural oddities’. New British Poetries supplements the missing focus of Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory, in that its principal focus falls on those areas of British poetry which are omitted. The book commences with a seminal and very informative history of experimental poetries in Britain by Eric Mottram, entitled The British poetry revival, 1960–75’. This charts the struggles for publication, subsidies, recognition, and distribution networks, and its survey clearly indicates the innovation, variety, tenacity and commitment that these poetries have demonstrated since the early 1960s. Their openness to ideas, their engagement with the multifaceted nature of language and their exploration of its imaginative potentialities, have kept alive the possibilities of poetry as a radical discourse. This perspective is amplified by R.J.Ellis’s essay ‘Mapping the United Kingdom little magazine field’, which considers the often ignored but crucial political role of the small publication ventures which are the arteries ensuring the vitality of the alternative poetry scene. More specifically, the book’s essays chart the various strategies of exclusion and marginalization operative within the business of poetry publication and distribution, with, for example, discussions about the unsupportive role of Arts Council funding for little poetry and magazine ventures. Further essays by Fred D’Aguiar, Helen Kidd and Peter Middleton address themselves to the politics of identity, while other essays provide some useful case studies of the work of Gael Turnbull, Allen Fisher and Lee Harwood. Much of this book is consistently engaged in wresting the territory of the poetic away from the vestigial influence of the limited possibilities of Movement verse, and re-engaging modernism as a set of differing but nevertheless exuberant and potentially liberating aesthetic practices. Less concerned whether these poets’ practices are ‘modernist’ or ‘postmodernist’, the stress falls on their contribution to maintaining poetry’s vital role in the contestation of language, syntax and representation in ideological struggle. Marjorie Perloff has always interested herself in avant-garde practices and poetics, and has increasingly turned her attention to the innovative writing of North American poets. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media brings that focus to a sophisticated and interesting point. In a typically wideranging and well-informed book, she has made a decisive intervention in the reading and production of contemporary avant-garde poetics. Engaging chaos

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theory to computer graphics, modern architecture to advertisements for washingmachines, her principal thesis expounded in chapter 1, ‘Avant-garde or endgame?’, is that with the advent of the electronic medium, the conventional boundaries of verse and prose, and creator and critic, are broken down. Gone is the conventional Romantic/Modernist notion of the poet/writer as isolated sensitive individual struggling against the contamination of the new media. The new writer, she argues, openly acknowledges the advent of new media discourses, and recognizes that all language is riddled with the effects of discursive constructions beyond his or her control. Writing has increasingly opened itself to a new interaction, moving from ‘“a closed poetic to an open rhetoric”’ (Perloff, p. 20). In chapter 2, The changing face of common intercourse’, Perloff analyses the historical evaluation of the stress on ‘natural speech’ within the modernist poetics of Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the ‘Projectivist’ poetics of Olson, and the new ‘postmodernist’ suspicion of such a stance. This chapter charts the destruction of the speech model within contemporary poetics by its emphasis on the ‘artifice’ of the verbal process; while chapter 3, ‘Against transparency: From the radiant cluster to the word as such’, charts the transformation over the last eighty years of the modernist use of the ‘image’ as the isolation of an adequate symbol for objective reality, to the word itself as image in recent ‘Language’ poetry experiments. Succeeding chapters encompass within this broad argument some interesting analyses of popular culture and its shifting use of images, especially of the radical changes which have occurred in the history of advertising over the past fifty years. Chapter 4, entitled ‘Signs are taken for wonders’, considers the advertising hoarding as a ‘poetic space’, and is a typical tour de force which compellingly interweaves analyses of different media. It deftly dovetails the captions from advertisements for cigarettes, clothes, and a wrecker’s yard; the semiotics of the Venturis’s architecture; the ‘resisting’ paintings of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers; and the varying poetic practices of Steve McCaffrey, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer and Johanna Drucker. The result is a graphic and linguistic demonstration of the manner in which we experience the transformations, performances and interrelations of images and signs in our daily cultural engagements with a variety of ‘texts’. Perloff’s achievement in this book is to demystify the reading and production of radical and experimental avant-garde poetics during the past fifty years. In her patient demonstration that such radical poetries are concerned with the deconstruction of rule-governed syntax and circumscriptive grammars, to construct new paradigms of linguistic articulation which challenge the complicity of language with various power bases, she enfranchises the hitherto ‘baffled’ reader. She provides a way of reading which effectively liberates the reader from the demands of the high modernist text with its dense allusions and eclectic imagery, and suggests that these new writings often ought to be read in a very literal —letteral—manner. Her attention to this new mode of writing focuses on discussions of, among others, John Ashberry, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky,

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Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Johanna Drucker, Steve McCaffrey and Charles Bernstein. When the hegemonic verse culture declares that such people’s writing is vague and incomprehensible, Perloff argues that ‘it is not because meaning won’t reveal itself to a receptive reader, but because the culture has preconceptions of how images should be articulated and connected. The stumbling block, that is to say, is not so much obscurity as convention’ (Perloff, p. 205). As a final demonstration of her argument, Perloff concludes her book with a close analysis of the aleatorical poetics of John Cage, a focus which has run consistently through the book. Her meticulous reading of Cage’s work I–VI, is innovative, persuasive and suggestive with regard to reading similar postmodern texts. She argues that Cage’s texts are ‘a carefully plotted overdetermination designed to overcome our conventional reading habits’, engaging the reader in a reading process which is a ‘making rather than taking’ (Perloff, p. 216). Perloff’s book is a must for anyone interested in contemporary poetics, as she carefully and considerately carries the reader with her in numerous detailed and enabling readings and arguments. Her conviction that recent ‘Language’ poetry and avantgarde poetics make valuable and unparalleled epistemological and ontological contributions to an understanding of contemporary society, is a welcome and timely serious consideration of work that for too long has been trivialized and ignored. Whilst Mary Kinzie’s study The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose, declares itself in sympathy with such calls made by Perloff for a ‘new prosodic and cognitive receptiveness to discourse in poetry so that forms other than lyric can again be pursued’ (Kinzie, p. 299), nevertheless a tone of criticism creeps in when Kinzie castigates writers for ‘enforced naïveté or blind self-referential play. To assume that language is the only telling index of its own use is at once to sanctify its abstract qualities… as if language ran on automatic pilot, sweeping its user away’ (Kinzie, p. 307). As the title of her book suggests, Kinzie proposes to consider poetry as a therapeutic and curative process. She focuses principally on mainstream or well-established poets like Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Brogan, John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney, and produces a theory of poetry as organically healing. Based on this structural metaphor of healing poetry (healing an unhealthy poetry, and poetry as healing), Kinzie openly defends poetry as speaking ‘with absolute gravity and transparency of the business of the soul’ and considers herself as ‘an upholder of the expressive theory of art’ (Kinzie, p. 309). The consequence of this is that Kinzie’s work appears uneasily situated between gesturing towards experimental poetry, but shrinking from its concomitant subversion and questioning of all those aspects of poetry which one associates with romantic aesthetics— expressivity, lyric self-hood, poems of feeling and confession. Ultimately, despite her claims, it appears that Kinzie has very little in common with the American ‘Language’ Poets’ interests, as she fundamentally seeks ‘to restore to poetry the universality and aboriginality that over time have mistakenly been

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reassigned to prose’ (Kinzie, p. ix)—to perpetuate an aesthetic of nostalgic ‘purity’ in the face of contemporary ‘contaminations’. These studies attest to the gradually accumulating interest in the poetic practices and polemical arguments of the avant-garde in recent years, and provide useful and interesting material for debate. Shamans and talkers to crows and other denizens of rural life may take heart, since these texts demonstrate the way in which marginal(ized) poetic practices have gained a few local and important victories. University of Wales, Aberystivyth

Paul Carter, Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 214 pp., £14.99 (hardback) Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (London: Routledge, 1993), 248 pp., £40.00 (hardback), £12.99 (paperback) PHILIP ARMSTRONG

Seeking room to move beyond the narrow channels of linear narration, recent critical approaches often emphasize the theorization of space as a challenge to the supposed hegemony of temporal or genealogical causality. The deployment of this interest in spatiality is so diverse that its benefits or difficulties can seem obscure. It may be better not to imagine a single coherent shift (from ‘the temporal’ to ‘the spatial’), but a pattern of related movements disrupting the grounds of historiographical logic. Together, Wood’s and Carter’s texts exemplify a number of the hazards endemic to this territory. Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps conducts a Barthesian ‘mythological’ reading of the formative interests and power struggles implicit in cartographic representation. The map thus operates as a cultural artefact, constituted through selections and distortions. A survey of the main chapter headings conveys the argument: One: ‘Maps work by serving interests’, Two: ‘Maps are embedded in a history they help construct’, Three: ‘Every map shows this…but not that’, Four: ‘The interest the map serves is masked’, Five: ‘The interest is embodied in the map in signs and myths’, Six: ‘Each sign has a history’, Seven: The interest the map serves can be yours’. The elaborate contents page ‘charts’ the trajectory immediately, schematizing an apparently straightforward structuralist analysis clearly before the eye of the reader. However, to those familiar with any form of ‘poststructuralist criticism’ —in so far as that term names the critique of structuralism—certain features of the text’s style and project will immediately be suspect. The semiotic theory employed relies too heavily on distinctions between ‘expression’ and ‘content’ (as received from Umberto Eco). Structural divisions of this type persist, for instance, in a pervasive nostalgia for the immediacy of sensory experience: ‘Ultimately, the map presents us with the reality we know as differentiated from the reality we see and hear and feel’ (p. 6).

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The text’s anecdotal chattiness, along with frequent use of exclamations, italics and ellipses, functions to imply a certain forthright honesty. However, to turn the book’s mythological reading on itself would suggest that this tone, like the diagrammatic transparency with which the argument is traced, supplies an alibi for the naturalization of the corrective interpretation. The style of the project thereby repeats what it seeks to denounce in ‘scientific’ cartography, namely the repression of its own artifice. Rather than merely making the text accessible, the colloquialism suggests that the distortions and misconceptions of an empirical cartography can be simply redressed by greater honesty: ‘Freed from this burden of…dissimulation…the map will be able to assume its truest character’ (p. 182). More importantly, the phenomenological and psychological structure of the argument raises more difficulties than it can deal with. Wood grafts on to his own childhood and familial experiences an unwieldy developmental theory derived from Piaget, which, extrapolated as a theory of ‘ethnogenetic’ development, leads to an evolutionary description of spatial representation traced from 4000 BC (!) to the present day. This model reinforces a genealogical linearity replete with cultural hierarchies —so that ‘some societies are more developed’ (p. 39)—as well as a nostalgia, echoing McLuhan, for the experiential immediacy of oral society. Consequently, the text insists on another dichotomy, between ‘mapping’ and ‘mapmaking’, the former being evident among peoples where ‘maps [are] not a deep part of their living’ (p. 38), and the latter in cultures where maps are the product of commodified and imperialistic specialization. This distinction—between the spatial processing of sensory experience and the cultural assimilation and transmission of such data— breaks down at every level, betraying a failure to employ a phenomenology adequate for the post-Saussurian analysis of cartography. Paul Carter’s book is both more varied in its interests and more specific in its objectives. Following the directions sketched out in his previous book on Australian colonisation,1 Carter explores repeated instances of what he calls ‘spatial history’, a term comprising various alternative modes of historiography concerned to displace the linearity of simple causality, unitary motivation and retrospective construction. The text claims to describe a ‘migrant aesthetic’. This emerges from the perpetually improvisational and performative encounters of the traveller, from the mimic gestures of a dialogue devoid of shared language to the military displays and corroborees exchanged between settlers and Aborigines. These and other instances provide a paradigm for the re-negotiation of postcolonial subjectivity—that is, a position enunciated in dialogue with the histories of colonization, and alive to the shifting constructions of language, culture and place. ‘To live in a new country is to insist on the provisional nature of appearances, on the arbitrariness of names’ (p. 5). The reflexivity of Carter’s theorization is refreshing. Appropriately, the book finds analogues for its methods among representations of the Australian landscape by explorers, artists and historians. One explorer’s journal observes

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the anastomosing nature of Australian creeks, ‘their tendency to distribute surface water rather than channel it into tributaries…. The same may be said of the narrative: constructed around absences, it sails from absence to absence without ever reaching home’ (p. 14). This refusal of strictly linear diegesis and closure characterizes the essays, which work towards the identification of a knot of problems or series of possibilities rather than a definitive statement, so that ‘Any thematic continuity is coincidental’ (p. 4). However, coincidence emerges as the condition of possibility for the impromptu conjugations to which the migrant culture attributes meaning. Carter quotes Edward Said: ‘if words and objects ever coincide, it is because at certain propitious times both converge into what the prevailing polity can readily identify as an event, which does not necessarily involve exchange or communication’ (p. 98).2 Reading travellers’ journals, landscape pictures, place-name histories and imaginary architecture, the itineraries of the essays diverge widely but nevertheless intersect at a number of points. Typically, these are features disavowed by the dominant colonial, historical or academic vision. Here the text employs a phenomenology of space—certainly influenced, though the name is not mentioned, by Lacan3—far better attuned to its critical trajectory than Wood’s or many other recent discussions of spatial representation. Carter describes, for instance, a moment where explorer George Grey is transfixed by the gaze of a Wandjina painting. Objectified by this evidence of prior occupation, Grey becomes aware of the transience and contingency of his journey, his ‘dependence on invisible eyes permitting him passage’ (p. 54). But by describing and reproducing the image he asserts the visual dominance of a categorizing and assimilating European eye: ‘Grey rapidly transposed the tactile evidence of presence into a powerful visual proof of absence’ (p. 56). In such moments of coincidence, meaning remains suspended in the interstices between multiple possibilities until fixed by a dominant order. But a certain excess always escapes that fixation, and the text seeks to trace these disruptive elements in the traces foreclosed from conventional historiography. Thus the tactility of Aboriginal cave-paintings can be retrieved from the flattening perspective of its protective wire screen, just as in Wood’s discussion the curvature of the earth or the height of landscape relief disturbs the accuracy of two-dimensional map projections and the Cartesian grid. Similarly, both texts figure sound as the feature that returns to throw the secure coordinates of visual spatialization into question. However, when Wood briefly considers the repression of sound by conventional mapping, he reinstates it through reference to a possible ‘soundscape mapping…of the audible field of selected desirable or undesirable sounds (church bells, music, birdsong, early morning garbage cans, helicopters, jackhammers and so on)’ (p. 86). Obviously, the criteria for the ‘desirability’ of sounds here are commercial ones, which merely assimilate the repressed aural features within the same dominant capitalist territorialization the discussion seeks to dislodge.

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Carter’s account of sound remains more troubled, envisaging ‘a kind of writing that respected the laws of sound, that did not exclude the environment of the sound source but…let back in the inland sea of noise that plays along the littoral of our ears, day in, day out’ (p. 79). Carter’s essays attempt this type of account in various ways. ‘Towards a sound photography’, for example, describes the recording of a wide variety of sounds during a journey, although such an enterprise ‘retains a nostalgia for visual enclosure…the necessity to foreground one sound at the expense of others, to create with the direction of the microphone and the volume control an acoustic space quite unlike the natural one’ (p. 82). The text resists the reduction of the aural field to such an enclosure, but recognizes it may be impossible for it to do anything else. Another chapter speculates on the history of the sound of the name of the Yarra River in Melbourne. Problematically, in its concern to create a history that does not exclude the auditory, this essay begins to attribute to the word ‘inherently poetic qualities’ (p. 132). ‘Sound history’ risks discovering within certain words either deep natural meanings, or else an implicit metacommunicative power. The argument is more convincing and suggestive when it locates this mimetic quality of the word in the ‘pleasure the first settlers and the indigenous people found in saying it back to each other’ (p. 131). Language is thereby implicated with the desire of the other, since the word ‘began by being something else, another sound, another word. Its origins, that is, were never with the speaker, but with the hearer’ (p. 133). A number of the concepts which recur in various essays—hybridity, mimicry, performance—are already familiar in postcolonial theory. Carter’s deployment of such terms has affinities with Homi Bhabha’s: the hybrid or mimic colonial encounter cannot be contained within the framework of the dominant culture, but returns as the troubling spectre of a contingent nomenclature and history, recalling the potential for dialogic play in momentary suspense of meaning.4 Attempting a ‘performative’ historiography in the essay ‘Grass houses: Vincenzo Volentieri, a bicentennial memoir’, Carter writes a hoax eulogy on an imaginary sculptor/architect. Through some intriguingly vague descriptions of Volentieri’s nonexistent artefacts and displays, the essay rehearses the theory of an aesthetic where migration and improvisation are the conditions of possibility of culture. Potential areas for the co-implication of psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory emerge through the re-placement of desire in the figuration of space, so that ‘mere coincidence…becomes a motive for travel, a direction, a destiny’ (p. 115). This essay also satirizes the controversial 1988 ‘Australian Bicentennial’ by celebrating a fake architect as a monument to the alleged origin of a fictive nation. One gesture important throughout the text is the return of Aboriginal culture and history as the disruptive repressed of European hegemony, a traumatic relation which remains necessarily problematic. Wisely, Carter does not attempt to theorize an Aboriginal position—such an effort would be presumptuous at best —but rather to push the European migrant tradition to a frontier from which it

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must articulate a more constructive meeting with the ‘other’ (culture, people, history). The massive claims for land and reparation made recently by Aboriginal tribes in Australia exemplify the urgent demand for a dialogic negotiation of place capable of thinking spatial history in a new way. It remains to be seen whether this transaction—where one party need not, as in the past, be rendered silent, invisible or nonexistent in the closure of dialogue—can be achieved or even attempted. Reading these two books together suggests that nothing is more vital to the ongoing exploration of spatial representation than a phenomenology adapted to the recent (dis)articulations of European theory. Carter’s excursions into the gaze, tactility, sound, performance and mimicry exemplify—albeit provisionally and with difficulty—the possibilities of such an adaptation. University of Wales, Cardiff NOTES 1 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber & Faber, 1987). 2 Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 58. 3 I am thinking here of Lacan’s discussion of the gaze in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London: Penguin Books, 1977), or the extrapolation of the concept especially among film theorists in the 1970s and 1980s. 4 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse’, October, 28 (Spring 1984), pp. 125–33, and ‘Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry, 12, 1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 144–65.