Textual Practice Vol 1 No 3

TEXTUAL PRACTICE

Editor Terence Hawkes University College, Cardiff Postal address: Department of English, University College, Cardiff, PO Box 78, Cardiff CFI IXL. Editorial board Christopher Norris UWIST, Cardiff (Review Editor) Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Catherine Belsey University College, Cardiff 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

Textual Practice will be published three times a year, in spring, autumn and winter, by Methuen & Co Ltd, II New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, 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.Advertisements Enquiries to David Polley, Methuen & Co Ltd, II 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; institutions $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, SPIO 5BE.Subscribing 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) Ltd, 300 Park Avenue, New York, NY10022.ISSN 0950–236X© Methuen & Co Ltd. 1987

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 1 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1987

Contents

Articles Wrapping up postmodernism: the subject of consumption versus the subject of cognition DAVID BENNETT

1

Making it ‘neo’: the new historicism and Renaissance literature HOWARD FELPERIN

20

Language and hegemony: principles, morals and pronunciation TONY CROWLEY

36

Realism, consensus and ‘exclusion itself’: interpellating the Victorian bourgeoisie N.N.FELTES

56

Noises off PETERWOMACK

69

Reviews Nature/culture PATRICK PARRINDER

90

Peshat/derash BERNARD S.JACKSON

95

Nukespeak IAN WHITEHOUSE

102

Narcissism STEPHEN GLYNN

107

In America ROGER POOLE

113

Defending interpretation IAN SAUNDERS

118

Reflexions FRED BOTTING

123

Index Volume 1

128

Wrapping up postmodernism: the subject of consumption versus the subject of cognition DAVID BENNETT

I The socialist Greater London Council having apparently resigned itself to its promised abolition by the Thatcher government on April Fools’ Day 1986, it was being rumoured in London’s alternative press in October of 1985 that the GLCs leader, Ken Livingstone, was planning to balance his council’s books by spending what remained in its kitty on a Christmas present for Margaret Thatcher. The rumour had it that County Hall (soon to be vacant) was to be giftwrapped at a cost of several million pounds by the expatriate Bulgarian artist Christo Javacheff and presented to Thatcher in a parodic gesture of political compliance. If Terry Eagleton is right in suggesting that ‘what is parodied by postmodernist culture, with its dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity production, is nothing less than the revolutionary art of the twentiethcentury avant-garde’1—an avant-garde which spurned the notion of aesthetic ‘representation’ for an art which would be a direct, material intervention in social praxis—then such a gesture on the GLC’s part would have amounted to politics parodying postmodernism’s parody of a political art. (The rumour, of course, proved apocryphal; the council threw a quarter-of-a-million-pound farewell party for itself instead, and Livingstone embarked on the career of a parliamentarian.) Meanwhile, in Paris (one of the incubators of what Peter Bürger has termed the ‘historical avant-garde’2), Christo himself had just added another package to an œuvre which, spanning some twenty-seven years, had begun modestly with projects like Wrapping a Girl (London, 1962) and progressed to such bolder and bigger parcels as Packed Medieval Tower (Spoleto, 1968), Packed Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, 1969), Wrapped Coast (Sydney, 1969) and Surrounded Islands (Greater Miami, 1980–3). Completed on 23 September 1985, after a decade of planning, the new work was Le Pont-Neuf Empaqueté. For fourteen days the double span of France’s most photographed bridge stood wrapped with 75 miles of rope and 444,000 square feet of sewn-to-measure nylon fabric whose sandstone tones reflected those of the weather-washed

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façades of the Ile de la Cité buildings and concealed the smog-blackened surfaces of the bridge without obstructing the flow of commuter and tourist traffic either over or under its upholstered arches. Handbills distributed to pedestrians by the artist’s uniformed assistants explained of this latest empaquetage: Le choix d’empaqueter le Pont-Neuf est né il y a dix ans, de ses références historiques, urbaines et artistiques exceptionelles et de sa situation privilégiée qui réunit la rive droite, la rive gauche et l’Île de la Cité, cœur de Paris depuis plus de deux mille ans. La construction du pont a débuté en 1587 sous Henri III et a été terminée sous Henri IV en 1606. (The decision to wrap up the Pont-Neuf was born ten years ago, because of its exceptional historical, urban and artistic points of reference and because of its privileged position uniting the Right Bank, the Left Bank and the Île de la Cité, the heart of Paris for more than two thousand years. The construction of the bridge was begun in 1587 under Henry III and was completed under Henry IV in 1606.) While Christo supervised the 500-strong team of helpers (including frogmen, tree surgeons, rock-climbers, bargees, electricians, engineers, builders and students) needed to execute this ‘œuvre d’art temporaire et publique’, not far away, on the Left Bank, Michel Cachoux’s commercial gallery was preparing for a vernissage, its shop window eye-catchingly dressed with a 5-foot, nonfigurative bronze packaged in transparent polythene and rope and bearing the legend: ‘CECI N’EST PAS UN CHRISTO’. Cachoux’s own handbills announced: ‘CHRISTO emballe le Pont-Neuf/CACHOUX déballe ses Cristaux’ (‘CHRISTO wraps up the Pont-Neuf/CACHOUX unwraps his Crystals’). II That the logic of commodification has come to structure every aspect of contemporary life, not least the cultural-aesthetic, is now a commonplace of periodizing theories of postmodernism. Displacing the use values of objects and practices with an exchange value which erases immanent qualities and differences, this universal commodification of our object world is said to have drained things of their independent ‘being’ and reduced them to so many means for their own consumption, so many instruments of commodity satisfaction.3 In Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord has argued that the ultimate form of commodity fetishism in contemporary consumer society is the image or spectacle itself (‘the spectacle is the main production of present-day society’4). The familiar example, as Fredric Jameson explains, is that of tourism: The American tourist no longer lets the landscape ‘be in its being’ as Heidegger would have said, but takes a snapshot of it, thereby transforming

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space into its own material image. The concrete activity of looking at a landscape—including, no doubt, the disquieting bewilder ment with the activity itself, the anxiety that must arise when human beings, confronting the non-human, wonder what they are doing there and what the point or purpose of such a confrontation might be in the first place—is thus comfortably replaced by the act of taking possession of it and converting it into a form of personal property.5 Given the other-directed nature of contemporary conspicuous consumption, such reifying images (by which ‘we consume, less the thing itself, than its abstract idea’6) serve in turn to ‘speak’ their owners for others. Like designer clothes, Cachoux’s crystals or the latest-model car, our tourist snapshots of Parisian bridges, medieval towers or Sydney beaches become images for others to have of us, their owners or ‘takers’. Obsessively packaging such thoroughly ‘mythologized’ objects or spectacles as if for consumption, purchase, or mailing back to the tourist’s home town, Christo’s empaquetages (not least his rewrappings of those institutional pre-packagings of art and history called galleries) seem monstrous parodies of the universal commodification which fetishizes history and nature, reducing cultural and natural objects to so many reified images for consumption. In so far as they eclipse the pretext or occasion of art, Christo’s parcels seem bold postmodernist negations of a ‘representational’ aesthetic. Teasingly masking the object from the camera’s reifying eye, they simultaneously erase all its distinctive intrinsic features, rendering it just one more anonymous package on the equivalence principle of commodity exchange. Read parodically, Christo’s empaquetages reactivate the strategies of alienation familiar from the historical avant-garde, repeating on a grotesquely inflated scale such gestes of surrealistic defamiliarization as Duchamp’s readymades or Man Ray’s The Enigma of Isadore Ducasse (a packaging in sackcloth and cord of the sewing machine of Lautréamont’s celebrated image of alienation: ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table’). Works of ‘temporary and public’ art, commercially valueless in themselves since ephemeral and freely accessible to the most casual passer-by, Christo’s empaquetages are clearly the political gestures of an avant-garde refusal of the commodification of art, and of what Benjamin called the ‘aura’ of the ‘authentic’, unique and possessable art-work. What ought to be powerful and critical political statements, however, seem to have lost their disturbing charge. It is as if the quantitative principle of exchange value (as opposed to the qualitative one of use value) had definitively determined that the new and the different—once the very hallmark, now perhaps merely the trademark, of the avant-garde—had become purely a matter of proportion: a sheer size or scale which in Christo’s case attests to the complicity of neo-avantgardiste art with those bureaucracies that the early avant-garde had, precisely, targeted. If modernism, in exalting the unique as the resistive element amidst the universal sameness of things (the homogenizing effects of mass production),

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ultimately played into the hands of a culture industry for which novelty, fashion and fad are the very stuff of marketability, then Christo’s postmodernism will assert its own distinction by exalting quantity. The spectacular scale of his projects, in attesting to spectacular, ‘wasteful’ cost and bureaucratic organization, would seem to lay claim to a value which is paradoxical in proportion to its apparent irrelevance to means—end or value-for-money rationality (a value which literally lesser spectacles or works cannot, by definition, claim). What would seem to distinguish the postmodernist geste from its Dadaist or surrealist counterpart, then, is its changed relation to its socioeconomic context. To describe Christo’s cultural practice as simply subversive of commodification would be misleading. Just as Leonardo, Vasari and Rubens made preparatory oil sketches of the elaborate ‘triumphs’ they designed for Renaissance patrons, so Christo makes preparatory drawings, maquettes and photo-collages for his projects, the sale of which through the private gallery system (whose dependence on the ‘original’ art-work as commodity his populist works of ‘street’ art would seem to bypass and parody) generates the multi-million-dollar budgets of his parcels. (The budget of Le Pont-Neuf Empaqueté was conservatively estimated at 2.6 million dollars.) It was not until the poster, paperback, record and gallery culture of the 1950s that the densely textured, self-regarding artefacts of high modernism and the antiart gestures of the avant-garde became institutionalized, canonized and made available for mass cultural consumption. But what took several decades to achieve for high modernism and the avant-garde takes postmodernism a matter of moments. For within hours of Christo’s tying the final knot of Le Pont-Neuf Empaqueté, mass-reproduced photographic images of the spectacle and its designer’s preparatory sketches were available for mailing back to the tourist’s home town in the form of postcards for sale in the Left Bank souvenir shops, all such images ‘copyright Christo’. Postmodernism’s putative parody of commodification is itself commodified and transformed into its own consumable image. Gone, it seems, from postmodernist art are not only the interventionist or revolutionary ambitions of the early avant-garde, but also its scandalous spontaneity and irrationality. After a decade of intricate negotiation, organization and co-operation between Christo and the French civic and political bureaucracies, it was no less an authority than François Mitterrand who overrode any lingering official objection to the Pont-Neuf’s wrapping and paid the package a visit in his capacity as President of the Republic. The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1948) detailed its author’s plans for the universal demoralization of instrumental reason through staging the appearance, at strategically timed intervals, of freshly baked French loaves, from 15 to 45 metres long, in prominent public spaces in the capital cities of Europe and the USA. (‘If such an act could be successfully carried through’, Dali thought, it ‘would be capable of creating a state of confusion, of panic and of collective hysteria…[and] of becoming the point of departure from which…one could subsequently try to ruin… systematically the logical meaning of all the mechanisms of the rational

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practical world.’7) What distinguishes Christo’s projects from such unrealized surrealist gestes of comparable scale is, precisely, their realization. III Whatever intrinsic or stylistic features postmodernist art may share with modernism or the avant-garde, then, it would seem, in Jameson’s words, that ‘the two phenomena…still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital.’8 ‘What has happened’, Jameson says, ‘is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally.’9 The projects of both modernism proper and the avant-garde have foundered. Where the modernists sought to affirm the relative autonomy of the ‘cultural’ sphere— asserting its traditional constitutive values (of creativity, imagination, individuality, autonomy, etc.) against the values of the market-place—the avantgarde sought to undermine the ideology of aesthetic autonomy, to collapse the cultural back into the socio-economic, in order to translate such values into social praxis.10 (Hence Eagleton’s wry suggestion that what postmodernism parodies is the revolutionary programme of the avant-garde.) The historical failure of both projects is, we are told, the determinate condition of postmodernism as a period. Contemporary aesthetic innovation and experimentation have lost their oppositional or subversive potential and are themselves stimulated and catalysed by the culture industry’s reliance, for the reproduction of its market, on generating fresh waves of ever more novelseeming commodities, from clothing to cars to artistic movements—and no less, we might want to add, their situating cultural theories. Such, at least, is how Jameson, Eagleton and a growing number of American and European commentators have undertaken to define the distinctive cultural logic of the new ‘period’. Jameson’s own successive attempts to unravel this logic—attempts characterized in his seminal essay, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’,11 aiming towards the ‘cognitive mapping’ of postmodernism—represent only the most subtle and powerful limbs of this swelling body of periodizing theory which takes its bearings from the work of the Frankfurt School theorists and their successors like Habermas and Peter Bürger. But, if such critics are right to ground their period definitions of postmodernism in an altered relation between cultural production and its socioeconomic context, then it would seem a properly dialectical strategy to reflect on the relation between such cultural criticism (or production) itself and its putative object of analysis— in other words, its own positioning in the terrain it would map. Including as it does the production of new period definitions, the rereading of history, and the development of interpretative strategies said to be appropriate to the texts of postmodernity, such cultural criticism is itself an instance of cultural production. If the adversarial potential of the ‘cultural’ sphere has been lost through its penetration by the logic of the commodity, then the question

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arises: from where and in whose name can oppositional criticism of Jameson’s and Eagleton’s own kind be conducted? Among other things, this is a question about the implied subject of their critical discourse, the subject of the knowledge it undertakes to produce—what we might call the subject of cognition as opposed (both epistemologically and politically) to the subject of consumption. Echoing critics as diverse as Ihab Hassan, Hal Foster, Norman Holland and Eagleton, Jameson himself has argued that what he calls ‘contemporary theory— or better still, theoretical discourse—is also itself very precisely a postmodernist phenomenon.’12 The theory of ‘expressive causality’13 which underwrites this equation (but which, as I shall suggest, Jameson doesn’t invite us to employ in situating his own theoretical discourse) hinges largely on the fate of the individualist subject in the postmodern era. Of the two ways of viewing this once scandalously decentred subject, Marxist commentators like Jameson and Eagleton prefer to see it less as the discursive effect of a demystifying literary, linguistic and psychoanalytic theory than as the ‘objective’ effect of a socioeconomic process of which this theory is a mere epiphenomenon. The process in question is the social transition from ‘the classic age of competitive capitalism’ (‘the heyday of the nuclear family and the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic class’) to an age of ‘consumer’ or ‘corporate’ capitalism (‘of the socalled organization man’),14 a transition which has fractured the autonomous social subject of the bourgeois era into what Eagleton describes as ‘a dispersed, decentred network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion’.15 ‘Technology and consumerism’, Eagleton suggests, have ‘scattered our bodies to the winds as so many bits and pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation and reflex of desire’; ‘it is surely arguable that late capitalism has deconstructed…[the monadic] subject much more efficiently than meditations on écriture.’16 If we were provisionally to accept such a reflexion model of the relation between ‘contemporary theory’ and its social context, and look for an ‘expression’ of the logic of consumerism within literary theory, for example, we might find it in those radically ‘subjectivist’ accounts of reading which have emerged in the wake of a once equally fashionable structuralism. What I have in mind are those forms of reader-response and reception theory which, in representing what we call ‘texts’ as simply the epiphenomena of reading—as the projections or productions of reading subjects, either individual or collective— would seem to represent something in the nature of a consumers’ revolution in the sphere of interpretative theory.17 Among the critics associated with this broad tendency in postmodern literary criticism are Roland Barthes, Hans Robert Jauss, Norman Holland, Stanley Fish and Tony Bennett. Methodologically and ideologically diverse though they are, the problems their reading practices pose for the discerning consumer of literary theories have generally been addressed as problems of epistemology. What I want to do is temporarily to suspend epistemological questions and consider such

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theories of reading, which privilege the act of reception/consumption over the act of production, within the perspective of the Marxist historical narrative of modernism and postmodernism currently being elaborated by Jameson and other critics, a narrative to which the category of the commodity would seem central. What I shall be suggesting is that such models, which at once construct and deconstruct the reader as an autonomous subject, have, like Marxist criticism’s own discourse of knowledge, both their ‘modernist’ and their ‘postmodernist’ moments. In other words, the ideal of aesthetic autonomy which modernism reputedly entertained for itself, and which postmodernism is said to have deconstructed, not only is perpetuated in contradictory forms in certain kinds of supposedly postmodernist criticism, but is in fact inherent in any self-reflexive discourse. The moments I am calling ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’ respectively are the moment of imaginary autonomy, transcendence or emancipation, and the moment of knowing complicity, subjection or determination. To tell the story of the consumer revolution in literary theory is, precisely, to construct as narrative a logic whose conclusion will also appear as a historical destiny. (‘Construct and deconstruct’, we say—rarely the other way round.) But what such narratives historicize or project as a unilinear trajectory in time is, I would suggest, a necessarily incessant oscillation in all interpretative theory between what I have termed its ‘postmodernist’ and its ‘modernist’ moments. IV What Marx called the fetishism of commodities is the process by which the products of labour come to appear as an independent and uncontrolled reality apart from the people who create them. Commodity production (i.e. production for exchange, not for use by the producer) creates the social division of labour, as a result of which labour appears as private— expended to meet private needs and wants through exchange on the market—rather than as real, complex social relations with other people. Commodity production constitutes a social relationship between producers, but this relationship appears to the latter not as a social relationship between themselves, but as one between the products of their labour. This confusion of relations between people with relations to things is the fundamental contradiction of commodity production. The moment of this ‘reification of social relations’ (Marx) within literary theory—a transitional moment in its consumer revolution—is the concept of ‘intertextuality’, a promiscuous concept whose twentieth-century alliances include Russian formalism, New Criticism, Eliot’s Great Tradition and classical structuralism. For the ‘intertextualist’, the determinate social relations in literary interpretation (and production) are those between texts themselves— apprehended, like the circulation and exchange of commodities, as an independent reality, uncontrolled by their producers. The progressive attrition, in modern criticism, of Romanticisrn’s ‘author’—his/her demotion to

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structuralism’s ‘scriptor’, Wolfgang Iser’s ‘implied author’, Stanley Fish’s ‘necessary fiction’, and finally to Barthes’s dispensable trope of reading— corresponds to a progressive alienation and reification of the social relation of writing and reading: a reification of the symbolic act, the praxis or production of writing signalled in the now pervasive displacement of the concept ‘work’ by that of ‘text’. Where the ‘work’ was grounded in history (the history of its labour of production) to which it thus ‘referred’, the concept ‘text’ has the power to suspend both historical and generic definitions. Like commodification itself, the concept ‘text’ erases the intrinsic heterogeneity of objects, dissolving distinctions between the ‘literary’ and the ‘non-literary’, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, the ‘aesthetic’, the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’, even the written and the non-written. Marking the moment of culture’s opacity to history, the Text signals the repudiation of Authority and, with it, of the Oedipal charge that might once have typified the reading experience. With the author’s demotion to ‘a paper-I’ (Barthes), the reader can no longer bring paternity suits against the ‘only begetter’ of a text: the author who, fathering something on the mother tongue, previously provided a chromosomal key or guarantee of identity to the ‘work’ and a patronymic label for that legal relation of ownership, the copyright or droit d’auteur, which is the relatively recent invention of capitalist publishing.18 The identity of the text, as distinct from the work, lies in its destiny, not its origin, in the moment of its consumption, not of its production. No sooner reified and so freed from any intrinsic determination by the mode of its production, however, the text (this reified symbolic act) is itself dematerialized, becoming no more than an image of itself, an ‘object-effect’ of the consuming subject, the reader of whose autonomy qua consumer Barthes was the most eloquent exponent. In 1971 Barthes offered his theory of the scriptible as not so much the promise as the record of a historical reparation of the social division of labour between writing and reading, a division which he described as itself a comparatively recent historical phenomenon.19 In pre-capitalist cultures, according to Barthes, reading and writing were the equal privileges of a single class. Just as in the history of music there was a period when for the numerous class of practising amateurs ‘“playing” and “listening” formed a scarcely differentiated activity’—i.e. before the delegation of playing to the professional ‘interpreter’ and the relegation of the amateur to passive listener—so also in literature, Barthes says, ‘the coming of democracy’ introduced a new social division of roles between producer and consumer.20 The scriptible or modernist text heals over this division and restores the literary commodity—the alienated product of labour—to its producer for consumption, Barthes is the least ingenuous of reader-champions, but his defence in the rhetoric of utopian socialism of the notion of the scriptible text as a ‘genuinely democratizing’ effort to reverse ‘the reduction of reading to a consumption’ seems a postmodernist parody of Walter Benjamin’s prediction in 1936 that, with the expansion of the press, ‘the distinction between author and reader is about to lose

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its basic character…. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.’21 What Benjamin envisaged as a reversible social relation Barthes envisages as a non-alienated, privatized act of simultaneous production and consumption. Acknowledging that consumption has its pleasures, Barthes contrasts these with the pleasures of co-production, not the co-production of the writer and the reader, however, but of the reader and the ‘writerly’ text. Illustrating what he calls the ‘abolition of critical distance’ in the postmodernist period, Jameson argues that the aesthetic of ‘expression’, which is ‘closely linked to some conception of the subject as a monad-like container, within which things are felt which are then expressed by projection outwards’, is one which dominated much of what we call high modernism, but which has disappeared in the world of the postmodern.22 As in the reception theories of Iser, Jauss, Holland, Fish and Bennett, so in Barthes’s theory of the scriptible text there is a moment when this expressivist aesthetic resurfaces in the poetics of postmodernism. As for Romanticism (and, if we believe Jameson, modernism), the ‘expression’ in question is still for the postmodernist critic the ‘text’, but what it is an ‘expression’ of is the subject of reading (consumption), not of writing (production). Stanley Fish, the coiner of ‘affective stylistics’, is at once the most radical and conservative exponent of the reader’s emancipation as an autonomous subject from determination by its object or other, the text. In Self-Consuming Artefacts (1972.) Fish still wrote of reading a work ‘correctly’— which was to say, as the writer intended—but, in ‘Interpreting the Variorum’ (1976) and his subsequent work, Fish rejected as ‘positivist’ the notion that there could be a correct reading of a text or even ‘the assumption that there is a sense, that it is embedded or encoded in the text’.23 Affective stylistics begins its de-reification of the text by substituting questions of experience for those of knowledge, questions of response for those of meaning. What we call ‘text’ is no more than a temporal sequence of mental operations or experiences of which the reader is the subject: strategies of anticipation and readjustment, experiences of unbalancing, reassurance, disappointment, surprise. What the Fishian consumer responds to, however, is not a structure objectively ‘there’ or inscribed by the producer in the work, as it might be for the merely semi-autonomous subject of Iser’s and Jauss’s reception aesthetics. For Fish, as for Wittgenstein, interpretation is not a two-stage process, a matter of adding an identity or response to some neutral sense-datum. What is perceived in or as the text is itself always already an interpretative product. There are no raw materials—whether of meanings, grammar, letters or marks on the page—given before the interpretative labour. If it is not an immanent structure of the work that structures the reading experience, then the determinants and constraints of that experience are immanent in the interpreting mind. What, then, is the other of this reading subject? ‘Affective stylistics’ liberates the interpreter from determination by the work, only to deprive its transcendent subject of its sovereignty. Having dematerialized literature, Fish’s criticism dematerializes the reader, turning him/her into an

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imaginary subject, a mere image of itself, a ‘subject-effect’ of the codes and conventions which constitute what Fish calls the ‘interpretive community’ in which the individual reader is inscribed. ‘Subjectivist’ or ‘consumerist’ criticism can be divided into two kinds: that which constructs the subject of reading as essentially collective and public, and that for which it is essentially individual and private. To move from one to the other is to shift interpretation from the axis of the reality principle to the axis of the pleasure principle, to move from questions of knowledge and signification to questions of pleasure and desire. As an exponent of the collective subject’s autonomy, Fish attributes sovereignty over the work to the ‘interpretive community’ whose norms, codes and conventions speak through its members’ reading ‘experience’.24 Fish’s transcendent ‘interpretive community’ is a consensual one, seemingly predicated on the imaginary insulation of a monastic academy against the multiple, potentially conflicting interpretative communities in which any individual participates, either serially or simultaneously, as a gendered social being. If the critical community is still able to fall out with itself and produce new, revisionary or contradictory readings of Paradise Lost, this, for Fish, is only because one of the unbending rules of the academic institution of literary criticism is that which requires interpretative originality of the reader for the latter’s professional survival. Like the scholarly journals on whose acceptance or rejection of articles professional appointments often depend, the academies themselves depend on the acquisition or production of new and different intellectual commodities for the reproduction of their markets: in the case of journals, a professional readership; in the case of the universities, a student population and corporate or state endowments. As an essentially epistemological project, Fish’s deconstruction of the individualist reader has yet to pose any perceptible threat to the institutional boundaries within which it is conducted. In other words, his reading subject remains unified and autonomous, albeit collective. The more engagé and refractory historical and ideological analyses of interpretative communities to which Fish’s theory of the institutional subject of reading would seem to point (and which would presuppose a political theory of textual production/consumption) have been the concern of the Marxist theorist of consumer autonomy, Tony Bennett. Bennett’s ‘reading formations’ are as autonomous and transcendent of the so-called ‘texts’ they construct in their own images as Fish’s interpretative community is.25 How Bennett’s or Fish’s own texts could therefore be regarded as ‘saying’ anything to the ‘reading formations’ whose interpretative autonomy they postulate is a question still in need of a satisfactory answer. Another criticism which could be levelled at such theories is the one frequently made of Jauss’s insistence that it is the ‘horizon of expectations’ (cultural, ethical and literary) that the public brings to a literary work which determines how it is read:26 namely, that such models fail to allow for sufficient diversity both among the various publics by which a text is consumed at a given moment in time and within any single group of consumers.

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From the perspective of the consumers’ revolt in literary theory, the radical moment of collective subjectivism no sooner arrives than it passes. Suggesting that the capitalist culture industry has effectively eroded the whole notion of an autonomous art, Habermas has argued that, when the laws of the market which govern the sphere of commodity exchange penetrate the sphere of art and discourse about art, then critical judgement transforms itself into consumption and into acts of individualized reception, rather than public communication.27 The valorizing theory of this privatized response in the case of literature is Norman Holland’s ‘transactive criticism’, which he describes as abandoning ‘the Cartesian craving for objectivity’ and ‘restor[ing] stories to their rightful owners — you and me’.28 The transactive critic celebrates ‘the obvious truth that we each read differently’, and counters those ‘more orthodox critics’ who try to suppress ‘that embarrassing fact by using differences in response as an occasion for eliminating difference’, that is, ‘subtracting readings so as to narrow them down or cancel some’.29 (Robert Crosman, incidentally, has recast this hermeneutic point in the rhetoric of consumerism when he insists that, ‘in order to serve the various needs and desires of various readers, texts ought to have plural meanings.’30) For the transactive critic, the text is the private property of its individual consumer—‘you and me’. ‘Much as a musician might play out an infinity of variations on a single melody’, Holland’s individual lives out variations on an ‘identity theme’ which, as the ‘primary identity’ imprinted on the infant psyche in its relations to its ‘mother-person’, is structurally unchanging though capable of infinite ‘variations’ or transformations.31 All interpretations, according to Holland, ‘express the identity themes of the people making the interpretations’: ‘each reader, in effect, re-creates the work in terms of his own identity theme’, shaping ‘the text to match his own characteristic defences, fantasies, and coherences’.32 (Holland’s habitual use of the masculine pronoun would seem to help prove his theory.) First, he shapes it so it will pass through the network of his adaptive and defensive strategies for coping with the world. Second, he re-creates from it the particular kind of fantasy and gratification he responds to.33 all of us, as we read, use the literary work to symbolize and finally to replicate ourselves.34 Rereading ‘The Purloined Letter’ in 1980 in the light of Lacan’s and Derrida’s readings, Holland rejected as both epistemologically and empirically untenable those dualistic theories of reading, such as Iser’s, Jauss’s and Riffaterre’s, which concede only a relative autonomy to the reader, attributing certain inherent features to the text, which the reader is then said to reconstruct in his/her own image.35 Radically subjectivist and consumer-oriented though it is, Holland’s criticism could be viewed as an attempt to repair, at the level of interpretation or consumption, that self-alienation and anomie of the individualist subject which

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preoccupied so much of literature during the high-modernist period but which, Jameson and Eagleton tell us, has symptomatically ceased to be a source of anxiety in the postmodernist period, either for literature or for interpretative theory. Simultaneously producer and consumer, Holland’s unalienated reader is a subject of pleasure, rather than knowledge, of the text. Similarly, it is as an ‘aristocratic’, semi-autonomous subject of pleasure that Barthes seeks to reconstitute the subject in The Pleasure of the Text—a subject whose dispersal among the codes and discourses of which it is an imaginary effect has denied it any cognitive relation to its object. (‘Thus, what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.’36) Like most subjectivist or consumer-oriented theories, Holland’s and Barthes’s have both their ‘modernist’ and their ‘postmodernist’ moments: moments of imaginary autonomy and transcendence, and moments of knowing subjection and complicity. Holland’s ‘transactive criticism’ might be characterized in Lacanian terms as a ‘mirror stage’ or narcissistic criticism. The textual object, according to Holland, reflects back at the reader an image of the reading subject; but this subject is restored to itself, recentred or de-alienated, only to lose itself again, turning into an ‘imaginary’ self, a subject caught in the realm of simulacra, of imaginary identifications. In his 1983 essay ‘Postmodern psychoanalysis’, Holland reiterates the ‘modernist’ moment of his theory when explaining that ‘transactive criticism in America asks the critic to build his [sic] essay from his own response rather than from a work of art imagined as having a being all its own’;37 but this moment of autonomous, unalienated production proves illusory when the critic tries to identify the response in question without mediating it with a ‘meta-response’. The ‘identity theme’ of which every reading of a text is a ‘variation’ is, by definition, unknowable, since every attempt to interpret it merely produces a further variation. ‘In other words, this theme-and-variations concept of identity decenters the individual in a distinctly Postmodern, metafictional way. You are ficted, and I am ficted, like characters in a Postmodern novel.’38 Remote as Holland’s nutting-out of the problem is from the mercurial self-reflections of Barthes, their discourses rehearse analogous moments of vertigo. The reader for jouissance, in The Pleasure of the Text, is the subject which knows itself as ‘ficted’ and seeks a sensation of freedom from its subject-ion, its imaginary self-hood, by dissolving itself into the forces and codes of which it is an ‘imaginary’ effect, or in which it is unconsciously constructed. V Emancipation and subjection, autonomy and complicity, production and consumption—what I have called the themes of ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ respectively—oscillate throughout the radically relativistic or ‘subjectivist’ theories of reading which have displaced the structuralist dream of scientificity. Privileging consumption over production (reading over writing)

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only to unmask the one as a covert form of the other, such theories can be read as instances both of resistance to, and complicity with, what Jameson terms the ‘cultural logic’ of the postmodernist period. ‘Objective’ cognition having been demystified as an imaginary effect of the structures and forces which unconsciously inhabit the subject, such theories return the decentred subject to an imaginary autonomy and transcendence, either by constructing it as a subject of consumption and pleasure rather than of knowledge, or by reconstituting it as a collective autonomous subject. Viewed from one angle, these ‘postmodern’ theories can be seen as quintessentially ‘modernist’ strategies within contemporary criticism to resist the reduction of art/literature to the status of an exchangeable commodity, and the reduction of reading (or the interpretation of any cultural text) to a passive consumption. Commodity production is production for exchange, not for consumption by the immediate producer; ‘subjectivist’ criticism reconstitutes the reader-consumer as the text’s producer, and when I produce the text for my own, immediate consumption the critical labour is no longer alienated. My usage of the terms ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’ in this paper is, of course, essentially arbitrary, and, as the prefix ‘post-’ entails, it projects as a temporal distinction (and a recent one at that) what I have tried to suggest are coexistent moments in any self-reflexive discourse. Perhaps equally plausibly, we might call these two moments (the moment of ‘imaginary’ autonomy and the moment of ‘knowing’ subjection) those of realism and modernism respectively, or, again, those of Romanticism and realism respectively.39 It seems an invariable property of any modernizing poetics that, having defined itself (its own disillusionment) against the mystifications of an earlier period’s poetics, it then colonizes the past—its defining historical other—with its own preoccupations, its own truths. The ‘classic realist’ or ‘Balzacian’ work against which Barthes set the modernist or scriptible text turns out on close inspection, in the case of Sarrasine, to be more modern than might have been expected. In the preface to his recent book on Shakespeare, Terry Eagleton suggests that, ‘though conclusive evidence is hard to come by, it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida’.40 This has happened before; Shakespeare Our Contemporary and Shakespeare: An Existential View are the titles of two other modernizing constructions of the Bard.41 One of the functions of the production of new period definitions like that of ‘postmodernism’ is a renewal or defamiliarization of our cultural milieu, an updating of the present by locating its distinctive origins in the more recent past. Theories of postmodernism as ‘period’ rather than as aesthetic genre or style typically entail a notion of cultural coupure, a decisive break with ‘modernism’, generally (though by no means universally) dated in the late 1950s or early 1960s.42 Yet to reread Balzac’s anatomy of early nineteenth-century French culture in Illusions perdues in the light of Peter Bürger’s, Jameson’s or Eagleton’s definitions of the distinctive cultural conditions of our own period is

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to be reminded that the penetration of commodity logic into the failing heart of the cultural sphere (i.e. the alienation and reification of writing as a commodity for exchange, the structural subjection of the publishing, reviewing, theatre, poetry-writing and paper-making industries to the profit motive) has typified capitalist society at least since the 1820s. And, while it is argued that the historical failure of the early avant-garde’s interventionist ambitions is one of the determinate conditions of ‘postmodernist’ culture, it might equally and perhaps more plausibly be argued that the feminist avant-garde of the past two decades has come closer to realizing such ambitions than was ever latent in the programmes of surrealism or futurism. The holistic concept of ‘period’ depends upon the taxonomical privileging of one ensemble of cultural practices— identified as the distinctive or definitive one—over a plurality of others within the so-called ‘period’. The homogenizing effects of such privileging—which subsumes a multiplicity of cultural practices with potentially non-synchronous or relatively autonomous histories under a single ‘cultural dominant’—resembles the homogenizing effects of commodification. (While my own self-consciously ‘tropical’, quasi-parodic reading of certain instances of ‘subjectivist’ criticism within the problematic of consumerism rejects the assumption that such theories are simply complicit with postmodernism’s supposed disempowering of the subject, it also clearly elides significant differences which inform those diverse theories in their various national and institutional contexts. Any adequate historical critique of reader-oriented hermeneutics would need to take account of the different ideological formations in which Fish’s professionalism and Bennett’s Marxism, Holland’s ego psychology and Barthes’s Lacanianism are inscribed in their respective North American, British and French academic and cultural contexts.) In so far as the institutions of the capitalist culture industry and market (including those of education, publishing, art galleries, theatres and the media) depend for their intelligibility and survival on the canonization or privileging of certain cultural products over others, the enterprise of periodization— identifying, as it does, what is new or newly ‘dominant’—is complicit with that industry’s interests. The recent massive production of monographs, journals, art shows, conferences, television and radio programmes devoted to defining the phenomenon of ‘postmodernism’ clearly participates in that reification and commodification of culture which is said to be a defining feature of the period itself. If the culture industry relies on generating new or oppositional movements for the continuous reproduction of its markets, however, this is not so much in order to displace as to defamiliarize the ‘classics’ of a (previously) dominant movement—to renovate the images we have of them. This defamiliarization is now happening with respect to ‘high modernism’ and the avant-garde, as AngloAmerican critics (rediscovering their debt to the Frankfurt School) review the artefacts of a now ‘old’ period in the waning light of the cultural sphere’s submergence beneath the horizons of the market-place.

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Participating willy-nilly in the logic of the culture industry, then, the oppositional criticism of period theorists like Jameson and Eagleton has its moment of complicity as well as its moment of resistance, and it may be the former which is unavoidably the more enduring moment. Jameson’s essays toward the cognitive mapping of postmodernism promise to restore to us in the form of a knowledge the cultural text we inhabit or which inhabits us. But how does the self-transcending subject of cognition differ from the ‘imaginary’ autonomous subject of consumption? Like ideology itself in its Althusserian definition, the commodity (or the advertising industry which invests the object with its symbolic value and, thus, transforming it into an image of itself, constructs the object as commodity) interpellates the consumer as an autonomous subject: the subject of choice, and as such a self-determining, selfdefining subject. But if what we are consuming is (as Debord suggests) not so much an object as an image of the object, one which is in turn an image of ourselves as consuming subjects, this closing of the gap between object and subject simultaneously opens up a gap within the subject. The subject of consumption can never be self-identical; there is always différance or slippage in consumption. The desire to consume (the consuming desire) is predicated on lack: precisely a lack of the subject-identity of which the commodity is an image. Without such difference and deferral, commodity consumption would come to an end. And this is no less true of the consumer of cultural criticism than it is of the consumer, say, of the huge array of perfumes manufactured to meet each woman’s image of herself—made, as the advertising says, ‘for the kind of woman you are’. A loss of co-ordinates, both spatial and conceptual, is for Jameson, Eagleton, Baudrillard and others a defining feature of postmodernism as a new period. Thus Jameson explains his own efforts to map the postmodernist terrain as essays toward an ‘as yet unimaginable new mode of representing’ the ‘world space of multinational capital’, a representation ‘in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion’.43 Always cast as a prolegomenon to (and thus a deferral of) a genuine knowledge, Jameson’s essays in cognitive mapping finally make no ingenuous claims to faithful reflection of their terrain; and the self-reflexive moment in his work, the moment at which it refuses any such artless claims to mimesis of its object, is also the most explicit statement of the kind of subject that oppositional criticism projects. Recalling Althusser’s redefinition of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’, Jameson says: ‘surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do.’44 Promising no more than an imaginary (if as yet unimagined) knowledge of its object, in other words, cognitive mapping is a confessedly ideological project, founded on the Althusserian assumption that ideology, if not the poor, will always be with us—its explicit aim being to constitute individuals as (albeit ‘imaginary’) autonomous subjects, the subjects

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of choice and thus of history. Jameson’s own habit of referring to this subject as ‘the bourgeois ego’, however, is a reminder that the project is less one of constitution than of reconstitution: something like trying to squeeze the toothpaste of the socially deconstructed subject back into the tube of ideology— surely a Sisyphian labour by the logic of Jameson’s own base-superstructure analysis of the postmodern period. In confessing to its ideological motive, cognitive mapping announces its moment of resistance: resistance to the disempowering fragmentation of the self under late capitalism. Since there can be no politics without a subject (nor anything for that politics to envisage emancipating) and no praxis without a knowledge, then it would seem, for Jameson, that the subject of knowledge is the subject of politics. But if the fragmented subject of ‘contemporary theory’ is a mere epiphenomenon of the decentred social subject of consumer capitalism, then the project of reconstructing this subject at the level of critical discourse (i.e. as a discursive effect) would seem at best a self-contradictory undertaking, doomed always to fail in its aim of repairing within theory what is an ‘objective’ effect of socioeconomic process. There is certainly a pleasure of consumption for the reader of Jameson’s own texts: the continual pleasure of discovering unexpected homologies, novel resemblances and differences, vertigos of self-reflexion—above all, the pleasure of always knowing that there will always be more to know. But that the desire for knowledge (and thus for the transcendent subjectivity of cognition) does not in or of itself give rise to the desire to act was signalled by Marx in the hiatus which he marked with a semicolon in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant distinguishes between ‘theoretical cognition’ as one through which we come to know ‘what there is’ and ‘practical cognition’ as one through which we imagine ‘what there should be’. The deconstructive reading of Marx is to interpret his master-narrative of human progress toward emancipation as the projection of a desire, rather than of a knowledge. Yet, as the Kantian definition of ‘practical cognition’ suggests, such a deconstruction might in itself serve as an emancipation into politics or practice of the otherwise self-divided subject of an always deferred, since always incomplete, knowledge. Like any self-reflexive art (Christo’s empaquetages, say), the discourse of the oppositional wrapping-up of ‘postmodernism’ as a ‘period’ is always in varying degrees complicit with what it opposes. How this critical discourse is to be judged must depend on the kind of desire we allow it to generate for us: the desire to know, for example, or the desire to act. A deconstructive reading of Jameson’s own totalizing theories of postmodernism might ask whether the implied subject of his cognitive discourse can afford to know itself as white, First World, probably male, middle-class and academic— without, that is, its transcendent knowledge being recognized as the ‘imaginary’ effect of particular institutional, social, economic and ideological determinants.

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I began this paper by asking from where and in whose name can adversarial criticism of Jameson’s and Eagleton’s kind be conducted. Clearly, the oppositional consumer which their texts interpellate is no more a universal subject than the knowledge which they promise and withhold is universally desired. Jameson is the most self-reflexive of postmodernist theorists (and it is perhaps for this reason that his texts may generate more of a desire to know, less of a desire to act, than those of a critic such as Eagleton). But the question what kind of representation or ‘imaginary’ knowledge would be politically most useful for a Third World factory worker, for example, as distinct from a First World academic, is one which his texts never pose. The ‘modernist’ moment of oppositional postmodernist theory is that in which it mistakes the liberal academy as the collective subject of a universally useful knowledge. And on that, regretfully ‘postmodernist’ moment of my reflections I must give up the pleasure of my own text. University of Melbourne NOTES 1 Terry Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism’, New Left Review, 152 (July-August 1985), p. 60. 2 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 3 See Fredric Jameson, ‘Reification and utopia in mass culture’, Social Text, I (Winter 1979), p. 131. 4 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), para. 15. 5 Jameson, op. cit., p. 131. 6 Ibid., p. 132. 7 Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (London: Vision Press, 1973), pp. 310–11. 8 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (July-August 1984), p. 57. 9 Ibid., p. 56. 10 See Bürger, op. cit. 11 See above, note 8. 12 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, p. 61. Cf. e.g. Ihab Hassan, ‘The culture of postmodernism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 2, 3 (1985), pp. 119–31; Hal Foster, ‘(Post) Modern polemics’, New German Critique, 33 (Fall 1984), pp. 67–78; Norman N.Holland, ‘Postmodern psychoanalysis’, in Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan (eds), Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 291–309; Eagleton, op. cit., p. 71. 13 Cf. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 28. In explanations of cultural process which employ what Althusser terms a theory of ‘expressive causality’, ‘a sequence of historical events or texts and artifacts is rewritten in terms of some

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14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

deeper, underlying, and more “fundamental” narrative, of a hidden master narrative which is the allegorical key or figural content of the first sequence of empirical materials.’ Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and consumer society’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), p. 115. Eagleton, op. cit., p. 71. Ibid. Cf. Terry Eagleton, ‘The revolt of the reader’, New Literary History, 13, 3 (Spring 1982), pp. 449–52. See Roland Barthes, ‘From work to text’, in Image—Music—Text, ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 160–1. Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., pp. 162–63. Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 232. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, p. 63. Stanley Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, in Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 158. See ibid., pp. 303–55. See Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), ch. 8, and ‘Text, readers, reading formations’, Literature and History, 9, 2 (Autumn 1983), pp. 214–27. See also Bennett’s contribution to ‘The text in itself: a symposium’, Southern Review, 17, 2 (July 1984), pp. 118–24. See Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary history as a challenge to literary theory’, in Ralph Cohen (ed.), New Directions in Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 11–41. Jürgen Habermas, quoted in Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 165. Norman N.Holland, ‘Unity identity text self’ (abstract), PMLA, 90, 5 (October 1975), p. 809, and ‘Re-covering “The Purloined Letter”: reading as a personal transaction’, in Susan R.Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays in Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 370. Holland, ‘Re-covering “The Purloined Letter”’, p. 370. Robert Crosman, ‘Do readers make meaning?’, in Suleiman and Crosman (eds), op. cit., p. 162. Holland, ‘Unity identity text self’, p. 814. Ibid., pp. 818 and 909. Ibid., p. 818. Ibid., p. 816. Holland, ‘Re-covering “The Purloined Letter”’, pp. 365–7. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), pp. 11–12. Holland, ‘Postmodern psychoanalysis’, p. 296. Ibid., p. 304.

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39 Where realism places the individual subject at the centre of its fictional world, asserting the primacy of individual experience, modernism explores this subject’s self-alienation and anomie. Where Romanticism affirms subjective autonomy, positing an unsocialized subjectivity, realism explores the socialization of the subject, the formation of the self by the other. 40 Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. ix–x. 41 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1967); David Horowitz, Shakespeare: An Existential View (London: Social Science Paperbacks, 1967). 42 For a discussion of generic and historical definitions of literary postmodernism, see David Bennett, ‘Parody, postmodernism and the politics of reading’, Critical Quarterly, 27, 4 (Winter 1985), pp. 27–43. 43 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, p. 92. 44 Ibid., p. 90.

Making it ‘neo’: the new historicism and Renaissance literature HOWARD FELPERIN

THE OLD HISTORICISM AND THE NEW My point of departure is a recent essay by Stephen Greenblatt entitled ‘Marlowe and the will to absolute play’, a strong reading of Marlowe’s plays and a strong showing in the current struggle for the repossession of Renaissance literature in the name of a new historicism.1 In spite—indeed, because—of its strength, and that of the movement it spearheads, I want to take issue with Greenblatt’s reading and with the neo-historicist understanding that supports it. I hasten to point out that the present essay is not meant as a corrective to Greenblatt’s, at the level either of interpretation or of theory. I am not suggesting, that is, that Greenblatt has taken a wrong turn within his approach to the plays—though this may seem to be the case at a certain point—or a wrongheaded approach to them from the outset. My purpose is not to invalidate Greenblatt’s neo-historicism or its application to Marlowe but to deprivilege it; or, more precisely, to dispute its own covert claim to interpretative privilege by revealing the repressions necessary to enable that claim to be made. So the following observations are offered more as a supplement than a corrective; they attempt to articulate the shadow-side of a sympathetic, even shared, enterprise: what Greenblatt saw without seeing and knew without being able to take into account, the ‘unspoken other’ of his discourse.2 That ‘other’ is, as we shall see, a political as well as philosophical matter, and, in attempting to unconceal it here, I admit to a political motive of my own: to make room within the spreading institutional hegemony of neo-historicism for a different kind of reading, one that is often regarded from within this latest regime as ideologically unsound and politically suspect. That is a pity, to say the least, because neo-historicism, in both its American and its British manifestations, still has much to learn from its deconstructive ‘other’. Hence the need to question the principles and practices on which the new historicism is proceeding before they have the effect of proscribing alternative, more openly ‘metaphysical’ readings of Renaissance texts. Such readings, I shall argue, are not only no less philosophically valid than their own but play a conscientious and productive institutional role in relation to them. The particular reading of Marlowe I have in

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mind, for which the present essay clears the way, stands in just such a dialogic relation to Greenblatfs reading. It is entitled ‘Marlowe and the will to authentic being’. In the difference between ‘absolute play’ and ‘authentic being’ as the object of the Marlovian will and the project of his plays, my entire argument with Greenblatt’s neo-historicism is foreshadowed, and an appeal reopened from a historical and cultural to a more philosophical criticism. Now, having charged Greenblatt with illicitly privileging his neo-historicist reading of Marlowe, I am bound to account for my revision of his title and renaming of Marlowe’s project as something other than a wilful or arbitrary inversion of Greenblatt’s reading, with its own implicit and no less illicit claim to privilege. For neither of us is permitted by the logic of our respective poststructuralisms to believe in interpretative privilege, in the inbuilt advantage of one interpretative strategy over another in disclosing a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ textual meaning hitherto obscured to our blind and blundering predecessors—not even (especially not) when the strategy and meaning in question are our own. This is not by virtue of any particular personal modesty, false or sincere, of the kind expressed in acknowledgement pages (‘we are pygmies standing on giants’ shoulders’); nor is it by reason of any liberal-democratic belief in the value of individualism or pluralism in interpretation (‘all interpretations have a right to exist, and are to that extent more or less right—let a thousand flowers bloom’). It is, rather, because post-structuralism, in both its contextualist (or neo-historicist) version and its textualist (or deconstructive) version, is not, philosophically speaking, a ‘realism’ at all but a ‘conventionalism’.3 That is to say, poststructuralism does not posit as its object of knowledge a text whose meaning exists independently of our terms and method of enquiry into it, of our construction or representation of it. In this respect, post-structuralism is fundamentally different from such epistemological and methodological ‘realisms’ as scientific empiricism and historical Marxism on the one hand, and from the ‘idealism’ of structuralist poetics and cultural semiotics on the other, whose textual dealings are entirely definitional and aprioristic. Post-structuralism, by contrast, proceeds on the understanding that language, and hence all texts, are multivocal, plurisignificant and polymorphous, so that any attempt to restrict textual productivity to a single meaning, claimed to be ‘real’ or ‘true’, ‘authentic’ or ‘autonomous’, arises not from the side of the text but from that of its interpreters or the interpretative communities that take it up. Such interpretative claims are always a function or illusion of a will to power over the text, even when they are made by the author him/herself. The shifting into place, under historical pressures, of a new set of collective presuppositions, a change of institutional ground-rules and interpretative grid, changes the object of knowledge according to the new conventions of enquiry. It throws different texts into and out of scrutiny and esteem, and makes visible previously unseen or unforegrounded meanings in the same texts. But, because of the very historicity of this process of becoming visible, thinkable and sayable, those meanings may well be new but can never be ‘true’ or ‘real’, ‘authentic’ or ‘autonomous’, in any

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transhistorical sense. All such claims to privilege are made, and sometimes enjoyed, by grace or power of the ruling or dominant paradigm that made them thinkable, which changes soon enough from that of the context of production of the text to those of its contexts of reception. The very notion of a ‘will to absolute play’, or for that matter a ‘will to authentic being’, as the project of Marlowe’s plays would have been unthinkable and unspeakable to Marlowe and his contemporaries, not because such concepts are from an Elizabethan viewpoint shameful or even heretical—this might well have recommended them to Marlowe —but because the discursive formation, the conceptual framework, within which such terms might have made sense to him did not yet exist. So the question arises, what is a so-called neo-historicist like Greenblatt doing when he anachronistically foregrounds ‘absolute play’ as the Marlovian project? Or what is a so-called deconstructionist like myself doing when he urges a shift of focus to its ‘other’, something so apparently contrary, but no less anachronistic, as ‘authentic being’? What we are certainly not doing, and should not delude ourselves that we are doing, is identifying either of these notions as the ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ meaning of Marlowe’s plays, in the sense of a historical meaning, either that which Marlowe intended to convey through them or that which contemporary audiences and readers might have found in them. That is what the ‘old historicism’ was about. Operating as a late, empirical application of nineteenthcentury hermeneutics, it identified the meaning of the literary text with the author’s intention and his or her historical culture’s understanding of it, the adequation of the one to the other being assumed in a successful work. For the old historicism, language presented no problem or, more accurately, presented only philological problems, in so far as its problems were perceived as arising, not from a fundamental semiotic multiplicity and excess, but from the contingencies of historical distance and alterity. Language itself was not yet conceived as intrinsically problematic above and beyond historical languages, and was in principle transparent to the point of invisibility. Problems concerning authorial intention, later to trouble literary criticism, were thus radically contained by this assumption of linguistic transparency. Intention, the goal of the old historicism, was pre-textual and extra-linguistic, since it was located in the mind of the author, on which the text was potentially a transparent window once the operations of its historical idiom were mastered. Even when the author’s intention was not clearly accessible in the text or was a matter of contention, it could still be corroborated or triangulated by comparing other historical and biographical evidence—authors’ letters, annotations of their sources, their other writings, or those of their contemporaries. Thus confined and stabilized within the enclosure of a historical culture’s self-presence, or a historical mind’s selfunderstanding— confined, that is, within the presumed coherence of this perfect circle of communication—the meaning of the text could be exhumed and established once and for all time, through the painstaking methods of

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empirical research. Reliable, positive knowledge of the literary past, like that of the past itself, could be built up, filled out bit by bit, until it was complete. For the old historicism, unlike the new, was a realism; its knowledge of past literature, once ascertained, was supposed to be independent of its methods of enquiry, which were modelled, after all, as closely as possible on those of nineteenth-century empirical science. Its methods, that is, were objective, so it could yield authentic knowledge of the other, of the other as other, untransformed and unappropriated by the language of the self. For such knowledge was based on objective evidence, the best of which was the author’s actual writings, what would correspond in empirical science to direct sense-data gleaned from the phenomenon under investigation. This was primary; but a great deal of secondary evidence, ranging from contemporary allusions and anecdotes to other accounts—put together by analogous means—of the political, intellectual and social history of the time, was also admissible, once duly analysed and weighed, as it bore upon intention and meaning. Anything close to the author in time and place was potentially meaningful, or metonymic of meaning, proximity to the work’s point of origin in the mind of its author being the overriding criterion of value and validity, in a word, of ‘authority’. Through its act of approximation across time and distance to this supposed point of origin, historical criticism could then appropriate to itself something of the same authority to support its claim to interpretative privilege. It was ‘true’, at least ‘truer’ than any other interpretation, because it was historical.4 Now some new historicists, pre-eminently Greenblatt, recognize the hermeneutic hubris of attempting to maintain such a privileged position and the hermeneutic hazards that beset any attempt to make contact with, or even approach, the text’s point of origin in the past. This is the case for two fundamental reasons, both of which Greenblatt raises directly. One is the problem of present appropriation that we have already touched upon, of accessing the other in the language of the self without turning it into the self. ‘If cultural poetics is conscious of its status as interpretation’, he writes, ‘this consciousness must extend to an acceptance of the impossibility of fully reconstructing and reentering the culture of the sixteenth century, of leaving behind one’s own situation.’ ‘The questions I ask of my material’, he goes on to realize, ‘and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by the questions I ask of myself.’ Having identified, but without fully addressing, the problem of ‘these impurities’, Greenblatt raises the second, equally serious problem—what might be termed the problem of past elusiveness: Each of these texts is viewed as the focal point for converging lines of force in sixteenth-century culture Their significance for us is not that we may see through them to underlying and prior historical principles but rather that we may interpret the interplay of their symbolic structures with those perceivable in the careers of their authors and in the larger social world as constituting a single, complex process of self-fashioning. (pp. 5–6)

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At this point the full conventionalism of the new historicism, as distinct from the realism of the old, becomes almost explicit. Greenblatt does not imagine himself seeing through the text ‘to underlying and prior historical principles’ but seeing in the text ‘symbolic structures’ whose relation to other symbolic structures in the life and society of the author (whose mode of existence is also presumably textual) is not one of direct correspondence or perfect coherence but one of ‘interplay’. Greenblatt’s syntax here, uncharacteristically and significantly, is less than transparent, but he seems to be saying that the encounter with historical texts does not yield real authorial intentions or cultural meanings but constructions that to some extent swerve from some prior, deeper and ultimately unknowable reality and that are more or less incoherent among themselves: symbolic structures always already divergent and detached from what they symbolize, at play with it and with one another, and thereby requiring further interpretation. Their relation to ‘underlying and prior’ historical principles is necessarily elusive and untrustworthy, in something of the way that rhetoric is in relation to logic, ideology is to history, or manifest to latent dream-content is traditionally conceived. For, like these analogues, such structures may well be cunningly or unconsciously contrived by author and culture to conceal a deeper, potentially threatening knowledge from others or even from themselves. Such methodological circumspection is only to be expected from a historicism too well read in modern social and psychoanalytic theory to view historical cultures as fully coherent articulations of positive facts and transparent documents that can be exhumed and read off unproblematically, and too aware of the obliquities and duplicities of language, power and ideology to make bald claims for its own historical certitude and interpretative authority. Neohistoricists—at least this one— may know all this, but such knowledge does not prevent them from going about their business of interpretation as if they did not, and from staking their own claim to interpretative privilege, albeit covertly, in the process. ‘I do not shrink from these impurities,’ Greenblatt writes, ‘but I have tried to compensate for the indeterminacy and incompleteness they generate by constantly returning to particular lives and particular situations, to the material necessities and social pressures that men and women daily confronted, and to a small number of resonant texts’ (p. 5). ‘Shrink’ he most certainly does not from the ‘impurities’ of method and material he openly acknowledges. But the compensation offered for ‘the indeterminacy and incompleteness they generate’ may still leave something to be desired, may remain an unfulfilled, indeed unfulfillable, promise. For this ‘constant return’ to ‘particular lives’, ‘particular situations’, ‘material necessities’, ‘social pressures that men and women daily confronted’—to things that may seem in their apparent concreteness to subtend or pre-exist textuality altogether, and hence the indeterminacy and incompleteness of textuality— would thereby reinstate a claim to historicity prior and deeper than any text, by Greenblatt’s own principles, could ever have made. The return to such pre-textual specificities would certainly be the compensation and corrective necessary to

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counter the hermeneutic scepticism that Greenblatt himself feels and acknowledges. The problem is that such specificities are not a pre-textual but still very much a textual matter, and such a return, constant as it is, is not really a return at all but, as we shall see, a projection, albeit a retrospective projection. GREENBLATT’S MARLOWE The essay on Marlowe richly exemplifies this pattern of proclaimed return to the other and unwitting relapse into the self. Greenblatt begins, according to his promise and usual practice, with a particular life and situation—that is, with a text, in this case an eyewitness account of an incident that occurred on the West African coast in 1586. The narrator is an English merchant named John Sarracoll. Greenblatt lets him ‘tell his own story’: The fourth of November we went on shore to a town of the Negroes… which we found to be but lately built: it was of about two hundred houses, and walled about with mighty great trees, and stakes so thick, that a rat could hardly get in or out. But as it chanced, we came directly upon a port which was not shut up, where we entered with such fierceness, that the people fled all out of the town, which we found to be finely built after their fashion, and the streets of it so intricate that it was difficult for us to find the way out that we came in at. We found their houses and streets so finely and cleanly kept that it was an admiration to us all, for that neither in the houses nor streets was so much dust to be found as would fill an egg shell. We found little in their houses, except some mats, gourds, and some earthen pots. Our men at their departure set the town on fire, and it was burnt (for the most part of it) in a quarter of an hour, the houses being covered with reed and straw. (p. 193) Remote as it may initially seem from the topic of Marlowe’s plays, the passage serves Greenblatt’s purposes well. With its careful notation of places and dates and matter-of-fact, diaristic style, Sarracoll’s account seems to transport us, as it were, into the very presence of the past. Sarracoll’s account is, after all, ‘his own story’. Moreover, the spontaneous destruction it reports, if not the tone of its reportage, has a distinctly Marlovian flavour. Even before Greenblatt cites Tamburlaine’s burning of the town where Zenocrate dies and Barabas’s poisoning of the nunnery that houses his daughter, the student of Marlowe will have brought to mind several analogous moments in the plays. Even the Deptford tavern where Marlowe himself was fatally stabbed a few years later seems, in this connection, uncannily close at hand, not just because it was located only a few miles from the docks at Gravesend whence Sarracoll embarked, but because of the similarly under-motivated violence of the brawl that took place there, an event that seems in retrospect to have flared up out of almost nothing. The effect is one of rapidly collapsing perspectives, as

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vast gaps of geographical distance and historical time seem to close at a dizzying pace. ‘Interpret me, if you can’ is the hermeneutic imperative that cries out to us from between the reticent, riddling lines of Sarracoll’s account across the cultural and psychological distance that separates us from it. ‘Interpret me’, it beckons, ‘and you will also understand Christopher Marlowe.’ After all, they are products of the same culture. Greenblatt can now extract from his hat the rabbit he has so deftly concealed there. ‘If,’ he fancies, ‘on returning to England in 1587, the merchant and his associates had gone to see the Lord Admiral’s Men perform a new play, Tamburlaine the Great, they would have seen an extraordinary meditation on the roots of their own behaviour’ (p. 194). It is only fair to Greenblatt to acknowledge that getting down to those ‘roots’, to the heart of the deeply cultural matter, to the metonymy of meaning shared between these two Elizabethans, Sarracoll and Marlowe, who might well have rubbed shoulders with one another in 1587 at the theatre, is not in fact facilitated by Sarracoll’s account, as it might have been for an older historicism. In fact, traditional interpretative priorities are reversed. While he plays up the claim to contemporary actuality of Sarracoll’s ‘own story’ and thus to the hermeneutic edge it affords in reading Marlowe, he does not quite forget that it too is a text, and at first glance a rather opaque and puzzling one at that. Far from explaining or even illuminating Marlowe’s plays, Sarracoll’s account itself stands in need of explanation, for it raises more questions than it answers. In fact, it is Marlowe who will ultimately be called upon to illuminate Sarracoll. Remarking on its ‘casual, unexplained violence’ as ‘most striking’, Greenblatt proceeds to interrogate the merchant’s tale: Does the merchant feel that the firing of the town needs no explanation? If asked, would he have had one to give? Why does he take care to tell us why the town burned so quickly, but not why it was burned? Is there an aesthetic element in his admiration of the town, so finely built, so intricate, so cleanly kept? And does this admiration conflict with or somehow fuel the destructiveness? If he feels no uneasiness at all, why does he suddenly shift and write not we but our men set the town on fire? Was there an order or not? And, when he recalls the invasion, why does he think of rats ? The questions are all met by the moral blankness that rests like thick snow on Sarracoll’s sentences. ‘The 17th day of November we departed from Sierra Leona, directing our course for the Straits of Magellan.’ (p. 194) Greenblatt’s strategy of return, of letting the merchant ‘tell his own story’, yields something other than ‘a concrete apprehension…of a specific form of power’; it yields a series of troubling, unanswered questions. These questions are troubling, however, not because they are unanswerable but because they are rhetorical, because we fear we know only too well their answers in advance. We certainly know where their answers are to be found and the general outline they would take. Where else would they be found but in the

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forestructure of prejudices—Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s Vorurteile—that conditions the expressive possibilities of Sarracoll’s description of events, in the ‘unspoken other’ of the discourse he shares with his contemporaries that enables his utterances to make sense to them without his having to spell it out.5 That forestructure of understanding, and the disturbing answers it holds to Greenblatt’s questions, he has already telegraphed to us even before raising them when he ironically refers to the ‘atypical’ absence in the passage of ‘the bloodbath that usually climaxes these incidents’ and terms it ‘a reminder of what until recently was called one of the glorious achievements of Renaissance civilization’ (p. 193). The ‘casual, unexplained violence’ that is so striking and the ‘moral blankness that rests like thick snow on Sarracoll’s sentences’ turn out to be explicable before the narrative fact in terms of the prejudices that Sarracoll does not need to explain or even state, precisely because they could once be taken for granted within the discursive formation of Elizabethan colonial and mercantile expansion. One did not need to be a kind of Elizabethan ‘snowman’ to talk of these things in this way, in an almost Kafkaesque neutrality of tonal register; in fact, there were no Elizabethan snowmen. For many, if not most, of Sarracoll’s contemporaries the motives for incinerating an African village, or even for decimating its inhabitants, are too evident to require explanation, since they inhere in the very structure of the discourse in which such events are described: the village is the fabrication of creatures alienated from the divine authority in whose name English expansionism is carried out and justified; it is the work of creatures who are not fully human, subhuman at best and demonic at worst; and, like the destruction of some prodigious ant-hill, its burning involves no transgression against kind; in fact, there is nothing ‘unnatural’ about it. Nor is it extraordinary in Elizabethan terms that the fine construction and cleanliness of the town do elicit extended comment from Sarracoll, for, given the subhumanity of its builders and occupants, it is these qualities that would have struck him as remarkable indeed. And, within such a discursive field, is it really surprising that Sarracoll should think of ‘rats’? Whether or not this explanation of Sarracoll’s narrative exclusions and inclusions and of his matter-of-fact reserve is generally valid—and I trust that Greenblatt and other neo-historicists engaged in the archaeology of colonial discourse would find it so, since it merely extends and applies the work they have done—such an explanation must have its own forestructure of understanding, its own unspoken other. And that would have to be sought, not in the discourse of expansionism presupposed by Sarracoll, but in that presupposed by us; not in the context of his production of the text, but in our contemporary context of its reception and reproduction. Greenblatt has already alerted us, after all, that ‘the questions I ask of my material, indeed the very nature of this material, are shaped by the questions I ask of myself.’ Sarracoll’s account is striking and troubling to Greenblatt and to us in precisely the degree to which the forestructure of shared prejudices that condition and constrain its expressive

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possibilities, that define and permeate its domain of discourse, have changed radically over the past four centuries. Few would even attempt nowadays to speak of such matters as Sarracoll describes in a discourse of neutral tones; even if they attempted to do so, it would not strike others as neutral, no more than Kafka’s narrative neutrality, that of In the Penal Colony, for example, can be so regarded. Our twentieth-century, our late twentieth-century, discourse of colonial and mercantile imperialism no longer permits neutral tones, detached observers or the absence of ulterior motives to exist in good faith within it. So thoroughly Marxified, anthropologized and Freudianized has it become that whatever innocence, moral and political, it might once have felt itself to possess—if only by virtue of there being no alternative non-Eurocentric discourse—has been lost to it. Or, to put the matter the other way round, whatever justification it might once have assumed or produced for itself, had it felt the need to do so, is no longer available to it. More tellingly still, whatever innocence or justification it might once have had is now retrospectively denied to it, as the contemporary guilt of our discourse of imperialism—which can only be felt at the moment of its breakdown—is projected backwards on to a past constructed in terms not of cultural alterity but of cultural continuity. Sarracoll troubles us because of our own guilty conscience, our sense of residual complicity with him and his enterprise. The very idea that there must be a deeper psycho-social structure of motive and meaning underlying Sarracoll’s—and Marlowe’s— utterances is a twentieth-century invention essential to the forestructure of understanding we bring to bear on their utterances, but one not necessarily shared by them. The inescapable shadow-side of Greenblatt’s disarming candour about the questions he asks of his material is that the answers he finds in it are the answers he has already found for himself, with the help, needless to say, of a great deal of contemporary cultural prompting. So a political motive begins to emerge as part of the deeper structure of Greenblatt’s reading, the tip not of an iceberg but of the submerged volcano of a politics of decolonization at once broadly social and more narrowly institutional, which conditions and controls that reading in its large methodological contours and local exegetical details. Of course Greenblatt does not explore the submerged politics of his own reading. But the very choice to begin the reading of Marlowe with a text so understated and pedestrian, yet significant and pregnant for these same qualities, is itself politically strategic: For despite all the exoticism in Marlowe—Scythian shepherds, Maltese Jews, German magicians—it is his own countrymen that he broods upon and depicts…. If we want to understand the historical matrix of Marlowe’s achievement, the analogue to Tamburlaine’s restlessness, aesthetic sensitivity, appetite, and violence, we might look not at the playwright’s literary sources, not even at the relentless power-hunger of Tudor absolutism, but at the acquisitive energies of English

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merchants, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, promoters alike of trading companies and theatrical companies. (p. 194) Whether or not such lateral attentiveness will achieve the professed object of understanding, i.e. Marlowe’s ‘historical matrix’—and I am fully persuaded that in Greenblatt’s case it goes far towards that end—it is carried forward by political motives quite remote from those of Tudor England. The lateral attentiveness Greenblatt recommends is explicitly opposed to the hierarchical fixation that has dominated the academic study of Elizabethan drama. Not Marlowe’s literary sources, not the relentless power-hunger of Tudor absolutism—these cynosures of traditional attention are too bookishly or aristocratically aloof, too exclusive, to comprehend the discordia concors and concordia discors of Marlowe’s achievement within a ‘historical matrix’. So something of an inversion of the values and priorities assigned to texts within institutional practice, a programme of textual land-reform or levelling—already announced explicitly in Greenblatt’s preface—is on the platform. The high textuality of literary sources and high drama of Tudor absolutism—those once rich repositories for PhD dissertations and BBC costume-series respectively— are demoted in hermeneutic prestige, and such low textuality as Sarracoll’s mundane travelogue is promoted. All now take on a more egalitarian standing within a reconstituted ground of historical explanation. This project of systematic inversion at the level of Greenblatt’s own textual and institutional practice, its consistent displacement and redistribution of privilege, is, as we shall see, strikingly similar to, yet significantly different from, that deliberate inversion of Elizabethan social process which he discerns or projects in the form of the ‘will to absolute play’ at the heart of Marlovian drama. THE RENAISSANCE CARNIVALESQUE The crucial element, common to both Elizabethan social process and the alleged Marlovian inversion or subversion of it, is relentless repetition. On the part of Tudor authority, this takes the form of a systematic deployment of didactic examples designed to secure the political, religious and moral conformity of potentially wayward subjects. Its counterpart in the careers of Marlowe’s protagonists is an equal and opposite display of ‘constructive power’ exercised in defiance of, or deviation from, those authoritarian structures and directed towards the establishment of an autonomous identity independent of them, ‘as if a man were author of himself’, as Greenblatt puts it, quoting one of Shakespeare’s most Marlovian heroes. The ‘repetition-compulsion’, within which the Marlovian hero repeats his name and his actions over and over again in the course of his dramatic career, is produced in dialectical response to a culture in which literature and history are primary media for the inculcation of ‘repeatable moral lessons’ designed to maintain reigning orthodoxy.

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The theatre is also crucial in this process, taking its place within an inescapable array of public spectacles ranging from homilies against rebellion appointed to be read in churches to public hangings and beheadings for a wide variety of offences, including conspiracy, atheism and sodomy. These are, of course, the very activities through which Marlowe’s heroes, and possibly Marlowe himself, enact their ringing reiterations of a distinction and superiority above the ‘base slaves’, to use one of their own favourite terms of abuse, the men of common mould, who are defined by obedient subjection, which in Marlovian terms means the abjection of not defining themselves at all. Whatever his own beliefs, proclivities or activities, Marlowe’s heroes derive their compulsive energy and take their outsize shape in systematic opposition to the rigidity and closure of a social order that leaves little room for deviant or sceptical manœuvre, for what we might call ‘self-expression’. It is not that deviance was unthinkable, but, as Greenblatt points out elsewhere, it was thinkable only as the thought of another,6 of the other, thinkable, that is, surreptitiously, vicariously or at a relatively safe distance—surely one reason for the exoticism of Marlowe’s heroes and settings—or, closer to home, thinkable only in the mode of denunciation. This profoundly perverse project, this negative labour of constructing the self in the name of a culturally forbidden, and officially proscribed, ‘other’, of something tacitly affirmed by virtue of its being so proscribed, Greenblatt terms ‘the will to play’ in Marlowe. Properly understood, the will to play is in no way a misrepresentation of the peculiar dynamic of Marlovian tragedy, of what underlies and motivates the more particular wills to power, pleasure, wealth and knowledge that characterize the careers of Tamburlaine, Edward II, the Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus, respectively. The ‘will to play’—the very phrase is like a bell to toll us back to things and themes quintessentially Elizabethan, yet distinctly modern as well. It promises to function as a kind of missing link, a needed mediation between Marlowe’s culture and our own, between a Renaissance and a modern anthropology. Indeed, nothing seems to have been more deeply ingrained in the texture, or more instinct with the structure, of Renaissance social existence than ‘play’. As numerous studies have shown, play was elaborately institutionalized in the form of holiday rituals— ‘carnival’, the ‘feast of fools’, and other saturnalian occasions—which enabled potentially anarchic and threatening energies within culture to be at once expressed and regulated. The point has frequently been made (and Greenblatt is well acquainted with such studies) that Elizabethan drama seems to reinscribe these ritual patterns— ‘through release to clarification’, as C.L.Barber puts it—within its own structure.7 ‘If every day were playing holiday,’ Prince Hal reflects in a play in which such ritualized inversions are pervasive, ‘To sport would be as tedious as to work.’ That is, of course, the danger posed by Falstaff; and there is a sense in which Marlowe’s heroes succeed where Falstaff fails in reversing the cultural priority of every day to holiday and realizing the ever-present potential of play to overthrow

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repressive cultural norms. ‘Through release to self-construction’ might serve as their revolutionary slogan; for Marlovian monodrama, as Greenblatt and others have made abundantly clear, is also metadrama of a high order, theatre supremely alive to the idea of theatre and to its power to construct, rather than merely imitate, reality. So the idea of play, in an anthropological and a metatheatrical sense that are fully Elizabethan, seems a highly promising point of departure for a neo-historical understanding of the Marlovian project. Yet Greenblatt’s reading of the ‘will to play’ in Marlowe is not confined within any Elizabethan acceptation of these terms. It is not a reading of the playwright backward towards his culture, as it claims and appears to be, but forward towards our own. And there is something in Marlowe’s work, or in the relation between that work and our culture, that licenses this kind of reading. The idea of ‘licence’ is important here, because it is crucial to the Elizabethan understanding of play as culturally ‘licensed’ but in a way different at once from our own and from Marlowe’s understanding of it. For the Elizabethans, play is generally conceived as a licensed transgression of workaday norms, in the way that Shakespeare’s plays were ‘licensed’ by the authorities and that his fools are ‘licensed’—allowed up to a point to voice the normally impermissible—by the authority figures within those plays. Such limited licence was not only tolerable within an authoritarian, not to say totalitarian, social order, but, it has been plausibly argued, necessary in maintaining and perpetuating that order. Bakhtinian ‘carnival’, far from being a revolutionary force, exists in unspoken but dialogic relation with the conservative authority of church and state which permits it.8 It is as much a structural containment of potentially subversive energies that Aristotle, if not Plato, would have understood and approved, as it is an unleashing of them. In a sense, it is their structure. In all the major modes of Elizabethan drama—revenge, tragedy, romantic comedy and chronicle history—this same structural containment of the ludic or anarchic is repeatedly reinscribed. A dazzling cast of metadramatic megalomaniacs—Richard III, Falstaff, Volpone, Iago, Vindice, to name but a few —are allowed to turn their worlds into a stage on which they strut and fret their histrionic and directorial fantasies until they are definitively silenced by rigid conventions of closure, which are theatrically, socially and, in the end, theologically sanctioned. These non-Marlovian self-dramatizers are possessed of a demonic gusto similar to, if not the same as, that which Greenblatt attributes to their Marlovian counterparts: ‘cruel humour, murderous practical jokes, a penchant for the outlandish and absurd, delight in role-playing, entire absorption in the game at hand and consequent indifference to what lies outside the boundaries of the game, radical insensitivity to human complexity and suffering, extreme but disciplined aggression, hostility to transcendence’. All this is contained in many, if not most, of the plays of the period, including Shakespeare’s, and it is readily understandable within the dialectic of carnivalesque inversion of social norms elaborated by Barber and Bakhtin. In a fundamental sense, it exists in the plays that contain it in order that it may be

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contained. It is shown to be a containable will to play or a will to contingent play, and as such it ultimately serves and reinforces the order it defies by collapsing back into the dominant ideology of its age and culture. THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED This is not exactly what we encounter in Marlowe, not the licensed, contingent and containable play that may test but finally verifies the social order as its framing and grounding condition, but an uncontainable, unlicensed and uncontingent play that finally de-realizes the social order that may well succeed in extinguishing it, but only after having been revealed as itself an illusion, a mystification, a kind of play. Greenblatt recognizes this difference, and in order to accommodate it he has to qualify— or, more accurately, to unqualify—his notion of the ‘will to play’, in a way that also de-Elizabethanizes it: The will to play flaunts society’s cherished orthodoxies, embraces what the culture finds loathsome or frightening, transforms the serious into the joke and then unsettles the category of the joke by taking it seriously, courts self-destruction in the interest of the anarchic discharge of its energy. This is play on the brink of an abyss, absolute play. [Marlowe] writes plays that spurn and subvert his culture’s metaphysical and ethical certainties. We who have lived after Nietzsche and Flaubert may find it difficult to grasp how strong, how recklessly courageous Marlowe must have been: to write as if the admonitory purpose of literature were a lie, to invent fictions only to create and not to serve God or the state, to fashion lines that echo in the void, that echo more powerfully because there is nothing but a void…. For the one true goal of all these heroes is to be characters in Marlowe’s plays; it is only for this, ultimately, that they manifest both their playful energy and their haunting sense of unsatisfied longing. (pp. 2, 20–1) In unqualifying the play motive in Marlowe, in revising the terms in which it is cast from those of a ‘will to play’ to those of a ‘will to absolute play’, Greenblatt seems to move into an altogether more modern, decentred and ungrounded realm than that of the Renaissance carnivalesque. For the displacement of Marlovian play from the totalitarian regime of Elizabethan culture to ‘the brink of an abyss’ and finally into ‘the void’ itself has the effect of turning it into a textual absolute, of cutting it loose from a Bakhtinian domain of contextual determination and launching it into a Nietzschean space of limitless differentiation. There is a paradox here of such proportion that it requires some explanation. What Greenblatt states as an obstacle to our comprehension of the full force of Marlowe’s achievement—‘We who have lived after Nietzsche and Flaubert may find it difficult to grasp how strong… Marlowe must have been’—is actually the very condition that makes our comprehension of it possible. It is, of course,

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impossible to know precisely what an Elizabethan theatregoer—John Sarracoll, for example—would have made of the ‘high astounding terms’ in which the Prologue to Tamburlaine announces that its hero will threaten the world. We know only that the play was a resounding box-office success, so Sarracoll and his ilk had to have made something of its force. In one sense Sarracoll might have been more astounded—and threatened—than we are by the terms of Marlowe’s play; to witness a human being set himself above other human beings (emperors and kings at that) in something of the same way he had Eurocentrically set himself above the ‘uncivilized’ African natives: this must have been truly ‘astounding’, mind-boggling indeed. For such an act would have lain outside his cognitive capability, in a way that the terms of Prospero’s humiliation of the fishy Caliban or Artegall’s of the barbarous Irish did not. But because it was so ‘other’, so alien to his cultural if not cognitive resources, he could not have comprehended it in anything like the clarity and depth that those of us who have lived after Nietzsche and Flaubert, not to mention Conrad, can comprehend it. Greenblatt, in an important sense, understands Marlowe better than Sarracoll could have done, not simply because Greenblatt is smarter than Sarracoll, but because of the very historical distance, and the alternative discourses it has generated, that separate him from Sarracoll. The Elizabethan understanding of ‘will’ and ‘play’ can gain only a weak and limited purchase on Marlowe’s project; it is only when those terms are endowed with something of their full Nietzschean, Heideggerian and Derridian senses that Marlowe’s project can be ‘properly’ understood in anything like its present force. Greenblatt has gone far towards doing this, but he has done so at the cost of abandoning his residually historicist objective of telling the Elizabethans’ story as their own, and of relinquishing the old and false claim to a privileged approximation that inheres in it. He has put words in their mouths or, more accurately, put their words into a context that renders them metaphysical in a way they could never have dreamed. Their words now echo and chime, not so much in the void, as within a time and tradition much more nearly ours than theirs. The ‘metaphysics’ of postmodernist and post-structuralist thought that many neo-historicists have tried to repress in the interest of historical understanding—and Greenblatt is admittedly far less dogmatic and totalitarian in this effort than most—has uncannily returned in the massively magnified form of ‘the void’ and ‘nothing but the void’. It is a tribute to his honesty as a reader, as a textual witness, that Greenblatt allows it to return without further attempts at futile repression. For his faithful pursuit of the transgressive Marlovian will to its destination in the void has led him, willy-nilly, into precisely that metaphysical space, the utopian or dystopian ‘nowhere’ of ungrounded and unbounded structural displacement, where his strategy of constant return to historical particulars was supposed to prevent him from fetching up, and where it can certainly no longer help him. His reading of Marlowe is, after all, a chapter in a book dominated by the thesis that Renaissance ‘self-fashioning’—no matter how ardently or fearlessly

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pursued—finds itself inescapably inscribed and circumscribed by the very social structures from which it seeks deliverance. Self-construction, so Greenblatt consistently maintains, is always already social construction; culturally prescribed and sanctioned positions are all there are; they alone determine, even if negatively, the discourse of the self, for all the ludic and rhetorical resistance it may throw up against them. And so it proves to be, but a determination by altogether different discursive structures from those that were initially invoked. For, in his reading of Marlowe, Greenblatt ends up where, by his own principles, neither Marlowe nor he has any right to be, in a void of purely textual free play, a culture-free no-place that within the terms of his contextualism should not exist. No less remarkable than the Marlovian itinerary he traces is the tone of admiring incredulity that enters Greenblatt’s own writing as he traces it. For Greenblatt is no snowman either. That Marlowe’s heroes—indeed, Marlowe himself—can bring off the apparently impossible project of eluding the powerful reach of their own cultural norms, let alone that of Greenblatt’s historicist thesis, seems to quicken his prose with a kind of wonder that is increasingly registered but remains unaccountable. Greenblatt’s reading recognizes and responds to a heroic audacity in Marlowe’s work that violates the very principles on which that reading proceeds. For all the Renaissance erudition in Greenblatt’s work, its command of historical detail, richness of peculiar anecdote and attentiveness to contemporary texts, it is his own culture that he broods on and depicts. If we want to understand the historical nature of Greenblatt’s achievement, we must look finally beyond the Renaissance context he so painstakingly constructs and into his own cultural and institutional context. And, when we do, his neohistoricism turns out to be not a historicism at all but its metaphysical and postmodernist afterlife, what has been termed ‘post-historicism’.9 Macquarie University NOTES 1 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). All subsequent page references to this work will be given in parentheses in the text. Something of the historical background, critical practices and institutional implications of the new historicism is sketched out by Howard Felperin, ‘Canonical texts and non-canonical interpretations: the neohistoricist re-reading of Donne’, Southern Review, 18, 3 (November 1985), pp. 235–50; and by Jean E.Howard, ‘The new historicism in Renaissance studies’, English Literary Renaissance, 16, I (Winter 1986), pp. 13–43. 2 The concept is Mikhail Bakhtin’s. See Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 197– 211.

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3 For a rigorous discrimination of ‘conventionalism’ and ‘realism’, see Terry Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, Pleasure (London: British Film Institute, 1980), pp. 9–18. 4 I am doubtless oversimplifying the ‘old’ historicism, for the purposes of exposition, by reducing it to a basically Schleiermacherian position. The full range of positions and operations bequeathed by the tradition of German hermeneutic philosophy, particularly as they pertain to literary criticism, is usefully and provocatively unfolded by E.D.Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967). 5 The concept of Vorurteil within the structure of hermeneutic understanding is developed by Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 194–5, and by HansGeorg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960). Whereas Heidegger employs the concept in the sense of ‘prejudgement’, for Gadamer it takes on the more rigidly negative sense of ‘prejudice’. While remaining a necessary and even welcome condition of interpretation, the inescapable existence of this forestructure of interpretative ‘prejudice’ changes the criterion of valid interpretation from that of historical authenticity to one of contemporary relevance. In the case of Sarracoll’s interpretation of events, we are clearly dealing with ‘prejudgements’ that are very much ‘prejudices’. For a critique of Gadamer’s position, see Hirsch, op. cit., pp. 245–64; and, for a defence against Hirsch’s (among others’) objections, see Joseph J.Kockelmans, ‘Toward an interpretative or hermeneutic social science’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal of New School for Social Research, 5, 1 (Fall 1975), pp. 73–96. 6 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 19. 7 See C.L.Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959). 8 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). Bakhtin’s seminal notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ has provoked much subsequent but inconclusive discussion of its subversive or revolutionary potential. Cf. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), ch. 7; and Barbara A.Babcock, The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). 9 I owe this apt coinage to Simon During. See his ‘Postmodernism or postcolonialism today’, Textual Practice, 1, 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 32–47.

Language and hegemony: principles, morals and pronunciation TONY CROWLEY

It is precisely in the so-called poetical forms that ‘the people’ are represented in a superstitious fashion, or, better, in a fashion that encourages superstition. They endow the people with unchanging characteristics, hallowed traditions, art forms, habits and customs, religiosity, hereditary enemies, invincible power and so on. A remarkable unity appears between tormentors and tormented, exploiters and exploited, deceivers and deceived; it is by no means a question of the masses of ‘little’ working people in opposition to those above them. (Bertolt Brecht) There can be no doubt that the comparatively recent interest taken in the works of Gramsci stems from his formulation of the concept of hegemony. In particular, most attention has been paid to what can be crudely described as his revision of the classical Marxist position on the relations of the economic base and the cultural superstructure—that is to say, a revision of the reductive formula which sees such relations as determinist and unidirectional, and according to which the economic base simply (or not so simply, according to certain versions) determines the forms of superstructural expression. The revision was not a simple reversal— according to which superstructure would determine base—but a dialectical view in which Gramsci stressed the interactive nature of the relations between the different levels of the social whole. In fact, Gramsci’s revision is briefly summarized to some degree by two rather unlikely contemporaries. The first is Sir Ernest Barker, who argued— in a text addressed to political theorists—for a greater recognition of the importance of cultural formations as the basis of national identity: ‘What divides a nation internally may be even more differences in culture than economic differences.’1 And the second writer of this period to stress the importance of culture in the formation of hegemonic rule was the educationalist George Sampson. His argument took a negative form: ‘Deny to working-class children any common share in the immaterial and presently they will grow into the men who demand with menaces a communism of the material.’2 The Gramscian perspective would

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evidently be at odds with any account that saw cultural formations (Sampson is writing of the teaching of English language and literature) as immaterial, yet the stress on the importance of culture to hegemonic rule fits the Gramscian model perfectly. The warning from Sampson was clear: unless hegemonic rule as constructed in cultural formations is exercised over all groups in society, then it is possible that those who are excluded will become a threat to those in whose interest such rule is formulated. Or, to put it more bluntly, neglect of the task of imposing hegemony can bring about the possibility of an alteration in the distribution of power and perhaps even ‘a communism of the material’ and ‘immaterial’. For Gramsci, one of the tasks of hegemony is the creation of a ‘we’, an adherence to the unifying pronoun in all sorts of specific contexts. Once that task is acknowledged, an analysis has to be attempted in order to answer the question: how and where does hegemony work? One possible answer to this question would be to say: in grammar. Grammar in this sense is not the grammar of the philologist or the modern formal linguist but the grammar outlined by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein writes of a grammatical investigation: ‘We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is not directed towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the “possibilities” of phenomena.’3 A grammatical investigation—and I shall call any analysis of hegemony grammatical in this sense—would be the exploration of the processes by which the possible and the impossible are constructed—that is, an investigation of the grammar in which our thoughts, desires, feelings, language and actions are constructed; and one that can only be located in the sites of hegemonic dissemination: in those discourses, practices and institutions that construct the ‘possibilities of phenomena’. Therefore any analysis of hegemony must be directed towards the processes of education (in the largest sense of that term) which have the effect of delineating what can be and what cannot. It has to be an investigation of the processes by which the current economic, political and cultural order is represented as ‘natural’, ‘inevitable’, good for ‘us’ and, in the last instance, ‘the only one possible’. It has to be a confrontation with the modes of education which deliver consent to, alignment with and reproduction of the present ruling interests without the necessity for brutal coercion and repression. Which is to say that we have to pay attention to the lesson that at least one Victorian MP dictated over a century ago: ‘A band of efficient schoolmasters is kept up at much less expense than a body of police or soldiery.’4 The task of hegemony is to ensure that those who are economically, politically and socially dispossessed feel that they have a stake in the social order upon which their dispossession is predicated. This process can work by the obfuscation of that dispossession, but it can also take the form of a limited revelation of dispossession—along with the lesson that the only way to gain what has been removed is precisely through faithful (faith revealed in attitudes, words, actions) adherence to the processes which in fact cause such loss. In any

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case, hegemony is concerned with the control of the ‘possibilities of phenomena’ and with the direction of the grammar in which we live. Such control can take place within what Althusser called ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (as, for example, with the ‘band of efficient schoolmasters’), and it was this sort of process in fact that might have led Foucault to ask the question: What is an educational system, after all, if not a ritualization of the word; if not a qualification of some fixing of roles for speakers; if not the constitution of a (diffuse) doctrinal group; if not the distribution and an appropriation of discourse, with all its learning and its powers?5 Yet such processes do not only take place at the level of state apparatuses, since they also occur at the level of everyday verbal interaction. To place the widest possible stress on this term, then, we are all engaged in education, always and everywhere, since, as Gramsci points out, Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world wide field, between the complexes of national and continental civilizations…. This form of relationship exists throughout society as a whole and for every individual relative to other individuals.6 It must follow that ‘All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all in society have the function of intellectuals.’7 We are all educators, all schoolteachers and all, as Foucault was to say, supervisors of each other (though not all institutionalized as such). At the local level, in our most casual comments (especially there) and our most spontaneous responses, we work in and through hegemony: from grunts and groans to a curse on the Grantham grocer, we are in the realm of the grammar of hegemony. However, to put it in this way is to encourage a pessimism and a resignation which have also been formed by hegemonic rule and which, of course, serve ruling interests. Which is to say that, whether we take Althusser’s line (the prison of ideology) or Foucault’s line (the ideology of the prison), we end up with much the same difficulty. With Althusser we end up inside the prison shouting out in the hope that someone might free us, and with Foucault we end up outside the prison shouting at the walls hoping they’ll fall down in order to free the prisoners. I would argue that to say that ‘we’ are constructed through the different levels of hegemonic rule which leads us to supervise each other for signs of deviancy or criticism is to leave out of account the most important aspect of hegemonic rule and its processes. It omits to mention the fact that hegemonic rule and the cultural, political and economic domination it produces are never— as Foucault appears to suggest—stable. Hegemony is never achieved (in the French sense of achever, to finish, to bring to completion, to perfect) but

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constantly in need of renewal and adaptation. It is always ‘under negotiation’. Hegemonic rule, then, is never homogeneously assured but both internally contradictory (never able to suppress completely its own fissures) and open to contradiction from without. The possibilities of resistance and change are not— as both Althusser and Foucault seem to suggest—already taken into account by hegemonic rule, but are always potentially open. The rest of this article will be given over to an examination of a set of processes designed to exercise hegemonic control over a domain of our lives in which the establishment of a ‘we’ is crucially important: the language that we use. It amounts to an examination of textual practice in a number of fields that have very specific practical effects. LANGUAGE AND MORALITY: RESPONSES TO CRISES Gramsci, whose own training was in the study of language, took a keen interest in the role of language in the exercise of hegemonic rule. He argued at one point: Every time that, in one way or another, the question of language emerges, that means that a series of other problems is making itself felt: the formation and widening of the ruling class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relations between the ruling groups and the national popular mass, that is, to re-organize cultural hegemony.8 Although the Italian situation differed greatly from that which held in Britain, none the less Gramsci’s theoretical insight here provides us with an important perspective upon the ‘disciplining’ of language at particular periods in the past century and a half in Britain. To start with, then, I shall examine the role of language in the response to the crisis caused by one of the most determined yet ultimately contradictory nineteenth-century social movements, the Chartist movement. Chartism for a time brought about what one of Tom Paine’s enemies had accused him of attempting: the possibility of ‘a revolution in language’.9 Chartism, as a contemporary educationalist put it, had altered (or rather reappropriated) the terms and the discourses of political debate. KayShuttleworth argued: A great change has taken place in the moral and intellectual state of the working-classes. Formerly they considered their poverty and sufferings as inevitable, as far as they thought about them at all; now, rightly or wrongly, they attribute their sufferings to political causes; they think that by a change in political institutions their condition can be enormously ameliorated.10

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The discourse of politics had shifted, since the hegemonic order which served the interests of the powerful by stressing the ‘inevitability’ of oppression had failed to fulfil its task and had been displaced by another discourse. The Chartists argued that such oppression was a result of specific historical and political causes, an effect of the ordering of ‘political institutions’. Once that had been established, it followed that a change in such an order could bring about improvement. The Chartist shift had produced what Kay-Shuttleworth coyly describes as a ‘moral and intellectual’ change, and it is on precisely this level that the counter-response was to be organized. The counter-response was not direct, since hegemony is far more subtle and elusive than that in its workings—though this is not to argue that direct and crude responses did not take place, because of course they did, as Tolpuddle and Peterloo demonstrated. The point is that brutal violence and coercion only become necessary precisely when hegemonic rule breaks down, and in fact it is clear that more subtle responses are desirable for ruling interests. This is not because of humanitarian concern but because (as recent events in Ireland and Britain should have made clear) there is often no better way of organizing and directing opposition against ruling interests than by putting troops on the streets or having police horses trample down picket lines. So the responses that were made to Chartism took place on several levels, and one of the most subtle responses that interests me is that which revolved around the emergence of the question of language. It has become a commonplace in the history of the study of language that language was ‘discovered’ in the nineteenth century through the discipline that we now know as comparative philology.11 Language—rather than a language or languages—was the desired object of knowledge. As the Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford succinctly put it in 1862, ‘In the science of language, languages are not treated as a means; language itself becomes the sole object of enquiry…we do not want to know languages, we want to know language.’12 However, as far as Müller’s account of linguistic research in Britain goes, it is wrong; in Britain (by contrast with Europe) the desired object of knowledge was not to be language but a language, and that language was to be English. In contradiction to the development of linguistic studies elsewhere, comparative philology in Britain was to play a clear second role to another new discipline whose appearance was signalled by texts and courses devoted to it: I mean that branch of knowledge that we have come to know as ‘the history of the (English) language’. The title of the new discipline is itself interesting, since the use of the definite article suggests a confidence and rigidity of knowledge because it is the history (to be generally acknowledged as the sole history—and validated as such by Oxford University in its Dictionary project) of the English language (which is an entity given unity and coherence precisely by the history). Thus English was to become—over and above its synchronic and diachronic heterogeneity—a unitary, single and fixedly knowable language; it was to become the uni-accentual language constructed by the uni-accentual history. However,

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although the development of this study is itself a field worth investigating, I shall be more concerned here with the deployment and effect of specific texts from within this new discipline in the hegemonic contests of nineteenth-and twentiethcentury Britain. One of the most popular and influential of the nineteenth-century linguists was Dean (later Archbishop) Trench. A controversial figure in his own right (as the Archbishop of Dublin appointed to oversee the disestablishment of the Irish church), Trench is perhaps most often cited as the father of the Oxford English Dictionary project. More interesting for my argument, however, is the role played by Trench’s texts on language in the 1850s. If the ‘moral’ and ‘intellectual’ state of the working class had been altered by the discourse of Chartism, then it was at least part of Trench’s task to construct a discourse around the English language that opposed such a change. Interestingly, Trench’s task was later indirectly described by Volosinov in his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929): The first philologists and the first linguists were always and everywhere priests. History knows no nation whose sacred writings or oral tradition were not to some degree in a language foreign and incomprehensible to the profane. To decipher the mystery of the sacred words was the task meant to be carried out by the priest-philologists.13 The most striking aspect of Trench’s texts, such as On the Study of Words (1851), is precisely the stress upon the connection between language and morality, and its starting point was the divine genesis of language— ‘God having impressed such a seal of truth on language that men are often uttering deeper things than they know’.14 However, from that divine state of perfection human beings fell into the state of post-lapsarian impurity, and thus the entry into human history of labour pains and pains of labour is recorded in human language: ‘Has man fallen and deeply fallen from the height of his original creation? We need no more than his language to prove it’ (OSW, p. 26). It is precisely this view of language that enables its study to have a specific importance for hegemonic rule, since language was held to be a ‘moral barometer’, able to ‘embody facts of history or convictions of the moral sense’, and words, therefore, ‘in so far as that moral sense may be perverted,…will bear witness and keep a record of that perversion’. Evidently language was to become crucially important in evaluations and judgements, necessary to the process of what Foucault (in the passage cited earlier) called the fixing of roles for speakers: the constitution of a doctrinal group and the distribution and appropriation of discourse. Trench’s aim was to recover what he described as ‘the witnesses to God’s truth, the falling in of our words with his unchangeable word: for these are the true uses of the word while the others are only its abuses’ (OSW, pp. 38–9). The fixing of the meaning of a word (that is, the process of persuading someone of the ‘real’ or ‘original’ meaning and then arguing that that meaning is

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unchangeable) is a familiar gesture in ideological struggle. The phrase ‘no, this is what it really means’ is a signal of contest, of course, but it is also a signal of deliberate blindness to the processes by which words gain meanings, lose meanings and have any meaning at all. That is to say, in order to gain specific victories in historical struggles as a way of gaining hegemonic control over discourse, such a gesture of pointing to the ‘real’ meaning attempts to do away with historical struggle in the name of origins. Or, to put it in shorthand, etymology (from єτνμo λoγo, translated as the true, real, actual meaning, word, thought) is set against history. However Trench’s method was in fact more complex than this: he managed to hold both elements—origin and history—in view at the same time, for he insisted both on the original perfection of words and on the utility of considering their history. His method is perhaps best illustrated by citing one of his etymological histories. The example is that most contentious word in the Victorian period, ‘pain’. ‘Pain’, Trench argued, is the correlative of sin [in] that it is punishment; and to this the word ‘pain’ which there can be no reasonable doubt is derived from ‘poena’ bears continual witness. Pain is punishment, so does the word itself declare no less than the conscience of everyone that is suffering it. (OSW, p. 36) Evidently, according to his own etymo-logic, the Archbishop of Dublin must have been something of a sinner on the side, since he died as a result of a long, poena-ful illness stemming from a fall while crossing the Irish Sea when he sustained two fractured knees. Other words, however, did not offer such vindication of the ways of God to human beings but rather an indication of the impurity of the ways of human beings after the Fall: There are also words which bear the slime on them of the serpent’s trail; and the uses of words which imply moral evil—I say not upon their parts who now employ them in the senses which they have acquired, but on theirs from whom little by little they received their deflection and were warped from their original rectitude. (OSW, pp. 41–2) So far Trench’s interests may appear purely theological, but in fact it was a part of the task to which his texts were deployed to link together the discourses of theology (morality) and history (politics) for specific ends. His ‘fundamental conviction’ was that ‘Not in books only…nor yet in connected oral discourse, but often also in words connected [singly] there are boundless stores of moral and historical truths’ (OSW, p. 1). Language had been given crucial importance because it could offer both moral and political lessons and thus for the Victorian pedagogue was the perfect tool. The efficacy of language was clear to Trench, since words ‘do not hold themselves neutral in the great conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, which is dividing the world…they receive from us the impressions of our good and evil, which again they are active to propagate

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amongst us’ (OSW, p. 55). That is to say, Trench recognized the generative aspect of language because he recognized the crucial role played by language in the dissemination of hegemonic positions, and moreover the active mode in which such dissemination takes place. In later texts Trench shifted to a more direct engagement with the history of the English language and thus with contemporary history. His English Past and Present (1855) was written and published during the Crimean War and addressed to those who have ‘the duty of living lives worthy of those who have England for their native country and English for their native tongue’.15 Morality appears here as a call to duty, but it is an appeal predicated upon the fulfilment of the hegemonic task of creating the historical ‘we’ of England and the English. It was a task that Trench was keenly aware of, and one that became the cornerstone of his texts: It is of course our English tongue, out of which mainly we should seek to draw some of the hid treasures which it contains…we cannot employ ourselves better. There is nothing that will more help us to form an English heart in ourselves and others. (OSW, p. 2.4) The most interesting aspect of this manifesto is that it acknowledges indirectly the need to struggle for hegemonic control and the as yet unfulfilled state of the task. It argues that the English tongue can be used ‘to form an English heart in ourselves and others’; but logically this must mean that ‘an English heart’ does not yet exist among all the English. Therefore Trench argues that such a hegemonic construction has to be formed in order to avert certain dangers, and he points out that the danger was so acute that the task had to be carried out urgently. The task is vitally important, ‘especially at the present. For these are times which naturally rouse into liveliest activity all our latent affections for the land of our birth.’16 In fact, Trench was not attempting to bring out ‘latent affections’ but to produce those loyalties, desires and needs which are the objects of hegemonic domination. Against the disturbing forces of Chartism (to be characterized by Trench in one of his poems as the forces of ‘envy, faction, hate’) and the problems caused by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, the study of the history of the English language was to play the role of stressing unity and adherence to the national ‘we’. He argued, in the text written during the Crimean War: It is one of the compensations, indeed the greatest of all, for the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of war, that it causes a people to know itself as a people; and leads each one to esteem and prize most that which he has in common with his countrymen, and not now any longer those things which separate and divide him from them.17

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In order to allow ‘the English’ to esteem and prize most that which they have in common with their countrymen, it had first to be established precisely what it was that they shared. And a prime candidate was held to be the language that they used. The English language bound the English together as a nation, since they all used ‘the same language’, and it was, moreover, a language that was made to reflect the already constructed political and cultural sense of superiority of the community to which they belonged. An example of such a linkage is given by Trench’s argument for the parallelism of English political institutions and the English language in which he proposed (ten years after the outbreak of the Irish famine) that: It is in the very character of our institutions to repel none, but rather to afford a shelter and a refuge to all, from whatever quarter they come…. We may trace, I think, as was to be expected, a certain conformity between the genius of our institutions and that of our language.18 The parallelism was predicated upon the historico-linguistic fact that the English language ‘has thrown open its arms wider’ than any other language to the importation of foreign terms. Hegemonic domination was exercised not only by praise of the English language per se (thus offering to the dispossessed a point of identification and alignment) but also by praise of the actual status and use of the language in the world. In the discourse of ‘the history of the language’, the dispossessed were offered an identification with the political structure that at least in part created their loss—imperialism. English, ‘our’ language, was the language of a great empire, and thus as speakers of that language, in ‘our’ own small way, ‘we’ all become members of that empire. The language, as one writer put it, ‘is rapidly becoming the great medium of civilisation, the language of law and literature to the Hindoo, of commerce to the African, of religion to the scattered islanders of the Pacific’.19 Another looked forward to a time when ‘the world is circled by the accents of Milton and Shakespeare’; and yet another declared that such a time had already arrived: The sun never sets on the British dominions; the roll of the British drum encircles the globe with a belt of sound; and the familiar utterances of English speech are heard on every continent and island, in every sea and ocean, in the world.20 If the factory hands were tied to the machine and the few mill streets around their place of work, and the domestic servants were bound to the kitchen of their master and mistress, then at least they could be consoled that the language they spoke would do their travelling for them.

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THE DANGEROUS BARBARIANS Trench’s involvement with the study of the English language is perhaps most often recalled when discussing a text whose own role in the formation of cultural hegemony has been rarely acknowledged, the Oxford English Dictionary.21 One of the first problems that the proposers of the Dictionary had to face was the question what it was they were supposed to record in their text. The answer came with the concept of the ‘standard language’, a term recorded as first having been used in the Proposal for the New English Dictionary: ‘As soon as a standard language has been formed, which in England was the case after the Reformation, the lexicographer is bound to deal with that alone.’22 Here it is evident that the ‘standard language’ meant the literary language or, to be more accurate, the language to be found in those literary texts which were to provide the material for the Dictionary. Yet by the end of the century another definition had been made which was to be equally important for cultural hegemony. In the OED supplement the term ‘standard’, as in ‘standard English’, is defined as applied to a variety of the speech of a country which, by reason of its cultural status and currency, is held to represent the best form of that speech. Standard English: that form of the English language which is spoken (with modifications, individual or local), by the generality of the cultured people in Great Britain. The example given was from Henry Sweet’s The Sounds of English (1908): ‘Standard English, like Standard French, is now a class dialect more than a local dialect: it is the language of the educated all over Great Britain.’ It was to become the term that stood for a specific type of usage that had already been delineated in the nineteenth century: it was the usage of ‘educated people’ (1891); ‘the average Southern Englishman, when speaking carefully in lectureroom, pulpit, stage or platform’ (1898); ‘good and careful speakers’ and ‘the best speakers’ (1877); ‘civilised persons’ (1868); those of ‘good taste and good breeding’ (1864); ‘the highest classes of London society’ (1869); those of ‘the highest social culture and position’ (1880); ‘the well-bred and well-informed’ (1836)—and so on.23 It is necessary to be clear about the hegemonic tasks played by both of these definitions of the standard language, since in some ways they appear to contradict each other. The concept of the standard language as that which can be found in the texts of English literature has the task of stressing the longevity and coherence of the English cultural inheritance. ‘We’ can all be proud that ‘our’ literature and language are not mere upstarts (as with the other modern languages) but the products of a rich, stable and fixed tradition created by English people who are ‘our’ ancestors. And so this first sense creates a form of unity. However, the concept of the standard language as the language of a superior group within ‘our’ nation has the task of stressing that only some

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language is ‘good’, only some language can be counted as being ‘correct’, ‘proper’ and ‘standard English’. Other usage, while still recognizably English, would have to be termed sub-standard English. That is to say, the two concepts had the task of imposing cultural unity and division: of forming a national ‘we’ but ensuring that many who belonged to that ‘we’ were aware of their inferior status. That the formation of the national ‘we’ in this context was successful should, I think, be granted by anyone who considers the political developments taking place in Britain between 1880 and 1914.24 However, the success of the other hegemonic task formulated around the use of the term ‘standard English’ is less certain. It is true that language became a marker of class division; as one educationist later remarked, ‘In this country classes are sundered by difference in language—difference of speech is a symbol of class antagonism.’25 Another commentator—the President of the English Association—observed that ‘there is perhaps no greater divide of society than the differences in viva-voce expression’.26 Yet, rather than simply delineating the inferiority of the substandard speakers within the national ‘we’, I would claim that the hegemonic deployment of this sense of ‘standard English’ actually concentrated feelings of possession or dispossession, antagonism and class tension on both sides of the divide. One linguist of the period, for example, wrote that the educated Englishman or Englishwoman (‘he and still more she’) ‘lives in a perpetual terror of being taken for a Cockney’.27 And the theme was developed in Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism, where Eldon, the factory owner who has just sacked his workers, talks of his feelings towards his ‘hands’: ‘They are our enemies, yours as well as mine; they are the enemies of every man who speaks the pure English tongue and who does not earn a living with his hands.’28 It should be clear from the tone of these passages that language was becoming a very significant focus of sensitivity to class status in the late ninteenth-and early twentieth-century social formation. Moreover, the sensitivity was not confined to one side of the divide, since those castigated as sub-standard speakers were also keen to assert their autonomy. The dialect poet William Barnes, for example, cites the case of a child confronted with the refusal of his own language: This will be understood by a case of which I was told in a parish in Dorset, where the lady of the house had taken a little boy into day-service, though he went home to sleep…the lady began to correct his bad English, as she thought his Dorset was; and, at last, he said to her weeping ‘There now. If you do meake me talk so fine as that, they’ll laef at me at hwome zoo that I can’t bide there.’29 Barnes elsewhere reports ‘general laughter’ at the ‘fine-talking’ of ‘a home-born villager’, and a later dialectician was to complain that ‘The working classes speak quite differently among themselves, than when speaking to strangers or to educated people, and it is no easy matter for an outsider to induce them to speak

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pure dialect.’30 More problematical, however, than the task of deriving dialect material from rural or working-class speakers was the appearance of a class who demanded attention and who were extremely sensitive (on occasion) to the status of their own language. That is, as one writer put it, the appearance of ‘the people of the abyss’. If the second use of the term ‘standard English’ was intended to ensure the inferiority of sub-standard speakers, then its intention was not being met. Instead, there had appeared a class for whom the relations between language and silence were very important, as one commentator, C.F.G.Masterman (who wrote as one of this class), pointed out in From the Abyss (1902.). In that book, a queue of working-class women and men outside a pub at Sunday lunchtime waiting for the opening are described as a ‘strange, silent crowd’, and Masterman comments: ‘There is no speech nor language, no manifest human discourse, no human aim or visible object.’31 Perhaps, however, this is just the effect of eager anticipation, since later Masterman describes the pub as humming with noise. Or perhaps the distinction between speech sounds and noise is one that Masterman deliberately makes. I would argue that this distinction is used textually to point out that the ‘barbarians’ make a lot of noise that is not regarded as lying within discourse. A noise cannot be counted as a speech sound until it is utilized in the structure of language, until it has a place within the linguistic system of differences and speakers who use it. At that point it rises from a mere noise to a sound or, in the terminology of post-Saussurean linguistics, from a phonetic unit to a phonological unit. In a section of From the Abyss entitled ‘Of the silence of us’, Masterman comments on the silence: If the first thing to notice is our quantity, the second is our silence—a silence that becomes the more weird and uncanny with the increasing immensity of our number. That one or a few should pass through life dumb is nothing noteworthy; when the same mysterious stillness falls upon hundreds of thousands the imagination is perplexed and baffled. In some forms of disturbed dream a crowded panorama occupies the scene; each figure acts his part in the dumb show; there is apparent activity and motion, but no sound discernible. And the terror of this situation is somehow interwoven with this silence; it weighs one down with a sense of physical oppression; could one only once cry aloud, it appears, the fantastic vision would vanish away. A similar feeling is experienced in the contemplation of the moving crowds of the abyss; could they but in a moment of illumination be stimulated to a united utterance, one feels that strange events would follow. (pp. 18–19) Each line of this remarkable description of the situation of the barbarians is interesting: the silence is ‘weird and uncanny’, a ‘terror’ with ‘a sense of physical oppression’. This is the fear that one witnesses in encountering the ‘dumb’ or those who make noises but cannot speak, those whose noise is not

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elevated to the level of sound, and thus who are forced to communicate in other, more gestural semiotic codes. This is the ‘mysterious stillness’ that leaves the observer ‘perplexed and baffled’. It is like a ‘disturbed dream’, a nightmare or a ‘fantastic vision’ in which thousands take part but in which the actors or ‘figures’ are silent, merely acting parts in a ‘dumb show’. They act, or at least there is ‘apparent activity’, but they do so with ‘no sound discernible’. Therefore, to rid oneself of this silent nightmare one has to imagine its ideal antithesis: to overturn the mysteriously still dumb show of oppressed figures, one has to imagine instead a ‘moment of illumination’ that could bring about a ‘united utterance’ from which ‘strange events would follow’. At the present, however, the ‘united utterance’ is distant, and possible only in the imagination, since the actual historical situation is one of silence: ‘Always noisy, we rarely speak; always resonant with the din of many-voiced existence, we never reach that level of ordered articulate utterance; never attain a language that the world beyond can hear’ (p. 20). Again we see the very clear distinction that is drawn between ‘noise’ and ‘ordered articulate utterance’; although there is a noise here, it is the noise of many voices amounting to no more than a din. There is noise, but not ‘ordered articulate utterance’: noise, then, but no language. Classically the barbarians were those who didn’t speak Hellenic Greek (βαρβαρoι meant all the non-Greek-speaking peoples, and βαρβαρισμoς meant the use of a foreign tongue, or the use of one’s own tongue amiss); now they are those who don’t speak the standard language, the language of the ‘educated’, the ‘articulate’, the ‘best speakers’. These barbarians are reduced to silence because they have no language, or at least no language that counts as facilitating discourse, since they lack ‘a language that the world beyond can hear’. Thus, as the same text asserts of these speakers: We are very silent, so silent that no one to this hour knows what we think on any subject, or why we think it…. We take up the burden of silent work through long years of silent endurance. We rear up others to compete against us in a similar life. At length, at the closing of the day, we pass to a silent grave and of the meaning of this dim, silent existence we have no power to ascertain. (pp. 24–5) Such absolute refusal of discourse was to concentrate the bitterness of class antagonism and to create the class of ‘dangerous barbarians’ who were to pose such a threat in early twentieth-century Britain, as described in From the Abyss: We gazed at them in startled amazement. Whence did they all come, these creatures with strange antics and manners, these denizens of another universe of being?… They drifted through the streets hoarsely cheering, breaking into fatuous irritating laughter, singing quaint militant melodies…. As the darkness drew on they relapsed more and more into bizarre and barbaric revelry. Where they whispered now they shouted, where they had

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pushed apologetically, now they shoved and collisioned and charged. They blew trumpets, hit each other with bladders; they tickled passers-by with feathers; they embraced ladies in the streets, laughing generally and boisterously. Later the drink got into them, and they reeled and struck; and swore, walking and leaping and blaspheming God. (p. 3) LANGUAGE AND THE POLITICAL: THE 1920S I have argued that language had become a crucial focus of class divisions in British society in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and I shall argue in this section that hegemonic responses to the widespread crisis that faced contemporary Britain after the First World War were made in education and again were concentrated around language (and around a particular use of language that we have come to call literature). One point, however, needs to be stressed: the war did not cause the crisis that came after it but was only its most bloody and horrible event, since the crisis both preceded and followed the war. This needs to be stressed, for otherwise much of the pre-war bitterness and militancy that characterized British society is elided, and reductive explanations dealing in grand claims about death and carnage and its shocking effects are allowed to pass (as though the men and women who worked in mills, factories and ironworks were strangers to amputation or sudden death). The war and its aftermath did, however, set the stage for those voices previously counted as substandard to be heard. As the Minister of Education, Herbert Fisher, remarked in 1917, ‘There does exist throughout the community a vague and undefined expectation that the war must see radical changes in our social and educational structure.’32 One way of reading Fisher’s comment would be to say that what had appeared was the recognition of the need to reorganize cultural hegemony. If that reading were correct, then it would follow (from Gramsci’s argument cited earlier) that language could be expected to ‘emerge’ at that time. Language did ‘emerge’ after the First World War in many textual and practical ways. For example, Henry Bradley and Robert Bridges (in a debate ‘On the terms Briton, British, Britisher’ published in the Proceedings of the Society for Pure English) noted the importance attached to language in the post-war period: In both Europe and Asia legislators are at this time anxiously in search of the factors that determine nationality, and among the determinants it would seem that language, which prescribes our categories and forms of thought, shapes our ideals, preserves our trade, and carries all our social relations and intercourse, had the most solid claims.33 And within Britain, in the late twenties, I.A.Richards was to argue emphatically for increased attention to the significance of language:

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From the beginning civilisation has been dependent upon speech, for words are our chief link with the past and with one another and the channel of our spiritual inheritance. As the other vehicles of tradition, the family and the community, for example, are dissolved, we are forced more and more to rely upon language.34 Of course, he overestimated the dissolution of tradition, the family and the community—but then within this type of hegemonic discourse the vehicles of tradition are always about to disappear, despite the fact that ‘the family and the community’ in Britain today still appear to be carrying out their hegemonic task of placing subjects in particular social positions rather well. However, Richards’s comment on the need for reliance upon language was accurate, since again in the face of crisis language was to come to the fore and was to be loaded with enormous significance. I shall concentrate my analysis of this period by looking at the Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England, published in 1921. The report summed up the problem it faced and the answer it proposed in one paragraph: Two causes, both accidental and conventional rather than national, at present distinguish and divide one class from another in England. The first of these is a marked difference in their modes of speech. If the teaching of the language were properly provided for, the difference between educated and uneducated speech, which at present causes so much prejudice and difficulty of intercourse on both sides, would gradually disappear.35 The neutral phrasing—‘marked difference in their modes of speech’— should not, however, mask the very clear attitudes towards the speech of the working class, since the commissioners went on to argue that ‘amongst the vast mass of the population, it is certain that if a child is not learning good English he is learning bad English, and probably bad habits of thought’ (p. 10). The discourse of morality had once again been introduced into the discourse around language: The great difficulty of teachers in Elementary Schools in many districts is that they have to fight against the powerful influence of evil habits of speech concentrated in house and street. The teacher’s struggle is thus not with ignorance but with a perverted power. (p. 59) Or, as the Tory prime minister Stanley Baldwin was to comment later (echoing Trench): False words, said the dying Socrates, are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Although the use of words may be abused and the fight for their honour may at times seem hopeless, we must never give up the struggle to use them solely in the service of truth.36

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If the discourse of morality was not to provide the metaphors, then it was to be the discourse of medicine: It is specially upon speech that our work must be buttoned if it is to hold firm. Boys from bad houses come to school with their speech in a state of disease, and we must be unwearied in the task of purification. (p. xii) Having fixed roles for speakers and a doctrinal group in this manner, the report then went on to regulate the distribution of discourse. Their recommendations for working-class speakers were as follows: First, systematic training in the sounded speech of standard English, to secure correct pronunciation and clear articulation: second, systematic training in the use of standard English, to secure clearness and correctness both in oral expression and in writing: third, training in reading. (p. 19) And the hegemonic aim of such cultural training: The English people might learn as a whole to regard their own language, first with respect, and then with a genuine feeling of pride and affection. More than any mere symbol it is actually a part of England: to maltreat it or deliberately to debase it would be seen to be an outrage; to become sensible of its significance and splendour would be to step upon a higher level…. Such a feeling for our own native language would be a bond of union between classes, and would beget the right kind of national pride. (p. 22) The problem with such a task (and this is the point at which the hegemonic unity again becomes uncertain) is that the use of the term ‘standard English’ poses difficulties. Is standard English the literary language? Evidently not, since the report writes of ‘the sounded speech of standard English’ as well as ‘clearness and correctness both in oral expression and in writing’. Then it must follow that standard English is the language of ‘the generality of the cultured people’ (or any of those other definitions cited earlier). Yet, if that is the case, then the workingclass speakers by definition could not learn such a language. The problem is made clear by one educationalist: We don’t need to define standard English speech. We know what it is, and there’s an end on’t. We know standard English when we hear it just as we know a dog when we see it, without the aid of definitions. Or, to put it another way, we know what is not standard English, and that is a sufficiently practical guide. If anyone wants a definite example of standard English we can tell him that it is the kind of English spoken by a simple unaffected young Englishman like the Prince of Wales.37

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In essence, the definition of standard English is this: it is whatever working-class speech is not. And, as a corollary, working-class speech is that spoken by those who are not standard-English speakers. A nineteenth-century commentator had summed the matter up in this way: Whatever may be the recognised standard of pronunciation, there will always be a refined and vulgar mode of speech—one adopted by the cultivated and well-informed, and the other used by the rude and illiterate.38 PRINCIPLES, MORALS AND PRONUNCIATION I have argued in this article that language in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been a crucial vehicle for the imposition of cultural hegemony, and I have attempted to show how language has been ‘disciplined’ by its use with certain other discourses in specific contexts in order to gain political ends. The study of language has not been the neutral and objective study proposed by its historians and linguists but a discourse shot through with hegemonic concerns, and I shall conclude by citing two instances of such concern. The first, taken from the Newbolt Report and therefore written five years before the 192.6 General Strike, is an example of how accurate Gramsci’s comment was: Lucidity and command of language…will be of service not merely in commercial life, but also in those political and social activities, such as trade union meetings and the like, which are becoming the preoccupation of an ever-increasing number of working people, and where sincerity and clear-headedness are matters of national concern. (p. 146) The second can stand on its own and is taken from a Report on Bristol Miners (1794), which argued that they were forty or fifty years ago, so barbarous and savage, that they were a terror to the city of Bristol, which they several times invaded; it was dangerous to go amongst them, and their dialect was the roughest and rudest in the Nation but by the lessons of Messrs Whitefield and Wesley, by the erection of a parish church and some meeting houses, and the establishment of several Sunday and daily schools, they are much civilised and improved in principles, morals and pronunciation.39 That would be a good place to end this article, but I feel as though I can’t pass up the opportunity to quote from a writer who was often concerned with alienation, distance and awkwardness with regard to the language we are brought to use. Moreover, he is a writer who often suggests strategies of resistance. He is a writer whose relationship to the British ruling class was, to say the least, marginal, a

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writer who in no ironical way may prove to be the greatest of all historians of language, a writer who took the Oxford English Dictionary and turned it into a literary text. I mean, of course, Joyce—an Irishman (though his texts are counted in that familiar imperialist gesture as ‘belonging’ to ‘English literature’), and therefore writing in that shadow that Britain casts over Ireland. Perhaps also he is a writer whose texts might possibly become more comprehensible to us in all their linguistic and cultural complexity when a further cultural and political reorganization has taken place between Britain and Ireland. Certainly he is an author who exemplifies that distance and linguistic alienation that I have been trying to articulate. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen walks past the memorial to Wolf Tone—not of his religion; past the four French delegates— not of his nation, though one of them holds a placard declaring ‘Vive l’Ireland’; past his French class—not of his liking; and past Ireland’s past—not the historical nightmare in which he wanted to live: ‘the Ireland of Tone and Parnell seemed to have receded in space.’ He walks to the unfamiliar territory—‘was the Jesuit house extraterritorial and was he walking among aliens?’; and he walks to meet the English Dean of Studies—‘a countryman of Ben Jonson’. Which is all to say that he walks towards his confrontation with that strange, difficult and tormenting thing, the English language: The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. If it was true that in 1916 Joyce had not yet made his own words, it was a problem that he was to resolve later in a number of his own textual practices, whose effects on the relations between ‘standard’ and ‘sub-standard’ language, politics and sexuality have yet to be explored fully. University of Southampton NOTES 1 Sir Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in its Formation (London: Methuen, 1927), p. 2,2.2.. 2 George Sampson, English for the English, 2nd edn rev. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. x. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 90. 4 Quoted in D.Leith, A Social History of English (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 167. 5 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 227.

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6 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q.Hoare and G.Newell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 350. 7 Ibid., p. 9. 8 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. D.Forgacs and G.NowellSmith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), pp. 183–4. 9 J.Adams, An Answer to Pain’s [sic] Rights of Man (London, 1793), p. 10. 10 J.Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods of English Education (London, 1862,), p. 2.29. 11 See H.Pedersen, The Discovery of Language, trans. J.W.Spargo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959). 12 Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2nd edn rev. (London, 1862), p. 23. 13 V.N.Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L.Matejka and I.R.Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 74. 14 R.C.Trench, On the Study of Words (London, 1851), p. 8; referred to subsequently in the text as OSW with page numbers in parentheses. 15 R.C.Trench, English Past and Present (London, 1855), p. vi. 16 Ibid., p. 1. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 43. 19 E.Guest, A History of English Rhythms (London, 1838), p. 703. 20 J.M.D.Meikeljohn, The Book of the English Language (London, 1891), p. 6. This text also noted the fantastic ‘possibility of the English language in space’. 21 The best account of the Oxford English Dictionary project, though hardly critical, is K.M.E.Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 22 The Proposal for the New English Dictionary (London: Philological Society, 1860), p. 3. 23 The quotations are, taken in order, from: H.Sweet, A New English Grammar Logical and Historical (London, 1891), pt 1, p. 212; J.H.Staples, ‘Notes on Ulster dialect’, Transactions of the Philological Society (1895–8), p. 358; W.D.Whitney, The Essentials of English Grammar (London, 1877), p. 3; H.Sedgwick, ‘The theory of classical education’, in Essays on a Liberal Education, ed. F.W.Farrar, 2nd edn (London, 1868), p. 97; H.Alford, A Plea for the Queen’s English (London, 1864), p. 281; G.F.Graham, A Book about Words (London, 1869), p. 156; R.G.White, Everyday English (London, 1880), p. 88; B.H.Smart, Walker Remodelled: A New Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (London, 1836), p. xl. 24 Evidence of such a shift brought about by a number of textual practices is given in H.Cunningham’s outline of the shift in ‘The language of patriotism’, History Workshop, 12 (1981). 25 Sampson, op. cit., p. 44 26 J.Galsworthy, On Expression (London: English Association, 1924), p. 8. 27 H.Sweet, A Primer of Spoken English (Oxford, 1890), pp. vi–vii. 28 G.Gissing, Demos: A Story of English Socialism, ed. P.Constillas (Brighton: Harvester, 1972), p. 376. 29 W.Barnes, A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (Dorchester, 1885), pp. 34–5. 30 J.Wright, The English Dialect Grammar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), p. vii.

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31 C.F.G.Masterman, From the Abyss (London: Johnson, 1902), p. 86; subsequent page references appear in the text in parentheses. 32 H.Fisher, Speech to the Liverpool Education Committee and Liverpool Council of Education, 2 October 1917 (London: HMSO, 1917), p. 1. 33 H.Bradley and R.Bridges, ‘On the terms Briton, British, Britisher’, Proceedings of the Society for Pure English, 14 (London: SPE, 1927), p. 11. 34 I.A.Richards, Practical Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929), p. 301. 35 Sir Henry Newbolt, The Teaching of English in England (London: HMSO, 1921), pp. 22–3; subsequent page references appear in the text in parentheses. 36 Stanley Baldwin, On England (London: Phillip Allan, 1926), p. 80. 37 Sampson, op. cit., p. 41. 38 Graham, op. cit., p. 159. 39 Cited in John Barrell, English Literature 1730–1780: An Equal Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), p. 138.

Realism, consensus and ‘exclusion itself’: interpellating the Victorian bourgeoisie N.N.FELTES

I Realism…is an overall form of writing that is normal in bourgeois society.1 An explanation of the ideological interpellation of Victorian novel readers inevitably engages discussion of literary realism, and so I shall begin by presenting a materialist critique, from the problematic of Louis Althusser and Michel Pêcheux, of a recent description of the production of the ‘realistic’ fiction effect. I shall argue a theory of literary realism (based on Pêcheux’s Language, Semantics and Ideology2) as a process of simultaneous reproduction and transformation of the ideological formation, demonstrating this process in the text of Dickens’s Dombey and Son. I want to construct an argument, that is, against the description of fictional realism as a form of consensus; by invoking ‘consensus’, a social category, such a description of realism invites ideological analysis: whose consensus, I would ask, is it, and whose, at any particular historical moment, is it not? Fictional realism is said to be ‘an aesthetic form of consensus, its touchstone being the agreement between the various viewpoints made available by a text’.3 The consensus of available viewpoints in a novel ‘establishes an agreement of meanings’; it ‘literally “objectifies” the world’: The genial consensus of realistic narration implies a unity in human experience which assures us that we all inhabit the same world and that the same meanings are available to everyone. Disagreement is only an accident of position. However refracted it may be by point of view and by circumstance, the uniformity at the base of human experience and the solidarity of human nature receive confirmation from realistic conventions. The ‘message’, for instance, in both Little Dorrit and Middlemarch is that the various forms of imprisonment or waiting in those novels ‘constitute a common

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property, a common basis that validates the notion of a common “human” experience’. And so the distance, or ‘perspective’, or ‘faith’4 embodied in the realistic narrator can make a reassuring order out of history, since (in a significantly Carlylean formulation5) ‘History is an arena of confusion and not, as in realism, an orderly linear sequence.’ The narrative perspective (or ‘narrator’) in a realistic novel is faceless, even ‘without identity in the ordinary sense of the word’, but it achieves the ‘identity’ of consensus. For its task is to co-ordinate diverse viewpoints into a unified, collective vision, ‘to homogenize the medium’, to break down ‘the discontinuities that limitations introduce into experience’ and to bridge ‘the manifest gaps in material existence’. A heavy price is paid in the way in which realistic narrative fulfils these functions, ‘the price of estrangement from the particulars of experience and from the actual present—the price, in a word, of disembodiment’, but it achieves a ‘governing point of view’ which can specify generalizations ‘that project beyond the arbitrarily limited horizon to all times and places’.6 The parapraxis in this language of ‘arbitrary limitations’ and ‘manifest gaps’, of ‘estrangement’ and ‘the actual present’, must by now be clear: an idealist history which simply sees ‘society’ as increasingly ‘a self-contained entity rather than part of a cosmic hierarchy’ permits the judgement that ‘differences in temporal and spatial position’ have been treated increasingly through history as ‘quantitative rather than as qualitative differences’ (p. 181). The ‘unthought’ in all of this is class and gender, in the historical generalizations as in the discussion of narration in realist fiction. History is assuredly an account of ‘manifest gaps’ and ‘arbitrarily limited horizons’, the gaps and limitations of class division, gender oppression and power. And just as realism, as the normal mode of writing in bourgeois society,7 suppresses knowledge of these historical facts, ‘homogenizes the medium’, so criticism (however original) becomes complicit in maintaining these as ‘unthought’ by the very fullness of its originality and historical scope.8 This complicity may be avoided only by seeing bourgeois realism as necessarily ‘a limitation of the productivity of language through the establishment of certain positions for signification’, since it is precisely in its constitution of the subject in fiction that realism achieves its ideological effect: it is because ideology can presuppose a consistent subject, the origin of ideas and actions, that we can represent ourselves as free even when there is evidence to the contrary. It is this coherency, this sense of a unified being which is produced in the work of ideology and fixes identifications and representations, and subjects in relation to these…. It is this coherent subjectivity which is specifically emphasized in bourgeois ideology.9 A materialist analysis, recognizing realism as, historically, a bourgeois form, and locating its ideological effectivity in its constitution of that coherent subject which can ‘homogenize the medium’, would examine the subject-narrator for

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those very contradictions which bourgeois ideology occludes, as bourgeois social forms exclude the working class and oppress women. The assertion of ‘consensus’ can thus be read as yet another instance of what Roland Barthes called the ‘anonymity of the bourgeoisie’, that avoidance of the very name ‘bourgeois’ which is central to bourgeois ideological practice: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named…the bourgeoisie merges into the nation, even if it has, in order to do so, to exclude from it the elements which it decides are allogenous (the Communists).10 Bourgeois ideology does indeed present itself as a consensus, the genial consensus of the ‘free market’, which so easily and painlessly assigns, say, food, housing and education differentially, while never recognizing any gaps or limitations; and the bourgeois subject never recognizes what its consensus necessarily excludes: ‘This subject, traversed and worked by social contradiction, is…set in place as fully responsible, a controlling consciousness, consistent within one articulation.’11 But bourgeois ideology is clearly, historically, a contradictory formation, the contradictory imbrication of consensus and exclusion, manifest in such social practices as the suburban ‘state of semi-detachment’ produced in ‘the quest for social exclusiveness’.12 What bourgeois criticism posits as the identity that this consensus creates is, simply, contradiction, which the structural assumptions of the critical argument allow to be ignored. The unconscious’, Lacan says, ‘is a concept forged on the trace of what operates to constitute the subject’,13 and in this case the excluded class and gender struggle is forged on the trace of ‘consensus’. An alternative critical practice would thus interrogate the constructed narrative subject for precisely the contradiction which the apparent consensus denies, for the forms within which bourgeois realism, in each specific instance, conceals its inevitable exclusion of any implication of the possibility of a working-class or feminist perspective. Michel Pêcheux’s materialist theory of semantics directly addresses the issues I am raising in the conventional critical description of the constitution of bourgeois realism: neo-positivist idealism makes no mistakes in its pursuit of ‘metaphysical entities’…: it unhesitatingly falls into the trap of the social psychology of groups as a stock of explanatory hypotheses, but turns up its nose at ‘demagogic fictions’ like the people, the masses or the working class. Confronted with these ‘entities’, logical empiricism suddenly rediscovers all its critical vigour and tirelessly repeats that…the ‘mental world’ does not allow of a secure reference, except by virtue of the illusions which capture all subjects in the form of ‘consensus’, conformism, etc. (p. 88)

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Drawing on Pêcheux’s analysis, we can redefine what the empiricist account calls consensus as the preconstructed, ‘what relates to a previous, external or at any rate independent construction in opposition to what is “constructed” by the utterance’ (p. 64). The preconstructed describes the form of the ideological determinations in a discourse, the determinations, that is, of a specific ideological instance (such as a particular literary work), produced on the ideological level of a particular historical social formation: ‘thus the effect of the preconstructed appears in its pure form where the positing of a singular existence is linked to the universal truth which affects assertions bearing on that singularity’ (p. 66, n. 6). Such a universal truth might be that ‘we all inhabit the same world’, or that ‘the same meanings are available to everyone’. Rather than these constituting a consensual ‘identity’, we have instead ‘an identificationpresentification which inevitably involves complicities, perceptual and notional “guarantees” (“I see what I see”/“one knows what one knows”…)’ (p. 161). Pêcheux analyses this ‘identification-presentation’ effect (the construction of ‘the obvious’ or the normal in bourgeois society) as depending both on a ‘mise-enscène’ of the concept (in realist fiction, the ‘narrator’) and, simultaneously, on the return of the ‘known’ (of the Universality of the concept) in the subject’s thought in the form of a reminder…i.e. the sustaining effect produced by the accessary clause, i.e. the intervention of what I have called the ‘transverse-discourse’. (p. 161) That is to say, the narrator-subject is constituted by a ‘mise-en-scène’ (I see what I see) and a ‘transverse discourse’ (one knows what one knows). The preconstructed, the discourse of ‘reality’, is ‘transversed’ by an ‘articulated discourse’, the discourse of ‘meaning’, within the ‘interdiscourse’, which is a complex whole in dominance or, concretely and historically, the discursive practice of bourgeois realism, on the level of the narrator, of any particular Victorian novel. In his analysis of ‘interdiscourse’ as the preconstructed (or the ‘embedded’) transversed by the ‘articulated’, Pêcheux explains not only the contradiction at the heart of bourgeois ‘identity’, but also its historical function: ‘ideological “objects” are always supplied together with “the way to use them”— their “meaning”, i.e. their orientation, i.e. the class interests which they serve’ (p. 99); for instance, they may ‘assure us that we all inhabit the same world’. The ‘distance’ (which in bourgeois theory risks ‘estrangement’) becomes ‘a separation, distance or discrepancy in a sentence between what is thought before, elsewhere or independently and what is contained in the global assertion of the sentence’ (p. 64). I am arguing that the same separation or distance exists in a realist novel between the narrative perspective and the global assertion of the working of the plot, and it is this contradictory form, this ‘discrepancy’, that constitutes the only true ‘identity’ of the ideological subject position, of the narrator in a novel:

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the interpellation of the individual as a subject of his discourse is achieved by the identification (of the subject) with the discursive formation that dominates him (i.e. in which he is constituted as subject): this identification, which founds the (imaginary) unity of the subject, depends on the fact that the elements of interdiscourse (in their double form, described above as ‘preconstructed’ and ‘sustaining process’) that constitute, in the subject’s discourse, the traces of what determines him, are re-inscribed in the discourse of the subject himself. (p. 114) The subject-narrator position becomes ‘obvious’, or ‘realistic’: Indeed, interdiscourse is the locus for a perpetual ‘work’ of reconfiguration in which a discursive formation, as a function of the ideological interests that it represents, is led to absorb preconstructed elements produced outside it, linking them metonymically to its own elements by transverseeffects which incorporate them in the evidentness of a new meaning in which they are ‘welcomed’ and founded. (p. 193, n. 1) Thus, far from simply arriving at a consensus of the various perspectives in a work, as a merchant might be thought to arrive at a market price by balancing supply and demand, the subject-narrator of a work imposes meaning (‘fixes’ the price), out of its own contradictory ideological configuration: ‘it is in the nonsense of representations which “are there for nobody” that a place is marked out for the subject who takes up a position in relation to them’ (p. 188). The ‘domains of thought’ (‘preconstructed’ and ‘articulated’) which produce the subject also simultaneously produce what it is given ‘to see, understand, do, fear and hope, etc.’ (pp. 112–13). ‘This is how every subject “finds” himself,’ says Pêcheux, ‘and this is the condition (and not the effect) of the notorious intersubjective “consensus” with which idealism pretends to grasp being from a starting-point in thought’ (p. 113). The advantage of such an analysis as Pêcheux’s is that it starts in material history and in the human production of ideology. While his own analysis is focused on specialized linguistic questions, I believe that we can apply his analysis to instances of a particular discursive practice (realism), following out a larger interest in ‘the effect of class relationships on what can be called the “linguistic practices” inscribed in the operation of the ideological apparatuses of a given social and economic formation’ (p. 8). Pêcheux invited such developments —‘I shall be pleased if this work enables others to save time and go further without retreating’ (p. 181), he wrote before he died—and I shall now try to ‘go further’, using Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son.

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II ‘Do I understand that this respectable matron keeps an establishment, Miss Tox?’ inquired Mr Dombey, condescendingly. ‘Why, I really don’t know’, rejoined that lady, ‘whether I am justified in calling it so. It is not a Preparatory School by any means. Should I express my meaning,’ said Miss Tox, with peculiar sweetness, ‘if I designated it an infantine Boarding-House of a very select description?’ ‘On an exceedingly limited and particular scale,’ suggested Mrs Chick, with a glance at her brother. ‘Oh! Exclusion itself!’ said Miss Tox.14 Dombey and Son clearly satirizes the bourgeoisie’s fetish of exclusion, and the play of this passage demands that the reader recognize it also, if only for the first time; that recognition is preconstructed. But transversing this passage is another ideological discourse, structured by Mr Dombey’s ‘condescension’ and Miss Tox’s ‘peculiar sweetness’, and this is not admitted by the ‘consensus’ of the preconstructed. It would likely be read simply as a muted play of ‘courtship’ between widower and spinster, but I would rather read it as a local instance of that transverse discourse of gender and class exclusion which marks the text of Dombey and Son ideologically. For the narrative subject position of Dombey and Son ‘works’ preconstructed and transverse discourses of consensus and exclusion. We can trace this most clearly in the first five numbers, to the end of chapter 16, where Miss Tox expresses her amazement, in a remark I shall return to, ‘that Dombey and Son should be a Daughter after all’ (p. 225). It is in these early pages that Dombey’s first readers, who were also solicited by the part-issue’s advertisements for the Magazine of Domestic Economy and Chubb’s Locks and Fireproof Safes (and the later reader, who, while not perhaps being a customer for Lett’s Diaries for 1847,15 is nevertheless selected by later ideological apparatuses to be a reader of Dickens), are made to ‘recognize’ Mr Dombey and his world. We ‘know’ Dombey, the Firm, his associates and friends through the ‘evidentnesses’ of our class-and gender-determined experience. This level of response is preconstructed by those determinations—‘I see what I see’—and we respond by exclaiming, ‘How wonderfully real!’ or, like the reviewer in the Economist, ‘There was an urgent need to paint such a man as Dombey.’16 This process is the first of ‘the two articulated figures of the ideological subject’ for the exploitation of ideological ‘obviousnesses’, the ‘identification-unification of the subject with himself’.17 We ‘recognize’ Dombey’s cold exclusion of almost everyone on class/gender terms at the same time that we may deplore it. Much of the early chapters is made up of rites of class exclusion and entry, for Dombey is ‘the beadle of private life; the beadle of our business and our bosoms’ (p. 58). When Mr Dombey first meets the Toodle family at Polly’s interview, he insists that there is to be no relationship at all established between Polly and the baby Paul, and when Mrs Chick asks him (in a deleted passage), ‘Oh! But what relationship is there?…

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Can there be, I mean’, Dombey answers sternly, ‘Why, none…. The whole world knows that, I presume’ (p. 17, n. 4). Thus Polly is admitted to the Dombey household on condition that she be known as ‘Richards,—an ordinary name, and convenient’ (p. 18). Again, Miss Tox’s entry into Dombey’s world is conditional on her behaving as ‘the very pink of general propitiation and politeness’: From a long habit of listening admiringly to everything that was said in her presence, and looking at the speakers as if she were mentally engaged in taking off impressions of their images upon her soul, never to part with the same but with life, her head had quite settled on one side. (p. 6) And Major Bagstock (in whom Miss Tox recognized ‘something so truly military’; p. 85), deciding from his observations ‘that Dombey, Sir, was a man to be known, and that J.B. was the boy to make his acquaintance’ (p. 125), has the connections and knows well enough ‘the conventionalities of life’ (p. 127) to effect a meeting. I am arguing, of course, that Dickens’s readers, whatever their opinion of Dombey, Miss Tox or Major Bagstock, register their world as ‘real’, as answering to their own knowledge of the ways of the bourgeoisie. Dickens’s humour in these scenes necessitates this understanding, so thorough an understanding of its ‘reality’ that its foibles, even its evils, may be tolerated up to a point (which point ‘we’, the same readers, also ‘know’). Whatever their comic or ‘artistic’ effect, Miss Tox’s head to one side or Bagstock’s bragging verbosity are situated within a quite acceptable ideological ‘reality’. Indeed, even to speak of these characterizations as ‘caricatures’ is to speak out of the social knowledge which preconstructs them, for ideological preconstitution explains the extremes of class practice, makes them easily assimilable even as it presents them, by ironizing or by personalizing them—‘the contradiction grasped and displayed’.18 In the case of Dombey and Son, the ‘preconstructed’ designates social ideologies of gender and class, related, that is, to a previous, external or at any rate independent construction, to what is thought before, or elsewhere. Thus the Economist’s reviewer of the novel focuses on the concrete, individual subject, ‘a man such as Dombey’, both as ‘an element of a set (community, people, etc.) and as source of the metaphor constituted by the personification of this set operating “as one man”’.19 For, since preconstruction interpellates readers as subjects, ‘one can begin to see how unconscious repression and ideological subjection are materially linked, without being confounded, inside what could be called the process of the Signifier in interpellation and identification.’20 We can see in that contemporary reviewer’s phrase the ‘ideological “subject” effect’, whereby ‘subjectivity appears as source, origin, point of departure or point of application’.21 And so ideology conceals its own existence within its operation by producing ‘a web of “subjective” evident truths, “subjective” here meaning not “affecting the subject” but “in which the subjective is constituted”’.22

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Fictional ‘realism’, therefore, is a specific practice in what Pêcheux would call a ‘discursive formation’, a given position in a given conjuncture determined by the state of the class struggle, which itself determines ‘what can and should be said’ in a region (‘the novel’) of a Victorian ideological formation (‘literature’); ‘consensus’, as we have seen, is the idealist, positivist critical category which masks this. For example, realism controls what may be ‘truly’ said of ideologies (ideological practices, since ideologies exist only in practices) such as ‘the family’ or ‘free enterprise’. A ‘realistic’ portrayal of a family or a firm is preconstituted in this way; the preconstituted ‘domain of thought’ produces the reader-subject ‘and simultaneously along with him what he is given to see, understand, do, fear and hope, etc.’. Each reader-subject is supplied with his/her ‘reality’ as ‘a system of evident truths and significations perceived-acceptedsuffered’, yet realized precisely in the reader-subject in the form of autonomy, of a participatory ‘consensus’ or ‘identification (of the subject) with the discursive formation that dominates him’.23 What the Economist’s reviewer applauds, in effect, is the text’s ‘portrayal’ of a Firm called Dombey and Son; that is to say, the ‘realistic’ discursive practice so ‘works’ a Victorian ideological formation— ‘free enterprise’—as to produce a recognizable set of characteristics; the reviewer ‘sees what he sees’. But Dickens also uses these same details to point convincingly the meanings in his story, so that the reviewer ‘knows what he knows’, i.e. ‘Mr Dombey, as a Man and a Father,…at the Head of the Home-Department’ (p. 23). For, just as the word ‘house’ signifies both the Dombey residence and Dombey and Son, so Dombey, his family and all his social relations come early in the novel to be invested for the reader with the mysterious characterics of a ‘firm’. Dombey’s desire to make his family’s relation to Polly Toodle ‘a question of wages, altogether’ (p. 18), is only the most explicit instance of this; his ‘coldness’, and the use of the ‘cold’ metaphor generally (as at Paul’s christening), is perhaps the least explicit instance. But the metaphor of the ‘firm’ pervades the early parts. Because Dombey’s mind is ‘too much set on Dombey and Son’ (as Dickens put it in the manuscript; p. 31, n. 1), the production of Paul as ‘Son’, so to speak, is speeded up. The ‘old-fashioned’24 child (p. 185) is exhausted by the mechanical social relations of Blimber’s factory-academy and dies talking to Florence of ‘the waves’, of their mother and other images of those values which the ‘firm’ excludes. This whole first stage, up to the death of Paul, thus ‘works’ a set of ideological discourses on ‘the family’, ‘free enterprise’, ‘production’ and ‘history’ (i.e. ‘oldfashionedness’) to preconstitute a subject position, to interpellate the knowing reader. That reader’s knowledge is circumscribed by the ‘realist’ discursive formation, excluding knowledge of how certain other elements are themselves excluded. Dombey’s excluding from his world the Toodles and the company from the Wooden Midshipman shop, while perhaps ‘extreme’ (a reader might say), is none the less ‘realistic’: ‘it happens’! That is to say, the matter cannot be at issue in the novel: Dombey is free, as we all are, to choose his acquaintance.

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Issues which might arise from the structures of class and gender, issues which are the locus of struggle, are occluded by being individualized in this way or by being treated metaphorically, so that they cannot contradict the ideologically preconstructed, the ‘truths’ embedded in the text. But the preconstructed is, of course, but one ‘domain of discourse’ in the trope of interpellation. The novel’s discourse is also ‘articulated’ or syntagmatized by the plot of the novel. Just as ‘there is a separation, distance or discrepancy in a sentence between what is thought before, elsewhere or independently and what is contained in the global assertion of the sentence’,25 so the preconstructed of a realist novel may be distinguished from the extrapolation, or ‘assertion’, of its plot. And so Dombey and Son is ‘articulated’ in shrouded, ideological contradiction to the preconstructed elements of Mr Dombey’s world. For example, Dickens’s number plans record the earliest version of Miss Tox’s remark at the death of Paul: ‘“And so,” said Miss Tox, drying her eyes, “Dombey and Son’s a Daughter after all!”’;26 this transformation was part of Dickens’s earliest conception. And Butt and Tillotson recount Dickens’s statement of intention when that number had appeared. Lord Jeffrey had written him to ask: ‘After reaching this climax in the fifth number, what are you to do with the fifteen that are to follow?’ Dickens wrote to Forster: To transfer to Florence, instantly, all the previous interest, is what I am aiming at. For that, all sorts of other points must be thrown aside in this number.’27 His memorandum for the next number reminds him: ‘Great point of the No. is to throw the interest of Paul, at once on Florence’ (p. 840). And it is here, in all the intensity of ‘throwing aside’ and ‘transforming instantly’, that we must look for the precise structure of the ‘articulation’ of the text, for that contradiction of ‘consensus’ by ‘exclusion’ which marks it ideologically. The text’s transfer of interest to Florence is precisely the ‘assertion’, ‘extension’ or ‘articulated discourse’ of which Pêcheux speaks, here shaping the plot of a novel. The discursive formation, realism, ‘as a function of the ideological interests that it represents, is led to absorb preconstructed elements produced outside it, linking them metonymically to its own elements by transverse-effects which incorporate them in the evidentness of a new meaning in which they are “welcomed” and founded.’28 The characterization of Florence is developed out of contrasts with Edith, when that ‘new face’, ‘very handsome, very haughty, very wilful’ (p. 2,80), appears during Dombey’s visit to Bath, and with Alice Marwood, whose face, as we meet her, shows as tellingly ‘a reckless and regardless beauty…: a dauntless and depraved indifference to more than weather: a carelessness of what was cast upon her bare head from Heaven or earth’ (p. 462.). But our perception of Florence is even more the metonymic product of the admiration she increasingly evokes from everyone but Mr Dombey, from Paul and Susan Nipper, Mr Toots and Walter, Edith and Captain Cuttle; indeed, she is constructed as not only the captain’s but also our ‘Heart’sdelight’. Her actions as the novel proceeds dramatize Florence as a womanly ideal: she accepts her father’s cruel disregard but she leaves his house; she

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remains chaste and keeps the ‘dead’ Walter’s memory; she marries the resurrected Walter and becomes a mother. But how, we might ask, does all this make Dombey and Son ‘a Daughter after all’? For Dombey and Son, the Firm, has no place for a daughter, or any other woman, in its larger scheme of things; as a recent critic puts it: ‘Dombey and Daughter is non-sense because it was until very recently a “natural fact”, necessary to the structure of society, that women were economically and politically inferior to men.’29 Miss Tox, ‘realistically’, is ideologically unable to correct herself on this matter. The obviousness of that social fact makes it escape her notice; it is inexpressible. But the crucial point is that it is recognized nowhere in the text. Whereas Miss Tox’s oversight might be said to be produced by her habit of propitiation, the text’s oversight is the ‘fiction effect’ of realist discourse. I have suggested that ‘Dombey and Son’ is personalized, that Dombey’s family and immediate acquaintance are spoken of metaphorically as a ‘firm’. That trope occludes the major contradiction in Dombey and Son. Or, to use Pêcheux’s scheme, the articulated discourse, as it unfolds syntagmatically in Dombey and Son, ‘reminding’ us of the healing power of ‘womanly virtue’ in the life of a ‘firm’, excludes the question of woman’s place, or absence, in a Firm, in a Victorian commercial enterprise. As the narrator-subject’s discourse ‘develops and props itself up on itself’, ‘throwing the interest’ on to Florence as dutiful daughter and young mother, this ‘accessary construction (which ‘constitutes the [narrator-]subject in his relation to meaning’30) appears to complete the story of Dombey and Son while it in fact redirects and transforms it. The story of the Firm, and ‘a man such as Dombey’, is modulated into the story of the ‘firm’, the Dombey family and its close contacts; ‘the principal social theme of the novel is hardly developed before it is abandoned,’ says Stanley Tick, ‘its unresolved elements left to mix awkwardly with the character studies of unnatural pride.’31 So the Firm itself, when it reappears in the story, reappears only as part of the melodramatic apparatus surrounding Carker, who has mishandled its funds, bringing about Dombey’s downfall. Just as Dombey himself personifies the ‘insolence of wealth’ (p. 149), so it is Carker (‘canker’) who is personally the fault in the firm; his death redistributes the novel’s capital in satisfactory ways, the human relationships in the novel are conventionally re-established, and the issues of gender and class exclusion latent in the preconstructed disappear. ‘Private life’ does indeed overrun Dickens’s ‘business’ novel,32 although the ‘overrunning’ is less thematic than the plot’s inevitable extension in articulated discourse. This fulfilment on the level of the ‘firm’ guarantees the narratorsubject’s oversight and the reader-subject’s ignorance of the exclusionary structures of capitalist economic forms. Yet these forms are latent in the preconstructed elements of the opening scenes. Florence is introduced into the novel, literally, in her absence, for the narrator first announces that Mr and Mrs Dombey had had, in their ten years of marriage, ‘no issue’, and then goes on:

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To speak of; none worth mentioning. There had been a girl some six years before…. But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested—a bad Boy—nothing more. (p. 3) But the latencies in the preconstructed are transformed ideologically by the articulated discourse of the plot. Thus the preconstructed exclusion, here, of a girl child from ‘the House’s name and dignity’ is transversed by Susan Nipper’s ‘girls are thrown away in this house’ (p. 28), the move from ‘House’ to ‘house’ matching the move from ‘Firm’ to ‘firm’ that I have mentioned. The theme of ‘manners and merchandise’, of ‘commercial enterprise and human relationships’,33 was transversed in the proofs by the narrator’s comment on Dombey’s ‘sense of property’ in Paul (p. 20, n. 3), an articulation continued in the conversation arising from Paul’s innocent question to his father: ‘Papa! what’s money?’ (pp. 93–5). These discourses articulate the latencies of the preconstituted so as to personalize them, redirecting them away from the economic and socio-historical to the childish wisdom of the ailing Paul. For the move to Paul’s as a narrative central consciousness is another trace of the transverse discourse. The possible connection, which Horsman speaks of, of Mrs Pipchin to ‘reduced old lady’ in Dickens’s childhood, and ‘the increasing adoption of the child’s standpoint’ (pp. xxiv–xxv), only reinforce the main determination of the use of Paul’s vantage point, the need to personalize the narrative so as eventually to shift the interest on to Florence while occluding her socio-economic position, her exclusion from the sorts of expectation her brother is permitted to have. Exclusion is the mark in the bourgeois ideological formation that it is indeed ‘a complex whole in dominance’. In its ideological practices, the bourgeois ideological formation traces the domination of its ruling ideology, reproducing the relationships of unevenness and subordination which structure the social formation.34 Dombey’s circle demands ‘exclusion itself’ in situations recognizable to Dickens’s readers. The novel’s realist narration in turn ensures the suppression of any understanding of the dominating place of exclusion in that ‘complex whole in dominance’ which is the ideological formation. For realism too is a ‘complex whole in dominance’, a discursive formation whose ‘consensual’ selection of ‘perspectives’, whose ‘interdiscourse’, denies its origin in the bourgeois ideological formation, excludes recognition of ‘exclusion itself’ as the mark of the relations of unevenness and subordination. The text may joke with Miss Tox’s turn of phrase, since, for Dickens and the readers interpellated by his narrator, that is all it is. The novel’s realist narration, whose ‘genial consensus assures us that we all inhabit the same world and that the same meanings are available to everyone’, erases the contradictions of class and gender in the Victorian social formation which the bourgeoisie tries to resolve by its exclusionary practices. And the bourgeois subject-reader interpellated by

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Dombey and Son notes only the ‘obviousness’ of it all, reading only what is normal in bourgeois society. York University, Toronto NOTES 1 Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 37. 2. Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, trans. H.Nagpal (London: Macmillan, 1982.); page numbers in parentheses in the text refer to this edition. I regret the gender-exclusive language of this translation. 3 Elizabeth D.Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. ix–x; I am using this book because it represents a particularly clear symptom of the conventional ideological position. 4 Ermarth, op. cit., pp. 54, 77, 65, 46, 38, 91. 5 ‘Narrative is linear, Action is solid’: Thomas Carlyle, ‘On history’, in A Carlyle Reader, ed. G.B.Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 60. 6 Ermarth, op. cit., pp. 61, 39, 40, 66, 85, 91. 7 ‘It belongs,’ George Levine reminds us, ‘almost provincially, to a “middling” condition’: George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 5. 8 This is a classic ideological instance, what Pêcheux labels a particular kind of ‘ignorance’. It is ‘anything but an initial void of thought, it is on the contrary the ideological “fullness” by which the unthought is hidden from thought in thought itself’ (op. cit., p. 48). 9 Coward and Ellis, op. cit., pp. 44, 68. 10 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), pp. 140, 141, 138. 11 Coward and Ellis, op. cit., p. 75. 12 H.J.Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1961), pp. 27, 53. 13 Jacques Lacan, ‘Position de l’inconscient’, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 830; quoted in Coward and Ellis, op. cit., pp. 106–7. 14 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 99. Page numbers in parentheses in the text refer to this edition. 15 Advertisements in Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation (London: Bradbury & Evans, November 1846), no. 2, pp. 11– 13. 16 Alan Horsman, ‘Introduction’, Dombey and Son, p. xxii. 17 Pêcheux, op. cit., p. 91. 18 Ibid., p. 107. 19 Ibid., p. 89. 20 Ibid., pp. 92–3. 21 Ibid., p. 90. 22 Ibid., p. 104. 23 Ibid., pp. 111–14.

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24 This ‘opaque epithet’ signifies ‘precocious knowing’ at this point in the novel: Patricia Ingham, ‘Speech and non-communication in Dombey and Son’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 30 (1979), pp. 144–53. 25 Pêcheux, op. cit., p. 64. 26 ‘Appendix B: the number plans’, Dombey and Son, p. 839. 27 John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 101, n. 2. 28 Pêcheux, op. cit., p. 193, n. 1. 29 Robert Clark, ‘Riddling the family firm: the sexual economy in Dombey and Son’, ELH, 51 (1984), p. 71. 30 Pêcheux, op. cit. pp. 118 and 156. 31 Stanley Tick, ‘The unfinished business of Dombey and Son’, Modern Language Quarterly, 36 (1975), p. 390; Tick’s analysis of the slippage of the signifier ‘oldfashioned’, from ‘commercial means and ways’ to ‘the consolation of Eternity’, supports my argument in general. 32 Butt and Tillotson, op. cit., p. 109. 33 Tick, op. cit., pp. 393, 392. 34 Pêcheux, op. cit., pp. 99–101.

Noises off PETER WOMACK

In this essay I’m interested in a persistent mark of modern literary theatre: violence off the stage. From Baron Tusenbach (shot in a duel in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Moscow, January 1901) to the equally philosophical, equally goaded Stephen Andrews (killed in a train crash in David Hare’s A Map of the World, London, January 1983), the corpses have piled up in the wings of our theatres. The carnage extends from Tennessee Williams eastwards to Maxim Gorky, and from Ibsen south to Lorca; nor does it respect political and stylistic boundaries. In 1949, to take the example of a good year, the first nights which went into the history books were those of Death of a Salesman, a liberal tragedy in demotic prose; The Cocktail Party, a high-Anglican drawing-room drama in verse; and the Brecht—Weigel production of Mother Courage, the moment of crystallization of epic theatre. The three evenings can have had little in common except that in each the onstage apprehension of an offstage death (Willy’s, Celia’s, Swiss Cheese’s) formed one of the show’s most decisive and famous moments. It’s worth noting at once that this recurrent device does not, or at least not necessarily, reflect a taboo on the representation of violence on the stage. Many of the writers I’ve already mentioned observe no such prohibition; and contemporary dramatists such as Howard Brenton and Edward Bond, who have staged atrocities in an unprecedentedly literal manner, have nevertheless continued to present some of the violence in their stories by means of reports from offstage. We are looking, not at some negative force which stops a violent event from being shown on the stage, but at the positive production of a different, integral signifier: offstage violence. I It might be helpful to postpone the violence and begin by considering the offstage. This ambiguous place is interestingly described by the director André Barsacq, who in the 1930s made the experiment of staging Molière’s Le Médecin volant on a simple platform stage in a forest. He explains how, ‘in proportion exactly as the elegant turns of Sganarelle began to grow on the stage’, he felt the vitality of the playing disappear into the indifferent life of the forest behind. In an

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attempt to ‘give back to my poor actors the lustre they had lost into the emptiness’, he hung two sheets across the back of the stage on a rope. Suddenly, then, the miracle of theatre happened…. The empty scene, the very acting-space itself seemed to be waiting. Behind the curtain that we had just hung up there had become condensed together a different world unknown to us, of which we awaited the revelation. Then through the centre slit appeared the opening player. Coming on in this way he made his appearance to tell us what was passing in that hidden world whence he emerged, and which none but he had the right to penetrate. The other actors appeared, and each time their entrances were rich with significance.1 The function of the sheets was not an obviously practical one. They didn’t resemble or stand for anything in the fictional world of the play; nor did they blot out more than a few square yards of the distracting natural setting. They enabled actors to remain unseen while waiting to come on, but the forest presumably was full of trees which would have served this purpose equally well. Rather, the level at which they worked was semiotic. They complemented the stage, a place whose whole raison d’être was its visibility, with an adjacent space the whole point of which was that it couldn’t be seen. The concealing sheet then at once became part of the stage image: that is, the invisibility of the offstage space was itself a theatrical sign, a term in the visual language of the performance. The place from which the actors emerged was shown as not shown. This paradoxical parading of concealment was, as it turned out, essential to the performance. From the point of view of theatrical storytelling, the usefulness of such a space is that it can stand for whatever fictional location is supposed to be adjacent to the one where the visible action is set. If the stage is meant to be a street, the gap between the sheets leads to the inside of one of the houses; if a drawing-room, to the hallway, and so on. But Barsacq is claiming a good deal more for his device than this expository convenience. According to him, it was the source of his actors’ ability to compel attention to their fictions. This amounts to a reversal of the commonsense view of the relation between onstage and offstage. It’s not that the hidden space is a house because the stage is a street; rather, the spectator is induced to accept the stage as (what it evidently isn’t) a street because the actors behave and speak as if they have just come out of a house. On the basis of that acceptance the whole fiction establishes itself: the actor is a man in the street, his interlocutor is someone he has met by chance, it is not an afternoon in 1937 but a morning in 1650, and so on. Thus the life of the spectacle is attached, as by an umbilical cord, to the unseen source behind the sheet; it is their metonymic link with that undisclosed place which saves the words and gestures and costumes of the actors from being merely eccentric behaviour and constitutes them as a signifier. The stage has the character of an anteroom, whose significance is not inherent but is a function of its forming a part (an ancillary part) of a system whose

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centre is an inner chamber. Only their free access to this chamber gives importance to the actors in the eyes of the public, who are excluded from it. The ‘lustre’ of the performers, like that of the moon, is strictly a reflected radiance. Barsacq’s account of his piece of practical research is striking for its theological language. The offstage space which is conjured into existence by the sheets is a ‘different world’ from which we await ‘revelations’ by the pontifical mediation of those who have an exclusive ‘right to penetrate’ its mysteries. His use of the word ‘miracle’ is not just theatre sentimentality: in his version of events, with its deliberate contrast between the paucity of the physical means and the splendour of the spiritual effects, what comes over the stage is a kind of transubstantiation. The structure of the illusion is so to speak Platonic: the visible action, the world of appearances, is valid inasmuch as it reflects the ideal reality of the invisible world behind the sheet. This theatrical idealism is particularly clear in this case because of the strongly anti-metaphysical tendency of the role that happens to be mentioned. Sganarelle, servo, trickster, homme moyen sensuel, is a figure at once flamboyantly theatrical and aggressively materialistic. It would be hard to find a better representative of the concept of theatre as immediate entertainment in the here and now. If mediations supervene all the same, if even his ‘elegant turns’ require such a theophany before they come to life, then it starts to look as if any text at all will be haunted by the same mystique. It’s not an expression of this or that particular dramatic theme, but the reflex of a general spirituality of theatrical form. This suggests that the project of a materialist theatre may be more problematic than is often supposed. II Barsacq’s notion of the actor as emissary finds a paradigm from theatre history in the Messenger of classical tragedy. Almost devoid of personal substance, this figure based his claim to the audience’s attention wholly on what he had seen in the place ‘whence he emerged’. He is not an arbitrary convention, but a deeply typical mark of the whole genre. Individuals in Greek tragedy are never alone, or alone with one another. Their identity is constituted in dialogue with the Chorus, which, like the audience, is always present, but not on the stage. On a lower level, blocked by the architecture from the doorways by which the actors enter and leave, the members of the Chorus wait for news to be brought to them from the palace or the mountainside, This means that the fictional location of the action has normally to be one where they can intelligibly be waiting—a communal meeting place, a forecourt or an altar, somewhere rather like a theatre. To this place the actors come and declare themselves to a public (the Chorus, the audience, the polis in conclave). This collective orientation is confirmed by the drastic limitation on the number of actors at the dramatist’s disposal (for Sophocles the maximum was three), which prevents private relationships, however intense, from attaining

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to much density or continuity. The image of a lived ‘world’ on the stage is not permitted to become self-sustaining. In an important sense, most fully realized in the forensic structure of the Oedipus Tyrannus, all the speakers are messengers. Offstage thus acquires a shadowed vividness in the words pronounced onstage. The drama, vigorously dialectical, somewhat resembles a meeting whose agenda is set by events elsewhere. But this political structure is never the sole determinant of any particular play; there is always a mimetic supplement. The speakers refuse to be transparent windows on the events they report; their accounts are thickened by passion and interest; anger or pity interrupts the flow of information; even the formal Messenger may hesitate to tell his story for fear of the misfortune which traditionally overtakes the bringer of bad news. Dramatis personae define themselves in conflict with diegesis; the control of the stage by the absolute authority of what has occurred elsewhere is resisted. The extreme form of this resistance is hubris: the tragic protagonist attempts unilaterally to cut loose from the invisible forces which determine his or her visible existence, to establish on the stage an autonomous state in which the deciding factor in everything is his or her own will. This course of action leads to a cumulative crisis in which every fresh entrance is a further threat to the protagonist’s position: from outside the jurisdiction of his or her immediate presence come opinions, prophecies and evidence which press against and eventually crush the dream of a status quo subsisting on its own terms. The name of this ultimately irresistible supremacy of offstage contingency is, of course, the name of the god. The invisible forces which shatter the illusory autonomy of the visible are sacred. Their absence from the stage is anything but fortuitous; they reflect tragedy’s intimate links with a celebratory discourse whose express reference is to a transcendent reality. The text chooses representational incompleteness, so to speak, in order to lay itself open for completion by the untextualizable. Thus, in supplying a paradigm for Barsacq’s mediatory actor, we have also discovered a specific religious object for his slightly playful theatrical theology. In the performing context of the great Athenian festivals, the ‘revelation’ of ‘that hidden world’ is enacted in blood and terror. This in turn reconnects the ideality of offstage space with our original question. The fact that the Messenger’s report is so often about mutilation and death has led to a great deal of discussion on the basis that classical tragedists were labouring under a conventional prohibition of onstage violence (for the sake of verisimilitude, or decorum, or stage convenience), and that the Messenger is a device for getting round this awkward ban.2 My argument here suggests a more direct explanation: death is the final term in the cumulative assertion of the coercive power of the offstage world; the violence is that of a structural conflict. That explains, not why violence was kept offstage (a false question), but why what was offstage was, in the end, violence. Equipped with this reversal we can return to the modern theatre.

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III With the theophanic self-destruction of Oedipus in mind, it comes as a surprise to notice that the natural home of offstage suicide in the modern theatre appears to be realistic and naturalistic drama. A catalogue of plays which end in this way would provide a fairly good reading list for the study of dramatic realism; including, for example, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, Miss Julie, The Seagull, The Lower Depths, The House of Bernarda Alba and All My Sons. Chekhov is an illuminatingly reluctant example: he saw the ‘pistol shot’ denouement as a mechanical concession to the theatrical form he was somewhat sceptically working with, and strove ingeniously to manage without it.3 His difficulty in making his self-denying ordinance stick suggests how close were the links between realistic dramaturgy and offstage death. Yet dramatic realism, through the history outlined by my list, is officially an epochal secularization of the stage, a movement which freed its dramatis personae from the external determinations of fate or poetic justice and set them down in a disenchanted social reality. A whole range of disciplines—social accuracy in the settings, antirhetorical restraint in the playing, psychological expertise in characterization, historical typicality in the construction of situation—coheres in the dramatic aim of being ‘true to life’ as such truth is constituted by empirical and scientific knowledge. What is the occluded death, ancient mark of the unconditional, doing in among all this meticulous rendering of conditions? The rather complicated answer to this question begins from the structure of the realistic sign in the theatre. Realism means that the justification of this or that aspect of the performance comes primarily, not from its generic appropriateness, or rhetorical efficacy, or doctrinal correctness, but from its reference to reality. ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ actors say in rehearsal: a man of that class wouldn’t sit down in the drawing-room; a woman of that period wouldn’t smoke cigarettes; a person of that type wouldn’t express anger so directly. The fictions—both the storytelling of the writer and the physical pretences of the actors—take up their ground on fidelity to the real. Thus everything that is done on the stage, everything that is said, worn, handled, and so on, privileges its referent, subordinating its own significative capacity to the task of representation. The intention is that the spectators should regard what is presented to them as the literal reproduction of an event; taking the actors for granted as simply vehicles for the characters, ignoring the stage for the sake of the living-room it depicts, forgetting about the stage lights so as to be able to ‘see’ daylight coming through the windows. In short, the theatrical signifier is designed to be overlooked. In this way, the primacy of the real as a theatrical reference point takes the theatre itself to the height of unreality. The realistic theatre is the theatre of greasepaint, of carefully asymmetrical fake beards, of false perspectives through doorways and philosophical manifestos skilfully disguised as after-dinner conversation. Because of the energy it commits to the validation of the referent, the spectacle itself wilts, becomes flimsy and tense, consents to its own

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unreality. Hence the verbal paradox that the terms ‘realist’ and ‘illusionist’ both refer to the same kind of stage convention. Hence also the emergence from within that convention of such anti-realistic extremes as Strindberg’s dream plays or the epistemological paradoxes of Pirandello. The bourgeois stage, with its minute and massive density of realization, is haunted by its own illusoriness. The stage gives us the appearance of things. The value of its images is not intrinsic but referential; the truth is what underlies what is seen, is reflected in it, has generated it; the referent is considered as the origin of the sign. This separation bears very directly on the concerns of realistic writing, which is consistently preoccupied—it is the theme of its scientism—by the distinction between real and unreal (truth and lies, sanity and madness, valid authority and arbitrary power, love and sentimentality, genuine decision and the air of determination with which indecisive characters cheer themselves up). None of these distinctions can be categorically drawn within the illusive and secondary space of the performance; all such questions are referred to the real source behind the show. In other words, the scene attains to significance (that is, has meaning and is worth watching) only as the predicate of an hors-scène, an irreducible externality which doesn’t appear and therefore doesn’t become a sign, doesn’t (unlike everything on the stage) refer to something else again, but is structurelessly, pre-semiotically itself. In this sheer objectivity, talk encounters a silent resistance, to which the various verbal and visual languages of the stage— it is the guarantee of their truth value and hence of their claim to be regarded as languages at all—defer as to an absolute necessity. The standard form, as it were, of this conclusive absence is, once again, the place behind the screen: the millrace at Rosmersholm, the unseen wearer of the boots Jean polishes in Miss Julie, the factory and the crashed planes in All My Sons. Its indispensability to the realistic project is negatively illustrated by a writer such as Pinter, whose plays are set in just the minutely realized room of naturalistic tradition, but then decline to specify the offstage space in any consistent or dependable way. This truncation of reference introduces a teasing indeterminacy into all the onstage oppositions of truth and lies, sanity and madness, and the rest; so that, although Pinter reproduces the rhythms of actuality with rather more fidelity than most classic realists, he sabotages the effect of reality by isolating the onstage action from the objective criteria of the hors-scène. What Pinter gains by thus abandoning the cognitive security of the offstage real is a new particularity and solidity in the onstage words and gestures. The show is saved as performance by unhinging its function as representation, rather as the dialogue saves the words as speech acts by dislocating the referential order which would otherwise subordinate them to itself. Conversely, the price which is usually exacted for the authentication of the spectacle by a reality offstage is that the always greater authenticity of the latter starts to drain the life and truth from the visible action. The matter of the performance is, increasingly, illusion; not only as a mechanism of representation, but explicitly as a dramatic theme. Everything

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that counts is somewhere else; the ‘three-walled room’ is the space of illusions long cherished and relinquished with agonizing reluctance after a series of evidential hammer-blows from without. When Willy Loman’s son cries, ‘We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!’,4 he is speaking for a whole line of inheritors: in claustral realistic interiors, from the Doll’s House to the house of Bernarda Alba, and from the Mannon mansion in Mourning Becomes Electra to the haunted playroom of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the semblance of ordinary family life whose trivialities made the first act so long turns out later to have been constructed by a systematic packing of skeletons into closets. The truth is offstage because it was pushed off in the act of demarcating the playing area, and, as it reinvades it, the realistic appearances are discredited, the unity of the characters is disorganized by hysteria or alcohol, and the detailed surface of everyday actuality is shattered by its exposure to the violence of what it has been suppressing. The dramaturgy of the ‘true to life’ produces, no less than classical tragedy, the drama of an absent truth which is ultimately apotheosized in death. The theatrical aesthetic of absence finds its form most programmatically in Waiting for Godot, which is thus, a formalist might say, the most typical realistic play of all.5 The spectacle has been hollowed out altogether: the location is so devoid of positive character that it is impossible to tell whether or not one has been there before, and the activities of the protagonists are, explicitly now, tactics for making the time pass until the mystery concealed in the wings should declare itself. However, the typicality is parodic for the decisive reason that the offstage contingencies, though all-important, are comprehensively undecidable. Godot’s arrival would perhaps be the annunciation Vladimir vaguely expects; but it is equally possible that it would solve nothing, or that he isn’t really coming, or that he doesn’t really exist. All that is certain is that he is mentioned on the stage; the resulting impression of his anterior actuality could, it’s clear, be a mere epiphenomenon of dialogue. He is a promise that the nothingness of the performance, the law which confines it within a web of mere appearance, is a localized anomaly of the stage, and that beyond it the world is made up of reliably positive entities which originate signs instead of just relaying them. But this, the cornerstone of theatrical realism, here remains only a promise, which may well be deceptive. The show is playing a game that is possible because of a contradiction, which I have overlooked up to now, in the whole semiotic of the offstage space. On the one hand, as we have seen, it underwrites representation by being outside it, a self-identical ‘real thing’ protected by the hard line of the proscenium arch from the deferring play of signification. On the other hand, obviously, the offstage space has no such coercive externality, but is an absolutely disposable signifier. Free even of the shifting constraints of ‘practicality’ which control the illusions of the scene, it can contain whatever it is said to contain—an army or a lover, a lumber room or a forest. Moreover, the signs which mark it out as any of these

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can be cancelled or altered as easily as they were entered; the audience can be given to understand that the Queen is embroidering and that she is not embroidering. She picks her nose, examines the pickings and lies down again. Then, she dries the dishes…. She is not nursing the wounded. She is embroidering an invisible handkerchief…. She is in a chest. She is sleeping…. (Explosion) That may have been the Royal Palace. Long live the Royal Palace!6 What is given as pre-semiotic is what is above all permeated and constructed by signs; what the performance designates as its hors-texte is its totally textualized interior. We recall that Barsacq in his forest hung up the sheets, not in order to hide, but in order to produce, what was behind them; that the origin of the stage action was supplied as an afterthought. In drawing attention to this reversal, Beckett and Genet also impugn the codes by which the onstage performance itself represents reality; they compromise the assertion that the appearances on the stage point beyond themselves to some definite reality whose manifestation they are. If there is no such reality, no determinate point at which theatricality is exhausted by its object, then the spectacle is nothing but endlessly proliferating appearances—screens, as in Genet’s profoundly irritating Algeria play, behind which nothing is concealed but more screens.7 One way, then, of describing the offstage suicide in realistic theatre would be to say that it is a rhetorical strategy in the face of this vertigo of representation. Realism requires that the offstage world, which is really a production of textuality, should appear as pre-textually given; the authority of the hidden space must therefore be enhanced by imagery which at once naturalizes it and renders it absolute. Violent death— concrete, wordless, irrevocable, unrepeatable, opaque —fulfils this function as nothing else could. It is as it were the opposite of a sign: following Barthes, we could call it a mythic signifier which connotes asemiosis.8 But the trouble with such an analysis is that it takes the ‘absolute reality’ of the offstage death and absolutely reduces it; the result is a mirror-image of the realist projection; the mystique of origin is simply transferred from the hidden space to the text itself. Such an inversion remains wholly within the onstage—offstage opposition. To summarize, the opposition consists in the show’s designating the hidden world as its other. What is exhibited is, let’s say, speech, desire, change, choice; so what is hidden is silence, law, permanence, necessity— everything which is not performance, and which at once underwrites and undermines the latter’s authenticity. This is clearly a structural opposition: it’s not that either is the origin of the other, but that both are generated simultaneously in the act of separation which draws the boundary of the visible stage in that particular way. Thus, in Hedda Gabler, the events that have occurred in the Elvsted household have no intrinsic priority over those occurring at the Tesmans’; but, because only the latter appear on the stage, the former acquire the character of a given reality,

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determining Hedda’s predicament and mocking her attempts to alter them. Still more to the point, the banal bourgeois prejudices which dictate the destruction of Lövborg’s career and impale Hedda herself on the threat of a scandal must appear, within the confines of the drawing-room where the action is set, as an unchallengeable necessity; not because they can’t be challenged at all (on the contrary, the play challenges them) but because they can’t be challenged there. In consigning the conditions of action to an occluded space removed from the scene of action, the staging makes it impossible for the actor to engage directly with them. They are constitutive of the spectacle; their latent contradictions are inoperable; their bearing upon the scene is quasi-divine. In other words, social powerlessness is permanently encoded in the dramatic form. This reification of social reality is often in contradiction with the authorial tendency of realist drama, which is broadly critical and oppositional. The plays take issue thematically with imperatives whose authority they confirm structurally: that is, their ideological form is that of protest. Hence the inevitability of the offstage ‘pistol shot’ or its equivalent: the struggle between the freedom of the protagonist and the irreducible resistance of things as they are is impossible to resolve, because the victory of either would destroy the opposition that marks out the space in which dramatic representation can take place at all. Suicide is the form of the impasse: the dramatic subject preserves its freedom while at the same time acknowledging the superior objectivity of circumstances; unable to mount an effective challenge to the unseen forces determining his destiny, the hero irreversibly leaves the stage and becomes part of them. Getting beyond this dilemma is a dramaturgic problem but also, evidently, a political one. IV For one kind of Marxist realism, this exit from the text is the decisive one. As Jameson says at one point: One does not have to argue the reality of history: necessity, like Dr Johnson’s stone, does that for us. That history…is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and non-representational; what can be added, however, is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form.9 When it is put like that, one can certainly agree about the necessity of the stone; only the most sterile academicism would want to debate whether history is real. Yet the formulation isn’t quite satisfactory. The problem is not with the name, ‘history’, but with the metaphysics of an object of knowledge which can be accessed only by a procedure which effaces its ‘fundamental’ characteristic. Whatever we represent history as being, that isn’t what it is, because the whole point about it is that it is non-representational. In thus admitting the interminable

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play of différance which we saw rendering the spectacle phantasmagoric in Genet, but at the same time rescuing historical realism by placing its reality, out of reach but incontrovertible, at the end of the endless avenue of screens, Jameson threatens to elect history as a sort of transcendental negative, a hidden god. Though Jameson is talking about narrative, this is not a bad description of the turn taken by the figure of offstage violence in the political drama of the twentieth century. An early and minor instance, Gorky’s Enemies, shows the structure particularly clearly. Written in 1906, the play, especially in its first act, bears the marks of Gorky’s dramatic mentor Chekhov. On the lawn of a provincial landowner’s house, the family and its guests wander in and out, revealing in the course of loose-linked, apparently casual scenes the seriocomic network of their relationships. At the end of the act, the landowner’s brother-in-law Skrobotov is carried on, dying from an offstage revolver shot. In a familiar way, the coercive reality that lies behind the screen invades the secluded acting area, announcing the objective conditions that determine the dalliance of subjectivities, the speeches about love and existence and drinking too much. However, Skrobotov has not shot himself. The family owns a factory where a dispute is in progress; Skrobotov was the dictatorial manager of this concern, and has been killed by an impulsive bullet from the crowd during an altercation with the workers, who had discovered his intention to enforce a lockout by sending to the provincial capital for troops. The resistance of the real, which the offstage suicide of classic realism had relayed as a nameless absolute, is here named in startlingly specific fashion: it is hardly an oversimplification to say that the shooting of Skrobotov is a synecdoche for the 1905 revolution. It needs to be added at once that the specification is also a damaging reduction. In identifying the asemiotic rock of history so positively, Gorky is effectively trying to have it both ways: the shot is to have the authority of a pure event, but also the discursive intelligibility of a historical narrative. A dimension of the signified is passing itself off as something given; the text is repressing its own productivity; the result is a vulgar materialism at the level of theory, and, at the level of performance, a glazed impassivity in the roles of the workers who are the emissaries of this fraudulent absolute. It was not by an accident of reception that Enemies became, in the 1930s, one of the canonical texts of socialist realism. But subsequent uprisings have occupied the same space in a wide stylistic range of other plays: Easter 1916 in O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, the Milan factory occupations in Trevor Griffiths’s Occupations, Spartakus in Brecht’s Drums in the Night, the battle of Cable Street in Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley, Berlin 1953 in Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising. Popular insurrections (mostly unsuccessful ones, by the way) become mythic signifiers of History, the fiercely substantial ‘non-text’ which demonstrates its undifferentiated integrity at once by being physically coercive and by being out there.

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The resultant structural opposition of ‘in here’ against ‘out there’ is susceptible of many variations. It is at its most intense when the three- walled room of traditional realism itself becomes a symbol of historical alienation; for example, in the apartments where the war veterans are immured like hermits in John Whiting’s Marching Song and Sartre’s Les Séquestrés d’Altona. Similarly, played-out conventions of domestic realism can be satirically estranged by the spectre of historical realities they fail to accommodate: this is Shaw’s method in Major Barbara and other plays, and Priestley’s in An Inspector Calls, where a drawing-room comedy is trying to happen but is prevented by the discovery that the boundaries of ‘society’ can’t be set at the drawing-room door. Shaw also produced one of the most programmatic appeals to the authority of offstage violence in Saint Joan, where the clownish Chaplain blows away all the rationalizations of Joan’s execution, both his own and those of others he has been too stupid to understand, by simply having witnessed the burning: ‘You dont know; you havnt seen: it is so easy to talk when you dont know.’10 Here the actor, bringing news of what is passing just out of the spectators’ range of vision (the red glow is all that is seen onstage), fits into what might be called a First World War structure of historical awareness: civilian illusion versus the ‘out there’ actuality of state violence. In another context again, the opposition articulates an imperialist logic: native English issues are set against Suez in Osborne’s The Entertainer, a nineteenth-century colonial war in Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance and Vietnam in Dennis Cannan’s parts of Peter Brook’s US. This connects in turn with a sort of guilt about the cosy insularity of the experience of the British left: in David Mercer’s After Haggerty, Howard Brenton’s Weapons of Happiness and David Edgar’s Maydays, domestic politics appear as an interior whose outside is a world where socialists directly face imprisonment and death— eastern Europe, or Africa. A surprising number of these texts also exemplify a further variant which identifies ‘in here’ with theatre itself: what is visibly happening as revolution or repression proceed offstage—as in Grass’s The Plebeians, in Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play, in Athol Fugard’s The Island, in Peter Weiss’s Marat-Sade—is that someone is putting on a play. That is clearly the most formally self-conscious way of producing the structure: in a sense, the opposition which all the other variants reflect is that between the historical drama and its historical object; the interior, national or private or institutional, which is tirelessly reproduced as a setting, is at root the interior of the theatrical text as such, reaching out, via windows or telephone calls or news from abroad, for its referent. In all these cases, and in innumerable others they stand for, what intimates the pre-textual ‘reality of history’ is violence. A commonsense view would attribute this to the events of the particular history that our uniquely bloodsoaked century has made available to its writers. We live in times when, as Edward Bond extremely says, ‘It would be immoral not to write about violence.’11 But to put it like that—there is our subject-matter, and here is what we write about it—is to speak as if the theatrical text’s constructed ‘outside’ really did just happen to be

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there, as realism pretends. And that is in turn to remain stuck within the reifying opposition of consciousness and conditions: here is Humanity (free individual subjects, represented by living actors), and there is History (objective collective necessities, represented by reports and offstage noises). If we spell out the complementary processes which the theatre thereby makes itself incapable of depicting—the production of humanity by history, and the making of history by human beings—it immediately becomes clear enough that the opposition is an ideological one. In the late sixties and early seventies, Bond’s own move against this closure was in a way the obvious one (though it took a special artistic intransigence to carry it through): to bring the violence on to the stage. The killings in such plays as Lear and Narrow Road to the Deep North, enacted in a blankly literal manner, shockingly carry the lightless non-representationality of the offstage death into public view. Because the atrocities (the torture of Warrington, the stoning of the baby in Saved) are part of the performance, the mind struggles to accommodate them to a discursive order, to see them as ‘justified by the context’, as the censors say. But the hard surface of the drama repels the attempt: irreducibly in excess of political instrumentality, or psychological motivation, or authorial moralism, the violence remains non-negotiable, simply the worst thing. Violence as a myth of historical authenticity is savagely rejected: in its numbing repetitiveness and the boredom and frivolity of its perpetrators, the violence of Bond’s darkest plays is above all normal. ‘Off, a single shot. No-one reacts.’12 No one reacts because the antagonism between onstage subjects and objective offstage violence has been erased; the latter has saturated the stage; there is no transcendence, only the single image of a deadly way of life, with its own integral rationality. The ideology which constructs the human as an ahistorical essence in opposition to a dehumanized history has apparently been broken. However, the problem is that the continuance of the society of Bond’s Lear is incomprehensible; with such a total system of forces tending towards destruction, how do the subjects whose words and actions are exhibited on the stage get produced at all? In particular, what is the source of the anguished, unreconciled subjectivity which speaks in the play itself? For the flip or bland presentation of outrage fools no one: the unspoken accompaniment to the laconic horrors is the appalled scream of pain of all that the mise-en-scène denies. Hence the importance to this theatre of fools, cripples, saints: only those who are illiterate in the language of the depicted society can have any access to the terms in which it can be named. The terms themselves are then desocialized: humanity is a violated child, a slighted divinity which avenges itself in slaughter and madness. The crucial appeal to this innocence, denied an object on the stage, is displaced on to a level of lyric protest; the dramatic discourse, despite its unrelenting insistence on the cruelties of power, remains monologically subjective, and the violence itself comes to appear phantasmagoric. The human and the historical have come apart again.

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This is because the staging of the violence turns out to have involved an unacknowledged substitution. The capacity of theatrical violence to intimate the reality of history was based, as Bond’s theoretical writings make clear, on its systemic character. That is to say, the modern theatre plays within (and with, and to) a society which reproduces its structures, guarantees its stability, constitutes its members as subjects, and so on, by patterns of coercion and fear. ‘It would be immoral not to write about violence’ because it would be immoral to lie, and one cannot truthfully show our lives in society (that is, our lives) without violence. But violence on the stage can only consist of particular violent actions—one actor portrays a person stabbing or strangling or shooting another. What the audience sees is not systemic, ‘historical’ violence, but an incident. To build scenes around violent incidents on the basis that they reveal an entire society is to abstract violence from its historical matrix and make pure aggression an autonomous principle of development, at which point analysis shades into paranoia. It’s noticeable that in The Bundle, a play of the later seventies in which Bond seeks to construct a dynamic and material history, with a hero and a successful revolution, the violence reverts to its more traditional place offstage. The problem of staging violence without dehistoricizing it, yet without reifying the history either, remains intractable. V The Bundle, which is a meditation on such themes as the abandoned child, the cup of water, and the thousands in need waiting behind the one who is helped, is explicitly (though not uncritically) Brechtian; and for more reasons than that the obvious question at this point is: what does Brecht do about violence? Brecht touched on the issues in a poem of the mid-thirties, ‘On Violence’: The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one. The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers?13 Is the unnamed violence of the riverbed visible or hidden? Neither. It is invisible in the sense that no one calls it violence because what is seen is the violence of the current. But it is not hidden; not a second unseen violence accompanying the first—it is the same violence, since, of course, neither the water nor the bed in which it runs would be violent without the other. It is a question, not of an unseen reality, but of a way of seeing. Thus the storm is not seen, but this is not because it is somewhere else, out of sight. As everyone knows, it is there, where the trees are bending; you can’t abstract the storm from the trees. It is possible,

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on the other hand, to abstract the other storm from the roadworkers: the ordinary patterns of speech perform just this separation. But then the poem resists the abstraction: to think the bent backs without the storm, it suggests through the parallelism of the stanzas, is as delusive as to think the stream without its bed. The form of resistance, the tactic for naming what no one names, is catachresis: the sense of ‘violent’ is stretched metonymically in the first stanza and that of ‘storm’ is stretched metaphorically in the second. Thus the poem does not merely comment on some uses of terms; more importantly, it opposes an ideological language by using it illegitimately, against itself. This is to practise the art of the realist as Brecht defined it in another context: ‘to dig out the truth from the rubble of the self-evident’.14 This is a programme for drama. Violence is to be shown in all its generality; it is to appear, not as a collection of individual outrages, but as a system (not the stream, but the stream and its bed) and as historical (not only natural storms, but those of the social order too). But, at the same time, that historical system is to be discovered, not as a quasi-divine ‘absent real’ standing invisibly over and against the mere ideology of the visible incidents, but actually as an overlooked dimension of the incidents themselves; not in some extra-textual recess, but in the immediate contradictions of the evident. How does this project work out? The obvious place to look is in Brecht’s great war play, Mother Courage and her Children. On turning to this text, we note with consternation that the mystique of offstage violence is deployed in an exceptionally blatant manner. Whereas Chekhov’s reaction to the closure of the offstage shot was to refine it, to turn and work his structures so as almost to do without it, Brecht’s tactic is exactly the opposite: he makes it cruder. In the first scene, the mother performs a fortunetelling ceremony in which all three of her children draw the black crosses which mean they will not survive the war. She has fixed the draw in order to frighten them for their own good, but by a Hardyesque irony the disingenuous prophecy is worked out as remorselessly as if Courage were Cassandra; and when the last and most innocent of the children has been slaughtered the play is over. The war is fought almost entirely offstage. In every scene of note its violence and famine press against the confines of the acting area; characters regularly appear tattered or bleeding from the maelstrom as if bearing the crushing verdict of its deity (it is consistently personified in the dialogue) upon Courage’s hubristic attempts to outwit it. Between pity at her helplessness and terror at the untextualizable power behind the screen, the audience may reasonably expect to experience a tragic encounter with the absolute. The drama surrounding the death of Swiss Cheese is a particularly lurid example of the play’s doom-laden use of the offstage space. Every heartrending circumstance is piled on. In Hollywood fashion, the moment of truth is announced by an offstage roll of drums and a rare darkening of the stage. When the lights come up, the tragic Messenger appears in the shape of the mercenary prostitute, shocked into moral outrage by the violence which she alone has seen.

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Not content with that, Brecht also arranges the plot to make it dangerous for Courage to recognize the body; so after the drums and the verbal report there is also the corpse itself, which Courage, masking her grief, Peter at cock-crow and mater dolorosa all in one, denies. In a final evocation of offstage horror, the body is carried off to be thrown into the carrion pit. Like Bacchus in Euripides, the war has visited its swift and unspeakable revenge on those who trifled with its power, sweeping the merely human bond of mother and son out of its godlike path. It must be admitted that this account is not very ‘Brechtian’ in its terms, and we shall see in a moment that it overlooks some aspects of the presentation. But we miss the point of the structure if we pretend, in a spirit of constrained left-wing enlightenment, that Brecht’s theatrical devices don’t really exhibit this vulgar atavistic grandeur. Epic theatre is not more cautious but more reckless than bourgeois realism in exploiting what Barsacq calls the miracle of theatre. The portentous shadow of offstage events is a theatre resource, like music, or athleticism, or melodramatic coincidence; Brecht makes use of them all. The reason for this insouciance is his commitment to the principle of contradiction. Realism emends the theatre of offstage mystery, secularizing its theology and disguising its metaphysical disjunctions to the point where the image of a homogeneous and natural ‘life as it is’ can just about be sustained; as we’ve seen, this effectively leaves the mystery in place in the wings, changing the names but leaving the structure intact. Brecht, on the contrary, is concerned to exacerbate the covert discontinuities of realistic staging until the unity of the reality effect breaks up. The conception of historical conditions as ‘mysterious Powers (in the background)’15 is not to be tactfully superseded, but to be dialectically challenged. The challenge takes the form of a series of reversals in the spectacle’s relations with its offstage war. In the first of these, the basic opposition of stage and offstage is complicated by the most famous prop in twentieth-century theatre: the wagon. It’s true that the acting area, like those of so many other modern plays, is permanently on the edge of a battlefield. But this location is neither fortuitous nor mysterious: on the contrary, it comes about because Courage devotes much of her immense energy to making sure that it does. The peaceful and pleasant activities centred on her canteen—drinking, conversation, haggling, family life—are not simply haunted by the unseen war as by an inescapable other; it’s precisely in order to keep up with the fighting that the establishment has wheels. So if in one sense the structure of a given scene is the now familiar opposition—onstage, mutable subjectivity; offstage, objective contingency—the sequence of scenes deprives the opposition of its necessity. If the wagon ground to a halt, the war would go away without it; in fact, we see, on the stage, the enormous effort which is needed to make sure that doesn’t happen. The subject of the drama chooses her offstage, and the choice is grievously reaffirmed every time the wagon is, with visible strain, set in motion once again.

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On the other hand, the content of that reversal is, of course, not simply Courage’s perversity. Strictly speaking, it is not Courage who is obliged to follow the soldiers wherever they lead, but the wagon; for it is the latter which would lose its value if it were deprived of the war. It is as the slave of the business which keeps her alive that Courage continually risks her life. This double image of the travellers on the stage—the humans and the commodities—produces a corresponding doubleness in the characterization of the offstage space. People are constantly venturing off the stage in order to buy or sell supplies for the business: the coerciveness of the offstage world doesn’t consist merely in its violence, but equally in its being a market. This double sense is rigorously insisted on: Halle, where prices are at rock bottom because the town is probably about to be sacked, is at once a place of danger and a business opportunity. The danger makes it so difficult to survive that one can’t afford to neglect the opportunity. This tangle of threads linking onstage and offstage is at its tightest in the scene I have already described: the execution of Swiss Cheese. The whole climax is paced by exits and entrances, with Courage, Yvette and Swiss Cheese himself hurrying backwards and forwards between the arbiters of his fate and the wagon which might realize enough to bribe them. Yvette’s entrance as ‘tragic Messenger’ is in fact her fourth in the scene: 1 She appears with her rich colonel in tow, persuades him to offer 200 guilders for the wagon, and leaves to offer the money to the one-eyed spy to get Swiss Cheese off. 2 She reappears to say that One-Eye will deal, but that the regimental cashbox, from which Courage has been hoping to recoup the money, is irrecoverable. Courage sends her back to offer 120. 3 She comes back with the news that One-Eye won’t come down from 200, and that time is running out. (Though Brecht doesn’t labour the point, it is clearly because time is running out that One-Eye won’t come down; the inseparability of violence and business runs through tiny details as well as the overall structure.) Courage sends her back to offer the whole amount. 4 She comes back to confirm that Courage has ‘haggled too long’, and to warn her that the body is to be brought to the wagon for identification. It works, deliberately, like the repetitions of a folk-tale. Yvette went to the river bank three times. The first time, the offer was accepted, but the money was not there. The second time, the money was there, but the offer was not enough. The third time, the money was there and the offer was enough, but time had run out. These repetitions work to establish Courage’s unequivocal responsibility for what happens: she could have paid enough at the right moment, as she was ready to do both too soon and too late. This is a militant reversal of the theophanic model of offstage violence: cutting across the myth of a vengeful god, we have the fable of a foolish mother; the unseen firing squad ceases to function as the non-

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negotiable reality of war, and becomes a disaster which can be incurred or averted by the weakness or the resourcefulness of those on the stage. But that is not the whole meaning of the fable. The failure of the three journeys, like the deaths of the three children, also encodes a fatality; it implies that the winning combination of resources, wisdom and luck cannot be found because, as in the children’s problem about ferrying the wolf, the goat and the cabbage across the river in one boat, one of the measures taken always destroys another that is equally essential.16 Thus the personal judgement on Courage—that she allowed her son to die because she could not break the habit of holding out for a better deal—is just, but goes further than it intends. Certainly, it is her weakness: Mother Courage, the great helper, has proved helpless in her son’s hour of need. But why did we expect help from her? Because of her resourcefulness, because we have seen the shrewdness and energy with which she conducts her business to support her children, and, above all, because of her wagon, whose survival value is dramatically confirmed at just this point by the fact that its sale could realize enough to buy a life. In other words, her failure reflects neither an implacable fate nor a faulty character, but her fear of losing exactly the asset which afforded her only chance of success—a fear whose validity we see in Yvette’s hope. The Courage the judgement implicitly asks for, the one who unhesitatingly sacrifices everything for her son’s life, would certainly not have enough to sacrifice in the first place. That is to say: the unseen reality, the storm which bends Mother Courage’s back, is not the structureless absolute of the bullets that kill Swiss Cheese. Instead of that abstract conflict between consciousness and death, there is a material conflict between Courage’s creatural needs and her social means of satisfying them. Locked into this contradiction, she sacrifices to the offstage violence the children she nourished by exploiting the offstage market. The coercive power which strikes from the wings like a brutal god is not an inhuman ‘Power’, but a double-bind operating within the relationships between people. Or, more exactly, it is an inhuman power, but it is not given as such; we see its dehumanization in the progressive substitution of the wagon for its dependants. What is offstage— the slaughter and the profits—is not a history external to the events we see but their historical interior: that which constitutes the unbreakable relationship, on which the curtain falls at the very end of the play, between Mother Courage and her wagon. It is here that we have, after all, the tragedy which was suggested by the big, crude images of a concealed and ineluctable fate. The fate which overtakes Mother Courage’s children is ineluctable, but its necessity is that of a social and economic structure; ineluctable does not mean immutable. On the contrary, it is precisely because the structure cannot be eluded that it must be changed. But then how, within the formally tragic staging of that materialized inevitability, is the possibility of change to be positively represented? How can the occluded conditions be got at, and their apparent sovereignty resisted? As we would

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expect, this question brings us to the play’s only onstage act of war: the shooting of Kattrin. For Kattrin more than anyone, the war has indeed been a matter of blows dealt out by an incomprehensible fate. Her dumbness and the scar which ends her hopes of marriage are both marks from the anonymous violence which surrounds the stage. Her mother has taught her that survival depends on being ‘a stone in Dalarna, where there’s nothing but stones’,17 and that the slightest attempt to make an impact on her environment will be fatal. She has learned that lesson, but she has also learned what Courage did not intend to teach her—the powerful maternal tenderness which was the impulse behind the teaching. For much of the play, then, Kattrin is in a situation quite comparable with that of a heroine contained by the three-walled room of domestic realism: unable to act upon the conditions of her existence, her dreams of love and her potential for helpfulness frustrated by immovable circumstances, she experiences history as pure suffering. With the stealth she has learned from the years of self-effacement she smuggles the drum on to the farmhouse roof; with the fury of their frustration she bangs it to warn the threatened town. It is the most beautiful of the reversals in the relationship between onstage and offstage. The war, which has until now been a series of shattering noises off, assaulting the ears of the silent girl, suddenly requires silence for its immediate purposes. So she gets a piece of military equipment and assaults the offstage war with noise. Earlier, unseen drums announced that Kattrin’s brother had been killed; now, in a direct retort to that, the drum is beaten in full view to avert the killing in the unseen town. The authority of the bloody mystery behind the screen is desecrated by an impromptu theatre of pity and defiance: an act of peace. Accordingly, when she is killed, it is not by another inscrutable gesture of the hidden god but by a highly visible gun, summoned from offstage with much difficulty and delay and fired by a man who has no malice towards either her or the people of Halle, but who is afraid that he will be court-martialled by his (unseen) colonel for allowing her to sabotage the attack; and who is also, like Courage in the earlier scene, too late. Of course, the scene’s optimism should not be exaggerated. The town is warned, but the effect is a call to arms: the war in the wings goes on. We are left with an ambiguous hyperbole: the noise of offstage violence is so deafening that only the dumb can find a voice to answer back. To deliver that all but impossible speech, to sabotage the logic which accepts the unrepresentable as the unquestionable, is still the project of realism in the living theatre. Strode College, Street

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NOTES 1 Quoted in Richard Southern, The Seven Ages of the Theatre (London: Faber, 1968), pp. 156–7. 2. Discussion reviewed in Peter Arnott, Greek Scenic Conventions in the Fifth Century BC (London: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 134–8. 3 See Elisaveta Fen’s introduction to Chekhov, Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), pp. 32–3. 4 Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 104. 5 The reference is to Victor Shklovsky’s identification of Tristram Shandy as ‘the most typical novel of world literature’. See his article, ‘A parodying novel: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’, in John Traugott (ed.), Laurence Sterne, Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 66–89; p. 89. 6 Jean Genet, The Balcony, trans. Bernard Frechtman, 2nd (paperback) edn (London: Faber, 1966), pp. 62–5. 7 Jean Genet, The Screens, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Faber, 1963). 8 See Roland Barthes, ‘The reality effect’ (1968), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 141–8. 9 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 81. 10 George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan, scene vi. Collected Plays vol. 6, (London: 1973), p. 188. 11 Edward Bond, Plays: Two (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 3. 12 Edward Bond, Lear, II.iii, in Plays: Two, p. 59. 13 Bertolt Brecht, Poems, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 276. 14 Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children, in Collected Plays, vol. 5, pt 2, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 142. 15 Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), p. 190. 16 Only one of the three can be ferried at a time; the wolf will eat the goat, and the goat the cabbage, if either pair is left on either bank. I am aware that this problem is only apparently insoluble. 17 Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children, trans. Eric Bentley (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 30.

PLAYS REFERRED TO Author and English title

First performance

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm August Strindberg, Miss Julie Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler Anton Chekhov, The Seagull Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters

Oslo, 1879 Oslo, 1885 Bergen, 1887 Copenhagen, 1889 Munich, 1891 Moscow, 1896 Moscow, 1901

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Author and English title

First performance

Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara Maxim Gorky, Enemies August Strindberg, Dream Play Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author Bertolt Brecht, Drums in the Night George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children Federico García Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba J.B.Priestley, An Inspector Calls Arthur Miller, All My Sons

Moscow, 1902 Moscow, 1904 London, 1905 Berlin, 1907 Stockholm, 1907 Rome, 1921 Munich, 1922 New York, 1923 Dublin, 1926 New York, 1931 Zürich, 1941 Madrid, 1945 London, 1946 New York, 1947

Author and English title

First performance

T.S.Eliot, The Cocktail Party Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot John Whiting, Marching Song Jean Genet, The Balcony John Osborne, The Entertainer Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party Arnold Wesker, Chicken Soup with Barley John Arden, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance Jean-Paul Sartre, Altona Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth Jean Genet, The Screens Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Peter Weiss, Marat-Sade Edward Bond, Saved Peter Brook (director), US Günter Grass, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising Edward Bond, Narrow Road to the Deep North Trevor Griffiths, Occupations David Mercer, After Haggerty Edward Bond, Lear Harold Pinter, Old Times

Edinburgh, 1949 New York, 1949 Paris, 1953 London, 1954 London, 1957 London, 1957 London, 1958 Coventry, 1958 London, 1959 Paris, 1959 New York, 1959 Paris, 1961 New York, 1962 Berlin, 1964 London, 1965 London, 1966 Berlin, 1966 Coventry, 1968 Manchester, 1970 London, 1970 London, 1971 London, 1971

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Author and English title

First performance

Edward Bond, Bingo Athol Fugard, John Kani, Winston Ntshona, The Island Howard Brenton, The Churchill Play Howard Brenton, Weapons of Happiness Edward Bond, The Bundle Howard Brenton, The Romans in Britain David Hare, A Map of the World David Edgar, Maydays

Exeter, 1973 Cape Town, 1973 Nottingham, 1974 London, 1976 London, 1978 London, 1980 Sydney, 1982 London, 1983

Nature/culture PATRICK PARRINDER

• Ludmilla Jordanova (ed.), Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London: Free Association Books, 1986), 351 pp., £25.00 and £8.95 ‘Our schools and universities cheerfully reinforce the science/arts divide…. So internalized has the distinction between science and the arts become that we greet any sign of a bridge between them with surprise.’ These words in Jordanova’s introduction make it clear that Languages of Nature is to some extent a crusading work, and as such it ought to be wholeheartedly welcomed. Until very recently, literary criticism and theory have conspired with technology worship to keep Snow’s ‘two cultures’ apart. The distinction between literary and ‘non-literary’ uses of language—a distinction which has its origins in I.A.Richards’s contrast between emotive and scientific language—was taken as axiomatic by almost every self-respecting literary theorist. Literary history was held to have nothing to do with the history of science, and the processes of writing and scientific research were seen as self-evidently having nothing in common. The kind of work that is represented in Languages of Nature questions all these assumptions, and thus opens the way to a new understanding of culture. According to Jordanova and her contributors, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries possessed a conceptual language which was shared by novels, scientific papers, philosophical, political and medical writings. Each of the terms or concepts involved was shifting, ambiguous and problematic—hence the editor’s use of ‘languages’ in the plural—but the relationships between the different senses of a term reflected, and reinforced, wider cultural and ideological patterns. This general position is obviously indebted to Raymond Williams’s work, and it is fitting that Williams himself should have written a brief foreword to the volume. Consider a term like sensibility: many writers, including Williams himself, have traced its literary uses, but one can read their accounts without finding any mention of its quite precise and restricted meanings in the eighteenth-century biomedical texts which Jordanova surveys in her own essay in this volume. In a context of human biology, sensibility was thought to provide a physical basis for

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sympathy. One could speak, for example, of the sensibility of the uterus. Sterne was aware of these sorts of usage, and (as James Rodgers shows in an illuminating essay) he cunningly exploited the resultant ambiguities in Tristram Shandy. Jordanova concludes her own case-study by insisting on the interpenetration of different fields of specialized vocabulary: To chart the development of biology without recognizing the larger cultural context which gave meaning to the concept of life, or to read novels depicting sexual experience and kin relations in isolation from the scientific and medical treatment of those subjects, results in a partial and distorted historical perspective. Science and literature, united in eighteenthcentury culture, must be reunited by the historian. This commitment to the reunification of science and literature is shared, so far as I can tell, by all the contributors, whose separate essays are welded together by the editor’s forceful and sometimes polemical introductions. There are difficulties, however. The concept of history, in the declaration just quoted, is no less ideology-laden today than was the idea of nature in the eighteenth century. What sort of history is envisaged? Cultural history is necessarily evaluative, however much it may lay claim to impartiality and lack of distortion. For example, it is possible to stress the unity of literature and science at the expense of overlooking other crucial cultural elements; as we shall see, the contributors to Languages of Nature take rather little note of theology, which was once regarded as the queen of the sciences. Moreover, a history which is founded on detailed textual interpretation inevitably has canonical implications. There are, we may assume, certain major texts of the literaturescience relationship, one of which is doubtless The Origin of Species (analysed here by Gillian Beer in an essay reprinted and expanded from her book Darwin’s Plots). Should we consider the other writings analysed in Languages of Nature as, at least potentially, ‘major texts’? This is no idle question if, as I am, one is engaged in setting up an interdisciplinary science-and-culture course. The answers given by Jordanova and her colleagues are rather confusing. Erasmus Darwin’s verse, according to Maureen McNeil, expresses ‘crucial political and economic shifts in production and work during the Industrial Revolution’, a statement which seems to put Darwin on a level with Blake; the difference, for McNeil, is that the one sided with the bourgeoisie and the other with the proletariat. The nature writings of Jules Michelet are, Roger Huss argues, ‘unresolved and challenging texts’—though Huss himself, in a highly entertaining essay, has little difficulty in exposing their self-contradictions and the ideological discourses that generate them. Michelet, the popular natural historian as highminded buffoon, seems on this showing to have been an easy target. Finally, Jordanova introduces Sally Shuttleworth’s essay on Silas Marner with the claim that George Eliot’s tale ‘sheds considerable light on mid-Victorian science, philosophy and social thought. George Eliot’s explorations of the

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complexities of the language of nature… reveal the profound implications for social relations of scientific discourse.’ This, surely, is an unambiguous recommendation. If one is to accept Jordanova’s assessment, then Silas Marner must be a very strong candidate for inclusion on a Victorian literature-andscience course. But to give it such a status would, in my view, be inappropriate and wildly misleading. The rhetorical apparatus which Shuttleworth brings to bear on George Eliot’s text is, it is true, rather formidable. In Silas Marner, it is claimed, Eliot ‘employs scientific ideas in social argument’; she ‘offers models of history’, ‘interrogates ideas’, ‘explores contemporary theories of social change and progress’, and so on. ‘Fairy tale or science?’ is Shuttleworth’s title, and there is no doubt which of these procrustean alternatives is supposed to be the correct one. It is, I would say, the present-day fetishization of theory that is responsible for such a rampantly intellectualist reading of what is conventionally regarded as the least discursive and argumentative of George Eliot’s novels. The major events of Silas Marner’s life take place, as Shuttleworth reminds us, in moments of mental vacancy caused by his susceptibility to cataleptic fits. For Shuttleworth, this implies a resort to plot structures ‘based on the outdated geological premises of catastrophism, a geological theory which had, by the 186os, been supplanted by uniformitarianism’. The ‘self-contradictions’ of the text, therefore, ‘dramatize George Eliot’s doubts concerning the necessary relation between uniformitarian principles of causation, and optimistic theories of social progress’. The link between the geological debate and Eliot’s novel is to be found in the contemporary ‘physiological psychology’ of two of Eliot’s principal intellectual mentors, Herbert Spencer and—more particularly—George Henry Lewes. This is a highly intricate argument, but it implies that George Eliot’s fiction is little more than, as it were, a continuation of her male colleagues’ scientific investigations by other means—and this I think does the novelist a grave injustice. Despite the current valorization of divided texts and contradictory attitudes (an ideology which Shuttleworth, Jordanova and perhaps some of the other contributors seem to share), the idea that the key to Silas Marner is George Eliot’s dramatization of her doubts about particular scientific theories simply dodges the crucial literary question about the story, which is as follows: why, given that it embodies such obviously conflicting fictional modes, is it such a resounding narrative success? We cannot answer this without finding at least a third term to resolve the spurious dichotomy of ‘Fairy tale or science?’ During his cataleptic fits Marner is ‘powerless to resist either…good or evil’ (ch. 12,). At Lantern Yard he suffers evil, but in Raveloe, on New Year’s Eve, a cataleptic fit is the occasion of the miraculous arrival of Eppie, who becomes his adopted daughter. Now Strauss in The Life of Jesus, which Eliot had translated fifteen years earlier, had argued for the impossibility of miracles; therefore Shuttleworth finds herself obliged to maintain that in Silas Marner no miracle takes place, and that before and after Eppie’s arrival ‘the natural chain of

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causation is not broken’. There is a chain of causation certainly, but whether it is ‘natural’ may best be judged by the reader. To make what in rational terms is a highly implausible plot more acceptable, Eliot invokes both the ‘invisible wand of catalepsy’ and the ‘demon Opium’ during the episode of Eppie’s arrival. It is a species of scientific fairy-tale. The general intention of this slightly lurid plot-mechanism may be divined from a letter that George Eliot wrote several years later, when she described her writing as ‘simply a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of—what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better life after which we may strive—what gains from past revelation and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting theory’ (Letters, VI, 216). ‘Shifting theory’, perhaps, puts the efforts of Strauss, Spencer and Lewes in their place. If events as redolent of poetic justice as Eppie’s arrival in Silas’s cottage are worth representing, then clearly there is a place for the miraculous in our apprehension of life, and the ‘gains from past revelation and discipline’ are to that extent vindicated. Silas Marner, as Barry Qualls has argued in The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction (1982), is perhaps best read as a secular salvation narrative, in which Marner’s apparently unprepossessing and ill-favoured life turns out in the end to have been a pilgrim’s progress towards earthly happiness. (The name ‘Master Marner’, by which he is known in Raveloe, may finally be interpreted as ‘Master Mariner’.) Bunyan and Wordsworth would seem to be the essential background to the story. The theme of grace and divine intervention is paralleled, but no more than paralleled, in the contemporary geological debate, since the main issue for both literature and science in George Eliot’s time was the need to come to a reckoning with religious doctrine. It is no accident, either, that the exact form taken by the ‘miracle’ in Silas Marner is the arrival of a child, since both Marner and Nancy Cass are, more or less, childless workaholics portrayed with an intensity which clearly owes something to their author’s own self-diagnosis. It follows that the ‘ideas’ which count in Silas Marner are at once more spiritual and more intimate than the scientific debates which Shuttleworth presents as the tale’s essential context. In order to write literary history, or any sort of history, we must be able to show that the specificity of the texts, their status as documents, has not been distorted or wilfully ignored. That is what the ideology of ‘history’ requires. According to Jordanova in her general introduction, ‘A fully historical view of science is hard to attain’; but two sentences earlier she has criticized the ‘unfortunate polarization between “genuine” and “pseudo” science’. As it happens, the distinction between genuine and pseudo-science is at least as well founded as the distinction between the mythical and the ‘fully historical’. There are many pitfalls and unresolved problems in the enterprise represented by Languages of Nature, and that is why an examination of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of this pioneering volume has seemed to be appropriate. In any

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case, the present collection stakes out far more ground than is or could be covered in its separate case-studies. What it deserves is to find readers who are attentive, argumentative, and above all determined to emulate and supersede it. University of Reading

Peshat/Iderash BERNARD S.JACKSON

• José Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 226 pp., $27.50 • Geoffrey H.Hartman and Sanford Budick (eds), Midrash and Literature (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 409 pp., £27.50 Rabbinic literature has not always had a good press. As a by-product of the Protestant crusade against ‘Justification by Works’, Jewish ‘legalism’ was constructed in the nineteenth century as an amalgam of literalism and rule fetishism. Even those distant from religious polemics have used the adjective ‘talmudic’ to denote a peculiar form of convoluted argument, which in some undefined manner fails to match up to the standards of Western logic. Even the great orientalist, Joseph Schacht, categorized Jewish and Islamic legal thinking as ‘analogical’, by comparison with the (modern) Western ‘analytic’ mode. One of the great contributions which modern semiotics is making to the study of culture is the provision of a set of concepts through the use of which crosscultural comparisons may be made, without any innuendo of cultural superiority. One reason lies in the fact that semiotics, while it still often accords to linguistics the status of a privileged paradigm, looks also to a host of non-linguistic semiotic systems—many of them in areas where the claims of Western cultural dominance have a much lesser initial plausibility. Another reason lies in the approach to logic itself: logic, when manifest in discourse, has to be treated as a form of discourse, with all the rhetorical implications that flow. Faur’s book takes a significant, if limited, step towards locating rabbinic literature on such a map of cultural semiotics. It is, however, more significant as a reconstruction of the Jewish tradition’s internal view of its own semiotic processes—an account which is all the more powerful for the weight which Faur rightly attaches to the links between semiotics and theology: the significatory systems (plural) used in revelation, the character of creation, the natures of both God and man. The fact that most of Faur’s material is taken from the Jewish tradition—particularly from the golden age of Spanish Jewry, from which

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Sephardic tradition the author himself stems—does not detract from the value of the work as a contribution to modern cultural semiotics. For the issues have been defined, sharpened and selected through a sensitivity to semiotic issues, notwithstanding the fact that the author’s invocation of the semiotic literature seems to me frequently to leave much to be desired. Nevertheless, Faur’s account serves a number of important purposes: it renders accessible to modern, secular discourse aspects of Jewish thought which might otherwise have been considered arcane, particularistic and of interest only to theologians; it reminds us once again of the variety and richness of semiological thought in the premodern world; and it underlines the relativity of some of those semiological concepts, both everyday and scholarly, which we tend to take for granted as natural and universal. The semiotics of divine revelation are problematic right from the biblical text itself. At least two modes of communication are used, and both are interrupted. God speaks to the people of Israel from Mount Sinai, but the people are terrified, and request that Moses act as an intermediary, so that they no longer have to tolerate the terror of direct communication with the divine. But what form did this divine communication actually take? At one point, we are told: ‘and all the people saw voices’ (Exodus 20:18). Again, when Moses descends from the mountain, he has with him two tablets of stone, ‘written’ by God himself (Exodus 32:15–16). But this mode of communication also ultimately fails. Moses smashes these tablets, in rage at the sin of the golden calf. When, later, Moses ascends the mountain a second time, God commands him (Moses) to do the writing (Exodus 34:27–8, pace Exodus 34:1). Jewish tradition was able to make much of these ruptures and ambiguities. The title of Faur’s book is taken from Canticles 1:11, where the lover promises to provide his beloved with jewellery fit for a princess, in the form of golden doves (perhaps studded) with silver dots. Rabbinic tradition saw this as a metaphor for aspects of revelation: the ‘golden doves’ were the divine message prior to articulation, the ‘silver dots’ the oraculum as processed into language. But that distinction, between what Faur elsewhere calls ‘pure thought’ and thought processed into language, does not adequately resolve all the problems. Faur grapples with the differences recognized within the Jewish tradition between the written biblical text—the form as found in the ritually sanctioned Torah scroll—and the vocalization of that text, as read in the synagogue and elsewhere. The written text is in unpointed Hebrew— which consists only in consonants, the vowels being omitted. More important, Jewish tradition recognizes many places within the biblical text where the vocalization is different from—indeed, inconsistent with—the unvocalized, consonantal written Hebrew. One of the striking features of Faur’s exposition is his identification of this traditional vocalization with the concept of the ‘Oral Law’ which, according to Jewish tradition, was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai at the same time as the ‘Written Law’. But even the consonantal, written text has to be viewed—at one level, at least—as language, not as some non-linguistic form of

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communication (‘pure thought’). For throughout the ages Hebrew has usually been written in this consonantal form: only in children’s books is it usually considered necessary to ‘point’ the text with vowels (taking the form of dots and other symbols above and below the consonants); elsewhere, the reader will spontaneously supply the necessary vocalization, and will only rarely encounter ambiguity as a result of the purely consonantal form of the text. And, indeed, the written text has usually been associated with the concept of the ‘Written Law’, which in many places is to be interpreted according to its ‘simple’ sense, its peshat. On this understanding, it is difficult to view the consonantal text, representing as it does the original tablets written with the finger of God, as anything but a linguistic form of communication. At a different level, however, Faur is able to point to elements in the Jewish tradition which make his reading plausible. He cites Maimonides for the view that the minimum unit of signification of the written text is the individual letter. The letter is not a minimal unit of signification of language. Though Faur does not develop this theme, the idea of the significance of the individual letter (often allied to its numerical value) is a central theme of the kabbalistic (mystical) tradition within Judaism, with its emphasis upon gematria (a Greek loan-word!). Faur also has illuminating things to say about the transmission of the ‘Oral Law’ (torah shebiktav), now giving that term its more traditional understanding, as referring to the whole body of rabbinic tradition, which orthodoxy claims was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai along with the written (biblical) text. The nature and status of the Oral Law have, of course, been mainstream subjects of enquiry within Jewish scholarship throughout the ages; the historical approach, in modern times, has paid particular attention to them. Faur’s treatment certainly benefits from the emphasis upon modes of communication. Much ink has been spilt within Jewish scholarship upon the problem of the supposed ban on the writing down of the Oral Law. The problem arises from the fact that this literature did not remain purely oral for very long; indeed, there are those who think that it was written down from the outset. Faur argues convincingly that the ban was not one on writing down the material, but rather on reading it publicly (in the synagogue or schoolhouse) from a written text. Just as the written text had to be preserved in a form as closely as possible resembling that of the original divine revelation (despite the fact that some words would be ‘read’ in a manner different from that in which they had been written), so too the form of transmission of the Oral Law—the speech-form, representing the divine oraculum —had to be preserved. It is this which explained the otherwise curious institution of the tanna—the person trained (no doubt, by memorization of a written text) to recite the Oral Law by memory. (It also explains the emphasis placed in many eastern European yeshivot, which still survives elsewhere today, on the memorization and recitation of long passages of the Talmud; this is not merely a matter of mnemonics, but is a ritual which from its form evokes the original revelation.)

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But it was not the whole of rabbinic tradition which was to be transmitted in this way. Faur persuasively interprets the central rabbinic concepts of halakhah and aggadah in terms of modes of communication and transmission. This is quite different from the traditional view, which renders halakhah as ‘law’, in opposition to aggadah, often understood negatively, as referring to the non-legal forms of literature. But such a distinction in terms of content falls foul of the error of reading the Jewish tradition in terms of a supposedly (but mistakenly) universal concept of law, namely that concept familiar to us in the West. Just as difficult is the understanding of the distinction between halakhah and aggadah as referring to distinct literary documents—the Mishnah, for example, on the one hand, the Midrash on the other. Rather, Faur argues, the two terms refer to different modes of oral transmission, which he labels ‘verbal’ and ‘conceptual’. Halakhah is that section of rabbinic tradition which was intended to be transmitted verbally, comprising those traditions which had received precise and authoritative formulations. Aggadah, on the other hand, comprised those traditions which had not received such precise formulation: what was transmitted was the concept or idea (Faur compares Cicero’s opposition between memoria rerum and memoria verborum). Faur rightly stresses the relationships perceived by the Jewish tradition (and particularly the Spanish grammarians) between the modes of transmission of revelation and its interpretation. The mainstream of modern scholarship has tended to discuss interpretation in terms of the distinction between peshat and derash. Despite substantial qualifications in the scholarly literature (Kermode in the Hartman and Budick volume refers approvingly to the classic study by Raphael Loewe), this distinction is still usually perceived in terms of the ‘simple’ or ‘literal’ sense on the one hand, as opposed to an interpretative argument on the other. From an early date, rabbinic tradition sought to describe and classify the forms of permissible derash: one classical, early rabbinic statement enumerates thirteen hermeneutic principles of derash—though it is clear that this list was neither normative nor canonical. To a large extent, Faur correlates the peshat/derash distinction with another, introduced by medieval and mana. He uses semiotic notions to Spanish scholars, between is interpretation according to the lexical express this distinction. meaning, that which is immediately recognized by all members of the speech community, whereas mana is the inner sense, or significance, which is not immediately perceptible to all, but which requires interpretation for proper decoding. The sense of the former is defined in terms of authorial intention; that , moreover, is of the latter is free for interpretation by the receiver. defined intensionally in linguistic terms alone, whereas mana has a referent which is an objective reality, not a linguistic category. Language cannot always completely express mana, which requires a combination of sound, word and association (citing Saadya). Indeed, Maimonides claims that God communicated with man by transmitting to him mana without language (and thus free of ambiguity); we may recall the view that the minimal units of the written

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revelation were letters (not units of language), and that the children of Israel were said to have seen the voices. God communicated to man in the modes of and mana, and these concepts are taken to be symbolized by the both ‘golden doves’ and ‘silver dots’ of Canticles. But, whereas God is capable of communicating mana in a non-linguistic mode, man requires language to do so. His communication of mana will therefore not be without ambiguity; on the contrary, it requires freedom of interpretation and argument. Midrash is the mode which has to be used for human communication of mana. Such a statement of the semiotic claims made from within the Jewish tradition is of considerable interest. It provides, on the one hand, a model or thesis by reference to which more systematic studies internal to the Jewish tradition may usefully be attempted. It also enriches the global stock of semiotic concepts, and reminds us of the relativity of our own. Faur seeks to go one step further, and to view these Jewish concepts as reflecting a particular view within modern semiotics, namely the distinction between ‘semiotics’ and ‘semantics’ as drawn by Benveniste. But this equation involves, in my view, some major problems. According to this distinction, each sign at the semiotic level has a definite value in isolation from other signs, and is defined paradigmatically, whereas the semantic dimension brings the sign into syntagmatic opposition to other signs in the sentence and requires a process of interpretation (in relation to the real situation to which the sentence refers) for the attribution of meaning. Whether such a distinction is best denoted, nowadays, by the terminology of semiotics versus semantics is a relatively unimportant matter; suffice it to say that such a conception of ‘semiotics’ is hardly communis opinio today. More important is the validity of the distinction, and the use Faur makes of it in explaining the and mana. The idea that signs have Jewish concepts of peshat, derash, fixed meanings determined exclusively on a paradigmatic axis, irrespective of their use in actual sentences, belongs to a form of structural semantics, few of whose practitioners would nowadays wish to insist upon the existence of a level of isolated signs, abstracted from their use in discourse. Moreover, the paradigmatic axis itself does presuppose some standard type of context, such as would require a syntagma for its full expression. (Cf. Kermode attacking the ‘zero context’ theory of literal meaning.) When it comes to the application of Benveniste’s distinction to the interpretative concepts of Jewish law, Faur’s construction appears both inconsistent and difficult. Inconsistent, because a ‘semiotic’ label is apparently attached both to the non-linguistic mana as communicated originally by God, and to the linguistic transmission of that mana by man (which is taken to produce peshat). The distinction, moreover, is problematic, in that it takes an unrealistic view of the semiotics of both peshat and derash. Few linguists today would accept that ‘literal meaning’ is simply a function of the clarity of authorial intention on the one hand, and the appropriateness of the linguistic signs chosen to convey that intention on the other. The ‘literal’ sense is as much a function of the conventions of the audience as is the plausibility of more recondite

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interpretation. Kermode has some pertinent things to say about this in his essay entitled The plain sense of things’ in the Hartman and Budick volume. Conversely, Faur’s account of derash gives the impression that it is completely unencumbered by literary or semiotic constraints. This too is unrealistic, notwithstanding the inadequacy of the tradition’s own account of those constraints to explain actual practice. Comparison may be made here with the essay in Hartman and Budick by Solotorevsky, ‘The model of midrash and Borges’s interpretative tales and essays’. She points out that, in midrash, symbolic or indirect meanings (derash) are seen as arising from literal or direct meanings (peshat). To similar effect, Fisch in the same volume notes that midrashic statements, however free, are also constrained…there is a prime text to which midrash has constant, indeed, obsessive reference. It is not a matter of intertextuality merely; what we have rather in midrash is the recognition of the unlimited possibilities but also of the unlimited authority inhering in a prime text. Constraint is not the right word either, for what predominates is the joy of recognition. You give the imagination free rein and then back you come triumphantly to the scriptural verse itself, from which all these inexhaustible readings have been derived, with the phrase hada hu di-khtiv—There, that is the meaning of what was written!… This constant and joyful re-encounter with the prime text is what gives midrash its excitement. This mode of invention depends on a loving intimacy with the words and letters, indeed with the vowel points and variants (keri and ketiv) of the written word of scripture. In a different way, Faur himself accepts the constraints which are institutionally built into the activity of midrash. Only the ‘Written Law’ is handed over for nonliteral interpretation. He draws a parallel to the ‘handing over’ of a private law document to the court, thereby authorizing the court to apply derash to it. However, on Faur’s own account, this gives the court the right to expound the document as it sees fit only when the intention of the document is doubtful, or there is superfluous language. This implies a functional interdependence of literal and non-literal interpretation, of a kind which Faur seems to wish to deny through the application of the semiotic versus semantic distinction to the interpretative concepts of the Jewish tradition. Faur has interesting but sometimes problematic things to say on a range of other issues—sufficient to excite the reader to a desire for a more systematic treatment. The Jewish traditions of the existence of Torah before the creation of the world, and of the role given by God to Torah in the creation itself, are given a semiological interpretation, presented as in opposition to Western, ontological views of the universe. A notable passage is quoted from Bahya, arguing that the existence of meaning (in the universe, as well as the divinely revealed text) presupposes intentionality, and intentionality presupposes the existence of a Creator. The natural universe is to be regarded as a set of signs of the will of

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God. In this, man’s nature is unique: he alone has the capacity to refuse to respond to God’s call, and equally to initiate a dialogue with God, by calling upon his name in prayer. The semiological model of creation which Faur presents is of particular interest, in that he presents an alternative to the modern, causal model quite different from the ancient, normative view (nature obeys rules) which the modern view superseded. Again, Faur has interesting things to say about the concept of truth—emet—which he presents, from the Jewish tradition, as implying trust and faith, and as being context-bound. Similarly tantalizing are the indications provided of the internal Jewish view of language itself. Maimonides distinguished between the general faculty of speech (which is God-given) and the systems of particular languages, which are taken to be conventional or artificial. Chomsky might express the matter differently, but would find himself essentially in agreement. The Hebrew language itself is claimed, in the very morphology of its personal pronouns, to recognize the difference between intersubjective communication (first-and second-person) and third-person discourse, involving the invocation of the ‘absent’. On several of these matters, the views of Maimonides are quoted—sufficient to indicate the usefulness of studies of the semiological views and presuppositions of individual rabbinic scholars. In the end, some of those same semiotic questions must be addressed also to Faur’s own discourse. Does it belong to Western discourse, being a search for the truth of some external, objective reality? Or does it continue the Jewish tradition of derash, notwithstanding the fact that the texts it seeks to interpret are primarily rabbinic rather than biblical, and thus, on Faur’s argument, appropriate only for peshat? To this, the Jewish tradition perhaps has the most satisfying answer. Given the presence of the required emotive commitment to the tradition, ‘these and these (however contradictory) are the words of the living God’ (Eruvin 13b). Perhaps this is the spirit in which we should view Faur’s own transgression of some of those very semiotic constraints which he himself attributes to the tradition. University of Kent

Nukespeak IAN WHITEHOUSE

• Paul Chilton (ed.), Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today (London: Frances Pinter, 1985), 230 pp., £25.00 For Homo grammaticus, the passage from cave to Cruise has been long, arduous and attended frequently by difficult decisions whose consequences have meant the difference between life and death. One of the most salient features of the entire journey has been the continual production, by we symbol-using, symbolabusing animals, of texts. Throughout the ages, throughout the changing configurations of land masses, political and economic philosophies and social relationships, the texts we have produced have both served as a record of our collective struggle for peace, understanding and survival, and played an instrumental role in bringing about these states. Upon deeper reflection, this is not surprising, since texts in their many forms are our basic unit of exchange. Language not only provides us with an arena in which to actualize our potential as social, political, rhetorical beings, but also provides the means by which we construct, interpret and negotiate our beingness within that arena. Indeed, as Benjamin Whorf led us to conclude, language is the very grammar of our being, and texts our most powerful means of extending, defending or maintaining the province of that being. Homo grammaticus, then, is not only a symbol-using but a text-producing animal. The texts we produce, however, are not simply a natural expression of our desire for production. It was Aristotle who, some two thousand years ago, observed that when men spoke most often it was for the purpose of persuasion. In his great study of the subject, he went on to define rhetoric as the faculty of determining in any given situation the available means of persuasion. Putting his case another way: Homo grammaticus is first Homo rhetoricus. Grammatical man constructs texts in order to persuade. Our own observations quickly confirm this thesis, for we, as individuals within a given society, are constantly engaged in the practice of persuasion. Daily we persuade, and are persuaded by, one another for various reasons, at various costs, and in the name of various institutionalized realities. Day after day, text after rhetorical text appears to

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extend or defend some province of power, one or another contending ideology. As Aristotle also noted, along with each rhetorical text comes the necessity, for its particular audience, of making a decision. And now we are being persuaded, by an escalating number of rhetorically sophisticated texts, that our only chance of survival, our only means of maintaining our already fragile existence, is by the continual production and accumulation of nuclear arms. We are now being persuaded, whether rightly or wrongly, that, while the pen may be mightier than the sword, neither has the persuasive power of the fear instilled in ‘the Soviets’ by the belief that the ‘Western Powers’ are prepared, in the name of ‘freedom’, to end our uncertain tenure on this small planet. Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate is a series of twelve essays which study in depth the logic, the lexicon, the syntax and the semantics of this powerful rhetoric. Paul Chilton begins where Aristotle left off—at the agora, at the Greek forum where issues concerning the future of the individual and the state were advanced, openly debated and then democratically decided. Unlike the Greeks, argues Chilton, a great many of those whose expertise should make them participants in the nuclear debate have developed agoraphobia—fear of the forum. Reluctant to enter the political arena for fear of relinquishing their ‘scientific objectivity’, many of those who do know better sit in nervous silence while the future of the planet, made precarious by the terrible potential of our technology, is written by those who manifestly do not. Convinced that linguistics, in order to offer an analysis of language in use, must study the political context—if for no other reason than the sheer volume of politically motivated texts now being produced— Chilton and the other eleven contributors to this important, informative book enter into the universe of nuclear discourse. Applying linguistic methods to an investigation of the ideology underlying the pro-nuclear texts, this group of committed linguists, discourse analysts and media observers, although diverse in political philosophies, announce their unified opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This is not to imply, however, that this book is a series of antinuclear tirades. It is not; rather, it is an impressive collection of well-written, carefully documented essays which explore various aspects of the nuclear discourse, revealing in the process the complexity, the complicity and the sometimes frightening power of language in use. As such, it offers a valuable contribution to our understanding of the precise way in which ideology works within specific discourses, the ways in which the lexicon and the grammar of a language can be mobilized in order to codify a particular view of the world. Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate uses as one point of entry into this particular network of signifying practices the word ‘discourse’, a morpheme, following the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, much in circulation in our current narrative exchange. Gunther Kress succinctly maps its semantic field as follows:

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Discourses are systematically organized sets of statements which give expression to the meaning and values of an institution…they define, describe, delimit what it is possible to say and not to say (and by extension, what it is possible to do or not to do) with respect to the area of concern of that institution…. A discourse provides a set of possible statements about a given area, and organizes and gives structures to the manner in which a particular topic, object, process is to be talked about, in that it provides descriptions, rules, permissions, and prohibitions of social and individual actions…. Discourses do not exist in isolation but within a larger system of sometimes opposing, contradictory, contending or merely different discourses. ‘Nukespeak’, a pun on George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, is the name Chilton coined for the pro-nuclear discourse. Newspeak, as readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four will recall, is the medium through which the repressive, militaristic rulers of Orwell’s imaginary state control the thoughts of its subjects. Through the careful creation and manipulation of certain words and grammatical rules, Newspeak effectively defines what it is possible to think, and therefore what it is possible to do within the state. Nukespeak, argues Chilton, operates in exactly the same way —that is, it attempts to limit what it is possible to think, say and do with respect to the subject of nuclear arms. A striking parallel between Nukespeak and Newspeak is quickly established in Peter Moss’s essay on the rhetoric of defence in the USA. In investigating the principles which guide the nomenclature of the many nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, Moss soon found himself pointed back towards the myth of a pioneering past, or, as in the case of ‘Star Wars’, directed towards a popular celluloid fantasy. ‘Honest John’, ‘Hawkeye’, ‘Minuteman’, ‘Trident’, ‘Cruise’—these names hardly indicate the terrible destructive powers that such weapons possess; rather, each in its own way links itself to a particular cultural frame which is already marked with high prestige in the national psyche. In documents explicating their classification and use, the weapons are further endowed with human attributes in such a way that the compliant reader is persuaded to think that these friendly ‘second-generation’ missiles really do possess the ‘moral responsibility’ which the Defence Department wishes to attribute to them. But the introduction of words from one discourse into another is only a small part of the process. The larger picture reveals the fact that a war is being waged, a war in which texts are the missiles, euphemisms the groundcover and compliant readers the casualties. In this war, words are conscripted and semantic fields are appropriated in the name of ‘peace’, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Like conquered domains, the boundaries between words collapse. It has now reached a point in the nuclear discourse where ‘peace’ is synonymous with ‘war’ and ‘war’ with ‘peace’: their semantic fields have been collapsed, dissolved, consolidated in the name of ‘national security’.

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The lexicon is not the only property of language being annexed. The nonrealization of agency when the event describes one of killing; the use of modal verbs to enlist support; the repeated use of the impersonal pronoun to turn that which is politically constructed into a ‘natural consequence’; the use of negation to dismiss dissent; the deployment throughout certain reports of euphemisms such as ‘collateral damage’ to camouflage the death of thousands upon thousands of innocent children—these are all symptoms of the syntax, all part of the strategy employed by the pro-nuclear discourse in moving from a propositional level to a surface structure. The logic behind the lexicon and syntax is known as ‘deterrence’. The modus operandi of this logic is fear. The basic proposition in deterrence is that the more ‘our capacity’ appears to substantiate ‘our intention’ to risk annihilation, the ‘more credibility we possess’. Another transformation of the same proposition has it that the ‘more probable our use of nuclear weapons’, the ‘more fear we instil in the Soviets’, the less likely ‘they’ will give ‘us’ any need to ‘demonstrate our capability’. ‘Intention’, ‘capability’ and ‘credibility’ are the cornerstones upon which the logic of deterrence is built. They are also the lexemes with which any opposition to nuclear arms is marginalized. Under the province of ‘intention’, any dissenting voice is excluded from careful consideration as, at best, a well-intentioned fool unknowingly undermining ‘the real efforts for peace’, or, at worst, ‘a leftwing sympathizer’ deviously manipulating a ‘small minority’ of the ‘uninformed’. The result is that there is no ground available for questions, discussions or debate. To question the sanity of the logic of deterrence is to be accused of being either a fool or a left-wing sympathizer. And so the war goes on. As part of their contribution to Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate, William Van Belle and Paul Claes, using the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, offer an intriguing expose of this nuclear neurosis. Caught in a mirror relationship with one another, the competing powers build an image of the ‘other’ based on their own desires and fears. The ‘other’ is simply their own narcissistic self, a self which invites rivalry and aggression. Dialogue concerning their mutual desires, insist Van Belle and Claes, is the only therapy to prevent the neurosis from becoming terminal. According to Gunther Kress, dialogue is also the linguistic mode which is fundamental to an understanding of language in use: it is within dialogue that the construction of texts in and around difference is most readily observable. Kress goes on to argue, as did Mikhail Bakhtin, that all texts are dialogic in nature— that is, every text is an answer to a specific problem, an attempt to resolve difference. Building on a theory of language which attributes equal responsibility for the production of meaning to both the reader and the writer, Kress concludes that every text offers the possibility for intervention in exactly those places where discursive differences remain unresolved. In terms of the pro-nuclear texts, it is precisely at the site of unresolved difference that space is available for alternative texts with alternative views.

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This particular book is one such alternative text, and a very important one. It is important because it opens a space in a discourse where one did not exist before, a much-needed space where alternative voices can be heard. Concomitantly, it is a book which itself offers a number of alternative reading positions: for those sceptical of theory, it offers a universe of discourse where theory is grounded in practice, a book in which Halliday, Greimas, Lacan, Foucault and others find an articulate application through individuals concerned about the ‘real world’ and the texts which seek to configure it; for the politically committed, it provides strategies for action; and, finally, for the student of rhetoric, the would-be writer or simply the intellectually curious, here is an expose of some of the most forceful, and most frightening, writing of our time, an analysis of texts in which war is sold like soap. The Nuclear Age began with Albert Einstein, and a remark that the great physicist made in one of his many pleas for sanity concerning nuclear weapons bears repeating. Einstein said that the power released by the splitting of the atom had changed everything in our world, everything but our way of thinking. Paul Chilton’s book seeks to rectify that potentially terminal oversight. University College, Cardiff

Narcissism STEPHEN GLYNN

• David Punter, The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 204 pp., £14.95 The Hidden Script resists easy summary, since it does not trace a linear argument. Rather, it ranges over a series of apparently diverse cultural materials, primarily derived from the 1970s. Punter studies material as apparently disparate as selected works of one American and four English novelists, some later interviews by Foucault, a variety of (primarily American) science fiction, an eclectic selection of horror and science-fiction movies, the poetry of W.S.Graham and Philip Larkin, Dallas and cigarette brand names (the list is not inclusive), in a series of thematically linked discussions which attempt what can best be called a political psychoanalysis of the 1970s. Punter begins with a discussion of ‘Narratives and the unconscious’, an account of some of the novels published in the 1970s by J.G.Ballard, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Beryl Bainbridge and Kurt Vonnegut. Although he expresses some doubts (justifiably, given the case he is arguing) about the validity of his assumptions ‘that we can make a kind of narrative sense of an individual author’s career, and that we can arrange the images in an author’s texts in a developmental way’ (p. 2), the section is arranged as series of almost freestanding discussions of the individual authors and their novels. The discussions are linked thematically; using an eclectic concept of the unconscious process, Punter time and again traces the breakdown and fragmentation of the full subject (usually male), be it across Ballard’s nightmare landscapes or into the apparently more reassuring mysticism of Lessing. Bainbridge’s novels might seem out of place in this assembly of ‘post-modern’ (Punter’s term) science fiction, fantasy and horrid imaginings of dystopias set in the near future, but even here, Punter argues, the reader is drawn into endless fragmentation and lack, haunted ‘with the possibility that our self-development has been a massive artifice built on willed ignorance, and that our power of relating is built on half-subdued hatred and half-known fear’ (p. 77). In his second section, ‘Fears of surveillance/strategies for the future’, Punter abandons his apparently traditional literary-critical approach for a seemingly

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more radical one. Using Foucault’s analysis of the way in which the locus of power has shifted from a centralized coercive force into a dispersed network of localized surveillance, Punter suggests that the contemporary text enacts in various ways a desire to escape this network via a provisional escape from the local sites of surveillance and by problematizing knowledge. The unconscious wishes behind the fictions he considers (and, if I understand him correctly, behind the works considered in the first section) include a desire to escape the panoptic vision of power/knowledge and, simultaneously, the desire to become part of it; the reader both vicariously participates in the protagonist’s attempts at escape from surveillance and, as reader, derives ‘pleasure from the act of surveillance, from having this other, puny self at its mercy’ (p. 111). The text both offers the fantasy of escape and, through the pleasure of reading, legitimates the structure. Punter then moves to a survey of (predominantly American) horror and sci-fi films of the 1970s and early 19808 in an attempt to extend this analysis. Their overdetermined images bring together, he suggests, primitive fantasies, the realities of class and gender conflict, and the fear of nuclear annihilation. Thus Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 version of Stephen King’s The Shining simultaneously dramatizes childish Oedipal fantasies about the parents’ sexuality, makes the audience long for some outside intervention and interpretation to end the nightmare (thereby legitimating surveillance by presenting privacy as a state of hellish claustrophobia) and, at the same time, refuses any sort of intervention from outside the closed circle of the family, thereby repeating both the new right’s rejection of the state and collective organization and its valorization of the family. From the hotel in The Shining it is but a short step to D.M.Thomas’s The White Hotel, which Punter reads as a literary modulation of the same theme. As he puts it, by adopting a version of determinism which produces the self as victim, we thereby bring about the apparatus of victimization from which, some time in the future, we will suffer. The hotel of The Shining…is here again: the fear is that when we arrive there, in search of purification and of a sexual activity which will be purged of guilt and free from social connotations, we will find that we have indeed brought all our luggage with us, all the terrors and blackness which we had thought to leave behind on the mountain slopes. (p. 123) For Punter, Thomas’s book appears to dramatize many of the contradictions inherent in the other texts—both literary and theoretical—that he examines. On the one hand, we see both the fragmentation of the myth of the individual and a critique of the operations of state power; on the other, we see a psychic determinism which calls into question both state and individual action and which seeks to stop history. Confronted with theoretical and state discourses which

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problematize individual action in different ways and with the pervasive fear that all individual existence (let alone action!) could be abruptly ended by nuclear war, the West, for Punter, retreats into the fantasies of psychic survivalism which these texts offer. And psychic survivalism, as Christopher Lasch argues in The Minimal Self,1 is both a critique of what he regards as the paranoid and narcissistic fantasies underling the postmodern text. Punter’s book ends with a series of Trajectories through language and culture’, a section which, though it is in some ways the most elegant and well argued, seems readily detachable from the rest. It contains an extended discussion of the poetry of W.S.Graham, which Punter sees as exemplary of ‘the encounter of the troubled consciousness precisely with the new forms of control which are represented, on the one side, by the machinations of state power and, on the other, by the emergence of a theoretical conventionalism which resists materiality’. Punter reads this encounter (convincingly, it seems to me, though I am not particularly familiar with Graham’s work) as a long movement from an uneasy linguistic plenitude towards a growing linguistic absence and lack, an emptying of poetic meaning. He ends with a series of short, elegant discussions of ‘Some cultural materials’, a collection of brief essays in the manner of Barthes’s Mythologies. He offers them in lieu of a conclusion, in the hope that these ‘brief cultural snap-shots’ (p. 154) will trace the themes he has been discussing through cultural materials as seemingly diverse as Ken Russell’s Tommy and the poetry of Philip Larkin. And, of course, they do, since they have been written (extremely well, for the most part) for that purpose. The Hidden Script is a dense, suggestive text, which contains much to value and much to dispute. I fear, though, that Punter would feel I value the wrong parts for the wrong reasons. Punter’s strength is his quite traditional skill as a critic and interpreter. His readings, though one might dispute them in detail, are usually quite persuasive, and his overall analysis of his material contains much that is valid. However, The Hidden Script clearly tries to situate itself within ‘theoretical’ discourse (though, to be fair, Punter is dubious of the category of ‘the theoretical’), and its attempts so to situate itself raise many questions. As already noted, Punter questions the notion that ‘the individual author’s career’ is an appropriate unit of analysis. He is certainly right to do so, but having raised the question he does little with it. He does not, for example, discuss postmodernism and metafictionality as literary phenomena of which some of the texts he discusses are a part. Since Punter uses Lacan, Foucault, Barthes and other theorists who use the models of structural linguistics, one looks for some discussion of the narrative langue which makes possible, and is sometimes transgressed by, the individual narrative paroles he discusses. One looks in vain. Rather, in the first section, the reader is confronted with a series of sovereign authors who have chosen (consciously or unconsciously) to embody particular meanings in their work. Thus The White Hotel is said (p. 12.4) to have ‘a male narrator’. In fact, it has many intradiegetic narrators, some male and some female. At the main diegetic level it has a variety of narrators, some male

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(notably Freud), one female (Lisa Erdman) and some untagged. By ‘narrator’, Punter in fact presumably means either the implied author or the actual historical one. Similarly, he seems troubled by the fact that Angela Carter sometimes uses a male narrator; discussing The Passion of New Eve, he writes: Although I am aware that Carter is a woman, and although that extratextual consciousness is incarnated within the text in her obvious proximity to Leilah/Lilith, I nonetheless find that the first-person narrative of Evelyn/ Eve appears to me throughout…as a masculine narrative…. I read Eve still through the male consciousness (Evelyn’s) of what he has become. It is as though Evelyn forms a barrier, a thin film which stretches between ‘Carter’ and Eve at all points. (p. 38) Quite why he should find this a problem is unclear, since by ‘“Carter”’ he presumably means the implied author (hence the quotation marks round her name). This is not just pedantic structuralist sniping. At times Punter seems to be discussing cultural phenomena, while at others he seems to be discussing individual writers who (familiarly enough) have messages the critic is decoding. For example, he suggests (pp. 121–2) that Don Siegel’s 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about finding ‘a way of stopping a cancerous spread, which was a thinly disguised version of insidious communism’. Certainly, this is what Siegel thought his film was about, but he insisted so publicly on it because some critics were reading the film as an attack on McCarthyite anti-communism. Given that the film can be taken both ways, why privilege one reading rather than examine the film’s apparent ambiguity? The point might seem minor, but it does indicate a central paradox in Punter’s argument. On one level (particularly when he is using Barthes and Foucault), Punter suggests that meaning is constituted within discourse, and that this discourse is a product of power relationships in which it is deeply implicated. On another level, though, Punter is busy identifying meanings, which seem to be there regardless of the critical discourse he uses to identify them. The critical discourse Punter uses is, primarily, that of psychoanalysis, and it is here that his failure to consider meaning within discourse becomes most apparent. I alluded earlier to his eclectic concept of the unconscious. At times he uses Lacan, at times a Freudianism which he describes as ‘unreconstructed’ and others might call vulgar, and at times he uses Jung. Furthermore, some of his apparently Lacanian formulations seem to function more to connote what Barthes might have called ‘Lacanniness’ rather than to denote anything within a Lacanian system. For example, he frequently refers to the ‘Other’, and at times to ‘Others’, in contexts which clearly imply ‘other’ in the everyday sense of the word; he writes in a footnote (to p. 60) that ‘I use the term “Other” throughout in the strong sense, often thought of now as the property of psychoanalysis but in fact reaching back into older Hegelian traditions’, but quite what he means by

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this ‘strong sense’ is unclear (clearly, it is frequently not the Lacanian sense), as is the status of ‘Other’ before this annotation. Similarly, he writes of Vonnegut ‘dissipating the transference’ (p. 84), when what Vonnegut seems to be saying in the interview Punter quotes is that writing Breakfast of Champions made him aware both of his anger with his parents and of some of the reasons for it, and that he is determined not to repeat the pattern with his children. At times, Punter’s use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary leads him to extraordinary formulations. Discussing The Passion of New Eve, Punter writes that ‘To this name-of-Tristessa, Zero counterposes the interdictions of the Father, and foremost among them is the prohibition of speech’ (p. 40). He annotates this remark with the observation that ‘I am aware that this formulation runs counter to Lacanian theory; that, indeed, is the point.’ To which one can only respond, ‘What is?’ The reason I stress this is that the concepts of psychoanalysis clearly have meaning only within a quite strictly defined discourse. A ‘goal’ has one specific meaning in soccer, another in American football, and a whole series of nonspecific meanings in everyday usage. The concept ‘goal’ in soccer exists only in relation to a set of definitions about what a goal is and how one scores it. These definitions make the difference between what Searle would call the ‘brute facts’ of either the structure of net and wood or the action of kicking a ball into it and the ‘institutional fact’ of there being a goal or of scoring a goal. Similarly, concepts like ‘unconscious’, ‘transference’, and so on, exist only in relation to particular discourses within psychoanalysis. Moreover, they clearly only exist in a differential relationship with other concepts within the same discourse. My complaint is that Punter seems to use psychoanalytic concepts without specifying the discourse to which they belong, and as if they can readily be detached from particular discourses and still retain any useful meaning. His use of Foucault further complicates the picture, since Foucault calls into question the basis of the discourse of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, ‘psychoanalytic criticism’ covers a variety of activities, and it is frequently unclear whose unconscious (if anyone’s) Punter is studying. At times he writes as if there is a universal symbolism of the unconscious which allows an unproblematic one-to-one mapping from manifest to latent content. At other times he reads texts as allegories of unconscious processes, and at others again he discusses the unconscious process and desires which underlie the audience’s or reader’s participation in the film or text. Thus Lessing’s writings appear as allegories of particular unconscious processes, while the landing of the alien ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is interpreted as a fantasy of the sexual act as ‘not genital but anal, and at that not fully achieved, a fluttering contact undertaken in secret’ (p. 115). I have no quarrel in principle with either way of using the texts (though I do about the specific interpretations offered) but I wonder why, for example, Lessing’s fictions of group minds are not interpreted as (for example) fantasies of narcissistic fusion with the ego-ideal.

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Despite these comments, I believe this is a valuable book. Punter’s readings of individual texts are skilled and often illuminating, and his overall thesis about the unstated assumptions and implications of the cultural phenomena he discusses is suggestive and persuasive. Some of his theoretical assertions are more questionable, but they do not, it seems to me, invalidate his readings, which draw their strength from an older tradition of close reading and practical criticism. Whether Punter would thank me for saying so is, of course, another matter. Polytechnic of Central London NOTE 1 Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984).

In America ROGER POOLE

• Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons (eds), Criticism and the University, Tri-Quarterly Series on Criticism and Culture, no. 1 (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 236 pp., $9.95 In the year when the Statue of Liberty had her centenary celebrated by a refurbishment programme costing 70 million dollars, and when President Reagan’s popularity had never been higher, there cannot but be something puzzling about a book like this which set out to examine the extent to which academic criticism influences American political consciousness, and to what extent it should do so. One can only wonder whether there is any possible interface at all between the aspirations towards political relevance of university criticism, and the ongoing tide of hedonistic materialism whose most recent exponent has come to be Richard Rorty. Nevertheless, undeterred, the contributors to this volume take their project seriously, and make an excellent job of it. It is very instructive for us in Britain, who saw Peter Widdowson’s Re-Reading English so blandly dismissed in 1982– 3 in the columns of the London Review of Books and the TLS, to see American academics operating with the full expectation that their doubts and problems will be of interest to a general public in America. The refusal of any serious engagement with the implications of Peter Widdowson’s book was due, no doubt, to the fact that in Britain the academy is so self-satisfied that it simply cannot regard any criticism of its working assumptions as a serious threat. But, in America, the struggle between theorists and humanists, between Marxists and non-Marxists, between feminists and non-feminists, is taken with total seriousness, and the debate carried on in full evening dress. There is a sense that all this matters immensely, and to us in Britain, besieged as we are in the academy by government attrition on the one hand and public indifference on the other, this comes as a refreshing breeze from across the Atlantic. The manifesto of the book is given in the Preface, signed jointly by Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons. It is a call for a ‘revitalization of the humanistic study of literature’, and the thrust of the volume is that academic criticism has

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become precisely that: academic, cut off both from the world outside the academy and from the reality of experience and life itself. This is an immensely attractive and engaged position, with good will and integrity written into it from the very beginning. It receives one of its first formulations in what Reginald Gibbons calls, in his opening chapter, ‘Kundera’s paradox’. It is doubly paradoxical, though entirely just in a wider scheme of things, that ‘Kundera’s paradox’ should be related by Gibbons to the name of Edmund Husserl. What Husserl called ‘die Lebenswelt, the world of concrete living’, has of course been long ignored by philosophy and science—that was Husserl’s own point in 1936— but nowadays it is ignored by the novel as well, and is becoming progressively ignored by criticism of the novel too. What we might call Kundera’s paradox would hold that the more contradictory, implausible, brutal, horrible and absurd the world becomes, the greater the novelist’s desire and need to discover to the reader the reality of our being in that world—not to answer that world with his own absurd contention that nothing means anything anyway, nor with lazy or complacent presentation of aspects of our being with which we are already too familiar. And yet most criticism seems to mimic these two failing and inadequate gestures of the bad novelist, either by questioning the ability of any text to move a reader, or by performing without question accepted and not very useful critical tasks. (p. 2.4) This conviction that criticism has willed itself into a kind of voluntary impotence is shared by Gerald Graff, who gives a caustic but all too accurate account of the way in which academic institutions swallow all opposition and avoid all dialectic between real positions by simply admitting new ‘fields’ into the department and thus automatically marginalizing them. The arrival of ‘theory’, says Graff, is just one more case of this sad and expensive habit of marginalization: Instead of being used to create a context of general ideas that might bring the different viewpoints and methods of the literature department into fruitful debate, literary theory becomes yet another field, a fact which encourages it to be just the sort of self-promoting and exclusionary activity that its enemies denounce it for being. Forward-looking departments rush to their theorists, who form a new ghetto alongside those occupied by the black studies person hired several years ago, and the women’s studies person hired yesterday. Once literary theory has been thus ‘covered’ in the department’s table of ‘areas’, the rest of the faculty is free to ignore the issues theorists raise. (p. 67) Painfully accurate, painfully true. And this academic habit of thinking exclusively in terms of specializations, areas and ‘fields’ certainly has a great deal more to answer for than perhaps we realized. To this danger we have, in this

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country, to add another: the arguments which proceed from the deeply held conviction that ‘ghettos’ are in themselves a good thing, that indeed one cannot write or teach or think authentically at all unless one writes or teaches or thinks from within a ghetto. This particular betrayal of the Kantian ideal of objectivity may not yet have raised its ugly head in the States—indeed, there is no trace of it in the Graff and Gibbons book—but it is one which may blow like some malign pollen across the water to infect American efforts towards that universality and humanistic highmindedness which are, at this moment, the most impressive aspects of American literary culture. Indeed, it is only when one encounters arguments pitched at such a high level of intellectual responsibility as the GraffGibbons volume offers that one becomes fully conscious of just how benighted and malevolent some of our literary exchanges in the columns of the TLS and the LRB really are. Divided up into ‘fields’, then, the department marginalizes opposition and avoids authentic debate. This leads progressively to irrelevance and to inturnedness. ‘Having no way of making visible the conflicts that make up its history,’ Graff writes, ‘literary studies becomes a set of fields geared to advancing methodology for its own sake and generating “productivity”.’ It is no wonder, then, if the world outside takes no notice of the debates within the academy. ‘The broad consensus which underlay traditional liberal education no longer exists’, and thus literary criticism becomes ‘only another form of technical manipulation’. This may well be a commonplace, but what is not commonplace is the vigour with which Gibbons, Graff, William Cain and others in the volume argue strongly for the restoration of that ‘broad consensus’, that ‘liberal education’, that ‘revitalization of the humanistic study of literature’. To the rather incredulous reader-response which takes the form ‘But can this be done?’, the answer comes back strong and clear: ‘Yes, it can.’ This again—the sheer optimism of that reply— marks off American literary studies from cultural pessimism in this country. Maybe this optimism in America has something to do with the fact that the Americans have thought it worth the expense to refurbish the Statue of Liberty from toe to flame. William Cain weighs in with a strongly argued attack upon theory, arguing that theory ‘makes no difference’ to the practical everyday reality of an English department. It is not that William Cain, or indeed any contributor to the book, believes that theory is in itself a bad thing. But it is a generally shared perception that the exclusive and elevated social status of theory above all other practical pursuits within the teaching activity of the academy supports the actual teacher of English only in the sense that the rope supports the hanged man. Deconstruction, in particular, argues Cain, has never managed to halt its swirling patterns of negation; it is a formidable weapon for undermining other methods, positions and beliefs, yet seems unable to furnish positive terms of its own…. Politics involves resistance and opposition, but it also implies work for something, on behalf

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of something, and a serious concern for the reality—which is not figurative, linguistic or textual—of cruelty, suffering and exploitation. (p. 91) It could hardly be said more forcefully than that, and the surprising thing for us in Britain is that it should need to be said with so much emphasis. William Cain is particularly severe with Marxists, not because they may not be in some sense right, but because their radicalism is of a kind which just does not even intersect with American politics or the American mood at this moment. ‘To affirm a Marxist position can be no more than a futile gesture,’ observes Cain, and this is because their ‘radical’ suggestions are so far removed from American reality that they pose no threat at all to the establishment, and can easily be ‘marginalized’ by the usual method of awarding prestigious chairs and research facilities. What, then, must we do? We need, I think, to recognize that the most realistic political course of action for us at the present time is liberal, reformist and progressive, and is a course of action that an American, not a Marxist, social-democratic vision impels and guides. (p. 101) ‘What, then, must we do?’ asks Cain, and the Tolstoyan echo is some index of the serious intent which animates Cain’s essay, as indeed all the essays in this book. The sudden deposition of ‘Marxist’ in favour of ‘American’ rings a bell which I hear as authentic, at the present juncture of political and theoretical realities in the USA. It is only by integrating one’s project into the American mood and political climate that one can have any ‘political’ influence at all, and this, unfashionable as it may be to say it, also happens to contain the greater degree of realism. This is why William Cain’s suggestions about what we ‘must do’ are so apparently mundane and practical. He suggests that one can integrate reform into the actual political reality of American consciousness now by paying attention to such things as the reform of the canon of taught texts, the establishment of new programmes on the timetable, and inter-staff discussion and genuine debate about aims and priorities. Frank Lentricchia, however, in a ‘Reply’ to Cain’s essay, thinks of this as altogether too low-grade a solution, and argues for the act of writing as the ‘forum’ in which political/critical/social change can be engineered—to which ‘Reply’ William Cain in turn replies that small internal advances within any one department are worth any amount of theoretical writing. One is faced, then, with a delicate judgement to make here between Lentricchia and Cain. Both are arguing for realities, the question being only: which reality takes priority? In the end, I think one has to adopt two time-scales, with Cain being right in the short term and Lentricchia right over a period of, say, a decade. Frank Lentricchia’s own essay argues for the agony and the diremption of having to go through the full critical millrace of dislocation, disbelief, scepticism and despair. He makes a kind of existential case for Angst, and paints the picture

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of deconstructive freewheeling as something imposed upon mortals by the nature of things. But in the interface between ‘theory’ and ‘history’ there is discovered the ‘double-edged’ responsibility which leads to ‘theory as a social practice’. I do not suppose that this would satisfy Graff, Gibbons or Cain, but it is as strong a defence of the pure theoretical position as Lentricchia seems disposed to offer. It throws into relief the extent of the conflict between theoreticians and new humanists. The call for a ‘revitalization of the humanistic study of literature’ is strong and well argued for throughout the book, yet the independence of theory is also something precious, and, unless the new humanism can itself find some points of assonance and agreement with the new ‘American’ mood it so often cites as its ally, it may itself find that its call is too late and that material realities have overtaken it. University of Nottingham

Defending interpretation IAN SAUNDERS

• K.M.Newton, In Defence of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice (London: Macmillan, 1986), 246 pp., £27.50 The elegant wrap-around jacket of this book contains it in more ways than one. Framed by two areas of script (title, author, but not subtitle), a person, deep in thought, pores over a weighty manuscript—presumably, we suppose, doing just that which the title advises us Newton wishes to defend: interpreting literature. The back flap informs us that this is a reproduction of Chardin’s A Philosopher Reading, adding, however, that the painting is known by a number of other names: A Chemist in his Laboratory, The Prompter and Portrait of the Painter Joseph Aved. Newton does not discuss this textual competition, but it would serve him well. Interpretation, he contends, is not about truth; it is about power. The best interpretation is simply the most powerful, the one that holds sway under the circumstances. For us, consumers anticipating a unified commodity, the writing that frames the reproduction acts as power-broker, and so, whatever the fact of the matter might be, here painter, prompter and chemist give way to reader. ‘A Philosopher Reading’ may not be that mythical entity, the true interpretation, but in this context it is the most powerful one. After more than a decade of work in literary theory (and several decades in philosophy and historiography) that has argued against the viability of truthclaims in interpretation, it may seem somewhat late in the day for Newton to add his voice. His work, however, is not mere restatement, although there is an element of this. The crucial difference between it and most earlier formulations is that his position, as the book’s very title might suggest, is in no sense radical. That is to say, it is impelled not so much by a desire for change but by a belief in the importance of the conservation of certain civilized virtues: rationality, imagination and ‘the play of mind’ (p. 39). How does his argument work? All discourses, Newton asserts, function in terms of signifier and signified. All signifiers must be interpreted in order that we might establish what they signify. (I find this Saussurean notion of a pre-language semiotic soup, where fluid signifiers await some chance signification, unsatisfactory and without point. But for the most part this book is not concerned with a general theory of semantic

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meaning.) For Newton, then, it is not the signifier that establishes signification; it is the interpretative work. But, while some discourses, such as instructions, timetables and warnings, are relentlessly pragmatic and so constrain the range of tenable interpretation, literary discourse is not. Its texts ‘exist outside of contexts of use or necessity’ (p. 11), and so can support an endless production of alternative interpretations. Newton’s development of this initial position is bifurcated. On the one hand he wishes to make the case as strong as possible, and his argument against the possibility of a consistent (and thereby delimiting) semiotics of interpretation, like his discussion of the inconsistencies of ‘objective’ editorial practice, is both cogent and lucid. Most entertaining, perhaps, is his careful response to Eagleton’s remark, ‘Whatever King Lear is about, it’s not about Manchester United.’ Not necessarily so, says Newton, and he goes on to detail a history of the managerial woes of the club that, it turns out, bears a remarkable resemblance to the structure of conflicts in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Unhistorical? Well, so too is looking at Shakespeare in terms of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida, or any other set of present-day interests. Manchester United is not at present an area of interest to the literary institution, but, Newton suggests, there is no intrinsic reason why it may not become one. Set against Newton’s argument that literary interpretation is indeed limitless is the fear of what this might imply, expressed in a vision of a nightmare world where the discipline collapses under the immense weight of a textual reproduction out of control. ‘The accumulation of interpretations means that the majority of new readings are scarcely noticed, and, if readings continue to be generated at the same rate in the future, the interpreter must feel that his interpretation has little chance of surviving’ (p. 41). Given that future, ‘what is the point of producing particular interpretations of texts?’ (p. 15). What, indeed? A possible answer to that question is that particular interpretations have particular social and political effects, and are to be valued accordingly. This is not how Newton sees it. For him there is an important distinction to be made between what he calls the level of the literary institution and the level of literary discourse. It is the literary institution— ‘teachers, examination markers, publishers’ consultants, reviewers, editors, members of academic appointment committees, and so on’ (p. 11)—that makes ideological choices, promoting and thus legitimizing some interpretations, ignoring others. Indeed, it is precisely the exercise of such discriminations that ensures the viability of the institution as such. By contrast, literary discourse concerns individual interpreters, individuals who, Newton believes, need not concern themselves with these ideological questions. Literary discourse is characterized, simply, by ‘the desire to interpret’. The interpretations produced are a function of the interpreters’ interests, to be sure, but it is not for them to worry about the closeness of fit between personal interests and those of the institution; ‘it is for the institution to make that decision’ (p. 226).

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Newton’s surprising placidity here points to something of the uneasy balance his position demands. He wishes to maintain the literary institution, and assumes that a continuing supply of the economic and social wherewithal necessary for its survival depends on its conforming to the dominant ideology of the society in which it is placed. But the maintenance of that institution is essential only because literary discourse is itself of intrinsic worth. The nature of that worth can begin to be seen when one considers how Newton identifies the individual, together with his or her ‘desire to interpret’, rather than the institution, with the intrinsic value of literary discourse. The twist for Newton comes at this point, for, as we have seen, if value resides in the individual interpretation, it is none the less precisely the number of such interpretations that threatens to overwhelm the possibility of any one being heard. The solution, Newton contends, is for criticism to give up its ‘atomistic and agglomerative path’ (p. 41), where numberless texts are produced and coexist without meaningful communication (something of the textual equivalent of the lonely crowd), for an interpretative practice which frankly admits that its own coinage is relative power, not truth, and engages with other interpretations. Interpretation ought not to be atomistic but, as Newton puts it, ‘agonistic’. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Newton’s proposal is the way in which it unconsciously (apparently) re-enacts the Leavisite episteme. For Leavis the gravest threat to civilization is the technology of the numberless crowd, the meaningless democracy of lookalikes. Its greatest hope is the individual imagination that can meaningfully engage with the world. The literary text is important as the most powerful evidence of the possibility of that kind of engagement. For Newton, the greatest threat to literary discourse is the ‘atomistic and agglomerative’ criticism that produces an inhumanly vast and featureless landscape. The greatest hope is the ‘desire to interpret’ channelled in an agonistic practice where the individual critic directly engages with the textual world that surrounds the work at hand. ‘There can be no resolution, but the point of the activity is the contest itself …its continuance is necessary not only to the existence of literature and literary criticism but also to any society that values rationality and the play of mind’ (p. 39). The central chapters of the book are offered to illustrate what this ‘agonistic’ criticism might be like, and Newton discusses Pinter, Shaw, Shakespeare, Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Dickens (Great Expectations) and George Eliot (Daniel Deronda). With the exception of the fascinating chapter on Eliot and Deronda’s absent periphery, it is for me the least interesting part of the book, and, while this judgement no doubt reflects my own interests, I think there are other reasons too, not least that Newton’s own interest tends more towards expounding his theoretical case. The Shakespeare chapter is a good example. In it Newton recalls the reception that Michael Long’s The Unnatural Scene (1976) suffered—appalled horror—and suggests that, wonderfully subjective as Long’s approach undoubtedly was, the position of his traditionalist critics is, in fact, objective only in name. G.K.Hunter, for instance, criticizes Long’s

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Shakespeare as ‘an adolescent’s laureate’, but, Newton argues, Hunter’s bard could well be described as a humanist’s Shakespeare. ‘In other words,’ he writes, ‘ideology plays an unacknowledged role in traditional criticism’ (p. 125). This, surely, is by now an indisputable commonplace, but Newton continues undeterred, proposing to give an alternative account of three plays (Othello, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale) which engages with that humanist ideology, but is itself anti-humanist, while yet remaining (unlike Long’s radical account) historically plausible. Given his interest in interpretative power, it is not surprising that in his hands the plays themselves turn out to be about power, although not so much in the sense of discriminating between moral and immoral power as achieving an even-handed, Machiavellian anatomy of the varieties of power. My dissatisfaction with all this could be ordered under two headings. In the first place, Newton’s ‘agonistic interpretation’ seems not fundamentally different in methodology from other critical approaches. Indeed, the very notion that the norm has been to produce interpretations in splendid isolation— Newton’s starting premise—cannot stand scrutiny. Critics for the most part write with a keen awareness of the competition. True, naming names may be consigned to footnotes, but surely we need not read this disinterested posture at its face value. The other point concerns the interpretations themselves. Yes, they constitute an alternative to the view represented by Hunter, but the healthy existence of such alternatives can be traced, at the very least, back to the 1950s and Northrop Frye. Moreover, at the level of specific detail Newton’s interpretations seem to lack bite. An adequate defence of this kind of subjective response may not be possible, but an indication of its cause may be found in the following comment: ‘My aim is not to interpret these plays as fully as they deserve, but merely to discuss them at sufficient length to demonstrate that a reading opposed to the humanist one is not only possible but defensible and to suggest how it might be formulated’ (p. 126). To be sure, there is an element of conventional diffidence here; none the less it is possible to see the beginnings of a problem. If interpretations are neither true-or-false nor of ideological use value to the interpreter, and if it is simply the contest of agonistic criticism that is of value, then the actual substance of any interpretation is no longer of specific interest. For Newton’s ideal critic, what one says about Shakespeare is immaterial; the crucial thing is that it be said agonistically. But of course, if that ‘what’ is indeed of so little account, then there is little cause to say it. Thus a sense of futility, or so it seems to me, debilitates the interpretations Newton produces. In this book, defending the practice of interpretation is evidently more interesting than actually doing it. Despite many differences of view, that defence strikes me as both substantial and provoking. Most lacking, however, was a detailed exploration of the relation between the defence and the interpretations, between (in the words of the subtitle) theory and practice. In place of that exploration, Newton offers, as we have seen, a benign opposition between the individual critic and the institution to

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which, as teacher, reviewer or editor, she or he belongs: ‘even a radical pluralist, committed to exposing the “bourgeois ideology” which places inauthentic limits on interpretation, need feel no sense of contradiction in applying that ideology as a member of an institution’ (p. 227). No sense of contradiction? Newton aims to stem ‘current disillusionment with interpretation’ (p. 228), but it is difficult to see how teacher or critic could find comfort in the cool shelter of this dissociation. University of Western Australia

Reflexions FRED BOTTING

• Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 156 pp., £5.50 (paperback) Reflexivity sets out to introduce—to translate into the discourse of British philosophy—those parts of Nietzsche and Heidegger that have informed the writings of the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Nietzsche is reread as violent anti-metaphysician, rhetorical destroyer of the rhetorics of God, as against the conventional version of him, like Bertrand Russell’s, as artistic, flamboyant and unanalytical, a pseudo-philosopher of evil. Lawson’s account offers the Nietzsche familiar to readers of Derrida, de Man and Foucault, the Nietzsche who speaks of language, its lies and deceits, who delights in paradox and contradiction, immersing his readers in the metaphoricity that is the world. Heidegger loses the existentialism that is often attributed to him, his ‘Being’ becoming more elusive, his method more self-critical and questioning, hinting at ‘Being’ only by what it is not, by its difference from. Heidegger problematizes ‘Being’ even as he proposes it, placing it ‘under erasure’, marking the impossibility of achieving presence in language, but recognizing the inescapability of language. These philosophers are part of Derrida’s background, traces in the texts of the deconstructor of the ‘metaphysics of presence’, the disruptor of origins, priority and meaning in the name of différance, of textuality. The three are connected in their struggle on the borders of language by a common involvement with ‘reflexivity’. ‘Reflexivity’ is a self-consciousness or awareness, a turning back on oneself in a paradoxical movement that disrupts the closure of metaphysical philosophy. The starting point for a critical position remains outside, unvalidated by its own rules, rupturing the whole system; the fixed, prior or given meaning, the origin, is destabilized, and other, contradictory meanings emerge—logic turning back on itself, questioning itself alone. This is the thread that runs through Lawson’s account, and language has predominance as a self-reflexive retreat from the world into its own play of meanings. Yet there are tensions in Nietzsche and Heidegger, a reflexivity and a desire to move beyond. The heroic defiance of the self and its will, the quest for unattainable ‘Being’, manifested ‘always already’

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within language and yet somehow beyond, are indications of doubts, moments of nostalgia for a self or ‘Being’ that is securely elsewhere. Derrida’s proclamation, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, seems to avoid this nostalgia, moving away from structures and the traces of a modernist reflexivity in which the turning back involves a lingering glance over the shoulder upon a world that, mirage-like, remains ‘out there’. For Derrida, the proliferation of signifiers and texts are ‘the world’ and its shifting sands; the ‘glimpse beyond’ is toward the possibility of other, different texts; their turning back on themselves is a spreading outwards, a play of differences. While acknowledging the difficulties of introducing such diverse and heterogeneous texts, whose ‘essence’ is that there can be no final, complete account, this introduction encounters dangers, tensions, on the borders where it operates, vacillating between the discourses of the philosophical institution and its deconstruction. It is the problem of translation, of writing for a tradition of British philosophy, writing within it but against it while resisting absorption in its all-too recognizable framework. ‘Reflexivity’ can be the familiar name for the paradoxes of analytical philosophy, a name that somehow resolves or contains their internal disruptions, annoyances that are ignored in the search for solutions; from an institutional position, the pre-and post-structuralists could be left on the margins, their ‘central concern’ reduced to the ‘mere’ problem of reflexivity, as if that were all they were about. These are signs of a concern that ‘reflexivity’ should remain within the structures of logocentrism, the ubiquitous language of imprisonment, of an inability to escape the structures which trap us, a longing for a new vocabulary offering itself up wholesale and complete. This project could then be transformed into a ‘history of ideas’, a delineation of strands of influence, an incorporation into already existing discourses rather than a point for their deconstruction, a safe consumption of ‘the postmodern predicament’. The indiscriminate use of the term ‘postmodern’ seems to be a current fashion. Though a wonderful example of a liberated signifier, it is also a blanket term that effaces many differences of history, politics and practice, making it practically useless, a general term, an overall and, more importantly, a safe categorization. This blanket is perhaps above all a fire blanket. Theorized, ‘postmodernism’ becomes fixed, stable and institutionalized, a single meaning or condition such as Lawson provides in his first chapter: ‘The post-modern predicament is indeed one of crisis, a crisis of our truths, our values, our most cherished beliefs. A crisis that owes to reflexivity its origins, its necessity and its force.’ This is a postmodernism that grows out of modernism, not the ‘after’ or ‘anti-’ of other postmodernisms. It is modernity’s self-consciousness, the turn from everything to nothing, from individuals expressing a whole self inside and possessing a real world outside, to slipping meanings and shifting positions; a reflexive turn, away from the world and its lost stability to a search for self among the ‘broken images’ of language, full of a nostalgia for fixity, for a relationship of signifier and signified, for a truth of expression, a coherence and identity. But, as Saussure noted, language is emptied of the world, presence tipped out of words

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and meaning made possible by the ‘arbitrary system of differences’ in a world differentiated by signs. However, this play of differences, of history and conflictual discourses, makes unified structures unsustainable; ‘poststructuralism’ intervened among the gaps and conflicts of the modernist attempt at totality and wholeness, disclosing the impossibility of unity in the paradoxes and aporias that modernist self-consciousness tried to efface. An author remained, an individual subjectivity, a self, sustained by Nietzsche with an act of will, and, though under stress from a world of shifting texts, that self is imagined to be, transcendentally, whole. The author and ‘his’ presence have been allowed to die by the post-structuralists—a death repeatedly celebrated in their texts, a death by fragmentation, a shattering of the authorial self into multiple incomplete selves. The modernist predicament lingers on, projecting closure, rationality and meaning, but various postmodernisms move elsewhere, away from the self and its lost unity, playing among the fragments of its explosion, enjoying many meanings as established ones crumble. There lingers only the fear of a reactionary unification by violence, and the turn to a liberation of different meanings, other beings. Nietzsche and Heidegger have more to do with the ‘ends’ of modernism, writing in the collapse of a world while hanging on to their selves. For Derrida, the world and the self have already disintegrated among texts, and he engages instead in the serious business of deconstructive play, writing in the margins of unfulfilled projects, offering a glimpse, in texts like ‘Living on/borderlines’, of a writing without logocentrism. At times Reflexivity appears to repeat the modern predicament as a crisis of unified discourses and consensus, while it is those things (surely) that the postmodern has dispensed with. Lawson’s text, important and impossible, is written in the knowledge of the dangers of ‘losing the traces’ of the texts he introduces and returning them to the realms of analytical philosophy, leaving the rational mind a presence for language to reflect upon, at the centre still. Many problems of introduction are acknowledged, and its project of integrating British philosophy into continental disintegration is not an easy one, but this short book traces one crucial area and its contexts, providing positive accounts of philosophers who have too long been excluded by the mainstream. The text’s version of postmodernity sketches one aspect of current debates on its relationship with the modern and leaves question marks beside any radical difference between them. It certainly is about time, as the series editors argue, that debates on these and related issues began to reverberate in philosophy departments. The book provides a helpful initiation aimed at students and analytical philosophers; it is a dissemination which raises the possibility of the many borders that have yet to be transgressed. University College, Cardiff

Notes for contributors

Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English, to Professor Terence Hawkes at the Department of English, University College, Cardiff, PO Box 78, Cardiff CFI IXL. It will be assumed that authors will keep a copy. Submission of a paper to Textual Practice will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript the author agrees that he or she is giving to the publisher the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the paper, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microfilm or any other reproduction of a similar nature and translations. Authors will,, however, not be required to assign the copyright. The manuscript Submissions should be typed in double spacing on one side only of the paper, preferably of A4 size, with a 4cm margin on the left-hand side. Articles should normally be of between 7000 and 8000 words in length. Tables should not be inserted in the pages of the manuscript but should be on separate sheets. The desired position in the text for each table should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. Photographs Photographs should be in high-contrast black-and-white glossy prints. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained by authors before submission, and any acknowledgements should be included in the captions. References These should be numbered consecutively in the text, thus: ‘According to a recent theory,4…’, and collected at the end of the paper in the following styles, for journals and books respectively: J.Hartley and J.Fiske, ‘Myth-representation: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), PP. 12–33. C.Norris, The Reconstructive Turn (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). Proofs Page proofs will be sent for correction to the first-named author, unless otherwise requested. The difficulty and expense involved in making amendments at the page proof stage make it essential for authors to prepare their typescripts

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carefully: any alterations to the original text are strongly discouraged. Our aim is rapid publication: this will be helped if authors provide good copy, following the above instructions, and return their page proofs as quickly as possible. Offprints Ten offprints will be supplied free of charge.

Index Volume 1

ARTICLES David Bennett Wrapping up postmodernism: the subject of consumption versus the subject of cognition p. 243 Tony Crowley Language and hegemony: principles, morals and pronunciation p. 278 Thomas Docherty Theory, enlightenment and violence: postmodernist hermeneutic as a comedy of errors p. 192 Jonathan Dollimore Different desires: subjectivity and transgression in Wilde and Gide p. 48 Simon During Postmodernism or post-colonialism today p. 32 Terry Eagleton The end of English p. 1 Howard Felperin Making it ‘neo’: the new historicism and Renaissance literature p. 262 N.N.Feltes Realism, consensus and ‘exclusion itself’: interpellating the Victorian bourgeoisie p. 297

John Hartley Invisible fictions: television audiences, paedocracy, pleasure p. 121 Linda Hutcheon Beginning to theorize postmodernism p. 10 Ludmilla Jordanova The popularization of medicine: Tissot on Onanism p. 68 Wim Neetens ‘The thin crust of refinement’: culture, socialism, naturalism p. 139 Christopher Norris The rhetoric of remembrance: Derrida on de Man p. 154 Ian Reid Prospero meets Adam Smith: narrative exchange and control in The Prelude p. 169 Peter Womack Noises off p. 310

REVIEWS OF Richard J.Bernstein (ed.) Habermas and Modernity p. 229 Norman Bryson Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix p. 107 Paul Chilton (ed.)

Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today p. 342 David Dabydeen Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art p. 87 David Dabydeen (ed.)

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The Black Presence in English Literature p. 87 Mary Evans Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin p. 224 José Faur Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition p. 335 Roger Fowler Linguistic Criticism p. 94 Henry Louis Gates, Jr (ed.) ‘“Race”, writing and difference’ p. 87 Sander L.Gilman Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness p. 87 Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons (eds) Criticism and the University p. 353 Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (eds) Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism p. 112 Geoffrey H.Hartman and Sanford Budick (eds) Midrash and Literature p. 81 and 335 Irene E.Harvey Derrida and the Economy of Différance p. 98 Ludmilla Jordanova (ed.) Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature p. 331 Richard Kearney Poétique du possible: phénoménologie herméneutique de la figuration p. 238 Hilary Lawson Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament p. 363 Claude Lefort The Political Forms of Modern Society p. 235 Colin MacCabe Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature p. 221 Toril Moi Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory p. 112 Kurt Mueller-Vollner (ed.) The Hermeneutics Reader p. 229 K.M.Newton

In Defence of Literary Interpretation p. 358 Christopher Norris Contest of Faculties p. 98 David Punter The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious p. 347 Robert Scholes Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English p. 117 Elaine Showalter (ed.) The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory p. 112 Martha Vicinus Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850– 1920 p. 217