Textual Practice Vol 1 No 2

TEXTUAL PRACTICE

Editor Terence Hawkes University College, Cardiff Postal address: Department of English, University College, Cardiff, PO Box 78, Cardiff CFI IXE. Editorial board Christopher Norris UWIST, Cardiff (Review Editor) Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Angela Carter Terry Eagleton Wadham College, Oxford John Frow Murdoch University, Australia Linda Hutcheon McMaster University, Canada Mary Jacobus Cornell University, USA Francis Mulhern Middlesex Polytechnic Allon White University of Sussex 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.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Methuen & Co Ltd, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retriveal system or transmitted in any form or by any mean, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic type, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three Xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University College, Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Christopher Norris at Dept of English, UWIST, Colum Drive,Cardiff CF1 3EU. Advertisements Enquiries to David Polley, Methuen & Co Ltd, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK and the rest of the world: individuals £22.00; institutions £35.00; single copies £7.95. North America: individuals $35.00; instructions $55.00; single copies

$14.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Methuen & Co Ltd, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP10 5BE. Subscription to Textual Practice in the USA: payments in US dollars may be sent to Associated Book Publishers’ account in New York: Account No. 051–70 700–4 at Barclays Bank (New York) Lt, 300 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022. ISSN 0950-236X © Methuen & Co Ltd. 1987 ISBN 0-203-99064-1 Master e-book ISBN

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 1 NUMBER 2 SUMMER 1987

Contents

Articles Invisible fictions: television audiences, paedocracy, pleasure JOHN HARTLEY

1

‘The thin crust of refinement’: culture, socialism, naturalism WIM NEETENS

19

The rhetoric of remembrance: Derrida on de Man CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

34

Prospero meets Adam Smith: narrative exchange and control in The Prelude IAN REID

49

Theory, enlightenment and violence: postmodernist hermeneutic as a comedy of errors THOMAS DOCHERTY

73

Reviews Making history SUSAN ADRIAN SHAHZADE

98

Signifying JANE MOORE

102

Sexual politics MARGARET ATACK

105

Habermas EDMOND WRIGHT

110

Rethinking Marx J.M.BERNSTEIN

116

Poetics and hermeneutics JOHN LLEWELYN

119

Invisible fictions: television audiences, paedocracy, pleasure JOHN HARTLEY

PASSPORT CONTROL Although television as an institution is dependent upon audiences, it is by no means certain what a television audience is. However, it seems that this is not the only uncertainty facing those working in the field of television studies. E.Ann Kaplan, for instance, in her introduction to Regarding Television, remarks: The structure, form, content and context for British television are so radically different from those of its American counterpart that everything has to be rethought by critics in this country [the USA]. Television scholarship is simply not exportable in the easy manner of film criticism.1 The idea that international television criticism is a contradiction in terms is not confined to the American side of the Atlantic. In fact it has been taken even further by the British writer John Ellis, who suggests not only that television scholarship is unexportable but also that one nation’s television is ‘incomprehensible’ to observers from other nations. In the preliminaries to his Visible Fictions Ellis confesses that at the time of writing he had never visited the United States, and continues: This really demonstrates an insuperable problem with all writing about broadcast TV: unlike cinema, which in its commercial sectors has a highly integrated international aspect, broadcast TV is an essentially national activity for the vast majority of its audience. Broadcast TV is the private life of the nation-state…incomprehensible for anyone who is outside its scope.2 Neither Kaplan nor Ellis qualifies these remarks with customary scholarly caution. Both write in absolute terms: television is incomprehensible for those outside its scope; television criticism is simply not exportable; everything has to be rethought; the problem is insuperable; it applies to all writing about broadcast television; television is essentially national. Furthermore, their remarks are not

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isolated. Quite a lot of media criticism in recent years has been conducted around a perceived gulf, as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, between American and AngloEuropean perspectives.3 This gulf, once invoked, is made to explain such divisions as those between empirical and theoretical approaches; so-called transmission and ritual models of communication; liberal-pluralist and Marxist theories; even the disciplinary location of media studies—in America it’s a social science, in Britain it’s in the humanities. If these divisions really constitute an insuperable problem, then of course international television scholarship does become impossible. Or, more accurately, the kind of criticism that constructs as its object an essential form, on the model of ‘cinema’ or ‘literature’, becomes impossible. What the uncertainties noted above do imply is that there is no such thing as ‘television’—an abstract, general form with invariable features. Neither does television have any essential mode of production, distribution and consumption—despite the very obvious fact that many television shows, series and formats display exactly that ‘highly integrated international aspect’ claimed by Ellis for cinema. As for television studies, a certain uneasiness with the erection of essential, national boundaries around television scholarship has been voiced by Willard Rowland and Bruce Watkins in their introduction to Interpreting Television. They discuss ‘this old and contentious issue’, largely with reference to a myth of American ‘dependence’ on European thought, and show that, although that dependence is mythical, the consequences of reiterating the myth have been real enough. They argue that, although it is tempting, it is inadequate to categorize current research by means of a ‘bi-polar, European/critical versus American/ liberal dichotomy’. They conclude that ‘it is becoming increasingly difficult to speak about any pure national or even regional tradition of thought, especially in communication and cultural studies.’4 If it is indeed difficult to speak of pure, national traditions of thought in this context, it may be easier, and certainly more productive, to speak of impurity. It may even be possible to see in impurities not a problem but a fundamental criterion for cultural studies. The productivity of impurity, of transgressing national boundaries unawares, has been amply illustrated, paradoxically enough, by John Ellis. Having erected pure—insuperable—boundaries between British and American television, and between British and American writing on television, he then subverts this line of thinking completely: Sudden exposure to the often bizarre practices of broadcast TV in another country can stimulate fresh thinking about the whole phenomenon of TV. This is the case with Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘flow’ which resulted from his culture shock on seeing US TV. Seeing another country’s broadcast TV has the effect of ‘making strange’ something we normally take for granted: TV, normally habitual and bound into the life of the nation, suddenly becomes an alien and inexplicable series of events.5

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Thus, transgressing the frontiers of the familiar, the national, produces culture shock—the bizarre, the alien, the inexplicable—and this turns out to be the very condition for understanding, stimulating fresh thinking by breaking habitual bonds. Even so, it has to be noted that some bonds remain taken for granted: Ellis is still presuming that there is such a thing as ‘the whole phenomenon’ of television, in the teeth of his own evidence to the contrary. TELEVISION: ANOTHER COUNTRY? Since the concept of the nation seems to play such an important role in specifying both television and TV scholarship, it would seem to be a good idea to look at what the concept of the nation might mean. However, it wouldn’t be such a good idea to substitute for the essentialism of ‘television’ another kind of essentialism—for instance, the notion of an essential ‘America’, or ‘Britain’, or ‘Australia’, or even ‘the nation’. Nations cannot be understood ‘purely’, that is, from their own supposed intrinsic or essential features. Neither television nor nations can be understood at all, in fact, except in relational terms. They have no pure, intrinsic properties but only differences from other, related domains. Benedict Anderson has argued that they are by definition limited, or impure, because each nation is defined by other nations: Even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind [sic]. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of the day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.6 It follows that nations can only be defined by what they are not; their individual identity consists in the recognition and establishment of finite boundaries that are simultaneously elastic. This formula generates, of course, a well-known definition not only of nations but also of signs; like signs, nations are constructs. But, like signs, nations are constructs not of any external, referential world but of discourses; Anderson calls nations ‘imagined communities’. They are communities because everyone has confidence in the existence of others within their nation; they are imagined because there is absolutely no external warrant for this confidence: An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his [sic] 240,000,000-odd fellow Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.7

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Where does this confidence come from? Among other sources, Anderson mentions the newspaper as a mechanism for providing imaginary links between members of a nation. Newspapers are at one and the same time the ultimate fiction, since they construct the imagined community, and the basis of a mass ritual or ceremony that millions engage in every day: ‘What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?’ asks Anderson.8 Of course, a more vidid metaphorical figure for the imagined communities of nations can indeed be envisioned. It’s called television. Indeed, like newspapers, television may be more than merely a metaphor for imagined communities; it is one of the prime sites upon which a given nation is constructed for its members. And, as we have seen, the nation is, concomitantly, one of the sites upon which television has been constructed as a concept. Like nations, television as an institution is limited, impure, with no essence but only difference from other television, other forms, other institutions. Nevertheless, television does frequently transgress national boundaries—the idea of its essential nation-ality is as imagined, or fictional, as the idea of the nation itself. Certain programme types, especially sporting championships, Olympic Games, news pictures, beauty and other contests, awards ceremonies within the general showbiz domain, together with the more recent genre of ‘aid’ shows, may be seen more or less simultaneously by hundreds of millions of people, sometimes making it possible for producers to dream, as it were, of a wholly tuned-in planet. As well, television transgresses national frontiers in more routine ways, notably at the level of transnational ownership and control of both production and distribution, and at the level of international sales of individual shows and series. It follows that if television can be imagined as an ‘essentially national activity’, as Ellis puts it, it can only be so imagined on behalf of the experience of audiences: the audience is constructed as comprising those for whom television is indeed the ‘private life of the nation-state’. In short, one unwarranted, invisible fiction—the imagined community of the nation—is used to invent and explain another: the television audience. INVISIBLE FICTIONS Television is, like nations, a construct of specific institutions; what it ‘means’ turns on how those institutional discourses construct it for their own specific purposes. Among the institutions that construct television discursively, three stand out: the television industry (networks, stations, producers, etc.); political/ legal institutions (usually formalized as regulatory bodies, and intermittently as government-sponsored inquiries and reports); and critical institutions (academic, journalistic and—surprisingly rarely— self-constituted audience organizations or pressure groups). Each of these institutions is, of course, marked by internal contradictions, hierarchies and historical shifts, and by manifold differences from each of the others. However, despite the fact that they don’t speak with one voice, all three tend to legitimate their actions and interventions in the name of

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the same imagined community. All claim to speak, albeit with quite different voices, on behalf of the audience. It follows that audiences are not just constructs; they are the invisible fictions that are produced institutionally in order for various institutions to take charge of the mechanisms of their own survival. Audiences may be imagined empirically, theoretically or politically, but in all cases the product is a fiction that serves the needs of the imagining institution. In no case is the audience ‘real’, or external to its discursive construction. There is no ‘actual’ audience that lies beyond its production as a category, which is merely to say that audiences are only ever encountered per se as representations. Furthermore, they are so rarely selfrepresented that they are almost always absent, making TV audiences perhaps the largest ‘community’ in the world that is subject to what Edward Said has dubbed the discourse of ‘orientalism’,9 whereby disorganized communities which have never developed or won adequate means of self-representation, and which exist almost wholly within the imagination and rhetoric of those who speak on their behalf, become the ‘other’ of powerful, imperial discourses.10 What kind of fiction is the orientalized audience imagined to be? In the critical domain, two influential recent developments in the theoretical conceptualization of audiences seem noteworthy. The first, elaborated in relation to cinema and associated largely with the journal Screen in the seventies, is applied by John Ellis to television. Here the audience is imagined as ‘the subject’, positioned or constructed as a textual/institutional effect of television. However, Ellis’s ‘viewer’ is far from being an effect of television; Ellis’s viewer is an effect of Ellis’s stated project, which is to produce an argument about the general aesthetics of broadcast television in comparison with those of cinema. Ellis is preoccupied with the idea that television has, or might have, a ‘specific signifying practice’, and that such a thing is what unifies television. Hence the argument is driven, ineluctably it seems, to imagining a unified viewer to go with this unified signifying practice: The viewer is constituted as a normal citizen. This is the position constructed for the TV viewer by the processes of broadcast TV; many viewers occupy the very position which TV addresses, even if they would never consider themselves to be such a strange being as a normal citizen.11 A strange being indeed, and one produced by that totally unwarranted confidence in the existence of the nation noted above. Indeed, Ellis’s viewer is imagined as coterminous with the ideal bearer of the concept of the nation: the ‘normal citizen’. Not content with imagining the ‘normal citizen’ as a fictional construct or textual position produced by television’s signifying practice, however, Ellis then asserts (on their behalf, without consultation) that ‘many viewers occupy [this] very position’. Thus Ellis’s viewer is an invisible fiction, a construct that is a figment of the argument’s imagination.

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The second influential recent approach to audiences is that of David Morley in and following his study The ‘Nationwide’ Audience. Morley’s work was groundbreaking when it appeared, offering the hope of integrating theoretical approaches such as those of both Screen and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, in their different ways, with the more traditional concerns of empirical audience research. Thus, although Morley is astute and convincing in his account of theoretical issues, his work retains a commitment to an ‘actual’ audience that—the research paradigm requires it—is an independent entity. Empirical research is based on the presumption that audiences are not merely the product of research into them but exist prior to, apart from and beyond the activities of both television and television research. Unlike Ellis, but like traditional audience researchers, Morley sets off in search of the audience. Unlike traditional researchers, however, he tramps the country seeking not preferences, attitudes, opinions and tastes but the relation between television and class. Thus he seeks his audience among already-constituted groups which he feels able to identify in class terms—groups of students taking courses in various different kinds of educational establishment. The shop stewards, trade-union officials, bank managers, apprentices and students of various other kinds are described in terms of their class ‘background’, though no warrant is ever offered for the very precise labels Morley uses. He never explains how he distinguishes between, for instance, ‘skilled working class’, ‘skilled upper working class’, ‘upper working class’ and ‘working class’.12 The fact that some of his chosen groups were unfamiliar with the chosen show (Nationwide), because he showed them a different regional version or because they habitually watched the other channel, is not deemed significant. And the fact that the show was screened to them in a setting that is itself discursively productive in ways that necessarily affect what the ‘social subjects’ said about it was, says Morley, merely ‘situational’.13 Clearly then, for Morley, an audience is an audience, whether it is ‘responding’ in an educational/work setting or ‘decoding’ in a family/home context. For Morley, the ‘cultural and linguistic codes a person has available to them’ is a matter not affected by a ‘situation’ in which those persons are watching a programme dealing with financial and union issues during courses in banking or trade-union studies. And an audience’s cultural competence to ‘decode’ is not significantly affected by the fact that they’ve never seen the show before. An audience is an audience at home or at work, despite the fact that Morley’s groups are carefully chosen and sorted into class ‘background’ rather than being interviewed at home. Clearly, Morley’s audience too is an invisible fiction, produced by his project, which was itself a product of academic/critical institutional discourses. His audience is no more real than Ellis’s, and no more independent of the research than any other experimental subject. It’s Morley’s method that is empirical, not the audience he constructs for his research.

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A PAEDOCRATIC REGIME Even innovative and critical work such as Ellis’s and Morley’s, whether theoretical or empirical in mode, is not exempt from a tendency to essentialize the audience. Ellis makes it essentially a ‘normal citizen’. Morley’s ‘social subject’ is more complex, being inflected by class differences in particular, but even so his project assumes that audiences have intrinsic (observable) properties, and his very title implies that they are to be found with essentially the same properties ‘nationwide’. If audiences can be understood in this way in critical, academic discourses, then the tendency to imagine them as independently existing, essential entities that are also nations is abundantly amplified in the practical discourses of the TV industry and of its regulatory bodies. This is no doubt partly because both the industry and its regulatory bodies are obliged not only to speak about an audience but—crucially, for them —to talk to one as well: they need not only to represent audiences but to enter into relations with them.14 The way in which corporate executives and professional producers imagine audiences is particularly important, since it determines to some extent what gets on air, and it may help to explain why the industry acts as it does. Conversely, the way in which regulatory bodies imagine the audience may help to account for some of the things that don’t get on the air. Turning, first, to the industry, it is clear that as far as private opinions of producers are concerned there may be as many views of the audience as there are personnel, and certainly such views will display contradictory aspects. However, in so far as audiences can be understood as imagined communities that are also nations, then it is relevant to ask what system or manner of rule or government—what regime—characterizes such communities. In other words, it isn’t the personal opinions of individuals which are at issue here but an institutional system—a construction of the audience that organizes the industry’s practices and serves its institutional needs and purposes. The institutional needs and purposes of the television industry are survival and profitability, to be achieved (hopefully) by audience maximization and by minimizing risks and uncertainties. Audiences are paedocratized to serve these needs. For the industry, television is a paedocratic regime. The audience is imagined as having childlike qualities and attributes. Television discourse addresses its viewers as children. It is itself characterized by childlike preoccupations and actions. This regime does not govern all television everywhere all the time, of course. But there may be a ‘law’ which states: the bigger the target audience, the more it will be paedocratized. Thus American Network television is the most paedocratic regime of all. However, smaller networks and stations are by no means exempt from the tendency to paedocratize audiences, if only because they buy Network product and operate according to models of popular television generated by Network. Indeed, it isn’t the absolute size of a target audience that determines whether or not it will be paedocratized but rather the proportion of the population (local,

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state or national) that might conceivably be attracted: the higher the proportion, the more paedocratic the regime. What do those who work at the centre of the US Network television imagine about the audience? How do they fill out their invisible fictions with plausible attributes? Often the fiction is invested with those attributes that best explain or justify the professionals’ own practices. Many examples can be found in Todd Gitlin’s excellent study, Inside Prime Time. In fact, Gitlin saves one of these comments for the last paragraph of the book, where it refers not just to audiences but to the whole television industry, and it serves as an epigraph not only for the industry’s view of its practices but for Gitlin’s too. Gitlin cites Michael Kozoll, co-creator of Hill Street Blues: Which truth to conclude with…? Let the last word go to Michael Kozoll…. Halfway through the second season [of Hill Street Blues], Kozoll said he had finally found the metaphor for television he had long been seeking. Doing episodic television, he said, is like raising a retarded child. By which he meant that there are only so many things it will ever learn to do, no matter how much you love the child, no matter how much effort and care and intelligence you lavish upon it. It will never shine. One could add: Its little accomplishments are also miraculous.15 So says Todd Gitlin, whose pessimism about television seems matched only by his pessimistic and very conservative view of ‘retarded’ children. Elsewhere, however, Gitlin cites Marvin J.Chomsky, director of Attica, Holocaust and Inside the Third Reich, who justifies Network paedocracy by reference to its need to win ratings: Our audience is the guy who’s used to walking around and getting a beer. We’ve got to reach him. He’s a guy who hasn’t made much of a commitment to give his rapt attention to what we’re offering, right? We’re going for the eighty million who will watch something. An infant in a cradle likes to watch things that move. So, there you are. We go in for close-ups and we try to find the conflicts.16 This ‘conventional wisdom’17 is perhaps best exemplified in the work of Aaron Spelling (‘in a class by himself, says Gitlin, for Network successes), producer of The Rookies, S.W.A.T., Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Vega$, Hart to Hart, T.J.Hooker and Dynasty, among other toprated shows. Spelling has called his products ‘mind candy’ and ‘fast-food entertainment’. His shows have ‘tennis-match dialogue’ and ‘show and tell’ plots —‘on a Spelling show any plot point important enough to be signalled once is signalled twice.’18 Gitlin cites a lengthy insider’s anecdote which is designed to show that even the smallest details of scripting, representation and semiosis are determined by the concept of a childlike audience. In particular, narrative

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suspense is constructed according to the conventions of children’s theatre. The insider explains Spelling’s methods: The villain walks out onstage and says ‘Heh-heh-heh! I have the secret matchbook, and I am going to hide it. I am going to put it behind this basket, and the heroine will never find it. Heh-heh-heh!’ And he walks off. Now the heroine comes out and says, ‘Where oh where is the secret matchbook?’ And all the kids in the audience say, ‘It’s behind the basket! It’s behind the basket!’ That’s what Aaron does. He believes that’s what the American audience is, you see.19 And Gitlin comments: ‘by any Network standard, it all works’. Indeed, according to Gitlin, ‘Spelling embraced the form’s simplifications so fervently he left his personal impress on the medium’, in the shape of ‘two-generation pairings’ of a father-like ‘sage and authoritative elder’ overseeing a team of youthful, siblinglike peers who in turn oversee the rest of the diegetic world, ‘patrolling the street nasties and keeping recalcitrant, childish reality under control’.20 In short, the mechanisms of representation, together with the diegetic world that they produce, are paedocratically organized to communicate with an audience which is itself believed to relate to television paedocratically. CHILD’S PLAY Why do industry professionals invent the audience in the image of a retarded child, or of an infant in the cradle—with or without a beer—who is just about sharp enough to spot the movement of moustache-twirling villainy? One reason is that audiences are, literally, unknowable. Gitlin quotes Scott Siegler, the then CBS vice-president for drama development: ‘Because it’s a mass audience—it’s an unimaginably large audience—the audience tastes are so diffused and so general that you’ve got to be guessing.’21 But guess they must, since communication depends on what Valentin Vološinov has identified as dialogic orientation towards an addressee. For Vološinov, this fundamental characteristic of communication applies to books (and we may add, allowing for technological developments, to television and the electronic media) just as much as it does to interpersonal speech. He calls such public performances ‘ideological colloquy of large scale’,22 and producers can’t escape it: not only must their programmes talk about something, they must also talk to someone. Since that someone is unimaginable, with attributes that are diffused and general, it is perhaps not surprising to find the image of a child, or an infant, being used to humanize the unknown interlocutor with 80 million or more heads. There are, in fact, other options open to broadcasters, but for historical and political reasons these options have narrowed. In the past, and in other discursive regimes, audiences have been hailed variously as ‘Workers!’, ‘Citizens!’, ‘The People!’, etc., but such appellations have been abandoned for most purposes in

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Western mainstream media, probably because of the leftist rhetorical connotations that such terms have been invested with since at least the Second World War. Similarly, there are unacceptable rightist connotations in some mobilizations of national identity, so care has to be exercised in this area; patriotism and commitment to what even Superman calls the American way may be understood as an automatic, natural reflex —but the knee-jerk must not be mistaken for the goose-step. Thus broadcasters have to maintain an uneasy equilibrium; without being too populist or too nationalistic, they must strive to be popular, and speak to, for and about the nation. In addition, their popularity is organized not around citizenship or jingoism, but primarily around pleasure; the chosen path to survival and profitability is entertainment, understood as universally intelligible narrative fiction and spectacle. What this means in practice is that broadcasters tend not to insist on allegiances and identities that might be constructed on other sites but, on the contrary, to persuade audiences to abandon any such allegiances and identities, especially those of class (rendered as ‘demographics’ in television, of course), ethnicity and gender. Other ‘variables’, like region, age, education, family structure, even nation itself, may be significant, but the whole point of popular television is to cut across such divisions and to reconstitute the people involved into one unified constituency: the audience. The mechanism broadcasters have hit upon to do this impossible job is that of paedocracy. This isn’t to say that television is merely infantile, childish, or dedicated to the lowest common denominator—those would be certain mechanisms for losing the audience. On the contrary, broadcasters paedocratize audiences in the name of pleasure. They appeal to the playful, imaginative, fantasy, irresponsible aspects of adult behaviour. They seek the common personal ground that unites diverse and often directly antagonistic groupings among a given population. What better, then, than a fictional version of everyone’s supposed childlike tendencies which might be understood as predating such social groupings? In short, a fictional image of the positive attributes of childlike pleasures is invented. The desired audience is encouraged to look up, expectant, open, willing to be guided and gratified, whenever television as an institution exclaims: ‘Hi, kids!’ FAMILY-CIRCULAR ARGUMENTS The paedocratic regime is not confined to the imagination of broadcasters, nor to the American networks. Broadcasters are encouraged in this view of audiences and the television medium itself by regulatory bodies that lay down broadcasting policy and programme standards. Such bodies tend to express little uncertainty about the audience and its attributes; indeed, so strong and obvious is this knowledge that it is used to account for the ‘nature’ of television, presumably on the principle that you grow like the people you live with. Here, for instance, is the Annan Committee, a Royal Commission whose report on The Future of

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Broadcasting was the biggest ever government-sponsored inquiry into television in Britain. The report is prefaced with this definition of television: We ourselves agree that it is in [television’s] nature to communicate personalities more successfully than ideas, emotional reflexes better than intellectual analysis, specific detail better than universal principles, simplicity better than complexity, change, movement and disorder better than permanence, tranquillity and order, consequences better than causes. The broadcast audience does not require education or even literacy to understand and enjoy programmes.23 This is another version of the ‘retarded child’ model of television, and once again it is a fictional imagining. Television doesn’t have an essential ‘nature’, so—like ‘the nation’—it is explained anthropomorphically (paedomorphically) by investing it with the very attributes that the Annan Committee imagines belong to preliterate children: personality, emotional reflexes, specific detail, simplicity, change, movement, disorder, consequences, non-literacy, lack of education. Reserving to itself the opposing (parental) attributes—ideas, intellectual analysis, universal principles, complexity, permanence, tranquillity, order, causes, literacy, education—the Annan Committee goes on to speak on behalf of the audience which, like a preliterate child, may not need education but does require protection: The audience for a programme may total millions: but people watch and listen in the family circle, in their homes, so that violations of the taboos of language and behaviour, which exist in every society, are witnessed by the whole family—parents, children and grandparents—in each other’s presence. These violations are more deeply embarrassing and upsetting than if they had occurred in the privacy of a book, or in a club, cinema or theatre.24 The television family is not just orientalized; it is tribalized. The image of a three-generation family sitting in a circle round a television set under the spell of taboos is a complete fiction. Three-generation families are statistically quite rare; where they exist, there’s no evidence that they watch television together (quite the reverse, in many cases); television cannot be watched in a ‘circle’; there are no universal ‘taboos’. Even so, this strange, tribal family is imagined as paedocratic: all its members are defined in terms of their relationships with children; they are not people, or even adults, but ‘parents’, ‘grandparents’. The child-orientated sensibilities of this family circle are not its own private affair; on the contrary, for Annan they are matters of the highest public policy. This is because ‘whatever is published is presumed to be in some way approved, or at least condoned, by the society which permits its publication.’25 The Annan Committee doesn’t say exactly who does the presuming, approving, condoning or

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—more importantly—the permitting, nor does it extend its notion of privacy (‘the privacy of a book’) to watching television in the privacy of the home. It simply equates television with ‘the society’, and then closes the circle by equating ‘society’ with the ‘whole family’, which, as we’ve seen, is governed by children. Along the way, a potentially useful model of the relationship between television and TV audiences is invoked and then ignored in favour of protective paedocracy. This is the model of broadcasting as publication. But the model of book and magazine publishing is not followed through. Instead, the ‘privacy of a book’ is imagined as essentially a solitary affair, while television, as a social phenomenon, is understood to require a ‘permit’ from ‘society’. Of course, publishing is just as social as broadcasting, but printed publications can cater for a much wider range of political, personal, sexual, aesthetic, generic and other tastes—with or without ‘violations’ of ‘taboos’—than broadcasting ever has, without each item (‘whatever is published’) being seen as approved of by the whole ‘society’. Publishing has had its own long history of regulation and censorship, but never in modern times has everything been subject to permit. If broadcasting is a form of publication, the question arises: why is it treated so differently? But the question does not occur to the Annan Committee, so strong is the image of the ‘embarrassment’ that would ensue if children were to be seen by their parents and grandparents witnessing ‘violations’ of language and behaviour (another interesting question they do not address is exactly who is imagined to be ‘upset’—the parents or the children). Such is the power of paedocracy. Turning from policy recommendations to the regulations that enforce them, and turning from Britain to Australia, it is clear that the ‘publication’ of television is governed by children down to the most surprising details. The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal issues a manual to broadcasters (‘licensees’). Having equated the ‘Australian community’ and the ‘general public’ with ‘adults and children’, the writers of the Manual go on to warn licensees of their ‘overriding obligation’ to ‘avoid televising program material which can give offence to sections of the public or can be harmful to the young people who make up a large part of the audience at certain times of the day’.26 Once again, it turns out that ‘the Australian community’ as a whole is governed by that ‘large part’ of the audience comprising ‘young people’—the tail wags the dog. This is especially evident in the standards laid down for ‘family programmes’, whose ‘special provisions’ are: (a) The selection of subject matter and treatment of themes should be wholesome and fresh in outlook. The more sordid aspects of life must not be emphasised. (b) The following in particular should be avoided— (i) torture or suggestion of torture;

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(ii) horror or undue suspense; (iii) the use of the supernatural or superstition so as to arouse anxiety or fear; (iv) any matter likely to lead to hysteria, nightmares or other undesirable emotional disturbances in children; (v) excessive violence. (c) Morbid sound effects intended to anticipate or simulate death or injury should not be used. (d) Particular attention should be paid to the treatment of child or animal characters, as a child’s imagination can be readily over-stimulated by suggestions of ill-treatment of such characters. (e) Particular attention should be paid to the use of correct speech and pronunciation; slang and incorrect English should be avoided, except when necessary for characterisation.27 Like their British counterparts, the writers of the ABT Manual are confident they can speak on behalf of ‘a child’s imagination’, and they are equally certain that they know what goes on in that imaginary, tribal ‘family circle’. Here is one of the regulations covering advertising (now under review): Because some products (especially those of a personal nature) are considered unsuitable as topics for conversation in the family circle, licensees should exercise discretion in accepting advertisements for them; if such advertisements are accepted, great care should be taken in selecting times appropriate for their transmission. Products of a particularly intimate nature which are not freely mentioned or discussed in mixed company should not be advertised through television. Illustrated advertisements for brassieres, girdles, briefs or similar items of underwear making use of live models should not be televised between 6.00 a.m. and 8.30 a.m. or between 4.00 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. on weekdays or at any time before 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, Sunday, or weekdays which are not schooldays.28 REGIMES OF PLEASURE Broadcasters are required to conform to a fictional image of the family circle and to an extraordinarily outdated notion of ‘mixed company’ on pain of losing their licence to broadcast. However, a more constant threat for television networks is losing not their licence but their market share. Does it follow, then, that audiences do in fact exert a powerful influence on broadcasters in the form of demand? Television as an industry is subject to certain market forces, but the institutional organization of the industry seems designed not to enter into active relations with-audiences as already constituted trading partners, but on the contrary to produce audiences—to invent them in its own image for its own purposes. Certainly the relationship of the television industry to its audience is

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not the classic market relation of supply and demand. This is because television, as one of the culture or consciousness industries, is not like the traditional producer of goods or services which are then sold to a market. Television shows are not commodities in the usual sense—they are ‘non-material’ commodities— and audiences don’t buy them. The exchange is not goods for money, but symbols for time. If, as Nicholas Garnham has put it, culture is ‘above all the sphere for the expansion of difference’,29 then it follows that the use value of cultural commodities like television shows is very hard to pin down or to predict. Television executives do their best. Todd Gitlin cites a list of the ‘mysteries’ that executives offered to him as explanations for a show’s success: ‘whether a concept was “special”, “different”, “unique”, even (wonder of wonders) “very unique”; whether a show had “chemistry”; whether it “clicked”; whether “it all came together”’.30 But clearly the demand for novelty or difference, for the ‘very unique’, is so unspecific that it barely counts as demand at all. The only discipline such demand imposes on the industry is that of variety: television, like other culture industries, cannot standardize its product but must offer a repertoire. Further, such demand cannot be stabilized. Despite the tendency to minimize uncertainty and risk by the use of repeats, long-running series (in both drama and news), recombinations of successful formulae, and spin-offs, uncertainty remains: out of around 3000 new ideas put up to each of the three American networks each year, about a hundred will be commissioned to the script stage; of these, twenty-five will go to pilot stage; after testing the pilots, perhaps five or ten new series will go on the air; of these, perhaps only one will go to a second season.31 In the face of such uncertainties, television networks are driven to ever higher production costs per item in order to maintain novelty and difference, which in turn means that they are driven to seek ever larger audiences to justify the unit costs. But for their part, audiences treat television shows not as scarce commodities but as public utilities for which they are not prepared to pay. Like other cultural goods, such as radio shows, advertising and free newspapers, television shows are not purchased. Furthermore, they are not consumed; they are not used up in the act of reading or viewing. This means both that the products of the past are available for reconsumption, and that audiences are apt to use television when and how they like, and (despite piracy laws) to save what they like for reconsumption—an increasing tendency since the introduction of videorecorders. This means it is hard for the industry to maintain scarcity (and thus price), especially given the need for audience maximization. In this context—where the industry’s product cannot be standardized, where demand cannot be predicted or stabilized, where the commodity is ‘nonmaterial’ and neither purchased nor consumed, and where vast capital investment is required to manufacture goods that are then virtually as free as the airwaves that carry them—in this context audiences are not television’s real market. There is one sense, of course, in which audiences are literally the product of the television industry: in the commercial sector, networks sell access

INVISIBLE FICTIONS 15

to their audiences to advertisers; in the public sector, the corporations must convince their funding agencies that an agreed proportion of the public is tuned in often enough to justify the enterprise. Thus audiences—or, more accurately, ratings—are the key to profitability and survival in the television industry, and access to them is the key to power. It follows, as Garnham has argued, that in line with other cultural industries, but unlike traditional manufacturing industries, distributors (networks) are more important in television than manufacturers (producers), just as publishers are more powerful and profitable than authors. However, it does not follow that audiences have power over networks: they are created, organized and maintained by networks, and not vice versa. Indeed, the real relations of broadcasters are not with audiences as such but with other professionals in the industry: with advertisers, funding agencies, suppliers and—it’s about as close as they get—with audience research organizations. In this context, the ‘power’ of the audience is contained within the networks themselves, taking the fictionalized form of ratings and of those imaginary, paedocratized representations of the audience that the networks promote throughout the industry. Networks minimize their risks by stabilizing not demand but supply, but neither networks nor producers know what will ‘sell’; they don’t know who they’re talking to and they don’t ‘give the public what it wants’ because they don’t know. This structural uncertainty at the heart of the television industry means that networks and producers alike are afraid of the audience: afraid of offending it, of inciting it, of inflaming it—above all, of losing it. At the level of programming, in the ‘ideological colloquy of large scale’, this structural uncertainty is reproduced as a constant effort to reconcile an irreconcilable contradiction. On the one hand, audiences must be appealed to and won; they must voluntarily forgo other activities and choose not only to watch television but to watch this channel, during this time slot, today. On the other hand, audiences must be disciplined and controlled; they must learn to recognize that what’s on offer is, despite its requisite novelty or difference, just that kind of pleasure for the enjoyment of which they have both forgone other activities and invested scarce time resources. A further contradiction facing broadcasters is that between the audience as an imaginably large mass and the audience as an individual viewer. Without having the slightest notion of each or any viewer’s identity, the ideological colloquy has to address each in order to amass all. In practice, such contradictions produce what can be called television’s regimes of pleasure. Like other publishing forms, television channels provide a montage or repertoire of different kinds of elements in order to convert as wide a spectrum of the public as possible into the audience. Far from seeking to fix just one ‘subject position’, least of all that of Ellis’s ‘normal citizen’, television as a cultural form has developed a heterogeneity of modes of address, points of view, programme genres, styles of presentation, codes of recognition.32 Television is characterized, in effect, by excess, providing audiences with an excess of options which can nevertheless be easily recognized, and offering an excess of pleasures

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(one of which is to choose between those on offer) which can nevertheless be disciplined into familiar, predictable forms. Thus, in order to produce an audience, television must first produce excess.33 But, like the audience whose demand it is supposed to represent, pleasure is a diffuse and irrecoverable concept; it must be regimented in various ways in order for the television industry to be able to supply it, and so to survive, profitably. Thus television is a pleasurable institution, but one offering a complex of channelled, disciplined pleasures which are driven towards corporately achievable forms; television operates regimes of pleasure. ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS? But all the time the efforts of television networks and producers to regiment the audience are subverted by the audience’s own excess—its tendency always to exceed the discipline, control and channelling of television’s regimes, and its tendency always to exceed the imagination of television’s corporate executives. Thus the interests of audiences and television are in principle opposed. Television as an industry needs regimented, docile, eager audiences, willing to recognize what they like in what they get; and audiences, for their part, need a relationship with television in order to exist at all as audiences, but that relationship is not organized, nor even represented very directly, in the institution. Their interests are discernible only as random: childish, unfocused desires for excess, transgression, novelty, difference; for play, escape from categorization, and occasionally for that characteristic childish demand—‘Do it again!’ The politics of television, then, consist in a very unequal struggle between different interests within a wholly fictional (that is, discursively/ rhetorically/ textually imagined) community. Since audiences don’t exist prior to or outside television, they need constant hailing and guidance in how-to-be-an-audience— hailing and guidance that are unstintingly given within, and especially between, shows, and in the meta-discourses that surround television, the most prominent among which, of course, are those publications aptly called television guides. Thus television is not just a regime, or complex of regimes, of pleasure; it is a pedagogic regime too. What this means, in effect, is that television producers haven’t got the courage of their convictions. For, if television audiences are subject to a pedagogic regime of pleasure, then it follows that they do not live, while acting as audiences, in a democracy. But nor do they live in a paedocracy either, since a pedagogic regime cannot be governed by childlike qualities but on the contrary constitutes government over them. In fact, the paedocratic regime of television discourse is itself, in the end, an invisible fiction, because audiences have no voice of their own to speak within the institution. Like the discourse of orientalism, paedocracy too often functions within the industry not to explain audiences but to explain them away, to contain their potential threat, to render obvious their need for protection, regulation, rule. The paedocratized image of

INVISIBLE FICTIONS 17

television audiences that circulates within the industry and around its academic and regulatory observers as an obvious truth is not necessarily devoid of force for those who ‘actually’ watch television—but its primary function as a discourse is to serve the purposes of the professionals engaged in professional survival. For them, any irruption of ‘actual’ audiences would spoil their routine assumption of the power to speak on behalf of a disorganized community which hitherto has existed almost wholly within their own imagination and rhetoric. Thus it is true that television networks act, as Todd Gitlin has put it, ‘in loco parentis’ for the audience, but it is not the childishness of the audience that produces this situation; nor is it, as Gitlin is tempted to conclude, ‘a projection of their own childishness’.34 On the contrary, it is a system for imagining the unimaginable; for controlling the uncontrollable. Luckily for the networks, few among the audience seem to have bothered much about it, at least until now. Murdoch University, Western Australia NOTES 1 E.Ann Kaplan (ed.), Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology (New York: American Film Institute/University Publications of America, 1983), p. xi. 2 John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 5. 3 See, for instance, Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974); James Carey, ‘Mass communication research and cultural studies: an American view’, in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society (London: Open University/ Edward Arnold, 1977), ch. 16; Stuart Hall, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’, in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet Woollacott (eds), Culture, Society and the Media (London: Methuen, 1982); Journal of Communication, 33, 3 (1983), ‘Ferment in the field’. 4 Willard Rowland and Bruce Watkins (eds), Interpreting Television: Current Research Perspectives (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage, 1984), pp. 33, 25. 5 Ellis, op. cit., p. 5. 6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), p. 16. 7 Ibid., p. 31. 8 Ibid., p. 39. 9 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 10 Edward Said, ‘Orientalism reconsidered’, Race and Class, 27 (1985), p. 7. 11 Ellis, op. cit., p. 169. 12 David Morley, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience (London: British Film Institute, 1980), pp. 40, 42, 46, 68. 13 Ibid., p. 27. 14 Cf. John Hartley and Martin Montgomery, ‘Representations and relations: ideology and power in press and TV news’, in Teun van Dijk (ed.), Discourse and Communication (York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), pp. 233–69.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33

34

Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 324. Quoted in ibid., p. 188. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 136, 137. Quoted in ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 139. Quoted in ibid., p. 22. Valentin Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), P. 95. Annan Committee, Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting (London: HMSO, 1977), p. 25. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid. Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, Manual (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1984), p. 11. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 27. Nicholas Garnham, ‘Concepts of culture: public policy and the cultural industries’, Cultural Studies, 1, 1 (January 1987) (first issued as a pamphlet by the Greater London Council, 1983). Gitlin, op. cit., p. 26. Ibid., p. 21. Cf. Ien Ang, ‘The battle between television and its audiences: the politics of watching television’, in Philip Drummond and Richard Paterson (eds), Television in Transition (London: British Film Institute, 1986). Cf. John Hartley, ‘Encouraging signs: television and the power of dirt; speech and scandalous categories’, in Rowland and Watkins (eds), op. cit., pp. 119–41, and ‘Out of bounds: the myth of marginality’, in Len Masterman (ed.), Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows, Signs (London: Comedia, 1985), pp. 118–27, where this argument is developed more fully. Gitlin, op. cit., p. 300.

‘The thin crust of refinement’: culture, socialism, naturalism WIM NEETENS

Throughout the nineteenth century, as P.J.Keating points out in The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction,1 fiction about the working class and its politics was predominantly a non-working-class affair. From Dickens and Mrs Gaskell to Walter Besant and Rudyard Kipling, non-working-class authors turned to working-class settings, characters and stories from the outside, often if not always equipped with statistical, even ‘empirical’ information. Apart from some ‘temperance fiction’, their writings were intended for a non-working-class audience as well: posing as ‘explorers’ of regions of London and the industrial North unknown to the reading bourgeoisie, writers often professed to impart to their readers an amount of ‘realistic’ knowledge, a ‘slice of life’, which the audience was not in a position to find out about. The working class itself, though allegedly central to these literary exchanges, remained essentially foreign to writer and reader as well as narrative. Keating observes that in these ‘workingclass fictions’ ‘we find time and again that the novelist has unconsciously set into motion a process of avoidance which prevents him [sic] from dealing with his professed subject—the working classes’:2 a process which takes shape in various typically ‘romantic’ displacements of character and plot. It seems that bourgeois novelists were as much attracted by the working class as they were daunted by its vastness, its equivocality and its virtual incomprehensibility—a contradiction foregrounded in periods of sharply articulated class conflict: During the nineteenth century, there were two periods when a significant number of novelists seriously attempted to present the working classes in fiction. Both were times when real or imagined class fears compelled people to look afresh at the basic social, economic and political structure of society. In the 1840s and 50s the motivating force was the outcry over the conditions of industrial workers, together with the middle-class panic engendered by Chartist politics: in the period 1880–1900 it was the problem of slum conditions and the widespread public debate on Socialism. The fictional response in both periods was almost entirely non-workingclass.3

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What could have been the motivation behind these peaks in the production of working-class-centred texts? The cultural space we occupy, far from constituting a coherent and unified whole, is necessarily one marked by power, struggle and conflict; any utterance, written or spoken, is ‘a contradiction-ridden, tensionfilled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language’.4 The Victorian novel’s ambition to paint a ‘truthful’ picture of working-class life deserves better than a commonsensical explanation as ‘reaction to’ or ‘reflection of’ moments of vehement social disturbance. It should be understood, rather, as part of a larger project in which not only the novel but a vast network of bourgeois discourses joined forces: discourses of sociology (such as Booth’s and Rowntree’s studies of urban and industrial poverty5), demography (in the wake of Malthus), political economy (Ricardo, James Mill), medicine and newly emerging sexology, etc., in which the bourgeoisie’s intellectuals exerted their will to grasp ‘scientifically’ and imaginatively that relatively new discursive object, the ‘working class’. Keating correctly points to the ‘real or imagined class fears’ undeniably bound up in that project. ‘There are’, however, ‘no objects which are not constructed in discourse,’ as Terry Eagleton reminds us;6 ‘class fears’ themselves are constructed, rather than expressed, in and through the bourgeoisie’s discursive selfrealization. This is not to say that they were (and are) somehow unreal or ‘inauthentic’. It means rather that fear, repulsion and anger vis-à-vis the proletariat (alongside forms of ‘compassion’ and ‘benevolence’) were necessary emotional moments which a class aspiring to hegemonic status had to construct and ‘live out’ if it was to root the project of its own ascendance in the ground of experience. Following Göran Therborn’s categories, we might say that such a psycho-political project involved ego- as well as alter-ego-ideological strategies, aimed at ‘forming the subjects of the bourgeoisie itself’ as well as ‘dominating or striving to dominate the formation of other class subjects’.7 That bourgeoisie’s novel, as the privileged discursive terrain where the stuff of ‘direct’ experience finds articulation, thus becomes intelligible as a veritable geography of the social field which hegemonic desire maps out in fictional narrative, its ambition being to conquer and control a rapidly expanding range of ‘others’. It is, then, an essentially colonial project that dictates the Victorian novel’s treatment of working-class material, and its strategies are intimately linked to those produced in the service of the (contemporary) imperialist enterprise. In Orientalism Edward Said has opened interesting perspectives for the theorization of such colonial practices. Colonial discourse, Said writes, is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, or even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with the political power in the raw, but rather is produced in an uneven exchange with power political…, power intellectual…, power cultural…, power moral.8

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Colonial discourse, whether it works along lines of race, class, gender or sexuality, starts from the assumption that there is an ‘us’ in power to conquer intellectually a ‘them’—the working class, the Orient or the tropical, women, gays, and so on. To ‘understand’ the other—to build up a body of knowledge which may render the other intelligible by imposing on it the categories of ‘our’ understanding, yet which in doing so ceaselessly reconstructs difference—is its mission: Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a ‘fact’ which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically, stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny authority to ‘it’…since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.9 ‘Our’ definition of the other as ontologically and therefore immutably other may put our supremacy on a naturalistic, a scientific, even a metaphysical basis and serve as a buttress to all of the discourses through which we fulfil our hegemonic mission. That mission, however, will not be allowed fulfilment without varying degrees of resistance. The other, however forcefully we may try to pin it down as an unalterable category, in different periods and under different circumstances may find a range of tones and voices through which it disparately begins to challenge our efforts to stabilize and naturalize difference. Such forms of resistance may ultimately develop into, or be displaced by, a more coherent counter-hegemonic force if socio-economic structures permit; socialism, feminism and various forms of anti-imperialist nationalism offer themselves as obvious examples. Two oppositional forces are therefore always at work on all levels of discourse and ideology: one which issues from a dominant or ascendant group, struggling to organize reality ideologically around its centre of power in a fixed and naturalized order; and one emanating from a grouping of others who resist or challenge that order to varying degrees (and whose strategies and aims, it should be added, are not necessarily compatible). In this struggle resides the inherent dynamic of language and ideology proper: ‘us’ and ‘them’ necessarily inhabit the same discursive and linguistic space, battling over words and definitions, appropriating one another’s dialects and penetrating one another’s speech in a continuing struggle. As Bakhtin puts it, ‘alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward.’10 Thus the ascendance of the English bourgeoisie from the mid-eighteenth century onwards coincided with the construction of a centralizing, unifying ideology which strove to reorganize society around a new centre of power —the

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entrepreneurial middle-class man. Leonore Davidoff, in her illuminating article on ‘Class and gender in Victorian England’, points out how the build-up of this unifying ‘world-view’ worked through the setting up of new or newly defined binary oppositions (middle v. lower class, urban v. rural, masculine v. feminine, private v. public), and maps out the resulting ideological landscape as follows: According to the organic view, society was able to operate as a system because of its hierarchically ordered but interdependent parts. The adult middle-class (or aristocratic) man, representing the governing or ruling group, was seen as the Head of the social system as well as the Head of his household which was in itself a society in miniature. The Hands were the unthinking, unfeeling ‘doers’, without characteristics of sex, age, or other identity…. Because work was central to Victorian society, the implication was that middle-class men did brain-work while the hands did menial work. Middle-class women represented the emotions, the Heart, or sometimes the Soul, seat of morality and tenderness.11 As is apparent, this was an ideological ordering which not only involved bourgeois self-definition but manifested itself powerfully as the colonization of non-bourgeois spaces by bourgeois-produced conceptualities and definitions. In this light, then, should be seen the body of knowledge which intellectuals from Malthus onwards have produced about the working class. The extra fictional attention that the working class attracted during periods of great social unrest then becomes meaningful not just as a ‘natural’ reaction to social phenomena but rather as the higher gear into which bourgeois colonial discourse had to force itself if it was to keep up with, and effectively incorporate, the decentralizing and potentially counter-hegemonic revolutionary discourses which the working class had begun to produce in its own right. From this angle, we are able to dismantle the Victorian novel’s privilege as the locus of ‘expression’ for dominant bourgeois ideology and to rewrite it as the dialogical arena where bourgeois culture confronts the voices of its others, drawing into its own discourse many of the different discourses of a changing society and dramatizing in narrative the linguistic, ideological and cultural conflicts provoked by the economic ascendance of the middle class. As such it proved particularly fit to play a central role in the articulation of ‘a properly bourgeois cultural revolution, in which the values and discourses, the habits and the daily space, of the ancien régime were systematically dismantled so that in their place could be set the new conceptualities, habits and life forms, and value systems of a capitalist economy.’12 Drawing on the inventories of existing ‘aristocratic’ genres (such as the gothic and the so-called ‘Silver Fork School’13) and on the discourses of popular romance and comedy, novelists of the 1840s and 1850s constructed the powerful narrative apparatus of realism, with its comforting displacements of social conflict into the realm of personal relationships, its obsession with property settlements and inheritance, and its

‘THE THIN CRUST OF REFINEMENT’ 23

foregrounding, above all, of idealized gender and kinship definitions which allowed the cross-class marriage to present a hopeful emblem of the containment of class struggle14—all part of a project through which a literary petty bourgeoisie criticized the brutal ‘materialism’ of official capitalist policy by contrasting it with the utopian vision of a middle class idealistically aware of its mission as a vanguard in historical progress. The literary culture imbued with this idealism gradually took the role of the conscience of the ascendant class, easily recoverable as it was into the bourgeois drawing-room, where values such as charitable feeling and compassion were located and fostered anyway (after being ‘feminized’ away from the maledominated public world15). Eagleton’s view of Matthew Arnold’s social criticism may, I think, be extended to the whole of mid-Victorian cultural writing and read as a synopsis of its ideological and political project. Its ‘thrust’, Eagleton writes, is to convert a visionless, sectarian bourgeoisie, pragmatically sunk in its own material interests, into a truly hegemonic class—a class with cultural resources adequate to the predominance it has come to hold in history…. The bourgeoisie is bereft of that pervasive spiritual predominance which has ratified aristocratic rule; unless it can rapidly achieve such cultural supremacy, installing itself as a truly national class at the ‘intellectual centre’ of society, it will fail in its historical mission of politically incorporating the class it exploits.16 The intellectuals who set themselves to the task in the middle decades of the century thus entered into a relationship with their audience which was antagonistic only in a superficial and oblique way. Engaged in the construction of a hegemonic culture, they sought to revitalize the values and virtues of early (‘heroic’) entrepreneurial capitalism (as did Dickens17), or of an ‘organic’ provincial society (as did Eliot18), uniting both strands of ideological pressure into a critique of capitalism and its life forms that was contained within the eventual endorsement of its relations of property and production, and hence containable within a general ideological consensus that transcended local political and economic debates. With the state (since the new Poor Law, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the First Reform Act) firmly on the side of free trade and liberalism, the middle class was heading for its triumph of prosperity in the 1850s and 1860s in a spirit of economic and political optimism, which indeed welcomed a form of (self-)criticism that promised ethical redemption without challenging structurally the foundations of capital. This bourgeoisie’s writers were thus able to aspire to the status of ‘organic intellectuals’, who acted as spokespersons for the hegemonic bloc and as artists provided it with a ‘directive’ cultural apparatus,19 and for a brief period they seemed close to realizing that ambition; these were, incidentally, the years when novel-writing became a respectable and lucrative occupation.

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George Eliot’s famously ‘theoretical’ chapter 17 in Adam Bede (1859) bears witness to the degree to which literary realism was implicated in the construction of a world-view aspiring to hegemonic status—a profoundly ‘realistic’ enterprise indeed, in that it articulated and reproduced in symbolic order the sprawling colonial desire at the heart of the ascendant class. Pleading for ‘truthfulness’ in writing and art, Eliot relegates the static and idealistic worlds of romance and chivalry to the realm of ‘falsity’ (‘I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot’), and claims as her own terrain the reality of ‘men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind’. Over and against the exclusive and hierarchical discourses of a pre-capitalist, prebourgeois past, Eliot erects her own totalizing ‘democratic’ apparatus, which she implores her (significantly female) readers to accept lest the culture they share should fail in its hegemonic task: In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. A plea for realism in writing thus becomes a plea for perceiving and organizing ideologically a reality riddled with conflict and contradiction as a unified and coherent whole. The epistemological problem, which Eliot recognizes (‘Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult’), is raised to an ethical level, where it is translated into a moral effort through which the ‘beauty’ and dignity of everyday reality become visible. On this level, the cultivation of compassion and the elasticity of moral and aesthetic standards must guarantee the potential of the ascendant class to assimilate conflict and opposition into its organic liberalism. What happens when such realistic endeavour confronts the decentralizing challenge of working-class radicalism is apparent in Felix Holt (1866), written on the eve of the Second Reform Act and concerned with the significance of political progress towards democracy. In its striving to contain symbolically the historical donnée of reformist and revolutionary struggle, the novel has recourse to the suggestively unifying power of elaborate metaphor20 and, more importantly, to a (re)construction of the historical narrative surrounding the First Reform Act and the elections following it, in which a positivist progressivism joins hands with Romantic organicist ideals. The novel’s historical ‘master discourse’ delivers social change as a ‘natural’ and inevitable process from which man-made, ‘mechanical’ interventions (such as the struggle for political reform) are but premature and unnatural deviations. This implicit ‘theory’ of history is inscribed in the parameters within which the narrative evolves and within which oppositional (revolutionary) discourses are allowed limited freedom of speech. The opposition between two models of change—a ‘natural’ gradualist

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one and a catastrophic revolutionary one—announces itself powerfully in the author’s Introduction, where the account of a coach-trip from South to North slips from socio-geographical into historical discourse. The contrast between a natural way of progressing and the unnatural propositions of technology is amusingly set up on the first page: Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of the country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory O! The whole novel lies practically contained within this paragraph. Henceforth the familiar Carlylean binaries—organic v. mechanical, natural v. artificial, community v. conflict, growth v. struggle—will be reinforced, elaborated and refined, the first terms from the outset identified with the pleasures of ‘picture and narrative’ and unifying ‘memory’ (Culture), the second with fragmentation, loss of individuality, and more concretely, of course, with the dangers of ‘progress’: the ‘tube-journey’ heads straight for the North, ‘blackened with coalpits, the rattle of handlooms to be heard in hamlets and villages’. The latter terms are the mechanical powers with which advanced working-class radicalism and Chartism will be conflated; the very space within which they will be allowed to speak is neatly circumscribed by the master discourse and is closed down progressively as the novel moves towards their final repudiation in a mythical, ‘personal’ reconciliation of contradictions. ‘[N]otably unwilling to allow any genuine oppositions to emerge in her fiction’,21 Eliot shows herself anxious to repudiate open class warfare in the light of a ‘progressivist’, but basically backward-looking hegemonic project for which she hopes to inspire enthusiasm in her audience. A ‘village model’ of social relations is celebrated, and an idealized gentry culture is made to fertilize the impersonalized industrial landscape of capitalist progress. The future is hopefully placed in the hands of a small class of men and women whose very qualities (mostly class-transcendently ‘feminine’ ones such as compassion, a gift for healing and hope, unassuming enterprise and duty) offer an implicit, albeit forlorn, critique of official capitalist policy—which itself is briskly expansionary, ruthlessly destructive, ‘masculine’. (The genderedness of these psycho-political oppositions is even clearer in Dickens, e.g. in Dombey and Son, where much the same ideological strategies operate.) Such a stance was, of course, possible only for a particular kind of intellectual in a particular—and indeed very brief—period in mid-century. As the notion of the middle class as a vanguard in history became increasingly problematic to the increasingly marginalized category of literary intellectuals from the 1870s onwards, so their ability to regard themselves as directive, and their corporate

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willingness to accept both the status and the responsibility of such a position, came under intense pressure. In the final quarter of the century the ‘discovery’ of mass production and consumption threw into stark relief the inherent inevitability of capitalist progress and of a further commodification of its culture. As the upper layers of the working class, during the years of the Great Depression, won for themselves some material comfort, a greater degree of cultural identity and visibility, and above all, through a socialism seeking alliance with existing working-class organizations and infrastructures, a distinct political voice, late Victorian England was inevitably pushed into its liberaldemocratic venture. A concomitant cultural revolution articulated itself— through, for example, shifts in publishing and journalistic policy (documented with bitter acumen in Gissing’s New Grub Street of 1891), geared to the creation of a ‘mass’ audience and aiming to capture the representations of the life of a new, better-off section of the proletariat: ‘neither a very good nor a very rich life, but…probably the first kind of life since the Industrial Revolution which provided a firm lodging for the British working class within industrial society.’22 A working class increasingly sure of its own political and cultural identity, and increasingly asserting its presence in public and political debate, exerted growing pressure upon ruling organicist, gradualist ideals of historical progress. More marginal phenomena such as unemployed agitation and anarchist terrorism foregrounded the fissures in corporate control. Post-Arnoldian writers were presented with ever more proof of their own prophetic necessity in a social formation increasingly denying them corresponding status. These are pressures and conflicts most clearly dramatized in the work of those (increasingly numerous) authors whose own insertion into the British class system was particularly ambiguous or painful. Women writers were among them. As the bourgeoisie’s own historic mission became more problematic, so its mid-Victorian foregrounding of ‘the feminine’, as the signifier of those humanistic qualities banned from the market-place but vital in the hegemonic project, became a problematic and questionable area, and feminism re-emerged within the ruling bloc itself, the ‘New Woman’ novel its (stifled) literary voice. Remarkably, in the late Victorian fictions which speak most urgently of these pressures, the English bourgeoisie is virtually abandoned as the focus of narrative interest in favour of other groups and types of community— most notably, of course, in favour of the Jamesian upper-middle class and aristocracy where, unbothered by the vulgar necessity of money-making, Culture, the development of the privileged consciousness and the ‘liberated life’ might seem secure. This shift in narrative focus indicates a number of more far-reaching displacements. The 1880s saw the rise of a new literary aesthetic, fast on the move to become the dominant: an aesthetic which, like that of its most important spokesman Walter Besant, centred on the text (or rather the book) as a marketable commodity and which, by unflinchingly paying tribute to the demands of its audience, seemed to be taking over the market-place altogether.

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This indeed was a period when writers themselves began to organize their craft on a ‘professional’ basis, fighting for copyrights and fairer publishing contracts. Inevitably, to the legatees of Arnoldian Culture this meant a degradation of an Art which in its heyday had worn the aura of gentlemanly disinterestedness. If the Arnoldian project was to continue in its hellenizing mission to the reading classes, then it had, contradictorily, to disengage itself ever more radically from that audience: from a philistine bourgeoisie that could bring to its hegemonic task nothing of the zeal and idealism—nothing of the Sweetness and Light—of which earlier intellectuals had held forth the promise. Instead it presented writers and artists with the opportunity to join its ranks as professional men and women, to become tradespeople dealing in the products of their knowledge and labour as lawyers and physicians did.23 Some, like Besant, welcomed the opportunity and aligned themselves unproblematically with the middle class in this new phase of its development. Besant and his Society of Authors went to great lengths to dismiss the romantic aura that surrounded writers and their work, and to establish their new image as populist-democratic producers of cultural commodities neither superfluously luxurious nor inaccessible to the great majority of readers. Besant proudly attributed the popularity of fiction to the fact that it required of its audience ‘no culture, no education and no natural genius’, and accepted commercial popularity as a token of artistic as well as professional success.24 Various authors were less willing to subscribe to the new model. With no academic market to aim for, as the ‘serious’ novelist has today, they found themselves in the contradictory position of having to depend for their livelihoods upon a public whose Grundyism and philistinism they thought beneath contempt. This was not dissimilar to the position in which Arnold had found himself, but the consequences were considerably different: some of the intellectual and ideological strategies which offered themselves to Arnold and his contemporaries were no longer available when Gissing, James, Hardy and the New Women were writing. For one thing, the educational aspect of the Arnoldian project had at that later time been claimed, albeit in a trivialized and commercialized form, by Besant’s populist aesthetic. For another, some of the symbolisms of class and gender through which Eliot and Dickens were able to construct their social critique no longer matched actual historical positions, and the realist model which these had informed was no longer a viable strategy for the ‘serious’ writer. As middle-class culture became increasingly commodified (hence, in the aesthetic parlance of the day, ‘vulgarized’), new allegiances had to be sought through which the hellenic project could find articulation. George Gissing is a telling case in point. Throughout his biography runs a painful search to secure for himself a niche in which the material comfort allegedly necessary to the writer’s integrity could be attained without surrender either to the vulgar commercialism or the pedestrian morality of a bourgeoisie which he had come resentfully to despise. Because of his transgressive sexuality he found himself from an early age exiled from the comfortable middle class to

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which he felt he rightfully belonged. Married to an alcoholic prostitute and living penniless among the London poor, he found, not surprisingly, that his interest was aroused by the renewed outspokenness of working-class politics in the early 1880s. After a ‘brief but deeply felt’ flirtation with advanced radicalism (which induced him to write Workers in the Dawn, 1880),25 however, he opted for an allegedly neutral, dispassionate stance vis-à-vis his material: My attitude henceforth is that of the artist pure and simple. The world is for me a collection of phenomena to be studied and reproduced artistically. In the midst of the most serious complications of life, I find myself suddenly possessed with a great calm, withdrawn from the immediate interests of the moment, and able to regard everything as a picture.26 Demos: A Story of English Socialism (1886) illustrates just how ‘neutral’ such detachment was. Much like Felix Holt, it purports to situate and ‘test’ a workingclass political programme within a clearly circumscribed theory of history. Its own project, however, is ‘experimental’ and naturalistic rather than realistically reconstructive, as if the genteel persuasion of mid-Victorian realism had by this time lost its potency and the need for a more rigorous method of cultural policing was felt. As is usual in novels about socialism, the narrative in Demos is richly interlarded with discussions of and about socialism and politics in general. The novel liberally invites various radical political discourses into its own space and allows for a central socialist discourse to build up in what Bakhtin would call the protagonist’s ‘character zone’.27 To the ingenuous reader Gissing therefore presents an illusion of ‘fair play’, with an impressive range of situations in which socialism is ‘objectively’ tested against the demands of ‘reality’. Demos is an experimental novel in that its plot is dominated by a hypothetical situation in which variables of ancestry and milieu are shown at work in different characters under different circumstances. Its ‘objectivity’, however, depends solely on the reader’s acceptance of the theory of history that informs the novel’s master discourse: Stanbury Hill, remote but two hours’ walk from a region blasted with mine and factory and furnace, shelters with its western slope a fair green valley, a land of meadows and orchard, untouched by poisonous breath. At its foot lies the village of Wanley…. Climb Stanbury Hill at nightfall, and, looking eastward, you behold far off a dusky ruddiness in the sky, like the last of an angry sunset; with a glass you can catch little tongues of flame, leaping and quivering on the horizon. That is Belwick. (ch. 1) As was the case with the short passage from Felix Holt quoted earlier, the entire narrative purport of Demos lies inscribed in these, its opening lines. The novel’s landscape contains a myth of history which is, again, not unlike the one we

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recognized in Eliot’s: it represents England at a point where the last remnants of Edenic unity are threatened by the disruptive violence of industrial expansion. Again, the natural, organic unity of land and village (which in the ensuing pages acquires connotations of civilization, gentility, Culture) is opposed to the catastrophic and destructive energy of ‘progress’—an opposition pervading the text’s semantics down to the level of rhythm and sound. The objects of desire in this novel are clearly circumscribed as Wanley Manor—‘old and peaceful amid its immemorial trees’: shades of Felix Holt again—and the marriageable Adela, cultured and ‘beautifully submissive’. They occupy a sentimentalized enclave of Sweetness and Light in an increasingly commodified and ‘vulgarized’ culture, and the question as to who will win both Land and Woman is ultimately one of cultural politics such as neither Eliot nor Dickens ever felt obliged to ask. The properly marginal space which high culture had from Romanticism onwards been able to construct and maintain for itself within industrial society had, for the brief moment of mid-Victorian optimism, opened itself up to a relatively non-problematic alliance with the project of its bourgeois sponsorship. As it became clear that the bourgeois state carried in itself the inevitability of liberal democracy (hence cultural and political ‘vulgarity’), and that the ruling bloc was bent on installing an imperial economy in the world rather than an organic society on English soil, high culture found itself in the contradictory position of having to disengage itself ever more radically from the middle-class project in which, on the other hand, it could not cease to inscribe itself. A philistine bourgeoisie that had lost the cultural and political optimism of an earlier generation therefore found itself, contradictorily, increasingly constructed as the other of its own intellectuals and its own culture, and grouped together with the proletarian mob as the twin threats to the ever-shrinking sanctuary of Sweetness and Light to which high culture withdrew. ‘Thus far I am with the Socialists’, Gissing’s alter ego in Demos proclaims, in that I denounce the commercial class, the bourgeois, the capitalists— call them what you will—as the supremely maleficent. They hold us at their mercy, and their mercy is nought. Monstrously hypocritical, they call for progress when they mean increased opportunities of swelling their own purses at the expense of those they employ, and of those they serve; vulgar to the core, they exalt a gross ideal of well-being, and stink in their prosperity. The very poor and uncommercial wealthy alike suffer from them; the intellect of the country is poisoned by their influence. (ch. 29) In this respect, Gissing represents a reactionary backlash to the more liberal moment of Eliot. His utopian rearticulation of the union of capital and gentry in Demos amounts to a mythical effort to halt capitalist progress itself—progress which, if capital is to find redemption in that union, is necessarily embodied in the envious and resentful aspirations of a dispossessed proletariat. Realism’s complex analyses of subtle class distinctions and of the possibilities of social

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mobility become impossible in the light of that project; what is needed here is the stability and the appeal to the authority of law which naturalism offers. ‘The naturalist’, John Lucas observes, ‘differs absolutely from the realist in believing that class is somehow a fact of—well, of nature. People naturally belong to one class or another.’28 By the same token the narrator (and the genteel reader implied in his discourse) naturally belongs to a class ‘which authorised them to use the service of ruder men and women in order to secure for themselves a margin of life for life’s sake’ (Demos, ch. 26). Drawing on a long tradition of ‘social exploration’ in Victorian fiction,29 naturalism developed a narrative ‘point of view’ (how misleadingly neutral these critical terms sound!) in line with its colonial project: Walking northwards [from Hoxton], the explorer finds himself in freer [sic] air, amid broader ways, in a district of dwelling-houses only; the roads seem abandoned to milkmen, cat’s-meat vendors, and costermongers…. The change is from undisguised struggle for subsistence to mean and spiritbroken leisure; hither retreat the better-paid of the great slave-army when they are free to eat and sleep. To walk about in a neighbourhood such as this is the dreariest exercise to which man can betake himself; the heart is crushed by uniformity of decent squalor; one remembers that each of these dead-faced houses, often each separate blind window, represents a ‘home’, and the associations of the word whisper blank despair. (Demos, ch. 3) In passages like these, the naturalist novel related itself dialogically to Marxist discourses in circulation at the time, apparently subscribing to their versions of wage labour and notions of alienation, but effectively incorporating them into its own reactionary programme. Narrative perspective played a vital role in that process. It circumscribed the space within which working-class voices and a socialist perspective were permitted to enter the space of high-cultural discourse. ‘The explorer’ (and with him the reader) perceives Islington from the outside of appropriately ‘dead-faced’ houses and ‘blind’ windows, nevertheless entitling himself to speak for what goes on inside and behind them. Before one workingclass character has been introduced, the whole class has thus been colonized by the narrator’s knowledgeable eye, and the perspective from which it will henceforth be perceived, represented and explained has been established. It is one which allows the working-class character no other role than that of the object of ‘our’ glance and knowledge. The novel’s project is to ‘explain’ this object, once captured and colonized, by assigning to it a ‘nature’ both inescapable and immutable, and hence unable to transform itself (and the world) through history. Working-class nature, through a combination of a number of socially and culturally negative characteristics such as greed, lack of imagination and egotism, articulates itself in Demos primarily as the (men’s) incapacity to restrain and control their ‘animal’ sexuality. A construction of working- class sexuality as

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brutal, unrestrained and ‘natural’ was not new to naturalism but was in line with mainstream Victorian opinion, which viewed ‘the restraint of male sexuality…as a great feat of self-control, one of the hall-marks of middle-class gentility’.30 The proletarian’s ‘true’ nature, we are made to understand, may disguise itself with moderate success under a socially acceptable patina of acquired gentility, but it breaks through inevitably in sex and rage: The thin crust of refinement was shattered; the very man came to light, coarse, violent, whipped into fury by his passions, of which injured selflove was not the least…. Even his accent deteriorated as he flung out his passionate words; he spoke like any London mechanic, with defect and excess of aspirates, with neglect of g’s at the end of words, and so on…. The lust of cruelty was boiling in him, as once or twice before. (Demos, ch. 28) Where could the Arnoldian intellectual in the 1880s and 1890s turn if both the major blocs on the political and social battleground—a ‘progressivist’, expansionist middle class and a politically organized working-class opponent— were irredeemable by any of the standards set by the humanism of high culture? Gissing sought solace in an excessively idyllic union of haute bourgeoisie and landed gentry, restoring ‘order’ to the land and keeping history at bay: ‘Once more’, the final chapter promises, ‘we can climb to the top of Stanbury Hill and enjoy the sense of remoteness and security when we see that dark patch on the horizon, the cloud that hangs over Belwick.’ This is fantasy—it was even in Gissing’s time, but all the more telling because it is. In a peaceful enclave of Sweetness and Light the sanctities of high culture may seem temporarily secure from the combined threats of mob democracy and bourgeois vulgarity. Gissing’s naturalism is therefore profoundly utopian: a mythical inscription, against the grain of history, of a place where the contradictory tensions in the social location of the late Victorian intellectual are ideologically resolved. It is a search for the ‘liberated life’ of which Gissing was to allow his readers (and himself) a glimpse seven years later, in The Odd Women: He was making friends in the world with which he had a natural affinity; that of wealthy and cultured people who seek no prominence, who shrink from contact with the circles known as ‘smart’, who possess their souls in quiet freedom. It is a small class, especially distinguished by the charms of its women…. These persons were not in declared revolt against the order of things, religious, ethical, or social; that is to say, they did not think it worthwhile to identify themselves with any ‘movement’; they were content with the unopposed right of liberal criticism. The ‘quiet freedom’ which Gissing himself never attained he projected significantly into a class culturally ‘above’ the bourgeoisie (but significantly

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represented as ‘declassed’). Would high culture, having failed thoroughly to ‘hellenize’ the bourgeoisie’s economic ascendance into a genuinely cultural hegemony, perhaps survive in these ranks? It seems, in any case, that in its attempts to locate itself symbolically outside the bourgeoisie, and outside the publicly political sphere altogether, it could not but reproduce the most reactionary tendencies of its own century, and point forward to the fascistization that awaited at least a certain section of high culture in our own. Antwerp, Belgium NOTES I should like to dedicate this article to Geoffrey Hemstedt and Adrian Crewe of the University of Sussex, in grateful acknowledgement of their stimulating advice, help and friendship in 1984. 1 P.J.Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). 2 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 3 Ibid., p. 2. 4 M.M.Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 272. 5 For discussions of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London and Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life, see Donald Read, England 1868–1914: The Age of Urban Democracy (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 245–8, and E.J.Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), PP. 133–4. 6 Terry Eagleton, ‘Ideology, fiction, narrative’, Social Text, 2 (Summer 1979), p. 68. 7 Göran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso, 1980), p. 28. 8 E.W.Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 12. 9 Ibid., p. 32. 10 Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 272. 11 Leonore Davidoff, ‘Class and gender in Victorian England’, in Judith L. Newton, Mary P.Ryan and Judith R.Walkowitz (eds), Sex and Class in Women’s History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 19. 12 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 96. 13 See Matthew Whiting Rosa, The Silver Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding ‘Vanity Fair’ (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1964). 14 This point is elaborated in the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective, ‘Women’s writing: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Aurora Leigh’, Ideology and Consciousness, 3 (Spring 1978), pp. 27–48. 15 See ‘The home’ in Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750–1980 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), pp. 94–119.

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16 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 104–5. 17 See James M.Brown, Dickens: Novelist in the Market-Place (London: Macmillan, 1982), for a largely Lukácsian theorization of Dickens’s ‘values’. 18 See K.M.Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist: A Study of the Philosophical Structure of her Novels (London: Macmillan, 1981). 19 ‘Every group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields’: Antonio Gramsci, ‘The formation of the intellectuals’, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 5. 20 A point well argued in Charles S.B.Swann, ‘Evolution and revolution: politics and form in Felix Holt and The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane’, Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature: Proceedings of the Conference held at the University of Essex, July 1976, ed. F.Barker et al. (University of Essex, 1977), P. 76. 21 Ibid., p. 83. 22 Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 137. 23 See John Goode, ‘The decadent writer as producer’, in Ian Fletcher (ed.), Decadence and the 1890s (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), where he elaborates on the notion of the literary text as ‘property’. 24 John Goode, ‘The art of fiction: Walter Besant and Henry James’, in David Howard, John Lucas and John Goode (eds), Tradition and Tolerance in NineteenthCentury Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 257. 25 Keating, op. cit., p. 53. 26 Letters of George Gissing to Members of his Family, quoted in Keating, op. cit., p. 54. 27 ‘These zones are formed from the fragments of character speech…from various forms of hidden transmission of someone else’s words, from scattered words and sayings belonging to someone else’s speech, from those invasions into authorial speech of others’ expressive indicators (ellipsis, questions, exclamations). Such a character zone is the field of action for a character’s voice, encroaching in one way or another upon the author’s voice’: Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 316. 28 John Lucas, ‘From naturalism to symbolism’, in Fletcher, op. cit., p. 135. 29 See Keating, op. cit., pp. 33 ff. Notable ‘explorers’ were Henry Mayhew, George Godwin, John Garwood, Mrs Tonna, Benjamin Disraeli, and of course Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. 30 Davidoff, op. cit., p. 20.

The rhetoric of remembrance. Derrida on de Man CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

Mémoires is the text of a series of lectures that Derrida delivered just a few months after Paul de Man’s death in December 1983.1 In fact they were the Wellek Library Lectures at Irvine, California, a circumstance whose irony Derrida records when he numbers René Wellek among those who see fit to denounce deconstruction—and de Man’s work in particular—without much sign of having read or pondered the primary texts in the case. The causes of this ‘resistance to theory’ were a topic that increasingly occupied de Man in his late essays on Kant, Hegel and aesthetic ideology. They are likewise Derrida’s concern here in his reflections on the way that ‘American deconstruction’ has both captured the high ground of literary theory and encountered such massive institutional resistance from the self-appointed guardians of civilized debate in the humanistic disciplines. What chiefly marks this adversary discourse is a shying away from close engagement of any kind, or (in Derrida’s words) a ‘refusal or inability in respect of a first task, the most elementary of tasks: that of reading’ (p. 41). So these lectures were conceived as a tribute to de Man which would also locate his work in relation to wider problems and prospects. What exactly is at stake in this curious compulsion not to read—or to read only at a certain polemical remove—texts which everywhere insist on the primacy of rigorous close reading? How is it that de Man has been so misread, as if to bear out (albeit in a crude and degenerate form) his own claim about the moments of constitutive or necessary ‘blindness’ encountered in all interpretation? The answer to these questions cannot be found by appealing to the kind of reception-history that separates the intrinsic problems of de Man’s work from the various distortions, abuses and misunderstandings that have grown up around it. Rather—as Derrida insists—those distortions are provoked by the characteristic rigour, the relentless and unsettling deconstructive power, of de Man’s texts. And one way of identifying the source of this resistance is to ask how one can possibly commemorate de Man—pay tribute to the continuing power of his example and influence—when so much of what he wrote seems to problematize the notions of meaning, intention and memory? Certainly any such tribute will have to go by way of de Man’s own writings and acknowledge these difficulties in its path.

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One such problem is de Man’s steadfast refusal to identify meaning with the power of inward, ‘living’ recollection that it has chiefly signified in Western philosophy from Plato, through Hegel to the present. Derrida tracks the course of this resistance through various texts of de Man, beginning with the essay on Poulet (from Blindness and Insight) where it takes the form of a postphenomenological critique of origins and presence.2 Poulet speaks for that particular mode of reading—the so-called ‘criticism of consciousness’ school— which thinks to arrive at an inward grasp of the author’s intent by empathetically evoking his state of mind in the act of creative expression. But this proves impossible, according to de Man, for reasons that emerge in the course of Poulet’s various essays. For such a meeting of minds to occur, it would be necessary that language achieve the kind of lucid self-presence—the intimate communion of memory, meaning and intent—which in practice it can never achieve. What Poulet’s texts thus reveal (against their own manifest purpose) is the temporal predicament of all interpretation, the gap that opens up between past and present, beyond all the powers of living recollection to transcend or annul. It is this hard-won knowledge that, in de Man’s words, ‘supplants memory or, to be more precise, supplants the naïve illusion that memory would be capable of conquering [this] distance…memory becomes important as failure rather than as achievement and acquires a negative value’ (cited by Derrida, p. 57). And it is the mark of an authentic, unself-deceiving criticism that it should recognize this limit on its own re-creative powers and not fall prey to the seductive pathos of a will to abolish that distance. Hence de Man’s reiterated claim: that we can best read critics by attending to those characteristic moments of ‘blindness’ where language resists the interpreter’s desire to suppress its more troubling implications. This is where Derrida locates the chief cause of that widespread hostility to de Man’s writing, an almost pathological aversion whose symptoms include the failure to read—genuinely read—his texts. The reaction is especially marked among American specialists in Romantic poetry, since it is here that criticism has invested most heavily in the ethos of subjective origins and presence. The mainstream interpreters of Romanticism—critics like M.H.Abrams3—seem motivated always by a need to endorse the high truth-claims of symbol and metaphor. That is to say, their readings are in some sense complicit with those powerful forms of aesthetic mystification by which poetry is assumed to transcend the antinomies of subject and object, absence and presence, memory and desire. Of course de Man accepts that such beliefs may be inseparable from the project of Romanticism, since its most characteristic achievements (in poetry and commentary alike) are based on the faith that language can indeed attain this wished-for condition. But it is necessary also to subject those beliefs to the kind of deconstructive critique that articulates their motivating interests and perceives the oscillation of ‘blindness’ and ‘insight’ to which they typically succumb. Thus metaphor is standardly contrasted with metonymy, the latter viewed as a pedestrian trope which operates by means of merely contingent or accidental

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detail, and can therefore claim nothing of the high creative power attributed to metaphor by theorists from Aristotle to Abrams. And the same applies to the cardinal distinction between symbol and allegory, the one synonymous with language raised to a level of supreme visionary truth, the other seen as a poor mechanical device which depends on mere narrative succession and everywhere betrays its own artificial character. Metaphor and symbol are the privileged tropes for Goethe, Coleridge and their modern successors in the tradition of high Romantic argument. They are the two chief names for that desire to pass beyond language to a kind of hypostatic union where all differences fall away and nothing remains to obstruct the intercourse of mind with nature or mind with mind. Metonymy and allegory oppose this desire through their stubborn insistence on the sheer literality of language, their way of closing off all escaperoutes to an illusory world of tanscendent unified perception. So when de Man reverses the Romantic order of priorities—asserting the claims of metonymy and allegory specifically against those of metaphor and symbol—his work naturally encounters resistance among critics for whom that order possesses the authority of revealed truth. Irony is another of the deconstructive key-terms that work to undermine the assurances of mainstream literary scholarship. Derrida cites a passage from ‘The rhetoric of temporality’—de Man’s most widely read and influential essay— which explains why this topic is so crucial to his thinking. The act of irony, according to de Man, reveals the existence of a temporality that is definitely not organic…it dissolves in the narrowing spiral of a linguistic sign that becomes more and more remote from its meaning…allegory and irony are thus linked in their common demystification of an organic world postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction and reality could coincide.4 Hence de Man’s strong revisionist account, not only of ‘Romanticism’ as commonly defined, but likewise of all those subsequent movements in poetry and criticism that have defined themselves expressly with or against the high Romantic line of descent. The New Critics, for instance, took a lead from T.S.Eliot in rejecting what they saw as the ideological confusions, the failures of poetic thought and sensibility, implicit in much Romantic writing. Yet they maintained a firm belief in the power of poetry to reconcile opposing principles, to transcend those antinomies that plagued the discourse of other, less privileged kinds of language. In this they adhered to the Romantic notion of ‘organic form’, of the poem as possessing a unique or sui generis integrity of utterance and style, beyond anything conceivable in terms of straightforward analytic reason. It is on this ground precisely—their appeal to what he sees as the illicit analogy between language and nature, art and the world of living, natural forms— that de Man takes issue with the New Critics.5 Though strongly committed to an

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organicist creed of wholeness, unity and self-present sense, their readings in practice thrive on just the opposite: a rhetoric of paradox, ambiguity and multiple meaning. Of course there is always the familiar line of argument—from Coleridge to the New Critics—that poetry is able to harmonize these conflicting claims and achieve the kind of synthesis (or ‘unity in multiplicity’) undreamt of by mere prose reason. But de Man finds that this argument rests on a mystification of aesthetic values and a failure to read both the poetry and the criticism with anything like an adequate attention to detail. Otherwise it would emerge that this beguiling talk of poetry as a form of secular revelation served as a means for criticism to evade the real problems thrown up by its encounter with the text. And the same would apply to any version of Romanticism—including those latter-day adversary schools—that sought to assimilate language or aesthetic cognition to a naturalizing rhetoric of ‘organic’ form and style. Such analogies can only pass themselves off by ignoring the moments of textual resistance where language asserts its radically formal (as de Man would say, its metonymic or allegorical) character. One can see why a superficial reading of de Man might give rise to the charges of moral and intellectual ‘nihilism’ most often brought against him. His work is a relentlessly negative critique of all the concepts (or pseudo-concepts) that have hitherto provided a working faith for Romantic scholarship and, beyond that, the whole tradition of modern literary studies. But those charges are unjustified, Derrida argues, since the critical negation of received ideas is not simply a form of corrosive or unprincipled nihilism. If there is—as he asserts— an ‘affirmative’ aspect to de Man’s writing, it cannot be distinguished from the constant undoing of naïve or premature truth-claims, the desire for criticism not to be seduced by the attractions of a mystified aesthetic. Such vigilance ‘tells us more about the institutions and strategies of reading, about their implications and political effects, about their somnolence as well, their amnesia, than all the pious bits of revolutionary bravura, which merely revolve in place’ (Mémoires, p. 68). For one thing, it works to reveal the sources of that potent aesthetic ideology which, at least since Kant and Hegel, has always provided an intellectual homeground for conservative thinking on art, politics and culture. In de Man’s late essays this connection is spelled out with increasing emphasis and care. It involves the evasion or specific misreading of problematic passages, notably in Kant, where the claims of pure understanding (knowledge in its abstract, categorical form) are reconciled with those of sensuous intuition by way of an appeal to aesthetics (or the Kantian ‘productive imagination’).6 According to de Man, this appeal comes down to a series of figural tropes and substitutions which in one sense support the whole edifice of Kantian philosophy, while in another they complicate its workings to the point of an absolute undecidability. As Derrida puts it, borrowing his terms from de Man, one has to seek out the ‘neglected corners’ of the text and then—by a kind of structural genealogy —go on to locate the ‘defective cornerstone’ upon which everything rests. This component is integral to the system, ‘assures its coherence while situating in

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advance, in a way that is both visible and invisible…, the site that lends itself to a deconstruction to come’ (Mémoires, p. 72). It is striking that those same passages of Kant (having to do with the ‘productive imagination’) are singled out by Paul Ricœur in his recent work on narrative and time.7 These two theorists of course have very different argumentative ends in view. For Ricœur, it is a question of showing how profoundly the categories of conceptual understanding are bound up with those of temporal experience; how philosophers from Aristotle to Kant, Hegel and Heidegger have always grasped this connection at crucial points in their argument, even when impelled (like Kant) by a will to think otherwise, a desire to fix cognitive truth-claims in a language of timeless a priori concepts. So de Man and Ricœur have this much in common: they both find a certain ‘rhetoric of temporality’ at the heart of all philosophical reflection. Thus Ricœur fastens on the well-known but cryptic passage where Kant speaks of an ‘art buried in the depths of the human soul’, an art whose name is ‘productive imagination’ and whose character can only be grasped in terms of the modalities of temporal experience.8 But this resemblance turns out to have sharp limits as soon as one turns from the local detail to the organizing purpose of Ricœur’s argument. What he sets out to achieve in Time and Narrative is a strongly affirmative account of this temporal predicament, a philosophy which at last comes out on the far side of all these problems and paradoxes, and which offers a transcendent, unifying vision based on the phenomenological understanding of time and its relation to linguistic and narrative forms. Ricœur’s is a positive or redemptive hermeneutic, intended to justify the truth-claims vested in that high valuation of linguistic creativity which has characterized the discourse of post-Romantic criticism. The story he tells is one of progressive revelation, so that Heidegger (for instance) perceives very clearly what can only be glimpsed on occasion in Kant, and then against the overt drift of his argument: namely, the primordial nature of time as ground of all authentic knowledge and experience. For de Man, on the contrary, time is what eludes the synthesizing movement of thought that enables a theorist like Ricœur to construct this reassuring narrative of obstacles surmounted through deeper understanding. Hence (as Derrida notes) the increasing resistance in de Man’s work to any form of dialectical or totalizing vision that would recapitulate Hegel without taking account of the problems created by a deconstructive reading of Hegel’s text. De Man sees in Hegelianism a specific allegory; not, as is often believed, the allegory of synthesizing and reconciliatory power, but that of disjunction, dissociation, and discontinuity. It is the power of allegory, and its ironic force as well, to say something quite different from and even contrary to what seems to be intended through it. (Mémoires, p. 74)

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Thus Ricœur’s attempt to reconstitute philosophy on the basis of narrative understanding—of an authentic, self-present knowledge achieved in the fullness of time—could only strike de Man as one more example of the thinking that seeks refuge from the rhetoric of temporality by conceiving an end to the obstinate antinomies of language, memory and desire. In de Man’s texts on Kant and Hegel9 this argument has large implications. It points to those specific blind-spots in the discourse of subsequent aesthetic theory which have led to a regular confusion between natural (organic) and artificial (linguistic or rhetorical) orders of description. Thus poetry is thought to possess the same kind of synthesizing power— the same organic unity of form and function—as obtains in the realm of natural phenomena. This presumption goes along with the Hegelian idea of philosophy as evolving through stages of increasingly complex self-knowledge to the point where all temporal differences fall away and Spirit achieves a consummate union between past and present, subject and object, mind and nature. Such notions have an appeal that cuts across some otherwise very marked divergences of ideological outlook. And so one finds W.K.Wimsatt—chief theorist of the New Criticism and nobody’s idea of a latter-day Romantic—invoking the Hegelian ‘concrete universal’ as an analogue or metaphor of organic form.10 What unites these diverse creeds is their will to find in poetry an image of that ultimate reconciling power that eludes the best efforts of philosophy or mere analytic reason. Hence, de Man argues, the continuing hold of those organicist tropes which induce even the best among the mainstream interpreters of Romanticism to suspend their close-reading skills and surrender to the ethos of natural origins and presence. This confusion has taken a political turn in those thinkers—from Burke and Coleridge to Eliot and the current New Right—who transpose the organicist metaphor from aesthetics to the realm of history and politics.11 This enables them to look back nostalgically to an imaginary age of ‘organic sensibility’, a time when (in Eliot’s version of the myth) poetry was as yet untouched by that disastrous split between reason and emotion which occurred at around the time of the English Civil War. So the fall into history—into politics, classconsciousness, secular revolt—coincides with the loss of this happy condition, this harmonious relationship between the faculties whose signs may be read in the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne and their contemporaries. And of course it was in Milton, pre-eminently the poet of Civil War politics, of strife and doctrinal division, that Eliot detected the first bad symptoms of our modern ‘dissociation of sensibility’. Henceforth English poetry would tend to oscillate between the rival claims of reason and emotion, unable to achieve (except at rare moments) that prelapsarian state of innocence and grace. That this potent mythology falsifies the facts is evident enough as soon as one turns to qualified historians of seventeenth-century social and political life. De Man has little to say about this aspect of the matter. What interests him chiefly is the persistence of that ‘aesthetic ideology’ that works to promote such a mystified account of language, thought and sensibility. This is why de Man can

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claim (in his essay ‘The resistance to theory’) that deconstruction is not, as its opponents assert, just one more retreat from history and politics into the realm of ‘textualist’ abstraction. On the contrary, he argues: those who take this line merely show themselves up as ‘very poor readers of Marx’s German Ideology’.12 And this is because the ‘resistance to theory’ most often involves a determined refusal to read philosophical and literary texts with an eye properly alert to their rhetorical complexities. It is precisely at those moments where the text puts up a resistance of its own—a resistance to premature or totalizing theories —that deconstruction becomes essentially a form of Ideologiekritik. So it is that de Man can turn the tables on his Marxist detractors by insisting on the stubborn materiality of language, its holding out against the various forms of mystification imposed by aesthetic ideology. As Derrida writes: ‘the materiality of actual history is that which resists historical, historicizing resistance.’ And again, quoting de Man: ‘generic terms such as “lyric”… as well as the pseudo-historical period terms such as “romanticism” or “classicism” are always terms of resistance and nostalgia, at the furthest remove from the materiality of actual history’ (Mémoires, p. 53). What these terms seek to achieve is a moment of pure, self-identical meaning, such that language would grasp its own nature and genesis, and no longer be subject to that dislocating ‘rhetoric of temporality’. What in fact they reveal—according to de Man—is the repeated failure to achieve this condition and the various ruses, strategies and evasions engendered by the will to prove otherwise. The last chapter of Derrida’s text assembles some of the evidence for his claim that de Man’s was indeed an ‘engaged’ discourse, one that ‘more and more explicitly…[said] something about institutional structures and the political stakes of hermeneutic conflicts’ (p. 142). In support of this claim, he cites de Man’s essays on Rousseau in Allegories of Reading, especially his chapter on the Social Contract, where issues of textual undecidability— of the tensions, as de Man puts it, between ‘constative’ and ‘performative’ uses of language—are inseparably linked with questions of history, politics and law.13 Those who deny this connection fail to perceive how the specific misreading of passages in Rousseau (as in Kant or Hegel) gives rise to a mystified aesthetic ideology whose effects are none the less real for their ‘textual’ character. Thus in Derrida’s words: ‘“reactionaries” and “political activists” in truth misunderstand, in order to protect themselves, the political stake and structure of the text, the political allegory of the literary text, no less than the allegorical and literary structure of the political text’ (p. 142). Thus Rousseau, Kant and Hegel have each been subjected to political readings which turn crucially on the sense attributed to certain problematic passages. And it is the hallmark of conservative ideologies that they tend to elide these problems by adopting an organicist metaphor of language, mind and nature whose motivating interests de Man is concerned to reveal. Of course Derrida himself has a stake—a political stake—in turning back the charge of reactionary quietism often brought against himself and de Man. What

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he writes here would equally apply to the reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, a reading that is likewise intended to demystify those ‘logocentric’ themes (of speech, presence, nature, origins) which play such a prominent role in Rousseau’s discourse and dominate the thinking of his mainstream interpreters.14 Again, there is a definite political dimension to Derrida’s text, though one that is ignored by those commentators who see only the promotion of a massively generalized ‘writing’ and hence—as they think— an indifference to everything outside the text. What this reading passes over is Derrida’s argument that the repression of writing has always gone along with a certain mystique of origins that works to efface real history—the history of civil and political institutions—by evoking a long-lost organic community of souls where speech would suffice for all practical needs. Hence the series of binary oppositions that operate everywhere in Rousseau’s discourse but also reveal its characteristic blind-spots of argument: on the one hand, speech, self-presence, origins and nature, all of them strongly marked positive terms by which to measure the extent of latter-day ‘civilized’ decline; on the other, writing, absence, hierarchy, delegated power and the various other forms of decadent modernity that Rousseau never ceases to denounce. Above all, it is writing whose advent creates the possibility of exercising power at a distance, of breaking with the intimate face-to-face communion of pure, selfpresent speech. So there are clearly political interests in play when Derrida shows how this binary logic is constantly subverted in the course of Rousseau’s arguments; how writing refuses to play its properly subordinate role (as a mere ‘supplement’ to speech), and becomes in effect the structurally dominant feature of everything that Rousseau has to say about language, culture, ethics and social evolution. This is not to claim (as a simplified polemical reading would have it) that there is no possible reference to a world ‘outside’ the text, since nothing could serve as an endpoint or anchor for the play of linguistic differance. Rather it is to urge, like de Man, that we read with a sense of the material resistances that writing puts up to any kind of aesthetic idealization that would seek to transcend history and politics in the name of some mystified organicist creed. Quite simply, writing is the precondition of all historical knowledge, all thinking that would pass beyond the timeless complacencies of myth to a grasp of what exceeds and baffles this craving for lost origins. And so one can fairly say of Derrida, as he says here of de Man, that ‘“politics” cannot be separated, neither in its acts nor in what it leaves to be deciphered, from that thinking of the political and of law which traverses all of his writings’ (p. 143). That Rousseau should figure so importantly for both of them—and in precisely this connection—is a topic that naturally engages Derrida’s interest. In fact, de Man took issue with him in an essay (‘The rhetoric of blindness’) which argued that Derrida had misread Rousseau in certain crucial respects.15 He had assumed too quickly that Rousseau’s writings were complicit with the orthodox interpretation which took them to assert the primacy of speech over writing, nature over culture, and so forth. It would then be a matter of

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deconstructing those texts in order to emphasize the moments of aporia— of selfinduced blindness to their own implications—which emerge through a close rhetorical reading. On the contrary, de Man argues: Rousseau’s text ‘has no blind spots’ and ‘accounts at all moments for its own rhetorical mode’.16 In his reflections on the origin of language, on history and the genesis of civil institutions, Rousseau is not only alive to these problems but effectively preempts every point that Derrida has to make. This is not to say that Rousseau consciously adopted such a strategy; rather, de Man is suggesting that his texts are so tightly constructed, so resistant to naïve misreadings (of which, none the less, de Man finds plentiful examples), that they cannot fall prey to a deconstructive treatment that comes, so to speak, from outside. In short, Derrida’s reading is ‘flawless in itself’ but ‘made to apply to the wrong object’. And this because, according to de Man, Derrida found himself in the most favorable of all critical positions: he was dealing with an author as clear-sighted as language lets him be who, for that very reason, is being systematically misread; the author’s own works, newly interpreted, can then be played off against the most talented of his deluded interpreters or followers.17 So it is Rousseau’s critics who stand in need of a deconstructive reading, since even the best of them—Derrida included—seem destined to repeat this alternating rhythm of co-implicated ‘blindness’ and ‘insight’. Which also explains—according to de Man—the existence of a ‘particularly rich tradition of aberrant readings’ in the case of those writers who, like Rousseau, ‘can legitimately be called the most enlightened’. What is odd about de Man’s essay is its failure to remark those frequent passages in Of Grammatology where Derrida does quite explicitly acknowledge that Rousseau’s text provides all the materials for its own deconstruction. Thus it is Rousseau (not Derrida) who most strikingly reveals the aporias engendered by a logocentric discourse on the origins of language; whose Confessions are everywhere haunted by the ‘dangerous supplement’ of writing; and whose mythical account of social evolution— of the evils attendant on civilized existence—is called into doubt by a close reading of his own ambivalent texts. All this Derrida himself points out with scrupulous reference to details of the text. So why should de Man so persistently misread Derrida as to pass clean over these manifest avowals? An answer begins to take shape as Derrida reflects on Rousseau’s importance for de Man as a strong precursor, an author whose texts exhibit a power of rhetorical demystification not to be found in the later Romantics. And, indeed, this impression is borne out by a letter (cited in Mémoires) where he responds to what must have been Derrida’s initial puzzlement: ‘The desire to exempt Rousseau (as you say) at all costs from blindness is, for me, a gesture of fidelity to my own itinerary.’ And so it was, de Man continues, that ‘I must have put a

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certain ardor into my defense of the relative insight which I have benefitted from’ (p. 130). To some extent, as we have seen, this ardour is explained by de Man’s understanding of the ideological errors and confusions that follow from the loss of that critical rigour discerned in Rousseau’s texts. But there is also a persistent concern with the fact of human mortality, with the limits placed upon thought, language and desire by the finite or temporal character of all experience. In the early essays it is Heidegger’s influence that comes across clearly in numerous details of argument and phrasing.18 Subsequently—as his style takes on a much greater austerity and self-denying rigour—de Man tends to focus on the figural devices which likewise resist the desire for transcendence of time and the mortal predicament. Thus Derrida remarks that de Man’s later writing ‘seems to be traversed by an insistent reflection on mourning, a meditation in which bereaved memory is deeply engraved’ (p. 22); and he connects this preoccupation with de Man’s steadfast refusal to accommodate his readings to that line of high Romantic argument that celebrates the visionary powers of symbol and metaphor. The will to deconstruct this deep-laid metaphysics of presence is closely bound up with the temporal aspect of a rhetoric which never comes to rest in a moment of timeless, living recollection. Hence de Man’s interest in tropes like prosopopeia, the figure that names an absent or dead personage, calls them to mind for the purpose of reviving memory but also—de Man insists—with the effect of reinforcing absence and death as the conditions of memory itself. Thus de Man reads Wordsworth’s curious ‘Essays on epitaphs’ as a text that reveals this uncanny, even deathly power vested in the nature of figural language.19 He cites one particular passage which in a sense prefigures the current dispute between orthodox and deconstructive readings of Romanticism. Language, Wordsworth writes, is too awful an instrument to be trifled with…. If words be not an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely they will prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments…which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit.20 On the orthodox view, such dark intimations are properly treated as aberrant moments, symptoms of a doubt that can always be dispelled through the reasserted power of symbol, metaphor and poetic imagination. Such is indeed the chief structural resource and the animating spirit of Romantic nature poetry, according to critics of this mainstream persuasion.21 For de Man, on the contrary, there can be no assurance of this saving dialectical progress from a state of anxiety, loss and self-division to one of regained imaginative faith. Language is ‘privative’ in so far as it reminds us of the distance that perpetually opens up between the desire for a living communion of minds and the knowledge that no such state can be achieved except by ignoring the ubiquitous rhetoric of

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temporality. Thus the ‘Essays on epitaphs’ can be seen as more authentic—more alert to this sobering predicament—than those other canonical texts of Romanticism that invest absolutely in the power of language to transcend mere contingencies of time and place. These texts would include Wordsworth’s much better-known Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where his argument rests on the organicist ideal of a language that renounces the ‘gaudy and inane phraseology’ of eighteenth-century poetic diction, and thus achieves the kind of living spontaneity and grace that belong to natural phenomena. For de Man, this can only seem a falling-away from the undeceived rigour and the courage of its own (albeit negative) convictions that mark the ‘Essays on epitaphs’. So there is—to say the least—a certain irony about Derrida’s addressing the work of de Man through what amounts to a form of celebratory remembrance. This irony is compounded by the fact that he finds de Man everywhere rehearsing the ways in which any such address must necessarily fall short of its intended meaning or effect. In de Man’s late writings on Hegel, for instance, he remarks the tension between two concepts of memory, the one (Erinnerung) appealing to a power of living inward recollection, the other (Gedächtnis) coming down to a process of purely tropological displacement and linkage that allows of no such comforting assurance.22 As with those other antithetical pairs— metaphor/metonymy, symbol/allegory—the effect is to foreground whatever resists the mystifying claims of aesthetic ideology. They are supplanted by a rhetoric whose terms are those of dispossession, alterity and death; a quasimechanical ‘grammar’ of tropes which holds out against any kind of ultimate Hegelian dialectical synthesis. For de Man, therefore, ‘true “mourning” is less deluded…. The most it can do is to allow for non-comprehension and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say prosaic, or, better still, historical modes of language power’ (quoted in Mémoires, p. 53). And so there develops in de Man’s writing a link between Ideologiekritik and the will to demystify those various kinds of consoling fiction that substitute for the knowledge of finitude and death. In Mémoires also, Derrida’s meditations take the form of a sustained prosopopeia, an act that summons up remembrance of de Man but also insists—against the pull of desire—that there is no escaping the radical estrangement brought about by the workings of memory and language. If prosopopeia is a fictive voice, a trope whose artifice strives to make amends for the fact of death, it is nevertheless a figure which ‘already haunts any real or present voice’. That is to say, it reminds us of the distance between past and present, that which (in Derrida’s words) ‘makes the inscription of memory an effacement of interiorizing recollection, of the “living remembrance” at work in the presence of the relation to self’ (p. 56). As Erinnerung (for Hegel, ‘authentic’ memory) gives way to the merely tropological effects of Gedächtnis, so life and living speech seem always marked by the signs of absence and death. Here we can see how a certain thematics of mourning resumes the burden of Derrida’s essays on (among others) Plato, Husserl and J.L. Austin. It is the fact—

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as he would have it, the structural necessity in language—that speech acts should function irrespective of whether they happen to express the self-present, living intentions of any given utterer.23 Such is the ‘iterability’ of speech acts, their readiness to be grafted from one context to another, a process of translation into the public domain which enables them to signify—to mean what they standardly, conventionally mean—quite apart from any appeal to ideas in the speaker’s mind, sincerity-conditions or whatever. And this is where language betrays the signs of that deathly power at work within words, their capacity to outlive the speaker’s present intentions and take on a ghostly life of their own. Prosopopeia thus becomes the name not only for a specialized trope involved with acts of poetic mourning but for everything in language that exceeds the grasp of ‘authentic’ living intent. As Derrida writes: here lies the ambiguity of memory, the contamination which troubles us, troubles memory and the meaning of ‘memory’: death reveals that the proper name could always lend itself to repetition in the absence of its bearer, becoming thus a singular common noun, as common as the pronoun ‘I’, which effaces its singularity even as it designates it, which lets fall into the most common and generally available exteriority what nevertheless means the relation to itself of an interiority. (p. 50) This passage is of special interest for a number of reasons. First, it points up the constant link in de Man’s work between deconstruction on its ‘technical’ side— the analysis of those tensions engendered in language by the workings of an aberrant rhetoric of tropes—and a lingering Heideggerian thematics of finitude and being-unto-death. This link persists despite the notable chastening or askesis of style and ethos practised in de Man’s later texts. It is carried across (as Derrida perceives) into his writing on figures like prosopopeia and the will to deconstruct all rhetorics that collude in the myth of aesthetic transcendence. What the passage also shows is Derrida’s responsiveness to this strain in de Man’s thinking, his recognition of affinities between it and his own enterprise. Speculating further, one might suggest that Mémoires begins to articulate that possible meeting-ground of ethics and politics in the form of an ‘affirmative’ deconstruction which has surfaced intermittently in Derrida’s writing since his early texts on Levinas and other such thinkers of radical difference.24 In de Man, this prospect is glimpsed at the point where thought resists the lure of organic or totalizing metaphors, analogies from the realm of natural phenomena to that of linguistic representation. Thus Derrida writes: Despite all his suspicions of historicism or historical rhetorics blind to their own rhetoricity, Paul de Man constantly contended with the irreducibility of a certain history, a history with which all one can do is to undertake its ‘true’ mourning…. The materiality of actual history is that which resists historical, historicizing resistance. (p. 53)

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‘True mourning’ is that which renounces such easy consolations as might be offered by encouraging memory to abolish all distances of time and historical event. It is a knowledge (as Derrida writes, echoing Levinas) that can only come about through our recognizing ‘the trace of the other in us, the other’s irreducible precedence’. But it is here that the otherwise relentless negativity of de Man’s thinking takes on a certain liberating force with regard to the ethics and the politics of memory. If deconstruction insists on the temporal character of all authentic understanding—what Derrida calls the ‘ontological difference… translated into the rhetoric of memory’—this emphasis may yet have positive implications for the practice of historical criticism. And this is for reasons that should carry weight with readers of Walter Benjamin’s subtle meditations on language, history and the structures of temporal experience. For Benjamin, what opens up the space of future possibility is precisely whatever can be used to disintegrate the bland, homogeneous continuum of time projected by idealist metaphysics.25 It is only by suspending that conception—by allowing for the random, the contingent and the undialectical, in short for those events that satisfy no kind of Hegelian synthesizing drive—that thought can muster the resistance required to seize its opportunities for change. Hence Benjamin’s arresting image (in his lapidary ‘Theses on history’) of the Jetztzeit, the moment of charged potential whose signs must be read on the instant as they enter some new and entirely unpredictable conjunction.26 Such moments offer no firm guarantee—no appeal to an unfolding master-plan of history and truth—which could lift them above the contingencies of present circumstance. Rather, as Derrida says of deconstruction, and specifically of its fortunes in America: ‘these entanglements are multiple: they meet nowhere, neither in a point nor in a memory. There is no singular memory’ (Mémoires, p. 14). Otherwise, thinking is fated to rehearse the same pattern of delusive totalizing gestures that reduces all history to an endless repetition of identity disguised as difference. There are many points of contact between Benjamin’s somewhat arcane materialist theses and de Man’s strong attachment to whatever escapes or defies the grasp of dialectical reason. Like Benjamin on the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel,27 de Man finds a certain redemptive promise in those details of the text that stubbornly hold out against the claims advanced by other, more elevated literary forms. What Benjamin diagnoses as the reactionary will to ‘aestheticize politics’ is everywhere confirmed in de Man’s texts on the mystifying powers of aesthetic ideology. And there are passages in de Man that do indeed suggest (albeit more guardedly) something of the hard-won affirmative faith that survives in Benjamin’s writing. Derrida cites one example from the early essay on Poulet, where de Man argues that ‘the power of memory does not reside in its capacity to resurrect a situation or a feeling that actually existed’, but should rather be conceived as ‘a constitutive act of the mind bound to its own present and oriented toward the future of its own elaboration’ (p. 59). In

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Mémoires, likewise, Derrida is moving towards a more affirmative stance on those issues in the ‘politics of deconstruction’ which have vexed recent theoretical debate. That he should do so through a complex—at times even a baroque—meditation on the character of mourning may perhaps appear less paradoxical in the light of these analogies with Benjamin. University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, Cardiff NOTES 1 Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, trans. Cécile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Page numbers in parentheses in the text refer to this edition. 2 Paul de Man, ‘The literary self as origin: the work of Georges Poulet’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 79–101. 3 See, for instance, M.H.Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957). 4 Paul de Man, ‘The rhetoric of temporality’, in Blindness and Insight, pp. 187– 228; p. 207. 5 See Paul de Man, ‘Form and intent in the American New Criticism’, in Blindness and Insight, pp. 20–35. 6 See Paul de Man, ‘Phenomenality and materiality in Kant’, in Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (eds), Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), pp. 121–44. 7 Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F.Max Müller (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. 116. 9 See Paul de Man, ‘Sign and symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), pp. 761–75. 10 W.K.Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky: University of Kentucky Press, 1953). 11 For a highly representative modern instance, see Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen, 1984). 12 Paul de Man, The resistance to theory’, Yale French Studies, 63 (1982), pp. 3– 20; p. 11. 13 Paul de Man, ‘Promises (Social Contract)’, in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979). 14 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 15 Paul de Man, ‘The rhetoric of blindness’, in Blindness and Insight, pp. 102–41. 16 Ibid., p. 139. 17 Ibid. 18 See, for instance, some of the early essays collected in Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

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19 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, pp. 67–81. 20 Cited by de Man from Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W.J.B.Owen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 154. 21 See, for instance, M.H.Abrams, ‘Structure and style in the greater Romantic lyric’, in F.W.Hillis and Harold Bloom (eds), From Sensibility to Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). 22 De Man, ‘Sign and symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’. 23 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature event context’, Glyph, 1 (1977), pp. 172–97; John R.Searle, ‘Reiterating the differences’, Glyph, 1 (1977), pp. 198–208; and Derrida’s response to Searle, ‘Limited Inc abc’, Glyph, 2 (1977), pp. 162–254. 24 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 79–153. 25 See the essays collected in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1971). 26 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on history’, in Illuminations, pp. 255–66. 27 Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1979).

Prospero meets Adam Smith: narrative exchange and control in The Prelude IAN REID

The notion that narrative ‘represents a succession of events’1 has not seemed axiomatic to everyone. In Wordsworth’s view, the distinctive thing about all narrative forms is that ‘the Narrator, however liberally his speaking agents be introduced, is himself the source from which everything primarily flows’.2 Sensibly ignoring any ‘action sequence’, which neo-Aristotelian analysts regard as the sine qua non of storyness, this more Platonic definition focuses on the quintessential act of telling, dispersed though it is through ‘speaking agents’.3 That none of these agents, nor the narrator, need be a character in the ordinary structuralist sense (an amalgam of ‘relatively stable’ person-like traits that intersect with a ‘chain of events’4) should become clear from a reading of parts of The Prelude, for its story does not so much concatenate actions involving separate individuals as trace the irresolute interaction of discursive figures— figures of motion, figures of governance—which carry the marks of a particular sociocultural situation. To regard its poet-narrator as a single unified personage who follows one trajectory is to miss much of the rhetoric that (arguably) constitutes the very narrative movement itself. And yet The Prelude has often been regarded in that way. M.H.Abrams, for example, in an influential book, asserts that ‘a supervising idea…controls Wordsworth’s account and shapes it into a structure in which the protagonist is put forward as one who has been elected to play a special role in a providential plot’: one that Abrams describes as a ‘quest’ and also as a ‘pilgrimage’—merging these together in a homogenized journey-model, the ‘controlling idea’ as he insistently calls it.5 Now the pattern noted by Abrams and others is certainly salient and may appropriately be called a ‘controlling idea’: control is indeed of prime concern in shaping the story. But to see this text as so single-minded is to repress much of it, for The Prelude partly anticipates and abets resistance to its own semantic controls. Repeatedly displaying discursive contradictions, it consists very largely of efforts to subdue these by proposing holistic rereadings of its structure—only to bring in yet further contradictions in the process. From the outset it is self-revisionary. Here, in the 1805 text,6 is how it begins:

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Oh there is a blessing in this gentle breeze That blows from the green fields and from the clouds And from the sky; it beats against my cheek, And seems half conscious of the joy it gives. O welcome messenger! O welcome friend! 5 A captive greets thee, coming from a house Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free, A prison where he hath been long immured. Now I am free, enfranchised and at large, May fix my habitation where I will. 10 What dwelling shall receive me, in what vale Shall be my harbour, underneath what grove Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream Shall with its murmurs lull me to my rest? The earth is all before me—with a heart 15 Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, I look about, and should the guide I chuse Be nothing better than a wandering cloud I cannot miss my way. I breathe again— Trances of thought and mountings of the mind 20 Come fast upon me. It is shaken off, As by miraculous gift ’tis shaken off, That burthen of my own unnatural self, The heavy weight of many a weary day Not mine, and such as were not made for me. 25 Long months of peace—if such bold word accord With any promises of human life— Long months of ease and undisturbed delight Are mine in prospect. Whither shall I turn, By road or pathway, or through open field, 30 Or shall a twig or any floating thing Upon the river point me out my course? Enough that I am free, for months to come May dedicate myself to chosen tasks, May quit the tiresome sea and dwell on shore— 35 If not a settler on the soil, at least To drink wild water, and to pluck green herbs, And gather fruits fresh from their native bough. Nay more, if I may trust myself, this hour Hath brought a gift that consecrates my joy; 40 For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within

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A corresponding mild creative breeze, A vital breeze which travelled gently on O’er things which it had made, and is become 45 A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation. ’Tis a power That does not come unrecognised, a storm Which, breaking up a long-continued frost, Brings with it vernal promises, the hope 50 Of active days, of dignity and thought, Of prowess in an honourable field, Pure passions, virtue, knowledge, and delight, The holy life of music and of verse. 55 Thus far, O friend, did I, not used to make A present joy the matter of my song, Pour out that day my soul in measured strains, Even in the very words which I have here Recorded. To the open fields I told A prophesy; poetic numbers came 60 Spontaneously, and clothed in priestly robe My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem, For holy services. Great hopes were mine: My own voice cheared me, and, far more, the mind’s Internal echo of the imperfect sound—65 To both I listened, drawing from them both A chearful confidence in things to come. Sketching the situation from which the poem will proceed, those opening lines adduce two biblical analogies, one filtered through an intermediate text. The narrator comes (echoing Exodus 13:3) ‘from a house/Of bondage’ (ll. 6–7), like the Israelites freed from Egypt. Yet he also solicits comparison with earlier wanderers, primal rejects dismissed from a commodious garden rather than delivered from a confining city, and here (ll. 15–19) the allusion works through a cluster of adaptations from the last lines of Paradise Lost; in addition to the modified resonance of ‘The earth is all before me’, those key words rest, guide, choose, wandering and way are all repeated from Milton’s final sentence.7 Then which situation is the prelude to The Prelude? Is the speaker initially emancipated or expelled? Insistence on what E.D.Hirsch calls ‘valid interpretation’, obedient to the ‘controlling idea’ (he too uses that revealing phrase), would require an exclusive choice, just as for Hirsch ‘an interpretation of Hamlet which views the hero as a dilatory intellectual is not compatible with one that views him as a forceful man of action thwarted by circumstances.’8 In that view, the discovery of formal unity depends on securing a unified personality for the central character. The Prelude, however, makes no such

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security available, and, instead of permitting the speaker’s orientation to be determined either way, this passage presents disjunctively a metonymic paradox: the mind will ‘mount’—or be mounted, since the phrasing in l. 2.0 may suggest both senses—in such a way that descent from Eden can be substituted, as if synonymously, for ascent from Egypt. Active and passive at once, the equivocation in ‘mountings of the mind’ foreshadows fuller indications that the balance of power in this text between ‘the mind’ and its surroundings is unstable. Besides, there are different overtures of control here, not entirely concordant. Who is the inscribed narratee, recipient of the (proleptically) received version of The Prelude’s story? A direct vocative greets the creative breath itself in l. 5, ‘O welcome friend!’: an aspect of the natural world is being addressed. Yet an odd shift soon takes place, moving the breeze from second to third person, so that at l. 55 the repetition ‘O friend’ marks a difference: the amicable auditor is now human. Later to be named as one ‘Coleridge’, he is already being enlisted as a controller of meaning in the poem—a reader of exemplary competence for whom (so the story goes) the story is being told, for whom (as the final line of Book 1 puts it) ‘this labour will be welcome’, and for whom the narrator wishes to present ‘a theme/Single and of determined bounds’ (1. 668–9). ‘Coleridge’ functions less as a particular person than as a built-in model interpreter, a virtual reading position designed to replicate the narrator’s own and to seem interchangeable with the sympathetic attentions of his natural environment. Accordingly, a few lines on, the initial utterance is said to have been addressed not only ‘to the open fields’ but also to a further audience in the speaker himself, listening to his voice and to its internally refracted doublet (ll. 64–7). Nature and narrator almost become each other’s ‘speaking agent’. Remarkable, then, in this preamble are two kinds of rhetorical operation that can disturb the would-be control of any narrative exchange. One is that process of figurative substitution whereby B replaces A, as here a post-Edenic trope purportedly becomes equivalent to an Exodus trope and therefore generates a need for further narration in order to account for the apparent discrepancy. The other is that process of positional alteration, verging on interlocutory reversal, whereby the narrator’s orientation towards his story and audience keeps shifting. Both processes are involved in the change of weather that comes over the scene here (ll. 41–54). Having fanned the story into its sense of possible beginnings, the breeze that was apostrophized directly now veers back into the third person, and also into the past, engendering as it does so an unruly counterpart, an exorbitant gust within the poet. Yet the ‘power’ it betokens is no more immediate for that, since it is one of promise rather than of fulfilment: ‘the hope/Of active days’, not present activity. That it has ‘made things’ is asserted, but it brings a disconcerting recognition of things merely desired. (A refrain of ‘hopes’ then develops; within the next hundred lines there are ‘Great hopes’, ‘hopes/Still higher’ and ‘lofty hopes’, all precariously situated.) Between lines 54 and 55 there is a pause, and the breeze, which had seemed a sign from which to proceed, now recedes further in time: ‘Thus far, O friend, did I, not used to make/

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A present joy the matter of my song,/Pour out that day my soul in measured strains’—where the sense of ‘strains’ is doubly eloquent, tense as well as tuneful, qualifying the subsequent profession of ‘chearful confidence in things to come’. But what kind of figure is this ‘I’, and what ‘course’ is he taking through the poem? An impulse to censor inconsistencies of character and trajectory, to bring the play of meanings under tighter control, is often apparent in post-1805 revisions of The Prelude, and so it is unsurprising that the reference to Exodus was dropped. Yet the indefiniteness of this narrative journey soon reasserts itself when, after a breather, the happy hiker of 1850 takes up his travels as follows: casting then A backward glance upon the curling cloud Of city smoke, by distance ruralised; Keen as a Truant or a Fugitive, But as a Pilgrim resolute, I took, Even with the chance equipment of that hour, The road that pointed toward the chosen Vale. It was a splendid evening, and my soul Once more made trial of her strength, nor lacked Aeolian visitations; but the harp Was soon defrauded, and the banded host Of harmony dispersed in straggling sounds, And lastly utter silence! ‘Be it so; Why think of anything but present good?’ So, like a home-bound labourer I pursued My way beneath the mellowing sun, that shed Mild influence; nor left in me one wish Again to bend the Sabbath of that time To a servile yoke. What need of many words? A pleasant loitering journey, through three days Continued, brought me to my hermitage. (1850 edition, 1. 87–107) This is very far from adumbrating the unified journey described in Abrams’s commentary. ‘Quest’ can hardly encompass the self-substitutions of that disconcertingly multiple figure: truant, fugitive, pilgrim, labourer and hermit. It is important to recognize sociolinguistic traces in these tropes by considering the enunciative stance from which they are being presented as if equivalent. A proper explanatory account of what is involved here would need to be historically situated in terms of language registers; a few general points will suffice now. What exactly is the discursive context of that vocational heroism which has subscribed to ‘the hope/Of active days, of dignity and thought,/Of prowess in an honourable field’? Part of it is quasi-priestly: the poet-narrator has

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dedicated his spirit to ‘holy services’. But upon that commitment he superimposes both industriousness and indolence at once, recognizing no discrepancy between the paradigms of a manual worker stepping restward and a loiterer on a three-day ramble. Through this odd cluster of images can be glimpsed a particular configuration of changes in the economy of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Here they take the form of a set of tensile social relations—ostensibly, alliances—between artist and artisan, between the trades of religion and poetry, between rural worker and leisured gent. To subsume these, in one’s reading, as facets of a unified character is to comply with the text’s own overt ideology and to pass over what Fredric Jameson would call its ‘political unconscious’.9 That this matter is indeed political can be seen in the poem’s frequent but uneasy use of a term such as ‘labour’, which as the eighteenth century came to its end was undergoing a process of critical semantic enlargement. To the basic earlier meanings of manual effort and of onerous travail, writers such as Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations is directly mentioned in The Prelude, 12. 76– 80) had begun to add the more abstract sense of labour as a component in the production of commodities, and soon after the turn of the century there emerged distinctively the reference to labour as a social class.10 Meanwhile literary personification of ‘Labour’ in relation to landscape occurs as early as Goldsmith’s The Traveller (1764), which declares that ‘Nature…/Still grants her bliss at Labour’s earnest call’. Wordsworth allows himself a comparable sentimentality in the picture he paints of his native region in ‘Home at Grasmere’: there is a noble independence, he avers, about those who work their own land: ‘…Labour here preserves His rosy face, a servant only here Of the fireside or of the open field, A Freeman therefore sound and unimpaired.’11 Very similar to that in some respects is the self-representation at the beginning of The Prelude: in the ‘open field’ (ll. 30, 59) the poet-figure is ‘free’ (ll. 7, 9, 33), ‘like a peasant’ (l. 110). And yet such assertions are shadowed by his awareness that ‘a servile yoke’ (l. 113) needs to be avoided. Although he may declare himself no longer burdened by ‘The heavy weight of many a weary day’ (l. 24), he must still share, in so far as his situation recalls the one at the end of Paradise Lost, in Adam’s curse; the prospect of ‘Long months of peace… Long months of ease’ (ll. 26–8) is parenthetically acknowledged to be doubtful. When intervals of ease do occur further on in the poem, they will detract from his seeming resolution to ‘dedicate’ himself to ‘chosen tasks’ (l. 34); for instance, he confesses to having spent his student days in ‘good-natured lounging’ (the phrase is borrowed from Thomson’s Castle of Indolence), and something of the same

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tone carries over into the account straight afterwards of vacation-time ‘sundry wanderings’ in rural regions (6. 199–213). The narrative project of The Prelude finds itself awkwardly situated in a cultural limbo. That landscape amidst which the speaking figure is at something of a loss, or a loose end, is at once literary and socio-economic. He belongs neither to the sweating peasantry whose virtues he will extol, nor yet to the select company of ‘Milton and Shakespeare, labourers divine’ (5.165). After picturing himself in the preamble as being ‘singled out’ for the ‘holy services’ of poetry, and as having ‘told a prophecy’ to ‘the open fields’, he must later renew his sense of special election in the face of reminders that many others toil with less privilege.12 Book 4 records the exemplary occasion when, walking home at sunrise after dancing away the night, he experiences an intense moment of confirmation that he is ‘a dedicated spirit’—and sees, in a flicker of latent irony, ‘labourers going forth into the fields’ (4. 336–44). Again, in the poem’s penultimate book, winding his testimonial towards the climactic claim that he is indeed part of a band of ‘poets, even as prophets, each with each/Connected in a mighty scheme of truth’ (12. 301–2), he feels a need to dissociate himself from the view that natural gifts require for their growth ‘Retirement, leisure, language purified’ (12. 189–90), and is nagged by an anxious wish To ascertain how much of real worth, And genuine knowledge, and true power of mind, Did at this day exist in those who lived By bodily labour, labour far exceeding Their due proportion, under all the weight Of that injustice which upon ourselves By composition of society Ourselves entail. (12. 97–105) In the convolution of that last clause there seems more than a smidgin of guilt, and the rest of the poem is often troubled about the relation between the work that it is producing and the work that is done by those who labour more arduously. The closing lines of Book 1 can express hope of ‘honourable toil’ (1. 653), hope too that at least to the poem’s direct addressee ‘this labour will be welcome’ (1. 674); but pulling against that are strong fears: fear that dreary burdens will come from ‘labour in excess’ (12. 197), as in the pageant figure of ‘Labour, his own Bond-slave’ (3. 630), and, above all, fear that nothing of substance will result—that the effort to tell ‘some variegated story’ may prove baseless, evanescent, fugitive, until ‘the whole beauteous fabric seems to lack/ Foundation, and withal appears throughout/Shadowy and insubstantial’ (1. 226– 8).

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The allusion that these lines make to Shakespeare’s The Tempest is strengthened by their later revision, in which the ‘unsubstantial structure melts… mist into air dissolving’ (1850 edition, 1. 225–7). Several words are echoed here from the famous speech (previously alluded to in Wordsworth’s ‘An Evening Walk’13) that comes after the end of the masque in Act IV; the actors, says Prospero, Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers… shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (IV.i.150–6) There will be more to say soon about relations between The Prelude and The Tempest. Meanwhile the dual function of this kind of intertextual allusiveness is worth brief general comment. By incorporating quotations from a prestigious prior text written by one of those ‘labourers divine’, the later text is able both to keep up, and to control somewhat, its rhetorical momentum. While in one sense a curbing device, the use of allusion also allows meanings to run on. A few lines from Book 8 catch this doubleness succinctly, coming in a passage which mainly emphasizes the stabilizing influence on the poet’s mind of his familiarity with landscape forms: These thoughts did oft revolve About some centre palpable, which at once Incited them to motion, and controlled, And whatsoever shape the fit might take, And whencesoever it might come, I still At all times had a real solid world Of images about me. (8. 599–605; my italics) (The italicized line includes another glance at that same masque scene from The Tempest: ‘Incite them to quick motion’ (IV.i.39) is Prospero’s command to Ariel, regarding subject spirits of the natural world.) The Prelude’s apparent assertion at this point is that an ideal quasi-gravitational balance allows human ideas to circle around figures of the physical world. But ‘about me’ opens a contrary possibility, and the whole passage is deeply ambiguous; Colin Clarke calls it ‘ingenious double-talk’.14 It can be read as allegorizing the instability of narrative control itself, for that same rotation of figures and speaking agents which produces storyness may also involve a risk for the narrator of being dispossessed of power. In attempting to secure his own position, he affixes it to

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those natural images as if to a centre of gravity, and yet that exposes all the more his inability to determine what ‘shape the fit might take’. In narration as in social arrangements it may turn out that (to apply phrasing used of French politics later in the poem) ‘power’ has ‘reverted’ to ‘Nature’, creating an ‘open space/For her to move about in, uncontrolled’ (1850 edition, 11. 31–4). Far from being an isolated instance of shifty roles, that Book 8 passage has numerous parallels elsewhere in the poem. The lines referred to above about the ‘insubstantial’ fabric of his ‘variegated story’ (1. 220–8) show much the same tendency; discussing them, Frances Ferguson comments that ‘nature as an external presence appears strangely locked into an unsatisfyingly symbiotic relationship with the poet’s “human nature” as the movement from the internal to the external begins to be a slippage.’15 Shifts already noted in the initial series of images, especially in the fluidity of the protagonist’s self-characterization vis-à-vis his supposedly ‘natural’ interlocutors, are therefore part of a more general fluctuation between two different language registers. One of them draws upon the local speech of a rustic environment, using simple and regionally particular locutions that approach ‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’.16 Alternating with that, the other register draws on an elevated cultural heritage for which the sonorous blank-verse patterns, elaborate syntax and rich diction of Miltonic and Shakespearian poetry serve as a stylistic synecdoche. The narrator is placing himself and his implied readership partly within that formal, prestigious tradition in the very act of declaring a certain measure of independence from it. In relation to the literary mainstream, he is both free and enclosed from the outset, making gestures of linguistic self-confidence alongside gestures of limitation and deference. This cultural situation, intricately linked to several social changes, underlies the motile relations between The Prelude and a number of established literary genres and rhetorical practices: philosophical verse essay, effusive ode, elevated epistle, distended lyric, Miltonic epic, pastoral idyll, rustic rumination, topographical sketch—elements of these all mingle in ways that to Augustan taste would have seemed indecorous if not downright incongruous, along with newer forms, notably the intimate ‘conversation poem’ recently invented by Coleridge (whose ‘Frost at Midnight’ is quoted directly at the beginning and end of the two-part proto-Prelude (1799 edition, 1. 4 and 2. 497; cf. 1805 edition, 1. 278 and 2. 467)). Against that varied background, the irresolute wanderer of Wordsworth’s poem, a figure not only released but also evicted, allegorizes his historical situation as writer and as countryman. Early in Book 1 there is a paradigm for the unstable relationship between narrator and nature. As the ‘gentle breeze’ addressed in the poem’s first line veers from second to third person, from present to past, and from outside to inside (‘I…felt within/A corresponding mild creative breeze’; ll. 41–3), it metamorphoses sharply from a zephyr into ‘A tempest, a redundant energy,/ Vexing its own creation’ (ll. 46–7).17 ‘Redundant’? In Dr Johnson’s dictionary this

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word is defined as ‘superabundant, exuberant, superfluous’; and so its use here, oddly linking wind with mind, reveals a tacit deconstructive logic known to Derridians as supplementarity. Nature is deemed to be a plenitude, with the human imagination a mere adjunct. Yet as an independent source of creative power the latter can exceed or overflow the former, whose total governing capacity is thereby called into question. Versions of this supplementary paradox recur. In the following lines from Book 2 for instance, despite a seemingly careful insistence that power came to the poet rather than being produced by him, it remains unclear how something ‘universal’ can be accompanied by a ‘superadded’ element: that universal power And fitness in the latent qualities And essences of things, by which the mind Is moved by feelings of delight, to me Came strengthened with a superadded soul, A virtue not its own. (2. 342–7) An analogous paradox is writ large in the very structure of The Prelude. Never formally completed by publication in the author’s lifetime, never supposed in any case to be self-sufficient, and yet coming by default to stand in lieu of the building to which it would have been a mere portico, this supremely supplementary poem manages to have it both ways. It can intimate an ideal unity without executing it, and indeed, while still a foreplay, praelusio, it can verge on a praeteritio, proceeding to tell that which it disclaims a capacity to tell. As ‘circumspection’ mingles uncertainly with ‘infinite delay’ (1. 242), the poem’s provisionality allows it to go on postponing the execution of a finished script. And so, in its drive towards and against completion, this text can remain—like a spectacle in Book 8— a canopy Of shapes, and forms, and tendencies to shape, That shift and vanish, change and interchange (8. 720–2) —never letting its reader confront the ultimate state of repose where every motion gone, The scene before him lies in perfect view Exposed, and lifeless as a written book. (8. 725–7)

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It is a startling image: to be brought to book is to become inert; to be made textually complete is to die. In contrast, shifting shapes are seen as part of a vivid process, ‘Like a magician’s airy pageant’ (8. 734: that Tempest masque again), a ‘spectacle to which there is no end’ (8. 741) and which is momentarily free of worries about evanescence.18 Lying ‘in perfect view…lifeless’, the image of a book is often regarded in The Prelude with ambivalence. Among many examples of the poem’s two-way argument with its own condition is the passage where, having just remarked ‘How books mislead us’ (12. 207) in representing ‘the differences, the outside marks by which/Society has parted man from man’ (12. 217–18), the narrator goes on to declare that his theme is the best of those who live Not unexalted by religious faith Nor uninformed by books (good books, though few), In Nature’s presence. (12. 241–4) And, indeed, Book 5—itself entitled ‘Books’—culminates in a grand affirmative fusion of natural present with literary past, asserting that the receptive individual can Receive enduring touches of deep joy From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty poets. Visionary power Attends upon the motions of the winds Embodied in the mystery of words. (5.617–21) Discussing these lines and some that follow them, Isobel Armstrong remarks that their syntax holds in suspension, as so often in The Prelude, two different sorts of relationship between mind and world; for example, ‘visionary power “Attends upon”, works on or waits dependently upon, “the motions of the winds”, an active and a passive agent’.19 But either way the preoccupation is with the powerful embodiment of ‘motions’ in language. Book 1 gives special prominence to this vital narrative principle of momentum that stems, as seen already, from substitutions in the sequencing of the énoncé and dispossessive shifts in the modelling of the énonciation. Its function emerges most clearly in those familiar passages which relate the formative childhood experiences of trapping, climbing, rowing and skating (reproduced below as an appendix). Remarkably enough, the word ‘motion’ itself has explicit climactic emphasis in each of these episodes,20 but more importantly their sequence plays out the reiterative and interactive elements of narration, signalling issues of

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textual exchange and control by leading straight into an engagement with The Tempest. In the first three of the four passages, the figurative structure is strictly symmetrical. It is not just that each records a moment of epiphany amidst a craggy landscape; more than that, an isomorphic pattern governs their image sequences and what Greimas would call the ‘investments’ of their ‘actants’.21 In the first (1. 310–32), the narrator’s own agitated, iterative pursuit of natural creatures (‘from snare to snare, I plied/My anxious visitation, hurrying on,/Still hurrying, hurrying onward’) culminates in his being ‘O’erpowered’ by a ‘strong desire’ to take what others have caught, whereupon initiative is taken from him and he himself becomes the object of imagined pursuit. Those ‘sounds/Of undistinguishable motion’ mark the reversal. In the second passage (1. 333–50) the narrator again has a predatory role, wanting this time to take eggs from a raven’s nest; but as he clings to the ridge he is himself arrested—his ear assailed by the wind’s ‘strange utterance’, his eye startled by the ‘motion’ of the clouds. Once more, then, the motive agency shifts, by a kind of dispossession, from the human figure to more powerful agents. (In the 1799 version of these passages, the word ‘powers’ is actually used in each case to designate these; 1. 35 and 73.) The third passage (1. 372–426) follows the same narrative programme of repetition and reversal. The narrator takes someone else’s boat, propels it across the lake ‘lustily’ (desire is never far from the surface in these passages)—and then turns hurriedly back, admonished by the apparent uprearing of the cliff, which continues afterwards to ‘move’ uncannily through his mind. A kind of ripple effect develops, marked by even greater use of reiterative phrasing than in the first two passages. Just as ‘the voice/ Of mountain-echoes’ accompanies the skiff, so the high incidence of repetition amplifies the lines, particularly those that refer to the moving boat (ll. 386, 387, 390), the horizon’s bound (ll. 399, 406), the huge cliff (ll. 406, 409), the willow-tree cavern (ll. 375, 395, 414), and the dual doubling of ‘struck the oars, and struck again’ (l. 385) followed by ‘I struck, and struck again’ (l. 408). As before, the pivot of the episode is a sudden usurpation of the boy’s puny volition and movement, this time by the ‘voluntary power’ and ‘measured motion’ of the cliff figure. A significant element in these three passages becomes clearer by contrast with the fourth, the ice-skating episode (1. 452–489). Superficially the familiar pattern seems to be replicated, as human movement is appropriated by the natural environment, but there are important differences. The activity is no longer entirely solitary, stealthy or rapacious. Though the boy does at times separate himself from the crowd, his perceptions have a shared context in ‘games confederate’; he and his friends are only playing at hunting; and the echoes contribute to their pleasures. Most strikingly, instead of the taking that occurs in each previous instance, there is now a giving; and so a different relationship, implicitly figured as a reciprocal exchange, is established with the surrounding landscape:

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When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short—yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round. (1. 479–86) The narrative sequence still involves an impressive transfer of movement to the natural world (typified by modulating from ‘I wheeled about’ (l. 458) into ‘the solitary cliffs/Wheeled by me’), but it is not admonitory, not disturbing; rather it induces tranquillity. Instead of needing to be subordinated to the disciplinary powers of nature, the narrator can stand and watch the hills stretching ‘Feebler and feebler’ behind him; he is an untroubled still point in this turning world. And instead of the semiotic opacity of those earlier encounters, evident in phrases like ‘sounds… undistinguishable’ (ll. 330–1), ‘strange utterance’ (l. 348) and ‘undetermined sense’ (l. 419), the scene contemplated this time is one that he can decipher. An invocation of natural forces then follows, one that works intertextually in a way that the earliest version signals most clearly: Ye powers of earth, ye genii of the springs, And ye that have your voices in the clouds, And ye that are familiars of the lakes And of the standing pools, I may not think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry—when ye through many a year Thus, by the agency of boyish sports, On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills, Impressed upon all forms the characters Of danger or desire, and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With meanings of delight, of hope and fear, Work like a sea. (1799 edition, 1. 186–98) Discreetly but substantially, in their repetitive phrasal rhythms and their apostrophic conventions as much as in details of diction, these lines allude to the long, crucial speech by Shakespeare’s Prospero which begins:

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Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune… (The Tempest,V.i.33 ff.) Fortified as they are by a thick spread through the poem of recurrent motifs from the same play (island, tempest, dream, music, drowning, charm, enchantment, power), the specific stylistic parallels here are strikingly insistent, though a little subdued in later versions of the passage. Implicitly, taken in conjunction with those other allusions discussed earlier, they invite a reader to compare this poet of The Prelude with that magus of The Tempest. On the face of it the two figures stand here in sharp contrast, since Prospero is speaking of a power to administer his own will to and through the spirits of nature, whereas Wordsworth’s speaker hails the spirits of nature as ‘powers’ who employ ‘ministry’ over himself. The Shakespearian magus apparently dominates the communicative situation; the Wordsworthian poet is apparently subservient to it. Yet that is not the whole story. On the one hand, Prospero is invoking his ‘potent art’ of control only to renounce it henceforth: But this rough magic I here abjure; and when I have requir’d Some heavenly music (which even now I do) To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. Instead of controlling physical and spiritual forces in order to take revenge on those who wronged him, he will give Ariel (the lightfoot labourer) and Caliban (the servile drudge) their freedom, give Miranda to Ferdinand, and give a pardon to the miscreants. On the other hand, the Wordsworthian narrator will proceed to claim an active role, equivalent and complementary to that of nature. Although in the present passage it is nature’s power that can imprint ‘the characters/Of danger or desire’ and ‘make/The surface of the universal earth/With meanings of delight, of hope and fear,/Work like a sea’, The Prelude later declares that the relationship between nature and the responsive individual can be reciprocal: From Nature largely he receives, nor so Is satisfied, but largely gives again; For feeling has to him imparted strength, And—powerful in all sentiments of grief,

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Of exultation, fear and joy—his mind, Even as an agent of the one great mind, Creates, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds. (2. 267–75) What makes such passages particularly revealing to the narrative analyst is their implicit function as an embedded microtype, or compact model, of the text’s own ambiguous relationship with its potential reader. In this they simply accentuate what is latent throughout the poem, for there has been a doubling of auditors all along. Just as those opening lines addressed both the natural world (in the form of an inspirational breeze) and an ideal fellow traveller (in the form of a particular human friend), so here too the exchange indicated by the apostrophe to natural spirits accompanies, and serves as image for, a friendly reader’s participation in the collaborative task of constructing and endlessly reconstructing narrative meanings, ‘working but in alliance with the work’. In the same way that the creative and receptive mind engages with nature, addressee and speaking subject can supposedly become ‘joint labourers in the work’, as the poem’s final paragraph asserts (13. 438). This can be seen as inscribing what Michael Friedman calls ‘Wordsworth’s chimerical political economy’—virtually a myth of symmetrical exchange by which real social inequalities become story-shaped as spiritually active virtue is attributed to those who are materially subordinate.22 (A comparable view, incidentally, of the ideological dimension of Shakespeare’s Tempest is proposed by Terence Hawkes, who argues, for example, that Prospero’s ‘pastoral pageant… serves to support an established and work-dominated social order’.23) According to Friedman, the value system implicit in Wordsworth’s writings, detectable not only in the Convention of Cintra pamphlet but also in several poems, reveals a Tory humanist ideology based on the tenet that interdependent class relations are mutually rewarding, with ‘affective power’ supposedly compensating for a lack of ‘effective power’, and vice versa. ‘Working in alliance’ is thus a principle of control—as much for interpreting a text as for maintaining a social order. At the beginning of Book 9 the narrator represents his own shaping of the text as conjoined by an inclusive pronoun with a reader’s traversal of the text: As oftentimes a river, it might seem, Yielding in part to old remembrances, Part swayed by fear to tread an onward road That leads direct to the devouring sea, Turns and will measure back his course—far back, Towards the very regions which he crossed

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In his first outset—so have we long time Made motions retrograde. (9. 1–8) This fear of inundation, of a surge of superfluous meanings, is especially prominent in Book 5, whose three main episodes involve the motif of being engulfed.24 It is important that drowning figures occur in a ‘book’-length section, entitled ‘Books’, within a potential ‘book’ in the usual fuller sense of that word. Few things indicate so strongly an impulse to control the flow of signification as does the material frame of a completed volume, palpably containing parts within a whole. The Prelude never became an authorized unit of that kind. A ‘perfect view’ of its text remained latent. In that circumstance there is more than a little of Prospero’s spirit of renunciation; the full speech of which part is quoted above ends with his declaration, ‘I’ll drown my book.’ On the other hand, such relinquishments of control are less than final. Prospero hands over his power only after determining in large measure the bounds within which his subjects will be able to interact. What is more, he retains the right to command their attention: the play concludes not with this abjuration of his book-based ‘potent art’ but with a promise of further narration: he will tell ‘the story of my life’, he says. Identically, Book 1 of The Prelude ends with its narrator’s promise that he will tell ‘the story of my life’ (1. 666–7), and in its later books the text continues to be governed substantially by those very devices through which control is ostensibly handed over. After all, the intertextual relation that this Wordsworthian narrative establishes to a Shakespearian predecessor-text is itself one means of investing the narrator with cultural authority. And yet The Prelude, not being a text for theatrical performance, has no dramatis personae. Its gestures towards the medium in which Prospero is both player and playmaster are mere flickers in the poem’s vast series of moving images, and its narrator need not be regarded as a person-like ‘character’ at all.25 ‘I’, like ‘Nature’, is just a naming, not a warrant of identity; it is among the rhetorical stratagems that solicit unity for the narrative, but there are many countervailing tendencies towards a dispersal of selves. Character, at least in this kind of narrative, may be thought of quite literally: as script; as figure or mark of writing. The narrator and his ‘speaking agents’ are precipitates formed from the narrative medium, putative subjects of the verbs that activate it, ways of designating a nexus between motion and control. Lettering, labelling, ‘written paper’, as metonomy for ‘the story of the man’ and as ‘type/Or emblem of the utmost that we know’, is explicit in the anecdote about the blind beggar (7. 615–20). The same point is insisted on in other Book 7 passages (221–2, and 309–10) and in some of the best-known ‘spots of time’.26 A murderer’s name carved into the ground at Penrith is all that remains of him: ‘the characters were fresh and visible’ (1850 edition, 12. 240); ‘characters of the great apocalypse’ typifying a vista ‘without end’ are envisioned in the French

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Alps (6. 570–2); and in the passage from Book 1, discussed above, the narrator is hailing ‘powers’ that are said to have Impressed upon all forms the characters Of danger or desire, and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With meanings of delight, of hope and fear, Work like a sea. The syntax reveals that its attributions and substitutions of agency are nearly circular: earthly powers that haunt the landscape have printed characters on all forms and thus have made the earth’s surface ‘work with meanings’. Where exactly is the locus of power? It is hard here to distinguish subject from object; and there is a similar ambiguity about the referent of that resonant phrase ‘the characters/Of danger or desire’. What is dangerous, and what is desired, in this economy of narrative figures? The Prelude’s own answer is that both motion and control are both feared and wanted. Without some substitutive movement of ‘characters’ there would be no narrative; without some scope for dispossessive shifts the narrator’s authority would be too rigidly dominant, and ultimately might—as the last book puts it —‘substitute a universe of death/For that which moves’ (1850 edition, 14. 160–1). Deakin University, Victoria, Australia NOTES I am grateful to my hosts and audiences at the following institutions, where more or less primitive versions of material for this article were delivered: the University of East Anglia, the University of London (Institute of Education), Middlesex Polytechnic, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, the Australian National University (Humanities Research Centre). 1 See, for example, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 2. But this definition of narrative is ubiquitous. 2 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B.Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. 3, p. 27. 3 The Platonic nature of this emphasis on speech rather than on an imitated action has been well elucidated by Don Bialostosky in Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), ch. 1. 4 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 127. 5 M.H.Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), PP. 76, 77, 102.

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6 All quotations are from the Norton critical edition, William Wordsworth: The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H.Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), and are from the 1805 version unless otherwise indicated. 7 Cf. Ian Reid, ‘“A naked guidepost’s double head”: the Wordsworthian sense of direction’, ELH, 43 (1976), pp. 538–50. 8 E.D.Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 102, 128. 9 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 10 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Glasgow: Fontana, 1976), pp. 145–8. Incidentally, that Adam Smith’s lack of regard for ‘fixed principles in human nature’ was anathema to Wordsworth is plain from a scornful agricultural metaphor in a footnote to the 1815 ‘Essay, supplementary to the Preface’, where Smith is called ‘the worst critic, David Hulme not excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced’: The Prose Works, ed. Owen and Smyser, vol. 3, p. 71 n. 11 Lines 359–62, of ‘Home at Grasmere’, in The Cornell Wordsworth, vol. 3, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 12 Christopher Caudwell, writing in the 1930s about ‘the bourgeois illusion’ in English Romantic poetry, commented sternly that ‘Wordsworth’s “Nature” is of course a Nature freed…by eons of human work The division of labour involved in industrialism has made it possible…to maintain a poet in austere idleness’ (quoted in Robert F.Gleckner and Gerald E.Enscoe (eds), Romanticism: Points of View (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 124). On the relation of Wordsworth’s poetry to contemporary debates about the division of labour, see David Simpson, Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982,), pp. 142–54. Related but more general issues are broached by V.G.Kiernan, ‘Wordsworth and the people’, in David Craig (ed.), Marxists on Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 161–206. 13 This earlier allusion is noted by Jonathan Bate, ‘Wordsworth and Shakespeare’, The Wordsworth Circle, 16, 2 (1985), p. 87. 14 Colin Clarke’s discussion of this passage is reprinted from his Romantic Paradox (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) in W.J.Harvey and Richard Gravil (eds), Wordsworth’s Prelude: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 166. 15 Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 129. 16 ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads of 1798, in The Prose Works, ed. Owen and Smyser, vol. 1, p. 116. An example of a working-class regional locution being selfconsciously introduced into the poem occurs in Book 8, speaking of shepherds: ‘long as the storm is “locked”/(So they do phrase it)’ (8. 363–4). 17 This seems, by the way, another passing reminiscence of The Tempest: when Prospero, after the masque, says he is ‘vexed’ (IV.i.158) he implicitly links his state of mind with the stormy ‘still-vexed’ Bermuda islands of I.ii.229. 18 But they will return later in a context where Prospero’s magic (‘by simple waving of a wand,/The wizard instantaneously dissolves/Palace or grove’; 11. 79–81) becomes an image of a sceptical spirit that threatens the ‘mysteries of passion’ (11. 84).

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19 Isobel Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982,), pp. 65–6. 20 The words ‘motion’ and ‘move’ (or their inflections) occur eleven times within 155 lines. Helen Darbishire remarked sixty years ago on the importance to Wordsworth of physical movement in the natural world, and on the recurrence of the motif in The Prelude; her observations are reprinted in Harvey and Gravil (eds), The Prelude: A Casebook, p. 87. 21 A.J.Greimas and J.Courtès, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 5–6, 162. 22 Michael Friedman, The Making of a Tory Humanist: William Wordsworth and the Idea of Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 285. 23 Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 7. Chapter 1 of this book, ‘Playhouse-workhouse’, develops a fascinating argument about the interrelationship of work, pastoralized landscape and social power in The Tempest. 24 Geoffrey H.Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 227. 25 Cf. Jonathan Culler, ‘Problems in the theory of fiction’, Diacritics, 14, 1 (1984), pp. 2–11, on the need to question the habit of recuperating a strange utterance by attributing a personality to the textual utterer and then interpreting in the light of that. What Roland Barthes has to say about character and figure is also pertinent: on the one hand, ‘to say I is inevitably to attribute signifieds to oneself; further, it gives one a biographical duration, it enables one to undergo, in one’s imagination, an intelligible “evolution”, to signify oneself as an object with a destiny, to give a meaning to time. On this level, I…is therefore a character…. As figure [on the other hand], the character can oscillate between two roles, without this oscillation having any meaning, for it occurs outside biographical time (outside chronology): the symbolic structure is completely reversible: it can be read in any direction…. As a symbolic ideality, the character…is nothing but a site for the passage (and return) of the figure’ (S/Z trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), p. 68). 26 Cf. Cynthia Chase, ‘The accidents of disfiguration: limits to literal and rhetorical reading in Book 5 of The Prelude’, Studies in Romanticism, 18, 4 (1979), pp. 547– 66.

APPENDIX Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up 305 Fostered alike by beauty and by fear, Much favored in my birthplace, and no less In that beloved vale to which erelong I was transplanted. Well I call to mind— ’Twas at an early age, ere I had seen 310 Nine summers—when upon the mountain slope The frost and breath of frosty wind had snapped The last autumnal crocus, ’twas my joy To wander half the night among the cliffs

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And the smooth hollows where the woodcocks ran 315 Along the open turf. In thought and wish That time, my shoulder all with springes hung, I was a fell destroyer. On the heights Scudding away from snare to snare, I plied My anxious visitation, hurrying on, 320 Still hurrying, hurrying onward. Moon and stars Were shining o’er my head; I was alone, And seemed to be a trouble to the peace That was among them. Sometimes it befel In these night-wanderings, that a strong desire 325 O’erpowered my better reason, and the bird Which was the captive of another’s toils Became my prey; and when the deed was done I heard among the solitary hills Low breathings coming after me, and sounds 330 Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

Nor less in springtime, when on southern banks The shining sun had from her knot of leaves Decoyed the primrose flower, and when the vales 335 And woods were warm, was I a plunderer then In the high places, on the lonesome peaks, Where’er among the mountains and the winds The mother-bird had built her lodge. Though mean My object and inglorious, yet the end 340 Was not ignoble. Oh, when I have hung Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill sustained, and almost, as it seemed, Suspended by the blast which blew amain, 345 Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ears; the sky seemed not a sky Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds! 350

The mind of man is framed even like the breath And harmony of music. There is a dark Invisible workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, and makes them move In one society. Ah me, that all 355 The terrors, all the early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, that all

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The thoughts and feelings which have been infused Into my mind, should ever have made up The calm existence that is mine when I 360 Am worthy of myself. Praise to the end, Thanks likewise for the means! But I believe That Nature, oftentimes, when she would frame A favored being, from his earliest dawn Of infancy doth open out the clouds 365 As at the touch of lightning, seeking him With gentlest visitation; not the less, Though haply aiming at the self-same end, Does it delight her sometimes to employ Severer interventions, ministry 370 More palpable—and so she dealt with me.

One evening—surely I was led by her— I went alone into a shepherd’s boat, A skiff that to a willow-tree was tied Within a rocky cave, its usual home. 375 ’Twas by the shores of Patterdale, a vale Wherein I was a stranger, thither come A schoolboy traveller at the holidays. Forth rambled from the village inn alone, No sooner had I sight of this small skiff, 380 Discovered thus by unexpected chance, Than I unloosed her tether and embarked. The moon was up, the lake was shining clear Among the hoary mountains; from the shore I pushed, and struck the oars, and struck again 385 In cadence, and my little boat moved on Even like a man who moves with stately step Though bent on speed. It was an act of stealth And troubled pleasure. Nor without the voice Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on, 390 Leaving behind her still on either side Small circles glittering idly in the moon, Until they melted all into one track Of sparkling light. A rocky steep uprose Above the cavern of the willow-tree, 395 And now, as suited one who proudly rowed With his best skill, I fixed a steady view Upon the top of that same craggy ridge, The bound of the horizon—for behind Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky. 400 She was an elfin pinnace; lustily I dipped my oars into the silent lake,

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And as I rose upon the stroke my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan— When from behind that craggy steep, till then 405 The bound of the horizon, a huge cliff, As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again, And growing still in stature, the huge cliff Rose up between me and the stars, and still 410 With measured motion, like a living thing Strode after me. With trembling hands I turned And through the silent water stole my way Back to the cavern of the willow-tree. There, in her mooring-place, I left my bark 415 And through the meadows homeward went with grave And serious thoughts; and after I had seen That spectacle, for many days my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being. In my thoughts 420 There was a darkness—call it solitude Or blank desertion—no familiar shapes Of hourly objects, images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields, But huge and mighty forms that do not live Like living men moved slowly through my mind 425 By day, and were the trouble of my dreams.

Wisdom and spirit of the universe, Thou soul that art the eternity of thought, That giv’st to forms and images a breath 430 And everlasting motion—not in vain, By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me The passions that build up our human soul, Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, 435 But with high objects, with enduring things, With life and Nature, purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying by such discipline Both pain and fear, until we recognise 440 A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me With stinted kindness. In November days, When vapours rolling down the valleys made A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods 445 At noon, and ‘mid the calm of summer nights When by the margin of the trembling lake

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Beneath the gloomy hills I homeward went In solitude, such intercourse was mine— ’Twas mine among the fields both day and night, 450 And by the waters all the summer long.

And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and visible for many a mile The cottage windows through the twilight blazed, I heeded not the summons; happy time 455 It was indeed for all of us, to me It was a time of rapture. Clear and loud The village clock tolled six; I wheeled about Proud and exulting, like an untired horse That cares not for its home. All shod with steel 460 We hissed along the polished ice in games Confederate, imitative of the chace And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn, The pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, 465 And not a voice was idle. With the din, Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound 470 Of melancholy, not unnoticed; while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively 475 Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the image of a star That gleamed upon the ice. And oftentimes When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side 480 Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short—yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled 485 With visible motion her diurnal round. Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

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Ye presences of Nature, in the sky 490 Or on the earth, ye visions of the hills And souls of lonely places, can I think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry—when ye through many a year Haunting me thus among my boyish sports, 495 On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills, Impressed upon all forms the characters Of danger or desire, and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With triumph, and delight, and hope, and fear, 500 Work like a sea?

(1. 305–501)

Theory, enlightenment and violence: postmodernist hermeneutic as a comedy of errors THOMAS DOCHERTY

Traditionally, hermeneutic has been tragic in condition and orientation. It depends on the notion that texts are obscure, with secret topoi in the dark tropics of their discourse, demanding epistemological sleuths for their illumination or demystification. Ricœur writes, for instance, that: on the one hand, hermeneutics is thought of as the manifestation and the restoration of a meaning which is addressed to me in the manner of a message, a proclamation or, as it is sometimes called, a kerygma; on the other hand, it is conceived as a demystification, or a reduction of illusions.1 Both the theological and the politically demystifying aspects of this formulation constitute the tragic orientation of hermeneutic. We have the interpreter as Oedipus, faced with the enigmatic and secret riddling text of the Sphinx at the gate of the city. In identifying the correct answer to the Sphinx’s riddle as ‘man’, Oedipus is really naming himself: the answer, specifically, is ‘me, Oedipus’. It is, then, not some kind of transcendent truth or essence which reveals the city of light behind the text; rather, it is a profoundly secular, historical act of selfidentification and self-nomination. The narrative of Sophocles can then slowly produce a meaning or identity for this name, constructing the truth of ‘me, Oedipus’. The hermeneutic train from Thebes all the way to Frankfurt has implied the presence of a reality or ground which lies behind, alongside or in front of texts. The emancipatory aspect of hermeneutic depends on the interpreter’s being ‘in touch with a reality obscured by “ideology” and disclosed by “theory”’.2 The ‘Elect’, ‘Reason’ or ‘Theory’ itself have all occupied the position of Oedipus, and taken on the function of ‘illumination’ of the ‘city of light’ which is obscured by the dark text. The terminus of this trajectory would seem to be the recent reader-response work of Fish. In revealing the secrets of the texts which he examines, Fish watches them self-destruct, exactly like Oedipus before the self-consuming Sphinx; and, interestingly, ‘the’ reader of his mode of criticism turns out to be, paradigmatically, himself. The interpretative manœuvres turn out to be an act of self-identification and self-nomination: ‘The reader of whose responses I speak, then, is this informed reader, neither an abstraction nor an

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actual living reader, but a hybrid—a real reader (me) who does everything within his power to make himself informed.’3 But it is this ‘information’ or shaping of the name, Fish or Oedipus, that the interpretation then narrates and substantiates. That is to say that Oedipus’ original solution, though an act of enlightening demystification, proposes in turn its own mysteriousness: who is this ‘Oedipus’? And the narrative proposed by Sophocles ‘enlightens’ this secret in turn. In the case of Fish, this narrative aims to be more clearly historical; the act of interpreting proposes a story of what Fish is doing as the text self-consumes under his pitiless truth-telling gaze. The tragedy of Oedipus, and of Fish, is not that his identity turns out to be different from itself, or other than he thought (that would make the narrative a comedy of errors), but rather that he believes that there is an essence of his identity, a truth of identity, which is not historically constructed but merely ‘revealed’. This tragic hermeneutic is, as it were, geo-political: it aims to reveal the polis, the city of light, as a non-historical, non-secular space. Revelation or illumination of this space is, as Oedipus finds out, blinding and apocalyptic, spelling the end of change and of history.4 The modernist and postmodernist condition of hermeneutic is, I shall argue here, oriented towards a chronopolitical mode, a mode of interpretation which is radically historical.5 In so far as it is thus historical and constituted by change, self-difference or narrativity, this mode of hermeneutic lacks the possibility of an absolute knowing and an absolute self-consciousness. Consequently, the truth-claims of the propositions made by it will tend towards illegitimacy rather than verifiability. It will be, in terms proposed by Gerald L.Bruns,6 inventively rhetorical rather than philosophical, and to that extent pragmatic. The question addressed here, however, relates to the possible positive aspects of this. Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach indicates the limitation of philosophical interpretation: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’7 In the field of cultural practice, rhetorical interpretation might contribute to this task. There are three stages in my argument. First, by following a specific chain of euphemisms in modernist poetry and interpretation (Stevens and Freud), I indicate that modern and postmodern hermeneutic are not based upon demystification, but rather, on the contrary, are concerned to produce secrecy, in the form of secret narratives. Second, this production of secret narratives is construed as a mode of symbolic action, demanding interpretation in turn, but demanding in this a mode of interpretation which will itself be historical action.8 That is to say, this interpretation is concerned not so much with epistemology as with ontology, not with the production of knowledge as such but with the effecting of a mode of being towards the text. However, just as absolute knowing and absolute self consciousness are problematized in this kind of interpretation, so also the very agency of the interpreter is questioned. Can we know what will be the result of our pragmatic and rhetorical interpretations? This raises the third issue, on the historical efficacy of a cultural practice of rhetorical interpretation,

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with respect to modes of historical and political change effected by the seemingly more direct form of violence. HELIOTROPISM: THE LINGUISTIC TURN IN THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS We do not prove the existence of the poem. It is something seen and known in lesser poems. It is the huge, high harmony that sounds A little and a little, suddenly, By means of a separate sense. It is and it Is not and, therefore, is.

(Wallace Stevens, ‘A Primitive like an Orb’) As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations. (Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’) In a footnote in Margins, Derrida indicates that the flowers of rhetoric have always had a specific coloration or turning, being always metaphors for doomed youth or for the passage of time. But the very historicity of this is not attended to by Derrida. Since the Fleurs du mal of Baudelaire, the modern language of flowers can be seen to take a new turn, not towards the violence of the (en)light (enment) of the sun, but rather towards the darkness visible of secrecy and obscurity; it is only in death that such flowers bloom. When Harold Bloom considers Stevens’s ‘The Poems of Our Climate’, he makes one basic misprision to construct the genealogy for the poem: Stevens writes: ‘simplified’, but he means ‘reduced’, and what he reduces is Keats’s Grecian Urn, with ‘a bowl of white,/Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round’ replacing the ‘silent form… Cold Pastoral’ of Keats’s vision.9 The poem does begin in a cold climate, with its central cold bowl; but another genealogy is available. It is stressed that the bowl is clear, brilliant and white ‘With nothing more than the carnations there’, and yet ‘one desires/So much more than that’. Bloom arrives at the ‘Cold Pastoral’ via a meditation on pater (as always for the Oedipal Bloom, many ‘fathers’ ghost these texts), whose relation to fin-de-siècle decadence allows the second misprision, which reads the line in the manner of a Wildean dandy as ‘one desires/So much less than that’. But a something more is specified in the text, a supplementary excess which is

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precisely a kind of imperfection and hence, one might say, the staining of the water in the white bowl, as in Blake’s ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence, where ‘I made a rural pen,/And I stained the water clear,/And I wrote my happy songs’; the excess or staining here being instrumental in allowing the bard to write at all. The identity of the pater for the poem, then, is not so clear. In characterizing the poet as aesthetic flower-arranger, Bloom notes ‘an overtone of fleshly regret in those “pink and white carnations”’ such that ‘this still life does not decline life’. This allows us to begin to identify the bowl, and with it the source of authority for the poem, more precisely. There is an equation of three elements: bowl, cold, and light in the room or chamber. This makes the bowl a locus or topos of light, precisely a bearer or carrier of light: Lucifer. The light is described as a ‘newly fallen snow’, and thus like an angelic Lucifer, falling in the guilt of some original crime or transgression: a transgression against authority which aims to give Lucifer his own authority. Desire and evil accrue around the description of the bowl, the topos of light in the chamber/room/ camera (obscura). Might this ‘chamber-bowl’ not simply be a porcelain chamberpot, to be stained by something fleshy, something falling? In any case, it assumes the burden of a guilt associated with flesh, with the historical reality of the material, carnal functions of the human body. If Stevens does indeed desire more than water or carnations, is he not asking for some kind of ‘production’ (of faeces/baby/penis in the Freudian triad), that is, for some historical motion in this too still life? Such a production is equated with crime; it is the criminal production or revelation of something secret, private to the flesh and body of the poet. The fall involves a fresh compound, an incarnation of an evilly compounded and now, being born, vital I. It is as if Stevens is trying to produce himself as poet, to give birth to himself as a ‘figure of the youth as virile poet’ (to borrow the title of one of his essays) in the production of his fleshy ‘supplement’. *** A botanical monograph This, clearly, is being done in the language of flowers, and there are indeed flowers, carnations, in the bowl already. One sixteenth-century formation of this word is ‘coronation’, suggestive of the roundness of both flower and bowl here. One kind of carnation with low, rounded flowers is sweet-william. Interestingly, the French for carnation is œillet, and sweet-william is referred to as œillet de poète. The English equivalent of this coronation-flower, however, is not the carnation as such but rather the narcissus, of which there are three main botanical types: daffodil (with the trumpet-shaped flower known to Wordsworth), jonquil (used in perfumes, and, in its form as ‘gillyvor’, known to both Ophelia and Perdita in Shakespeare) and the ‘poet’s narcissus’ (with a ringlike cup as its flower). The flowers in the bowl, then, are the locus of a heliotropic transformation: not so much carnations, losing their colour or trope of

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pinks and whites and becoming more obliquely, more darkly, narcissi. The bulbs of the narcissus, further, were considered to be medically useful in the herbarium, as a cathartic, an enema or aid to (tragic) production. The aesthetic flowerarranger or rearranger uses the language of flowers (a language which brings about Ophelia’s desperate death as she tries to find its ‘words’, as she tries to speak it) to create himself as a figure of virility. The bowl in Stevens’s poem reflects snow, and thus acts as a mirror of some kind, making the analogy with Ovid’s narrative of Narcissus and Echo more explicit.10 The topoi and climates of the two narratives—that proposed by Stevens and that of Ovid which ghosts it—are similar. In Ovid, the secret pool where Narcissus stops is ‘always cool’, matching Stevens’s coldness at the start of the poem. But, as Narcissus looks into the pool, he gazes ‘in his lovely face where a rosy flush stained the snowy whiteness of his complexion’: a staining of whiteness in the rosy language of flowers, and a passage towards heat, clearly echoed in Stevens. Narcissus desires himself, and here things hot up, ‘kindling the flame with which he burned’, ‘fired at the sight of himself’. At this point, he reaches knowledge, specifically an absolute epistemological recognition of himself, a revelation of his own identity as ‘other’, just like Oedipus, and he undergoes his ‘rearrangement’ or metamorphosis, consumed by fire and water. The ‘climates of our poems’ are now clear. Stevens moves from cold to hot, from a cold bowl to a point where ‘delight,/Since the imperfect is so hot in us,/ Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds’. Through imperfection, we go from cold to hot, like Lucifer who falls in imperfection or crime, and also like Narcissus who falls through a similar transgressive ‘authorization’ of himself. Beneath the camera obscura that is the darkroom or topos of this poem, then, there is another scene or topos in which a secret narrative link is proposed among the three figures of the evilly compounded vital I: Stevens, Lucifer, Narcissus. The source or authority for this ‘com-position’ is, therefore, not a single identity but rather a ‘compound’: the ‘truth’ behind the name of enigmatic Stevens is not just another single identity, certainly not the name of Keats alone; rather, the interpretation reveals a problematic relation among three names. That is, it reveals the skeleton of a historical narrative, in which the interpreter constructs a narrative link among the three names, and shows how they can be construed as part of the same story. That story or secret narrative here may have something to do with Oedipal self-authorization. The ‘truth’ behind the face and signature of Stevens is not just another ‘topic’ (identified variously as Keats, or Blake, say), but rather is a secret narrative: a setting apart of three names in one secret relation. The poem, according to this mode of interpretation, is itself precisely composed in flawed words and stubborn sounds or echoes. Echo, of course, edits what she hears, giving a ‘separate sense’ in her repetitions. Her speech itself offers a criticism, a critical edition and interpretation of the texts she hears. Stevens’s poem renders his relation to his criminal mythic forebears secret by ‘flawing’ the word ‘narcissus’ and replacing it, in the euphemistic linguistic

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turnings of the language of flowers, with the word ‘carnation’: a fundamental misprision of these blooms. The troubling point about this manner of interpretation is that it seems to be willing to change the text in order to suit the interpretative propositions: criminally to fix the evidence. This is a problem, however, if and only if the aim of interpretation is purely epistemological, only if the interpreter aims to reveal the truth of the text, its geo-polis of light behind its opaque surface. But, here, what is revealed is not ‘a knowledge’ and certainly not ‘the truth’ of the poem; rather, what is produced is something more historical, in that it is a narrative situation among a set of symbolic names. The text thus becomes not an icon or monument or document which exists geopolitically, as a ritual object which has stepped out of time and history; rather it becomes an arena of action, an arena in which temporal change or history is its very mode of being: a chrono-political history, therefore. The interpretation of it does not propose its meaning as any substantive entity, but proposes that in the hypothesization of the narrative links among its spectral names the reader is involved in the historical production of meaning, that is, in meaningful action. ‘Meaning’ here is something that a consciousness does, not something that a text or consciousness has, intrinsically. But this would be to admit, necessarily, that this hermeneutic does not produce epistemological enlightenment; rather, it simply produces more obscurity, or a condition of secrecy (the secret narrative) as the very condition of its act of interpretation: it mystifies in the act of demystification. This, then, proposes the historicity of interpretation, in that interpretative analysis becomes interminable. Such a condition is, it might seem, the necessary consequence of understanding the notion of authority in these matters in terms of ‘production’ rather than creation or ‘revelation’ of meaning; for the same state of affairs applies in Macherey’s position when he writes of the roman énigmatique of Anne Radcliffe: The mystery novel, at least as it exists in the hands of A.Radcliffe, seems then to be produced by the confluence of two different motions: the one inaugurates the mystery while the other clears it up. All the ambiguity of the story resides in the fact that these two motions do not, properly speaking, follow one upon the other (in which case they would cancel each other out only at the end), but rather accompany each other inextricably, the one (but which?) constantly contesting the other: and perhaps, contrary to Breton’s thought on this, it is the revelation rather than the mystery which emerges reduced from such an adventure. Thus the time of the story is like an interlude, after which everything will be able to begin again as before. But this interlude is properly endless: the mysteries never stop appearing, never stop disappearing.11 The difference between Macherey’s position and the one I am outlining here is that Macherey synchronizes the movement of de- and re-mystification—a

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procedure allowing him to outline the geopolitical component of the texts to be analysed, and a procedure by which he produces or brings to light the ‘truthful’ propositions lying in the dark spaces of the text where it cannot know itself, the text’s political unconscious, as Jameson identifies that. The same position is also iterated by Ricœur in his consideration of Freud on Leonardo. It seems at first glance that Freud achieves a demystification, a revelation of the smile of the mother behind Leonardo’s smiling Mona Lisa. But, in fact, the painting has created what is supposedly hypothesized behind it, as its ground or truth, for the first time: this reality revealed did not exist prior to the painting, but was in fact created there: if the artist’s brush re-creates the smile of the mother in the smile of the Mona Lisa, it must be said that the smile exists nowhere other than in this smile, itself unreal, of the Mona Lisa…thus it is not something more familiar that would explain the mystery of the work of art; rather it is a deliberate absence which, far from dispelling it, redoubles the initial mystery…. Leonardo’s brush does not re-create the memory of the mother; it creates it as a work of art…. The work of art is thus at one and the same time both symptom and cure.12 Ricœur here shares Macherey’s stance of synchronic understanding; but the example of Freud’s Oedipal reading of Leonardo’s work does begin to bring into play an element of diachronicity in interpretation: it is here as if the present work of painting done by Leonardo is, instead of creating a future, creating a past, the enigmatic source of the present work itself. But Freud in fact offers a greater purchase on the notion that interpretation produces not only mystification as well as demystification, but a narrative progression and movement between these two hermeneutic states. Psychoanalysis would appear to be a modernist version of Schleiermacher’s preferred mode of hermeneutic, the ‘technical’, an interpretation whose aim is to reveal the ‘content as what moved the author and the form as his nature moved by that content’, as opposed to the ‘grammatical’ exercise of an analysis of what the author’s language can mean.13 However, in Freud’s hands, psychoanalysis constantly slips into a grammatical mode of hermeneutic; yet that ‘grammar’ in turn reveals (having first concealed or made secret) a ‘technical’ content. This, as in Stevens, does not reveal a single identifiable human nature under the material analysed, but rather a narrative situation comprising a number of technical consciousnesses. More explicitly than in Stevens’s poetry, the psychoanalytic exercise problematizes the status of the text with regard to its commentary. As Freud elaborates his procedure in The Interpretation of Dreams, it becomes apparent that the text which is the ostensible object of study (the various dreams) is already contaminated with criticism or with other texts, through the processes of displacement and condensation. These texts, then, are ‘stained’, the scene of a

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writing, as Derrida indicates. Freud’s practice is to use the dream as reported (which apparently is his text for analysis) in order to restitute the fundamental text which is his real goal, the historical reality proposed by his articulation of the dream-thoughts. One crucial factor here is motivation: the Freudian interpreter takes a text and motivates it, in the sense that he or she takes the text’s substantive images (like proper names) and construes them in a motivated narrative formation. The dream, Freud argues, cannot represent the conjunctions which would themselves constitute its narrative motivation; it is the task of interpretation to restore ‘the connections which the dream-work has destroyed’.14 The basic manœuvre in this is one of ‘verbalization’: not only does the interpreter bring to articulation the substance of the dream-thoughts;15 he or she also links a set of substantives (nouns or proper names) by action-words, verbs, in order to construct a symbolic action or narrative situation which lies within the text of the dream as reported. We now have a number of possible locations for the text, and with them a number of possible narrative situations. We have, for example, the text as produced by the dreamer in relating it orally; the ‘same’ text as transcribed by patient and/or Freud; we have the restitution of the ground-text of the dreamthought, as construed and transcribed by Freud; and we have the texts as presented in The Interpretation of Dreams, where they have undergone overt censorship.16 The material to be interpreted has, of course, already undergone criticism and editing through the psychic censorship; it is, then, a critical edition of something more fundamental. In every location for the text here, Freud is having to criticize an already critically edited text in order to reveal the fundamental criminalities or transgressions which the psychic censor and the conscious Freud want to keep secret. The practice, then, is always an interpretation of an interpretation (the interpretation of the dream is work carried out upon a text which has already been interpreted and modified by the censors). But, more than this, the practice is an interpretation of an interpretation of a text which has yet to be written, for the interpretative procedure produces, for the first time, the text which it aimed merely to reveal. It is, in some ways, like Stevens’s ultimate poem. Freud writes this text himself in The Interpretation of Dreams, where his own interpretations not only produce and constitute his text but also undergo further interpretation, both by himself and by a reader such as Carl E.Schorske who produces the narrative of Freud’s desired act of parricide from the materials of this text.17 We have a further issue here. The production of the secret narratives linking Freud and his patients raises the question of agency and authority over the texts. Following the question ‘Where is the text?’, we must now pose the question ‘Whose text is this anyway?’ That is, the question of authority, of what axiomatically grounds a text, arises. Who is the agent of the text, and who is its patient? Is authority in The Interpretation of Dreams pure, identifiable as that of the singular ‘Sigmund Freud’; or has it been produced intertextually and interpersonally, through the relations of Freud with patient and reader; and is it

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thus contaminated, promiscuously deflowered, a ‘gillyvor’ or one of nature’s historical bastards, a rhetoric of grafted flowers, grafted texts?18 There are a large number of dreams reported by Freud in which flowers figure prominently. I want to link two such dreams: ‘I arrange the centre of a table with flowers for a birthday’ and ‘The dream of the botanical monograph’.19 In the first of these, dreamt by a woman whom Freud describes as ‘normal’, there is a revelation of sexual frustration at the likely deferral of her marriage. The woman elaborates on her dream, and three factors assume special importance. First, the flowers are specified as ‘lilies of the valley, violets and pinks or carnations’. The carnation here works exactly as in Bloom’s reading of Stevens, becoming a euphemism for something carnal, fleshy (a ‘colour’, which is the woman’s first association with the word ‘carnation’, is itself an old word for trope or figure). Secondly, ‘violets’ rapidly slips into ‘violates’, and thus weaves a scene of euphemistic rape (le viol) into the analysis. Thirdly, the flowers are decorated with green, crinkled paper which looks like ‘velvet’. There is a chain of linguistic turns here, hinted at but unstated by Freud. I can list the linked words, or tropes, here, placing in parentheses those which are hinted at but unarticulated in Freud’s text.20 The text moves from valley to (vale to veil to) violet to violate to velvet; but this velvet is itself rapidly displaced as ‘a reference to pubic hair’ and is hence suggestive (of vulva). By this method, which looks more like the grammatical questioning of a language than the technical questioning of a consciousness or unconscious, Freud elaborates the text of the dream-thought, going from flowers (violets) to the violation of a vulva: ‘If I were he, I wouldn’t wait—I would deflower my fiancée without asking her leave—I would use violence.’21 The woman as ‘patient’ here, it seems, wants to stop ‘waiting’; that is, wants to stop being a patient. It is as if Freud himself—for this is his interpretation, his words—wished her to become an ‘agent’, thus casting himself in the role of patient, waiting for something to happen in the historical situation of the analysis. Other matters complicate this interpretation. The woman is associated not with the table but with the flowers at its (her) centre; and, as the analysis progresses, ‘her reserve gave place to an evident interest in the interpretation and to an openness made possible by the seriousness of the conversation’. She is, in short, rather like a heliotropic flower, opening or blooming in this dialogue as she turns, not towards the light of the sun/son, but towards that Oedipal father, Freud the enlightener. It is this relation that the interpretation both reveals and conceals, as a secret narrative. The velvet paper mutates easily, by the same linguistic chain, into (‘vulvar’) leaves or folds, like paper pages to be turned, conversed with, manipulated by Freud. These folds can then be ‘read’ or opened out for the ‘pleasurable suffering’ which, Freud claims, this ‘normal’ woman is anticipating and secretly desiring immediately. At this point, it should also be noted that she is reported as having ‘a feeling of happiness’ (‘und habe ein Glücksgefühl empfunden’) associated with the dream. Might this be at the expectation of a joy of some kind and thus ‘a feeling of Freude’ (in which case Glücksgefühl, ‘happy

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feeling’, would be a displaced euphemism for Freude, ‘joy’; and thus would bring Freud’s proper name into a ghostly relation with the text and its ‘patient’)? The situation, after all, is one in which the language of the woman, her flowers of rhetoric and sexuality, is arranged and rearranged (terms analogous with coition in Freud) by Freud. She is, as it were, deflowered in the language of flowers, as Freud proleptically interprets her dream. The psychoanalyst as voleur here manipulates and steals the woman’s flowers, violating them as he metaphorizes them as euphemisms of her vulva; his interpretation unfolds or makes bloom her vulva for his linguistic or oral ‘arrangements’. This text, then, proposes a different narrative situation from that revealed by Freud’s interpretation. As he ‘reveals’ one situation (the woman’s desire for intercourse with her fiancé), he also proleptically constructs another secret narrative situation, with a narrative which links Freud directly to his patient in a secret, ‘criminal’ or at least transgressive relation. This latter narrative relation, of course, is not just a dream but is based in material historical relations between Freud and the woman. That is to say, the interpretation in its revelation of the ‘grammatical’ sense of the woman’s dream is instrumental in constructing another narrative by prolepsis, and this latter narrative is one that is enacted historically, at least at the level of symbolic action. The dream-text, then, is not just the scene of a writing but also the scene of a crime: one mystification is replaced by another, as Freud’s enlightenment contrives to obscure his historical, critical and criminal relation to his patient. What Freud ‘jokingly called my favourite flower, the artichoke’, makes a related appearance in ‘The dream of the botanical monograph’: I had written a monograph on an (unspecified) genus of plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in the copy there was a dried specimen of the plant.22 Proceeding on Freud’s own principles, that a joke is serious and that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish, we can specify the monograph more precisely. Freud himself identifies it as his 1884 paper, ‘On coca’, a paper whose authorship he wishes, in the analysis, to keep secret. This secrecy is itself instrumental in allowing him to establish a historical link, expressed in the mode of a secret narrative link, among three proper names and three historical identities: Koller, Königstein and Freud himself (not to mention Freud’s father who, according to Schorske, ghosts the whole text). This relation is clearly akin to the similar ‘trinity’ constructed by the secret narratives underpinning Stevens’s poem discussed earlier. In the elaboration of Freud’s analysis, however, another text supplants the centrality of ‘On coca’; and it is the text which Freud, like Stevens, wishes to produce or complete, the text which we are now reading, The Interpretation of Dreams. That is, it is a text which Freud wants to identify, in the sense of stabilizing its identity, integrity or definition, by completing it:

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I saw the monograph which I had written lying before me. This again led me back to something. I had had a letter from my friend [Fleiss] in Berlin the day before in which he had shown his power of visualization: ‘I am very much occupied with your dream-book. I see it lying finished before me and I see myself turning over its pages.’ How much I envied him his gift as a seer! If only I could have seen it lying before me!23 This not only establishes a further relation, a narrative identification of Freud with Fleiss; it also identifies the text in the dream as The Interpretation of Dreams itself. The text which is the ostensible object of analysis and demystification is a text which has not yet been articulated. This is the condition of all modernist and postmodernist interpretation, and one that guarantees its problematic status in historical terms. A reader does not so much demystify the secrets of a text as interpret those secrets prior to their transcription, and thus in fact constructs a secrecy or a mystification through his or her own authority or authorization of such secret narratives as are produced by the interpretation. All such interpretation, then, is proleptic in condition. The page being turned, or troped, within the dream is a ‘folded coloured plate’, and thus like a ‘green, crinkled paper’ (substituting ‘coloured’ for ‘green’, ‘folded’ for ‘crinkled’ and ‘plate’ for ‘paper’); and it is this which Freud associates with his favourite flower, the artichoke. The turning of the page brings to mind the violation of a book in a narrative from Freud’s childhood (and here the father reappears), a book which Freud pulled apart ‘leaf by leaf, like an artichoke’.24 The reading of books and the writing of them (demystification and mystification) are for Freud acts of such violence or violation. The act of interpreting, a cultural or symbolic action, implies or proposes a real historical narrative involving material action or violence. What Freud later calls his ‘intimate relations with books’ is thus like a description of this deflowering act of criticism (demystifying the flowers of rhetoric); but his interpretations of the dreams of others are equally acts of deflowering, rhetorically or symbolically, in dream or in history. The deflowering of the leaves of a book or, euphemistically and by analogy, the deflowering of the folds of skin, that carnal palimpsest which constitutes the material and historical scene of Freud’s phallocratic writing and interpreting (the body of woman), constitutes precisely the cultural actions of reading, writing and interpreting. It is by such acts of interpreting, in the realm of symbolic action, that Freud produces or constructs the historical and material text of The Interpretation of Dreams. Two things follow. First, The Interpretation of Dreams is, by condition, radically incomplete in that it demands its own successive reading, an act which involves its reader in the construction of secret narratives and the establishment of the cultural and political relations which constitute lived history; and such critical reading, according to the violent tenets of operation in The Interpretation of Dreams itself, must be iconoclastic, a ‘violation’ of the text’s own flowers of rhetoric.25 It is not a substantive text, but rather the site of a ‘texting’ or weaving.26

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It is not a symbol or icon, but rather a site for iconoclasm, and for an iconoclasm which destroys icons in order to produce those secret narratives which constitute history. As Ricœur has it, in discussing Marx, Nietzsche and Freud: these three masters of suspicion are not three masters of scepticism; they are certainly three great ‘destroyers’; but this must not mislead us; destruction, says Heidegger in Being and Time, is a moment of completely new foundation, and that goes for the destruction of religion in so far as that is, in Nietzsche’s words, a ‘Platonism for the people’. It is beyond ‘destruction’ that one poses the question of knowing what would be the meaning of thought, reason, even faith.27 This is the second complicating consequence of the analysis: the production of historical action itself is linked to violence, a violence either historically enacted or deferred and maintained in the realm of desire or dream. In the woman’s dream discussed here, the secret narrative produced by way of analysis is that of Freud’s violation of the patient woman, a crime in which Freud as Tereus steals the tongue and flowers of rhetoric of the woman as Philomel. The question here is not whether a material rape took place in one of Freud’s sessions with this woman; it is more complicated, and more basic, than this. If the violation took place only at the level of rhetoric, and if the secret narrative of Freud’s assault on the woman remained a secret narrative, or symbolic action which did not result in a material violation or criminal transgression, and if it remained at the level of dream or desire deferred, then we must pose the question of its material historicity: how ‘historical’ is it? Is material historical action based upon a prior imagination, desire, intentionality or rhetorical control of a patient and understanding reader? Further, is such ‘symbolic’ action historically effective or significant: can interpretation change the world, or must we resort to the seemingly more direct form of violence in material terms? How historical is the entire realm of cultural activity? AGAINST ‘AGAINST THEORY’ : PRAGMATISTS PLAYING PATIENCE I have been advancing a theoretical assumption about the status of the text in the foregoing argument. This is that the text is not stable, but static, in the ancient sense of a stasis: a text at civil war with itself, whose boundaries thus appear stable while internally being riven with dissent.28 This would be, in itself, no advance on Burke’s idea of the text as symbolic action, nor on Derrida’s texts based on difference, nor on Macherey’s texts which allow the production of an identity just where they do not cohere or know themselves. What I hope to add to this notion of the stasis-text is historicity. All preceding grammars of criticism proceed on the tenet that the text is a site of a civil war, and thus concern themselves with the spatial, geopolitical dimension of the text, with identifying

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precisely its topics or topos. For such criticism, the text, grammatically, is regarded as substantive noun, the site of a nomination, and demystification proceeds by revealing or producing the proper name which identifies the text.29 Here I propose a notion of the text as verb, so to speak, and thus as a space characterized not by its spatial identity or difference but rather by its temporal difference from itself; that is, a text conditioned by its historicity or by the temporal dimension of its civil war with itself. This shifts, potentially, the arena of political debate in a manner suggested by Paul Virilio, from geo-politics to chronopolitics: ‘Geography is replaced by chronography…. The new capital is no longer a spatial capital like New York, Paris or Moscow, a city located in a specific place, at the intersection of roads, but a city at the intersection of the practicabilities of time, in other words of speed.’30 The stasis of the text in the model proposed here is thus one measured not by space but by temporality and historicity; and, as a result, narrative becomes the privileged mode of textuality, replacing the primacy of lyric in New Criticism and since. There is a corresponding shift in interpretation from epistemology to ontology, from producing or revealing the truth or a knowledge about a topos or space towards construction of a historical mode of being through the cultural activity of interpretation and narration. The parameters of argument here operate between a ‘topical’ criticism (based on subjects for discussion or discourse) and a ‘pragmatic’ criticism (based on deeds rather than ‘mere’ rhetoric). These parameters also mark the distance separating the tragic trajectory of an Oedipus, whose deeds are based upon a topical knowledge and a truth of identity, from an archetypal ‘comedy of errors’, in which there is no truth of identity (nor of anything else), and the subjects of narrative stumble or err from one local deed on to the next, with no ‘topical’ method. There arises, then, the fundamental textual conflict, a ‘conflict of interpretations’, a conflict between competing narratives and their tellers. The question, then, becomes imbricated with the issues of power or authority or legitimation of such narratives, narratives we live rather than live by, historically; and with the issue of who has the authority to tell the narratives, or who has agency over the patient audience. This, together with the seeming ‘illegitimacies’ of some of my interpretative manœuvres on Stevens and Freud, addresses the problem of legitimation in interpretation; but now this legitimation is not merely related to epistemological results and evidence but also to the legitimation of what might be called our ‘narrative action’, our historical behaviour or mode of being. This is the ground of the conflict between the positions of Habermas and of a pragmatist like Rorty. Habermas has characterized the thought of the nouveaux philosophes as neoconservative in that it offers no rational basis for choosing one mode of historical action over another; in Rorty’s words, ‘that they offer us no “theoretical” reason to move in one social direction rather than another’.31 Habermas’s position is thoroughly informed with an epistemological impetus, and the legitimation of his stance is based upon the truths established by the discursive formation of the consensual rational will. He writes:

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What rationally motivated recognition of the validity claims of a norm of action means follows from the discursive procedures of motivation. Discourse can be understood as that form of communication that is removed from the contexts of experience and action and whose structure assures us: that the bracketed validity claims of assertions, recommendations, or warnings are the exclusive object of discussion; that participants, themes and contributions are not restricted except with reference to the goal of testing the validity claims in question; that no force except that of the better argument is exercised; and that, as a result, all motives except that of the cooperative search for truth are excluded. If under these conditions a consensus about the recommendation to accept a norm arises argumentatively, that is, on the basis of hypothetically proposed, alternative justifications, then the consensus expresses a ‘rational will’.32 Here, a social practice is consequent upon the production of knowledge or of method (what Lyotard calls ‘metanarrative’); that is to say, however, that the production of this knowledge is assumed to take place outside history or social practice itself in the first instance; and the epistemological insight becomes the ground for ontological and historical practice. In this, it is sufficient for the control of history or for a social practice that an agent knows itself fully. This is a legacy of Habermas’s involvement with the whole Frankfurt School’s attempt to wed Marx and Freud. As Frederick Crews pithily put it, that school assumed that ‘If the Western proletariat was not arising on schedule, its unconscious must have been in thrall to the oppressor.’33 It is thus sufficient to come to selfconsciousness in order to assume a positive agency over history. Habermas follows Weber in thinking that such full and rational self-knowledge is theoretically possible, and that it is a guarantor of the legitimacy of a social practice based on the better arguments of Marxism. The ‘neo-conservatives’ who are the target of Habermas’s attacks, such as Lyotard and Deleuze, certainly seem to be more pragmatic than epistemological. Such thinkers have not given up on theory as such, but they have rejected the idea of ‘Grand Theory’ and with it the related idea of ‘Universal History’. Lyotard’s postmodern position, of ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’,34 puts him into the camp of those who prefer the local historical action, a pragmatic action based not upon conformity with a methodical and fully known metanarrational programme, but rather upon a less ambitious ‘narrative knowledge’. Deleuze, in his work with Guattari, rejects the specific metanarrative of Oedipus as told by Freud. Metanarrative is rejected by Lyotard on three interrelated grounds. First, its totality, teleology and absolutist status render it non-historical; subscription to a metanarrative would suggest that we are only fulfilling a prophecy and finding an allotted space in a non-secular version of ‘history’: it is thus geo-and not chrono-political. Second, its basis in theology and dogma, as a totalizing nonsecular system, is alien to the secularity and materiality of Lyotardian paganism

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or Deleuzean nomadism.35 Third, and most important, metanarratives are ‘terroristic’ and violent: they construct parameters in which one language-game or discourse is authorized at the expense of silencing or disfranchising every other proposition made from the stance and vocabulary of a different languagegame. For Lyotard, who wants to retain the notion of the cultural and historical specificity of language-games and their resultant heterogeneity, the real ‘terrorists’ are the system-makers or speakers who, like Robespierre, subsume all language-games under the rubric of their own, thus silencing the dissenting voices of any minority, ethnic or otherwise; Lyotard argues that there are only minorities. His position becomes anti-democratic for the reason that democracy, or rule by the many, is based upon a mode of violence akin to the Terror of Robespierre. To the extent that he rejects violence as a mode of resolving the historical conflicts of narratives or interpretation, Lyotard is trying to save politics, for the violence which silences is, as Arendt has pointed out, antipolitical, spelling only the end of politics.36 In the postmodern condition, that politics is chrono-political. In so far as he wants to maintain the possibility of dialogue (albeit with massive logical problems, given the absolute heterogeneity of language-games or discourses), Lyotard approaches the ‘new pragmatism’ of Rorty and others who take a stance more or less ‘against theory’. For Rorty, historical change is nothing much more than a different way of talking about things; one narrative of how the world wags is superseded in time by another, to which we all more or less subscribe. Truth here is replaced by ‘what is better in the way of belief’, the Jamesian phrase much quoted by Rorty: epistemological certainty is replaced by pragmatic efficiency. One of the major problems with the ‘new pragmatic’ position, however, as elaborated by Rorty, is that in junking the idea of truth, and specifically of a truth lying dormant behind an ideological veil, Rorty then proceeds as if he has also conjured the disappearance of ideology as well. History has been a progress towards the position in which Rorty and his cohorts now find themselves, and the adoption of a ‘frank ethnocentrism’ whose legitimacy is not doubted is made axiomatically correct. Such a stance, of course, is an imposition of Rorty’s pragmatic language-game on every other possible language-game, all of which are now considered from the parameters set out by Rorty’s favoured discourse. Lyotard refers to this as ‘soft imperialism… the conversational imperialism of Rorty’.37 The pragmatic ‘liberal’ idea of free conversation and opposition of ideas not only ignores the ideological, historical and cultural formation of those ideas in the first place, but also leaves Rorty in the rather imperialist position which seems to be the logical terminus of all individualistic or ethically based politics.38 For, while Rorty argues that ‘obscure mixtures of opposed values’ are better than the ‘clear hierarchies’ of Cartesian philosophy, the historical obscure mixture of opposed views is read as having led, inexorably, to where Rorty now stands, in that current version of the Leibnizian Optimistic position that ‘Whatever is, is RIGHT’.39 In his adjudication between Habermas and Lyotard, Rorty writes:

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whereas Habermas compliments ‘bourgeois ideals’ by reference to the ‘elements of reason’ contained in them, it would be better just to compliment those untheoretical sorts of narrative discourse which make up the political speech of the Western democracies. It would be better to be frankly ethnocentric.40 This perhaps unduly Optimistic position on the ‘Western democracies’ becomes more ‘frankly ethnocentric’ (or imperialist, depending on how you look at it, on what language-game you speak) when he argues, in the context of debate with Lyotard, that ‘We await…the time when the Cashinahua, the Chinese and (if it should prove that there are any) the Martians will take part in the same social democratic community…. We pragmatists believe that this moderate ethnocentrism is inevitable and fully justified.’41 This, it is vital to note, is argued not on a priori grounds but on the more Optimistic grounds that Rorty’s ethnic group at his historical moment has found ‘what is better in the way of belief’. To the extent that it judges all other competing discourses from precisely that racial and historical point, it sees them as deviant, ‘foreign’, as wayward questings after some other kind of truth. This ‘liberal’ stance, favouring conversation among equals, turns out to be indeed more imperialist, and its democracy is, in its ethnocentrism, not egalitarian at all: it is literally ‘rule by the many’ over the minorities to whom, according to Deleuze and Lyotard, we all belong. It is important that Rorty and his anti-theoretical neo-pragmatists are merely ‘awaiting’ or ‘expecting’ (attendre) the moment when all will share their views and language; for there is a second self-contradiction in this position, relating to the impossibility of historical agency. Historical shifts between language-games, or pragmatic ways of talking about things, turn out to be undirected. The pragmatist, the critic who has shifted ground from epistemology to ontology, from knowledge and truth to deeds, turns out to be surprisingly devoid of the capacity for enacting such deeds. As Rorty puts it, ‘the notions of criteria and choice (including that of “arbitrary” choice) are no longer in point when it comes to change from one language-game to another’, and he goes on to discuss the historical and cultural shift of beliefs in the wake of the Copernican ‘revolution’: we did not decide on the basis of some telescopic observations, or on the basis of anything else, that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, that macroscopic behaviour could be explained on the basis of microstructural motion, or that prediction and control should be the principal aim of scientific theorising. Rather, after a hundred years of inconclusive muddle, the Europeans found themselves speaking in a way which took these interlocked theses for granted…. We should not look within ourselves for criteria of decision in such matters any more than we should look to the world.42

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These historical changes seem just to happen: Europeans ‘find’ themselves talking in different ways; Romantic poets ‘find’ themselves writing a language different from earlier verse, and so on. By analogy, of course, Rorty must now simply ‘find’ himself preaching the new pragmatism, by neither choice nor conviction, but more or less unconsciously, modishly, fashionably (or, one might say, ideologically). If we should not look within ourselves for criteria in such matters of historical or cultural change, then it becomes odd to speak of ‘what is better in the way of belief’: belief as such has become a difficult category and one which, logically, has no place in Rorty’s pragmatism. Similarly, while historical change ‘just happened’ in the past, now it must stop as Rorty ‘waits’ for others to catch up with his ethnic group’s arrival at the end-point of such a historical narrative. But Rorty, of course, is not so passive or ‘patient’, and pretends to be capable of actively bringing about historical change. He does not merely ‘find’ himself speaking one thing, but tries to persuade others to speak it too: Interesting philosophy is never an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis [never epistemological], but, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things…. The method [of effecting change from one to another] is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of behaviour which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of non-linguistic behaviour.43 Rorty then goes on to confrom to his own precepts by refusing to argue, and preferring to try to make his favoured vocabulary look attractive: a cultural ‘soft imperialism’ which tries to sell itself as an attractive commodity or tool to other ethnic groups not as ‘advanced’ in history’s narrative as Rorty’s. At each point in history, someone, somewhere, is telling the narratives which become dominant and shape the imagination of a linguistic group. Neopragmatism’s self-contradiction here seems to arise from its ignorance of the power and authority which are formed in narrative situations: someone tells the story, for whatever pragmatic purpose, and another hears it; one is the ‘agent’ of the narrative act, another its ‘patient’. In Rorty’s espoused view, it is as if we all become the ‘patients’ of history, denied the possibility of agency: an odd definition of pragmatism. If historical change has ‘just happened’ until now, with people finding themselves speaking in different ways, then why should this arrangement suddenly stop in order to allow Rorty and others to shape history by selling us a new and attractive vocabulary? Two possible answers come back. Either this ontological pragmatic practice turns out to be epistemological after all, and we can now control history because we know how it is shaped; or—a more sinister response—having learnt the lessons of an imperialist history, we now impose our discourse on everyone else from all other ethnic groups

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(including Martians), and simply deem illegitimate or illegible any other languagegame which fails to conform to our precepts and vocabulary. The result of this is a justification of a kind of state terrorism, if not cosmic imperialism, a rather tragic narrative of the postmodern world of violent and/or cultural imperialisms. But, in the modernist and postmodernist state of affairs, the situation in narrative is rather different. First, in the example of Freud, there is a confusion of the positions of agent and patient: the patient tells the story, and the agent then ‘appropriates’ it in whatever way he or she can.44 This leads to the agent’s being an agent of parody or satire, rather than a straightforward agent of an original narrative: he or she rehearses the story by grafting its flowers of rhetoric on to another vocabulary or, in short, by parodying it and thus proposing a comic, rather than tragic, narrative as the modernist and postmodernist condition of understanding. Second, Rorty’s ‘new pragmatic’ position depends upon a notion of consciousness having some kind of epistemological self-consciousness. But it is worth pointing out that the modernist exercises in self-conscious art arise precisely from doubts about the very possibility that a consciousness may reflexively know itself. As Ricœur indicates, considering three modernist precursors, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, a common denominator seems to be the decision to take, from the start, consciousness in its entirety as ‘false’, thereby taking up, each in a different register, the problem of Cartesian doubt in order to take it into the very heart of the Cartesian fortress. The philosopher schooled with Descartes knows that things are doubtful, that they are not as they appear; but he does not doubt that the consciousness is not as it appears to itself; in it, meaning and consciousness coincide; since Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, we doubt this. After doubt cast on things, we have entered the sphere of doubt cast on consciousness.45 The postmodern realization of this, after Wittgenstein and Derrida, produces a variant on the existentialist notion that the self is radically split or pour-soi. That variant is described by Ricœur in terms that indicate the shape of the modernist and postmodernist consciousness as founded on separation, on self-difference and thus on secrecy from itself, or criticism: I am lost, ‘astray’ amidst objects and separated from the centre of my existence, as I am separated from others and am the enemy of all. Whatever may be the secret of this ‘diaspora’, of this separation, it implies first of all that I am not in possession of what I am.46 It is just such a self-critique, or such a condition of criticism, that the quietist ‘patient’ pragmatic position of Rorty denies. While there may be a great deal of anti-methodical pragmatic scepticism in Rorty’s philosophical practice, there is implied a political stance of the metaphysics of ‘frank ethnocentrism’ and a corresponding unhistorical geo-politics (as opposed to chrono-politics) which

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seems to be beyond doubt, even beyond argument. The pragmatic ‘postmodern bourgeois liberal’ works on the assumption that loyalty to its own society is ‘morality enough, and that such loyalty no longer needs an ahistorical backup’.47 But a historical back-up might still be felt to be necessary, as Lyotard knows. The relation of knowledge to state, or politics, requires legitimation: scientists must cooperate [with the prescriptions of the state] only if they judge that the politics of the State, in other words the sum of its prescriptions, is just. If they feel that the civil society of which they are members is badly represented by the State, they may reject its prescriptions.48 Criticism, dissent or decision—that is, policy-making and politics—here remain possible. More importantly, criticism of, and separation from, one’s own narratives makes the politics of this case more akin to a chrono-political state, if the distance from one’s own narratives is a temporal or historical separation. There is thus a proliferation of narratives, and of the heterogeneity of language-games, which makes communication extremely problematic; but at least such a position has the virtue of not forcing Lyotard into a ‘frank ethnocentrism’, patiently waiting for the tardy races to catch up with his development.49 FOR A CHRONO-POLITICAL THEORY OF INTERPRETATION Much has been written on the violence associated with interpretation and with authority, even specifically the authority informing the act of writing itself.50 If interpretation is seen as a mode of enlightenment, then the equation of light with violence offers itself as a possibility: too much light produces the tragedy of blindness. Derrida writes of this in ‘White mythology’, and relates it to a political, even a racial, issue. Examining a passage in Anatole France’s Garden of Epicurus, Derrida comments on the metaphor (carrying across) of a metaphor from West to East, so to speak, and comments: Metaphysics—the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, IndoEuropean mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason.51 The East, of course, is where the sun also rises; that is, where the light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel finds its origin and ground. This metaphysical discovery of origins, either of history (Hegel) or of language (Rousseau), in the East is instrumental in establishing that racial violence described by Said in Orientalism and elsewhere.52

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Enlightenment, then, may not be so neutral or even so positive as it seemed; as Newton showed in the Age of Enlightenment, there is more to light than meets the eye. Light as origin, ground or truth (as base of physical research, as biblical origin, or as origin of language) is already invested with the colours of an originary violence of some kind; there is a subsequent sense in which violence and light (or enlightenment) can seem to be coterminous. If there is to be a politics of interpretation, then to what extent should it be invested with enlightenment or violence as grounding or authoritative principles? Hans Blumenberg traces a change in the attitude towards truth in the history of Western philosophy. ‘That life was pleasanter for one who knew than for one who sought knowledge was a premise Aristotle took for granted’; but this eudemonic epistemology underwent more or less complete reversal in the Age of Enlightenment, when ‘Lack of consideration for happiness became the stigma of truth itself, a homage to its absolutism’.53 Truth in the modern age is ‘harsh’, itself founded on a mode of violence. This finds its modern political counterpart in the notion that ‘the interest of the whole must automatically, and indeed permanently, be hostile to the particular interest of the citizen’,54 who thus finds an ‘enemy within’ the self. One way of evading such violence and such ‘criminalization’ of the self (a criminalization according to the dominant ideology, of course) is to take a strophic turn away from the sun or from its white mythology and to release the dark tropics of discourse into their full obscurity. Perhaps we moderns have all been, like Hamlet, ‘too much i’ the sun’, too much in the violent light of the white fathers and their imperialist discourse or missionary truths. The idea should not be entirely shocking, for it has a respectable, if forgotten, history. As Bruns points out, the ancient world certainly saw secrecy as a prime condition of understanding as such; and, when he considers the example of Origen’s Hexapla, Bruns indicates precisely the problem which attends us here. The Hexapla gave six versions of Scripture (for which read écriture) side by side, all with some claim to authority, originality or the ‘light’ of truth: The Hexapla illustrates nicely the problem of the scriptures: you cannot enter into an understanding of them until you know that you have actually got them in front of you, but it is difficult to say when you have actually got them. Scripture is a text whose versions are replicas, not of an original text, but of one another, as in a family where there are resemblances countermanded by disagreements brought on by tangled lines of descent.55 This is the condition of a writing which denies nomination, refuses to enlighten us as to the ‘name of its father’, so to speak; it is, thereby, outside the law, in the Lacanian sense—both illegible and spawning illegitimate versions. The relation of these versions one to another is like that obtaining in a comedy of errors rather than a tragedy of revelation and self-nomination or self-identification. Error, as much as secrecy, becomes a condition of hermeneutic. This error, further, is

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‘criminal’ in the eyes of the white fathers, the acknowledged legislators behind the law of the imperialist enlightenment of the dark tropics of discourse; but the ‘criminality’ remains fully justified if we wish to reject the parameters of an imperialist mode of politics and an imperialist mode of conversation or social understanding (that ‘soft imperialism’ of Rorty, in Lyotard’s view). This postmodern hermeneutic, then, based on an ancient model, proposes that the interpreter actually constructs a secrecy in some sense, providing not an allegorical revelation of the ‘true’ story behind the text’s dark and veiling words, but rather a satirical version of that text. It reveals the text precisely as it is not, thereby construing an interpretation whose founding impetus is that of parody, and whose orientation is proleptic. As Bruns again indicates: More than one critic has satisfied himself that satire is a species of comedy, but it is also possible to imagine it as a species of tragedy as well, and it is equally possible to imagine it as generically unstable: something that is liable to break out at any moment, like an act of terrorism.56 But, in its parodying of the text, it is perpetrating not so much an act of historical violence (which would simply silence the text) as an act of violating the text in the rhetorical language of flowers. Violence, as Arendt points out, has a special place in politics. It can mean the end of politics, in that violence as such is characterized by that which reduces opposition or criticism to silence: ‘Where violence rules absolutely, as for instance in the concentration camps of totalitarian regimes…everything and everybody must fall silent.’57 Such a silencing establishes, at best, a geo-politics, a system which is itself beyond change and unhistorical. The parodic mode of hermeneutic which I am advancing here violates the text in a certain sense, but this violation is an act whose aim is to bring the text not to light but to speech. Ricœur sees this as part of our condition of ‘modernity’, which leaves us oscillating between two trajectories in hermeneutic: on the one hand, to purify discourse of its excrescences, to wipe out the idols, to go from inebriation to sobriety, to draw up once and for all the accounts of our poverty; on the other hand, to make use of the most ‘nihilistic’, destructive, iconoclastic movement, in order to let speak that which once, that which each time was said when the meaning appeared brand new, when the sense was full…. We today are those who have not finished disposing of idols and who have hardly begun to understand symbols. Perhaps this situation, in its seeming anguish, is instructive: perhaps extreme iconoclasm belongs to the restoration of meaning.58 This iconoclasm, in the form of my own hermeneutic ‘graftings’ of the languages of various flowers above, is thus instrumental, in the modern and postmodern condition, in promising a futurity of speech, bringing speech to articulation or

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audition. It seems prepared, as with nearly all modernist movements, to involve itself in the Nietzschean ‘active forgetting’ of a past, a forgetting attacked by Eagleton and, in the specific context of legitimation, by Gillian Rose. But Rose’s argument, that as a result of this forgetting ‘the world remains not only unchanged, but also unknown’, does not follow.59 The position I am advancing looks like a return to Feuerbach; its prolepsis relates specifically to his ‘anticipative’ epistemology. In Blumenberg’s characterization of this, ‘The knowledge drive does not want to push forward into the inaccessible, which is anthropologically irrelevant, but rather to anticipate what is possible for man, which is the future.’60 In Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach, the substance of the attack is that Feuerbach is, in the terms I advance here, merely geo-political, and not chrono-political: The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt] or of intuition [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively.61 By shifting attention to the practice itself here, Marx also shifts attention from the ‘objective’ to the historical. In the light of this, a proleptic or anticipative practice of the production of future meaning, such as I am advancing here, seems crucial to a materialist historical hermeneutic. But it follows from this ‘active forgetting’, from this heliotropic transformation of the past and its ‘objects’,62 that there can be no law of interpretation for hermeneuts who want to take their poetry from the future.63 A genuinely chrono-political criticism must be, above all, transgressive of law, criminal, able to forge a future through the interpretative parodying of historical narrative, document, text. In the terms of materialist politics, however, it follows that, while criticism may be criminal in its iconoclastic parodic gestures, ‘violating’ texts to bring them into proleptic speech, such a cultural practice, such a criminality, remains entirely gestural. It is a ‘violence perpetrated on poetic language’, to paraphrase Jakobson parodically; and this violence of criminality, precisely because it is merely gestural, replaces a more materialist violence of changing the world and writing the poetry of the future by the direct action of silencing that future’s poets and critics, of collapsing the heterogeneity of their discourse into a totalizing and ‘true’ answer to the riddle posed by the Sphinx. The white light of truth in interpretation proposes only the possibility of tragedy and violence; the dark secrets and errors of comedy allow the production of the poetry of the future. Postmodern hermeneutic, then, is useful only in so far as it releases poetry into its full comic, parodic obscurity. University College, Dublin

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NOTES 1 Paul Ricœur, De l’interprétation: essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965), pp. 35–6. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 2 Richard Rorty, ‘Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity’, Praxis International, 4, 1 (1984), p. 40. 3 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 49. See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 66–7, on Fish doing Fishian readings as a Fishian reader. It should be remarked that Fish has since moved on from this position. 4 See Jacques Derrida, ‘White mythology’, in Margins, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), on the violence of light; cf. Jacques Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1983), and Gerald L.Bruns, Inventions (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 5. 5 I take the term ‘chrono-politics’ from Paul Virilio. 6 Bruns, op. cit., ch. 1. 7 Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), p. 65. 8 See Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968); cf. Ricœur, op. cit., pp. 26–7, on symbolicity as the locus of interpretability as such. 9 Harold Bloom, Agon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 248; see Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 193–4. 10 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). 11 Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: François Maspero, 1980), pp. 45–6. 12 Ricœur, op. cit., pp. 174–5. 13 Friedrich D.E.Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, quoted in Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (ed.), The Hermeneutics Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 94. See Paul Ricœur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B.Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 47, for an explication of this point in detail. 14 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 422. 15 Ricœur, De l’interprétation, p. 36, sees this as imbued with violence or a kind of iconoclasm. 16 Freud, op. cit., p. 45. 17 See Carl E.Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); cf. Freud’s own comments in the Preface to the Second Edition in The Interpretation of Dreams. 18 See my On Modern Authority (forthcoming) for a full discussion of this. 19 Freud, op. cit., pp. 494 ff., 254 ff., 386 ff. 20 This makes the operations of the text approximate to those obtaining in a Roussel novel; see Raymond Roussel, Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963).

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21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41

Freud, op. cit., p. 496. Ibid., p. 386; cf. p. 254. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 388. See Schorske, op. cit., p. 181, for Freud’s jokey letter to Fleiss on the ‘public enthusiasm’ for his Interpretation of Dreams. In this letter, part of the joke is that Freud gets his flowers back, so to speak: ‘The public enthusiasm is immense. Congratulations and bouquets keep pouring in, as if the role of sexuality had been suddenly recognized by his Majesty, the interpretation of dreams confirmed by the Council of Ministers’ (my italics). Freud, op. cit., p. 388. Ricœur, De l’interprétation, p. 41. David Trotter, The Poetry of Abraham Cowley (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 8. Most immediately, this name is usually that of the artist, which is supposed to guarantee the validity of our understanding of the work of art; but this is akin to that criticism which reveals or discovers or names a work according to a style or an epoch, a moment in a historical narrative, such as the Marxian or Freudian metanarratives. Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e)/Columbia University, 1983), pp. 61, 64–5. Note here the link between speed and nuclear war: the political ‘space’ we inhabit today is a temporal one, that of the last four minutes. Note also the link of speed to aspects of modernism, especially through Marinetti and the futurists. Rorty, op. cit., p. 40. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 107–8. Frederick Crews, ‘In the big house of theory’, New York Review of Books, 33, 9 (29 May 1986), p. 38. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxiv. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R.Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984). See Jean-François Lyotard, Rudiments païens (Paris: Christian Bourgois et 10/18, 1977) and Instructions païennes (Paris: Galilée, 1977), where Lyotard thinks through the valorization of ‘local’ knowledge in terms of the pagus, that space inhabited by the ‘pagan’; this knowledge thus takes on the cast of an anti-theological knowledge with all its pretensions to global knowledge. The Deleuzean ‘nomadic’, in this context, is broadly similar. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 18–19. Jean-François Lyotard and Richard Rorty, ‘Discussion’, Critique, 41 (May 1985), PP. 581–4. That is to say, a politics which has collapsed into ethics: from polis and its concerns to ethos, character, disposition and mere individual morals. Alexander Pope, ‘Essay on Man’, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 515. Rorty, op. cit., p. 35. Richard Rorty, ‘Le cosmopolitisme sans émancipation: en réponse à Jean-François Lyotard’, Critique, 41 (May 1985), p. 570.

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42 Richard Rorty, ‘The contingency of language’, London Review of Books, 8, 7 (17 April 1986), p. 3. 43 Ibid., p. 4. 44 For the sense of the word ‘appropriation’ in this context, see Paul Ricœur, ‘Appropriation’, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. 45 Ricœur, De l’interprétation, p. 41. 46 Ibid., p. 53; cf. p. 52. See also Sissela Bok, Secrets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 2.86, note 6, for the etymological links relating separation, secrecy and criticism; cf. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore, Md, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. ix. 47 Richard Rorty, ‘Postmodern bourgeois liberalism’, paper circulated at the School of Criticism and Theory, Northwestern University (1983), p. 5. 48 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 36. 49 See Lyotard and Rorty, ‘Discussion’, pp. 581–4, for a debate on the relations between rhetoric and violence relevant to this point. 50 See, for typical instances, Ricœur, De l’interprétation, pp. 206–7; Arendt, op. cit., pp. 20, 38–9, 208–9; Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 11, Of Grammatology, trans. G.C.Spivak (Baltimore, Md, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 108–9, and Margins, pp. 211, 256–7. On the relation of violence and its ethical position with respect to Marxist revolution, see Steven Lukes, ‘Can a Marxist believe in human rights?’, Praxis International, 1, 4 (1982), pp. 334–45; cf. Arendt, op. cit., pp. 62, ff. 51 Derrida, Margins, p. 213; cf. pp. 268–9. 52 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 53 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 232, 404. 54 Arendt, op. cit., p. 79. 55 Bruns, op. cit., p. 34. 56 Ibid., p. 9. 57 Arendt, op. cit., p. 18. 58 Ricœur, De l’interprétation, p. 36. 59 Terry Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism’, New Left Review, 152 (July—August 1985), pp. 60–73; Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: PostStructuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 1 and passim. 60 Blumenberg, op. cit., p. 442. 61 Marx, in Engels, op. cit., p. 61. 62 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1970; London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), p. 257. 63 The allusion is to Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), p. 13: ‘The social revolution of the 19th century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future…. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the 19th century must let the dead bury their dead. Then the words went beyond the content; now the content goes beyond the words.’ This is precisely the problem for a cultural practice: how does the content go beyond its words? The answer proposed here is simply that it goes beyond the words to the extent that it is gestural merely.

Making history SUSAN ADRIAN SHAHZADE

• Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985), 396 pp., £15.00 and £6.95. Martha Vicinus’s latest book, Independent Women, resembles her earlier Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1972) and A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (1977), in that all three expand our understanding of nineteenth-century English social history in general, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century women’s history, and all three include invaluable, exhaustive bibliographies. The two earlier books, though, are collections of essays edited by Vicinus, and consequently lack the force of sustained argument and persistent vision that Independent Women, written entirely by Vicinus, embodies. While each chapter can be read separately, together they map out a territory of English social history only now being explored, that realm of political and social action undertaken by nineteenthcentury women that resulted in expanded employment and communities for unmarried women. Appropriately, the book begins where the movement begins, with an analysis of the burgeoning population of unmarried, middle-class women, referred to as ‘redundant, ‘superfluous’ or ‘superabundant’ by sympathizers and detractors alike. These women, not only in reality but in their mythical and spectral dimensions created by the press, were responsible for, among other things, the greater occupational opportunities, increased economic alternatives and broader social definitions that single women of the middle class enjoyed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The ‘redundant’ or ‘superfluous’ woman—what Vicinus calls simply and neutrally the single woman—was invented around mid-century when the 1851 census ‘revealed’ that women outnumbered men in England. In fact, Vicinus points out, unmarried women existed long before that, and women outnumbered men in every census in the nineteenth century save that of 1811. Whatever historical forces may have transformed the ubiquitous ‘old maid’ into the ‘redundant’ woman, however, they fall outside the scope of Independent Women.

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Accepting the emergence of this phenomenon as a given, Vicinus explores how the concept was used by activists to liberalize and expand women’s opportunities and by conservatives to coerce women into compliance. As is often the case with anomalies the cultural paradigm cannot assimilate, conservatives either ignored the magnitude of the problem or misinterpreted its causes and cures. Thus the notion of the redundant woman was used by The Saturday Review—and writers like Eliza Lynn Linton and W.R.Greg—to scold unmarried women, point up their inadequacies and remind them of their expendability. But insisting that women marry did not provide the requisite husbands and homes. The facts of poverty, displacement and boredom which besieged thousands of unmarried middle-class women could be neither ignored nor camouflaged as women’s perversity. Consequently, as Vicinus makes clear, these conservative strategies of avoidance played into the hands of the resourceful activists who argued that conservative exhortations were themselves superfluous, since most women would gladly conform, if only society would provide them with the means to do so. If society would produce the husbands, single women would, in most cases, happily produce the wives. But the activists went far beyond defending the redundant woman; they sought to use the fear the idea generated for both men and woman to force men to relax their stranglehold on the public sphere, recognize the problem, and yield up in some measure the benefits of public life: money, independence and excitement. These demands had the effect of opening up possibilities, not only for the common woman who wanted satisfying work and a congenial place to live, but also for the truly exceptional woman who sought independence and challenging new outlets for her creativity and energy. Having articulated the problem of the single middle-class woman, Vicinus proceeds, chapter by chapter, to examine the ingenious, resourceful, often complicated solutions that women invented and that permitted them to earn money and live away from home without irreparably jeopardizing their feminine middle-class status. These solutions included sisterhoods, nursing, teaching, settlement work and, later, the suffragette movement. In chronicling each of these efforts, Vicinus even-handedly describes not just the success and the advantages of such pioneering institutions but the obstacles they faced as well. None of the institutions, for example, ever had enough money, so that, while many survived into the twentieth century, their power and influence was inevitably hedged by economic constraints. Furthermore, virtually every attempt to organize meaningful public work and communal living for middle-class women necessitated combat with the commonplace notions that women could not live in harmony without male supervision and that women in power were bound to abuse it. And, like most pioneering work attempted with inadequate precedents, little guidance and insufficient resources, many of these groups’ innovative schemes produced, along with their successes, a sufficient number of public problems to substantiate the allegations.

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Sisterhoods, for example, were accused of power abuse. Settlement houses generally lacked trained permanent staff and found that integrating middle-class settlers into the foreign lands of the slum often proved virtually impossible. The suffragettes, the most heroic of Vicinus’s independent women, endured verbal accusations and physical and psychological abuse. Nursing, ironically, because it already had a questionable reputation, suffered rather less abuse than the other movements, because what could be levelled against it as a profession had already been tried. Moreover, it was rescued from ignominy by the charismatic guidance of Florence Nightingale, whose very presence provided a refutation to charges levelled at the profession. Those chapters of Independent Women concerned with women’s colleges and reformed boarding schools for girls do not just discuss the triumphs, struggles and defeats of the movement to educate girls and women and to carve out a place for women in education, but also light a torch in a vast chamber where not many have yet been, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf. For it is in these chapters that Vicinus explores the relationships, the ‘raves’, that developed between students and their teachers or between an older and younger student. The book chronicles the intense, tangled relationships which provided women with an emotional outlet that cultural mythology claimed they did not require. Vicinus’s book, like the movements she describes, is a pioneering achievement in the analysis of women’s interaction and co-operative accomplishments and in the excavation of the history of women’s public work and communities. Through her careful and exhaustive research, she reconstructs the pleasure, the pain, but always the intensity of the triumphs and defeats these women experienced. And in so doing she paints a vivid picture of women’s experience, unmediated by men’s perceptions or words. Such a portrait is still rare enough to be of incalculable value to an understanding of the nineteenth century and to an understanding of ourselves. Moreover, her study presents, more comprehensively than anything yet published, a history of women’s first far-reaching public triumph, since what she details is a major ideological shift orchestrated primarily by women. Explicitly, Vicinus analyses the intellectual, moral and spiritual apparatus that Victorian middle-class single women brought to their task of forging an adequate place and a meaningful life for themselves within the larger context of Victorian society. Implicitly, she reveals what we bring to our own task of integration. We see our own strategies and goals in contrast to those of our foremothers. Where they emphasized duty, we insist on rights; where they saw their own efforts as complementary to those of men, we see ours as oppositional. For them the goal was social service, for us it is political action. Where these women displayed their ingenuity, resourcefulness and flexibility most convincingly was in their ability, not to subvert the system, but to turn its resources—moral, ideological and spiritual—into tools and strategies for fabricating a place of their own. In some ways, our task, though similar, is more difficult. Whereas Victorian women lacked the means to achieve their goals, they

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possessed the values and commitment that made their duty clear and their path straight. Today we possess the means more often than the conviction. The truths that motivated and sustained Victorian women appear more protean to us, resisting and eluding our attempt to pin them down. We often accuse Victorian women of being naïve and innocent in the areas of values and virtues and in their sense of themselves; yet it was that very naïvety that made them so powerful and active. Vicinus manages to capture both their innocence and its power, and, in so doing, she reveals our own knowledge and its potential powerlessness. Foucault is right that knowledge is inextricably tied to power; what he doesn’t go on to say is that knowledge and powerlessness co-operate just as readily. Stanford University, California

Signifying JANE MOORE

• Colin MacCabe, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 156 pp., £17.50 and £4.95 These essays are not an easy read: they traverse three huge disciplines and span over a decade of theoretical developments. The pioneering work produced for Screen in the early 1970s is represented by MacCabe’s two best-known essays: ‘Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses’ and ‘Theory and film: principles of realism and pleasure’. Together they draw on Brecht and the semiology of Christian Metz, as well as the French theorists Barthes, Lacan and Althusser. MacCabe uses these theories to identify subjectivity as an effect of signifying practice, and Lacan, in particular, to define the way in which film addresses and constructs a spectator-subject. MacCabe’s later work—‘On discourse’, ‘Language, linguistics and the study of literature’ and ‘Realism: Balzac and Barthes’—moves into what is probably the unfamiliar area, at least for the literary theorist, cf linguistics. Through close attention to the complexities of linguistic debate, past and present, MacCabe evaluates work by Mill, Frege and Saussure in the light of Barthes’s theory of signification and, later, Pêcheux’s analysis of subject identification and disidentification in discourse. His project is, perhaps, over-ambitious for a readership unlikely to be fully conversant with film, linguistics and literature. But it is in bringing these disciplines together that MacCabe is able to alert the reader to his major contention over the ‘false’ separation of literature from linguistics and the arbitrary hierarchization of literature over film. This is a contention arising out of MacCabe’s belief that an understanding of subjectivity is crucial. And, for him, it is in order to understand the construction of various subject positions that we have to look to all areas of culture and language, examining not only the specific subject positions produced, but also the institutional contexts of their production. Thus he claims: in order to deal with the effects of meaning we must combine an analysis of the institutional sites of language together with an analysis of subjectivity in language to enable us to understand how specific

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practices of language both produce subject positions for individuals and articulate various practices within institutions. If the project, and success, of Screen was to foreground the importance of film and other cultural forms in the production of subject positions and the representation of realism, MacCabe’s current project is to highlight the significance of the often ignored area of linguistics in this process. But it is a task of Herculean proportions, involving the reader in a labyrinth of cross-disciplinary references, so that one welcomes his introductory essay, ‘Class of ’68: elements of an intellectual autobiography 1967–81’, which historically locates the specific struggles that make up the context of his essays. Useful though it is, however, the introduction is itself problematic: a post-Barthesian ‘Author’ embarking on an ‘autobiographical’ journey is surely a contradiction in terms. And it cannot be that MacCabe is unaware of this, or of the coercive nature of introductions per se, since he states clearly that his aim is not to try to make the essays finally coherent, not to exercise the firm hand of authorial power such that all previous readings are petrified under his control: ‘this egocentric task does not appeal, or rather, its appeal is undercut by the knowledge of its impossibility.’ Despite this disclaimer, the contradictions remain, and there are important issues at stake in the introductory essay, the first of which is the position of the reader. MacCabe’s authorial narrative—the ‘metalanguage’, placing the subsequent essays in inverted commas—invites the reader to take up a position of imaginary mastery, knowingness, plenitude. It is, however, precisely this illusory position which is taken to task in ‘Realism and the cinema’, in MacCabe’s analysis of the ‘classic realist text’. Second, the position of the Barthesian Author, dispossessed of ‘his’ own meanings, is ruptured by the continuous sream of personal insights we are given into MacCabe’s turbulent career. We are told, for example, that the job at Cambridge was the one MacCabe ‘most wanted to undertake in the academic world’. On gaining this job, he confesses, ‘I worked so hard that, even now, I feel physically ill when I think of it.’ The question is whether these personal details add to the historical and political contextualization of institutional struggle—which was to result in the ‘structuralist controversy’—or whether they simply work to produce the illusion that MacCabe is the author and guarantor of the ‘truth’ of his own meanings. The ‘structuralist controversy’ itself provides in many senses the justification for MacCabe’s life history. Having left behind Screen and the enmity directed at him, MacCabe arrived at Cambridge only to find that enmity reproduced, with possibly greater intensity: Cambridge began, he tells us, ‘with people resigning at the mention of my name’, and ended with his dismissal after having been denied tenure. It is hard to believe that the chain of events, from Screen to Cambridge, was unconnected with MacCabe’s radical theoretical position. But, if this is so, MacCabe does himself a disservice by focusing on the personal animosities he endured, since this detracts from what was really at stake—under

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what terms and with what methods English language and literature could continue to be taught. Especially so because, as MacCabe himself concludes, it would have been impossible for the media and his opponents to admit this, since ‘then they would have already conceded what they were desperate to defend: that there could be no questions about English as a discipline. For them, English had no history. It had been, was, and would continue to be.’ The fact is that English does have a history, and one wrought by institutional struggle at that: witness Cambridge, which, prior to MacCabe’s dismissal, had driven out William Empson, denied George Steiner a lectureship, and occasioned I.A.Richards to remark to MacCabe that the only thing one could do to avoid ‘petty institutional animosities’ was to ‘keep working: both as a means of retaining one’s own sanity and as the most appropriate response to local jealousies’. If I.A.Richards and Stephen Heath provided MacCabe with the friendship he needed to see Cambridge through, it was Louis Althusser who provided him with the theory necessary to analyse the politics of the struggle within which he was embroiled. Althusser’s work articulated Screen’s early concern with the relationship between ideology and form and the politics of the institution. Indeed, MacCabe acknowledges his debt to Althusser. But it is true to say that, in general, Theoretical Essays marks a shift away from ‘pure’ Althusserianism. For any sustained attempt to theorize subjectivity, Althusser was insufficient: ‘if Althusserianism was genuinely to demonstrate the operation of ideology then it needed to analyse how discourse functioned in the production of subjectivity and how class positions would alter that functioning.’ For MacCabe, Michel Pêcheux’s work, which is discussed in ‘On discourse’, represents the most elaborate and detailed consideration of this problem. Pêcheux attempts to develop a theory of discourse which takes account not only of the divided subject of psychoanalysis but also of language’s place within the class struggle. Thus it is in the movement from the politics of the signified to the politics of the signifier that an emphasis on the body and the impossibility of its exhaustion in representations becomes crucial, since it is here that one can understand the material basis with which the unconscious discursive formation disrupts the smooth functioning of the dominant ideologies. It is with this disruptive feature of language that MacCabe’s work continues to be concerned, marked, as always, by the politics of the institution, language and culture. University College, Cardiff

Sexual politics MARGARET ATACK

• Mary Evans, Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin (London and New York: Tavistock, 1985), 142 pp., £4.95 (paperback) Mary Evans states at the beginning of her study that Simone de Beauvoir’s stature as a feminist does not mean her arguments should not be subjected to critical appraisal. Such an attitude can only be welcomed, since writing on Simone de Beauvoir can indeed verge on the hagiographical. Unfortunately, the result here appears so perversely dismissive of her work, basing its analyses on extremely selective quotation and presentation, and inadequate contextualization, that far from engaging with a critical analysis one feels rather constrained to set the record straight. Evans heaps praise on her subject in general terms—on her courage, commitment, opposition to oppression, honesty, inspiring example— but at the level of specifics the charges are damning: Beauvoir’s idea of emancipation for women is to assume male values and modes of living; her model of social relations is simplistic, either positing the total autonomy of the individual or, in a crudely materialist reversal, subordinating the individual totally to capitalism; she had little practical experience of politics; her universalist model of sexual difference led her to underestimate class factors; she condemned lesbianism, celebrated heterosexuality and had a negative view of women; her fiction serves up didactic morality tales, and fails to cope with the complexity of individual motivation. What is feminist in all this? Not much, the author seems to conclude (although she does trace similarities with some feminist positions). Simone de Beauvoir should be seen as an educationist, she argues, a reformer in the Western liberal tradition. To support her arguments, Evans discusses in detail primarily the autobiography (especially the early volumes), The Second Sex and the fiction. A major drawback, therefore, in a book which sets out to evaluate a feminist mandarin (though by the end of the book the accent is rather on the ‘mandarin’), is that it ignores virtually all the articles and interviews which date from Simone de Beauvoir’s explicit espousal of feminism. Les Écrits de Simone de Beauvoir (a massive work published in 1979 but not in the bibliography) lists twenty-one separate articles, prefaces and interviews specifically devoted to feminist issues

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in the six years between 1972 and 1977, when it stops. It also reprints several of them which flatly contradict some of Evans’s comments—for example, on political lesbianism and friendships between women—and throughout the book the general statements on Beauvoir’s attitudes and positions should be treated with extreme suspicion because of this absence of any historical perspective. Evans writes: ‘Indeed, if Simone de Beauvoir had not written The Second Sex, it is not inconceivable that she would never have been identified with feminism at all’ (p. x). This effectively wipes out the last fourteen years of her life, when she described herself as ‘une militante féministe’ and was actively involved in a whole range of campaigns and projects. The way Evans acknowledges this is also, therefore, something of a distortion. She continues: It is true she may well have given her support to causes such as the liberalization of the French abortion laws, but then so did many other women, and men, who had no significant or specific commitment to or identification with feminism. (pp. x–xi) Part of my irritation with the text stems from sentences such as this, for its condescension and wrongheadedness. Since from the 1970s Simone de Beauvoir did have both a specific commitment to and an identification with feminism, the fact that others did not is really neither here nor there. But the hostile message is clear. More importantly, the significance of her contribution isn’t even broached. This false impression of Beauvoir’s political work as a feminist is compounded in the chapter ‘Politics and problems’, where we are told that her politics ‘were essentially those of intellectual intervention—the statement, the manifesto—rather than engagement with other individuals in organizations and institutions’ (p. 102). Alice Schwartzer has documented the regular meetings of feminist groups at Beauvoir’s flat, and one would have thought that over thirty years at Les Temps modernes, and involvement with Choisir and the Ligue des Droits de la Femme, might have counted for something. Anne Whitmarsh, who Evans seems to think supports her view, devotes several pages of Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment to Beauvoir’s feminist militancy, concluding that it is here that she finds a way of translating commitment into action. When Whitmarsh writes earlier in her book that ‘for most of her life she has been happy to leave [action] to other people’, it is clear the exception is the women’s movement, which she only briefly mentions at this stage with other campaigns as ‘not strictly political’. Wilful avoidance of the evidence aside, one might have hoped that a feminist study would have sought to correct this view. In discussion of the works themselves, Mary Evans focuses on important questions for contemporary readers—the values underpinning Beauvoir’s writings, relationships between the sexes, the kinds of solutions advocated —and her analysis is not without insights. But her arguments fail to convince, for a variety of reasons. In the case of The Second Sex, what I find unsatisfactory about her account is, first, her oversimplification of the philosophical framework. If

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Simone de Beauvoir had indeed argued, as Evans variously suggests, that women are doomed to passivity by their biology and that the individual is absolutely free in his or her choices, she would have been at best a very muddled existentialist. Determinism in all its forms was one of existentialism’s major bugbears, hence Beauvoir’s rejection of the biological, Freudian and economistic ‘destinies’ in the early chapters. On the other hand, there is no real notion of absolute autonomy either. Consciousness is grounded in alterity, in its relation both to the Other and to itself (Beauvoir quotes Lacan’s mirror stage in support of this — which, together with the extensive use of Lévi-Strauss, should incidentally give pause for thought about some received views of recent intellectual history). There is no self-consciousness without the other, nor can individuals be abstracted from the complex contingent factors which form their situation. The existentialists were almost as guilty as many of their critics in eliding the philosophical and moral senses of freedom, but, since these had different targets, it is very important for them to be sorted out. Evans does not help her argument either by failing to distinguish between ‘the Other’ and ‘the other’, a failure which in my opinion invalidates several of her criticisms. Evans’s second main objection to The Second Sex is that it fails to deal with the social world and concentrates primarily on ideology, drawing many examples from literature. Her view of literature strikes a rather old-fashioned note —‘although literature can explore social problems it is essentially individual in its subject matter’ (p. 73)—harking back to a very traditional stance which predates (or aggressively continues to reject) the reading of literature as ideological discourse. I would not endorse this dichotomy between what is presented as the firmer ground of empirical documentation and literature, nor that between the social world and ideology, both of which point to the rather reductionist use of class occasionally surfacing here. They also seem curiously misplaced as criticisms of The Second Sex. If anything gives this book its pioneering character, enabling it to be read with profit nearly forty years later, it is precisely the importance it places on the ideological and cultural construction of ‘woman’. Evans argues otherwise, and my second major reservation relates therefore to the very selective use of the text. Quotations are used to show that Simone de Beauvoir bases her view of the sexes on animal or biological patterns of male activity and female passivity, ignoring historical or social factors, whereas Beauvoir’s overall argument is that women’s dependence cannot be deduced from animal behaviour or biology, and many of Evans’s criticisms virtually reproduce other parts of Beauvoir’s discussion; the same is true of some of her strictures on the importance of class factors. The Second Sex is certainly contradictory, but to overturn the value traditionally placed on its central thesis, ‘on ne naît pas femme: on le devient’, and persuade us that Beauvoir’s analysis is relying on categories such as universal difference between the sexes and a female nature, would have required engaging with all the material of the book. The criticisms lose their force by their partial presentation.

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Similar problems mar the discussion of the memoirs. The trio is turned into an eternal triangle, a drama of Sartre’s infidelity and Beauvoir’s jealousy. One would never guess from this account that it was also a drama of Sartre’s jealousy of the friendship between the two women. Beauvoir’s account of the value she and Sartre attached to honesty, especially concerning the famous contingent relationships, is countered by an anecdote (quoted by a reviewer) from Olivier Todd’s Un Fils rebelle. As Todd’s distasteful book is marked not only by a determination to degrade the elderly Sartre but also by an extreme hostility to Simone de Beauvoir (humourless schoolma’am and killjoy, yet again), it is surprising that a study which bills itself as ‘sympathetic’ places more belief in a remark from such a source than in Beauvoir’s detailed exposition, while relegating what documentary evidence there is for her view, in the shape of the Lettres au Castor, to a footnote. The text also abounds in a variety of inaccurate or misleading statements of sociological and historical fact. I object to the phrase ‘written by a feminist’ as anachronistic when applied to The Second Sex. Sartre and Nizan were not primarily concerned with attacking the authority of Descartes and the French Academy (Brunschvicg and Kant perhaps), and one wonders what the author of the Critique of Dialectical Reason would have made of the following: ‘She and Sartre did not therefore follow the paths of others of their generation towards either Marxism or psychoanalysis’ (p. 50). The importance of the fact that contraception was not freely available in France until the 1970s is consistently underestimated. It is idiosyncratic, to say the least, to apply both the terms ‘petit bourgeois’ and ‘bourgeois’ to Beauvoir’s background, as though they were interchangeable. And how is the reader to understand ‘petit bourgeois’, when ‘on both sides of her family de Beauvoir’s world was one of familiarity with the ownership of property and its trappings—country estates, servants, dowries, and large houses’ (p. 4)? Perhaps her father’s impoverishment is supposed to cancel that out. It is anachronistic to suggest that ‘her own background was sufficiently privileged for higher education to be available’ (p. ix). So it is for working-class girls today, but this, as we all know, says absolutely nothing about real possibilities of access. In Beauvoir’s case, this writes out the victory, precisely because of her background, that the agrégation represented for her, and the consequently different value she placed on it in comparison to Sartre. Finally, it is extremely depressing to see that the published translations are quoted as primary sources with no apparent awareness of their unreliability. To take just three examples: Simone de Beauvoir’s father did not say she was on her Paris honeymoon (however much that appears to bolster the author’s own description of Beauvoir as a ‘young bride’), Sartre did not say she was in danger of becoming a female introvert, Beauvoir did not warn against ‘adapting one’s outlook to another person’s salvation’ (whatever that may mean). I have found so many mistranslations in the quotations that I trust none of the others I have not checked. Evans does her readers a grave disservice in uncritically repeating these

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errors, and, in implying that serious analysis can be based on these translations, she does nothing to enhance the standing of her own work. University of Leeds

Habermas EDMOND WRIGHT

• Richard J.Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), 243 pp., £25.00 and £6.95 • Kurt Mueller-Vollner (ed.), The Hermeneutics Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 380 pp., £29.50 and £12.50 The term ‘hermeneutics’ embraces both the art and the philosophy of understanding, a praxis and a theory. It is through the influence of German thinkers like Gadamer and Habermas that in the last decade interest in hermeneutics has flourished among philosophers and literary critics in France and America. The books under review are a pressing invitation to the British reader to find out what it is all about. Not only are they in a sense complementary to each other in that the Habermas volume is a contribution in its own right to the hermeneutics debate, but both are evidence of the continuing rejection of Europhobia in philosophy. Their purposes differ: the first levels acute criticism at Habermas’s contention that an emancipation extending beyond philosophy into political engagement can be founded upon a new analysis of rationality; the second aims at being an anthology representative of the main currents of thought in hermeneutics since its modern inception in the eighteenth century. The Hermeneutics Reader follows in the excellent series published by Blackwell providing collections of essential background material for a particular field, useful too as general introductions. Habermas and Modernity shows the awareness, international in scope, that is becoming characteristic of the recently founded Polity Press. Together the two books are challenging for British readers in that they bring out the relevance of this debate to the question of what sense should be given to our guiding concept of modernity. Anyone who sets out to define the modern is making a bid to define the future. In Habermas and Modernity a group of writers from the fields of philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and sociology consider his attempt to ground a hope of escape from the threat of over-systematization in a new theory of rational communication. It could be said to be a politicizing of hermeneutics, the forging of a link between hermeneutics as a theory and a praxis. Although Habermas asserts his dislike of philosophies that seek a unifying theory based on

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transcendental concepts, particularly that of a transcendental self, he has put forward a theory which courts scientific endorsement and is thus presumed to have universal application. There is, of course, a Marxian analogy here, since it is a claim which, though avoiding utopian optimism, nevertheless appears to show that those who are seeking emancipation from what Weber called the ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’ find a given in the very mode of human intersubjectivity which predisposes it towards that emancipation. Habermas would be the first to deny that there was any historicist inevitability built into his scheme or that a totalitarian result is necessarily out of the question. But there is no doubt that a central motivation for his hope can be found in the discovery that the rationality of language has a built-in progressiveness. Truth, truthfulness, intelligibility and sincerity, four validity-claims, never realized in ideal perfection, are considered to be the underlying essentials of social communication and form the necessary ground of all human interaction, in that anyone seeking to influence his or her partners in any enterprise through argument where the rhetorical positions are free of constraint must perforce set about establishing his or her right to make such claims. This is Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’, never fully achieved, as he says, but always ‘anticipated’. The message is that, once ‘symmetrical’ relations on the rhetorical board have been set up and all coercion has been removed, the force of the ‘better argument’ must make itself felt, and herein lies deliverance from the rigidities of system. Richard J.Bernstein’s introduction is an admirable critical review of the trajectory of Habermas’s thought over the last two decades, providing a frame for the essays in the book. Anyone not familiar with Habermas will find a clear account of the substantive issues in Knowledge and Human Interests and The Theory of Communicative Action as well as some indication of the areas of controversy. What emerges most notably is the question of the foundations of the theory and, hence, the central weakness of Habermas’s position. His rejection of any kind of transcendental line of argument has led to an expectation that he would provide a secure empirical base for his claim that intersubjectivity contains in itself something emancipatory, but, as Bernstein points out, he has not really analysed the dialogic basis of discourse. One might add that Habermas, sensitive to the charge of relativism, has made appeal to speech-act theory in AngloAmerican philosophy. He further claims to be producing what he calls a ‘reconstructive science’ on the lines of Chomsky, Piaget and Kohlberg, upon which a ‘rationalization’ of discourse can be based. This rationalization would in particular prevent the maintenance of ‘systematically distorted communication’, which disrupts intersubjectivity through being only an ‘appearance’ of truthfulness, rightness and sincerity. Such defences are hardly adequate, as will become plain. Anthony Giddens draws attention to Habermas’s similarity in this regard to the logical positivists with their verification principle: that is, their indirect attempt to treat what they preferred to call a rational policy as a substantive support of truth. If he wishes to show that the specification of truthconditions logically involves justification through argument, then some

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explanation must be forthcoming. Giddens points out that the ‘universal pragmatics of language’ upon which such a load has to be put requires a much deeper investigation. For example, the distinctions between labour and communicative interaction, between the ‘system’ and the ‘life-world’, seem to bear no argued relation to the linguistic theory. A parallel inconsistency in the central issue of the ‘ideal speech situation’ is found by Albrecht Wellmer, who gives a sympathetic account of Habermas’s position in relation to Hegel, Marx, Weber and the older critical theorists. He cannot however see how the legitimating of communicative practice can depend upon the practice itself. The moral equality of the rhetorical partners cannot be established, according to the theory, unless there is no coercion. Wellmer rightly argues that legitimate institutions must ensure the absence of coercion before the effects of the ideal speech situation can be felt. It is the critic with an interest in psychoanalysis, Joel Whitebook, who helps to identify the source of this weakness. According to him, Habermas’s way of viewing the intersubjective nature of language as leading to a legitimating consensus forgets the problem of ‘inner nature’. He points out that there is nothing in inner nature to guarantee the truth of public communication nor that, given the free operation of a rational language process, social harmony will result. So, whereas Habermas has learned much from Freud about the mechanics of a distorted communication, he has not seen that unconscious elements can be present in the speech of a normal person without being describable as ‘distortions’. Thus there remains a serious difficulty here for Habermas’s theory concerning the distinction between the mental and the somatic. It is perhaps significant that in his replies Habermas took up this point only from the perspective of high-level ethics, claiming that he does not exclude what he calls ‘embodied existence’ from his theory: he argues that, whereas Kant may have tried to keep duty and inclination apart, he grounds his concept of freedom in subjects who are able to ‘reconcile, if not identify, worthiness with happiness’. A mere mention of ‘happiness’ does not amount to an introduction of the body into the argument. As in the case of his attempt to reconcile, if not identify, communication with his four validity-claims, this declaration rests merely on his faith that such things shall be rather on an adequately supported thesis. Indeed, Richard Rorty advises him to hold to his intuition that consensus is the guide and to discard the unnecessary theoretical baggage of ‘communicative action’. All the same, Rorty joins Habermas in the over-comforting belief that a completely public language is the safeguard, and that the hermeneutic problem can thus be solved. If, however, there were an ‘unpresentable’ in Lyotard’s sense, or, as Rorty sees it, an element of experience which stubbornly resists objectification, then, according to Rorty, there could not be a public language. For him such pessimistic scepticism about the capacities of language (traceable in any case to bourgeois ideology) has no place when language can go its Wittgensteinian way and iron out all queer subjectivities to fit the form of life. Whitebook takes an

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anti-Wittgensteinian view: ‘The possibility of a completely public language is not entailed by the demonstration of the impossibility of a totally private language.’ It is here that one can make the cross-reference to hermeneutics, for its whole activity proceeds on a non-Wittgensteinian assumption, namely, that there is a mismatch between speaker and hearer. Of course, there are those who believe that, given a proper hermeneutical method, the mismatch can be overcome and an original ‘speaker’s meaning’ recovered, but there is no immediate presupposition that such transparency comes with no need of polishing. To quote Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of Mueller-Vollmer’s choices for inclusion in his reader: ‘All understanding is simultaneously a noncomprehension, all agreement in ideas and emotions is at the same time a divergence.’1 Thus, whenever anyone speaks to another, it is impossible for them ever to match their understandings perfectly. It follows then that, although there cannot be a private language, a single individual can most certainly understand a word in the public language in a way that goes contrary to the opinion of the majority of those in the same ‘form of life’, and yet that interpretation could well be more useful, more adaptive. It is an ideological puzzle, not too difficult to solve, as to why this obvious truth should have been so blandly ignored. The private understanding of a word by a single subject could be (1) maladaptive for all the community (including that subject) if it were generally adopted; (2) adaptive for some members and not others (perhaps only for that one subject—which is an uncomfortable possibility); or (3) adaptive for all. The subjective difference could obviously remain concealed until after its pleasant or unpleasant consequences had been fulfilled. What is wanted is that people should have the opportunity to speak out, even persons of little power and small esteem, as Habermas would have it. What is patently not true is that the existing majority consensus is the final arbiter of truth. It is very easy to confuse public as meaning ‘majority’ with public as meaning ‘involving many persons’, but that is the mistake Wittgensteinians make when they think that a private meaning is not only of no worth but impossible. A private language is impossible, and that was Humpty-Dumpty’s mistake: a private meaning in a public language is possible, but the Wittgensteinians have tried to make us believe that this was also the Humpty-Dumpty mistake, when it is certainly not. One can easily pursue this modern problem in Mueller-Vollmer’s collection. His overview gives a clear outline of the position of each of his choices, which are well judged not only from the point of view of the philosophers included but from that of the extracts themselves. They are both representative and of a sufficient length to allow one to follow through developments and controversies without distraction. Turning to Schleiermacher, for instance, who perhaps deserves the right to be called the founder of modern hermeneutics, one finds that his advice, for anyone trying to understand a text, is to relate the part to the whole and vice versa, and, similarly, individual to language and language to individual. Whereas Habermas is fond of characterizing a rational decision as a ‘Yes’, a ‘No’ or an abstention (the latter strictly meaning a putting-off till later),

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Schleiermacher’s principle implies that there can be a ‘Yes’, a ‘No’, an abstention and a ‘Yes and No’. Dilthey, another of Mueller-Vollmer’s choices, believed that the only way of arriving at the solution to the hermeneutic problem of how to combine language with the individual’s experience is to focus on ‘what cannot be represented in logical formulae’, and in the same sentence he linked the understanding of human life with ‘the understanding of literary texts’. It is most obviously in literary texts that differing interpretations of meaning play out their dialectical games according to rivalries of judgement about contextual relevance. For Habermas to take on speech-act theory (ultimately inspired by Wittgenstein) was to invite a Trojan horse into his theory that would destroy all claim to dialectic. For speech-act theory such rivalries of interpretation can only be ‘parasitic’ on standard speech, as Habermas agrees. Searle’s principle of expressibility, that ‘whatever can be meant can be said’, flies in the face of material subjective differences between one speaker and the next, for Searle’s principle rules out the possibility of the simultaneous occurrence of four events: (1) speaking in the public language; (2) expressing a valuable meaning in doing so; (3) not being understood by the majority; (4) both speaker and hearers believing that mutual understanding was achieved. Thus Habermas would have been better advised to reread Adorno’s Negative Dialectics: ‘the isolated individual unhampered by any ukase may at times perceive objectivities more clearly than the collective.’2 By ‘objectivities’ Adorno did not mean ‘objects’, for he insisted on a gap between the word and the thing. Husserl, also represented in The Hermeneutics Reader, went on wrestling with the possibility of a ‘pre-predicative experience’, a ‘consciousness prior to all experience’ which, as he says in one of the extracts given, ‘may very well have the same sensations as we have. But it will intuit no things, and no events pertaining to things.’ He continued in Experience and Judgement to face up to the difficulties that this concession involved him in, where he reached the point of discussing the aesthetic question of a ‘play’ of perception in which it might be difficult to decide which ‘thing’ was to be perceived in an ambiguous sensory presentation.3 Gadamer has also been fascinated by the ‘play’ concept but, like Wittgenstein with the language-game, he can only think of the ‘primacy of the play over the player’, which holds him, like Habermas, to an ontology of given objects. The line to the critical theorists can be traced back to Feuerbach: it was Feuerbach who accused Hegel and modern philosophy in general of ignoring the sensuous and becoming lost in the abstract. This charge against Hegel might equally be levelled at Wittgenstein—it is the same charge that has been made above. If this correction be admitted, there is no universal assurance that the ‘better argument’ will inevitably crystallize out. One asks: ‘Better for whom?’ The necessary convergence in language can certainly be termed an ‘ideal speech situation’, as long as we remember that it is after all only ‘anticipated’. Hence, notions like ‘truth’, ‘truthfulness’ and ‘sincerity’ will continue to be useful as part-fictional guides to hold us to our pragmatic mutual assumption of

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agreement. Theory has to be tested in practice, and that is what hermeneutics boils down to. University of Oxford NOTES 1 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, trans. George C.Buck and Frithjof Raven (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 43. 2 Theodor W.Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B.Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 46. 3 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgement (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 92.

Rethinking Marx J.M.BERNSTEIN

• Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. John Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 342 pp., £8.95 (paperback) Claude Lefort is a French political theorist and philosopher. He is best known as an interpreter of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, and as one of the founding members, together with Cornelius Castoriadis, of the small left-wing group, Socialisme ou Barbarie, which throughout the 1950s published a journal bearing that name. The volume under review, prefaced by a lucid introductory essay by the editor John Thompson, consists of ten essays, the earliest dating from the late 1940s and the latest extending through to work done in the early 1980s. The editor has divided the book up into three parts: part I, ‘Problems of politics and bureaucracy’; part II, ‘History, ideology and the social imaginary’; and part III, ‘Democracy and totalitarianism’. This selection of essays is, evidently, directed to political analysts and theorists; none the less, Lefort’s work, including that presented in this volume, should be of interest to a much wider audience. Almost from its beginning, Lefort’s work has been preoccupied with the problem of totalitarianism—with, that is, the significance and fate of socialism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe; and it is from the outcome of these researches that he has analysed Western capitalism. At the centre of Lefort’s analyses of the Soviet Union are two denials. First, he denies Trotsky’s conception of the Soviet bureaucracy as a parasitical caste doomed to be ousted by either revolutionary insurrection or the restoration of capitalism. Second, he denies that totalitarianism can be understood either as a specific political regime or as a contingent joining of an assortment of various political institutions. These two denials together entail that it is a mistake to regard totalitarianism as a contingent historical or sociological phenomenon—that is, as a contingent empirical deformation of an existing state of affairs whose ‘deformed’ character can be traced directly through straightforward historical and sociological analysis. Rather than regarding totalitarianism as simply a monstrous outgrowth of political power, as is usually done, it should be seen as ‘a metamorphosis of society itself in which the political ceases to exist as a separate sphere’ (P. 79).

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According to Lefort, totalitarianism is a form of society in which the separation of the different spheres or domains of social life, such as the economic, the political, the legal, the aesthetic, and so on, which is itself the characteristic mark and ‘achievement’ of bourgeois capitalism, is negated in the name of an imaginary unity that is represented by and concretely mediated through the party. For Lefort, this imaginary unity is quite other than the sort of imaginary unity found in pre-capitalist societies, for here the unity in question does not come from ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ society, but is rather immanent in society. Totalitarianism is a form of a historical society, that is, a form of society whose origin does not lie outside history. This brings us to what is arguably the centre of Lefort’s theoretical work, his interrogation of the social as such as it arises in Marx’s writings. Lefort contends that there is a deep and productive tension in Marx’s writing between, on the one hand, an image of history as one continuous story of, say, class struggle or a dialectic between the forces and relations of production and, on the other, a conception of history that is radically discontinuous, with a chasm yawning between capitalism and all that preceded it. Following through Marx’s account of pre-capitalist societies in the Grundrisse, Lefort demonstrates that an image of a communal form, anchored in the land, and written as an image of the body which eliminates any dimension of externality, is sustained throughout; and, further, that the genesis of capitalism is presented in terms of the destruction and fragmentation of that same corporeal image. Pace his official story, then, Marx conceives of pre-capitalism, with its repetitive history, as the determinate Other of capitalism’s dynamic evolutionary history. Further, through an analysis of some central passages from Capital together with the core of his argument in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Lefort reveals how Marx comprehends the dynamic movement of capital as itself governed by a mechanism of preservation and repetition. The moment when the labourer is separated from his own body ‘is precisely the one in which phantoms are set free, in which imaginary forces materialized in institutions dominate human beings, in which the past severed off from the present—as capital is from living labour—acquires an independent movement, both in representation and in reality’ (p. 179). Finally, and again contrary to the official story, intricated in the constitutive mechanisms of capital reproduction are processes of representation and dissimulation which internally mark capital’s refusal of its own dynamic historicality. For Lefort, Marx’s actual analyses of capitalism and pre-capitalism press Marxian theory beyond the rationalist and metaphysical terms in which Marx tended to present the results of his research. We might say, although I am sure Lefort would not appreciate the gesture, that what we are offered here is a quasideconstructive reading of Marx’s texts. For Lefort, the socializing processes of capital are the ‘discovery’ of the excessiveness of social and historical being beyond any ‘natural’ determination, beyond, that is, the logic of determinacy, beyond, as we might say, presence. Capitalism is the deconstruction of pre-

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capitalism that writes itself in the repetitive language it negates. What deconstruction sees as an oscillation between presence and excess is in fact an oscillation between two forms of historicality, repetitive history, which in significant ways is written in the image of the body (=presence), and nonteleological, dynamic history which rises up as a fragmentation of the corporeal image, a fragmentation which in capitalism leads to the production of mechanical ‘monsters’ and the setting free of phantoms (=the non-presence of presence and the presenting of this non-presence=ideology?). If the ‘logic’ of capital is ‘deconstructive’, then the practice of deconstruction can be no more than the radical repetition of capital itself, its undoing of presence mimicking capital’s restless negation of all natural boundaries; and, as capital writes its uncovering of the excess, it is in a language that dissimulates that excess, so that deconstruction finds itself unable to do other than present the limits of presence in the language of presence. The limits of the practice of deconstruction are coterminous with the limits of capital reproduction, for those limits are the same. Given what has been said thus far, it should come as no surprise that Lefort’s longest and most complex essay in this volume is a study of ideology, more specifically an ‘Outline of the genesis of ideology in modern societies’. This is a dense and in some places very difficult essay. Broadly speaking, it has two aims: first, through a critical understanding of Marx, it attempts to generate a conception of ideology which, while sustaining an essential link between ideology and domination, is none the less free from the simple duality of presence and absence; and, second, to develop an account of the unfolding of the forms of ideology in modern societies. Needless to say, Lefort’s central contention is that ‘ideology is the sequence of representations which have the function of re-establishing the dimension of society “without history” at the very heart of historical society’ (p. 201). It follows from this line of thought that ideology belongs only to historical societies. Now this claim should not be construed so as to deny the obvious —namely, that there was domination in precapitalist societies, and that this domination was accomplished through linguistic means. Rather, what distinguishes ideological from pre-ideological dissimulation and domination is that with historical societies the discourse that is shaped by ideology is, for the most part, a discourse of novelty, rupture and change. In other words, within capitalism the conditions for the undoing of ideology are immanent within the conditions in which it is produced. There is much in this essay from which I would want to dissent, particularly Lefort’s analysis of contemporary ideology as ‘invisible’. And it is disappointing that in the more recent essays Lefort ‘forgets’ the depth of his critique of capital as a consequence of his interrogation of the role assigned to the proletariat in Marx’s writings. Even in his more ‘liberal-tempered’ essays, however, Lefort presses political thought and analysis beyond its usual assumptions. In all, this is a volume to be savoured. University of Essex

Poetics and hermeneutics JOHN LLEWELYN

• Richard Kearney, Poétique du possible; phénoménologie herméneutique de la figuration (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 282 pp., 150 francs There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the philosophical thinking that conceives possibility either as potentiality in the manner of Aristotle or as anamnetic possibilitas in the manner of Leibniz. If this sentence formulates the thesis of Kearney’s book, it also signals a difficulty that some readers will have in accepting it. This difficulty is indicated in the words ‘there are’, words that may lead the author himself to question whether the sentence is an accurate formulation of his thesis. According to the traditional realist and idealist categories, possibilities are in some sense already present in the nature of things. Taking the hint of the ambiguity of invenire as between ‘to invent’ and ‘to discover’, and stressing the idea of what is to come that this verb contains, Kearney sets out to show that more fundamental than the possibility which gives priority to the notion of presence and what is there is a notion of possibility which is not but may be. His point of departure is the Heideggerian account of possibility in which actuality is secondary to possibilizing, Ermöglichen, an account which has its point of departure in the Husserlian phenomenological reduction which, while suspending questions as to the empirical or metaphysical existence of beings, raises the question whether there can be a categorial intuition of being. Dasein’s Ermöglichen makes possible its actuality and facticity. Because Dasein is temporalizing transcendence, its future, its Zu-kunft, its à venir, its projective tocome, is the origin of its present and past. Kearney reminds us of the ambiguity of the verb ermöglichen in a crucial sentence of Being and Time where Heidegger refuses to attribute the enabling exclusively either to Dasein or to being. However, in the Letter on Humanism, where Heidegger has kept his promise to move on from the existential analysis of Dasein, his wish to hold the question of being more persistently before his reader’s attention is marked by a preference for the word Vermögen to refer to the enabling of which he now treats. This may be because he feels that the prefix er-suggests activity too strongly and he wants now to underline the mutual receptivity of thinking and being. Kearney notes the

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etymological connection between Vermögen and Mögen, which latter word Munier translates by aimer. Munier also gives désir. This leaves room for the desiring of what one does not love, and indeed the German is better rendered by ‘to like’ than ‘to love’, where again one can like without loving. The CapuzziGray translation of Heidegger’s das ‘Mög-liche’ as ‘favouring-enabling’ facilitates reference back to the notion of care, Sorge, in Being and Time, a reference that is also facilitated by and facilitates the employment of Vermögen for the authentic mode of possibility, Ermöglichen being used to cover the authentic and inauthentic (and indifferent?) modes. Kearney’s and Munier’s aimant leaves open the opportunity to refer Heidegger’s ‘quiet power’ of the favouring-enabling forward to a paragraph much later in Kearney’s study, where mention is made of Bloch’s reinterpretation of Aristotle’s ‘according to possibility’ (kata to dunaton) ‘as a utopic magnet (aimant) which attracts matter towards the future’. In the chapters leading up to the one in which he outlines what he considers to be corollaries of Bloch’s principle of hope, Kearney maintains that Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutic calls to be supplemented by a hermeneutic which is aesthetic, ethical and eschatological. Among the philosophers he cites in support of this claim are Ricœur, Levinas, Castoriadis, Dufrenne, Merleau-Ponty, Marcuse, Breton and Heidegger himself. He quotes illuminatingly too from the literature of mysticism and theology and from his Franco-Hibernian compatriot Samuel Beckett. Although these quotations are not confined to his instructive footnotes, the body of the text keeps the structure of his argument in admirably clear relief. By the time we reach the end of that argument, it has become charged with a number of carefully made distinctions and has anticipated a number of objections. The most important of these objections, to my mind, is the ‘realist’ objection which has been touched on already and will be the topic throughout the remainder of this review. The realist holds that, however much we strive to keep possibility alive by refusing to subordinate it to actuality, the notion of possibility makes sense only if it is conceived as a possible actuality. Otherwise it is no more than mere fancy, no more than a figment of the imagination. Kearney rejects, or rather denies the fundamentality of, this conception of possibility. From the very Introduction of his book, he declares himself opposed to the separation of the real and the imaginary. He goes on to endorse Husserl’s assertion that imagination is the lifeblood of phenomenology and Ricœur’s assertion of the indispensability of symbolic figuration. Hermeneutic understanding, whether ontological or aesthetico-ethicoeschatological, is understanding as-if. One of the reasons why Kearney calls his poetics of possibility a hermeneutic phenomenology of figuration is that ‘figure’ is derived from fingere, which also yields ‘fiction’. This is all very well, the realist will say, so long as we confine ourselves to a hermeneutic of the fictional or figmental productions of the literary and other arts. But, surely, it will not do when we turn to the ethical and the religious? Granted, there too the imagination plays an indispensable role, but can the ethical and religious life make sense

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unless in living it we believe that we may be contributing to bringing into existence something more than a purely imaginary state of affairs? Even the aesthetic imagination is engaged in imagining worlds that we cannot help seeing as continuous with the world of everyday life. To suspend disbelief with regard to the world it imagines is to see that world as if it were the one we inhabit. Likewise with the world as we believe it should be or hope it will be. Kearney writes: ‘Every expression is already a figuration-as and as-if, namely a metaphor that transports us beyond the illusion of literal sense towards our potential true sense.’ Doubtless what we call literal-mindedness may reach such a depth of shallowness that it becomes fetishism, inauthenticity, idolatry or defiguration. But, without neglecting the positive and transfigurative force of metaphor—as Kearney believes Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida do— must we not acknowledge the vital part that is played by what we call the literal and some might call death? Not only because in calling an expression metaphorical we must retain the notion of its conventional opposite, but because the recourse to metaphor is made because it is thought to be the best and perhaps only way of describing how things at a deeper level literally and actually are or can become. Supposing we agree with Levinas’s statement, reproduced by Kearney, that ‘the authenticity of art should announce an order of justice’. Supposing we understand how the divine May-be is tantamount to a Should-be. Can we think the ethico-religious Should-be if we deny the can-be or deem irrelevant the distinction between the can-be and the cannot-be? Specifically, must not believers be able at least to deceive themselves into thinking that the Kingdom will one day come, that the promise of the promised land will be kept, and that the tomorrow when we see Him as He is will not be eternally postponed? Are not believers and hopers deceiving themselves if they believe they can liberate themselves completely from this self-deception? Although an eschaton may not be a telos, in so far as it is humanly possible for us to help make a possibility come (p. 169), must we not conceive that possibility as a tomorrow of which it will make sense to say that it is now a today? Can we slough off our everydayness? Is not an advent an adventure in and of the one world of events, the sabbaticality of the working weekday? If, as Kearney writes, ‘the fundamental meaning of our world is the eschatological possibility of another world on earth’, the meaning of the latter is not to be severed from the superficial meaning of the here-and-now. I think that it is to this interdependence that he commits himself in his critique of the dualism of the real and the imaginary. I think that it is only because there is a natural human tendency to acknowledge the dependence in one direction that he chooses to stress the dependence in the other. Heidegger’s name for this tendency is Verfallen, falling. Neither ethical evil nor theological original sin, falling manifests itself in the propensity of symbolic expression to precipitate and sediment as representation, but representation that can serve as the platform necessary for the creation of the new orders of aesthetic, ethical or theological reference upon which Kearney’s poetics of the possible lays most stress.

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Although it is upon poiesis that Heidegger too dwells in his later thinking, poiesis as production is already central in the categorial analyses of Being and Time. There is no reason why in his later writings he should not continue to recognize that inauthenticity is not a temporary lapse but a permanent and positive possibility, no reason why he should stop affirming that to the forgetting of the question of being there corresponds a forgetting of our propensity to forget this forgetting. Kearney observes that Heidegger does not rule out a contemporaneity or ‘correlative parallelism’ between the ontological and the theological. One recalls the difficulties Husserl has with his doctrine that there is a parallelism between the phenomenological and the psychological. Is there a parallelism in these cases or a double crossing? Kearney proposes that we examine the idea of a proportional analogy between phenomenological ontology and eschatological hermeneutics, an analogy that sees the transcendence of the thinking of being beyond concern with beings as a pointer to the transcendence of eschatological hermeneutics beyond phenomenological ontology. This sounds like the postulation of an external parallelism. That is not, however, what Kearney intends. Contrary to a naïve analysis of the nature of analogy, the pairs of terms between which an analogy is drawn interact with each other productively. Instead of a simple side-by-sideness there is a chiasmus. That this is what Kearney intends is borne out by the title of his final chapter, ‘At the heart of the hermeneutic chiasmus’, by the Joycean motto of that chapter, ‘Jewgreek is Greekjew’, and by the statement made in the course of that chapter that ‘It is precisely because the truth of Revelation is already given in the encounter with the truth of being that always remains to be disclosed (by the thinking of being), that Heidegger could say to Beaufret that “faith has no need of the thinking of being”.’ Kearney hastens to add that this does not mean that the philosophical thinking of possibility cannot be taken up analogically by the religious thinker to clarify and deepen what is given in revelation. The provocative contribution to that philosophical thinking of possibility which Kearney makes in this book calls for the translation that would allow it to be taken up by those who do not read French. University of Edinburgh

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